Rapid Listbuilding with My Secret Weapon Clay Collins

Co-Founder of LeadPages.net – Clay Collins

 

Clay is an amazing online marketer, and friend, but that isn’t his secret sauce. He has data from hundreds of online businesses on how they are getting leads and what is converting best. He is my go-to guy to learn about optimizing my site, so I brought him on to tell us exactly what we need to do to our websites to get more leads and generate more revenue. You don’t want to miss this!

Check out LeadPages.net for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Today on the show I have my good friend, Clay Collins. He runs a company called LeadPages. If you haven't heard of it yet, you need to! He pays attention to the data and that's why I love Clay. He has tons of information on what's converting the best on landing pages and getting leads right now, today, in many different businesses. You do not want to miss this one make sure you make some time. Thanks!

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today I have my good friend Clay Collins on the show. I'm super excited; I use all of his products. He runs a company called LeadPages and what they do is they get more e-mail addresses so that you can make more money in your business. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Clay.

Clay: I'm happy to be here, Jaime. Thank you for having me.

Jaime: We met in person in early January this year, so nine months ago or something like that. I didn't realize that the inception of the company was about that long ago. I just assumed that you'd been doing it for a really long period of time. So, first of all, tell everybody a little bit about what LeadPages is and then tell us how it got started earlier this year.

Clay: In the work that I used to do as a marketer trainer and consultant, we discovered, just anecdotally, that in most of the businesses that we were working with and helping, that about 95% of the business results that came from any given website or online presence came from about 5% of the pages. So if you had 95 pages on a website, about 5 of those would be the ones that are actually driving business results. I call this the 95-5 rule. Usually, those pages that are generating 95% of the business results are opt-in pages, sales pages, upsell pages, webinar registration pages basically conversion pages, so any page where you're measuring specific actions that people are taking that are measurably taking the business forward. LeadPages is software that creates conversion pages for you so, again, opt-in pages, webinar registration pages, sales pages, thank you pages, upsell pages those pages that really have to be dialed in, in order for your business to do really. Our goal with those is that you can just plug a lead page into your business and instantly double or triple and, in a lot of cases, quadruple the conversions you are getting on those pages. So LeadPages allows you to create conversion pages, if you will.

Jaime: The idea of conversion pages, or whatever these are, there are so many tips and tactics to make them better and that's why I signed up for your stuff, because I thought "Clay knows all the numbers and what I'm supposed to do and all I have to do is pay for it? Perfect. Done in a second!" Because it takes forever to figure that stuff out I'm a geek and I'm still annoyed with it. What made you decide to start a whole company? Because you were already a consultant.

Clay: I was blogging quite a bit and I really couldn't stand to write another epic blog post. I used to spend, I don't know, sometimes days working on a 2-3000 word blog post, making these excellent points that I would try to hone and craft and I just got sick of making points so, instead of making points, I decided that I would just take the graphic designer that we had on our team and ask them to make a landing page template that was based on the best of what was working. I thought that, rather than trying to explain something complicated, I could just give people a landing page template. I could walk them through all of the visual elements and the layout of the landing page, explain how and why it worked, give conversion stats and numbers and just give it away. So I turned from writing these long, epic blog posts to just creating videos where I say "Here's the page, here's how it works, here are the conversion stats and here's how you can implement it into your business. Done?" Those are five minute videos and it would take me an hour or two to make them. People enjoyed them, I seemed to get more inbound links and I just benefited a lot more from those quick posts. When I was writing those epic blog posts I knew that I wasn't a professional writer. I really enjoy writing and I think I'm okay at it, especially when I'm writing copy, but I really admired the consistency with which people like Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV were putting out videos, because every video was like "Hey, I'm going to grab three wines, I'm going to taste them, I'm going to talk to you about them a little bit and then we're done." You knew what was in every episode. He didn't have some great point to make, he simply had to leverage his existing expertise grab three wines, taste them, done and I wanted to do that with the content I was putting out on my blog. So I was giving out these landing pages and people would come to me and write in the comments "How do I hook this up to AWeber or MailChimp or iContact or Constant Contact?" That was one kind of question people had. Another kind of question that people had was "How do I integrate this with WordPress? How do I add this to a Facebook page? How do I integrate this into my website?" At first these questions annoyed me because I was giving these away for free and in the blog comments people were wanting me to give them extensive tutorials on how to take a page that's in HTML and add it to WordPress I don't have the time, there are tons of tutorials online, go and look it up! I wasn't really upset but I just didn't have the time to explain it to everyone and hold their hand through how to do it because in some cases it would take advanced programming knowledge. After a while, getting asked those kinds of questions, like "How do I make this mobile responsive? How do I integrate it with MailChimp, AWeber, whatever? How do I integrate it with WordPress?", a light bulb went off what if, instead of someone figuring out how to do this, I make a series of high converting landing page templates available inside of a product that handles all of the integrations and the ability to post it to Facebook and WordPress and makes them mobile responsive. So that's what we did we created LeadPages based on the questions and feedback that we were getting from the blog. Since then it's turned into a lot more we've added A/B split testing, we've added analytics and a whole bunch of other things. Today we're adding the ability to collect a whole bunch of form fields and we're expanding into a lot of different things. But that was the humble beginnings of the product and we launched that in January 2013. Since then we've grown I think we have over 6,500 customers today; we definitely have over 6,000 active, paying customers so we've been growing pretty quickly since we started in January.

Jaime: I love that story first of all, because you had a blog. A lot of the time people want to start a blog to make money online and, as you've said, it takes a lot of time to write posts and it's a lot of pressure to come up with amazing content every single time. You ended up transitioning to an amazing, huge business based on that. Do you think you had to go through that? Did you have to do the blog in order to come up with this awesome product that you have?

Clay: There are a lot of people who don't, but I'm really glad that we started out with an active base of users who are willing to buy the product during the presell. So we presold the product and got a lot of feedback during the preselling process. I was glad that we could start out, from day one, with an interested group of people that needed the product. I'm glad we started with that and I'm glad that we got feedback from the audience. I don't think you have to have an audience or to start with an audience first, but it definitely helps. I like to say that markets don't buy products people buy products. In other words, audiences buy products. I think a lot of people think about the size of the market and it's this impersonal term. When you start thinking about markets you start creating products that people don't want to buy. When you start thinking about people you start creating products that people do want to buy. I have a love/hate relationship with content marketing, I've stopped creating the blog posts on our website we have an amazing person who does that now and we're soon hiring a blog editor. So we'll always do content marketing but I don't think we're going to grow to be a billion dollar business if I'm personally writing blog posts every day, you don't see a lot of billion or even multi-million dollar companies where the CEO is blogging day in and day out. There are lots of people making $50-100,000 a month who are blogging consistently but there are not a lot of millionaires or multi-millionaires who write long, epic posts on a weekly basis.

Jaime: That's funny because I was just thinking I interviewed Neil Patel and he said if you want to have a business go from seven figures to eight figures you should start blogging and I was like "What, really?" So he does have a little bit of a different idea and he writes himself, which is crazy. I think it's few and far between, which is what you want to highlight. It's awesome that you're still doing content marketing; it's not as though you don't think it's a good idea but for you, as a business owner, it makes logical sense for you to be growing the business, paying more attention to that than doing the one-on-one marketing stuff.

Clay: I don't want to confuse people here I'm not saying that I don't pay attention to the audience. I still answer all the questions that are on our Google+ page, I still respond to nearly every single comment that someone leaves on the blog, so I'm still responding to everything that happens in our online communities. I'm usually there and I'm responding; I'm just not spending eight hours on a Monday writing a blog post anymore. I'm still as interactive as I ever was ' I still respond to everything on Twitter and all that, I'm just not spending a lot of my own personal time creating content.

Jaime: You're the face of the company everybody knows you through that, which is great. So talk me through the process of starting this software business up. Because a lot of people want to start a software company, it sounds like a great idea, then they start getting into it and realize they don't know what to do next. Can you give us the step by step process that you went through?

Clay: That's a good question. I'll answer it but I also just want to say a little bit about software. I think there are a lot of people going around selling software as this business opportunity and I think that's fine. I wouldn't encourage most people to get into software unless they have to. I think what happens is, a lot of the time, people have this range of motivators they don't like their job, they want to quit their job, and then the next question is "What am I going to do instead'" At that point they get hit by a whole bunch of bizopp people selling them things to start a software company, to become a professional blogger, to create info products, to become an affiliate marketer, to start niche products all of this stuff happens where they're getting pitched at from every angle on these business opportunities. I would suggest that people don't leave their day job until they have a passion for solving a problem. If you do leave your day job, don't rush into something. If you know you just can't do it anymore, leave it, but create a vacuum leave a space for your creativity to come in. Don't immediately jump at one of those business opportunities. Wait until you're super passionate about a problem that you want to solve. So, if you're a consultant, and you want to leave your day job and you're so sick of the way companies are marketing themselves on social media and you have some different ideas you could sell your services for a modest price but you could also solve that problem. You can take that problem that you're solving at an hourly rate and transition to charging more per hour and, eventually, if you find that software is the best way to solve that problem and to scale your ability to solve that problem, then get into software. I wouldn't suggest getting into software off the bat because it's a better or worse opportunity than starting a Shake 'n Bake franchise down the street.

Jaime: I haven't thought about Shake 'n Bake in forever! So you're saying problem first, which is huge. What if somebody doesn't have a problem? Because people will say "I don't know what to do I know I have to solve a problem but I can't find one," so they look in the ether for this problem. Would you suggest that they get into something just to test the waters to see what the problems might be?

Clay: My suggestion is to just follow your interests and that will naturally lead you to problems. The second you get involved in something, you will very quickly be met with frustrations. There is a limitless number of problems that exist in this world. Do one of two things if you feel super insecure about leaving something and not going to something else, please stop it. When I used to have that feeling I would just sit in this chair, I called it chair meditation, until I was hit with something that I could not do. So I'd just sit in the chair when I was feeling a lack of purpose. At some point you have to go to the bathroom, right? So I'd get up and go to the bathroom because you can't not go to the bathroom. Then, at some point, you have to eat. So you sit in the chair and you can't not eat so you have to go and eat. It's the same with sleep and everything else. But at some point something will occur to you; there will be something you want to look up. Something will hit you and you'll think"I can't not do this." So just let yourself sit in that lack of purpose and create the space for something huge to come and when it comes don't get caught up in the long term game plan, just do what interests you and that will lead you into an entire world. You'll soon find yourself enveloped in an entire world around what that thing is and the problem to solve will present itself. I would say don't purposefully look for problems to solve because you end up finding these artificial problems that you were looking for in the first place and I see a lot of people solving problems that don't really exist or solving problems that may exists but they certainly aren't the biggest problems or the main problems that consumers in the markets have. I would just say hang back a bit and the huge problem will hit you in the head at some point.

Jaime: So for LeadPages did it hit you in the head when you started dealing with everybody? Was it a "lights on" moment, like "Oh shoot, I should solve this with software!" Is that what happened?

Clay: Yes, the first problem I solved was my own problem. I knew that content marketing was huge for our business and I knew we needed to do it but I didn't want to do it anymore. So I had to solve the problem of continuing to create content that people want, that there's a demand for, without writing these long blog posts, so I started releasing landing pages. Then, people were terrorizing me in the comments like "Why are you giving this away for free if I can't even use it?" and "How do I integrate this with MailChimp?" and "How do I put it on WordPress?" People were getting irritated that there wasn't a way for this to happen and I was getting irritated that they were mad at me for not fully supporting some free thing that I was giving away. So the problem definitely attacked me and it got to the point where I could not solve this problem and that was a problem that very clearly needed to be solved with software.

Jaime: So it just made perfect sense to build the software?

Clay: It made perfect sense.

Jaime: When you decided that, then you had to go and create this huge piece of software. So tell me, step by step, what you did to end up with what you have today?

Clay: The first thing we did was we presold the product. We started working on it a little bit, but as soon as I had screenshots to show people I decided to go to the audience that I had and launch this and ask people if they would be willing to buy the product at a slight discount in advance of the release of the product and they did.

Jaime: You didn't have anything? No code written yet when you asked them.

Clay: There was a little code written. I'm not an attorney and I can't give legal advice but there are some laws that I know of around preselling ne, you can't have testimonials for a product that doesn't exist. You can have testimonials for you, your company or your ability to solve problems, but you can't have testimonials for a product until that product exists. The second thing is that you can't say the product exists when it doesn't exist. The third thing, which is why we wrote a little bit of code, is that you need to give people something within 30 days. If you're selling it as a product, you have to give them something within 30 days. If you're selling an event then you can sell that as far in advance as you want like people buy tickets for the Super Bowl a year in advance and people buy flights a year in advance, but those aren't products, those are events and services. You can often take a software product and sell it as an event or a service and give it away six months later if you figure out how to do that. We didn't want to do that; we wanted to sell this as a product, so we needed to launch within 30 days. So we launched a minimum viable product within 30 days that had two landing page templates in it and it connected to AWeber, MailChimp and, I believe, Infusionsoft at first. Those were the three that we connected with. So we launched with two templates and three integrations. During the presell we sold about $40,000 worthy of the product before we released it which, given the size of my audience, wasn't a lot. I was expecting to do a lot more, but that was enough to sell the concept and the idea. That was the genesis this crappy, first version of the product. The developer who created it was amazing but he was under insane constraints and deadlines. We did the presell in late November and we gave it to people in late December and then we launched it in January.

Jaime: That's insane. Being able to sell $40,000 worth of software is something that a lot of people can't do without an audience, so at least for you, you had an audience already there and you could just put something out there really quickly. You said you kind of recommend it and you kind of don't but it seems like that worked out really well for you.

Clay: I definitely recommend building an audience where you can. It's one of those things where you've got to do what's in your DNA and what you're good at. I enjoy content marketing, I enjoy blogging and building anaudience, I love having that platform, so that was a natural fit for me. I think a lot of people just don't have it in the DNA, they don't have it in their blood. They could blog all day long, writing these super analytical articles with no emotion that are kind of detached and they're never going to build an audience. Look at Google, Facebook or Apple there are plenty of software companies that have been incredibly successful without starting with an audience first. There's Dropbox, there are just so many examples of this happening. When it comes to software, people starting with an audience is probably the exception rather than the rule. There are companies like 37signals and Treehouse and Copyblogger they have a SaaS product, their content marketing analysis thing but starting with an audience first is the exception rather than the rule. It really helped us, but it was because I was playing to my strengths and that was one of my strengths.

Jaime: And you had also invested a ton of time beforehand to deal with all of that stuff. How long were you blogging for, before you launched that product?

Clay: I started as a personal development blogger because I thought I knew something about personal development, which I don't, just to set the record straight!

Jaime: Which you found out after you became a personal development blogger!

Clay: I was able to build a following. I started doing that in 2007, so I got the hang of how to build an audience, write compelling blog posts, how to build an e-mail list, and stuff like that. I had been doing that for a while, so that was a skill that I had under my belt.

Jaime: Some people don't necessarily need to but you already had that, you so might as well use what you have. Then you built the software did you call it beta or did you just call it prerelease?

Clay: We gave it to the people during the presell and we fixed the bugs that were there and then we had a launch. It was a minimum viable product. I liked the approach that we took a lot of people will take a year to launch a product we took 45 days from the time that we started coding for it. That meant that we could launch features, as opposed to editions of the product. A lot of people will wait six months to a year and they'll have this big thing around the release of the product. We decided that we were going to be launching individual features and landing page templates to our audience. By launching features on a weekly basis we were able to show people how we'd grown as a platform and just generate a lot more content. If I were going to do it all over again I would absolutely do that it creates more awareness about every individual feature and it gives you an opportunity to contact your audience every single week. What kills me is, when I first started releasing feature updates, we would get more likes, shares and comments on these two minute videos that were just "Here's a feature that we've added, here's how it works, bye," than on these 2000 word epic blog posts that I would spend forever agonizing over to make some perfect point that people would read and say "Oh man, I totally feelyou. That's such a great point I'm so there myself," and then they leave. That'swhat the comments would be like. That was fine, but then they'd promptly forget about it. I like creating real things and the content marketing that we're going now is much more effective than anything we've done in the past. Maybe that just means I suck at writing epic blog posts!

Jaime: That's what it is! Now you learn. But why do you think that is? Why are people more engaged to share, Tweet and like for a feature, rather than actually learning something?

Clay: I think it's because we're solving a real problem. I think that when you have an online presence, getting your conversion pages to do well and getting a series of pages up that can really help your business is one of the main struggles. Often, people are up late at night, beating their head against the wall, trying to solve the most minute technical problems. Their personal development issues, or whatever, are relevant at 2am when they've got to launch something the next day and they're frustrated as heck because nothing out there works. Which is why, incidentally, we get a whole lot of views at a whole lot of sales at 1am and 2am in the morning from these people who have been talking to their developer or beating their head against the wall over some crappy WordPress plugin trying to get a page to appear and at some point they're just like "Screw it! I'll buy LeadPages." Then we get e-mails saying "Thanks for saving me I got that page up in five minutes." So there is real pain and there's a real need and it's a real practical solution. We're not asking people to engage with us on some philosophical, theoretical or emotional level. I have no aspirations of being a rock star there are all of these content marketing people that do these professional photo shoots and they're all styled out. They're like ninjas or rock stars.

Jaime: Hey, I want to be a ninja! Let's start talking about that.

Clay: I'm glad that I don't have to do all of this posturing, "Look at me, I'm cool. Buy my info product because I'm some marketing rock star or ninja!" I can just be "Here's the problem it solves. Here's the features it provides."

Jaime: "I'm Clay."

Clay: I really enjoy that.

Jaime: That's awesome. All you have to do is put it out there and people seem to really like it. That's what everybody wants this thing where all you have to do is put it up there and it goes crazy. That's probably not the only thing that happened to you, though. Yes, you had an audience, which definitely started it, but it takes a lot of work to get to 6,000, which you have now so tell us about the best tactics that have worked for you on selling those 6,000 customers.

Clay: I'd say content marketing has been really huge for us. I'd say, really, just teaching. I think there's a huge opportunity around doing educational content and our goal has always been, with all the content that we put out, to give away stuff that is as good and as helpful as other people's $200 or $2000 product. I don't even know about a $2000 info product so I don't want to speak to that. But we want to put out the same kind of content that people are selling in their $200, $500 or $1000 info products and give it away for free and then show people how they can automate that content with our product that costs $37 a month. So many people fall into the trap of trying to create information that sells other information without giving away too much information that people don't want to buy their information, so they're constantly doing this dance of "I'm going to do a webinar and I'm going to tell you 5 secrets but I also have a book that tells you 10 secrets so I can only tell you 5 of the secrets so that you'll buy my other 5 secrets," or whatever. Our approach has always been that there are no secrets we're going to tell you everything. For $37 per month we'll automate this for you and you can use our software, or not use our software the principles hold regardless. We think that there is a huge opportunity around not charging for education and monetizing it in other ways.

Jaime: That just makes perfect sense considering you're actually solving the problem with software. You're not selling information at all so it makes perfect sense that you can give as much information as you want. Information marketers, of course, have a harder time maybe they should be finding problems and solving them with software. Tell me a little bit more content marketing is one thing that worked for you, is that SEO-wise? What about content marketing makes people come to you and buy your stuff?

Clay: It's really everything. When you make good content the result is that people are more likely to link to you, so it helps with SEO. People are more likely to share the content, so it helps with Facebook, Twitter and viral promotion. Also, when you put out good content, affiliate marketers want to share that content because they know that it's not going to hurt them it's going to provide value to their user base that are never, that they're not going to pitch or hard sell anything, that the software is a value added to the incredible value that we're giving away in our content. So it's helped with affiliate marketing, it's helped with SEO, it's helped with social media, it's really the drive behind our business and it's helped us out in so many ways I'm really happy with how all of that has panned out.

Jaime: I just want to say, too, that I love the way you do it. Because I didn't know if I needed LeadPages, I know a lot of the information that I need to have on my squeeze pages and I have Optimize Press, I can do all of that myself. I don't think it was late one night, but I was thinking "I'm really annoyed. Fine, I'm just going to buy LeadPages. I love Clay anyway; I'm just going to buy it." I bought it a couple of weeks ago and I have been using it and it's just so much easier. I could totally do it myself but because I heard you on James Schramko's podcast and then I heard you on Pat Flynn's and all of these other things, so you keep knocking in my head, Clay, like "I've got this thing that would make it much easier," and you've worn me down.

Clay: That's our goal!

Jaime: To wear you down. I love it; I think it's great. You've been giving away so much information that I've been taking and using and had been doing it on my own before but why would I not pay? It's $200 for a year, or something like that, so why would I not pay $200 to have you do it all for me?

Clay: One of the things that we wanted to build into the software was the ability for the platform itself to learn from what's happening. Every single interaction that happens on your pages, if you allow us, helps the entire community learn. When people are doing split tests, for example, on our platform, we're constantly seeing those split tests and if someone comes up with a better variation of a landing page, we'll take that split test and we'll take the winning variation of that split test and put that back into the default version of the template. For example, one of our templates is for downloading a report and, for a while, the best converting text for that type of page was the phrase "Free, instant access," but at some point we figured out that if you could change that phrase to "Download Now," that you could double the conversion rate. So, yes, someone could hypothetically put anything they want on the button, but by putting "Download Now" on the button, that's what they're doing by default, because a lot of people don't change it, so they're inherently getting better versions of the page. Also, on "Launching soon" pages, we've found that the phrase "Tell me more" converts much higher than the phrase "Let me know when you launch" or "Notify me when you launch" because the desire to learn more information on a "Launching soon" page is much, much greater than the desire to be notified when it launches. Yes, there's that sort of countdown ticker, but even though the entrepreneur is obsessed with telling everyone that they've launched, when people arrive at that page the biggest question they have is "Can you please let me know more about what this is?" So just putting "Tell me more" on the opt-in button on a "Launching soon" page versus "Notify me," can often have a 30-50% increase in conversion. So we bake all of this into the platform and then we're constantly learning how variations of every single landing page template does. There's this little button at the top that says "Sort by average conversion rate" and when people click that button it sorts pages by how well they're converting in the system or it sorts the templates by how well the average version of that template does when it's created as a page. You can go to webinar registration pages and sort by conversion rate and have the highest converting webinar registration pages at the top. It just allows people to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd it's kind of like crowd-sourced conversion rate optimization. We really don't want to leave people's success to chance. That's one of the many things that we've done with LeadPages, just to help out.

Jaime: That's actually the whole reason that I got it.Listening to you, I actually ended up changing to Download Now and it did increase my conversions for a couple of things, so thanks, Clay! You're never going to know all the options like I use Visual Website Optimizer and I remember thinking "I don't know what works and what doesn't work." I can read tons of information and not know, so that's why I listen to you so much "Clay, just tell me what the crowd says that I should try and I'll try it." But that's worked out really well because if you have all of that data I might as well be using the data that you have instead. Give us another tactic, your best tactic that somebody who has an online business that's getting leads can use to get way more leads.

Clay: The first suggestion that I have is to create a customized opt-in for every single blog post that you put out. So, for example, in this interview that we're doing, you could make a PDF transcript of the video available, plus an MP4 downloadable version of this file and an audio file. You could wrap those up as a download in a ZIP file and allow people to opt-in to download the transcript and maybe a worksheet around this session and the video. Having customized opt-ins that are specific to individual blog posts has grown our list on our blog faster than anything else we've ever done. It's been a while since we've had a huge breakthrough in our opt-in rate and we recently tripled the conversion rate on our blog by offering these customized downloads for individual blog posts. People who just don't have a lot of time, if they're writing one of these epic blog posts, they can just take that blog post, put it in a text editor, save it as a PDF and offer that because a lot of the time people just want to possesssomething on their hard drive, they want to have it. So having a download that they can customize to do that is really good. If you've a health coach or something like that and you have recipes that you give away, allow people to opt-in to get that recipe. That's the main tip. I've got to say that we make this extremely easy to do with LeadPages you can create, for example, 20 different landing pages and make it so that when someone opts in to one of those landing pages, everyone from those 20 landing pages is added to your blog mailing list but every one of those individual landing pages gives away a different lead magnet. So if someone opts in, they're added to the same AWeber list, for example, but LeadPages also gets the e-mail address and e-mails them the lead magnet.

Jaime: So I don't have to have a bazillion things set up! Because that's a huge pain.

Clay: Yes, usually if someone wanted to do this, for everything that they gave out, they'd have to create a new e-mail list and a new form for that mailing list and a new e-mail that goes out with that downloadable thing, and then they've had to upload that thing to Amazon S3 and link to it in the e-mail. It would take about 45 minutes. With LeadPages you just upload the lead magnet and assign that lead magnet to that opt-in page so someone can be added to the same form that everyone else is added to across the entire block but LeadPages handles giving out the lead magnet.

Jaime: And it will send the e-mail through LeadPages?

Clay: Right.

Jaime: I should do that. Good to know!

Clay: It's super cool. That's the first tip. The second tip that I have, and I talk about this a lot, but I think everyone should find different things to give away. for example, on our own site you can sign up to get a free report, you can sign up for a webinar, you can sign up to just get blog notifications, you can sign up to download HTML templates there are so many opportunities to sign up and we're constantly coming up with new things that people can opt in to. Probably my favorite thing for someone who is new and has just started to give away to increase their conversion rates is just a resource guide a list of resources. I call it the Resource Guide Opt-in Page. So, for example, in one of our businesses we give away a list of resources for creating videos and we list the $80 HD video camera that we use and ScreenFlow and the microphone that we use. It took me 15 minutes to type us this list of resources and three minutes to create the landing page and so, after about 20 minutes of work, we have what is the highest converting type of evergreen landing page in our business. Again, that took me 20 minutes to make. People in just about any industry and category can create one of these resource guides just think about what you do and come up with a list of resources. So if I were a dentist I would come up with the top five electric toothbrushes to get this year and then I'd mention the one that I use. Or if were a health coach I'd list the blenders to get and some kind of rubber bands for exercise or yoga mats. Whatever it is, you can always come up with a list of resources.

Jaime: I just want to stop you because I did that and now I have the three habits of all successful millionaires but, just like you, I felt like I needed a new opt in. because I'll opt in to a really great eBook but then I have to read it and I don't have a lot of time, so I created the three tools that all millionaires use, which I just finished. It took me probably an hour and a half I had my VA pull out from all the interviews what the top five tools were and then I made that into a PDF so I'm just putting that on my site now. It's on the 404 page, so if anyone screws up where they're going it's on the 404 page.

Clay: That's awesome.

Jaime: You told me what to do and I did it! So I'm just starting to get there. I'm just starting to listen to you, Clay. I'm taking all of your advice. So far it's been really cool.

Clay: Awesome. So create a list of resources like that it took you an hour and a half. Come up with a list of resources, give it away and come up with a customized lead magnet for every blog post. Those are two really good things that you can do. Another thing is what you just mentioned and that is to make your 404 page a landing page. A lot of the time, when people go to your 404 page, they'll just leave; they'll just instantly exit. We found that out in a pretty painful way a notable blog linked to us, back in the day, and it was a huge disaster. We were all waiting for the day when they linked to us and when they did they used the wrong link. I started using my analytics to estimate how often this happens how often people come to our website and get the wrong URL from links on social media or their friends referring them. It turned out that it happened a lot more than I even could have imagined and I was like "This is bogus! I'm going to build into LeadPages the ability to make any landing page be your 404 page," so you can have your 404 page be an opt in page. Now, if you go to our 404 page it says "The page you're looking for was not found but don't leave empty handed! Snag this free report." At least when someone comes to our opt in page now, they are leaving with some kind of value and they're presented with an opportunity to learn more instead of just a notice that what they're looking for isn't there. That's another hole you can plug in your business.

Jaime: I just want to mention a couple of things on how I've done that. I assumed that not a lot of people will go to my 404 page, and I'm also switching over to Infusionsoft I haven't got it set up yet but I really wanted to try this and I thought "No one goes to the 404 page." So I set it up and the next day I was thinking "Why am I getting leads from Infusionsoft? I haven't done anything!" There were so many people opting in, which is really bad because it probably means I had a lot of 404 issues. I was really surprised and I didn't know what to do with them because Infusionsoft isn't really set up, all it does is give you the five tools. But it works really great and it made me realize that I have a lot of issues to deal with.

Clay: You might have 404 issues but there might be a lot of people linking to you that just have wrong links. You know when people do those link roundups? I feel like one out of every five of those get the link wrong.

Jaime: You don't blame me, I appreciate that. I changed my whole URL structure when I switched to WP Engine, though, so it's probably my fault. Either way, I'm happy that I'm converting people to my e-mail list it's probably one of my better converting pages! We have to start wrapping up I ask the same question every single time and I know you've given a whole bunch of tips, but what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Clay: I'd say twice a day write down ten things that you want. I'll give two tips, I don't know if people are going to get excited about this one but it has really helped me. Just two or three times a day, write a list of ten things that you want. Be liberal don't go crazy with this in the sense of making them huge, lifelong goals just think about what you want, even if it's just a glass of water right now, or to sleep, or a particular person to stop calling you, or someone to decide to hire you, your blog to be up next week. Get really, really in touch with what you want and get used to saying, on a regular, frequent basis what you want. Too often we get caught in this cycle of complaining or resisting what we don't want that it can be very empowering to get into the habit of frequently saying "I want." I've noticed that, in social interactions, it's almost arrogant to say "I want?" Like if someone says "Where do you want to go to eat?" and you say "I want Mexican food tonight." Why can't you just say that? Someone just asked what you want. So get into the habit of writing down exactly what you want and just think about what you want a lot. That's a low level thing. A higher level thing is to start building an e-mail list. I say this to everyone get your damn opt in box up! I had this one website where we went for about a year without collecting an opt in because I couldn't think of the lead magnet or the opt in bribe to use and the day we put up the opt in box we got 50 opt ins. So a year went by where I could have got 50 opt ins a day and I didn't because I didn't come up with the lead magnet. And here's the thing I never came up with the lead magnet for that site! Even when we put up that opt in box it just said "Sign up for updates" and we still got 50 a day. I was all hung up on what I was going to say to people when they opted in and what the lead magnet was going to be. I wish I'd just thrown that opt in box up on day one, saying nothing but "Sign up to receive updates when we release cool stuff." You can be that vague and some percentage of people are going to opt in, and when they do opt in they're going to ask you for things they're going to ask you questions and interact with you and that's what's going to grow your business. So don't get in your own way get your damn opt in box up!

Jaime: I love that you can't think of opt ins either! Good, I'm not the only one. I'm glad to see that you couldn't do it and it stopped you for a year. Thank you so much I really appreciate all of this information. Can you tell us where we can find out more information about your content marketing and LeadPages online?

Clay: To find out about LeadPages you can just go to LeadPages.net or you can go to our blog at blog.leadpages.net. We have a lot of cool stuff on conversion rate optimization. You can get LeadPages, you could not get LeadPages, there is lots of cool split test data and tools and resources and ideas for getting better conversions at our blog.

Jaime: Awesome, and you can totally do it without LeadPages, because I did before, but then I got it anyway! Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Clay. I really appreciate it.

Clay: I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Jaime: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Clay. We have something very special for this week only if you're listening to this when it first came out in late November I want to tell you about a webinar that I'm going to be doing. I'm going to have two dates, one is Wednesday the 20th of November at 9pm Eastern, the other is Friday 22nd November at 2pm Eastern. I am really excited to have you hop online with me so that we can go step by step and evaluate your business. I know many people right now are going over their 2014 goals, which I highly recommend if you haven't already this is something you want to put on your calendar. But sometimes we don't know what we should be paying attention to what are those top priorities that we need to be doing? That's what this webinar is all about. We're going to go through a business evaluation, so I'm going to have you rate yourself on every piece of your business, so you can see how you measure up, especially compared to the high quality businesses of the millionaires that I interview. So signup at EventualMillionaire.com/webinar. Pick which one works for you best, signup and I want you to join me so that we can walk, step by step, through and figure out what you need to be doing next year in your business. I hope you enjoy go and signup at EventualMillionaire.com/webinar. Thanks.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Clay Collins, Email List, email list building, email marketing, leadpages, list building, millionaire interview

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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