Speaker1: [00:00:00] Today, I am so excited because we are doing a different kind of podcast,

Speaker1: [00:00:04] I’m talking to a software company today, essentially a software company that has really changed my life. Without this software, I would not have the business that I have today. I am not a coder. I would say I don’t code websites. They frustrate me. When I got WordPress in the beginning of my blogging journey, I used to pull my hair out of my head until I found drumroll please Leadpages which make sales pages so much easier. So today we have a special guest on, Bob Sparkins, the sales marketing manager at lead pages. He champions the customers of the top landing page and website building conversion platform and the audiences they serve. A former high school history teacher and academic team coach, Bob has taught business owners around the world how to leverage digital marketing to impact more people with less effort since 2006. He is the author of Take Action Revised Later and lives in Bloomington, Minnesota, with his wife Teresa and their amusing kids, Kira and Landon. I’m so excited for Bob to be on today because he’s going to give actionable tips on how to get more leads in your business and close more sales, even to the point where I’m taking notes and I’m going to change some things that I do. And I would consider myself a master user of Leadpages. So this is a really great episode and I’m really excited to dive in. You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business. I’m on a mission to help one thousand women make one hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s right. One hundred million dollars towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know right here week after week so you can join us on the journey to one hundred million dollars. Sound good? Then let’s jump in. Bob, welcome to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m really excited to have you here today!

Speaker3: [00:02:20] Thank you, Monica. It’s great to be here and I love everything that you’re doing.

Speaker1: [00:02:24] Yeah. So this is my first time interviewing someone on the podcast that’s from a software that we use. So this is going to be a little bit of a different interview, but exciting because I’ve been using Leadpages, like I told you, I feel like forever. Well in my entrepreneurial journey, I have been using it forever and I started using it mainly because it was easy and WordPress was not easy. These are things I get asked all the time. So there are things I want to talk about.

Speaker1: [00:02:47] But before we dive into my questions, I would like to know about your journey. I usually say entrepreneurial journey, but it’s a little different for you. But yet not, because you do have an entrepreneurial journey, yet you do work for. So I’d like to just know more about you, like how you got started and how you ended up at Leadpages.

Speaker2: [00:03:04] Yeah, I think it’s a good place to start.

Speaker2: [00:03:06] Thank you. We can do the very short version that includes a few steps. So one, if you follow me on Twitter, I’m at Bob the Teacher. And the reason that I’m Bob the teacher is because I’ve been a professionally trained teacher for a decade in a high school history classroom in Maryland. Back in the day, I started to get that, it’s that many teachers do, where there is not enough reward and not enough financial reward testing all that stuff. So I decided to try to add extra income. And so I tried out a few different things, some direct sales, affiliate marketing, cetera, and some of it I was really good at. But what I found I was the most good at, if that’s a word, is, is teaching people how to do things that they didn’t know how to do online. And so I became a trainer of those tools like auto responders and how to do a website and all these types of things. And eventually I did leave the classroom and I started a 10 year business that incorporated both training as well as business coaching. And then along the way, I discovered Leadpages just like a lot of people do. It was back in twenty twelve, a pre launch, I’m customer number thirty three. So I was on the list of call-ins, the co-founder of Leadpages, and he says, hey, I know a lot of you love the templates I’ve been giving away, but what if I made it easier and created a system where you could just have the templates ready to go and you could move things or add things to them and deploy them, have them connected to your email systems, et cetera.

Speaker2: [00:04:29] So that’s great. So I was one of the very first customers and then I became an affiliate and trained on it for the next couple of years, meaning as an affiliate, I was teaching other people on behalf of myself, not Leadpages, but getting a commission, doing workshops. I moved to Minnesota, and the co-founder invited me to breakfast after about a year and said, why don’t you just do this for us full time? And so I kind of thought about it and I was like, well, I’ve got this really cool entrepreneurial pursuit. And then on the other side, I have a potential nine to five ish sort of job. There’s remote work involved and stuff like that. But I could continue teaching and doing what I love to do as a business coach a while for but just all for Leadpages. And so I signed up in twenty fourteen. So for the last seven years almost, I’ve been teaching entrepreneurs, business owners, people who are just out of the gate, out of corporate or out of some of their job, or returning to the workforce after parenting for a number of years and deciding, hey, I want to generate some income from what I know or know how to do. And I’ve been doing that ever since.

Speaker2: [00:05:28] And obviously we have tens of thousands of customers that range the gamut from now. So I love to do podcasts like these, webinars, I still do the business coaching for Leadpages on a weekly call that we do for customers and just have a lot of fun along the way. So that’s the entrepreneurial journey. And I’m also married to an executive coach who is also an entrepreneur. So I get to still like deploy Leadpages on her behalf for her business and see what it’s like to continue running a business during and after, hopefully soon after covid and all this stuff that’s been going on in the recent past.

Speaker1: [00:06:00] So basically for you right now, your whole thing is Leadpages. You don’t really have any individual entrepreneurial pursuits outside of your wife’s business.

Speaker2: [00:06:08] That is correct.

Speaker1: [00:06:09] So was it a big change for you when you decided to go full time?

Speaker3: [00:06:12] It was. I mean, in one respect, it was a lot of my entrepreneurial friends, like, what do you do on the job? Is like that’s kind of suck to a brave soul sucking day job because they had been so burnt out by whatever experience they happened to have. And as a teacher, I got burnt out after a while. But when Clay said to me, like, we basically want you to do what you’re doing just under our umbrella, that was very easy. The transition was very smooth. And then also I have a team of people that I get to collaborate with on an ongoing basis. So I didn’t have to continue to find a new virtual assistant or find freelancers to work with or all these other things that as an entrepreneur you have to do. And that’s fun and it can work well. And some of you are solo partners and you want to do it all yourself and you want to do a individual freelancer for a month or two, or you might bring on a team and scale up and have twenty people

Speaker2: [00:07:02] Working like so many people do. But for me, I just I love the consistency of working of Leadpages from a job perspective, from an income perspective, because entrepreneurial pursuits also can mean, roller coasters are gone.

Speaker2: [00:07:16] And so that’s a perk, health benefits and all that kind of stuff. What I really love about it the most and what I don’t anymore, I won’t. But what I love about it is I still get to do what I do.

Speaker2: [00:07:27] Well, which is to teach and to impact the lives of people through the education I can provide to them. And using Leadpages as part of the gateway drug, I guess, into becoming a better marketer for people. Right. And so because they’re able to be a better marketer faster, they gain more confidence. And then that confidence breeds additional value for the stuff that they bring to the table. So, yes, it was weird, but I love it.

Speaker1: [00:07:53] I love how you referred to this as a gateway drug into online marketing, because I would agree I would go as far to say if I hadn’t discovered Leadpages, I don’t know if I would have gotten to where I am because coding and all that stuff was just I used to get very angry at night. My husband used to ban me from working on my website, like after the kids went to bed because I get super angry and then I couldn’t it would just ruin the night. So he started banning me. Actually, one of the first investments we made was for our tech guy on WordPress because he couldn’t handle listening to me. And then I found Leadpages. And I’m like, oh, my life is so much better even if I don’t code.

Speaker1: [00:08:29] And I can spin up a really good sales page on Leadpages now in under 30 minutes, like a really good one that converts. So that’s like an amazing feat for someone like me. So I always say, if I can do it, you can do it. And I totally credit Leadpages with that. So with that being said, a lot of people might not even understand what Leadpages is. So like what is the standard line that you give for what the pages does?

Speaker2: [00:08:54] We are, first of all, a Minneapolis based software company with a great support team, great product team and obviously education. But as far as what you get out of Leadpages, you get a software platform that does make it easy for you to look at online, turn clicks into clients, turning clicks into clients as our primary tagline. And basically what we want you to do is you’re on social media. You have an email list that’s growing. You have personal contacts. When somebody decides to find out more about you, what are they going to find? They go to the link bio off of Instagram. What are they going to see? Well, with Leadpages, you have a way to make that first experience that they have with you very positive and most importantly, convert, convert into a subscriber a new lead or convert them into a buyer as a new customer. I’m sure we’re going to get into some questions about tactically, like when to use what types of pages or whatever, but ultimately Leadpages helps you look good and convert strangers into leads and customers.

Speaker1: [00:09:56] My Instagram bio goes to a landing page that I built on Instagram. And, you know, a lot of people use Linktree off of Instagram, which is like a free app and essentially just their buttons that you can click over to whatever the thing is you’re promoting or talking about. But I use a landing page and it has like the call to action buttons. I have gotten more questions and what I use, I’m like, it’s a landing page I built on Leadpages, but people think it’s like just so much better than anything they’ve seen. Takes two seconds to build. It’s actually quite easy.

Speaker2: [00:10:27] I just wanted to reiterate, I love that people are using Leadpages for their Instagram “link in bio” because you can just do so much more than what Linktree or any other service allows. You can do the same thing. You can stack your buttons up, but you can have a call to action that actually gets people to sign up to something right there on that page somewhere else.

Speaker1: [00:10:49] Exactly. And as a matter of fact, we don’t use a built-In form on that page and we really should. So I’m marking that down, when I get and here’s the other cool thing about Leadpages. So we have multiple brands, we actually have three Instagram accounts, two are active. I can use the same landing page and mask to each domain that I own. So like instead of it being my Leadpages, because sometimes Instagram doesn’t like the Leadpages domain, they get a little antsy about like the redirects on it. So I always mask it to my domain because it just looks better to like redefining mom, Yeah, it brands me. So I do that, but I can use the same page and mask it behind all of my domains and it’s so much easier and it’s a cohesive experience in my opinion. So I don’t know. It’s worked really well. OK, so here’s the thing. When I started on Leadpages, Leadpages was not a place to build a website. There were landing pages and what at the time we called the boxes, which were the pop up boxes. Now I think we just call them pop ups. I still can’t leave boxes. It’s very hard for me to get away from that terminology after a while. But that was like the two main features of what Leadpages did when I signed up. Now you can actually build an entire website, but it’s not the same as what you would necessarily build on WordPress. And I get this question all the time. So can we start first with the differences between what a Leadpage site is and a Leadpage landing pages and then talk about how to compare? To something like WordPress.

Speaker2: [00:12:16] So I do get this question a lot as well, so you’re not alone. First of all, a landing page, let’s start there. Landing page is simply the first page you go to after you have clicked something else. So from an ad social post, whatever, a good landing page is focused on one thing and one thing only, and there’s no navigation on it. There might be a footer with some navigation, but there’s no like menu up at the top. There’s no sidebar, there’s no distraction. It is one hundred percent focused on a problem that the visitor is currently experiencing and the solution that you have. And that solution can come in the form of what we call a lead magnet, which is a free downloadable thing or a video that you would watch or a webinar that you might experience or PDF White Paper or whatever, but you get it in exchange for an email address. But a landing page can also be a sales page and is focused on the conversion point of buying something, a website as comparison. You have a menu, you have a lot of other stuff. There’s usually the typical website is designed for information, whereas a landing page is designed for conversion. Since we are in the conversion marketing business along the way, about five years ago we decided that we would stop saying no to all the people, asking us why can’t I use Leadpages to make a website? And we decided to say, well, let’s make a website, but we don’t want to make a website like the traditional websites because they’re already there. WordPress is a great system. If you have a team of people to help you manage it and you’re willing to be up to date with plugins and themes and all that stuff, it works really, really well. We use Leadpages for our marketing, we also use a WordPress site for our marketing. There’s no reason to not use both, other than it’s complicated.

Speaker2: [00:13:59] Yeah, traditional websites for information. What we wanted to do is build a website builder that was focused on conversion instead. So you still have the opportunity for a menu. But every element of the website that we have is designed around converting that new visitor into a subscriber or a customer. And so when you want to use a website and this can be a primary website or a secondary website, we’ll talk about the differences in a minute. But if you want a website where you don’t need to update posts every afternoon, if you’re a serious blogger who’s writing every couple of days or once a week, even you may still want to use WordPress. But if you have like five to seven articles that you want to write over the course of the next year or you want to knock them out in one shot and then not write again, because that’s not your thing, then Leadpages website is really ideal for you. You have the ability to make as many pages on it as you want, but an ideal Leadpages website will have like three or four top menu items, maybe two or three sub menu items. But they’re all focused around converting the one thing that you want them to do, maybe a second thing. So it could be like a lead magnet, maybe a consultation. But what Page is is not good at as a website builder is it’s not a store like you might want to use with Shopify, where you have 50 different products that you’re trying to showcase at the same time. That’s not what we do. But if you’re a knowledge broker, as we like to call it, someone whose expertise is what you’re selling and you have a suite of four to six products, for example, over time, or you’re just getting started with your very first product, then having a page, the website is going to simplify your life. It’s going to remove a lot of the techniques. You won’t want to defenestrate your computer every afternoon. And instead you’ll want to show it off and you’ll actually want to spend more time doing things other than working on your site. So if you feel like you are in this morass of complication with your website try Leadpages, I think you’re going to really love it.

Speaker1: [00:15:54] Yes, I agree. We actually did finally build a site that we use actively on Leadpages. It took a while. At first I was like, what am I going to use this for? You know, at this point I’m invested in WordPress. But like you said, Redefining Mom was born as a blog based, so we need the ability on WordPress to publish regular blog posts. Then I branded myself under MonicaFroese.com, and we were releasing a podcast. So we need it like a blog function to be able to do podcasts now. But when I broke off my brands, in came another brand Empowered Business, which is where all of my B2B, how I teach women how to build a digital product, businesses and that we built Empowered Business that we built on a Leadpages site. Wow, does it make my life a lot easier! There’s no need for a blog there because the podcast lives on the other side and it’s all meant to educate on what our product suite is.

Speaker1: [00:16:48] So we want you to do one of two things. Essentially, like you said, you can have very honed in action. We want you to get on our email list or we want you to invest in our product suite. That’s it. And then we do have a Shopify store as well.

Speaker1: [00:17:01] And I try to explain this. When people come into the online business world, it seems very overwhelming Leadpages, in my opinion, especially when you’re talking about landing pages and stuff, kill it with going out there and collecting cold leads. So people who don’t know about your business, people who you’re trying to bring into the top of your funnel and Shopify, we use for what I consider my warm audience who are like, hey, you have a lot of stuff you’re selling. It’s kind of annoying to have to go through individual funnels to, like, feel what you have to offer and buy the stuff you have to offer. So I give them a cohesive shopping experience with Shopify. But what you’ll find out, in my opinion, is that Shopify doesn’t really give any urgency even when you give coupon discounts. Honestly, urgency is very hard to accomplish with Shopify.

Speaker1: [00:17:45] So if we push Shopify first conversions tank, so that actually brings up another conversation of urgency, like the importance of urgency. What do you think about the importance of urgency?

Speaker2: [00:17:57] What is critical, first of all? And to take a step back, I would also say just speaking about Shopify is one of the Leadpage’s kind of philosophies that has been an underpinning for a long time as we play well with others. And so you can use us with WordPress or without you can use us with Shopify or without so much of that. But as far as urgency goes, urgency usually in our world takes the form of the countdown timer. Right? So you get to a page and you see that there is something for sale or even for free, and you have to actually take action within the next 20 minutes or the next three hours or the next five days. And maybe we should talk in a minute about the ideal urgency range. But without that, you have a bunch of procrastinators on the other side of the computer screen who think that it’s just going to be here forever. And so they look at the page and they say, oh, that looks interesting. It looks good. I should probably buy that. But I’m not drowning with this problem right now. And if I’m not personally drowning with this problem right now, I don’t have an internal sense of urgency. But as a marketer of your business, your job is to help people make decisions. One of the early lessons I learned from Clay Collins that I take to this day is that if you could learn this one thing about your business, it’ll make a huge difference. You are not in the business of getting people to buy your product. You’re in the business of getting people to make decisions. If you change your approach to saying you need to decide whether it’s yes or no, that’s up to you. But if you just decide, then your business is going to grow. Because what kills most businesses, especially when you’re starting out, is the lack of decision that people are making when they come to your page because they feel like they have all the time in the world or they can come back later to it. They just don’t have to make up their mind right now. But if you can say, hey, look, now we’re in every moment basically, and you can actually enforce it with a real legitimate countdown timer that hits zero and the page disappears or the page changes to a different offer entirely, then you actually can have that urgency. So urgency can be eternal for the end user. It can also be because there’s a limited number of them that you have, especially if you’re dealing with personal relationships, sort of businesses. And price can obviously be a thing, too. It doesn’t always have to be a discount. But if you can put a countdown timer on your page, it says you need to decide within the next 20 minutes or whatever the time is or this particular offer is going away. You’ll get people to say, yes, I want this or what? I don’t actually need this. And that’s OK. To your job, again, is to get people to decide instead of procrastinating.

Speaker1: [00:20:32] So urgency, time frame. You have an opinion?

Speaker2: [00:20:34] Yes, I Do.

Speaker1: [00:20:36] I would love to hear it.

Speaker2: [00:20:38] There’s not a real rocket science around the calculation, but this is something that you want to experiment with. The answer, of course, is going to be it depends. But what it depends on are these factors. So first of all, how much is it if you come to a page and a free thing, Then, you could have a timer for five minutes or less and say this is free for the next five minutes. And if the timer hits zero, you can have another timer that says, I’m giving you another chance, or you can say the timer hit zero. You missed out for it being free. Now it’s a dollar or it just disappears entirely. You can’t have it. There’s a lot of different options, but for a price of sales, if you’re in it, depending on your market, you might be in different parts of the world. But in my world, in the US, anything under one hundred dollars is typically like, I don’t have to go ask a spouse about this. I don’t have to think about this and I’ll have to check my bank account for it. And if that’s the situation for most of your audience, then a 20 minute timer is very effective for especially a discounted price. So if your normal price and the regular price is something like one hundred bucks and you say you can get this for 50 bucks as a new subscriber special or whatever, 20 minutes is plenty of time for them to realize that they have that time to watch whatever video you have. If you have one, read the page, etc. when the 20 minute timer goes off. But I like to do is say you missed out, but I’ve got a second chance offer for you. And now for the next twenty four hours I’m going to give you this is usually incorporated with some email follow up to instead of 50 bucks it might be seventy five for example. So still better than one hundred. Teaching your audience every single interaction they have with your landing pages or teaching them what to expect from you the next time. And so if they come to the page and it had zero and nothing changes, you’re teaching them that urgency actually doesn’t matter to you at all. And I see this mistake a lot. I see a lot of people have the time or have zero. It stays on the page until it hits zero. Nothing actually changes. 

Speaker2: [00:22:39] So the next time you have an offer via email is like, I don’t really need to decide because they’re not actually following up on this. But if you actually have the timer on there, do it. The biggest thing I see, Monica, with timers is people think about with a launch or especially when it’s a live event, for example, or webinar or virtual summit, something like that, they’ll put the timer to win. The thing starts as opposed to when I need to decide to join it. Ok, so we’re doing this recording in the middle of summer of twenty twenty one. Say we’re in September. Right. And it’s September 1st. We’re writing our page and then we have a virtual summit coming up October 15th when somebody has a page like this. What I typically see them do is say, hey, we’ve got a virtual summit coming up and it starts on October 15th. So the countdown timer says you have forty five days until we begin.

Speaker1: [00:23:22] I do this! Haha! I’m listening…

Speaker2: [00:23:26] There’s no sense of urgency about that. That doesn’t matter to anybody. That’s forty five days away. It’s kind of fun. A thank you page to countdown to it. It’s fun to have the page where you’re telling people all the information after they’ve signed up, but when you want them to sign up, you need to give them a reason to do so now. And so any countdown timer that’s more than forty eight hours out doesn’t have any urgency to it at all. It’s basically useless to you as a conversion tactic. It might be informational, might be kind of cool and interesting looking. But from a conversion perspective, you want to say, you know, this event is not for a couple more weeks, but you have early access to it. You have VIP access, you have bonuses that you can get. And then every two days you basically are refreshing. What’s that offer and changing it to even just a little bit to consistently have that urgency. So whether it’s a webinar or virtual summit, any of these types of things, think of what you want to do. I remember a conversation we had once during a program we taught about six years ago. You mentioned if he ran a bar, he would have a bar that had a countdown timer towards Happy Hour. And when the next happy hour was and when the next happy hour was, and that would be like over top of the bar above all the top shelf stuff. So just when you think about combined numbers and urgency, use them to actually get people to make that decision and think of creative ways to compel that even when what you’re trying to talk about is weeks away.

Speaker1: [00:24:51] Wow. I mean, I’m really good at getting leads into my business. I will say I don’t struggle with this, but I did not do it this way. And now my mind is like I want to like change. We have a webinar coming up and actually about forty days I just flip the entire funnel from the last one and it’s sitting there with the timer being informational. The countdown to when I’m going to be presenting and we’re going to run Facebook ads to it and I’m like, holy cow, I never thought of that. That’s so much smarter. 

Speaker2: [00:25:23] At the very least, there’s gray lines here and we’re a very ethical company. So this is not done just for the sense of hype. But you can use language like this is free for the next whatever or this is fifty bucks for the next whatever. It doesn’t

say it’s only this for the next whatever, or you have to buy it or the price will be more. There are some inferences that you can have people draw on their own. And then what you would do is with lead paint, which is as you may recall, you can have your timer hit zero and then just hide a section, OK? And when the timer hit zero, you can hide a section and reveal another section. The new section would just not have a timer on it at all. And it would still say you can do this for whatever the price is or do it for free or for

your business if you’re doing a summit or webinar. Long time in the future. We have a timer called an evergreen timer. So it’s one of the three options. You can either do it by date, specifically Evergreen Timer, which is you have ten minutes or you have forty five minutes or you have three days or whatever, and then you have a daily timer and the daily timer resets every day at a certain time, noon, four o’clock, midnight, whatever. Then the next day when people visit the same page, that timer is there again and then the next day the timer is there again. So you’ll see that it is often used. And if it’s used responsibly or ethically, it basically helps people make that decision. But it doesn’t say something that isn’t true. So just be careful when you’re using a timer that you’re not saying things like this is only this today, only instead say today it’s only this. You see the difference semantically and then that’s only as a.. Towards the price as opposed to the time.

Speaker1: [00:27:04] Wow. My mind is, there are so many ways I could have used urgency differently. OK, I do have a question. So I actually, all my products that are forty seven and below, we do set the timer. Quick action timer at 20 minutes. I feel I got that one nailed so we set it for 20 minutes. You land on the page, countdown starts at the end of the 20 minutes. It goes to a redirect page. Also, Bill, 28 pages. Here’s the big thing about lead pages. Duplicating pages makes my life so easy. This is why I can spin up very complicated funnels and very little time, because it’s like duplicating. So I take what we call the tripwire page, a limited time offer page. I duplicate it, take off the timer, change the price back to the full price, and that’s what the page goes away. And is that typically how you would see it being used or am I missing something here?

Speaker2: [00:27:56] No ideas, but I would say you could do one of two things differently that might work better, might not. So one is that when the timer hits zero, you can have on the same page the different sections that show that price instead of sending them to a different page. And the reason that you might want to do that is just for the simplicity of managing all your pages. However, what you wouldn’t see in that regard in lead pages specifically is how many people bought at this price versus the other price. You would need to use your

Speaker2: [00:28:28] Stripe checkout data to show you what that situation is. And you would have conversion rates separated out by the two different pages. So then you could see your page converts at forty seven. But this page and then when the price is ninety seven, it converts of this. And so that’s easier to see that conversion. But the big thing that I love to teach people to do, which I referred to it earlier, is usually forty seven is the max of the price. That’s the normal price.

Speaker1: [00:28:54] Usually I set it for 20 minutes if the product’s forty seven or below.

Speaker2: [00:28:58] Ok, and then the normal price though, let’s just take pick one product. What’s his regular price. What is your discounted price.

Speaker1: [00:29:04] It would be like ninety seven to forty seven or sixty seven to thirty seven. Usually that would be like that. 

Speaker2: [00:29:09] OK, great. So the one thing I encourage people to do is after that 20 minute timer is up, have a new either section revealed or another page redirected. That’s sixty seven dollar offer instead of ninety seven. So don’t just jump up to the full price, give them another chance to save money, even though it won’t be as awesome of a deal. And then let that be for a day so that you can coordinate an email campaign alongside it. You mentioned you’re using ConvertKit when you have somebody buy your system with Leadpages after they purchase will tell ConvertKit, ‘Hey, they’re a customer now, right?’ Well, with ConvertKit, you can say if they haven’t bought within this amount of time, then send them a second message that says, hey, you missed out, but I’m still going to give you thirty bucks off if you are able to act in the next twenty four hours or something like that. And then they still have that other chance to save. So for those ninety seven to forty seven jumps, you have this gap that you can fill with a second offer and that usually results in a nice boost in income and people still feel like I got a good deal next time. When Monica tells me something’s a good deal, I’m going to act on it, but I still feel like I got the right price. And also what it does is it eliminates the occasions of when people email you and say, I was on vacation, or my kid threw up and I had to leave it on the computer, refresh the screen while I was gone. Can I still get this deal? If you can say I’ve got a secondary deal, it’s not as awesome, but basically no excuses sort of thing. You can still do what you want to do. It’s your business, but it eliminates a lot of those types of situations where people are complaining they missed out for whatever substory reason,

Speaker2: [00:30:49] Legit or not, and says, well, they can just reflect on their own. Well, I missed it, but this is still pretty good. I’m going to take advantage of it.

Speaker1: [00:30:56] You know, it’s not to me is I really would consider myself very well versed in Leadpages at this point. And for whatever reason, I’ve never done the hide and unhide page like we do hide sections when we’re manually flipping things over, like let’s say we’re running like forty eight hour EarlyBird. So I always had a 4:00 Eastern time because I’m not up at 3:00 a.m. Pacific time to unhide the right sections of the page or whatever. Why have I never used it that it can do it itself. I’m like that’s such an obvious feature. I probably could have saved myself a lot of time, to be honest with you, if I had decided to use that feature.

Speaker2: [00:31:30] It makes a big difference. But also you pointed to something else that I don’t think people really appreciate about Leadpages that you cannot do in WordPress. You can pre create sections that you hide from view that are in your Leadpages account. They’re inside the page itself. They’re in the builder.

Speaker2: [00:31:47] Every page is made with sections and then rows and columns. Right. But every individual section can be hidden by yourself with a little click the eyeball icon. Right. And so you can plan out an entire series of like, when am I going to release what content and have it right there on the page and then just go click the button. I remember back in the day in two thousand six and seven when I was starting my business using. Front page and all this other wacky stuff I used to do, a sale for the halftime of the Super Bowl halftime sales, all my favorite things to do was really fun. Only thirty one minutes during the halftime, could you actually buy this one thing? But I’d have to sit there and do all the things in real time and then in real time change it and then 10 minutes later and change it. When the sale was over, then go back into that page and change it. Now you are able to preview these sections, have the buttons to hide them and then make them visible when appropriate. There’s a lot of things about sections that I think people learn to love about Leadpages, whether it’s mobile device specialization or optimization, the countdown timer stuff, different backgrounds, all that kind of stuff. So a lot of fun.

Speaker1: [00:32:59] Yeah, I will say the sections have saved us so much time. We did a big it was kind of accidental. I was on Coronavirus Stardate. We were like, oh, what do we do now? Like this is a world that we have not operated in when it comes to Internet marketing. And, you know, no one really knew what was going to happen. So we kicked off what we called a template extravaganza at the time. And a lot of people come to us. They’re like, I want to quit my 9:00 to 5:00 and I have no idea what I’m going to do or like I don’t have enough time templated stuff. It makes it easier for people to get up and running. Now, suddenly, even my real world friends say that in quotations we’re like, what do you do on the Internet now, Monica? Like, oh, now you care. I see how this is. So we did it. We styled it as weekly drops and we pre built everything and then just had sections so we could flip it around very easily. Week ones drop here, you know, and then we had a to the next drop and then we all going to do is unhide. We didn’t have to build it every week and be stressed out that we had to flip it at a certain time and still had to build it all in there. It makes running urgency type promotions, in my opinion, so much easier. So I am a big fan of that too. OK, so here’s another question I get. I think this will be our last one, but this is a really big one that I get from people who are getting started. And I have to imagine that being at the company, you guys have a lot of data among what converts and what doesn’t. Right, because you have the back end data for everything that’s happening on lead pages. I don’t know why people obsess about this. In my opinion. You have to just try. But people don’t want to try. They want an answer, which is what is your thought on long versus short, either opt in page or sales page? Because people obsess about this. And I get to the point where I’m like, can you just try something? I find the question annoying after a while. 

Speaker1: [00:34:48] What do you think about that?

Speaker3: [00:34:49] I’ve never heard that question before, Monica. No, I’m totally getting it’s much daily.

Speaker2: [00:34:54] And it reminds me of back in the day when I was a high school teacher. How long is this essay need to be? You know, and it’s as long as it needs to be to get the job done. Right? So you do your thesis, you have some support and then you’re done with examples. And whatever same thing applies here, you test it out. So I think that you trying something is very important. My business motto is take action, revise later. And the idea behind that, of course, is you do something and then you see if it works or not, and then you try a different thing and see if it works better. Using split testing, by the way, and Leadpages is super easy to do.

Speaker2: [00:35:27] And this is a great way to figure out for your business, for your audience, which is best if you were to go to Leadpages dot com slash templates right now and click the button that says sought by conversion rate. This will help you answer the question from us. I didn’t know you could do that. A standard thing. Yeah, the normal display is already by that. And then you can buy newest and sort by industry and all that stuff. But since we’re such a conversion focused business, that’s how we show it off. And so if you look at the first two or three rows of the templates, they’re almost entirely one section, maybe a foot section might be separate, but it’s basically a hero section with a headline, maybe a sub headline, a call to action buttons. And that’s the entirety of the page. OK, so if you were to start with one and then want to experiment, your control should be shorter than longer, especially for landing pages where you’re converting to a subscriber. People don’t really need a lot of information about you, even they just need to know that your headline is compelling, that they identify the challenges you have specified and you have made the downloadable thing or the video that you’re going

Speaker2: [00:36:34] To show attractive and compelling enough to want to sign up for it because people do prize their email address. So you have to give them the goods. But it may be the case that you do need to have a little bit more information. So you might have a second section, might have a third section. Sales pages are obviously different. The more expensive a product is in general, the longer the page will need to be, because you need to justify the value that you’re bringing to the table, the authenticity that you bring, the credibility that you bring, the empathy that you have, et cetera, but generally start shorter and then go longer with the experiments and then just test it out, run enough traffic to it so that you can actually see real data. So that means trying to get a. One hundred conversions to each version of a page before you declare a winner, because otherwise there isn’t enough data there to justify statistically that it’s accurate. A lot of people do a split test and they’ll see one’s converting and, Thirty eight percent, the other one’s a twenty five percent. But there’s been like 12 visits to each page and that’s like five versus three. You’ve got to let it play out a little bit longer before you obsess over making tweaks and stuff like that.

Speaker1: [00:37:38] I’m so glad you said that. So I spent four years teaching small businesses, mainly content creators and bloggers, Pinterest advertising. And so they had smaller budgets. They would get I don’t know, I actually just had someone ask me this. They had thirty six hits from their pin to their landing page, which they built on Leadpages because I taught them how and they’re like, we didn’t get a conversion. I’m shutting everything down. I’m like, whoa, there are like a million reasons why you don’t get a conversion yet. Thirty six page views.. I mean did they even let the page load from the pen. There’s so many factors. Was your pin good? Was it pre framing what they were going to, did they understand they’re going to be taking action? Like I could go on and on but thirty six, thirty six page views tells you nothing. So very common question. A lot of people want to focus on how many people should have seen the page. I love how you just flip that. I’m going to use this, I’m feeling this for my students and you flipped it and said I want you to have one hundred conversions before you make a call. When we say conversion, I feel like for this, particularly talking about getting the email conversion because one hundred sales conversions for a lot of people that yeah, that’s a little bit more. But for me, and my own personal conversion, that seems completely reasonable to me, especially if you’re running paid ads.

Speaker3: [00:38:51] Absolutely. If you’re running a sale, I would be checking every twenty to twenty five conversions for each one. But if one page does have twenty five and the other one has two, you can actually make a call. If they have an equivalent amount of traffic then go out and make the change. But we have this just happened this past week at Leadpages. We have a three way split test going and after the first week we had I think about two thousand visits and I think it was like two hundred conversions for each one or so. That was more than that because it was like thirty percent to twenty percent was the range of the splitters. But after another week, the winner flipped to be a different one. So it’s a combination of what you mentioned. What do they click on in the first place? So we tweaked our Facebook ad and then the other one one started winning instead.

Speaker2: [00:39:37] So it’s usually in combination where you want to see which one’s going to bring the best. But the reason you want to pay attention to this I know for many of you, you’re just getting started. The math of conversion rates and all this stuff may not be your first priority, but the reason you want to pay attention to that is because it shows you how much more you get out of the same effort, whether it’s the same ad spend or the same social media efforts. If you can take one hundred people and get thirty five of them to convert and twenty five of them to convert, it just makes your life that much easier and that’s why it’s worth paying attention to.

Speaker1: [00:40:08] Leadpages make it super easy because they actually have built in a split testing which I use for a while. Then I was like, man, you know, sometimes you focus on other things. And then I realized, why am I not using this feature? It would save me so much time. So I highly recommend if you get Leadpages or you have Leadpages, take them up on their absolute testing because it’s actually super easy to do. So I don’t know why it was like not using it to my advantage. All right. So this has been great. I learned stuff. I’m going to have to listen back, especially about the webinar stuff. I’m like, who? I have so many ideas now and the hidden sections and all the stuff. So thank you for your time. First of all, if people want to, I know you have some of your own social channels that people can come and follow you on. And then also if they want to sign up for Leadpages, what do they do?

Speaker2: [00:40:57] Yeah, well, I’m sure they’ll be a nice, friendly link underneath this recording. And there’s actually two links that I want you to post. One of them is to get started with Leadpages, so we’ll have a link to that. But the second is that you mentioned that a lot of your audience does like to blog and there’s always a question about whether or not Leadpages is best for bloggers to use instead of WordPress or to use in tandem with. And so I have a link to a blog post that I wrote about two years ago about how to blog with or without WordPress, with Leadpages that I think would be super helpful for you.

Speaker1: [00:41:27] That would be super helpful.

Speaker2: [00:41:29] Yeah. And the actual the bottom line is, how often do you publish content consistently will determine whether or not you use them in tandem or you use just Leadpages by itself. And the one thing we didn’t really mention technically is you can have your WordPress site you might already have and you put Leadpages on a subdomain of that same website that gives you the opportunity to have the best of both worlds. Or you can use our plug in and just publish directly to your website. So little technical stuff, just food for thought for later. But in any case, use the links below to get your trial started up.

Speaker2: [00:41:59] We do let you try it out for free for a couple of weeks and then you can pick it from a couple of different plans. I recommend that a monthly plan to get started with first just because it gives you the features that we have and then you can determine whether you need all of them or not, and then you can upgrade or downgrade. Before you actually start paying that to blog with WordPress, as far as connecting with me, I’d love for you to go out on social, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, whatever. Reach out to me and Bob Sparkins. You might see me as Bob Jenkins. Historically, my wife and I got married. We merged our names together in a little portmanteau of Sparboe and Jenkins’ to make Sparkins. But in any case, I’m at Bob the Teacher and pretty much everywhere. And then, of course, Leadpages and pages. We have a pretty active Instagram feed and Facebook community, etc..

Speaker1: [00:42:41] Yeah, we’ll be sure to link to all of this in the show notes, as always. Again, thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of your knowledge with us.

Speaker2: [00:42:49] You bet, Monica. It’s been a real treat and looking forward to connecting with you and your audience.

Speaker1: [00:42:58] Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Empowered Business podcast, if you want to get started creating your own digital products and don’t know where to start. We have a brand new training that can help. It’s called Three Secrets to Creating Digital Products that sell like crazy head on over to empowered business.co/profit to join the free training. Now, see you again next week.