When you start an online business you’ll start hearing about lead magnets and freebies. In this blog post, I want to go over what a lead magnet is.
Definition of What are Lead Magnets
The definition of a lead magnet is…
It is something that you give to your audience for free in exchange for them giving you their email address and sometimes other information too. Your main goal in providing a lead magnet for your audience is to get them on your email list.
Competition is fierce today so it’s more important than ever that you provide a lead magnet that really resonates with your audience in a way that makes them put aside the fact that they need to provide their email to get it. People know and expect that you will market to them once you get their email address so they’re not going to give it to everyone. This isn’t a bad thing though.
You don’t want everyone on your list. You only want the people that think like you and have the same vision as yourself and your business.
That means you’ll need to offer a lead magnet that solves a specific problem for your tribe.
I talk about the one problem, one solution approach in the 5 Steps To Build a Great Lead Magnet blog post.
Offer a Digital Download – Here’s Why…
A lead magnet is generally a digital product that doesn’t cost a lot to produce or a lot to deliver. The reason is that you’re giving it away for free. It would be hard for example, to give someone a physical product as a lead magnet because that would be costly.
When you can provide them with something that is helpful and useful to them to solve a problem in digital form you only have to pay for the time, effort, and cost (outsourcing, tools, templates, etc) to create it. So you pay once and can continue to get the benefit without an additional amount.
Lead magnets are generally easy-to-download files such as PDFs, MP4s, email courses, videos, and other files that are small and easy to download and access for the recipient regardless of whether they’re on their mobile device or their desktop computers.
So as you can see offering a digital download is the best option, but I have seen people who offer a free printed book as a lead magnet, but the person who wants the book has to pay for the shipping cost. This is a great alternative if you’d like to provide this type of lead magnet.
Examples of Lead Magnets
You can offer different types of freebies to your audience. Just make sure they offer a solution, but don’t try to give them the answer to all their problems.
Here is a list of examples you can offer as a freebie:
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Templates
There are a lot of different templates that you can offer to your audience such as Canva Templates. At Your Essential Toolbox offers these types of templates, such as the toolkit below. You can grab these to use in your business and create different digital products for your audience to download and use for their own personal use.
I also offer a PLR Resell License for these Canva Templates. That means you can purchase these, change the templates up, and sell or giveaway as Canva Templates. I wouldn’t suggest giving all of them away – I would give a 5-pack or something similar to use as a freebie.
Also, if you purchase the PLR Resell License you do need to change them. You can change colors to reflect your brand, move around the elements, delete any of the designs you’d like to, change the fonts, and so much more.
Again, Canva Templates are only one of many types of templates that you can offer your audience as a freebie.
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EBooks
You’ll find that eBooks are one of the most popular lead magnets that people online use. With an eBook you can easily show your expertise in your niche.
Think about the biggest struggle your audience has and create a short report that will help them solve this problem. Then write your eBook and give it away for free.
After you’re done writing it – you can easily make it beautiful with Canva, Powerpoint, or Word.
Take a look at the blog post – 3 Ways To Make Your Opt-In Beautiful to help you make it appealing to your audience.
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Step-by-Step Guides
A step-by-step guide is an easy freebie for people to create. Go through any systems, processes, or steps that you do in your business and write them down.
Then create the guide.
People love step-by-step guides, especially from mentors or people they consider experts because they share tips and steps that others won’t know. So don’t think just because this could be a page or two that it isn’t powerful because it is.
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Checklists
When you’re done creating your step-by-step guide make a checklist that is going to help people walk through your process with ease.
By providing both the step-by-step process and the checklist you’re creating even more value to your freebie and making it actionable to your audience. People like to see results and they’ll get them if they know how to do the steps and can check them off as they go.
These Checklists and Cheatsheets templates are great for helping your audience get everything together for a variety of tasks that you need to accomplish.
No more forgetting to do something!
You can use these to make checklists and cheatsheets for ANYTHING that has steps. They are completely customizable.
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A Cookbook or Recipe Cards
Recipe Cards are perfect for anyone who has a lifestyle, health,or mom blog that has a lot of recipe blog posts. Take a few of your readers favorites and make a 5-pack of recipes cards or an entire cookbook to use as a freebie for your audience.
You can create your own recipe cards or take one of these beautiful design templates, personalize it with your recipes, and use as your lead magnet.
==>Check out all the Canva Template Toolkits<==
Now that you know what a lead magnet is and have some examples, give some thought as to your own products and services and how you can create an effective lead magnet. This could involve using something you already have, or creating something brand new to offer in exchange for an email.
An effective lead magnet will be targeted to attract just the right people, as well as set them up to want to purchase more from you. To do this it has to be laser targeted to the right audience and solve a problem that your audience has in a quick, actionable, and straightforward way.
Have a great and productive day!
~April
