Optimizing Opt-ins and Lead Generation

Darren: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 99 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. Today, I have a special treat for you. It is an interview with Tim Paige from LeadPages. 

LeadPages is a great tool that we use on ProBlogger. I’ve mentioned it numerous times in previous podcasts. I’ve had Tim on my list of people that I wanted to interview for quite some time now. His role at LeadPages is conversion educator, which sounds a little unusual, but he is fantastic teaching people how to get better conversions on their website. I think this is something that us as bloggers need to learn a whole heap more about.

LeadPages do have an offer for you today which we would love you to checkout. It’s at leadpages.net/problogger. We’ll talk about that in the podcast. Whether you take that offer or not, there’s a  whole heap of value in today’s episode. 

Tim talks about his Reverse Value Bomb strategy for getting more opt-ins for your site as well as using a little strategy called content upgrades which is something that we’ve seen a number of bloggers using incredibly effectively to increase the number of opt-ins on their site. He also talks a whole heap about some of the emerging trends for online marketing that we really need to be paying attention to as bloggers.

Check out the following interviews. It goes for about 40 or so minutes and has a whole heap of great content. I will say right up front that we are an affiliate for this particular product. It is a product that I’ve been paying for some time now, and we’ve been using on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. In fact, if you check out our show notes, you all have seen one of LeadPages products for quite some time now. There’s a little yellow button at the bottom of all of our show notes which is a LeadPages tool. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99. 

Let’s get into today’s interview with Tim Paige. Good day, Tim Paige. Nice to talk to you.

Tim: Oh, man. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Darren: Yeah. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been wanting to have a chat with you and to talk about LeadPages, landing pages, for a while now. We do get a lot of questions about it from ProBlogger. It’s great to have you on. 

I was just looking at your bio. You’re the conversion educator. I never heard of that title before at the LeadPages. I wonder if you can just fill in the gaps with what in the world that is and also, how you got into that. Give us a little bit of a backstory in a couple of minutes if you can. I was getting into that point, in case anyone wants to be a conversion educator themselves.

Tim: No problem. It’s kind of a made-up title. That’s the fun part about it. What it means is that, my job is to take everything we’ve been learning as a company over the past few years and just share that information with other people so that they can apply those same things in their business. I speak at live events all over the place. I host our podcast, ConversionCast, which we ran about 150 episodes now (which is really cool), and I host our webinars. In fact, I’ve done, as of today, over 450 webinars in the last two years.

I got here in a really weird way. I was a professional touring musician for about seven years. I traveled all over the country, got signed to a record label, did all that stuff, but was living on $5 a day. Paying the bills, the rent, and all those things is tough to do on $5 a day. We would come home, everybody would go scramble to get a job at Dunkin Donuts, gas station, or whatever. I would always get sales jobs. I was really good at it. You could make a lot of money really quickly. When I left, I always had a job when I came back because if you’re good at selling, you can work anywhere. 

I really got deep into the sales psychology thing. One day, I felt like I was ready for a different way of life. I’ve had enough of constantly being out there spending 12 hours a day selling stuff. I stumbled upon Pat Flynn’s website, The Smart Passive Income, and I started to learn everything I could about online marketing. The beautiful thing is sales psychology and marketing psychology hold hands together. It’s the same thing just spread out widely. That led me to the path of podcasting, blogging, and all this stuff.

I was introduced to Clay by John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire. From there, it was just magic. I’ve been with them ever since.

Darren: It’s amazing how these things evolved, isn’t it? One thing does lead to another or end up in a very different place.

Tim: Yeah. A series of a few little, some would say, luck. I would say partial luck, a series of lucky steps and here we are.

Darren: Yeah. I’m a big believer in luck. That’s a whole other topic. We probably will get ourselves distracted if we go down that path, so that’s great. 

Whenever I ask my audience, when I’m interviewing someone, I do ask some of the audience on our Facebook page for questions that they want to throw at podcast guests. There were quite a few about LeadPages and landing pages. One of the things I picked up, I was a little bit surprised by it, having people actually want definitions and explanations on really basic stuff. That’s where I want to start today. 

I got this question from Warren. He said, “Landing pages get talked about a lot on blogging, podcasts, as though everyone already understands their purposes, and where they fit into the whole picture.” He says that he’s been spending a long time over the last couple of years getting his head around blogging, but once he explained where a landing page ends, if you want to talk about LeadPages as well, it fits into the blogging approach. Particularly, he says, “What can you do with a product like LeadPages that you can’t do on his own WordPress site?” I got the sense that he’s doing his own landing pages already (or a version of them) using a page on WordPress.

Tim: That’s a great question. Great series of questions. We’ll define what a landing page is but before I do that, one thing that’s important to understand is that in this age of access to everything online, we are just completely overloaded with choices, options, and information. Our brains just explode every time we go online. When people have all of these choices, it can be really difficult to make any decision, any choice at all.

You, as the blogger, as the reluctant marketer (that’s what we are), one of your primary functions is to take away that confusion, take away that over stimulus of options. A landing page is just a page designed to do that. It’s a page that is focused on getting the visitor to that page to do one particular thing.

When most people refer to a landing page, they’re talking about an opt-in page designed to get somebody to give you their email address. A landing page could be a sales page. It could be a subscribe-to-my-podcast page. 

The key thing to understand about a landing page is it is really designed to get somebody to do one thing. That’s really needed in this world of craziness. That said, it’s a great question. “Why wouldn’t you just create a page on your own?” You could absolutely do that. 

The difference where LeadPages come in, LeadPages is a software tool that has been built from the ground up based on billions of points of data about what gets people to give you their email address, what gets people to register for a webinar, what gets people to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Everything in LeadPages is based on that. What it does for you is it is a whole compilation of tools, but the most well-known one is LeadPages itself which are landing pages, sales pages, et cetera, all built based on those points of conversion. You can go in there and in five minutes, have a landing page that has been tested across 40,000 customers, and proven to get incredible results. 

You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to go out there and throw up a landing page and hope it works. It’s just already been tested and proven for you. That’s the main reason why you would want to use that. Usually, LeadPages is supposed to make something yourself.

Darren: Yeah. That’s exactly our experience at ProBlogger and in Digital Photography School. We built our own landing pages for over 10 years using WordPress pages which, initially, I hacked together myself. I would get my developers to do it. I invested significant money into getting a team to build them specifically for us. Using a tool like LeadPages is just so much quicker. It’s not just exactly taking the template and just using it out of the box, but to adapt to it, change the colors, and that type of thing so quickly is a very powerful thing.

You mentioned a couple of them already. Talk us through some of the different types of pages a blogger might use. You’ve got an opt-in landing page but what are some of the other ones you see bloggers are particularly using?

Tim: Two that I recommend to every blogger, that opt-in landing page but also the webinar registration page. I know that a lot of folks who just love to write can’t stand being behind the microphone. I totally get that. I’ve got many friends that feel that way. But a webinar is such an incredible way to connect within an audience that’s only used to seeing what you’re doing in text format. It’s a way to really show your personality like who you are, shine, and of course, we found that they convert really well. That’s one thing I would recommend.

Another page that I would encourage bloggers to have and focus on is your actual home page. I think a lot of people think that in order to be a blogger and have a successful blog, your homepage needs to display your five most recent posts. Really, the best marketers in the world have figured out that every page on your website is a landing page. That first connection people get with you, if the first thing they experienced is you say, “Hey, here is something that will help you. Some guide, a checklist, a worksheet, designed to help you. If you’re looking to accomplish this goal, you should get this guide. Just send in your email address and we’ll send it to you. If you’re not interested in that, just click here and you could check out the latest blog post.”

That has proven to be really, really effective for a lot of bloggers in the world both specifically focusing on blogging, and in the world of blogging as a part of an overall business marketing strategy.

Darren: I’m totally on board with all of that. Even as you’re talking, I’m looking through some of the templates that you do have in there. You have thank you pages, launch templates, sales templates, webinars ones, upsell ones. There’s a whole variety of things there. It’s amazing how many different types now we’re starting to see. Really creative stuff from bloggers as well.

The other thing I loved about the LeadPages products is you’ve got the different tools as well. LeadPages is just one of those things that you’ve got. Can you run us through LeadBoxes, LeadLinks, and LeadDigits as well? I think there are applications there for bloggers, too.

Tim: Absolutely. LeadBoxes is my favorite thing that LeadPages has ever made. We’ve got a lot of tools but I think LeadBoxes is the fastest way, especially for a blogger, who can grow his or her email list. LeadBoxes are a pop-up opt-in form that’s triggered when somebody clicks on a link, a button, or an image. I know a lot of people will say, “I’ve heard that in traditional marketing wisdom, the more steps you give somebody, the less likely they are to actually give you their email address.” 

A lot of times in history, that’s proven to be true, but we tested this particular concept. The idea of not having an opt-in form visible on the page until somebody clicks something and asks for it. We tested that across 35,000 LeadPages customers, and saw an average conversion rate increase of 32%. So, 32% more people give somebody their email address when they didn’t have an opt-in form visible on the page which is pretty amazing. 

That’s what LeadBoxes was. Was it okay if I shared a little tactic that I would recommend every blogger to start doing? I get really excited about this because everybody I talked to that’s like, “Oh, what is that?” Then they start doing it. I get an email not two weeks later, they’re like, “My list has grown.” It’s a concept called a content upgrade. More and more people know about this. Some people called it different things; I’ve heard many different names for it.

The content upgrade, what it is, every time you publish a blog post, you also include a LeadBox. If you’re not using LeadPages, you could just use a regular opt-in form. You have an opt-in form that gives away something that you made specifically for that blog post. A great example, I’m a new homeowner. About a year ago, we bought our first house. Now I want to know how to do everything—how do I build this? How do I make that? 

I was reading a post about how to build a wooden picnic table. It’s a really interesting post and broke everything down. At the bottom of the post, it said, “Okay, ready to build your picnic table? Enter your email address below and you can download a PDF checklist of all the materials you would need to build that picnic table. That way you can just print it out and take it with you to the hardware store. You won’t forget any of the stuff you needed.” That is so brilliant because if you’re reading that post, you are clearly going to want that thing. You’re reading that post, it’s relevant, it’s specific to that topic of the blog post.

The beautiful thing is, the highest converting content upgrades that we ever seen are checklists. It takes all of 30 minutes to make a really nicely designed checklist just even using Word, Pages, or whatever app you’re using. It takes nothing. You have this really effective giveaway and in exchange, people give you their email address. That is the number one thing that grows our list at LeadPages.

Darren: This is something we’re actually preparing some content for ProBlogger on. I can’t emphasize enough how well it works. One of the first people I saw was Amy Porterfield. She does it with every podcast. I was interviewed by her. She actually came to me and said, “Can I use three of your blog posts, put them into a PDF, and use that as the opt-in for that particular post?” Every podcast she does, she doesn’t even need to create that content. I created it for her. I just thought that it brought a lot of life to me as well-being on her podcast. Really think about what extra thing can you add, give away as part of an opt-in. It works brilliantly. 

This is a big shift that’s happening in the blogosphere at the moment. People are moving away from the site-wide opt-ins to not just category-specific opt-ins which is a better thing but post-specific opt-ins. Great tip there, Tim. Really love that.

Tim: Just to toss that other thing out there. For those of you out there who feel like you don’t have any time to create that kind of thing, you already spend a lot of time in your blog post, and in all the other things that you’re doing, I totally get that. I’ll give you something that is not quite as effective as something new and specific in custom. If you still want to implement the content upgrade tactic, what you can do is take the same text that’s already in the blog post that they’re reading, put it into a PDF, and offer it to download.

There’s this weird psychology where people, when they download something, they feel like it has a higher value. People will want to download that. If you need a way to position it, right up at the top of the post, say, “Short on time but still want to read this post? Enter your email address and we’ll send you a copy of it so you can read it when you’ve got a few minutes.”

Darren: Yeah. It’s a tactic I’ve seen in […] from […]. If you look at his blog, every post on his blog has the option to get a PDF version, and he sells that as you can print it. It becomes a printable version of his post that is behind the opt-in. It’s a very simple thing and just so easy to do. Like you said, it probably won’t convert quite as highly as something else. They haven’t yet got but it’s an easy way to do it. It would be hard to create that PDF. 

You’ve talked about LeadBoxes. We actually use the LeadBox on the ProBlogger show notes. If you check out problogger.com/podcast/99 (which is today’s show notes), you’ll see right at the bottom of the show notes, a little yellow button. I need to redesign it. It’s a little bit ugly at the moment. It is a LeadPages LeadBox. It converts higher than any other opt-in we got on that site.

You also got LeadLinks?

Tim: Yeah. LeadLinks is a tool that (I think) a lot of people had a hard time understanding which is okay. It’s a tool that allows you to insert a link in an email where when somebody on your email list clicks on that link, they are automatically added to another list or registered for a webinar. There are three main reasons why people use this. You can use it for a lot of things, but the main things that people use them for, one is segmentation. If you want to get people into different groups or buckets in your audience based on who they are, what they’re interested in, or demographics, you can use LeadLinks and just say something like, “Click on the link below that speaks to you. You are a <insert demographic here>. You are a <insert demographic here>.” They’ll click that link, and they’re automatically added to that other list. 

One of my favorites is for webinars, specifically. You’ve already got these people on your list but now you want them to join your webinar. You can say, “Here are the details. If you want to join me and reserve your spot, just click the link below, and you’ll automatically have your spot held.” They click the link and they registered.

If you’re looking for a way to use that to quickly grow your list, if you have any partners that you work with whether they’re affiliate partners or just friends that help you promote, and you help them promote, you can give somebody else your LeadLink. If they email their audience with your LeadLink, anybody from their audience who clicks on that link will be automatically added to your list. That’s the power of LeadLinks.

We’ve got a lot of things coming out. The other one that’s really worth talking about, too, is LeadDigits. It’s our newest tool. It’s a tool that allows you to collect opt-ins via text message. There’s a lot of uses for it but my favorites are if you do any public speaking at all, it’s tough to get people on your email lists from the stage. But, if you say something along the lines of, “Hey, I’d like to give you my slide deck so you don’t have to frantically scribble notes. Just text Tim’s slides to the phone number 33444,” or whatever the number is.

When they send that text, they get a response that says, “Okay. What email address should we send the slides to?” They text back with their email address and now they’re added to your list. That’s great for podcasts. We do it on our podcast ConversionCast. We invite people to our webinar using LeadDigits. It’s great for YouTube videos. It’s really great if you do banners or billboards or business cards. It’s just another way to be able to reach out to people in a place that is typically, even if you’re using mobile responsive websites and landing pages, the mobile device is still the best thing that people are used to doing on a phone is texting. It should be calling but it’s texting. So, make it easy, let them do what they’re used to doing on the mobile device, and have them text to opt-in.

Darren: For sure. I think, particularly as a podcast, people are often driving. They’re often doing other things. “I can’t go to a link. I can’t type in the details.” But if you can get them to text which they probably shouldn’t be doing either, it’s so much easier to get someone to text than to go on, and jump through 10 hoops.

Karen actually asked a great question particularly for those that are starting out. She says, “I’m setting up a new website. The design and content are going to take me some time to put together. Can I use LeadPages in the interim to build up my list?” I think that’s a great use for it. What do you think?

Tim: That’s a fantastic, fantastic, question. The answer is yes, absolutely. Of course, I’m going to say you should absolutely use LeadPages for it. Even if you’re not, if you’re not using LeadPages for whatever reason, I would encourage you the first thing you should do in business—the thing I wished I did when I first started my first business—is to grow your list. Start by growing your list.

The best way to do that is to have a simple landing page that has some kind of giveaway that speaks to the target audience that you’re going to have. You have an idea of what you’re going to blog about. You have an idea of your topic. Who’s somebody that’s going to read your blog? What’s the pain point or frustration or problem that they have? I recommend that first lead magnet—the thing you give away to get them to give you their email address. I recommend that the first one be a simple list of tools. Maybe one page that lists some tools and resources that you use to accomplish whatever it is that you’re going to talk about in your blog. That can be books, apps, websites, resources. Anything that helps them quickly accomplish a goal.

Yes, I would definitely encourage you to do that. You can get your domain, whatever domain you want, and link that to a LeadPages landing page. Just direct them there. Just to explain the thinking as to why you would want to do that because I’ve had many people say to me, “Wait a minute, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to have a landing page up before I even have a blog?” 

Think about it this way, if you’re going to open a local pizza shop, and you were given two options. The options were if you go open your doors, you can have crickets. Just open the door and there’s nobody there. You’ve got to go out and find your customers. Or you can open your doors to a line around the block of people ready to get your pizza. Obviously you would pick the second option. You want that line around the block.

When it comes to a blog or an online business, it’s harder to conceptualize that line around the block but growing an email list before you ever launch that, that’s your line around the block.

Darren: Yeah, that’s just a great strategy. The other thing you can do in a similar vein is if you’re developing a product and you haven’t yet got that product ready. Why not set up a LeadPage for that particular product? You may have an ebook coming. Set up a page, give a little bit of way like the first chapter, checklist, or something like that so that when you’re ready to launch that product, you got people who have specifically put their hands up and said, “I’m interested in this particular topic.” 

I’ve actually seen one blogger. I can’t remember who it was. She said, “I’ve had three LeadPages for three different products and then developed the one that got the most sign-ups.” She actually used it as part of her research for which product to create.

Tim: Yeah. I was just going to recommend that. That’s the other thing. If right now, the thing that you’re creating is a blog, and you don’t know what your product is going to be, a great way to do it is just to talk to your audience. You’ll hear many people tell you, “Yeah.” It doesn’t count until people vote with their wallets. I agree. You shouldn’t invest a ton of time and money until somebody has actually opened their wallets and said, “I’m ready to pay for it.” That being said, you’ve got to start somewhere. What a great place to start by reaching out and saying to a few people who have subscribed, “Hey, what’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now?”

If you could wave a magic wand and make something happen, what would that thing be that could help you with that? If it was a tool or a training or a coaching thing, what would you want to get out of that? Now, suddenly, people are telling you. It’s a starting point.

Darren: Yeah. There are so many ways that you can use this stuff. 

I’d like to shift our attention just to lead generation a little bit more. This is just one of the things that you can do with the landing page. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any best practices. Anything new that people are using (whether it’s using LeadPages or not) for growing your email subscribers. I know you interview a lot of marketers in your podcast. What’s the latest thing that people are doing?

Tim: I have to say the biggest thing right now that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people in terms of actual list building is something that scares a lot of people, but I’m going to bring it up because I think it’s important. It’s something that we refer to as a Value Bomb landing page. We actually call it a Value Bomb Reverse landing page. The idea behind this being that you create something of massive value. I’m talking tons of content. The  thing that actually does take a long time to create. People will tell you to go out and create something quickly that’s short and easy. You hear me say that all the time. I definitely recommend it.

Once you’ve got that and you’ve got those content upgrades growing, you’ve got that landing page that’s giving away a simple one page PDF, then you can focus on something that’s your big lead generator. The big thing that you create once you put a bunch of time into it, you put it out there in the universe, and it’s constantly getting you a slew of leads.

If you need an example of this, Michael Stelzner published his every year at Social Media Examiner this report. It’s like the year-end social media report. He does a ton of research. It’s this big, huge, massive thing. He gets a ridiculous amount of leads from doing this. Yes, it takes a lot of time, but he has quite a successful blog, and part of it is because he put in that time and effort to do that.

We do the same thing. We actually have three of them. I’ll tell you how we do it, he does it a little bit differently. Ours is a little bit different but this is something I’m seeing more and more people do. What you do is if you want to do this in written format, that’s fine. You can create a big report and put a couple of pages of the report up for free. If they want to get the whole thing they opt-in for it. That’s a great way to go. The most effective way I’ve ever seen is if you can bring yourself to do a video. I say it like that because I can’t stand doing a video, I’m an audio guy, I’m also a voice actor. I love being in the booth and I’d rather not have a camera but I totally understand that we’ve tested this over and over and over and the video’s important. 

What we encourage you to do is to create two to three hours worth of videos. Sounds crazy but trust me. You can break them up to 10 or 15 videos. What you do is put all those videos up on one landing page for free. Right there, people can go to the landing page, and they can watch the videos. You can upload them to YouTube or whatever and put each video all on the landing page. 

Take all those same videos, get the audio ripped from those videos, get all the videos transcribed. Create a couple of checklists for infographics or something that can go along with the videos and zipped all of that—all those videos, all that stuff, into one file, and make it available for downloads. But in order to download all that stuff, people have to opt-in. They’ve got to give you their email address. 

People say, “Why would you opt-in for that? You can just go back to the page and see the videos.” We’re talking hours worth of content. It’s very rare for somebody to go to the page and go, “I’ve got three hours to kill.” That doesn’t ever happen for me. You get there and you see all that content. It looks like a ton of value. Maybe you watch a few minutes of the first video then you’re like, “I’m going to download this.” Again, it speaks to that power of possession we want to have something on our hard drive. It feels like something that has more value. That one tactic alone has generated over 25,000 new emails subscribers for us in six months.

Darren: Wow, that’s fantastic. This is a trend I’m noticing more and more. You mentioned it before not actually having the form on the page. You wait until people are ready to give you their email by providing value first. I like the idea you’ve just gone through because everything is there. They don’t have to jump through a hoop to get their content to start with. You create some value. You show people what you can do. You put it all out there. 

They’re driven to want to give you their email, because they want more from you. You proved yourself first. I’ve actually seen this more and more in sales pages as well. People not having a call to action above their fold, which traditionally, you would’ve never done that, but they wait until they’ve proved their value by the top of the sales page actually giving some value, engaging in some ways. I really loved that approach.

Tim: It’s great because with a traditional landing page, that page only benefits both the person visiting the page, and you as the person who put that landing page out there. It only benefits you if they give you their email address. If they didn’t give you their email address, they just went to a landing page, and left. Whereas the Value Bomb Reverse landing page that I was talking about, that gives value either way. If they’ve opt-in, you’ve got them on your list, and they’ve got your whole course and everything. If they don’t, you’re still giving them a bunch of value. They see that you’re willing to give regardless. They see all that value, they learn, they trust you more.

On top of that, there are a lot of other non-email list building benefits. In terms of ranking in the search engines, Google absolutely loves video. If you have a page with 15 videos and you’ve got enough keywords in there—there’s lots of text in there which will most likely give you the keywords that you want, that is a landing page that can rank. This is unheard-of. Your typical landing page will not rank in Google, but this page that is so valuable is likely to rank. Also, it’s very shareable. This is a whole free course. 

The stuff that people charge you $1000 or $2000 for, you’re giving it away. That’s very shareable. People are very likely to share that on social media. We know that because about half of the people that opt-in on our Value Bomb Reverse squeeze pages came as a result of somebody sharing the Value Bomb Reverse squeeze page with them. It’s really amazing.

Darren: Yeah. One Of the things we’re tying on ProBlogger—it should be live by the time this podcast comes out—is trying to create value that keeps on giving. I think a lot of the opt-ins I’ve seen have the most success. Don’t just give someone something straight away that has a cycle to them. The one that we’re—I think I’m allowed to talk about it—giving away to our readers over the coming six months is we’re going to give you six months worth of ideas for blog posts. We’re going to send you an email every month. That gives you another 30 ideas. 

Actually, not only giving value away today. They’ll get one immediately, but they’ll get one in another month which is a reason to keep subscribed. I think a lot of people give away an ebook.  These people just unsubscribe from the list because they don’t want anything else that’s coming. So, building that anticipation. I’m almost wondering with the Value Bomb approach, if you build a part two coming next month or there’s part three coming the month after, where building that anticipation may actually explode that even to a further level?

Tim: Yeah. It could be an interesting thing to try. What we’ve done is after that, we know that if they’re downloading that whole program, that whole course, it’s a little bit of a commitment. They’re committing to even though we know we downloaded lots of stuff and never watched it. It’s a commitment at least at some level for them to commit to learning from you and saying, “Hey, this is something that I want help with.” 

What we do is the first email that they get after we deliver that free file invites them to a webinar. We can take them to that next step and say, “Come on with us. Get to know us a little bit. Spend some time with me because I’m the one that’s on the webinar.” That’s one way. Then they automatically, every three days after that, get a follow-up course. We’ve got three of them right now. They get a follow-up course that comes every three days that is related to the topic of that thing.

Even if they don’t ever watch the thing they downloaded, they’re getting more free stuff that is specific to what they’re interested in. That keeps them engaged, keeps them going. We found that by about email number four, most of the people that will buy, will buy by email number four.

Darren: Let’s flip it around a bit. What are some of the most common mistakes you see bloggers or other marketers are making, particularly with their email opt-in landing pages? 

Tim: One thing is not really having an offer at all. It’s nice enough to say, “Subscribe for updates.” But if you think about your own email inbox, do you need another email with updates? I’m not saying that you should not use this. That’s great because there will be some people that genuinely want updates. We use it at LeadPages. I use it on ConversionCast. Many people that I know, that is their only opt-in. It’s the only way that they’re getting new subscribers. The majority of the people (unfortunately) will not be interested in updates. You need to give them some incentive. We’ve talked about a whole bunch of them in this episode. I would say that’s the biggest mistake.

The second biggest mistake that people are making is one of two things. They’re either having a landing page that is thrown together based on a couple of things. There’s a little headline, maybe a little image of something, then an opt-in form. Believe it or not, your landing page—the design, the layout, the structure, everything, has a really big impact on whether or not people opt-in. We love to think that if we create something that’s compelling, that people will just opt-in because that thing is compelling. It’s not about the landing page.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. You really do have to have something that really makes people want to opt-in for that thing that they should be wanting to opt-in for anyway. That’s where LeadPages come in. The other side is I studied copywriting for a long time. We learn all these copy reading tactics. What words get people to opt-in, what words get people to buy. Those things are good. It’s great to learn that stuff. What I find is that people end up writing this copy that has nothing to do with their audience. They’re just using emotional keywords and not speaking the language of their audience. 

I used an example every time I talked about this in a webinar. It does not come up every webinar but I once saw a comic book shop. I’m a huge comic book fan. I love comic books. I saw a comic book shop’s website. Their opt-in form looked like an Internet marketer opt-in form. I can’t even remember the exact text but it was very buttoned up and very professional kind of stuff. I was like, “We’re talking to comic book fans here.” If I were to design that, that opt-in form would say something like, “Hey, you want to up-level your comic book wisdom? Enter your email address, and we’ll teleport the guide to you.”

Talk to your audience. It’s the biggest thing that you can do to get the most amount of people on your list. If your offer is something that will help them solve a problem and your copy speaks their language, then that’s the one-two punch.

Darren: That’s great. It reminds me of Ed Dale. I don’t know if you know Ed, but I heard him speak last week at a conference. He talked about really making your product but also your copy either a pain reliever or a game creator. Rather than using those emotional words that trigger people to respond to actually write about something is going to relieve pain or create a gain or both (ideally both), more and more that’s the type of copy we’re writing in our sales copy but also opt-ins. That’s pain relievers, game creators. If you can’t do that, why is anyone ever going to subscribe at all?

Tim: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly it. Again, if you’re not speaking the language of your audience, they’re going to assume or at least you’ll find that they’re likely to assume that you don’t really understand them. You don’t understand their problems or what they care about.

Darren: Yeah. I could go for a whole tangent there, but I’m going to resist the temptation. I’ve got two more questions for you. Before I do, I want to ask you about your best-converting page. I want you to think about that. Don’t answer yet. I want something that people can go away and give it a go themselves. Also, what’s next? Emerging trends and all that stuff.

Before I get onto that, I know LeadPagees does have an offer for ProBlogger listeners. This podcast isn’t just about trying to get people to sign up for LeadPages. We want to give you some real value as well. Thank you for delivering that. I do want to put that offer out there for ProBlogger readers. Do you want to just talk us through what you’ve put together for our readers?

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. If you go to leadpages.net/problogger, that’s leadpages.net/problogger, and you sign up for an annual or two-year plan of LeadPages, what we’re going to do is we’re going to give you some really awesome bonuses. The first bonus, we will custom design a one-page resource guide lead magnet. That’s the one-page list of tools that I recommend that you use as a lead magnet earlier. We’re going to design that for you. You just tell us the text you want and our design team will make something that looks really nice that you can give away.

Darren: That’s a fantastic plan […]. Can you do that for us, please?

Tim: Yeah, you got it. That’s one. Then, we’re going to give you a few courses. One is the Landing Page Copywriting Course. This is going to walk you through some of the elements of the best converting copy that we’ve seen. Part of that is speaking to your particular audience and speaking their language. You’re going to learn some of the tips and tricks that we’ve learned over the years as well as how to craft in that course. You’ll also learn how to craft a followup sequence that gets more people to go from new subscribers to buying whatever it is that you’re selling.

The next thing you’re going to get is we’ve really worked hard on our webinars. Webinars are one of our top revenue streams for our company, overall. They’re the second-highest generator of leads for us. Content upgrades are number one, webinars are number two. They’re really important. It’s easy to go out there and try it and just go, “I’m going to do a webinar,” and it doesn’t work. We think that it doesn’t work. 

We’re going to give you a course that we’ve created called the Webinar 2.0. It’s going to walk you through set-by-step how to do webinars. We’ll tell you how to create content, how to layout and script your webinars, how to get people to register, show up, stick around, and buy whatever you’re selling. It’s going to tell you the technology options available. It’s going to tell you how to follow up with your webinars so that you have webinar replays that are always selling for you. It’s a really fantastic course. It was actually the first training I ever did, I ever learned, on how to do webinars.

Next, we’re going to give you something called the Presell Formula. This hearkens back to the old days of our CEO Clay Collins before he started LeadPages. He created this really incredible program that will tell you how to build a list of people interested in a product that you’re thinking about creating. Then, how to talk to them to have them specifically tell you what products they want from you. It’s going to tell you how to pre-sell your product to them so that your audience is funding the creation of your product before you even create it. We’re going to give you that course.

The final bonus (I’m really excited about this) is we’ve worked together with you and your team to create a special template. This template was something we built using the Drag and Drop Builder together. We’re going to be giving people that template which will normally be for sale. We’re going to give that template away. Again, for anybody who buys an annual or two-year plan when you go to leadpages.net/problogger.

Darren: Yeah. There’s a whole heap of great information on that page about all those bonuses as well as some of the questions like, “I’m already a member. Can I get the bonuses?” There are options there for existing LeadPages members. Can I just say that the quality of the content that you guys create, I love the fact that you’re not just getting a tool, you’re actually learning how to use it, and where it fits in the rest of what you need to be doing. I love the fact that LeadPages is very passionate about not only selling their tool which is a great tool in and of itself. Actually, making the tool work so much better because thinking about what to do after you’ve got that in an email subscriber. Thinking about how to use webinars. Even how to create products is something that is just so important for bloggers.

I think as bloggers, a lot of us know about content. We know about how to get readers, hopefully, but how do you actually make that sustainable is so important to get some of these teachings and to use tools like that. Thank you for putting those banners together. I think this ends on the 31st of March. Is that right?

Tim: Yes, I believe so.

Darren: Midnight, Eastern, on the 31st of March. You’ve got a couple of weeks to grab that. We will have a link to that on today’s show notes. It is leadpages.net/problogger.

My last two questions, I wonder if you can give us an example of an opt-in page or is there a template that just works better than any other in the LeadPages templates that you can just talk to a little bit? Maybe talk about why you think it works?

Tim: Yeah. One of my favorite things about LeadPages is that you can actually click one button and it will sort all the templates in order on how well they convert across 40,000 people using LeadPages. Any time you ever want to know what’s working best, you can always do that.

Right now, the template, last I checked and that was a couple of hours ago, the template that was converting the best is called the Modern Webinar page. It’s a webinar registration page. It’s really very, very, simple. It doesn’t include pictures of the presenters. It has a big spot for a headline right at the top. A big headline, a little sub-headline. Below that is a countdown timer that counts down to the webinar because that urgency is important. Below that, there’s the call to action button, some information, and some basic copy of the webinar. It’s very simple but it has just proven to convert with so many different types of audiences. 

I have my theory as to why. I would say the main thing is that it is so simple in a world of complexity. It’s really easy. “Hey, here’s what the webinar is about. Here’s so much time we have left. You better register.”

Darren: Yeah. Simple is definitely the way to go, I think. It’s simple to create, too, although you do need to really learn how to edit and stop yourself going on and on.

The last question, as I’ve mentioned before, you were interviewing heaps of marketers in all kinds of fields. You’ve already given one answer to this. Is something else that you see people doing at the moment that is the next thing that we all need to be thinking about?

Tim: Yeah. I think the biggest thing, the number one trend that I’ve seen—in fact, I’ve had to turn down many guests for our podcast, ConversionCast, because so many people want to talk about the same thing—is the power of segmenting your list. Doing that through learning more, through talking to them more. In this day and age, it’s tough to just have one list, add everybody to the list, and talk to everybody the same way. It’s getting harder and harder to break through the noise that way. There are a lot of really fun and unique strategies for finding out who people are, what they’re looking for from you. 

We’ve even gone as far at LeadPages as to segment our own list by how often people want to be emailed. As opposed to saying, “What do you want to be emailed about?” We’ve said, “How often do you want an email? Every other day? Once a week? Or once a month?” From there, you can find out other things. Learning more about your customers tastes, interests, preferences, who they are, and what they care about, and then marketing to them properly if you emailed based on that, that’s the biggest thing that’s going on right now. We’re learning a lot from diving into that.

Darren: Yeah. It feels overwhelming when you’re just starting out with it. You don’t have to start at that point, although the tools now are getting better and better being able to think ahead in that way as well. 

I really appreciate your time today, Tim. I feel like we could’ve gone in about 20 different directions at times during this podcast. I hope that our listeners have got some real value out of some of those practical things. They can check out leadpages.net/problogger for the offer and today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99 for some further reading and some extra resources that I’ll include on some of the topics we’ve touched on today. Thanks so much, Tim. Where can our listeners find you personally and learn more?

Tim: If they want to reach out to me, I’m always on Twitter. It’s @TimThePaige. You can always hit me up there. Also, I have my public Facebook account but just search for my name on Facebook add me, and I will add you. You’ll get to see me posting much more about comics books than anything else. If that’s your thing, you’ll enjoy it.

Darren: Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, Tim. I appreciate it.

Tim: Thanks, Darren.

Darren: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Tim Paige as much as I did. I was jotting down notes furiously during that podcast; things that I wanted to try out, adapt, and tweak in our own strategy on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I encourage you to go back and listen through that podcast again when you’ve got some more time. We do have today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99. The offer that Tim mentioned does expire on the 31st of March 2016. It’s at leadpages.net/problogger. 

I highly and genuinely recommend LeadPages to you. It’s a tool that we’ve been using for some time now on ProBlogger. It is so easy to use. As I’ve mentioned during the podcast, they genuinely want to help people to not only use their tool and make a profit, but to learn how to use it effectively. That’s what I love about those bonuses that they’ve put together for you. Do check that particular deal out.

The last thing I’ll say is that I know a lot of you do listen to this podcast while driving with your hands full of dishes, ironing, or that type of thing, and […] you can’t get to our show notes right as you are listening to the podcast. If you do happen to get across to those show notes today, do look for that yellow button at the bottom of all of our show notes, and subscribe. In that way, we can send you the show notes every week. You’ll get the ProBloggerPLUS newsletter which is just basically a quick email that I put together personally every week. Just a summary of any new podcast that we published, any new blog post that we publish, and anything else that’s happened in the ProBlogger brand where there’s something on our Facebook page or something that I’ve been experimenting with on Periscope, Facebook Live, or something else.

Look out for that yellow button on our show notes and subscribe. You will get all the updates and all of the links to the show notes so that you don’t have to remember to check them out later on as you are driving or that type of thing.

Thanks for listening today. I look forward to touching base with you in the next couple of days in Episode 100 of the ProBlogger Podcast. What am I going to do about it? I don’t know yet but hopefully, it will be one where we connect again. Thanks for listening.