In the big scheme of things, there are two groups that you market to as a business owner or entrepreneur. Group number one is your existing customers; you try to get more business from them. This is a terrific source of “low hanging fruit” by the way, and I and every other experienced marketer out there will tell you that if you had to choose between marketing to people who have already bought from you, or marketing to new people that might buy from you in the future, choose the former. Group number two that you can market to is new customers or prospects. You are trying to get them to become paying customers. Squeeze pages are an effective tool for getting people in that second group to opt-in to your mailing list so you can begin communicating with them and turning them into happy, paying customers.

A squeeze page is really just any page with a place for people to enter their email address. The reason they are called “squeeze” pages rather than the more boring and generic “opt-in” pages is that the whole purpose of a squeeze page is to get someone to put their email address in that little box and press the “submit” button. So, in effect, you as the marketer are psychologically “squeezing” or influencing the prospect to take that action. Motivation for parting with their email address is provided by offering to exchange something of value for that email address. For example, a free video tutorial, ebook, newsletter subscription, or the like.

Squeeze pages are a fundamental tool that online marketers use to add new prospects to their lists. Once you have an effective squeeze page that converts at a good rate, all you have to do is drive relevant traffic to the page, and you will grow your list. I’m not trying to make it sound like it’s a piece of cake to drive relevant traffic, but it actually can be done with no cash investment or very minimal cash investment of approximately one hundred dollars if you decide to outsource some of the work. Quick side tip about driving traffic: The article you are reading right now is a part of one of my own free strategies to attract interested entrepreneurs and small business owners to me!

Okay, let’s return now to the primary topic of this article. Squeeze pages can and should be used by businesses of all sizes and in all industries. Literally, from IBM to the hair salon, from attorneys to flower shops, squeeze pages should absolutely be part of every company’s online presence. If you look through the yellow pages and pick ten random businesses, you will find that those businesses that are even savvy enough to have websites are rarely collecting email addresses on their site. And if they are, they are not offering a very compelling reason for anyone to give their email address. That is such a huge missed opportunity! It’s like throwing your fishing line in the water with no bait. From a marketing perspective, that is pure insanity, especially because squeeze pages are so inexpensive and easy to create.

In addition, you can create specific squeeze pages targeted at various segments of your market. For example, if your market is “parenting help”, you could develop targeted squeeze pages about “Parenting Tips for Moms”, “Parenting Tips for Dads”, “Parenting Tips If Both Parents Are Working”, and “Parenting Tips for Single Moms and Dads”. This way, your squeeze pages can deliver specific incentives to capture email addresses based on the needs and desires of these particular demographic groups. This strategy of segmenting your market and communicating in a more personalized way with the sub-sets of your overall market is an advanced yet very easy strategy that can have a huge positive impact on your conversion rate (i.e. the percentage of visitors to your squeeze pages that actually opt in to your list.) Obviously, if you can improve your conversion rate, you’ll improve the number of prospects on your list.

Setting up a squeeze page is really just like setting up any other type of web page. You can have a squeeze page set up as a page within your larger website, or it can have its own domain name. Once you have created the web page, you will want an enticing title. Continuing with the “parenting help” example above, it could be something like “Are you sick and tired of coming home from work and having to deal with misbehaving, disrespectful kids?” This clarifies and reinforces the problem that you are then going to propose to solve by giving your visitors a bonus in exchange for their email address. Then, you can have either text or a video below the title (typically on the left side of the page) that further clarifies the problem and mentions benefits of opting in to your page. Then, typically to the right of the text you will want to have a box where prospects can enter their name and email address. This box should be clearly labeled with something like “Enter your name and email below to claim your copy of my invaluable free report right now…” Don’t worry about the perfect layout of your squeeze page, just get it set up, and then you can tweak and continuously improve it after you get some visitors.

Now, you’re probably wondering “where am I going to find this “opt in box” you mentioned?” The answer is, it couldn’t be easier… Your email marketing system (such as iContact, which I recommend for everyone except very advanced marketers) will automatically generate the code for these boxes. You don’ t have to know anything about code or programming, just how to copy and paste a line of code (technical gibberish) from one page to another. From your email marketing system, follow the instructions they provide to create a “sign up form” and then copy and paste the code they give you into the area of your squeeze page where you want the opt in box to go. (The opt in box is the little box where people enter their name and email address.)

If that last paragraph flow over your head, do not worry, you can find someone on eLance or Craigslist that can set this up for you for fifty to one hundred dollars (even less if you use someone overseas). My advice is that you do not try to learn any of this technical stuff yourself. Get in the habit of outsourcing it, and you focus on improving your marketing. One great benefit of this system is that the opt in box on your squeeze page will be automatically linked to your list in your email marketing system. So, when someone enters their name and email address, you don’t have to worry about adding it to your list, it will already be done automatically!

If you have followed these steps, then you have created a squeeze page with the ability to capture the email addresses of your prospects and have them automatically added to your list in your email marketing system. Keep in mind that you can always tweak and test your squeeze pages to see what is the most effective layout, offer, and text to get as many people as possible to opt-in to your list.

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As an entrepreneur or business owner, you know it’s critical to be in touch with your customers. That’s how you stay top of mind with them, and how you build trust. And as I am sure you have heard many times, if people trust you, they will buy from you. Email marketing also increases your chances of getting word of mouth referrals, because people can easily forward your email to their friends and family, which is a beautiful and effective recommendation of your business by someone’s friend or family member!

The easiest and most effective way to stay in touch with your list of existing customers and prospects is through email marketing. The way to make it automatic so that you do not spend hours and hours emailing all of your leads is to use a service called an autoresponder. That’s just a fancy name for a service that sends emails automatically on a certain predetermined timeline to your list. If you wanted to, you could sit down one day and write thirty different emails, and then tell your autoresponder service to send a different one each day to your entire email list for an entire month! That’s probably overkill and you would annoy a lot of customers if you bombard them every day, but this example shows you the power of autoresponders. Imagine if you had to write a separate email every day to each of the hundred or thousand people on your email list for thirty days. You would never get it done, but you could get it done with an email autoresponder system. If you’ve ever signed up for something online, it’s likely that you’ve been on the receiving end of an autoresponder email. So many internet marketers use them because they work so well.

There are several inexpensive email-marketing services, such as iContact, Constant Contact and AWeber. They are in the range of $10-15 a month and it’s incredibly easy to set up your account. I personally recommend iContact, as I have used all three that I mentioned in this article plus another one called 1ShoppingCart in my own businesses, and have found iContact’s system to be the easiest and most user-friendly. Then, if you have a bunch of existing customer emails, you can upload your list of existing customer email addresses from an Excel file to your new account, and you’re ready to go! As you add new names to your list using strategies like squeeze pages or opt-in pages, those new leads will be automatically entered onto your list so you can market to them in the future.

Now that you’ve set up your account, and have uploaded your list, it’s time to begin communicating. It’s okay if you only have ten people on your list, just start communicating with them and providing value to them a couple times a week. Daily emails are generally too often and get annoying, unless people specifically signed up for a daily tip. However, if you are communicating with your list any less frequently than once every two weeks or so, you run the risk of people forgetting about you entirely in this age of information and short attention spans! Another helpful tip: don’t use ALL CAPS or exclamation points in your email subject lines, because Spam filters will likely identify these emails and pull them out before your customers can read them.

When thinking about content for your emails, keep it short, to a few paragraphs at maximum, and keep your content focused on one primary message. You are trying to deliver one important message in your email, not tell them everything about your industry or everything you can do for them. Remember, you’ll be communicating with your audience again soon enough! And, make sure you keep your content interesting and useful, so that your customers get in the habit of opening your emails and not just deleting them as “useless promotion”. Useful, funny and/or entertaining is so much more powerful for growing your relationships with your prospects and customers than dry, information overloaded, or overly promotional.

Now that you’ve written the first email, you can create an autoresponder series in your email marketing account, and make this email the first one in the autoresponder series. Then, you can draft as many follow up messages as you would like, and set them to be sent automatically to this list on, for example, day 4, then day 7, then day 12, etc. This way you can knock out a month’s worth of marketing in one shot, quickly and easily! You have now enabled your business to communicate with customers and prospects instantly and continually, for only a few dollars a month. Email marketing should pay for itself very quickly, as it usually only takes one new customer or add-on sale to pay for the service itself.

There are many ways to find new customers and make more money on the Internet, but nothing makes sense unless you are implementing the critical, fundamental strategies that are available to you right now. Once you have tons of relevant traffic, you can chart your own course. Discover how to harness the power of the Internet to create your own cash-producing machine. Sign up for Taylor Garland’s FREE online newsletter to learn how to do that – http://CriticalInternetSecrets.com