Should Free Offer Page and Sales Page Be independent?

[mangozilla]

Back with a rookie question:

I have an information video product along with a set of free promotional videos to be delivered via email one at a time.

Which is the better strategy?

1. Put my free offer (to build my list) on the same sales/squeeze page with my Buy Now button.
2. Only promote the free offer on the landing page and send links to the "buy now" page in the promotional emails.

I think I've seen this done both ways. The first creates the issue of unclear action by the customer, and whether I encourage them to sign up for the free vids or buy the course. My definition of "conversion" is undefined.

But the second strategy eliminates the opportunity for someone to buy on their first visit.

Any insights are appreciated!

[Tinkerbell]

mangozilla,

Keep them separate, but make your "buy now" page the page your autoresponder returns your visitors to once they've confirmed their sign up for your free offer.

Tina

[Blitzian]

you can do it three different ways

1) front end free offer optin - show the sales page after sign up - promote your sales page again in the follow up messages
2) make your home page the sales page - make your free offer an inner page like backdoor.html - could give the sense that there is lot more value to your free offer
3) make your home page the sales page - put your free offer on an exit pop

[danmart]

I'm a firm believer in a web page having a single purpose. If you put your optin offer on the same page as your sales page, it could create confusion with the customer or worse yet, you could have a customer that would have purchased the product decide to take the free offer first and "see how it goes".

Putting the optin on an exit popup is the best solution. That way you are "monetizing" your exit traffic and not "sharing" your traffic. if that makes any sense....

Dan

[mangozilla]

OK, Thanks for the suggestions. Seems like consensus is either promote the opt-in OR pitch the product, but not both on the same page. Since my free videos are already produced and say "visit myfrontpage.com for the full program" I better make the pitch and put the Buy button there.

But I'm still hesitant to make the opt in too hard to find. I actually modeled this project based on Guitar Lessons | Electric Guitar Lessons | Online Guitar Lessons | Video Guitar Lessons (not a plug, not my niche, but I liked the model). The opt in is prevalent on the front page, but there's the main product is presented as well. I can't remember the figures, but I've heard the owner claim revenues on this model of 5 figures per month - which would be acceptable to me. I think his main funnel is the free videos (also run on YouTube) that pitch the full program.

To be clear, I don't want to dispute opinions/suggestions to my request. But given the vguitarlessons model that has history of success, would you suggest that model be modified to only present the opt-in in an exit popup or somewhere outside of that front page?

[mangozilla]

OK, one last pitch for ideas:

There's no free offer on my sales page now, just the 'buy now' option. I added the Aweber exit popup to my (buy now) sales page to present the free offer, but I discovered 3 pitfalls:

1. With so many people using popup blockers, many will never see the free offer.
2. I can't direct PPC traffic to a page with a popup without violating Adwords TOS.
3. I may just have the wrong idea of the popup function, but assuming the popup is not blocked, it appears over the new page that the user navigated to, not my original page. I can't find an example now, but I thought popups remained over the original page, letting the visitor proceed to the new page after either signing up or closing the popup. Aweber says that this is the way it's supposed to work.

The obvious solution is to pitch the free offer on my front page, but my free offer is actually a series of how-to videos. Each video says 'if you like this, visit myfrontpage.com for the full program.

Any ideas/suggestions are appreciated.