Create a Give Away for Your Squeeze Page
You need an incentive for people to give you their contact information, and a good one is to offer them some useful information or tools at no cost. What tools should you offer? “How to” titles on hot topics work great. You can create a product that provides instruction for the first several steps of a large process. Give them enough information that they can implement what they have learned and reap some benefits from it.
A few “give away” ideas are an audio download, video series, e-book, free trial, or Ezine access. Depending on your specialty and where you are in the development of your products and services, some methods are far easier than others. When you are getting started, I recommend creating an E-book (perhaps with audio version) or a video that teaches an important concept. These are both relatively easy to do, and they don’t require that you work with anyone else or have any products created.
If you do have other people to work with, you can use a recording from a live teleclass or interview and then have it transcribed to create a free report to go with it. It’s important to remember to deliver your information in as many different mediums as possible in order to increase the convenience, appeal and likelihood that it will actually get consumed.
EBook
An eBook is the trendy little sister to the white paper. They are not published in print; instead they are put in a PDF or other format that’s easy to open and share. EBooks don’t need to be long many are between 15-30 pages (but there is no hard fast rule). You write them in a conversational tone, much like this book and use stories and examples to make the information fun and entertaining. It’s not hard to make your eBook look professional. You can quickly download professional images online and have a custom “cover” made for your book at a very small investment.
The great part is that although eBooks themselves are functional, they help you build a reputation, share your information and give you an opportunity to prove yourself. They also make for a stepping-stone toward writing a full-length book “in print” if that’s one of your goals. Personally, I know several experts who have “self published” small quantities of their paperback books and benefited from the publicity, but I also know others like myself who have generated ample traffic with quick and easy eBooks. If you have yet to give one a try, create a title and start today. Here are a few pointers to get you started:
• Choose a hot topic: Topics that relate directly to increasing money. Examples: Profits, sales, leads and getting new clients are always good.
• Create a list of everything you know about this topic that you could share.
• Organize your list into an outline for you to follow.
• Brainstorm for a title (include your important key words). Write down as many as you can think of (no less than 30). Choose your favorite for your title and your second favorite for your sub-title. Use the rest for chapter titles.
• Set a goal of one chapter per day or week, whatever is appropriate for you, and stick to it.
• When you write, clear your area from clutter and noise. Get a glass of water and write with out stopping to evaluate or edit anything.
• Google “images” to find inexpensive interesting and relevant images online. There are lots of options available. I like www.clipart.com and www.istockphoto.com. Be careful not to get carried away, include relevant pictures only.
• You can make your own cover or hire someone to do it for you. Your cover design is something easy and inexpensive to outsource.
• Write in a light conversational style — think magazine not tutorial. It’s important that your eBook is fun to read.
• Use personal stories to teach.
• If you are interested in protecting your content, you can get software that will enable you to disable copies. You may want to do this if someone had a credit card chargeback or you knew that they were illegally creating duplicates. Ebook Pro and ebook security are good programs to look at, check them out at www.ebookpro.com and www.ebook-security.com.
• Keep your download page for your free gift from being listed by search engines. In the html code after the meta tag (near the top of the page) add this text: <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow” /> it will tell the spider not to index your page and it will not show up in the search engine results.