GoDaddy website
I'm currently building a GoDaddy website. I need a lead capture function. I.e. a place where a potential customer can put there information. Is there a way to create a page with that capability? Better yet, is there a way for ME to create a page with that capability? I'm obviously not as tech savvy as I would like. I thought it would be easier, or I would've just paid someone else to do it...
@Kevin Delaney There is many ways of doing this from using software to installing certain plugins. Honestly it's so technical that it all can't be explained here. So just inbox me so I can go over it in more detail.
I think I got it now. Not really happy with it. To do what I want it to do requires an upgrade. Would've been nice to know before jumping into it. My 2 years will be up before I get the website where I want it lol.
Call Go Daddy tech support, they'll walk you through it quickly!
I do agree that Godaddy does have very good customer service.
But I also agree websites to me are better done by experts and not by me.
AC
How much are you paying for that service ? You can have $99 yearly substitution with Wix.com - it is very powerful and you can do pretty much anything.
Best,
Kyle
Mailchimp and some of their competitors have very easy customizable forms that create markup you can copy into your site. They also integrate well with popular content management systems like WordPress through plugins.
These forms then feed into a mail list that works well for lead gathering. I believe Mailchimp is free for up to a certain amount of use.
Plugins would be your best bet here, like others above mentioned you can use a plugin from your email service provider to get it tied in. That way anyone who signs up will be added to your email list directly.
You can also do what's called a landing page. That is basically just a page that has an email capture as well, no other fancy stuff like a blog on it.
Lots of free resources out there. My website is hosted for free, built by me by borrowing code from places I like, using benchmark email instead of a paid aweber or mailchimp account, b2evolution.net for blogging, podio for CRM. I'm still working on it.
It isn't too hard to do. I believe GoDaddy has a website builder that should be pretty easy. Depends on how sophisticated you want it. If its a simple landing page, lead capture, find someone on Fiverr to do it. I can give you a link for a first gig free.
Lots of free resources out there, just like the advice on BP =)
There are a couple of options for the for builder but you are a little limited. You can use the form builder inside an autoresponer servcie like Aweber or mail chimp, but getting it to match exactly with the site may be a problem. You can also use the free version of Podio and create a form that will automatically upload the data to the CRM. Both of the forms use Javascript.
GoDaddy does have great customer service and we use them to purchase and manage our domain portfolio but their website service is not the best you can get. Those sites can be difficult to rank for top keywords in your area (for several SEO reasons).
I would recommend Wordpress becasue it's free and you will have a much better CMS to add and manage your content. You will also have much better options for plugins for the forms you are trying to build (also free). Additionally, Wordpress is already optimized for the search engins to rank well SEO.
We just created our own Worpress Squeeze Page Theme that you install with a couple of clicks and we're done. It has three templates and we use it for motivated sellers, cash buyers and private lenders.
I hope this helps!
I ended up getting the upgrade for another reason, but I was able to change their form app to meet my needs. In hindsight, I should've just paid someone to do a much better job.
I am thinking of starting something like that as well. how much would it cost to hire someone to do it? what are the most popular freelance Web Development places that people use?
for the people that have a lead capture site.. what's the response rate per week? month?
Doing it yourself doesn't cost much at all. I didn't price any developers. I wish I had. It may be worth the expense. Mine isn't fully active, so I can't give a response rate just yet. I would love to hear from others though.
I've used a lot of different web hosts over the years and GoDaddy is pretty low on my list. They have a lot of non-standard ways of doing things that make it hard to manage your site. You can find tools and tutorials about how to do things but then find out it won't work on GoDaddy's hosting. I have used GoDaddy for many years for domain names, but don't use them for hosting. I agree, their support is really good, except I found that the hosting support was not good, at least in my experience. That may have changed. But mainly from a technical perspective, I just don't think it makes sense to use GoDaddy for hosting your website.
And I'd steer away from most of the build-your-own-website services out there because many of them produce cheesy-looking sites that are obviously an amateur job. Not all. Some are decent. But generally you're better off using a service specific to real estate investors. It will save you a lot of time and hassle.
For anyone doing it themselves, as someone else suggested, WordPress is a good way to go. If you want to collect more than just name and email, I'd suggest using GravityForms, a plugin for WordPress. It's really easy to use and is powerful. It can then be connected to many other services. It's not the cheapest route, but it's good. That's what I use on my clients' websites.
http://www.leadpages.net does it pretty well I hear.