Not long ago I moved this site to a new domain and in the process axed a lot of custom code and plugins I had been using for almost three years. I was frustrated with the bloat of the site and wanted to start fresh. During that process I deleted a plugin that I had forgotten I had installed that did a nice job of helping me make a more personal connection with you, my visitors. That plugin is named What Would Seth Godin Do and has been around for quite a while. It was created by Richard K. Miller. In fact, it’s been downloaded 52,667 times according to the WordPress plugin repository and it’s been through six version updates.

Don’t know who Seth Godin is or what this plugin does? In short, Seth Godin is a marketing guru who has created several internet ventures and written a bunch of books. According to the developer, this plugin idea was sparked by a few words of Seth’s in one of his books:

“One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.”

That leads us to the basic idea behind this plugin. It allows you to target returning visitors different from new visitors. Let me explain a little more by showing you an example from this very site. More than likely you’ve seen the output of this plugin just before you started reading this post. Go ahead, scroll up and take a peek….see what I mean?

If this is your first visit to my site, you should be seeing a message similar to this:

Message for New Visitors

If you’re a returning visitor (more than two visits), you should be seeing a message similar to this:

Message for Returning Visitors

I love this plugin and how it allows me to send a personal message to two different groups of visitors and to highlight the things I want to promote. One thing I had to consider when entering the actual content in these messages was the overall size of each message block, especially the message for returning visitors. What you see above in the second image isn’t the default output, I added a bit of my own css styling to tweak things so it would fit into what I consider an acceptable space when viewed above a post.

What configuration options are there you ask? Here’s a quick video run-through to give you a better visual…. (click the full screen icon for 1280 x 720 video size)

I hope this plugin description and overview has been helpful, and I do hope you’ll share your experiences with this plugin in the comments so we can see how you’re using it. I would imagine that because this plugin accepts HTML in the message fields that you could probably do some pretty cool stuff…

Here’s the YouTube version:

What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress Plugin