Creating a landing page, also known as the “name squeeze page” or “lead capture page”, is very important to any website in a sense that it can help build your mailing list by directing your prospective subscribers to it. You will only do this once, but your traffic driving efforts can be focused onto just one effective method.

The following are tips in creating a successful landing page that converts visitors into subscribers on a very huge percentage:

Winning Tip 1: Offer a freebie in exchange for your visitor’s email address. I very much endorse this method of building your mailing list. You can offer a special report or a sample of your paid product to your visitor in exchange for their details such as name and email address.

Winning Tip 2: The landing page must be written professionally. When writing your page, treat it as if you are writing a sales letter. While you are not necessarily making a hard sale or try to get someone to buy your product upfront, being able to entice your visitors to give their details to you is just as important as selling.

Winning Tip 3: Other than your opt-in form and perhaps important disclaimers and terms, there shouldn’t be any other links on your landing page. This will prevent unwanted distractions on your visitors.

Success Tip 4: Rub in the benefits of the freebie you are offering more than a mere subscription to your newsletter. You should focus most of the attention of the letter on encouraging your prospective visitor to download your free offer. Later, you gently remind your prospect that he or she has nothing to pay but just merely subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie.

This may be pretty basic, but including a handwritten signature and a professionally taken photo of yourself elaborating on your goals with main focus of aiming to help your visitors through the free reports that you offer is a surefire way to assist in building trust.

Any business being done online will have a hard time fighting for existence if not for mailing lists. It is the lifeblood of any online business. There’s an old saying “the money is in the list” and which had been proven true time and again. For each time you have a new product or some new features to launch, imagine how easy it would be if you had a targeted list of prospects. It will save you a lot of time and effort if you have a list of prospects waiting to hear about it.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — Apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, it does not require a “heavyweight” download like a a full-feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, free wallpaper, letter templates, preformatted greeting cards, desktop themes and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

On the other hand, putting together a simple download with a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

Firstly, placing your download form prominently on your website will have a big impact. Dedicating a page to it even better! This way, you can put link to that page from every other page of your website. There is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and every time they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Don’t just stop with putting up that download page, squeeze in some effort in promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and letting your visitors know why they should download it and why they should download it from you. Although freebies are not easy to pass up, quite a number of your visitors don’t actually put an effort to download it. Aside from reasons of sheer laziness, most of their previous downloads could be sitting on their hard drive collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to offer good quality download and to show your visitors why they should not pass up on the freebie that you’re offering.