When someone’s on your website, what are the best practices that convert them from visitor to buyer? If you want more newsletter subscribers, how do you design a landing page that gets the job done? In fact, what is the balance between copywriting and graphics that gets the biggest results?
These are some of the questions I ask my expert guest, Martin Cris, in today’s interview. If you don’t know how to optimize your website, join us for this fantastic conversation to learn more!
Martin is a master at creating sales pages that convert. He and I discuss everything from writing effective headlines to prompting your clients for compelling testimonials. We share design dos and don’ts and even get into how to leverage AI to fine-tune your messaging.
This is the episode for you if you want to make sure you’re not losing sales when people click on your links. Don’t miss out, and enjoy!
For more from Martin, visit MartinCris.com/spi for his crash course on creating high-converting landing pages! [affiliate link]
Today’s Guest
Martin Cris
Martin started designing websites fifteen years ago, pivoting through different industries. He has been active in several niches, including SaaS, B2B, sports, health, startups, and more. Finding the creator’s space was a big shift in his career. Today, Martin helps creators elevate their brands and sell more with beautiful, high-converting sales pages & websites.
- Find out more at MartinCris.com
- Visit MartinCris.com/spi for a crash course on creating high-converting landing pages [affiliate link]
You’ll Learn
- Landing pages versus home pages, the differences and similarities
- How to design a page that gets you more newsletter subscribers
- Understanding where your visitors come from to increase conversions
- How to provide social proof if you’re just starting out
- The questions to ask past clients to generate compelling testimonials
- How to find the perfect headline for your sales page
- Using AI to fine-tune your copywriting for a target audience
- Understanding graphics and why simple designs perform better
Resources
- Subscribe to Unstuck—my weekly newsletter on what’s working in business right now, delivered free, straight to your inbox
- Connect with Pat on Twitter and Instagram
SPI 823: Top Landing Page Dos and Don’ts with Martin Cris
Martin Cris: Between copy and design, I will say that copy is key, but the combination of two is, is really the magic there. But we don’t want to overwhelm with visuals. There are some stats that the pages with a lot of visuals convert less than simple and clean designs. So it’s around 60% more that a page will convert if they are more simple in terms of visuals. So it’s a balance, right? We want to keep it clean, but we also want to give them a good experience when you are going through a sales page.
Pat Flynn: Hey, I’m going to quiz you. So when a person comes to your website and you’re trying to get them to do something, what is the best practice? If there’s one action you want them to take, whether to buy something or subscribe, what is the best practice? If you don’t know, well, then this is definitely the episode for you because today we’re talking with an expert.
His name is Martin Cris, and he is a landing page designer and expert. He helps clients. He does his own and he is a master at landing pages. So we’re going to talk in layman’s terms to help you, especially you, the beginner who doesn’t know what a landing page is, or you know what it is, but you just aren’t really sure exactly how it should be formatted or what should be on it.
We’re going to go deep into that today with Martin Cris, he’s got a cool accent and he’s got something cool for you at the end as well. So let’s get into it. Let’s dive into landing pages and land in the diving zone. Land, let’s, okay, just start the show. Here we go.
Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, if he could make a living just telling dad jokes and puns all day, he would. Pat Flynn.
Pat Flynn: Martin, welcome to SPI. Thanks for being here, man.
Martin Cris: Thank you for having me, Pat.
Pat Flynn: So you specialize in landing pages, especially for creators. And I think this is a topic that is often overlooked. We see landing pages and tools and we can set them up really easily, but we don’t really dive into what exactly should be on there or the science behind them or any of that stuff. We’re going to dive deep into that today.
How did you get into focusing on landing pages? Landing pages specifically. Tell me a little bit about your history there.
Martin Cris: Yeah, sure. I would try to be brief here because a long story. So I started, it was like 15 years ago. So it has been a while. I was looking for basically for my first job, any kind of job. So imagine I was at that time. 18, 19 years old, looking for my first job to have my own money. And so I came to a company called Cymaco Repuestos, which is here in Uruguay. It’s a very well known company that sells auto parts. This company, you know, I came to them and they say they might have a job for me to work as a delivery guy, right. So delivering auto parts to individuals and companies. So three days later, they agreed to call me if there were an opportunity. So I was expecting to, to get a job as a delivery guy. Right. And they call me and say, okay, we have these graphic design position for you. So it was like, okay, what?
And it happened that at the same time I came and I leave my resume, the only guy that they have as a graphic designer within the company is me quit. So they saw my resume and they saw that I have this course on graphic design. I didn’t have any job, any experience at that time, really. So long story short, I took the opportunity and I started learning.
It was like kind of the, the push for me to start learning graphic design. And then I got into website design. I worked on that company for around two years, and then I jumped between small agencies here until I got to a point where I wanted to build my, my own career as a freelancer, because I wanted to, you know, to have the freedom of working from anywhere else in the world.
And so I started my, my own company. First, I learned about website design, then UX, UI. I work also for a company in the U S an agency, a big agency. I worked for them for about. 10 years. And then I started also building my own business, right? On the side. Until a point I started working by myself and creating my own company.
At some point, a few years, you know, into the business, I found what it was conversions rate, right? So conversion rates.
I realized that I could not only create beautiful designs and experiences for my clients, but but I can also give them a more tangible result and business result, right? So I got into it, I learned about conversions and then thought myself copywriting.
So along with copywriting and design, I started getting into this world of landing pages. And then at one point I was struggling to find my niche. So I was pivoting between different type of clients until I got out to a point where I started working with creators, let’s say creators or personal brands, you know, founders, I guess we have a, a lot of, of these in your audience.
So, yeah, I got to this point where I started specializing in landing pages for, for creators. And I found it really great because I, I call not only create a beautiful things for them, beautiful experience, but also provide results for them in their business.
Pat Flynn: Amazing. Before we get into what makes a great landing page and the different components that are on it and how to optimize, what are the use cases for a landing page, especially for those who are listening, who are maybe just starting out is like, isn’t a homepage a landing page? It’s a page that people land on. But what in your mind is the definition of a landing page? And what is its purpose? What is it meant to do?
Martin Cris: There is a confusion between, you know, a website and a landing page.
So if you if we want to picture this better, I like to do this comparison, where, you know, the website is your your home, right? Where you have different rooms for different purposes, right? So you have your living room where you chill out your kitchen where you cook and so on. And so the landing page is just one room, right?
You want to focus on just on just one goal. It’s different from the website where you have different purposes. You show all your stuff or your online presence. So the about page, the services, all that you have for landing pages is different because we want them to take just one action. So it is usually for people to understand it more in a real life situation, you are scrolling through social media and you see an ad or, you know, something, someone promoting a service, a product, whatever it is, and they click on the action there and this takes you to a page.
That’s the landing page that we are talking about, where we focus on, on just one goal, right? We want them to, whether it is you’re selling your course, you want them to sign up to your newsletter or buy your product. That’s the work of a landing page.
Pat Flynn: So a sales page is a version of a landing page that is meant to specifically help a person convert to a sale. There’s different kinds of landing pages where a person might be specifically focused on subscribing to a newsletter.
There might be another landing page that talks about an event that might be going on or a webinar registration page. These are all different specific landing pages, but I think the biggest thing here is, and the definition is, is it does one thing in one thing only. There was another term that used to be more popular back in the day.
It was called a squeeze page because a person lands there and they’re kind of squeezed to only do one thing, leave the page or do the action. And that’s kind of, that’s still the best practice today, right? With these landing pages is to just have the one thing. to do on the page, the one action that you want them to take.
Is that still the best practice today?
Martin Cris: Yes, definitely. You don’t want to confuse or overwhelm the, the, the visitor, your audience, or your potential client, you know, with different things. So we want to focus the message there, the offer for them to take one action, you know, whether it is, you know, sign up to the newsletter by the product.
Pat Flynn: Okay, let’s just talk about newsletters for now. Newsletters are becoming more and more popular now. It kind of went away for a while. Now it’s back. It’s even taking over what was once blogging in terms of written content. So a lot of people want more people to subscribe to their newsletter. So let’s imagine we are setting up a landing page for a newsletter. What are the components of a great converting landing page, right? It’s meant to do one thing, which is to get a visitor to sign up to the email list. But how do we do that? What are the best things to include on that page.
Martin Cris: One thing, what we want to make sure is that they understand what you have to offer in your, in this case, in your newsletter.
So you want to make sure that they get the, they perceive the value you have to offer within your newsletter, newsletter, right? So that’s one thing. Another thing is you can include their social proof. So it could be in the, in the way of how many readers you already have, right? So if you have a, don’t like you, but you may have, I don’t know how many you have at this point, but let’s say 4k.
Pat Flynn: 100, 000.
Martin Cris: Okay. So you have all those subscribers. So that will give you, you know, credibility. And I know that people is listening to you already. So that’s one thing. And another thing is to make it very easy for them to subscribe, right? You don’t want to place a lot of different fields there. So you make it easy for them to go in and start experiencing and learning from you what you have for them within your newsletter.
Pat Flynn: Great. Let’s work backwards here from those three things that you mentioned. You mentioned easy to subscribe, social proof, and then value. So let’s work backwards because I think it gets harder as we, as we go back up. So easy to subscribe. I think this makes sense. This is one call to action. Here’s the button.
You make it clear, like how detailed do you get with your clients in terms of that action? Are you testing different colors? Are you testing different phrases on the button? Are you testing first name and email or just email only? What have you been finding that is working best or how do you know even which decisions to make there?
Martin Cris: Yeah, so we want to do add, I think there’s one thing that is key here is to add some excitement to this as well, right? So you don’t want to tell them, okay, sign up to my newsletter because you’re going to get more newsletter. It’s my newsletter and that’s it. Sign up here. So you want to add some excitement there, right?
So maybe you can simplify, first of all, you want to simplify this as just email. Okay. If you want to, you know, get more information from your potential clients or your on create a database where you have more info, you may want to add as well the name and then in the call to action, make it clear, right?
Make it clear where they need to click on to start writing the email, or name and email. So you want to make super clear where they need to go next. So they, they will go through your page. If we picture these people coming to your newsletter page, they will read the headline, what you have to offer. And then if they are, they are ready to, to join your newsletter, they want to find really easy where the field is right to fill out the email and then the action just to click it and make it super easy for them to to join the newsletter.
So in the call to action, you can also add, you know, me more exciting. So showing into I don’t know, 1,000 more people that is, you don’t want to do it super, super long, but join along with this amount of readers as well, or something that sounds a little bit more exciting. That could be something that you could try it and see how it works, but otherwise you want to keep it simple, like email, join here, and then you just welcome them in the email system and they are using, right?
Pat Flynn: There’s a friend of mine, Steve Cam, who has a website called Nerd Fitness. He helps nerds get fit. And to join his newsletter, the button says, join the Rebellion. Because the Rebellion likes Star Wars and stuff. So that’s like an example of how you can add some personality, add some fun into that. Is there any concern on having the fields to enter in the subscribe button below the fold.
Like a person has to scroll down to see that, or do you advise having that above the fold shown before anybody has to scroll? What are your thoughts on above the fold versus below the fold?
Martin Cris: So yeah, definitely keep it all, all together on a simple above the fold, because this is the most important section, right?
If you then want to. show some social proof or maybe testimonials of the people that already joined your newsletter, you can do it below. But it is best to keep everything above the fold, so it’s pretty clear where they need to go, right? You, I can scan the page and see everything together over there, see the value, see the action, the field and the action.
Pat Flynn: Are you allowed to have multiple opportunities to capture that email on the single page. For example, we do the best practice, which is keep it above the fold. We have the headline, we have some social proof there. It kind of sells the idea of the newsletter, but then we go into more explanation below.
People scroll down, we might have more of our story or whatever we might include just to kind of add more elements. And then another field at the after they scroll down. Is that okay to do, or is that kind of too much information and you’d rather just have everything above the fold and that’s it?
Martin Cris: I mean, I have seen both options working right where you can, we kept everything simple above the fold and you just have that information there in the page.
Right. So You focus on that only, but maybe if you are starting out, maybe if you need to convince more people, you know, about your, what’s your value in it, you want to expand a little bit more about the newsletter or what is in there. Maybe you can play some examples of your newsletter, right? So previous newsletter, review emails you have sent.
So people can get a sense of what this is about in a real situation, right? A real email that you have sent already to your audience. And then, of course, repeating the action is key here because we want them to see, right? We want to guide them to the next step.
Pat Flynn: I think it also matters. And I’d love to talk about this, like, where people are coming from to land on that page.
For example, if you are explaining everything already, maybe on a YouTube video or somewhere, and then, you know, you’re selling your newsletter there, bringing people to a landing page to then have them read this giant long page is maybe too much, or you’ve already duplicated the things you’ve already said, so you don’t necessarily need anything other than just clearly reinforcing what you just mentioned somewhere else on that landing page. But I imagine that if you are running ads for a newsletter and these are all people who are cold, they don’t know who you are, you might need more information. You might need to talk about who you are and your background story a little bit more, which will require a longer page. And then you’d want to make sure there’s multiple opportunities to subscribe in there.
Am I thinking about that correctly? Like where they’re coming from. and the psychology of who that person is when they land is really important, right?
Martin Cris: Yeah, yeah, definitely. This is super important because you know the same having a warm audience that cold traffic that is landing to your page. So as you say, it is just right.
You want to keep it simple for one audience or people that already know about you. But if you are running ads, you probably want to extend more information and give them more details about your offer, or in this case, the newsletter.
Pat Flynn: Love it.
Let’s go back up to social proof. We mentioned this a couple of times. You mentioned the example of join 5, 000 people who are also getting this newsletter, what if you don’t have that yet? What if you’re just starting out? What kind of other proof can you include if you don’t quite yet have those numbers?
Martin Cris: If we want to keep in the, you know, in the example of the newsletter, one thing you can do is actually showing your newsletter. To get people to know more about these details or what you have to say, what you really have to say, otherwise is, is hard for them to understand your value. Another thing could be, maybe you don’t have subscribers yet, but you have clients that you have worked in the past that validate your experience, right? So it’s something that you can use as well as a social proof to promote your newsletter as well.
Pat Flynn: Love that idea. Could you also include, I know this is, I’ve seen this on a few landing pages. We even included on ours, which is like other publications that have talked about us like Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine and those kinds of things.
Is that exactly those are okay to include on there as well? And is there a best way to do that?
Martin Cris: Yeah, that’s definitely a good idea because we’ll give you credibility as well. If you were featured on, on a famous press, you can place that in your page as, you know, as the logos, I wouldn’t recommend to add the links to the old press because you, we don’t want to send people somewhere else.
Okay. So just the logo only. Yeah. So as a logo, maybe if it’s something short, you can, you know, add a short description or something that kind of give more details and look more credible, right? But I think it’s a, it’s a great idea adding logos or from the press that you were featured on adding you know, previous client testimonials or combine those, or as well, you know some examples of previous newsletter that you have sent.
Pat Flynn: Nice. I love that. I think that that plays well too with sales page landing pages. If you haven’t yet sold anything, then you don’t have testimonials for that product yet, but you can go to clients that you’ve worked with who can vouch for you. I mean, that’s really the whole point of this is you got to understand the psychology of somebody who’s on a page, who’s thinking about giving you money or giving you their email address. They’re not sure. They want proof to make sure that this is actually legit. So, I love these things that you’re talking about. The testimonials are huge. Is there a good format for testimonials that you found works on these pages? Is it a quote with a picture or a name, full name, last name, or a video, what works best on testimonials?
Martin Cris: So I think testimonials need to provide some value, right? So you want to read this testimonial and feel like it is something that you’re going through, right? Oh, I mean, if we put it in reverse. So I want people to feel, by reading my testimonials, to feel what’s the value within my offer, right?
Pat Flynn: So, so not just like a, Oh, Martin was really fun to work with, highly recommend. That’s like there’s no value there.
Martin Cris: It’s great for me, but for my ego, but it’s not great for someone that is looking to hire me. Right. So we want to place testimonials that are strategically pointing out to specific value they got from your service, from your product.
Right. So whether, if you’re in my case, I’m a web designer, so a good thing for me, if will be that a client mentioned that increased conversions or, you know, that the brand looks much more professional. So along those lines, so you want to provide value to the audience. That’s one thing. Another thing is you don’t, you know, you might have a long testimonial, so you want to highlight parts to make it as kind of, that’s good.
Right. Yeah. I think Some people read and some people scan and some people will, you know, will do half and half. So you have to take care of the, you know, of the different situations you might have in your page or for your visitors, right? So you want to make sure that your testimonial is scannable. So highlight the key parts of the testimonial.
It is, if it is a long one, it starts at a good, you know, it’s kind of a good batch to add there a good visual. That also add a little bit more of credibility, a photo of the author and and the name and last name as well is important. Otherwise it feels like it is fake really. And if you are adding, are you seeing video testimonials?
I always recommend for you to also put a text next to it that summarize the key parts of the video testimonial, because not everyone is going to watch. the video, right? You want them to still get the value from from this testimonial, even if they don’t watch the video.
Pat Flynn: That’s really smart. So when including a video also include a summary, that makes sense because people might be at work or just on the go can’t really watch the video or they aren’t able to hear the audio.
I love that. And I love the idea of making sure that the testimonials all relate back to something that the viewer or the potential subscriber or the potential buyer might care about they probably don’t care how great Pat Flynn is if they’re on a Pat Flynn landing page, but they care about how Pat Flynn helped them save time or help them get their podcast up and build a business or help them run their first webinar when they were scared, like those kinds of things.
So with those kinds of testimonials, like those are ideal testimonials, but we don’t want to put words in their mouths. How do we or what questions can we ask? Or how do we get those testimonials that do include those benefits? Do you have any strategies for that? Because we don’t want to make this up. We don’t want to be fake.
But we also want to guide testimonials to look more like that than the just, Yeah, this was fun.
Martin Cris: Yeah, one thing that I mean, the easiest thing to do here is to ask them the right question when you finish your your project, right? When you finish the work with them, the service. So you want to ask them what they what value they go from working with you.
What was the experience about working with you? So you want to be strategically about the question you ask for them to provide the it. information to then have a great testimonial, right? You don’t want to put the words in their mouth, but you want to guide them. As you said, we great question. So the experience they have working with you is is established there in the testimonial, right?
Pat Flynn: I think that question of value, what was the biggest value you got from working with me or how would you describe the the most valuable thing? What was your transformation? Right? There you go. That’s a good one to the before and after, right? Even you can even get specific with that, right? You can ask multiple questions.
What was life like before you started working with me or what were the biggest challenges you were facing before working with me? What has been the biggest difference? That’s a good one. What’s been the biggest difference now after I’ve helped you with X, Y, and Z? Oh, I’m getting more conversions than I ever have before.
Boom. Right. Everything is just, just works the way it’s supposed to. I don’t have to think about it anymore. Boom. You know, whatever those might be. So it’s definitely important to set up those questions. I think, yeah, that’s perfect. And we had mentioned that word value a few times here today. How do we know what is valuable to our potential subscriber or potential buyer?
And then how does that get translated into the landing page? Cause value is a word that does get thrown around quite a bit, but like, what is, what is it means different to different audiences? How do you know what is valuable to those viewers, to that traffic?
Martin Cris: You need to study your audience, right? So you need to ask questions.
You need to make sure you understand what the problem you are solving, right? So you want to make sure that you understand all the problems or the problem you are specifically solving for your audience. So whether you are, you know, in your case, you’re helping people to, to create a podcast, right? So you might be thinking about like, okay, so these people is struggling to create a podcast.
They don’t know the tech that it needs to go through to create a new podcast, to launch, to grow it. So you, you start to get to different problems, situations that they are going through. And and then you are touching in their, in their emotions through the landing page and then presenting your solution for, for them to transform, right?
What we were talking about before, we want them to have a transformation. They go from point A to point B and and they get, that’s the value, right? So they get a value from your service, from your help.
Pat Flynn: I think the headline on that page they land on is probably the most important thing. It’s going to be the first thing they read.
Yeah. And it’s often the hardest thing for people to come up with. When you understand that value and you do do the studying, which is important. It’s, it’s interesting. Like you have to do the work. You have to know who it is that you’re serving, what it’s going through their head. Like Martin said, what are the biggest challenges and struggles, but you could know that and still not portray that on the page because you’re not using the right words and the right headline.
Yes. How do you land on the perfect headline for that page? What are the exercises that you have people go through or what do you do to discover those words.
Martin Cris: Sure. So I have something that is I have a process that is like three steps. So you want to list out first the problems that the, your audience is going through, right?
So you want to create all these problems, your list out all these problems, and then you get onto one problem, one specific problem that is the biggest one. From there, I start by, by creating the headline by creating this very simple, right? And a high level. So in your case, let’s take it an example for, for the podcast, it could be like a step by step course to, to create your podcast.
Right. So that’s the solution, but then you want to go a little bit further. Right. So you want to make it more unique. You want to touch on the benefits, right? This is just how you are going to do, but there is more from it, right? There is something that is more deep inside your solution. So in this case, instead of in a step by step course to launch a podcast, it could be like launch your podcast and grow your audience and your brand.
Right. So that’s, that’s more powerful. And then on the subheadline, you can explain how you do it. That’s right. So a step by step course, they’re going to detail for you to grow.
Pat Flynn: Oh, that’s the subheadline.
Martin Cris: Yeah, that’s more. So in the, in the headline, you state the value, you state the benefit, what is unique about your offer, and then immediately you explain how you do it basically on this subheadline.
Pat Flynn: Yeah, that formula works really, really well. We use that on a lot of our course landing pages. It’s almost like three statements. Right. I think for podcasting, I think you’ve nailed it because kind of launch your podcast, grow your brand and monetize your business or something like that. With our email one, it’s grow your list, generate more revenue, automate like magic, that sort of punchy one, two, three.
And then, like you said, the sub headline goes into the, how I think a lot of us start with the, how, like you said, it’s like, here is a step by step course to help you launch your podcast. Yeah.
Martin Cris: Like the thing, right? Right.
Pat Flynn: But it’s like, okay, so what? Like you launch a podcast, so what? That’s, that’s my test for always getting to the benefit.
I think what we’re talking about here are like we said earlier, what’s the benefit. AKA the value for the viewer is the value the fact that it’s a step by step course that’s going to launch their podcast, or is the value the fact that when you launch a podcast, you’re going to grow your brand and monetize your business is the value, not because it’s simple or not because it’s step by step, but because.
When it’s step by step, you won’t get lost because it’s easy because it will save you time. Like these, these things are really, really important. So I think a lot of us try to nail it on the first try. It’s okay to be messy. It’s okay to workshop it and talk about it with others. Do you, or would you recommend using something like ChatGPT or something to help with the wording of this?
And do you have any strategies for that for people who need a little bit of help with the copywriting?
Martin Cris: Yes. I mean, AI is great for this because you, you know, you will get a lot of back and forth. I work with AI all the time. It’s my, my assistant because it helped me to think, right? I’m not going to use exactly what the AI give me.
I mean, the results immediately. But if you work with with a tool, it’s a fantastic tool for you to come up with a better solution. So you might start with, I have this course, I don’t want to promote to people and they will give you just, you know, overall results, but then you, you go deeper, right? So let’s try to focus on, on this benefit.
Why will you give me, if one of the best headlines that you can think of, if we want to stay this benefit, like, you know, grow with your audience, or it is people that want to start from scratch, they don’t know how to do it. So how we can phrase that in a way that they will, you know, they will find the value in it.
Pat Flynn: I love that. Yeah. I use AI too as a collaborative partner for a lot of these things, especially when it comes to copywriting. And I try my best to, before I ask it to do anything, I have to kind of train it. And I have these history chats with certain subjects with ChatGPT and also Claude to train it on who my audience is and what their biggest problems and pains are and struggles.
So that when I prompt it for something like a headline for a product or something, it already knows who my target audience is. is and what their behaviors are, and that helps out a lot. It takes a little time to set up. We’ve had Rick already on the show before who helps business owners with AI, and he is really, really big on making sure to properly train it first before you ask it to do things for you.
And I think this is a good example of how and why that would work so well. Martin, this has been great. I have one more sort of exercise to work through with you. And it’s mainly on the visual components of a landing page. How fancy should, or should we not get with the visuals, the graphics and all of those kinds of things on a landing page?
Because on one side, I know a lot of people say, no, keep it simple. Like almost text only with maybe the image of the newsletter or the book or the course and others go, no, like brand it out, make it personal, like make it design nice. What’s your take on it as far as how visually. Compelling or what adornment should be included on these landing pages.
Martin Cris: So I think if we put in a balance, you know, between a copy and design, I will say that copy is is key is very important, but the combination of two is, is really the magic there, right? We, we want to have a great copywriting and we want to have a great design as well. But we don’t want to overwhelm with visuals.
There is some stats according to HubSpot that the pages with a lot of visuals convert less that simple and clean designs. So it’s around 60 percent more that a page will convert if they are more simple in terms of visuals. Oh, wow. That’s a lot more. Yeah, there’s a lot more. So, but you want to still, you know, because images and visuals are very powerful as well, right?
We can communicate a lot with this. So it’s a balance, right? It’s a balance, a great copy. We want to keep it clean, but we also want to give them a good experience, right? And the, the visuals would, will make that, you know, will, will upgrade the experience when you are going through a sales page, right? If it is only text versus a great copy with visuals that are complementing the copy as well.
Pat Flynn: Yeah, a good test that I found is if you were to remove an image that you put on there and it doesn’t change anything. Then leave it out. But sometimes images are important. It’s like, okay, here’s a picture of my face and that’s important because it builds trust and it shows who’s the author behind this newsletter.
So, okay, we’ll keep that in. If we took it out, it would remove trust. We added in, it adds trust this arrow. That’s important because it visually builds trust. Points people to the call to action area if I remove that then my eye gets lost this arrow. Okay, we’re gonna keep it this butterfly in the corner.
Well, if I remove it, it doesn’t really change anything So let’s just keep it out, right? So that that’s kind of the test that I use for visuals and I I’m not an expert graphic designer, but just even just that foundational question alone has helped me quite a bit in, in the things that I try to design and don’t, and if you are trying to design your own landing page, I mean, there are a lot of landing page designers.
Now they’re built into a lot of these email service providers even, but I only know they can take us so far. If you want something a little bit more custom and laid out properly, Martin, I know that you take clients and you help people out. Where can people go to maybe get a little bit more of a custom effort and work with you on building a perfect landing page?
Where should they go?
Martin Cris: Did you go to MartinCris.com and there they can, you know, find more about my services and how I can help them to create a safe space website and improve their brand as well. And also I am creating these crash course for your audience, which they can find in MartinCris.com/spi. So there’s crash course to create their own high converting landing page as well.
Pat Flynn: Okay. Awesome. Well, everybody go and land there to see what it looks like. And you know, we’ll see what it can do over there. So MartinCris.com/spi for that crash course on your own landing pages. Martin, this has been super helpful.
Thank you so much for this great crash course, if you will, on landing pages today across a number of different aspects of it and appreciate your time.
Martin Cris: I appreciate you, Pat. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Pat Flynn: Thank you.
All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Martin Cris. You can find them on X as well, @TheMartinCris, which is where we connected and I was glad to get them on the show so we could talk deeply about landing pages and hopefully you are more informed now and you can get this done. And if you need some help or want to deep dive into this even more, head on over to MartinCris.com/spi for that crash course. MartinCris.com/spi. And of course you can go to the show notes page to get all the links and everything that we talked about. SmartPassiveIncome.com/session823. Thank you so much. And if you’re a first time listener and you’ve made it all the way here, bless you, you’re amazing.
I appreciate you. Hit subscribe so I can serve you in the next episode. We got a lot of great stuff coming in October. is right around the corner. I’m looking at my guest list for October, and on the 23rd, I’m looking at a name, and it’s gotten me really excited. Mr. Seth Godin himself. I’ve already done this interview.
It’s one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had, and I’m going to share it with you in about a month. So anyway, hit subscribe so you don’t miss that and all the other ones in between and thereafter. I appreciate you. SmartPassiveIncome.com/session823 for the show notes and SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. Just go there, be a part of it. It’s awesome. We want you there. Cheers everybody. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!