For part 1 of this journey – please click here
I will detail step 2 of my journey here – creating a funnel, or squeeze page as they are also known.
This is the web page with an offer and email form on – where you will send clicks, to get your leads (email addresses) and build up your list! Note : leads are also known as ‘subs‘ (subscriptions) or ‘optins‘.
Squeeze Page Design/Coding
Once you have a domain name and hosting (see part 1) you will need to design your webpage(s), and upload them, then surfers can see them – and more importantly you can start to buy solo ads which in turn will build up your subscriber list! The way I see it you have two choices :
1) Install WordPress on your domain (free), plus a copy of the Optimize Press plugin ($97)
If you have no experience in programming html, and you have some spare ca$h – you may want to take this route. Most hosts will either install WordPress for you or have oneclick installs available in their admin. If not – installing it yourself is easy and doesn’t take long. There are oodles of help pages and tutorials on how to do this – just search Google or Youtube. Once you have this installed – Optimize Press is a great WordPress plugin that does all the hard (funnel design) work for you. Click here to get it. It’s $97 I’m afraid, but as I said, if you can’t program your own web pages it’s money well spent. So many people I know doing solo ads use this plug in and make some great sales pages with it to boot – you can go and check out the sales video they have on their page, and see if you think it would work for you. 🙂
2) Design your own pages using an html editor such as Dreamweaver and upload them with an FTP client.
If you are short of funds, don’t mind programming your own webpages, and are happy to use an FTP client – then this route may be the one for you. I’ve been using Dreamweaver for years so didn’t have an issue making my own pages. If you don’t know what an FTP client is – this is the software you need for uploading webpages to your server space. For PC or Mac, Filezilla works great and is free.
So how did I decide on a design? Well simply put I looked around a lot in the Facebook Solo Ad Society group – if you aren’t a member I highly recommend you sign up now – and quickly found a lot of threads with people posting their funnels, asking for opinions/advice on them, etc… so that is a good place to find ideas and inspiration. I also posted some examples of squeeze pages in part 1 of this journey thread so go and check those out too. A third way of finding good squeeze pages is to just browse the web and look for them – Google is your friend 🙂 Any pages you find that you think are good, bookmark them, or keep a text file of the best ones. (I do this) A quick hack to making your own funnel is to simply download one you found online, open it in Dreamweaver, play around with it, change colours, strip out all the links and replace with your own, then upload and test! If what I have written here in option 2) seems like too much hard work, or beyond your skill set – no worries – don’t get discouraged! Just look at option 1) instead. If you missed it the first time, the Facebook Solo Ad Society group is an awesome place to meet super helpful people who are very open with their advice, tips, suggestions, and what to do in the world of solo ads. Don’t hesitate – jump in and join the group today 🙂 If all else fails and you can’t do either of the 2 above steps and have some spare money, you can always pay for a designer to make you a squeeze page.
So back to design…now I’ll be the first to admit that when I first started making funnels, I had no idea what I was doing. I just threw something together that I thought might work – click here to see my first attempt at a funnel. The design isn’t bad, I mean it looks ok, but I uploaded it, then did what you should do too – make contacts, add people as friends who are in the Facebook Group, and on Skype too, then ask their opinion on what you’ve done. 99% of people I’ve met this way have been more than helpful, and given me so much advice on how to improve all elements of what I am doing with my solo ads business. I uploaded my first squeeze page, hit a few people up on Skype, and half an hour later, slightly amazed over how eager to help everyone was – I had loads of pointers on what to do next. General opinion was that this page had too much text, was too ‘busy’. Too much going on. I learnt that funnels need to be short, sweet, and to the point. After playing around with some more variations of this page – you can see them here, here, and here, I went back to my new friends on Skype, got the thumbs up from them, then started buying solo ads straight away – to test out my pages and see how they performed. 🙂
The results weren’t good 🙁 The pages above were getting a 21-36% optin rate.
Hang on a minute – what’s an optin rate? This is easy to work out with simple maths!
Say you buy 100 clicks and get 35 optins to your list. This would be a 35% optin rate. (35/100)
Say you buy 200 clicks and get 87 optins to your list. This would be a 44% optin rate. (87/200)
Whenever buying solo ads this % is one of the most important things to keep an eye on.
The higher the better, and you definitely want as close to 50%, more if possible.
Keep tweaking, testing, and trying to improve your squeeze pages all the time!
I went back to the drawing board, got stuck into Google and the Facebook Group, and looked around for more funnels. I kept seeing simpler and simpler squeeze pages compared to the designs I had done, so decided to dump my original funnel completely and start afresh. After some messing about in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I ended up with a brand new one that looks like this.
Eager to see what the results would be like, I bought some more solos ads straight away. The results this time round were amazing – I was hitting 50-55% optin rate, and up, on pretty much every order – even getting 61% in one case! Not only that, my Skype friends were telling me I could improve this conversion rate even further by split testing. (more about this in another blog post) It was at this point I knew I could start putting more money into buying solos, and increase the size of my Aweber list.
Solos is purely a numbers game and here is why your optin rate is so important. Say I continued to buy clicks on my older low optin rate of 21-36%. 100 clicks will cost you around $40, so putting in that $40 will get you back in between 21 and 36 new leads, roughly. So per lead that works out at inbetween $1.11 and $1.90 each. (40/36 = $1.11) (40/21 = $1.90) Sounds expensive right?
Let’s do the same example with my new higher optin rate of 55%. $40 for 100 clicks in this case should get me back about 55 leads. This time each lead will cost me about $0.72. (40/55 = $0.72) It’s not perfect by any means, and I really think this % could go even higher by playing around with my page some more, but you can see the vast difference between the first example and the second. You simply get more bang for your buck, or more email addresses for your dollar in this case 🙂
Now I had a vastly improved optin rate on my funnel, it was time to dump some more money in to this project, buy more solo ads, and increase the size of my Aweber list.
Note : Before you buy any solo ads for your new funnel – make sure you have an OTO (one time offer) page set up for the surfers to be redirected to once they optin! I have detailed this in the next step of my journey.
Ok I hope this post has been helpful for some people, please do post your comments below if you have any. 🙂 Don’t forget to join the Facebook Group, keep adding new contacts on Skype – network network network!
Click here to see part 3 of this journey!