First Landing Page

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This is an exciting video. We are going to create your very first landing page. Now a quick recap of what a landing pages it's effectively a very stripped down website, a single page website that is very singular in focus. It's meant to have somebody click on and take a single action on the page. It could be to download an ebook.
It could be to download a free PDF. It could be a lot of things. So again, A landing page is effectively a website, just very, very targeted and very clear. And the best part is our old friend convert kit is really going to pull through for us. Because again, as I said, in some of the introductory videos in this launching lab, you used to have to buy a separate application to build landing pages, but convert kit has it built right in, they are relatively basic, but they're very practical and very, very usable.
So we log into our account and then if you go to landing page in forms, you can see that we can create a new landing page. You can create forms to embed on an existing website. That's outside the scope of this video. We're going to create a full landing page. When you create a landing page in convert kit, it starts by choosing a template.
And they have a lot of really, really nice templates, depending on the context that your landing page is being used for. Now, I know for our use case, we're having people at this point opt in from your list of contacts that you've put together. So it doesn't have to be super fancy. So I think I'm going to choose a very minimalistic template.
You can. Feel free to follow along exactly with me or branch off and do your own thing, but I'm kind of liking the simplicity of this maple and that this is just a preview and you could click through and look at the preview of all the other ones. So you can see there's quite a variety and they're obviously easily.
Customizable with your own content, which I will obviously be showing you how to do it now. So I will be going with this maple. I think it's the most simple. And you see this built with convert kit logo. That is part of the downside of having a free plan. And I don't think it's that big of an issue.
However, if it does bother you, you will have to upgrade to have that be removed up here. You can see I'm on a desktop view, but you can preview what it'll look like on a phone and the most important thing with any website or landing pages today is that it works just as well on a phone as a desktop. It used to be not that long ago, optional or sort of secondary for your website to look good on a phone.
Whereas today, it's almost the opposite. You must look at it on a phone and there's less people coming to your website from desktop. So the good thing is, is you can preview these templates on desktop and on mobile. So we are going to choose this template. The convert kit landing page builder is quite straightforward.
I really like it is quite simplistic and just straight forward over here, you can see headings. Headings are our bigger font choices here. You can see, you can change the weight if I wanted it. Unbold. I think bold is good and you could change the font color, but I actually already liked the font color.
You can also change the font altogether. If you prefer something else. For example, we could change it to this again. I chose this template actually, I suppose, because I already really like it, but you can also change the body. So if I wanted the same. Text now I am not a professional designer. However, it is a good idea to have contrast between your type faces.
So this is called a Sarah font. It has the little doodads on many of the letters and something that I like to do, although it's not anything set in stone is contrast my font choices. And you have one Sarah font and one sands, Sarah and I tend to prefer sand Sarah for paragraph and Sarah for headings.
Now you can change the background. If I wanted to add an image, I could do that. But what we're going to do with this one is just use a color and we could change the color if we wanted to very easily, which is very cool. He just used this color slider and you can create what other color you want.
Something that matches your brand. I kind of tend to prefer cleaner light designs. Now, the first thing that will change is the image. Obviously the best case scenario is you want a picture of you and convert kit makes it very easy because you can simply search on your computer or just drag and drop an image that you want to use onto the site.
It'll upload it and then it should. Yeah, add it right there. So just as easy as that, we're already on our way to customizing our landing page. Now our title in this case is quite straight forward because we're emailing people and asking them to opt in from people that we already know, but it's still a good practice to use the best practices.
So we want to be clear and concise. So the title I'm going to go with is let's stay connected because it's always a balance between being straightforward, but also friendly. And this aligns with more of your brand. Some of you might be very buttoned down and professional. So you'd use a certain type of language, whereas other people might be going and striving to be more friendly and you would use much more relaxed language.
So depending on your use case, in your context, you can feel free to adjust the language, use to best suit you and your audience. Now, the paragraph. Is slightly less important again for this use case because we are driving quite warm traffic. So it's, again, we're really just practicing. So we really want to provide a little bit more details to our title.
Why do we want to stay connected? What are we staying connected for? So this would match somewhere along the lines. That you're creating for your email to them about what you're doing, what they can expect. So my paragraph balance is just being friendly and, and I just used a placeholder, but this really should be quite slim, quite similar to what you're proposing and what you were describing to them in your email to have good congruency.
So they're seeing consistency and they're very clear with what you're doing and what they're signing up for. Again, we know this is warm traffic. However, this is a very good. Time to practice and stay consistent and learn best practices. Something you'll want to do before. Moving too far along is to change the name.
And this is really just for you. So you'll know what it is. So let's call it warm email. Opt-in. Now with the call to action button, this is important to be even more clear. So it's never a doubt what we want people to do and what they need to do as the user. So for my button, I'm going to use something a little bit more fun.
You could be much more straightforward and say, subscribe or join the list or whatever, as long as you're clear. A reason why I actually chose this template is I kind of like the two step process. I always like when users are taking real action, you don't want it to be a burden. Obviously clicking a button is not difficult, but it's really good to balance a taking action.
So having to click the button to get to the actual form is something that I like. I just think it adds a little bit of texture to the experience for the user. And I actually think it kind of comes across as being professional in a way. And that could just be my perspective, but it a next level landing page doesn't have to be all that fancy.
It's just these little things along the way that tell people specifically those new people as you move towards those colder audiences, that you are a pro look how great my landing pages. Look at all these little features, I am somebody that you want to be associated with and we can make that impression at every single step.
Now on this second step, it is almost like another page in a way. So we do have to change the photo again, for me, I am going to use the same photo because I think that it'll provide the best experience. And again, we're, this is our kind of final step to coax them, to actually submit their information. Now, with my paragraph on this step, I added just a little bit of, uh, excitement around their action that they're taking.
And I also like to remind them, they do have to do another thing. So you are one small step away. It's a small thing, but sometimes it's good to just make sure people know that there is more to do. And something I like to add in some way is to enter the best email for you. I try and phrase that in some ways on most of my landing pages, because in today's world, lots of people have quite a few email addresses.
Maybe a work email and a personal one, and we don't know which one is best. However, I think it's good to use the term best or your favorite or something along those lines. And then they might say, Hmm, okay. Which one is my favorite? Not everybody will, but for those that it matters to that it's relevant to, I think it allows them to take a little bit better action.
And again, we're producing a better email subscriber, the more diligent and thoughtful we are at every single step. That the button that they have already set up with this template works great. Submit and sign me up. I like that something I do like to do is collect first names and email addresses. And that is what we strongly suggest for you.
Anything beyond that can be a bit of a burden and can stop people from opting in because it can feel like a little bit too much is going on. I always avoid last name or phone number, any of that stuff. It doesn't really matter with email list building. If you were trying to, for example, get someone's phone number to call them.
I would have that much further down a nurture sequence then right off the bat. Cause it's a little bit too heavy handed to start with. But we do want the first name. And right now this form is only set up to have email address. So if we click this plus sign, you see, you see this menu open up on the right hand side.
And what we want to do is select custom field and then first name and we are going to make it required, meaning they must do it. And just for me for convention sake, I prefer first name first. So it's easy to change the. Order with convert kit. Again, they make a lot of things very, very easy. So there is other settings you can mess with, but for the most part, I'm pretty happy with the settings that it came with, but you could change the font size, the font, weight, et cetera, if you want it to.
And I think ConvertKit allows you to do is create a thank you page. So if I click this plus button. It'll create a thank you page. And again, going, gonna look very similar, but this is a general, thank you. I like to do thank you pages, just because it gives a very clear confirmation that they took action and everything went through as expected.
So again, we're going to change this photo again to this one we have, and then we're just going to change this to you are all signed up and then we're going to keep this very simple. Just keep it very simple. Watch your inbox for updates now to be able to actually use the thank you page. Basically it's a flow, right?
We land on this page and then we click that button and then we give our details. We would click submit, and then we'd go to the thank you page. Now it does require a little bit of setup to make that happen, but again, convert kit makes it easy. If we go to settings. You can see when a visitor subscribes on the page, what do you want to happen?
And you could do a bunch of things. You could just show this message. But what we want to do is redirect the thank you page domain name is something that I will cover at the end of this video, but it's a way of using your own domain. So we'll get to that. An incentive email is effectively if you were providing some sort of piece of content, so a PDF, a access to a video series, whatever it ends up being, which we will talk about more later, when we talk about creating a lead magnet, however, in this scenario for these warm opt-ins, we do not want to send an incentive email at all.
So we uncheck that and you'll see it takes. Uh, lots of those options to keep it more simple and we will go into incentive emails and all these other settings later. In the advanced tab, there gives a little bit more, I guess, advanced settings, as it says. So change what is shown to return visitors who have already subscribed to the form convert kit is very smart.
It saves something called a cookie. And that means if someone who has already opted in on this page comes back, they already know that. So you could just show it as normal. And the form could be there. They could theoretically opt in again. You could choose to hide the form entirely. I think the best thing to do is to be, to show custom content and saying something along the lines of you are already subscribed.
Another thing we're going to check is send subscriber to thank you page and I'll show you why that matters later. The SEO and analytics is something that is a little bit advanced, but still a good idea to do. I would keep it very simple and I would just use your name and a generic join my list and for the description, I think it makes sense to mirror what we used in our first pair graph with some alterations.
Perfect. The image again, this is what shows up if you were to post it on Facebook, for example, so you could customize it and then if you're there yet, you could add your Google analytics and et cetera, but that's a little bit outside the scope of this. And then we got to click save. Now, as I said before, this built with convert kit logo, is there due to you being on a free tier and I have a little bit of a hack for you, and that is using custom CSS.
CSS is a technical term. It's stands for cascading style sheet. You don't have to understand what that is, but it's ultimately the underlying code of the website and to be able to change how it looks. And I have a little code snippet for you. That I have put together that will hide this and I'll have it linked down below.
But if I show you, I'm going to paste it in here, you'll see that it disappears. And that's because it's sending its display to none, basically hiding it again. It's a very technical, you don't have to do this if you don't want to, but it is a cool, um, and I guess, benefit of having. A nerd named Carson, helping you through this process.
And we can do, you can see that that same thing is applied to the thank you page. At any point of the process, you can click preview and you get a more realistic version of what it looks like in real life. So we could test it. Okay. We could enter our name and our email. Or we could click submit, but just because we were testing, we wouldn't want to do that.
And in case it isn't clear this little X is what would take you back. But if we click the exit preview or back, and this is what we are used to seeing. Once you've done everything that you have wanted to do, where you want to do is click save and publish. And it does say it takes a few minutes to see your changes go live.
I did actually notice that. So I would just wait a few minutes, but you can get the link from this share and then you can click to copy. And then if I open a new tab, And enter what I copied. You can see that that landing page is here and up here in the menu bar. You can see this title. That's that SEO and that's, what's showing up here again, back here in settings SEO, you see this right here.
That is where that is showing up. So that's why that matters. Now, if we wanted to test, we can go like this click submit and we are all signed up. Now, if I were to refresh and go back and to try and do this again, you see you are already on the list. So that's heading that we set up is already working.
Awesome. So our landing page is looking pretty good. So I think we hit save and publish one more time, just for good measure. And while we're here while we're waiting, just a few moments for that to populate. If you click the reports tab. This will give you basically the information that is, this gives you the confirmation.
This gives you the conversion rate for your landing page. Now, if you remember back to the introductory videos for this launching lab, we talked about conversion rate is effectively the amount of people that have visited your page divided by the number of subscribers. And so far between me testing the page with two of my email addresses, we are at a hundred percent.
So that is good news. But one thing that's cool is you can monitor this over time. Test things, obviously that becomes into more play when you start creating new lead magnets, new landing pages to test things out. But these analytics are really critical and really helpful because it's just another way of getting feedback and adjust and adjusting and seeing how your adjustments affect the behavior of your possible subscribers or your subscribers.
And if you want it to, you could click down though your subscriber list and it would just download an Excel file of everybody that opted in. Um, if you were curious to look at it, but obviously they are in your subscribers. And as you can see, I tested on two with two of my emails, just to see if the page works and it does.
Now going back to the page, now that we have a landing page set up, you'll see that this view is just a little bit different because it's showing analytics. And obviously we just started today. So it's a little bit looking a little bit goofy, but this will start looking more normal and you'd be able to see a trend over time.
And if you wanted to create a new landing page, you could do that here. You could change the view. To see everything however, works best for your eyes. And if you wanted to go make changes or look at it, you can click and we're right back into the editor that you are used to. So that basically concludes in general, creating your first landing page to be able to use with that email that you're going to send out to your warm people to try and get them officially on your email list.
And to finally take you from zero to not zero. So you could stop here. However, I do have a little bit of a bonus or extra credit for you, but even if you're not sure if you're ready to follow through, I encourage you to stick around and learn. And if you decide not to do it right now, that's okay. But what we're going to talk about is using a custom domain.
So if I click share, this is the URL that we're given from convert kit, basically, and you can see it's quite ugly, something about exciting leader, something, something. And I think this is automatically generated for you by convert kit. And the good news is, is it's possible to use your custom domain, including the domain you just purchased from Namecheap or that you already own.
So what we're going to do is in our settings, we are going to go to our account settings. And then this is that exciting leader. This is kind of your name that's given you from convert kit. So. I would suggest you change this to something more descriptive.
And then when you do you click save, Oh, N Kathleen warning domain is already taken, so let's try clean Sealy.
There we go. That was successful. So now, if we were to go back just to show you what we effectively did, go back to our landing page, click share. You see that, that logo or excuse me, not logo that domain has now changed. And this.ck that is obviously convert kit. So this is the sort of general domain that they give you to use, and then it works perfectly well.
Now, something else you can do back in your account settings is you can set a homepage to your URL, this URL right here and. This is the landing page that we made. If I select it and click save. And then I went back to my landing pages, click the warm email. Opt-in looked at the share. You can see there's no slash anything.
It's basically like the home link to that. So then if I open a new tab and paste it, you see it's there now for bonus points. What we're going to talk about is. How do you use your own domain? So instead of Kathleen seeley.ck.page or whatever yours is, which in general, I actually think that this URL is not too bad.
As long as you use your name. Um, and this is that link that goes at the bottom of your email. Opt-in part of that template that we gave you. This would be that link. And I think that's totally suitable and it's done for you easy. Now, if you want to take it to the next level and use your personal domain link, that is what we're going to cover now.
So if we go to your account settings and then custom domains, You can see, we can add a domain. Now, what we're going to add is a arbitrary domain that I bought just for some texts testing purposes, and then we're going to select which landing page we want that to link to. So then we click save. Now this gets a little bit complicated, but it's really not too bad and you can follow along.
Step-by-step. So what we have to do is show is changed DNS records with our domain. So if you bought your domain at Namecheap, they make this pretty easy and I can show you how to do it. Um, I'm already logged in so I can go to, Oh, I'm not logged in. Here we go. I go to my domain list and then I click manage on the link that I want to change.
And then if I click advanced DNS, This is where we're going to be working. So if we go back to this, you can see what we need to create is a type three, a types with these values. So what I'm going to do is copy this one, go back, add a new record. We're creating an, a record. And what we do is we paste this in here and then set this to one minute and then you use the.
At symbol in this section, we click the check Mark. That'll be created. We go back and we need to do that for these two other. So copies
a record with an app piece this in set this to one minute check box and for the third one.
New record a record at paste that set to one minute, hit the check box. Now this can take some time to propagate, but what you can do is we can click, refresh and see it has not been verified yet. And that's okay. It takes a little bit of time, but if we click save and we come back in a few minutes and we click refresh.
You can see that that domain has been refreshed and it's now verified and obviously connected to this opt-in. So now this is a domain. If I right click this and open in a new tab. You can see it links directly to the landing page that we created. So we're now using a custom domain with our convert kit account all for free.
So we are looking extremely professional and this would be the link that you would copy and use in your email to send to your list of potential opt-ins and they would come, they would opt into your great landing page and you will now have. Email subscribers. How exciting. Congratulations. I can't wait for you to go from, well, I guess zero to hero, uh, but you are not a zero.
Just your email list was, but this is exciting times. This is a great and exciting moment. When you start building your email list and I assure you the future is bright. So congratulations. And I'll see you in the next video.