150 – Lead Capture Page Conversion Tips With Clay Collins From LeadPages

Podcast: Download (Duration: 29:19 — 23.6MB)

Get Notified Of Future Episodes Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Blubrry | Gaana | TuneIn | Deezer | Anghami | RSS | More

View LeadPages

Highlights in the Podcast:

• The inspiration behind Lead Pages
• Landing Page Software that has all the best features
• Parallel integration and compatibility
• The effects of high speed page processing on lead capture page conversion
• Building a business entirely on this one tool
• LeadPages has the right amount of features
• How convenient is this tool?
• Setting up your Welcome Gate
• Benefits of the recurring fee vs One-time plugin offered by others
• Top Three ways to get someone’s email address
  • Providing a resource list
  • The Top “Mistakes” List
  • Done For You Stuff
• Making the highest conversion page yet
• The “Curiosity Hook”
• What is the best thing about LeadPages?

Get LeadPages from BuyWithBonus.com and claim your bonus

Transcription:

James Schramko here, I’ve got Clay Collins my good buddy back on the line. Good day Clay!

Clay: James, It’s great to be here.

James: We’re just catching up all the time and there’s a good reason for that is because this software you’re producing, it just loads all my buttons. I don’t know what it is but you’ve like awaken the imagination within for me. First, it was LeadPlayer, you have this amazing device that turns every single video on your website into an opt in form and as soon as I saw that, I’m like, “I have to have this”.

And we’ve rolled it out across our sites and as you know, I’m a really great advocate for this software but then you had this other thing out in the background called LeadPages and that’s what I want to talk about now because I’ve been poking around under the hood of that LeadPages software. I’ve logged in myself, built a page; I also had my top web assistant login and build a page for herself so we both had a crack at this. I put that thing up on the site and flicked on the welcome gate option and boom! My opt ins have just gone ballistic.

So if any of that stuff makes no sense to the listener, don’t worry we’re going to explain this all for to you. So first, let’s just get to square one, so what inspired LeadPages?

How LeadPages came about
Clay: You know I think, for one, just the straight up love for software. Like coming out of the marketing space, there are a lot of people who are participating on software who really just see it as a business opportunity and they butt some course on how to monopolize on software, to grow an internet company. And so they get some personal like whip something up then all of a sudden there’s a special offer and I was seriously dismayed that there wasn’t solid enterprise class, amazing software for direct sales marketers that do business on the internet.

Like if you’re a Fortune 500 company, it exists and it’s going to costs hundreds and thousands of dollars and then if you want just a couple of WordPress plugins that kind of do what you want, that stuff existed but there wasn’t like hard core software as a service like that just rock solid software that exists for direct sales marketers that do what you and I do and I wanted to make that and I really saw this opportunity. I saw that in one hand, there was landing page software that was like WYSIWYG so you basically could create any page you want but there were unlimited possibilities that people simply just didn’t know what to make so they go into this “what you is what you get” software that you’ll be staring at a blank canvass and that software does nothing for you if you don’t know the fundamentals of conversion design. So that’s one thing.

On the other hand, there was just a lot of WordPress plugins that had limited options and only had few integrations and I really saw this room for someone to create a software that allows you to create all the conversion pages in your business and allows you to do it in a number of seconds and that had built in to it the best of the best of what had been tested and proven to work across the board and they did in a way that is absolutely pro so our application runs on the same servers that Google does. It’s lightning fast, it’s all CSS 5, HTML whatever mambo jumbo like it’s just the best of the best so that’s why I created it.

James: That’s what I like and I’ve seen a whole spectrum of the little plugins that sort of hosted all in the WordPress environment right through to I remember when I worked for a corporate company, they paid for $70,000 for a very basic page from a super duper web designer who spent a week on Dreamweaver or something.

Now the thing that’s cool about LeadPages is that it is cloud hosted, but you can still pull it into your site via a plugin which is really simple like upload plugin, it forms your page and Boom! The other thing I like about it is that it works with the stuff that I already got like GoToWebinar and with Office AutoPilot that I happen to use but I’m sure it works with all the major email systems is that right?

Useful integrations
Clay: Yeah absolutely. I mean one of the things that we wanted to do with this was we wanted to be able to do parallel integrations. That means that any, like literally any landing page or squeeze page and lead pages can be a GoToWebinar registration page so for example, you can just take like a normal, “Hey, download this free report squeeze page” and hook it up so that when someone opts in there, it simultaneously adds them to your Aweber list, your Mailchimp list or your Office AutoPilot list so simultaneously size them up for whatever email list that you have and it can automatically register them for a webinar on the back end.

And that’s done it to API level which means that without getting too geeky on people, our server is talking directly to their server which means the pages are screaming fast so not only are the pages, images and scripts on Google’s server infrastructure, which is faster than Amazon’s by the way, but also we process the page super fast because all the data gets sent to us and then if everything’s slow on GoToWebinar, our server can just tell, wait until GoToWebinar is ready to receive that data but in the meantime, the pages are already processed.

The person’s already on the thank you page and might be five seconds later before GoToWebinar says, “Ok, they’re registered” but in the meantime, the page on your customer’s side, like the person who’s viewing the page is on the thank you page. You’re registered and you’re all good to go, so it’s screaming fast as well. Which believe it or not has a dramatic impact on conversion rate for landing pages and also Google ranking.

James: I totally believe that. I know that Google plays a big emphasis on that so just to put people in the picture here what we’re talking about is a way for someone to come to your page and to put their details on it and you can build an entire business around just one tool with a quality auto responder sequence.. You don’t even need a website, you can actually use the LeadPages, hosted page or you could do what I do which is to pull that page into my existing site and I can name it into any page that I want, and it looks like it’s on my normal site but it’s actually being pulled in from somewhere else.

Just enough features
The thing that I like though is you somehow balanced the right amount of options like I can do the things I want to. Like I want to install analytics, I want to install split testing software, I want to make a choice where there’s a “skip this page” link is there or not or if it opens in a new window or not. How did you magically come up with just the right amount of features?

Clay: You know it really just comes from working with a freaking ton of people, so I get on the phone like every single week and I just help people with this stuff. Whether it’s customers or customers when I used to sell information products and then also we use this in our own business, so this isn’t just something that we saw a hypothetical meat around.

This is something that I want to use every day in my in my own business. And I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I am unwilling to create software that I don’t personally use in my business every single day because I just become too detached from the process. We live and breathe in this space, so does our entire client base, and so does our entire team uses this software. We’re just pulling from instinct and talking to a freaking ton of people who we’ve interacted with over five plus years of just interactions, so it’s really just knowing the space and knowing the market place and knowing people’s needs and being obsessive.

James: I love that obsessive thing. So this is what makes it work. You can log in really easily just start straight away like you click on an almost ready to go page and you just click on the part of the page that needs something.

If it needs a video, you click on it. It tells you what size to put. You just put the embed code. You can even whack in a YouTube video if you want.

Then you click on the opt-in and then you can integrate it with your opt-in and you can tell it what copyright, link or not a link, and then it’s just ready to roll and it’s so fast.

That’s good so I’ve sort of got a hold of this and I’ve just had this “oh my goodness” thing and I’m out there thinking “What can I give away now?” because I really want and I can see the power of this and there’s three main choices. You can make the page the homepage for the site.

You can make it a side page on the site. Or you can make it appear to the people who visit for the first time and that’s called a Welcome Gate and that’s probably the first product I can ever recall hearing your name around, and that one’s been successful for a bunch of people. Do you want to give us some sort of statistics or some usage patterns that you’ve observed with that particular one?

A highly effective welcome gate
Clay: Yes so a Welcome Gate means that it’s very specific, and I saw Andrew Warner at MixerGy doing this thing and I was like “well let’s see how this works…” so I created basically the ability in LeadPages for someone to pick one of their landing pages and have it be the page that someone is redirected to the first time that they go to the home page. So if there’s a deep link into a specific article, the page isn’t going to appear. If someone’s going to an About Me page or something like that, the page isn’t going to appear. But if someone goes to the Homepage for the first time, they’re going to see an Opt-in Box if you have your page set up to be your Welcome Gate.

The results for this are phenomenal. The majority of people who use this get more opt-ins from their welcome gate than from any single landing page in the rest of their business. A lot of people, I’ve had over ten people tell me that their Welcome Gate generates more than any of their opt-in boxes combined, and often people see an 8 – 10x increase.

The reason why I say this is because it really speaks as to why we created the software as I saw an opportunity to really sky-rocket people’s businesses with a little effort. With very little effort on their part because we just had some proven pages and some proven concepts where you literally could just plug it in and it just works. So yes, that’s what a welcome gate does and it’s a lot of fun.

James: Okay so tell me the difference between having a recurring fee on the cloud versus a one-time plug in that a lot of people are offering.

What the recurring fee gets you
Clay: Yes so, the recurring thing. With LeadPages we really have 2 options. There’s a monthly recurring and there’s a yearly recurring and there’s a lot that comes with that. The first thing that you get is you get on going, amazing support.

We just hired our third full time support person and you get lightning fast responses. Often you’ll get custom demo videos so you get amazing support, and you also get hosting on Google’s server infrastructure. A lot of people might be like “Oh really, there’s a monthly fee?” but it’s very affordable for everyone and what this gets you is ridiculous scaling. So for one flat fee you get unlimited pages, you get unlimited domains, and unlimited scaling.

People who buy this sometimes are just getting started and it’s reasonable, especially compared to the competition. People also buy this – I’m at the point now where I’m just overblown by who my customers are at this point but they’re like “Yeah we have a list of a million” so well let’s scale them and we’re like “Damn straight it will scale” because – do Google server scale, yes we’ve scaled this on people with a million plus list. And so part of what you get is that page will always be up, that page will always integrate on the back with GoToWebinar or Aweber. That page will always be fast and everything is just going to work, and we take full responsibility for the entire experience of someone who arrives at that page, that’s also what you get with this.

James: That’s really awesome scalability. Okay I’m going to put you on the spot here Clay. Off the top of your head – what are the top three things that people can give away in order to get someone’s email address?

Giveaway No. 1: A resource guide
Clay: I love this question. Okay, the first thing that someone can give away is just a resource list, so just a list of the top resource, and man the conversion on this is so amazing. My highest converting opt-in page is just a page that says – Free report reveals the 5 dirt cheap tools I use to create all my videos including my $80 HD video camera – so it’s just a list of 5 tools. It’s just a toolbox for my target market and for one of my products. And everyone can 1, Write the copy for this kind of landing page here it is, here’s the formula – Free Report Reveals The Top 5 or top 7 Tools For _____ – really that’s all you have to do and you can create this kind of page.

I’ll give you a few examples. If you’re a real estate agent you can create a resource guide – The Top 5 Safest Credit Boosting Home Loans Of This Year – right? Easy to do, I’d download that. If you’re a dentist you could create a bribe that’s like buyer’s guide – The Top 5 Electric Toothbrushes Of This Year, Including the one that I use. And this is just a report that someone can opt in to download.

If you’re a life coach it could be, you can give away an app guide that tells people the top 4 iPhone App For Increasing Your Productivity. If you’re a local marketing agency it could be The Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools For Local Businesses. If you’re a fitness expert, and I just sort of like wrote this the other day, if you’re a fitness personal coach or fitness coach it could be The Only 3 Pieces Of Exercise Equipment You Need In Your Home, that kind of thing.

You can literally write this up in 5 – 10 minutes, convert it to PDF using your Word processor and you’ve got a bribe that people want. The most popular editions and issues of magazines often are the buyer’s guide for like golf digest and for cigar aficionado and for back packer monthly or whatever, it’s the gear guide. People want to know the tools because they have this secret fantasy that they don’t admit to anyone else, and the fantasy is that – if only I had the right tools, the tools that the pro’s use, then I wouldn’t actually have to be here. I wouldn’t have to produce all this magic I could just use these tools.

In many cases that’s true, sometimes I found like especially with the video stuff, like just having the tools automatically doubles my productivity and doubles the effect of what I’m doing. So yes, that’ the first answer.

James: You know like an affiliate, just how is this for a mind blowing business model? Like today, you can order LeadPages, you could create a page that you send people to with your affiliate recommendations as a reviewed resources and then set-up your name capture so now you start building a list and the affiliate income should pay for the traffic to build the list so you have a paid for list building machine that you could bolt onto anything. With LeadPages you can basically – if you already have a blog or website like I do, I’ve got stacks of websites, I can just go and add a welcome gate to every one of my sites by just going to that one central place building out the pages, and soon there’ll be a super-duper feature that I have asked Clay for which will make this even easier, and you can have that page strapped onto that blog within minutes.

The top 5 mistakes
Okay now Clay, give us option number 2. What else could we give away?

Clay: The resource guide is my favourite one. The second one that you could create is really just the top 5 mistakes that people make in a specific market. So just a list of the common newbie errors, and the reason why this is good especially when you’re selling information products or services, the reason why this works well is because almost every person who’s looking to get into something or looking for information about something has a set of newbie mistakes that probably they have made or they’re ready to make or they’re about to make.

And by immediately sort of entering that conversation that this newbie person is having in their head and telling them what they’re about to do wrong or that they’ve already done wrong. If you could describe the mistakes that they’re making or about to make better than anyone else, then they will automatically assume that you have not only a solution but the best solution to help them side step the big errors that they’re about to make, so I can tell you that when it comes to landing pages in building your list there’s a whole bunch of mistakes people make.

One mistake is that a lot of times people won’t get up a landing page until they have the perfect bribe. And I can tell you I have a website that brought in 50 opt-ins a day for three years that I had no bribe associated with it. It was just like an opt-in to get more information from me. And I would have missed out on 50 opt-ins a day x 365 days a year x 3 years if I had waited to get a bribe, not just a bribe but like the perfect bribe.

So that’s a mistake. Yet I always said to people “Get your damn opt-in box off”. So there’s usually a set of mistakes and if you can describe your goal and then now you’re in the driver’s seat to show them how they cannot make those mistakes.

James: Okay, so that could be in any sort of format audio, text, video?

Clay: Yup, have someone interview you like what we’re doing right now.

James: That’s a really good idea. You should totally do that. Totally.

Clay: Totally.

James: I love it. Okay so number three.

Giveaway number 3: done for you stuff
Clay: Number three. You know I really like done-for-you stuff. Done-for-you doesn’t mean that you need to create software or you need to get someone involved. Done-for-you stuff is once I gave away and this was a huge hit but it was a marketing income calculator for online businesses and it was just an excel spread sheet.

And I just had all the formulas set up in the excel spread sheet and people can type in like the CPN that they would be paying for and the conversion right to their sales page and the cost of the product and the affiliate commission. And they could just calculate whether or not they’d be profitable on various traffic sources in their business. And that kind of thing works incredibly well depending upon what niche you’re in.

There are things that you can give to people that don’t require someone to process information. They’re simply done-for-you thing. So if you help real estate agents for example in their recruiting, you could give away an auto responder sequence with three emails that they could just load up when someone opts in for more information about being a real estate agent in their office and three emails just automatically go out whenever someone opts in, space out a couple of days in a row. But anything where you’re doing some work for someone and they don’t have to process information is good. If I had a specific industry I could come up with a pretty ready stuff.

James: You know like in SEO business of mine, we do website check. People go to our site at SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services, they fill out the website check and I suspect if we convert that page to a lead page we can actually really drive up our response so I’ll be testing that. And I thought you might also mention webinars because they seem like a pretty good hook these days and it integrates well with them.

Clay: Yeah, so we’re loading up your page. It’s being developed right now but the James Schramko special edition webinar registration page, you can go in to LeadPages and just use James’ webinar registration page and I love that page. That might be the highest converting one we do so far, I know.

James: We liked the idea. Remember that I tested this a year and a half ago and it just drove so much traffic to it. And the thing that really made it work was a faded mind map. People want the mind map.

I think it’s the same reason that you said people want the best tools. They want that secret ingredient, that special blue print that I followed to create millions of dollars and if they could just get that, then they could do the same. You know what, it’s actually partially true. The students that I take in my SilverCircle literally follow the same mind map that I taught in that webinar and the faded out version of that in the background of the page is very, very enticing as something that people will get instantly when they opt-in.

So I’m really looking forward to running that. And I’ll share the results with listeners, so stick around listeners and I’ll be back to you with another episode on this topic to tell you the results we got from the Clay Collins-James Schramko webinar LeadPages mash-up project.

Clay: You know I love that faded mind map that you give away because it’s kind of that allure of a blueprint that you can kind of see but you can’t quite make out exactly what’s there. It’s kind of like when I was in college (and I’m engaged now so this doesn’t apply as much). But when I was in college and I was looking at girls and the ones that showed or dressed any way like you could tell enough that you’re interested but you certainly did not see very much at all.

James: So I would call this a curiosity hook. There are a lot of different angles you can take. You can have the blind offer and stuff so that the curiosity thing is just as powerful I think as scarcity or greed and all the other ones that we see all the time, hope and etc. So the curiosity one that really does get most people and if you combine that with something else like scarcity like you could get this mind map but only before a certain date and if it’s legitimate then that’s great.

Did you know where I’ve been today Clay? I was down in the city of Sydney and I was checking out the venue for my FastWebFormula live event at the time of recording and it’s an awesome event. And I’m really looking forward to the event so I would definitely be running a webinar before the event to share with people the same sort of ideas and information that I teach in my communities. And I will ask people to come to the event.

That’s pretty much what I’ll be offering that they should do and if they can’t come to the event they should at least join my membership. The last time I ran that event, it was very successful, the actual webinar event. And it was ideal because people either ordered a ticket to the event or if they couldn’t make it they ordered the recordings so this time it’s almost the same thing. So I can’t wait to revisit this but with my LeadPages secret weapon.

Clay: You know I’ve heard people flat out rave about your events so I’m really glad that you’re doing this again and I’m going to see if I can get a ticket to Australia.

James: If you would like to come and talk to us about LeadPages, LeadPlayers and conversions and software, you’re certainly welcome. You can come as my guest, Clay.

Clay: That would be awesome, I could probably get up there and talk and talk. I’d probably go after landing page after landing page.

James: We do have great export of IPA beer. In fact, there are all sorts of beers, very strong beers here so I’m sure it will be fine. So we’ll see how that goes.

Summing it up
So in summary, we’ve talked about what LeadPages is. It’s lead capture software that runs off Google’s server that is almost ready to go out of the box. And it’s already using high converting things, little things like the pictures of people looking at the opt-in to divert the eye’s attention, that you’ve got the ability to integrate with just about anything and you can have these things up and running on your own site. Pulling it in via a plugin straight away and you’ve got lots of choices you can make but only the ones that matter.

I’m absolutely loving the software. Thanks for creating it. And I’m just so excited about it. So if people have questions, ask where this podcast is, I know that Clay will come and have a look at them and I’ll also answer questions.

And what we’re doing is setting up more pages and sharing results and we’re just going to keep perfecting the landing page. It’s the best landing page software I’ve ever seen. It’s much easier than buying sales page themes that we used to do. It’s much cheaper than hiring an expert to hand code something.

You really don’t need to do that because Clay’s designs have already done that for you. So Clay, give us a final tip to end the discussion on what do you think the best thing about LeadPages is.

Clay: I think the best thing about LeadPages is that we have the ability to not collect any private information or any individual information but we have the ability in the aggregate to look at what is working and what isn’t across all the user’s sites and we are constantly creating new designs that increase conversion for you. So everything in there, works out of the box. You could almost be the worst copywriter in the world and what you put up will likely convert really well just by virtue of the designs and how we force you to structure the pages.

I like that you can login in literally less than a minute and have a landing page ready to go that looks good, that converts well and that’s integrated with whatever software you’re using. And that’s not a lie. Like literally 60 seconds. So I’m super proud of that.

James: Thank you so much for sharing your time. It’s always great to get you on the call and hopefully we’ll catch up soon.

Clay: That’s awesome. I really appreciate you James. I really look up to you and I’m definitely taking cues from what you’re doing left and right and envious of your business. So thanks for having me on.

James: Alright, now listeners you can go to BuyWithBonus.com and grab LeadPages through my special link and I’ll happily send you a bonus. You can have a course or I’ve got some extra special content that’s not available anywhere else, always custom created content. I’m happy to give you a copy of that as my little thank you for listening to the show and through buying from BuyWithBonus.com. Thanks Clay. Thanks listener. We’ll be back soon.

More of Clay Collins

For more podcast episodes, subscribe on iTunes

Please comment below.