Let's explore how to build a great marketing website or landing page

in five steps.

Now, this is video number 3 in my Marketing Funnel series.

So if you haven't yet watched the previous videos, I do recommend

you check them out and I'll link them up for you down in the video description box.

But in this video, we're going to talk about

how to build a great marketing website.

Now, the unfortunate reality is that most business websites are terrible.

They're often built using cookie cutter templates that are never customized

or just never optimized

for the specific product or service that the business sells.

And oftentimes they really fail when it comes to providing clear

and effective marketing language that helps customers

understand exactly what they sell or what they are offering.

And instead, a lot of these websites use technical jargon or industry terms,

or they just use overly creative language that fails to resonate with visitors

and ultimately leaves

people more confused and unable to make a purchasing decision.

But worst of all, I would say is the fact that most business

websites fail to make a compelling offer.

They talk about their business, they talk about their team,

maybe they talk about their founding story, but they fail to address

the immediate needs of people that are visiting the website.

So in this video, we're going to cover 5 powerful tips for how to create

a great marketing website.

And these are the exact strategies that I've used to create

many different landing pages and many different product websites.

And if you follow the steps in this video, you will end up with a website

that is far more likely to convert visitors into paying customers.

And just to be totally clear, this is not a step by step

guide on how to code or how to construct your website.

Instead, we're going to focus on two specific things.

First and foremost, how to identify the right structure and flow

for your website based on the product or service that you happen to be selling.

And second, how to create effective marketing messaging

to more effectively convert visitors into paying customers.

So by the end of this video,

you're going to have a custom tailored website mockup, complete

with marketing messaging that you can then take to a professional web developer.

Or if you feel comfortable and confident you can build it yourself

using one of the many online visual website builders out there,

including Squarespace, Editor X or something like Web Flow.

So let's begin with step number 1.

Find a proven structure.

Now, the reality is you could fill a small library with books

and other resources on the many different ideas

and strategies behind how to create an effective marketing website.

But a really powerful way to shortcut that entire process is to identify

two different websites that will serve as inspiration for your own website.

The first is for structural inspiration and the second is for design inspiration.

Now we're going to tackle the second category here in a moment.

But let's begin with structural inspiration.

The goal here is to find a proven website model that is already effective

for selling the kind or the type of product that you sell.

So, for example, you might sell a physical product,

a digital product, an in-person service, an online membership,

Whatever it is that you sell, you want to identify a website

that is already highly effective at selling that type or that kind of product.

But in a different industry or to a different audience.

So if you're selling an online membership for musicians, you would look for sites

that are selling other online memberships

for a different interest or for a different hobby.

And likewise, if you're selling an in-person service like electrical work,

you would look for other in-person services like plumbing or garage

door installation.

The point here is that you're looking

for a winning formula for your type of product or service.

That way

you don't have to start with a blank canvas

and you don't have to start with cookie cutter templates.

Now, the right website will serve as an inspiration

for the entire structure of your website, everything from the layout to the text

to include to the order in which to convey certain ideas

and even the optional use of sections like customer testimonials

or feature highlights or even checkout options.

So it's very important that we identify the right website to use

as structural inspiration.

So with that in mind, here are five important criteria to consider when you're

looking for the right website.

First and foremost, it should generate a high volume of sales.

This should go without saying,

but we want to draw inspiration from a website

that is highly effective at converting visitors into paying customers.

Now, the unfortunate reality is that many business websites

are just glorified online brochures for a product or service

that either isn't selling well or if it is selling well, oftentimes

those sales are being generated from a different sales or marketing channel.

So the website itself

isn't actually responsible for driving a significant amount of revenue,

which of course is not the kind of website we want to be emulating here.

So it's very important that we identify a website

that is responsible for driving a significant amount of sales.

Now, this isn't always easy to determine, but generally speaking, a good shortcut

is looking for a product that is very popular and that, you know, sells well.

And for a situation in which the business is pretty aggressive

at promoting the website as a primary sales channel.

So if you can tell that

they're running online marketing campaigns that go directly to the website

and that they're clearly trying to use the website as a primary sales tool,

then generally speaking, that's a good indication

that the website is well optimized.

Second, it should have a simple design.

We want to avoid drawing inspiration from websites that use complex animations

or other visual elements that would be difficult to emulate.

And ideally what we want to do is find a website that again converts

very well, but just primarily consists of simple imagery and simple text.

So that'll be much easier for us to recreate that with our own website.

Third, it should have minimal navigation.

We want to keep things simple for visitors by having as few pages as possible.

In fact, many highly effective marketing websites just have a single long

form page that covers

all of the essential information that a visitor might need to know

if they're going to make a purchasing decision.

Now, of course, there are no hard and fast rules here.

You might sell multiple products.

There might be a good reason for you to have secondary pages

covering certain information.

But as a general rule, it's really important to lean towards a simple website

and if you can get away with it, just having a single page

covering the information that a visitor needs to know

in order to decide whether or not to buy your product or your service.

Fourth, it should adopt best practices.

We want the website to instantly feel familiar to first time visitors

so they don't have to learn how to navigate or how to browse the website

before they can actually learn about our product or our service.

So it's very important that we incorporate standard best practices,

like having a logo in the top left corner, having a clear and prominent headline

near the top of the page and having calls to action throughout the page.

For example, a buy button or sign up

button in the top right corner of the page and again perhaps right

below the headline and closer to the very bottom of the website.

It's important to have these common themes, these common patterns

that people are used to seeing on other websites around the Internet.

Last but not least, the site should be mobile friendly.

This is important because the majority of web traffic

today comes from mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers.

So your website needs to work well on these smaller screen sizes.

Now, of course, almost any website can be reformulated to work

as a responsive website that will appear well on smaller screen sizes.

But it's just so much easier if the site that you're using as structural

inspiration is already mobile friendly, because that way, you know,

with total confidence that if you use a similar

structure, your website too can be mobile friendly.

Now, a quick way to confirm whether or not a site is responsive is to simply load

it up on a desktop computer and adjust the width of your browser window

to see if the website scales in response to the change in width of your browser.

So if you adjust the size and the website scales, then you know that website

can be mobile friendly on a smartphone or on a tablet computer.

Now, I should quickly say that when it comes to choosing a website to use

as structural inspiration, there is always this temptation

to draw inspiration from multiple different websites.

You might find two or three different sites out there

that each have interesting elements

that you think might be well-suited to your product or your service.

But if you're new to creating marketing websites, I strongly recommend

that you just choose one website to use as structural inspiration

because when it comes to combining things from multiple different sites, it's

hard to say whether or not those things will come together

and actually work well as a marketing website.

Whereas again, if you're new to creating marketing sites, it's so much easier

just to choose one site that you know is already working well

and to start from there so that you have a rock solid foundation.

Now, of course, we are going to be customizing the structure.

We're going to be changing some of the visual elements, some of the color scheme.

We're going to be rewriting the marketing

copy and things like that as we progress through this video.

And you always have the option in the future to change things further.

But we want to start somewhere with a rock solid foundation.

So that is why I recommend that you just choose one website for this first step.

Step number 2. Get design inspiration.

Once you have a clear structure for your website,

it's time to adapt it to better suit your product or your service.

So as mentioned earlier, we need to identify a second reference website.

The first reference site was all about the structure

and it was based on the type or the kind of product that you sell.

But the second reference website

is about the design, and so it's to be inspired by different products

that critically are sold to your ideal customers.

So the first step here is identifying other products

or other services that your ideal customer is likely to buy.

Now, this is something that we briefly tackled

in the very first step of this overall series,

But the idea again here is to identify other products

or other services that your customer is likely to purchase.

So for example, if you sell online guitar lessons that teach

someone how to play country music, well, it's probably

fair to assume that your target customer owns a guitar.

Maybe they own a cowboy hat or two.

Maybe they own or have purchased music from popular country music artists.

So you can start to identify the other kinds of things that they are

likely to buy.

And then what you can do is you could look at the business websites or the

marketing websites for these kinds of products and services and start to look

for what they tend to have in common when it comes to design elements.

So things like color schemes, imagery, fonts, all of these kinds of things,

you can start to look at these different sites and most importantly,

not just borrow individual elements, but look for what they tend to have in common

because this typically speaks to the needs and the preferences

of your ideal customer in terms of what they are used to seeing

when they are shopping for products or services that interest them.

So again, where the first site was really about the structure,

this is not going to affect the structure at all.

We're now looking for a site solely to influence the design elements.

And again, this tends to come down to things

like imagery and visuals and things like color scheme and things like fonts.

So for example, when it comes to a site that’s selling

some kind of physical product, well,

any structural site out there, your structural inspiration site

might show product shots, physical product shots, but the layout

and the color scheme and the scenery in those product shots might vary.

So for example, a certain site might have a product shot

that's on a white background and it's very stark.

And yet other products that your customers might buy might traditionally

be photographed in the hands of customers or in a specific scene,

maybe in someone's home or in someone's office or out in nature.

And these are the kinds of visual cues that you want to start to pick up on

how are visuals represented in the kinds of products and services

that your customers tend to buy.

So when you look at other marketing websites

to sell these kinds of products to your ideal customer, you want to ask

questions like do they use soft colors, vibrant colors,

or perhaps natural colors Are product

shots in isolation, or are they seen in the hands of customers?

What kinds of scenery or settings are used in their photos?

What kinds of fonts do they feature?

Do they use serif fonts or sans serif fonts?

Is the text thin and lightweight or bold and blocky?

What is the overall look and feel of the website?

Is it artistic?

Is it professional? Is it minimalist?

All of these different kinds of things can influence the appearance

of your website.

And again, just to be totally clear, we're not changing the structure at all here.

We're effectively re-skinning or re-theming the website

based on the color schemes and visual elements and fonts and things like this

that are more likely to appear

on other websites that your ideal customer is likely to buy from.

So we're again trying to take proven effective strategies

that already work that your customers are already used to seeing.

And then we're applying

those visual elements to the structure that we identified in the previous step.

And again, as with that previous step, you always retain the option

of making further changes down the road.

But the point here is we want to start with something that we know works.

We don't want to just guess

and we don't want to impose our own stylistic preferences on our customers.

We want to start with something that we know they already like.

Step number 3.

Write a great headline.

When it comes to the overall messaging of your website

and customizing that messaging to suit your product or your service,

the number one bit of text that you need to focus on is the headline.

This is the large text that tends to be prominent near the very top of the page.

And this is critical because oftentimes this is the only text

that the average visitor will actually read before deciding

whether or not to stick around to learn more about your product or service.

So it's very important that we get this text right now.

There are many different schools

of thought in terms of how to go about crafting a great headline.

But generally speaking, I think it's most important to focus

on avoiding common mistakes and the common issues

that can cause a headline to be ineffective.

So let's quickly go over three common headline mistakes.

Number one is using technical language.

Marketers often forget that

their ideal customer is not necessarily an industry insider,

and as a result, they can often make the mistake of using industry jargon

or technical terms to describe what they do or what they sell.

This is something that we want to avoid.

We want to focus on using plain language, simple terms

that everybody understands when it comes to describing what we do.

Mistake number two, trying to be too creative.

A lot of marketers see what highly successful companies

like Apple are doing with their headlines in terms of using a play on words,

are using puns to make things more interesting,

and they end up emulating this strategy, assuming that it's a great way

to stand out in the marketplace.

But the problem here is that Apple can get away with this

because most people understand what Apple does.

They know that they sell iPhones and iPads and personal computers.

So Apple doesn't have to explain what they do.

Instead, they can focus on having a little bit of fun, whereas the average

small business might have people visiting their website for the very first time

that are just hearing about this company and don't really understand what they do.

So it's much more important that they use their headline to clarify

exactly what they do.

Just as a quick example of this, imagine you land on an electrician's website

and they decided to get creative with their headline and it says shockingly

good service.

They're trying to do a play on words that relates to being an electrician,

but unfortunately

they're not actually conveying what they do in terms of who they serve.

Maybe you're looking for residential work,

maybe you're looking for commercial work, maybe you're looking for

an electrician to work on new home construction.

Well, this headline doesn't clarify what they actually do and who they do it for.

So rather than getting overly

creative, it's much more important to simply convey the essential information

that somebody needs to know

in order to determine whether or not they're on the right website.

Mistake number three, using too many words.

The very best headlines are those that can be read at a glance.

So you want to avoid falling into the trap of trying to convey

absolutely everything about your product or your service.

Instead, you want to keep things as short as possible.

The best headlines are just 3 to 4 words,

and some longer options might get as long as 6 to 7 words.

But you really want to just convey things in as few words as possible.

I think Netflix is a really great example of this.

Their headline simply says Unlimited movies, TV shows and more.

Now that is six words in total, but they're really just conveying

three ideas unlimited movies, unlimited TV shows,

and they have more content.

So in one short headline, you can get a sense for what it is

that Netflix offers.

And of course, they offer all kinds of things from original content

to exclusive content,

and they stream that content on all kinds of different devices.

They could talk about their apps on the iPhone and on Android phones

and on tablets, but instead they just focus

on the core elements of what they offer to customers.

Now, interestingly enough, their subheadline is just as concise.

All it says is watch anywhere, cancel any time.

So they're tackling two of the most common objections to the service.

Can I watch it on my TV or on my smartphone?

And what if I don't like the service?

Can I cancel or am I signed up to some long term contract?

Now, when it comes to crafting a great headline, the priority here

is to clarify exactly what you do or what you sell and optionally

who it's for in as few words as possible.

Now, if this sounds challenging or tricky, that's because it can be.

In many cases, it's very tricky to come up with exactly the right words

to describe what you do without getting overly descriptive.

So I highly recommend that you don't just settle

on the very first headline that you come up with.

Try many different variations,

work with others to brainstorm options and then test those ideas with customers.

A simple way that you can conduct this test is load up

a mock website on your iPad with your headline in place.

Show it to a potential customer for 2 to 4 seconds and then ask them

what is the website about if you're not consistently getting accurate answers

when you conduct this kind of test, it's time to rewrite your headline.

Step number 4.

Clarify your call to action.

Every marketing website or landing page

should have a clear goal in terms of what you want the customer to do next.

Do you want them to buy a product?

Do you want them to sign up for a free trial?

Do you want them to schedule a call?

You need to know your primary call to action.

That is the action that you want people to take when they visit your website.

Now, oftentimes, this will be directly inspired

by the reference site that we tackled and step number one.

So once you've identified a website that sells the same kind of product

or service as you, you want to study their call to action.

So, for example, if you're selling an online membership

and you're looking at another site that is successfully doing so,

perhaps they're offering a seven day free trial as their primary call to action,

in which case that's probably a great place for you to start.

You can always change things up in the future,

but you should probably start with what is already a winning formula.

And likewise, if you're selling an in-person service

and your reference website is really pushing people

to book a follow up call, that too is probably a great place to start.

Of course, depending on the call to action that you choose, you need to make sure

that you have the infrastructure in place to manage that call to action.

So for example, if you're encouraging website visitors

to place a phone call to your business to schedule an appointment,

then you need to make sure that someone is there to answer the phone

and that you have a system in place to manage calls

that might come in after hours so you don't miss out on that business.

Once you've identified your primary call to action,

it's very important that it is highly visible on your website.

Anybody visiting the page should know exactly what you want them to do next

in order to move forward.

So whether it's a buy button, a sign up button, a free trial form,

whatever your call to action is based on the structural site

that we tackled in step number one, You want to follow their exact same lead,

put calls to action in all of the same places,

and make sure that they're colored in a way that stands out.

So, of course, you are redesigning the site

in terms of color, scheme and visuals, but it's important that these call

to action elements stand out and that they are highly visible Now.

In some cases you might have a secondary call to action

so that if somebody isn't ready to buy today,

you can collect their contact information, maybe offer them a free PDF report

or a free video miniseries

or something like that in exchange for their contact information

so that you can follow up with them in the future.

And this is something we're going to talk more about later on in this series.

But generally speaking, you want to make sure

that your primary call to action stands out and that everybody understands

that is the action you're hoping they will take.

And oftentimes you can actually merge

what is your primary and your secondary call to action.

So, for example,

in the case of an online subscription service,

instead of offering them the option to either

sign up or join a free trial, you might just merge these two options

and invite everybody to get started with a free trial.

That is the approach that Netflix uses.

For example, the key point here is you want things to be as simple as possible.

You don't want visitors to get bogged down choosing between multiple options.

You want them to have one clear action that they can take in order to engage

with your business.

Step Number 5. Create your website mockup.

Now's the time to bring everything together

into a simple mockup that represents your final website.

And fortunately, you don't need any special tools for this.

You don't need any special software.

In fact, it's much better to just use pen and paper

when you're going through this process, because that way you can try more things,

you can iterate, you can test ideas, and you're not spending too much time

polishing everything or trying to turn it into a final website.

So I highly recommend that you just start with pen and paper.

In fact, a really great way to do this is to take pieces of paper

and to chop them into different lengths, different chunks of paper that represent

different sections of your website.

So you might have a short piece

that represents the top bar of your website where you put your logo,

maybe some navigational elements if you need them,

and then your call to action up in the top right

corner below that you might have a slightly taller section

to represent the area that is going to contain your headline

and another mention of your call to action and perhaps a subheadline

between those two elements.

And then you're going to have longer sections

to represent the different structural elements of your websites,

whether it's a feature section

or you might have text on one side and an image on the other,

and then alternate and have an image on the one side and text now on the other.

Whatever the structure is based on the reference site

that we tackled in step number one, you want to bring this layout to life

using pieces of paper to represent each of the different sections.

And the reason why you don't want to just do this on one big piece of paper is

you want to have the option to quickly substitute in different variations.

So for example, you. might have three or four different

takes on the main section that includes your headline and your call to action.

That way you can test different variations and you can join

the different pieces together to have slight variations on your overall website.

And when you're done that, it's also important to make notes

about the imagery changes you're going to make.

So wherever in that original model website there was an image, you're

going to make notes about what image you plan to include in your final website.

So, for example, if they have a product shot, you might make notes of how you will

feature a shot of your particular product and any sorts of scenery options

or color options or background options might be involved in making that photo.

So, you know exactly what is going to be in that section of the website.

Now, just to be clear, the idea here is to recreate the structure

from the reference website tackled in step number one.

So we're going to take that exact same structure

and recreate it with pen and paper using different chunks of paper

so that we can substitute in different variations here.

So wherever they have their headline, you're going to put in your own headline

anywhere they include an image, you're going to put a placeholder box

where you detail the kind of image that you are going to feature on your website.

So if it's a product shot on the original site,

you're going to have a product shot.

But of course the design and the background and the color scheme

is going to be influenced by the reference site in step number two.

So this is where you're simply making detailed notes about what kind of imagery

you will eventually be including in your final design.

This is also the point.

What you will rewrite any marketing copy for the entire page.

So you want to go through that original reference

site, the structural reference site.

Understand why they are talking about certain things in a certain order,

and then you want to recreate your own version of that marketing copy

to convey the same kinds of ideas.

But now, of course, about your product or your service, again,

the goal here is to end up with a complete website mockup that covers

absolutely everything that you will need to build your final website.

You need to have your headline, your call to action, all of your marketing copy,

and then placeholders with detailed notes for all of the different images

that you need to include in your website.

And all this should be put together with different pieces of paper

that, when joined together, represent your final website.

And then you can hand this off to a professional web developer.

Or once again, if you feel comfortable, you can build the site yourself

and bring it to life.

Using an online visual website builder like Squarespace, Editor X or Web Flow.

Next up, we're going to talk about how to build a valuable email list.

So click the like button, subscribe to the channel

if you haven't already, and then continue on to the next video.

You can find a link to it right here in the video player as well as down below

in the video description text.