Lucrative List Building: The Squeeze Page

Most internet marketing professionals agree that if you don't have a list, then you don't really have a business. Building a lucrative list is essential to your success. A customer list is the greatest asset of any business. In internet marketing, your customer list is your personal gold mine.

After you solve the problem of generating traffic to your website, it then becomes necessary to capture the name and email address of your visitor so you can build your own customer list. If you fail to do this, your business will fail.

It's amazing to me how many people spend a ton of effort and money on getting visitors to their site where they pitch a product in hopes of getting a sale and then fail to capture their visitor's name and email address.

You must focus your attention on building your list instead of on trying to make your initial sale. Remember, only 1 in a 100 people is going to buy your product after arriving at your website. You must capture the other 99 people's name and email address so that you can show your product(s) to them again in the future.

There are a few techniques you can use to capture your visitor's information and build a lucrative list. Here are the three "biggies" which are the most effective:

1. The Squeeze Page

2. The Pop-Up, and

3. A Simple Opt-in Form

The best method to use of the three ways to build a list is the squeeze page. A regular opt-in form might get a 10% to 20% opt-in rate, while a squeeze page is more likely to produce a 20% to 40% opt-in rate of the total number of visitors who arrive at your website.

A squeeze page is a web page with only one purpose: to capture the information details of your visitor. The squeeze page is different from using a pop-up or normal opt-in form because you don't allow your visitor access to your website unless they give you their name and email address, and/or other details.

Therefore, a squeeze page must "sell" the benefits of your website to your visitor. A good squeeze page must have a strong benefit driven headline to grab the reader's attention, some bullet points outlining the benefits of your website, and a call to action.

The best squeeze pages are not long. Do not make your visitor scroll down the page to opt-in. Other best practices include placing your photo on the page, make bold every other bullet point, and put a box around your "call to action" which is merely your opt-in form. Tell the visitor exactly what to do in no uncertain terms.

You must provide enough information to entice your visitors to leave their name and email address. Use good copywriting and sales techniques to "squeeze" your customers into joining your list. To ensure that people opt-in, you usually have to bribe them.

Offer some kind of free gift to bribe your visitor. A short report, a mini-course, a subscription to your newsletter, or an audio or video file is usually enough to get your visitor to join your list. In your call to action, be sure to let your visitors know that they will be given their free gift immediately after clicking the "submit" button located on your form.

Just a note here: You will not be sending your customers to your web page immediately after they enter their information details. Instead, you will send them to your "One Time Offer" page which is the subject of one of my other articles in this series of articles on list building.

Newbies are often afraid to use a squeeze page. They think that not enough people will choose to opt-in to their list. It's true that you will need to write convincing copy and you will have to offer a valuable gift to get your visitor to opt-in. But you need not worry about visitors who don't choose to opt-in. If your visitors are not even interested enough to give you their email address, then they probably won't be interested enough to buy from you either.

How to Easily Build A Mailing List from Selling a Book

I have tried everything from putting ads into my books, to having great links listed but the response from my readers has been minimal at best. Through experimentation, reading, attending talks and seminars, I gradually began putting together a system that gives me a larger opt-in response from my printed materials. This idea is not new but it does need to be done on a consistent basis.

For each book I write, I write for a specific audience and therefore want to have a unique URL. My books are laced with links to get free items that are related to the book material and hopefully what I write is so enticing, the reader will take the time to go to the website and enter their email information to get the gift.

But simply having links for free information is not enough, I add other goodies to the mix in the footer of the book such as a free 7 day course on writing skills, or marketing books. Since the footer appears on every page, the reader will eventually look at it and perhaps respond. But do not stop there, you are after that name on your list so you can continually market and upsell other products. Add third party offers throughout the book as well (you should be an affiliate of the third party offer so you make additional money). The third party offers should also be driven to your URL or to another one you have created specifically for that product. There is no harm in having multiple websites that each offer one specific product - you never know what people will decide is best for them.

There is one word of caution here, you have to make sure that what you are offering is beyond all expectations. If it is, then the upsell to additional higher priced products and services will become easier because the customer knows that you deliver on your promise and beyond and they know they will not be disappointed.

If you are not ready for this approach - start with a book, lace it with incentives to drive customers back to your website, and have a prominent way to collect email opt-in information. After the book, start productizing with audio programs, workbooks, DVDs etc. It is not difficult, you just need a system that works for you and a system that keeps you on track to complete the work.