Article marketers.. Do you send your traffic to a squeeze page?

I've tried sending traffic to a squeeze page, to a blog or niche site and also direct linking. I've found all three to be profitable in varying degrees. Sending to a site with content and an opt in along the side and direct linking have worked better for me than just a squeeze page, but this is just my experience.

I have 8 different niches and have split-tested what I do in only 4 of them (but applied my findings to all 8 of them on the grounds that although the niches are unrelated, the traffic demographics are very similar).

In each niche, I split-tested squeeze-pages against my "normal landing pages" for the same sort of traffic sources.

My normal landing pages are the home page of my sites, with a prominently incentivised opt-in, and the opt-in itself (without the full explanation) appearing on most other pages of the site too. Together with niche information, product-reviews, affiliate links and all the sort of stuff you expect to find on an affiliate's niche sites.

With squeeze pages, I built bigger lists but made less money from them as measured over a 6-month period. With my normal landing pages, I did better (from smaller lists).

The easy mistake to avoid, I think, is the assumption that building a bigger list is necessarily going to lead to more long-term income. I actually found the opposite, independently, in each of the 4 niches in which I tested it.

My focus is on building lists of buyers. Generally the article resource box points to a long sales page with a pop up opt-in form for product samples or a video demo. This process considerably screens out nearly all casual visitors, but the ones that do opt-in are highly convertable. It works very effectively in the more competitive niches, because prospects tend to be already familiar with these products; having been repeatedly exposed to sales promotions by less fortunate article marketers.

This, I think.

It's easy (but not always right!) to say that 800 people are better than 500 people (or whatever) but they can be different people.

My "reasoning" is that I do better out of the ones who see the whole site before/while opting in (home page), rather than after opting in (squeeze page), because they know they're signing up for "more of the same" and they're therefore a self-selected group who want "more of the same", and therefore more likely to trust me, open my emails, and buy from/through me.