One of the most important tools in your internet marketing business arsenal is the capture page. Put simply, a capture page is a web page that enables you to capture a visitor's name and email address so that you can market to them at a later date. Capture pages are also known as squeeze pages and opt-in pages so if you hear these terms simply know that they are one and the same thing.
In this article I will take you through the steps to create a capture page and highlight some of the techniques used in today's marketplace. Firstly, let's look at a basic capture page construction. There are essentially 4 elements to a capture page:
- Headline
- Sub Headline
- Body
- Opt-In Box
There are a plethora of books and courses on creating a good headline and body copy alone so I'm not going to go into any intricate detail on these aspects. What you need to know is that the headline needs to grab the reader's attention. The Sub headline needs to outline a major benefit to the reader. That is, to re-inforce the reason why they should continue reading.
Having said that, not all capture pages necessarily need a sub headline. Sometimes you can combine a headline and sub headline into one longer headline. Such as, Discover The Top Secret Tactics That the Heavy Hitters are Using to make Thousands of Dollars Daily. This could quite easily be used as a single headline, or broken into a headline and sub headline. The body copy goes into deeper detail about the benefits, either through basic text or bullet point items. A developing trend in capture pages is to make them shorter and straight to the point as opposed to the longer, sales page type construction of a few years ago.
From this point of view, the body copy can be condensed into bullet points quite easily. It will be up to you to create benefit driven copy without being verbose. Remember, the name of the game is to get an email address, so the more direct and enticing your copy is, the more likely someone will take action. The longer it is, the more likely they are to get bored and click away from your page.
Finally the opt-in box provides the call to action to entice the reader to leave their name and email address. While we're on that subject, marketing research shows that the more fields you have in your opt-in box, the lower your conversions (the number of people who actually opt-in) so a name and email address field is more than enough.
There are a number of ways to create a physical capture page such as doing it from scratch (or using a template) within a HTML editor where you add all the text and images yourself and create the look and feel of the page, or by purchasing any of the online and offline programs that specialise in capture page creation. Once you have a page that you are happy with, you need to upload it to your webhost using a File Transfer Protocol program (FTP program) such as Filezilla or similar and then start driving traffic to the page using any of the myriad of methods (like article writing for instance) to do so.
But it doesn't end there. It's unlikely you'll create the perfect capture page straight away so it pays to tweak and test the page by altering the components of the page to see if the same traffic sources react differently. That is, change the headline for example and see if your conversions go up or down. If up, then keep the headline, if down, then change it back. The objective being to always try to increase your conversion rate irrespective of which part of the page you change.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Aaron_J_Parker
