When you work with clients, they have so many light bulb moments that your business could single-handedly be getting us all off the grid.
But the people who sign up to work with you aren’t coming from your website. In fact, you keep double checking to make sure you actually hit “publish” on your sales page.
What gives?
Does Your Sales Page Actually Sell?
The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make on their sales pages is too much lead up and too little selling.
And it makes perfect sense why this happens. It’s because you’re an expert at what you do. You really know your stuff.
Plus, you’re passionate about what you do. So of course, when you talk about it, you tend to geek out.
All that passion comes out as a firehose-spray of information as you tell people all about what works, why it works, and why that’s so important.
You’re really excited about your expertise, so naturally you try to share that enthusiasm with potential customers.
Does this sound like you? I’ll be honest with you: It sounds exactly like me. I spent years firehosing potential customers. So I totally feel you!
Turns out that’s a HUGE mistake on a sales page. Here’s why:
A sales page is for selling.
I know you know that already, but let’s think about what that really means.
A sales page is not a store. At a store, people learn about the product, ask questions, and maybe even hop on their phones to do a price comparison with another retailer. They make returns and receive follow-up service. A store has a lot of jobs.
But not a sales page. A sales page has one purpose: To get someone to click the “buy now” button. That’s its raison d’ȇtre.
If a visitor reads your sales page and thinks, “Hm, that’s really interesting. I should do some more research on that.” it’s not a win! It’s a lose!
Excite, Don’t Educate
If you’re putting the full weight and responsibility of a store on your sales page, it will help if you stop thinking of your sales page in a vacuum.
You might be thinking, “I wanna sell this thing. Hmm, what would someone need to know about it to want to buy it?”
The job of your sales page isn’t to introduce people to what you sell. Its one and only job is to move people to action.
Megan Barnhard
In reality, your sales page has a lot of help. It’s the final stage in a process that’s been started much earlier. It’s the last stop on a long railroad line of content.
- The process starts by getting people’s attention.
- Next, it informs and educates them so they get interested in what you have to offer.
- Then, it piques their desire, getting them all excited about taking action.
The sales page is simply where they finally take that action.
That means the job of your sales page isn’t to introduce people to what you sell. Its one and only job is to move people to action.
The sales pages is like a conversation between the potential customer and herself. You’re not really even necessary.
She’s reading the beginning of your page, looking for some kind of “you are here” marker. Is she in the right place? Do those problems and struggles you listed feel like what she’s going through? Does she relate to the picture you painted?
Then she’s checking out the results you promise and seeing if they sound like what she wants. Do they spark joy? Do they make her feel hopeful? Is this exactly what she’s been scouring the internet for?
If she can see herself in the struggles you list and get excited about the results you promise, she’s going to take action.
But if she isn’t jolted into action by her own emotions, she’ll click away and become just another missed connection.
Recycle Your Bad Sales Page
I’ve got good news and better news. The good news is that you absolutely can write compelling sales pages for your business. You simply need to shift away from educating and start engaging your readers on an emotional level.
The better news is that you don’t have to chuck out that really long sales page you wrote that you now realize isn’t a sales page at all.
Remember how I said that taking action is merely the last stage? Unless you sell chocolate, before people get to that stage, they have to be informed about your product or service.
(Mmm… chocolate. I’m not drooling! You’re drooling!)
If you’ve got a firehose sales page, what you’ve really got is a bunch of content that introduces people to your specialty or educates them about why what you do is so flippin’ cool. Recycle that bad sales copy into killer blog post content.
Read back through what you wrote and divide it up into bite-sized topics that will help people learn about what you do, why you do it, and why your approach is unique and amazing.
Total honesty here? This very blog post has recycled bits of bad sales page in it! It’s not that the information I was sharing was unimportant. It’s just that it didn’t belong on a sales page. It belonged earlier in the process.
Your blog is the perfect place to get people’s attention and introduce them to your area of expertise. Set that Attention –> Interest –> Desire –> Action sequence in motion! Educate, inspire, and inform. That’s precisely what a blog is for.
That way, by the time they get to your amazing sales page, they’ll be chomping at the bit to work with you.
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