How to Build a High-Converting Landing Page (7-Step Formula)

Most people piss away literally thousands of pounds of revenue in their business because of terrible landing pages. In this video, I'm going to show you the seven step landing page formula that if you implement on your landing pages, you will see a doubling, maybe even a tripling, in some cases quadrupling of your landing page conversion rate, which can mean a doubling or tripling of your revenue in your business. So strap in. This is going to be not one to miss. So the seven step formula is exactly what I'm going to guide you through today. This is particularly focused on lead generation landing pages and you need to implement all seven steps in this order to see the result. And we're going to go through all of them with examples for you to swipe and deploy today before we dive in. Welcome to the YouTube channel. My name is Elliot. Welcome back to my loyal viewers. I have designed and built literally hundreds of landing pages, probably close to a thousand over my career. I started off running my own agency where we ran ads and designed and built landing pages for our clients and generated over 150 million pounds in revenue for that portfolio of clients. And then now, in my current business entrepreneur circle, we have tons of landing pages for our low ticket community, our software company, a high ticket coaching program, and cumulatively, those landing pages generate us over £1 million every single month. I say none of this to brag, but to provide you with an accurate lens as to where the information I am about to share comes from. And so landing pages have always been important, but are of increasing importance because we live in a world where getting traffic is actually the easiest it's ever been. With the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, our typical ad platforms, our main source of traffic, have just never been easier to give us traffic. It's so much easier to get in front of the right people as it's way more automated. And you'll see this in ad platforms as more and more AI features come on out. And this is only going to continue. And so when traffic becomes easier and easier, landing pages become, in my view, mission critical. And actually they become our key point of differentiation. Because in a world where it's easier to get traffic, he or she who is able to convert the most amount of that traffic will be the ones that win. And that is why the landing page experience is going to be even more important as time progresses. And so I must first start by addressing a brutal truth about landing pages. And it is something you have to come to terms with. And it's the fact that your landing page is not a fucking piece of art, okay? It is not a piece of art. It is a machine designed to convert viewers into conversions, whatever the next step, the action we want them to take. Now, the web design industry are terrible at this. Most web designers do not care nor really understand conversion rate optimization and conversion rate principles. And as such, they design websites that are more akin to art. Things that look nice, things that look aesthetically pleasing. And I will tell you, there is no correlation between how subjectively beautiful a landing page looks and its conversion rate, in my experience, is actually the opposite. And, you know, to bring this to life, look at Amazon. Look at their website. One of the highest converting pages of all time looks terrible. It's designed functionally and for conversion. And when we are marketing and trying to invest money into traffic and convert it into more money, we need to have the lens that we don't care about art and we want to design for conversions Now, I was lucky early on in my career that I was exposed to a lot of this. You know, in my agency, we first started running ads because that was my core skill that I had from working in a really big ad agency. And I quickly learned that no matter how good my ads were, if we were sending people to terrible landing pages, then we didn't get any results, and the clients weren't very happy. So I immediately, within literally like a month of launching my agency, came to this realization, and so started designing and building landing pages myself from scratch. In the beginning, I then studied up because I wanted to get even better results. And about a year in, I was at an event and I was able to meet these two gentlemen, Dr. Carl Blanks and Ben Jessen. These guys are the founders of a company called Conversion Rate Experts, and they effectively created the term known as conversion rate optimization. And I was able to study them, learn from them. We even collaborated with them and became one of their clients for a while. And what we learned was just truly fascinating because these guys understand that there is so much leverage in improving the conversion rate of your landing page. And these guys literally created the playbook. They do it all very scientifically, and they have ran conversion rate optimization, the process of systematically and scientifically improving landing page conversion rates for pretty much all of the biggest websites in the world. If you can probably think of it, these guys have probably helped improve the conversion rate. And so there's a genuine art to this science. And one thing I learned from these guys is a very simple equation, which in the world of digital commerce and websites, this stands very true. And it's the fact that visitors multiplied by our landing page conversion rate multiplied by our average order value equals our revenue. That is the equation. This is a fact of business. So the volume of people we have going to the site multiplied by our conversion rate times what they are worth to us equals our revenue. And we can actually, you can look at that in any business. So what this tells us is that the conversion rate is a critical part of this equation. And if we are able to increase the conversion rate by 10%, by 50%, by 100%, we will effectively see if the other two variables stay the same, a proportionate increase in your revenue. So conversion rate doubles. In most cases, revenue doubles. This is why getting this stuff right is so important, because it is a straight direct line to your revenue and, and one of the highest leverage activities you can do as a business owner. And so before I get into the seven step formula and the tactics, I want to first talk about the principles. Because remember guys, tactics are somewhat fleeting. Principles are what stand the test of time. And it's the people that rush and swipe and copy tactics without understanding why that tactic works, the principle behind it that forever fail. But it's the people that, that understand the reasoning why we do things that are the ones that have the great success. And this channel is all about sharing the principles and the tactics so that you can get the best of both worlds and get results in your business. And so the first key principle when it comes to landing pages is. Don't make me think. Now that is the title of a fantastic book by a guy called Steve Krug that I read many, many years ago. The book came out over a decade ago and it's all on conversion rate design. And it's the idea that our landing page visitors, when they're on our website, these people are skeptical, they're distracted, they're looking for any excuse to leave. And our job is to build a page that does not require them to think. The minute they have to think, they have to use too much brain power is the second we have lost them. And so we design with simplicity in mind. And this ties into principle number two, which is principle of cognitive load. Okay? All of our brains only have so much brain power, and scientists call this cognitive load. And so when we have a page, the more things that are on that page, the more cognitive load it is taking up. Now, our brain doesn't like it when we have too much stuff going on. Our brains are inherently lazy, as they are energy conservation machines, because fundamentally they just want to Keep you and me alive. And so our pages, we need to strip them back, designed for simplicity. And our goal is to reduce the cognitive load. And one of the great errors people make in their websites is, is there's just too much stuff there. Competing information about different things, different buttons taking you to different places. And as a result, we are piling cognitive load onto our prospects and reducing the chance of them taking an action because they get overwhelmed. Okay, finally, then, a key principle. These aren't all the principles, these are the key principles is that of micro commitments. So one of the biggest ways people absolutely fuck up their landing pages is, is with the actual conversion mechanism themselves, I. E. The form or the calendar booking widget, or the way in which people actually become a lead or book a call or the next step. And what they do is they have a ginormous form of loads of fields that people look at and think, oh my God, the cognitive load required to go through that is way too high. So I'm going to bounce, I'm going to skip. And so we're very cognizant of micro commitments. And as you see, when I walk through these steps, one of the things we always do is we don't have a form on the page. We have a button, and you press the button and then the form will appear and it will show one field, and we'll ask them for their first name, they'll input that, press next, boom, the next field will appear, and we space out the form fields in a way that reduces the cognitive load, but also has them taken actions, because every scroll, every button press, every, every keyboard type, this is a micro commitment. This is an action the person has now taken. Now, as humans, we are funny little creatures, and we have a deep, inbuilt psychological desire to remain consistent with our previous actions. So the minute someone starts taking micro commitments is the minute they become more likely to do the next thing. And so by simply spacing things out, we actually drastically increase the conversion rate and people follow through. This also taps into the sunk cost fallacy, another psychological bias where once we've begun to put effort in, we feel bad about not completing it. And so you have that driving force that also pushes people through. And so as we design these pages, so I've got to be aware of this stuff, because we want to make sure we do things that are congruent and in line with the psychological biases of that exist. Because if we are trying to fight against that, then we are teeing ourselves up for failure. And that's not Clever. So with those principles out the way, let's dive in to the seven step formula. Top line, the seven step formula includes a hero section, a proof section, a pain section, a what the heck is this section, a how does it work section, a social proof section, and an FAQ section. Let me run through these in detail with you and give you some examples that you can swipe and deploy. Now, a quick little word of warning about artificial intelligence. Because one of the key factors in making good landing pages is your speed of execution. Inside my secret vault, where I work with a small number of clients very closely and share all of my in depth playbooks, I talk about this a lot. Agility, okay? You want to be agility, you want to be agile, which means you want to be able to move fast. Because it shouldn't take us weeks to design and build and test the landing page, we should do that in days, okay, if not a single day these days. And AI helps us do that. We use tools like main us. We use tools like replit that can actually build entire landing pages and publish them to custom domains literally in about 20 minutes. And that is awesome. But here is my warning. In a world where AI is making things more accessible, where it's making the production of marketing and sales assets easier for everybody, we have to be willing to go a step further if we want to generate unusual results. Most people's landing pages are not good. Industry benchmarks for conversion rates are low and terrible and we almost always exceed them. And the reason is not because we're geniuses, but because we put the work in. Yes, we use mainness, yes, we use replit, we use it to whip up these designs. But we then sit down and we tweak it, we humanize it, we apply our own thoughts, brain power, additional context that we have from our years of testing that the AI just simply doesn't, and our in depth knowledge of our customers. And we make changes to the page. And so what I recommend the best practices to take what I'm going to share with you today. Use tools like maintenance and replica to build these pages very quickly. But then you must sit down, edit it, put the tweaks on, humanize it, use your context and knowledge and that is how you get genuinely exceptional results. If you're not, if you're like everyone else, then you're going to get results like everyone else. And everyone else gets pretty sucky results. So with that out of the way, let's talk about the hero section, the section that we should talk about for the longest because the hero section is the one part of your website that everybody who lands on that page will see. 100% of people that land on your page will see the hero section. And therefore we want to put in an outsized, disproportionate amount of effort to this hero section because the majority of people will choose to convert or leave purely based on this section. So it has the biggest job. Now, the main element of a good hero section is the headline. You will live and die by your headline. And when we do split testing, we consistently see the headline is like one of the biggest levers. We were running a split test the other day. One headline versus the other or everything else was exactly the same. One version got 500% higher conversion rate because of a different headline, which is nuts. So how do you actually write a good headline? Well, my preference is always what we call the three step headline formula. And it goes as follows. We start off by saying attention and we call out and label who our ideal customers are. So business owners in the uk, service based businesses in the uk. I have a client, I'll show you their page in a bit. They always call out anxious horse riders. It's a label that your ideal customer will immediately identify with in their head. We then have the main headline which for a lead generation landing page is normally how to achieve this specific outcome in this specific time. Okay, how to achieve the specific outcome in the specific time. Because that is all people care about. This is the what's in it for me? This is what am I going to get. And how to. In our testing always works the best. The third part then is we say without and we then tackle two of the most common objections, misconceptions people might have about achieving this result. So attention business owners in the UK. How to double your landing page conversion rates in 30 days without investing loads in crazy software or, you know, losing your brand identity in the process. Could be an example headline though. That formula works an absolute treat. And we spell it out, we don't get too fancy, we don't get too persuasive. Who is this for? What's the main benefit? Don't worry about these key objections now. Underneath the headline we then normally have an image or a video and the image in the video simply shows the thing. What is the thing we are offering people on this page? Is it a PDF guide? Is it a book? Is it a live webinar? A masterclass, A video? Whatever it is, we visualize it so they can see the thing because again, most people will want the thing, because of the thing I will never forget when I was working in my first agency out of university, one of my clients was Pokemon Go. And we were able to spend an awful lot of money running ads for Pokemon Go. And we did a big split test where we took images, screenshots that I took on my phone of Pokemon Go of the software versus what were some very expensive, heavily produced CGI videos that they had made of, you know, people playing in the park and Pokemon being everywhere. And lo and behold, the screenshots of the thing drastically outperformed the very expensive CGI videos. Because by showing the thing people are going to get that normally is enough of a driving force for them to want it. And so we visualize it. And that was a lesson I took and have deployed ever since. So that is what we do with the hero section. And then we obviously have a big call to action button so people can take action. And by our call to action button, we want to include what we call micro trust signals. So these are little snippets of text normally that just provide little elements of proof, such as, you know, 1500 business owners already subscribed. I always put underneath our buttons, it's 100% free. This is a safe and secure form. Just little words that reinforce in the prospect's mind that they're in a good place, everything's okay and you are safe and secure. So those are the key elements, those what we want to achieve. We don't need crazy videos, we don't need, you know, tons of graphics. Keep it simple. So let's look at some examples to bring this to life. So first example is from one of our live event pages. So this is where we run a live broadcast and we say at the top, brand new live event for UK entrepreneurs. We immediately call out who this is for. We then have our big headline here. How to get your business to 100k months. The nine step system to scale your business from 100k a year to 100k a month. We then have our first bit of micro proof here, which is 17,000 businesses already registered. We have the date of the event and then we have the button with more micro trust elements beneath it that works really well. It's missing the image in video, but we lean on the promise and that tends to work very well. Let me show you another example. This is for GENIE AI. This is for our software company. And so we have what it is, GENIE AI. We have our big headline here, the most complete marketing system in the UK for small business owners. Very clear what this is and who it is for. Big call to action. Massive visualization of the software so they can see it. And then we have, you know, trust signals everywhere beneath it. Let's look at another one. This is one of our pages for one of our low ticket funnels where we sell a book. And so number one, for business owners who want to get more customers and clients, the proven step by step system, Big headline. Then we have big buttons. Okay, Interestingly, we have two buttons here because there's two options. Digital book for 5 pound or physical book for 12 pound. We then have our micro trust elements here. Guarantee all of these safe and secure symbols. And then more micro trust lying here. But importantly, a mega, mega image of the book because we know if we show the book, people are going to want to buy the book. One of our best converting pages. Now I've got a page. This is for another live webinar. This is from one of my secret vault members. And again, attention nervous and anxious horse riders. How to become a calmer, more confident rider without just pretending to be brave or faking it till you make it. The excellent 1, 2, 3 step headline. We then say tunes the live masterclass. Just reiterating what this thing actually is. Benefit, benefit, benefit. This is a nice little gif actually in real life that shows the presentation moving so people can immediately visualize who this person is and what they're going to be talking about. We then have the big call to action button. Claim your complimentary ticket. Micro trust beneath. It's 100% free and practical. And then we've got some more proof beneath that. This page converts for them amazingly well. Okay. And they crank these webinars every week and are having a great life. Finally. Let's just look at what the big dogs are doing. So your boy, Alex Hormozy. I've been to Alex Hormozy's HQ several times, spent quite a lot of money learning from him and his team. And I always like checking out their pages because I know how, how rigid and diligent they are with their split testing and the volume of traffic that they send. And so this is a pro tip. You want to understand who are people that do a lot of split testing that you know for a fact that you can then swipe learnings from. And so, you know, I shamelessly always look at what these guys are doing so I can pick off the learnings as well. And so this is for their lead magnet. Massive headline. Get your free personalized scaling roadmap. Big image of the thing to just visualize what it is. And then what's your name? Simple form with a big blue button, as you can see. Micro commitment. Because I'm just putting my name in the. Then they'll ask you for my email, then my phone. And then beneath that, which you can just about see, they have got additional micro trust here, requested by over 250,000 business owners. Already takes less than 30 seconds. All tremendous hero sections. And the point here is that your hero section can look very different, but it's the core elements that enable it to work. And so deploying those elements, you will see a massive boost. Right. The next part does also come above the fold, and it is the proof strip. So this builds on the micro trust, and it's all about slapping our visitors in the face with overwhelming evidence that we can do. We slapping people in the face with overwhelming evidence that we are credible to talk about these things. So we do this normally in two ways. We have a chunky box. We have where we say, trusted by 50,000 entrepreneurs, because we have helped 50,000 entrepreneurs. We then have all the logos of places that we have been featured which are very recognizable. And then we have our trustpilot, Google and Facebook reviews that shows the live amount of actual reviews from all of them that people can actually click into and go and check and verify that they are real as well. Now, I like the chunky box. Sometimes we'll just do it as a strip. So it's like a thin strip, which is what you can see here, but it's all the same stuff. And the purpose of that is for it to just overwhelmingly scream people's face that these guys know what they're talking about. There's no way they would be able to have these sorts of accolades if they did not. So you want to get all your awards in there. Recognizable logos and reviews. Okay, now we are beneath the fold. So we've got our hero section, our proof in place. Now we want the problem and pain. So people always want to make sure that they are understood. And one of the biggest objections anyone will have is, does this thing actually apply to me and my unique situation? I use quotation marks there. Because we all think we're unique. And the reality is, yes, we are to an extent. But a lot of us share very common situations. And so the problem and pain section is designed for us to show the prospect that we understand where you're at right now. We get you, and therefore we can help you. But also we want to just remind them of their current situation and the problem and pain they are in because people need a reason to act now. And pain is a very big driver of that. And so the problem and pain section is a simple little section where we have three key bullet points, normally spread out graphically like this, that articulate the problems that they are facing right now and how not having your thing is going to mean they keep suffering with this. And so our goal here is to really articulate the pain, the challenges they actually, you know how they say it in their mind, the closer we can do that, the better our conversion rate will be. Now, a key part of this is you want to do something called naming the enemy. Now, this is all about stamping a label on the common enemy because we want to show our prospects that, that, look, it's not your fault, it's this thing's fault and, you know, we fucking hate that thing too. And we've got the solution. So let us join together, give you the solution so we can slay this enemy. And this is all about binding people to you and again, uniting us in one common goal, to slay this bastard. Once we've got the problem and pain section out of the way, we then dive into what they actually get. So this is my favorite section because when we are offering any kind of free lead magnet, live masterclass, whatever it might be, we simply want to tell people exactly what they are going to get and what the benefit of that thing is. In order to get them to opt in, we don't need to do fancy persuasion tactics. We just need to say, these are the goods. And so to bring this to life with our books, this is exactly what we do. And we do this very graphically where we show all different pages of the book so they can see inside it and see what's entailed. And we go a step further because we then have massive bullet points that go on, like 50 bullet points beneath that articulate all of the different things they're going to get and on what pages. So we just literally reveal all the stuff that's inside, but every point is tied to a benefit. So it might be, you know, the four step framework you can do to increase your profits in the next two weeks. Framework benefit. For our live masterclasses, we talk people through our signature framework, the nine step master plan framework. And so on the landing page we show, look, we built 15 businesses following these nine steps. Here's the nine steps. Now, in this case, it's a little bit cheeky because we blur them out, because that's what we're going to cover in the live event and that's why they need to opt in to get it. But they can visually see that this thing exists and that is normally enticing enough for people to want to opt in and get it. For our regular membership, our low ticket community, we do the same thing, explain what we've got on offer, few little bullet points and then a nice visual so they can actually visualize how these things look as well. Because for most people that is going to be the primary driver of them taking action. So you want to just get very good at visually portraying and using bullet points to say, here is the stuff that you are going to get. Because if that's clear in people's mind, they'll be willing and ready to take the next step. Then we get to section number five, which is the how it works section. And so this section is all about removing the mystery of what they should do next and what exactly is going to happen. And so what we simply do here is normally have a section that has three steps and we say, right, you need to click the button and give us your details so we know where to send you this thing. I'm a big believer in justifying the reason why you want someone's details, because again, we want to make it clear, remove any ounce of hesitation from the miners to what's going to happen next. We then say, look, you're going to get instant access. And I love that term, instant access, because the speed at which people get things greatly determines the value. Okay, Something that we get immediately is more valuable to us than something we don't get in a month time. So we want to make that very clear. But then point number three, we say, look, apply it and you will get this dream outcome in this time frame. And those are the three steps because we're saying, look, this is what we want you to do next. You're going to get instant access to this thing. And this is a reminder that if you apply it, you will get this amazing outcome. And therefore it is worthwhile pursuing very simple, clear directions, funneling people through, not making them think about why or what the next step is. Then we get to step number six, which is all about social proof. And we live in an economy where trust is low and the more social proof we have, the better your conversion rate. And so this section is where we actually have like a full section and we really beef it out with written testimonials. I love screenshots of emails, WhatsApp, DMs, whatever it might be because they look very realistic or you have good old fashioned videos. So this is from one of our pages. We just have this huge block of all these videos that anyone can play. You can see all these different customers, then obviously they press play and they're saying lovely things about us. One of my favorite tools at the moment is a tool called Sendja, which is free, has a free version anyway, but it enables you to collect testimonials, video testimonials, but display them in really nice widgets. And we're seeing these convert very well. So this is an example from one of my clients pages actually, where at the end of the page we have the social proof section. And all of these are gifts, so they're actually moving. But you have the key takeaway from what this person is saying and who they are. And then if someone wants, they can simply press this and the video starts to play. But why I like this is because These are all GIFs, you can see everyone moving. So it adds a real level of realism to the testimonials and then people can actually play the videos as well. But this goes on. There's about 20 of these all in a row. And it's overwhelming amounts of evidence to prove that we are as good as we say we are. So we hit the social proof very hard. That brings us to the final part of the page, the FAQ section. So the FAQ section is pretty standard in the world of web design, but we want a nice frequently asked questions accordion. That's what we call this, the accordion, where we have the questions and you can click and it would expand the accordion and show you the answer. So the way to tackle the FAQ section is we want it to genuinely have the answers to all of the most common objections or worries people would have about us as a business and about the thing that they are choosing to opt in for. So in the case of a live broadcast, how much does it cost? No, don't worry, it's totally free. If they haven't managed to grasp that already. Is it really live? This is a key thing we want to iterate because yes, it is live. And we know if people believe it is live when it is actually live, they're going to be more likely to show up. Do I need to be a member? No, you don't. Don't worry about that. What are you selling? We're very upfront here. We say, look, this is a complete value packed workshop. You absolutely can come, pay nothing and leave with a ton of valuable stuff. However, at the end. We will make an offer for this thing for the small number that want additional help, because we don't lie. Okay? We're very upfront and honest. Who's this for? Reiterate who it's for, is it recorded? And whatever other common questions people like to have about your thing go in here. And so a great way to deduce this is chat with AI, give it deep understanding of who your idle customers are and the lead magnet or thing that you're offering, and then get it to create these for you. Okay? And fill out those FAQs and again, have a nice call to action button beneath it as well. So those are the seven steps. So let's look at them all put together with this beautiful drawing that I constructed especially for you. So at the top we have our hero section with our three step headline calling out the ideal customer. The big headline, how to achieve specific outcome in specific time frame without objection one and objection two, an image of the thing, a few key bullet points to reiterate exactly what it is and why it's good. And then your big call to action button. Note, we always want the call to action button to be the same color throughout and the only button, so it's very consistent and clear what their action should be. We then have our proof section as well as our little micro trust signals around the call to action to give off the vibe of credibility before we get into the problem section where we briefly articulate what what the three most common and painful problems that our customers have in their own words, so they know that we understand them and they know that what we're about to offer works perfectly for their situation. Because then we have the what you get section where we have a big visual of the thing, whether it's the book, whether it's the masterclass, whether it's the framework, whatever it is. And then we have the bullet points that further reiterate exactly what they get and the benefit of that particular thing. And then we have another big call to action button that then leads us to our how it works section where we say, look how it works. Number one, click the button, give us your details so we can send you the thing. Number two, you'll get instant access. Number three, apply it and you will get this result in this time frame. Happy days. Amazing. Click the button and let's get you sorted. That then leads us to our social proof section where we overwhelm people with Happy testimonials, screenshots, WhatsApps, emails, DMs, videos using the send your widget and then another button before we round it off with the FAQs. So hopefully you can see it actually is quite simple once you understand the key principles behind it and the logical structure that enables our viewers to go through, tick all the mental boxes in their mind about opting in and then capture those details. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have, please like and subscribe. Drop a comment and let me know what other sorts of videos you want to see. We post every single week. I've been Elliot, you've been amazing. Peace and love.