If you're a business owner, you are pretty much guaranteed to have at least heard of Alex Hormozi once. He went from running a gym to teaching others how to run their gyms. Now he's building a $100 million empire at Acquisition.com.
One of the main marketing strategies he preaches is paid advertising. But the thing is, your paid ads are only as strong as the landing page they drive traffic to. And that's exactly why Alex gives so much advice on building high-converting landing pages.
But that brings us to an important question: Is his advice actually legit, or does it only work when you have his budget and his audience?
Well, as someone who's built over 500 websites for brands like NBC Sports, Boston Dynamics, and Live Nation, I want to see for myself. So, let's break it down.
Landing Page Advice #1: Keep It Clear
All right, let's get into our first video from Alex Hormozi on landing pages.
**Alex Hormozi:** Most landing pages suck. Here's how to have them suck less. First, start with the headline. You have to stop the person in their tracks and promise a clear outcome.
That's hysterical. I'm never going to say that to somebody on a sales call, but I love how candid he is in terms of starting this off.
What he's saying makes total sense. Too many people try to get too cute with their headlines on landing pages. It's important to make it really clear what people are getting from spending their time there.
Everyone is short on time. You want to make it really obvious: What's the outcome? What's the benefit they're going to get? And that starts with the headline. So, great advice there.
Alex Hormozi: That's it. The subheadline clarifies that promise.
It's also important to highlight the value of subheadlines. You can make a claim with an outcome, but it's really good to have a subheadline that ties in some of the "how" behind that outcome and adds credibility.
It's good that he's recommending that one-two punch. I would definitely agree that's something almost every good landing page, strategic service page, and similar page on a site should have.
Alex Hormozi: It's basically like YouTube. You've got your headline and your thumbnail. The relationship between those two things adds context to the headline. The hero image should add proof to the headline and subheadline. So either I'm showing you the thing you're going to get or the outcome that you want to experience.
I think "proof" can be used pretty loosely here. You can think of a literal interpretation of proof with images and visuals included on landing pages. But really, the visual is meant to reinforce whatever is being stated.
If you're a SaaS company, it could be a visualization of your software that backs up what's being stated in the headline and subheadline. If you're a product manufacturer, it could be a really nice visualization of the products you manufacture.
Ultimately, you want the visual to back up what's being said in those first two headlines.
Alex Hormozi: The CTA should have what they're going to get and how they're going to get it. Nothing else. For the form, you want to have as little information as required to get a qualified lead, but that could still be four or five pieces of information. In my experience, I tend to add more than I used to at the beginning because I used to want to get more opt-ins, and now I want more customers.
The advice on the contact form is also really good. It's something I see people take to one extreme or the other.
Some people put something really bare-bones up there, while others go completely over the top and have 10-plus fields. The recommendation of four to five fields is good. I'd say four to eight is probably the maximum you want to include.
My recommendation for what those fields should be is to focus on questions you would use to qualify whether someone is an ICP fit or not. Think about the kinds of sales questions you'd want to ask a prospect and see if you can get some of those answers through the form.
A lot of this advice is tied to using paid ads as a strategy. If you're paying for ads on a platform, you want to make sure you're getting the most qualified leads possible through that form.
That's especially true if a form submission leads to a call or some other investment of time on your side. You want to make sure you're spending that time wisely.
When you get into channels like Meta, for instance, the net of people you attract is incredibly wide. You'll get everyone from small individual tire-kickers to actually qualified buyers. Making sure those form fields are dialed in is really important.
Alex Hormozi: If you have more than five fields of information, break it into multiple steps.
The multi-step advice is good. I would add that I wouldn't necessarily say five fields is the cutoff. I'd actually focus more on grouping the information.
One strategy we'll use with a multi-step form is to put key contact information in the first step. That might be first name, last name, and email address. That's really simple information that people are comfortable filling out.
Then the next step is the qualifying portion of the form. That's where you add a little more friction and ask people to provide the information you need to determine whether they're a good fit.
That combination tends to be really effective because you get people started with the first step. Once they've already put in some effort, the likelihood of them completing the second step is much higher.
I would actually opt for a multi-step form in a lot of cases, regardless of whether it's four questions, five questions, six questions, or more, because you can build momentum through the form.
Alex Hormozi: You can add a one-line description to a lead magnet. The whole purpose is to answer, "Why should I give my email?" It's justification. If you're going to have bullets underneath the fold, I like three bullets, and they should be the three biggest objections in order of most common to least common.
He talks about using bullets underneath the fold. We do something very similar, except we tend to structure them more like FAQs.
There's really no hard limit. It's about understanding who the potential buyer is, what their sales objections might be, and strategically using those FAQs to address them.
These are things that might cause someone to hesitate before filling out the form. If you can address those concerns directly on the page, that's great.
Alex Hormozi: Over time, I used to put a lot of social proof on my landing pages, but if for some reason I need it or it's a more complex thing, I will put social proof underneath.
That's another thing I've seen on a lot of landing pages. People will have this endless wall of social proof. When there's too much, it can actually detract from what you're trying to communicate because people aren't going to focus on it.
And candidly, not everything requires a huge amount of social proof.
If you're offering something completely free, like a free information guide or resource, you don't necessarily need to put down a ton of social proof.
If you're selling something, even if it's a lower-cost offer, then it can be beneficial to have social proof backing up what you're trying to sell. But for free offers, a lot of it can just become extra noise on the page.
Alex Hormozi: Everything else visually, the point is to keep it blank because we want to direct all the attention toward doing the only thing you have to do. Oftentimes, the more you lengthen the landing page, the lower it will convert. Keep it mobile-optimized, keep it fast, compress all the images so it loads quickly, and last but not least, put all the legal stuff so you don't get in trouble.
Overall, I think this is pretty solid general advice for putting a landing page together.
One thing I would caution people against is getting too fixated on designing the page exactly the way he communicates it. There's a lot of variability. You can use these same types of components in different ways and still achieve a similar outcome.
For instance, if we look at this landing page on our site for a free guide we've created, you can see a lot of the same components.
We have our headline immediately followed by a subheadline and bullet points. But those bullet points and the subheadline aren't just centered directly underneath the main copy.
We also include a little bit of social proof. The form asks for first name, last name, company name, and email, just the basics for this particular report.
Because this is something people are accessing for free, we're not investing a lot of time after the fact, so we're not going through heavier qualifying steps.
Then, if someone has additional questions or concerns that might make them hesitate before filling out the form, we strategically use an FAQ section to address those concerns.
So, it's a lot of the same components we're discussing, just structured a little differently. There's also a little more design overall on this page, but it still converts extraordinarily well, at over 20% of the people who visit.
Landing Page Advice #2: Should Your Copy Be Written at a Third-Grade Level?
All right, we've got our next piece of advice from Alex here. Let's check it out.
Alex Hormozi: The number one thing that you can do to make any website or any email convert better is take all the text on the page and put it into a reading editor. There's one called Hemingway App. I recommend it. Continue to edit all the words until you're below third grade.
You don't even need to change anything about the meaning of what you're saying. Just continue to edit it until it's below third grade, put it back in, and test it. I virtually guarantee that your conversion rate will go up without even changing what you say, only how you said it.
I'm going to have to disagree with Alex on this one.
I'll take a step back. I think the premise of what he's trying to communicate is right. You want to be direct, and you want to make things simple.
But specifically saying all copy should be written at a third-grade level is an overgeneralization, and it's not going to be the right move for a lot of industries.
For instance, we work a lot in manufacturing and engineering. There's a credibility loss that could happen if we communicated exclusively at a third-grade level to engineers, procurement professionals, and other specialized people visiting the site.
The better advice I would offer is: Know who your customer is, know what they care about, and be as direct as possible with the copy you're putting on the site.
Don't specifically target a certain grade level just for the sake of it.
Simpler is better, but you don't want to dumb things down so far that you lose credibility.
Know your audience. In some cases, bringing the reading level way down might be effective. If you're a lawn care company, for example, maybe it makes sense. But I would caution against making that a blanket rule for every business.
Landing Page Advice #3: Simple Layouts
All right, we've got another piece of advice from Alex Hormozi. Let's check it out.
Alex Hormozi: There are three landing pages that we use most commonly: headline, subheadline, contact info, submit. The same thing except with an image. Or the same thing with an image and then three bullets.
Those are the three most common layouts I use. Pick one of them, and all you have to do is test it.
The nice thing is, the simpler the landing page, the fewer variables you have to test, so you can quickly improve it. It also gives the person who's clicking to that page fewer things to do.
They said they wanted the thing. They go to the page. The page says, "Here's the thing you said you wanted." They're like, "Yeah, I guess I did want it."
Generally speaking, those are three very common formats that you see.
That said, again, it really depends on what you're offering with the landing page.
If it's a simple, free information offer, those three variations could very well be the only variations you need.
But if you're selling something, or you have something more complex like a quiz, calculator, or similar tool, sticking to those bare-bones formats might not be the right solution.
The formula you really want to think about for landing pages is this: Be direct upfront. Highlight the value of what they're going to get. Reinforce the proof and trust behind it. Then handle whatever objections they might have.
That should be the overall criteria you shoot for.
In terms of testing variations, you can swap out images. You can swap out specific copy in certain places.
But overall, yes, those are three valid landing page formats, especially for a simpler information product or offer.
Landing Page Advice #4: Test One Thing at a Time
All right, we have another piece of advice from Alex here. This time we're talking about skyrocketing conversions and really maximizing things on that front. Let's check it out.
Alex Hormozi: The process is simple. Every week, what we do is have our marketing meeting and do one split test.
Just one.
That's because everyone wants to test 100 things, but doing one test forces us to be very, very focused on the one thing we think is going to drive the highest result for us.
When you do this every single week for 52 weeks in a row, and you do that for five years, your process just gets better and better and better. Those increases in conversion compound.
I will say, that is really great advice.
So many times, we're working with companies and they're trying to test too many things simultaneously. It's really hard to pinpoint what's actually moving the needle if you're changing too much at once.
Having a single test where you're focusing on one theory and one objective, and then having a more compressed timeline in which you're doing it, is much better than trying to run multiple tests simultaneously against the same thing.
So I definitely agree with that.
Alex Hormozi: When we are running split tests on marketing, especially for paid advertising, I'll give you the two biggest things that we look at.
The first thing sounds obvious and simple, but people don't do it. We simply split test the headlines on our landing pages. That's it.
The next thing we'll split test is the image underneath the headline.
What we've seen from the vast majority of all the tests we've done is that almost all the juice, the biggest jumps in conversion rate, happen above the fold.
When I say "above the fold," I mean everything you see on a landing page before scrolling. On desktop, it's everything that's immediately visible when the page loads. On your phone, it's everything immediately available on the screen.
That's where you're selling people on whether they're going to stay on the page and continue reading. That's where the biggest returns will come from.
Again, I can't fault anything he's saying here.
Too many people get caught up doing split tests on page layouts and more complex things when they haven't necessarily tested the lower-effort stuff first.
With headlines, you can come up with so many different variations, especially now with AI acting as a genuine helper in the process.
Being able to split test different headlines allows you to make meaningful improvements at relatively low effort because you're not worrying about full redesigns. You're simply swapping out copy.
The same thing applies to visuals. You can test different images of your software, different metrics, social proof, or whatever you have in that hero section without requiring a huge amount of execution.
I think it's really smart to focus on those types of things first.
Once you have a strong winning combination between a headline and a visualization, then maybe you can get into layout adjustments.
But you could probably spend a month's worth of testing just on text and images, optimize those, and see pretty big jumps before ever needing to touch the layout.
Generally speaking, when you do get to layout, the incremental improvements you're likely to see are going to be lower than what you can achieve through messaging and imagery.
So, I think this is really good advice and very achievable for most businesses that aren't overly technical and don't have in-house design or development teams supporting them.
You can probably do this yourself with a little software assistance and some pre-planning.
Landing Page Advice #5: Every Bullet Has to Earn Its Place
All right, now let's check out our final clip from Alex on landing pages and see what he has to say.
Alex Hormozi: If I'm going to add a bullet, it takes up mental real estate for the prospect to make a decision. I'm asking for a cost from them to read this bullet, so it better be worth it.
I believe buyers are single-issue voters. They're single-issue buyers.
It's cool to have many, many things, but if you've watched heat maps for purchasing behavior, people read, read, read, they hit the thing, and then they buy. That's the game.
Every single bullet should, for the right buyer, be worth the entirety of the price times two or three.
If you think about that as the razor for deciding what you're going to include, you can offer other things in your community, but for something to take up real estate in your pitch, you need to put a lot of effort into it.
At the launch, for example, I had playbooks that were 30 or 40 pages long, and every playbook only had three bullets because there was no more time for me to go into everything.
It's about word concision, and more importantly, idea concision. Make fewer bullets and make each bullet perfect.
I think the general advice here, having a very focused message about what your offer is and making that clear on the landing page without a lot of extra noise, is valuable.
However, again, it's going to be very dependent on what you sell and who you sell to.
Our customers often have multiple users and multiple potential buyers. It's not always the exact same persona coming to the site or involved in the buying decision.
To an extent, you do have to craft your message for the different individuals visiting the page.
If you have a business with different types of buyers, you need to account for that.
For instance, if we're working with a large-scale manufacturing company, they might have engineers looking at the machinery they offer. They might also have procurement professionals looking at that same machinery.
Those two individuals are going to analyze the site and the content in very different ways.
So I would say the concept of being focused is important, but having a single message that you stake everything on isn't necessarily the right decision for every business.
For certain offers, where things are more straightforward or you're dealing with a narrower audience and you know the main thing that audience cares about, that advice makes sense.
But again, contextualize it.
Does your business have different types of buyers or different types of buying decisions? If so, you may need to go beyond one single message and instead focus on the top three or five messages that resonate with your audience.
Final Takeaway
And that's Alex's $100 million landing page advice.
But what if your page follows every single one of these principles and it still doesn't feel like a premium company?
If that's the case, I made another video breaking down the exact science behind designing a premium website, including everything that makes a site feel expensive before a visitor even reads a single word.
Watch that next, and I'll see you there.
