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List Building: Don't Make Dopey Squeeze Pages

BY: Tellman Knudson
Words: 697

I was just surfing around the Internet today, looking at all the stuff that's going on about list building. A lot of it is killer. Some of it is lame. How do you separate the killer from the lame? Read on...

Your squeeze page is like your calling card. It may be the first time you meet and greet someone, and you really ought to make a good impression. You don't need dumb sounds, like gunfire or wolves howling. You don't need a flash presentation. You don't need animation. No! That stuff might be OK if you're just messing around, but if you're online to make money in business, you should put your business face on.

When you see advertising in a magazine, almost 99.9% of the time, it's perfect. But what about that .1% of the time that it's not. Don't errors just glare at you from the page? I mean, sometimes people get pretty upset when they see misspelling, bad punctuation, and just stupid mistakes. Why would you think it was any different online than off?

It's not!

Here are some tips for you to remember:

1) Keep it short, no more than a couple of hundred words for a squeeze page. Less than one paragraph is good. I use bullet points most of the time--three to five bullet points and a great headline.

2) Be sure to give readers the "benefits" of joining your list, not its features. Benefits explain how something will help people. For instance, one benefit of joining your golfing list is that they'll receive 5 awesome tips on improving their swing. For a golfer, that's a great benefit, right? A feature would be: You get 5 messages. So? Anyone can send out 5 messages, but how will they help? People are all about the WIIFM principle--"What's In It For Me." You have to let them know what's in it for them, or they won't sign up.

3) Here are some grammar tips:

Make sure you have spelled everything correctly. This is a no-brainer. With all the spell-checking software available at our fingertips, it's just dumb not to do it. Firefox even has a spell checker built in to the browser, and it underlines every misspelled word. The browser will give you away, even if people don't notice! And don't just run the spell checker. Run your eyes over the page and let someone else do that for you, too. Spell checkers can't pick up words that sound the same, like your and you're or deer and dear.

Never use apostrophes for plurals. "Squeeze pages are an important tool for building list's." That means for building something that belongs to a list. If you want your word to indicate more than one, it's just "lists." Period. No 's.

And then there's its vs. it's. Its refers to something that belongs to "it." It's is short for "it is." Never get those two things mixed up.

4) Change your "submit" button in the autoresponder form. You can do it easily through your autoresponder service, no doubt. Have it read, "Claim your free subscription," or "Sign up today!" Make it a real call to action.

5) Try to keep your page "above the fold," if you can. If people see the whole page right away, and don't have to scroll down, you'll be better off. But... if you want them to keep scrolling, don't leave too much white space under your last bullet or sentence, or people won't realize there's more, that they need to continue. And don't use a horizontal rule right below your last bullet or sentence, either. That will be a sure sign to people that the page is finished.

These tips are important to your conversion rate, to how many people sign up for your list. The grammar and punctuation parts are just as important to list building as the construction parts. OK, so I'm not all about grammar and punctuation, either, and in your autoresponder emails, these things aren't quite as important because your audience will be more forgiving once they know you. Typos happen. But this is your first interaction with your customer. At least give yourself a chance to get your foot in the door.