Whether you’re using WordPress as a blog or as a standalone website building a list of hungry prospects enables you to develop long-term relationships. If a prospect gets to know, like and trust you they’re more likely to purchase products you recommend. WordPress makes it easy to build your own list building page using the Contact Form 7 plugin.
Click on Schedule An Appointment With River View Shell to see a live example of the form.
The Contact Form 7 plugin enables you to manage multiple contact forms on multiple pages or even place them in your sidebars. You don’t even need to create a confirmation page because the person immediately receives a confirmation message on the same page after he has submitted the form. You can also customize the form by easily generating any number of fields e.g. text, drop downs, radio buttons, message fields. Form results are forwarded to your e-mail address. Using an additional plug-in (which works with the Contact Form 7 plugin), form results can be stored on a database on your server and managed with an Excel spreadsheet . The Contact Form 7 plugin supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and more.
7 steps for setting up your own list building page using the Contact Form 7 plugin
1. Download the plugin
http://contactform7.com
Download the plugin to your desktop then unzip the files (use Winzip). You should see the contact form 7 folder containing all your files.
2. Upload the plugin
Upload the entire contact form 7 folder to the plug-ins directory on WordPress (/wp-content/plugins/)
3. Activate the plugin
Go to the “plugins” menu by logging into your administration panel then activate the plug-in. Now you’re ready to set up a list building page.
4. Create the list building form
Within your WordPress administration panel click on “Contact” just below the Settings tab. You’ll see a default form named “Contact form 1″, and a code like this: [contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”]. Copy and paste this code into your list building page. Make sure you use the HTML view instead of the Visual view. Give your page a title such as “Contact Us.”
5. Customize your form
If you want to use more fields than what’s available in the standard form you’ll need to customize your form To do this click on the “generate tag” drop-down to select the additional fields you wish to create. For example If you wish to create an “address” field simply click on “text field” and fill out the form displayed by naming your field “address.” Copy and paste [text address] into the form displayed on the left and copy and paste [address] into the mail fields displayed below. Save your changes by clicking on the save button.
6. Test your form
Fill out the fields in your form and click the “send” button. The form results will be sent to the e-mail address you set up for your WordPress website. If you want the results to go to an alternative e-mail address go to “Settings – General Settings” and replace the e-mail address with the one you want.
7. Save form data to a database
If you receive a lot of form submissions to your e-mail address it will be difficult to manage them. One way to remedy this is to save your form data to a database stored on your server. It will nicely display all your form results in an Excel spreadsheet.
Here are the steps on how to set this up:
a) Download the Contact Form 7 to Database Extension Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7-to-database-extension/) to your desktop then unzip the file.
b) Upload the contact-form-7-to-database-extension folder to the plug-ins folder on your server.
c) Activate the plug-in through the ‘Plugins’ menu
d) Make sure the contact form 7 plug-in is installed and activated because this plug-in is an extension to it.
e) To view your stored data look for “Contact” -> “Database” in your administration panel.
Now you have a professional list building page ready to receive visitors that stores all their contact information in an online database for easy management.
And now I would like you to instantly claim your FREE 28 Page Report named:
Mining Your List: “3 Ways To Make More Money From Any List”
http://www.isitebuild.com/reports/mining_your_optin_list.html
From Herman Drost – Web Design, Hosting, SEO
killer post – hey what do you do to create “squeeze pages”? I’m wondering because in WordPress there’s all these elements I can’t get rid of like the header, footer and sidebar.
They all tend to distract from the optin.
At work I have tech guys to tweak the Thesis theme we’re using but for my personal sites I’m having a hard time.
I’m imagining the key is going to be using CSS to block the stuff I don’t want shown, but I tried a couple things using absolutely placed div’s that didn’t look right.
Josh,
I usually create a static page then go into my admin panel-reading settings to point to this page.
If you use Genesis from Studiopress it makes it easy to create a landing page ie
http://dev.studiopress.com/create-landing-page.htm
Cheers.