Online course sales page: ask before you sell

You can sell this thing in a room. Somebody asks what you do, you talk for four minutes, and by the end of it they want in. Then you write the same offer down, put it on a page, send the link to sixty people, and two of them open it and none of them buy. The words are yours. The offer has not changed. Something got lost between your mouth and the screen, and it is worth knowing exactly what.

Because in the room, you ask first

That is the whole answer, and the rest of this page is worked out of it.

In the room you don't start talking. You ask. What brings you in, how long has it been going on, what have you already tried. She tells you it's the three in the morning waking, or the exam in March, or her shoulder since the move, and only then do you open your mouth. Every one of those four minutes is aimed at the one thing she just told you. You are not being clever and you are not selling. You are answering a person you have listened to.

A page has never asked her anything. It speaks first, and it says the same paragraph to a woman who can't sleep, a man rebuilding after an injury, and somebody who clicked because the picture was nice. So the page reaches for the words that are true of all three, and words that are true of all three are true of nobody in particular.

Two things before you give this an evening, because they decide whether the rest is worth your time. I have not measured what a tailored page does to sales against a general one, ours or anybody else's, so you won't find a figure anywhere on this page and you should be wary of anyone who hands you one. And none of this rescues an offer nobody wants. A better-aimed sentence about the wrong thing is still the wrong thing.

One page, saying one thing, to everybody

Open your own page and read the first screen as though you had landed on it by accident. Most of them say some version of the same thing: a warm hello, who you are, how long you have been practising, what the course covers, eight modules listed out, a price, a button. All of it's true. All of it about you.

The visitor arrived carrying one specific thing. She came from a post about sleep, or from a friend who said you were good with backs, and she's holding a question she would ask you out loud within about nine seconds if you were standing in front of her. Your page gets to it in paragraph six, if it gets to it at all.

What you are actually shopping for, when you go and look at other people's pages for ideas, is never a nicer layout. It is a page that says her own thing back to her before it says anything about you.

The three sentences that carry a sales page

If you change nothing else this week, change these three, in this order.

Who it is for, named specifically enough that one person flinches. Not "anyone who would like to feel calmer". Try "for people who work nights and try to sleep while the street is still awake". That is the same argument as describing a niche narrowly instead of widely: the narrow version is not a smaller subject, it is the same subject with a person standing in the first line.

What is true for her right now, in her words rather than yours. You already know these words. They are what clients say in the first ten minutes, before they have tidied it up, and they are almost never the words that end up on the page. Write four of them down next time you hear them.

What she will be able to do at the end. One thing. Not eight modules. The modules are what you built; the thing she can do is what she is paying for.

The questions at the bottom are the part nearly everyone leaves empty, and they are the closest a page ever gets to the room. Somebody wrote in and asked you something awkward about whether it works if you have to miss a week. Answer it there, once, for all the people who were too shy to ask it.

A page that asks before it speaks

Which brings me to the reason this post exists at all.

CourseSpaces now has Smart Pages. Before the sales page is shown, the visitor answers a short set of questions about what is going on for them. The page they then see is built around the answer they gave. Somebody who says the problem is sleep does not have to read three paragraphs about posture before she finds her own life on the screen.

That is the four minutes in the room, done by a page. You ask, she tells you, and then you speak to that.

It's worth saying why this doesn't feel pushy, because that's the first worry a practitioner has about it and it is a fair one. Think about every clinic, dentist and physio you have ever walked into. They hand you a form before you see anybody. You fill it in without resentment, and you fill it in honestly, because being asked is the opposite of being sold to. It is what happens when somebody intends to pay attention. The version of this that would feel pushy is the one where the questions are a hoop and the answers change nothing, and you can tell the difference in about two seconds, which is why the answers have to actually change the page.

Nobody reads your page in a quiet room

An opinion now, and it has no work to do for the sale.

Everybody writes a sales page imagining it read in a study, in the morning, by a calm person with a coffee and forty spare minutes. It's read at eleven at night on a phone, one-handed, with the television going and something in the oven. The reader is tired and half-decided and looking for one line that says this is for you, before she puts the phone face down and never comes back to it.

Write for eleven at night. The calm morning version takes care of itself.

Who should leave this alone

• You have never sold this course to anybody yet. The page is not your problem. Go and sell it to four people by talking to them, and write down what worked. Getting the first students for a course nobody has bought is a different job and it comes before this one.
• A handful of visitors a month. Tailoring what they see will not show up as anything you can see. You need more people arriving before a difference is a difference.
• One offer, one kind of person. If everybody who comes to you comes for the same reason, a page that asks first is machinery you don't need. Write the one page properly and get on with your week.
• People buy and then stop turning up. That is not the page. A better page just sends more people into the same room, and the room is what wants fixing.

What it costs

$47 a month, one plan, no tiers to read. That covers unlimited courses and products, the sales page builder, the public catalogue, hosted video, the AI course builder, communities and chat, coupons, guest checkout so a stranger can buy without making an account first, and up to a thousand active students.

We take no cut of what you sell. You bring your own Stripe account, you pay Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents on a sale, and nothing to us.

Thirty days free and no card to start. Thirty-day money-back guarantee after that.

Give your own page one afternoon. Read the first screen as a stranger would, then write the three sentences. Even if you never touch anything else, you will finally have written down the sentence you have been saying out loud for years.