In this episode, host Julie Hood shares exactly what a sales page (or sales letter) is and how a course creator should use it. She also shares the 5 biggest mistakes she sees course creators making when they are trying to sell their online course.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares exactly what a sales page (or sales letter) is and how a course creator should use it. She also shares the 5 biggest mistakes she sees course creators making when they are trying to sell their online course.
LINKS MENTIONED
If you enjoyed this episode, you'll love the full course on sales letters. For a few more days, you can jump in at HALF PRICE and get all the templates, worksheets and fill-in-the-blank pages you need to create your best sales letter for only $97. Get all the details here.
RELATED EPISODE
Episode 015: Landing Page Design for Course Creators
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Here are two examples for you to compare a sales page and a shopping cart page from a company called Centerpointe which sells courses and meditations to improve peoples' lives. They have a product called "Youthful Mind":
The Biggest Mistakes Course Creators Make:
1. Not spending enough time on their headline.
2. Focusing on the content (also known as the features) and not enough on the benefits.
3. Not breaking up the text enough.
4. Not enough Buy buttons.
5. Not enough "transitions" to keep people reading.
COME VISIT!
Sign up for my free course Is My Course Idea Any Good? here.
Clubhouse
Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood.
CourseCreatorsHQ.club – to join the waitlist for my upcoming Clubhouse course
Website
https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/CourseCreatorsHQ
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/CourseCreatorsHQ
Twitter
https://www.Twitter.com/CourseHQ
Hey, Hey, so excited that you are here today. I'm sitting here with my make things happen mug, and today let's make some things happen with the sales pages for your course. Let's talk about what the biggest mistakes are that people are making and to make sure that you don't make them. So 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. So this topic is one of those that can really, really help make your core sales take off. If you can do a good job with your sales pages, you will be pulling in the students who are perfect for you. So before I jump into some of the content today,
I wanted to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the sales page design secrets course that I just put together. And depending on what date it is, you might be able to get it for half price. That's at the notes page for this episode. So if you go to coursecreatorshq.com/59, and you can get the link in order to sign up for the entire training.
So if this is helpful today, I'm giving you a sort of sneak peek into the full training. And if you like this, you can get the rest of it, including all of the templates and the worksheets that I've pulled together to make this so much easier for you. So let's get to the content and then if you really like it, make sure you go to coursecreatorshq.com/59 to get the link to the full course at half price for a few more days. Okay. So what exactly is a sales page? And the first thing I want to tell you is that I use sales letter and sales page interchangeably. Not everyone else does that, but I do. So when you hear me say sales page, or you hear me say sales letter,
it's the same thing for this episode. And basically a sales page describes your course, and it has a one very specific goal in mind. And that is the person who is reading is invited to either purchase your course or not. It's a very yes or no black or white sort of page. And it's based on a strategy called direct response marketing. And the goal of direct response marketing is to get one of two responses from the person visiting the page yes or no,
sign up or not. You know, it's very black and white. And the reason I mentioned that is because sometimes people will put their sales pages on a landing page that has all kinds of other stuff going on. So there's a whole bunch of menu items at the top where people can go get distracted and go click around and go find out about you and go to your blog.
And when they do that, they leave your sales page and they don't buy. So we don't want to distract them with other things going on. It's a very specific strategy in that. We're just talking about your course and we want to get them to sign up. We want to get a response from them. So in case you're interested, the opposite of direct response
marketing is basically brand advertising, and brand advertising is where you're just trying to create awareness of your brand. So you want your brand to be top of mind and very recognizable, but it's not something we're trying to get someone to actually go buy right now. So for example, if you think about Nike, their swish logo and their Just Do It, slogan is very recognizable and every brand message that they send out,
every commercial, it reinforces that branding in our mind. So the commercial you watch, it might not be sending you directly to a webpage to buy a pair of shoes, but they're, they're trying to get that brand specific in your mind. So that's the difference. And today we're very much focused on the direct response part of this and getting people to sign up or not when they look at the page.
So, and think of it as a letter that you're writing when you're creating a sales page, where you're talking to your potential student directly about your course and specifically about how it's going to help them. Now, the next thing I want to mention is that a sales page is very different from a shopping cart. So some companies will use shopping cart pages instead of sales letters,
and they tend to be more factual on a shopping cart page and a little less emotional, little less full of stories. And I'll put a couple examples in the show notes, at coursecreatorshq.com/59. So you can actually see two examples of this. And you'll notice the sales page is much more factual and, and describes what's in the course and on the shopping cart page.
But then the sales page is a lot more stories, a lot more emotional tugs as you're reading through it. So the sales pages actually tend to be more persuasive and more likely to get people to buy. But sometimes I will have my students start with a shopping cart page because it can be easier to put that together. Initially, if you're really struggling with trying to get a sales page together,
start with more of a basic shopping cart page and then go from there into the sales page part of it. And then this, another question that I get quite often is does your sales page actually have to be texts? Like, is somebody going to read this big, long a sales letter? And no, it doesn't have to be text. Some times people will make them into videos.
And those are called video sales letters, or you'll hear the, the acronym V S L that stands for video sales letter. And sometimes people will use the same sort of messaging in like a webinar training. You can use some of the same content that you're putting into your sales letter. So it's, it's all the content can be shared in multiple different ways,
but regardless, you're trying to get folks to take action. And so remember that as you're doing all of this, your goal is to get the person who's reading to respond and sign up to your course. So every part of your sales page of your sales letter is working toward that end of getting them to sign up. So let's talk about some of the biggest mistakes that course creators often make when they're trying to put together their sales letter.
And the first big mistake that I see them making is that they don't spend enough time on the headline. And the headline is the large text at the top of the sales letter. And it's what grabs their attention and gets them started and gets them reading. And it really is the most important part of your sales page. So my son is a copywriter for an advertising firm,
and he has told me that there were times when he would need to come up with some creative headlines. And so they would tell him, you know, go write 50 or a hundred headlines. And he said, mom, you know, the first five or 10 are pretty straightforward and kind of boring. But then once you get past that and you keep making yourself come up with more and more ideas,
they get more and more creative. So I want you to make sure you spend lots of time on the headline and making it not the name of your course. That's not what we want our headlines to be. The headlines need to be action-oriented and they need to talk about what the result is that you're going to get for your student. So there's a lot more to it.
And we put all this in the course along with a whole bunch of templates and power words that people can use, but I'm really having the students in there spend a lot of time focusing on their headlines, because what's going to grab the attention of your students and get them reading. Okay. The second mistake that I see people doing a lot with their sales pages is where they focus on the content of the course.
You know, it has five modules and 15 lessons, and we're going to be talking about X, Y, and Z. And it's, those are also known as the features of the course. So they're not super persuasive. And yes, you probably do want to include that further down in your sales letter. People are wondering, you know, how big is this course?
What am I going to get that sort of thing. But especially at the top, you want to focus more on the benefits, the results, the transformation that your course is providing. So make sure inside your sales page, that you're spending some time talking about those and sort of the layout that we like to use is that at the beginning of the sales letter,
you talk more about the problem so that your student who is reading through this recognizes that, you know, the problem that they have and they're reading through it. And if you have questions, they're going, yes, this is me. Yes. This is me. Yes, I, this person knows what I'm talking about. And then you're jumping more into the benefits of how you are going to help them with the results.
So the modules and the logistics of the course should be much, much further down in the page at the top. You want to focus on those emotions because most of us buy with our emotions and then we use our logic to justify it. So get them started with the emotional side of how your course is helping. Okay. Mistake number three is not breaking up the text enough.
So one really big, long sales letter. It is kind of boring and you could lose people along the way. So make sure that you break it up. So you're going to use some sub-headlines throughout with a bigger font, use photos, use bullets, use bolding. All of those things make the page much, much more interesting. And if you look back at the pages in the notes,
on the notes for this episode, I'm going to give you two sample pages and you look at that sales page and you can see how they've done this very strategically placed sub-headlines and photos to make the page interesting. So this takes us back to that question that I get a lot, Do people actually read these long, long sales pages. And I will tell you for something that they're really,
really interested in, yes, they will. For things that are super high pricey tends to get even more readers, because they want to make sure that they're spending their money very, very well. So they're going to also read, the other thing to remember is sometimes people will just read the sub-headlines. So they're scanning through your sales page and they may not read every single paragraph,
but making sure that it flows nicely and that the sub-headlines make sense. If you kind of scan through them, those will make your page way better than a lot of the ones that are out there. Okay. Mistake number four is not having enough abide buttons on the page. And what I mean by this is as soon as you get through your introductory part of your page,
where you're talking about the problem and the solution that you're providing, as soon as you actually introduce your course, then you want to put a buy button right there and spread out some buy buttons throughout the rest of the page. Because a lot of times there'll be something specific that you say throughout the rest of the page that will get someone's attention. And you want to have it super easy for them to jump over to where they buy.
Right? You know, whichever thing that gets their attention, you know, maybe you have a section with testimonials from other students who have taken your course, and that moves the person over the edge. So you want to have a buy button there and so include more than one buy button, spread them out throughout your sales page so that people can jump in whenever they get the urge,
like, okay, this is what I want. And so there's a button right there for them. And then the fifth biggest mistake that I see people making is the sales letter needs to flow very nicely. And if you don't use enough transitions to keep people reading, then they're not going to keep reading. So we had a whole special section that we added to the course about these are phrases that you can use to help you transition through the different paragraphs and to keep the flow going for the reader.
And that's kind of an advanced sort of topic, but it's really essential to having good copywriting and good writing to your sales page is making sure that the paragraphs transition into each other and keep people reading into the different pieces of the puzzle. So let me recap very quickly, the different five different mistakes. So you can make sure that you don't make these.
The first mistake is not spending enough time on your headline. So come up with lots of ideas for your headline. Number two is focusing too much on the content or the features of the course, the logistics, and not enough time on the emotional benefits to your students who take your course. Number three is not breaking up the text enough. So make sure you've,
you've got lots of sub-headlines and photos and bullets to, to keep it interesting. Number four is not enough buttons spread throughout the page so that people can jump in whenever they ready. And then number five is not enough transitional phrases in your sales page to keep people reading, to keep them going through, to get to the next paragraph. So I hope this was helpful as a very,
very brief introduction to what your sales pages could be and how you can make them even better to help sell your course. And if you're interested in the full training on this, I'd love to have you join us right now. It's on I half price sales you can get in for only $97. Atcoursecreatorshq.com/59. That'll be the notes for this page.
And I'll put the training up at the top so that you can sign up and jump in with us. And I can't wait to see what kinds of sales pages you get. So make sure you take an opportunity to send them to me so I can talk about the results that you're getting and how they're working for you. So send them on over. I'd love to see what you're doing and make sure you tell me,
this is from the podcast episode. This is what I came up with so that I can take a look and share them out for you. So thanks so much for listening and subscribing and following our podcast. If you're on apple podcasts, it's those three little dots up at the right where you can click and then say, follow, if you got something helpful from this episode,
I would really, really appreciate a five-star review. They help us get in front of more course creators. So thank you so, so much for listening. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for replying. And let me know what you like and what's helpful for you. So I have a really fantastic week and I hope this episode was helpful. We will talk to you on the next episode of the course creators HQ podcast, take care.