In this video, we’re going to take a look at how to set up a GetResponse blog announce feature for a GetResponse list, and to put an opt-in form to your WordPress blog.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/getresponse-setup.swf[/evp]
When you first set up a GetResponse account, GetResponse automatically creates a new campaign based on your user ID. So to see all campaigns, you can just click on Campaigns. And then click on View Campaigns List. Now, this is the default campaign created by GetResponse, and in my case, it’s ‘youractualname’. That’s the name of the list. So if you scroll to the right, you’ll be able to see a few links here for campaigns settings, and to show contacts, and also to remove any of your campaigns. So just click on campaign settings. And if you scroll down here, you can actually change the email address that you wanna use – that the users will see when they receive your email newsletter or email broadcast. And you can also choose to send the replies to a different email address. You can also choose to send reports to a particular email address and to send a report daily or weekly, as well as a performance report. But the most important thing here is if you want to automatically broadcast your blog’s latest post to your GetResponse subscribers, then you need to find your blog’s RSS URL.
So there are really many ways to actually search for your blog’s RSS URL, but let’s assume, for example, that you are using the default WordPress theme. So if you scroll to the bottom here, you’ll be able to see a link for ‘Entries (RSS)’. Now, I’m going to copy that link; and then I’m gonna go back to my GetResponse account and paste that link into here. So this is how the RSS feed actually looks like, and I can click on Validate to test if this is the correct RSS feed.
And then I can choose to announce my latest blog posts to all contacts – only ‘Active contacts’, or even ‘Inactive contacts’. So I’m gonna leave it as the default ‘All contacts’, and if you already have a Twitter account, then you can also choose to broadcast your latest blog posts to your Twitter account by entering your Twitter login and also your Twitter password.
And then when you’re done with that, okay…you can just scroll to the bottom and click on Save Settings. Now, once the settings have been updated, now you need to create a web form so that you can actually start to collect names and email addresses on your WordPress blog. So to do that, just put your mouse over Contacts, and in the second-level navigation menu, you can see a link for Web Forms. So just click on that.
So it says that I have not created any web forms yet. ‘Click Here To Create A New Web Form’. So that’s what I’m gonna do.
Now, I’m gonna give my web form a name, and it’s important to remember that for any particular list in your GetResponse account, you can have as many different web forms as you want. So for example, you can create on web form for your blog; another web form for a different website, etc., etc. And then I’m gonna click on Inline form and click on Next Step. In the next step, I can actually customize how my opt-in form, or my email collection form, is gonna look like, so if you can – let me scroll down a little…so you can see the default gray box design here, and I can also choose, for example, if I may want a blue box…alright? And then I can change the title of my web form title, and you can see the title here has changed…okay? And I can also change the tags for the submit button. But I’m gonna leave it as Subscribe for now.
And if you look at what appears below the Subscribe button, it’s actually the amount of subscribers to that particular GetResponse list. And if you do not want to show the amount of subscribers, especially maybe if you’re just starting out and you have zero subscribers, so you may want to check on this to not include counter for subscriptions. Okay? But for the sake of example, I’m just gonna leave this on, and then I’m gonna click on Next Step.
Okay, so it says my web form has been successfully saved. Now, right beside the preview of the subscribe form, you’ll be able to see the code that you need to copy and paste into your WordPress blog. The first is a simple Javascript code that you can just copy and paste as it is, and the second is a raw HTML version. Now, if you already know HTML, CSS, etc., then you may wanna use the raw HTML version, which you can even customize further to exactly match your blog. But for the sake of example, I’m gonna copy the first one here – the fast and simple method, and then I’m gonna log in to my WordPress blog, and I’m gonna click on Edit post.
So let me just take the default Hello world! post, okay? I’m gonna click on Edit. And this is how your Edit Post screen will look like. And if you notice, you can actually view the content in your post – either in Visual mode or in HTML mode. So it’s important that you switch to HTML mode and then you can just piece your GetResponse script into here, and click on Update post.
Okay, it says my post has been updated, so let’s click on View Post to see how the opt-in form looks like on my blog post.
So this is how it looks like, alright? And depending on your team’s design or style, there may be some inconsistencies in the web form itself, which you can edit later on inside GetResponse.
Now, what if you wanna put that opt-in form in your blog’s sidebar? It’s actually pretty easy to do. All you need to do is go to Appearance, and you should see Themes there. So make sure that your team already supports WordPress widgets. If it does, you will see a link here that says Widgets.
So once you click on Widgets, you’ll be able to see the amount of sidebar areas in your particular theme. In this case, since this is the default theme, there’s only one sidebar here. So to display the opt-in form, I need to look for the Text widget. The Text widget is pretty flexible and it allows you to put almost anything you want. So I’m just gonna drag that – I’m gonna go up here…it’s a long way up…and then I’m going to release this in my sidebar.
Okay, and as soon as I release the text widget, it opens up, so I can piece the code that I got earlier, and I can give that a title.
And then I’m gonna click on Save. So once my sidebar has been saved, I can just minimize that, and I’m going to take a look at my blog now to see how it looks like. Alright? So as you can see, there are now two different opt-in forms: the one that I put inside my content; and also the one that appears in my sidebar. Alright? So the way it looks really depends on your WordPress theme. And to get a better feel for that, let me just change to a different WordPress theme. Okay, so I have a couple of themes here, and I’m gonna change to this one, and I’m going to activate the theme, okay?
And now, let’s look how the opt-in form appears in this theme. Right, it appears much, much better here because the default WordPress themes is just a bit difficult to work with, so you can always download any free WordPress theme, and as you can see, it’s pretty easy to set up a GetResponse list, a Blog Announce, and also to put in the opt-in form into your blog to start collecting subscribers.