subject: How To Design Effective Squeeze Pages [print this page] The first and most important aspect of any web based business is its content. Original and unique content is the foundation of your visitors experience. Without useful and informative content, any unique visitor that visits your site will be a one time visitor only, never to return. That being said, the second most important aspect of any website on which to concentrate are its landing pages.
There are two types of landing pages. The first is the sales page. The sales page is generally a very long page that lists out all of the benefits and testimonials necessary to sell your product to the minds of your visitors. The second type of landing page is the squeeze page. There are many advertising and marketing specialists that would argue that aside from the home page and sales pages, the squeeze page or pages are at least equally if not more important. Why? Because, the squeeze page is the only opportunity that the webmaster has to capture the contact information of the prospect.
The contact information represents the ability of the marketer to contact the prospect for future sales. Many marketers refer to this as the list. There are a small handful of qualities that all squeeze pages must have if they are to be effective. Additionally, these aspects are quite different from typical web site pages and the sales pages that may be part of the website.
Typical landing pages have a great deal of information available to visitors with the hope of something catching their eye and inviting them to stay on the site longer. The same goes for sales pages. Squeeze pages however are the exact opposite. These types of pages have a minimal amount of information on them and all of the information that they do contain would only be information directly related to the offer being made with absolutely nothing else. The idea is to not confuse the prospect with decisions and information that could jeopardize their decision to opt in using the sign up form. The longer a squeeze page is and the more time it takes your prospect to read through your information, the higher the chance becomes that they will have second thoughts and exit the page. Remember. Keep it simple.
The second thing that is not necessarily required, but may help in terms of conversion percentage is a nice professional template. Professionally designed templates are not necessary, but they do give the added benefit of giving you a professional appearance. I have seen many squeeze pages that are little more than a splashy title, a graphic, a few benefits and an opt in form. There is nothing wrong with these layouts, but a professionally designed theme wrapped around the information contained in your squeeze page makes it that much nicer and attractive to your visitors.
The third aspect of an effective squeeze page is the absence of any and all out going links. In the internet marketing world, out going links are referred to as leaks and rightly so. Out going links have great potential to leak visitors from your landing page to other pages where you cannot catch their contact information. It is as that point that they become a one time visitor only and all of the hard work you performed in terms of SEO and driving traffic fall short. One major problem with not providing outbound links on a squeeze page is that it is actually against the terms of service of some pay per click advertising establishments in terms of a quality landing page. This has to be taken into account if you are running a PPC campaign. Ideally, squeeze pages should not be the targets of PPC campaigns but if they are, follow the appropriate PPC squeeze page guidelines or risk getting your account banned.
The best place to send visitors to a squeeze page is through articles on your website. Articles give you the ability to pre-sell to the visitor making them that much more likely to give you their contact information.
If you would like to get some examples of squeeze pages that work, the best way to find layouts and designs that work is to just sign up for a free traffic exchange program and as you surf the different pages, most of which will be squeeze pages, make note of which ones trigger your interest or capture your attention then mimic these.
