Creating the Capture Page

My primary company is a Spa Party Business. Our company prohibits specific advertising on the internet, as they consider it "National" advertising. So long as my ads are local, I can advertise, but as soon as an advertisement goes "National", I can jeopardize my business.

Mike Dillard suggests marketing an exclusive access item (book, report, interview, etc) as a means of generating leads. Instead of talking specifically about your opportunity, talk about the secrets to your success. This is an extension of the concepts he asserted in first his book, Magnetic Sponsoring.

This is a concept I've been telling my subscribers for months and months. Not only does it assert your authority in the mind of the potential lead, it also creates a stream of leads that may already have an MLM company affiliation, but may want to look at other options in the future. You're building a network that expands beyond the reaches of your company. There's some specific examples and verbiage that Mike includes, but you have to buy Building on a Budget in order to learn all the "top-secret" word choices.

I developed a capture page, per the specifics outlined in Dillard's book. Mike, however, doesn't go into detail on how to create the sign-up form itself, or how to process the form so that the subscriber gets immediate access to the product.

I could begin a lesson on auto responders here, but assuming you're brand new, we need to keep this as simple as possible. Something I wish Mike would have mentioned in the book's opening chapters.

So it's a good thing I'm not completely ignorant when it comes to HTML or web design. All those months as a business website builder did finally pay off! Yay!

I used a free form generator script to create the sign-up page form. I also created a rough "thank-you" page that refers successful subscribers to check their email for link details.

The link is sent via a "vacation message" set up in the email account I created to handle the traffic. Instead of saying "I'm away from the office until 2010", I just put the address for the download link.

The free report isn't live yet (I just created the page, remember!), but should be viable by the end of the weekend. Yes, this is Easter weekend, but I think I can swing it.

Mike's book says that once the capture page is up, we can start driving targeted traffic that should yield a 10% opt-in rate. Mike Dillard expects a 10-50% conversion rate, depending on the quality of the traffic sources. Based on generating 20 leads per day, we need to crank out 200 site visitors daily, which, according to page 17 of Building on a Budget, Mike says should be "easier than you think".

We shall certainly see. Considering my personal website generates about 40-50 new visitors on a weekly basis with minimal effort to drive traffic (my sig file in forums and emails mostly), I think I should be pretty capable of driving new traffic to my site with craigslist.