Let’s say have 15 minutes until a magical flood gate opens. A flood gate of traffic to your website. Let’s imagine one thousand people visiting your website’s landing page in the next 15 minutes. They aren’t casual browsing. In fact, these people are my customers that heard about you from my email.
They are cold warm hot!
How many of these people, you think, would either turn into a lead or a customer?
Well, there’s no ONE answer. But there definitely are benchmarks (like the one below from Unbounce).
And that’s brings up this very important question:
What does it take to turn a website profitable?
How can you create a high-converting website landing page without being a professional copywriter? That’s exactly what I want to help with, in this post. I will first show you 5 tasks you must work on, in the next 30 minutes. Then, I’ll show you other things you can work on in the next 24 hours.
Sounds good?
Let’s first look at two of the biggest mistakes business owners make with their websites.
Mistake #1: Design vs Copy
Oftentimes business owners hand-off their website to a designer. At this point, the goal is pretty simple:
“I need a website.”
Fair enough. You get what you want.
And it’s only after a few months, that they wake up to a rude surprise:
“Why isn’t anyone interested in my products or my free Ebook?”
The truth is that you have a good looking website, not a high-converting website.
Mistake #2: You vs Your Customer
‘Customer-first’ needs to show on the website too. And that’s where lies the second biggest mistake. Business owners tend to focus too much on their product or service and its features. All of the website is screaming loud just one thing:
“Look what we’ve got. The best product that does A, B, C…and also X, Y, and Z. And by the way, we also offer P, Q, and R.”
But your visitors and customers don’t care about any of them. They are only looking for one thing:
“Are these the right people to help me? Do they have what it takes to help me solve my problem?”
They are constantly scanning the inter-webs and got to your website. Don’t chase them away!
3 Key Elements of a High Converting Landing Page
No matter what business you’re in, your website has to communicate the following three clearly:
- Who you are?
- What you’re offering?
- What’s in it for me (visitor)? (WIIFM)
But these are high-level elements. In the rest of this post, I’ll try and break them down into simple tasks.
Let’s turn your website to a giant magnet and a money machine 🙂
How to Create a High Converting Website Landing Page?
You could be running an e-commerce business or selling online courses or coaching or something else. No matter what kind of business you run, follow the following cues. Let’s first look at what you should do in the next 30 minutes.
5 Website Landing Page Exercises in 30 Minutes
Let’s start with this exercise. Roll-up your sleeves and get ready!
1. Focus on One Audience
Your business could cater to a few different segments of your market. But make sure at any given point in time, you’re speaking to just one specific customer avatar. A message for everyone will get no one’s attention.
Your first task is to pick one customer avatar.
If you haven’t worked on your customer avatar, do that right now. At a very high level, you should have an answer for the following questions:
- who they are
- where they’re from
- what are their biggest pain points
- and, what turns them off
- what they love. and
- who else serves them
2. A Killer Headline
A headline is something that grabs your visitor by their eyeballs, connects with their emotions, and makes them drool. It’s as simple as that. There are two ways you can use a headline:
- Standalone.
- Headline + subhead
If you choose to go with a standalone headline, make sure the headline is focused on grabbing attention. And at the same time, make sure the headline is relevant and is not misguiding.
The job of a subhead is to help the visitor transition from the attention-grabbing headline to the irresistible offer. If you choose to use a subhead, use it to feed into the visitor’s interests.
3. Make an Irresistible Offer
You have grabbed your visitor by their eyeballs – excellent!
Because, your visitor is emotionally ready to give you something priceless – their attention!
It would be a shame if all you did was showed them a gallery of photos, or gloated about yourself and your achievements. No, that’s what most businesses do.
You got to make them an irresistible offer!
“Here’s my new Ebook”, is not an offer. An offer is something that addresses your visitors’ deepest desires. They are more emotional. Peace, money, fame, prestige, are examples of human desires.
Your irresistible offer should deliver one or more of the desires of your ideal customers. If you have a product (Ebook, course, etc.), use words that speak about the benefits of your product than the features. And lastly, use words that your ideal customers would use to describe these benefits.
4. Clear and Unambiguous CTA
The CTA or Call To Action is what tells the visitor what they must do.
“But why should I tell them what to do?”, you think. That’s an understandable question. But if you don’t tell them what to do, they decide what to do. This can leave a visitor confused. And a confused person often times doesn’t take any action.
What is a good CTA?
A good CTA is one that is clear, specific, and almost hand-holds the visitor to the exact step. If the action is to make a payment, please be clear about what the visitor needs to do to make the payment. Perhaps also tell them what will happen after they click the payment button.
In the case of a lead-generating landing page, your goal is to get the visitor to key in their email address, and click the button. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. And just like I described before, also tell them what will happen after the click the button.
5. Focused and Uncluttered
A distracted customer is a lost customer.
So let’s talk about focus first.
When it comes to a high-converting landing page, the focus is everything. A good idea to follow would be Michael Masterson’s Power of One.
One central idea, one desirable promise, conveyed by one story that has one core emotion throughout it, direct the reader to one specific action
Michael Masterson, American businessman and Copywriter
Clutter magnifies distraction.
However focused your copy is, if the landing page has too many elements, it not a good idea. If your landing page is telling a story, remove everything that doesn’t contribute to that story.
That brings us to the end of the first 5 exercises. You should be able to do this in 30 minutes, if you know your customer avatar. But if you’ve never taken the time to understand your customer, you will need a little more time.
When you’re ready, move on to this post. In that, I outline 18 landing page hacks that you can implement in the next 24 hours and skyrocket your conversions!