Hi Sarah
I’ve gone through exactly the same learning curve myself so I’d like to try and help.
For an autoresponder, I use Aweber, and it’s very powerful, and also easy to learn to use. It’s around $45 for 3 months You could also try mail chimp (which I believe is free).
What you do is create a ‘thank-you page’ on your website. There are no links to it from anywhere in your site – people land here after they go through the sign-up process (the autoresponder will ask you to specify a thank-you page). The page basicallys says ‘Thanks for signing up. Here’s a link to the pdf I promised’. Then when they click on the link, the pdf opens and they can save it on their computer. You upload and store the pdf file with your other program files on your web host site.
You can protect this page from google in various ways. Here is a link where google explains how to do this (for WordPress, I use the robots.txt file method – don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds):
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=8846
This method is very simple but obviously not foolproof – for example, if someone knows the url of your thank-you page, they can go there directly and get the pdf without signing up. They could also give the link to others. But I’ve found that it works well for my purposes. If you want to see it in action on a simple site, check out http://www.montessoristeps.com. Sorry, but my wordpress site with autoresponder is under construction.
Hope this helps!
Sue
Hi,
Check with this custom login page:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bm-custom-login/
Thanks,
Shane G.
Thanks Shane and Sue!
Sue, I’d thought about aWeber, but just starting out, was having trouble justifying the price … did some more googling, though … and I decided to try out iContact. It seems to be highly recommended (for some of the same reasons as aWeber), but about half the price — I’m really excited to get started with this.
Shane — will a login serve the same purpose? I’m looking to have people sign up for a mailing list, and then get taken to page like Sue is talking about … perhaps this is something you can tweak for that purpose!
It is nice to find so many people willing to answer questions and be supportive – helps with that learning curve!
Best, Sarah
Okay, Sue … ended up trying aWeber. So far, I’m loving it! I think iContact would be a better fit for me if I was more experienced. AWeber was super easy and guided me right through those first steps. Huge time saver, which is valuable!!
Great – I’m glad you found something that works for you!
