Landing Page Tips - Ten Things You Must Do If You Want To Convert Visitors -- LNIM245

On this episode of the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, I share 10 essential landing page tips to help you convert visitors. A landing page is a page where you send traffic to, with the goal of getting visitors to take some kind of action. The conversion rate on a landing page can have a significant impact on the profitability of your business. I emphasize that everything is up for debate and the best way to determine what works is by testing, using tools like Google Optimize. I encourage listeners to think about these 10 tips and consider how they can test different elements on their landing page to find the best opt-in rate.

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On this episode of the Late Night internet Marketing podcast. I've got 10. Absolutely. Essential. Landing page tips for you. If you want to convert visitors on your landing page, you need to pay attention to these 10 tips. All of this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Hey, I am your host, Mark Mason. And this is episode 245 of the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast coming to you from. The little studio. In Dallas, Texas. I'm so happy to be here again. We're on a roll here in 2023. I don't know. This is like the sixth. Episode in a row in 2023, I'm fired up in very excited and, you know, If you've been listening to those episodes, you know, that I've been involved in trying to rekindle the revenue stream in my business around cost per action marketing. I've been creating a lot of landing pages and it reminded me that I haven't talked on the podcast. About landing pages in a long time. And I thought we should go over my 10 most important tips for you. If you're building landing pages now, what is a landing page? Broadly a landing page is simply a page that you send traffic to, or, you know, somehow traffic arrives there. Maybe the traffic is coming organically and you wish for people in general to take some action when they're on the page, the most famous kind of landing page. And the thing we think of most often in what I've been working with lately is the kind of landing page where you're wanting the visitor to opt. In or take an action to vote. Yes. For whatever it is that you are talking about on the page. And the conversion rate on a page like that can make the difference between whether or not your business, whatever it is is profitable. If your conversion rate is too low, your business may not be profitable. And if your conversion rates just a little bit higher, Maybe it was at 2% and you make it go to four or 5% because you make the landing page a little better using these 10 tips. You can literally double the revenue of your business with just a few percent change in the opt-in rate of a landing page. It's truly powerful magic voodoo excellence that we're working with here today. Okay. So, what I will tell you is these 10 tips are really 10 things that you need to think about, but one of these hidden secrets that people never talk about when it comes to landing pages that. Everything is up for debate. And therefore you must test. So while I'm going to tell you the things that you need to talk about and give you suggestions around those things, I want you to remember that you always need to test to make sure that you understand what's really working for your market, your message for your particular situation. You've got to test. And the easiest way to test usually is with a tool like Google optimize, which is free, which allows you to test this headline versus that headline, this color button versus that color button and so forth. That's a really great tool. And there are tons of videos on YouTube about how to use Google optimize. So as you are thinking about these 10 landing page tips, I want you to also think about how. You might test using Google optimize to understand what your very best opt-in rate could be. So the very first thing I want you to do with your landing pages, make absolutely sure that you have a clear and compelling headline that grabs someone's attention and makes it immediately clear what your value proposition is. What is the potential upside for your visitor? We've always heard these statistics about how you've got just a few seconds to grab your visitor's attention. So, if you are doing something exciting, if you've got something exciting to offer, make sure that the benefit of that thing is in the headline. And when I say benefit, I don't mean you've got some new software that uses 14 different artificial intelligence engines. That's a feature, your 14 engines. That's just a feature of your software. The benefit is those 14 engines are going to save you 37.2 minutes per day. And there are lots of tips around headlines that you can learn about. Usually having a number in a headline has some specific benefit to conversions. People are naturally attracted to numbers and that's been proven time and time again, but having a compelling headline that works is absolutely critical to having a good landing page. And if you've got two or three really good ideas for what your headline might be. Then go ahead and test those and see which one converts the best. Tip number two, it is absolutely imperative. And this is a mistake that I see made all the time. It is absolutely imperative that you have a clear call to action. So that people know exactly what it is that you expect or want them to do one button to push. And that's another thing. One call to action. I don't mean you can't have the same call to action at different places in the page, but you should have one thing that you want to happen on a true landing page. You want someone to opt in? Or you want someone to buy the product? Let's, don't give them a lot of choices where they can go get more information or look at this blog post or sift through these menu items. Let's don't do that. Let's make one obvious choice for the visitor and let's give them the opportunity to do that right away. A clear call to action with a clear benefit. That's clearly called out in the headline. Third thing I want you to do with your landing pages is to make sure you've got plenty of white space. Look. The last thing you want to do is have someone visit your page and have them hit a giant busy wall of texts. It's hard to read. It's not easy to scan. You can't figure out what's going on and you can't sort of quickly understand what the landing page is all about. One of the ways that we do that when we're designing pages is we make sure we use the right amount of white space, not too much white space, but certainly enough white space so that it's not fatiguing to read the page. And that brings me to the fourth tip. The fourth tip that I'd like to offer you is to use bullet points and lists. In cases where it makes sense instead of paragraphs. And the reason is the combination of white space and bullets and lists makes your page easy for visitors to scan so they can tell right away what it is that you're wanting them to do. And they can get the information that you need. Now another thing, and this goes, this is tip five. Another thing that I want you to do is to make absolutely 100% sure that your page is mobile friendly. We have a tendency to design these pages in front of a computer, and we want to have a beautiful background image and maybe some animation on the page or whatever it is that you think beautiful looks like. And then you look at it on mobile and that stuff doesn't make sense. I want you to design your landing pages for mobile first, and I will tell you that in the work that I'm doing right now paid ad traffic, the vast majority of that is coming from mobile and the mobile. Traffic is what's converting best for me. So it's absolutely critical that you have a mobile friendly design, whatever it is that you're trying to build. Another thing I want to tell you to do is pay attention to colors. So I find that landing pages that are mostly white. Convert the best. There's a big push in computing right now to go to dark mode. So dark might be something that you want to test. But in any case, the colors that you use should be high contrast and easy to read. Don't use, you know, yellow on pink or something that has a really difficult contrast problem that makes your page hard to read and creates eye fatigue. If you've got bad colors, people will bounce. And I'd say the other thing about colors is. Use colors that are typically used in your industry that make it look like you're a pro don't make your website look like something that a middle school student did in 1980. I mean, you really need to make sure that you're using some design savvy colors. And if you're confused about colors, there's lots of good information on the web. Look for information about color palettes for websites, because there. There are interesting color theory, things that real marketers have worked out regarding opposing colors on the color wheel and how you should, and maybe more importantly, should not combine these colors to have a great design. So look for web design color palette information on the internet. This is a well-studied space by universities all over the world. The seventh thing that I would say is that it often happens to help. If you can have just a little bit of social proof on your landing page about how Johnny. I took the action that you're wanting people to take and it changed his whole life or he got the value immediately, or it helped him right away or whatever it is. If you can have a little social proof, usually below the fold. On your webpage that can really help. And when we say below the fold, What we mean is below the area where in order to see that you have to scroll so above the fold is the space that you can see without scrolling. Below the fold is the space that you need to scroll in order to reveal. And what I would say is it's fine to have social proof. Below the fold, as opposed to your call to action, which I think should generally be above the fold. Again, all of this is subject to test, but go ahead and look for some social proof. Tim number eight is consider the use of images and videos. You know, I like to use offset images where I've got texts to the left and images to the right, and then below that, an image to the left and text to the right again, to kind of. Smartly use white space and break up the content a little bit. That can be really helpful in terms of creating a page that's visually appealing and you can flow. Well, you can also consider the use of video, particularly if your videos summarizes the contents on the page, and you can convince someone to take an action through the use of video. I think the use of video can be very effective. We see very effective use of video. On sales letters. I use video on opt-ins all the time. I find it to be effective, but I do think you should test because sometimes people will be landing on your page in a situation where they can't watch a video. They're in a meeting they're multitasking and other people are around or they don't have audio. And for that case, I think if you do use video, you really need to burn in the captions to your video so people can watch the video without the audio and still. I get the message. One thing that you might want to do in terms of your landing page, and this is tip number nine is some sort of risk reduction. Look, when people come to your landing page, if they don't opt in, oftentimes it's for a reason. Maybe they're not interested in what you're offering, but maybe they kind of are interested, but they've got some hesitation. We call that in conversions an objection. They have some objection to your page. And one of the objections might be risk. For example if you're asking for their email address, they may feel a risk around that. They may worry that you're going to send them spam or you'll never leave them alone, or you're somehow going to invade their privacy or they may be. Worried about cookies on your website or whatever. So I recommend that you always consider. What the objections might be around risk and include some risk reduction in your landing page. This can be, in the form of, Hey, we don't sell your email address or we won't send you spam. We'll deliver your item, even if it's two o'clock in the morning, because one of the risks they may be worried about is a delay in getting whatever it is. And. People love instant gratification. So that can be a benefit as well. They click the button and they get the thing you want to think about what their risks are around doing business with you and try to mitigate those risks. Maybe with some trust badges of some sort, maybe your site has been scanned by McAfee and it's guaranteed to be virus free. I don't know what it is, but think about the, what those risks might be and try to mitigate them with the use of trust, badges, and policies around what people might be worried about. And speaking of policies, item 10. I try to use some clear and concise policies around privacy and cookies and other kinds of things. Not only will that benefit your landing page in terms of it'll make you look legit. Real websites have things like privacy policies and other kinds of legal boiler plate. In links in the footer, on their site. You need to have that too. That will also make people that are concerned about those things. It'll give them a place to look say, oh, I don't need to worry about that. He's got a privacy policy, so I'm not going to worry about it. I'm certainly not going to read it, but with no privacy policy, you kind of like. Can I trust this person? I mean, I don't even know what his policies are. Maybe. Maybe this person doesn't even have any policy. So be sure you have those, the side benefit of having those legal pages can be as well. That, uh, Google or other. Entities that may be sending you traffic either paid or free traffic are also looking for those algorithmically. They're making sure that the places that they're sending traffic to are reputable, and one of the ways that they assess whether or not a page is reputable is they look for the presence of these policies. So the quality of your page as seen by algorithms. Can be affected by these policies. So those are my 10 tips. And I will say that, you know, there are other trust signals perhaps as tip 11, like make sure you're using HTTPS. I don't even know if you could have. Uh, website anymore without an SSL certificate, but make sure you're using SSL. encryption, and make sure that your website. Is hosted with a reasonable domain name and just that it looks trustworthy. So those are my recommendations for you now, again. If you've got some questions about, should my opt-in button be orange or red or green? You know, should my headline be blue? Or orange should my headline used the word? Five F I V E or the number five. When you get down to questions like that, you absolutely need to test, and there's just no substitute for a B testing and the one caution. I would give you about this kind of testing is to make sure that you're testing with enough data. One of the challenges that we have as marketers is sometimes when we're building a new landing page, we don't have a lot of traffic to it. And so we want to test it. But we don't have any people with which to test it. So we start making decisions on four or five visitors. Like I had five people come and nobody opt in. So now I'm going to change the headline to blue. Well, my recommendation would be that you consider a more significant number of visitors before you start changing things. Maybe something more like. 20 or 30 or 50 visitors before you start making these minor tweaks. Sometimes that means you have to spend more money in order to get valid data, but I'm telling you if you start making changes, With a sparse dataset. That's what we call it. An engineering. You're going to get the wrong result. You potentially drive off into a corner and make things worse. So just make sure that you are testing with handfuls of people, dozens of visitors, at least. And not just a few, because you'll just get the wrong result. If you do it that way. Okay. I hope that's helpful to you. I hope that you're building landing pages. I hope that you have offers. Because the only way you can really make progress in this business is to make offers. And match your offer to people who need your offer. We call those people in general buyers. You got to match offers with buyers in order to make money in any kind of business, especially in online marketing. And I hope that these 10 tips are helpful to you in that regard. My name is Mark Mason from Late Night, Internet Marketing dot com. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I hope that if you really like it, that you'll consider pushing that button that gets you these episodes automatically in your pod, catcher of choice. Usually there's a button called subscribe. It doesn't mean that you pay money. It just means that every week when I release an episode, it will come directly to your device wherever you listen to podcasts. So please. Subscribe to this podcast and share it with some friends who maybe, maybe they have bad landing pages and you can help them by sending them this episode. Thanks. I'll talk to you soon. Ciao. Man, it's been a great, super busy week. I'm heavy into building out stuff with 1, 2, 3 profit. I've got my first few conversions. I'll be giving you guys an update on that, uh, in the near future, but it's been a busy baseball week and that's got me super excited. If you're watching this on YouTube, you will see that I have my baseball hat on. I've been at baseball. I'm actually also sunburned on the right side of my face. Face, but not the left side of my face, I guess the way, you know, the sun was out in Texas and it was bright, but, but really cool. And so there's one of those days when I wasn't wearing the sunscreen that I probably should have worn. We had opening day festivities where we did a scrimmage and then we played the next day on Saturday. We played the high school down the street and we were able to win that game. That was exciting. Uh, my son got to pitch a couple of innings. He had a couple of strikeouts. He didn't allow any hits or any runs in those batters that he faced across two innings. So that's a great result. He wasn't happy with it. He didn't feel like he had command. Of his off-speed pitches. He particularly, uh, throws a split finger fastball. And he was having trouble getting that exactly where he wanted it in particularly he was having trouble with it, drifting out arm side with a split finger fastball. So for those of you that are baseball geeks, you understand this, you know, you either. Can paint the corners with fast balls and off-speed, or you can, and when you can't, it's a struggle and you have to fight. When, when you've got precise control of your pitches. Maybe that happens about 25% of the time. Life is good. When you don't have precise control of your pitches, you've got to be more creative. And it's interesting in high school because. You're kind of relying on the coach. You. In high school pitchers, they don't usually have permission to shake off the coach in particular situation. So if the coach calls a curve ball and you don't throw a curve ball, Uh, you're going to hear about it later in the dugout. So, you know, you're kind of at the mercy of the coach, understanding what's going on with you. And that was a challenge for us, but he fought through it and did a great job. And so what's baseball time in Texas. We're super excited about that. And when we're not playing baseball, we're working on stuff like this podcast for you. So until next week, I'll see you soon. I hope you make amazing progress on your business. Ciao.