A squeeze page is a transaction between you and a visitor to your site. it's an opt-in. In order to get the content you're offering, the visitor needs to give you an email address. You present something they want, they give you an email address that you can market to.

The basic presumption is that by using pay-per-click advertising, you can direct people to your squeeze page, and build up your referral list of customers who want to buy something. Because of the scaling factors of the Internet, it is possible to treat internet marketing as a least-common-denominator numbers game, and there are lots of internet "make money fast" schemes that do precisely that.

And every single one of them has ignored the biggest problem of squeeze pages:

People are incredibly skeptical about them. While it's all in the conversion rate (and most conversion rates are under 1%), there's more to getting a business out of the internet than just running up your bandwidth bills with AdWords. You also need to provide content.

Now, because of the way Google has changed their pricing models, they actually charge more for naked squeeze pages (which really sounds like a bad movie starring people wearing not enough clothing, than they do for squeeze pages that are integrated into a landing page with good, solid content.

Yes, it's true. You need to make your marketing work for people as well as search engine spiders. In spite of what the get-rich-quick marketing gurus like to say, search engine spiders never bought anything. People do. And people, in spite of how search engine optimized your page may be, won't buy something unless there's a compelling reason to do so. For you to get your affiliate program sales, your landing page needs to give a good reason for people to A) give you their email address, and B) go on to your source and buy the product.

Why is it so important to get their address through a squeeze page? Because once they've signed up for your site through the squeeze page (particularly if your affiliate links are all linked to a common theme), YOU have an important piece of information: You know that a real person with an email address that's known to work is interested in a certain set of subjects which means that when you post up a new link to a new vendor, you can send a solicit out to those people and say "Look at what I found. You'll like it. Really." And generate residual sales.

Our next essay will be on how to get good, useful content to decently clothe your squeeze page in material that's interesting to real, honest to God human beings who came to your site by clicking on a link for a paid advertisement.