Create Your Opt-in Form and Connect to Your Autoresponder

In the previous two lessons you learnt how to:

• Create a giveaway that you could offer to a visitor and
• Set up your autoresponder and connect it to your website.

In this lesson you'll learn how to create an opt-in form on your website, capture your visitors' details and add them to your autoresponder's email list.

Your Opt-in 3-Page Funnel

I like to create three pages for an opt-in.

The first page shows the giveaway (that would be the book cover if it's an e-book) and the form requesting the visitor's name and email address. It also promises to send the link to download the book to the email address. This protects you against someone entering a fake email.

This page is the one that you'll promote via blog posts, social media or other advertising methods such as pay-per-click.

The second page is the one that appears after the visitor completes entering their details. It tells them what will happen next. You don't want this page appearing in search engine results, so it carries the noindex flag.

The third page is the one that is linked to from the email that is automatically sent to the contact. It contains the link to actually download the giveaway so it must also have the noindex flag.

I like these pages to appear in their logical order in my page list, so I typically name them

• [giveaway] 1 Opt-in
• [giveaway] 2 Confirmation
• [giveaway] 3 Download

For example:

In this example, the [giveaway] is ChatGPT Book.

The Opt-in Page

Here's what the Opt-in page that I'm going to create looks like:

Begin by creating a new page as normal. I'm going to call it ChatGPT 1 Opt-in.

Then I click on the Launch Thrive Architect button to build the actual page.

I'll choose to build it as a Normal Page.

The page is displayed in Thrive Architect, ready to be built with drag-and-drop.

Note that the page is already showing some content. This is coming from the default Page Template, created when when the Thrive Theme Builder was run. This content will automatically be shown whenever this template is used to create a new page.

I'm going to start off with two columns, one smaller than the other, one to display the giveaway's book cover and the other to display some text and the opt-in form itself.

Expand the elements section in the right-hand sidebar. Then drag the Columns element and drop it into the Post Content space.

Under the 2 Columns tab, select the 1/3 | 2/3 option. Then, from Elements in the right-hand sidebar, select the image element, drag and drop it into the left-hand column and select the ChatGPT book cover from the Media Library.

Then we add some text in the right-hand column that will serve as an introduction to the opt-in form.

The Opt-in Form

Now to build our opt-in form. From the Elements section in the right-hand sidebar, scroll down to the Lead Generation element. Click and drag it to directly underneath the text. This will display form template images for you to select from.

In the left-hand sidebar, select Opt-in Forms to narrow the selection down.

I'm going to select Opt-in Form 01, a clean, simple design containing Name, Email Address and a full-width CTA (Call to Action) button.

The form appears where we've dropped it, ready to make a couple of edits. Note that the button color is automatically set to the theme color. We can override this if we want, though I prefer consistency and the ability to change the color of all my buttons with one simple edit to the template.

With the form selected, its properties are shown in the left-hand sidebar and can be edited there.

I'm going to make these changes:

• Make Name a required field (email already is)
• Change the email prompt to "Your Email" to match "Your Name"
• Connect the form to my autoresponder
• Change the button label from "SIGN UP" to "GET MY FREE BOOK".

There's one more change we need to make and that's where to send the visitor after they click the button. But that's to the confirmation page, which we haven't built yet.

Connect the Form to My Autoresponder

In the form's properties, click the Add Connection button.

Then select your autoresponder from the drop-down list.

The list will contain Email (which we'll come back to later) plus the autoresponder you connected to as described in the previous lesson.

I'm going to select Active Campaign, as that's the autoresponder I use.

I can then select the list to add this contact to, from the different lists set up when I established the autoresponder.

Select the desired list and then add a tag. I'm going to add the tag ChatGPT. This will identify how this person got onto my Internet Marketing list and allow me to send emails specifically targeted at them.

Add the tag, then click the + button. This will move the tag down into the block below. Note that you can add multiple tags and test for any of them in your email campaigns and automations. How to do this is covered in the next lesson.

Click the Apply button when finished.

Your opt-in form is now attached to your autoresponder!

How Do You Know When Someone Opts-in?

Although not essential, it can be very useful to be advised when someone completes your opt-in form and gets added to your list.

You can create an email that gets sent to you automatically with all the details.

Click on the form in the Opt-in page and, in the form's Properties in the left hand sidebar, select the Add Connection button.

But this time, select Email from the drop-down list.

Note that this is not the email that is sent to the visitor with the download link. That is triggered from your autoresponder and is covered in the next lesson.

This email is sent to you so that you know that a new visitor has requested your giveaway and been added to your list.

After selecting Email, click on the Compose Email link.

This will bring up the default email, which you can now tailor.

The default format doesn't identify the website or the form that was completed. This doesn't matter when you only have one, but as you will probably end up with several, you should edit it to give more information. Also, the to and from email addresses may not be the ones you want.

This is how I like to edit it:

The changes are:

• The to and from emails are now website specific
• The subject line identifies both the form and the website
• The first line of the email has been personalized
• The tag added to the contact's list details is identified.

Click the Save and Apply button when finished.

The Confirmation Page

The confirmation page is the one that your visitor is sent to after they submit the opt-in form. It confirms to the visitor that the opt-in form has been submitted and instructs them to open the email with the download link.

It usually also thanks the visitor for requesting the giveaway and so is sometimes referred to as a Thank-You page.

Whatever it's called, let's build one.

Begin by creating a new page as normal. I'm going to call it ChatGPT 2 Confirmation.

But this time after selecting Thrive Architect, I'm going to choose Pre-built Landing Page.

Select Pre-built Landing Page and press Enter.

You will see a large number of templates to choose from. Each represents a "family" of pages and can be used to build a complete, consistent funnel.

Or we can select just one page from a funnel, as we are going to do here.

I've chosen the Hydrogen Smart family of landing pages, and then the Confirmation Page.

Select the Confirmation Page-Hydrogen Smart and then click the Apply Template button. The new page is built with the selected template.

I'm going to make some changes.

I like the nice, simple 3-step approach, but I don't like the headline "Please Confirm Your Email Address". I'm going to replace it with the book cover image, as a confirmation for the visitor that they are in the right place.

I'm also going to change the wording in the steps so that it's totally generic. This means that I can clone this page and use it as the confirmation page for multiple opt-in offers simply by changing the image.

Here's what the confirmation page looks like after these changes:

Once you've published this page, display it in your browser and copy its URL from the address bar. This is so that you can insert it where required in the Opt-in page.

So go back to the Opt-in page (which in this example, we called ChatGPT 1 Opt-in) and load Thrive Architect.

Click on the opt-in form, which will cause its properties to display in the left-hand sidebar.

You will see the section headed After Successful Submission, which defaults to Redirect to Custom URL, which is the option you want.

Enter the copied URL of the confirmation page and click the Save Work button.

Now, when you visitor enters their name and email address and clicks the Get My Free Book button, they will be taken directly to the Confirmation page.

The Download Page

We have one more page to create in this 3-page funnel.

The Download page is the one that the visitor is taken to when they click on the email link.

(And yes, we are still to create the email and upload the giveaway PDF to our website. These are yet to be covered).

As before, go to Pages >> Add New and start a new page named ChatGPT 3 Download.

Click the Launch Thrive Architect button.

Again, I'm going to build the page using a Pre-Built Landing Page.

There are many families of pre-built landing pages available and you should take some time to find those that resonate with you.

I'm going to use the download page from Copy 2.0 Smart. I like my download pages to be nice and simple. Branded, confirmation that the user has arrived at the right place and an unmistakable Download button.

Here's what it looks like:

Now I'm going to change the background section at the top to brand the page with my logo, update the Free Report with the image of my book giveaway, leave the button and delete anything else.

I must also remember to set this page to Noindex, as the only way of reaching it should be via the confirmation email.

Here's what the page looks like after the changes:

We will use FileZilla to upload the giveaway book to our website.

FileZilla is a free software package that allows you to see your website's directory structure, create new folders and transfer files between your computer and your website, wherever it happens to be located, using an interface very similar to Windows File Explorer.

It should be in everyone's toolbox.

If you haven't got it already, I've included instructions on installing and using it as a resource below.

Use FileZilla to show your local hard disk, in the folder containing your giveaway product, on one side and your website's directory structure on the other.

In this example, I'm showing the actual upload of the Why You Need FileZilla PDF to the IM FAST Training website.

On the left hand side, I've navigated to the local folder containing the PDF and on the right hand side, I've used the Site Manager to load the IM FAST Training website. Now I have to drill down to (or create) the directory that I want to upload the PDF to.

(Note that the terms "folder" and "directory" are interchangeable; they mean exactly the same thing).

You can right click anywhere in the right hand window and create a new directory.

Because I like my directory/folder structures to be totally self-explanatory, I've created the structure imfasttraining.com/am-fast-resources/module-9/lesson-3 to contain why-you-need-filezilla.pdf.

So now it's just a matter of navigating to the newly-created directory and uploading the file.

Simply double-click the file name in the left hand window to upload it to the right hand window.

Now you need to go back to the Download page and add the path to the PDF to the download button.

This path will be https://imfasttraining.com/am-fast-resources/module-9/lesson-3/why-you-need-filezilla.pdf. And yes, this path will work right now. Copy and paste it into your browser (make sure you don't include the full stop at the end) and it should open the PDF immediately.

One more thing to do. Go back to the Download page that we have already built. Remember? It looks line this:

Click on the button (not the button text). This will open the button's properties in the left sidebar.

Insert the path to the PDF (https://imfasttraining.com/am-fast-resources/module-9/lesson-3/why-you-need-filezilla.pdf in this example) and click the Save Work button. Then publish the page.

The 3-Page Funnel

That's the 3-page funnel completed. To summarize:

1. You drive a visitor to the Opt-in page, which promises a giveaway in exchange for the visitor's name and email address. The visitor enters their details and clicks the Get My Free Book button. This adds them to your email list and send the visitor the confirmation email.

2. The visitor sees the Confirmation page, which tells them they can get their book by clicking the link in the email that has been sent to them.

3. When the visitor clicks the link in the email, they are taken to the Download page, which contains a button which fetches the book (PDF) from where you've stored it on your website.