Small Steps, Big Results #9

"Squeeze Pages & Auto-Responders"

Hello & Welcome to my FREE Newsletter!  The goal of the "How To" newsletters is to teach the beginner how to create a website and how to start to make money online.  At first glance, it appears very difficult to get started because there seems to be SO much to learn!  But you'll soon discover that YOU can do it!  Because YOU have taken the first step.  Learn from these newsletters, take notes, write down your goals, but above all, enjoy yourself here! - Kristine Wirth

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."  

- Bill Cosby

Hello again!

This week we'll talk about Squeeze Pages & Auto-Responders.  Click the "Play" button below the video to view it or, if you'd rather read the transcript, that's directly below the video itself.

Transcript

Now, in the past two newsletters you’ve created a web page, and you’ve added a colorful header to that web page.  These two steps alone take people MONTHS to learn and you’ve done it over the course of 2 weeks!  You should be amazed at what you’ve accomplished so far! 

But, even though we have this fantastic web page, we need to know why we have it at all.  Why is it important that we’ve created this page and what is its purpose?  Well, that’s the focus of this newsletter so let’s get right into it.

This web page that you’ve just created is called a Squeeze Page and the reason it’s called a squeeze page is because it’s ONLY purpose is to squeeze out information from people who visit this page on your site. 

And the information that you’re trying to squeeze out of people is of course, their name and email address. 

The reason why it’s called a squeeze page is because there is usually only one action that people can perform on this kind of web page and that’s either signing up to your list or not. 

They only have that one option.  In other words, you don’t have links back to your home page, to other sections on your site, to YouTube videos or to anything else; signing up to your newsletter is the one and only option that they have.

In order to get this information from the site visitor, you need to have an opt-in form on your web page where people can enter in this kind of information. 

Now, I know that I’ve referred to this before, but it is imperative that you know that your list of interested people is your most valuable asset that you have online.  It is this asset that will include a list of people who are:

A) interested in your subject matter,

B) have expressed interest in hearing more from you and

C) will allow you to market to them so that you can make money online.

The most successful squeeze pages do NOT try and sell you anything.  Rather, they GIVE first in order to RECEIVE later.  I know that this might sound a little counter-intuitive because you are, after all, interested in earning money online right?  But you first must build and gain trust from those subscribers. 

Remember, they don’t know who you are, they only know that you have a web page that is talking about something they’re interested in and you’ve interested them enough to get them to sign up to your list...that is all.

Now notice that I said that you should try to GIVE first in order to RECEIVE later.  One way to effectively do this is to GIVE those who do visit your web page a free gift of some sort as a way to thank them for stopping by. 

This free gift can be an e-book, a free video, a free audio file, whatever it is that you’d like to give away related to the topic of your website.  But whatever it is that you do choose to give away must be of excellent value! 

But before we even get to this step of giving something away, we first need to have a form to insert into this page and before we have this form, we first need to understand what auto-responders are all about.

An opt-in form comes from your auto-responder company.  An auto-responder company is a service that manages all of your subscribers, the messages that you send to them, and so forth.  So let me login to my own auto-responder companies website and show you around a little bit. 

The only company I use, and one that nearly everyone I know uses, is Aweber.  Now, unlike the past couple of videos where I showed you how to use free software in order to accomplish what normally are very expensive and labor-intensive tasks, Aweber is NOT free.  It is however, very affordable. 

Now, an auto-responder can have many lists.  When someone comes to your web page where they can opt-in; in other words, they enter in their name and email address, they are then added to one of your lists.  Now each list should correspond to a particular website or to a particular audience. 

Let’s take an example.  So let's say that you own a salon in your town.  You may want to keep separate lists of current customers, prospective customers and promotional customers. 

Each list will have it's very own set of messages that get sent out on a regular basis. 

For example, let's say that you want to reward your current customers with a 30% off special.  But, this is only good for current customers.  You wouldn't want to send out this same promotion to say, prospects because it is only special to those who currently use your service. 

Additionally, maybe you have a promotion going on and have placed an advertisement in your local paper that says they'll get a free manicure with every hair color service.  You may want these people on a different list since they'll get different kinds of messages.

What's nice with Aweber's autoresponder is that you can have an unlimited amount of lists for one monthly price.  And if you ever just want to send out an email to everyone without segregating that list in any way, you can.  It's really very flexible.

As an online business, you may have several different kinds of websites.  And so you wouldn't want to send out the same promotion to a "bird-watchers" website that you would send out to a "learn-piano" website.

Now, I'm not going to get into the details of how to set up a list since that's a little outside the scope of this video and it will be covered in later videos, but I do want to draw your attention to "Messages".  Because you'll notice that there are 3 kinds of messages that you can send.  And each one of these is a little different.

Now, I'll be creating very specific videos on how to use each one of these but I want to quickly go through the differences here because they do each have their own traits. 

The follow-up messages is the area you'll likely be using the most when you first begin using your auto-responder. 

This is because this is the spot where you'll add all of your messages that will go out at specific intervals.  For example, since you've signed up to this list, you know that I send you a couple of messages right off the bat to familiarize you with the contents of the emails to come.  And that you get a copy of the newsletter once a week.  These are called follow-up messages and they are pre-set up to go out to you on a very specific basis.

Now next, let's quickly talk about the web forms tab.  This is the spot where you'll create the actual form that will be included on your web page where people can type in their name and email address.

Without this form, no one can sign up to your list and you will have no one that you can send messages to.  This will be covered in great detail in Small Steps, Big Results #10. 

For now though, I would suggest that you sign up with your own auto-responder company if you haven’t already. 

You absolutely, without a doubt, need a way for people to sign up to your list in order to make a living for yourself online. 

The website traffic that you get to your site is absolutely precious, and you only have a very small amount of time to capture the attention of your site visitor; when you do however, you want to be sure that they sign up to your list.  It won’t happen with everyone, but rest-assured, without a way to keep in contact with those people, you have a 100% chance of losing them each time they stop by.

Below is a link where you can get a $1 trial of Aweber but note that this promotion with them comes and goes.  At the time of this recording, they are still offering the $1 trial so if you haven’t yet chosen an auto-responder company, fill in the form below to take a “test drive” of Aweber.

Next week we’ll actually create this auto-responder form and get it inserted into our web page.

- Kristine