Years ago I learned that a confused customer never buys.  So, keep your offer simple and clear.  Buy now and you get this.  The only question is cash or credit?  It’s not option 1, 2, 3, and you need to research.  You are fighting not just for your customer’s money these days, you’re fighting for their time as well.  Long winded talks, emails, websites, conversations are taking away the most precious commodity your client has.  Keep it simple, make the sale.

And that all ties back to my Journey to a Million Dollars project using websites.

I must have looked at 10,000 websites and landing pages in the past few months.  I’ve been using the Landing Page Handbook (from Marketing Sherpa) as my Holy Grail in deciphering the best way to set up a landing page.  No, it’s not teaching me programming.  Jorge knows about that.  I’m learning about copy writing, CTA (calls to action) and the general design and use of a landing page.

Three months ago, I didn’t even know what a landing page was.  Now I can at least talk a good game.  The landing page is used when you send someone to a site with one intent - to buy your product or service, to pick up the phone and make a call or to sign up for something.  That’s the CTA.  

And it conflicts with my “old school” (ie..2005 or so) approach which is to provide great content for free and then get names signed up for free reports or enewsletters or something so you build a database.  My entire business system is build on that approach.

That’s when Jorge pointed out the power for SEO to me.  (search engine optimization)  There is a 2 to 4 times greater chance that someone will buy my offer if they are searching for it online versus someone in my database.  So, I’ve now got two marketing philosophies at play here:  building something and then find someone who wants to buy it (via SEO) and #2  find something that my optin database needs and build a solution.

Sounds great, right?  Well, the two marketing genies in my head get in an argument every time we put a landing page together.  #1:  Keep the landing page simple.  Give them ONE CTA - buy, buy, buy!  #2:  Capture info (at very least email addresses) for each and every visitor (ie…I now have a SECOND CTA - register, register, register!)

So far, I’ve compromised and done both.  But, it seems to me that I need to test this on my next product.  I have a product under development that I think will get a good following.  Rather than create just one landing page, I think I might want 4:  (1) to send my current clients to  (2) to pick up leads only with special reports and then in a second step sell them the product , (3) sell the product only and (4) do both - capture leads and sell.  

For (2), (3)  and (4) run them for a month using the same ads (so I’m not confusing a test for ad copy with a test for 1 versus 2 CTA) and see how they convert.  Hmmm - anybody want to guess how it works?