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We’ll see you at WordCamp US 2016

We’ll be in Philly later this week for WordCamp US 2016 and hope to see you there. If you’re in the northeast, don’t have plans this weekend, and love WordPress as much as we do… then come meet us!

it's a secret!Say hello and hear about our new product

Look for Jason in a Postmatic t-shirt. He’ll be handing out early invites for something new we’ve been working on. It has a logo which looks a lot like what you see here. 🙂

Oh! Tacos and beer!

On thursday night we’ll be co-hosting the first annual WordCamp US Taco Club. We’ve teamed up with CalderaWP to put on a laid-back and non-exclusive event for fellow WordPress enthusiasts to talk shop, dream up products, and maybe even hack a bit. You can RSVP if you think you’d like to join us.

Help us test our new blog monetization platform

We’re about to launch a zero-configuration monetization platform built on Postmatic.

It works by inserting contextually appropriate ads in the header and footer areas of your Postmatic emails – For posts, newsletters, digests, and comment notifications. The ads are tailored to both your content and your subscribers – ensuring an experience that is smooth, makes sense, and generates revenue.

The goal is to make you money while giving you free Postmatic service.

We’re calling it Postmatic Pays.

Interested in trying it out? If you have a WordPress-based site with an active commenting community and subscriber list of at least 500 email addresses get in touch. The beta is open now.

Join the beta

Livefyre is shutting down. Here are the best alternatives to move back to native WordPress commenting.

Adobe just announced that the Livefyre comments plugin will be shutting down beginning this week, with final closure coming mid winter.

Here is what you need to know about moving away from Livefyre

Your conversations on existing posts will continue to render until early February of 2017, but starting immediately (October 20) users that do not already have a Livefyre account will not be able to create one and comment on your site. Then, come March you will lose all Liveyfyre comments immediately.

Step One: Get your data back

Update – October 21, 2016

Adobe has just announced that a proper Livefyre > WordPress migration tool will be made available by November 30th. Cheers to them for making that happen.

If you have been running Livefyre on your site (this doesn’t apply to any Postmatic customers, btw) the first thing you’ll need to do is to get your comments off of their server, and on to your own. The Livefyre plugin should be copying comments back to your WordPress database already. If it is not, you need to reach out to their support immediately and request and export.

The limitations of the comments you’ll get back

This is where the tragedy begins: the comments which Livefyre does send back to your site are less than stellar. There are two problems with the data:

  1. Livefyre will not give you the email addresses of your commenters. This is a huge loss for your email marketing efforts and also means WordPress will not be able to generate Gravatars for your commenters. Moving forward your comments will display on your site, but you will not have profile images, which makes for a rather boring comment area.
  2. You will lose your comment hierarchy. This is the biggie. Livefyre will release your comments in a flat list, rather than with replies/nesting in tact. This is going to make the conversation hard to follow on your old posts, but at least your data is there to continue giving you an SEO bump.

Step Two: Build an awesome comment system for free, using native WordPress commenting

Hopefully this will be the final time in which the case needs to be made that third-party comment systems are nothing but trouble. Managing comments inside WordPress can be so easy. Plus, you’re not selling your user data to advertisers and what is yours stays yours. As it should be.

This is all you need to build a fantastic comment section on your WordPress site

For the comment form and comment display:

  1. Epoch or WpDiscuz
    Each of these free plugins supercharges your comment form and how your comments display. Maybe you were using Livefyre because the comment template in your theme was ugly and slow. Both of these fix that handily

For spam and comment moderation:

  1. Akismet – The free and awesome standard for detecting spambots. Indispensable.
  2. WpBruiser – A great addition to Akismet to help with detecting bots on the front end and managing trackback spam as well. Thank us later.
  3. Crowd Control – Our little plugin that lets your users report inappropriate comments and automatically send them back to moderation. Take a vacation and let your readers take care of the site.
  4. Postmatic – Paid Postmatic plans offer the ability to moderate comments via email, from wherever you are. It’s a fantastic way to make keep your guest authors in the loop on conversations on their posts, while also making them responsible for moderating their own comments (all without leaving their inbox or logging into WordPress)
  5. Sift Ninja – A new service that is currently in beta – Sift Ninja provides invaluable control over trolls. It filters comments for Bullying, Racism, Violence, Sexting, or PII (Personally Identifiable Information ). Keep an eye on these guys. They are making wonderful stuff.

For comment subscriptions and higher engagement rates

Postmatic Basic – Postmatic lets your readers stay in the loop by receiving smart email notices of followup comments and replies. Features include smart throttling and batching of new comments so nobody gets too much email  – and of course the ability to respond to comments simply by hitting reply from within their inbox. Awesome.

Step Three: Stay tuned

We hope to release some of our own tools to clean up those exported Livefyre comments very soon, as well as writing more detailed migration guides. Keep in the loop by subscribing to our blog using the box below.

 

 

We’re heading to Lake Huron to plan what’s next

Hey Everyone! Jason here.

Sorry it’s been so quiet on this blog. The Postmatic Team has had quite a summer.

After the launch of Postmatic 2, Dylan took a much needed month off to hide out in the woods, hunt for grubs, and run up and down mountains. It’s all true except for the grubs. He’s vegan, after all.

Elissa also took a needed break to head to Japan for a whirlwind tour of paper studios and conveyor belt sushi.

Following Dylan’s return in August my life became thoroughly derailed when my wife Denise and I moved our farm and family an hour south to Hartland, Vermont and began our next adventure: running a Bed & Breakfast. The move was difficult on our little ones but now school has started, most of our renovations are done, and things are settling to a new normal. Pro tip: moving stinks, especially when your roots run deep in the community you are leaving. Opening a Bed & Breakfast in a 230 year old house possibly makes up for it, though.

It’s time to take a good look at what comes next for Postmatic. Dylan and I will be spending the rest of the week staying with his family in Bay City, Michigan to take a look at how far we’ve come, and what we should do next. Postmatic has passed the viability test as a bootstraped startup. People love the products and technology. Our customer base is sustainable and happy. There are always lessons to learn from and the one staring us in the face is this: to take this thing to the next level we have to simplify. Maybe a full engagement platform is too much for the average WordPress site. Perhaps we should grow a few arms and release simpler standalone plugins. We’ll be looking at that and more in the coming days and weeks.

Expect to hear more from us soon, including the release of Epoch 2 later this month. I truly hope I find time to wrap up it up soon. It’s so close and so cool.

Keep in touch!
Jason

Take everything we know

Join us for a 7 day crash course on overhauling your comments and engagement using Postmatic

The Postmatic family of plugins has grown to include 5 unique applications spanning a huge variety of technologies. They all related to the same thing: engagement. But it is admittedly overwhelming.

We now make plugins to handle blog subscriptions, newsletters, comment notifications, web commenting, social commenting, decentralized moderation, and of course email commenting. Add them all together and you have something special.

While we are always available to walk you through overhauling engagement on your WordPress site, we have now created a free 7 day courseReimagining Blog Conversations with Postmatic. 

Seven days to overhaul conversations on your site. Here’s the outline:

  • Day 1: Plugins for laying a solid engagement foundation
  • Day 2: Installing and configuring Postmatic
  • Day 3: Forming a content delivery strategy and developing a template=
  • Day 4: Building your list and jumpstarting your community
  • Day 5: Sending posts with Postmatic
  • Day 6: Sending awesome digests & newsletters with Postmatic
  • Day 7: Keep the conversation going

To subscribe, simply comment on this post or head over here. We hope you enjoy it!

Our Top Tips for Encouraging Blog Comments and Engagement in WordPress

You have an awesome blog, right?

Of course you do.

And you have awesome readers, right?

Of course you do.

How are your comments?

Hrm…

We’ve been watching and participating in conversations on hundreds of blogs since launching Postmatic. We have seen some sites with hundreds of comments per post. And others with crickets. Even on great posts. We admit we haven’t cracked the code yet as to what makes for good commenting material. Sometimes it’s the content. Sometimes it’s the audience. Most of the time it seems to be about timing.

The fact is that it takes work to get the ball rolling with blog comments. There are things you can do to help create an environment where people will not only feel encouraged to comment, but compelled to comment.

Here is what we have learned so far.

Our Top Tip: Content Matters

If you want to get people talking you have to give them something to talk about.

We used to get discouraged by watching early adopters like Tom McFarlin seeing little to no gain in numbers of comments after installing Postmatic. But then we’d see someone like Danny Brown using our products to get a 210% increase in commenting. And we’d scratch our heads.

The reason Danny gets hundreds of comments per post and Tom only a few has to do with what they are blogging about. At the end of the day you have to be writing about something conversational rather than instructional if you want to generate comments.

Tom writes fantastic WordPress tips and tutorials. They are straightforward and the comments section gets used by his readers to ask clarifying questions or share alternative products/techniques. Danny writes about life, parenting, and the little stories that happen around us every day. His comment area quickly fills with anecdotes, banter, and a volley of differing opinions.

WordPress Tavern illustrates this point perfectly. It is a tech-news site that occasionally publishes an opinion piece or behind-the-scenes story. Day-to-day they get about 5 or 6 comments on each post. But once or twice a week they’ll publish a piece that dives into the political nuances of the WordPress ecosystem and it will generate hundreds of comments. Content matters.

End Your Blog Post With a Personal Question

Asking for feedback shows your readers that you value their opinions and care about what they think. And by directly asking for comments, you are opening a welcoming door to conversation. Your question can be as simple as “What do you think?” Make the question open-ended so people give you meaningful responses, instead of just answering with a yes or no.

Use Previous Comments as Inspiration for Future Blog Posts

Blog comments can sometimes be better than the original blog post. Why not extend the conversation by using these comments as fodder for new posts? In doing so, you reward commenters for participating on your blog by highlighting them – they’ll see that you value them and their opinions.

Be Controversial

People are passionate creatures and boy, do they have opinions. A great way to get folks to comment is to write about a provocative topic – one that stimulates a gut response and can’t be ignored. Be careful not to cross the line into offensive territory with your content – you don’t want to damage your brand. If you’re concerned about keeping the discussion respectful, make sure that you have a published comment policy and enforce it as needed.

Make People Think

You wouldn’t be writing blog posts unless you had something good to say, right? Well, how about offering something that really gets people thinking? Talk about something fresh and new or revive discussion on a subject that hasn’t been addressed for a while. When you put your stamp on a topic, you gain credibility as an authority.

Reply, Reply, Reply

Don’t leave your readers hanging – if they’re awesome enough to comment on your blog, respond to them! Answer all questions and say thank you. It doesn’t sound like much, but doing so demonstrates that you appreciate your readers’ participation. To not do so gives a clear message: I don’t care. And don’t forget – with the ability to reply via email, Postmatic makes this super easy to do, and it’s smart enough to send your short note of thanks only to the person you are responding to.

Customize the Text Above Your Comment Box

You’ve got a juicy piece of real estate where you can invite people to chime in – the spot above the comment box. Why settle for “Leave a Reply”? Make your pitch for participation by changing the text to “What do you think?” or “Have anything to add?” If you aren’t sure how to do this on your site you can do it easily with Epoch.

Make It Easy

Don’t force readers to jump through hoops to leave a comment – keep it as simple as possible. Requiring that people log in creates a barrier and takes some of the spontaneity away from the commenting experience. You really don’t need more than someone’s name and email address in order to accept a comment.

For bonus points, implement Postmatic Social Commenting – it lets readers comment using their social profiles.

Listicle Love

And number 9 on our list of ways to get people to comment on your blog…

You may hate ’em, but listicles are big right now. They offer easily digestible nuggets of wisdom to those with full-length blog post commitment issues. Why not invite your readers to add to your listicle? They’re a natural for drawing readers into the conversation.

So Now You Know What We Think. What Do You Think? 

Do you have a great way of getting folks to comment on your blog? Let us know all about it in the comments below.

See what we did there?

Meet the team behind Postmatic

With our big launch behind us we are finally finding time to build out the finer details of our marketing and website.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about who we are, how big our team is, and what other products we make. Last week we wrapped up an About Postmatic page with team bios, a community snapshot, and overview of all our technologies.

If you’ve had questions about who does what here at Postmatic HQ – now you can find out.