Technical Setup - Contact Form & Archives Page
How to Create a Contact Form
It is surprising how many bloggers there are that do not have a contact form on their blog. But why would you want one? Well if you want to market something, either yourself, your services, a brand or even a product ? anything, you will need some way for those that are interested to be able to contact you. Unfortunately, these days spam is a big problem so publishing your email address online is probably the last thing you want to do. A contact form will allow people to reach you via email but will keep your email address hidden away on the server.
You can create a form manually using HTML but there’s no need to go to those lengths unless you need something specific. If all you need is a simple way for your visitors to send you a message then I recommend the great WordPress plugin from The Marketing Technology Blog.
Once it is installed, from your WordPress dashboard go to ?Settings? to find a new option called ?Contact Form?. Click on this option to reach the contact form editor.
It will ask you to give your email address to send the mail to, but don?t worry, this will remain hidden from your visitors. It will also ask for a subject line and some standard messages. You also have the option to create a question for your visitors to answer in order to avoid spammers.
Once this is all set up, you then need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress post or page. You simply need to type %%wpcontactform%% in to the body of the page and once it is displayed on your blog, the text will be replaced by the actual form.
And that is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself 
How to Make an Archives Page
WordPress does have built-in archives features but they will only show the full post, it provides no simple way to merely see a contents table at a glance. Luckily, plug-ins come to our rescue yet again. There is a great one at idunzo.com.
What this will do is create a single page that will display a single link for each post. It will group the links into months and it will also show how many comments each post received.
Once the plug-in is installed you will see a new option called ?SRG Clean Archives? in the ?Settings? menu. There are several checkboxes allowing you to tweak the output but you may find that the defaults are fine.
The process to make the archives page is very similar ? you have a piece of text to put in which will get replaced by the actual archives output once the page is published. There is one subtle difference however ? you will have to type the text in the HTML view of the page and not the Visual view.
This is what to type in: <!–srg_clean_archives–>
This is actually an HTML tag (a comment) which is why it needs to be input in the HTML view. If you type it into the visual view then this is what you will actually see on your page when output.
Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since September 2007 which generates 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money with blogs and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.
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