Traditional squeeze pages are getting less and less effective.

Customers are wising up to them and either not signing up at all or they use a throwaway email address to allow them to get the freebie but not any of your follow up messages.

That’s a problem in several ways:

• You think you’ve got lots of opt-ins and subscribers
• But your messages don’t get read
• Yet you still pay your autoresponder company for all those people who’ve opted in and will surely make you $1 per subscriber per month if only you could tweak your follow up messages better

Reverse squeeze pages work better than traditional squeeze pages:

• Potential subscribers have the chance to get to know you a bit before they subscribe
• They weed out a lot of freebie seekers, so you’re not paying for subscribers who never see your messages
• It’s a case of quality more than quantity

So if you don’t care about the bragging rights of having thousands of (unresponsive) subscribers on your list but do care about your bottom line profits, it’s time to take a look at reverse squeeze pages.

The biggest problem with traditional squeeze pages is they are too short.

The one on the right is typical – a headline, a box for your email address and a sign-up button.

Sometimes they are more complex: a few bullet points as well as a headline and a signup box.

Sometimes there’s a video for people to watch and possibly even a delayed sign up button so that people have to watch some of all of the video before they can subscribe to your list.

That can work well – it’s got most of the elements of a reverse squeeze page without forcing people to click away from the first page.

It’s a format that’s used by a lot of top Clickbank vendors and I think we can safely assume that at least some of them will have tested the format against more traditional formats.

That’s the key – you need to test!

There’s no point taking my word or anyone else’s word as the only solution.

Everyone’s traffic is slightly different and potential customers react in different ways.

But there’s a lot of evidence that traditional short squeeze pages don’t convert as well as they used to and – even if they do convert intitially – that people don’t treat the subsequent messages with any form of respect.

Think about it:

You’ve signed up to a list for a free whatever.

The headline and other copy was good enough that you got over your reluctance to sign up.

Or – more likely – you used one of your “throwaway” email addresses to sign up. You know the ones – the email where the only time you log in is to click the “confirm” link and then only if you weren’t taken directly to the promised download page. The email account where there are screens and screens of unread messages. We’ve all got them – I’ve got several I use for that precise purpose. All those carefully written follow up messages languishing, unread.

Chances are that when you sign up you get sent to a one-time offer page that says to check your emeil in a few minutes for the download link you were promised but while you’re waiting, here’s this never-to-be-seen-again, irresistable, offer that you simply can’t live without.

Yes, another one of those.

That’s how the squeeze page owner is hoping to monetise their freebie seekers.

Sometimes that works – I’ve seen one time offers at around $2.79 that I’m guessing pull reasonably well.

But that’s still most likely the only chance you have of selling something to them.

Even if – by fluke or carelessness – you get the person’s real email address, they don’t remember your name (if you ever told them) so you’re just another email that needs to be deleted or sent to junk.

It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to unsubscribe.

Reverse squeeze pages get over those problems

They are informative in their own right.

Maybe they’re even the free report you would have offered people when they signed up – that can work well as the pages get indexed and you get free traffic and subscribers from Google.

But the pages are longer – sometimes a lot longer, other times just a few hundred words.

The pages in a reverse squeeze page sequence end in a cliff hanger.

The kind that happens everywhere on television in the sections that start with “coming up” just before the commercial break or at the end of a show where there’s often a preview of the next episode.

The idea is to make sure that your reader wants to get more information enough that they’ll click through to the next page.

At this stage of the process, the format changes according to your preference.

For some people, it will lead to a sign-up page which is likely a headline and a bullet point list as well as the regular “join my list” button.

For others, it will be more information – maybe several more pages worth – before you eventually reach a sign-up button.

It’s your choice which to use.

There’s a lot to be said for both approaches. But testing is the only way to find out which works better for you.

And remember to test for longer term response as well as simply signups.

You’re unlikely to get as many signups as you would on a traditional squeeze page. But the quality is likely to be better and there’s a higher chance of getting someone’s main email address (where they check emails more regularly than once in a blue moon) and getting your emails read.

I’m gradually moving more and more of my squeeze pages to a reverse squeeze page format. It saves me culling the unsubscribes from my Aweber lists quite as often. And the people who sign up generally seem to react better to my emails than ones who barely know me.

It’s certainly worth experimenting.