There are many ways to make money on the internet as you are probably well aware, but with the strategy I teach students can make passive income that can be scaled up over time to incomes that may have been previously out of reach in a regular 9 to 5 job.

This method of making money is called internet marketing and simply involves selling products online. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a product to sell – you can simply sell other people’s products for a commission

Unfortunately, what most beginner marketers don’t realise is that there is a lot of work to be done before you can get people up to the point where they are in a position to buy.

10,000 Consumers can’t be Wrong…

Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing, cites a famous study in which more than 10,000 consumers rated the reasons why they chose one company over another. Here were the top five responses:-

1. Confidence
2. Quality
3. Service
4. Selection
5. Price

Consumer confidence is the number one factor why consumers decide to go with one company over another.

Here’s some more statistics that are worth noting:-

* 37 percent of interested prospects take 0-3 months to become customers
* 28 percent of interested prospects take 3-6 months to become customers
* 18 percent of interested prospects take 6-12 months to become customers
* 17 percent of interested prospects take more than one year to become customers

What Can we Deduce from these Statistics?

The reason I’m citing these statistics is to hammer home one key point of internet marketing. It is incredibly important to build a list. When I talk about building a list, I’m simply referring to collecting the names and email addresses of visitors to our web site.

Building a list gives us a mechanism for contacting our prospects so that they build a relationship with us over time. What often happens, especially in the wealth creation niche, is that consumers are vary wary of being scammed (and rightly so because there are so many duff products out there it’s unbelievable!). People want to know a little bit about you and feel confident that you’re a real person and not just another scammer.
Building a List is Actually Very Easy

When I talk to those who are just getting started in internet marketing, they always show signs of worry as soon as I start to mention the process of building a list. Often, they’ll tell me that they aren’t technical and that they have no idea how to manage a list or what to send their prospects. To put them at ease, I always tell them something akin to the following:

There is no need to reinvent the wheel – internet marketing has been creating wealth for people for many years. The techniques are well known and its simply a case of taking a bit of time to learn and understand the skills that you need to create an income online.

And the most important thing for you to learn is how to use an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a piece of software that will allow you to build and grow your list without having to worry at all about coding or anything complicated. I recommend a program called Aweber – in fact I not only recommend them but I use them to build my own list.

The Most Effective Way to Get People onto Your List

There is a certain type of web page called a squeeze page that you may or may not already be familiar with. A squeeze page is just a one page web site with one purpose – to encourage your visitors to enter their name and email credentials.

A typical squeeze page will offer a free gift of real value. For instance, when you click on the banner at the top right of this page, my squeeze page will load up. On this page, I have a video of me talking and I offer a free gift (well two free gifts actually) that you can get simply by entering your name and email address.

This squeeze page converts at around 37% which means that out of 100 people who visit my page, 37 people will enter their credentials. The average is around 20%, although I have heard of some people getting around 60% conversion rate.

For the rest of this article, I want to tell you what I’ve found to be important when creating a squeeze page for high conversions.

7 Must Dos for A High Converting Squeeze Page

1. Location of Opt In Box

Your opt in box is simply the form where the user enters his / her name and email details. Tests and studies have been done to show that the users concentrate their eyes on the right hand side of the page first. These studies involve using heat maps (a heat map is simply an overlay of a web site showing where visitors are looking on the page).

It’s also extremely important that you place your opt in box above the fold. This simply means that your opt in box should be clearly viewable as soon as the page loads. If the user has to scroll down to see the opt in box then there is a really high chance that your conversion rate is suffering because of that.

2. Attention Grabbing Graphics

Often a web site that really stands out from the crowd can attract a higher conversion rate. I always try to create my squeeze pages so that they are very graphical and unique to other squeeze pages that I’ve seen in the past.

When using graphics, it is important to understand your target market. For instance, if you were in the “potty training” niche and wanted to capture the names and email addresses of recent parents, then you may include an image stock photo of a baby in a her mum’s arms (for instance). This really helps your target market to resonate with the message that you are sending out and makes that person feel that the message is highly relevant for him/her.

3. An Irresistable Offer

This is your opportunity to “ethically bribe” your visitors to entering their credentials.

Before you get to building a squeeze page, it is always recommended that you plan out the “profit funnel” every step of the way. A profit funnel simply means the path that you are going to send your subscribers down when they subscribe for your list.

Usually a profit funnel would offer incredible value for free and then promote a low end offer before moving into a mid-value offer before moving into high end offers. The flow from one product to the next is important and really should be planned out in advance.

Once everything is planned out, you can create a giveaway that doesn’t infringe on any of your paid products. If you don’t plan in advance then you could be in danger of giving away the “kitchen sink” so to speak so that the customer doesn’t need your paid products further down the line.

Internet connection speeds are getting faster all the time and I’ve found that multimedia giveaways tend to convert better than a free report. Giveaway ideas include:- interviewing an expert in your niche and offering the recording, a short how-to e-book or even a small video tutorial series.

You need to make sure that the giveaway answers a question or solves a problem that your target market are very keen on having answered.

4. Benefit Driven, not Feature Driven

A mistake I see a lot of beginner marketers make is that they try and sell the “features” of their free gift as opposed to its “benefits”.

The benefits should be those that really hit the mark with your target market. In the make money online niche, for instance, I did a recent survey to my list that showed the number one problem internet marketers have is…Traffic!

So a free report entitled “How I Generated over 5,000 Visitors to My Site for Free in the First Month using Strategies that Anyone can Do” would be very likely to encourage a strong opt in rate.

5. A Privacy Policy Statement

I have to admit I don’t actually have a privacy policy on my squeeze page (because it doesn’t fit well with my graphics!) and I’m probably quite stupid of making that omission because in the past I have split-tested (a split test is simply a test of two or more pages to see which ones perform the best) to see whether a privacy policy makes any different to conversion and my results showed that the page with the privacy policy performed statistically significantly better than the page without.

Something to the effect the below is all you need:-

“We will not rent, trade, or release your information to any third party for any reason – ever. We respect your e-mail privacy and hate spam with a passion.”

6. Add your Video

I like to get on camera and deliver a video message to anybody that visits my site to encourage visitors to enter their name and email address. In a recent project of mine (Affiliate Marketing Shortcuts), I split tested a squeeze page with and without video. Here are the results:

As you can see the blue line (the squeeze page with the video) consistently out performs the orange line.

I personally like to try and build that element of trust with my visitors right from the very beginning. A video is also a great way to tell people why you’re doing what you’re doing. People buy beliefs, ideals and values – if they can resonate with your why then you’re half way to creating a loyal customer.

7. Powerful Calls to Action

This may sound a bit obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t have a really powerful call to action…

Calls to action can come in an auditory sense, visual sense or communicative sense. Ideally your squeeze page should include all three to influence the highest percentage of visitors.

An auditory call to action is only really possible if you have an audio file or video on your squeeze page. Simply make sure that you say something along the lines of “Enter your name and email address to the right hand side of this page for instant access”.

A visual call to action should be present in the form of brightly coloured arrows that point towards the opt in box. If you have a video squeeze page then you should point towards the opt in box during your video while you are making the auditory call to action.

Lastly, you should make sure that you tell the visitor – in written text – to enter their name and email address into the opt in box. Obviously this text should be a fairly dominant feature on the page.

If you look at my squeeze page here you’ll notice that I have all three working in unison.
So What should I Be Aiming for in Terms of Conversion?

It’s very hard to give you a figure that’s an accurate reflection across all niches, however most people would agree that a conversion rate of 20% is OK. If you’re getting in excess of 30% then you’re doing well and any more than 40% then you’re doing great.

The key to creating a squeeze page that converts really well is to test, test, test!

Internet Marketing is ALL about TESTING

You’ll hear me talking about this a lot, but it stands to reason that you should test everything you can when it comes to internet marketing. The reason I say this is because only through testing can you continually increase your conversion rate.

A high conversion rate is really quite fundamental to a successful campaign – it is one of only two variables that can increase your revenue. The other factor is traffic…And traffic is notoriously hard to get cheaply in abundance.

Furthermore, if you are paying for traffic (using pay per click for example) then you’ll have more chance of running profitable campaigns if your earnings per visitor is higher….And your ability to convert is an essential element to creating a high value per visitor.
How are Your Squeeze Pages Converting?

It’s always great to hear war stories from fellow internet marketers.

What have you found that converts well for you?
Do you use the squeeze page or alternative ways to build your list?
How have you increased your conversion rate in the past?

Hope you enjoyed this article – it’s certainly longer than I anticipated originally but I think I have most of the bases covered. Hopefully you’ll now be in a better position to make money on the internet.

Check out pragmatic info about the topic of free traffic – study this web site. The times have come when proper information is truly within your reach, use this opportunity.

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