Links talked about in this episode:Leadpages landing page gallerySquarespace Guru podcast iTunes profileSo you’ve planned and set goals for 2015...have any goals for your website or online presence? We’ll talk about this and more coming up...Welcome to the Squarespace Guru show. I’m Greg and I love talking about web design and digital marketing and how Squarespace fits into that. It is Wednesday January 14th 2015, and I have been missing this show. It’s been several weeks since I’ve been able to publish a show and I believe I’m at a point now where I can again devote some time every week to the podcast. You may or may not know through earlier episodes or through social media, but my wife is expecting our 4th child any day now. This fourth one puts us at 4 kids under the age of 7. My son is 6, older daughter is 5, younger daughter is 3 and our newborn son is coming sometime this month. If you have kids then you know the significance of me saying we will have 4 kids under the age of 7. It is a zoo! But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll stop talking about my kids, I know you didn’t tap the play button to listen to that, but I mention that because we’ve had sick kids, a wife in her third trimester, and I came up with the brilliant idea that I would launch a major online course during the holidays. I initially planned for my Squarespace 7 course to be completed before Thanksgiving...but here it is halfway through January, and I’m just now putting the finishing touches on the course. Through family being in town with the holidays, kids being sick, my wife needing extra help...and my membership platform demands...boy has it been a crazy crazy last few weeks. Even with the baby coming here soon, considering all the other chaos that’s been going on here, I’m back in a predictable rhythm. And I hope you had a great holiday season. Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali...now it’s the new year, and it’s time to talk goals and plans and all that fun stuff. And I’m excited to dig into todays show, lot’s of great stuff to talk about. But first, let’s talk about a little Squarespace news. Since launching the new version 7 platform in October, there’s been a rather slow trickle of updates to the platform that could easily be missed including a safe mode when pasting in code to the code block. I just noticed this the other day when pasting in some video embed code, a little black box that said preview in safe mode. You know typically when pasting in embedded code into a code block, the javascript doesn’t render until you save the page and then refresh the page. The new preview in safe mode button I assume renders the code even before saving the page. I’m not really sure, it doesn’t appear to work that well...and I haven’t found any documentation on the Squarespace help site...so I’ll keep testing it and of course report back to you. I’ve also noticed that the block menu has been rearranged a little. going from 3 columns wide to 4 columns wide….which is a nice touch, eliminates some extra scrolling. Here’s something thats kinda funny...you now can’t use a domain with squarespace in it. Even if you own the domain on say godaddy or hover or google...you can’t make it a primary or secondary domain in Squarespace...I thought that was interesting...I had cleared my name and url with Squarespace before I started my blog. I didnt’ want to be a nuisance...and I didn’t want squarespace to distance themselves from me, so I had some discussions to let them know what I was doing and my goals and stuff. And they’re ok with it. And my original url was squarespace guru dot com, and ran under that domain for 6 months...and then some hot shot guy in the business operations team starting harassing me, and finally I gave in and started using the sqsp.guru domain. Which I think is way better and much more fun. I don’t even think that guy works at Squarespace anymore. Havent heard or seen him on the employees page….I’ll have to go snoop again and see if he’s on there. Of all the Squarespace employees that I’ve interacted with or had conversations with on twitter, via email, over the phone, in person...theyve all been way cool and very nice and positive. But this dude, had a chip on his shoulder and he was out to lay down the law.Anyway speaking of domains, Squarespace has updated the way the 3rd party domains are mapped to Squarespaces servers. So if you have a 3rd party domain, which is a domain you’ve purchased outside of Squarespace, then you need to go into the domains area and remap the domain. They have completely changed the way it works. Before there was domain forwarding and things we’re a little iffy, but now Squarespace generates a unique alias, which is a bunch of letters and numbers that you’ll need to use when creating the text records with your registrar. You’ll in fact need to create 5 new text records, at least that’s the way it is with Godaddy...I imagine others will be the same. I’ve got a tutorial on youtube and in my Squarespace 7 course that shows how to do this if you want to check it out. I’m sure you’ve been planning and creating goals and strategies for your business, so for the main part of the show today I want to add another goal to your list...and that is to create more landing pages. Before we jump in and start talking about specific and attainable goals in relation to creating landing pages, first I want to quickly go over what a landing page is and why it’s important. I know I’ve covered this topic in some of my earlier episodes, but this is something we really can’t talk too much about. So what is a landing page. To me, my personal definition of a landing page, is a page in your website in which the sole purpose is to be a tool to attract and convert visitors that wouldn’t otherwise find your website. Most businesses that have a website today, only paid the web developer for a basic 5 page template website. They spent less than a thousand dollars, and the developer slapped up a site that looks like its from 2003. Those basic websites have just the five common pages right, the home page, about page, services page or products, blog page and contact page. But you are going to give yourself an advantage by creating landing pages. One thing to note here is that if you have a simple 5 page website, with several services or products listed on the services page, the search engine value and the average visitor value of that page is very low. Why is that? Well if you are selling 5 widgets, and you have a litte information about all 5 widgets on one products page….the offering or impact per visitor is diluted. But if you had a single page devoted to each widget...then the offering is much stronger. Not only for the visitor looking at your page...but for the potential visitor who is searching for that widget, or the person who is spending time in an online community devoted to that widget.I like to compare the landing page concept to bobbing for apples. Imagine you have a big 50 gallon trough full of water and only two apples. One red, one green. If you were blindfolded, you’d likely have to bob around in the water searching for a while until you finally found one of these apples. You might even get tired or lose interest and just give up before you found one. Now, what if you had a 50 gallon trough with 1000 red apples and another 50 gallon trough with 1000 green apples? How long would it take to find an apple now? This is how landing pages work. Simply leaving your 5 page website untouched and very basic is not enough content to grab potential customers attention. The more content you put out there, the more you are able to tip the odds in your favor. More content, more traffic, more sales. Don’t get this confused with blogging though. When you blog, you aren’t typically selling something to your audience. A Blog is better served for those good-will pieces of content. A landing page is selling something. These are your money pages.Create one landing page for widget a, create another for widget b, another for widget c and so on. If you really want to be aggressive, you could create multiple landing pages for each widget you are selling. Coming from different angles, or optimizing the content for a specific audience segment. For example if I had a pest control business that covered the entire dallas metro area, I would create landing pages for each bedroom community. One for plano, one for allen, one for frisco...and so on. And then I would even create a landing page for bedbugs in plano, another for mosquitoes in plano, and another for termites in plano. You see where I’m going with this? The objective with a landing page is to create high value content that sells your product or service. I could talk all day about landing pages...love em. But now let’s start with the end in mind here. What’s the goal of a landing page? To sell a product or service. So what is that product or service that you want to sell using this landing page? You might have just one product in mind, or you might have several. Now convert that product into a goal. Some examples of good goals are to sell 600 of widget a each month. Or to book 25 appointments each month. These are high level goals that are directly tied to the success of the business. Now that we know what the purpose of the landing page is...let’s create one. In squarespace, create an index folder, and then let’s place a few pages inside that index folder. Just in case you don’t know, the index folder acts like a normal folder...meaning it can hold several pages. The cool thing about the index folder is that it displays all those pages at the same time. When you are editing a page in the index, it will only display the page you are working on, but to the visitor of your live website, the index will stack up your pages and display them all at the same time. It’s brilliant really.Alright so, the first page in the index will introduce the product or service. You’ll want one big line and a smaller short paragraph with an image to the right or left. Then a big call to action button underneath. The next page or pages will be full of information you would give someone about that product if they walked up to you at your place of business and asked you about it. Features, benefits, hone in on pain points...work your salesperson magic there. The next page could be a testimonials page. List off as many legitimate testimonials as you can find, or just one super powerful testimonial with the photo of the customer.The next page could be a frequently asked questions page. The final page could be another large heading with supporting short paragraph with a large button underneath. If your template has the full width banner images, make sure that the first page in the index has a thumbnail...but make sure all the others do not. Unless of course you are using the Pacific template or one of the pacific variants in which the thumbnail becomes the background image for that page….which is super cool. And don’t be afraid to use the banner as a major element to the landing page. Bedford, bryant, hayden, adversary all these templates have great banners with buttons...use em.Design-wise you want to stay away from the 2004-ish looking landing page. You can see examples of those on any cable company’s website. Actually at&t’s wasn’t too bad when I looked last week trying to get the nba channel. but typically they are cluttered and cramped with cheesy stock images...too many options...I usually opt for a telephone call which is saying something. If you want to see some really great landing page examples to use as inspiration, check out market.leadpages.net and it would be a good idea to keep an eye on this service called leadpages. Although you can’t integrate leadpages with Squarespace, they are doing some really cool things over there...and I steal...I mean use as inspiration their stuff all the time.So to wrap this up, create your landing page, keep an eye on the numbers over the course of a month or so...and then figure out how many visits you need to generate 1 conversion. Then figure out how many conversions you’ll need every month to hit your profit goals for the year. Then once you have that number, you can use social media, forums, online communities, advertising to drive traffic to that landing page. Over time you’ll want to continue monitoring that landing page for conversions, bounces, where people go from that page, if they abandon the cart afterwardsSo, 2015...make it the year of the landing page. That’s what I’m doing...and I’ll be talking a lot about landing pages this year. All signs are pointing to the landing page being the most valuable page in a website. Before you go, you can catch new episodes every Wednesday at 4pm on my website sqsp.guru or subscribe to the show using your podcast app of choice, just search Squarespace and you’ll find me. Also if you enjoy the show and want to help me climb the rankings with iTunes, take a minute and rate or review the show in iTunes. It takes literally like 2 two minutes. It helps me tremendously when others are searching for podcasts related to mine, I see my show starting to pop up in those results...but the more reviews the show gets, the higher in the results it gets. So do me a solid, and review the show that would be great. I have links to the things I’ve referenced in the show, you can go to sqsp.guru/podcast to see the shownotes. That’s all for this week, I’ll see you next Wednesday!
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