Happy Tuesday!
Today kicks off Sterling Valentine’s “30 Day Listbuilding Challenge” at List Laser. In case you haven’t heard I have been asked to be a guest judge and one of the trainers for the challenge.
To be honest, I hate public speaking (who doesn’t?) so my mind has been racing trying to figure out what to talk about for an hour. I’m sure I will probably spend some time talking about how I got started list building and that got me thinking about how far I have come with the design of my squeeze pages.
I thought it would be fun to dig into my archives and share some of my early squeeze page designs with you.
Some of these are pretty embarrassing but having durfed in front of a few hundred people I don’t think these can hurt my reputation any worse.
Aug 2007 – My Introduction to List Building
I won’t go into the whole story but back in 2007 I joined a very expensive online business opportunity and promoted it pretty heavily. The company had a large variety of promo tools that we could use to promote the site including some very professional looking squeeze pages.
I remember we had the option to use the company autoresponder or subscribe to Aweber and manage our lists ourselves. Luckily I was smart enough back then to know that if I was going to be building a list that I want my contacts to be in my possession and not the owners of this program. I went with Aweber which I am still using today and believe it or not some of the contacts that I made back then are still active today.
I don’t have any samples from this period because I was using the generic company squeeze pages. Let’s just say, they didn’t work very well.
Feb 2008 – List Building for Profit
The business opportunity I was promoting eventually closed (as they almost always do) but I still had my list and I was starting to see how powerful this list building stuff could be.
I decided to try building a list and using it to make money without having someone else’s business opportunity on the backend.
At the time I was doing a lot of advertising on traffic exchanges. I went and found myself a free rebrandable ebook about traffic exchanges written by someone else that I could promote to build my list.
Here’s the page I came up with:
Yes, that is Homer Simpson.
No, I don’t own the rights to that picture.
Yes, I probably could have gotten sued for using that.
Don’t worry. I don’t do that any more and I recommend you don’t do it either.
But, even back then I was trying to do something that would stick out in the sea of generic affiliate pages that people were promoting in traffic exchanges. Homer got people’s attention. It worked.
I also knew the power of personal branding back then. Yep, it’s the same picture I am still using today. Seriously, build your brand! It’s one of the best things you can do for your business.
What I didn’t know back then is the importance of keeping your squeeze pages “above the fold”. What that means is that most people viewing your squeeze page in traffic exchanges or safelists are too lazy scroll down your page. You need to try and keep all of your information within the viewing screen so people can sign-up without needing to scroll.
July 2008 – My Own Product
Around this time I started to see the benefits of creating my own free giveaway product instead of promoting one created by someone else. I was still promoting pretty heavily in the traffic exchanges so I decided to write my own traffic exchange book.
Here’s one of the early squeeze pages I made for it:
Yeah, that’s pretty bad.
But I still have my picture, it’s a decent headline, the bullet points are good, there’s a call to action, I changed the “submit” button, and I included a privacy disclaimer.
If only it wasn’t so ugly!
By the way, not too many people remember this book and I don’t recommend that you go looking for it. It’s seriously outdated and there are much better TE books out there today.
In fact, forget you ever saw that page!
June 2009 – Professional Design
In 2009 I started launching my own membership sites to support my ebooks. This was a step up from what I was doing before so I starting spending some money to have a professional graphic designer create my squeeze pages for me.
The result:
Pretty nice, huh?
One of the things people don’t tell you about hiring a web designer is that you still have to do some work. I assumed I could just pay someone some money and say “give me something awesome” but from my experience designers usually want you to tell them exactly what to do. So I still had to write the copy and give them the general layout but the design is much better than anything I could have done on my own.
March 2010 – The Three Stooges
This is easily my most successful squeeze page so far.
It was originally a splash page but I recently remade it into a squeeze page that I could use to build my list. It’s got a headline that you can’t miss and while the music may be annoying you definitely can’t ignore it when you are surfing.
Check it out:
To make this I basically just chopped off the header from my website (to keep it “above the fold”), deleted all of the content, and added the squeeze page.
And in case you are wondering about the copyright issue… that particular episode of The Three Stooges has fallen into public domain. I think that means I can’t be sued for using it… at least I hope that’s true. I just wish there were more good public domain videos that I could edit into something like this.
Present – Fast and Easy Squeeze Pages
Lately I have gone back to making my own squeeze pages using AdKreator.
It’s rare but every so often I get a brilliant idea in the middle of the night for a squeeze page and don’t want to wait weeks for a designer to make it for me. With AdKreator I can make my own professional looking squeeze pages and have them online in less than hour.
Here’s one of my most recent squeeze pages:
AdKreator is very simple to use and it’s a lot cheaper than constantly hiring graphic designers to make squeeze pages for you. It’s also not nearly as embarrassing as some of the early designs I tried to make on my own.
So that’s it. If you want to build your list you need a good squeeze page. In most cases your squeeze page is going to be your introduction to your new subscriber. Always put your best foot forward and do something unique that makes you stick out from the pack.
Also, don’t worry if your first designs suck because mine sure did.
