static function checkEmail($email) {
if (eregi("^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+$]", $email)) {
return false;
}
list($Username, $Domain) = split("@",$email);
if (getmxrr($Domain, $MXHost)) {
return true;
}
else {
if (@fsockopen($Domain, 25, $errno, $errstr, 30)) {
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
}
}
Archive for September 17th, 2009
Great PHP script for validating email addresses on a squeeze page
September 17th, 2009Squeeze Page 101 for those who are squeezed for time — a practical guide to creating a squeeze page
September 17th, 2009How To Guide for Hosting Your Own Teleseminars! | Easy Traffic Steps! A Guide to Building Sustainable Traffic
A ‘Squeeze Page’ is nothing more than a landing page or a prospect page, often a single-page web site with the sole intent of engaging the reader with visual stimuli such as; images, video, colorful text, bold and unique fonts and multiple paragraph breaks to name a few. The purpose for engaging the reader is to collect a very important piece of unique information from the reader, an email address. In the days of past, all sorts of trickery was used to gather email addresses; crawling and harvesting from web sites, social engineering, SPAM … the list goes on. In today’s Internet, there are enough regulations in place that would make it very difficult to succeed that way however.
The squeeze page solves a lot of challenges that other ‘less than ethical’ ways of collecting email addresses present. A user simply going to your squeeze page navigates one of the most important hurtles in list building, ‘opt-in’. You didn’t force the user to go to your page and your not keeping the user there either, they can still exercise free will to leave or stay. It is up to the user to provide their email address to the squeeze page, its your job to make them want to do that!
Your squeeze page’s only mission in life is to be compelling enough to make the user want to give his or her email address through the squeeze page. Your only mission in life (regarding the squeeze page) is to drive users preferably targeted) to your squeeze page, ideally by the droves!
Your squeeze page should get straight to the point, it isn’t generally going to be a full fledged web site. You typically won’t have an, ‘About Us’ page or any other typical web site pages. The first part of your squeeze page should be all about why the user wants either what your selling or what your recommending. Use several brief paragraphs to do this. Multiple paragraph breaks will keep the user’s eyes moving and attention focused. If your whole description is in one single paragraph the user’s eyes will get bored and then they’ll likely leave the page altogether. RBGY! Red, Blue, Green and Yellow … these colors are your friends! I am not advocating you create the Internet version of a three ring circus but I am telling you that you do not want all black text!
Text colors and Squeeze Pages
- Red = Stop, Alert, Warning
- Blue = Calm, focused
- Green = Exciting, Motivating
- Yellow = Attention, Proceed
You should use black text at a nominal 9 – 12 point font for standard content and descriptions (not headlines or titles .. etc). Imagery is acceptable on squeeze pages but you don’t want to slow down the load time of your page (no hosting images on other sites an hot-linking!), if your squeeze page loads slow the user will almost assuredly close the browser window on you.
Having advertisements on a squeeze page can be a dicey game. You are driving traffic to your squeeze page to either sell or recommend a product to users, you typically won’t want to distract them with, ‘shoot the monkey’ advertisements. You need your traffic to remain focused on the task at hand, being convinced to give you their email address!
Search Engine Optimization
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a topic in itself and is beyond the scope of this Squeeze Pages 101 guide however, SEO is absolutely vital to your squeeze page and is worth a quick trip to Google. Additionally if you want to connect with me (Ryan Huff), I would be happy to set you on the right path to learning about SEO. A word of caution though, be wary of any person or company that tries to guarantee you a consistent spot in any search engine. That magic bullet simply does not exist. If you could pay someone to make your page, ‘the number one result in Google’, don’t you think Google would have caught on by now? You can investigate Google Adwords, which is a paid positioning service from Google (but not positioning in the result set of a search).
Essentially though, SEO is all about relevancy, how relevant is the text in your page to the keywords the user typed in to whatever search engine they used. The best way to maintain good SEO on your squeeze page is to keep your page focused on one topic, don’t let the page text go off into different topic areas — keep the page laser focused, there should be a single underlying theme throughout your page. You’ll also want to learn about META tags which are hidden statements that are placed on your squeeze page that help search engines find the page (but the user won’t see the META tags on the surface of your squeeze page).
Here is a sample squeeze page that I have made so you can see what I consider a ‘good’ squeeze page. To look at the example page ‘under the hood’, right mouse click a white area of the page and choose ‘view source’. This will expose all the code and even the META tags used to make the squeeze page work.
Example: A Sample Squeeze Page
As always, feel free to connect with me if you would like my assistance or guidance with squeeze pages or other technology tasks for your Internet business!
Additionally, here are some useful links that can help you build your opt-in email list and generate a massive internet following!
This article is written and produced By:
Ryan Huff — Your Technology Coach
ryan@rthconsultants.com
http://rthconsultants.com
Ryan Huff is a freelance web developer, technology mentor, martial artist, business developer and an avid internet marketer. You can connect with Ryan at http://rthconsultants.com, follow Ryan at Twitter or at Facebook
