squeeze pages

The Evolution of My Squeeze Pages

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Happy Tuesday!

Today kicks off Sterling Valentine’s “30 Day Listbuilding Challenge” at List Laser.  In case you haven’t heard I have been asked to be a guest judge and one of the trainers for the challenge.

To be honest, I hate public speaking (who doesn’t?) so my mind has been racing trying to figure out what to talk about for an hour.  I’m sure I will probably spend some time talking about how I got started list building and that got me thinking about how far I have come with the design of my squeeze pages.

I thought it would be fun to dig into my archives and share some of my early squeeze page designs with you.

Some of these are pretty embarrassing but having durfed in front of a few hundred people I don’t think these can hurt my reputation any worse.

Aug 2007 – My Introduction to List Building

I won’t go into the whole story but back in 2007 I joined a very expensive online business opportunity and promoted it pretty heavily.  The company had a large variety of promo tools that we could use to promote the site including some very professional looking squeeze pages.

I remember we had the option to use the company autoresponder or subscribe to Aweber and manage our lists ourselves. Luckily I was smart enough back then to know that if I was going to be building a list that I want my contacts to be in my possession and not the owners of this program. I went with Aweber which I am still using today and believe it or not some of the contacts that I made back then are still active today.

I don’t have any samples from this period because I was using the generic company squeeze pages.  Let’s just say, they didn’t work very well.

Feb 2008 – List Building for Profit

The business opportunity I was promoting eventually closed (as they almost always do) but I still had my list and I was starting to see how powerful this list building stuff could be.

I decided to try building a list and using it to make money without having someone else’s business opportunity on the backend.

At the time I was doing a lot of advertising on traffic exchanges. I went and found myself a free rebrandable ebook about traffic exchanges written by someone else that I could promote to build my list.

Here’s the page I came up with:


Yes, that is Homer Simpson.

No, I don’t own the rights to that picture.

Yes, I probably could have gotten sued for using that.

Don’t worry.  I don’t do that any more and I recommend you don’t do it either.

But, even back then I was trying to do something that would stick out in the sea of generic affiliate pages that people were promoting in traffic exchanges.  Homer got people’s attention.  It worked.

I also knew the power of personal branding back then.  Yep, it’s the same picture I am still using today.  Seriously, build your brand!  It’s one of the best things you can do for your business.

What I didn’t know back then is the importance of keeping your squeeze pages “above the fold”.  What that means is that most people viewing your squeeze page in traffic exchanges or safelists are too lazy scroll down your page.  You need to try and keep all of your information within the viewing screen so people can sign-up without needing to scroll.

July 2008 – My Own Product

Around this time I started to see the benefits of creating my own free giveaway product instead of promoting one created by someone else.  I was still promoting pretty heavily in the traffic exchanges so I decided to write my own traffic exchange book.

Here’s one of the early squeeze pages I made for it:

Yeah, that’s pretty bad.

But I still have my picture, it’s a decent headline, the bullet points are good, there’s a call to action, I changed the “submit” button, and I included a privacy disclaimer.

If only it wasn’t so ugly!

By the way, not too many people remember this book and I don’t recommend that you go looking for it.  It’s seriously outdated and there are much better TE books out there today.

In fact, forget you ever saw that page!

June 2009 – Professional Design

In 2009 I started launching my own membership sites to support my ebooks.  This was a step up from what I was doing before so I starting spending some money to have a professional graphic designer create my squeeze pages for me.

The result:

Pretty nice, huh?

One of the things people don’t tell you about hiring a web designer is that you still have to do some work.  I assumed I could just pay someone some money and say “give me something awesome” but from my experience designers usually want you to tell them exactly what to do.  So I still had to write the copy and give them the general layout but the design is much better than anything I could have done on my own.

March 2010 – The Three Stooges

This is easily my most successful squeeze page so far.

It was originally a splash page but I recently remade it into a squeeze page that I could use to build my list.  It’s got a headline that you can’t miss and while the music may be annoying you definitely can’t ignore it when you are surfing.

Check it out:

To make this I basically just chopped off the header from my website (to keep it “above the fold”), deleted all of the content, and added the squeeze page.

And in case you are wondering about the copyright issue… that particular episode of The Three Stooges has fallen into public domain.  I think that means I can’t be sued for using it… at least I hope that’s true.  I just wish there were more good public domain videos that I could edit into something like this.

Present – Fast and Easy Squeeze Pages

Lately I have gone back to making my own squeeze pages using AdKreator.

It’s rare but every so often I get a brilliant idea in the middle of the night for a squeeze page and don’t want to wait weeks for a designer to make it for me. With AdKreator I can make my own professional looking squeeze pages and have them online in less than hour.

Here’s one of my most recent squeeze pages:

AdKreator is very simple to use and it’s a lot cheaper than constantly hiring graphic designers to make squeeze pages for you.  It’s also not nearly as embarrassing as some of the early designs I tried to make on my own.

So that’s it.  If you want to build your list you need a good squeeze page.  In most cases your squeeze page is going to be your introduction to your new subscriber.  Always put your best foot forward and do something unique that makes you stick out from the pack.

Also, don’t worry if your first designs suck because mine sure did.

How Can Traffic Exchanges and Squeeze Pages Help Me?

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Last week I sent out a mailing to my list on behalf of Brett Phillips and John Guanzon about the relaunch of their program TEReports.

In addition to adding two new products and twice as may new squeeze pages for upgraded members TERports now offers a squeeze page for free members.  This is a great way for free members to start building their list using free traffic exchange programs.

One of my subscribers replied to my email with a questions about using traffic exchanges and squeeze pages.  I thought I would share my response here.

Hi Jerry. I have been receiving your emails for some time now. I like the info but I need some clarity. How do I get on the traffic exchanges, and how will anyone find my squeeze page? I have a network marketing business and I would like to reach lots and lots of people, but I am not sure how. How can traffic exchanges and squeeze pages help me?

Hey Paul.

That’s a pretty big question but i’ll do my best to reply here.

First, to get on the traffic exchanges just pick one and join it.

You can start with any of these:
http://affiliatefunnel.com/top5te.php?rid=6698

They are all free but if you upgrade to a paid membership you’ll get more traffic for less work.

There are lots of guides out there about using traffic exchange but most of it is pretty self-explanatory:

1. Visit other member sites to earn credits
2. Spend your credits to show your site to other members

Using a traffic exchange is a great way to expose your squeeze page to thousands of new people.

It is important to remember though that the traffic you get from traffic exchanges is inscentivized (I know, big word).  Basically, that means that most people are only coming to your site because they want to earn credits to show their own site.  Your squeeze page should directly target these people and hopefully be interesting enough to stand out in the crowd.

It helps to have your own product to give away as an incentive for surfers to subscribe to your list.  If you don’t have your own product then you can use any of the free ones provided by TERports.  They all work really well in traffic exchanges.

Once you start building your list you have the opportunity to build a relationship with the people on your list and to potentially sell to them over and over again.

That’s sorta the simplified version but hopefully you get the gist of it.

If you need more details… just ask!


Click Here to Join TEReports

How To Generate Traffic to Your Squeeze Pages

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Happy Monday!

I guess I let the list building tutorial slip for a few days.  Sorry about that.  But now that I am back let’s get back into it.

By now you should have your squeeze page up and running.  Great!  Today I want to start talking about how to generate traffic to your squeeze page so that you can start getting some sign-ups in your autoresponder.

There are all sorts of ways to drive traffic to your new squeeze page.  There’s search engines, pay-per-click advertising, article marketing, forums, blogs, safelists, etc.

One source that I have successfully been using to drive traffic to my my sites for the last 7 years is free traffic exchange programs.

Traffic exchanges are sites that allow you to generate traffic to your sites by spending some of your time visiting other people’s websites.

I’ll be honest.  Traffic exchanges are terrible for trying to sell stuff because the people who visit your site through them are only there because they are trying to generate traffic for their own sites.

Traffic exchanges are only for two thing:

1. Building Your Brand
2. Building Your List

If you read the lessons in Affiliate Funnel you will know why it is important to always be building your personal brand online.

What you may not know about Affiliate Funnel is that it was created by the owners of some of the world’s largest traffic exchanges. As a result Affiliate Funnel has become one of the best resources available for traffic exchange users.

Affiliate Funnel is also home to one of the most important traffic exchange ranking systems which is updated every week. If you want to know what the top traffic exchanges are this is the first place to look:

http://www.affiliatefunnel.com/rank-report.php?rid=6698

Of course Affiliate Funnel will also provide you with all sorts of other traffic sources too but for now let’s just focus on TEs.

As I mentioned earlier, traffic exchanges are a great tool that you can use to build your list but only if you use them correctly.

I have a friend named John Guanzon who has really perfected the art of building his list using free traffic exchange programs.  John and another friend of mine (Winter Perkins) recently wrote an excellent book called “TE List Building” which I highly recommend reading.

John has given me permission to give away free copies of his book to my reader. If you want the secret to building a huge list with free traffic exchanges then you need to read this book:

http://getrichwithjerry.com/downloads/TEListBuilding.htm

TE List Building also makes a great gift to give away to your list.  To make money with the TE List Building ebook be sure to click the link on the download page for more info.

6 Steps To Creating a Killer Squeeze Page

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Now that we have all the safelists and giveaway stuff out of the way let’s get back to the list building.

My last post showed you how to get a product to give away to get people to join your list.

Do you have a product, yet?

Good.

Ok, I know you probably don’t have one yet but i’m going to keep going so you can come back to that step when you are ready. Until then, I want to show you how to create your own squeeze page that you will use to promote your product and build your list.

Just to get it out of the way, a lead capture page and a squeeze page are the same thing.  They are webpages which contain a piece of code from your autoresponder that are designed for one purpose… to get people on your list.

There are 5 things that make up a good squeeze page:

1. A Killer Headline – The purpose of your headline is to get your visitor to read the rest of your page.  Getting the perfect headline takes a lot of practice. Check out: http://www.copyblogger.com for some great tips to improving your copy writing skills.

2. An Eye Catching Graphic – A picture is worth 1000 words.  Having some kind of graphics on your page can really help your page stand out.  You can get access to all sorts of stock photography that you can use from sites like: http://www.istockphoto.com

3. List of Benefits – Your squeeze page should include a list outlining 3 to 5 of
the benefits of your product.  Notice I said “benefits” and not “features”.  If
you don’t know the difference do a google search for “features vs. benefits”.

4. A Call To Action – Now that you have your reader’s attention you need to tell them what to do.  “Fill out the form to get your copy now”.  It sounds  obvious but it makes a big difference if you don’t do it.

5. Your Autoresponder Code – Of course.  Just copy and paste the code from your autoresponder into the page where you want it to appear.

6. The Privacy Disclaimer – Just another way to ensure people that you won’t abuse their email address if they fill out your form.  It’s been proven that if you don’t include this you will definitely get fewer sign-ups.

Here’s a sample:
http://www.safelisttactics.com/jv.htm

Now that you know all the components that go into a squeeze page you probably want to know how to build one…

Personally, I like to make my own from scratch.  I have my own website and I use a free html editor to make my own pages.  For less than $10/month there is so much you can do with webhosting.  If you don’t have your own webhosting I use Servage but there are plenty of good hosts to choose from.

But even if you have hosting you still might not feel comfortable enough to make your own web page.  For that I offer several solutions.

1. Instant Bonus Page – I already posted something about this.  You can make bonus pages for free but if you upgrade you will get access to one of the most simple squeeze page makers around. Highly recommended.

2. AdKreator – This site is great.  It let’s you make stunning graphic  advertisements without having learn complicated programs like Photoshop.   There’s upgraded membership option that gives you the ability to make your own squeeze pages which is well worth the price.

3. TE Toolbox – TE Toolbox has a variety of free Internet marketing tools including a basic squeeze page maker.  While not quite as powerful as the other two squeeze page makers it’s not a bad option.

That all for now.

Are we having fun yet?

Great!  Because next I am going to share with you my all time favorite website which will give you access to all sorts of free tools that you can use to make  money with your list.

See you soon!