James: James Schramko here from jamesschramko.com with John Lint from 10XPRO.io. Hey, John.
John: Hey, what’s up?
James: Plenty, actually. You and I have been chatting about tips for online businesses. We saw some great comments on one of the videos we’ve made about whether they should do a membership or a course. There’s a few back-and-forth comments in LinkedIn there where we publish it. And we publish it on a few other platforms as part of the lead-up.
Also, had a lot of people diving into onlinecoursesystem.com. That’s where we’ve published a course. If you want to have your own course, and you’re not sure how to do it, that’s a great place to go.
I want to ask you, today, a question that comes up a fair bit, and I actually got asked the same thing by a student today. And they asked me, if I have 10XPRO, will I still need to have my own hosting and stuff? He referred to my homepage where I introduced myself and I talk about the prospect’s challenge. And he said, That’s your homepage. Will I still need hosting and a website if I have 10XPRO?
And I said, No. You could actually have whatever page you want as the homepage. So I want to ask you, John, what do you see as being a successful homepage for people running courses and memberships? What sort of options do we have?
John: Yeah, I mean, I get this question as well, a lot. Like, hey, what should be the homepage of my website? I guess everybody’s talking to each other, and they want to know that.
Well, the reality is that there’s no real specific answer. It actually depends on your strategy and what you want to do, and kind of where you are at with your business. So if we break it down, what is a homepage first? Well, it’s when someone types your domain name, that’s the first page they are going to land. For example, you, James, jamesschramko.com. I type that in, I land on your homepage, that’s what a homepage is.
So we have then different strategies, right? You can be as simple as just a page, a landing page, which we call an opt-in page or a squeeze page. Just a simple page where you tell them, hey, enter your name and email, and you’re going to get this awesome stuff, this awesome solution to your problem, to one of your problems. Great. So it can be as simple as that.
Other people go with more, hey, I’m going to have a sales page there. That can work sometimes. If you want to just drive people straight to a sale, you can do it that way. Sales page, what is it? It can be as simple as a sales video and a button or it can be as complex as a full-on sales letter, we have everything there, the entire copy. That’s option number two.
Option number three can be what we call some kind of branding type of page, right, which will be the more traditional website type of homepage. Where it’s a page, where you want to actually position yourself as an expert, you want to show people that you are helping others, that you are getting results. You talk a little bit about you, maybe, something like that. That’s a typical type of website homepage, right?
And in that type of page, it’s just really about making sure that when they land, they get the message about, hey, what is this website about? Okay, that’s the ultimate promise. Okay, great. And then you want to kind of destroy some of the objections they may have, such as, I don’t know this person. So you want to kind of introduce yourself, or what kind of result did they get before. So you know, having testimonials on that homepage can help. And then different things like that.
It will then depend on your strategy. What I would always recommend, of course, if you have any kind of homepage, you always want to have a call to action where you can build your email list. So on that homepage, offer something of value again, that can be a little box that tells them, hey, get these report or get this cheat sheet or get this video, whatever. You always want to do that, at least building your list, right?
So these will be the three main strategies when it comes to homepage. And of course, in that website type of homepage, you can then have the traditional menu, right? Where it says About us, Contact us, maybe Blog or Podcast, whatever your strategy is, then people can navigate and go to the different areas.
And like you said, everything I just said, you can absolutely do with 10XPRO.io. You can build any kind of pages. We have a ton of templates for opt-in pages, sales pages, website pages. So the traditional, you know, website homepage, we have a beautifully designed template like that. And now, we also have a dedicated blog system that you can just add to that, or you will just add it to the menu and it will be there.
So yeah, these will be the three main strategies. I don’t know. Maybe you can think about something else, James?
James: Look, they are some of the ones I’ve used. So you’ve got an opt-in or lead magnet-type landing page, you’ve got the sales page direct, you have the branding sort of homepage. I guess it depends where the customer is arriving into your business and, you know, what was the promise prior to that?
If they’re coming from an advertisement, there’s a good chance you’ll have them on a dedicated page. And of course, I know from my SEO knowledge and looking at analytics, quite often people don’t arrive on the homepage. Maybe only half or 40% of the people will come to the homepage, depending on what sort of website strategy you have.
In my case, we publish a lot of videos and audios. Each time we do that, we create a new page. And then when I’m linking that from LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever, YouTube, with a description, it’s linking to that specific page which is very relevant for whatever that video was that they’re coming from.
The same when we send an email out, we don’t email broadcast people to our homepage. We email broadcast them to a dedicated specific page, which in our case is often giving information and it’s definitely asking for an opt-in, at the minimum, for transcription. And we’ve covered that in some of our other videos, what sort of things you can offer to get an email address.
But the bottom line is you can handle it all. And I like the fact that you’ve got built-in designs that are ready to go or you can go crazy, get your design onto it. Design up and build anything that you can imagine can be turned into pixels. So, it’s a one-stop solution.
Well, I think we’ve covered the question really well. So basically, the answer is it depends but it’s very customizable. And yeah, you can go and have a look at onlinecoursesystem.com to see how we’ve handled it for an information product, and see what we’ve got there and how that’s laid out. And take a clue from someone who’s building these sites all the time.
Thanks so much, John. It’s a pleasure to catch up.
John: No worries. Thank you.
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