How I Write Sales Pages - The Pivot Class

How I Write Sales Pages - The Pivot Class Recently, I was asked to write a sales page for both Naomi and her colleague Clare Holliday (from Indie Retail Academy) for a brand-new offer called The Pivot Class.

(It's a class about how to shift your business from where it is now to “the thing you really want to be doing.”)

Since the copy is so fresh in my mind, in today’s post I’ll walk you through a few things I did on the page and teach you how to do them, too.

The page has just gone live, so the class is open for registration. You should check it out, if only for the stunning design.

(I can’t take credit for that, though. I just wrote the copy. Clare did the design and illustrations.)

So, here's a walkthrough of some of the more interesting elements.

Creating a compelling buy button

The “buy” button – and all the space around it that supports your call to action – is one of the more important parts of your sales page (for more than the obvious reason of “you’d really like them to buy your thing”).

Reading a sales page is a passive activity. Your potential buyer doesn’t have to do anything while they read – they can go at their own pace and just absorb the words, images and design elements of your page.

But when you get to the call to action, they have to move into an active phase – they have to make a decision. Your potential buyer has to think.

Thinking and making decisions can be hard sometimes. We have to take a lot of factors into account, and sometimes that makes a person’s head go all swimmy.

So constructing a buy button and call to action that helps a reader organize their thoughts can make their decision a lot easier.

Take a look at how I set up this buy button for The Pivot Class:

There are 4 specific elements I put in here to make the decision-making process easier:

In the header, I reinforced the outcome of owning the product and included a timeframe for results.
Underneath the headline, I put a line of transitional copy that mentions the price, the guarantee, and the ease of registration (along with a call to action).
Immediately before the buy button, I included details of how the registration process worked to let the reader know what to expect.
Underneath the buy button, I included a graphic showing all the payment options the buyer could use.

These 4 elements sum up the relevant details that a potential buyer needs to consider the moment before signing up, so they can focus on the key information that they need to make their decision.

Incorporating these elements on your own sales page can help boost your conversion rate – simply by streamlining the thinking process for your readers.

Keeping the story element short

If you own Easy-Peasy Sales Pages, you’ll already know that the “story” element of the sales page is where you walk the reader through a journey of transformation.

That transformation is the place where you show them how to get from where they are now to where they want to be, and often it can get pretty long, especially for high-ticket items.

(Side note: In general, the length of your story / origin story should exist in some relation to the cost of your product. A $2000 course will probably get a longer story than a $27 ebook.)

Pivot Class Story Because The Pivot Class is decidedly not a high-ticket item, for this page I went with a very short “story” element, that you can see in this image (the blue part). It’s just a simple outline of the 5 steps required to transition from what you’re doing now, to what you really want to do in your business.

That blue section? That's it.

This simple outline covers the potential buyer's full transformational journey, and by describing the steps in a way that’s concise, concrete and achievable, it packs a lot of punch without sounding pat or simplistic.

Many people don’t know this, but you can keep this element really short if you want to. You don’t have to write a saga here to make this section work.

One of the keys to shorter copy is to take the time to consider how to communicate as much as you can using the fewest words. And to understand what’s supposed to happen in each section of copy, so that that small collection of words does the job it’s supposed to.

When I’m writing sales pages for people, I often hear that they don’t want to have a long story element, especially if the “story” is about themselves. They don’t want to go on forever about “them”. If you model your story off of this example – taking your story down to the concrete, important elements, you can really trim this section down.

Using a (mostly) 3rd person voice

This was an interesting situation to have to write copy for – a class taught by two different people who usually take a very first-person approach to their sales page copy.

The challenge here: If any given piece of copy was written like it was coming out of one person’s mouth, you’d have a back-and-forth narrative that would quickly become difficult to read. Now Clare's talking. Now Naomi's talking. It's a lot of back and forth with different voices.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book where the authors take turns in sections or chapters, but it can be pretty jarring and break the flow for the reader. This flow-breaking would be a really bad idea on a sales page.

At the same time, using the word “we” all the time can get a bit tiring for the reader. All that “We decided to do this” and “We created that” can start to sound pretentious and cloying. Are we a power couple? The Queen? Easy with the “we” action, buttercup.

What I did on this page to avoid those issues was predominantly talk about the class itself, as if the teachers didn’t exist, for the most part. I framed the copy around the details of the Pivot Process and the specific components of the course. Mentions of Naomi and Clare are sparse, and “their” voice only comes through on occasion.

Typically, people use more “I”-centered language on a sales page to communicate to the reader that they understand their struggles, or to build authority, or to express what they decided to put in the product.

Because the copy stays focused on the details of The Pivot Class and the buyer’s direct experience (what they will do, what they will receive), there doesn’t need to be a lot of “I” language in there. The reader can see that the material addresses their struggles and gives them solutions and benefits as they read the page.

Of course, there are sections of the page where the “We” language comes out, but again, it’s used sparingly. This ensures that there’s enough connection with Naomi and Clare, while not making it the “Naomi and Clare Show”.

Instead, it’s the “Here’s a roadmap for transitioning to something new Show”.

Reducing explanatory language

Sales copy often includes a lot of explanatory language used to make sure a point gets across. For example:

Each module is available in PDF and audio format, so that you can print it up for reference (or listen on the go)

That’s not bad copy, inherently. But on a level, everything after the comma doesn’t require explaining. It’s inherently obvious. And while it does qualify as benefit-driven content, it’s doesn't pack much of a wallop.

That copy could be tightened up to this:

Each module is available in PDF format and iTunes-ready audio files

Here the “iTunes-ready” detail is not as inherently obvious, so it counts as a more meaningful benefit. It’s more striking and unexpected, so it will command more attention.

Here’s an example of where additional explanatory language still counts as strong – directly from the sales page for The Pivot Class:

Pivot Class - Module 1

Take a look at the second paragraph, where I talk about the blueprint. We all know the intuitive benefits of a blueprint – or we can picture what it is. It’s a complete picture or diagram of what we’re doing. We often look at blueprints as static things that you have, like a basic reference document. Reference is inherently obvious.

But the less obvious benefits are what I covered in that second paragraph.

The second bullet point on the left almost becomes explanatory. I’m mentioning a capture phase, to collect all your thoughts and ideas, and my original first-draft-sloppy-copy had something like “so you can get organized”.

But I caught the explanatory language and cut that, replacing it with “to use as reference for the design phase”. That puts more attention on the specific utility, rather than the general, and makes the copy stronger.

Other explanatory phrases to watch out for include:

because
and/so then you can
which will help you

These phrases aren’t bad. You don’t need to cut them out entirely. But they should always be flags to check if what you’re explaining is so blazingly obvious a child would know it.

Consciously formatted testimonials

I’ve written about how to optimize your testimonials before, but here’s a good example that shows a few of those tips in action on The Pivot Class sales page:

First of all, on this page I alternated testimonials between Naomi and Clare so that as they promoted The Pivot Class to their individual lists, readers would quickly see testimonials for the person they were more familiar with. It’s easier than having a block from one person followed by a block from another person.

5 other specific tweaks to these testimonials include:

Bolding specific phrases that would be meaningful for the reader
Headlines for the testimonial (taken from the extended text of the original testimonial that doesn’t appear on this page)
Capitalization and quotation marks in the testimonial to draw attention to them
In Naomi’s testimonial, I also included the buying history of the person to show they’ve taken several classes from her
Color changes in the testimonial background to keep them from blending together

Those are just a few tweaks – you can find more in the article above.

You can upgrade your own sales page using these approaches.

If you’re writing a new sales page, you can take everything I’ve written about into account as you’re creating your brand-new sales copy. (Hopefully, with a copy of Easy-Peasy Sales Pages by your side.)

But if you have existing sales pages, you can pick one and read through it again, seeing where you can use these lessons to improve your sales page and boost your conversion rate.

And in the meantime? I hope you’ll join me in The Pivot Class.

I’m taking it myself, because I’ve got a pivot coming up soon. :)

Take care,

Kris Faraldo