Michael Campbell, who is surely not the only one, says he doesn’t mind trading an email addy for something of value, but, he says “What bugs me, are people that use squeeze pages, for a sales letter. Gee, how convenient. I have to give personal info, just to get sold to.”
OK, so the seller or the affiliate needs to ensure that they have a means to follow up with visitors and, sadly, these days, getting people to casually leave their email address is becoming harder and harder, but I agree that this is too early in the relationship. I know I never sign up for them, but I guess those who use squeeze pages do so, because they work: people do sign up.
If you offer me a gift or a course, or even product information by email on a sales page (that I can get to without first having to give my email address), then I will sign up for that. With a good email address too. Take note.
Anyway, normally, I’m not a fan of “hacking” things, however, the method that Michael advocates is a mere trick and, he says “Then, if it turns out to be something of value, and you want to receive further communications from this person, go ahead and resubscribe with your real address.”
What you do is to view source on the squeeze page and see if you can find the form Field Name called redirect. That should give you the URL to the sales page, which you can then copy and paste into your browser, so that you visit the sales page, bypassing the need to sign up for any trash.
A probably better method would be to make that initial signup (bearing in mind what he says about giving a real email later if the info is good), with a self-destructing 10 minuite email from http://www.10minutemail.com
For Firefox users, I found an even better and more convenient way, using this Firefox extension that works with TrashMail, a free temporary email forwarding service.
What this does is to add an item to your right click menu, as seen on the right, which, when you click it, brings up a popup window in to which you type your real email where you want the message delivered.
Apart from the fact that this is free, really convenient and easy, because you don’t have to register, or visit some other site first before you can get the address …. go back to the squeeze page to paste it in, etc. (i.e. hassle), TrashMail also provides a few other useful settings, plus the ability to change the domain of the soon-to-be-trashed email. There are some humorous choices right now, including @spamme.bounceme.net
However, I think this implies that the service is actively maintained and, changing / adding new domains means that when email services ban one or other of them (as they tend to do), then you have other options.
Of course people are going to use this method in your forms too. What can you do about it? Not a lot, except offer the information they want.
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Sponzurz
