List Building How To

Creating a squeeze page (or squeeze pages) for your site

The objective is to collect the e-mail information from anyone who visits this page, a page known as a squeeze page.

This page is going to stand alone, separate from your WordPress installation, but it is still going to be attached to the same site, domain name and the directory in which you have already placed the WordPress files.

Every article page of your WordPress installation must be linked to this squeeze page. This ensures that the squeeze page receives the maximum incoming link ‘power’ from within your site and ensures that the search engines find it.

However, on the squeeze page, the only outgoing links should be those that are required by the search engines like Google, things like a link to your ‘Terms of service’, ‘Earnings disclaimer’ and so on. Do not link this squeeze page to your content pages, do not allow access to those pages without signing up to your list.

The easiest and best way I know to combine a wordpress blog with independent pages, like a squeeze page or a sales page, is to use an dedicated premium theme, that is designed to do that well.

One, that I recommend is able to create those pages without having a sidebar or any of the links normally on the page, and yet with the ease of wordpress editing. Really good theme. Check it out here

To make the work of creating the squeeze page easy, your best bet is to use the theme above.

There are guidelines to creating squeeze pages that work. By working, I mean that a large percentage of your visitors opts to sign up to your list. They call this conversion and it is expressed as a percentage number, the percentage of the visitors actually signing up to your list is your squeeze page conversion.

There are normal conversion numbers, low and high conversion numbers. Which one you’ll get will depend on many factors, and one of them is the content and the format of your squeeze page.

The first element of the page is the headline. Best is to use true and tried headline formulas. One real effective “formula” is the following.

“You’re About To Learn ‘Secrets’ That Most
{People/Marketers/Women?men etc} Will Never Know About How To Really {What They Will Learn}…”

A powerful and personalized HEADLINE in red is always a good start, because any visitor who lands on this page will see themselves in ‘most people’ or ‘most women’. They immediately understand that by subscribing to your list, they are going to learn the secrets that most people will never know, and everyone loves to learn secrets, particularly those that no one else is privy to:

It tells you how long it is going to take to learn these secrets, and you should of course minimize this time. People are more willing to spend 30 minutes doing something than they would be if it was going to take 90 minutes, so keep the time down to a minimum.

One other highly effective numbers based strategy that you often see applied when the headline promises to teach you how to make money (which is the best-known example) is to use an exact figure.

Instead of teaching you how to make $5000 a month, the headline might promise to teach how to make $5276.87 a month, which almost always generates a better response than a rounded figure. This appears to be because the sum quoted somehow seems to be more real and also that mentioning such a precise figure implies that it has been achieved in real life rather than being a vague figure plucked from the head of some advertising executive.

The second element on a squeeze page is a subhead, where you tell the reader what they are going to receive from you, in terms of benefits.

The third element on a squeeze page is a list of benefits, often called bullet points because of the format. It is extremely important that you list benefits as opposed to features.

The fourth element, at the bottom of the page, is the all-important call to action. This is where the opt in subscription box is pasted on the squeeze page, right underneath the final reminder as to why your visitor should subscribe to your list and the ‘call to action’ where you tell them exactly what they have to do to do so. Note that you should not ask them to subscribe but tell them, and tell them how to do the job – just including a simple instruction of this nature will often increase your subscription rates by a significant margin.

The amount of information you need to include on your squeeze page is dependent upon the marketplace you are operating in and the power of the message you can include in the headline.

For example, here is a very simple subscription form used by one the more successful online dating businesses that they have been using for some considerable time:

As an alternative, the same company uses a squeeze page, which is very similar to the template we were dissecting above:

After you publish your squeeze page, you need to test it, because what works can’t be predicted. Keep testing on a regular basis.

Start testing the layout first. This means starting with radically different squeeze pages. Send a reasonable number of visitors to each page (ideally from the same traffic source) to establish which of the radically different squeeze pages works the best.

From there, you then start testing on a ‘micro’ level by making one small change to create two different squeeze page versions that are almost identical. Test them in exactly the same way as you were, to establish which is the most effective. Take the one that is most effective, make another change, run the test again and so on.

Keep improving your squeeze page conversion, so with the same amount of traffic you’ll end up with more and more subscribers.

Uploading you squeeze page

If you created your squeeze page on your computer, then once it is ready, you need to upload it to your site.

You can upload a single page using an ftp software or the built in uploader:

If you created your squeeze page with theme I recommended, then this whole upload issue is solved.

Upload the squeeze page in the same directory where your blog is installed.

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