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Happy New Year everyone and welcome to another episode of Silence in Golden where Troy and Simon give away invaluable tips for your business. Today our main topic is landing pages – we discuss a cool plugin to help you build it super fast, how to write headlines that will get attention and most importantly how to get them to convert. The guys also give us the latest news on the WordPress Survey results, Zac Gordon's Gutenberg course and WP Engine's funding.
Watch the Video
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News
WordPress Survey Results Are In
The results from the 2015 – 2017 WP surveys have been published which you can view here. Some interesting points:
- Overall the stats are similar over the three years. However, in 2015, 45,000 people responded and in 2016 and 2017 the number was more than half that.
- WordPress has increased its usage as an application framework and decreased its usage as a CMS.
- The most frustrating things people found about WordPress were plugins and themes being abandoned, conflicts and coding standards. (Side note: support the developers and use premium plugins when you can to help eliminate this issue.)
- The average number of websites that people built was in the range of 2-20 in 2015. In the latest results, it is still quite similar with fewer than 100 built per person. This could be due to the trend of people building their own website, then realising that it is quite easy and start doing it for other people, growing slowly from there.
Zac Gordon’s Course on Gutenberg Development
Zac Gordon has released his Gutenberg Development course aimed at developers who want to update their themes, plugins, and shortcodes to work with Gutenberg. Get more information and a coupon code here.
WP Engine Secures Strategic Growth Investment
WP Engine is a WordPress managed hosting company and is in the top 0.4% of companies in the world. They have recently just secured $250 million for growth from Silver Lake.
We have discussed the future of WordPress here at Agency Mavericks often – whether it will continue or be taken over by another CMS, whether it will become a redundant technology or whether grid builders will replace it. So this is good news for us because they will be using this money to grow the business and keep WordPress strong.
The Content
Landing Pages
Facebook Questions
Q.
Our first question was from Colleen who asks:
I have some confusion about when to use them. I mean, I know you want to use them for a more targeted promotion to send people to and have minimal distraction, but I have a page all about my web design services and I've wondered if I should remove some of the sales copy there and save that for a landing page?
A.
Well, let's start with a definition of a landing page – a page where you want a user to take a very specific action. You want them to either give you their email address in exchange for something of value (such as a download), or you want them to buy a particular product. A landing page is designed to remove distraction and get them to take the action that you want them to take.
So this differs from a regular page about your web services. Just think about what that one action is that you want them to take. Get specific. If there are too many actions to take on that page, then you may need to divide it up into separate landing pages.
For example, if your business offers a few different services such as web design, SEO and social media marketing, then you should have a separate landing page for each of those things. On this page, you will have one action to take such as an opt-in for your free tips on that service or to request a consultation.
Q.
Our second question was from Jamie:
What are the 5 most important things for a landing page that converts?
– How to get traffic to your landing page
– How to do A/B testing
– How to price and sell LPs to clients
A.
A good way to price and sell landing pages is to use the “go wide go deep” method and ask the client a lot of questions to ascertain what the value of this page will be to their business. Then work backwards and ask how many leads can we generate per month? How many can we convert? What’s the lifetime value of these customers?
Then work out how much it will cost you to generate that landing page and make sure you are delivering that service as a profit.
Kissmetrics wrote a very helpful blog on the anatomy of a perfect landing page. Check out the 10 key landing page features to draw in clients here
A couple of reminders:
- Make sure you get as much info as you can above the fold on a standard desktop.
- Whatever it is you are delivering must be helpful to your target audience.
One of the best landing pages is Google. There is nothing else to do here except type and press enter.
Let's Dive in on How We Build Landing Pages
Here is an example of a prototype that Troy cooked up earlier:
Troy made this in 15 minutes, he then sends it to the client for approval, then to his designer to make it pretty and finally he writes the content for the client.
It is important that you write the content as clients don’t usually have the skillset or the knowledge to write the content for these pages and we want this to be as effective as possible.
A landing page can be a good tripwire product too. A tripwire is a product that allows you to turn a lead into a customer by making it a low-cost, relatively painless offer. Then once you have their trust and deliver above and beyond it is then easier upsell to them.
Using Elementor to Create the Prototype
The plugin that Troy used for this prototype is Elementor. The free version is awesome but you can upgrade to a pro version to get few more features and more support. It is fast and easy to use and it also allows you to build a template and then export it to any website so it can be used for multiple clients.
Troy is in the middle of making a video on how to make a prototype using Elementor and you can find it on our Youtube channel in the next week. So make sure you subscribe to our channel
The Most Important Things on the Landing Page
The heading and the button of course!
So how do we make a good headline? A good formula to use is How to “X” without “Y”. In other words – how to achieve a benefit without having to do the headache or sacrificing something.
There are some tools to help you. Hubspot have one called the “Blog Ideas Generator”
Simply enter in the topic you want to talk about, for example:
It then generates a list of potential headings for you:
Another good tool to use is Portent. It gives you fun headings and tips as well. Look where I got my inspiration for today's heading!
Troy's Golden Nugget Tip
If your clients don't know what a landing page is, then this is a great opportunity to write a blog and position yourself as an expert!
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Over and out guys! Until next week… tune in at 10 am Sydney time next Tuesday for the next live episode of Silence is Golden.
