How do you create your landing page fast?

1 Marketing breakdown

Today’s essay is sponsored by… ME!

I’ve opened the pre-orders of my latest product: Solopreneur Gym.

There are a limited number of membership spots at this early-bird price and when they’re sold out, the price is increasing.

So if you’re fed up with your 9 to 5, are sick of not being able to live life on your own terms, and want nothing more than to become a successful solopreneur, this is for you.

Click the button below and I’ll see you soon:

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What’s good young and eager mind?

Today you’ll learn how to whip up a landing page that makes you money, fast.

Yesterday, I wrote an essay on scarcity and at the end of it, I posted the link to my new product.

Cool. All done. So when I went to click “schedule this post,” I accidentally hit publish now.

What’s the problem?

Well…

I HADN’T EVEN STARTED WRITING MY SALES PAGE YET

So I had to write a landing page in RECORD TIME.

Well, the original idea was to walk you through the launch as I’m doing it but hey, I broke some eggs so let’s make an omelet.

Does that expression work? You know what, I’m just gonna go with it!

A simple framework to write a sales page

• Pain

• Dream

• Fix

• CTA

• Social Proof

There you go.

A super simple framework to create your very own sales page.

The ones that clicked the link fast enough literally saw these bullet points on my page as I was filling them out.

You can check out the sales page here:

I can’t stress this enough… Don’t just read my emails, use it! You can’t learn this stuff without practicing.

Solopreneurship is not a spectator sport.

Even if you don’t publish your sales page, just making one is already beneficial.

Alright, let’s break down each component starting with pain.

Pain (A)

If a person has no training in copywriting, they’ll start with the fix.

Thing is… you haven’t convinced me, the reader, why I should even be interested in your fix.

You can sell like that, and it’s better than nothing, but you’re limiting yourself to people that already understand their own pain very well.

This is called being an order-taker.

If you’ve been in my audience for a while, you’re familiar with this concept. A McDonald’s worker can just ask you what you want. Don’t model your sales letter off of that. That’s NOT sales.

A few examples of pain:

• Are you buying books that you know are just going to collect dust on the shelves?

• Are you hungry but you don’t have time to cook?

• Your house is a mess and you don’t have time to clean.

• Your teeth are yellow and you’re embarrassed when you smile.

• You’ve bought all the courses under the sun to help you become a solopreneur but your revenue isn’t budging.

I want you to look around you right now.

Touch your pockets. What’s in them? Wallet? Pen? iPhone? AirPods?

Look at your wrist. You wearing a watch?

Are you sitting behind your desk? What’s on it?

Are you on a bus, what products or services do you see around you?

Do me a favor. I love hearing from you so reply back with where you’re reading this.

Now ask yourself, what pains are all these products or services solving?

You might notice that the same product can solve different problems for different people.

E.g. A sneaker might solve a functional pain for one person: keep feet clean, dry, and safe.

While it might solve a social pain for another person: move up in the status hierarchy by signaling my affluence and that I’m comfortable wasting resources = costly signaling. (McAndrew, 2018)

If you’d like to know more about this, look up “conspicuous consumption” (seeking admiration) and “invidious consumption” (eliciting envy) and read my Star-Problem essay.

Your goal in the pain section is to make people say: “That’s right!”

“That’s right!” is code for “You understand my pain.”

In my Youngling Research Cohort program, I taught a framework called the AB Framework.

The idea is to figure out where people are and where they’re trying to get to by using your product.

The pain is A.

Dream

If the pain is A, the dream is B.

The reader is trying to move from A to B, and if you can do a good job of communicating that you understand that, you can convince them that you are the right person for that job.

The lazy man’s way to write the dream section is to simply invert the pain section.

To make your life as easy as possible, I’m copying the pains again and then I’ll flip them:

Pain

• Are you buying books that you know are just going to collect dust on the shelves?

• Are you hungry but you don’t have time to cook?

• Your house is a mess and you don’t have time to clean.

• Your teeth are yellow and you’re embarrassed when you smile.

• You’ve bought all the courses under the sun to help you become a solopreneur but your revenue isn’t budging.

Dream

• Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when you buy a book, you’ll actually finish it?

• Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a healthy meal waiting on you right now?

• Imagine that your house was perfectly clean and it didn’t cost you any time!

• Imagine your teeth are pearly white and you’ve never smiled so much in your life.

• You enroll in the Solopreneur Gym and your revenue is finally blowing up.

When you’ve written the pain and dream section, you’ve communicated that you understand A and B.

The reader understands there’s an implication that you can help get them from A to B, so the next question that pops into their head is “But how?!”

That’s where the fix finally comes in.

The Fix

Here, you simply tell them how your product works.

How do you move them from A to B?

If you wanna get fancy, you can go the extra mile and translate your features into benefits.

E.g. I utilize a lot of live training to help my students get results. There’s group coaching, private coaching, and live courses inside of the Solopreneur Gym. That’s a feature.

The benefit is the answer to the question, “What’s the purpose of that feature?” My answer is that the dropout rate is high 90%+ with self-paced courses. Among the ones that finish the material, you again got 90%+ of people who simply never implement it.

This means that if you’ve got 1000 students, it’s very possible just one, or even no one, actually gets results.

“A study undertaken by MIT academics reveals that about 96 percent of enrolled students drop out on average over five years.” (Read this.)

So the purpose of me, investing so much time in a non-scalable way, is to maximize the odds that you the students actually get results.

My competitors all do offline courses because their primary focus is their own lifestyle, not your results, while for me it’s the inverse. My main goal is to get YOU results and I’m perfectly happy sacrificing my lifestyle because I’ve got the mindset of a craftsman.

To turn a feature into a benefit, simply answer the question “So what?”

You do live courses? So what?

You sell a membership fee instead of selling each product individually? So what?

Private coaching is included in the program? So what?

The Fix shouldn’t be hard to write.

When people without training write a sales page, that’s all that’s on the page.

Simply write about how you help people get from A to B, and optionally, translate your features into benefits.

Call To Action

The CTA is pretty straightforward as well.

A percentage of people who’ve been reading your page are bought in.

So what do you want them to do next?

Your CTA answers that question.

• Enroll today

• Apply now

• I want this

• Buy now

• Contact me

• Schedule a call with me

Social Proof

If you’ve got some testimonials, add them here to really get people over the edge.

Read these two pieces for more on influencing people:

Testimonials aren’t just great from a social proof POV (we like to follow others), but also from a copywriter POV.

The best copy is always created by your customers.

You can literally take what they say and use it, verbatim, on your sales page.

Ask them what their pains are, why they bought from you, what they were hoping to get out of it, and what they got out of it.

If you’ve sold products/services but don’t have any testimonials, ASK!

Email or DM your former customers and ask if they’ll leave a testimonial. You can use a tool like Senja to collect them.

If you haven’t sold anything yet, keep building your email list and ship content to create goodwill so that when you launch, you’ll get buyers. If you haven’t started doing that either, then do some free work for 3 people in exchange for a testimonial.

You don't HAVE to have testimonials. If you do a good job with A, B, and the fix (mainly A and B), people will buy as long as the price is lower than the willingness to pay (maximum they’ll pay for it).

I made many thousands of dollars before I finally started asking for testimonials.

(It’s a bit of a bummer because I helped make some students tens and even hundreds of thousands but now they’re too busy to get back to me or after asking multiple times still haven’t made a testimonial.)

It’s just human nature. No one enjoys making a testimonial so the sooner you ask your customers, the better. When they’re riding high on a result they got because of you, that’s when you should ask them for a testimonial.

Remember: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.

My sales page is very rough around the edges as I literally shipped it in <90min. However, I’ve already sold 2 purple belts and a white belt.

No one gives a fuck. Just get it out there.

So don’t use not having testimonials as a reason to procrastinate.

Go chop wood and carry water and we’ll talk tomorrow.

RJY

References

McAndrew, F.T. (2019). Costly Signaling Theory. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3483-1