It's that important.



One of the ways to accomplish this is to have a Squeeze Page. This is a simple website with an optin form on it so that visitors can give you their name and email address in exchange for what some people call an “ethical bribe”.

Usually a free report, ebook or audio. Something that relates to the niche or topic.

This option form is connected to your autoresponder and it gets them subscribed to your newsletter or ezine. By doing this they are giving you permission to email them and start forming a relationship with them. You can have a set of emails ready to go out or at least a welcome email.

If they ever want to unsubscribe it is very easy for them to do so because at the bottom of every email should be a link.

So what makes for an effective Squeeze page?

1. There should be a strong attention grabbing headline in quotes. (I like to use Tahoma font in red)

2. A signature

3. Some bullet points of what they will recieve for opting in. (Whats in it for them) You probably don't want more than about 8 bullet points.

4. Make sure the bullet points elicit curiosity

5. A strong call to action... "Just Enter Your Name and Primary Email address Below" (Tell them exactly what you want them to do.) If you don't do this your prospect is likely to leave without taking the action you want.

6. Let them know that you will not spam them and that you will never sell there name and email address and stick to your promise.

7. Make sure there is nothing else for them to do on the page except optin. No other links should be on that page. It's either optin or leave.

Once you get these basics in place you can test other things such as adding audio or video. Or adding your picture or other images. But again you want to keep it simple.

Make sure the copy on your squeeze page flows well and also include some power words.

To get an idea of what is working in your niche, do some research. Check out your top competitors squeeze pages. Get ideas from these and make a 2nd squeeze page and split test these 2 different pages to see which page gets the most optins.

You can use Google Website Optimizer for split testing. It's free and can be a very powerful tool.

Oh, you will also need a web page editor. A good free one is Nvu. There are others out there but this is a good WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get).

So if you haven't gotten around to getting your squeeze page up yet now is the time. The sooner the better so that you can start building that all important list.