In this episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast, I explore the science behind building landing pages that truly convert. I cover eight key components, including compelling headlines, strong calls-to-action, the value of social proof, and clear personal intros. Designed for course creators, membership site owners, and coaches, this episode offers practical tips to boost the performance of lead magnet pages. I also highlight timeless marketing principles that continue to deliver results. Tune in for practical advice and proven strategies to create landing pages that work.
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- Master the Essentials – Effective landing pages rely on eight core elements, including captivating headlines, action-driven CTAs, and trust-building social proof.
- Simplicity Wins – Strategic yet simple marketing principles often outperform complicated tactics and continue to deliver strong results over time.
- Tailor for Your Audience – Whether you’re a course creator, coach, or membership owner, optimizing your lead magnet page with practical, audience-focused strategies is key to higher conversions.
If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
Connect with Teresa on Website, (Grow, Launch, Sell), Sign up to Teresa’s email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook
Transcript
Teresa: Creating a great lead magnet is one thing, but your landing page needs to attract people to actually download it. And I don’t know whether you know this, but there is actually a science behind a highly converting landing page, and in today’s episode I’m gonna break down the eight essential elements that you need to include.
From headlines that talk directly to your perfect customer to call to action buttons that actually want to be clicked. You are gonna want to make notes for this episode.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast with me your host, Teresa Heath, Wareing , as always, I hope you are having a great start to your week now.
One of the things that I do in my Grow Launch Sell program is people are able to submit their landing pages to me, their sales pages, their lead magnet pages, and I will go through their funnel and I will actually record myself going through it, and then I will be commenting and making suggestions and telling tweaks and changes.
One of the things that are really important to me in my business is that I. Have a business where it’s higher touch than I used to think. I would love a business where I [00:02:00] sold thousands of people in a course or something like that. And actually I don’t want that at all because one thing I love to do is to be able to make immediate changes for people or help people.
As closely as possible. And in the Grow Launch Sale program, that’s exactly what I do. I give them six months of support, and part of that six months support is I literally go through their stuff and look at their stuff and go, tweak this, change this, do this. And that is really, really important to me because you can buy every course in the world, but without someone looking at your individual stuff and taking into consideration your audience and your.
Offer and all that sort of good stuff. It’s hard to actually know whether the thing that you are learning is the thing for you or is gonna work for you and your audience. Anyway, with all that being said, this has kind of spurred me on to think about this week’s episode and what I wanted to talk about because like I said, one of the things I do is literally look at people’s landing pages and I love it.
And for me it’s really easy ’cause I can see immediately where. Why people aren’t [00:03:00] opting in or why people aren’t necessarily understanding or why they’re falling away. And I thought what I would do in today’s episode is I would walk you through, and I know this is a bit tricky, so we’re gonna take it slowly, but I’m gonna walk you through what makes up a good landing page.
And what I would love you to do. Maybe like listen to this for you listening, and then maybe the next time you are sat at your desk, put this on and look at your landing page while I’m talking to you. And therefore, while I’m telling you the things that should be in different places and what you should do, then you can actually do a kind of little audit on your own landing page.
And the other thing reason I wanted to do this is because back on two weeks ago, episode 3 96 yes, we’re very close to episode 402 away. In fact, episode 396 I talked about the lead magnet, do’s and don’ts. So I talked about actually the physical lead magnet, and I thought it’s all well in good, having a really good lead magnet.
But if you have a terrible landing page, then people aren’t gonna get to that lead magnet. So I wanted to break [00:04:00] down what it is that you need to consider and you need to look at on your landing page. So let’s get started. Like I said, if you’ve got your landing page in front of you when you’re doing this, awesome.
If not, then just listen away and I’m sure there’ll be key things you can take away. And it’s surprisingly simple. This isn’t. Massive and difficult. It’s just a formula. And this is the thing, like I don’t say these things ’cause it’s nice and I like to look at the page that way. This is what works. So let’s look at the top of the page.
So if you’re looking at the top of your lead magnet page above the fold, and if you don’t know what I mean by above the fold, it’s basically the point in which a website disappears and you have to scroll. So anything above the fold is what I see immediately. And everything I’m about to tell you in this first section should be above the fold in an ideal world.
So the very first thing that you need is an attention grabbing headline, and it really does need to grab my attention. Now. Above that, you could always have the words free download, freebie. [00:05:00] Free audio, whatever your lead magnet is. So you could have, and in my head I’m imagining the free download or free masterclass or whatever it is in smaller text and then in bigger text, we want your headline.
In your headline. There’s two ways to go in this way number one is you use a specific benefit driven headline, or the second way in which you can use your headline is you go with a pain driven headline. Okay. So a benefit driven headline might look like, do you want, I don’t know, I’m gonna make things up as I go here, but do you want more engagement on your Instagram posts in 30 days?
Do you want to double your sales in six months? Like, I’m literally just using random things here. But basically it’s like, what is the transformation they’re looking for? What is the benefit they’re looking for? So that’s a really good start for your headline, is to put in a benefit driven headline. Now some people prefer to put in a pain driven [00:06:00] headline.
Now, where this works really well is, let’s say, and I see this a lot with, with mindset people, where they’re talking about, you know, stop imposter syndrome now, which would be a benefit. However, I. They might not know they’ve got imposter syndrome. They might not even know what the word imposter syndrome means.
So in cases like that, starting with a pain driven headline is much more effective because they will know where they are. They’ll know the pain that they’re in right now. They might not know the thing that’s gonna help them get to the benefit, and they might not know what the benefit is, even though they might just go, well, I don’t wanna feel like this.
But they’re not entirely sure what they wanna feel like or what anything different could look like. So a pain driven headline could be things like frustrated with low sales or sick of feeling. I’m just trying to think of a mindset one, and I’m struggling off the top of my head, feeling overwhelmed or feeling anx.
I [00:07:00] wouldn’t even go with anxiety, anxious because again, they might not know that’s the thing. So what are the actual feelings? What is the thing that someone would say to you, oh, I’m so tired of feeling this thing. So like I said, pain or benefit driven. That’s your headline, not. This is my free download for whatever, whatever.
It’s like what’s gonna grab their attention. I want you to keep it concise. Try not to have too many words here. ’cause bearing in mind you want someone to see this and read it quickly. If you can include numbers or times or deadlines or whatever, that just helps it be a little bit more convincing. So like it’s, the more specific you get, the better it is.
So, for instance, the example of get three x more leads in 30 days. That’s really specific. So it’s more kind of, it’s more likely that they’ll take action on something that is specific. So benefit driven, pain driven, keep it concise, and if you can add some numbers to kind of clarify it or to quantify it, great.
So, like I said, a kind of mini headline above the headline that [00:08:00] says freebie or whatever headline. Then we want a subheading. Now your subheading needs to expand on what you’ve just said in the headline. If you’ve done a benefit-driven headline, your subheading could be a pain driven thing. Like, you know, if you have focused on the benefit, you might flip it in the subheading and and go tired of.
You know, not many sales or whatever, it is you can also use the subheading to look at initial objections and to overcome them. So let’s say you do a lead magnet on wanting to feel more peace. You could then, in your subheading, put something like. Without having to meditate for 30 minutes or something where the objection, you know, for instance, like I could do something, so let’s go with the three times more leads.
In 30 days, you might put, without selling your soul to the devil, like you might wanna think of what is an objection to someone thinking of that [00:09:00] thing. Like, okay, yeah, you say that, but what is the objection and can you put that in your subheading Also? You can reinforce some urgency or in some importance of that situation.
So like whatever the kind of pain is, you know, you could talk about the urgency of wanting to stop it. So you’ve got mini headline of freebie or whatever type you’re on top headline, subheading. Then, so this tends to be, if you imagine on the left hand side of the page, that’s where all those headings are, underneath those headings.
I tend to have a call to action and I’m gonna talk about calls to action on their own, because this is just general, you know, things about calls to action. So I’ll, I’ll do that in a bit. So then on the right hand side, so imagine all that text is on the left hand and on the right hand side, I want you to have an image of the lead magnet itself.
Now people are very visual and they like to see what they’re going to get. So I want you to mock up. A image of what that lead magnet might look like. If you’re [00:10:00] listening to this and you are in the Grow Launch Sale program, then I have provided all the mockup templates for you. You don’t need to do that.
You can just go and get them from the program, but you need that. I need to see what am I actually going to get? So a found out image or a scrolling image on a, you know, laptop or whatever. You need to be able to show me what is the thing that I’m going to download, even though I’m not downloading a physical thing, I’m downloading a digital thing, I still want to see what I’m getting.
Don’t worry about people. Like you’re not gonna show them every inch of your lead magnet. You’re just gonna show them a little bit of it so they can see and get an idea of what it is. So don’t worry about people reading the image. And therefore, and in my head, I’m like, if you wanna actually stop and read every single thing on that thing and not download it, then go you, because it tends to be teeny tiny and it they’d struggle to read it anyway.
Teresa: So all of that is above the fold. That is what I wanna see at the top of a landing page for your lead magnet. Okay. Now let’s talk about the rest of the page. Now, I guess one thing I should say is at the bare [00:11:00] minimum, that’s what I want. Absolute bare minimum. How much more you put in is kind of up to you.
I actually don’t have any, I was just thinking as I was saying this, I don’t have any hard stats on. Whether it increases downloads if you do this other bits or not. But I like to include these other bits. ’cause I think if someone is on the fence about downloading it, if they don’t know you, then we need to give them a bit more reassurance.
So the next section down, I would use that to explain a little bit more about the freebie, you’re offering. And I would do this in a bullet point form or a format, just so that it’s broken up text, this is really important. I would look at like. What are the things that they’re gonna be able to do once they’ve got the download?
What does it include? But basically you want it in an easy format so they can scan that if they wanna scan it. But this section, this next section, is just to kind of explain a bit more about the benefits of downloading the actual thing then. [00:12:00] What I also would include on this page is some kind of social proof.
So include any specific testimonials of people who have used the lead magnet. If you’ve got, you know, if you have worked with some big clients in the past or have some featured in, you might wanna include some of this on there as well. And like sometimes people put download numbers on there, like over a.
You know, 500,000 people downloaded this. I mean, we’re not there yet, but we might be. So yeah. So you want some kind of social proof on there where. It basically says, look, this is worth doing because this is good. So even including just some general social proof, I think is really important on these landing pages.
But again, you don’t have to do loads. Just one or two is fine. And then the last thing I would say that you want on this page is an introduction to you, because in an ideal world, the people coming to this are not people who know and love you because this is one of the main points of having lead magnet is getting new people onto your list.
So you want to basically [00:13:00] have something on there that says this is who you are. You want an image of you. So. I’m sorry. If you don’t have one and you don’t like it, you need to put an image of you on there. It’s building that know, like, and trust factor. You want to keep it short, no, I don’t want more and peace.
I don’t want your about page, I just want a paragraph about what makes you qualified to teach me the specific thing that you are teaching me. So you might have a kind of a, an about you or a kind of paragraph that you use to introduce you, but I want you to read it and go with the lead magnet in mind.
Does that convince someone why? I’m really good to teach ’em the specific thing. So where you can and where possible, I want you to tweak it to go with the lead magnet that you are actually doing. Okay, so that’s it. That’s basically the page. Now the other thing you’re going to have at the bottom of the page is your call to action.
So let’s focus for a second on creating clear call to actions. So the first thing I would suggest, and again, [00:14:00] this isn’t because I like it, this is because it’s proven. Use a contrasting color for your call to action buttons, and I would suggest you use the same contrasting color. So let’s say your page is predominantly red and blue.
Then you might wanna use a yellow for the call to action buttons. But every call to action button has the yellow in it. Obviously, I’m not saying use yellow, I’m just saying use a contrasting color. So contrasting colors for your calls to action buttons. Write action orientated buttons. So get my thing now, grab your whatever now.
Now what person you wanna put it in is up to you. So if you wanna put it in first person or third person, that’s entirely up to you. So you could say, grab your download or get my download, however you wanna say it, and obviously make sure that’s the same throughout the whole page. But the important key thing is it’s the action orientated word that inspires them.
It kind of. In their head makes ’em go. Okay. Yeah, like they’re taking action. And again, [00:15:00] like make sure that you’re positioning a call to action at the top, above the fold. And then depending on how many of these sections you’re putting in and how you display your page, you may want a few different call to actions, but I would end with a call to action now.
When I say call to action, you may or may not have the form on the page, so the form is the bit where they’re gonna fill in their name and their email. If you have the form on the page. Personally, I would say put the form towards the bottom, although weirdly I was looking at some of my pages the other day and there at the top, so dunno what I was thinking there.
Anyway, I would normally suggest put the form at the bottom and then the call to action buttons will jump to the bottom of the page. Now if you’re saying thinking, I dunno how to do that, Teresa , there’s a, I’m positive that whatever system you’re using to create your landing pages on. When you click the button, there will be an option to say, take them to wherever [00:16:00] or to another place on this page.
And that’s what I do. So you have kind of like sections of the pages. So I will call a section, call to action or form or whatever. And when I’m doing it, I will say, jump this to the form page. So, call to actions needs to be really clear. Need to be scattered throughout the page, but you don’t need too many on a lead magnet page because it’s not gonna be that long.
You need a contrasting color and you need those action words, and then whether you click them to a form that pops up and opens up, or whether it’s a form on the page. Ask for essential information only. I only ever ask for name and email. That’s it. The more you ask, you are literally reducing the percentage of people opting in.
So if you are asking for three other things, then you are literally taking down by a third each time, every time you ask for something. So keep it short and sweet, now. If you want more information, one of the things I’m toying with is [00:17:00] whether I start taking people’s WhatsApps. Now, if I wanted that, I would probably, I might experiment doing it as a name, email and WhatsApp, however you might want to do it once they’ve submitted that.
So you might want to take them from submitting the form from their name and email to going, great. Can I just have a little bit more information about you? And then asking them to do it. After they’ve already submitted, because by that point they’ve already opted in. And then it’s an option as to whether they want to fill in the rest and if they don’t, not problem if they do.
Brilliant. So keep the form to a minimum and that will maximize the number of people actually doing it. I want to talk briefly about the layout of your page. Now, I know not everyone’s designers and neither am I. However, it is really important that it looks. There’s like attractive as I go to the page and there are certain things that are really going to help with this.
So first off, simple, not really a design thing, but really simple, but very important. Remove the [00:18:00] headers and the footers and any other links. So there shouldn’t be any other link on that page other than the form to fill in, other than the button that says fill in the form. There should be no other link.
That’s the first thing. No header, no footer. Because what happens is the whole point of a landing page is they should be able to do nothing else but that on the landing page. The second thing is I want you to break up your text with images. Now, normally it would be in my stuff, it’s like. You know, imagine you’re looking at the page as a whole.
It would be text, one side image, the other. The next section would be image, one side text the other. So I’m almost alternating which side the image goes on. Don’t have any text other than a maybe one line of subtext that goes across the whole page. No one likes to read well, and they won’t. That’s the truth.
If you have texts that stretches across the whole page, they won’t read it. So that’s why I tend to do an image. And [00:19:00] and text to the side. That’s why we use things like bullet points. That’s why we break things up with headlines and sub headlines and titles and page breaks and all this kind of thing. So make sure you’re chunking it up and you are not doing big streams of text.
Sometimes having different fonts can help, but I’m a little cautious to go down that route with you in case like some people will just go brilliant and use 36 fonts. Please don’t do that because then it’s really hard to read as well. So make sure you are breaking up those texts with images. Try and create some white space around things.
Try not to have things too close. That helps as well. And the other thing, check mobile devices. So make sure. How it looks on mobile. Now, I’ve been caught with this many, many, many times where an image doesn’t look right or you know, the worst thing that happens, not the worst thing. It sounds like it was stressful.
It’s not that bad. But one of the things that happens to me is when I. Use an [00:20:00] existing landing page and I duplicate it. ’cause that’s the beauty of once you’ve created a good format, then you just duplicate it, swap out the images and texts. I duplicate it, and then I forget to check the mobile version. And the mobile version is a completely different page because in most systems, and I obviously use Kajabi.
Well, I say obviously, if you’ve never listened to a podcast episode with me before, you might not know I use Kajabi, but I use Kajabi and I love it. And one of the things that they have there is you literally have a, you know, they duplicate everything onto a mobile, but if something doesn’t look right, you can hide it from the mobile version and you can have an image or text or whatever just for the mobile version.
So sometimes. Most time it’s like a hodgepodge of all of it. But yes, make sure you check the mobile because a lot of people are going to be checking off a mobile. Okay. Like I said, that’s not necessarily the easiest episode. If you do get chance to sit and listen to this while looking at your own page, I am going to recap the main points.
So if [00:21:00] you aren’t in front of your screen, then hopefully you’ll remember some of these main points. Then hopefully that will help with your conversions. Okay, so top of the page, above the fold, we want attention grabbing headline, a subhead, and like I said, a mini headline that maybe says, free download, free masterclass, whatever it is, and an image showing me the thing that they’re going to get, and a call to action button that’s above the fold.
Then as we come down the page, you can include. Bullet points about the benefits of downloading it, what they’re gonna get when they download. Again, remember, I don’t want this across the whole page. Give me another image. Give me just a stock image. It doesn’t matter really at this point. You want some social proof if possible, you want some introduction to you and an image of you.
But again, keep it short and then. Your call to actions need to be contrasting colors. They need to be action orientated words, and they need to go to a form, whether it’s on the page or it pops up, that asks for very simple information to help [00:22:00] people want to fill it in. I really hope this episode has given you some really good practical information about how to create these landing pages.
One thing I am discovering. Not even discovering I knew this, but one thing that is being reinforced to me constantly is this isn’t like just nice to haves. These are very strategic marketing things that we do and these don’t change. Like, you know, with the introduction of ai, with all of that sort of stuff, it doesn’t change these rules, these rules stand.
They are the same rules when I learned them 10 years ago as they are today. So these things won’t ever go wrong with you. They will always kind of help you with those downloads and help people opt in. Okay? Like I said, I really hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. Next week we’re back with an interview, which I think you’re gonna really enjoy, but that’s all I’m gonna tell you.
And then it’s episode 400, and I’ve got something a bit special for you. So anyway, thank you so much for listening today. I hope you have an awesome rest of your week. I will see you then.
