Is having a separate squeeze page important when building an email list?

[murph]

I would love some thinking on the above. I have heard some people say that it is really important to have a separate squeeze page to your main website/blog when you are collecting email addresses to build your list. I have heard the argument that if you bring them to your blog/website there are too many items there and you may lose the opportunity to get their email address.
The other thought I had was to direct the link, say from You Tube, to a relevant page on my domain where they can input their email address to sign up for a newsletter or receive a report relevant to that page.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[ChristineCobb]

Conversion experts will say that having a special landing page for traffic coming from a certain webpage, banner, ad, etc. will increase conversions substantially. That's because you know where they are coming from and why they are clicking over. Therefore you can specifically appeal to the reason they clicked. You can also create headlines, images, colors that match the originating page so people will immediately sense that they are in the right place.

So for example, if they watch a You Tube video about how to correct your golf swing, they could go to a squeeze page offering another video about how to add yardage to your drives in exchange for their email. That page could also be a video squeeze page.

I don't think these special landing pages replace the optin in the sidebar--they would be in addition to.

[murph]

So, Chris, if I understand you correctly what you are saying is that you would not have a generic squeeze page but would create squeeze pages that reflect and enhance the You Tube video or article that you are writing about - is that correct? Would you have the domain name of the squeeze page totally different to your blog/wesite, or would you use a sub domain of your blog?

[ChristineCobb]

You could create a squeeze page that serves multiple referral sites (i.e. various articles using the same resource box), but yes create page(s) that continue the relationship process started when they read/saw some content and clicked to your site. You can easily create separate pages on your blog and they could be similar perhaps with different headlines depending on what the visitor should expect. I don't think a sub domain is necessary.

[murph]

Chris, that's really helpful, thank you