Morning!

God, hasn’t it gone dark quickly? The clocks have gone back and it feels like we have entered the depths of winter. I go to work. Black dark. I get the train home. Black dark.

And don’t get me started on how wet and miserable Manchester is at the minute…

Anyway, this last month we’ve been prepping for the launch of a playbook we’re releasing for noticed. in November. It’s the largest piece of writing I’ve ever done in my life.

• 13,000 words

• 80+ A4 pages

• Everything I know about acquiring customers

All in 1 playbook. I’m pretty proud of how it’s come out, but I’m also extremely nervous about our launch. We’re going bigger than ever with it and I want it to be perfect. Well, as close to perfect as we can get.

The make-or-break piece is the landing page.

Get it right and we’ll get 1000s of downloads. Get it wrong and all of the effort we put into the playbook will go to waste. It’s not just important, it’s absolutely pivotal in the success of the launch.

So, we’ve been spending hours and hours breaking down what makes a perfect landing page. But during our research, we found a landing page that ticks every single box we could think of.

(It’s very close to perfect.)

So I thought it might be interesting to break it down for you step by step and show you what a perfect landing page might look like.

NOTE: When I say “landing page” here, I’m essentially referring to a sales page to convince someone to buy/download a singular product

Here’s the anatomy of the perfect landing page:

THE ESSAY

Three months ago, I was scrolling Twitter when this odd little ad stopped me mid-scroll.

It caught my attention and I kept watching. 30 seconds later, I found myself on the landing page trying to work out if I could really get this best-selling marketing book for free.

Fast forward 3 more minutes and…

• I’d paid for shipping

• The book was on its way

• And I was going further down the rabbit hole of Sabri Suby

I’d been got. And I hate being got. But the truth is, I’d just gone through one of the best ad funnels I’ve ever seen. The ad was sharp, but the landing page was the real reason I converted.

Sabri Suby is an outstanding marketer. Not because he got me to buy his book (which I finished within two weeks), but because he turned me into a fan with one page.

So what made it work? And how can we build something similar?

For me, it had these 4 key principles that made it an incredible landing page:

1/ An ‘Everything headline’

If you Google how to write an amazing headline, you will get one million different suggestions.

Make it an outcome. Keep it simple. Arouse curiosity. Address your audience directly. The list goes on.

There is no secret formula for writing a perfect headline. But there are specific outcomes you need to happen to the reader. For me, the 3 core ones are:

A) Show you’re credible to provide the thing you’re offering (in this case, marketing advice)

B) Position the product as extremely valuable

C) Get the reader interested about what it is

And Sabri does them all in the most incredible and interesting way. That’s why I call it an “Everything Headline”. Because it does it all.

Just look at it. It’s not like your usual landing page headline. It’s more like a news headline. This is something Sabri recommends throughout the book too. When you write headlines like news stories, you naturally hit all three reactions above: credibility, value, and curiosity.

Look at the headline Sabir wrote again. It has credibility. He leads with Shark Tank Investor. That phrase alone instantly makes you trust that he knows what he’s talking about.

Second, value. The offer is a free copy of a #1 bestselling book. You immediately assume it’s worth something, and getting it for free feels like a win.

And third, curiosity. The wording “just to prove his marketing strategies work better than anything else” makes you want to know what those strategies are.

It does everything a good headline should do, without looking like it’s trying to.

2/ A Cold Ready Offer

Earlier this year, I was listening to Liam Dunne’s marketing podcast, where he was interviewing a cold email expert called Nick Abraham (founder of Leadbird) when they said something I hadn’t heard before. Nick said…

A “Cold ready offer”, I thought. I like that.

What Nick was explaining is that when you’re reaching out to cold audiences, your offer has to be valuable to people who’ve never heard of you, your brand, or your results.

Example:

You run ads to a landing page with an offer of 12 months of SEO services for 20% of the cost you usually charge.

NOT a cold ready offer. No one wants to sign up for 12 months of services with a company they’ve never heard of.

Or instead, you could run ads to a landing page with an offer which is - Give us your URL and we’ll give you the 6 key issues holding you back from ranking no.1 on Google for your niche. All in 24 hours. Completely free.

Now THAT is a cold ready offer.

No matter which company is offering it. No matter if you’ve never heard of them before, it’s still a great offer. An offer most people will be willing to take.

Now, if we go back to Sabri Suby’s landing page, his offer is as cold ready as it gets.

You get a free copy of a best-selling book, written by a Shark Tank investor, completely for free. If you hate it, he’ll pay you what it costs you to ship it.

It’s a no-brainer. Why not say “yes” to that?

It’s so easy when you think of the perfect landing page to think about the technical aspects. How does the design look? Have I included enough social proof? Can I tweak the headline?

These are all important things, but the most important thing is that you’ve got an incredible offer at the centre of it.

3/ Littered with 3 types of proof

Saying your book is incredible is all well and good. But nothing pushes people closer to converting than "proof”.

Proof that your product is as good as you say it is, proof that other people love it, proof that it delivers the outcome you promise. But the key isn’t to just put loads of the same proof on there. It’s to litter it with proof in different variations. This is what Sabri does so well with this landing page.

It is completely littered with the 3 most impactful types of proof:

1/ Testimonials

Sabri has an animated section of the page where 6,000+ testimonials float across it. When you have them with this kind of volume, there is not much you can argue - it works.

That being said, humans don’t just read words and see 5 stars and start to believe you’re actually as good as you say you are. They need to see real people too.

2/ Visuals of real people

Sabri’s landing page is littered with images like this…

I think photos like this are endlessly more impactful than testimonials. Because, as humans, we can infer so much from simple photos like this. We know lots of people are buying the book and we know that they seem to be enjoying it (just by the smiles and the fact they took photos with it).

But there’s also a second type of visual proof like this that Sabri includes on the landing page…

He includes these informal texts and messages he’s received from readers. You can’t clearly see the people’s faces in their profile pictures, but the fact that it’s so informal and you can see people messaging him saying the book is great resonates as a reader.

There’s a micro lesson there too → the more informal the social proof, the more believable it is.

3/ Video Reviews

I’m cheating here a little because this is an evolved form of my last point. But more than testimonials, more than photos, more than informal positive messages. Video reviews are better proof than all of them.

Because nothing convinces people you’re telling the truth than seeing another human recommending it.

And Sabri’s page is littered with videos like these.

4/ It’s Never Ending

The Sell Like Crazy landing page is 8986 words long. Don’t believe me? I literally had to check myself.

That means it is:

• 6.7x longer than the Declaration of Independence (1,320 words)

• 20% of the length of the novel ‘The Great Gatsby’

• And 8x as long as this essay

It is an extremely long page with an extremely large amount of text. But that’s on purpose. In the book, Sabri explains that with all of the tests his company has done on landing pages, the longer the landing page, the higher the conversion rate. Which, when you think about it… It kinda makes sense.

If you took any landing page and then added a section that included:

• More reasons to buy the product

• More proof that the product would deliver on its promise

• More examples of people loving the product

Then it’s highly unlikely it’s going to deter someone from purchasing/downloading. If anything, it will increase their chances. So, that’s exactly what Sabri does. He adds more sections that increase people’s chances of converting.

Here are some of my favourites that he has further down the page:

Objection handling: People think he’s not actually a great marketer, so he shows the stats and success of his agency, King Kong.

Detailed Look Inside: People question the value inside, so he goes into detail with what is actually in the book.

Transformation Story: Giving context on who he is and how he came up with the system in the book. Most of all, how it changed his life.

You’ll notice that with each section you pass on the landing page, there is a button to get the book. Each section is like a mini sales letter, all piled together to create one incredible landing page.

When you look at the page (go here if you haven’t already: https://selllikecrazy.co/) it is a little wild. It may not be your style, it might not even be right for your business, but it is a great landing page.

No matter what, there are so many lessons you can take from it. Hopefully, I outlined a couple in this essay.

Right, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Could you take 2 seconds to rate this week’s breakdown before you go though?

It takes literally 2 seconds and helps me a bunch knowing what to write each week - thank you :)

Until next Sunday.

— Niall

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