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Topics discussed:
01:15 – All new pay per click friendly LeadPages
04:22 – Reduce bounce rate with error page optimization
06:25 – It only takes three clicks!
07:30 – Which sales page got more conversions?
09:18 – What makes LeadPages so effective?
11:40 – How to use the new advanced feature
17:01 – One big question for Clay
18:48 – Closing notes for LeadPage users
19:59 – Get the recordings from these two places
21:09 – Clay’s prolific content creation secrets revealed
26:08 – Our most popular web development product
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Transcription:
James: James Schramko here, welcome to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today’s a special occasion, and I know I say that all the time but it really is today because I’m doing a video with Clay Collins because we have fast enough Internet now. Good day, mate.
Clay: It’s a miracle.
James: I like to see your little Harry Potter staircase there, on your studio loft. Love that.
Clay: Yeah, I’ve got a dragon tied up there. That’s where I keep the broomsticks and the dragons and all that stuff.
James: So you’re well-rested now, you’ve just got back from Australia.
Clay: Yeah, I’m officially post-jet lag, I think. But I’ve been taking some melatonin. But man, what a great trip. What a great ride, I’m so glad I went on that 14-hour flight. It was well worth it, though.
James: Yeah, well the SuperFastBusiness members have been enjoying watching your recording I put up there for them just recently, and I still get a lot of comments about how awesome, like you knocked it out of the park with your presentation, you saved it up to the last minute. We talked a fair bit about the event, about what I was hoping you would deliver, and you exceeded my expectations.
Like really just riffing about conversions and conversions, and I want to talk about – I made a couple of notes here on my desk, I actually draw on my desk – and I want to ask you about some of the things that were mentioned and take it a little further. And also about some of the new innovations for LeadPages, because I think you are my most frequent guest on SuperFastBusiness, so congratulations.
Clay: That is an honor. Thank you.
Pay-Per-Click LeadPages
James: One thing you’ve just announced is the pay-per-click friendly LeadPages. Tell me about that.
Clay: Yeah, so something that we, personally as a business, don’t have a lot of experience with, but our community does, is pay-per-click. And frankly I don’t know very many people in our space who do as much pay-per-click marketing and buying AdWords traffic as Mindvalley.
And so the CEO of Mindvalley Hispano, Juan Martitegui, who’s just a huge friend of the platform, and just an amazing community member and someone we really trust with the direction of the platform, came to us and said, “Hey, I want to take one of your pages, and I want to add a bunch of things to this, to make this AdWords compliant and to give this the huge, best quality score we can possibly get.”
And so he tweaked it, he tested a bunch of different things, and then he literally – I can’t believe that he did this – I should probably cut him a check or something like that. But he just handed that AdWords-compliant page back to us, with amazing design, and just said, “You’re welcome to include this in LeadPages as a template.”
And in fact what he said was, “I’d really like you to include this in LeadPages as a template because we want to scale this across our organization and we want to be able to just use LeadPages to set these up.” So we have, from the person I would trust the most with pay-per-click marketing, we have one of the templates he used to get an amazing quality score inside of AdWords for pay-per-click traffic.
So Google loves this page, Facebook obviously loves this page. Google standards are a lot higher than Facebook’s. It’s got a good quality score, it’s a proven template, and that’s one of the new additions to LeadPages, and we’re just super thrilled to be able to provide AdWords-compliant pages now, and so that’s one of our new additions.
James: Yeah, I think people like to contribute because you can use it over and over again, and sure, other people are using it, but it saves that customization. It’s literally we’ve outsourced our landing page team to your software tool. So it’s great innovation.
So that’s the PPC page. Now I logged in and found a…
Clay: Literally we’ve outsourced our affiliate program to you, James, so it’s a good trade.
James: Well, fair enough, you know. It’s sort of funny because in my other business I’m the supplier for SEO and websites. We supply, and we’ve outsourced our marketing to business service providers. So it’s like I play different roles to different people. But there’s certainly a place for everyone in the market.
Well let’s do the little one first, the error page optimization
Error Page Optimization
Clay: Yeah, so what we wanted to do was – and I was just thinking about this the other day, because a fairly prominent blogger had linked to us, and he’s got the link wrong, and here I was like, “Oh, this is my moment”, right, and then they mailed their list and people come to our website and they see this 404 page that’s all text, and it’s like oh, there’s nothing here, sorry.
And I was like, what if, during that moment, they had gone to a page that said “Sorry, this page does not exist, but don’t leave empty-handed. Download this free report, or this resource list, that’s going to help you do x, y, and z.” And so what we added to LeadPages was the ability to set your 404 page to be any LeadPages template.
So you can create a page that reduces bounce rate because when people see a blank page that says “Hey, what you’re looking for isn’t found”, they just leave, in most cases. So what this template does is it allows you to say, “Hey, the page that you’re looking for isn’t here. However, don’t leave empty-handed, get this thing”, and so it looks like a real web page, it doesn’t look like a 404 page, although it explains what’s going on.
And it’s not like that’s changing our world. I think we got maybe seven opt-ins yesterday using this form. So it’s not going to change your life, but I think part of business is just plugging every single conceivable hole that could exist and certainly the next time that someone gets the link to us wrong, we’re going to recoup that traffic.
We’ll probably have a higher opt-in rate for the 404 traffic when someone gets it wrong than when someone mails to a specific blog post because those people aren’t going to see opt-in boxes that are, like, front and center. So that’s another thing we added was the ability to turn any landing page template into a 404 page for your WordPress site.
James: So how hard is it for someone to set this one up?
Clay: It takes, if you’re looking at the panel, it takes three clicks. So you pick a page from LeadPages, and you just – normally you set it as being a normal page or it could be your home page, but you can just say that – or a welcome gate – but you just say, “No I don’t want it to be a normal page, I want it to be the 404 page”.
So there’s two things. You decide what page you want to be your 404 page, from your LeadPages account, and then you just click that you want it to be the 404 page. So it’s like three clicks.
James: I think that if I’m not mistaken, you can log into your WordPress, for example, and it will actually be there’s a tab where it wasn’t there before.
Clay: Exactly. Yes, exactly.
James: Yeah, so I think that’s where I first saw it, and it’s really clever. So you could actually use one of the pages that’s already in your account.
Clay: Absolutely, yup.
James: Okay.
Clay: Yeah, and you might want to modify it and say, like, “Hey, the page you’re looking for isn’t here but don’t leave empty handed, get this instead,” or something like that.
Sales Page Template
James: Nice. Okay, so I logged into LeadPages and I saw a sales page template. And just before my event, I thought it would be really cool to make a sales page for my event and split test it against my existing sales page. And guess which one got the highest conversions?
Clay: Unless you’re an a-hole, hopefully you’re going to say that we did well.
James: The LeadPages one. Remember I asked you for one modification? Because as usual I used it straight away. And I asked you for the video at the top option, because that’s what was on my existing page, and it did beat the other page.
Clay: Yeah.
James: I don’t think I ever – there wasn’t enough volume, I only had a hundred dollar odd sales, so I don’t know if – it’s not a long-running test, but my initial reaction was that it was pretty cool. But it was so easy to do, and I think a lot of people would get stuck with – I guess the old way was to get a WordPress theme that makes sales pages, but you don’t need to do that any more.
Clay: Yeah, I mean I think it was a small sample size. It looked like it doubled it, but it wasn’t statistically significant, yeah, but it looked like there was an increase. Yeah, I mean with LeadPages you can – we wanted a long form sales letter, a lot of people had asked for it, and we went ahead and added that, and the funny thing is, I’ve literally never in my life met somebody who implemented it as fast as you.
I think we sent out an email, telling people that this thing had come out, and I think you wrote back like ten minutes later and you were like, “Oh yeah, I got one up”, and I was like – (laughs)
Clay: And I was split testing it as well. But that’s how easy your stuff is. This is the thing, I have a web development team, there’s half a dozen people full time in there, and up until now, I would send them stuff to do, and then I would wait for it to get done.
But now, it’s simply a case of I just go and make it, and then I’ll just ask them to make changes or whatever. I like to set up split tests, and know exactly what I’m testing and make sure that it’s funneling the traffic properly.
But you’ve made the software so easy to use, and I think that’s what makes LeadPages effective, because a lot of people don’t have a web team, they don’t even have a full time person in their business, and they’re trying to do this from oDesk or eLance or Fiverr, and the time taken to task source is just a killer.
So for just a small fee, you can have all this stuff on tap, like you literally are the outsourced landing page, sales page, error page, welcome gate opt-in king, so that’s what I think makes the software work.
Clay: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we wanted to do was like we saw people with amazing products, like just utterly incredible products, that were getting their clocks cleaned by these gurus, or not just gurus but professional marketing organizations. And I remember in one case, I had a friend who created a product, and it was like I thought it was the best product I’d ever seen on something.
But he was getting just utterly destroyed by someone else, who had a full time graphic designer to create the page, and then they had like someone to take that design and turn it into html and someone else to post it and split test it.
And while that was happening, he was just getting technical challenge after technical challenge, hiring someone, trying to like finagle something, and he just got exhausted and quit, and I was like, “That sucks”.
And so one of the reasons why we created LeadPages was we wanted to level the playing field. And interesting story, that person that was like crushing him, now doesn’t have – I mean, he might still have that team anymore, but he’s also a LeadPages customer and is using it on their launches and stuff like that. So I wanted to level the playing field and kind of put, like, the special sauce in everyone’s hands and it’s kind of …
James: Yeah, you’re giving them the power. Now one of the new features you’ve got is more of an advanced feature, and that’s the pre-populated field. I want you to tell us what is it, and how would we use that?
Clay: Yeah, so what we’ve added is the ability to, with any of our landing page templates, to add a little text at the end of the URL, that allows you to pre-populate the email address or the name.
So for example, if you had a page at mydomain.com and it was a LeadPage there, and you added mydomain.com, and then just a little information about the name of the person and the email of the person that’s going to that page, then it would pre-populate the squeeze page or the webinar registration page or whatever, with the name and the email. And that increases conversion rate, right?
If someone doesn’t even have to type in their name and email to opt in, they just have to click Submit or whatever, obviously conversion rates go up. And so here’s how you would use this.
If you have affiliates that are mailing people to your webinar registration pages or to your landing pages, you can have your affiliates go into OfficeAutoPilot or AWeber, Infusionsoft or whatever they’re using and replace, instead of putting like their name in it they could replace it with the name of who’s ever receiving that email.
So if they have a thousand people they’re mailing to, it’s very easy, it’s just like a field merge, you can just say that, you know, replace this part of the URL with this person’s name and replace this part of the URL with their email address. And so that means that affiliates mailing for you and everyone who arrives at that page is going to see that page pre-populated with their name and their email address, and conversions go up.
But also, if you’re doing a webinar to your own list and you want to pre-populate those fields, if you’re doing list segmentations, someone’s already on your list but you’re wanting them to opt in for another email newsletter that you have or you want them to opt in to a sub-list for a launch that you’re doing, this pre-population is going to take your conversions through the roof.
A little bit more of an advanced feature, but something that anyone can do. We have a tutorial on how to do this and it’s within everyone’s reach..to be able to do this. It’s not something that a lot of people take the time to do because, frankly, it takes 2 minutes to create a page and LeadPages and this may take an extra 5 minutes to set up but absolutely crushes it in terms of conversions.
James: So is there any use you might have for it for your own list? I mean people might say, well, you already got their email address and they’ve already opted in. Why do you have to opt them in again? Where would you…why would you do that?
James Schramko and Clay Collins
