210 – 8 Conversion Tips That Can Double Your Revenue In 6 Months

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:16:58 — 70.6MB)

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

In this episode:

00:05 – Getting LeadPlayer and LeadPages for the first time
05:23 – My top converting tips
09:43 – Doubling business cumulatively
12:08 – The “95%-5%” Rule
13:20 – A little bit about Clay
15:31 – Tip # 1: Stop using crappy sh@!#% Hosting
19:08 – Tip # 2: Write your copy in the first person
20:33 – Tip # 3: Get up a resource guide squeeze page
29:51 – Tip # 4: Don’t squander your thank you page
33:25 – Tip # 5: Repurpose your best blog content
42:15 – Tip # 6: Use two-step opt-in boxes
50:15 – Tip # 7: Use magic buy buttons
52:41 – Tip # 8: Optimize your 404 pages
54:47 – Extra tip: Use welcome gates
56:54 – Question and Answer with Clay

Access all the FastWebFormula 4 videos here

Quotables:

5 percent of your pages are going to generate 95 percent of the revenue [Click To Tweet].
The fortune is in the follow up [Click To Tweet].
Make sure that you are collecting people’s details on your website [Click To Tweet].

 

 

 Transcription:

James Schramko: This session is well worth paying attention to because it’s something that is not given enough emphasis and something I’ve been really interested in lately that’s made huge and significant headway for me. It’s conversions.

It’s one of those little simple words that rolls off the tongue that nobody’s focused on. We did hear, Ezra talked about it yesterday in E-commerce (You don’t mind if I talk while you eat do you, Victoria? That’s right. Just checking. Laughs).

Conversions
So in e-commerce it’s vital. Remember that little cash flow thing? You make more sales and what it costs? The conversions part is more important probably even in the traffic. You don’t need a lot of people if you’ve got your conversions in place and that’s why I’ve been so interested in it.

So I became aware of some software that allowed me to turn my YouTube videos on my website into an opt-in at any point in the video. And I looked at it, I thought about that, and I thought, “That’s really cool.”

LeadPlayer and LeadPages
When you think about my strategy of continual content creation, every single video that I put on my website, every single page that I add is now a squeeze page. And that software was called LeadPlayer and I thought that that’s…I get it.

So I purchased it and straight after I purchased, I got an email reply back from the sales chief, Clay Collins, and he said, “Hey, dude. Thanks for buying the software. It’s really awesome.” And I said to him, “I’ve already installed it within minutes. It was so easy and I like it and it integrated seamlessly with my Office AutoPilot and I’ve tried lots of plugins and integrations and putting in variables.

It was so easy and I’m like, the design was notches above what’s out there. And the professionalism, the contact made straightaway I could totally relate to. I’ve just been talking about that this morning.

So I struck up this relationship and I said, “I love this product”. Where can I find my affiliate link? I would love to promote it and I got hooked up to an affiliate program and I started just taking screenshots and sharing with people how I was using it and how easy it was to install and I offered it on my BuyWithBonus.com site and started making sales.

And then there was this other innovation, this other product that came out called LeadPages and at first I didn’t really understand what was going on.

It required a little bit of a shift for me going from the WordPress sales theme sites to just now a hosted solution that creates squeeze pages that you then can pull into your WordPress site with a plugin, if you want to use a WordPress site. But when I actually got it and used it, it just made everything so clear.

So now across most of my websites, I have a LeadPages installed on there and they’re so easy to build. You literally just – WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. You type your message, you integrate it with your opt-in and then you deploy it and you can easily create multiple versions of it and now I split test them and I showed you some results yesterday of my current “winningest” version.

If you want to know what I think is working well for opt-ins, it’s pretty much what’s at SuperFastBusiness.com right now. I track each opt-in. I track the header. I track the little scroll widget that pops up. I track the in-video. I track the dedicated banner leading to a LeadPage.

And on my podcast sites, I have the Welcome Gate option and the Welcome Gate is where the opt-in will show first for first-time visitors and encourage people to opt-in. But a really cool thing is you can allow people to bypass that and they can skip this step.

So I’m a big fan of the software, I use it on my sites. I’ve now interviewed Clay Collins several times on my podcast and every time we get on, there’s something new. Everytime I log in there, there’s something new. Once I logged in, I was able to now push my page to Facebook.

So if you have a Facebook fanpage, you can add a tab and put something like “Free Report” and your opt-in page can be right there. It’s just pushing a couple of buttons on a wizard. Then I logged in and there was a sales letter. The sales letter version of the LeadPages out-converted my WordPress sales page for this particular event. Small sample size but it smashed it.

And there’s even more innovations coming which is just exciting. I mean it’s on a very enterprise level, professional design, biased system or platform but you’re going to hear all about that from the man himself. I just wanted to share that. But I will share with you some of my top converting tips.

First Conversation Tip
The first one is to offer something that you give away, that you could normally charge for. And for me it was putting OwnTheRacecourse.com up there. The way that I decided which course to give away was the one that people keep mentioning all the time. They ask me about it on podcast, they resonated with it and that’s become something that people know me for is OwnTheRacecourse.

And whereas it’s slightly different to other people’s things about putting your stuff everywhere, the real thing about it is control of your own asset and that’s where people resonate with. So I give that away on my site. That was the main thing that caused such an influx of leads that was instant.

I continually split test my LeadPages, that made a big difference. The LeadPages is the number 1 opt-in source. And the in header bar is one of the top ones. The one after the post and the one in the video, now less performing because of the other one’s working so well.

The other one that works well is the little yellow “scrolly” thing which everyone asked me, “What is that? What is it?” It’s called the Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box and that does work really well. But LeadPages still out-converts it. And I think, a simple, simple idea and an action step for you would be to make sure that you are collecting people’s details on your website and if you look at most websites, they’re doing a really poor job of it.

So, that’s one of my top things is give away a paid product. Put some attention to designing your website to make it work. I’m not going to tell you all about that because Clay’s going to cover that nicely but I will say you really should be using LeadPages for a number of reasons and it’s been a significant change for my business.

Let me actually let Clay talk about that more so, all the way from America, I’d like to introduce Clay Collins. Come on up, take it away, brother.

Clay Collins: Can everyone hear me OK? OK, cool. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting story about when I met James. I remember when his order came through and I was like, “James Schramko, I totally know who this guy is.” And that was when we were first starting just early adopters were buying it, right, like people on the cutting edge.

I emailed James and I think it was like 45 minutes after he had bought it and he replies back like “Yeah, I have already implemented this on ten sites and it’s working great.” I was like, “Who is this guy?” And then he starts being affiliate for the product and really that was when everything started to explode for us. I can kind of follow the lineage of how we grew to a six-figure company then a seven-figure company.

Then you know, multiple seven figures then beyond that, and it was kind of like Pat Flynn promoted it and then James Schramko promoted it and it was like this explosion took off, like, Ryan Deiss started using it, Frank Kern started using it like just on and on and on. Ezra started using it. A whole bunch of people started using it and so I really owe a lot of thanks to James.

I think, no I know for sure James is our number one affiliate and in terms of sales to list size, James out converted everyone. There are people with lists with like 400,000 who have promoted LeadPages who haven’t gotten the level of sales that James has got.

So this whole OwnTheRacecourse thing that he’s talking about is absolutely true, it absolutely works. Just standing here I was just checking and just do the search engines and everything James is going on without any hard core promotion, like the sales are just rolling in like on the phone and I haven’t had time to implement everything that I’ve learned from him because I’m too busy like hiring people to build the team to support all the customers that he sent to us. So James, just, thank you. I’ve never, I’ve truly never seen anything like it.

So I’m going to talk about eight conversion tips that are going to double your revenue in the next six months and this is kind of based on the premise or some experiments that we started awhile ago.

Back in the day, I knew that we wanted to double our business. This is about 18 months ago. And I started thinking about all the different ways that we could double our revenue. And one way that we could double our revenue was by doubling our traffic and frankly I didn’t want to do that. That seem kind of like a pain in the ass, I’m not a paid traffic guy.

We had already SEO optimized our sites. We had done a lot of things. We are doing ok with social media but I honestly did not know how we were going to double our traffic so I decided that’s not what we’re going to do.

So then I started looking at conversion on our sales pages and like no way in hell I was going to rewrite my sales page. I don’t know, once I finish our sales page, I’m like, I’m not going to touch this for another six months. It’s kind of exhausting.

So I decided not to rewrite the sales page to double our conversion. So I was like, what else can we do to double our revenue as a business? And the next idea that I had was well, we could double the opt-in rate on our landing pages and across our web properties. And that’s what we did.

So the easiest way that we found to double our revenue as a business was by doubling the percentage of people that came to our web properties that ended up opting in. And when we did this, we not only doubled our revenue once but then we doubled it the next month. So then we quadrupled it. Then we doubled it the month after that so 16 times and then the month after that we almost doubled again. And it wasn’t by doing anything fancy.

All we did was we systematically went from page to page to page to page across our websites and we tweaked our landing pages, our opt-in boxes. Because when you can double the number of people that you get on your list from your website, just amazing things happen especially when you do that across your own, you know across all your properties. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

95-5 Rule
Kind of the premise behind this is, I’m just going straight to the content, f**k the intro. Who cares if I like to go camping? So kind of the premise behind this is what I call the 95-5 rule and the premise behind the 95-5 rule is that 5% of the real estate on your website is going to drive 95% of the revenue. Ok? So 5% of your pages are going to generate 95% of the revenue.

And so, with that in mind, wouldn’t it behoove you to focus on the 5% of the pages of the 5% of the page that is creating all of the money rather than slaving away, doing all kinds of crazy hand-waving and what-not on social media, to drive people to a traffic that doesn’t convert at all.

People talk a lot about viral loops and the quickest way that I know of to get virality isn’t to do anything like fancy social media what-not is to get more people on your list because the more people that opt-in to your list, the more people you can email the next time you put out a blog post.

And all those people are going to go in and tweet your stuff and share your stuff later. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about. We’re going to be talking about the 5% of pages on your website that drive 95% of the revenue.

A little bit about me
A little bit about me, my name is Clay Collins. I’m from California originally but now I live in Minnesota. I like to go camping. This is where I’m going this summer.

It’s called the Boundary Waters, it’s in the border of Canada and United States but there’s 8000 lakes there, that’s an awful lot of lakes.

I’m really, really stoked about it. If you start looking up the names of these lakes, they ran out of names, they’re like, Salt, Pepper, A, B, C, D, Tobacco, Leaves, it just gets insane.

I’m the co-founder of LeadBrite along with two co-founders. We’re a 12-person software company and we believe that this group of people here have been sold and just me personally, I’ve been sold a lot of crappy, shitty, terrible, terrible marketing software.

Why We Started LeadBrite
And so part of the reason why we started LeadBrite was because we installed so many WordPress plugins, we bought so much software that had simply failed us in the midst of the launch.

There was a lot of software around the time that I started that was created by marketers who I had identified a software opportunity and we’re creating sort of like software because they thought it was this huge opportunity but they weren’t really software companies and so we wanted to build a real deal hard core, enterprise level software company that served like direct sales marketers and I think that’s what we’ve done.

Our Mission
Our mission is to take the best and the latest of what’s been proven in marketing and create software that just does it for you. So for example, I used to teach a landing page course. It was like 10 hours on how to create a landing page and most people when they were done they were just like stab themselves, “Nah I give up”. And so rather than doing that, we just created software that has like built in to it the sort of best practices.

So anyway, some of our users, like OfficeAutopilot is a paid user of ours, Infusionsoft, like, I don’t know, a lot of people are using our stuff.

Tip 1 – No to Crappy Hosting
So, let’s just get into like the tips. OK. So, tip 1 (these are 8 conversion tips): Stop Using Crappy Shitty Hosting. Page speed has an enormous effect on conversion rate and enormous, enormous, enormous effect like more than you have ever thought possible. And if you are running your servers on a $7 a month, like, Bluehost or Hostgator or whatever thing you’re doing, please stop it, please stop it, please stop it.

If you are trying to run your business on WordPress, on one of these $7 setups, you are really, really hosing yourself in terms of conversions. For every additional second that it takes for your page to load, you’re losing 7% of conversions. My advice is to move your site completely off. This is going to sound radical so just hear me out. Move your site, completely, 100%, totally off of WordPress, except for your blog.

So if you’re going to put up a blog post, you’ve got your blog.yourdomain.com, post it there. If you can move everything else to like static html files and get rid of a CMS, your pages are going to load in like less than a second as opposed to 3 to 4 seconds. And this is something that Google cares about heavily. This is something that has a huge impact on conversion.

Just to put this on into perspective, if an e-commerce site is making a hundred thousand dollars per day, a one second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every single year.

Google AppEngine
Speed is something real. In terms of stuff that I recommend, there’s something called Google AppEngine and you can literally have your websites on the fastest server network in the world. With more servers and more redundancy and more uptime than you could even imagine, you could run your entire website for free on Google AppEngine if you have someone on your team that knows enough Python to upload your files to it.

It’s a kind of a pain in the ass. But their bandwidth is like pennies. It’s like less than Amazon S3, and so my advice is to put your blog at like blog.yourdomain.com and have your entire site running on Google AppEngine if you possibly can. It’s not that difficult to do. I know it’s kind of addicting to have everything on WordPress, my advice, only have your blog on WordPress.

Where to Host?
If you are addicted to WordPress, I recommend using something like WPEngine it’s pretty fast, we like that. Buy the best hosting you can possibly afford. Another good option is Storm on Demand by Liquid Web. We’ve had really, really good experiences from them. I kid you not, we’ve changed hosting providers and seen our rankings boost like quite a bit and our conversions boost a whole lot. This is something that Google is obsessing about.

So conversion tip number 1, you can do this, I don’t know, without a lot of work. But switch to like a real-deal professional enterprise-level company. There’s no reason you should be running a six- or seven-figure business on hosting that cost like $20 a month, unless it’s Google AppEngine.

So yeah, anyway, there’s a graph of conversion rate as it correlates to page load so, shit drops off when your site is slow.

Tip 2 – Write Your Copy In The First Person
The second conversion tip. Write Your Copy In The First Person. So everyone said, enter the conversation that the prospect’s already having in their mind. So when a prospect arrives at a website, they’re thinking, “Where’s my report? I want to download my report.” They’re thinking, “I want to buy X. I want to do Y.” And so your copy should reflect that.

Here’s a really interesting split test and we’ve done this extensively.

So in one button you have “Create MY Account,” and then in the other one, you have “Create YOUR Account.” So If I’m at a website, I’m thinking, I want to create MY account. I don’t want to create YOUR account. Who’s that? Who’s YOUR? So that’s what the split test shows: 24% less conversions with “Create YOUR account” versus “Create MY account.”

Here’s another one, OK, this is a 90% increase.

When you switch from “Start Your Free 30-day Trial” to “Start My Free 30-day Trial,” eight people think, “I want to start MY trial”. They don’t think in their head, I want to start YOUR trial. Who are they talking to? So especially with button text, especially with opt-in bribes, write in the first person. OK, next tip.

Tip 3 – Get Up A Resource Guide Squeeze Page
Tip 3: Get Up A Resource Guide Squeeze Page. So here’s what I mean. Here’s a resource guide squeeze page. This is (laughs) this kills me, this kills me to no end. Has anyone seen my webinar where I talk about this? OK good.

So this is hands down, hands down, the highest converting opt-in page we’ve ever used in any of our businesses in the history of being online. It is, let’s just deconstruct this page. There’s an attractive woman. Let’s start off there. OK so we’ve tested this, both men and women like looking at attractive women. So if you can have a woman as opposed to a dude, do it.

The second thing is, where is she looking? Yeah, she’s looking exactly at the opt-in box. We’ve tested that effectively. If you can have a finger pointing or a motion pointing, the best thing is an attractive person looking at something… attractive woman looking at something. So that’s just the graphical element.

But also, there’s the text on this. “Free Report Reveals The Top 5 Dirt Cheap Tools I Use To Create All My Videos Including My $80 HD Video Camera.” So, very little amount of text there, right? It doesn’t take very long to figure out if you want to know the 5 tools that I use to create all my videos.

Next thing, I don’t ask for a lot of fields, I only ask for the email address. The fewer fields you ask for, the higher your opt-in rate. But anyway, so this is a resource list squeeze page when they opt-in, they get this:

It’s literally one page. And this fuck*ng kills me that this is one page. It took me five minutes to write the copy on this page and that was too long. And it took me 15 minutes to write this. It’s literally just a list of resources. It’s not all of them. It goes down a little bit. So like this thing and this thing, are out-converting like literally entire courses that I spent weeks to create.

I’ve literally spent two weeks creating an entire course that people could opt-in to and to get and this is outperforming it. I’ve created like a hundred page e-books that I’ve given away and like this one page with a list of tools on it is out-converting it. No, I’m not saying this is the only opt-in bribe that you should have, I’m just saying you should have something like this because this absolutely crushes it.

Best Landing Page Ever Used
So why is this the best-performing landing page we’ve ever used ever, ever, ever? Well the first reason is that it doesn’t require someone to process too much information, right? There isn’t a three-minute video that someone has to lock with some like boring talking head person saying something. So there isn’t any video to watch. There isn’t a lot of copy. Someone can quickly decide whether or not this is what they want.

The second thing is that everyone wants to know the tools that you’re using. This is huge. This is huge. It is part of human psychology to believe that if we only have the tools that the pros have then we get the results the pros have. Does anyone want to guess what the best selling issues of like Golf Digest and Running Magazine and Camping Magazine are?

It’s the gear guides, right? What golf clubs to have? What shoes to get if you’re running? Like what kind of camping gear you should have if you want to get amazing results, right?

Everyone wants to know the tools because we would rather acquire a tool than acquire a skill and in a lot of cases, you can get pro results instantly by having the tools that the pros use. So it is part of human psychology to just want to know the tools you’re using. Like, I literally spent probably 200 hours on a sales video before and people have come to me and said, “Oh, what tool did you use to make that video? I want to do that too.”

I was like “Are you kidding me?” Like everyone wants the tool, they want to know if there’s a tool that you that you can do this with. So you can do this in your industry, whatever it is. You can compile a list of tools, you can be done with this tonight, like you literally can be done with this tonight, and have one of these up. It outperforms webinar registrations, because not everyone wants to attend a webinar. It can make the date.

It also outperforms free reports because the last thing that people want is another, like, 30-page thing to read. I would be more likely to hire a business coach for $5,000 a month than I would to read a 30-page report. I just would. So I’m not interested in 30-page reports.

I’m not going to read them. And I’m not going to want to watch a 15-minute video either. I can’t because I have this thing where I can speed up videos. It also outperforms video bribes.

(From someone in the audience: “What’s that?”) It’s called MySpeed. Yeah, it’s really cool. It outperforms video bribes, because, again, videos are clunky, not everyone wants to watch them. And it also outperforms – this kills me, this freaking kills me – it outperforms opt-in rate for free coaching sessions.

I guess it probably should because you want to qualify the people for the free coaching sessions, but even when you, like, only require an email address for a free coaching session, it outperforms it, which goes to show that there is no correlation, there is no correlation, between the value of what you’re giving away and your opt-in rate. There just isn’t.

Because what’s more valuable than your time? So the time-to-benefit ratio for creating one of these is high. So again, here’s the page.

Are there any LeadPages customers here? Oh, that is awesome, James. Thank you. It’s that one you can use. There’s a whole bunch of other ones in there as well. You can create one of these in minutes.

Copy Samples
So if you’re a real estate agent, here’s the kind of copy you come up for in something like this page. Resource Guide: The Top (I don’t even know if this is right, I just made this up)… “Resource Guide: The Top 5 Safest Credit-Boosting Home Loans Of This Year.” Right? So you opt-in to get that free report. Here’s another one: If you’re a dentist: “Buyer’s Guide: The Top 5 Electric Toothbrushes Of This year (Including The One That I Use).”

I would totally want that. Like, I want to know the electric toothbrush that my dentist’s using, because I want to buy another gadget. I really do. So I would really want that.

If you’re a life coach: “App Guide: The Top 4 iPhone Apps For Increasing Your Productivity (Including The One That I Use Everyday)”. Who would download that? Who would want to know what those are? OK.

If you’re a marketing agency: “The Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools For Local Businesses (Hint: The 3 Best Ones Are Free).” You could sit down right now and write out what your headline would be for one of these resource guide opt-in pages.

Fitness experts: “The Only 3 Pieces of Exercise Equipment You Need In Your Home (Hint: They All Weigh Less Than 5 Pounds).” So like, those little curiosity points in the parenthesis, like, “Hint: They All Weigh Less Than 5 Pounds” and “Hint: The 3 Best Ones Are Free,” that’s counter-intuitive, right? So those little things in parenthesis really increase conversion rate.

When you can tell someone something that’s counter-intuitive, like, exercise equipment is really heavy most of the time, so just say that they all weigh less than five pounds, those little things where you kind of let people know that it’s not what they think it is. Those little curiosity points, I forgot, there’s like an official, fancy, copywriting name for those. But those really increase conversion rates when you should do that.

So, why should you create a resource guide squeeze page? If you already have squeeze pages, you should still do this, because I guarantee you this is going to outperform whatever you’re doing right now. And you can set up one of these in a matter of minutes.

And by the way, like on this page, just use your affiliate links. You can make a little affiliate income off of it. And also list one of your own products, like you can throw in a link to one of your services or something like that at the end.

Customer Results
Okay. Just like results from this. Eric D. says it’s got them an 8X improvement over their basic homepage. There’s just lots of results. This took Brian Swichkow from 8.6% to 23% in a single day. Juan Martitegui says it’s giving him a 3X to 4X conversions against the one that he was getting before. Mindvalley.

Teramis: it’s accounting for 71% of their new list subscribers, using this kind of tip. So this kind of resource guide squeeze page really, really works. You can have this up tonight. You literally can. Just like, go to Microsoft Word, type down like five resources then go into whatever you use to create landing pages (hopefully it’s LeadPages), but go into it, and just create a headline.

The woman staring at the opt-in box comes in out of the box, but you can buy something else on iStockPhoto. So you can be up and running in a short period of time. OK, who’s going to do this? Please tell me you’re going to do this. OK, cool. Cool. Awesome.

Tip 4 – Don’t Squander Your Thank You Pages
Okay, so tip number 4. Don’t Squander Your Thank You Pages. Please, please, please, please, please, don’t do this. So here’s the path that someone takes; it’s like a miracle.

It’s like a miracle from on high that a certain set of events happen that leads to someone getting to your thank you page. So the first thing that they do is among billions of web pages on the Internet, among billions, someone finds your site. Holy crap. How lucky are you? That’s amazing. Someone’s on your website.

And then, of the people that are on your website, that don’t bounce and leave, they opt in. They think it’s interesting enough to opt in. And they enter their email address, and they’re one of the few people who opt in. Like on most sites, it’s like 2%-3%, right?

If you’re lucky, it’s like 10% because you’ve really optimized it. And then after that, you send them to a stupid thank you page, like “Hi, thank you.” OK. “Thanks for opting in, we’ll send you your thing.” That is really, really sad, and a huge waste of real estate, because someone’s on a “Yes” ladder, they’re in a pattern of saying “Yes,” they’re in a pattern of saying, “I found you, and I read your stuff, and I’m going to opt in.”

Like, they’re so compliant with you at this point, you can practically ask them to do anything and they’d do it. So what I suggest you do is have a thank you page like, here, I’ll show you mine. I have a Thank You page like this.

So after someone opts in, it says, “Thank you for signing up! Everything we promised you will be sent to your inbox shortly. While you wait for your materials to arrive, please check out our product, LeadPages.” This is simple, it took me like two minutes to set this up in LeadPages. And when they click on that, they go to my sales page. That’s it.

So this increased immediate sales by around 15%. Just like right out of the box, by adding a page that says, “Hi, thank you. OK, now go to my sales letter.” Not in like a mean way, but this is what I’m doing.

So where does this page go? It goes right after the opt-in page. Then you have a thank you page, and then the sales page. Here’s one from Jake Hower, from the Multimedia Marketing Show.

Is Jake here? No, he’s not here. OK. So he used another LeadPages template, and after someone opts in, he shows them a video and he thanks them for opting in.

Step 1: Like us on Facebook. Right, someone’s already in a pattern of compliance. You should always get someone to do the more important thing that’s your business before a less important thing. So ask someone to get on your Facebook page and like your Facebook page after they’ve opted in to your list.

Right, so they’re on your list, then ask them to like you on Facebook. If they’ve opted in to your list, the chances of them liking you on Facebook are really high.

So Step 1 do that, and Step 2 I believe this is like “Sign up to my webinar.” Right? They’re already in a pattern of compliance. There’s a little trick in sales that if you can get someone to say “Yes” three times in a row, or like two times in a row, maybe it’s three times in a row, the likelihood that they’ll say yes to the fourth thing is very high. It’s called consistency in commitment.

So if you did nothing but add a thank you page that maximized conversions for people who are already in this huge compliance pattern, that would really help you out.

Tip 5 – Repurpose Your Best Blog Content And Add It To Your Autoresponder
Who here has an autoresponder up, just like an autoresponder that people get when they opt in? OK. Keep your hands up, keep your hands up. Who has one that lasts longer than a week? Awesome. Two weeks? Three weeks? A month? A month and a half? This is awesome, James. OK, two months? OK. This is cool. This is really cool. You guys are awesome.

Ok. So, repurpose your best stuff for your autoresponder. Autoresponders work. I was on a forum the other day and someone said like, “What’s the hot new thing? Is it like webinars, or like, what is it, is it like automated webinars, or automated launches or perpetual whatever?”

And the thing that’s like really working right now is sales funnels. Just good, old-fashioned automated follow-up marketing where you’re tracking the stats and what’s going on.

So here’s what I do. So I started out, I showed you the resource guide opt-in page, right? So someone looks at the attractive woman and opts in, and then they get the free report, and then every three days after that, they’re emailed a lesson that sends them to a lesson page with repurposed blog content so, a Free Video Marketing Course Part 1 of 6.

Elements Of A Landing Page
Let’s deconstruct this landing page. And for LeadPages customers, this is in LeadPages. OK, so there’s a lot of things going on here. Out right of the box. So the first thing that’s going on is there is a progress bar. Okay? The reason why this is here is because it is part of human psychology to want to complete things that we start. So when we see an incomplete progress bar, we tend to want to finish it.

So this is a six-part course, and they go through it and every time they see, like, three days later they’re going to get Part 2 of this course, and then the progress bar will be a little bit further advanced. So that’s the first thing that’s going on is there’s a progress bar.

The second thing is it says “Part 1 of 6.” Because if you’re emailing people every three days, you want them to know that this is going to end at some point. People are much more likely to stay on your autoresponder sequence if they know that it’s part of a course that has an end date.

You can really mail people every single day if you wanted to, if they know what’s going on, if you’re like, “Here’s what’s happening. You’re in a course, it’ll last for 20 days, you’re going to get an email every single day, if you don’t want to read it right then, that’s OK, store it on your email, after 20 days you’ll be done with this. People are cool with that.

It’s when you email someone every single day and they don’t know when it’s going to end that people get upset. So the first thing that’s going on is we’re saying “Part 1 of 6.”

The second thing is we’re having a progress bar to keep that open loop going on psychologically so that people want to finish the course. Next thing that’s going on: the “Like” buttons. When someone likes this page, it shows them in Facebook as liking the opt-in page.

And the reason for that is because if someone likes page like, 3 of 6, I don’t want them sending their friends to Part 3 of 6 of the course because they’re not going to know what’s going on. I want them opting in so they can get the full course. Right, so it builds my list.

Also there’s “Comments Below.” I can’t show them all but there’s Comments Below and if someone leaves a comment, it shows them as leaving a comment on the opt-in page. Their friends end up going to the opt-in page and getting added to this course. There’s also a Buy Now button.

So if you exclude our sales page, which is where all the sales are made, this is last month’s highest-grossing web page for us.

Like this type of page that’s in our autoresponder sequence. This is all we send out in our autoresponder sequence, just links to pages like this. And so here’s how it works.

After someone opts in, they get one of these pages every three days for about six weeks. This is where the money is made, it’s been said that the fortune is in the follow-up, and that’s absolutely true and this means that you don’t just make money when there’s like a bunch of hype right?

Like you don’t just make money when there’s like a webinar and the cart is closing and “Oh my God the site’s crashed” and “Holy crap! This is the best deal ever and it’s going away” and a bunch of hand waving and sensationalistic what not.

It means you make money every single day because you’ve got a pre-programmed series of emails that go out and it’s absolutely changed our business. And, so anyway, that’s what’s happening. Someone gets opts-in, they get a report, they get a series of these things that go out.

So, how do you set one of these things up? It’s a lot easier than you might think. A lot of people freak out when they think of setting up an autoresponder sequence, they’re like “I have to create two months’ worth of content or a month’s worth of content” and then it freaks them out and they start getting a panic attack and then they don’t do it all and then they spend more time on Facebook or something.

So, here’s what to do. Every three days, create a video blog where you teach something that is 100% of value on its own, like a 100%.

So, let’s say you’re a health coach, right? So you might, every three days you create one of these videos; let’s just say we’re going to make the first video in this series. And the first video is on super foods, so at the beginning of the video, maybe like the first 75% of a five-minute video, we talk about our four favourite super foods or our three favourite super foods and why we like them.

And then, at the very end we’d say “And there’s three other super foods that are awesome and if you’re part of my coaching program, we’d create a customized diet plan to help you lose weight and have more energy and we’d turn these into recipes that work for you and that your family will enjoy,” right?

So, every few days create one of these videos where there’s tons of value and at the end, you just like casually mention something else that folks would get if they bought your thing.

Initially, email everyone on your list about these blog posts. Ok? Everyone on your list. So here let me show you this first. So initially, see on the left there?

Put it on the blog like this video lesson, put it on your blog and email your entire list. Tell everyone that’s on your list. And then, after you’ve emailed your entire list, take that same video and put it on one of these lesson pages and add it to your autoresponder follow-up. So, you’re repurposing the content because everyone who’s on your list when you published this is going to see it when you tell your entire list.

But after that, how are the new people going to find out about it? They’re going to find out about it because they’re going to be added to your autoresponder follow-up sequence. When you have a lot of these, you want to start swapping them out.

You’re going to find out that if you publish content on a regular basis and you follow this format where it’s like 80%, you know, just teaching something of value in the last half you just casually mention something extra that people get if they bought your thing.

You’ll find that after a while, some of these create a whole lot more sales than the others. And when they do, take those, put those at the beginning of your autoresponder sequence and start removing them. So, just maintain that autoresponder sequence.

By the way, when we have the same video on one of these lesson pages, it has a quadrupling of the conversion rate in terms of sales. So, when it’s on the page that’s on the right, it converts a whole lot better than when it’s on the left, so it’s like conversion optimized when it’s on one of those landing pages because there’s a big yellow button.

And also, it’s a magic buy button too. Does anybody know what a magic buy button is? We’re going to talk about those in a second. OK cool!

So, in LeadPages that’s the video lesson page for autoresponder follow-up.

Here it is, these buddies are like seduction gurus. I love the people, there are so many different kinds of people using LeadPages.

This guy used it and got a huge bump in conversions and it’s, I mean this kind of thing is just crushing, like, just almost all of our sales come from this off the autoresponder follow-up sequence.

Tip 6 – Use Two-Step Opt-In Boxes for Your Webinar Registration Pages and Your Webinars
Ok, tip number six – Use Two-Step Opt-In Boxes for Your Webinar Registration Pages and Your Webinars, and actually just anything, I recommend you use two-step opt-in processes. So what is a two-step… oh, let’s just skip all these. So, ah I hate slide builds. OK, alright. So here’s a two-step opt-in box right?

So the way this works is, on this webinar page is someone clicks on like “Claim my spot now” and then when they do, they see a box like that so they don’t immediately see the opt-in box. So there’s a million things going on,on this page. This, right now, literally, this is the highest converting webinar registration page in the industry.

Like, nobody has been able to beat it that I know of. We’ve A-B split tested this against everything. There’s so many things going on with this kind of page. We’ve literally have never seen it beat, like, Ryan Deiss was talking about how this is the highest converting opt-in page they’ve ever used in their business. It converted like 72%. It’s just killing it, it’s crushing it.

So, there’s a number of things going on here. The first is there’s a countdown timer. Countdown timers are great to have on any page. If you could find an excuse to have a countdown timer for like anything, put up a countdown timer. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why this works.

One, it creates urgency. It’s another way of conveying time right? So you can say “Oh the webinar is on the twelfth” but if you say, the webinar is happening in 3 days and 12 minutes and whatever, it just seems a lot more real, so that’s one of the things that’s going on.

Another thing that’s going on is that something is moving on the page. And when something is moving, people tend to look at it longer. And when someone looks at something longer, they stay on the page longer. And when someone stays on the page longer, they’re much more likely to opt-in, right? The longer someone can stay on a page, the more likely they are to opt-in, period.

Put a countdown, like if I had a bar, I’d have a countdown timer until happy hour. And then I’ll have a countdown timer until bar closes and then I’ll have a countdown timer until we open again. Like I would have countdown timers on everything. We’re adding countdown timers to everything we have right now. So, the countdown timer is awesome.

Another reason why this converts well is because it’s good looking. It’s just a lot better looking than the GoToMeeting registration pages, which are hideous and ugly.

It’s also mobile responsive. It also has this two-step opt-in process so if you click on “Claim my spot now” and there’s an opt-in box at the bottom, you see that.

So why is this huge? A number of reasons. The first reason is that it really brings the decision to a head. When you have an opt-in box it’s always present on a page like all the time, people can ignore it. But when they click on the button, and everyone wants to click on the button.

I’ve had upsells for $2,000 products and it’s like “You will be charged!” and everyone hits it. We had to spend, we spend an entire week just having to refund people’s orders because everyone just wanted to click the button even after they’ve checked the box, they just want to see what happens. It’s ridiculous.

So, the first thing that’s happening is that it brings the decision to a head. Someone has to decide, right? If the entire world had to make a decision about whether or not to opt-in to your list, you’d have millions of people on your list. Most people don’t opt-in to your list because they’ve never made a decision about whether or not they want to opt-in to your list.

And if you could get everyone to make a decision, one way or another, about whether or not they wanted to be on their list, your list would be a lot larger. So the first thing is it’s sort of like brings the decision to a head.

Another thing that goes on here is that it sort of creates a commitment ladder. It’s like a mini commitment ladder. Like if you can get someone to say “yes” at a small level, to saying “yes, to click that button” low level of commitment. Then the likelihood that they’re going to say to opting-in is much greater, right? If you give someone like just a tiny little thing to do, the likelihood that they’re going to do the bigger thing is much greater.

So it’s called the Yes Ladder. It’s also called behavioral inertia. They’re in a pattern of doing something and then you can get them to do the next thing. Like, I find myself sort of behaving along this pattern all the time.

The other day, I was at a swap meet, I was going to buy a shirt and I was just browsing, you know how you just ask random questions when you’re curious about buying something, and I said to someone like “Hey, do you have this T-shirt in a medium?” and he was like “Yes!” and I was like… and I just bought it because he just responded so quickly.

And so, just by doing stuff like this, you can really increase your conversion rate. We’ve seen that sort of out-of-the-box adding a two-step opt-in process, you can, in many cases, have around 30% increase in conversions just by adding this two-step thing. It’s really been phenomenal.

Other things that are going on here, there’s like a couple of other things here. The countdown timer, the two-step process… yeah, good enough. So, what I recommend that you do if you don’t have an autoresponder setup, I recommend that you have people opt-in to a webinar sort of like after that third email.

So, people get that sort of that resource guide opt-in page, then they get the list of resources, then they get an email sent out every three days that has repurposed blog content on it and you don’t have to like, you can build that autoresponder. You can build that plane as you’re flying it right?

So, you can be like “Hey, I just have one blog post to add to this,” and then like maybe three days later, you add your second one and then maybe you go on a vacation and then you come back and you do another one and you add a third one, your autoresponder sequence will build up over time. And people are totally cool with it if you’re like “Hey, this is part one out of eight” or whatever. Just let them know what they’re getting into.

So, the process so far is do one webinar every two weeks. I highly recommend you do it. Webinars are like rocket fuel to your business. Who here is doing webinars on a regular basis? Ok, I really recommend you do webinars. I’ve never seen, in terms of automated marketing, nothing I’ve seen converts as well as like those lasting pages.

In terms of event-based marketing, I’ve never seen anything convert as well as webinars. And you know, they’re not for some people, they are for others but I think it’s worth trying either way. I think you really need to do it.

When else in sort of this online environment, other than in person, do you get an hour and a half to spend with people who care what you have to say and also answer questions in a live setting? It’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s a tremendous opportunity. And you know, there’s people going around saying “Well, you know webinars are dead, webinars aren’t working.”

And thing, webinars are dead is like saying sales pages are dead. Like, it’s just one way to do stuff and it’s as effective as sort of you are but it’s an amazing experience. I don’t have time to go door-to-door selling so the next best thing is like a webinar, it’s really fantastic and it’s an experience a lot of people need. So, yeah, I mean this kind of page is just like absolutely crushing it.

I’m so, I mean just like Ryan Deiss, 72% best highest converting webinar registration page he’s ever used. Samantha Hartley, yeah they switched to this, they doubled their conversion rate. Andy Andrews 70%+ conversion rate on that template.

Tip 7 – Use Magic Buy Buttons On Your Sales Pages and Your Opt-in Pages
Okay, tip number seven for conversion rate optimization – Use Magic Buy Buttons On Your Sales Pages and Your Opt-in Pages. This is something that sort of we’ve done out of the box for all of our sales pages. And so, what a magic buy button is it means that the sort of the button underneath your video that says “Buy,” doesn’t appear until you get to the sales part of the video.

So, in most sales videos, let’s see, a 10-minute sales video, which is kind of long. Well, let’s say you have a 10-minute sales video and the first eight minutes you’re sort of introducing yourself, you’re talking about your philosophy on like on what you do.

You’re explaining sort of like your approach and how you think about things and you’re introducing the general opportunity that exists and you’re sort of like opening other people’s minds the possibility of things being different, right?

And then, let’s say like the last three minutes of a 10-minute sales video, you’re talking about your offer. You’re talking about the price, the bonuses, the guarantee, you know, what people are going to get in every single module or what they’re going to get with whatever they’re buying from you, right? And so it’s right then that you have this button appear. And so, we have seen opt-in rates double.

Don’t do this if you’re going to do a big fancy Internet marketing launch and you have like a bunch of JVs, you’re driving a bunch of JVs to the page because they’re probably going to be buying because of some like bonus that someone else is giving away and they’re already pre-sold or something like this but on like cold traffic and just like internal traffic, this is working incredibly well.

Here is what DigitalMarketerLab said about magic buy buttons: “When it comes to variables that whisper, rarely do you find one that doubles conversions, but the magic buy buttons does. When the order button isn’t visible when the prospect first arrives, your video sales page looks like regular content, not a sales page. When your video sales letter reaches its call to action, shazam! Your buy button magically appears.

But prospects have kept an open mind throughout your video.” So it creates space for people to consider your content and when you get to the call to action, then the button appears so they’re not like pre-judging it. Does everyone understand the mechanics of what I’m talking about here? Like I wish I could just display it but I didn’t know if I’d have an Internet connection.

Tip 8 – Optimize Your 404 Pages
So tip eight – Optimize Your 404 Pages. So this is something that we recently started doing and it’s been pretty phenomenal for us. There’s lots of weirdos out there that literally can’t get a link to your site right. They’re writing a blog post and they link to your page and then they just get it wrong. They’re like https://https:// weirdness.

And what happens when people arrive at your page and they don’t get the page that they’re looking for is they usually just go. So, what we did was we just, because we have a software company I can say “Hey, guys can we just add this feature to LeadPages?” So this is what people get when they get to a 404 page on our website:

“404 Error! Oops! The page you are looking for could not be found but do not leave empty handed. Snag this marketing lesson…” and then there’s that and so they can opt-in. So, we get people from our 404 pages to opt-in. So it’s like unused real estate. It’s literally a page… it’s literally landing page you didn’t know you had, right? So you can get a lot of opt-ins out of this.

Not that it’s going to change your life or anything but you should get every single, you should fill every single hole in your business where you’re sort of leaking traffic and opt-ins.

So for LeadPages customers, just go to the drop-down box and pick the thing and then select that you want a 404 page, it’s pretty cool.

Oh, and the last one. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this. The last one is add a welcome gate to your site. Like, Ezra, you were saying… What was your experience with that? (Ezra replies) OK. So, it went from 20 opt-ins a day to 65 opt-ins a day. Yeah, if it holds. OK, cool. That’s awesome!

What is a welcome gate?
So, a welcome gate is just a landing page that people see only when they go to your homepage and only when they go there the first time so it’s not obnoxious like a popup. The reason why popups according to our testing, don’t work as well as they used to is because they’re like actively keeping people from the content they want to see.

Like someone wants to see page X but they’re shown popup box Y so they just want to close it because it’s frustrating them. What a welcome gate does is it shows them a landing page that’s pretty seductive on the homepage so it’s not like when someone’s following a link in Twitter and going to like a specific article. It’s only when someone goes to your home page.

They can skip this step or they can not opt-in if they don’t want to and when they go to the homepage, they’re not going to be shown the welcome gate and people are getting just phenomenal results with them and they’re easy to set up and there’s really like no reason not to set one up. So the next thing is to add a welcome gate.

Tips

1. Stop using crappy hosting
2. Write your copy in the first person
3. Get up a resource guide squeeze page
4. Don’t squander the Thank You pages that people go to after they opt-in. Use that as valuable real estate
5. Repurpose your best videos and add them to your Autoresponder sequence. Put them in the order of how well they sell for you
6. Use two-step opt-in boxes anywhere you possibly can for your webinar registration pages (and do webinars)
7. Use magic buy buttons on your sales pages (and opt-in pages)
8. Optimize your 404 pages
9. Use a welcome gate if you can so that there is a picture or diagram where I recommend you put in your webinar

Get Faster Web Hosting Here

Q&A
At this point in time I can do Q&A and does anyone have any questions?

Dan: Two questions, the first one was you said that you’d have an email course and after six steps, six videos you’d stop. Should you literally stop emailing completely?

Clay: No, it just goes on to broadcast at that point. So once the autoresponder is going on, like when the autoresponder sequence is happening? We’re doing everything we normally do as a company when we email people. We’re still emailing people about new plug post that are coming out. We’re still emailing people about webinars that are happening.

When people know when that course ends, you can do everything else what you normally do in your business and when that’s over with, you’re still emailing broadcasts in sort of like, relevant, timely content about stuff that just happened that week so you don’t, like nothing changes while this follow up sequence is happening.

Dan: Sure, another question was that you said every three days, is that something you’ve tested? Is there a specific reason why it’s three, not two or four or five?

Clay: Yeah, so this is one of these things that’s really difficult to split test but sort of like anecdotally, we tried everyday and it was a little bit too much. People were ignoring the content, it wasn’t that they were opting out, it was that, they just weren’t consuming the content at the rate that I would like them to. We tried every other day and it became very predictable.

Every three days seems to be frequent enough that people would stay along with the course but not so often that people opted out. So it worked for us and I know there are a lot of people who are doing paid media buys or pay-per-click traffic and it’s important for them to get an ROI as soon as possible.

Like they paid $4 to get someone on their list and then they need to get their $4 out as soon as possible and we sort of have like a very, very, very long term approach so we don’t need to do that, it was just sort of the sweet spot for us. Frankly, I don’t know how to test that but it works really well for us and we’ve tried 1, 2, 3 and 4 and 3 worked the best.

Dan: Cool. Thanks for that.

Clay: Yeah absolutely.

Sam C: Hey Clay, how are you doing?

Clay: Good, how are you?

Sam C: Good. I have 3 accounts and about to buy 2 more for clients. I don’t want them to see my sources but anyway. I have a couple of questions. The resource guide really kind of struck me. I’ve been hearing you say it but now I think it finally sunk in. Do you have a LeadPage template that you’d recommend for that?

Clay: For the resource guide itself or for…

Sam C: For resource guides so that would be a thank you page after the optin right?

Clay: So we email them a PDF. It’s not the Thank You page, we send them an email with the PDF. There’s no template that we use. I mean you can just type it up in Word and save it as a PDF.

We’ve got a full-time in-house designer so they do that but you know, you could probably go on like Fiverr and find someone to do a halfway decent job but at that point they just want to know what the resources are and how pretty it looks is kind of irrelevant. We don’t even have a picture of the guide on our opt-in page right? So people kind of just want to know what the stuff is.

Sam C: OK, so you email them the resources.

Clay: We email them a link to the PDF because we want to make sure that we have a legit email address.

Sam C: Ok, I understand. Then the other question I had, welcome gate – if you recommend only having WordPress as your blog, does it still work for the rest of your site? Because that’s what I’ve been struggling with.

Clay: No, the welcome gate will only work with WordPress. It’s one of those things where it’s not something that we can program without WordPress but you could recreate it. If you hit us up, if you hit up our support we’ll give you some codes you can turn… I don’t want to say that in public too much.

I will create a blog post where we release some code that allows everyone to do it ‘cause I don’t want my support desk to get slammed but you can do it on any site. It’s just with WordPress we have a consistent way to do that.

Sam C: OK, so any developer, a skilled one, could take it and… OK, understood. Thanks.

Clay: Yeah absolutely.

John: John Burns. How are you?

Clay: Good, how are you John?

John: You are now a legend.

Clay: Ah, Thank you.

John: How much does it cost to buy Leadpages?

Clay: It’s $37 a month or $197 for a year.

John: I think I might have already bought it because I’d like to buy every.. The hosting company that you’re talking about that does everything a lot quicker, does it have a hosting where you buy then you sell on hosting and have a cPanel?

Clay: Oh, are you talking about Google AppEngine?

John: No, not Google App, the other one you were mentioning about.

Clay: Oh like Storm on Demand?

John: It’s Storm and Demand, yeah.

Clay: I believe it’scPanel or something. I haven’t logged into it in my life.

John: So does it give you the opportunity to resell hosting?

Clay: I’m sure they have a reseller program, they probably do.

John: Thank you, Clay.

Clay: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: Hi Clay, Andrew Poto. I have a question about the welcome gate. One of the reasons why I sort of hesitated to sign up was because I currently use PopUp Domination and a lot of my traffic comes through the blog posts that I share on Facebook and email through various lists and stuff like that, so I want a way to capture traffic on those individual pages.

What are you recommending for those individual pages if welcome gate is just showing up on the main page?

Clay: Sidebar opt-ins are good. Here’s what I recommend: a lot of people have opt-in boxes on the sidebar of their blog and we actually took that away and replaced it with a banner and when people click on that banner, they go to a landing page. So when someone sees an opt-in box on the right hand side of the blog, at some point everyone just becomes immune to that.

There’s an opt-in box there but if they see a banner with something compelling on it that is clearly from you, it’s not like a paid advertisement and they click on it, it brings them to an entire page where they’re forced to make one decision or another, you’re going to get a much higher opt-in rate.

But what we did was we took the opt-in box, we moved it to the bottom, we replaced that with a banner on our sidebar that sends people to a landing page.

The reason why I don’t like pop-ups is because it was hurting our SEO. So here’s something that I’d like everyone here to think about. Everyone is so obsessed about conversion rate. I don’t care about conversion rate. I care about raw number of opt-ins. Ok?

And I found that when I had a pop-up on my website, fewer people linked to me, the media was less likely to talk about me, people saw my business in a certain light, I got fewer social media shares, etc. When that pop-up went away, I received a lot more just sort of love from the blogosphere, a lot more links, a lot more social media shares, because people knew that they were sending their sites, and linking to a site that didn’t have a pop-up.

So even though, when that pop-up went away, my conversion rate went down, as a percentage of total traffic, the number of opt-ins went up, because I was getting more traffic from Google because I was getting more links and I had more traffic coming from inbound refers.

So you could be like a total douchebag and cram the hell out of the people with the pop-up and the sidebar and the thing on the side and all these doohickeys, and have 10, 20 different ways and get a 30% opt-in rate, but then your traffic just shrunk in half. You know what I mean, because it’s just unpleasant to people.

So I like to optimize around, sort out like the raw number of opt-ins, rather than the straight conversion rate. So that’s the number that I look at, it’s just the raw number of opt-ins. I do look at conversion rates when I’m looking at paid media buys and split testing and stuff like that. But in these situations, I personally am not a fan of pop-ups anymore. I don’t like how it positions me and my business in the industry.

I bet if you were like in the crochet niche or something like that then it would probably be fine because they’re like not completely immune to it, but at some point, you know, it just becomes like this big, huge, opt-in arms race. And it’s better off to just be like really cool with people, don’t pummel them, you know.

Andrew: Great, thank you Clay.

Clay: Yeah, absolutely.

Samuel: Hey, Clay. Samuel Junghenn.

Clay: Nice meeting you.

Samuel: First, I think you should go back to school, because it’s like 40 gold nuggets (of wisdom). And for the people in the audience that don’t realize, it’s probably like 10 times worth the ticket price just in that there.

Clay: I hope so, thank you.

Samuel: My question is more around some paid traffic sources. Obviously Google hates squeeze pages and that sort of stuff. If you’re running re-targeting campaigns, specifically, I mean just as an example, what are some tips on getting high conversions but still complying with the gods that be?

Samuel: Oh, you just put up one thing and when they approve it, you swap it out, just kidding. I’m just kidding. So, just an announcement, today we just added an AdWords/Pay-Per-Click compliant landing page template to LeadPages. So anyone who has that (thumbs up)… And please thank Juan Martitegui at Mindvalley.

I’m in a very privileged position because people like James and folks at Mindvalley and a number of different places come to us and say, “This is working better than anything we’ve ever seen,” and then they know the next question I’m going to ask them is, “Can I please put this in LeadPages, and can we like tweak it a little bit?” And we did that with one of James’ pages and it’s like an amazing webinar registration page.

So Juan was like, “Oh, I like modified your page,” and blah blahblah, and we got it approved by Google and AdWords, and it’s awesome, and I was like, “Awesome, can we add it?” He was like, “Yeah, you can.” So we have that now. So it’s not true that Google hates landing pages, it’s that Google hates certain kinds of landing pages.

In terms of re-targeting campaigns, I found that the re-targeting networks seem to be a lot more lenient, so they’re going to want different things than Google does, they’re going to be less stringent because you know, you’re re-targeting, so you’re like cooking traffic that’s already been on your website so you have like some level of permission.

Most of our pages are going to work fine with ReTargeter and Adroll… yeah we haven’t used Perfect Audience but I’ve heard good things about them.

Samuel: Yeah, cool, thanks.

Clay: Yeah, totally.

John: John McIntyre here. We’re all talking about opt-ins, opt-ins being the goal, but no one ever talks about, like if you get more opt-ins you’re going to be less qualified. You optimize the s**t out of the funnel, you’re going to get lots more people in there, but you’ll end up with freebie seekers and that kind of thing.

So what do you think about that? Should we be optimizing for more opt-ins, or should we be adding elements that are qualifying people out of it?

Clay: That is an excellent question. And it is something that a lot of people, intelligent marketers can debate about this for a while. And, so here’s my point of view. It costs virtually nothing to have someone else on your list. And if you can get them in, when maybe they just want a list of free resources, and nurture that lead over time, two years later they might buy.

I’ve seen this point of view that’s, you know, you should hyper-qualify people because you only want super-qualified people on your list, and I was like, “Why?” I know people are like “Yeah, we’re not letting people opt-in to our list anymore, we’re only letting people in who will pay a dollar for a report.” It’s like, why are you doing that? I see this as a relationship.

If you meet a girl at a bar and you’re, “Are you really into me, are you sure you like me, do you really want to go on a first -” It’s just kind of like, you know, get their number and flirt, and carry on the relationship, and then maybe you’ll get married. You’re not like, “Are you looking to get married in the next two weeks?”

So as long as it costs nothing to have another email address on your list, I’d say, you might as well get it, nurture a relationship over time, I have people who have been on my list for three and a half years and then they’re like, “Yeah, I just finally decided to buy because your concept was so good and I liked the free thing at the beginning and I thought, “What the heck.” And so sometimes it will take three years.

But this whole notion that we should be actively pushing people away because they’re not qualified… You know, you can add layers of qualification, like after someone opts in, then you can have on the next page, enter in your phone number, or fill out this questionnaire, and then you can segment that off into another list.

So I’d say, get the widest reach you possibly can, and you can qualify after they opt in, after you have their email address, and you can do a whole bunch of other things down the road, but personally I reject this notion that somehow, I can’t stand that someone would be on my list that’s only a freebie seeker. It doesn’t make a difference to me. I’d rather have them on the list than not.

John: So would you – if you could track the total opt-ins you could track, say, like the revenue numbers. So it’s kind of like the opt-ins is arbitrary, you could have 10 opt-ins you’re making $10,000 from, you’d have a 100 opt-ins and be making $9,000 from them.

Clay: Right. So I optimize around revenue. So I would rather have a billion dollar business where each person on my list was worth five cents, than a million dollar business where everyone on my list was worth ten dollars, you know what I mean? So I optimize around revenue only. And so that’s my approach.
John: Cool, makes sense. Cheers.

Clay: Yeah, totally. Thanks for the question. It’s an interesting thing, yeah.

David: Hey, Clay, well, the last guy kind of answered my question for me, but at one point you talked in one of your videos about directing people to a web page that was more like a storefront to help work on qualifying conversions.

Clay: Yes.

David: Yes, so how are you, I mean are you still promoting that sort of philosophy, or are you moving away from that, more to just straight conversions?

Clay: Yeah. So what I like to do is I like to get people on my lists in the first place. And then after that, you can get them to go through various hoops to qualify themselves. But I only get them to go through hoops after they’re already on my list.

So what we did, was we were, when we were getting ready for the pre-sale of LeadPlayer, like a year ago, we took the people who were already on our list and we asked them, we told them we were giving something away, and they filled out an order form, that looked like an order form but at the bottom, it said it was $7 but we pre-populated the coupon code.

So it looked like it was an order page but the pre-populated coupon code that made it free, but it trained them to fill out an order form because very soon, we wanted them to fill out another order form that looked exactly like that order form but it wasn’t free. So that was targeted to people who were already on our list.

And so, I would never personally have as the very first thing that you do is to fill out this big long order form unless the value proposition is like off-the-charts huge. Which actually it is for that free WordPress plugin that we were giving away. We thought we could get away with it. No one else in our space was giving away a WordPress plugin that was producing the kind of opt-in stats that this free plugin was.

And so, you know you kind of have to like figure out what this situation is, and what your goal is at that point in your business. But that was sort of our approach, at that point.

David: Thanks, Clay.

Clay: Yeah, thank you.

Steven: Good day, Clay, how are you doing?

Clay: Hey.

Stephen: My name’s Stephen. I just want to share with you… I want to say thanks, to start off with. I’ve been using LeadPages for a couple of months.

Clay: Awesome.

Stephen: And I’m in business with my best mate. I’m a copywriter, I do all that sort of stuff and he does all the sweeping behind me. And a couple of days ago… I feel your pain when you say, you know, you spend three weeks on building a product and then something that takes five minutes just cleans up.

So I did this landing page optimizer, you know, get my free blah blahblah, all that sort of stuff, with the countdown timer, it was one of your latest ones, and I converted that at 25%, OK? Now my mate, listen to this, he worked at it and it didn’t work on mobile and for some reason I thought it did. Anyway.

Clay: Which one is this?

Stephen: It’s the one with the…I’ll show you. While I’m talking, I’ll show you. But anyway…

Clay: About 75% of our templates are mobile-responsive right now.

Steven: I thought it was. Anyway, so he just does the – and I’ll show you the next page – I’m here in Sydney, I’m busy… (turns tablet to face Clay) that’s the one there. Converted at 25%, he reckoned it didn’t work on his mobile.

Clay: Awesome.

Stephen: Right, anyway. So he does the simple, crappy, like he can’t do, you know, yoyoyo, he doesn’t do the grammars s**t. And he said, I’m going to put out this landing page, and I said, hmm, go for it, you know? And his converts within a couple of days, mine’s been up for a few weeks, his converts at 70.89%…

Clay: Holy crap.

Stephen: And it’s… to me, I thought, it’s just “Register.” It’s just email list registration.

Clay: I’m so glad it was also a LeadPage.

Stephen: Oh yeah, it’s LeadPages. That’s why I’m up here. That’s why I’m saying thanks. And all it says is “Don’t miss out on our huge announcement. Enter your email address below to get the latest updates. Enter a valid email here. Register.”

And I’m thinking, “Yeah, whatever,” you know, give it a go, and mine’s all, “Get my free report, blah blahblah,” so, yeah. I feel your pain and thanks, for the 70.89%.

Clay: Awesome. Awesome. Oh, I always love the validation. Thank you. Alright, well thank you everyone.

This video is a part of a series of FWF4, to see the rest please join JamesSchramko

For more podcast episodes, subscribe on iTunes