Thread by @jmikolay

Writing landing pages is hard.

@jackbutcher and @harrydry spent 90 minutes reviewing 15 landing pages from the 10x Creator Course. I distilled their insights from 15,000 words to 1,500.

Audit their masterclass in marketing and branding:

The two biggest marketing points in the world:

When you share what you know, you prove you know it. When you prove you know something, you confirm you can teach it.

The most important thing in advertising is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself.

The job of a landing page is to bring the product to life.

Use as few words as possible and let the product speak for itself.

🔷Show your best tip
🔷Show your best slide
🔷Show your best material

Condense your messaging and make it visual.

Don’t say, “Tips and tricks,” or “Tools and processes.”

Just share tips and tricks, and show tools and processes.

Your only edge is specificity, and every website can be made better by making it more specific.

The more specific you are about your buyer’s knowledge and the outcome of consuming your product, the more specific and tangible your landing page will be.

Limitation is the essence of branding.

Don’t just make your language specific, make your *product* specific, and match the specificity of your product to your experience and expertise.

Don’t market a course to attract early product adopters; market a course for early product adopters in the smart home space.

Don’t build your product around ecommerce; build it around the most specific part of ecommerce you can find.

Three truths about people:

🔷People buy from other people
🔷People believe what other people have done
🔷People want to know how other people do it

Your language doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to be clear.

🔷Buyers need to know what you’re selling
🔷Buyers need to know what they’re getting

The fastest way to write a landing page without landing page speak:

🔷Imagine a face-to-face interaction with a real person
🔷Pretend to tell someone what you sell and how
🔷Take the words you used and write them on a website

Be clear on your customer and don’t speak to too many people. Qualify or disqualify someone in the first sentence.

Somebody with ideas is a different person from somebody with a functioning service business.

When you sell a product, you’re not just selling an outcome; you’re selling a specific way to get to an outcome.

You can brand an idea even if it's not a new idea.

Own an idea one layer above what you teach, and make the language specific to you (i.e. create idea equity).

@JamesClear doesn’t teach habits; he teaches Atomic Habits.

Your story is your currency.

Therefore, make your product bespoke to you:

🔷Where are you now
🔷What mental transitions did you make to get there
🔷How did you make those transitions

Summarize those elements as bullets and provide proof for each bullet

Remember, you’re the one selling your product. Bring yourself into the conversation.

🔷Show your formula
🔷Show what you’ve done well
🔷Show the outcomes you’ve achieved
🔷Show the processes you’ve used over and over
🔷Show which people and companies you’ve helped, and how

Put yourself at the forefront and look retroactively at the transitions you made as a practitioner.

Show how you made a transition and describe what you did in chronological order.

“In 2019, I went from unpredictable gigs to more work than I could ever fulfill…”

To get to the position of advising someone else, look at the hurdles you overcame, and then break down each hurdle into a benefit.

For a freelance writer:
1. Find clients
2. Carve out a niche
3. Manage client relationships
4. Increases exposure to new clients
5. Charge more

Conjure and present your story: .

🔷I realized I’m an expert on a subject
🔷I made myself a more confident writer
🔷I elevated my reputation and credibility
🔷I pulled ideas out of my head I never had before

The fastest way to sell a transformation is to prove you’ve been through the same transformation yourself.

“I built this product around the information I applied to solve my own problem, because I recognize the problem you have.”

If you want to successfully market your product, you need to be confident about the outcome of your system once you teach it.

Set a big hook.

If you make one brilliant claim, people will pay attention.

If you make ten ordinary claims, they won’t.

Communicate a screaming pain point.

Ecommerce shipping is painful, but how painful does it need to be before someone needs your product?

“Your home is overflowing with cardboard boxes…”
“Your significant other is tired of you spending eight hours a day at the post office...”

Identify pillars underneath the vague, high-level thing.

If you’re selling a course on book-writing, instead of talking about monetizing your creativity, talk about why you need to write a book in the first place.

Unpack opportunities that come from the process.

Construct a double layer of proof.

Show people how the skill you’re teaching changed the course of your life and, by extension, other people's lives

Replace vague claims with specific ones.

Vague:
Turn your ideas into sellable products
Learn from our decades of experience
Learn how to package your skills and insights

Specific:
I've built my website to 500,000 hits a month
Make $5,000 per month within your first year

Back up your claims with numerical testimonials.

Give them room to breathe on the page.

Trim them and make them short.

“This product helped me turn a five-figure long term rental into a seven-figure portfolio.”

Never say something is proven. Just prove it.

Unremarkable landing pages hesitate to state a clear outcome.

Don’t ask your reader to extrapolate five steps from the thing your product does to the outcome your product achieves.

Tell a focused story about who your product is for AND when it breaks.

If you have $100,000 of sales per month, and haven’t built a team…”

The people who will be interested in the products you build are just a few transitions behind you.

Lean into your experience and use that to identify with someone who is in that position.

Then package what you’ve implemented for them, specifically.

Carve out a position for your product that speaks to an owner.

“If you employ 12 people to produce content for you, and you're publishing one podcast every two weeks, this product will install an operating system of prolific production in your business.”

List the most common things you hear when you pitch your product in conversation, and bust your buyer’s objections.

Answer frequently asked questions and add rebuttals into your copy.

Present more text by narrowing page width to 600 pixels and bolding part of your subtitle.

Wider spacing washes text into the background.