If you haven’t heard the saying “the money is in the list” you are either not trying to make money online, or you just started today. Building a list is the easiest way to increase your online income, and most beginners fail to start a list. If they do start building a list they just pop the opt in box in the sidebar of a blog and that’s a huge mistake.

Only having your opt in box in your sidebar is a huge mistake because there is just too much going on and too many choices a reader can make once they hit your site. They can read articles, click affiliate links, or even click the back button. Too many options leads to confusion and a confused mind never does what you want it to do. If you are trying to build a list you don’t want confusion you want the only option to be to sign up to your list.

What is an opt in page?

An opt in page is a short page that has one possible action your readers can take, and that’s to sign up for your autoresponder. This page is also known as a squeeze page because you “squeeze” the information out of the reader. Your opt in page will be short and sweet. It will provide just enough information for the reader to get excited about what you are offering and opt in. That’s all the page is trying to do, convert readers to subscribers. Get the name and email address.

Creating an opt in page will increase your subscriber rate enormously. Since there are only two options to get off the page, sign up or click the back button, you will find most people will opt in to get your gift or ecourse. If you are providing a nice incentive (gift) for them to give you their email address, most people wont say no.

What are the pieces of an opt in page?

There are only a few must have elements for an opt in page. First of which is a free gift to entice people to join your list. This gift can be a free report, an e course, or even a newsletter. Creating this freebie doesn’t have to be stressful, it can be as simple as collecting 5 or articles you’ve written on the topic an putting them together in pdf format. You could even use a plr report you’ve purchased on the topic. It’s a little more expensive, but if you don’t want to do the writing you have have one written for you by a freelance writer.

The second element on your squeeze page is your headline. This is where you grab their attention and make them want to keep reading. This is what lets them know if you what you have is a match to what they are looking for. Here’s an example of one of my well converting squeeze page headlines. “Learn from a Giant Squid How to Make Squidoo work for You” Learn step by step how to choose a topic, find great products to promote, set up a new squidoo lens and start making money!…” This is for a 10 day ecourse on how to use squidoo to make money. This site converts quite well because people come looking for how to do squidoo and that’s just what this page offers.

You want to tell people how they are going to benefit from getting your information and being on your list. If you’ve created an ecourse you can go through each lesson and pull out the biggest benefit. This can be a short bullet point list. You want to show benefits, but you don’t want to make this a sales page. If you can keep all this information above the fold of your page, all the better.

The final piece of the opt in page is the opt in box. This is the space where people actually enter their information. You get this part from your autoresponder service. You want to include the name of your freebie, and encourage them to fill in their name and BEST email address. After the code is created you can just copy it and then paste it right where you want it on your opt in page.

Once you’ve finished this simple page the key is to send all your traffic through this page first. That way you can get people on your list and have the opportunity to talk to them more than once. The more times you can put your product or service in front of someone the more likely they are to buy from you in the end.