ARE THEY AS GOOD AS THEY MAKE OUT TO BE…..

A Squeeze Page is becoming a commonly used term for a direct marketing tool for a website. Often, so-called marketing experts sing the praises of such a practice, but is it really as good as they make it out to be?

I have discovered that a lot of so called E-Marketing experts are starting to use basic one page websites with an auto responder email to the owner. Its sole purpose is to capture a vast amount of information about highly targeted audiences.

The site is coined as a Squeeze Page and normally such a page will offer a free book, a free cd or something else for free, as long as you give your name and email. It will have strong headlines, gripping bullet points, and colours which draw you into the site. Once you’re drawn in and give your information, this information is then used to build a database for direct email marketing. Sometimes this information is sold on to other marketing companies.

The information is golden as it’s a very cheap, effective away to build a highly targeted list of potential clients apposed to buying a mailing list. This then allows the owner of the Squeeze Page to market their products effectively to subscribed people who COULD be interested in their products.

This sounds ideal, but is it?
Lets look at this in detail….

First of all you need to build yourself a Squeeze Page and this could cost anything from £60+ including domain registration. Sounds cheap so far but now you need to get people to this site. How are you going to do this with just one page? That’s going to be tough.

Adwords. How much is this going to cost? It will cost anywhere from £20-£100+ a month, not guaranteed as the value of the keywords increase every month.

Link building. This is one option but it takes time and you have to make sure the links are high quality or google could penalize you if you link to a link farm or to low scoring websites.

Offline marketing. This unfortunately is the only real way to market the Squeeze Page. However this could cost you a lot of money. If you were to advertise in a trade publication you could pay around £3000+ for one advert which may only appear for one month. That’s a large amount of outlay to start a campaign with. However, any traffic going to the Squeeze Page is targeted and anyone giving information are likely to buy your product.

However, there is a strong possibility that the search engines will list such pages as spam and therefore could be a high risk strategy.

At this stage you’re possibly thinking where am I going with this article? I will explain:

If you were to do a search for “How to market your website” for example, the first site that Google advertises instantly has a pop up asking you to fill in a form to receive something. But this is not want you want. You want to see a forum or a website by a professional person with experience, which can give pointers for free.

Squeeze Pages are now becoming as annoying as the flyers which come through your letter box every day.

My advice to anyone wanting to sell their service online should concentrate on building a slick looking website packed with good content with the ability for users to either use a blog or the option to subscribe to a newsletter. This will then give you not only something professional but a better presence and a better brand image.
Having a strong brand is better than a flash in the pan one-off website.

I would always recommend offline marketing. It is the best way to get targeted traffic to your website AND you don’t need a squeeze page to help you do this.