A squeeze page is used for collecting visitor’s email addresses in exchange for a free gift. If you drive your traffic there you are able to build your list and so make offers to subscribers over and over again. But you need to make sure your squeeze page has certain elements in order to get people to sign up.

1 Free gift. This should not be any old Private Label Product you’ve found and thought would do the job. It won’t. This gift will be the first product, hopefully of many, they get from you. So you want to make a good first impression and have it as an indication of the excellent products they’ll be able to get from you.

Not only that. They’re signing up for your ezine. If the gift is poor, this might put a shadow of poor expectation over your ezine content. The gift is in fact the introduction to your whole business which should follow through from it.

2 Be professional. Although you’re not selling anything in the usual sense on the squeeze page, you are selling the gift and ezine. So treat the page as a sales page where you have to persuade them to sign up and then urge them to do so. Persuade with your list of benefits. Urge them when you get to the form, before and after it. You will have seen pages where graphics are used too, to make the sign up action obvious.

3 No links. There should be nothing to distract them from getting to the action of the sign up. You will need a disclaimer link, or have it at the bottom of the page. But that’s all.

4 Emphasise benefits. Put the stress on the benefits they’ll get from your free gift. Have the bullet pointed benefits but also mention them, or the main one, before and after, too.

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I’ve not posted here for a short while. Here’s why.

This blog is obviously a central focus for me and my business. I’m still wondering to ever have any ads (even any more link ads) on here.  That is, to keep it clean for pure content.

Also:

1 Been thinking about how I can now begin to develop out from the blog, or rather the best way for me to do it. I’ve always had a plan. As ever, with actual practice your perspective changes, as you learn new things. I think this is a problem everyone meets and meets at various points in business development. In effect, not only what’s the next step, but what’s the best next step, and for me and my business specifically. This is all very briefly put.

2 I’ll just say, then that part of the above is that I’m considering setting up an internet marketing membership (free as a start) or an internet marketing portal-type site or content/information site, which could still be monetized if it’s all valuable enough. I know this is vague stated in this way. I have more detailed ideas. I’d be really interested in any responses to this.

Also, I did say originally I would have a new product out this month  – obviously things have changed. Firstly, because I’m not satisfied with the resources I could provide as useful to people in a one-off stand-alone product. Secondly, because I’ve grown more ambitious (over-eager?) to get to at least my stage one I was aiming at, that is, a membership site, which would in fact have originally been the end point of a Stage One for me.

3 The vexed question of article marketing. I still need to pursue this particularly, so I need more time on it.

Lots of people have always claimed that article marketing  done by itself (bum-type marketing) will get you lots of targeted traffic. You write lots of articles and send either to lots of directories or to a few key directories.

I will only ask: is this actually, as it stands, true? Or partly true? Is it the case, which might seem a bit daft to say, it depends on your interpretation of the various factors, including the results! I won’t say anymore about this because I want to make the next point about article marketing – which I think is the real emphasis.

Article marketing is best done, perhaps needs to be done, contextually, in the context of other methods. Put simply, article marketing needs links back and forth in a mesh of links, sites, and texts. For example, rather than be stuck in a directory and left, which seems to be the general advice with slight variations, there needs to be a context of Web 2.0 sites, blog(s), ezine(s), other articles, RSS and whatever.

In other words, there needs to be a pattern of formation and interaction in the total context.

I think this is where people get confused who are trying to work out traffic methods. For, what is the best pattern? Perhaps there isn’t a “best”. There are hints and some maps here and there.

I’ve mentioned in a comment about my interest in the relationship between ezine, blog and articles. Having already questioned the role, in some sense, of articles, I think these 3 are also best in a larger pattern of relationships and links.

No wonder people get mixed up, and find traffic-getting in this way difficult.

Try mapping some patterns out yourself and you’ll see;)

Oh…and I haven’t even mentioned backlinking in all this!

Let me know your thoughts. I’d love to read them!