[cta-box]Note: This template is available in the standard LeadPages® template library—look for the "Giveaway (2-Step) Squeeze Page, #2." Hello everyone. My name is Clay Collins, and in this episode of The Marketing Show, I’m going to be giving you version 2.0 of the Welcome Gate. This is what the original Welcome Gate looked like and this is version 2.0, so I’m going to be giving this away. I’m going to be showing you how it works, and I’m going to be giving you examples from my client’s businesses. That’s what you have to look forward to in this episode of The Marketing Show. So here is the original kind of layout for the Welcome Gate, and this was used by a lot of people, this was, and pages like this, and it was inspired by Mixergy. So the way Mixergy works is if you go Mixergy.com, it redirects you to this page, but if you just clear this out, and you go to Mixergy again, it takes you to the page. Also, if someone links directly to one of these pages from Twitter or something, you don’t see that opt-in page. You just go directly to the page. It’s really only for people who go directly to Mixergy.com in this example, and I got Andrew’s blessing, and I built a WordPress plug-in along with a team actually. They did the work. But we built a Welcome Gate plug-in, and it’s been downloaded by a gazillion people at this point, and it’s done really well. It’s just a free thing that we gave out to the marketing community. Since releasing this Welcome Gate, we’ve gotten a lot of amazing results. For the people who used it, here’s one example from Eric Davis. He said, “I’d just want to show the results from Welcome Gate. Welcome Gate was almost an 8x improvement over the basic homepage and a 3x improvement over the previous opt-in.” So an 8x improvement and a 3x improvement. This is from Teramis:
“I’ve been using Welcome Gate for a little over a month now and I noticed today that it is accounting for 71% of my new list subscribers. Wow! How’s that for results?”
This is from Dee Christianson:
“As for my experience to the Welcome Gate, I nearly quadrupled my opt-ins just by installing and configuring this nice piece of software. My site is relatively new and I don’t have much traffic, but before the Welcome Gate, I had opt-ins of 3%. Now, it’s around 12%. So that’s a 400% improvement.”
This is from Johnny Vasquez at NewStitchADay.
“As you can see here, Welcome Gate is accounting for 61% approximately of his subscribers beating out the generate box, the side bar and the little opt-in box after post.”
For those of you not familiar with Welcome Gate, here’s how it works. It does not appear when someone links to a specific article on your website. So if someone links to a specific blog post or something like that, it will not appear. And links from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus won’t trigger your Welcome Gate as long as someone is linking to a specific post or page, right? It only appears when someone goes to your root right to the homepage and it does not appear more than once per year. So someone will see it once, and then after that, it will not appear again.
What are the Welcome Gate benefits?
Well, Welcome Gates don’t annoy folks like pop-ups do, right? Pop-up keeps people from the content that is behind the pop-up so normal pop-up creates this environment where behind the pop-up is the content that people want to see and they can see that content behind the pop-up, and that pop-up is keeping folks from the article that they taught they were going to get when they clicked on a link on Twitter or something like that. And so, it’s just an annoyance and a frustration. Welcome Gates don’t create that annoyance and that frustration. Welcome Gates also give you more room than pop-ups, right? Welcome Gates occupy an entire screen so they give you more room to accomplish what you want. Welcome Gates have higher conversion rates than pop-ups. In fact, Welcome Gates have higher conversion rates than just about anything I’ve ever seen. So again let me show you one more time how Welcome Gate works. Say I’m going to go to Vooza.com. Okay, I’ll just go to Vooza.com, and rather than taking me to the homepage, it shows a page like this. Go behind the scenes of the world’s most amazing text start-up. Confirm your email to get access. Now someone can either enter this or they can click on skip this stuff. This is an option that you can turn on or off so I’m just going – Actually, I’m going to opt-in. Why not? It’s what it’s for, and welcome gates work incredibly well at accomplishing this so get exclusive access. Okay, so that is the traditional Welcome Gate. But here is the welcome gate 2.0, and in order to see how this works, I’m just going to Simple Analytics. This is a client of mine so I’m going to simpleanalytics.com and when you go to that homepage, instead of getting directed directly to the homepage, you were sent to this page. Again, if someone comes to Simple Analytics from a blog post or whatever, they’ll just see that exact blog post but instead, they see this. And we’ve updated this in a number of respects. The most important thing that we added is this two-step opt-in process. So I’ve talked extensively about two-step opt-in processes and why they work so well, but when you go to a page and you do not immediately see an opt-in box, it is disarming. It allows you to show value before you asked for someone’s email address in return. And in fact, one of the quickest things you can do to double or triple your opt-in conversion rate is to not show the opt-in box immediately, and you have it appear in a box like this where it says step one, step two. Step one into your email below, and step two get my free reports. Anyway, this template is available for download below for all you geeky web people. If you want an easy way to hook this up to your WordPress site, and you want an easy way to hook this up to your AWeber or MailChimp or Infusionsoft or OfficeAutoPilot or whatever you’re using, you can use LeadPages. So this is the template that we’ve added to LeadPages. So I’m going to go to my.leadpages.net. I’m going to log in. I’m going to go to templates, and I’m going to go to this page. This is the new Welcome Gate. And of course, you can replace this with your logo, whatever it might be, so I’m just going to use oh this LeadPages logo. I’m a huge fan of LeadPages. So now you can do the LeadPages logo is here. I’m going to click on this, and I’m going to change it quick. Quickly create a DIY video studio. I’m going to click on okay. I’m going to get a picture of my video studio report. Now here is a picture of a book and that works great, but sometimes, what you can do is just show people a smaller version of what you’re giving away. So here’s a picture of my video studio reports. I’m going to go here. Say Get your free DIY video studio Set up guide and find out the top 4 tools in my video set up including my $90 HD video camera. And then, maybe I’ll make this bold and I’ll make this bold. And of course, you can change all the colors here by just going to style settings, and you can configure it to be however you want it to be. You can change fonts and things like that. So this is something that you can very quickly set up, and if you want to set up opt-in form integration, again, we support a whole bunch of these. These are the ones we use in our own business. So I’m going to click here and just associate it with this AWeber list. I’m going to click okay. I’m going to save it to my pages. Call it Welcome Gate demo, and now this page is live on the internet. Now if you want to add this to your WordPress site, here’s what to do. Log in to your WordPress installation. Go to your LeadPages WordPress plug-in. Click on ‘Add new’ and go and find your page. So here, it says Welcome Gate demo, and I can set this up to be a normal page that’s just like any other page you would link to on your WordPress site. I can make this the homepage of the site or I can make it the Welcome Gate. So I could type in Welcome Gate or welcome page here, and when I click publish, this will be the page that people see when they go to my homepage, and it will only show once, and it will only show once here, and it will only show when people go directly to the root, and then it will direct them to this URL, and it will perform like a traditional Welcome Gate and behave like a traditional Welcome Gate. So what’s cool about this actually is when you have LeadPages, you can turn any one of your pages that you have in LeadPages into a Welcome Gate. So for example, if I go to buywithabonus.com, which is my friend James Schramko’s site. You can see here that it redirects you to /free, and he turned this page into a Welcome Gate, and of course, you can opt-in here to get the bonuses he talks about in this video, and I encourage you to do this actually. He’s a super smart guy or you can click on Skip This Page, and I believe James reported a quadrupling of his opt-in rates to doing this. Anyway, my name is Clay Collins. I hope you enjoy the download that is available to you below. If you’re a geeky techy person, you can do this yourself. If you are a LeadPages customer, this is available to you right now. You can go in and take any one of your pages inside of LeadPages. Turn it into a Welcome Gate. Hook it up to your WordPress site. Hook it up to AWeber or whatever you’re doing. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this and let me know if you have any questions in the comment. Thanks so much and take care. Bye.
