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By Donna Gunter in Featured

advertisingI see the well-known Internet marketing gurus do this all the time — they begin to try and sell to me when I first opt into their list. This has worked quite well for them over the years, but I think the tide is turning and people are generally becoming more marketing-savvy. Your list members don’t mind being sold to, provided that they have a relationship with you and have completed the like, know and trust journey (or are at least on the path of this journey) of getting to know you before they decide to buy something from you.

Whether you have a 500-person list or a 5000-person list, the rate at which they respond to your offers ties directly in with how well they know, like and trust you and see you as the expert providing answers to the problems keeping them awake at night.

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Writing articles is a very simple and free way to generate traffic to your website and improve sales of your product. However, to be effective it has to be done properly, and there are some aspects of article marketing of which many people are unaware.

Or perhaps you are aware of them, but don’t know how to put them into practice. It is not the purpose of this article to tell you how to write: there are rules that should be followed for best results, but these have been more than adequately covered by the myriad other articles that have written on the subject.

In fact, that would be one of the lessons: the use of the noun ‘myriad’. A word for a large number, it is Greek in origin, and correctly should be neither preceded by ‘a’ or followed by ‘of’, so ‘a myriad of articles’ is not grammatical, while ‘myriad articles’ is. However, like many of these rules of grammar, common usage is gradually superseding the correct form, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it.

No, here we are going to discuss how articles can be used as opposed to how to write them. We shall assume that already have a great article, with a good keyword-rich title and your body keywords used as they should be. So this is not so much about writing articles, but how to use them to generate traffic and improve sales of your products.

There are two main ways in which articles can be used: by publication as content on your own website and by submission to article directories. Let’s discuss each of these in turn.

Using Articles as Website Content

Articles can be used as web content for any type of website. People generally prefer to come across a web page containing a useful article that tells or teaches them something about the topic of the page than simply a page of graphics or links. In fact a proper silo site demands them.

Silo Sites: When writing articles for a silo site it is first important to draw up your site structure and make a list of the topics you will have to write about. There are various types of silo site, but that which offers excellent search engine results involves a home page linked to each of a number of silo header pages. Each of these introduce the theme of the silo, and link both to the home page and to the first silo page for each silo.

It is not the purpose here to discuss silo sites in detail, only that they can help to generate traffic and improve sales by the simplicity of their structure. Search engines can easily find every page on the site, and every page contains good content. That is assuming that they are well written and provide useful information.

Articles should just be ‘page fillers’ but should teach something about the topic, or provide information that is genuinely useful to readers or visitors to your website. Each page of a silo site is intended to provide that type of information, and can also be backed up with products or services that relate to the theme of the article and the silo page.

Sales Sites: Writing articles for sales sites does not infer writing sales pages, but writing in such a way as to promote a product or provide a problem and its solution, the product or service being promoted then being presented as a means of applying or achieving that solution. While I see a silo site as providing information first and the product second, with a sales site that is reversed, and certainly changes the way the articles is written and used.

Affiliate products can be sold both ways: they can be presented as a means of backing up the information provided in an info-silo site, offered as solutions to problems or form the main object of a web page and the articles offered in a promotional or review format.

Distribution to Article Directories

When you distribute an article to an article directory you benefit in a number ways, the main two being through the Google PageRank and search engine results listing gained from the backlinks proved to your selected web page from the link in the resource section of the article, and from the search engine listing of the article itself.

Articles are also read by users of the article directories, and they are also copied by webmasters as content for their own Adsense site: here, the resource section must be left intact, again offering you links back to your site. However, it is from their listings on search engines that you will get most tangible benefit, because each article is published on its own page in the directory website, and can be listed on Google in the same way as any other web page. Hence the need for good SEO on in your article.

If you don’t understand how to optimize an article it is certainly worth hiring an article ghostwriter or learning how to do it yourself, because it can make a massive difference to your sales, and generate traffic such as you have never previously experienced.

It is not necessary to submit your article to hundreds of individual directories and ezines. Submission to the top 10 or 15 directories is all that is needed. Because many of these syndicate their articles to other directories, and a number of ezines also pick them. If you want to increase your submissions above that, there submission services available online and also software that can be used to help you do it yourself.

So, writing articles can generate traffic and improve sales very dramatically if you know, not only how to write them properly with good search engine optimization, but also how to use them to your greatest advantage.

Writing articles properly can convert an average website into a hugely successful one if you know how to use them to generate traffic. Pete is a professional article ghostwriter, and for information on how to write and use articles properly visit his site Article Czar where he offers you a free writing course and tips on how make your site a success.

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Have you ever noticed that competitive runners achieve their best race times when they are pitted against worthy competitors?

You can be an excellent sprinter, but odds are you will not run your personal best on a track by yourself–most of the time it’s the spirit of a heated race and a determined runner breathing down your neck that makes you dig down deep give it all you’ve got.

The quest for a higher search engine ranking and more website traffic is much like athletic competitions. When you’re trying to get your site ranked higher in Google, you are not operating in a vacuum–you have competitors, whether you acknowledge them or not.

Your progress is not only dependent on your own efforts at marketing your site, but the efforts of your competitors–if other website owners are more consistent, more reliable, and more focused in their marketing, there’s a good chance that they will outrank you.

With website rankings, there is a constant jockeying for position, so it is extremely helpful when you’re trying to market your site and get a higher search engine ranking if you will use your competitors to your own advantage.

Before you start your next link building campaign, take a look around the playing field and gather some intelligence about those you’re running against.

How Can You Tell Who Your Competition Is?

It’s actually quite easy to tell who your top competitors are–just do a search for each of your keywords in Google.

What site is at the #1 position?

Unless it’s you, that website is your top competition. Repeat this search for each one of your keywords.

When you’re starting out, you may want to limit yourself to 3 main keywords whose competitors you’re keeping track of. That way you have 3 competitors to keep track of, and that will give you a good idea of how you’re progressing and also how far you need to go to catch up to the #1 position.

What Type Of Information Should You Keep Track Of?

Alright, now that you know who your top competitors are, it’s time to do a little investigating. Here are the main bits of info that will help you get an idea of where your site stands in relation to site holding the #1 position.

1) How many backlinks does the competing website have?

You can do a backlink check by typing the word “link:” (following by a colon) and then the competitor’s URL into the Google search box. The results will be a listing of sites that are currently linking to their site, and at the top of the page you can see a total number of backlinks.

2) What is their search engine rank for the keyword?

For the first month at least, their ranking is #1.

Another thing that will be interesting to you is to see how the site that is ranked at #1 can fall if they are outdone by another site further down in the ranking. If you are consistent with your link building campaign, you can see your site climbing up the rankings each month, until finally your #1 competitor drops from the number one position and your site takes over.

3) What is the other site’s PageRank?

PageRank (PR) is a tool Google uses to reflect the authority of a web page. The rankings go from 0-10, where 10 is the best. You’ll likely notice that a website does not need to have a PageRank of 10 in order to hold the top ranking for a keyword–many times sites with lower rankings hold the top position. Why is this?

Remember, it’s all about competition–the top ranking website may have a PR2, but the other sites who are competing for top listing for that keyword have lower authority. Of course, there are many other factors that go into determining who has the top rank in Google, and only Google knows all of their criteria for judging.

At any rate, it is helpful to know the other site’s PageRank, especially in comparison to your own. If you see that the competing site has a PR4 and your site has a PR2, you can set a goal for yourself to achieve PR4 or higher.

With all of these indicators, it’s nice to get an idea of what you’re shooting for. Being aware of your top competitor’s stats can help you strategically jump up the rankings and keep your motivation going to earn the #1 spot.

To supercharge your link building results, it’s a smart idea to enlist the services of a trusted article submitter. SubmitYOURArticle.com distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button – for more information go to http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

If you have to learn how to make money then you should try tweeting on Tweeter. It is a simple way to promote your site, but one of which most have little knowledge. Twitter is not a new phenomenon on the internet, because it was created by Jack Dorsey as long ago as 2006. Don’t laugh – 2006 is a long time ago in internet terms, and Twitter has grown a great deal since it was conceived by Jack as a means of small groups communicating by using short SMS messages.

Messaging services are now commonplace, but Twitter has developed into a world-wide phenomenon. I am not here to discuss Twitter’s past, but how you can use it in the future: not only to communicate with people, but to make money and turn it into a marketing tool more effective than any that have gone before.

I fully understand how Google works (as well as anybody who is not employed by Google can), and Twitter is Google bait! This will only last for a short time, and even if you only have a blog that you want to promote you must learn how to use Twitter to promote it. If you have a Squidoo lens, just the same: Twitter can be use to give you visitors.

So how is that? The question you have to answer yourself when you tweet on Twitter is who will see it? A tweet is not a web page, and is not listed on a search engine. It isn’t an email, or any other direct means of communication. The only people that will come across those short messages you send are those that are ‘following’ you. To do that, they must deliberately click a link so that they do so. Why should they?

Many newbies to Twitter make their tweets and they go nowhere because they don’t have any followers. Imagine if you could choose your own followers. I am not saying that Britney would follow you because if you check out Britney’s link you will see no tweets except hers and her manager’s and agent’s. She uses Twitter as an advertising medium, and follows nobody.

You can use Twitter that way too, and can advertise products and web pages but refuse followers – you will then make nothing. It is very important that learn how to get followers, but the followers that suit you. There are ways to achieve that, and also ways to choose the Tweeters that you want to follow. If you get it right, one or both of two things can happen:

  1. You can make a lot of friends, even if you have no desire to use Tweeter to make money.
  2. You can use Tweeter make a lot of money, even if you have no desire to make friends.

What you should be aiming for is a combination of each, and if you know how to do it, then you can, to the advantage of you and your friends on Tweeter. They need a service or have a problem to be solved, and you can provide either or both. But how do you get together?

By Tweets of course! But you have to get them following you, and while you know how to register with Tweeter and make your tweets, who is reading them? Nobody! However, let’s take just one social networking site – Facebook. As with most, you can have your tweets posted on your wall in Facebook, so that all of your friends can see them. That is just one simple way of advertising yourself totally free of charge.

Solve that problem and you will be made. You will be able to put everything you learn into practice and will be able to make money and promote your site by Tweeting on Twitter! Think of all the social networking sites out there on which you can make your tweets visible, even to non tweeters? At one time it was tag and ping – that is old hat now.

There are far better ways of getting your message publicized than that: Twitter offers it if only you can see how to do it. Enough said!

Peter Nisbet – If you want to find out how to use Twitter as it can be used, then check out at Twitter Traffic – you will also find out how Twitter can be used to make money, particularly if you have a product to sell. If not, simply enjoy knowing how to use it to its maximum advantage to you.

By Merle in Featured

blogHave you ever imagined getting paid to post to your blog? Yes, you heard me right. Get paid for writing on your blog. There are many bloggers that are making a steady stream of income by utilizing “review sites”. Here’s how it works.

There are plenty of advertisers out there looking for bloggers to write about their products/services. Review websites bring both parties together, usually in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Before choosing a service to sign up with, make sure you read the terms of service to ensure you’re picking one that’s a good fit. If you use Google’s Blogging service, some review sites won’t accept you as they’ll only take blogs hosted on their own domains. It’s smart to read their terms of service first before wasting your time submitting. Research how you’ll be paid and also how you’ll be notified of new review opportunities.

By Karon Thackston in Featured

Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts.

There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2. Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance.

3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not.

7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be…” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.

8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation. There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Need help with SEO copywriting? Karon has written 3 excellent books to help you learn keyword optimization techniques. Visit http://www.CopywritingCourse.com and click to the Order page for details.

By Chad White in Featured

For many retail brands, we are quickly approaching the saturation point for email volume. My Retail Email Trends Index currently indicates that retail email volume is running 19% above last year’s. While that’s slower than the 28% year-over-year increases that we were seeing in July 2008, it’s alarming because we’re heading into the holiday season.

Last year, retail email volume rose 43% during the holiday season — and during its peak week was up 76%, compared to the pre-holiday baseline. If this holiday season follows the same trajectory, retailers will average 3.4 emails per week, with a peak of 4.2 emails per week.

Subscribers are unlikely to suffer such increases on top of the increases already seen this year. Email marketers are sure to experience deliverability problems like some retailers had during the first week of December 2008, when average retail email volume was pushing past 3.2 emails per week. (Note that figure is less than the projected average for this upcoming holiday season.)

Imagine losing all the sales generated by your email marketing program during the first week of December — plus the distraction and expense of getting your email unblocked during the heart of the holiday season. That’s what some email marketers are risking if they increase their broadcast promotional email volume like they did last year.

More than ever, the question is: How can we make each email that we send work harder? How can we minimize volume increases to avoid increased list churn and deliverability issues, while maximizing revenue?

Consider these tactics:

Additional opt-ins. Give your subscribers the chance to opt in to an additional email stream of daily or weekly holiday deals or your “X Days of Christmas” campaign. This way you’re focusing your additional volume on subscribers who want it and are most likely to convert.

I spoke to a retailer last year who said his company only sent its “12 Days of Christmas” campaign to its best customers. Company strategists felt that insulated them from the downside of higher volumes, saying that their unsubscribe rates among those receiving the additional emails was no higher than their average opt-out rate. What they failed to take into consideration is that these were their best customers, a group with lower opt-out rates and higher conversion rates. Instead of holding the line on opt-outs, they actually drove their best subscribers away at an elevated level by over-mailing them.

Preference updates. Use August, September and October to ask (and perhaps even incentivize) subscribers to update their preferences. You can then use that information during November and December to power your segmentation and dynamic content programs to ensure greater relevance and higher conversion rates for your emails.

If you don’t have a preference center, there may still be time to launch one before the holiday season gets underway in earnest. If you have one already, now would be an excellent time to review all the selections in it to make sure they are up to date and feeding into your email system properly.

Triggered emails. Rather than sending way more broadcast emails, launch new triggered emails or revamp the ones you have. Does your welcome email make the most of that first touch? Don’t forget to take advantage of your transactional emails to promote related products and get buyers back for another purchase. Also consider shopping cart abandonment emails and browse-based emails — just be careful not to come across as too Big Brother-ish.

Good luck with your holiday campaigns.

Chad White is the Research Director at Smith-Harmon, an agency focused exclusively on providing email marketing strategy and creative services. Visit his blog at http://www.retailemailblog.com/

By Eric Johnson in Featured

seoWhen it comes to getting your website listed at the top of the search engines keyword search rankings, it is essential for you to gain a deeper understanding of the search engine spiders that crawl over your website. After all, it is the spiders that determine the relevance of your website and decide where your site will land in the search engine results page. Therefore, by learning how to control the direction of the spiders, you can be certain your website will rise in rankings.

Gaining Control with the Help of Robots.txt

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Reverse SEO has become one of the most effective strategies for minimizing the impact pf bad publicity within the search engines’ organic listings. It is an online reputation management (ORM) tool of SEO consultants who manage public relations online. Too often, companies become targets for negative press online. Angered customers start blogs to take businesses to task for grievances suffered, real or imagined. Dishonest competitors will often go to great lengths to distribute fraudulent reports online. Still others post untruthful reports about companies simply to cause mischief. The problem is that these blogs, pages, and reports can start ranking well in Google and Yahoo.

Reverse SEO can be used to suppress negative publicity that targets your company in the organic listings. By pushing bad press onto the second, third, and fourth pages of Google, those pages will be prevented from gaining traction or attention. In today’s article, we’ll explain the potentially devastating effects of negative press and how reverse SEO can help you manage your company’s public relations online. We’ll also describe what you can expect when you work with an experienced SEO consulting service.

Why Reverse SEO Tactics Are Used

The reason to use reverse SEO is based upon current societal trends. Many of your customers are likely to research your company on Google, Yahoo, or Bing before purchasing a product or service from you. When they find reviews, they tend to believe them. Unfortunately, there are few barriers that prevent people from posting negative reports online about your business.

For example, a disgruntled employee can start an anonymous blog vilifying your company. An unsatisfied customer can post a less-than-honest story about your business on ripoffreport.com. Your competitors can do the same. The reputations of more than a few companies have been decimated in this way.

When prospective customers find these pages on the search engines, they give them unwarranted credibility. Reverse SEO minimizes the damage. Studies have shown that the vast majority of searchers never venture onto the second page of listings. Of those who do, a small fraction progress to the third page. By pushing negative publicity off the first page of Google’s listings, a reverse SEO strategy removes them from sight.

Reverse Search Engine Optimization Curbs Negative Publicity

Negative publicity, if left unchecked, gains momentum in the search engines. Highly-ranked pages attract links. As inbound links increase to these pages, they become harder to remove. This is why it is important to launch a reverse SEO campaign as soon as bad press emerges, if not beforehand. By suppressing negative pages quickly, you can prevent them from gaining traction. Cut off from a supply of links, they will eventually submerge into the depths of the search engines’ listings.

The Basic Strategy of Reverse SEO

In the same way that a search engine optimization project requires a refined approach, a reverse SEO campaign should also follow a rigid formula. The basic strategy relies upon a network of authoritative sites to control the first page of organic listings for your company’s name. That includes article and press release syndication, capturing keyword-rich sub-domains on authoritative blog sites, and carefully using social networking properties. There are also a number of formidable online tools that can be used to further support your reverse SEO efforts.

By leveraging the ranking ability of these authoritative sites for your company’s name, you can control the first page of organic listings. That pushes negative press downward beyond your customers’ field of view.

The Positive Effects of Reverse SEO Require Time

It’s worth emphasizing that a reverse SEO campaign takes time to gain momentum. Even though you will be leveraging authoritative sites that rank more quickly than other properties, controlling the first page of Google is not an overnight process. However, once these sites climb to the top positions, they are very difficult to remove. Their ranking ability does not guarantee immediate results, but results tend to be sustainable. That means future attempts to attack your company with negative publicity will be forced to climb a much higher wall to do so. In effect, your business will be insulated.

Working With a Reverse SEO Consulting Service

The full-service SEO agency with whom your company works will already have a honed strategy for deploying a reverse SEO campaign. They will maintain a list of authoritative sites that are groomed for your circumstances. They’ll research your website’s position in the search engines as well as the positions of any negative press that currently populates the organic listings. Rather than pursuing reverse SEO methods that are unethical and thus, have only short-term results, they will use principled tactics that prevent bad publicity from gaining traction in the future.

Reverse SEO is becoming a popular method for minimizing the damage from complaints and negative reports, whether they are valid or not. In fact, a growing number of companies are relying upon reverse SEO tactics as a preemptive strategy for managing their public relations online.

Reverse SEO Consultants are found at Rostin Reagor Smith, Inc. With national experience in online reputation management (ORM) and proven strategies for reverse SEO in public relations online, Rostin Reagor Smith is the resource for reverse SEO (reverse search engine optimization,) public relations online, search engine marketing, and ORM (online reputation management.)

By Donna Gunter in Featured

For years I’ve resisted the urge to create a squeeze page for my email newsletter. A squeeze page is a one-page site, or a landing page on a site, that has one call to action: convince the visitor to enter her name and email address to join your list and/or receive your giveaway. On a traditional squeeze page, the visitor has only one option — to part with her name and email address to opt into your list. This is how the squeeze page term was coined, as the visitor is “squeezed” for her contact information to permit her to continue into the site.

I’ve most often seen this strategy used as the home page of a site, and the use of that strategy in that way made me hesitant to adopt it. Why? Because a squeeze page home page provides little content for search engine spiders to index and may block the indexing of the remainder of your site. You hurt your chances of using SEO to rank high in the search engines. And, I think that requiring contact info to enter your web site will turn repeat visitors away.

In the last year or so I’ve seen more of what I term a “wussie squeeze page,” in which all of the concepts of a squeeze page are in place, but the site owner has placed a bypass link underneath the opt-in box that invites the visitor to enter the site without being forced to opt into a list.

I’ve recently done something similar with my ezine by placing a hidden squeeze page on my site where the top navigation links of the site are still visible but the page isn’t listed and can’t be accessed via the site navigation menu. So, while the invitation to bypass the opt-in box isn’t quite as obvious to the visitor, a method of bypassing the opt-in box is still available to visitors. If they choose to bypass this page, I have two backup plans to capture a visitor’s contact info: a subscription box on every page of my site, as well as an opt-in hover ad that pops up about 45 seconds after landing on my site.

Here are the 10 essential components you need to create an effective squeeze page for your ezine:

1. Domain Name. Pick a compelling domain name that accurately describes the result of opting into your list or the nature of the list to which the visitor is opting into. You’ll want to forward this domain to a hidden page on your site that is not accessible via your navigation menu. Don’t mask the domain when you forward it (i.e. hide the internal URL to which the domain is forwarded — your domain registrar usually offers this as an option). If you use this domain in your resource box when you syndicate your articles, you want to reap the rewards of strong inbound links from high-traffic article directories, and that won’t happen if you mask the domain name of your squeeze page.

2. Client Attraction Device. The most effective way to entice a visitor to opt into your list is by giving something away. Typically this giveaway, or what I call a Client Attraction Device, is in an electronic download format and helps solve a major issue faced by your target market. Many savvy online business owners put several electronic downloads together into a kit (audio, ebook, and checklist, for example) for their giveaway, as the expectations have increased as to what visitors expect when exchanging their contact info for free information.

3. Graphic of Giveaway. The adage of “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings quite true in the Internet marketing world. Have a graphic representation created of your giveaway, as that increases the perceived value of what you’re offering.

4. Value of Giveaway. Placing a monetary value on your giveway is another strategy to enhance the importance of this free item in the eyes of your visitors. Don’t be outrageous in your pricing — determine what you might actually charge for your giveaway if you were selling it as a product on your site.

5. Compelling Headline. A headline that grabs your reader’s attention will go a long way in convincing them to hang out long enough to finish reading the content on your squeeze page. Appealing to some emotion of the visitor is the most effective way to construct a compelling headline, like fear of loss, greed, vanity, lust, pride, envy, laziness…you get the idea.

6. Captivating Copy. It’s no longer sufficient to simply invite a visitor to opt into a list. Most visitors have become too savvy for that. In order to convince them to opt into your list, you must answer the “WIIFM” question, or “What’s In It For Me?” This means that you need to take a page out of the copy writing playbook and essentially create a short sales letter on your squeeze page. Outline the benefits they’ll receive if they opt into your list for the giveaway.

7. Enhance with Audio and Video. It never hurts to appeal to all information intake styles of your visitors. Record a quick audio or video that convinces your visitors that your giveaway is something that they cannot live without. Verbally instruct them how to opt into your list, as well.

8. Testimonials. Reading (or hearing) glowing reviews of how others liked the giveaway will often serve as the deciding factor to get a visitor to take action. Request written, audio, or video testimonials from others who’ve received your Client Attraction Device or from those who’ve purchased other products and services from you. Testimonials go a long way in convincing visitors that opting into your list is worth their time and energy.

9. Opt-in Box. You need an email marketing service to help you create an opt-in box to capture your visitor’s name and primary email address. If you plan on doing direct mail marketing in the future, you may also request their mailing address and phone number as optional fields. You’ll be surprised at how many visitors will complete the entire form with all of their contact info, even if the name and email address are the only two required items.

10. Informed opt-in. Let visitors know that they will also be receiving a complimentary subscription to your ezine when they opt into your list. Don’t hide this fact from your visitor. Give them a bit of info about your ezine, like how often you publish it. You may want to create a graphic image of your ezine to add to this page, as well.

A squeeze page for your ezine is an effective way to triple the opt-in rate to your email marketing list. Follow these 10 steps to skyrocket the size of your list today!

Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

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