First let me introduce you to the concept of landing page, it can mean differently for different people.

For affiliates a landing page is the first visible page to the traffic that they send by promoting that particular product, for affiliates landing pages can be the deciding factor for sale or no sale. It is also the squeeze page from where you effectively build your list.

For Website owners, a landing page merely means the first page or the index page [also known as the home page] of their entire site, this is the page that gives the site its identity and provides visitors with an overview of what is inside the site, just like a index page does on books or the introduction in movies.

For Product owners, the landing page is where their affiliates send the traffic to, this is the most important page of any website because it is that page which will provide the user the information about the product and everything regarding it, its also that page which has to be good enough for the visitor that it converts him into a paying customer. But lets keep that aside for now.

The above mentioned are examples of how one can describe a landing page, but am not going to go deep into those topics, i will make detailed post about them later. But the Landing page which am going to talk about now is the one for a ‘list-builder’, this list builder can be anyone, a website owner, a affiliate, a product owner or simply a company doing research. Also known as a squeeze page. See my previous article for more information on list building.

Like i said, for a list-builder the ‘landing page’ means everything, because the ultimate goal of a list – builder is to convert the visitors to his site into subscribers to his list! And all list-builders depends on the landing page to do its magic.

Landing page is also known as squeeze pages or lead capture pages so don’t get confused when you hear those terms as they all mean the same.

First things first – The tools:

Before you start building the perfect landing or squeeze page make sure you have the right tools, because sometimes having the right tools reduces your work, saves a lot of time and money along with giving you great results. Here are the top tools i recommend.

1. WebHosting: HostGator (for hosting your pages – use code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ for discounts)
2. Domain Names: Namecheap, Godaddy
3. WordPress Based Themes: Elegant Themes (for bloggers)
4. Products to promote or sell: Click Bank (once you build a list, click bank is basic you can find many other programs out there)
5. Get an Autoresponder : Aweber (the back bone of your email marketing campaign or alternatively you can use getresponse)
6. Exit pops & pop ups: Pop Up Domination (for bloggers – or else use an exit pop, search online you can find one for free)
7. Link Cloaking: PrettyLinkPro (wordpress plugin, use free version or get the pro with added features – useful if you have internal links or in your mailings or ebooks, etc very helpful since they are easy to edit anytime without changing the link and redirect it anywhere you wish)
8. Automatic Squeeze pages: Profits theme (for wordpress, build a squeeze or sales page with click of a button)
9. Outsourcing: Fiverr (for traffic, videos, voice overs, content, ebooks, anything you can think of!)
   

The landing page magic:

Ready to build a list yet? So how can we create that magic to get excellent conversion rates? follow these points to create the magic for your landing page.

• Stick to the topic: Your landing page should be product specific, niche targeted and to the point
• Give something free: Landing pages are more effective when your offering something for free
• Use my writing techniques from here to optimize your landing page
• background of your landing page should be white or the same color as that of your website,according to my research white backgrounds get most ‘time’ a visitor spends on the page
• Their should be images for any product that your giving away or offering trials for, these images should be placed in the left hand side for optimum results
• Use buttons to highlight important points, red buttons works the best – bullet points are the key here.
  
• Use ‘highlighting’ to mark important features of the offer, such as ‘free’, ‘limited’, etc.
  
• Remember that your building a list, not a membership site, so don’t force your visitors to fill invaluable forms or provide lots of details, most list subscription forms requires email and first name, stick to that because i have found that the more the information you ask for the lesser are your conversion rates.
• Stick to the title, if your offering free goodies or report, or a trial to your brand new product then stick to that don’t deviate from topic and start talking about things that are not needed, this is not a product page – your not necessarily selling something so there is no need to have a ‘story’.
  
• Keep your landing page as short as possible! Most affiliates and product owners tend to make their landing pages[which are also their sales letters] into incredible 10000 + words articles. Study shows that average visitors to your website are more likely to convert if you give them information about what they can expect in brief and since your landing page is meant to convert traffic to subscribers their is no point in writing a article about it, because no one will bother reading it.
• Promote your landing pages effectively, you may not promote your site at all, but you must promote your landing page because you need traffic to convert them into subscribers so promote them in all possible ways you can.
• Use points instead of paragraphs, because short points are much better to read then entire paragraphs with so many words
• Show the visitors the aim of your offer, don’t hide things, be open – or in other words, provide users the trust that your not going to spam their emails or sell them to others.
• Avoid lots of internal links to external sites on the landing page, links in landing page is like a leak in a pot, your valuable traffic may just run away from your page which is what you don’t want! So keep links limited unless important ones.
• Brand your page, don’t let it look dull and unimportant, give the professional look
• Do SEO even on the landing pages. yes some people argue about this but this is actually very helpful, because you get organic traffic to those pages and that traffic is very laser targeted and converts at very high rates!
• Be clear and write with the flow, don’t use hard words, make sure the reader understands what your trying to convey
• Provide your subscription forms more then 1 time! This is important and so is the location of the forms, your goal is to make sure at least one form is visible to the visitor at all time, so when he scrolls down to read till the end their should be 1 form visible to him at all times!
• Use google analytics and the tools provided by your email marketing solution, track your traffic and conversion rates and find out where you lack and where to improve.
• User drop down menu buttons instead of radio buttons, because the shorter a form looks the easier it is for visitors to fill it and the higher you convert
• Cause urgency, tell the visitor that the page will vanish after certain time or the offer won’t last long so that they take action the very moment they read it
• Talk to the user, about the user and for the user, no one actually cares about what you the list builder gets from it, everyone cares for themselves so instead of using words such as ‘we’ user words such as ‘you’
• Most visitors are likely to read the starting few lines and the last few lines, and the same goes for the paragraphs, make optimum use of it then they might read the middle portion, so you know the major ‘hot spots’ where a visitor gives most of his or her attention
• Don’t use too much flash work or pop ups, those things are irritating even for you, so the visitors to your site are also humans, avoid torcher!
• Test before trying and compare before starting, make sure your better then your competition or any other list builder, also visit their landing pages to find out how they are doing and take out the best portions of their tricks and apply to yours
• Make sure your page is fast loading, the slower it loads the lower it converts because no one is going to wait 2 mins for a page to load!
• Don’t use clip art or artworks[unless your promoting or offering art related items], instead provide images
• Location of the page, make it discoverable don’t hide it, in fact study shows landing pages with their own domain names convert a lot better then the ones hosted on sub-domains, but it all depends on what type of offer your giving to your visitors.
• Use a good simple design, but make sure the design is not too good also. Keep the major elements of your page visible while keeping the prospect into the ‘flow’ of your page, they should not feel or tempt to close the page, be creative!
• check your conversion rates, think of how much you convert and track the major sources of traffic that convert effectively.
• use exit pop ups, when a visitor is about to exit your page give pop ups with a even better offer to catch their attention again!

Updated June 2011:

Here are a few more pointers that i have learned since posting this:

• Use Videos: Videos are the new trend and video landing pages tend to convert much better.
• Show your self : either show your picture or record a video with your own voice, don’t be afraid or nervous. These are the ‘trust’ factor and would definitely get you more conversions.
• Use captions for images: If you use images then put captions underneath them, these little captions are very powerful and according to Ryan, people look at title, sub headings, images, captions and post script. So these must be the converting factors!
• One field tactic if your desperate: If your page doesn’t convert, simple remove the ‘name’ field and just ask for their email, that’s it! This one field tactic will take away the ‘personalization’ value form your list but will increase conversions.
• Offer a double bait: If you don’t get good conversions then here is another tactic, offer your ‘freebie’ that you are giving away or part of it to your visitors without them having to opt in, you can use this with exit pops and convert exit traffic efficiently. Simply put a link back to your opt in page inside the freebie or better split the freebie in 2 parts, give one for free and ask them to opt in for the 2nd.

I think this much information is enough for you to create the landing page magic, if you need any help feel free to ask me. I would also like to know the methods and tricks that you use to convert effectively so don’t hesitate to tell!

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad and like my fan page on facebook, till then have a great day,

SJ

I am sure you must have heard pretty much from every single guru, affiliate and successful online entrepreneur that the money is in the list, but what exactly is a list? How can you build one too? How can you convert huge traffic into your opt in subscribers and then later convert those subscribers into your paying customers?

These are the things to remember when building a list, but more importantly building a profitable list so you can really supercharge your ‘make money online‘ dreams:

What you will need in order to start building a list:

1. An Auto Responder: Building a list requires a few tools in order to get started. The first and the most important one is an auto responder. Auto responders are were you will store your list, build campaigns & send messages to your list. Auto responders are the backbone of your list building efforts & it’s important to get a auto responder that has good delivery rates, lots of features, good support and of course is within your budget. The industry leaders currently are Aweber & GetResponse, which are the most preferred auto responders used by internet marketers. However Aweber & GetResponse can be costly if you are just starting out with an average of $200 for 500 subscribers annually. For starters i would recommend Mail Chimp, another good auto responder but most importantly a great tool for building a list without a budget. Mail Chimp has a free for life plan where you can store up to 2000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is good enough for now, so register at MailChimp if you are starting out or consider Aweber and GetResponse if you want more options.

2. A Landing Page or Blog: Now that you got a auto responder ready & fired up its time to start getting those subscribers. But of course where will you send your traffic? You will obviously need a site/blog or else a squeeze page (also known as landing page) to send your traffic to where your optin lead capture forms are (alongside your offers). If you don’t have one already then you will need a web host (i recommend Hostgator – use coupon code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ to get 25% off) along with a domain (get them at Goddady or Namecheap). Once you got everything set up, all you need to do is set up your squeeze pages & plugin your opt-in forms.

3. Traffic: Its all about traffic when it comes to building a list. Once everything is set up you will need to start driving quality & targeted traffic to it. Start getting the word out, promote your page via social media, bookmarking, etc. Once you start building traffic then read my post on how to retain traffic to your site.

List Building Ethics:

Now that everything is set up its time to convert the traffic to subscribers & then the subscribers to paying customers.

1. Know what a mailing list is: A list is basically the collection of all the people [their emails and other optional information] who have opted to receive messages from you, always remember that manually entering a huge list of emails into your auto responder is not actually a list and their is definitely no money in that too, because what you will be doing that way is spamming those emails which could be very bad later on. So never spam your list or create a list without the permission of those people who are added into your list, make sure your list is 100% opt-in. On a site note it will be hard to find a good auto responder that will just simply allow you to add a list and send them mails. Another thing to take care of is that importing a large list can cost you a lot & migrating from one auto responder to another can result in loss of your subscribers.

2. Bribe your visitors: When it comes to building a list, most successful internet marketers actually ‘bribe’ their traffic into submission, they do this by giving attractive free offers which results in the traffic and the people to sign up for the list, those offers must be highly niche related, free and very tempting. If you obey this single rule you will convert more then 90% of your traffic if its highly targeted, so obey this golden rule, bribe them.

3. Write a good landing page copy: The landing page is the most important aspect of a list, its the page where the traffic comes to, this page should be able to convert that traffic into opt-in subscribers. So making your landing page as informative, short, tempting and attractive , the more will be the conversions. Read my post on how to make good landing pages for more help.

4. Don’t be a dictator, Respect Freedom: Give your list members the ability to unsubscribe, make sure they are able to contact you, so maintain a separate email for that activity. Give them valuable information but not all at once, keep them waiting so that they don’t run away, spoon feed them step by step, don’t be Hasty and don’t talk always about a product, i.e don’t always do promotions with your list, send emails that are worth reading and related to your niche, involve them in your work. Don’t annoy them by sending messages every single hour or day for that matter, maintain a gap and monitor your lists.

5. Engage & build a community: Once you have a list which is growing continuously, there are a few things to remember, now that the traffic to your landing page are your subscribers, its time to treat them as ‘humans’ and not ‘bots’ anymore, this is the most important step where everyone else fails. If you read point no.2 i told you to bribe them, but its actually that they are forced to join and after they get what your giving free, they are more likely to unsubscribe to maintain low spam in their in-boxes. This step is very important because once someone joins your list, your ultimate goal is to NOT let them unsubscribe, once you follow this the money will flow automatically, because you must win the trust of your subscribers and not make them feel as yet another group of email list which you keep spamming and try selling your products too.

Bonus Tip for bloggers: If you find some of your list members being inactive then consider deleting them from the list to free up space for other subscribers, this can help you save a lot of money. If you are building a list via your blog or website rather then a squeeze page then consider getting pop up domination, it is a very powerful tool that can help you get up to 300% conversion rates.

This should be enough for now for list building basics. Keep building that list, next time i would get more deep into the topic. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ