Working with Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a plugin for the WordPress CMS. It allows you to easily add multiple and quite sophisticated webforms to your WordPress site. There are 2 companion plugins that you may find useful:
- Really Simple CAPTCHA - This a fairly painless plugin to add, as the name suggests, simple CAPTCHA to web forms. As an alternative, you can use the quiz function of Contact Form 7 to make your own CAPTCHA, but this makes life a little easier.
- Contact Form to DB Extension – This is a rather useful extension that adds submitted form data into the site’s database; useful as a reference later -when you can’t find the original email- or to add to spreadsheets for analysis.
I’ve been using this plugin for ages and have found it to be pretty reliable and stable. You have to add code in though, which can be a little daunting if you’re not used to it, so here’s a tutorial (PDF) to get you creating/amending your custom web forms.
Starting from Zero
How to make money on the internet with no upfront costs.
This book is the real deal and it’s free. The distilled wisdom of 2 years-worth of dead ends and paying my own money out to find stuff out the hard way. There’s 4½ ways of making money described herein, and a summary of my experiences with them. Finally the book zooms in on the one that worked (and is still working) for me and concentrates on how to optimise that. It also comes with a ‘building WordPress sites’ beginner’s course, which is all part of it, but you’ll have to read it to find out.
“What’s the half?”, I hear you cry. Well, I originally wrote this book for a place called the Warrior Forum (It’s an internet marketing forum which basically boils down to a bunch of guys selling each other PDFs). There is some good information there, but there’s a lot of guff too and finding out which is which can be expensive. Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at selling a book there…it cost me around $60 to publish it and I made one -count them; one- sale at $6.99. So I’m only counting it as a half; not least because you have to shell out cash up front. I’m sure there is a way of making money doing that (owning an internet marketing forum, for one); and it was my first attempt and -it has to be said- I didn’t try very hard on the sales spiel. Live and learn.
I’m giving the book away for free for three main reasons:
- Firstly, it’s served the purpose it was written for…seeing what was actually involved in selling an e-book. I learned a lot and may give it another go if I ever get the time.
- It really is full of useful information. I defy you to read it and not learn something useful. Probably several somethings.
- One of the ways of making money described in the book is through affiliate links; and many of the resources linked to in the book are my affiliate links. The process is gone into in more detail inside. There’s only links to decent resources that I recommend and use myself though…If there was no affiliate program for a resource that I use myself then there’s no affiliate link…I wouldn’t link to an unknown competitor just because there’s a chance that there may be a few dollars in it at some future point. Good information is the primary concern for me. This is possibly why I don’t have a yacht.
The formatting is a little scruffy: It was trying to make the text big enough so that it can be read on a phone; and the way I did it just lacks…something. Another part of the learning experience. Anyway, stop moaning – it’s free.