If you own an internet business and have a business blog, you’re no doubt already aware that WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, and there’s a good reason for that – it’s so easy to use! And there are so many options, plug-ins, themes, etc., available, it’s almost impossible and overwhelming to know where to start.

But, one of the most important features you, as an internet business owner, need to take advantage of, is the ability to collect customer information so that you can maintain a relationship with visitors to your blog. In order to do that, you need to have a way for your visitors to enter their information by adding a form to your blog. That type of form is commonly referred to, in internet marketing terms, as an autoresponder, or opt-in, form. So, here, we’ll walk you through the process of creating and adding an autoresponder form to your WordPress blog.

Creating The Form

There are several companies which offer autoresponder services for very reasonable prices. These include the Grandaddy of them all, Aweber, Getresponse, etc., and the number keeps growing, and they all offer similar services and options, so, if you can create an autoresponder form in one, you can pretty much do it any.

In our case we’ll use Aweber. There are several steps involved in this process:

  1. Create a list
  2. Set opt-in message
  3. Add a welcome message
  4. Create the web form

Don’t worry if you’ve never done this before, because Aweber walks you through each step and provides videos with demos on just what you need to do.

So, here’s how the page used to create the web form looks:

First, select the template that best matches your internet business. You can create forms of various types – in-line, meaning they’re displayed on your blog page; pop-over, or hover, meaning the form appears and hovers over your blog; lightbox, same as pop-over but your webpage is darkened; pop-up, which opens up in a new window. Add the text you need to the form, and whatever other options you might need, and then create the form, and copy the HTML code supplied.

For our purposes, we’ll use the basic in-line form. Add some text in the form header, inviting your visitors to enter their details in return for something free, normally a report or newsletter or something that the visitor might value.

Once the form’s created, you’ll be presented with a page where you can decide how you want your form published. You should select “I will install my form”, at which point you’ll be given 2 options – either “Javascript snippet” or “Raw HTML version”, the default being Javascript, which is the one we’ll use. You should only select HTML if you need to customize the form further or add such things as tracking.

A line of code should be displayed as follows:

Copy that code. Now, you’re ready to add that form to your WordPress blog.

Add Form To WordPress

Please note: You can only add an opt-in form to a WordPress.org blog, i.e. one for which you provide the hosting. This will not work with a blog created on WordPress.com.

Here are the steps to follow to add your autoresponder form to your WordPress blog.

  1. Log in to your WordPress control panel.
  2. Select “Appearance”
  3. Select “Widgets”
  4. If there’s not one already there, add a “Text” widget to your blog’s sidebar
  5. Edit the “Text” widget and paste the previously copied opt-in form code:

  6. Refresh your blog’s home page and you should see your opt-in, or autoresponder, form there:

Note that the form appears to the right of the blog.

And that’s it! Your internet business blog is now ready to accept subscribers, with whom you can remain in contact and hopefully turn into loyal followers and eventually customers.

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