As Matt Van Atta illustrates, “an opt-in list of email addresses can be the affiliate marketer’s “secret weapon.” With them you have a ready-made, reliable audience for your marketing efforts, including information on new products, email newsletters, special offers, and more.

Best of all, the email addresses on the opt-in list belong to individuals who voluntarily signed up because they want ready access to your content. The larger the opt-in list, the more people to whom you can directly market your products, and - if all goes well - the greater your conversion rate.

So how do you start building an opt-in list?

Easy – start collecting email addresses. (Everyone needs a hobby, right?) One way to do this is by using a squeeze page, a web page intended solely to collect the names and emails of visitors to that page. Also known at times as a landing page (although many would argue that not all landing pages are truly squeeze pages), the squeeze page brings in visitors through offering information that appeals to the site’s intended target audience.
Say you have a report that ties to a product you are marketing on your site. The squeeze page can provide details on the report and why it’s beneficial to the visitor. It can offer the content to the visitor for “free.”

All the visitor has to do is provide his or her email address, and possibly his or her name as well. (That name could be used as part of the website’s effort to personalize the visitor’s experience on that site, thus making it more appealing. However, if your affiliate business is just getting off the ground, the email address is the nugget of gold on which to focus for now.)

Because the visitor to the squeeze page sought out your content in the first place, chances are that he or she will give you that email address. You can then send those subscribers ongoing high-quality content, such as a newsletter or a product update.

In the process, you establish a sense of trust on which the visitor can make a future purchase either from or through your site. That can be very important given online buyers’ tendencies to visit a site several times before buying.”

Carol - Clifton Web Group