Step-By-Step Landing Page Copywriting

http://nathanbarry.com/step-by-step-landing-page-copywriting/

by petercooper • 13 years ago

123 53 13 years ago

You have got to be kidding me. Excuse my French but this is an epic ripoff. A quick Google search and a free Evernote account and in a half hour you can get a monster swipe file filled with choice copywriting tutorials and examples.

There is real gold out there for free, and if you absolutely must spend your money frivolously, there are copywriting books on the Kindle for under $5 that will give you everything you need and more.

boothead• 13 years ago

What part do you feel is a rip off exactly? This tutorial or ConvertKit itself?

I believe that the point of ConverKit is to simplify and streamline the process of creating a landing page and drip email campaign. It seems like a pretty good proposition to me! I personally found the step by step process in this little walk though very valuable - especially as I'm writing a sales page myself at the moment.

brador• 13 years ago

Got links?

thoughtcriminal4• 13 years ago

The Landing Page Makeover Clinic is amazing, and one of the first places I'd start. Also http://copyblogger.com/landing-pages/

digitalengineer2• 13 years ago

You are right, but for a lot of people it doesn't matter if it's available for free somewhere. Right now, right here is his stuff from 'a' to 'z' with examples. Most people just can't find the good stuff and are in a hurry. His article puts a lot of what they're looking for in one place and he put a great deal of effort in to it.

thoughtcriminal4• 13 years ago

And I'm saying a fool and his money are soon parted.

MJR3• 13 years ago

The copywriting isn't the product. The article is about copywriting the landing page FOR the product.

mnicole5• 13 years ago

This was my confusion.

bpatrianakos3• 13 years ago

Let's be clear here - this is a rip off for you. I understand where you're coming from as someone who has seen people try to sell info-products on things I'm an expert in and know I could get for free however it's easy to forget the kind of mindset someone who would buy this has. In fact, I'd say many of us used to be the ideal customer for this type of product but as we've grown these formerly complex ideas are now almost just common sense to us.

This just isn't for you but I can see it having tremendous value. I work as a sole developer in a marketing department where I need to be an expert in web development and marketing. I have a lot of experience with landing pages (I usually create like 3 a day at least) but I'm still interested in the product and here's why:

The valuable thing about this is that it's a product that's been thoughtfully organized and crafted by someone with a good reputation that I trust and who has proven to most of us I think that he's definitely credible on the subject. I could find the free stuff if I wanted to but having it all organized, curated, and formatted for me plus the actual product he'll be launching saves me tons of time and effort. I could spend the equivalent of $300 worth of my time to get the information myself or I can send Nathan my $300, save that time, and become an even more effective marketer faster, which then gives me time to not only make back what I spent but turn a profit too.

Edit: Grammar.

thoughtcriminal4• 13 years ago

Yes, there will be those at a particular time of need that would buy a single apple for 100 dollars because of extreme scarcity.

In this case however, there is already an abundance of superior quality ripe fruit in the orchard waiting to be plucked. And it's free.

sethev• 13 years ago

Nathan isn't selling anything related to copywriting. His article is about copywriting and it's using the landing page for his new app as an example. The prices you see are for his app (yet to be released) which doesn't have anything to do with copywriting.

ahoyhere7• 13 years ago

What is a rip-off? The free article detailing the writing process?

twodayslate• 13 years ago

It was interesting to see his process and see what changed/stayed the same from beginning to end

growt• 13 years ago

I don't get the ConvertKit pricing: Preordering 3 months for $93 a month for $281. 3 times 93 is 279. The other prices are also off by one or two. Maybe I have OCD, but somehow that really confused me.

nathanbarry3• 13 years ago

Oops. I rounded off the change... 25% off of $125 is $93.75 (I wrote $93). $93.75 * 3 months = $281.25. But you're right, that is confusing.

Charlesmigli• 13 years ago

Very useful post. I put the tl;dr version the author wrote on tldr.io http://tldr.io/tldrs/51238dc4b3a7a6ca1000002f/step-by-step-l...

calinet65• 13 years ago

Let me be blunt: this is a confused mess.

MJR3• 13 years ago

I think the main problem is that Nathan incorporated the ConvertKit landing page versions INTO the article. Because the width is the same and the design of the blog and product page are somewhat similar, it's difficult to see while scanning, where the article stops and the example begins.

Nathan, you might be better off taking the landing pages out of the main article(lightboxes, new windows, something) to differentiate the article content from the subject of the article.

kaoD• 13 years ago

That's exactly what happened to me and I left instantly. How ironic is that?

bpatrianakos3• 13 years ago

Care to elaborate? I think that's more of a judgement call than any sort of fact. I have to assume what you're talking about (which makes me wonder why this is the top comment) is the screenshots within the post. That could go either way. For a second I was engrossed by them and almost thought I was looking at the actual page but it's not so bad that it warrants being called a confused mess. The images were necessary to get the point across and things were separated enough so you knew what you were looking at. Nathan has a unique design style that both his blog and the ConvertKit landing page share elements of which is why I can see people getting a little confused but in the end, it's just a blog post, dude. And it's well designed on top of that. Not everything on the internet is perfectly suited to your tastes, lay off.

mnicole5• 13 years ago

> things were separated enough so you knew what you were looking at

Until I noticed the low-res quality of the screenshot I didn't know what it was. Lossy images in 2013; great first impression.

> Nathan has a unique design style

I'll keep my opinions on that to myself, but when someone writes two books on design and hawks them on HN, people tend to be more critical of your work. I think it says something about someone's expertise when at least two of the HN posts on his products had people confused about design choices and what they were supposed to do on the page.

> And it's well designed on top of that. Not everything on the internet is perfectly suited to your tastes, lay off.

Design isn't someone's aesthetic or someone else's taste, it's the ability to communicate. This page is confusing a lot of people, so by definition, it is not well-designed.

HN also advocates raising one's prices to imply value, and I think that's why this and other posts have had people questioning the price points for the content. Additionally, I don't think "Good question. Not sure." is good copy for when I can expect a product I've paid for.

calinet65• 13 years ago

The top comment on the post now contains some constructive comments with which I fully agree.

Apologies for not having the time to elaborate.

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

This is not copywriting, this is landing page design (from the POV of a designer, and not marketer). I'm also wary of this data, because he does not include testing. The way you design a landing page is very different from this one when you incorporate testing from the start.

Edit:

If you want to see a really good landing page, go and visit posthaven's page (http://posthaven.com I think). Its just perfect. You actually feel the need to pay this people money.

vitalique• 13 years ago

You must be joking. It may convert like hell, I don't know, but - oh my, is this page... ugly. All the mixed fonts and barely readable colors. They aren't even consistent in using underlines and colors for links. Total mess if you ask me. Wouldn't even consider becoming a customer looking at this LP only.

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

Who cares if its ugly? Does money in the bank become any less valuable if it came from an ugly landing page?

bpatrianakos3• 13 years ago

Your example is not a good one. Posthaven's landing page only makes sense if you know who's behind the project. You should have stopped when you made the good points about landing page design from a designer's point of view rather than a marketer's and the lack of testing. I still would have disagreed with you but at least you'd have made good points. But using Posthaven as an example of a good landing page makes me wonder if you know what you're talking about (I swear I didn't mean that in the really mean way it sounded).

Posthaven's value proposition comes last - which would be fine if everything before it wasn't so boring and made sense to the casual user. The design is uninspired, derivative, and lazy looking. It may convert among the in-crowd tech scene but as an example of good landing page design it fails both aesthetically and in terms of messaging. "Learn about our pledge"? I don't want to know your pledge until I know what the hell it is that you do.

calinet65• 13 years ago

I'll offer a counter-example:

I have no idea who they are, and I still want them to shut up and take my money.

ahoyhere7• 13 years ago

Considering the post was all about the content (and the progress from very-designed-to-it-ought-to-be-designed-less on the design front), how can it be about landing page design? The whole post is about the words. Copy is made of words. You write words. Copywriting.

It's interesting that you diss the post because it doesn't have "test data," but then you say that posthaven's landing page is better because of how you "feel."

danso• 13 years ago

I appreciate the depth and detail of this, thank you for posting it. However, I think it would be more effective if broken up into steps by section/facet of the landing page, rather than a giant description of "Round Two".

Of course, when it comes to editorial content, the sections/facets/headlines aren't entirely orthogonal...changing the content of one headline means you might rearrange a lot of other content. However, I think this makes it even more useful to break things down by iteration of each facet: e.g. Hero-headline v1.0, Hero-headline v2.0, etc., and show (briefly) how that impacts the other decisions you make down the page.

Of course, this is a lot more work, both in writing and in production, to put out.

davidcristello2• 13 years ago

so this is somewhere between aweber and hubspot? Whats the unique selling prop about this project? I agree- I scan this thing and it confuses the hell out of me

davidcristello2• 13 years ago

The discount pricing isnt clear enough

dowskitest• 13 years ago

"Your funnel has a hole in it."

Hopefully it has two ... a big one at the top and a small one at the bottom.

The funnel metaphor has always thrown me off. IRL I don't pour stuff into a funnel and expect less than 100% of what I've poured in to come out the other side.

Why has funnel become a synonym for filter?

ishansharma• 13 years ago

Maybe marketers see the ideal situation where every visitor will be converted. A big Maybe though!

1123581321• 13 years ago

It's more that without the wide mouth at the top, the narrow pipe at the bottom would miss a lot of fluid. But yes, it's really more a sieve.

ahoyhere7• 13 years ago

I wrote that headline, and I'm acutely aware that a funnel has TWO holes in it. :)

Why do we use the word "funnel" then? Why write "Your funnel has a hole in it" even if you're thinking "Well, duh, it actually already has two holes"?

Here's why:

1. Funnel is the term of art. Like it or not, that's the word people use.

2. It's evocative and it's signaling -- "This is for me, I talk about my sales funnel"

3. Normal people don't think "sales funnel has two holes." Even though they use the word funnel, they really just envision a triangle. Just like when you say the word "chairman" or "cupboard," you don't think "That person is special because he owns the chair and doesn't sit on the floor like the rest of us" or "That's a piece of wood where you place your cups." The "hole in it" evokes more an image of a boat or a bucket, things dribbling through where they shouldn't.

Et voila. Your funnel has a hole in it. As a headline, it works beautifully.

throwawayG9• 13 years ago

What is discipline called? Online marketing? I'm interested. This article was excellent.

Step-By-Step Landing Page Copywriting

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