Wanna grow your subscribers like crazy?

Want to get people to subscribe to your list before they even see your blog?

The answer is a MAGICAL welcome mat!

By that I mean… well, this. See how one of my biz-crushes Allison has this super cool landing page right when you visit her homepage?

What if I told you it’s super simple to set that up so it’s automatically the first page your visitors see?

Aaaand that it’s also super easy to change it or remove it at any time with NO coding needed?

AND that this one little change could boost your opt-in rate by up to 535%?!

(Did I just blow your mind?)

It’s possible thanks to Leadpages. 🙌🏼

Today I’m going to show you step-by-step how to combine your WordPress blog with Leadpages to make an email list building MACHINE, mmk!

Okay, and maybe everyone else knew this, but I’ve been a Leadpages customer for 6 months now and literally just found this feature yesterday. YAH.

So I want to share it with you.

But First, What is Leadpages?

If you don’t already know about Leadpages, it’s a landing page creation tool that makes it dead easy and quick to setup targeted, fun landing pages. You don’t need to know how to code or anything: it’s all drag and drop AND they have beautiful templates to pick from.

It’s how I created my free content strategy course page!

Lots o’ pro bloggers use it. And for good reason: it’s affordable and saves SO MUCH time. I thought it might be overkill when I signed up months ago, but I can’t picture life without it.

So yeah in a nutshell, it makes pretty landing pages effortlessly.

AND, with this exclusive link, you can snag a 14 day free trial to check out Leadpages for yourself.

Mmk, Now What’s a Welcome Mat?

The example from Allison I featured at the beginning of this post is what’s called a “welcome mat”.

It basically means a call to action that you’re putting on your site as the first thing people see. They can either sign up and convert, or choose a “No Thanks” option and continue viewing the rest of your site.

Here’s an example from the King of Marketing, Neil Patel.

When you visit his website, you see his offer for a free video training.

If you click the orange button, you can sign up for his webinar.

If you don’t want to sign up, you can click the “No thanks” option to continue to his blog. There’s also a menu in the footer you can use to navigate the site without opting-in.

So the reason this is called a “welcome mat” is because it’s the first thing you see on the site. It’s welcoming you.

Yeah, you get it.

So do they work?

Some people think welcome mats are annoying or distracting. But the numbers don’t lie.

Welcome mats convert more users.

Course creation website Fedora used a welcome mat to boost their subscribers by 70%!

So YEAH they work. Let’s go make one!

How to Create a Welcome Mat with Leadpages

I’m pretty techy.

Like, no pro or anything, but I can setup a WordPress site, troubleshoot simple problems, and even follow some advanced tutorials online for CSS or PHP edits to my site.

But I had no idea how to make a welcome mat.

There are paid solutions out there, like the popular Sumo plugin, but I didn’t want to pay for yet another tool.

And now that I’ve discovered how to do this with my existing Leadpages account, it doesn’t cost me any extra!

So let’s get into the tutorial…

Step 1: Login to your Leadpages account, and create a new landing page.

If you don’t have a Leadpages account, click here to sign up now!

For your new landing page, pick something you want to essentially be the NEW homepage to your website.

I would suggest keeping it pretty short and simple. Everything should fit on the user’s screen and be obvious what you want them to do right away.

You don’t want to make your new homepage into a 1,000 word sales page, mmk?

A quick “Here’s a thing!” with a button to sign up, or a button to say “Nope!” and continue browsing the site.

People are going to make the decision to sign up or not within a second or two, so keep it brief.

I like this template for a welcome mat (omg excuse the shit circling job):

Step 2: Create Your Landing Page

Make the page! Maybe you have a brand new content upgrade to feature, or you can use an existing one too.

There needs to be some benefit to your users to signing up. They should get a downloadable PDF, an exclusive coupon, or some other cool, tangible THING.

Here’s an example of what I created:

Really basic, but it gets the job done.

Make sure you link up the subscribe button to the email provider of your choice, and the “No thanks” text to the next page you want to take them to. Normally your blog.

Now we need to make this page into our new welcome mat!

Step 3: Login to Your WordPress Account

Please note, this works for WordPress.ORG websites only!

Assuming you have the Leadpages plugin installed already, go ahead and click on it.

If you don’t have this plugin yet, GIRL, you need to.

Click here to learn how to install their plugin and get Leadpages integrated with your website.

Once you’ve clicked on the plugin, you’ll see a screen like this:

Click on Add New at the top.

THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS.

From the dropdown, select the page you just created.

Then choose the Welcome Gate option.

Now hold up a sec.

You could also choose the Home Page option.

The difference between those are that the Home Page option would show your welcome mat to EVERYONE all the time.

The Welcome Gate option only shows it to NEW visitors. 👩🏼‍💻 I recommend going with that one.

Sooo, click Publish.

TA-DA!! 🚀

Now when people type in yoursite.com, they’ll see THIS!

Just make sure there’s a clear way for them to get to the rest of your website, otherwise people won’t know how to access your content.

I hope you liked this short tutorial!

It kind of blew my mind when I discovered this feature…

If it turns out that I’m the last of mankind to find this out (like I was when perms went out of style), then FINE, nevermind.

But I hope it helped you learn something new.

And in case you missed me mentioning it like 500 times, you can grab a free 14 day trial of Leadpages by clicking here. 😉

Got any other Leadpages tricks and tips?! Share them with me in the comments!