SFR 194: Common Optin Page Mistakes...

Boom!

 

What's going on everyone? It's Steve Larsen, and this is Sales Funnel Radio. Today, I'm gonna teach you guys some of the most common mistakes when it comes to opt-in pages.

 

I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.

 

The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt - completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.

 

Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business - using only today's best internet sales funnels.

My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's up, guys?

 

I'm excited for today. I'm excited for this. I actually, I've been looking forward to this one. I created recently a whole course about opt-ins - it's a free course! If you go to freeoptincourse.com, there you go. There's the golden nugget of the entire episode.  

 

Freeoptincourse.com takes you through a live funnel build that I did to teach people how to get an opt-in. Now you might laugh at that a little bit. You know, it's like, "Hey this is sales funnel radio." The whole thing starts with the opt-in though - this is a give and take relationship.

 

I remember in college I wrote an e-book, actually two of them. I was so excited. I went and got this e-book written. I got it back from the ghostwriter, and I didn't like it - so I rewrote the whole thing. I was so pumped about it.

 

This was pre-ClickFunnels, I was using WordPress to build essentially a funnel.  I didn't know how to do that though, so I was like hacking out (with the little coding knowledge that I know) WordPress. It was so finicky, it was terrible.

 

It was another one of those experiences for me where I was spending inordinate amounts of time putting together this funnel. It was crappy, and I kind of knew that. And I was like, "Ah, maybe it'll still work though." I patched together a payment processor. I patched together an email autoresponder. It was really hard. I was so stoked about this thing.

 

This was back in the day when I believed that a sale happens because of the product. If you guys have been following me at all, you know that's not true.

 

The sale happens because of a sales message, not the product. Those are two very different things.

 

No one buys because of the product. They buy because of the message.

 

Well, this was before I knew that. This was before I knew any of that stuff. I was so stoked. This e-book was targeted at students, which was first of all stupid because they're all broke.

 

I spent all this time putting this thing together. I think it took me two days just to create the sales letter to just to get people to opt-in or whatever. Guys, I launched this thing, and nobody even opted in.

 

I had so many failures with this stuff way back in the day.

 

I was excited guys. I was proud. I was like, "Yeah, check this out. This is my product". I knew it was really good - it was the reasons why I was doing so well in school. I was putting awesome knowledge in this thing. Honestly really really awesome.

 

But I was so convinced that the product is the reason you opt-in. I was so convinced that the product is the reason somebody buys.

 

So what I wanna do real quick is I wanna walk through the more common mistakes that I see when it comes to creating opt-ins.

 

If you can't get opt-ins, you're already dead in the water. Especially when it comes to putting a sales funnel on the internet - you're already dead in the water.

 

If you can't even get somebody to opt-into your free thing, how you're gonna get them to buy?

 

So what I wanted to do is I wanted to walk through... I wrote a little list here, so you'll see me look up and down here a few times, but I wrote a little list here just thinking through like, "Yeah, these are the most common things that I see as mishaps for why people opt-in or not opt-in."

 

A little while ago, somebody sent me a message, "Hey will you critique my funnel?"

 

So just so you guys know, I'm always willing to critique somebody's funnel. If you guys want me to do that, you can go to stevejlarsen.com. Stevejlarsen.com is where I can critique your funnel. I sell one-on-one hour coaching sessions. We can dive through whatever you want to.

...So there was a guy that I was doing it for, and it was a bunch of fun. I really enjoyed it.  I love these guys. They were so cool. Mad, mad admiration for them. It was some guys over in Hollywood. And it was really really fun. And they worked with a lot of actors. Any, anyways it was really cool.

 

So they sent me out this squeeze page. And I start looking through this squeeze page and their funnel. And the very first thing that I noticed was how many places I could click. And I started looking through the page. (And, you know, I'm not gonna say who it was or whatever) I was looking through it, and there were so many places that I could click. There were so many places that  I could exit. That's one of the defining differences between what a funnel versus a website.

 

Let's think about this. If I have a squeeze page; the goal of the squeeze page is to get someone's contact information so that you can continue to market to them, upsell them, serve them, and add value.

 

If you're not adding value they're gonna unsubscribe anyway. So make sure you're always adding value. However, you're gonna go in, and you're gonna grab somebody's email.

 

Well, the thing is, if I go and I get on a page, and you can look at your squeeze pages now. You can look at your opt-in page. And if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, a squeeze page, an opt-in page, landing page, those are all kind of synonymous terms. Reverse squeeze page/ landing page.

 

There are subtle differences between all of them, but the main premise, the main idea is you're going to get somebody to give you their email address, or some contact info to start the marketing relationship. That's really all it is.

 

Well, I was looking at this guy's squeeze page, and the problem was that it wasn't a squeeze page -  it was a classic website that happened to have an opt-in box on it, and they were treating it like a squeeze page.

 

They were driving a lot of traffic. These guys were spending a ton of money driving traffic to this page. Off the bat, I immediately knew what the problem was.

 

I was looking at their conversions rates, and I was looking at all this traffic coming in. I was looking at their numbers. And the numbers were telling the story.  I mean they were having like ma...