[Transcript] The smartest pages you can create on ANY website and why you need to use them

Hello everyone.  Welcome to the Sell Your Service webinar, those of you who are joining us from the WordPress lead generation group and those of you who are Sell Your Service members and customers.  I am just going to give it a few more minutes to make sure that everyone can join.  We’ve got loads of people registering, I think it’s because we’ve got a slightly smarter email system now, although it’s not perfect.  So I’m going to give it a few more minutes and we’ll wait until people can join.  For those of you who are already on, everyone else can join us in a bit.  We’re already two minutes behind schedule.  We are today going to look at the six pages that you have never heard of, but that you need on every single website.  I promise that at the end of this, you’ll know six pages that you can put on a website that you’ll competition aren’t creating, but that your customers will absolutely love.

Now, before we sort of continue in, if you could make sure that you can just go to the box below and type in “Hello,” give me a name, location, make sure that you can see it, and that way we can tell if everything is going hunky dory.  Give it a couple of seconds because I think there is a little bit of a delay between my broadcast and what you guys are seeing.  Let’s just give it a couple of seconds. You can just use the question box below and shoot that through, and I will receive that that very second.

Cool.  Hey.  Fantastic, here we go.  Mark from Sussex.  Hey, Mark, how are you doing? Kelly from London; another Mark, you haven’t said where you’re from; hey there guys.  Fantastic.  Cool, cool, cool, cool.  Awesome. Alright, it’s going too fast now, I can’t see.  Cool.  Hey, Rob. Hey, Sam. Jack. Excellent. Chris, Emily, Jacob. Fantastic. Awesome, right, let’s crack on.

So, as always, I only want you to ever take away one nugget from this webinar.  There’s a lot in here, there’s a lot of information and I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed, because otherwise you end up implementing absolutely none of it, and all I really want is for you guys to take one thing and genuinely implement it.

So, here’s the problem. We need to constantly offer content and be seen as proactive towards our customers.  Okay, so that’s the big problem. Now this is a double-edged sword. First, we’re always told to offer more content to our customers, right.  We’ve always been told that we need to offer more content to our customers. We’re also told that we need to be proactive to our customers and anticipate their needs. Now that might sound like some buzzwords, that might sound like a little bit of marketing spiel, but in truth what it means is that we need to think, okay, what’s the next problem that the customer is going to face, and how can I solve that problem for them.

So, this basically means, sort of twice, double that we need to give more stuff to our subscribers via our website.  We need to not only give more stuff to our customers via our website on the actual site, but we need to give more stuff to our customers in the shape of value and products, and solutions, and this kind of stuff.  So ultimately what we’re trying to do is give more to our customers, and that can be quite tricky.

So here’s the myth.  Usually I’ve got images behind these, so I don’t know why they’ve gone white and blank all of a sudden.  Maybe I’m going for a minimalist thing.  I promise you it isn’t always this stark. The myth is that sitemaps are pretty much the same, right.  There’s really not that many different versions that you can have.  We’ve got a Home page, an About Us page, maybe a Products and a Service page, we have our blog typically with some posts, a Contacts page, maybe there’s an e-commerce system sales page or landing page, whatever. But the truth is that sitemaps need to vary, and I think the reason this comes about is because as web designers and developers in businesses, we want to set up a standard of processes, and these work. And because it works, we want to make our lives a little bit easier, which I totally understand. But there are six pages that we can add, and I’m going to tell you how we can exploit those pages that add a huge amount of value. And it’s kind of like a load of different things in your arsenal that you can keep pulling out and handing towards your customers, both as a product that you could create, so you could say, hey, we’ve got these six pages, our competition aren’t developing them, but I know your customers will use them, or you could use them on your own website and make sure that you pump those out.

So, ultimately if we solve this, if we do what we call a smart sitemap, what does it get us? We have high conversion rates and lead capture. That’s kind of at the core of it, that’s what I’m specialized in, and that’s what I focus on is higher conversion rates and lead capture. We also offer something different from your competition. I guarantee that 99.9% of your competitors are not going to offer these pages, and they wouldn’t know how to. Lastly, we add more value to our products and to our business, okay, and that’s what customers want to see, they want to see more value and they want to see more products.

So, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Mike Killen, I run SellYourService.co.uk.  I am a WordPress lead generation specialist. Some of you will have joined via the Facebook group, WordPress Lead Generation. If you search it out, click “Yeah, I want to join” because obviously you do. I will say sure thing and let you in. We run free webinars every single week on a Wednesday to do with WordPress. The idea is that there is no sales message, there’s no hidden content. It’s a community workshop, so if you want to see something in particular, please, please, please let me know and I will see if I can get around to creating that content.

We have got ultimately … Apparently I say “ultimately” a lot, so if you guys can flag up when I say the word “ultimately,” I’ve got to think of some new words to use. It’s the Wednesday Weekly WordPress Webinar Workshops; five W’s, right. Super easy to remember. Now here’s the deal.  I want you to use this content however you want. We have got, and I promise you, I’ve been saying this for about two months now, right around the corner a membership site, but also all of the replays for all of the webinars will be available, and we will give an option to download the slides. But in the meantime, take away what you want, take the content. There’s still the template download, at the bottom left of your page there is the smart sitemap, it’s really just a template that we’re going to be going over now so please go ahead and download that. If people could send through that they have downloaded it and that they’ve at least clicked the link and they’ve saved it at least, that would be great just to let me know that you are using it.

I want you to take this template, rip it apart, do whatever you want with it. If you want to create blog posts about it, if you want to do a webinar or a video on it, if you want to present it back to your customers …. You do whatever you want, whatever makes your life easier. Like I said, we have got a membership [site] coming, it’s right around the corner, it’s so, so close, and we are going to be exploding the amount of value that we can give to you guys.

Fantastic. So, #8 of the free Weekly WordPress Webinars, six pages for a smart sitemap. Cool. So, we’re going to race through these. Some of them require a little bit more depth because they’re actually referring back to another type of product or a type of system. But hopefully you’ll be able to take at least one of these away and give it. I think I know which two most people take away from this.  So, we’ve got a Light Bulb Moment, a Thank You Page, Splinter Product Sales Page, Mystery Gift Page, Survey Page, Top Posts Page, and I’m going to tell you how we can use all of this. Let’s jump straight in.

A Light Bulb Moment is nothing more than, I mean they call them lead magnets and money magnets and digital bribes and mini-bribes, there’s loads of different ways. Ultimately, ha! there we go again, what we’re trying to do is offer a huge amount of value to the customer, okay, or to a lead, I should say, to some traffic. Now for all intents and purposes, this is a landing page, and if anyone has done our landing page downloads, this will be very, very similar to you. A lot of the pages that we are looking at are modeled after a landing page. However, the way that they are presented to the customer is slightly different, and each one gives a slightly different result. A Light Bulb Moment, for a start, is basically a landing page where we offer a huge amount of value, and we say look, this is all of the stuff that we want to give to you, this is a huge amount that we want to give to you. All we require in exchange is an email address. Now you can call it a landing page, you could call it a lead magnet, you could call it an email capture or a lead generator. You do whatever you want. This is the first type of page that people neglect to set up on their website time and time again. Everybody knows about landing pages. Everybody knows that if you offer something, a free eBook, a template, a download, a guide, whatever kind of information; hell, if you’ve written blog posts, just package three of them up, put them together in a PDF and ship that out. For those of you who haven’t seen our landing page webinar, it’s very good obviously. This is one of the first pages that I set up on any website now is a landing page because I want to know how it’s going to look, I want the customer to see I’m committed to capturing email leads, and I’m committed to capturing leads for your business and helping convert them.

I’m not going to go over the structure of this too much, to be honest, because you can go back and see the replays, or if you shoot me an email, I’m sure I can direct to that. Bearing in mind, guys, you can send over questions at any time, please, please do.  I’m not adverse to that.

The second type of page that people don’t set up but you absolutely should is a Thank You page. Now the cool thing about a Thank You page is that it should come up after 90% of the interactions, okay. So, what have we got? Someone filling out a contact form, someone filling out an opt-in, someone filling out a landing page, someone filling out a Light Bulb Moment, another type of email capture, whatever people fill out, it really irritates me when people … that customers  or traffic who have then converted into a lead really, they are then just presented with a “Thanks very much for your message. We’ll get in touch with you soon.” What you should be doing is capitalizing on the fact that they’ve decided to take that plunge and redirect them instantly to another piece of amazing content. Now there’s two ways about it. We have given Thank You pages for sales pages, we’ve given Thank You pages to product pages, we’ve given Thank You pages to a blog post … For example, if someone has filled out our, we run another business in the states called Website Profit Explosion, and if someone fills out the “I need more help with my leads,” they are instantly taken to a piece of content that shows them what’s going wrong with their lead generation process.  It’s just a PowerPoint that we did with a screen recording, and we just slapped that up. We used to even just have it as a, we used to just have it as a YouTube video, just be redirected to say “Thank you so much for getting in contact with us. If you’re interested in leads, this is the next thing.” Okay. In fact, this little sentence up here, right at the top, it says, “Thank you for downloading. If you’re serious about growing your WordPress business (you can take that out and replace it with whatever your customers are), check out our presentation on how to ONLY (whatever the thing is that they want).” In fact, some of you might have even seen this. This is for our service product. That’s what we say, we go “Thank you so much for getting in contact with us. If you’re serious about whatever it is –  losing weight, sorting out the SEO on your website, climbing higher in Google rankings, generating more leads, having a better-looking website, if you’re serious about whatever it is that they want, the goal, then check out our presentation or check out our top blog post, whatever it is. Again, a Thank You page can be chopped and changed between whatever it is. It is a really, really useful redirect.  It’s also really useful to give to people when they sign up to something and you send that automation email, you send it out to them, and you go, “Hey, by the way, I just want to give you a big thanks for getting in contact with us. Here’s some piece of content.” Okay. Again,  one of the pages that I set up now for my customers, I say how are you going to thank your customers. For example, we started working with a high-end bakery that deliver cakes, and I go, “Right. How are you going to say thank you when someone gets in touch?” and they’ve decided to basically put up one of their recipes for saying, “Because we want to thank you for getting in contact with us, and because you’re not going to be able to get your products right now, we want to give you a recipe on how you can do this.”

Next, Splinter Product Sales page. What is a Splinter Product, I hear you ask.  Really, a splinter product at the end of it is a product that we sell for about the price of a cup of coffee or two cups of coffee. We do loads of work on splinter products. If we take your core offer as websites, or if we take your customer’s core offer as … whatever, as being a florist, a splinter product is a really cut-down, stripped-down version or a segment of that core product that we then say to people, “Look, here’s something that you can test us out with.” The psychology, the basic psychology behind a splinter product is that going from zero dollars or zero pounds to five grand is very, very difficult for the human brain to do. That’s … outside of sales tactics, that’s, it’s just difficult for the human brain to do. So if we give them an offer and we say, “Hey, we want to help you do whatever it is you want to do,” if you want to capture more leads, if you want to lose weight, if you want to start sleeping patterns properly, whatever it is, “I want to give you this product.”  And we create loads of little splinter products. We will absolutely tell people how to deliver splinter products, and if you stick an eye out for the membership, we’ve got entire membership plans dedicated on how to create splinter products. But if you go in Google [and search for] splinter products, how to create a splinter product or what is a splinter product, you’ll get the idea very, very quickly.  But a sales page for it is still really useful. It’s a little bit of content that we keep. It’s not updated regularly, it basically has a series of Buy Now buttons. We have a really basic sales formula and we go, okay what’s the headline, so a nice big attraction headline. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve. What’s the typical solution that’s out there at the moment. What’s changing within the environment. What is it that we’re presenting. A little bit about us, call to action, that’s kind of the basic sales process that we go through. This one was for a pitching and presenting thing. It’s just a little sales page that we send out. If something’s missing or maybe we’ve got a new customer and we’re trying to figure out which funnel we want to put them in, or we’d want to do a sale, usually having splinter Product Sales page is a really useful piece of _[19:06]_ just to have in your repository, so to speak.

Mystery Gift page. Again, I don’t know why more people don’t do this.  This is awesome. People love the idea of being let in on a secret, okay. So let’s say that for our business, and we are WordPress businesses, we are website businesses, let’s say that we want to create a product that gets people interested again. Maybe they’re already a lead, maybe they’re already on our email address [list], maybe they’re already in our database, but for whatever reason we’ve lost contact with them. And it happens, alright; we don’t email out as often as we should. What we’ve done is we create a mystery gift, and all it is, again, is either a Light Bulb Moment or a Splinter Product or some piece of content, okay. And we say, “Hey, we’re really sorry we haven’t been in touch for awhile, however we wanted to give you access to the mystery gift page. Now it is exclusive, it is password protected so you’re going to need this password to get in.” WordPress natively has password protection, you can create that, you don’t have to have any crazy plugins, it is literally built into the dashboard. Where we select “publish,” just above that we can select “public,” “private,” or “password protected”. Select “password protected,” say to them, look here’s the … the password is “Mystery Gift” or the password is “Devon Digital Design,” whatever the name of your business is, and go in there.  You’ll be amazed at how many people want to click through, even if you don’t give them an enormous amount to go on, you just say, look we’ve been away for awhile because we’ve been working on this. We want to give you access to it. We’re only giving it to our customers. Please go ahead, check out the Mystery Gift page.

Another piece of useful, kind of content that you can create with the Mystery Gift page, particularly this is via email, we typically send this out via email to say to people, “Hey this is the mystery gift we want to give to you. Click here.” It’s also really useful, occasionally we’ve done random pop‑ups, come up and say “Hey, do you want a free mystery gift to do with lead generation?” and It’s converted really well, and it’s just with a little light box that pops up and it says “All you’ve got to do is put in your email address here, and we’ll give you the password.” I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I’d be able to figure out some better patterns for it, but in truth I’m just really waiting for further confirmation that that sort of psychological process works, you know, do people like the idea of mystery gifts, but it is still really, really useful if you haven’t made contact with people in awhile.

Now this is my favorite one, and I think this is the one that people take away the most, is a survey page. Here’s why it’s so useful. So, the problem is that if you’ve got an audience, you need to keep them engaged all of the time, right. We need to constantly keep our audience engaged, and the easiest way to do that is to ask them for their help and to ask them for their opinion. So this is how I use it. I’ll set up a survey page and I’ll have … I’ll basically ask them, “Look, we’re creating new content, we’ve got a new product coming out,” “we’ve got a new blog post coming out,” whatever it is, “What do you want, what is going to help you the most in your business? If we could give you something, what is going to help you the most?” And of all the options, whatever they select, we’ll automatically send them a piece of content to do with that, as well as give us more ideas, so maybe people want to know more about SEO lead generation, or they want to know more about responsive and mobile website design, whatever it is. A survey is a great way to frankly do market research. It also opens you up and makes you appear a lot more human because you can put in the email campaign, “Hey, I really need your help. Would you mind filling out this quick survey for me? It would mean a massive amount. It literally is one question, it will take you 30 seconds, and there is going to be a mystery gift for you at the end.” Ta-Da!  As a reward, you can then say to them, once they’ve clicked that button, through whatever kind of automation you want, redirect them to this page as a mystery gift, and say, “As a thank you, we want to give you access to this mystery page, but we’re only giving the password to people who have completed it, like you. This is the password to get in,” and again it’s a piece of content to do with whatever it is that they’ve clicked on.  Now, on this one, you might notice that of the five options, three of them are to do with leads, one of them is to do with “My business isn’t growing,” and one of them is to do with “I don’t know what to do next.”  There’s actually only two pieces of content that they can receive, so I give them a lot of different emails, although specific to me, if I went, “Okay, 50% of people said they need new leads, as opposed to only 10% saying they need higher quality leads,” but at the same point, the content I’m redirecting them to is only going to do with leads. The other, my business isn’t growing and I don’t know what to do next, basically is a small exercise on getting your goals and ideas out on paper. Don’t overcomplicate it. If you can give an individual piece of content, awesome, but don’t overcomplicate it.

So, that’s the survey page. Really, really, really useful to offer to people via an email. Also, it’s a really great part of the onboarding process. If you have any kind of onboarding or email automation, a brand new customer … bearing in mind, it’s only one question, we say to them, “Hey, fantastic. Here’s the … I’m glad to see that you want to work with us. Can I just ask you please to fill out this one quick form and we’ll give you a little bit of content at the end of it.” So, it’s a really, really, really powerful piece, is the survey page, just asking people for their opinion.

So, we’ve got only a couple of slides left, and I want to make sure that people can get their questions in rather than letting the delay, so if you’re want to start firing your questions over, I am more than happy to answer those. In the meantime, the final page that you need to create is what we call a Top Posts page.  So, why is it so powerful? A Top Posts page is just an amalgamation of either your most popular post, so the ones with the most traffic, the ones with the most comments on them, or maybe they’re the ones that you prefer the most, maybe they’re the ones where you think, “Yeah, these are my favorite blog posts. I enjoyed writing them,” or whatever it is.  However you want to divvy that up, create a Top Posts page, just with some links to the posts, sort of as a collection of the posts, and here’s how I would use it. Again, if you’ve been away for awhile and you haven’t made any contact with your list, all you need to do is say, “Hey, I’m really sorry. We haven’t sent you anything in a long, long time. However, we have been extremely busy. I want you to check out the most popular content on our website.” Okay, so that’s all we need to go ahead.

We have a few of these. We have one that is sort of dynamically populated, kind of, depending on how much traffic, and it will just auto report out and say, Look, this is our most popular set of content. If we are doing website design for a company, for a business, we might say to them, “Hey, if you’re doing website design, these are our most popular blog posts on just web design,” and we would send them that content. So, it’s really useful for current customers who you haven’t engaged with for awhile, and it’s really, really useful as a tool to be able to send to your current customers  who you’re in that sales cycle with, you know, you’re in that sales cycle.

So, we’ve got a couple of questions that have come in.  Coincidentally, they are almost exactly the same. The smart sitemap download, go ahead and download it, it’s the bottom left. Like I said, you can rip it apart, use it, do whatever you want with it. We basically created this because … for a few reasons. When I first started, it was only me, and people said, “Well, why should I use you over anybody else?” And I honestly couldn’t answer them except for the fact that I could go, “Well, you get to work with me over someone else.”  But I said, “Ah, we’ve actually got six types of web page that no one else uses,” and I lied, I had no idea what I was going to do, and all I did was basically create four different types of landing page, a survey page, which just comes from my old days at corporate marketing, and I thought well if I sort of share the top posts, I guess …. If anyone is a fan of Digital Marketer, by the way, and Ryan Deiss, he’s got an email campaign floating around where it sends out a couple of things like this, like if you’re trying to reengage with people, it says, send them a survey page, send them a mystery gift page. So, that’s what we’ve kind of did, used it for. And you can take the copy, you can create your own blog post or sales content, however you want. Like I said, it’s absolutely never, ever, ever a sales webinar, but we do have to keep the lights on, this is just a small $9 product, michaelkillen.wpengine.com/cerberus. People who have bought it have a lot of respect for it, and people have said it has doubled their sales and all this kind of stuff. It’s just a little qualification method.

But let’s wrap up before we get into some questions.

So, use the six pages of the smart sitemap, just get into the habit of creating those pages, take the whatever it’s called, download, and just remember all they really are is landing pages with slightly different flavors that you can pump out. It’s also useful for you to do it for your own website; obviously give out and send to your customers or to your email list or to your content subscribers, whatever. But for your customers, when you’re building a site, create these pages in the background and just say to them, “Hey, would it be useful if we could send this to your, send something to your old email address list that maybe you haven’t interacted with, and get them on board, have as a quick onboarding program.”  So, keep it in your arsenal, and use the results they generate as a sales add-on, so use these kind of results as an add-on to say to people, “Hey, we have a way of being able to reengage with your subscribers,” “Hey, we have a way of being able to produce market research directly from (whoever it is you want).”

Cool. So, questions …. okey dokey. “Hey, Mike, how long do you spend each week creating content?” That is a really good question, Claire. Oh, and there’s another one from you. I’ll answer that in a second. So, Claire, that’s a good question.  I have recently started creating more and more content, and spending more and more time creating content. Here’s how I’ve split it up. If anyone’s done the pricing exercise that we did where it’s basically everything is split into thirds. Let’s say our project is, I don’t know, £9,000, just as a round number. £3,000 of that will go towards my business, keeping it alive, £3,000 of that will go towards profit and return on investment, and £3,000 of that will go towards the actual project. I take that £3,000 and use that as a budget now for someone else to do the work, so that gives me a lot more time to generate content and to create products. We have got a free product coming out in a bit which is specifically designed for websites and WordPress businesses. It’s basically 100 content ideas, and all we do is we take one of those ideas and we’ll either say do we need to create a blog post, do we need to create a webinar on it, do we need to create a product about it, do we need to create a splinter product or a light bulb moment. On average, per day, I probably spend two or three hours creating content, but that’s for my own business, and a lot of it is kind of stacked up and is pumped out.  However, for some people, that is unrealistic. In all honesty, I think there is an old rule of thumb where you should spend an hour a day working on your business, like just working on your business, shut off your phone, shut off your emails, doing any of that kind of stuff. I’m trying to think, I think if you … if realistically … so yeah, 100 ideas, right.  I mean, that literally is around the corner. We’ve got that, and that will be already sent out to any members, so as long as you’re on the list, you’ll get that already, we’re using that as an email capture. But the idea is that if you can even produce one piece of content a day, and that could be a tweet, it could be finding another piece of content and sharing it, as long as you’re saying something, but really you need to think, more than anything, the content I create, is it part of something that’s going to work, is it part of something that’s going to help capture leads, it is part of something that’s going to help turn leads into buyers. Something we’ve been doing recently is documenting absolutely everything that we do. Now, whatever I do, I record the screen all the time and I write out that list process of the steps that I take, and we find that that actually creates content because when I set up a website now, the steps that I might take to do that, I can then take that and maybe produce a piece of content on it or a piece of blog post.

So, we’ve got a few people here asking about the sales funnel, and asking about splinter products and light bulb moments. I haven’t really got time to go into it now. We will be doing something on a sales funnel. We have also got another $9 product coming out, which is an entire sales funnel built for you, including the product, including the copy, including the content, all of that, you just need to physically put it on your site. We’ve got all of that coming out, but also we have got a webinar coming up about creating a sales funnel. Very, very basically, we take a light bulb moment and we have a landing page in front of it. For every single person who signs up, they are redirected to a Thank You page, which is also a Splinter Product sales page.  Whoever buys that then is redirected onto our core product page. We have got that coming out, and again it’s part of the 100 ideas. It’s a big, big revamp coming out.

I haven’t had any more questions come in, but please, please, please shoot me an email if you need to. We have got the replay of this going live. I believe we’ve got that automated now, he says, fingers crossed. Also, I’m not going to be here next week, I’m taking a bit of a break and we are going away for awhile; only for a week, so I will let everybody know about the next webinar, which will probably therefore be on the …. probably on the 23rd of September, so we are going to take a two-week break and we will be coming back on the 23rd of September with a webinar, but I will let you know what it is because I haven’t figured it out yet. In the meantime, I’ve got no more questions coming through, so I will leave it at that. Thank you very much, as always, for sticking with me while I ramble on about stuff that I pretend to know about. Speak to you later. Bye now!

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.