Four key elements of a profitable landing page.

And how you are blind to your obvious mistakes.

One of the most vital business lessons I’ve learned lately (despite having read about it in books like Obvious Adams) is you need someone else to point out obvious mistakes, because you can so easily become blind to them (go read Obvious Adams, seriously).

Here’s what happened. I love writing and creating landing pages, and I’m pretty good at it (in the £millions kind of good). I love how it combines design, copywriting, sales, development and storytelling - and a good one can make a shit load of money. And I like money too.

But as good as my ego claims I am, even I suffer from this blindness. So to counteract that, I hired fresh eyes. Three pairs of fresh eyes in fact. And boy I was blind to a lot. Reading through the notes, I was shaking my head in disbelief to how many obvious blunders I was making. But this feeling was coupled with excitement to iterate and put the feedback into action.

The funny thing about this is that I love helping and critiquing other people’s landing pages. So it was funny to hear the advice I would give myself. It’s a weird sensation, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I thought for this newsletter I would offer my landing page critique services - but I realised I don’t have time for that. Instead I thought I’d just tell you what I’m likely to call out on your landing page in hopes this generic advice might help you all the same.

These are problems that I see over and over again:

The first one is your headline and subheading not getting across the value of what you do in a very straightforward manner. Your headline should be something that grabs attention and gets across the problem and the “transformation promise” that your solution offers.

Combining those two things, the problem and the solution, in one elegant headline is the trick to a good headline. For example “Tell great stories with confidence” implies your current problem is lacking in confidence with storytelling (and your stories likely suck). Write with implication. People are smart.

Next, the subheading really has to be something that tells someone exactly what you offer, so they'll just get it within two or three seconds.

Consider that 50% of people visiting a page don't really scroll below “the fold”, your headline and subheading are doing 80% of the heavy lifting, so you really have to nail it there.

The next thing I notice a lot is severe lack of social proof. With any product or service, people are looking at what other people are doing (you do this all the time without realising it, like when a fire alarm goes off - the first thing you do is look at how other people react).

So, the most important thing is to make sure you have some tangible social proof, whether that's in the form of showing star ratings and reviews, actual quotes from customers with their faces and names, or showing people using your products and talking about them.

These are all vital aspects of a landing page because if someone is looking at your site, they're looking for a reason to trust you and your product. Testimonials in particular are effectively a way of helping address any hesitations or obstacles someone has to purchase. If you know a common hesitation customers have, make sure your testimonials address that hesitation first. They’ll be more powerful than any copy you could possibly write.

The third aspect is showing the transformation your product creates in a customer. Present a three-step story on how to use your product or how to get value from it, just to make it easy in the prospect's mind. Step one might be highlighting the problem someone has, step two might be using your product, and step three might be how they'll be after using the product—that transformative story in three parts.

The final thing I think any given landing page suffers from is attention to all of the tiny details. If there are parts of your landing page that look buggy, unfinished, or have typos, it's equivalent to having a door that doesn't open properly on your physical storefront. These small details all add up, and when you've got a tight, well-designed landing page that's perfect, it signals trust. As soon as people notice things that are broken, it subconsciously signals to them that something else might be broken down the line with the product or customer service. Your bare minimum, non-negotiable level to be operating at is perfection.

So, to summarise: headlines and subheadings, testimonials, and showing the transformation are all crucial. And don't forget, make the value proposition abundantly clear—clarity above all. If you're doing these things well, then everything else is kind of secondary to that.

Maybe that was useful, maybe not. Let me know!

Cheerio, Charles.