Adding opt in box to your blog

Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 7:09 am

I recently did a post on my PLR blog about Double Your PLR Sales Easily. It was talking about capturing subscribers to be able to continue the conversation. I got this comment there.

The trouble is getting an opt-in box to look great on wordpress. Most, myself included, just stop trying to figure it out. If it isn’t done right, it isn’t worth doing.

Two things that bother me about that statement.

First even a poorly done opt in box will get some people to opt in.

Two it is not hard to add a good looking opt in to any blog. You even have multiple ways of doing it.

The most important part of your subscription box is the offer. If your ethical bribe is something of value people will want it even if it is not the prettiest item on the blog. Getting the offer right is the most important part of the puzzle. That could take a whole series of posts to cover all the options there and is more of a marketing topic than a WordPress topic.

Adding your actual form is relatively easy to do on any blog. If you are using Aweber (my recommended autoresponder service) you can create a variety of opt in forms with any number of options. It can be a slide in, an exit pop or even a light box form. I won’t go into the details as Aweber has great tutorials to show you how to create it.

To add it to your blog you just need to add the one line of java script that they give you to your theme template. It has to go between the body tags.

The easiest way is to add it to the header file for your blog right after the body tag. You can get there in your dashboard by clicking appearance – editor – header.

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Just add the java script snippet right after the body tag. Save the change and you now have whatever form you created active on your blog.

Note – Your theme needs to be writable to be able to edit this from your dashboard. If it is not you will need to chmod the theme files to 666.

Adding it to your sidebar can be a bit harder depending on the width of your sidebar. Often you need to edit the actual html code if your sidebar is narrow. The java script snippet can cause spacing problems if the form you created is larger than the sidebar.

In the html there are two items that need to be edited if you have a thin side bar. You can edit the td tags between name and text box and email and the text box. Replace the <td></td> with a <br> tag. This will put the name over the text box instead of along side of it as it is in the form to the right.

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You may also need to change the size of the text box if it is too large. The default is 20 and making it a smaller number (see the size=”20″ in the form above).

Once you have edited that just copy and paste it into a text widget in your side bar. To do that click appearance – widget and drag a text box to where you want your form. Paste in your edited code and save it. Check your blog and make an edit if you need to make it smaller.

Add in the numerous plugins that are available to add an opt in form to your blog in a variety of ways and it is relatively easy to add the form in numerous ways.

So there you have it now make sure you are getting subscribers from your WordPress blog. I do.

Mike Paetzold