This article is a simple how-to guide to building a list using a squeeze page and an autoresponder.

What You Need
Two resources are required to successfully build your list:

1. A website.
2. An autoresponder.

Getting a Website
You must have a website. You don’t have to have a fancy domain, but it certainly helps if you do your keyword research and buy a domain which contains some of the main keywords of the product you are promoting. There are tons of cheap domain and hosting providers out there. Just pick one of the cheapest to start with. Get a hosting site which supports PHP and MySQL, then you are ready to build your site.

Getting an Autoresponder
An autoresponder is the software which collects and stores the names and email addresses which makes up your list, and allows you to setup a follow-up series of mails and create broadcast mails. The autoresponder should also contain features for tracking and statistics, and it should automatically handle unsubscriptions and bounces (undeliverable mails). Some webhosting providers offer integrated autoresponder features, but your best bet is to go with dedicated autoresponder providers.

Overview of the Website Structure
The website needs three pages:

1. A squeeze page.
2. A confirmation page.
3. A thank-you page.

Creating the Squeeze Page
This is a short page which lists the main benefits of whatever it is that you are promoting and contains the signup form which collects the visitors name and email address. A good incentive is to offer a free bonus of some kind, available only to subscribers. You can put a bit of pressure on by making a time-limited offer. The signup form is usually created using the autoresponder software, which gives you a set of HTML to copy and paste into your squeeze page. At the end of the page, you can mention that you hate spam too and will never share or sell the email address. It is also a good idea to include a link to your privacy policy and perhaps some legal disclaimers there.

Creating the Confirmation Page
This is the page that you redirect subscribers to, when they have submitted their information. Use this page to remind them to verify their subscription by clicking on the link provided in the confirmation e-mail that the auto-responder sends. This is particularly important when using double-opt-in, otherwise you may loose many potential subscribers. Tell the visitors clearly that they will only get the benefits if they confirm. You may want to offer the signup form again on this page, just in case the visitor made some mistake entering the email on the squeeze page.

Creating the Thank-You Page
This is the page that you send your subscriber to, when he has confirmed his subscription by clicking the link in the e-mail. This is where you can offer the free bonus and/or redirect to the product you are promoting (using a cloaked affiliate link).

Setting up the Autoresponder
There are three main tasks involved in setting up the autoresponder:

1. Create the list.
2. Making the signup form.
3. Write a few follow-up mails.

Creating the List
Decide on a name for your list and pick the options you need. An important option is to choose double-opt-in, as that will ensure that your subscribers are real and interested people. When you create the list, you also write standard stuff like a signature and various tracking etc. You also set the URL for the thank-you (or confirmation success) page here.

Making the Signup Form
Your autoresponder software usually has features to create signup forms of various kinds, such as pop-ups, pop-ins, pop-unders, some that bounce in and whatever. You can experiment with those later. Start with a plain and simple signup form that just asks for a name and email address. Create a slight sense of urgency by labling the signup button something like “YES, Give Me Instant Access Now!”. Don’t spend much time on the signup form. Finally generate the signup form HTML code and copy/paste it into the squeeze page.

Writing the Follow-Up Mails
You need at least one follow-up mail, which is the “welcome mail”. There you greet your new subscriber with a warm welcome and introduce yourself and the service you intend to provide to your members. First impressions count, so make a good one! If you promised a free bonus or time-limited offer, you should give the links in the welcome email, so the subscriber immediately gets the first benefit of subscribing.

If you intend to use the list mostly for ongoing news and fresh offers and other active promotion, then you don’t need more follow-up mails. However, if you want to make an almost “set-and-forget” cash machine, then you need to write a series of follow-up mails. These are scheduled to be sent automatically by the autoresponder at fixed intervals after the initial subscription. There are many ways to structure a series, but a good way is to focus on the different groups you may have within your keyword list and create a mail in the series for each group. See your autoresponder FAQ for more suggestions.

Other Autoresponder Tasks
Later, when you have some subscribers on your list, you can send broadcast messages with news, offers and other promotional material. However, you need to be careful not to abuse your list by spamming it with unrelated stuff or several times a day. People will tire of it and unsubscribe or worse will report you as a spammer!

You should use the autoresponder tracking and statistics features and continually test and rework your squeeze page to be sure it is optimized and gets you as many signups and conversions as possible.

Getting Subscribers
Okay, now you have setup your squeeze page and autoresponder. How do you get traffic to the squeeze page? There are two primary ways to do that:

1. Using Google Adwords or other Pay-Per-Click sites.
2. By writing articles.

Using Google Adwords
A certain way to get traffic to your squeeze page is to pay for it. With Google Adwords you put up a list of keywords related to the product you are promoting and write several tiny ads which you design to attract visitors to your squeeze page. Each click on your ads has a price which depends on how many factors, such as how much competition there is on the keyword and the relevance of the keyword to your squeeze page (VERY important to mention your keywords on the squeeze page).

Writing Articles
An effective way to send free traffic to your squeeze page is to write several articles related to the main keywords of the product you are promoting and submitting them to the top eZine article sites. Include links in your articles which point to your squeeze page. The great this about writing articles is that they will just keep on sending you traffic as search engines pick up the articles and even more if other people start linking to it from their sites. You can even put them on your own site and stick some Google AdSense on the pages and earn a little (or a lot if you are clever) extra.

Other Ways to Get Traffic
Similar to the article writing method, you can also blog about the subject matter, or post messages on relevant forums. Again be sure to include links which point to the squeeze page.

Just do it!
Now you know how it is done. Not much to it, really. You just have to get started and then continue until it’s done, and then you are well on your way to building a list for fun or profit.

Odinn Sorensen
Is currently a full-time employee as Quality Engineer at TELMORE A/S, a major danish mobile service provider with nearly 600,000 customers. He has a long-term goal of becoming financially independent, and is now on a journey in the world of internet marketing, which he finds to be an exciting match to his skills in webdesign and writing.

If there is one question posed by more beginning internet entrepreneurs than any other, it is this; “What is a quick and easy way to make money online?”

I’m sure you’ve heard that one before, and you’ll hear it time and time again. The sad part is, more than anything it just takes doing, and not so much thinking. So many “newbies” get caught up in all the theory of internet marketing. The best place to learn is the school of hard knocks. Here is a quick and dirty battle plan to get you started without breaking the bank. With a little luck, this is an “earn while you learn” plan.

Step 1 is to get a Clickbank affiliate id. If you have not heard of Clickbank, in a nutshell it is a large affiliate manager for publishers of digital media products. If you have written an ebook, or created a series of videos on some topic, you can enlist Clickbank to handle the payment processing for you. In addition to handling the payment processing, Clickbank has over 100,000 active affiliates ready to market products in every niche from dog training to how to quit smoking. Visit their website and get your free affiliate id.

Step 2 is to find a niche within the Clickbank Marketplace that catches your attention. There might be several, and that would be good. Make a note of any product that pays at least $20 in commission per sale. You’ll want to start with a list of a few products. Visit the websites for each product and notice if the sales letter catches your attention and draws you in. If it does, chances are you have a winner so keep that one in your portfolio.

Step 3 requires a little bit of startup cash. Now that you have found your products, you have to somehow promote them. I, and many others, love Google Adwords for this. Nowhere else on the internet can you get such immediate response and feedback for your campaigns. You can signup for a free Google Adwords account from adwords.google.com.

Running an Adwords Campaign is a large subject in and of itself. The main points to remember are: keep your daily spending down to a limit that you can afford ($10 per day is good to start), look at other ads that are running for the keywords you are going to use and create ads that are similar (not the same) as those that are doing well.

Step 4 is one of the most important steps, and it involves doing your keyword research. Fortunately, Google provides a great keyword tool with your Adwords account. If you haven’t gotten your Adwords account, now is the time. Click on the Tools Link, go to the Keyword tool and type in some keywords that you think customers would use to search for your product. Remember to think like your potential customers. What problem are they trying to solve? Be as specific as possible. Don’t use “dog training” when you could use “training dachshunds.” Try and keep your keyword phrases at 3 words or more. That should keep them tightly focused.

Step 5 is to set up your first campaign. Choose the product you feel the most passionate about and start a new campaign in Google Adwords. Remember to keep your daily spend limit low, and remember to turn off content matching. Google will have it on by default, and that can potentially cost you your entire day’s spending limit almost immediately.

When you type in your keywords, you’ll want to group related keywords together in different ad groups. You will see this in action when you get to your Google Adwords account page. On a piece of paper, write down all of your keywords and group them together into at least 5 groups of similar keywords. Remember, think like your customer. What problem are they trying to solve, and how can you solve it? If they type “training pit bulls” into the search box and your ad for “How to Train Dachshunds” comes up, they won’t click on your ad, and you’ll be penalized for being irrelevant. When deciding on bid amount for keywords, I use the 1% rule. I figure that if a product makes me a $20 commission, and I can count on one out of 100 people who click on my ad to buy the product, then I can’t spend more than 20 cents per click. This way, you are much less likely to lose money on your campaigns. Some campaigns will make better than 1%, and those you want to keep and improve on. Those that are less than 1% you want to dump after about 300 clicks.

When you do have a campaign that’s starting to make a little money, try split testing alternate ads and trying to improve your click-through-ratio (CTR.) This number is all important to Google, and the better yours is, the less you’ll have to pay per click. As your campaigns improve and the CTR goes up, lower your max bid so your profit margin can increase.

It is actually possible to profit in one day from this method, I’ve seen it happen. Once you have a little bit of profit, start on the next product and repeat the method until you are making as much as you want. Don’t be discouraged when some campaigns flop. You can always turn them off and start new ones. You will hit one that’s a winner soon enough.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jonathan_Anderson

Your web site can be great. But if the search engines can’t find it, it doesn’t really exist.

One way to ensure visitors is to buy paid clicks, like the Google AdWords program. Despite a recent class-action suit regarding the empty clicks for which the Google customers were allegedly charged, Google still remains a reliable source of traffic that professional web sites rely on.

There is a lot you can do as well to make sure the web search engines find your page when your key words are searched.

By careful placement of key words in your page, you can increase your visitors substantially.

Here are the 3 simple rules for quick Keyword Optimization of your web site:

1. Your key word(s) should be a part of the header. For example, if your key word is “hotel,” do not post a leading article with the headline “An Unforgettable Caribbean Vacation.” “Best Hotels in the Caribbean” would a much better headline for your purpose.

2. Make sure your key word(s) is used within the first paragraph, and if possible, the first sentence of your leading article. The above example applies here as well.

3. Make your keyword(s) is a part of your FILE NAME. For example, if your keyword is “education,” your “articles” page should not have a file name like “articles.html” but something like “articles_on_education.html”.

And here is a BIG NO-NO: Do NOT stuff your web page with “invisible text” of high search frequency. You could get away with such desperate tactics 10 years ago. But these days such behavior can get your web site blacklisted permanently on sophisticated search engines like Google.

(And if you don’t know what “invisible text” is, that’s even better. Don’t worry about it.)

My most favorite keyword optimization device is Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

When you type in your intended keyword, this marvelous tool lists you the frequency with which that word and its derivatives were searched for in Yahoo within the past month.

Since Yahoo with about 100 Million visitors is the most frequently visited web site on the planet, you can take the Yahoo results as the most reliable feedback available today on your keywords.

Other available Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools:

AOL searches
http://hotsearches.aol.com/search/hotsearch.jsp

Google Zeitgeist
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Google Zeitgeist
Top 5 Monthly Summary
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist_monthly.html

Google Zeitgeist
Top 15 Search Keywords from Around the World
http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html

Lycos Top 50 Searches
http://50.lycos.com/

and
Yahoo BUZZ Index
http://buzz.yahoo.com/
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Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. is a Creative Copywriter, Editor, an experienced and award-winning Technical Communicator specializing in fundraising packages, direct sales copy, web content, press releases and hi-tech documentation.

He has worked as a Technical Writer for Fortune 100 companies for the last 7 years.

You can reach him at writer111@gmail.com for a FREE consultation on all your copywriting needs.

Please visit his official web site http://www.writer111.com for customer testimonials and more information on his multidisciplinary background and career.

The last book he has edited: http://www.lulu.com/content/263630

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ugur_Akinci