Mage Pages
Make your own simple landing pages to turn visitors to leads
Landing pages are critical to the success of a business because they help targeted prospects become leads instead of fleeting visitors. We needed this for our own company and decided to make it a SaaS for others.
My AppSumo campaign launched for the Landing Pages on September 30th. In the first 24 hours I had 277 views of my page and 1 purchase. I have two real users and one I consider a real client since he's not a long-known friend and I worked out a deal for earnings as an affiliate via using my landing pages (instead of the typical $36 annual flat fee).
This AppSumo client is the first "I did not personally talk with the person and they signed-up and paid in a completely automated way". So it's a big milestone for the Landing Page Services.
I excitedly waited for the new user's login. I crafted a special welcoming email to let them know they are the first AppSumo client and I'd give them white-glove treatment. Drat, they haven't made their account yet. Paid for it, but 16 hours after purchase and they still haven't logged in to my site to create an account and make a landing page. sigh I guess my welcome email and first Review / Testimonial will have to wait.
My first real client for the Landing Page Services is now live. I created the content based on his site and my reviewing his competition. I went the extra mile since he's my first client and I'm hoping for a good testimonial from him when the Landing Page starts bringing him new leads and clients.
Today I start promoting his page!
https://extragood.info/google-calendar-scheduling
Let me know what you think.
On Monday I received an asked-for roasting but it was really harsh. Some of the items listed were definitely valid and I had those all fixed within 24 hours. For example they did not like that the domain was extragood.info but the welcome email came from [email protected]. Plus the admin site for setting up the pages was on the programminglabs.com domain.
So I changed the outbound emailing to use [email protected] and moved the admin site to the extragood.info domain. No biggie.
Some of the other complaints I found overly harsh. "All images look dated" in the admin site. There are only two images but the roaster talked about it for 3 paragraphs in very harsh and insulting ways. They could have just said "you have two graphics I don't like which should be updated to something more trendy". I think sometimes roasters go overboard just to make their content more exciting for others to read.
Changing two image to be more trendy... no problem. I've sent that task to my UI person. Moving on.
This morning I generated 5,000 unique promo codes for AppSumo to promote my Landing Page Services. I'm offering a 33% discount on my regularly low price. I wanted to change it to 50% off but it looks like the deal is locked-in and they didn't respond to my tech support request. If they do, I'll lower it to 50% since it's only 5,000 and would be an interesting experience. They say it will be 1 to 3 days for them to approve then it will launch.
I'm really curious to see how much business this generates. AppSumo boasts 1M page views monthly and since I signed up with them I must admit they do a good job of emailing everyone promotional information about the SaaS being sold on their website.
Before I tracked outbound emails but now that has been enhanced dramatically. I switched to using PostmarkApp for outbound emailing.
I added this feature of PostmarkApp integration into Wizards Toolkit so it is available to all, but for Landing Page Services this is especially powerful.
This will make it possible to track which emails were sent but not opened, and whether links were clicked within the emails. Plus it will allow analytics on what percentage of emails bounced, were opened, time between delivery and opening, time between opening and clicking on a link, etc.
I talked with a founder last week that has an excellent SaaS but he confessed that marketing was not his strength. His SaaS handles online scheduling of meetings.
I made him an offer that I would build him three landing pages using my SaaS and marketing experience in exchange for me being his first affiliate marketer. To sweeten the deal I also offered to use (and pay for) my team to make him some professional quality videos which we'll use on the landing page and he can re-use for other purposes. He agreed and we're both very excited about the deal!
Yesterday I spent 5 hours researching his competition and outlining the first landing page to target the Google Calendar niche. I have my UI expert fine-tuning the editorial and design now.
Previously only posted on Twitter which was fruitless. I just don't have enough Twitter followers for that to work for me.
Today starting marketing by posting to indiehackers.com in the "Landing Page" group, reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur, SaaSHub, bip.so, BetaList and killerstartups. Killerstartups says it could be 60 to 90 days before the listing goes live unless I am willing to pay... which I'm not.
It will be interesting to see what generates the most traffic. I am purposely not submitting to ProductHunt or others yet. I want to get some initial feedback first.
It's amazing how long it took to make a 2 minute video. I spent all day writing the script, deleting test data, filming, and blurring sensitive data.
It was a great process though. I found several areas that I realized could be greatly enhanced with just a couple hours of coding. For example I made the Summary Analytics on the Dashboard allow entering of any date range instead of just defaulting to "lifetime" of the statistics. I added some filtering options on the Visitor List also.
The video is finally finished and trimmed down to be minimal amount of time to show all the cool-factor metrics and charts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXRPTqBoDZY
Finally, at long last I am ready to start marketing!
I completed the CRON job to automatically email users a Summary Analytic Report. Each user can choose to receive these nightly, weekly, monthly or never.
Each landing page also has an option to receive new leads immediately, nightly or never. I combined the CRON job so users will only receive one email with all the information and only on their schedule.
After reviewing my competition in the Landing Page arena, I created a YouTube video discussing what Landing Pages are, what technology was used to create a Landing Page SaaS, the cost of the technology, and how long it took to create the SaaS.
Plus I went over our business launch plan and pricing models.
In a way it is a strange video because it is telling all the how and why but I guess that is the current "Build in Public" trend.
I just posted the video everywhere. It will be interesting to see what kind of response I get from it.
