Hello! Welcome to another episode of Coffee Break Blogging!

In this episode, we go back to basics on this extremely important part of your email marketing and list building strategy. We can’t rely on our blog sidebars to do all the heavy-lifting, so it is important that we make use of squeeze pages. Plus, the typical squeeze pages converts typically 10X to 20X better than the typical blog when it comes to building your list. If that isn’t a good reason to do it, I don’t know what is!

And in this one, we talk about:

• What a squeeze page actually is
• How you use it alongside your blog
• Why you squeeze page should NOT look like your blog
• The 4 elements of a squeeze page
• Why the simplest squeeze pages usually convert better

Now, for those of you who already know what these stuff are; I just want you to bear with me. I mean, understand that the Coffee Break Blogging podcast is essentially a course that goes from beginning to end in creating an online business and there are people of all experience levels that are listening. And I know that not everybody is fully familiar with what a squeeze page is or the different elements that go on it and there might be some questions related to squeeze pages so we are going to go ahead and just talk about this topic in this episode so that we do not leave anybody out.

What A Squeeze Page Is

A squeeze page is simple. All it is, is a single purpose page that has the entire job of getting somebody on your email list. And that is it. Now, you have seen squeeze pages before; there are those ones that basically just say “Here, download, get this” and the only thing that you can do there is opt-in… Either opt-in or you leave. That is pretty much it. So one important thing about squeeze page is there is no clutter on the screen. There is nothing there except for some type of a lead magnet and an opt-in form. And that is it.

So let us go in to a few things about the squeeze pages and also why you should be using a squeeze page.

Lead Magnets

First of all, if you go back a few episodes here, we talked about lead magnets; you should know by now that I do not recommend that you only have one single lead magnet for your blog. I know a lot of bloggers who are doing that… They basically have one opt-in offer one thing that you are giving away; some big eBook for example and you put it on the sidebar and you think that you have done your job, like you have done your due diligence to get people on to your list. But if you go back and you listen to episodes 70 and 71, I want you to really and truly understand what the real purpose is of the lead magnet is. There is more to it than just giving something away. And for that reason, you need to have multiple lead magnets, not just one of them. And in fact, you are actually going to be harming the effect in this of your overall marketing, in content marketing and profitability if you only got one lead magnet.

So the thing is, if you have multiple lead magnets, it should be pretty obvious that you can’t just stuff them all on your sidebar. So what are you going to do with them? How are you going to give them away? Your answer is going to be squeeze pages. You are going to have at least one squeeze page for every single lead magnet that you have. So that means if you have five different lead magnets to get people onto your list, then you are going to have five different squeeze pages. Now, probably only one of those lead magnets is going to be in the sidebar of your blog but you are still going to have five of them with five different squeeze pages.

Hosting

Now that squeeze page can be hosted on your main site. So some people have gotten confused on how these squeeze pages interact with the actual blog. So the thing is, even if you create your squeeze page using some other software other than WordPress; and we will be talking about that a little bit later in the coming episode, you can still put it on your blog and have it on your own domain. So basically it would be like a page on your site. So in my case, it could be blogmarketingacademy.com/lead magnet. I mean, that doesn’t exist, I don’t think; but that would be an example of a URL that would point to your squeeze page.

Link

Now the question is how do you get people to those squeeze pages? Do you list out all your squeeze pages in your top navigation; do you list them all on your sidebar and let people click? No. You don’t do those things and in fact, generally, most of your squeeze pages are not going to be in your navigation or on your sidebar. What you are probably going to do is link to them manually inside your content when it makes sense.

So if you are writing a blog post about topic X; whatever that might be, then it would make sense to link to whatever lead magnet is most relevant to topic X and you just simply link on your squeeze page; just like you would link to any other thing on the internet, you just link to your own squeeze page and you can bring people over. And that is how you do it.

Paid Traffic

Now, the other thing too is that you can run paid traffic right into your squeeze pages. Now that is beyond the scope of this particular episode; we will be talking about stuff with paid traffic a lot later in this overall progression of Coffee Break Blogging. But there are multiple ways of getting people to these squeeze pages and the big thing that you need to take away from this is that you need to have them and you need to link to them where it makes sense from inside your own content.

Design Elements

Now let us talk a little bit about the design elements of your squeeze page.

The big thing about your squeeze page is that it has to be simple. And it needs to not have any of the other clutter of your blog on it. So that means you do not want to have your top menu, you do not want to have a sidebar, you do not want to have any of your WordPress widgets… you do not want any of that stuff. Your squeeze page is going to look decidedly not like your blog. It is not going to look like your blog. You might keep the logo of your blog at the top but that is probably about it. And even then, you do not want the logo to be clickable because you do not want them to be able to click on that logo and leave the squeeze page. The entire idea of that squeeze page is that they can even opt-in to your list or they can leave by hitting the back button. Do not give them an out. Okay? So you take the sidebar off, you take the typical footer off, take all of your headers stuff except maybe the logo only. All that stuff has got to be gone.

So what is going to go on there? Well, this is going to make sense to you if you go out and look at almost any squeeze page that you have ever been before.

Headline

The first and foremost thing on that squeeze page is going to be your headline. You are going to have a headline at the top of the squeeze page and that headline is going to be all about what they are going to be getting. What is the lead magnet? What is the primary benefit of the lead magnet? What does that lead magnet going to do for them and you put that into your headline.

Now getting in copywriting on how to write awesome headlines is beyond the scope on this episode but we have talked about that in other sections. In fact, if you go back to Episode 60 we talked about how to model high converting headlines. And there are various things on the blog itself at blogmarketingacademy.com that talk about headlines as well. But the headline is an important component of the squeeze page.

Bullet Points

The next important component; but I will say that this is optional, are bullet points. So here is the thing… You do not want to have a big bunch of text that somebody has to read on a squeeze page because generally, they are not going to look at them; they are not going to read it. But they will generally scan over bullet points so, what would you put on the bullet points? Well, you want to highlight the benefits of the lead magnet like, what is the lead magnet going to do for them, what are they going to be able to accomplish once they go to that lead magnet… and what you can actually do is take parts of those lead magnets and twist them in terms of wording into a point of curiosity. You want to make them wonder what is inside of that lead magnet or wonder what the answer is.

Now here is a little trick that you can do to help you highlight benefits… take some things, you take some feature of the lead magnet and you add the words “so that” on the end of it. So take a feature and then “so that” and then you put something out of that. So the whole idea of having “so that” there would be that it is going to lead you into creating the benefit. You are going to get a “how to do blah-blah-blah so that you can then do this and this and this” and that would be the idea of having a “so that” to the end of a bullet point. And you want to make sure that each of your bullet points; you only need 3 to 5 of these things… you do not have to have a big list of them, but you want to make sure that they are benefit-driven. And if it helps, just add “so that” on the end of each one of them and then add the benefit. What are they going to get because of that thing?

Lead Magnet Image

Now another important component of the squeeze page is going to be the lead magnet image. This is generally going to be an image of the actual lead magnet. Now, being that we are talking about digital products in most cases then you are going to have to go and create one. Now, it could either be a “banneresque” graphic of some kind, like just an image or you can actually go and have a cover image created so you actually make the thing look like a little book. Whatever works for you but you want to give them some graphical representation of the lead magnet and what they are going to get.

Now, one little side note on this is that if you do decide to run some paid traffic, let us say like drop a Facebook ad into your squeeze page then you really need to have the image on Facebook and the image that they see when they get to your squeeze page look pretty much the same. You want it to have visual continuation. I guess that would be the word between the two so that they do not click from Facebook and then come over to the squeeze page and go like, “What the heck is this? This is not what I came here for.” You want to make them see that that is exactly what they came for and that it makes perfect sense. But you want to have a lead magnet image there. It is generally convert a lot better.

Now here is another little trick that you can do… make it so that if they try to click on the image itself, that it either triggers the opt-in form or you give them a little java script pop-up that has… “Ooopss… in order to get this go down below and enter your email address and tell us where to send it.” Okay? Because you are going to have people click on the image so you want to make sure that your squeeze page reacts accordingly and that you do not waste those clicks. Okay?

Call To Action

Now the last component it should be pretty obvious on a squeeze page, is going to be your call to action. So this is going to be the opt-in itself. Now you can either have the email input in the button right there on the squeeze page or you can do the two-step opt-in where there is just the button which says “download now” or “get instant access” or something like that and then when they click that, the pop-up comes up with the opt-in form. So you can go two different routes on that.

So, the 4 primary components:

• Headline
• Bullet points
• The lead magnet image
• The call to action

There can be extra things for example if you want to put social proof on there, maybe testimonials of people who have said awesome things about your lead magnet, whatever. But you generally do not want to add too many extra things to it.

Now I will end of with one thing here and that is:

That is why when I talked about bullet points earlier, I said that they were actually optional because I have seen some squeeze pages that convert crazy well and all it is; is a headline and the opt-in. And that is it, like maybe an image… But we are talking about the simplest squeeze pages ever. And they can convert really well.

So I don’t want you to think that you got to get all fancy with this stuff. It is really more about having the right form, having that simplicity of the squeeze page, not giving them any other options and of course coupling this entire thing with having a compelling lead magnet to begin with that they are actually going to want. But you can make extremely simple lead magnet squeeze pages and they are usually going to convert pretty well. It doesn’t need to look anything like your site.

So that is basically how squeeze pages work and a little bit about how to actually create these things. In the future episodes here coming up we are going to talk about some of the tools that you can use to actually create these squeeze pages for yourself.

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I want to end up by telling you a little bit about the newest Action Plan over inside The Blog Monetization Lab and that is in blogmonetizationlab.com where we have created an Action Plan on how to create a blog profit funnel.

Here is the thing, if you want to make money with your site; the way to do it is not by putting banner ads all over the place or not by littering up your blog with affiliate links. The way to do it is by creating real profit funnels behind the scenes of the blog. And we are talking about putting offers in place behind it. Now these could be your own offers not just a preferable way to do it or you can actually do this with affiliate offers as well. But there are a lot in terms of how do you structure this funnel, how to make email work in conjunction with the things like that. And we go through the mechanics of how to set that up in a very plain English fashion in the Action Plan that is called “Creating A Blog Profit Funnel” and it is only available for the members of The Blog Monetization Lab. So to learn more about the Lab, go over to blogmonetizationlab.com and I would love to see you on the inside!

Thank you so much and I will see you in a few days with the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging!