Page Builder Lessons

Page Builder Lessons: Introduction

How many landing page builders does one need? At last count I had bought at least 4.  I am not sure I am the right person to ask as I have a bought a few over the last few years and not really got to grips with any of them – until recently that is. Lack of success is often a good way to learn – I do have some page builder lessons. I am not sure if I can even remember why I bought some of them but here goes. First a bit of a step back in time.

From Clunky HTML to WordPress Blogs

My website building journey started with HTML. I used to write an annual holiday season web page. It was a few words and a few pictures – all in HTML. Who remembers Geocities?  I then volunteered to build a website for a friend who runs a cycle touring business here in Australia – Cycle Across Oz. Again I started with HTML and built the first one for the 2004 tour from Perth to Melbourne. It was clunky HTML and we did not have to worry about mobile responsive until the smartphone came along. That move to smartphone pushed me to switch from clunky HTML to using a web builder. Following some guidance from one of my Internet Marketing mentors, I used Weebly and it still works. I just last month finished the new site for the 2020 tour from Melbourne to Sydney to Melbourne.  Join us at Cycle Across Oz 2000

How about the Page Builder Lessons?

Now I have bought a ton of PLR products each with their own sales pages. I had grand ideas of a raft of products I was going to sell. The clunky HTML has always got in the way of me ever launching any of those sales pages – what a waste of money that was. I hate the way the pages looked and It was just too hard to work in HTML to make the changes – for me anyway.

My journey into Internet Marketing got me down the rabbit hole of affiliate marketing and ad space marketing. In the early days, it was possible to make an income in niche areas using “click-push-start” websites. Choose a niche (e.g., cycling) and the tool would search for content and products and make a website. The first of these push button services I bought made HTML sites. In time the push button services created WordPress sites – I have quite a few of those in my favourite niches, cycling and yoga for example. Google Panda and Penguin basically killed that opportunity as content had to be unique or unique enough. That drew me into the next iteration of WordPress blogs with more focus on customising content and integrating social media. In those days it was possible to get good results just delivering content and collecting ad revenue from Google ads – it worked for me for a while.  I have a few of those blogs too – some even have opt-in spots in the side bars.

Money Is In The List

Everyone talked about “the money is in the list” – that led me to exploring landing page builders a little more closely. I wanted to get past the clunky world of HTML and I wanted a decent page builder. Along comes a sales pitch for Instabuilder – it works as a WordPress plugin. It was an obvious choice in a time before Leadpages and Clickfunnels came along. February 2013: I bought an unlimited licence. I tried it out and for the life of me I cannot even remember one successful site. I did have it loaded on one of my blogs https://BodyweightTrainingProgram.org – I do have it there not activated and I can see a licence key. And it looks like it will work. Well I tried to log in to the member site this week – my login ID does not work and forgot password does not recognise my registration email address any more. So much for Unlimited Licence. It is an unlimited licence until the vendor fails or the vendor upgrades to a new version or a vendor changes databases – or something like that. I have not bothered to contact support to find out what has happened. I do know I could build a landing page in it on the site I have it on.

Lesson 1: Make Sure You Keep Tabs on Your Vendor and the Software Version Changes

I was introduced to Fusion HQ at an Internet Marketing training program run by my friend and mentor, David Cavanagh. Presentation was run by Leon Jay, who was co-founder. What really struck me was the real workflow nature of the tool. It was not just a builder of landing pages but an integrator of pages using conditional rules.

View page – Yes -> go to next page: No -> go to another page.

What I really liked was its drag and drop funnel building. Lay out the series of pages in a funnel and join the pages up using the conditional tabs. It also has a long list of other cool capabilities:

• manage affiliates
• run membership
• manage products
• offer coupons.
• accept payments
• use built in autoresponder (including email funnel).

The IT geek in me was hooked and I knew quite a few Internet Marketers who had built big businesses using it, including one at the training program. Of course the first offer for a discounted annual licence looked like good value especially as the tool offers a bunch of capability that I knew I could use – sometime. Well sometime never really did happen. I tried a few times and it was just too hard to get my head around all the capability and the moving parts. I attended a Fusion Dojo event a full year later in 2014 and only then did I implement anything. The tool included a number of Business in A Box templates which follow a classic sales funnel approach – lead magnet and tripwire upsell. Enough to get one started. I picked the Copywriting Business in A Box and implemented it as one of the presenters at the Dojo was Bret Thomson, a leading Australian copywriter, and it used his lead magnets. We chatted a lot and I got traction selling his Copy Sniper product he was launching at the Dojo.

The Business in a Box works. All I really had to do was update legal pages; set up an autoresponder series; organise hosting (though they do hosting as well), set up payment processing using Paypal and start marketing. That funnel still works with the occasional lead coming through and I even made some sales of the trip wire upsell. Truth be told I have not scratched the surface of what Fusion HQ can do and it does a lot. I will use it for my upcoming Copywriting Funnel – I recently committed to a 3 year renewal at a special change of owner opportunity.

Lesson 2: Buy Tools That Fit What You are Ready For

One of the other BIG ideas I had was to build a business reselling software that I was using. So each time I found some software I liked the look of I would buy the reseller rights which for the most part were not that expensive. One of those products I bought was Genius Marketing Pro which is dressed up as an All in One Marketing System with a page builder, funnel system, survey tools and an autoresponder. I could see the potential as it has a lot of what Fusion HQ has. One of the reviews said the page builder was not really drag and drop – well I tried that out after I bought it and I never did get a page built for an MLM opportunity I was working on. It just went into the too hard basket – the page builder was hard to learn.

Lesson 3: Find Proper Reviews About Ease of Use.

Now that is a nightmare lesson in its own right. It is almost impossible to find a genuine review of a product, especially a new product, using Google Search as all the people promoting products are good at SEO. They get their review pages ranked by Google and Bing and all you ever find is pages by promoters spruiking products for their own gain. At least the good news is Genius Marketing Pro is still operating as a business – so it did fall not foul of Lesson 1. I cannot say how it has been upgraded over time as I have not been using it or reselling it.

Now while I was looking through my inbox for Genius Marketing Pro, I found another landing page builder I had bought called Genius Lander. It supposedly has a scientific method built in that generates perfect structure and copy. I tried it out for one day and did not get past day one – what a waste of time and effort that was. And I am victim of Shiny Object Syndrome yet again.

Lesson 4: Use The Tools You Have Already Bought.

The sad part of the story is I was not really anywhere on the journey of The Money Is In The List – I had a bunch of failed starts or never completed projects other than a small list in the Copywriting niche based on the Business in A Box. My Internet Marketing journey feels like a real nightmare of over one hundred (100 – YES!!!!) projects and nothing really completed. My wife tells me I should be in the business of creating ideas – for other people to implement. I was. I was a management consultant.

When I started out on the Quick Start Challenge with Dean Holland I wrote that this was the Last Chance Saloon for Internet Marketing. I was going to focus in on getting one project a little further down the road than an idea just started. Well I did and took the step to becoming an Internet Profits Partner. This has a simple enough model. Find prospects to send into the Internet Profits Funnel – i.e., find the leads and build a list – and they do the rest – just like this image shows.

Now Internet Profits provides access to a page builder as part of the service. It is a white label product and all the landing pages can be cloned for one’s own list building. Well I decided not to go down that path because of Lesson 4. Maybe I could use Fusion HQ. Some time before I had bought a lifetime licence for Convertri. Its big selling points were a free form drag and drop page builder, a strong mobile responsive editing capability and lighting fast loading speeds and it is a hosted service. I chose to build the new opt-in and bridge pages in Convertri – easy to use, mobile responsive, lighting fast and hosted. I did not need all the bells and whistles of Fusion HQ as the guts of the sales funnel is operated by Internet Profits.

Lesson 5: Ease of Use and Mobile Responsive are a Big Deal

Because I had a page I could model from, the building process was a lot easier. My brain does not do creative and execution very well together. I get distracted. A good suite of templates does help as I can rely on someone else’s creative juices and then focus in on getting it to work for me. That first pair of pages took me a little while to get right as I wrestled to learn the tool. The page builder is a free form page builder. It allows you to put anything anywhere on the page. That feels like a great idea but it takes a bit of getting used to especially when one comes through the journey of using block form editors (almost all the other builders including Instabuilder and Fusion HQ). The to and fro between desktop version and mobile version also takes getting used to. Easy to use it is but not as easy to learn. Free form works better with a little structure is what I felt.  But I did get the two pages built.

My landing page was not really converting well – and I did try quite a few copy changes to drive more conversions. Time to try something different. One of my partners, Lee Coppin, shared the success he was getting with a simple Internet Profits supplied lead magnet – a free guide on Profitable Blogging. He used their white label page builder. I figured I could use Convertri and present something that looked better and worked for me. Do this – Lee’s page on the left.

Challenge set – I loaded it up, found a template, organised the image in 3D I needed in the right size and built a page. I had to make some changes to the bridge page and the autoresponder sequence to get the list side right. The whole thing took no more than an hour’s work including learning time and testing time. First launch of that new page produced one new sale from the first opt-in = winner. A key thing was to just work with the tool the way the tool works – solve the technical issues and make sure the page is pretty enough and works.

Lesson 6: Work The Way the Software Works and Functional Is A Good Enough Start

I made a video walking through the story. Rather than just talk about the stuff that works and the lessons I have learned, I decided to do a new page live. We have access to a number of lead magnets on a range of Internet Marketing topics, like list building and social media and traffic strategies. How about making a landing page for one of the other lead magnets and I get two birds with one stone – video made and a new landing page built. Watch the video and you will find how quick and easy it was (less than 10 minutes)

Resources

Convertri is a page builder first and foremost. Its strongest selling points are the load time for pages and, the easy to use editor for desktop and mobile pages. It works for me and the price point is lower than the main competitors. There is a free trial period – you will not be disappointed.

Credits