Ruth Soukup is the founder of Living Well Spending Less, Elite Blog Academy, and her most recent venture, ACTIVATE—a coaching program for online entrepreneurs and business owners. After building a successful online business herself, Ruth turned her passion towards helping more people pursue their entrepreneurial dreams and achieving financial freedom.
Using Leadpages, she’s built multiple funnels that generate consistent revenue for all areas of her business.
80% conversion rates | $1.4 million in revenue from 1 landing page
Her results have been nothing short of phenomenal, resulting in ACTIVATE quickly becoming one of the premier programs for aspiring online business owners.
Ruth started Living Well Spending Less 11 years ago as a space to help women live better for less money. While it essentially began as a deals and coupon blog, over time it evolved into a resource that showed women how to be more productive and organized, while eliminating the overwhelm from their lives.
As LWSL’s success grew, Ruth wanted to help others create similar businesses. She launched Elite Blog Academy to share everything she learned while building her own blog. This became wildly successful as well, with the product launch generating an astonishing $1.4 million in revenue.
Elite Blog Academy grew fast. Too fast actually.
Eventually, Ruth felt like the business was running her, not the other way around. Worse yet, with her growing staff and expenses her margins were going down, even though her revenues were consistently on the rise. So, Ruth made the difficult decision to completely revamp her entire business.
“I realized I have no business coaching other people and telling them how to run their business if I’m not willing to make the hard decisions in my own.”
She simplified her operation and cut many of her expenses. With a more “lean and mean” business model, Elite Blog Academy was more profitable than ever heading into 2020.
The launch of ACTIVATE
Ruth had big plans for her business in 2020, but like so many entrepreneurs she had to completely pivot once the pandemic hit.
Because she was now at home and had more free time, she started offering live coaching sessions to her students. This had an immediate impact on her students. She noticed a big difference in the results they were achieving, which got her thinking that maybe it was time to make another shift in her business.
“Even though it was the pandemic, my students were seeing more success than they’d ever seen before.”
In the past, the self-paced nature of her program meant that some students got stuck and didn’t finish the material. So, Ruth refocused her efforts on live coaching and accountability, taking a more hands-on approach to teaching.
Elite Blog Academy was rebranded to ACTIVATE in late 2020, and the program has been a massive success. The new approach has led to even more profits and success stories for her students. This is also reflected in her own business, which is growing faster than ever.
Challenges
Ruth always had exceptional content throughout each iteration of her business. The problem was turning that content into leads and sales. She tested many different landing page builders and conversion tools, but they often failed to deliver the results she was looking for.
“Make sure everything you create is driving people to your email list, which is driving people to your product.”
As a busy entrepreneur, time was in short supply. Ruth didn’t want to spend days fussing with her landing pages and pop-ups. She was a content creator, not a designer. So she needed a solution that was more or less ready to go right out of the box, would work with and without WordPress, and only required her to make a few minor tweaks.
Ruth also wanted a way to see what was working and what wasn’t. She loved making experimental adjustments to her funnel to increase conversions, so she needed analytics and split testing to let her see the results of her changes.
Finally, Ruth was looking for a landing page builder that she could recommend to her students. Something that would be easy for them to use and help them get the kinds of results they were hungry for.
How Leadpages helped
A focus on conversions
Leadpages is designed to help you find new leads for your business, and that’s exactly what it did for Ruth.
Since Leadpages’ landing page templates can be sorted by conversion rate, she could quickly identify the ones that would deliver excellent results out of the box. The Leadmeter also gave her real-time guidance while she was constructing her pages, ensuring that each page was optimized for lead generation.
“We’ve done side-by-side tests, building one page on Leadpages and one page on WordPress. The Leadpages pages consistently convert around 20% better.”
No design experience needed
Thanks to the professionally designed templates and easy-to-use Drag & Drop Builder, Ruth saved valuable time. The templates already had the polished look she required for her business, and editing them was simple, even for someone who didn’t have design experience. She can create and edit pages herself, or easily hand them off to a member of her team.
Easy to monitor her results
Once her pages were live she used Leadpages’ analytics to monitor her results, and could quickly see if her changes impacted her conversion rate. She used A/B testing to determine which copy and designs were driving the best results.
The ideal solution for her students
But it’s not just Ruth who’s found success with Leadpages. Her students are thriving too. She recommends the website and landing page builder to all her students to give them access to the same marketing tools she uses. Because of its ease of use, they can focus on developing content and getting their pages up quickly, rather than playing designer.
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Ruth's Results with Leadpages
$1.4 million in revenue
Ruth launched Elite Blog Academy using a Leadpages landing page, and the results were even better than she could have hoped for. The page ended up generating $1.4 million in revenue, just one of many successes she’s enjoyed while using Leadpages.
Launched multiple businesses
With the help of Leadpages, Ruth has launched and run many different business ventures, including Living Well Spending Less, Elite Blog Academy, ACTIVATE, her book Do IT Scared, and a podcast.
Hands-off sales funnel
When Ruth decided to devote her full attention to ACTIVATE, she knew she needed a way to automate her other businesses. Using Leadpages, she created a self-functioning sales funnel for Living Well Spending Less that continues to drive consistent revenue.
Impressive conversion rates
Ruth’s conversion rates continue to exceed industry averages. Since using Leadpages for her websites and landing pages, she’s achieved conversion rates as high as 80%.
How Ruth Uses Leadpages
Landing Pages
Ruth and her team use Leadpages for both websites and landing pages. In some cases, she’ll use a landing page as a website, which helps her communicate value faster and net more conversions. Landing pages are also utilized for her many campaigns and special offers.
Testimonials
Ruth knows the power of social proof, which is why her landing pages are full of compelling testimonials from her customers. She embeds videos from her clients, along with short text highlights. By including so much positive feedback about her program she’s able to build trust with new customers and increase her conversion rates. She also increases the effectiveness of this social proof by sprinkling testimonials throughout her sales pages.
Countdown timers
Adding a sense of urgency is one of the most effective conversion tactics to get visitors to take action. That’s why Ruth uses countdown timers on many of her pages to let people know there’s only a limited time left to take advantage of an offer. For example, she utilizes a countdown timer on her ACTIVATE landing page to display the number of days until the next enrollment period begins.
Pop-ups
Since she’s all about conversions, Ruth wants to maximize her chances of turning visitors into leads. To do this, she uses exit intent pop-ups to offer lead magnets to users before they leave the page. This ensures every visitor is offered something and has a chance to enter her funnel by joining her email list.
Alert Bars
Ruth uses alert bars across all her digital properties to promote events, limited-time offers, and high-performing content. For example, at the time of this writing, Ruth is using an alert bar on her Living Well Spending Less site to promote her free holiday planner, one of her many lead magnets.
What’s next for Ruth?
What started as a small passion project has now evolved into a multi-million dollar business. Ruth has taken her blog and turned it into a profitable automated funnel. She’s also launched several coaching businesses and is now a published author and acclaimed speaker.
Ruth’s story is an inspiration, and we’re honored to be a part of it. However, with the launch of ACTIVATE and her continued success there are still plenty of chapters to be written. We’re excited to see where her entrepreneurial journey will take her next!
Try Leadpages free for 14 days
Easily create your website and landing pages with the only platform engineered by marketing nerds.
