What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages | Hacker News Reader

What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages

blog.roastmylandingpage.com

684 pointsdeadcoder0904237 comments

(Rant) What a snobby, begrudging comments section. Well done to OP for writing a detailed summary of a succesful productised service that they got off the ground as well as a solid list of actionable tasks you can take to improve your own product.

They've outlined how their clients have loved the service, it's been financially successful and everyone is happy, yet all people here do is complain about a) how this is the downfall of the internet b) there's some technical or editorial minutiae of the post itself they dislike c) how they could have done it better d) what they're doing is just plain wrong or unimportant.

If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line. Infuriating.

I agree; this looks like a great service. I don't understand the objections. Thanks @ollymeakings!

It really is amazing. He's helping people improve landing pages.

It's not how to generate spam, robocalls, improve your targeted facebook ads or some other form of active marketing - it's about making your passive marketing message more effective.

I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? As with all things moderation is key and this guy is focusing on the most neutral kind of marketing out there!

> I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad.

All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At best you get language that emphasizes upsides while downplaying downsides.

There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be trusted.

> Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products?

Word of mouth.

Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces the problem of getting those first users. Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to reach someone who can actually spread it before anything will happen. So many awesome products and services die because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral word of mouth spread.

I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...

This is off topic to the main post, but wanted to thank you personally as somebody who's used saucenao pretty consistently for the last ten years, being adjacent to a lot of anime/game fandoms and even personally posting art on pixiv regularly. Such a fantastic and easy little tool. Can't even remember where I heard about it, which in some ways speaks to how good the site is.

> Word of mouth works, but can be very slow

Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is healthier for society. All this explosive never ending economic growth we see today seems pathological to me.

> Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion?

Those first users are presumed to be close to the person who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll tell other people about it if they liked it.

> my reverse image search service SauceNAO

Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites.

I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell if advertising would present conflicts of interest.

Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-level marketing schemes and social networks both do this.

I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.

> The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers.

Absolutely not, unless your business model relies on single sales.

In functioning organizations with actual products, marketing and sales are advocacy functions for the customer as much as they are revenue functions for the business. They're how you know what to make and who to target.

The point was that relying on marketing messages causes the user having to research themselves what the product is actually good at and what it isn't good at and wasting time because the company isn't upfront the products strengths and weaknesses. The product might be sufficient in the end, but marketing will very rarely tell you what the product is actually sufficient at and what it is not.

The statement wasn't about whether the product is actually good or not, though in extreme cases, yes, the product is worthless while the marketing is all rainbows and sunshine. But relying on marketing is bad for the user in nearly every case, even if the product is good.

And even if you are "one of the good guys", your users won't know that. That's why you should verify from independent sources, or do your own research.

If marketing was really a reliable source of information, reviews, samples, product trials etc. wouldn't be a thing.

You say this but ISPs deliver only a fraction of the bandwidth they advertise, SSD marketing doesn't mention the fact you're not supposed write to it too much... Drug marketing never mentions any side effects, food marketing blatantly takes advantage of the public's ignorance...

People should assume all marketing is incomplete or untrustworthy information at best.

Every piece of drug marketing I've ever seen has been accompanied by a comically long list of side-effects. What market are you seeing unregulated drug marketing in?

Even TV ads? In my country they're forced to say "consult a doctor if symptoms persist" and they already compress that as much as humanly possible. No mention of side effects at all.

> Every piece of drug marketing I've ever seen has been accompanied by a comically long list of side-effects.

In as big a font / for as long and loudly as the supposed benefits? As prominently towards the top of the page / the beginning of the clip?

Let me guess: Hardly, right?

> What market are you seeing unregulated drug marketing in?

It's not a matter of regulated vs unregulated, it's a matter of how close to ignoring the regulations one can skate. And of lobbying the regulators enough to get very-skatable regulations... In what market are you seeing marketing regulations (for drugs or any other product / service) that cover length and prominence as per my first paragraph above?

That is an ideal. Reality is a mixed bag.

I literally just saw this on the HN front page:

> Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/05/13/ads-are-im...

Yet another example.

I'd say that honest, thorough and helpful articles like this as a function of marketing lead to word-of-mouth, organic growth.

Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other form of communication. Of course it's important to have some personal ability to detect deceit, and it's also important to have systems in place to disincentivize deceit. But the fact is that, when such systems are not in place or are not sufficiently strong, of course there are many cases where people are incentivized to lie with any form of communication.

> Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other form of communication.

It's less trustworthy. A simple example of trustworthy form of communication is instant messaging with people I know. I have friends who are knowledgeable about all kinds of subjects and I absolutely trust them several orders of magnitude more than any random marketing material out there. If a friend tells me they had a great experience with some product or service, I believe them.

> I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad.

Because 99% of marketing is bad.

99% of marketERS are bad.

Only like...80% of marketing is bad.

Are you sure you're not just weighing that heavily based on how frustrated you are by a given piece of marketing and thus heavily over-counting the "bad" marketing and under-counting the huge amount of marketing that doesn't stand out and frustrate you?

I'll admit I felt a less than positive impulse from the title of the article.

Probably the 'roasting' part reminded me of bikeshedding / every yokel with their own advice that occurs surrounding a font or button color or something .... that's kinda a horrible peeve for a lot of folks and came to mind for me.

But the article and ideas seems sensible.

Landing pages are hard, I think there's a lot of magic and weird theory out there on them. I did enjoy how focused and down to earth this article / his advice was.

Anyone who felt similarly I suggest giving the article a read, it's pretty good IMO. Probably not going to turn a landing page into a customer magnet but nothing really does that and I think the advice is good / I find it useful.

I saw this in the wild (Twitter I think) before I saw it here and ignored it because of the name.

I almost did here, for the reasons stated.

I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;)

Glad I did not here.

I've had to take breaks from HN just because of how insufferable people are on here.

The only way to address that is for us all to start seeing the same insufferability in ourselves. That's why the site guidelines now include "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." — as a tentative first step in that direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Let's hope that HN is around for the rest of our lives because it will probably take at least that long.

Edit: I pinched this comment for a long explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616

Doesn’t roasting mean to unfairly and harshly criticise? Maybe that’s what people are reacting to.

I definitely hear you but at this point its kind of why I come to HN and why I tell my software students to do the same. I think you're right that if a lot of these folks had their way the only way to do anything on a computer would be through a terminal interface, but when its not taking the form of an inactionable rant that just feels like such a beautiful kind of idealism to me and a valid / real perspective shared by a lot of engineers. I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the problems of addictive online media were somehow magically sidestepped.

In any case even though I could have done without the repeated revenue stats being thrown around I think its great this guy made the extra effort to consolidate his observations and conclusions as an open resource. What more can we all do as members of this community?

That said after reading the article and a lot of the comments I did find myself wondering, if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds? And is that even something we'd want?

> ... if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds...

This is not what the OP is suggesting. He's paraphrasing a well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has a readability score of 5th grade or lower, because people are in a hurry and they don't read text on the web, they scan it. Using more complex sentence structures in this context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

A dev in my department is doing a POC to demonstrate the relationship between the quantifiable readability (albeit in Japanese) of a company’s securities filings and that company’s financial performance. That project, and the nngroup link you kindly shared make me think readability is a legitimately important consideration when designing a landing page as the OP is suggesting.

What's the (proposed) causal relationship there? Companies with clear business models can write clear notes to the Stock Exchnage, or companies that write clearly to the exchnage can communicate to the market (users investors) also clearly

(I am assuming that no-one thinks that Japanese consumers read security filings before making their weekly shop?)

like such a beautiful kind of idealism to me

dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented

This is the ideal dream state you send your students to absorb? A bunch of terminal-users obsessed with building everything in the terminal? Why indoctrinate your students into that?

Note: Reading over the above I realize it sounds antagonistic, probably because I formed everything as a question. I don't mean it to be antagonistic. It's just me not understanding where you're coming from.

if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds

Yeah, maybe. But... I'm not sure if you want my dad to be part of your idealized future, but if you do, the terminal is not going to be the way to do it

I'm all for finding ways to empower users, but how does that lead to you getting off the train at no GUIs, instead of better GUIs?

Treating the masses like children is a habit that predates the Internet. But it's not always bad. Pruning a landing page's CTA to be as succinct as possible is necessary because time is the universal currency, and we only have so much of it to spend.

> I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the problems of addictive online media were somehow magically sidestepped.

MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.

Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

> MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.

> Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

For me it was newsgroups. (Sure, I read them in a Windows-based Usenet reader, but it was the contents that were addictive, and that was all text.)

... all we're doing is roasting their landing page. I thought that would be on topic here.

That’s just because people on HN are FAR too smart to be affected by mere APPEARANCES.

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe if more people knew the bizarre way "roast" was apparently being used here, the comments would be better.

> the only way you could buy it was via the command line

Hahaha! Congrats, I actually chuckled.

Technically though, I don't think there's anything that by default is purchasable via CLI. But, yes, that's why it's funny.

Build a CLI interface to amazon. There's your million dollar idea.

amzn buy --ship fedex --address home "micro usb 6' cable"

I mean… I'd use that.

Yes, please.

Sounds good...

The hooks for Amazon Dash are likely closed as it was phased out a year after start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash

Though, it can be done through Alexa.

There's this :

https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli

But I have no idea what a bamazon database is.

Personally I don't think I'd ever want to build a product on top of a huge company's product. That way lies madness.

> f HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line

    grep "features" | sort price

Meanwhile the rest of the world make their purchase decision based on emotions, social, and smell (we need a smell API in web browsers), and prefer passively.

> If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line.

... Unironically, that would be amazing. Maybe an optional page for pictures/screenshots, but otherwise I don't see a problem with that if your audience is compatible. I mean, I don't expect everyone to go that way, but if I never had to leave my terminal I'd count it an improvement.

Ah, the contrarian dynamic strikes again:

(1) an initial wave of objections to the article;

(2) a second wave of objections to the objections;

(3) those get upvoted, so that

(4) the most popular comment becomes the one about how the site is so negative, all people do is complain, etc., producing

(5) irony!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If you study this phenomenon, the difference between (1) and (2) is not negativity, just timing. And the upvotes of (3) are negative in the same way. Negativity about negativity is not positive. It's an idempotent operation.

(Edit: I hope it's clear that I don't mean to pick on you or anyone else personally! This is a systemic problem that we're all part of—that's kind of the whole point actually.)

If we want a solution to the ambient negativity that can afflict HN threads—which we do—we need to tackle it a little more deeply. We all need to become aware of how the same negativity that we perceive in others exists in ourselves, and without cheap avoidances like "well, the others do it worse". It always seems like others do it worse; everyone experiences that. It is the chief way we avoid looking at ourselves.

If we admit that we're all just mirroring our own denied negativity to each other, we can start taking steps to a solution. Not that we'd never be negative any more—but maybe we can get less mechanical in our responses if we learn something about how the mechanism works in ourselves. Denouncing it in others doesn't work—that's how the problem recreates itself: all this disowned negativity keeps circulating through the system, when what's needed is for people to work with it internally so that it can start to shift a little.

That's why the site guidelines now include this line: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." – as a baby step in that direction. The HN community has been around for long enough that I think we can take this as a task to work on together. It would be a big step towards optimizing this place for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is what we're all here for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seems some debouncing is required :)

The mmm.pages post yesterday was really refreshing positive, until a comment floating to the top ranted about geocities style/gifs being schizophrenic, nostalgia being toxic, and real creativity = having the same cookie cutter modern web design as everyone else (now that’s irony).

But based on your comment, you either: a) were inspired by the post itself and decided to have a little fun roasting this comment; or b) need to take a vacation.

or c) dang just has their finger on the pulse and has seen this every day for years.

Small observation on this great comment :)

I noticed on twitter that the culture (at least in my bubble) valued „smartness“ over empathy. In attempt to say something „smart“ it lead to many snarky responses.

I also noticed this pattern in myself, which is why I stopped replying to tweets. (It was easier for me to stop replying than stopping to reply in a snarky way).

For twitter I think this is not only a question of community, but also a question of design (ui/ux). And how the ui/ux shapes the community.

If I ran HN, I would consider if there are any (small) UX changes in the comment flow that could improve the „well, actually“/contrarian metric.

Do you have any ideas for how that could be done on HN? What about Twitter UX in particular do you think leads to that dynamic?

Sometimes I would like to see comments divided in two sections: 1. discussion strictly about the contents of the submission and 2. all the rest, which I would call meta. Meta would be hidden by default and often would be a catch-all for many types of negative comments in type of ("the page is unreadable", "I hate marketing", "I don't know what this is"). I know that many of my comments, like this one, would go to the meta section, but sometimes when I think about it like that I decide not to write a comment. Interesting thing would be to divide karma and weigh content comments by content karma and meta comments by meta karma. The problem would be that a reply to a content comment could be meta, so maybe every thread would have its own section?

That sounds amazing!

That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff.

Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways.

This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.

I was thinking about side-votes and thought the same before I read your comment.

One question is how would you categorize them. It could be some combination of software, community input, and moderation, and there are problems with all three.

I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic).

We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Is your downweighting process driven by manual reading through threads or are there signals that draw your attention to potentially-downweight-worthy subthreads?

edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.

It's mostly manual. Readers often email us cases that need attention, though, and that's super helpful when the top subthread is a generic black hole. If you see one, and have a minute to alert us at hn@ycombinator.com, we'd be grateful! It's probably the single biggest thing moderation can do to improve thread quality, and we can't read all the threads.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It is certainly the biggest issue with the idea. I thought about having a checkbox in a reply. Also there could be a side pointing vote arrow. So if you place your comment in generic category you would only have a side- and a down- vote buttons. If your comment gets more side-votes then up-votes it becomes generic (maybe after a threshold). Also people who's comments are too often made "generic" by community or moderators would not be trusted as much on "on-topic" comment votes.

Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments.

As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do.

Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.

I have gotten so much more information reading the comments than the article.

A lot of the "meta" is useful to me.

I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones.

Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd.

I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel.

I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I.

A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me.

(More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)

Same here, but sometimes the meta is overwhelming. Most big technical discussion boards have hit the same issue: the signal/noise ratio falls with popularity, leading to excessive negativity and a lot of meta-discussion to clean up the negativity.

Maybe @dang is right that the negativity actually results from both popularity and timing of comments. That's an intriguing hypothesis. It wouldn't be right to kill the popularity of HN, but maybe there's some way to fix the timing or visibility of comments. I hope that doesn't mean a complicated moderation system. Maybe a new algorithm could help.

Well, a lot of what you describe as meta (e.g. "this page is unreadable") is explicitly against the site guidelines, and much of the rest is more-or-less implicitly against the guidelines (ie, HN is for discussions which gratify intellectual curiosity).

The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well!

There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!

Is the solution that no one ever issues legitimate criticism, or that no one ever posts anything worthy of legitimate criticism? Personally, I don't find it ironic or hypocritical when people issue legitimate criticism of anything, including legitimate criticism of the preponderance of illegitimate criticism on this website. These are not two instances of "the same negativity." Issuing legitimate denouncements of people who are issuing illegitimate denouncements is not "the problem recreating itself." This is pretty much a textbook example of the paradox of intolerance.

I would say you're too focused on the legitimate-vs.-illegitimate binary. HN's goal is to be interesting, a.k.a. to gratify curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). For that we want comments that are thoughtful, substantive, and above all unpredictable.

Can there be comments which are legitimate but nevertheless also predictable, unthoughtful, unsubstantive? Sure there can. We don't need those here. They don't affect threads in a good way.

Can there be comments which are illegitimate, but nevertheless manage to be thoughtful/substantive/unpredictable? Surely this must also be possible. Such comments could well make for interesting conversation, in which case they'd be fine.

There's no rule requiring commenters to be right (which is handy, since to a first approximation we're all wrong about everything and rarely have any idea what we're talking about—this is what they used to call "the human condition"). When people approach conversation with a strong need to be right, that doesn't lead to curious conversation, it leads to the situation in the famous xkcd classic.

I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter and certainly not that people should just bullshit. Bullshit is a lot less interesting and more predictable than it assumes it is. I'm saying that an open-minded, exploratory, conversational way of looking for the truth yields best results here, and trying to categorize things as legitimate vs. illegitimate isn't in that spirit. As for "legitimate denouncements", god help us, that covers every denouncement ever made, as far as the denouncer was concerned.

"If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line."

s/planet/www/;s/HN/& commenters/;s/its/their/

This is funny because I have always had a dream about ordering from the command line, instead of fiddling with HTML forms in web pages in graphical web browsers. Then we users could more easily automate purchases.

In the dream, order details are in the HTTP headers. There is a standard for collecting user order information that all sites follow.

HTTP headers can be an efficient way to convey information. Consider a (failed) proposal like the DNT header. Instead of being able to manipulate a user into giving "consent" via ever more "creative" web forms, popups, etc., the question, "Do you want tracking?" is standardardised. There are only two answers: "yes" or "no". The answer can be automated by the user. Progress!

Then I wake up. We remain stuck with HTML forms of infinite variability.

Also, the word "snobby" is interesting. Much like that word "elite" that has become "weaponised" in today's online (and offline) discourse. Neal Stephenson compared Linux to a free tank and MacOS to a European luxury car. Wouldn't the "snobs" be the ones using an "elite" interface like the one offered by Apple.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...

I built an ecommerce website recently with a terminal of sorts. You can list and add products to your cart using commands. Alas the platform it's built on (Shopify) doesn't have an API for checking out/taking payments otherwise I'd probably have built an installable CLI as a bit of fun.

I rarely visit Hacker News for this reason... I've come to realize there are a lot of angry "holier than thou" neckbeards that congregate here these days.

This sounded interesting so I clicked on TFA.

OMG it does that thing I can't stand in news publications of repeating the same thing over and over!

This is literally the first 8 lines of TFA:

- - -

What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months

200 roasts, £70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later.

What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months

200 roasts, £70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later

12 months of roasting landing pages

Over the last twelve months I've roasted the landing pages of 200 startups.

- - -

I get so annoyed when news articles do that, because they skimp on writing abstract leaders by simply duplicating text from the opening para.

I don't know what else this article says because I stopped reading and closed the tab.

But I do want a Diet Coke.

The content is algorithm first, not human first. I too refrain from consuming articles written for computers.

It's pretty sad webpages now are written for search engines to parse and only incidentally, for humans to read.

It wasn't written for search.

Nobody googles titles like 'what I learnt'

The blog post shares every single insight I learnt reviewing landing pages and running my business without any SEO implemented at all.

Bookmarked, on the assumption that you were right.

Did I miss the data that backs up your assertions that the improvements were effective?

Ignore the haters. They don't have anything better to do. It's a great article and I found it really useful!

This used to be the case but Google is getting much better at understanding topics and how they relate to each other. These days, writing good quality content that is comprehensive is best for humans and Google. Sure there is some gaming of the system but it's not like it used to be

It's way worse now.

Is this why recipes online are such a pain?

"Want to check my roasted platypus recipe? Check out this 1000 words tell on why I love roasting platypuses"

Of course paired with an auto play video of unrelated content.

"I'll get to the recipe in a minute, but first let me tell you about the time I dropped a penny into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. You see, I had just broken up with my first boyfriend and..."

F%(*ing insufferable madness

Copyright. The recipe itself can't be copyrighted, but the descriptive text around it can. This created a style in print media that carried over into the online world.

I don't really follow. Who cares about copyright of their blog post when a recipe can't be copyrighted (ergo the valuable asset is not protected)?

My understanding is that it's Google PageRank's "fault".

Because every one of these websites has a google tracker embedded in it, google knows how long you spend on a website. If you load a page then don't interact with it or leave quickly, it assumes you didn't find what you were looking for. The longer you're fumbling around looking for the valuable part of the page (the recipe) the higher the site ranks amongst recipe sites for PageRank, the more hits they'll get in the future.

So - Slowing the current reader down will produce bonus readers later.

What is TFA?

The Fabulous Article

Similar to how RTFM stands for "Read The Fabulous Manual"

I will now be reading "AF" as "as fabulous".

I didn’t know what TFA was and my best guess was “the full article”. This makes me realize RTFM could also be interpreted as read the full manual, which feels amusing.

What, you never read all of the man pages on your Linux distro?

I've always understood the F in any of these to translate to "fine" when in ahem polite company. Same number of characters.

[EDIT] LOL wow that justification is wrong, forgot about the 'ing'. Still, that's the word I've usually seen subbed.

Its Fucking

It stands for “The Fucking Article”.

For a more sensible answer, I use "The Featured Article"

TFA (thanks for answering).

The "Friendly" Article

"Big... FRIENDLY Gun 9000"

The fine article

If anyone is curious, the historical context for this (probably) comes from Slashdot, circa the year 2000, typical use is/was "I didn't RTFA, but..." or "did you even RTFA?, because..."

Interesting that you call this out. You're right! But I didn't notice it at all.

Maybe I just got used to this sort of pattern, or maybe this is where being a skimmer actually benefits me...

That is a quirk of Ghost, it took the summary text from the blog homepage and inserted it into the post. I fixed it.

I didn't purposefully use that phrase repeatedly. Thanks for spotting.

Your post got roasted!

The roaster became the roastee

My, how the spitroast has turned

TFA?

https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly

"Nearly every founder was able to capture their product or business USPs gracefully in the form, but only about 1 in 5 had this language on their landing page."

I cannot belive how many landing pages I go to for prodcuts and I can't figure out what they actually do, or why to use them over X. It's shocking.

Indeed! The Curse of Knowledge strikes all the time if you aren't on constant guard for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

I tend to assume the issue is not that they can't explain things, but they don't want to. Plenty of companies spend a lot of money creating manuals to explain exactly how everything works, and then hide them away so that potential customers can't look at them.

The most common reason seems to be a desire to force you to talk to sales.

This could, however, be a way to implement one of the recommendations of this site: address the most niche audience you can until you reach a critical mass of customers. If you don't understand what the service/product is about, you're probably not part of the target niche.

That said, there's also just really bad web sites out there, no doubt.

This also applies to open source projects on GitHub.

> I cannot belive how many landing pages I go to for prodcuts and I can't figure out what they actually do

You can do anything at Zombocom. [0]

I can't believe how many years this site has been around, and it's still essentially the same site. The only change is that it now uses JavaScript to animate the spinning circles rather than Flash.

[0] https://zombo.com/

"The only limit -- is yourself!" -- after all these years, I still love that site. Still good for a laugh.

Why am I getting a warning page for Zombo.com now?

@ollymeakings, the key point I would have loved to learn was how effective your service was. So by implementing (some / all) of your advice, how much did the conversion increase over next 3 months or so? (with no additional marketing and other implausible but desirable assumptions). You do mention "as I built evidence of the roasts increasing conversion" but leave the evidence hanging. Or perhaps I read the otherwise quite comprehensive piece too hastily. Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

Yes there is an issue with the client agreeing with me sharing the data. It's something that is being addressed with new clients.

The main thing is to ensure you AB test. Lots of what's in the post is proven, not just by my own experiments, but by organisations like Unbounce who have global data across 1,000s of pages.

However the true key to improving your own loading page is to grow and act on your own quantqual data.

As @transitus said, some quantitative statements about results would be really helpful here. I hope you can get some. Other than that, what you’re saying is very convincing.

Olly here, founder of roastmylandingpage.com

Happy to answer any questions about the service or business not covered in the blog.

You can also see the post as tweets, with visual examples from landing pages here: https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581

I think including the example images in the original blog post would have helped to convey your points better.

Yep, this post wasn't 100% complete. Someone else posted it.

No complaints here but going to add images in asap.

You talk exclusively in qualitative statements, but do you have any quantitative data to back up any of things you are saying? Its all well and good to say what you think someone should do, but without actual data to back up these statements why should I believe you? You're just some random dude from the internet, and just because you said something, does not make it true.

You say for example "Contrast your product with competitors and the current way of doing things." but what data do you have to substantiate that this is anything other than your / intuition / opinion? What kind of conversion rate lift did you clients see by implementing this particular tactic while controlling other variables to ensure the integrity of the test?

As someone who's spent a fair amount of time on CRO in the past, I appreciate that most of what you're saying is probably right as it's all broadly speaking conventional wisdom in the CRO space, but it rings somewhat hollow without actual data to back it up. I understand data sharing agreements with clients can be difficult to arrange, but had you even included data on how the tactics you're recommending had impacted the conversion rate of your own landing page you could have at least had some proof in your pudding.

The article has acronyms (USP, CTA,...) that the author never cares to actually explain what they mean. I find that it's a really opaque and hostile way to approach a subject and it mostly makes me feel like the author wants to sound like he really knows what he's talking about. He stretches simple points (Have a clear mission statement/product description.) into longwinded statements with unnecessarily complicated jargon. Really just feels like I'm being pitched a service the whole time I'm reading.

Unique selling point and call to action.

I will actually correct that as one of my insights is to remove confusing acronyms to improve legibility.

Sorry the rest didn't work for you.

I wrote something that might help: https://github.com/skorokithakis/expounder/

I don't know why you got downvoted because this is a good idea.

The only criticism I have is that usually the dotted underline is associated with adwords on some sites. I don't know if there's a better way to do it. Superscript question marks at the end of the phrase?

Hmm, I have an adblocker so I can't say I've seen that pattern much, but you can easily change the display for it with a few lines of CSS.

There's a built-in HTML tag for this that traditionally uses the dotted underline. Looks like it doesn't do that on all browsers, though, these days, but it's a CSS tweak to add it. Behavior also seems worse than it used to on some browsers—safari makes you hover for a little to see the expanded definition, while I recall clicking to see it before, which is better.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...

There's also the <details> element: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... It works quite nicely but is a block element by default. You can override that with some CSS (display: inline or inline-block) and style it to look more like a regular piece of inline content. Pretty useful IMO!

I’ve never heard of USPs before this article. Stopped reading to google “USPs landing page” which returned links to usps.com, the US mail carrier.

CTA is pretty well known though. Regardless, explaining those acronyms would improve clarity.

Fantastic info, thank you, @ollymeakings!

As you mentioned in the comments here, your article assumes that the business already has product-market fit. Do you have advice for people who are at the idea stage and are building landing pages as a way of finding product-market fit?

I've been building a landing page to test out a consumer-oriented travel app idea before I build it. Ideally, I want to build a community of users before creating the app and learn from them what to build. Conversion at this point means signing up for an email list, then I reach out with a personal email. Not fancy, but it's a start.

I see the landing page in my use case as a conversation starter: "Sign up for this app! Actually, the app doesn't exist yet, but I'd really like to build something like this for you. Does it strike your interest?" Not in a bait-and-switch way.

Thanks again!

P.S.: I'm an engineer transitioning into entrepreneurship. Learning that marketing is my chief responsibility--and what marketing really means (way more than advertising)--has been an eye-opener for me. Here are some other landing page resources that I've found helpful:

Rob Hope's Landing Page Hot Tips ebook: https://gumroad.com/l/hottips/root

Harry from Marketing's guide to landing pages: https://marketingexamples.com/conversion/landing-page-guide

I, for one, really enjoyed reading your advice and mostly agree with them. It's like that book "Don't make me think".

I've had some of the most confusing times when a HN link points to a landing page. I personally prefer getting a readme on github. But some of them completely forget to describe what the thing is/does/improves, too.

I really dislike landing pages. But I also realize I'm probably sitting on the porch shouting and waving my cane :)

//I generated about £20,000 in roast revenue, and another £50,000 of freelance marketing work from clients //

This guy made this much money with a simple idea. And he hasn't killed anyone. So even though I would never buy such service or think it is worth something to buy , I don't want roast this guy for earning money. All the best.

Thank you! And every single client apart from one rated the roast 5/5 so they liked it too.

Thanks for the write-up! I don't get all the negativity in this thread.

It's a well-written and detailed post, filled with actual content. I liked that the author included the financial information too. I wish you all the best!

Instead of using this service, you can also post your project to HN for the same result :)

Yeah! HN roast are indeed very good. I was launching my project in HN and six hours later I have shutdown the project. Because I got roasted. Left and right comments are shown it's not good for either party ( Me and HN users )

Note: The project I have mentioned is targeted to HN users in mind.

Except HN will probably bring your site down in the process. I'm always in two minds about it even beyond the famously tough crowd here.

Hardly. HN will talk about how they could build the same thing in a week, why enterprise pricing is "Call to discuss" only, or complaining about the use of Google/Adobe Analytics.

Judging by all the 'I know better' comments that are posted in this very post, you really couldn't.

Something really irks me about how this site is using the word 'roast'. Feels like any of the following words, with relevant dictionary definitions, would've been more intuitive: analyse, improve, critique, assess, evaluate.

Instead, let's take a slang word, re-define it's accepted meaning by removing the interesting nuance of it's usage, and try and piggyback of it's coolness. Not to my tastes.

It generates word of mouth and share-ability but agree it's not for everyone.

reads this

ponders the front page of her art/comics site

Social proof... social proof... oh hey I have a couple of glowing quotes from Hugo winners for the cover of one of my comics, maybe I should put those on the link to it on the front of my site, too. Thanks, Landing Page Roast Guy.

Maybe next I'll even edit the css so they're not in tiny low-contrast type. Nah. Gotta stay humble.

btw fyi... on Rita's page, at the bottom, the Comics I Like hover effect is only showing 4 links, but there's a fifth all sneaky-like at the top (spacetrawler?). looks like a bug?

Huh, weird, I am seeing what looks like five links with a fifth appearing furtively on the fade in/out. Thanks!

I wonder what broke it somewhere in the years between when I did the css for that comic and now. And if I can get MAMP to start working for my local dev copy again, it refused to work the last time I tried to do some minor tweaks to the main site. Ended up having to fuck around with the live site. So many layers of tools.

Can I roast the roaster for not summarizing how he does the roasting (unless he is not wanting more business)? #headduck

Drink some Diet Coke and it shall all be revealed onto you.

Shameless Plug: I also roasted stuff, in fact over 200 pages, in public - on my YouTube channel: https://lf.gg/youtube/

This started as a side project during the pandemic, I was really bored.

I am not as good looking as Oliver and my English isn't as fluid but I tried...

P.S. If you have ANY suggestion on how to improve my YouTube channel - could you share it?

Enjoyed reading this - some very actionable advice and honest learnings too.

Thanks! Glad you like it :)

In the article he embeds a Tweet showing his first version vs his 20th version. Then I went to the site, and what's live looks more like the 1st version so I'm confused.

Constantly testing!

The cynical side of me thinks this is the problem with the "landing page optimization" market. Measure, tweak, measure, tweak (repeat 20x) and before you know it, you're back to where you began!

A couple years back, I read another article about landing pages that warned against taking A/B testing logic to the extreme, as it may lead you down the wrong path.

My advice: Use your instincts/experience/feedback along with raw data.

Am I the only one who really hates these opaque landing pages? They all just look the same and you never know what the hell is actually being sold. Like that popwork one he's glowing over in the video.

It's like you're walking down the street and bums keep handing you shiny wrapped presents. At first they all look shiny and you want to open it but then you've opened enough of them to know they're probably full of shit.

So I stop bothering opening them. No, I don't want to create an account and give you my email so that you can spam me for months merely to know what's inside the box. Frankly my next stop is finding a video on YouTube of someone actually showing how to use... whatever it is. Or people talking about using it in a forum or something.

You watched the video so you know at 1 minute in I say how important it is to simply tell people what you actually do.

I also advocate for plain language and showing the product not just talking about it.

Yeah, I saw that but still. It starts off with 1-on-1 meetings with managers and employees but then I guess it's actually just some scheduled survey like a weekly qualtrics to /dev/null that admin pushes at us already or whatever. Finally. That's what I got from that.

I guess what I would say is that the pop.work* landing page seems to want to sell itself as scratching an itch or solving a problem, but doesn't tell us what that itch or problem is or even show us how it solves it. It's just vague and no details (which is a major red flag about a landing page for me personally).

*lots of alternate "popwork" out there and you don't even link it or anything so I had to google text from the landing page in the video to find what and where it even was or if they'd completely pivoted to a different product (popwork.com)

My theory: the person in charge of a landing page doesn't want people bouncing off the site from the page they control (don't want the metrics to look bad!), so they tend to make it opaque to encourage click throughs. It doesn't matter what the best user experience is because they don't get measured on that. They get measured on bounce rate.

As a developer I've had to pound into people's heads that as the company grows, very few things we have worked on rank as 'special' for more than a little bit.

You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't.

Documentation eventually turns into a data warehouse. There's so much of it and you can't keep it straight, so some memorable fraction of the time, going to a Wiki page or your bookmarks or - god forbid - browser history. It's basically a fishing expedition. You know that there's a thing that did X, but you don't remember which thing it was (and code names make that basically impossible), so you're just going to scan a bunch of them until you find the right one.

If every page is like those cooking recipes that are held hostage by the life story of the creator, you're going to get pretty grumpy. Landing pages remind me a lot of this, because I've looked at twenty tools and I can't remember which one is for Postgres backups and which one is for Javascript minification. No, this one is for JSON. Next tab.

> You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't.

Here's why the web is a mess:

We've turned it over to Google, through search, and Google penalizes sites' rankings in search results for having Chrome users leave if they read the first line and realize the site or service isn't for them.

After all — your site is less engaging than the site that most users ended up on — right?!

Perverse incentives.

Also I don't know about you, but when I'm researching something I open a new window, and I middle click all the reasonable looking links on the search page.

My time with that tab open has nothing to do with that tab. It's mostly to do with the tabs chronologically before them, and whether I see something shiny that distracts me.

Am I the only one that thinks a table of contents would be great for this article?

It starts off salesy and when this happens I tend to avoid committing to it, so I think a table of contents would really help a user decide if this is a good read for them or not.

This is literally a 4min read and the author divided it up pretty nicely in parts and bullet points.

Every bullet point is an interesting insight for itself, so you could leave after reading half way and still make a net intellectual profit.

People are so overly critical these days, the guy is literally giving away useful hard numbers and advice for free (some exposure for himself).

Oliver, please take HN comments with a grain if salt. :-) People are very demanding here (which might be a good thing of course)

> Tools like Loom are amazing for recording video-in-video. But when they fail mid-roast recording it's horrible. When it happens 3 times in a row, you consider leaving your job, hiring a small dependable car, packing up your possessions and moving to a remote farm far away from everything and everyone you know.

Any particular reason for choosing Loom over, say, OBS? I know OBS is primarily for game streamers, but it would get the job done just as well and might be more stable since it's incredibly popular.

Or why not record your screen and webcam separately, and then edit the two together in post?

Or am I misunderstanding the issue?

> 95% of roasts were booked by male founders.

I'd be really curious what the demographics are for founders. I'm not in the SV area, and I'd love to know how representative (or not) of the general founder population that is.

Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious what your logo [1] is? Based on the first iteration of your website, it used to be the chicken drumstick emoji () or similar, but now it's a drumstick with purple and pink?

[1] https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6059199ee613ee15184e8810/606...

This post is giving me 2010-2015 CRO is everything vibes and the landing page for the roast site is actually bad imho.

Oliver, props on your business and thanks for the interesting insights. I’m really disappointed in HN today though.

my swipe file of landing page advice articles here: https://github.com/sw-yx/launch-cheatsheet/blob/master/READM...

I feel like this useronboarding site (https://www.useronboard.com/) is the right way to go about this. It's informative, helpful but doesn't make the website its tearing down feel wrong.

Very nice. One minor correction -- The emoji you used next to "Processes I implemented" is unavailable on the latest OSX update for some reason. I'm not even sure what emoji it is, but it looks like stacked bars.

I wonder what the range in conversation change was for landing page tweaks. I’m curious how much landing page tweaks in general really matter. Do you see 50% changes in conversion by making copy changes, or 5%?

Love this, what a good idea.

But, do you think you're undercharging at £150 per roast?

This is a lot of real effort - one per workday for a year. I just am trying to imagine what I could do similarly:

- a code review from an OSS project per day?

- a bug fix per day?

- document something every day

- add a line of code to an OSS project per day?

Any ideas?

You could use https://www.codetriage.com/ to receive a daily email reminder to triage an open issue in an open source project of your choice. (I haven’t tried that service myself.)

> Focus your landing page on one conversion goal.

How does this help with SEO? Won't your pages be too thin and suffer in Google's eyes? I thought rich content is the way to go.

Your site is cancer on my tiny iPhone SE screen. Banner thing, little chat bubble of your face, pop-ups everywhere. Is it a parody site?

Is it a parody phone :)

No it’s the best phone ever made.

It's not since the iphone 12 mini was released

Dammit I've been eyeing that one.

You must reserve the good roasts for paying customers.

“Real pain PAS (pain - agitate - solve) is a common copywriting technique used to increase conversion. Most landing pages touched on the pain they were addressing, but only 1 in 15 agitated or amplified the pain with emotional language and vivid imagery. The ones that did this well created much more powerful landing pages that moved me to explore the solution.

Fix it: Agitate your visitor by painting a vivid picture of the pain using emotional language, stories and visuals.”

How is this not a dark pattern?

Not heard of PAS before but it's a stalwart of UK politics for those in power presently. Bonus points if you actually cause the pain, I guess.

That's just marketing 101, as used for centuries.

A dark pattern would be luring them in further with something like "the one thing you need to do to fix your conversion rates", but with a link leading to a list of 10 things, with that one thing at the end or even not there at all.

And number 6 was going to surprise me! (AVOID!)

It should be. But I guess when the revenue of the entire freaking planet depends on manipulation, people start to accept it.

Why would it be?

There is nothing sinister in it. Probably 100% of people do the same in every day conversations in one or another way without even noticing.

Well, a lot of beauty products sell themselves by making people feel ugly, security products by making people feel fearful, and so on.

Some people find that perilously close to breaking someone's window then charging them to fix it.

> security products by making people feel fearful

People should be fearful. The lack of fear is allowing people and corporations to get hacked everywhere.

Though I work in cybersecurity (though not for a cybersecurity company), so I may be a bit biased.

They don't make people feel anything, all they do is show some pretty picture and a people do the rest themselves.

Should pretty images be considered shady marketing because of this? Probably no.

> How is this not a dark pattern?

It's common for potential customers to have a need and a problem but not understand their own need or problem. The customer's lack of understanding of their problem doesn't mean they don't need the product ("wow, I didn't realize I had cancer/bad breath/incorrectly spelled words on my website - thanks for helping me understand I need chemo/a toothbrush/a spell-checker" or "I knew I couldn't spell but I didn't realize it was making people leave my website without reading the content, thank you for helping me understand I need a spell-checker") so sales activities often involve helping the customer recognize a problem as a problem and as a problem they face. This is particularly common in enterprise sales where the sales reps tend to function as expert consultants who have much deeper understanding of the problem at hand than the organization experiencing the problem, because of the scale and complexity of the problems and the reality that each organization ideally solves the problem in question at most once but the sales reps are involved in helping dozens or hundreds of companies identify and solve the problem. If you want to call all sales activities "Dark Patterns" that's your choice, but the word "sales" has served us well for hundreds of years, as have "advertising," "marketing," and "branding."

Reminds me of the "World's Best Cup of Coffee" scene from elf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA

The user is feeling the pain, you are amplifying it.

Yes it sound stupid but it's only about evoking a feeling the visitor already has.

Here's some examples - they are everywhere

https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1391668206755106816

Dark patterns are:

a) UI

b) explicitly designed to mislead or confuse you into conflating things

This is simple persuasion, not deception. It's also not UI.

If this was a dark pattern then almost all of sales is a dark pattern.

So what you are saying is every salesperson ever is a dark pattern proponent?

Yes? That's pretty much my experience.

Not all sales is the used car guy trying to pull a fast one on you. Any decent sales experience is party A understanding the needs of party B and providing a solution that both parties accept. Good sales leads to both parties being happy. I say thank you to the grocery clerk because I want to give them money for food and they say thank you because they want my money. I'm happy to be eating.

The grocery clerk isn't trying to market anything to you, they are merely handling a transaction.

And yet there is a good chance that almost everything about your visit to that grocery store was steering you to increase the amount you spend while there. On the other hand, if the store didn't put things you might want to buy out on display, no-one would be able to browse, which a lot of people enjoy and/or find useful. So where is the line between unfairly manipulative and simply showing what you're offering and inviting someone to buy it?

If they could, approximately all sales-y and marketing people would be happy to make 7 billion people pay them 20 quids for a pound of horseshit.

So would I, the difference is they are regularly paid to try and do it.

Dark patterns are not "anything you don't like"

I certainly don't like being manipulated and "agitated" online, it's true.

I've done sales engineering, and usually the way I closed deals was by honestly finding solutions to client problems, not by dramatizing them.

Perhaps it's the use of the word "agitate" -- but it does seem manipulative.

This is necessary because people don't appreciate how bad a problem is unless you sensationalize it for them.

For example, if I say 'your DKIM records for your email are setup wrong, so there is a chance someone can send spam using your email address', nobody will pay for an hour call-out to fix it.

If I say 'your email Exchange server has been configured incorrectly and there's no authentication on your outbound emails so you can easily be hacked', people are more inclined to fix the problem because they more easily understand the severity.

Love your work Oliver! Keep on crushing it

There are some technical terms that you need to explain, as not all of the readers are well-versed on your industry. I'd also like to roast your page, as it has no navigation page.

Anyone know of a TLDR version? Top 10 on one page? Would love to watch all 20 minute videos but just not at this time.

My twitter thread covers 16 points and with visuals

https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581

Thank you! exactly what I was looking for

Why the down votes? its a valid question... geesh...

This is how you architect a boring web.

"Landing Page" tells you this is for SaaS products sales pages. Of course it's boring.

Although it would be interesting to see a parody of such sites, such as the classic "Every Bootstrap website ever"[0]

[0]: https://www.dagusa.com/

SEO has made the Internet so toxic. I can’t stand wading through data these days, it’s written for bots.

Sorry to be pain in the butt, but this is largely irrelevant. There are a lot of experts or 'experts' who analyze other people mistakes. However, the real data for landing pages comes from actual customers, not expert opinion, however good or bad it is. Second, the #1 mistake for landing pages happens before the landing page is even created. Namely figuring out what to offer, how to offer it, how to stand out and how to make your goods or services way better than competition. Make mistake at this stage and no landing page will save you and analyzing landing page for a bad product or a bad offer will only take you away from seeing the real problem /*rant off.

I see zero relevance in the post. The author may have learned something, but I as a reader did not. Usual marketing bullshit.

I know that there is a lot of art behind these type of patterns and getting people to sign up, etc. However whenever I see them discussing techniques, they seem to ignore the fact that people quickly learn to work around them.

If I go to a new company's site, I'll quickly try and figure out whether I can get the info I need without signing up to anything I don't want. I'm used to weighing up giving my personal details, signing up for emails etc. If your site seems too spammy, intentionally opaque, or just yechy, I'll just forget about it and move on.

Change the patterns or the KPIs, and I'm sure that many of your page visitors will change up too, especially the more savvy ones.

Yep, this is exactly why infobiz one-pagers with extra long text blocks that never ended started having the opposite effect. It's like writing THIS IS A SCAM in bold letters. 'Customer isn't a fool. She's your mother'(C)

Yes. A lot of 'innovation' in marketing is just changing things to eliminate design decisions which are associated with scamminess and coming up with new ones which aren't yet overused by the worst bottom-feeders and so seem 'fresh'.

Hi, author here

I shared what I learnt across the 200 pages I reviewed and my focus is on landing page conversion. I am working on the assumption there is some sort of product market fit.

I also included techniques to generate insights - like exit intent, review analytics and heatmaps, introducing a cycle of testing - rather than just telling people what they should do.

Finally, I don't look at naff tricks on the visitor. It's all focused on proven concepts for relaying what makes your business great.

However if you can find anything in the list you feel is some sort of bizarre manipulation or trick I'm happy to look again.

I stopped reading when it said make the landing page focus on one thing. No no no. I HATE pages where it’s plastered with “Sign up” but you have to search for the login button.

A "landing page" is not necessarily the home page. It can be a page that a Google/Bing ad points to, or one that ranks high on search, that's specifically designed to talk about the product and its features.

If you are already a user of the product, chances are you'll bookmark the login page, or have it appear in your browser autocomplete. Worst case scenario, you'll go to the homepage and click the login button on the top right.

>A "landing page" is not necessarily the home page.

Excellent point. And a very powerful one too. It just caused me to think about the content and structure of an educational site I'm involved with in a VERY different way. Thanks!

You're welcome.

The "landing page" is ultimately wherever you, the site owner, want the user to land on. The reason a distinction is drawn between a landing page and a home page is because there can only be one home page. But there is no limit to the number of landing pages you can create.

- LP 1 for "Self-serve video course" users

- LP 2 for "Live, Group based instruction" users

And even there, LP1 could have Variant 1 and Variant 2, which are randomly served to users as part of a split test, to see which page converted better. You can use tools like Unbounce or Optimizely to serve the pages to a randomized audience.

I often take the excessive focus on things like the landing page, design details to be a sign of inexperience/immaturity on the part of founders. Once you have a selling product, by all means, do optimize at the margins. But at an early stage, it’s just a distraction.

Really? I recently optimised a landing page for a client who had £100,000 weekly ad spend on Facebook and increased their paid ROI by 40%.

Trust me, it's a critical part of the conversion performance.

Sounds like they had a selling product to begin with. Optimisation has its place of course, but when the client is a pre-revenue startup with uncertain business plan and a scrappy budget, and they keep refining pixels on the landing page, I feel bad for them. While another client goes from zero to $20k MRR in two months with a $20 Themeforest template and a Lorem ipsum text still there.

Oh yeah, totally agree - multiple landing page iterations for early stage pre-revenue is silly.

I do cover user acquisition, methods of validation, when to test, types of test, the culture of lean, and more in the roast.

One thing to note however with the buyer you describe - they often make REALLY rudimentary mistakes. I've seen people forget CTAs, links not working, totally confused language (no idea what they do), missing key elements, not written to buyer etc.

Also missing great opportunities to showcase their business more powerfully. For them it's £149 and they have another person look at it and give practical feedback.

Its actually interesting (bit on the spammy side) a lot of sites get built by a developer who doesn't relay pay any attention on to its intended function.

And designing the right architecture for example do not stuff all your sku's / PDP on one single page with just images, no text and a page title of "Products"

And a lot of businesses a page will have to serve multiple requirements: a laser focused ppc landing page targeting one term well that's a lot easier.

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