If you’ve been following along with the Traffic Wave tutorials, you’ll have your autoresponder set up and your thank you pages done. All that’s left is the opt-in page.

Traffic Wave does provide an opt-in page for you, but I don’t use their pages for a couple of reasons. One is that I like to host my own opt-in pages so I can use my own analytics system (in my case, Google Analytics) to get insight into who is visiting the pages, and what percentage of visitors make it on to the various thank you pages (e.g. through the sign up funnel). Another is that the Traffic Wave opt-in pages only give you a limited selection of templates. Even though the opt-in pages I come up with aren’t that great, at least they’re my work…and when I want to, I can pay someone to create a custom opt-in page for me.

On to creating the page.

Pick A Template

Unless you’re the sort of graphical genius that can create an opt-in page from scratch, you need to pick a template. There are tons out there, just look around (or join The Advisory Panel and download a few packages from the free library there).

Your two basic choices are a squeeze page, or a sales page.

A squeeze page is a short page that can be seen all at once. It’s designed to catch the visitor’s attention and entice them into submitting their name and email. A sales page is a longer page that is designed to overcome the visitor’s reluctance to sign up by bombarding them with claims about how your product will cure all the ills in their life.

Which you use is up to you. Long sales pages are popular these days, even though I never read them and think they’re horrible tools. But they’re popular, so maybe they’re working for someone.

Whatever template you find will provide you with an HTML file and possibly some image files. You’ll need to edit the HTML file to add your opt-in form.

Creating A Capture Page

You have a template that has a space where it says, “Put your opt-in form here”. But where do you get your opt-in form?

Login to your Traffic Wave back office, and go back to the autoresponder you set up in previous tutorials. Choose the option titled “Capture Pages”.

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