The (over-long) sales-page for List Farmer frequently features a nice little cartoon image of a farmer with a rake and an email symbol. He’s smiling and waving. When I see the word ‘farmer’, it brings back scary memories of my youth: trying to avoid the two always-angry farmers that owned the many fields surrounding my mam and dad’s house. Those farmers were scowling and pointing. And instead of rakes they carried shotguns, which they readily fired into the air to scare my brothers and I off their land. Granted we were trespassing, but our den was in a little patch of trees on the other side of the field and the livestock didn’t seem to mind our intrusion.
So when I saw the word ‘farmer’ it makes me shudder like some people do when they think of clowns.
Having looked into the product that calls itself List Farmer, I’m happy to say that I’m over the shudders and only too happy to recommend it. In fact, the only draw-back is the overly long sales-page. Less is so often more. It could have been half its length.
List Farmer, from well-known IM names Rob Wiser, Jackson Lin & Aravingh Shridhar, is a plug-in for your WordPress website that reduces your ‘bounce-rate’ on Google and converts traffic into a list of emails and a subsequent customer-base.
What’s really good about it is that it’s designed with the temperamental nature of Google’s algorithms in mind. Since the ferocious Google Panda began tearing many websites into shreds upon its release last year, a website’s ‘bounce-rate’ has become of paramount importance. A ‘bounce-rate’ is determined by Google when it registers how many people come to your page and leave without looking further into it or buying anything. A high bounce-rate categorises your website as being of a low quality. People may go there, but if they leave quickly, there’s nothing there of importance, as far as Google is concerned, and they place your webpage lower down on their search-engine results pages (regardless of how much SEO you do).
One thing that List Farmer does is encourages your traffic to stay a while and more importantly, sign up to something, thereby reducing your bounce-rate and placing your page higher in Google’s search results.
There are three elements to List Farmer that achieve this: a fully customisable pop-up for people to enter their email addresses; a fully customisable ‘exit offer’ pop-up that occurs when someone leaves your page and encourages them to sign up for some bonus deal or other; and a Facebook ‘fan grabber’ that encourages people to like your site on Facebook (and thereby attract more people to it).
On top of this, you get access to 11 training videos, which are clear and concise and make everything easy, and a bonus ‘keyword research’ tool for that all-important search-engine optimisation (now all-important because your bounce-rate is so lessened).
What you need in advance of this plug-in (amongst other things) is traffic. This plug-in is not designed to increase your traffic (although the Facebook ‘likes’ will do so). You need an established strong flow of traffic in order to convert it into email addresses and a potential customer database. You also need a WordPress website(s) and to be signed up with an autoresponder service. Additionally, to truly make people happy to sign up, your website needs to be of a very high quality, as do whatever bribes or free products you offer in exchange for their emails. If you’ve read my other reviews, you might have noticed that I sometimes balk at having to put my email address in before I even know what the product or website is about. I stand by this – I hate providing my email address without knowing if the site really deserves it. At least kiss me first, you know? But I have no qualms about sharing my details if the site is of a high quality and the product(s) on offer is/are genuine and interesting.
This is three plug-ins in one and is well worth the low asking price ($27). There are rumours of them limiting their sales after they’ve sold so many, but if so, they will surely re-launch the product in the near future.