How to Have a contest on your website-Tutorial

Ever want to have a contest so you can build an email list? You can do it very easily and very effectively by putting a form on a webpage. This way people just fill out the form and press the submit button. It dramatically increases response to your contest.

a sample email form

This image on the left is a sample email form that you can put right into a webpage. It is quite easy to do and it very easy for the user to submit their email to you without having to crank up their email software. This is a screenshot of a signup for a book giveaway I do on several of my websites.

 

This tutorial is about how to do the code so you can have an email sent to you. It helps you easily create a form on a webpage. This way people don't have to open up their email and compose an email to you. You put a form on a webpage and it makes it very easy. People can just input the information and hit the send button and they are done.

A little bit about contests and giveaways. They really work. Especially if you are giving away something very focused to your web visitors.

Here is an example: I run a series of websites about fantasy and epic fantasy. I do lots of reviews of books and of course the publishers send me lots of books in request of a review. I could keep these books but it's much better if I give them away to my web visitors. Here is the sign up page for my contest giveaway. This way you can take a look and see what you can do. Fantasy Book Giveaway This is what your page will look like. (You might as well sign up for the giveaway! And I don't use the email list at all. It is all deleted after the weekly contest is over)

About Building an email list:

The most important thing about having a giveaway is the ability to build a quality email list. These are people that are very interested in your subject matter and they are very interested in what you have. This email list is very valuable and right on the sign-up page you have to let people know exactly what is happening with their email. I highly recommend you keep their email absolutely private and you sell it, give it, or show it to nobody at all. And tell your contestants that!! It will make a difference in how many people sign up.

What to do

You are going to be using a really simple script that is written in PHP. The script is all self generated. You just input some information into a form then upload the script to your server via FTP.

This page tells you everything you need to do: Free Email form Script

In a Nutshell you need to create three webpages in one folder:

1. A sign up page where the form will be

2. A thankyou page where the web visitor will be sent after signing up

3. An error page where the visitor is sent if they make a mistake like not filling in all the form fields

4. upload the php script to the same folder as these other pages

An important thing to note about the script you create: You have to save it as a .php file something like signup.php and this means you have to save it using a basic text editor like notepad. Then when you ftp it up to your site make sure you do it in ascii mode. If you follow these two things you should be fine. The tutorial takes you through the steps quite painlessly.

 

 

 


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