20: Tips for a Brag-Worthy Sales Page

Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host Destiny Kopp and in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. And thanks so much for joining me today. I have a special guest here with me, I have Danny Page and we're going to be talking about brag worthy sales pages and Danny is a conversion copywriter for online coaches and course creators. She she has kiboshed old school direct marketing and salesy tactics and instead writes conversational personality packed copy to welcome in community and cash flow for all of her clients. And Dani has been part of many successful launches and has sold tens of thousands of digital products. Her most requested services are long form sales pages and she is here with all of us today to dish on her sales page tips. Danny, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so happy to have you. And before we get started, I have tons of questions for you today. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became a copywriter in your story and how you got to where you are today?

Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I am pumped to be here, I'm.

Excited to have you and I love talking about sales pages. So this is going to be fun.

Me too. So a little bit about myself. I was born in Calgary, Canada. I graduated university in Chicago and then was fortunate enough to go play semi pro women's hockey over in Europe. So I lived in Vienna, Austria a while and I just absolutely adore Europe. And after that I came home and was working in the corporate industry and oil industry actually a little bit. And mostly because that's just what everyone else did in my hometown. But that just wasn't for me. I felt put in a box. I wasn't making any impact, wasn't doing what I enjoyed at all. And I ended up stumbling into the digital marketing world. And I had always been obsessed with writing and felt like my world just flew wide open when I learned about copywriting. So I immersed myself in conversion copy. I picked up my first client. It was incredibly small, but I figured if one person needed me, there's got to be more out there. So I quit my corporate job, lost all my wonderful perks and benefits and just decided to take the leap and run with it. And I don't know if I would recommend that bold of a leap. But you know, it worked for me. And I'm now in a cute little lake town and some of the best business advice I ever got was from a friend's dad and he always said make sure you love Mondays. And I'm just totally humbled that Mondays now really are my favorite day of the week.

I love that. Make sure you love Mondays just to, you know. And that is such an important piece of advice because if you don't love what you're doing, why aren't you doing it? Why not find something else? Right?

Well, that's just it. And like, especially in corporate everyone, you know, you make good money, you get all these benefits, and here I am taking this full other path, different path in life, and everyone's like, what are you doing? But you know, you got to love those Mondays. So that was what drove me.

I have to go back to something that you just said because when you told me I didn't know this about you. And this is, I'm like, she was a semi pro women's hockey player. You have to tell me more about that. And what did you learn from pan hockey?

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, hockey was just, I mean, I guess I'm from Canada, very stereotypical, but grew up with brothers. And that's just the route that I took. And you know, so much of business and life for that matter. Like, I'll kind of go into why what I learned took away from living in Vienna and playing hockey over there, you know, business and life, it's all about communicating, really. It's about understanding different people, listening to them and how you can help them. And communicating in Vienna was very hard. My coach would, you know, he'd be giving these pre game speeches, motivational speeches, but always in German. Right. He'd be helping us on the bench during a game, everything in German. But at the end of the day, we were all motivated by one thing and that was to win. And it was really a good lesson just to see how different all of us can be as individuals and still be able to relate to and understand each other.

Can you speak German?

I cannot speak German. I learned a few words when I was over there and I've pretty much lost everything.

So he was giving these speeches in German, but that is very interesting to me. So could you understand them then? Or is it just you're not fluent in it or. Tell me, tell me, how was it just his mannerisms that motivated you?

Well, I mean, especially German you could understand when it was a motivational speak and when it was an angry speak. Right. Speech. Right. So that's funny.

Yeah.

So I just, I had some friends close by that like, what the heck is he saying? Sort of thing. But other than that, it was difficult and you know, even during practices, like, I'm always one to be at the beginning of the line, but that was never the case. I had to always be at the back of the line, really trying to understand what the heck is going on, because I couldn't understand anything.

How long did you do this for?

I did it for a couple years.

Wow. I'm impressed.

Yeah, I mean, it was wonderful. It was the best time of my life.

Well, let's get down to the core of what we want to talk about today. And we have a lot of course creators who listen to this podcast. And you know that maybe they're at the beginning of creating the course, or maybe they're done creating it and they're at the point where they're ready to launch it into the marketplace. Tell me, and you know, based on your experience and the launches that you have helped people with, what is. Is a sales page for course creators? Is that important? Is it a must have, or can they get away with not having one? Can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that?

Yeah, totally. And like, I feel like copywriting has sometimes become a bit of a. An afterthought or an ugly duckling, I guess, in course creation, but it really should be top. One of the top priorities, because copywriting is all about communication, right? And this is vital in getting people to understand who you are and how you can help them moving forward. So if you can't communicate your benefit to them, nobody is going to buy from you. So there's a stat that I love to hear that's so true. It's that copywriting is 5% of your activity that will account for 95% of your results. And that's because you need two core things to be successful with your course. And one is a great offer, and two is great communication. And lots of people do have that great offer, but they may not be selling out their course or their copy of or. Sorry, they're not selling out their course because their copy and their sales page just isn't communicating that value or the offer. So, yeah, it's incredibly important. And I will dig into this a little bit more. I'm going to be sharing some mistakes here, so definitely want to dig into this a little bit more, too.

So I want to go back to the quote that you had, because I think it's so critical. One of the big quotes that I have is that and an online course business is only 10% product creation, but 90% marketing. But you're taking a little bit different twist on this you're saying, and I want to make sure I got it right. I tried to write it down while you were talking. You said that copywriting is 5% of the activity that you're doing, but accounts for 95% of your results.

Yeah. And it's huge because, I mean, and I wish I knew who originally said this, but copywriting is. I mean, every aspect of your course has a part of. Has copy in it somewhere. Right. Even if it's a little blurb at the bottom of your training, every portion has copy. So you need to put the effort in there because that's accounting for most of your results. Why people are gonna buy. You know.

I love that. And I'm going to write that down and include it in our show notes here because that is really the core, I think, of what we need to remember as we go through this. In other words, we're creating our sales pages or we're creating our retargeting emails or anything that we're doing to convert our prospects into buyers.

Exactly. And I. Sorry, I will say one more.

Go ahead.

Yeah. Because I know that something that really might help people too is to actually do the sales page first prior to building out the course or offer. And this may seem crazy to some people, but even it may help more during a beta or when you're not 100% sure with what your offer is yet. But doing this sometimes helps with the big picture because now you have a container of all the parts, you can map out your bonuses and your upsells because you can see exactly what you're creating and who you're speaking to. And it kind of becomes the ultimate step by step outline that you can use to work backwards from. So it's a good little tip that it might work for some people to actually kind of work the other way with your sales page.

I like that tip. That's great. So let's you mention a second or so that you see course creators making mistakes in their sales pages. Can you tell us about, you know, three or four of the biggest mistakes that you see people making?

Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I have a few. I'll start with a. I guess a preliminary mistake first. And that is just simply not having a sales page altogether. So people might be thinking, well, my course is only $47, I'll just stick it on my site sort of thing, you know. But if you're selling a course, you need a sales page, and it shouldn't be with all the other services on your website. It needs its own specific page because it takes time to crush objections and to paint a desirable picture. And that sort of thing just can't happen on a little corner within your website.

Okay, I, you know, you know, I'm 100% behind that. I think a sales page is absolutely critical. So that absolutely all the course creators, they need a dedicated sales page for their course. What's another mistake?

Totally. Yeah. So let's jump into these. So a big mistake I see is just is selling too much of your process and not enough of the result. So simply put, people aren't interested in buying your actual product or online course. What they're interested in purchasing is that change, that benefit or that transformation that you can give them, which means you ultimately always want to sell the result, not the process. So it's a bit of a take on explaining the benefits, not the features that we often hear. And I can give you some examples here. Say you're selling tires for a car. Nobody actually wants to buy tires. What they want, though, is for their family to be safe when they're driving in the wintertime. So this is the kind of mindset you want to have when you're writing your sales page. And I can give another example here too. Your readers might relate a little bit more to is selling a weight loss course. So I'll give a couple scenarios. So the mistake would be always selling the process. And that would be a sales page that talks about how you're going to teach people to eat carbs without gaining weight, or you're going to show them the best ab works workouts and they'll be learning how to avoid binge eating and stuff like that. But that's all. Selling the process, which isn't what makes people convert. Whereas the next scenario is of selling the result is which we want. Which we want to do would be using your sales page to talk about being down three dress size, how being down three dress sizes makes you feel when you're on the beach, or how food freedom will create joy and flesh flexibility in your life and how much pleasure and happiness you'll have when you can control your cravings and stuff like that. So you want to make sure that you're communicating the value and the result instead of just explaining the process or the what.

So should you do both? I mean, should you tell them about what they will get in the course?

Okay, we do want to sell, you know, we do want to explain the process, but that's more after you've already communicated the value and the results and really got them in. So they're like, yes, I know this is what I want. How am I going to do it? And that's when you can explain your process, whereas just explaining the process right away, and then people are like, okay, so what, what's in it for me? Sort of thing.

Very good. Any more mistakes that we need to avoid?

Yeah, totally. Another mistake is just not putting the price on the sales page. And if the price isn't there, people will just assume that it's too expensive. So it makes people hesitant because they just think they're not likely or they think they need to get on a sales call, probably if there's no price there. And they don't necessarily want to hear the spiel, they just want to know the price. So if the price is there, it will curate people for you. And the thing is that they may not buy from you immediately, but if you've communicated your value well enough and they understand that they need your course to help them get where they need to be, they'll often go away, let it sink in, and try to figure out how they can make it work and then come back to you and purchase. Whereas if you don't state the price on your sales page, it doesn't give them that chance to think about how they can make it work because they've often already written it off.

So that's a good point. So, and I think, you know, the majority of the sales pages that I've looked at in the past generally have the price, but, you know, let's just say that you have a higher end offer. Going back to your point before about having that phone conversation, is there at any point that you think a phone conversation or some type of zoom meeting would be necessary in addition to the sales page? Because maybe the price point is too high? What are your thoughts on that? Not. Not too high, but higher.

Yeah, for sure. And there is, I mean, there's no hard and fast rule for this. If I would say, if your course is over 10k, I do understand that you probably want to get on the phone with them and sometimes they still need to book with you. And even if you want to give that price before, this will still flush out better leads. So nobody is, you know, shell shocked when they hear the price. You don't want this call to be a waste of time for both of you. So kind of giving a little preamp does help. But I do understand that you definitely still sometimes need to get on the call too.

Very good. So can you tell me any other copy tips that you have that our online course creators could implement today.

Totally. Yeah. So one tip that I like to give is like a more in. More in the pre launch, not just the sales page, but when you go to promote a course beforehand, you can often do a webinar. And I see a lot of opportunity in that confirmation email because sometimes when you sign up for that webinar, you know, you get that automatic email that goes out. And this is the number one most read email on a webinar campaign because it's when your prospect is most excited to hear from you. So when I get a confirmation email after signing up for a webinar, I see a lot of missed opportunities with that standard. You're in see you next Thursday email. You know, instead it's a great chance to get your prospect committed right away to attending. You can explain to them who that person is that they're becoming by signing up for that webinar. You can inform them how proud their future self will be when they show up. You know, tell them about specific details they'll be getting out of the call. You don't need to wait till later like your later string of emails to do that because they're in the now. They're excited about that, that webinar coming up.

I love that tip. So it's the. They sign up for your webinar, it's that first confirmation email that comes from you, not from your webinar system, but comes from you. And it needs to be more than you're in. Thanks for signing up. You go into details about yourself, you know what they can expect, who they are by signing up. Like you said, that is a great tip.

Exactly. And if you can too, if your software allows you to send that zoom link out in that confirmation email, all the power to you because then people can put it into their calendar right away and they're more likely to come to show up when. When it's already in their calendar. Rather than searching for more emails and getting more emails from you and finding that link, if it's in their calendar right away, boom, they have a much better chance of going.

Very good. Danny, thank you so much for joining me today. Can you tell people where they can find you?

Yeah, absolutely. You can find me@dannypage.com that's D A N I sign up for me my emails. I would absolutely love to chat a.

Little bit more and thank you so much and I will include that link in our show notes so everybody has it. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. Would love it if you could rate and review our podcast on itunes or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.