With the big news of Epoch on Thursday (and specifically the WP Tavern article in the afternoon) came a ton of interest in that plugin as well as Postmatic. It was fantastic but exhausting. So this post is going out a day late. Sorry!

First a recap of what the big features in 1.4 are

1. Postmatic Optins add intelligent forms to your site to turn visitors into subscribers
2. Skimlinks integration brings monetization opportunities directly to the inbox
3. Take advantage of the best social sharing plugin available with Social Warfare
4. Epoch + Postmatic 1.4 bring realtime native commenting to WordPress. With email replies.

What is left for discovery in the upcoming Postmatic 1.4

This post will focus on all of the little tweaks and details. It’s for the enthusiasts. Here goes….

New widget options and variety

Postmatic Premium users can place 3 widgets in the footer of their new post notification emails. Now, in 1.4, you can set an entirely different set of widgets to display in comment notifications. One set for posts. One set for comments. This will make it nice to put more comment-specific widgets (latest comments, top commenters, active topics) where they belong.

Updated disclaimer language

We’ve tweaked the language shown in the email templates which invites the user to reply. It used to be Your comment will be published publicly and immediately on site_name but now reads a more gentle You’re invited to respond by replying to this email. If you do, it may be published immediately or held for moderation, depending on the comment policy of site_name.

Subscribe widget modifications

With the introduction of Postmatic Optins we’ve simplified our native subscribe widget. To that end we’ve removed unsubscribe options from the widget. Users can still unsubscribe via emails.

Improvements to the Mailchimp importer

The Mailchimp importer has been improved with more reliability and more graceful failure notices.

Support for subscribe/unsubscribe commands in the email subject

Some people get confused when trying to subscribe or unsubscribe to a site and place the word ‘agree’ or ‘unsubscribe’ in the email subject instead of the body. Now we’ll accept it.

Tons of performance improvements

We’re halfway through rebuilding our api (which serves as the layer between your site and our mail servers) to be faster and smarter. The first steps in our departure from a reliance on wp_cron are now in place.  We’ll be able to sever any dependencies on wp_cron in the upcoming 1.5.

Postmatic 1.4 will be available on Monday

We’re testing 1.4 with a few sites right now and a couple more tweaks need to be made. We’ll hit those Monday morning and let you know when it has shipped.

Off we go to 1.5…

Things here may be quiet again for a while. We’re going to be keeping our heads down pushing hard on 1.5. It has a codename you may love: Digests. But not like you’ve ever seen them.

Postmatic does a fantastic job of making it easy to engage with posts via email.

We want to bring the same commitment to quality and open standards back to the web-based commenting as well. For everyone, for free, starting today.

Epoch – Our next big thing

Epoch is Postmatic’s new little sister. It installs in a few clicks from the WordPress repo and overrides the comment template that came with your theme. It provides an amazing commenting experience to your users while improving site performance at the same time.

The best commenting experience on the web

Comment forms and comment display are often neglected by theme developers. We’ve been there ourselves. The functions and templates involved in WordPress commenting are complicated, frustrating, and no fun to work with. Every day we see fantastic themes with ridiculously poor commenting experiences. So that’s the first thing Epoch fixes.

Once installed and activated Epoch overwrites your native comment templates with a simple, elegant, and highly usable experience.

Is it commenting? Or is it chat? It’s hard to say.

No more submitting comments and watching the page reload. All Epoch comments are submitted via ajax and post instantly in their proper place within the conversation.

And, as it should be, new comments from other users show up like magic. It doesn’t matter if they are posted from the web, or from email. The conversation is instantly updated without reload.

Commenting that speeds up your site

We nailed it. Epoch is hands down the fastest commenting system available for WordPress, all the while supporting page cacheing and CDNs. Epoch comments lazy load into a placeholder container only when needed. This means your post will load instantly, your comments will load instantly, and your server won’t blink. Your full SEO mojo will stay in tact as well.

Success through compatibility

Epoch is built for compatibility. Just like Postmatic. It uses fully native WordPress commenting, plays nicely with most all other commenting plugins, and employs WordPress coding standards. Use it with your favorite social login, voting, moderation, and other commenting plugins.

Epoch is fully integrated with Postmatic 1.4

When running Epoch along with Postmatic commenting truly becomes fun again. The comment stream is updated in realtime with comments being posted from web as well as email. Subscribing to new comments is quick and simple while users are intelligently invited to become site subscribers as soon as their comment is posted.

Perfect commenting for all

Epoch is Free, open-source, and available now to all self-hosted WordPress sites. We thought it was time web commenting was done right.

Try Epoch right now.

Epoch is running on this very post. Enter something in the comments area below.

WordPress Tavern did a piece on Epoch just this afternoon which goes into more detail as to why we built it and where it is going. It’s a fun read if you are geeky about commenting.

Tomorrow will be the last segment in our 5 part series of what’s new in 1.4. We’ll go over the little stuff, bug fixes, and some pretty cool template changes. Thanks for reading!

And hey. If you’ve been using the beta of Epoch and have a good feel for it please leave it a review on wordpress.org. We need to squash some of the early-beta review trolls.

Heads up – this post reads as an advertisement for Skimlinks. It is not one. Promise.

The second feature in the upcoming 1.4 release is for affiliate and influence marketers.

Affiliate and influence marketing has become a large part of the WordPress world. Many subject-specific and niche bloggers make a supplementary income from affiliate links and sponsored content. One of our current customers earns over $2,000 a month from affiliate marketing from just web traffic. Maybe you see where this is going.  We think we can help them do even better.

We are working on integrations with a few different affiliate/influence marketing services and ad networks to extend those technologies to email. The first we would like to announce is the availability of Skimlinks in Postmatic 1.4.

Skimlinks caught our eye because their technology is as unobtrusive and elegant as we strive for our own products to be. It’s no coincidence it is the most popular of the affiliate/influencer marketing services among our users.

A quick overview of Skimlinks (skip this if you are already in the know)

Skimlinks helps bloggers make money from their content. It is a particularly good choice for sites that are publishing content related to products or services. It could be a travel blog reviewing gear a few times a week, or a food blog offering product comparisons. If you are writing this kind of content you are inevitably driving sales for someone else. Skimlinks makes sure you get a cut of the action but does so in a way that is so simple and easy we can’t help but recommend it to anyone running Postmatic. And no, we aren’t involved in any sort of formal relationship with Skimlinks nor get a cut. Their product just impresses us that much.

How Skimlinks works – the basics

1. If you think Skimlinks is a good fit for your content you sign up on their site.
2. Install a javascript snippet on your blog (or use their WordPress plugin) and you are done.
3. The next time you write about a product or service that has any sort of affiliate program Skimlinks will intercept any clicks on links in your post, track the sales, and share the commission with you.

It’s dead simple but also offers a slew of content marketing tools if you want to dive in. You can read all about it on their site.

Why Skimlinks + Postmatic?

Postmatic adds value to blogs by increasing engagement, building brand loyalty, and driving site traffic.

But until Postmatic 1.4 there has been a missing piece: letting affiliate marketers take advantage of these increases – even in the inbox.

It’s simple: Now your content will not only be delivered to your subscribers where they are but the links within will continue to operate as Skimlinks. On the web as well as in email. Let a few thousand people read your post on your website. Make a nice commission. But also send it via email to another few thousand and do even better. Postmatic + Skimlinks enables simple and honest monetization of your content – no matter where it is read.

How to get started

In Postmatic 1.4 you’ll see a new option for enable Skimlinks in Settings > Postmatic > Options. Check the box. Enter your Skimlinks publisher ID. Done.

What Skimlinks features we support

The initial release supports Skimlinks. Links that you place into your content will be tracked using the Skimlinks url shortener api. We do not yet offer support for either Skimwords nor the Skimlinks custom domain service. We very well may in the future.

A word on ethics, honesty, and the slippery slope

Affiliate and influencer marketing can be murky. To be honest, we had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went before we started looking into it. Some innocence was lost, and a lots of insight was gained. We found most bloggers and services being upfront, honest, and calling a spade a spade when it came to sponsored posts and affiliate links. But we also found plenty of the opposite.

As per the FTC and other international legislation around sponsored posts and affiliate links, please be upfront with your email subscribers that links in the post will earn you commission. It’s not only the legal thing to do, but it’s the nice thing to do too for your trusting subscribers.

And please, don’t take photos of your kids gobbling bowls of sugary cereal with the brand-name box in the forefront (featured image) and pretend the post is about 15 shortcuts for an easy school morning. The javascript tells a different story.

Postmatic 1.4 has shaped up to be a huge release. It feels like we’ve hit our stride in tapping into great ideas from our users. This release is for you. Thanks, everyone.

There is so much packed into 1.4 that we’re going to trickle out a series of posts this week to talk about it all.

Today we’ll start with the crown jewel.. which puts a heavy focus on offering better ways to invite new users to subscribe to your site:

Introducing Postmatic Optins – A lightweight, simple, and powerful way to convert visitors into subscribers

Being a bit more aggressive about asking users to subscribe leads to huge gains in the size of subscriber lists. And, in the world of Postmatic this can lead to even better conversations.

We’ve worked with a few of the free opt-in plugins available in the WordPress repo to build in support for Postmatic but the uptake among the premium offerings has been slow. So we put our nose to the grindstone just a tiny bit more.

Version 1.4 of Postmatic is all about creating awesome optins like you would with SumoMe, Bloom, or OptinMonster. Except it is free.

Starting later this week all Postmatic users will have a responsive, lightweight, and beautiful opt-ins package at their fingertips. Here’s how it works:

First you choose what kind of opt-in. There are four to choose from:

Popup

A traditional popup which displays over the page content using an animated modal window. This popup can be triggered depending how long a user has been on the page, when the user scrolls to the bottom of the post, or after the user leaves a comment. See what we did there?

Welcome Bar

A 50px tall bar that spans across the top of your site. Much like Hello Bar. The bar is a persistent (meaning it does no scroll with the rest of your content) and unobtrusive reminder to subscribe.

Bottom Slider

A subtle slider that pops up from the bottom of the browser window. A lot like Drip. This popup can be triggered depending how long a user has been on the page, when the user scrolls to the bottom of the post, or after the user leaves a comment.

After the Post

A nicely styled form that automatically displays at the bottom of each post on your site and invites users to subscribe. Classy, simple, and effective. A lot like early integration partner Magic Action Box.

Smart triggers to catch your visitors at just the right time

After customizing the text of your optin you can choose what should trigger it. Welcome Bar and After the Post are static and always present.

Popup and Bottom Slider let you choose between four different triggers:

1. Time-based – Show the opt-in after X seconds. Set the time that works for you.
2. Scroll-based – Show the opt-in when the user has scrolled to the bottom of the page.
3. Comment-based – Show the optin after the user has left a comment on your site. This has the added advantage of having the subscribe form pre-populated with the visitors name and email address (which we snagged when they left the comment). A tricky and convenient plan!
4. Exit-intent (not quite ready but coming soon) – Show the optin when the user moves their mouse in such a way that we detect they are about to close the browser window or change tabs.

Five themes to choose from

We’ve baked in 5 different optin styles so hopefully there will be one that matches your site. If not, things are easily customizable if you don’t mind getting your feet wet in a little bit of css. For now our focus is on simplicity.

Choose from our library of images or add your own

The Popup, Bottom Slider, and After the Post optins can accommodate an image to spice things up. We’ve bundled a dozen or so that you can choose from, most of which have been licensed from the Noun Project. If you don’t find something you like you can upload your own. It will be automatically resized and placed for you.

The available opt-in types and themes give you almost 30 different ways to invite users to subscribe to your site. We think that is a pretty great start. Further down the line we’ll offer up more customization options for colors.

Take a look

Here’s a gallery of a few of the variations. Any of these forms can be created in seconds.

Postmatic 1.4 with the free Postmatic Optins will be available later this week. We’re proud to offer up a simple yet beautiful and lightweight approach to helping you gain more subscribers.