The Why
Makers love spending all their time making their core product, and not enough time thinking about how to market and sell. "Build it and they will come", right?
Wrong.
The average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%, meaning over 97% of people never even see what you made.
We've all been warned not to judge a book by it's cover, but let's face it - we all do it.
One of my biggest stress points in launching my own book was leaving the landing page to the final week before launch, and realizing that I was totally out of my depth. After a certain point, one additional hour spent on the nth proofreading of the book was nowhere near as valuable to me as spending it on the landing page.
A top quartile landing page converts 5.31%, and the top decile converts 11.45%. That means you can 2x-5x your sales just working on your landing page rather than your product!!!
And that's assuming you can even make an average-performing landing page, especially on your first try!
So hopefully you can see why I think landing pages are important. If you're thinking "but I'm a developer, this isn't my job!", I'd say you're almost right. You took on this job the day you decided to sell something - your book, your business, your app, your self - online.
You're also right in that almost nobody - not even many marketers I have worked with - specializes in landing pages. It's almost nobody's job.
It is Rob Hope's.
The Book
For over 12 years, Rob has made a career out of studying one page websites. One Page sites embrace their titular constraint - within one page, they must drive the visitor to purchase or sign up or whatever action it is designed to do.
I've just finished going through Rob Hope's new Landing Page Hot Tips book. It distils the best of Rob's experience from curating tens of thousands of one page sites and of course working on his own. You can see a short sample of all 100 tips from his hugely popular tweet thread here - Dev.to Embed:
Leading up to my Landing Page course, here are 100 Landing Page hot tips over the next 100 days.
Simply follow this thread 👇 or get em dripped to email: onepagelove.com/100
🔥 Landing Page Hot Tip #01 - Utilize testimonials to further highlight features & answer doubts:13:46 PM - 26 May 2020
It's a quick read - just 100 short tips (1-2 page each) on everything from Design to Development to Pricing to Testimonials.
Side note: It's very un-like my style - where I like to explore every idea in detail, spell out every sub point (My book is 100k words even after editing!), Rob clearly likes to trim all the fat and just leave you with the core essence. There's a place for both, but I suspect Rob's approach is by far the more popular!
The book goes into more detail on each item and offers further links and 200+ resources to use to help achieve these things. Each tip is also delightfully narrated for an audiobook version, with sound effects (!).
Part of the value of the book comes from it being available in so many formats, from PDF to HTML to audio, so that you retain better by spaced repetition, but probably my favorite feature is the categorized checklists.
I will literally use these for every landing page I have to do for the rest of my life. That's worth the price of admission to me.
Rob didn't pay me to write this, I just think it's a great book and am writing it up as per my usual M.O. I did sign up for the affiliate thingy though - If you decide to get the book, I get a small kickback if you use my link, at no cost to you. It's $10 off for the month of September. You can also book a personal critique of your landing page, worth $179!
”I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
Top comments (6)
@swyx , how do you feel about landing pages, before you launch, for e.g. (concrete examples, actually):
yes, i like having them, but also mailing list signups are only a minor form of validation, you only really know you have something once you ask people for money.
Thats a cool cover really like the design.
Nice one, really informative stuff.
Put this on my reading list, for whenever I end up writing a book.
Thanks Shawn!
I'm really inspired by your works, your Learn In Public post on your site inspires me a lot.
Thanks a lot for the info 👍