S16 E12: The Anatomy of a High-Converting Listicle

0:01Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

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1:04Nik:This is your last chance to get Instant at 50 % off for your first 60 days. Grab it at instant.one slash Sharma. All right, welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick. And today we are going to, we're actually just gonna talk straight tactics. So this past weekend, I wrote a newsletter on basically something that, you know, has always worked for me. when trying to dial in paid social funnels, which is listicles, better landing pages, something I've talked about very extensively and I'm always a fan of. But this past weekend, I actually just talked about specifically a listicle.

1:41What's the best way to make a listicle? And I'll just give you a quick summary of it before we dive into today's episode, which is just gonna be looking at a number of different landing pages, websites, listicles. And I'm gonna have links for all of these at the end. It'll actually be in the show description, all the links. They're going to be short URLs like nick.co slash something. And then you do that and it'll populate you to the page that I'm talking about and you can scroll it. And I believe if you're on YouTube, you should be able to actually see everything as I'm going to be screen sharing it.

2:13So, all right. So back to the newsletter. So, you know, thinking about what are the actual elements of a really good listicle. Well, a few things come to mind. One is it has to be convenient to read, right? before you even get to the UI or the copy or the offer or, you know, the checkout flow, it actually needs to be convenient for somebody to get to and read and consume and be able to learn from without, you know, getting them bored or making them want to drop off. So the way that I like to do that is I just like to basically work backwards from what, you know, essentially, I think the person wants to see.

2:53So how do I find that? Well, first, I usually go and do a ton of research. And, you know, if you just look at the phases of this, I would probably say there's research, there's some level of copywriting and note taking from the research, then there's UX, and then there's UI, and then there's finalizing a copy, and then going live. So starting the research phase, this is where I actually think you probably don't want to use AI as much. A lot of people tend to use AI in the research phase of, you know, building out landing pages or listicles. But in my opinion, the problem with that is, and kind of the downfall is that everything just looks

3:32Nik:like slop. So if you're selling like a supplement product, you know, let's say you're selling a multivitamin, or you're selling a, you know, anti-aging skincare set, or you're selling a, you know, new pair of leggings. The problem is when you, when you have something that other people already also sell or may also sell or maybe a similar material or whatever it may be, or even if it's like the same product category, you're just going to get kind of the same slop as the other guys if you let AI just do your research. And that's for most people, because most people, when they're doing research, they're basically using Claude or ChatGPT and saying, hey, go scour the internet for X, Y, or Z, look on Reddit, look here, look there.

4:15Now, if you've got different parameters set up as you're searching. So for example, you know, I've talked about the fact that I almost exclusively now use a Hermes agent bot for all of my AI work, whether it's building products like the roast.nick.co website, or it's building full on databases like ads.nick.co, where I just screenshot and text my Hermes agent ads that I like to save or use as reference later, or just general search. You know, hey, where are the best tacos to order at 7 p.m. near my office address? There's actually a great search to run for Uber Eats. But, you know, whether it's simple or it's work-related or it's a client thing or it's a project I'm working on or it's even my health and wellness bot, those are all now living in my Hermes agent.

5:05And why that's great is because it actually knows everything that I want or prefer or like or that I look for. So actually when my Hermes agent is doing research, it's pulling a lot better things and a lot better context content than if you were to just ask the basic chat GPT or Anthropic window to do the same. One thing you can do actually there to kind of help you out is basically just plan your prompt better. So actually, if you use Claude to help you write prompts, so you basically use the microphone icon on Claude and you just speak out what you're trying to do or what you're trying to accomplish with the research phase, I bet you would get 10 times better results in terms of the information you get back.

5:50And as a result, the rest of your flow, the rest of this project is going to flow much better and it's just going to have better information. But if you still don't feel like you're super comfortable in prompting or using Claude to write a prompt, which then you put back into Claude, then what I would recommend is just simply doing all this research yourself. And the reason is basically a couple things. One, the way that I like to do research is I like to basically research on the left side of my screen and make notes on the right side. Now, the reason I like to do that is by the time I'm done with the research, I like to have kind of just massive Google Doc of just a bunch of things that I found that I thought were interesting.

6:33Nik:And, you know, I tend to consider myself a customer that is that does it that is generally very skeptical and not easily swayed. And so as a result, I basically, I just know that if I find something to be interesting or a fun fact or, you know, something like, wow, that should be something that's something that would convince me, then I would just make a note of that on the right side. And, you know, basically put that there. And the goal is to have like five or six or seven pages of all this stuff written out so that when you do get to the next phase of UX, it's actually not that complicated because you've already highlighted all the things that you first thought were really amazing.

7:14And now it's just a matter of reorganizing those things into an actual page wireframe. All right, so I'm going to pause right there, but basically just recap right here. So research phase, you know, if you've got your own agent set up that knows what to look for and how to look for things and knows about your brand and the context and maybe even what performs well from an advertising standpoint or open rate or click rate standpoint, if it's collected to your Klaviyo MCP, whatever it is, if you've got your own agent, that's a great way to do research. If you're just using AI to do research, make sure you try to prompt it in a much stronger way.

7:47So use Claude to generate a prompt, which then you put back into Claude to get the research. And honestly, whether you do the first two or one of the two or neither, I would also recommend doing the third one, which is just spend an hour to 90 minutes and just do as much research as you possibly can. Try to go down rabbit holes of forums. Try to go down rabbit holes of Reddit. Try to go down rabbit holes of TikTok. You know, people are putting story times on their TikTok and talking about maybe it's this anti-aging skincare. Maybe it's, you know, whatever it may be. And then at the same time, try to go down and find a bunch of like blogger, micro blogger, mommy blogger sites, try to find internet forums, try to find press articles that cover similar topics.

8:30You want to basically try to get as much research and context as possible. Because what this does is, you know, now you might not go and find your answer on a mommy blogger site, but you actually might find a really good angle of which, or a really good point that you want to then include on your listicle or your landing page. But in any case, that's your research phase. Now, the end product of this, like I mentioned, is that Google Doc. And so from that Google Doc, we're going to go over a few landing pages here in a couple minutes. But I mean, if you're listening to this episode and you're planning to make a landing page, you've probably seen my landing page guide at some point.

9:09I think you can just Google Nick Sharma landing page guide and you get a version of that as well. There's an older one and a newer-ish one. I should probably put a new one out soon too. But what you'll get is, or what you'll understand is like, for the most part, these landing pages are generally the same. You've got your hero section, you've got a notification bar, an announcement bar, you've got your cart, you know, typically you've got no menu items on the top to click out from. It's usually optimized mobile first. You've got social proof above the fold. You've got good imagery or video that kind of teaches or shares or educates people in the context of the product and what you're doing or how you're going to benefit their life.

9:44You've got a comparison chart. You've got some level of a five reasons why, whether it explicitly says five reasons why, or just shows five different reasons that people throughout the page are loving the product. You've got your reviews, you've got testimonials, you've got press, you've pretty much got everything there. So what you can do is once you have this Google Doc of all the information

10:08Nik:that specifically you thought was highlight worthy or stood out, you start to arrange that into different sections. You know, there might be certain lines of copy or certain phrasing or certain things you think go in better spots. And once you've got that, then your goal is to then fill out the rest of the copy in this kind of low fidelity looking wireframe. Me personally, I like to do this stage in a couple different places. If I'm working with a designer, I like to just do it in Figma because I know that my wireframe design is really bad, but it just helps me to kind of do more back of the napkin style wireframe in Figma.

10:41Nik:I know how to make boxes and circles and, you know, I can pull up the page dimensions of a mobile web page. So I'll usually design it mobile first. And the reason I do that is because you never want to design desktop first and fit it to mobile, which is what a lot of people do for some reason. I have no idea why. But a lot of people still do design for desktop. You know, typically when that happens, you design for desktop and squish it into mobile and you tend to lose a lot of the important elements from showing up where they should. You know, you might find that if your desktop header is really full above the fold, then when you squish it to mobile, you know, you have no social proof, you have no kind of buyer's guarantee, you have no, you know, messaging that pushes reasons to buy, because everything is kind of just squished in.

11:22So it gets pushed down. So that's just one example. But you know, that's why you want to design mobile first, and then stretch it to fill the desktop. So if on mobile, your your hero, or you know, you're above the fold is really nice and snappy and hits all the things you want it to hit. But then you stretch it out to desktop and you've got a few more, you've got a little bit more room to add, then that's where you add to it. But you don't want to do it the other way where you have a really full desktop and then you squish it and everything kind of gets moved down because you're trying to include all the elements.

11:50So just a thought there. Now, if I'm not using a, if I'm not working with a designer here and I'm just trying to, you know, vibe code this thing, then what I would probably do is I would still put together what I just mentioned, which is like a rough wireframe back of the napkin looking thing. Basically screenshot that, get a bunch of examples of other sites, which again, we'll go over in a second. So you'll have a bunch of examples here to pull from. And of course, all the links in the show notes. And then I would probably work with, you know, an anthropic model to brief out what this full wireframe looks like as if it was designed, and then work with Manus to actually develop it.

12:30I find that Manus is a really good development tool. But if you just let Manus design it as well and kind of brief the brief itself for the development. The result is not as strong as if you use Claude to brief and Manus to execute. So that's just something I've done a lot of. And of course, another thing I would say is ideally you have some level of like your own internal creative documents, design system, formatting. You know, I tend to have these all built out as markdown files, which are then, you know, some of them I've actually turned into online, like live URLs, which I can then reference to other models, which makes things easier.

13:14So for example, I have a database with all of my information on landing pages. It's like 30 pages long. And that's actually what gets referenced when you run the roast.nick.co website for five bucks is it references all of that to then give you a roast and a page score and improvements for your own page. Now, I have the same thing when it comes to ad creative and the same thing when it comes to general web design, you know, not similar to landing pages, but slightly different. And what that does is the final Manus product of this, you know, basically developed out wireframe

13:47Nik:looks really good. And then a designer can then use that to, you know, UI designer can use that to either go and take that to the next level. Or sometimes now what I'm seeing is design systems are becoming so strong that when you don't have too complex of a page, you can actually develop most of this directly. So a lot of people are doing that. And then depending on how that works, right, if you end up using AI to build the rest of this page out, meaning the development and the go live, then you can actually publish it directly now. If you develop in Manus, you can actually publish it directly in Shopify.

14:20But if you don't, and maybe you work with a designer and you've got your own developer, or I know a ton of brands that are, you know, now using AI more in the process post-strategy and pre-development. So basically in like that wireframe stage in helping write some of that copy maybe

14:36Nik:in making sure they're helping with some of the research. But still the strategy of that page is still being set kind of by the human brain. And then the design and development is still being done a lot by actual designers and actual developers because, you know, it just stays more on brand and whatnot. although that will for sure evolve as time goes on. We're already seeing some brands that have built out really robust design systems and are now pretty much just leveraging that for everything they're doing. All that said, then you go live and then you just start testing it. So why is this important?

15:12Well, most brands, even a bunch that I went through an ads library today, still send a lot of their product traffic

15:20Nik:or paid traffic rather to their homepage a collections page, or a product page. And it's not super common to use listicles, but everybody who uses listicles somehow pretty much ends up using listicles from there on after. Why? Because the conversion rate is amazing. And if you've got listicles that are really engineered for success, meaning you went through that proper strategy and flow I just talked about with proper strategy and research and pulling out insights or highlights, and then filling out the rest of that, designing it in your brand, developing it, going live, testing it, understanding using a heat map or a clarity, where people are going, what the drop-off is, what's found useful, what's found confusing.

16:06If you go through all of that, then that is really how you get to listicles that drive conversion rate from maybe sub 1 % or 1.5 % on your website to maybe like 6 % or 7%. And the reason is because you're basically qualifying the traffic pretty heavily in a way that is not just directly selling. So when you send people to a product page, you're pretty much directly selling them on whatever the message is on the product page, right? So let's take earplugs, for example. If you're selling these, you know, amazing earplugs, your product page might just talk about noise cancellation and the quality of the product.

16:41You know, it might not be kind of like a paid social engineered landing page. But if you've got seven ways to prevent tineadus or whatever it's called, that ringing in your ear, you know, seven ways to prevent, seven reasons you should be using earplugs when you're out at events, seven reasons you should never go, you know, you should never raw dog a conference, whatever it is.

17:01Nik:That basically allows traffic to be qualified in a way that is kind of speaking to something more people are going to understand versus just speaking to like the engineering quality of why this earplug is the best, right? So what it does is essentially cast a much wider net in terms of who you can get as a qualified customer and allows you to educate them in a format that's easy to understand. Shout out to BuzzFeed that made all these listicles and things, you know, BuzzFeed, Little Things, Refinery29, all these internet publishers that spent 10 plus years building out listicles that got insane amounts of traffic.

17:36Nik:Listicles are just a fun format. It's like playing a game to some degree for your brain. So that's why they work. And that's why today I want to talk about not only landing pages, but also listicles. So I'm going to share my screen here. And, you know, hopefully you can see this. If you can't see these links for any reason, then, you know, don't worry. Go ahead and find the links in the description of the episode. And I'll be able to show and share all the links there. You'll be able to see them. Pull them up on your computer. Look at it in both desktop and mobile. That's how I'm going to be looking at it.

18:09And yeah, I'm going to just narrate some of the things across these pages that I find to be really interesting.

18:14Nik:So let's get started. here's the retention tip of the week brought to you by instant here's a mistake i see food and beverage companies make constantly they cross sell by product category you bought our hot sauce now here's our other hot sauce that's lazy the brands with the best repeat rates they cross sell by occasion what does that mean now if somebody buys your barbecue rub in may they're probably grilling your follow-up sequence shouldn't be try our other rub it should be try our grilling bundle the rub the sauce the marinade maybe even a recipe card you're selling an experience not just the skew.

18:45Nik:Now think about how customers actually use your products and then build email flows around those moments. Holiday entertaining, game day, weeknight dinners, occasion-based cross selling increases AOV because you're solving a bigger problem than just you need more of this one thing. This kind of personalized behavior-driven email is exactly what Instant helps brands automate. Their AI builds flows based on how individual shoppers browse and buy so you can send the right bundle to the right person at the right time. Check them out at instant.1 slash Sharma. So the first one I have here is basically from BioRoot Labs.

19:21I'm going to go ahead and put this in inspect mode and refresh. And, you know, right here, this is so a lot of these links I kind of sourced just by finding native ads around the internet from different tweets that I'd bookmarked from many of them. Many of them are from Facebook ads library. So they're actually active ads as well. And I'm assuming that a lot of these pages that I'm going to share today are pretty well-trafficked pages. So, you know, we can take it with some level of a grain of salt, but for the most part, we should probably try to find things that we find interesting here. This first one is basically a listicle.

19:58You'll notice that at the top, there's pretty much no buttons here to click out. And it's essentially a 10 reasons why turmeric curcumin is a game changer for people who drink regularly. Now, what's interesting about this is this is basically a two-layer deep angle, meaning it's not just 10 reasons why turmeric curcumin is great for people, right? That's a one-layer deep. It's two layers deep for people who drink regularly. Now, why is that great here? Well, if you go back to what I just mentioned about kind of casting that net wider, it just did that, right? If you were to say, well, two things.

20:35One, It casts it wider because so many people in the world drink alcohol. And so when you're saying that this is for people who drink alcohol, they're going to feel like, oh, this is for me. Not for everybody, but for me, even though with this headline, they kind of are going after almost everybody, right? Because almost everybody drinks. So it says you don't need to quit to start drinking, or you don't need to quit drinking to start feeling better. You just need to give your body the right tools to fight back. Now, this is probably, yeah, this is just some curcumin supplement stuff. But essentially what this does is go through a, let's see, 10 reasons why.

21:11Now, a couple things that I like here. Well, one, you can tell this is just vibe-coded, which I'm not a fan of because you can tell it's vibe-coded. It's pretty basic looking. If it's not vibe-coded and somebody actually designed this, that's also pretty bad. But regardless, you'll notice kind of a common theme is design is going to be probably 4 to 6 out of 10. it's not a huge element although I do think that the better the design is in most cases the higher the trust is and therefore the higher the conversion rate. One thing I did like about this listicle specifically is that the right words are bolded here so whether it's in the beginning in kind of the paragraph before the reasons start or within the reasons or the think of it this way breakout and the key point breakout which are kind of basically like quote in lines on the page itself.

22:06Those are all nice. Now, a couple of things I'd changed. There's not really many CTAs. There's no imagery here at all. There is kind of this vibe coded, you know, 2000 % more absorption, basically like a clinical trial equivalent type of a module is what they're trying to put here. But then basically it just goes to this button, you click through and it takes you to the bio route PDP. Now the PDP itself is also incredibly optimized. So in the hero itself, you've got the, you know, the product on the right side, you've got these three icons that take up a decent amount of real estate, probably, you know, 25%, maybe some more, maybe 30 % of the actual hero area, fully just talking about these.

22:46And then what also is cool, at the top, which I haven't really seen before is you've got this scrolling marquee. So basically a little announcement bar looking thing under the logo of the brand, but it's side scrolling with these highlighted quotes, which I think, again, speak to basically the audience they're going after, which is essentially kind of like this older demo from what it seems like. All of the imagery in the actual PDP also, great job by them on this. It's basically like a TikTok shop carousel, aka how do you use the landing? How do you basically break out your entire landing page into these eight to 10 images that scroll through the top.