Would you like to get more comments and build email list? If you even hesitated in answering this question then I guess you are a complete newcomer to the internet marketing and blogging world.

But for the majority of people reading this, you have been wanting to get more comments and build your email list for as long as you’ve been a blogger and internet marketer trying to make money online.

I won’t link to any of my previous posts now but I invite you to get my free list building ebook. You can find the category with links to my posts on email list building in the sidebar to the right.

Recently a nifty tool has made it’s appearance which may revolutionize the way commenting is done and viewed. It will at least encourage it while helping you to build your email list.

What Is the Highlighter for WordPress?

This handy internet marketing and blogging tool is actually a WordPress plugin.

The best part about it is that it’s absolutely free, gratis, costing absolutely nada.

So relax completely. This is one tool that you can get and try without having to  worry about the cost.

I may not be the first person writing about it but I have tried it out when commenting on some of the relatively few blogs that have installed it (about 1500 downloads) so far.

I have also installed it on this blog. To make sure it’s still here look at the left top edge of this page You should see as tag with “Highlighter” written on it.

If you are on the home page it won’t show. You must be viewing a single blog post in order to see it.

This is very important because after I installed it I couldn’t see it. So do click on the headline of any post if you are on the home page that shows more than one post and you’ll see the tag.

It’s still a “Beta version” and some minor bugs are being worked out. The tool is called after what is also does – it highlights – the Highlighter for WordPress.

If you highlight a portion of the text in this post, you can then comment on it right away.

You can also point to an already highlighted portion of the text like this one (again, make sure you have clicked on the headline of this post first in case you are on the home page) and read the comments of previous visitors and respond to their comment or just add your own.

Using this tool on this blog or any blog that has it installed is the best way to see how it works and to determine if you’d like to try it on your own blog.

It’s very important to know that you can highlight only a limited portion of text.

It makes sense because otherwise the whole page would be soon highlighted and yellow.

So what is the limit of the length of text you can highlight?

You can only highlight about 100 letters and spaces or about one and a half lines of text.

This fact is not mentioned anywhere as far as I know but this is what my readers and I have discovered.

I must admit that I was a bit skeptical when I first found out about the release of the Highlighter for Word Press.

Advantages and Possible Drawbacks of Highlighter Plugin

One of the concerns I had was the disadvantage that most plugins bring which is slowing down of the blog and increasing the time it loads.

I have found in comments on for example John Chow’s blog that those who installed the plugin, including John Chow himself, have not experienced any such problem.

I have been visiting John’s blog for a while now and while it does take a long time to load on occasion, it had been doing that way before he installed the Highlighter.

One of the commenters pointed out that this plugin loads after everything else on the blog has loaded and thus it has no bearing on the loading of the blog pages whatsoever.

The second concern I had was that the blog visitors would be distracted by the highlighted text after a lot of people would comment using the highlighting.

For the most part this is addressed by their ability to turn the highlighting off and reading the posts undisturbed by it if they so wish.

To turn off the highlighted text areas anyone can just click on the tab to the left upper edge of the page and check the box inside of the form that appears.

The third concern I had was about how the email list was being built with this plugin.

I always want to be sure that I only use double opt in when growing my email list.

This concern is also addressed. I have gone through the opt in process and it indeed is a double opt in. People have to confirm their subscription.

And if they don’t want to subscribe in the first place they can certainly choose that option too.

So everything is aboveboard and I think that after trying the Highlighter you’ll be pleased with it.

But the only way to make sure is for you is to give it a try

You can download the Highlighter plugin for WordPress anytime by clicking on the link and watch a video about it on that page too. Update July 22, 2018: The Highlighter plugin is no longer available. It was OK while it lasted but it didn’t get that massively popular in the end.

Since it’s still in the Beta version stages it’s possible that some problems will need to be ironed out.

I know of some that have already been solved and there is one thing that I hope will be changed. The “like” button covers the gravatar of the commenters.

This was not the case with the earlier versions and I know that the “like” button seems to have changed locations twice already.

There’s one more thing that I hope will be changed too but it’s a minor flaw that doesn’t affect functionality, so I won’t mention it now.

I hope that this was a helpful information for you. This is not a lip service post that you can find anywhere. Besides John Chow I have not actually seen a blog that posted about this topic that has the plugin installed and working and where you can test it by using it.

What to do now?

Comment in the comment forms below about what you think about the post, about the plug in and if you are going to install it on your blog.

Tweet and bookmark the post to share it with others.

Authored by Vance Sova

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Filed under: Internet Marketing Tools