Hey you 🙂 Have you ever wanted to ask your readers a question? Wanted to know more about them?
When I started out doing business online, it was by coincident at first. I wanted to share the computer tips, I found, and asked ten friends for their email addresses.
These friends shared the mails with others, and those people also wanted to get on the list. They asked me for copies of earlier emails, and I started to put my tips online instead of only having them in the mails.
Every week, I sent out five new tips, and afterwards I put them online.
And the list grew.
When it had reached a couple of thousands, I believed that I was writing mostly for women between 30-50 years. Why did I have that impression? Probably, because I shared interests with this list, so I figured they must be like myself.
I sent out a survey to ask about something else, and included questions of age and gender, and boy, was I surprised. The majority of my list consisted of men aged 50-70.
That taught me a lesson about never just trusting a belief, but to ask. And I still do.
One of the people, who joined my list, and filled out my survey, wrote that he/she wanted to learn how to make such a survey. And I’m going to show you here how I do. It’s really easy (with the right tools).
How to Create a Survey Form With Instant Form Pro
If you read my blog post yesterday, you’d noticed that it started with a survey form, and here I’m going to show you how I made it.
You don’t need a blog for it, but you need a domain and a webhost for this to work.
You also need a script called Instant Form Pro. (Don’t worry, if the word “script” scares  you. They’ll install it for you.)
I have it installed on several of my domains, and I love it! I’ve tried other ways to do surveys, but there you’ll typically have to pay monthly to get more than 100 replies, and here, with Instant Form Pro, I’m in full control of my forms.
Okay, so I’ve logged into my dashboard and ready to make the survey.
- The first you need to do is to click on the icon that says “Create New Form”.
- This will take you to an empty form, which can be used for many purposes. Here I’m going to do a survey. Start by changing the name of the form, so you’ll know what it’s about later, when you’ve created more than one.
- You’ll see the form properties show up, and you can fill in a form title and a description. If you want to protect the form with a password or a CAPTCHA code that’s also possible from here. You can even chose a secure Tell a Friend feature, which I did in this case.
- Next, you’ll have to populate the form with fields. This is the list of fields you can chose from. For a survey like this, I only took the Multiple Choice field.
- Finally, you’ll want to write a list of possible answers your readers can choose from. You can see my choices in yesterday’s blog post.
- Click on “Save Form”, and you’re done.
If you want to offer your readers a gift for answering your survey, you can change the Thank you page, and if you use a Tell a Friend feature, you can fill out that form as well. The message goes out as you wrote it, by the way. There’s no way for spammers to change the content.
You can either have the form as a stand-alone form or embed it on your site or blog post. And you can have each result mailed to you or just choose to go to your dahsboard to see.
These are some of the results of another survey I made, and as you can see, you can export entries to Excel files or CSV files, as well as choose columns and show the result directly here on the dashboard.
Your Questions to Your Readers
If you could ask your readers questions through such a survey, what would you ask them? Please make me happy by writing your ideas in the comments.