Sales Page Creation Essentials – Part 1: Basic HTML

December 2 2011

In the Internet Marketing world, when you are creating and selling your own products, sales pages are one of the most important parts of your business. They are the first thing prospects see when they are sent to your product by affiliates, yourself, Google or any other source. This means that if there are any problems with your page, these prospects will close the page before they even read the headline.

Think about it, your sales page reflects the quality of you product so would you invest your hard earned money in a product where the sales page has mistakes or looks amateurish? If a sales page looks bad this will reflect on the quality of the actual product?

This means that your sales page must look professional before you send anyone to visit it. However, for those of you out there who can’t afford to pay some HTML expert to build a page for you, you have to go away and build your own sales page.

You could go and download a cheap or free HTML editor then dive straight into creating a page but this is possibly the biggest mistake you could make. How can you build a page without the slightest idea how HTML coding works?

Some people out there may be able to build a respectable looking page simply by using the ‘Design’ view of a HTML editor, but will this page work online in all browsers? Some of the less professional editors out there are unable to edit the code accordingly as you edit the look of the page. This means that while it may look okay in the actual editor you use, once its online it may look totally different or simply not display at all. Also, just because it looks ok in Internet Explorer doesn’t mean it will display correctly in Firefox. (Something you should always test)

If you have been following me online for any amount of time, you will know that I have numerous coaching programs available. The amount of pages people have sent to me with messages along the lines of ‘There is a problem with the text displaying on my sales page’ or ‘My page looks okay until I put it online, then the font is all messed up’.

This is because they have dove headlong into creating a page without any basic knowledge of how HTML coding works. Luckily for these people they have me to turn to when things aren’t going according to plan, but, do you have anyone to turn to?

If the answer to that question is no and you are in the middle of creating a product online, my advice to you is to simply learn basic HTML coding before you create any sort of sales page. There is nothing more frustrating than having a problem which you haven’t the slightest idea what is causing it.

This could save you a lot of time and effort if you take the time out NOW to learn HTML basics, rather than trying to learn by taking the plunge straight into creating a sales page.

Learning basic HTML isn’t difficult and can be 100% free. Here’s an excellent free resource I found that will help. You will also find tons of HTML tutorials on YouTube.

Sergio Felix
Reply December 2, 2011

Hey great tips John!

I want to add that if you have ANY skills on HTML, you can instantly fix the mess that WordPress does sometimes.

This can basically happen when you’re editing right from the visual tab inside WordPress and are dealing with lists, then paragraphs, images, etc.

So for someone who doesn’t knows ANYTHING on HTML, fixing a minor bug with the WordPress editor is super easy to do.

You just click on the HTML tab, fix the code, click back to visual tab and it’s done!

Take John’s advice and don’t be lazy, you’ll thank him later!

Great article John!

Sergio
Jennifer@JenniferCTaylor.com
Reply December 3, 2011

Hi, John

I’m working on getting to the “Sales Page Creation” step of my product … and, yes, I’ll be getting you to have a look!

I’ve used w3schools site a lot in the past and can endorse it wholeheartedly. It gives you examples and lets you change them to see how they really work! Thanks for reminding me of it.

Jennifer
Eamon
Reply December 5, 2011

Hi John

Some sound advice here…

…although I’ve switched to doing mostly squeeze page, sales pages and the rest now with wordpress – I do still use html editors for a lot of other things that need done, besides using wordpress.

As Sergio has also pointed out – wordpress can sometimes strip your code out when switching back and forth, so as you say John…no matter what way we look at it – we’re all going to need it under our belt to pull us out of them tricky situations, when we need to call upon some code to fix the problem.

Eamon.
Carl Picot
Reply December 6, 2011

Hi John

You are renowned for giving away awesome free content, and this is a really good example of this.

I really could spend hours on this blog as it is so full of useful information.

Nice one mate

xxxxcarlxxxx
Terry
Reply December 16, 2011

Hi, John,
Thanks for the link to the HTML instruction. I used an html editor called Kompozer to build my squeeze page and I really have been wondering why no one signs up to my newsletter. Maybe you put your finger on it with this post. Could be. Thanks.
zora
Reply December 18, 2011

Hi John,

Thanks for the like to the HTML learning site. It will be great to go and look up how to when I get stuck on something’s. Thanks for taking the time out and writing this post.

To Your Success
Regards
Zora
Roberta
Reply December 18, 2011

This is excellent advice, as always from you. I can’t imagine trying to build web pages without the slightest knowledge of HTML. My first website, in 1996, was built after struggling to learn how to code. I’m kinda glad I couldn’t afford the programs they had then, like Net Fusion, etc. Horribly expensive and hard to learn. Just learning the code was way easier. I used a site called htmlgoodies.com, but I see it’s under new ownership and not as fun now as it was back then. The site you referred us to looks like the easiest to use now. Thanks!
Andrew Collinson
Reply January 30, 2012

I think WordPress is the best option to get a website up and running quickly and can incorporate sales or lead capture pages.The only techie but is knowing how to place your auto responder opt in form on your page.