🗞 What's New: A copywriting framework that converts

You have 3 seconds to hook visitors who come to your landing page:

• Don't talk about what you do, but about the transformation that people will achieve with your product. Tap into people's desires.
• Giveaways can help you connect with your audience and increase engagement. Consider adding a theme, collaborating, or getting UGC.
• $225K in 6 months from an AI learning community. David Szabo-Stuban's rule of thumb is: When in doubt, spend on making your customers happy!

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by Akshay Raveendran

Your landing page has less than three seconds to hook visitors. If they only read the first bits of text on your page, will they know exactly what you offer? Will it tempt them to learn more about your brand?

A weak message will make people instantly bounce. Here's my go-to framework.

Headline

Explain the specific value people get that only your brand can offer. This is your promise to prospects, your big idea, and the reason your brand exists.

The trick is to not talk about what you do, but what transformation you're helping with. Tap into people's deepest desires, or their most superficial, nothing in between.

Example: A tax software for startups.

• Old headline: Have your taxes automated.
• New headline: Get $20K back from the IRS in 20 minutes.

The old headline explains what they do, but what people really want to hear is how they'll be able to either save or make more money.

Subheadline

This is where you can give more detail about your offer. Show your product's value, and handle any objections people may have.

Using the tax software example from above, the subheadline could be: We help SaaS startups claim tax credits that most accountants miss.

They could also add a guarantee to help with any uncertainties: Pay $0 if we don't save you any money.

Main CTA

This drives excitement, creates FOMO, and reduces friction. It's more of a call-to-value than a call-to-action. Don’t add any pressure; let them take action on their own terms.

Tips

• Write how your audience talks. You can take examples from positive reviews of your brand, and negative reviews of your competitors.
• Be on your audience's side. Relate to them and empathize.
• Don't sell products. Sell painkillers, lifestyle upgrades, transformations, or investments.
• If possible, create different landing pages for different sources of traffic. The landing page of someone coming from TikTok with no prior awareness should have a different message than the landing page people see after actively searching on Google.

Discuss this story.

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by Syed Balkhi

If you're a founder looking to boost engagement, giveaways are a fantastic way to connect with people and create genuine excitement!

What are giveaways?

Giveaways are promotional events where individuals or businesses offer free products, services, or experiences to participants, usually in exchange for some form of engagement, such as liking a social media post, sharing content, or providing contact information.

Giveaways can:

• Boost engagement.

• Build brand awareness.

• Grow your audience.

• Show appreciation for your existing audience and customers.

Awesome giveaway ideas

1. Themed giveaways: Choose a theme that resonates with your audience. Whether it's a "Self-Care Sunday" package filled with pampering goodies, or a "Techie's Dream" bundle of gadgets and gizmos, themed giveaways add an extra layer of excitement and cohesiveness.

2. Collaborative giveaways: Join forces with other businesses or influencers in your niche to create a giveaway. This widens your reach.

3. Flash giveaways: Flash giveaways, with their short entry periods and quick turnaround times, create a sense of urgency and excitement that can really get people buzzing. Just make sure to promote them well to ensure maximum participation in the limited timeframe.

4. User-generated content giveaways: Get your audience involved by asking them to create and share content related to your brand or a specific theme. Whether it's photos, videos, or even TikTok dances, UGC giveaways generate buzz and provide valuable social proof.

5. Milestone celebrations: Whether it's hitting a certain number of followers or reaching a business milestone, celebrating your achievements with a giveaway is a fantastic way to thank your audience for their support, and keep the momentum going.

Making your giveaways successful

1. Clear entry rules: Be clear in letting your audience know how they can enter the giveaway.

2. Promotion: Get the word out far and wide!

3. Engagement is key: Keep the excitement going throughout the duration of the giveaway by engaging with your participants. Consider sharing updates and creating a sense of community around the event to ensure that people stay engaged.

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

📱 Using social media to boost SEO.

🤔 How mature is your customer success team?

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🤖 AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality.

🔒 13 steps to protect your rankings.

😒 Investors are growing increasingly wary of AI.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by David Szabo-Stuban

In six months, we've built a profitable school that teaches solo founders how to build AI agents without code.

The idea

We hired a machine learning professor from Frankfurt, and built a prompt engineering course together. That made us $30K quickly.

Fast forward to September 2023: One of our Instagram reels was picked up by a ChatGPT plugin developer who had 250K followers. We did a live webinar together, and that's where we launched our first offer.

We had 2K+ people sign up for our webinar, and 700 attended. We made $40K in the first month.

Out-teach everyone

Here was our philosophy: Out-teach everyone. Not only through content, but through customer satisfaction that starts the first time they meet us.

As we were conducting the webinars, we also started doing customer interviews. That constantly brought in leads. I don't think the actual story contains a lot of useful learning points because (and I'm not afraid to admit it) a few times we just got really lucky!

Which brings me to my first point: If you're just starting out, be patient. It took me almost a decade to finally get lucky. You'll get there.

We realized that the online education market consists of the exact same user experience: People feel like course creators are ripping them off. So, we decided to flip this on its head and build a business where our customers get extreme value. How?

1. Service, not sales: We offered a lifetime membership for $297. No upsells, no subscriptions. Any future course we might create is theirs for free. We can still make money from software, consulting, affiliates, etc.

2. Do things that don't scale: Most of our users got used to being forgotten by the course creators after completing the purchase. We created a community for them, and we actively help them. I spend a lot of time in our community.

3. Be radically transparent: We're radically candid about hardships. This makes the whole business human, thus easier to manage. Two weeks ago, I started feeling burned out, so I cancelled all my calls and sent a short video message to our community. The response was overwhelmingly positive!

Today, we have 9.3K people on our email list. We have clients who are telling their friends about us, and this is the bit that's the long game. We currently have 1.1K+ people in our community, and 800 of them are paid members.

Growing with the community

I've made a lot of mistakes as CEO, but I've learned that when you focus on the customer, not the revenue, it opens up new possibilities. We have a team of 30 people who are all creating content for us just because we gave them so much value that they "want to pay it back somehow!"

That is how you really scale without cash investments. When in doubt, spend on making your customers happier!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Akshay Raveendran, Darko, Syed Balkhi, and David Szabo-Stuban for contributing posts. —Channing