In this episode, host Julie Hood shares her secrets for creating landing pages that work. She answers the questions: • What exactly is a landing page? • Are landing pages necessary? • Are landing pages effective? • How can landing pages help your business? • What are my 6 landing page best practices? • What landing page builders are available – including a new tool that you don’t have to pay a monthly fee to use!
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares her secrets for creating landing pages that work. She answers the questions:
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Hello. And thanks for listening this week. I have a jam packed episode for you today. All about the secrets to landing page design for courses creators, let's Get to it. Welcome to the course creators HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood Welcome episode 15 landing page design,
for course, creators. And today's episode is a free training for you all about how to create And design the very best landing pages. So we're going to answer the following questions that I want to cover today. The first one, what exactly is a landing page, our landing pages really necessary and are they effective? And how can landing pages help your business?
What are my six, a landing page, best practices, what landing page builders are available and including a new tool that you don't have to pay a monthly fee to use. So I'm thrilled to share this with you. And in fact, for just a limited time, you can get one of the newest landing page builders for a lifetime account. And I'll tell you,
I've spent thousands of dollars through the years on my landing page software. So the fact that you could get a lifetime account, you should definitely jump on this. You can go to coursecreatorshq.com/15, and I'll have the link on there. If it's still available to get this new lifetime landing page software that's coursecreatorshq.com/15, and you can get the lifetime account to swipe pages.
Okay. So let's jump in, first of all, what exactly is a landing page? And if you have not heard of that term before, I want to make sure you get my definition of it. A landing page is a page, not necessarily on your website. It's often a standalone page that has one action that you want the visitor to the page to do.
So it could be that you want them to jump in and opt in for a freebie. It could be that you want them to buy something it's any page where you have one action for the person to take. So the second question is, are landing pages necessary and absolutely 100%. I really insist that all of my clients use landing pages for their business and for the freebies that they're trying to give away.
And the reason is you don't want your visitors to get distracted. If you just had a regular page on your website, there's lots and lots of places for them to go click around and read more about you and learn more. And they just don't sign up. So we want landing pages that just have one action for them. And then secondly, our landing page is really effective.
And I will tell you, they absolutely are for my clients who buy traffic. They send their traffic, not to their website. They send their traffic to their landing pages because they're trying to get them to opt in and sign up for their email list. That is the most effective use of a landing page. And to build your email list so highly recommended,
and actually one of the more complex sides of doing your business, because there's lots of tools out there to help you create a website, but there aren't a lot of especially free tools to help you with landing pages. And the way they help you with your business is because you can help focus in on what it is that your listener, your reader, your site,
visitor, what it is they're actually wanting. So you can have different landing pages for different types of activities. So for example, right now I have about five or six different landing pages set up depending on what I want to share with a specific audience. So for example, you, as a listener, get invited very frequently to my coursecreatorshq.com/idea
landing page, where I give away training about how to know if your course idea is any good. So that's an example. If you're looking to see some more information about landing pages and kind of see what they're like, you can go to coursecreatorshq.com/idea. And then I have another one where people can get a webinar checklist. I have another one that helps people figure out where to host their,
their software and host their courses. I have several others that I like to give away depending on the audience. So that's where you really want to use these landing pages to help segment your audience and find out what it is they're really interested in because it's pretty easy to put together a freebie, maybe just a one page resource guide. You set up a landing page and you start seeing,
sharing it to see how many people opt in. Are they interested? W is it popular or is it not as popular? And which audiences like which freebies the best. So they're very, very helpful in your course business. So next up, I want to share with you my six landing page best practices. So number one is that you should not under any circumstances,
have a menu at the top of the page, because you do not want to distract your visitors. You want them to have one choice. They come to the page, they sign up, they come to the page. If it's a sales page, they buy, or they don't buy, you don't want to be distracting them with an about page or with,
Ooh, let me go check out her school and see what courses she has. And they don't actually opt in for the freebie that you're giving away. So that's the first best practice is to make sure that you don't have any kind of menus on the page. Number two is that I want you to use an orange button for your opt-in pages and your sales pages.
And we've done a lot of testing with this, and the reason it works so well is that orange buttons get the attention of your visitors. You want them to stand out on your page. And I know a lot of my graphic designer friends are going to be upset to hear this, but you don't want them to blend in and look beautiful with your,
your landing page. You want your buttons to stand out. So it's really, really obvious to someone who visits that they need to click on this orange button on your site. And then related to that is you want the button to have a call to action on it. So it's not just subscribe. You want it to be something like grab this training,
get my free masterclass, sign up here, download. Now you can see how those are all very specific calls to action to help them make sure that they know what they're doing. And it's more enticing than just a general signup. So that's number two, use an orange button with your call to action. And number three of the six best practices is actually somewhat similar.
Do not say subscribe to my newsletter anywhere on your landing page, because no one wants to subscribe and get more email right now, we are willing to sign up to get free stuff, but we really don't want to get newsletters. We really don't want to subscribe. We want to get free training or get masterclasses. So don't say subscribe, don't say subscribe to my newsletter.
Number four is to use an action specific headline. So you always want to make sure that your headlines on your landing pages, talk to the visitor about their problem and talk about how you're transforming and helping them. So there are, for example, you wouldn't want to just say resource guide for landing pages. You would want to say, grab this free landing page resource guide with my six top secrets and best practices for turning visitors into subscribers.
So you can see it's very action specific. It gives a very specific transformation that folks will get when they sign up. And that headline is what pulls them in and makes them keep reading to find out if they want to know more from you. So that's number four, use an action specific headline. Number five for the best practices is that I want you to put the button that they're clicking above the fold.
And what that means is that if you're looking at the screen on a computer, you don't want them to have to scroll or move to see the button. The button needs to be on the screen right away. If they have to scroll down or go page down on the page, they're less likely to click it and sign up. So keep your buttons above the fold on the screen,
on your landing pages. And then number six, I want you to test your landing page and test and test your landing page, and then test it again on a phone and a iPad and a mobile device to make sure that it's working in all of these different places, because there's nothing worse than actually getting people to click and visit your page, but then it doesn't work.
So they can actually sign up to get your freebie or sign up for your course. So test, test, test, make sure all of the landing page is working and all of the different links. And I'll give you another hint. Make sure if you have more than one button, which you might have, you can have one at the top that's above the fold,
and then you might also have one at the very bottom. So they read down to the bottom and they have another button down there. Make sure you test both of them. We had that as a problem once with one of my clients where the top button worked great, but the bottom button wasn't working. So lots of testing. Let me recap the six best practices for you in case you're trying to note them or jot them down.
The first one is to make sure you don't have a menu on the page. You don't want distractions. So no menu on the page. Number two is to use an orange button with a really specific call to action. Number three is, do not say subscribe to my newsletter. Number four is use an action specific headline. Number five is put the button above the fold so that it shows up on the screen.
And part two of that is put a button at the very bottom of the page. So when they get finished reading through there's another button that they can click on. And then number six is to test, test, test, and test again on mobile. So that's six of my favorite landing page, best practices to help you have landing pages that actually convert.
So next I want to talk about what kinds of landing page builders are actually available to help you figure out, like, should I be paying for this? How does this work? So a lot of times the email software that you are using will have a built-in landing page creator so that you can create landing pages to have people opt into your email newsletter software.
And they build that in. Sometimes they're not the best, like you can't do a lot of designing to the pages, but that is an option, same sort of thing with your course hosting software, depending on what you're using, they may have a sales page creator to help you create the landing page where people can sign up for your course. So they have that option for people to create a sales page built into the tool where you're hosting your course.
So those are two things to check first. Are they built into the tools that you're already paying for now? If not, and when I first started online, there were not these kind of built-in landing pages. And so there's three main tools that I like to recommend. The first one is at lead pages, online.com, that's lead pages, online.com. And the reason I like this one is it's been around for years and years and years.
It works really well. It also does fantastic tracking for you. So you can use the tracking system in there to see how well your page is converting. The second one I really like is ClickFunnels, which you can get to coursecreatorshq.com/ClickFunnels. And what I like about them is that you can create your entire funnel and see the numbers across the entire funnel where lead pages is just one page at a time.
ClickFunnels lets you put together the entire series of your pages. So you'll have the landing page. You'll have the thank you page, you, and you can see how people are progressing through and see where they click. So that's really, really helpful. It also has a lot of other features. Those are just two of the ones that I like. And then this week AppSumo is actually promoting a new tool called swipe pages and they are providing a lifetime account.
So right now I pay monthly for my lead pages account, but you can get ahold of swipe pages and get a copy of their landing page tool. And you just pay once to have a lifetime account. And it's really inexpensive. I think it's $49 for a lifetime account. So I highly recommend that if you do not have something, a tool to create these kinds of landing pages,
this is basically a no-brainer to sign up and get this lifetime account. And then the third one that is new, that I've also talked about a little bit, have not used this one a lot, but I see some potential here is the groove funnels tool and that is coursecreatorshq.com/groovefunnels. And it also right now is available for free to get started.
I'm not sure how long it's going to have free option, but they are building out the suite of tools. And this is one of the ways they're getting people signed up is what their landing page funnel creator. So that gives you a few options as you're trying to put together your landing pages and what you can look for in the different tools. I really hope this was helpful for you to hear about what you should be doing with your landing pages.
And have you thinking about, okay, how am I going to put these together in order to create really good freebies and build my email newsletter? So thank you so much for listening this week. I hope this was helpful for you and to get all of the links that we talked about. There were quite a few in here this time go to coursecreator hq.com/15
that's coursecreator hq.com/15. And thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you being in my audience and connecting with us. It is means a lot to me and I appreciate you subscribing so that as we build the list, it helps the software tools like apple podcasts. They will share us more, the more subscribers we have. So I really,
really appreciate it when you take the chance to subscribe you think today and could take two minutes to review us on apple podcasts and give us a five-star review. That would be Fantastic. So thanks for listening. I appreciate you and I hope you have a fantastic week and we will talk again next time.