Using the Thank Me Later Plugin on Fitness Blogs

It shouldn’t be any secret now that communication with your readers is essential, and reminding people of your site at the same time doesn’t hurt either.  What do I mean?

Let’s run a scenario… Bart is looking for fat loss information and stumbles onto your blog.  He reads your post and is so intrigued that he feels the need to comment.  He drops a comment (which always includes name, email, website, and comment) and then wanders around your site before something else takes his attention away.

This could be anything from a phone call, some work that needs to be done, Facebook, or even the thought that he will remember your blog address and revisit when he has more time.  Will he revisit?  Probably not.

How could you draw that reader back to your blog in a polite and inviting way?  Well you have the name and email of the commentor, so you could login to your Wordpress fitness blog and copy/paste the email address into an email you will send as a thank you.

But with all this talk of outsourcing and doing the big levers in your business, this probably isn’t a task that is going be worth your time.  This doesn’t mean that building a relationship with your reader or a new reader isn’t important, but this is a tedious task that can be handled much easier.

There are two ways to handle most simple tasks: hire an assistant or look for technological automation tools.  Well it seems there is just such a plugin for your fitness blog that can automatically send emails to commentors thanking them for their comment.  This is a quick tutorial of the Thank Me Later plugin and how to customize it to your needs.

First you will need to go to Plugins -> Add New -> Thank Me Later.  If you need help installing a plugin, see here – Wordpress Plugins Are Easy to Install.  Once you’ve got the plugin installed and activated, maneuver to Settings -> Thank Me Later.

Within your Thank Me Later plugin settings there are really only two sections we need to deal with: Message and Additional Options – Global Options.  The message interface is pretty self explanatory, thats the message the commentor will  receive.  So type a general “thank you for visiting, I just seen your comment, thank you so much” message that seems as if you wrote it.

The image above is the Global options section of this plugin.  The first option you see is the maximum number of messages you will send to one email address.  You obviously don’t want to overload people with emails because they will then know its not authentic.

The second option says do not send the same message twice to one recipient.  The nice thing about this plugin is that you can create multiple messages to send out to your clients and make sure they don’t get a duplicate.

The third option is a comment gap.  If someone lands on your blog for the first time for example and leaves a comment on multiple posts, this will control how much time is between each message.  There’s nothing worse than receiving an email blast of 3-5 messages in a row because you left a few comments on a new blog.

Fourth option is a send gap. The send gap is basically the amount of time in between messages being sent out to an email.  In the above you see it as 1 message every 2 weeks.

Finally you have the opt out options.  Thank Me Later will automatically send the emails out unless they unsubscribe or you allow them to not subscribe.

I actually just received a great email the other day from a blogging website that was general, yet gave you a real feel that he just wrote it.  I actually modeled it and changed my old one.

Here is an example:

Hey Susie its Tony and I was just checking out the comments on my blog and noticed you left one on (insert post id).  I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your thoughts and insight.  Not only that I also appreciate you taking time out of your day to give your thoughts on my post.

I also wanted to take a moment to let you know that I really want to try and give answers to questions that you might have pertaining to your health and fitness.  So if you have any question, here are some ways to contact me: Facebook / Twitter / etc.

I hope to hear from you again real soon.

Your friend,

Tony

URL

See how its general, yet makes it seem genuine?  How stoked would that reader be if you received an email after leaving a comment on someone’s blog thanking you for your participation?  Hopefully enough to come back and read more.

So I’ve given you my secret to email comments.  However, I do want to hear what you have to say in comments or email so that I can answer your questions.  If I don’t know what questions you might have, how can I help you?