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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.
