An ode to the Long Sales Page, “O Long Sales Page, Long Sales Page, wherefore art though Long Sales Page?” Yes we’ve all seen a long sales page from time to time and I have to admit they can be quite persuasive. I’ve spent a nickel or two on products bought from long sales pages. Why does that happen? Because they work so damn well. Which is why we had to build a Long Sales Page as our 6th template. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, it’s been a little over 4 months since we built our last template. We didn’t let the momentum we had continue, instead we let the snowball rolling down the hill melt in the bright SoCal sun…
Well enough with the sentimental crap and it’s time to get back up on that horse and ride off into the passive income sunset. We’ve sold enough templates over the past 4 months that we can definitely see value in continuing down this path to financial freedom. If you want proof check out our income reports.
So here are a few more details about the kick-ass new Long Sales Page template. We’ve included two headers, a large photo background header and a photo slider header. Users can hide either one of the headers or both, as well as add 4 images to the slider header and change out the title, copy, and call to action buttons for each slide. The Long Sales Page also has 10 different sections and within each section is a long list of really cool features ( FYI – the way the template editor works on LeadPages is that you can either show or hide elements on a page but you can’t add more elements. So in order to address a variety of customer use cases we had to duplicate each section 10 times with the same pieces of functionality in each section). Each of the 10 sections contains the following elements:
- Content Section – add paragraphs and any other copy
- Image Section – add an image
- HTML Section – add custom HTML
- Video Section – add a video
- Boxed Content Section – add content to a highlighted, boxed section. The color of the content box can also be changed.
- Button Section – we have 3 buttons that can be linked to other pages, products, or LeadBoxes
- Table Section – each table section includes 3 tables that can highlight product features and also include a large call-to-action button
- List Section – add a list of features or functionality
- Timer Section – add a countdown timer
- Facebook Comments Section – add facebook comments to a landing page
- Social Buttons Section – lastly customers can add Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons to their page
Inspiration
I’m pretty excited to share the inspiration for the Long Sales Page. We’d been thinking about building a long sales page template because, as with all our other templates, we didn’t really see one in the LeadPages marketplace. Not only was this idea in our heads when a customer reached out to us via the comments section of one of our other templates asking for additional functionality. We went back and forth and finally decided maybe it’s time we start building templates again and let’s build this Long Sales Page template for this awesome customer. Shout out and thanks to my man Elmar!
Our deal with Elmar was that we’d build the template for free and he could just buy it from us in the LeadPages marketplace. Which also inspired us to offer both paid and unpaid services for custom LeadPages template development. To learn more about our template building services check out our services page.
Development
This page is a bit of a monster so it took us a solid week or two to build it. The reason it’s such a beast is because of the 10 sections and then each section contains about 10 pieces of functionality. What takes time isn’t necessarily writing the HTML and CSS but putting unique ids on each section and subsequently each element in each section. Between the 10 sections and 10 pieces of functionality in each function we’re already at 100 unique IDs, and that’s not including the 2 headers and 4 slides in the slider header, as well as a number of other bits and pieces!
I’m going to head down the rabbit hole of this template for a minute to take the opportunity and discuss how the LeadPages templates work. A LeadPage template is basically a collection of a couple files. An HTML file (index.html), a CSS file (style.css), a Javascript file (functions.js), a collection of image files, and a JSON file (template.json). In order to make the elements in the HTML file editable in the LeadPages editor, a unique data attribute (data-lead-id) needs to be added to all HTML tags that are editable. The functionality of these editable elements is then defined in the JSON file. The LeadPages editor then uses this JSON file to determine what elements are editable and how they function.
Beyond defining editable elements in the HTML file we also need to give customers the ability to change colors of fonts, backgrounds, buttons, etc. The LeadPages editor uses a simple find and replace function to make these changes. These colors are also defined in the JSON file. The tricky, and time consuming, part about defining these replaceable colors is that each color has to be unique in order for it to be found and replaced.
For example, let’s say we have some blog content with a title and body text. Now we may want these to be the same color. However, a customer might want to have a different title font color and a different body font color. So in our CSS file we’ll create a style for the title using the hex color #000000, and in order to make the body content replaceable we’ll increment it’s hex color to be #000001. So with 10 different sections and 10 elements in each section, you can only imagine how many different black colors we defined in our CSS and JSON files.
Pricing
Below is a preview of the tasty new Long Sales Page template, as well as a link to buy it from the LeadPages.net marketplace. We priced theLong Sales Page template at $7. We tried $10 on our Conversion King template and quickly had to change it to $7 because we weren’t getting any sales. You can track how well this template is selling by checking out it’s sales reports.
Preview
