I’ve noticed an increasing trend over the last couple of months of lazy internet marketers putting up ridiculously basic squeeze pages offering a free guide in exchange for an email address. While you may think that’s fairly standard practice amongst the well-known marketing gurus, what’s missing in the pages I’m referring to, is any idea of who’s behind the offers! Take a look at this example where the squeeze page is the only page on the domain.
Here’s my take on it:
- There isn’t a page header and I don’t know who owns the site. This is really doing things on the cheap!
- There’s no clue as to who authored the free guide – how do I know it’s worth having? The cynic in me questions if it even exists.
- No effort has been made to provide a graphic of the free guide which, even with a virtual product or download, has been proved to increase sign-ups.
- There’s a link (out of shot) to a privacy policy. When I clicked through, there was reference to another website so I took at a look at that one too. Guess what? It was another anonymous squeeze page for another anonymous free gift!
My suspicion is that, if you give your email address here, or on similar pages, you’ll soon be on the receiving end of a lot of promotional messages and spam.
What do you think? Have you had any experience with anonymous squeeze pages? We’d love to know!
(I apologise if you’re the owner of this page and you are making a genuine offer. This post simply reflects my personal opinions on reading it.)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely! Though one would only get caught once signing up to a shonky opt in page. Good on you I`m sure this post will save somebody from finding out the hard way.
Hi Julie and thanks for your comment. I agree that we’d learn the lesson very quickly about the downside of signing up to potentially dodgy lists, and hope people will think twice before being tempted by a ‘too good to be true’ freebie!