FreeTrain
Learn to love freelancing
We launched our free course on the foundations of freelancing this week (https://freetrain.co/courses/freelance-foundations/).
The landing page has been up for a while, but we’ve fleshed our the details of the course, finished refining the lessons, added a quiz to the end, and built in assignments that can be answered while taking the course or shared with the wider FreeTrain community (https://freetrain.co/community/)
The idea is to use the free course to drive more sign ups, help populate the community, and signpost to premium courses and resources.
Taking a look at the list of signups to the FreeTrain community (https://freetrain.co/members/) and we now have 100 members. Discussions on the community form (https://freetrain.co/community/) are increasing too, but need to improve the onboading process for new members so they initiate discussions or introduce themselves to the community.
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Hey Ben,
I like this idea a lot.
Nice landing page, but I think you would benefit from simplifying it. Here are my thoughts:
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Menu Bar:Too much for new users.
If I'm visiting your site, I want to get to the value right away. About, Contact and Blog are a little unnecessary here. Maybe move them to the footer, or make them accessible from links on the landing page (below the fold).
i.e. You've already split your website into "community", "courses", "resources" (shop & tools), and I think that would be perfect for your top bar. The rest is creating too much choice & confusion.
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Hero Content:"Learn to love freelancing"
"Love Freelancing"
FreeTrain empowers freelancers through courses, resources and a community that enables productivity and growth.
I would focus more on benefits than the how, here.
"FreeTrain empowers freelancers like you to increase productivity, learn best practices, and grow your business. "
(focus on what your customers want here)
Join thousands of freelancers learning how to set freelance foundations, find freelance clients and build the freelance business of your dreams.
Too much text, IMO. It's a free account, I don't think so much selling is required, it overwhelms the user. I would include that below the fold.
Social proof is better IMO:
"Join 7,432 freelancers today!"
Create your free account 👉
The finger pointing tells me to look away from the button, I would remove it (might just be me, though!)
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I would make similar changes to the rest of the landing page to make your offering more clear and straight forward (i.e. explain the features through the benefits they offer the user, with sign-up buttons after each)
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But is it 7432 members or 100???
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7432 on the mailing list, 100 signed up to the community that soft launched a few weeks ago.
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Thanks for the feedback @sobbuh - I appreciate it. I’vd taken onboard your comments and slimmed down the top bar, edited the hero content to focus on benefits / social proof, and will work through the rest of the landing page to do the same. Thanks again, any other comments welcome.
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As a community platform, getting real discussion going among our members is vital. Today we had perhaps our first meaningful question from a user go out to the FreeTrain community without any prompting our side: https://freetrain.co/discussion/the-right-quotations-as-senior-digital-marketing-manager/
We made sure to provide a valuable answer and will be encouraging other community members to do the same, to try and add further value to the answer and demonstrate that questions will be answered- and answered well.
We were only using a text-based logo for FreeTrain, but saw a mention of Logo Taco (https://www.logotaco.com/) and now have a slicker logo. Uploaded across the site and slowly working our way through updating our other brand presences. Looks good on the site: https://freetrain.co/ - and we won't change the logo for a long time now!
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Looks great ! Thanks for the share.
One of the aims of FreeTrain.co is to migrate my most popular blog posts on freelancing and migrate them to a website that is independent of my personal brand.
Because the freelance articles are tied to my personal name, I often get a lot of random enquiries from people new to freelancing and I just don't have time to answer them all.
Answering people's questions about freelancing was why I started blogging in the first place, but that doesn't solve the issue!
Moving to a less personal site means I will get less individual enquiries and can instead direct them to paid courses or the membership community.
Now the landing page for FreeTrain is up and running and I've signed up for Podia, I've added redirects to the most popular posts about freelancing from my personal site through to the FreeTrain site.
The most popular post gets around 60,000 organic search hits a year, so this should mean a steady stream of potential customers visiting the FreeTrain site from the start.
My personal site got about 600 visits a day at its peak in the past 12 months without any updates from me, but this has dwindled to 300 hits a day.
I know I'll need to do some SEO work on the FreeTrain site to increase those visits again and I'll report back on progress in a month's time (note to self...)
With the FreeTrain.co landing page live, I needed a platform to power the online training courses and other digital content I'd offer members.
I've had experience of using Gumroad before, but changes to the platform and the course features not being that great, I looked elsewhere.
Other communities I've seen have even rolled their own membership platforms, using Wordpress plugins or building in Ruby on Rails.
I didn't want to spend time on building and wanted to focus first on marketing and getting customers through the door, so I was looking for a platform that was ready to go out of the box.
I eventually signed up to Podia (link below) after reviewing a few platforms. Their platform handles everything from digital downloads through to emails and payment.
After a free trial, I signed up to the annual plan - my first major expense - so now I've definitely bit the bullet and need to stat earning that outlay back by gaining some customers.
Bought the domain freetrain.co, added Wordpress and found a free template - Hestia.
Hestia is perfect as it comes with an intuitive builder for the home page, with clearly laid out sections, so didn’t take long to get the site together.
Added images from Unsplash and drafted initial copy for the landing page.
Still need to replace the placeholder photos and testimonails of people on the site, but will do this once I start to get feedback from the beta testers.
Will be evolving the landing page and will seek feedback, but this has taken 3 hours max so far and I only want to spend another hour max before launching.
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I wish you the best. I didn't start driving revenue until I converted my free to paid courses (still affordable). There is a segment of the population who doesn't "buy-in" unless they paid for it.
Thanks for the insight - we’re still finishing the first paid courses, so will consider switching as you did once we have a few of them live.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Thanks @ndorrell! Trying to keep it clean and have spent time on the value propositions. This is only the free course, but will aim to follow the same formula for our paid courses that will be coming soon. Feel free to take the course and feedback on the content as well ;)