However, some squeeze pages work better than others. If you’re looking to build an email list or your existing sign-up form isn’t meeting expectations, here are a few tips and strategies to build a killer squeeze page.

#1 Keywords

Visitors have arrived at your squeeze page because they searched for your information. They’ve used keywords to find you. Make sure those same keywords are represented in the content on your squeeze page.

For example, if you are using PPC to drive traffic to a squeeze page, make sure the keywords represented in your ad are also in your page’s contents. A PPC ad advertising fat loss for teens should lead to a squeeze page offering a report on fat loss for teens. This may mean that you have to create several squeeze pages. Each page will address a unique keyword and/or target audience.

Test and track your keywords for conversion rates. Chances are, the more targeted your squeeze page, the better your opt-in results.

#2 Benefits

Just like a good sales page, your squeeze page needs to offer value. Prospects want to know what’s in it for them. What are the benefits of signing up? If you’re offering a free report, then stress the value they’ll receive from the free report. If you’re offering a weekly newsletter, then let them know why it’s such a great newsletter.

Remember, features are different from benefits. The fact that your newsletter is sent daily isn’t a benefit. It’s a feature. The benefit is that they’ll receive the latest news in their email box every morning. They’ll be able to break the news to their colleagues and be “in the know.”

#3 Your call to action

Remember to tell them what to do. It may be obvious they need to provide their email. However, it’s important to tell them. Include a call to action. Also include a privacy statement. For example, “We never sell, rent or lend your email address to anyone.” This extra bit instills confidence in prospects that may be leery.

Make sure your squeeze page isn’t too long. Don’t ask for more than a simple email address. You can also ask for a first name but keep it simple. Your squeeze page should ideally fit above the fold. This means that all of the copy should be on your prospect’s screen. They shouldn’t need to scroll to read more.

Keep it simple, attractive and to the point. And of course, with any sales and marketing efforts, test and track. Find out what works best for your prospects. Test and track headlines. Test and track your call to action. Test and track design elements, too. With a little time and attention you can have a killer squeeze page. You can meet your email list goals.

Myth #1 I have to submit my site to a search engine for it to get listed.

Fact – You don’t submit your site to the search engines. They in fact index pages daily. What you do have to do is have content for them to index.

Myth #2 Meta tags matter.

Fact – Meta tags USED to matter but they no longer do. In fact, they haven’t for quite some time. You can put meta tags in your HTML code but it’s not necessary.

Myth #3 Trading links is a great idea because linking to my site boosts my page ranking.

Fact – Trading links with people isn’t as powerful as you might think. In fact, trading links or getting links from websites with poor reputations, or from websites that have nothing to do with your business niche, can hurt your page ranking. Focus on getting links from quality websites in your niche or industry. Link to others only when it’s appropriate and makes sense to do so.

Myth #4 I should work to increase the page ranking for my landing page first.

Fact – Not necessarily. The pages you focus on depend largely on your business model, target audience and your goals. You could have a website devoted to romance writing. However, it may be easier to gain visitors and the first spot on the page rankings for “Romance writing exercises.”

In that case you may want to bring people to your website based on those keywords and ideally you’d take them directly to your page devoted to romance writing exercises. Search engines evaluate each page independently which means you should focus on optimizing the page(s) that best help you reach your goals quickly.

Myth #5 All of my pages should be optimized for the search engines.

Fact – Not necessarily. For example, does your contact page, your privacy policy and your affiliate sign-up page need to be indexed for the search engines? Maybe, but maybe not. You can add a disallow tag to your code to prevent a page from being indexed.

Myth #6 If I link to high traffic and quality sites, it will help my page ranking.

Fact – It will help their page ranking, not yours. However, linking to authority sites can help your credibility and it generally won’t hurt your search engine rankings. Well, if it did, then I guess everyone would start doing the same and it would not make any difference. While linking to authority websites is a healthy habit, they don’t give you any added advantage.

Myth #7 The more the internal links my site has, the better.

Fact – Internal links are great for SEO; however, just linking for the sake of linking won’t do much. Keyword placement in the anchor text is extremely important for page ranking. You’ll also want to create a plan about which pages you’re going to focus your attention and your internal links on.

Armed with the proper knowledge you’ll be prepared to create a winning, and effective, search engine optimization strategy. Avoid the myths, stick with the facts and create a solid optimization plan for your website and strategic web pages. To your success!

Step One: Identify your brand personality

For most small business owners their brand personality is their own personality. If you’re a goofy or silly person then your brand may be goofy and silly. If you’re a hard hitting and serious person then that’s your brand personality. This is because it’s much easier and more effective to be yourself than to try to be a character. Martha Stewart is a great example. While she’s certainly not a small business owner, her brand is her personality. You know what to expect from Martha Stewart and people love that.

It’s also important when identifying your brand personality to make sure it fits with your niche and target audience. Some personalities and niches may not blend well.

Step Two: Identify your primary marketing tactics

Your brand personality will be communicated in every single marketing message and communication you have. When they’re consistently communicated, your brand will grow stronger. Each message will reinforce the last. Some marketing tactics to consider include:

* Email marketing
* Social networking
* Advertising
* Blogging
* Article marketing

You’ll want to make sure you have a unified approach. For example, if you’re a controversial personality then you’ll want to make sure you stir up controversy in your ads, blog posts, articles, email messages and your social networking communications. People want to know what to expect. Give it to them and you’ll strengthen your brand.

Step Three: Create, and adjust, your plan

Take a look at your marketing and content plan for the upcoming year. You’re going to need to adjust some messages so they provide a consistent theme and personality. It may be as simple as creating a salutation or signature sign off that you include in each communication. Or you may want to adjust your headline approach. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference.

Remember that your personality doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be a character or an exaggeration. What it does need in order to grow stronger is a consistent approach. When each communication and marketing message supports your personality and your personal brand, it becomes stronger in the minds of your prospects and customers. They’ll begin to identify with that personality and want to do business with you. A strong personal brand can make your business a lasting success.

According to current Alexa rankings, YouTube is the number three most visited website on all of the Internet, surpassed only by Google and Yahoo. Millions and millions of users flock to YouTube every day to indulge in viewing and commenting on videos, spending what, for some, can often turn into hours staring at the monitor.

In this article we’ll look at 5 key points that can help lead to success, should you decide to give YouTube a run as your next big marketing medium.

1) Know your target demographics.

That goes without saying when we talk about marketing, but let’s just explain why it applies here. YouTube users, while varied and diverse, can generally be narrowed down enough to speak about generally. While everyone from four year olds to Grandma spend time on YouTube, the people who live and breath YouTube are going to be your 18-35 males.

While females in the same age group do also use YouTube quite a lot, and there are many users older and younger, the 18-35 male demographic are the people that are going to spend hours a day surfing YouTube and sending videos back and forth between their friends (this is important!)

Sure, this demographic tends to be the most desirable one anyways in many cases, but if your target audience sit outside this range, there are likely much better ways to spend your time and money than YouTube.

2) Go viral or go home.

A video of me feeding my dog or taking my garbage out might be entertaining to me (“look how well I poured that cat food! Not a bit spilled”), but that’s probably the extent of it. If you’re going to try and use YouTube to get your message out, your ultimate goal should be for your video to grow virally.

That word, viral, is said so much these days that it’s going out of style, but there’s a reason, it’s important! You want your video to spread around, as quickly as possible, and to be seen by as many people in your demographic (and in general) as possible. Otherwise, why are you even using this medium in the first place? When you sit down to plan your campaign, always have this in mind.

Any ideas that come up that don’t reek of potential to spread quickly likely aren’t of any value. While you never know exactly what will go viral (I’m sure the parents that posted a video of their baby laughing didn’t expect almost 74 million views to date), you can generally tell whether something has the potential, as there are some aspects that essentially all the videos that really take off.

3) Make it funny, make it weird, make it shocking, or don’t make it.

Going viral happens because someone sees a video and deems it so awesome that they simply have to email it to their friends, their mom, their boss and their priest. As stated above, mundane videos won’t do this. If you want to ensure that your video has the potential to spread like wild-fire, you pretty much have to make sure that it’s funny, weird, shocking, or some other form of general awesomeness.

If you look at the top 25 most watched YouTube videos you’ll notice that while some may be cute, some may be cool, the aspect that you see most represented is comedy. Whether it be comedians or little kids being bitten by their brothers, things that make people keel over laughing tend to spread the fastest and widest. Whatever method you choose to go down to give your video the legs it needs to run across the net, there are certain warnings to heed!

4) Know your brand and know what it means to your customers.

There is a certain danger with viral video marketing, namely that many of the things that tend to go viral can also have a tendency to be on the edge of cleanliness, and certain brands may end up being hurt more than they stand to benefit.

Take the “Landlord” video, made famous by starring Will Ferrell and available on FunnyorDie.com. 61 million views for a video that isn’t on YouTube is a massive success. As viral as they come. However, the real star of this video isn’t Ferrell, it’s the landlord, who is a cursing, beer drinking…little girl. Funny? Sure. Viral? Sure. But does your brand want to be associated with swearing, boozing toddlers?

Maybe it does. Maybe your brand is edgy and your customers won’t look at such an association negatively. But maybe not. Always make sure that whatever your video is portraying isn’t going to conflict in someway with the core values of your brand.

5) Figure out what you want from the video and design it to deliver on that goal.

What do you want your video to do for you? Do you want it to build brand awareness? Do you want it to help sell something? Do you want it to drive traffic to your website? It’s very important that you recognize exactly what your goals for the campaign are, and that you realize a few truths about YouTube and it’s viewers.

Firstly, people aren’t on YouTube to watch commercials. If your video is plastered with your products, logo and marketing messages, it’s probably worthless to bother going any further. A good example of tasteful branding is Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, sponsored by Burger King. People watch the videos to see the funny stuff, not to see the BK stuff, so Burger King does a very short intro, which is in itself comical, and then a little bit of branding at the end. That’s it.

The next thing to realize is that it’s very unlikely people will leave YouTube to go to your website, unless you somehow entice them to. People on YouTube may love your video, and they’re happy you made it, but they don’t care about you enough to go check out your website just out of the goodness of their hearts.

Offer them something at the end of the video or in the description at the side that they can only get through your website, or they’ll never get their, especially not with so many other hilarious related videos being suggested to them by YouTube at the end of yours!

Finally, if you’re trying to directly sell something, you’d better find a way of featuring your product and making people crack up or say “wow” at the same time. Blendtec is the perfect example of this. They use video to help sell blenders by posting clips of them blending up ridiculous items like golf clubs and bricks (and people love it). Whatever your goal, define it ahead of time and make sure YouTube is a viable medium to deliver on what you’re looking for.

Making videos doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be. That being said, money is the easy part, a great idea with an almost certain chance of success  is the hard part. It takes planning and time. The key is to analyze beforehand whether YouTube is a good medium for your business to get it’s message across.

If it’s not, don’t bother wasting all that time and money on something that won’t work for you. If it is, follow these five rules and you’ll be far better off than if you just wing it and post something up on a hope and a prayer.

This is the kind of knowledge that can really make a difference when planning your next marketing campaign, since the longer your material stays on the minds of your target audience, the more you get from each dollar spent getting that message out to them.

The book breaks down the creation of sticky ideas into a formula made up of six element; simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. Using examples from the real world including sticky ideas ranging anywhere from real world ad campaigns to urban legends that everyone has heard of and no one can forget, the brothers do an excellent job of clearly demonstrating the application of the principals that they write about.

Over the next few weeks we’ll do an series of six posts, an element by element review of the theories put forth in Made to Stick, analyzing the ideas set forth in each section and seeing if the ideas the brothers are presenting are in themselves sticky! Make sure to check back often, so as not to miss any of the six parts!