Building a Proper Landing Page
One of the biggest mistakes made by advertisers in just about every niche and within every advertising medium online today is not utilizing proper landing pages. In fact most advertisers (specifically small business people who are doing things with out help from a consultancy firm) are still sending all their traffic to their home page. In general this is a massive mistake that over time will positively waste about 90% or more of your web traffic.
Can You Really Afford to Waste 90% or More of Your Traffic?
So what’s the solution? The answer is developing a landing page that specifically addresses the primary motivation for each advertising campaign. This landing page should follow the following simple process
1. Sell (and I mean SELL) the visitor something free, an e-Report, an eBook or any item of value that has no real ongoing cost for you to distribute.
2. In return for the “fee item” require them to provide you with a valid email address.
3. Once they give you the information redirect them to a page making them a special offer.
4. Use automation to deliver the free item.
5. Continue to send emails via an automated process to “drip” market to the prospect over a long period of time.
This is highly simplified and you can do a lot better but these steps alone will put you ahead of 95% of your competitors.
Examine the diagram below it explains the entire process. Study it carefully as simple as it appears this is the one process that is currently separating most would be great internet entrepreneurs from success.
The Landing Page Process
Incremental Results are on Your Side Thanks to Automation
Every business is being affected by the compounded power of incremental results. The problem is; devoid of automated processes; this incremental effect is almost always negative. What do I mean by that? Consider the following.
You are running a variety of advertising methods to drive traffic to your website. Combined let’s say that your results are an average of 1,000 visitors a day that come to your website. Most websites that simply attempt to sell a product or service will be lucky to convert even 1% of visitors to paying customers on the first visit to their website. This figure is true even with highly qualified and targeted traffic. Hence even with 1% conversion rate this particular business will average only 10 sales or less per day.
Would you consider 10 sales a day a success for your website? Some will and some won’t, it will of course depend on your profit margin, your sales price and the cost to acquire the traffic. Yet even if you consider your total daily sales a success you are still being damaged by the incremental effect. What about the 990 other people that visited your site each day, left and never returned. Each was a lost opportunity and each one cost you money and/or resources in order to get them to visit your site.
A good opt in landing page with a strong value proposition will have a conversion rate between 10-50%, we have even pushed some into the range of 75% and higher! However, let’s be ultraconservative and say that the best you can do is the bottom end of 10%. Now using the same number of 1,000 visits a day and that bottom end opt in rate of 10% let’s look at the cost to you in visitors you could be marketing to if they have been added to your database.
The Effect of Losing 10% of Potential Customers per for 1 Year
· End of Day One – 100 potential customers lost
· End of Day Seven – 700 potential customers lost
· End of Month One – 2,100 potential customers lost
· End of Q1 – 6,300 potential customers lost
· End of Year One – 25,200 potential customers lost
Now let me ask you the following questions…
· How many visits a day does your site receive?
· Are you using automation and landing pages?
· How long has your site been online?
· How much as this incremental effect added up to so far based on your visitor count?
· If even only 2% of those potential customers had eventually purchased how much has these incremental effects cost you at this point?
How Can The Small Business Person Rectify This Issue?
Much of this may sound complicated and perhaps you think you need complex software or advanced skills to pull it off. The reality is this is a very simple and inexpensive process to implement. All that is required is…
· The ability to build and publish web pages (which if you own a site you either have or must have someone to do for you)
· Subject matter expertise on your niche (which simply means you know more about your industry than the average site visitor)
· The ability to write compelling copy
· An email system (I recommend Aweber only $19.95 a month www.aweber.com)
· A little specialized knowledge (which I am about to give you)
Step One – Develop a simple eBook or e-report on a subject your visitors will find interesting. This may take a bit of creativity on your part but honestly any business person should be able to come up with this.
Here are a few real world examples of projects we have done.
· When selling a martial arts product about a little known Russian Martial Art known as “Systema” we capitalized on the skepticism of the market with a free eBook called “From Skeptic to Believer” chronicling a 25 year veterans life before and after learning the new art.
· Working for a recruiting firm looking to attract and get job seekers engaged into a system that would profile their skills and availability we developed an eBook called “The Death of the Resume” informing job seekers about the move to automation in the pre employment screening process.
As you can see the above two businesses are very different. One is a high end corporate business to business solution, the other is a consumer level info product yet the same system is deadly effective for both of them. The key is to assemble useful information into a consolidated format that will be of perceived value to the type of people that visit your website.
Step Two – Develop sales copy for the free book or report or newsletter or what every you are giving away in exchange for information. This is what I was talking about when I said, “I mean sell it”. You need to sit down and imagine that you are about to charge 49.95 for the item you just created and write your copy as though you were going to put a buy now button on it and charge that price.
The only thing you won’t do is actually put the price or the words “buy now” into the copy. Yet you will “sell it” point out the value of the report tell people it will save them time and or money (assuming that it will of course). Define for them why they need it, point out how it will improve their ability to make decisions, buy smarter, and learn about a subject or what ever value it is you have built into the report.
Here is the actual landing page for the martial arts product mentioned in step one. http://valriazanov.com/myjourney.html Notice how the copy reads and uses words such as, devastating, so simple, free eBook, etc. Note the use of bullets to specify multiple benefits. Does the formula work? You bet, depending on the source of the traffic and how specific we are with targeting this page converts at a rate between 24% to over 80% from some sources.
The key here is that web users are becoming savvier every day; free stuff won’t get real email addresses unless you do two things.
1. You must effectively sell the free product; it must have monetary value in the mind of the visitor even though it is free.
2. You must make it clear that the link to download the product will be emailed to them. You don’t redirect them to the product because if you do 25-60% on average will put in an email like etc.
If you follow the above formula and are purchasing targeted web traffic a conversion rate of 10% is honestly child’s play. Here are a few tips to increase the conversion rate…
- Create or purchase quality graphics, note how we created a book graphic on the landing page mentioned above. This makes electronic products more tangible in the mind of the visitor.
- Write long copy but make it a series of short pitches with an opt in form after each attempt. Again you can see this in action on the landing page mentioned above.
- Use strong calls to action, again noting the page referenced above notice how we used phrases such as “read this ebook” and “request your copy now”. It sounds over simplified but you simply must tell people what you want them to do and many will then do it.
Step Three – Put together some sort of large package deal for new customers and deeply discount it. Raise your retail price if you have to. Perhaps develop a more advanced eBook or two as well and sell them in your “store” for a price say 9.95-19.95 and use them to increase the total package value.
You then build a sales page for this package and put the following on top of the page in bold
STOP!
You are Only Ever Going to See This Offer One Time
I am going to warn you right now, resist the temptation to change those words in the slightest. The ONLY WAY they won’t apply is if you are not actually selling anything, so if you are building up a forum or perhaps giving out a free site membership you can take a slightly different approach but if like 90% of site owners you actually sell products this formula is so proven there is NO REASON to deviate from it. Of course keep your word, never loose creditability with your customers. This will be the only place and the only time you make this specific offer.
There is a formula to use on this page after the headline, I will outline it for you now but I need to restate this one more time. Use the above headline exactly as I have provided it to you. It works and has been proven over and over to be highly effective. On this page the formula is simple but needs to be followed to the letter. Take a look at the “One Time Offer” (OTO) page visitors are sent to for the martial arts product mentioned above.
http://valriazanov.com/stop.html
This page is a classic use of the OTO sales formula; here it is broken down…
- Each item is individually priced as stand alone.
- Each item has individual sales copy designed to truly sell it individually
- All the items are listed on a price list showing the grand total
- The discount offered is expressed as both a percentage and in total dollars.
- The user is given only two options – take the deal or expressly to turn it down with a “statement of understanding”.
- In most instances when turned down you offer a down sell also at a reduced price. You can see our down sell for the page mentioned above at - http://valriazanov.com/nothankyou.html we refer to this as an STO (second time offer).
This formula is so simple and can honestly be applied to any niche. Very few people running conventional businesses are doing it though and with that we have to ask why not? My view is they…
1. Think it will take too much time
2. Think that it is impossible to write a solid “free report” in their niche
3. Don’t think anyone would pay for the more extensive e-reports
4. Don’t know how to use the technology required to implement this process
5. Are to worried about ‘what if’ to just get on with it
In closing let me address each of these concerns/objections…
It Will Take To Much Time
Really? It takes too much time to put a sales process into place that will actually transform your website from a brochure into a sales person that asks the right questions and makes your visitors offers? I also want to point out that this doesn’t really take a massive amount of time, a system like this can generally be integrated in about 40-60 hours of work for people doing it the first time with no real guide, and once you do it a time or two most can knock out future projects in 15-20 hours of work. Translation you put in a few days work for a system that works 24x7x365 for years to come.
It is Impossible to Write a Solid and Valuable Report for my Niche
In a word, nonsense! I have never consulted with a single entrepreneur where we could not come up with some sort of value added information that prospective customers would find valuable. You just have to be creative. For instance I spoke to a local restaurant owner who said “we sell burgers, chicken, steak, etc. what kind of free report would we offer?” Took me about 5 minutes to come up with an e-report title of, “The Top Ten Undiscovered Secrets in Dallas-Ft. Worth” including the “best undiscovered burger”. The burger would of course be theirs, and then list 9 other secrets from businesses they don’t compete with. You name the niche and there is an opportunity for it, you just have to realize how much knowledge you have about your industry and be creative.
I Don’t Think Anyone Will Pay for my Paid e-Book
Well I think that 99% of the time this is simply untrue but it simply points out the flaw in the thinking anyway. First you don’t really care if anyone buys your paid e-product you just want something to boost the price of the total package that you can afford to discount. Why? So you can create a bigger discount in your one time offer. Further you don’t have to have a paid e-product you can discount a group of your physical products and just use that or you can say create a “discount club” and give free membership to it. Do not look for why this system won’t work for your business, figure out how to make it fit your process because trust me it can be done.