Blake Emal - How to convert people browsing your website into people buying your product!

I think we do think a little bit too much of ourselves when we're, or we're trying to like format our story and what does this mean to the customer? Really what it means is like, you want it, you're making them more money, you're saving them time, you're opening up their schedule. Like it's, it's pretty much the, the same benefits primally that existed for cave people exist now. Sure. It's just more modernized. So if you're going toward those things and you just make that really clear, then, then that works. But when you start getting too complex in your story, That is kind of a trend now that I think is somewhat helpful, but it's also like, I think we work too much on it. It's probably too big of a focus, but every company has to have a

story.

Right. I get both sides of that argument, but just be careful. Like, make sure that you're actually telling a story that is clear enough for people to understand what you're going for and that they see the benefits coming back to them right away. Because a lot of people won't care about that facade of like how you design the story. They'll only care about What's actually in it for me? So I try to communicate that really clearly.

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Thanks, man. I appreciate it. It's good to chat. It's been a minute and I'm doing good.

Blake and I, I think for, you know, for giving you guys some context, we go back like way long. I think probably like, I think early 2020s, if I'm not wrong. Blake is still kind of like starting out his Twitter journey and I'm starting out my SaaS founder journey and we kind of like, you know, crossed paths so many times. So Briggs, it's so good to have you, my friend. I feel this has been long due and I'm so glad we're doing this. Right off the bat, I want to ask about, now that you're knee-deep into landing pages,

Mm-hmm.

Explain to me or walk me through the evolution of SaaS landing pages. You've seen Probably like thousands. And I love your newsletter marketing jumps, you know, the 3 jumps. So it's going to like very, you know, short, sweet, impactful. So yeah, how SaaS landing pages have evolved over the years in your opinion?

Yeah, it's always cyclical. So what you'll see if you go into the Wayback Machine archive.org and you look at Stripe's landing page from 2016, which is like a legendary site that everybody modeled their SaaS company after Stripe's design. Mm-hmm. Uh, it's pretty much just like what you see now with a few little design tweaks here and there. But, but by and large, actually landing pages haven't changed a whole ton. And I think there's a lot of room for that to change, which we can get into.

Mm-hmm.

But it's largely just been F-pattern. So if anybody knows what like the F-pattern means on landing pages, people look at the left hash of the, of the landing page. And then kind of like 2 rows right in the middle going from left to right. And then they kind of ignore the rest. And so if you're looking at landing page heroes, you're usually going to see that pattern over and over and over again, especially in software companies. E-commerce a little bit different because e-commerce tends to drop you into the products pretty quickly. So that can look a little bit different, but some similar principles and over the course of the past decade or two, that's pretty much been it. Obviously you go 20 years back, it was really just text-heavy landing pages, more like open letters to people.

Right.

Whereas it's gotten more visual, richer with details. And now it's hopefully part of your copy on your landing page is actually the visuals that take care of a lot of the story for you and help emotionally charge things. But, but by and large has been kind of the same. And now you start seeing design patterns pop up that will be hot for a while and then they'll go away. Like, uh, glassmorphism was big for a while where everything was transparent and looked really cool, right? And then it went to like minimalist design and then that went away and then it came back and it's all just cyclical. But I think there's, there's a chance for this to actually shift,

uh,

a little bit going forward. But, uh, you know, I honestly, not a lot has changed in terms of what really works.

It's like humans. Yeah. Not, not a lot of us change, right? We just, you know, keep ourselves the same way. Yeah, talk to me about, like, let's expand on the prediction piece, or what do you think, in your opinion, that is going to make a massive impact now that you're working with clients and you charge like, you know, $5K per month, $3K per month? It's not like a— it's a premium service, right? Yeah. So, you've put a lot of skin in the game, they've put a lot of skin in the game. So, what is something that you are helping your clients That are going to differentiate them in this vast ocean of same old landing page design?

Yeah, I'll save the copy side of this for kind of a second part. I'll focus there. The core parts of a landing page are copy, structure, design. That's kind of like it. And then how it all flows together after the fact. But if you're just looking at one page, those are kind of the 3 main things that you're focusing on building out. And on the structure/design side, I'm not a designer. I've seen enough where I kind of know where, where things are and where they're going. And I, I've started to wonder how this kind of shifts with a couple of things. First with AI, and then second, just as design evolves in general. Mm-hmm. I almost wonder, I've been thinking about lately how we might start organizing websites a little bit more like folders in a Google Drive or in a Notion database or something like that to make it even easier to just navigate through and understand everything as like a card. So it's already basically like that. Websites are just folders that host different pages and it's got some text and some images and stuff. If you boil it all down to its basic components, it's literally just like text and some images. And then there's a bunch of code that makes it look different than that, but that's all any page is.

Hmm.

So it's really just storing files that are really, really basic. And then you make them look a little more beautiful, however you want to do that with interactions and stuff like that. But, um, I almost wonder if there is a future where websites, you land on there and it's more like, here's the portion of this file that I want to look at. And it's just organized kind of like a folder system, file system, better for UX potentially for some people since that's a really common thing. But then the flip side of this is how does AI play into all this? Because—

Yeah.

Now we're starting to get stuff like OpenAI just released ChatGPT-4o, which is a terrible name for a model, but that's, well, that's whatever. But now you're starting to get more voice in there. I do think that voice is going to become a really natural way for us to talk to computers. Right. But I'm not totally sure that like you want to have AI read you a website and that's the easiest way to get information because then that just takes forever. And there is a certain part of the AI component where We like websites because all the information's there and I can pick and choose what I want to look at. Whereas with voice, you do tend to have to know what you want to look for. So you have to have your questions in your pocket. So if I want a voice landing page to really work, I'm not sure what that really looks like yet, but I'm sure that we're heading to a future where voice is a huge part of it, where you can listen to any landing page, you can ask AI on any website. Anything about the company and it'll have a pretty good answer. Basically like integrating a wiki into the landing page. So there's a lot of stuff on the voice video side that I do think it changes. I think the way that we interact with these sites will become more, I'm just going to ask questions that I care about and not even digest any of the other content. Cause there's a lot of fluff on a lot of landing pages. So that's, you know, that's on that side. Now on the, on the copy side, thankfully writing is a little bit more timeless than design. Right. And design, design has its timeless foundations for sure that it just keeps showing up. But copy is really like, there are frameworks that work. There are certain ways that you should probably present information in ways that you shouldn't. And the biggest thing when, when clients come to me, the biggest thing I see is it's just like overly confusing. Or it sounds like ChatGPT wrote it and it's not conveying anything at all. So really, instead of people coming to me, I think a lot of people think copywriting, I need somebody that can wordsmith This headline to be clever and perfect and totally one of one and unique. And instead, most of these people have zero brand and nobody knows who they are. And they would just be way better off if the headline was just clear and it just made sense. If you could tell me what the thing is, who it's for, why I should care, what's in it for me, what's the transformation I could expect with this thing. If you can make that stuff pretty clear, that's a, that's 99% of it. And then you can always evolve that and try to differentiate with copy a little bit. Yeah. After that, where you can be a little bit more unique, but that comes also, that's as you build a brand, your ability to be more creative in your copy accelerates as

well. Love that. I think one key aspect of AI narrating a website, that's very interesting. And I don't think it's going to be like a blank page where you hit a button and AI is going to read out the whole thing. Like, this is the header. This is, I think that's weird. Maybe, I don't know, it will become mature in the next 5, 10 years, but at least now. But I think what is very interesting there, I just want to point out, is that I think websites are going to convert into chatbots where you ask a question. And again, to your point, you want to only consume XYZ information, not A to Z, and you ask X. that's going to be present in front of you, not just like talk it through or like in a video form. Hey, show me the hero page. That's the hero page. I think websites are going to reveal by itself. I guess that's one thing I'm kind of like anticipating in the future. It's not like everything is right on your face. It's going to reveal like a magic trick, if that makes sense. What do you think about that? Like, curious about chatbots being like this incredible format people are obsessed about. Everything is a chatbot now, especially in this AI age. Right. So yeah, I'm just curious, what do you think about like, you know, that kind of a presentation?

Yeah, I think OpenAI is pretty open about this as well, that the chatbot is not the final form factor. That makes a lot of sense. I'm a huge believer that AI is most powerful integrated and not as its own platform. So ChatGPT is cool now, but in 2 years, ChatGPT now is going to look awful compared to what we have, because I think it's going to start going more into integrating into specific workflows. But you already see, you already see companies spinning up like, oh, we're doing just this one part of this one marketing task. And that, that's impactful.

The

AI is still not as good, nearly as good as it's going to be. Um, so there's a lot that can happen there. But when you're, when you're talking chatbots, my vision of what this really can be is AI. Well, first off, AI across the board is meant to add a ton more depth and accelerate your learning. So it's not, I think the, the altruistic way of looking at it is AI tools should not replace what you do and make you lazier.

It

should enable you to be like 10 times smarter because you have access to all this stuff. You can do way more. You can automate things that don't matter, focus on more human things that you have to still do. That's really the vision that I am on board with that I see happening. So when you translate that to a website, I don't think that it's stripping all the elements down into a chatbot and then you ask it anything, because again, that's bad for user experience. You're putting the onus on the user to know what they're supposed to be asking. I think the information still all exists visually. It just adds more on top of it. So now, if you see something on the, on a homepage that you have a question about, instead of having to go to support and ask them and wait, you could like drag over it, highlight it with your mouse, and then right-click or whatever. And then AI can pull up a hover modal that expands on it or lets you ask a question specifically on that across the entire internet, for example. Right. You can do that wherever. So you, you deepen your knowledge. Text with text. Then if you need a different kind of visual or even audio, you can get it in that format as well. So if you wanted to click the button or, you know, highlight the text and say out loud, hey, tell me more about this. I have this specific question about this service that I'm highlighting. Then you could do that and get an audio response. It'll get good at creating videos as well. So you can do that if you need to visualize things. So, hey, show me, like, take screenshots of what it looks like on the inside of this product based on this service, and then show me in a and compilation video or whatever, and it should be able to create that. So I think you just add a lot more depth to everything. Um, and, and there's certain things that may, may be simplified because of that, but I do still think you kind of have all of it and you're just able to do way more in a richer format with everything.

I really like that. And now, now you also briefly touched upon copywriting being timeless, which I, I kind of agree. If you go back to, you know, the David Ogilvy times, we still embrace the copywriting there in the past. Like, for example, like writing or reading a Volkswagen ad or like a Porsche ad or whatever it is, it feels like so relevant. Or we touch— there is like a human touch to copywriting. So I'm very curious about some of the techniques that you've been implemented in the past, in your experience as a writer, as a marketer. That brings that human element. What are those techniques that you want to explain to our listeners that they should very much rely on?

Yeah. So earlier on when I was first learning, I focused really heavy on frameworks so that I could get it down. So attention, interest, desire, action, AIDA, PASTOR, all these frameworks, I would try to stick to those really closely. Now I've written enough of them where that kind of comes second nature to me. I don't always stay very close to those. Sometimes I veer from that. What I focus on more now is just asking myself really basic questions about the stage that I'm at. So if I'm writing for the main headline on a page, it's a little bit different than writing a subheader for the pricing table to kind of like introduce the pricing. So there are different questions you ask yourself, but the big one is obviously always going to be the main headline, the H1. So for me, again, the questions that I'm asking myself are super basic. Like if I landed on this page with, with no context other than I think this thing might help me, what would be the questions that I have? Well, I want to know, is this actually what I thought it was? So what is it? Am I the right person for this? Do I fit? Who is it for? Uh, why aren't— why should I care? Why, why is it different than all the other stuff I've researched? What is this going to change for me? What's the benefit of it? If I can communicate some of those things in one sentence altogether, then I've really got something. If I can communicate one or two of them, then it's probably pretty good. But again, clarity is like the main thing that I'm shooting for, especially for SaaS websites, e-com websites, agency websites. Most of them don't have people that know about them. And education is half of the job on a landing page. So you have to be really clear about all those different questions. So I think just— Getting really good at understanding what questions should I be asking myself for this thing that I have to write? And then just write a bunch of them and most of them might be terrible. Then you cross out the ones that are terrible, you riff on the ones that you like, and you just come up with a list of variants. So that's usually what works for me, pretty frankly. And you can use AI to help with some of the brainstorming here to help you see different angles you haven't thought of.

Right.

Look through it through like your competitors' eyes, through your customers' eyes, all this stuff. Sure. But ultimately it just boils down to, are you a good question asker? And do you know what people should be looking— just put yourself in that person's shoes, the ideal person that should be reading that, that would actually take action on that sentence, on that section. What questions are they asking themselves and how can I just answer them pretty clearly and as briefly as possible as well? That's 99% of what I focus on now.

Wow. I love that. You have to be a better questioner to be a better writer. If that's what I'm getting after, like, you know, from your answer, you briefly touched upon this thing called clarity. And so I'm just curious, I've been tinkering on my product's landing page, GuessLab, and I watched so many videos and I watched, you know, basically I read your newsletter as well. So, one thing everybody says is you have to be very clear on the first impression you make on the people who are going through it. So, I have a curious question. Do you think if we intentionally leave some space where, or some exploration where it's not too clear, it's like it's clear, but it's not very clear so that the the person who's going through the website actually explores the whole thing. Do you think that strategy works? Like kind of tease them with probably like 95% of, you know, clear idea, but there is like a curiosity angle. You don't, you're not intentionally being clear. You're basically not clear. And then the buyer or the person is actually exploring the whole website to make an impression. Is that something that— You recommend?

Yeah. What you're describing is basically the slippery slope where you're hoping that you kind of hook them a little bit in the headline and then you keep them going down that rabbit hole and being increasingly interested throughout your writing. So yeah, I mean, there's absolutely something to that. That happens naturally because every single product or service inherently has more to it than one sentence can describe it. So you're never going to cover You're never going to get complete clarity on your whole thing in one sentence. It's just not going to happen, especially when a headline is not even a full sentence. Usually it's like 4 to 5 words or whatever it is. So, um, unless you're writing super long headlines, but even then there's always going to be stuff that's left out. You're not going to be able to answer every question. So it's, it's important to just understand what's the angle that you think your customers care the most about and how do you just make that, that pretty clear in your headline while also very clearly flowing into a subheadline that expands on that. So usually the formula that I'm looking at is, can I at least cover those main, those main questions that I referenced? Like, what is it? Who's it for? Those questions. Can I cover one or two of those in, in some clarity in the headline in a way that is emotionally charged? Pro tip for if you want to make your headlines emotionally charged, but still pretty clear is to just put a label above the H1 that just clearly says exactly what you do. So then you can be more emotional. So if, if for my case, like if I run a copywriting subscription service, that's what I would put as a label above. So you know exactly what it is in smaller letters above it. Now I don't have to say that in my headline. I can, I have room for more emotion in there and I can get them on the slippery slope and still be clear because what I'm really communicating now in the H1 is like the main value. what you get from it. And you already get the what it is above in a small label. So I highly recommend doing that across your sections because then you don't have to just make your headlines super boring and on the nose every time. Yeah.

And

then with the H1, it's usually emotionally charged, probably talking about your differentiator or the transformation from point A to point B for your customer. Then in the subheadline, uh, usually it's an info-packed Continuation of that emotional thing that you said in the headline, but a little bit more practical now. And you just expand on it. You make it really tangible. This is what you can expect. This is who it's for, all that good stuff. You can do that in 1 or 2 sentences in a subheadline. And then the call to action should be like pretty straightforward and tell you exactly what's on the other side of that click.

Hmm.

And that formula works super, super well. Then with the rest of the page, you can worry through What's the story I want to tell? How does that flow into features, benefits, all that stuff? Because there are certain sections that you want, but there's definitely something to creating intrigue along the way. But that happens again, it happens pretty naturally because you have to break up your thoughts. You can't do everything at once.

I love that. I actually have a question about if you can describe key elements of high conversion landing pages, I think, which is what you exactly described. Thanks for breaking that down. Now let's talk about from a buyer standpoint, like from, from the one who's actually going to the website. What do you think in your experience, at least if you can generalize it, that triggers them? Is it clarity? Is it like emotion? Is it like wittiness? Is it like design? What is that thing that people or founders should really focus on?

Yeah. And when I say clarity, I'm not saying that you always have to say just like, this is what it is. So your headline doesn't have to be IndoorCom is an AI chatbot. Like obviously that's a terrible headline. So when I'm talking clarity, I'm more so meaning, do you really know what you want to communicate and are you actually communicating that? So if it's a more value prop driven headline talking about, this is what's different, this is why you should care about this. Or if it's an audience-driven headline, this is what it is and who it's for. All those are perfectly good angles to look through. Just make sure that they're clear there, but you have a lot of room for creativity. If you're looking at, could you repeat really quick one more time so I answer it? Yeah, yeah.

So let's talk about from a buyer standpoint or someone who's going through website, what triggers them in your opinion? It's like, is it design? Is it copywriting? Is it wittiness? Is it personality? Of, or design or elements. What, what, what actually differentiates?

Yeah. So the reason that you, the reason that you focus on structure is not because that is the trigger, but it's that it makes it really easy for them to know where to look. And then when they find the thing that interests them, it's just, they don't even have to think about it. So the structure, the design, hopefully all that is done so that you're pointing their eyes to the right things at the right time. And then it is obviously the words are what compels them more than anything, or the, or the visuals, the media that helps tell a story, whatever's telling the story and gives information is what's charging that forward. But it's the emotion. The emotion, people that are emotional buy things, people that are practical don't buy things because they think through all, like they overthink things or whatever. The emotion, not that it's always an impulse buy, but it definitely sparks that I want to do this. Uh, and then you have to, you justify that through more logical content down the page. So the, the reason that structure is so important is I get it all the time with landing pages that are super, super crowded above the fold. So you see tons of writing, multiple images, logos everywhere. It looks nice in theory, but your eyes have zero clue where to just naturally look when you land on the page. Hmm. Because the button, the button might be kind of hidden or it doesn't contrast and The words don't flow how you'd expect. They don't follow an F pattern or a centered kind of formatting. That stuff matters just because you want people looking at the right stuff. You don't want them focusing on all of the little details. Those are supposed to be nice things, but they should draw them into headline, button, take action. And if it, and if that's not the step that gets them to trigger, then they should at least feel compelled to scroll down and learn a little bit more. And hopefully you repeat that process until they have enough to feel confident and trust you. But yeah, definitely like once you get the structure design, everything correct and you're clear, then you charge it emotionally throughout the page. And that's usually the trigger.

Love that. Yeah, you're absolutely spot on when it comes to people being emotional, make those decisions very quickly. And I think it's, again, it's going back to that human touch. It's like, I'm talking to you, I'm not selling anything. The selling bit will be less and talking to you is a bit I want to also talk about the other side of websites, landing pages, which is the role of A/B testing, the role of SEO. It's like the technicality using those keywords, you know, that will— so talk to me about balancing emotion at the same time, also kind of addressing these things which are very important for a landing page to be converted.

Yeah, I honestly tend to focus more on the conversion side than the SEO side now, even though my background's in SEO, just purely because if you're overstuffing your page with keywords, it obviously looks kind of bad for the user experience. It's not really helping you with search engines anyway. Plus, I'm not entirely sure what search engines look like going forward and how much it's going to matter. You already, if you go Google stuff, You just did AI-generated stuff. So there's going to be value there. I'm not saying SEO is dead at all. I just think it changes and I'm not exactly sure what it changes to quite yet and how to get the most value out of that. So I focus a lot more on just, do I think this is going to get clicks? Is this going to convert? Right. Um, and I don't focus as much on SEO content. Mm-hmm. Not, you know, there's, there's on-page for landing pages, SEO, that is one thing. Then there's kind of what most SaaS companies, B2B companies especially do, which is like blog posts, things like that, that are supposed to drive a lot of their SEO value back to the main site. So I just focus on, let's assume we're getting traffic.

Got it.

Am I wasting that or not? Are you currently wasting it or are you taking advantage? Most companies are wasting a little or even a lot and they know it. And so clicks are way more important than that. And that's where I focus. Not to say that SEO isn't important, but there's probably somebody else that can come in and help there. I do think that the tactic I kind of gave about using labels above your sections can help there because you can format those however you would like to be H2s or whatever header type you want and make them even smaller. And it doesn't— like you can do whatever you want and play around there and specifically use keywords in those to describe each section and get the value there. But again, SEO on the homepage, usually not as— Impactful as SEO on more specific landing pages for like features or even content pages or whatever, just because they're not as targeted. A homepage has so many keywords it can go after. It's really just collecting all kinds of juice from all the things that you're— that make up your website, all the keywords that are applying to your website. But, you know, I don't really optimize around that as much. I just focus on, are you wasting this? And how can we make this better so you get more clicks?

Any tips or any like quick nuggets you want to share when it comes to conversion? People usually kind of miss, it's like a clear miss. They should actually care or spend a little bit time about that, you think, that you want to share?

Yeah, the biggest one is that You really don't want people to think when they land on your page.

Interesting.

And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have content. I think a lot of people would hear that and think, oh, so I just need to have the shortest possible thing with the, with the least amount of information. It's actually the opposite. You just need to have really well-organized information so that it's just really obvious and clear where they can find what they're looking for. Because the reality is that people landing on a landing page, Probably aren't gonna read the whole thing or maybe even 10% of it. And somebody that reads 10% of a landing page could still easily convert with the limited information that they've read. Mm-hmm. Just because they, you, you've answered their concerns enough and they, they wanna move on to the next step. So when you're thinking through conversion, some people refer to it as like friction. I just think through it as, am I making people think too much when they land on this page? Do they even have to think for a second of where to look to take an action? Where to look to get the main idea of what, what this is, who it's for, all that gets those questions again. And then throughout the page, am I bloating this with all of my different content things that I want to shove at them and I'm making it bloated and crowded? Or is my information really well organized? The landing page could be super, super long, but if it's well organized and it's clear to skim through and get the gist of everything really clearly, and they don't have to think and still get all the information they want. That's a huge win. Uh, so that's, that's like number one thing that I try to optimize around across the board. That blends really cleanly into clarity as well. Um, just am I making them think or not? If I'm not making them think too much and I'm still giving them good information, I have pretty good confidence that they're going to find what they want and convert. Uh, if I overwhelm them, I feel like even if my content's good, I'm probably not going to convert them.

I love that. Let's talk about, uh, I do have a question about, uh, the structure, and you kind of briefly touched upon organizing the whole page. So generally, this is what I follow, and I pretty much— I think everybody follows. There is a hook, there is like why people should care, what are you offering, the value piece, and social proof. You know, that's like a 4 to 5 section, you know, on a high level. Do you think it's— does it change? Has it changed in the past years? Or what is something that you would add or eliminate or delete. And I also want to also ask about how you actually structure one after the other. Is it social proof being on top? Why people care being on, I don't know, like priority 3. So how would you rank them? And what is like the organizing bit, like you said, and you said it's okay to have a lengthy, long-ass one-page website. As long as it's organized. So I want to, you know, curious about that.

Yeah. For social proof, first and foremost, I don't actually think of that as like a layer. I think of it as sprinkles. So like a layer would be, this is the section, that's the layer, moving on to the next layer. I think social proof is sprinkles that happens in every single section. And if it doesn't, then you're not capitalizing on it to build trust enough. So like for the, for the hero, you can obviously showcase logos or customer testimonial, whatever, you know what this looks like. But that is, that's not the only place you have it. And you don't just have to have one other customer quotes section near the bottom. Like you'll see, it should kind of be everywhere, wherever you can make it contextual. So if you're, if you have a feature section that's talking about, this is a really specific thing our product does, why not have a quote that somebody has given you about how they use that product to make $10,000 or whatever? Like if you can get those. Right. specific A sites, even if it's not directly on the page. And like, if they hover over a little icon, it pulls that up or whatever. There's all kinds of ways you can show social proof. You can show logos per feature as well. Like, these companies use this feature specifically. There's a lot of ways you can break it down. And you can do that for any section. So those are— I think you should sprinkle that throughout really consistently across the board. In terms of sections that really need to happen on a landing page. It varies so much that it's hard to really say definitively what you should have. And also within each of these sections, I'm all for trying out weird stuff. So if your, if your head— if your hero doesn't look like a headline, a subheader, a call to action, and social proof, Right. uh, you know, I'm okay with it if you just test it out, because there are some people where their hero may just be a full video. Mm-hmm. And that's literally it. But it actually tells the story really well and it gets people hooked or interested. And that could also totally flop and you never know. It depends business by business and one format, one structure doesn't necessarily work across the board, even in the same industry. It could work for one company and totally flop for another. So you do have to test, but that's a big thing here. But overall, I would say Structure-wise, like you've got your normal hero. The one thing that's changed in the hero over time is that the visuals have become more important. So we went through this phase in SaaS especially where it used to be, you know, the doodles that you would see. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just like, yeah, doodles everywhere. That's what it used to be in SaaS. The doodles communicated nothing. They looked kind of fun. They didn't tell anything at all. And now it's getting to a point where the media that's above the fold especially, but even throughout the page. is usually screenshots, visuals of inside the product, or at least it should be like, show me what I'm getting. Show me inside of this thing. Show me the transformation. Show me people like me that got results from it. There's more social proof, but that's the kind of stuff that's making its way further up the page now. And I think that's a good thing. So anytime I see doodles now, I'm like, that's cool, but like, can you just put it on the side of the design so you can put important things in the middle? Right. 'Cause yeah, like that's a huge shift that is For the better. And then throughout what you're probably gonna want to communicate on like a homepage, if that's, if you're by landing page, you're really meaning homepage. Besides the stuff we've talked about and hammered home into hero, I would lead with benefits or transformation in the second section. So take us, take me from point A where I'm at, which is painful, all the way to point B, which is awesome.

Mm-hmm.

Take me through that, that journey, make that clear what what I'm going to feel when I use the product and what's going to change. And then you can dive into the features after that and get really clear. You don't have to beat around the bush once you get to the features at that point, because you've already talked through, this is what's going to change. You've done all the emotional stuff. Then you can be super practical and clear in your features and say, this is exactly what you get. When you get in here, expect this, and then show it as well as tell it. Right. And then from there, you will hopefully have social proof all the way throughout. I usually am not a huge fan of including like blog modules or anything like that. Maybe case studies, maybe for, especially for like agencies and stuff, but that stuff just gets so crowded and nobody reads that there anyway. They're, if they're going to come in to read content, they're probably coming in through SEO for that blog specifically anyway. So just don't waste the space. And then one last thing I'll mention that is there's actually a really cool trend that's happening now is the open letter on homepages. So you're starting to see more founders and teams write an open letter to their use case or their product or their community where they're basically like, hey, this is our vision. This is what we want to change. And it's specific to them. It's differentiator content basically. And it creates that personal connection. So it's nice for community building as well. That's one thing that I've seen popping up. I think you've seen this on like once.com. Yeah. The people that do Basecamp. Campfire. Their whole thing is just basically that letter to what they were building. Intercom did this on their new website recently. design where it's an open letter. So I'm a big fan of that as well.

I love that. And a couple follow-ups on the trends. Yeah, I think one of the trends I am watching right now is forget about— I think doodles are way past in our life, and I feel people are using vibrant expression, expressing what their vision is in terms of using AI. And generating these really vibrant images. I think Intercom nailed it. They kind of created a new trend, I would say. So any other things that you are particularly hooked into right now that you want to suggest your next client, for example?

Yeah. I mean, the Intercom thing is kind of a mixed bag because it's cool, but also It just clearly looks like AI and it, you know, I'm not sure it kind of tells a story, but only if you really care about Intercom. If you literally just want a chatbot and you don't care about the story, which is like most people, honestly, then it's just cool. You put all the effort into it, but it's like, it doesn't matter. The words on the page matter and the media that actually tell the story, that matters. But there is something to the artistry of storytelling that does matter when you're trying to build a brand. Yeah. But I think we do think a little bit too much of ourselves when we're, we're trying to like format our story. And what does this mean to the customer? Really what it means is like, you want to, you're making them more money, you're saving them time, you're opening up their schedule. Like it's, it's pretty much the same benefits primally that existed for cave people exist now. It's just more modernized. So if you're going toward those things and you just make that really clear, then, then that works. But when you start getting too complex in your story, That is kind of a trend now that I think is somewhat helpful, but it's also like, I think we work too much on it. It's probably too big of a focus, but every company has to have a story. Right. I get both sides of that argument, but be careful, like make sure that you're actually telling a story that is clear enough for people to understand what you're going for and that they see the benefits coming back to them right away. Because a lot of people won't care about that facade of like how you design the story. They'll only care about What's actually in it for me? So try to communicate that really clearly. Some other trends that are interesting, I did this with my site now, but basically having like a video landing page where you just read through the landing page and maybe dive a little bit deeper into the stuff on there and putting that as an embedded video on your landing page. Huge fan of that. If people want to watch a video instead of read this thing, they've got the whole thing right there. If not, they can read it. That's cool too. Um, other than that, I don't think that reinventing the wheel is all that important. You can have an insanely ugly website, but if it's easy to skim and scan, people understand what you're going for and it clicks with them, then it works great. Yeah. So again, if you want to try something weird, just do it, test it out. And if it tanks, then pull the plug and go back. If it works kind of well, then just expand on that. But I wouldn't pay too much attention to like templates and how things need to be.

Yeah, I think it's part of the iteration. You do something, you see the conversion, you test it out. And I feel that that is something that it should come as a second nature. You know, like you said, it should have that mindset of this is not a perfect landing page. There's always room for improvement and improvement comes from iteration.

One thing there really, really quick. Um, another trend that I'm seeing that I have to be careful of is this overuse of interactions. So it's, it's really fun. You'll, you'll see all these crazy transitions, especially with like, uh, sites built on Framer. They look awesome. They really do. But all these transitions, the interactions, all of it looks cool and adds a little bit of delight. So some of that is really good. Yeah. But there are, there are companies where like the smooth scrolling, Yeah. It drives me nuts. It makes it so much harder to just go through a website like I would expect. And it also, it's going to slow your site down way more than it needs to, which is terrible. So just be careful that that's a huge trend right now. Now that it's way easier to create animations, interactions, transitions on your site, don't overdo it. Do it where it's going to add a little bit of delight on a button or whatever. But if that's your whole site, it's going to work poorly for you, probably.

Yeah. I saw this tweet trend. I think someone, I don't know who exactly it is, but he or she tweeted about like, if you're not even building animations, what are you even doing on your website? And that opened up a can of like people backlashing, like shitting on them. There are like 2 sides. I feel like you said, I think if the animation is, or whatever the thing, the format is driving the story, that it makes sense. But if the animation or the format is actually doing nothing justice to the story, I think that is the right way of judging it. Whether you do, you need that format or no. Video, do you need that? No. I would say that is like the fundamental question people should ask. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you as a founder. You know, you've been You've been working in startups, you've been kind of— you've done a lot of projects by yourself in the past as well. Now you're doing PageTier. Talk to me about that founder journey, the founder hustle. Like, you're a copywriter, you're a marketer, which is kind of your sweet spot where you feel like you're, you know, you love it.

Mm-hmm.

But you have to get clients, you have to do hustle, you have to create content. So talk to the other side of building a business?

Yeah, there's always something sacrificed. So for me, that, that has been like consistency of promoting myself has been the big thing that's been sacrificed for a couple reasons. Social platforms have changed. And so when I was doing really well and growing on certain platforms, that stuff is a little bit different now. So getting back into it, getting momentum has been harder. But honestly, it's just a lot of what I do is write for other people. And when you write a ton of words for other people and then it's 5:00 PM, your kids come home and you're like, I should really be writing some more social content to promote my business. I've already been writing for people all day. I don't want to do that for myself now. So that's, that's been the big sacrifice over the past year. In terms of the business, the journey that it's been is basically I started PageTerror over a year ago doing mostly on the side. Instantly had a couple of people interested, but by no means had like any, I'm not sure I even have product market fit at all now. Um, but it's, uh, you know, I, I didn't have any real idea of if it was gonna work. I just had a couple people that were willing to, to take the leap and be early clients. And one of those has just stuck around this whole time, which has been awesome. Mm-hmm. But what, what I was focusing on back then, I, I was not targeting the right person. I was just putting out feelers, taking on anything. That was, was within reason that would pay my rate. And I learned pretty quickly that who I was focusing on was kind of like solo founders that had a little bit of cash because they probably built something before and had a little bit of money. And now they were building their next thing and they were doing it mostly alone or with an insanely small team, like one co-founder or whatever.

Right.

And they Were kind of earlier on. And so they were doing copy and all this stuff, but maybe they weren't totally ready for it. Plus anybody that's, you know, worked agency or services kind of knows that when you're working with the founder themselves and basically no one else, it's always a harder client because they have so much invested in it. They can afford less. And so everything means more, which means that you get more feedback. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That you don't necessarily, like, feedback is great, but then there's like the feedback that isn't even helpful about all these things that aren't important that you get feedback on. And so that piles up. And so I was focusing on the wrong person. Hmm. And then kind of shifted that just by way of the people that started sticking around or, you know, early on it was turnover every 2 months. I had to replace my entire portfolio every month and a half, 2 months. Hmm. So, which is obviously insanely stressful. Yeah. Then I started working more with, all right, well, SaaS and agencies are kind of the main 2 that get the most value and have recurring tasks. The only companies that have recurring copywriting tasks are usually a little bit more advanced. They already have all their pages. Now they want to take it to the next level or do new stuff based on what they already have. And they've got a marketing team. It's not just one founder. And so once I started focusing on those people and getting more in there, Now the retention is much, much better and the work is a lot more fun. So over the past year, I've kind of slowly gone in that direction. Another thing with the business that has totally flipped is early on when I went solo, PageTare was the smallest thing revenue-wise that I was building. And the biggest thing, I was actually doing a ton of ghostwriting.

Right.

And I did not like doing the ghostwriting as much because I was doing it for like 10 people. And it's ghostwriting is really hard. So I, over the, over the past year, totally flipped that to where now I focus most of my time on page share. That's where I have most of my revenue. Ghostwriting, I have, you know, 1 or 2 people at any given moment and it's more selective and I don't have to worry about that piling up as much. I turn people away. And then I've got some other smaller projects that I work on, but you know, the content side is sacrificed. So now if you look through my LinkedIn, my Twitter. Yeah. You'll see me posting, but it's, uh, it's much lower engagement than it used to be. It's much lower frequency than it used to be. And it's not as like in-depth as, as it used to be potentially because of how much other stuff's going on. So now I think I'm at a, at a point where PageTier has grown enough. I feel pretty good about it going forward. All the other stuff I have kind of aligned with how I want to spend my time.

Hmm.

I don't think that I can go much longer, totally alone. And still grow. So I think I'm at the place where if I want to be able to do the content and fulfillment of this, I probably need to bring somebody on board part-time to at least help out. So that's kind of where things are at.

Yeah. I, yeah, you know, that is something that you have to like kind of prioritize, right? Like I saw, you know, you being pretty much hyperactive on Twitter around like 2020, 2021. That's when you grew You know, substantially. And that's how actually you build your personal brand too, right? Like through producing content. So talk to me about that. Do you think— so nowadays nobody's writing threads, at least nobody's writing that level of, you know, or giving attention to that level of detail they did in the past. What is currently, in your opinion, is working for people who want to build a personal brand?

Yeah, I think as much as it pains me how much the algorithm does not like me anymore, or really anybody, the algorithm just hates everybody now. The only thing that works now is that you're genuinely building something cool.

Period.

If not, it does, it really doesn't matter what you share. Uh, like largely that you can have a couple of things. I've had a couple of things go viral recently that brought absolutely nothing to me at all. They were just, you know, like a meme or a cool tool that I share or whatever. I've had a few of those in the past couple months that got 5,000 likes, 10,000 likes, whatever, tons of views. It didn't mean anything for the business. It didn't mean anything real. Oh. It didn't, it didn't revive my account or anything. Right. The people that are winning now are the people that are doing impossible things or doing things that are at least very hard to replicate. So like, I'm not in love with Peter Levels' content necessarily. I feel like he can be a bit abrasive, but he builds a ton of businesses and a lot of them work and he just like shares crazy numbers and I get it. Like it's impressive. People want to be like that. They want to be an indie hacker. Brett Adcock is building freaking robots that can do stuff that humans can do. And it's like building the future of, you know, what robots can look like. That's insanely hard to do. So obviously everything that he tweets is interesting and good. Elon has always done impossible things and shares that, like, whatever you think of him. So that's like, now it's largely shining through who's doing stuff that other people are not doing. And unfortunately for most people, that's really, you know, it's hard. There's a reason there aren't that many people doing that stuff. It's super hard to figure out the idea and actually execute on it. But fortunately, that does kind of put you in control. If you're the type of person that really wants to grow like that, you got to go build something cool. It's less about the content itself now, which that's not how it was before. When I was growing, it was very much about Do you know what the topics are that are interesting to people? Are you using the right formatting and is it well-written? And just give stuff away for free. And that worked. Yeah. But that, that's not to say that you shouldn't do that now. I think that's a mistake as well. We're, we're always like, hey, I gotta grow at all costs. That's the way to grow quickly. There's still a way to grow slowly that matters more for making money, which is still giving away everything for free. So, uh, that's what I keep telling myself, like long-term thinking in every single decision with content. Do the boring, simple things over and over and over. Just share new things you learn, be helpful. And a lot of the time I fail at that. I feel like lately I've shared just a lot of stuff that has been on my mind, but it's literally not interesting to anybody. So you need to have a filter there. Right. But give away stuff for free still, just grow slowly. I think we need to become more comfortable with, I'm probably not going to go viral. And if I do, it probably doesn't actually mean all that much.

Yeah.

But if I, if I show up every single day and I engage every single day, good things will happen. And that's the common denominator across my entire career and across right now. The times where I've posted content, 3 weeks later, magically something good happens. When I stop, 3 weeks later, I've got nothing, no emails, no, no discovery calls, nothing. So plan for 3 weeks ahead by posting and sharing and engaging now. Plan for 3 years from now by just like hammering home whatever you can do. At least that's what I'm telling myself because it's rough out there with the algorithms.

It is, man. Oh my God. I can totally, totally empathize with you. And I think what I'm observing right now is the algorithm really helped people who provided value 2, 3 years ago. like threads, ton of value, ton of value, ton of value. Now I feel like the algorithm is really favoring people who entertain other people, like through memes or shitposting. You know, shitposting is like the biggest thing right now, which I can do. I can, you know, I can talk like that. Yeah. There is a good angle, of course, like there is a creative angle for it. You know, the meme culture and everything, it's really good. But I feel right now those people who can shitpost or get creative expressing themselves, that is more entertaining rather than value, you know, you know, give a value-given way. I feel I might be completely wrong, but, uh, no, what you said is absolutely true. I feel the algorithm is not liking everybody. That is like the bottom line.

That part's interesting because if you look at the people that are doing that, like meme lords that are, that are doing really well right now, those people were mostly around in 2021 sharing threads. So like Tron Fan, Chris Backe.

Yeah.

Nikita, Nikita Bayer, however you pronounce his last name. Like these are people that have been around creating content forever and they just never stopped. And they were doing that stuff back then and now it works still, but I do think a lot of that is just a function of they never stopped posting and they've adapted to different formats and stuff. And maybe that entertainment side does work more now, but they were also the ones that were doing Threads back then. And another part of this is it's probably a good thing that Threads don't work very well anymore because it got extremely abused to the point where people were not— there was not anything valuable in Threads after a certain point. And it was just like—

Right.

Blame plagiarism, stupid stuff, AI, whatever. So I think it's actually good that deeper long-form posts or like video posts and really the kind of content that makes you think, I wish I would've thought of that, that stuff's being rewarded a little bit more. But again, the people that are succeeding largely are, they were showing up back then too, and they've just translated over to now, or they're new. But they're totally unique. Otherwise, if you, if you just decided to spin up a meme account right now, even if it was good, I would bet it would not do as well. Just, just because you are starting a new account with no followers and it's just not going to pick up traction the same way where like back in the day you could spin up a new account and get 2,000 followers pretty quickly and then you're rolling. You got some momentum. Yeah.

Yeah, no, no, no. I think you're right. Now I just realized what you said. Yeah. Those people are the ones who created, man, so many threads. Right. And I feel, I don't know if it's true, but I heard that if the algorithm sees like the thread emoji in the first tweet, it is going to suppress. I'm not sure how true is it, but I've heard like, you know. Yeah. Maybe you know because that's like a thing, right? Like that's how it's a format. But I'm also curious what will happen in the future now that people moved from threads to you know the shitposting. I'm curious what will happen, and I totally agree on one thing you said: not just shit posters are getting growth on these social platforms. I think people who are doing real stuff, like cool stuff, they're just. transparently sharing their journey. I think, you know, the build in public still works, you know, at large right now, like transparently, hey, I'm going through this, sharing this. That actually is kind of classic, like timeless, like copywriting. I think that will stay forever. Probably people won't get like 10x, 20x, you know, outputs that they get through Threads. Blake, this has been, I feel you've given us a masterclass in copywriting, landing pages, the structure, the F format, the frameworks. I feel like if you were to do PageTier again, or just like last question, what would you add to this arsenal of skills? Like running an agency, running like a service, not agency, service business per se. What is something that you want to hone in most in the next upcoming months, years?

Traffic.

Traffic. Perfect.

Yeah. My conversion rates across the board are super good. My traffic is really low on the site. Button clicks are pretty high for a service. And discovery calls, once I get somebody on a discovery call, I think I figured out that the percentage is like over the past year, people that hopped on a discovery call, about 90% of them became clients.

Wow.

So the conversion rate is really high. Once, once people, the page is clear enough that if they click through and do a discovery, they have pretty much all the information they need. I don't hide anything from them. And then once they talk to me, it's pretty much a go. So that's awesome. The other side of that is traffic.

Top of the funnel.

Because I had, it's not that I don't necessarily know what I want to do or how to drive traffic. It's again, it's, I have not done as much, nearly as much content on social. I also would love to build some kind of tool or driver to the website that is helpful around landing pages and just put that on PageTerror and try to build links toward that and have an SEO play there. Something genuinely helpful, like Something around maybe headline analysis or something like that. There's some tools that exist, so I want it to be a little bit different. Yeah. But I want to do that as well. But like that, it all boils down to traffic. That's, that's where I want to focus my time and where it's been most difficult to like, because I have more than enough work, I spend most of my time fulfilling on that work and client relationships and stuff. So then all the other stuff like promoting and selling, creating content kind of just happens. Whenever I have a moment and that doesn't happen that often. So yeah, that's the number one thing.

Awesome, man. This has been a blast. I learned a ton. I'm not, I'm not, I'm going to like kind of implement some of the things you said, particularly the, about the headline. You said add an H2, which is like, you know, very clear. You don't have to like get creative about it. Be clear there. Some things were very spot on, very new to me. So I appreciate you for joining. And kind of like revealing all the secrets. Any, any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

No, I appreciate you having me on. I love talking about this stuff. So if you're listening to this and just want a quick tidbit of advice, feel free to DM me. I'm happy to give some free advice to you. If you have a SaaS or an agency in particular, and you really want to get serious about copywriting, you got like projects in mind, things you want to do, PageTear might be for you. If not, that's totally cool too. I'm happy to just be a friend that Helps you out for free every now and again. And either way, send me a hello at Hey Blake on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And just search my name, Blake Emmel, on LinkedIn. Would love to connect. I'll answer all your DMs and be a friend.

Awesome. We'll put all the links in the show notes as well and point people towards the right direction. But that's all folks. This is a masterclass. I can clearly say that, you know, I learned a ton and I hope you learned a ton as well. Stay tuned. We'll have more guests, more awesome people like Blake hopping on the show and giving a ton of value. Stay cool then. Cheers.