Lessons

Lesson Info

Spreading Word About Your Landing Page

'Cause now we know how to do the landing page and connect it to our ConvertKit and start getting emails. But, big question, who do we tell about this landing page? Because we're not gonna go to a coffee shop and tell people and we're not gonna tell our friends and family. We wanna tell the right people because it's kind of just a waste of energy to go tell all your friends and family if they all live in condo towers that have no lawn. It's like it's pointless. So we wanna make sure we're telling the right people about our landing page, and I see this all the time in Facebook groups I'm in, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, people just desperately, it's like spaghetti at a wall. They're just throwing their link out there, hoping that someone is going to see it and click it, and the reality is they're not. So you have to go where the people are. And the reason we wanna do this is we want those quality answers because if I fill it out, if I fill out the survey, or I am sent to a landing page and I...

live in a condo with no lawn, then my feedback on the survey is gonna be fabricated 'cause I'm gonna be talking hypotheticals, and I won't sign up to the landing page anyway, so probably your conversion rate's gonna get skewed because you're sending a lot of people who would never be customers to begin with. So you want to try and get the right people over here. And a great way to do this, go back to the people who filled out your survey, the ones that gave you their email address, send them to the landing page and let them know, hey, thanks so much for filling out that survey a few weeks ago. We're gonna roll With this idea. We'd love for you to be a part of our initial launch, like sign up. And I did this with my online course, where I had the 400 people who answered my survey, and I went back to them and emailed all of them, and then told them, go to my landing page. And that's how I was able to sell out 85 seats in five or six days, with people paying. It's because they were highly qualified 'cause they filled out the survey. If I had just put it on my Facebook or even my LinkedIn, it wouldn't have done as well because half of the people on my LinkedIn don't have that problem. And even I would say follow up with the people who didn't fill out your survey. Maybe you had a list of people, or maybe you were posting in different groups. Don't be afraid to post in those places as well. But an example of an email that you could send, this kind of goes back to a topic from earlier, you can't just send an email that says, hey, guys, please take my survey. You have to frame it correctly. You have to give people a reason to want to do this and make them excited about it. So a sample email might be, hey, guys, exciting news. A few days ago you filled out a survey about lawn mowing. There was such huge response, that I've decided to move ahead with the idea, and I want you to be the first to know. What's next? Go check out this page and sign up to, and whatever it is. And if you think on our landing page, we were offering people those 50% off their first lawn booking, I would say, what's next? Go check out this page and sign up to get 50% of your next lawn booking. Because we want to see that intent, where they're going to sign up from that landing page. And so this would be an example, but you can see how this feels very different than just going to your email and sending a giant email with bcc, tons of people, and saying, guys, please fill out this survey, I really need your help, which is what most people do, or posting on Facebook, like, guys, I really need you to fill out. Don't beg people, like ask them in a human way. And people realize like, oh, I'm asked to do this because it makes sense for me, not because I've been, my email has been collected from somewhere and I'm now in this blanket of people who are being asked to fill out or go check this thing out. But also, just like we did for that survey, we need to think about where do the people hang out. So go back in the workbook, you made a list of where the people hang out. This is all coming full circle. So you need to go back to that list 'cause you've already done the work, refer to it, and go post in those places. Of course, with Facebook groups, obey the rules 'cause group leaders are being very strict these days, but if you're not allowed to post like self-promotional links and things, maybe contact the group owner and see if they'll post it on your behalf as something that's beneficial to the community. Post on Twitter with the appropriate hashtag, or maybe your local Seattle community of people in your neighborhood have like a Twitter thing that they all follow, and there's a leader on Twitter. I know in my neighborhood in New York, I follow this one guy on Twitter 'cause I know he's the financial district guy, he's my go-to guy. So if there is a trusted authority, a leader, someone, see if they would post it for you. Maybe you could get someone, like a popular YouTube person to, obviously, you'll not post it on YouTube, but they probably have other channels as well. Maybe they could email, maybe they could tweet. Instagram, you get the idea. Quora, we didn't mention this one earlier, but Quora's like a question and answer website, and I would just go to Quora and see if anyone has asked, like, does anyone know any good lawn mowing people in Seattle? Chances are, there's probably a question like that, and you could go post and say, actually, we're starting this. I see this all the time with entrepreneurs, posting a link to their idea or beta version on Quora as a solution. You get the idea. Definitely make use of this because it's going to help expand your reach far beyond your inner circle of friends and family, which I know I've told you not to tell, you're gonna do it anyway, so go do this as an extension because when you can connect with a local community person, the trusted neighborhood voice, that's when you're gonna get people that are more qualified, specific for our lawn mowing example. So we've already covered this. We are going to go back to the right people. And then what happens after people start signing up? So let's assume best case scenario. You have put up the landing page. People are telling other people about it and you're starting to get emails, and you think, this is awesome. So we're not gonna plan a launch party, but it is a reason to celebrate. And I include this because when you're an entrepreneur, I think it's so easy to just keep going on to the next thing, look at your task list, think, oh my gosh, I now have these 70 things still to do. But you have to take a moment to still celebrate all the little wins that you have along the way because, I'm the worst at this, I fail to celebrate, but when you do it gives you the momentum to keep going. And you can look back and you can see, oh wow, this week has been rough, but last week we had these wins. So celebrate those wins, especially if you're getting those email addresses from people. 'Cause when you get that email, like we've said, it's this official sign of intent, interest. People are willing to give up their email, then they're probably very, very warm as a potential customer. But the ultimate validation is when we can we can get them to give their credit card. So maybe we're not at the point like I was, where I was able to say, pay me $39 and come to my workshop. So how do we go about trying to get people to pay? And a question that comes up a lot is, how do I sell something before it's ready? A lot of people feel like planner woman, if she's decided she's gonna make a planner now and she's kind of done some research and decided that's what she's going to do, if she doesn't have the planner in hand, a lot of entrepreneurs think, well, I can't sell something that I don't have yet. And I think that's kind of an old-school mentality because just look at things like Kickstarter. Half the things are not ready yet, they don't exist. It's just mock-ups, it's just 3D-printed graphics, it's not the actual tangible thing that's waiting to be shipped in an office. So you kinda just need to go over that. But, well, you also don't need to be ready because I think a lot of people have this mentality of well, I can't ask for money 'cause I don't have the product, or because I don't have a great website yet. We don't have a demo video ready yet. We don't have a Facebook page, it's not ready, or we only have a hundred followers, it's going to look cheesy. Or, our Instagram isn't ready. And people put off launching and trying to get money until they feel like they are ready. But these are all distractions to making money. And we're not saying that in a selfish or greedy way, we're saying that because these are going to cost you money. So don't go do these things first. Let's see if people trust you enough to purchase whatever it is without all this extra fluff stuff, that is important, but not right now 'cause we are lean, validating people. So back to the lawn mowing. We're building what people want, we're staying simple. We are building a simple way to find, schedule, and pay for lawn care professionals to mow their lawn so we as the people don't have to do it. And that's from our research. This is our little product statement, mission statement, thesis, if you will. So how do we execute this? We need to keep it super simple and leverage those free tools that we talked about before. So thinking about this a little more, remember I said we need to focus on those verbs, focus on the tasks, kinda like a storyboard? What is the flow in this experience of getting your lawn mowed? So I wanted to just model this out so we can see an exact example. So schedule lawn mowing. How are all the ways that we could do that? We could just do it through email. I mean, let's be honest, we could just go back and forth in Gmail. That's manageable even if you have 50 people or so, you can deal with that. So Gmail, text messaging even. I mean, you could be doing this over Messenger, texting, whatever communication tools you have. You could then be, let's say, people are emailing you and you say, oh yeah, we mow on Thursdays and Fridays at these times. Once someone agrees to a time, then you send them a calendar invite as the confirmation. Or maybe you're also tracking in a Google spreadsheet or something. But scheduling, it's easily done. And notice we're not using any scheduling software, like Calendly or anything like that just yet 'cause I wanted to keep it really cheap, really simple, off the bat. So that's how we would schedule. Then how do we confirm? Again, we're using email or the built-in notifications from Google Calendar, things like that. Then we mow and we collect payment. Well, just three examples. There's tons more other ways to collect the payment. Of course, you could do cash. I think that's full of friction though because change and all this. People often don't have cash these days. So payments and then follow up. After you mow the lawn, you probably wanna send them a thank-you email or something like that. You also maybe wanna check in and see do they like it, et cetera. Maybe get some feedback, but also maintain communication. So you can say, when do you want your lawn mowed next? Or should we put this on a schedule for this summer? Things like that. So we want to be able to look at our idea and figure out what tools we're gonna use to do this all. And when you hack it together with all these tools, and notice, we didn't build anything. We didn't spend a dollar building anything because we used all this stuff that exists already. And so this is gonna let you test the whole entire customer process, the experience, if you will, the journey. There are many words for it, but this is going to let you test. And this is important because then you can figure out all of the little quirks that come up along the way. Maybe in the booking process you start to realize, wow, people have a lot of questions, like, do you mow when it's raining? Or do you do this? What is your lawn mower powered by? Like, electric, gas, I don't know, I don't have a lawn. We all know that now, but you would probably realize at different points in the process where you need to maybe tailor it so if you were to build this out with a developer in like a nice app or something, you would then know the exact requirements because one problem that a lot of people have when they hire a developer to build them something, the requirements are not clear. And so this process of you doing it on your own helps you get specific about those requirements. So maybe if we did this manually for a little bit, then we would realize on the lawn booking page we need to not only just ask for the time, the date, but maybe special information or special criteria. So do you want the front yard and back yard? Do you want, like how long do you want the grass, or short do you want the grass mowed. All these questions, should we mow around the pathways? What about the pool? All these things, these questions that could come up. So you wouldn't know that until you had tested this out. And it's gonna be a lot cheaper to find out all that customization and requirements if you can kinda learn it as you go through this process. And then as people become interested and you start to see that you're having real customers, people want their lawn mowed, and this workflow is working that you've hacked together of the booking, the payments, the follow up, et cetera, then you can start to automate some of it. So maybe down the road we realize, okay, this is working. People are paying for us. Let's automate this part, the scheduling of the appointments, and let's use whatever scheduling tool you want. And then you can take that manual effort out from you, and you can have this system doing it, or at least cut down the amount of time that you need to be putting into it, which is really, really great. And then maybe some of these are still happening automatically, but maybe a few months or weeks later you realize that, okay, for follow up and feedback after someone's lawn is mowed, we could actually just go into ConvertKit and we could have a sequence, so a group of emails, that automatically get sent out after we know someone's lawn has been mowed. So we won't get into the technicality of it, but let's say I mowed John's lawn. Maybe then John gets a tag of like, lawn mowing complete or something like that. And then John automatically starts to get follow-up email number one. Thanks, John, hope you liked your lawn. Let us know if you have any comments. Talk to you soon. Then four days later, hey, John, just checking in, got any questions or something like that. Maybe 10 days later, hey, John, we're kinda booking up for the summer, do you wanna lock in a schedule, like get your lawn every two weeks or something? And you can see that takes a lot of work off of you and helps engage the person further down the road. Zapier, Zap-ier or Za-pier, depending on how you say it, it's another great tool to automate a lot of things in your business. We're not gonna get into it, but I highly recommend checking that out. And that's how you can start to take this very manual process and then start to automate it. Again, you don't have to hire anyone to do all this 'cause you can easily set up a Calendly or set up a scheduling once or something like that. So we wanna go to all those people who gave us their email, and then we wanna ask for the sale. Because now that we have the plan of what we're going to do, once we are asking people for their money, now we can actually go ask for the money. So how do we do that? I think one of the best ways to do that initially is to get on the phone with people, for many reasons, but I think it helps build trust. And email just gets so busy these days and people forget, whereas a phone call, it's an appointment, it's more of a commitment. So what I would recommend if I was Mike, I would be trying to get on the phone and get those first sales from the people that filled out my survey. Because if people won't pay for this, then Mike doesn't have a business. It's just something he should do to be nice to his neighbors and feel good about it, and not think he's gonna turn this into a business. So for Mike, Mike needs to start going back to everyone who gave their email, and he needs to just ask them on the phone, hey guys, and it's all about framing, right? Hey, thank for filling out that survey. So we're getting ready to launch. Probably gonna be launching around June, July 12th, or something like that, and we're offering first-time customers 50% off. And then tell the times you're available and see what they say. Here's a tip though, you should go back to your research and look at some of the obstacles and goals and values that people have because if you can address some of those as you're having conversations with people, that again is going to make them feel like they are being spoken to in their language and it's gonna help you stay on topic so you're talking about the benefits, not just all the features of your wonderful lawn business.