One of the highest paid gigs for a copywriter to get is to create an entire sales page.
They cost so much because sales pages can often contain between 20 and 120+ pages long (you can see my whole swipe file of sales pages here to see what I mean).
But even when you are done writing the copy for a sales page, you then have to design the damn thing! And that’s where 99 Designs comes in. It’s a platform where you upload some specs, and designers around the world compete for your prize.
This competition style of design is great if you don’t know exactly what you want. Since I’m not a naturally great designer at all, this is a wonderful option!
So for our Sales Page Experiment we step-by-step built out a new sales page for Kopywriting Kourse. It’s 100% written and ready to go, we just needed a designer to complete the project.
Let’s go find a designer! Read on…
Step 1.) Setup a 99 Designs Competition ($998)
For $998 we held a contest with 99 Designs that allows different designers to duke it out for the prize money:
(I put my money on the dude in red gloves)!
So we setup a contest with a few basic guidelines and 46 pages of copy:
→ See the (now finished) 99 Designs Competition ←
Since we DON’T know exactly what we are looking for, it’s good to leave the guidelines relatively vague so the designers can try their own versions and be creative:
That’s all we entered in the design brief. We purposely didn’t want to provide too many guidelines, because that might squash the creativity of some designers.
Step 2.) Extend Your Competition
Not sure 99 Designs wants everyone to know this, but if you just contact support and ask for an extension on your competition, they’ll do it for free.
Instead of lasting only 4 days for the competition, we got ours extended TWICE to 12 days. This gave more freelancers time to work on the project or just see it.
In the first 4 days we got like ONE entry, which for $998 was kind of a waste.
*NOTE* Designers prefer smaller projects than sales pages usually, so for sales page competitions don’t expect crazy amounts of entries unless you bump the bounty up past $2,000.
Step 3.) Review The Entries
You’ll start getting entries coming in hopefully. For competitions for logo’s or small websites, you’ll likely get 10-30 entries!
However for something like a 80+ page sales page, that’s WAY more work for designers, so you’ll likely get ~5 entries or so (unless you bump up your bounty to $2,000+).
Here’s all the designs we got:
Step 4.) Request all the changes before picking winner
We made a couple of mistakes, and learned some tips for a successful contest, here they are:
Rate people 1-3 stars so other people don’t think they have no chance if they see a 5 star rating.
We originally rated some designs 5-star, and the designers assumed they were perfect, so they stop iterating on them.
Email designers your desired changes BEFORE ending the contest:
Call up 99 Designs and ask for an extension on your contest!
You can even ask them for more promotion and they’ll usually do it. We got 3+ more entries after we extended the contest and asked for a “little bump” of promotion through their social network.
Step 5.) Pick The Winner!
There were some other good entries, but here’s the Winning Design we chose from the competition:
Also See: Mobile Screenshot of the Sales Page
Step 6.) Now you’ve got to build the damn thing….
The most frustrating part about hiring a designer, is that THEY ONLY DESIGN!!! They don’t actually build it!!
Ugh.
This means you’ve got to hire a front end developer, or do the work yourself to assemble the sales page.
We were already out $998 just for the 99 Designs competition, so spending a ton more money on a front end developer didn’t seem fun. Also, if you get a hand-coded sales page, it’s hella difficult to make changes to it.
We kept this internal over here, and built the page from scratch using LeadPages (our old landing page was built using LeadPages, and it’s super easy to update, so we’ll continue that tradition).
You almost have to design TWO webpages though, as the mobile version of the sales page needs to look good also:
Step 7.) You’re finally done with the stupid thing!
I dunno about you, but by the time I’m done with a blog post or sales page, I’m DONE WITH IT.
I’ve looked at the stupid thing so many times, it starts to get a bit annoying.
Sometimes people feel bad about this, but it’s totally normal:
Sometimes for a few days after finishing a piece of copy, you will temporarily hate looking at it!
Before: /join
After: /signup
I think just because I’m so familiar with your design aesthetic, I really love the current landing page! :p
How much did it cost you to get the programming done?
Hey Neville,
the design looks really nice, I like it!
Do you mind sharing the designer profile from 99 Designs? Would love to get in touch with Konstantin (that’s him right?) to provide him some more work.
Cheers!
Hey Niklas, I don’t have any personal contact info, but here’s Konstantin’s designer profile of 99 Designs: https://99designs.com/profiles/kofe
Hope that helps :)
Thanks for documenting this. It’s a fascinating read.
Question. Since we know the only thing that really matters are results…and that ugly can sometimes beat beautiful…are you going to run a split test between the old and new sales pages?
Hey Ron, yes a split test is being conducted, but I estimate it’ll take 3+ months to know statistically significant results.
EVEN THEN, I’m always wary of split tests, as the page itself does not make a sale in my business, it’s the intent BEFORE they get to the page that’s most important.
So those results will be interesting for sure, but not the be-all-end-all :)
Glad you’ve enjoyed this series!
I love your content so much. And with some simple hand-drawing image, your blog still be attractive to me. I work in marketing field, usually visual is very important, even that is an email marketing template or a pdf of guiding, I have to make it look eye-catching with pretty images.
It’s scared to create some content without any nice pictures because I think my content is not great enough to get client attention and make them read it.
Can you share your idea about using image, Neville?
Awww why thank you Gundy!
I’ve actually done an article describing why I use images like I do here:
https://copywritingcourse.com/why-images/
Hopefully that helps clarify it :)
Curious to know if it outperforms the previous one. Do you plan on sharing conversion rates results?
That’d be amazing!
Hey Issac, we often keep those things private for a while, but I may do a Part 14 of this experiment and share some results and other metrics!
However it’s gotta wait a few months to collect statistically valid data :)
Would be good for conversions to optimize the images on the page before uploading them. The first one would be this one as it is nearly 2mb https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/xccHFBYNpyNTHqhG9JiHw5RDTckJWcuxx6rtEnivo_F8FvTWQeHdF9vYamc2XU4-fk-er4BE9Mhxxy214rBReQ=w1920
You can see the rest here:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/180710_CP_5d50c1d1a3dc10e1cabec9b2c353581e/
Noted, working on it Jonathan! That image can def come down in size a bit.
We do use the “Smush” plugin to optimize all images on the main site, BUT that image lives within LeadPages so it didn’t get compressed.
This post alone has 14 images and 3 custom gifs. We try to optimize for images as much as possible, but at some point we have to accept longer load times for the large amount of images in each post.
I understand the appeal of having a contest vs hiring a designer because (assuming you get enough entries), you’re assured of getting a design you like, rather than being stuck with what your designer gives you.
But it also seems like a real pain to either 1. hire another person to make the site or 2. do it yourself!
I use a wordpress front-end page builder, and even though it’s pretty robust, without knowing HTML or CSS I could definitely find myself in a situation of being unable to suitably re-create the winning design.
One question is: why re-invent the wheel every time? When I make a sales page, just about everything I create is borrowed from elements in my swipe file.
Hey Chris, I totally agree with you actually.
I only did the designing part because of this experiment (a lot of people who need to make a sales page have NO clue how to lay it out, so rely on designers).
I generally hand-build sales pages with LeadPages, but any of those page builders on WordPress such as ThriveThemes are great also.
The danger of getting a site hand-coded when a designer is done with it is the extra expense, and now you have a site that’d difficult to change without digging into the code.
I’m normally a huge fan of SIMPLE sales pages, not too many distracting or “pretty” elements. In fact even the winning design has almost a few-too-many pieces of “pretty scenery” for my tastes, but I’ll test it out and see if it works!
Yeah, Thrive is what I use, but I didn’t want to say it just so there was no question of me commenting to promote a product.
I think with a lot of these really popular third-party tools like LeadPages and Thrive (to a lesser extent), I think it’s possible to tap into a community of designers who work specifically with the platform of choice. I don’t know if you can ask for that on 99 designs or if you have to go to a separate place or what.
We did ask 99 Designs if we could specific they build the page on LeadPages and they said no.
But yes, there’s lots of experienced people on UpWork or in relevant Facebook Groups that can work on specific platforms for a fair price.
I think that’s a better option than hiring a frontend developer sometimes :)
1) I shared this on facebook and linkedin. Good content.
2) is like to post it to the incubator section on the new http://www.GeniusDen.com business incubator site. Can we chat?
Awesome, thanks for the share Joe!
Love the final design! Thanks for sharing such an expansive explanation of the sales page process (steps 0-13).
Very welcome Jake!
…and after 13 episodes of this, I’m SO DONE :)
We generally keep some of the detailed numbers private, but if there’s any updates I’ll do a part 14!
This is awesome, Neville! Love how you show processes/case studies like this.
Since a reasonable percentage of your customers are agencies, have you considered an Agency License for unlimited team members? Maybe add in a team coaching call, and price it for 3-5x more?
Hey Chris, yeah we actually do corporate pricing, but that’s generally done of sales calls. Most agencies don’t just click “checkout” on the sales page for that type of thing.
Their process usually involves sending a check, making a purchase order, or at least a short sales call.
So for that reason I generally don’t include corporate pricing on the sales page!
Great experiment Nev! I’m curious to know how much of that $998 the designers get on 99 Designs. Any idea?
Hey Eric, I paid a total of $998 to host this competition, and I think the designers win $599 if I’m not mistaken.
I’m sure there’s also some fees taken out of that amount for transferring it.
You can increase the “bounty” on your own competition to whatever price you want (obviously the larger the prize, the more entries) :-)