Presented live on Tuesday, Feb 14, 2017 – register for our next tutorials
If you’ve ever tried to persuade others to attend a webinar you’re cohosting or an event with little-known speakers, today’s tutorial is for you. You’ll get a walk-through of a sales page designed to make someone else look good to your audience. You’ll also see the template you can use for that very purpose.
Joanna is writing in Airstory, the beautiful drag-and-drop document platform. [activecampaign]
TRANSCRIPT
We have with us, Sarah and Lance who are here to help you out with any questions you have as we go. You should be able to see my screen right now. I have surprisingly few tabs open right now, which is good. But yeah, I’ll be sharing some stuff with you today about how to write a long form sales page. Not just any long form sales page because the more you write copies the more you realize there are different ways obviously to write different types of material and not just that but like a different audience, a different products, a different sort of “in” that you’re going for and today the “in” we’re going for is around introducing somebody else. And that’s when you’re able to introduce another person … Which I’ll explain more in just a second but when you’re able to do that, you increase your likability. So, if you’re selling somebody else’s solution, you are in a better position for “you” to say great things about them then for them to say great things about themselves.
That’s what this whole template that we’re going to look at today, it’s really a sales page which has been turned into a template you can reuse. That’s what it’s all about, it’s of course there’s really a second part to that and that is a heavy focus on secrets. We will talk about that a little bit but I do want to cover everything off in about 20 minutes, doesn’t give us much time so that’s the point right? Quick tutorials so you can go take what you’ve got and go apply it. Try and make it work in your business, see how it goes, reply to this section, and come back to the next tutorial where you can learn even more.
Okay, cool. So any questions you have please chat them, if there is anything I need to address immediately, Lance is sitting right there he will wave me down like that, I’m sure he’ll have to do lots to get my attention because I’ll be so focused but do chat those over if you are having any audio issues any other technical issues, please just give it a second, see if everything catches up, it’s usually just an internet thing. Give it a little bit of time, a second or two, hit refresh if you have to, which I think is hard to do in the Zoom interface but really for the time being just wait it out and of course Lance or Sarah will take your questions.
All right, so let’s look now at the screen. At the screen you can see, So in here is a sales page that gets some copywriter love, we actually talked with this one in my masterminds recently. It’s selling copy, so of course the copywriters in particular are excited about it but it’s a really really interesting sales page and you can see it right now on the page. I’m just going to really quickly walk you through what’s happening in it without getting too much into details. We’ll get into the details in just a second.
But I mentioned that this sales page that we’re looking at today is all about introducing somebody else, you can build them up without them having to look like their bragging. This is really good for if you’re promoting somebody else in your webinar especially in a paid webinar or a paid online event where people need to know a lot about them and it can help for somebody they already trust to tell them nice things about this person that they’re supposed to be spending lets say an hour with on a webinar or an online event.
It helps in conferences, you have a keynote speaker. This sales page format is something that increasingly even software businesses are turning toward. We are seeing more software businesses testing … Not necessarily a sales page that looks just like this one, there’s some things going on here that a lot of us don’t really want to go or wants to use, like you’ll see some highlighting. I’m not suggesting that you have to follow all of the formatting here, what we’re going to talk about is the messaging is what’s going on that makes the page like this so compelling. Okay, so again using it for events or anything where you’re not selling yourself, but your selling somebody else to your audience that trusts you.
So this one opens up just by pulling people in with some pretty typical attention grabbing sort of messaging around “Do you know, that you can do this simple thing to get this great result,” and matching a lot of what they’re already thinking when they arrive on the page and that’s really happening in this opening hook that we have here “What’s going on here?” in the beginning and then we very quickly on this page, so for you, if you were to use a sales page like this … You would open with a hook that obviously pulls people in, in this case, it’s all about matching what we know they’re already doing to try to achieve a goal and just slightly modifying that, so that the reader gets intrigued by the possibilities of making small adjustments to their work in order to get big results and make it seem very easy and that’s all that’s happening with this opening hook here.
Then we very quickly get into introducing this person, critically without saying who the person is. So we go on, actually I’m highlighting on the screen right now because this is a tutorial we’re gonna flying through some things but there will be a recording that you can always watch again afterwards. We are moving swiftly through into this place where we still … These four paragraphs are starting to talk about this person who got this expertise that you should sign up for a course for in this case.
It could be for webinar for you or again a conference or whatever it might be. We haven’t even yet heard in four paragraphs and we’re seven paragraphs in, we haven’t heard yet who this person is. We still don’t know by the time we get into this first head if you don’t write sales pages. Just for process, still working through it building them up some social proof, we’re seeing influencer name throughout really cool big names we are still moving towards a place where we … I think we’re pretty far down by the time I actually see his name, here we go … All the way down here, so we’ve already had a free opt in offer before we even, we passed through paragraphs before we’ve actually heard who this person is. By the time you get to the reveal that this person you should listen to , this person you should learn from is … By the time we’ve actually figured out his name it’s been so built up in our minds that we just cannot help but want to … Okay great! This guys sounds amazing how do I get inside his head.
So that’s the first part of this sales page is building up that person with all sorts of social proof, all sorts of like actual examples, stories … You’ll see it when you again go through this again afterwards we’ll show you the template right away but all those great stories that pull you in and then there’s a switch. So, once you come to understand who this person is … Knowing that he’s a person that you probably have never heard of in your life but now you know whole bunch about him and you feel like you’re “in” on a secret like this ten guy is a secret. Now we start in on a whole bunch of other secrets. So we switch from building up this you know primary secret that is … Who is this person we’re supposed to care so much about and then we swap over to actually getting more into these other secrets that will tell you “I’m taking advantage of this course or this offer or this course.”
So it moves through … I’m gonna go over the templates right away so you can actually see how this would work for you but we now were just building through all of the secrets down the page and we’re finally getting into the offer and the close to have your money back guarantee and all of those great things really simple call to action orders. You’re so soaked by this point you get here. If this is something that intrigued your reader by the time they get here they really don’t even need the flashy button we have text link that says “click here to order now”.
Not the most optimized copy on the planet but everything in here is very strategic and intentional and then … We finally down at the very bottom, get into what we call the testimonial waterfall. It’s like this cascade of endless amount of testimonials that keeps going and going, so rather than gathering your testimonials through the page, like a lot of people do … Instead of that, we’re just focusing all of this incredible social proof into a single area where the take away is like a mega list which we also talk about the take away is “oh my goodness there’s so many people saying so many good things about this person and the …” It doesn’t even have to be in this case about the training … Some of this about the training, some about the person himself can hear and then we get down to the bottom we have a part that call to action again but again it’s all like very strategic.
So this is … One form of sales page, it doesn’t have to be designed this way. We’re not gonna talk about the design but know that the format, they way it’s actually put together in this like narrative file where it reads like a letter or things that aren’t all over the place like you see a lot of pages. It reads that way intentionally, focusing the reader down the page pulling them line by line down the page. Okay, let’s say you stumbled upon this page and you were like “Okay, I love this” so normally we would put it in a [inaudible 00:09:17] file.
You would like bookmarked it or you take a screenshot and it would go somewhere on your desktop, you’re anything like me or somewhere in Dropbox and one day when you’re writing a sales page you don’t know what to say. You will like, try to remember what that one was called, where did I save that, where did you put that … So instead of doing that, you just highlight just copy the whole thing Select All and then paste it into something else, in our case you paste it into our solution Airstory which is down here. Paste it here, and then go through it and the great copywriters do, copywriters that are productive do this, they go through their favorite [inaudible 00:09:58] and they figure out what’s going on in them and use that as a new starting point for any of the copy that you’re gonna write that’s based on that. So instead of just looking at something you call a Swipe, we want to turn it into a form where we can actually do something with it because what are you gonna do, so what if you got this huge Swipe file that you never look at in your life.
So we did just that we went through this template, the sales page that I pasted in here exactly the same one, we went through it and turn it into a template and then we saved that template as a card that makes it easier for us to reuse the template at any point anytime. So I can go over here, I can find that template that I happen to have existing right here. I can drag that on to the page and I can go ahead and use it any time I want to right a sales page. What you can see here, is everything that we saw before on that control, this secret, this original right here. Everything has been, everything that you should keep as original language is now black or dark dark gray and everything that’s changed is colored and in curly brackets.
So you could take this template then and fill it in, compare it of course also to the original so we kept an original card as well. So at any point you can say “Oh okay, what did they say there, or what does this mean?”. You know, you can get specific outcome by using specific [inaudible 00:11:31] technique, what does that look like in the original, it look like … Have to go to the top [inaudible 00:11:37] you know you can [inaudible 00:11:38] where you’re at by using a certain rather proof foreword. Okay and now I can start filling that in as a copywriter, as a person who is not even a copywriter, right? This is where you just start filling in the blanks and ending up with those persuasion techniques already based in right. It’s already based on a winning framework for putting a sales page together for somebody else.
Sort of like a foreword because it’s like foreword to a book right where somebody else is introducing you so you feel really … Or introducing the authors of that … By the time you actually get to a book, you feel like that’s extra push like “Oh this person got a lot of story I should listen”. That’s why it’s called “The Foreword” from sales page template cause it specifically gets the courses, ebook, conferences and other events where somebody else, not you is the focus.
We go through this, fill it in, compare back in those areas where we don’t quite know. What’s cool here is of course as we get down the page because in this case we’re using Airstory … We once again, wants to place that in the testimonial we can just look up any testimonial we can gather, all of your testimonial, all at once and just start dragging those in to the page so we could replace this and just drag this testimonial in, right here … We could merge that and now we have that testimonial, we can repeat it here and just repeat it with here [inaudible 00:13:07] here who doesn’t want Garry [inaudible 00:13:09] here testimonial, that’s kind of the ultimate testimonial of copywriter.
Okay, so there we have it. So you can start piecing together your sales page this way. Fill in the blanks where you have things that fill in the blanks for you like template testimonial that are already done in advanced. Cool. So, that’s the [inaudible 00:13:31] of it, that is it. That’s the template with the original already there for you to look at as well.
This project … Is we’re gonna be sharing this out with you right away. We are getting to the end of the tutorial itself. So we’re going to share the link to this template with you and if you have an Airstory account you can just add it directly to … Just accept the invitation and this will be process that’s part of your Airstory account at that point. If you don’t have an Airstory account, you can get one and use this project free so don’t worry about “Oh no …” Nope, just accept the invitation to this. Go ahead and use it obviously, we would love to see more more people using Airstory but we just launched it. t’s got some pretty cool stuff built in, we’re gonna have new templates every single week. Basically, every single week going forward and more and more to come.
So how we can use a template to put together a page that is very similar to other pages that are winning as from sales pages and of course another point being there that you can turn any thing into a template and Airstory making your own card and then all of a sudden viola you have got a reusable asset that you can use across any projects especially across teams and things like that. So I am looking for any questions we have, now that we’re at the end of this quick overview of this particular long form sales page templates. I’m seeing some things here, so anything we should pay attention to, Lance? Or are we good?
Lance: We have one question here.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay, so there is something in here from Emily … I’m looking for … I don’t see … I’m just gonna fly through when we start at the end here actually where Mike, says ” I joined a bit late but I hear that people attention span are less in reading, less if that’s not the case then that’s from sales pages do they work well I’m trying to get ideas from selling web design services if you could tell me that they look for cool looking styles.
Yeah, people are they are all [inaudible 00:15:50] really nobody wants to believe that people are going to read that and the reality is that only a percentage of people who visit the page will read this page, right. Only a small percentage of them will, but that’s small percentage can be 10% so if you can get 10% so if you can get 10% of … I will encourage you to put quick tracking and troll mapping on your pages and see. We see with long form sales pages that we still get about 25% of people making all the way to the bottom of the page, we do see them convert very well because it doesn’t, again it doesn’t have to designed like you’re seeing here on the screen.
The point is, is the messaging hierarchy in place, are we taking great like reusable formats such us that headline and the sub head there and all of this [inaudible 00:16:44] that you’ve got. Can you reuse that fill it in with what you need to say and keep based in the part of building that anticipation of that like the secret who this secretive seven figure copywriter is that is at the top of the page, building that up for a long time and then switch over to the other secret. If you can keep that stuff in, keep all of the framework the same and then figure out “Okay how to we optimize the look and feel for our particular audience” but a working mistake honestly is jumping into this idea that people don’t read online or people have people always have low attention span people never read things that don’t interest them, if it interest you, you’re in, this is telling copywriting courses to people who are good copywriters and don’t think they need to be a seven figure copywriter.
This page knows to its audience is, writing to its audience and its some designer show up or consultant shows up it’s not for them, that not who the page is for, should they happen to buy … Okay but we’re not writing with that person in mind but we’re writing to somebody in mind where we know that this is for them and this is going to hook and pull them into the page to keep them reading and actually sells to them. So there’s a lot of different theories on how people do it, don’t engage with contents online but we’ve seen when you just let people look wherever they want to, you’re lucky to have a few person conversion rate. It doesn’t mean you have to have this exact layout but keep the messaging hierarchy the same and the approach and see how it works for your business.
Okay, any other questions … Call in … last week segmenting your email list … Oh this is a separate thing, okay. How would you survey your existing list to tag them, what tool would you use. So that’s the things from this we do, I’m not, I don’t know if we should talk about this right now we can like kinda hold it for the next time but surveying your existing list. I don’t survey my existing list. I send out an email to them if I have a big group of people or even a small group of people and I don’t know who they are like what’s going on in their minds then we send out an email that invites them to click on something and if they click or don’t click then we tag them accordingly. So usually it is, if you do click then they get tagged as such. So, we don’t, I don’t have a strategy for survey your list to segment them but rather take away what we talked about last week and just invite them to identify with something or …
If you’re like, Okay, I think I might have a lot of doctors on this particular list, I’m gonna send them a link to a blog post that’s about how to be a better marketer as a doctor and those two clicks are like neither likely to be either marketer or doctors or both so you would tag them accordingly. If you don’t click, it doesn’t mean they’re not doctors or marketers or both it’s just means they didn’t click so you could keep sending things to them to try to get to the place where you can understand who they are and tag them accordingly.
Okay. Other questions back to this strategy, not the email one cause some of the strategies can be applied to a long form of product sales page. Yeah the idea here is, this is a very specific template which is or a specific for a specific purpose. We will have more templates as we go. So many things that we write. So much business writing that will have different templates as we go, you can modify this but I would say give it a shot since it’s not built for that, it’s built for making a reader believe in somebody else. Building that up and building up the product that they’re selling. If you have affiliates for your products you could say “Hey affiliate take this I’m gonna fill this out” I’m gonna give it to my affiliate and they can use this template for sales emails and sales pages where they’re talking about you and your product so that might be a way to use other products sales page.
But yeah. Hang tight for other ones that we have as well for the long term sales pages. Any other ones that I should address, Lance? Are we good? There’s a few here but I see some at quite a few here but I see answer from Sarah … Looks like to everybody … Some asked what exactly is Airstory, it’s a drag and drop document filter just like you saw, it’s like instead of copying and pasting we’re looking at everything in the Airstory let’s you drag cards into onto the page. That’s essentially what it comes down to which is really good when you write for a living when you do a lot of writing like in the marketing team but if you’re a copywriter it’s not built for it like not list for people who really need to efficient with their writing and [inaudible 00:21:47].
Okay. Awesome, different process for templates plans can get somebody get access to or in a different process for templates?
Lance: Yeah.
Joanna Wiebe: It’s okay. I can just mention it right now. So, a different process for creating template is just like every other card you’ve got so after I went through this particular page and turn it into a template, like replacing things. All I did was highlight everything on the page. Just do all that and then click this, you’ll get two things you can either leave a comment that’s not the point right now or you can just click this and you can highlight the text to card. Then I’m just gonna move this so you can watch this ares right here over the card library and I click that now we get this brand new card that showed up.
It’s got all of that contents in it. So that’s how I turn everything into a template then I give it a title, tag it, cite … It if it’s coming from somewhere else it should say in the case like this then copy clinic like this one is based on by then settle so I put that citation in there so I always know where it came from. Yeah, that’s exactly how to turn anything at any point into a card like from the page. I won’t even get into it because it’s not a Airstory demo we have those on Thursday if you’re interested but yeah it’s one of the biggest parts of what … I’m completely this is my product and that was one of the moments where I was like “Holy crap that’s neat.” So yeah. So we’ll talk about it later but that’s essentially how you do that.
Let’s see … Cool cool … I cannot keep up with all the questions … so I’m going to … If you have anymore questions, we can answer them on twitter @copyhacker so we can answer them on Twitter @air_story where probably you will hear the answer soonest because Sarah is there and I am off in another meeting right away. We have a small team. So also some other things, Sarah is still chatting with everything basically … Everybody. I’ll wrap it up with that then guys. So I think they’ve already chatted out or they will be chatting out the link to invite you to this project in Airstory.
Yeah, I’m glad. Thank you guys. Lots of nice things we’re seeing here so … Do get that link accepted, start using this in Airstory and then next week we’ll have our next tutorial every time we release a template, you’ll get that one. If you don’t sign up then you don’t get the template that you missed. So anybody who didn’t sign up last week sadly as you already missed out on one and going forward you will still miss out on those too if you don’t sign up. So sign up! Get a free account it’s easy and we will see you otherwise and this recording will be available. Thanks everybody and thanks to Sarah and Lance as well. Have a great day. Okay
