I doubled my opt-in rates on my squeeze page by doing this

Hi everyone,

I'm not going to share the squeeze page address for now because I'm still gathering stats, and I don't want a bunch of WF members skewing the numbers (I can share it in a few days) ... but I finally got around to using video on my squeeze page and I love the results.

My old page was simple. Header graphic, headline, some text explaining the freebie in exchange for an email address. It was only getting about a 13% opt-in rate.

My new page is VERY simple. Same header image and same background colours. Same headline, and one line of text under the headline that says "Press play on this video to learn more about my methods".

Then I have used the Worpress plugin "Flash video player" to add a video to my site. The size is 480 x 360 and fits nicely on the page. Not too big or too small.

The video runs through a set of powerpoint slides that I made, to pitch my free audio lesson for parenting. The whole pitch is 5 minutes long and I give SEVERAL spots in the audio commentary where I say "just go ahead and fill out the form right now". So I'm confident most people do not listen for the full 5 minutes.

Right before then end I go over the objections that might come up. 1) Email privacy; 2) Me sending them crap. I just tell people that I won't share their info and I tell them that there is an unsubscribe link in every email. I want them to know I genuinely will not spam them, etc.

At the end I give several testimonials from people who have emailed to me saying how great my free lesson was.

I put a BIG RED ARROW in the slides to point to where the opt-in box goes.

My opt-in rate is now 25% and I'm thrilled. I can probably make it go higher in time with new tweaks. But for now a huge return on my investment (of time)

Other details:

- I first wrote my script using notepad. I polished the script after a few edits.

- I recorded the script with Audacity (free) and addes some background music in Adobe Audition (not free, but can be done with any other free software also). I output to MP3 format.

- I next made the powerpoint slides to match up with the script, and then I went in and defined all of the slide transition points in the script.

- I animated all of the slides to that headlines and bullet points would come in at approximately the right time to match the audio. I simply had the MP3 play while I did animation previews on the slides to verify timing.

- I did a screen recording of the slideshow with Camtasia Studio and simply played the MP3 in the background and pressed "return" to change slides at the right marker points in my script. This made the screen recording very easy. I only needed to change slides and the slide animation took care of the rest.

- MAKE SURE to set your screen resolution to 1024x768 or 800x600 before screen recording so that it will fit naturally into an output of 480x360 or 400x300 if you choose. Aspects ratio must match. I have a widescreen monitor and I had to change resolutions. If you are not on a widescreen monitor you're probably OK.

- I drop the screen recording into camtasia, along with the MP3 and output in FLV format with 480x360 as my size.

- Install the Flash Video Player plugin for Wordpress and drop it into the new squeeze page.

That's it. All done. Total time invested (honestly) was about 8 hours because I had never put video on a website before.

Key points:

This did not cost me a penny.
This has **doubled** the growth rate of my list.