I discussed the importance of building an email list in my previous article, but encase you missed it, let’s start with a quick recap.
I cannot stress enough just how important it is to capture the email address of each person who visits your blog or website. Sending people to your website requires a lot of effort or costs a lot of money. Once the majority of the visitors leave, they will not come back.
Even visitors who enjoy your content and find it helpful are unlikely to return unprompted. There is too much information available on the internet. We need to shut the majority of it out or we’ll suffer from information overload.
Fortunately, if you have a visitor’s email address, and permission to contact them, you can remind them that you exist whenever you like. You can reach them inside their personal sphere via their private mailbox. With direct access to their email inbox, you can them remind them just how great your blog is.
Shouldn’t I Build My Social Media Following Instead?
This is a valid point. Building a social media following for your business website’s blog is important but it should be done in addition to building an email list. The email list should also take priority and there are two reasons why.
Firstly, a social media post is easier to miss than an email. A lot of posts are shared on social media every second, particularly on networks like Twitter and Instagram. This means that it’s easy for your content to get drowned out. On the other hand, if your blog post lands in a private inbox, that owner of that inbox has to read the message or make the conscious decision to ignore it.
Secondly, if your follower list lives on a social media website, you don’t own the list. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. own the list, and they can change the rules whenever they like. For example, a few years back, Facebook removed most of the organic reach that was possible as a result of somebody ‘liking’ your Facebook page. This change meant that all the businesses that had put in the effort, or worst spent the money advertising, to build page likes now had nothing to show for it. Fortunately, nobody owns email, if you have a list of email addresses and permission to contact them, nobody can take that away from you.
You Need an Irresistible Lead Magnet
Most people with a basic knowledge of internet marketing understand that you need to effectively bribe people if you want them to give you their email address. This bribe is called a ‘lead magnet’. A lead magnet might be a discount code, a free trial or an information product.
Your lead magnet needs to be something of high-value. The lead magnet will not work if it’s generic and quickly thrown together. It needs to make your visitor think, “Wow, I need this in my life!” or “If I get this all my problems will be solved!”.
Get inside the head of your ideal audience member by mapping out their persona. Answer some of the following questions.
- What are the wants and needs of my ideal audience members?
- What do they desperately desire?
- What am I well placed to offer them?
The lead magnet should never be generic information that is easily found elsewhere on the internet; it must offer a tangible benefit to your audience.
Information Products
This article is going to focus on using an information product as a lead magnet. For example, an eBook or an online course. I have listed some examples of great information product lead magnets below:
Subject: Golf
Lead Magnet Title: Learn how to add 50 yards to your drive in one month without going to the gym!
Subject: Online business
Lead Magnet Title: Learn how to grow your website traffic by 1000 visitors a month without spending a penny on advertising!
Subject: Gardening
Lead Magnet Title: Learn how to grow giant carrots in two months without backbreaking labour!
You see why these lead magnets are enticing? They offer a tangible benefit in a way that is attractive to your audience. They also offer the benefit without the expected pain such as backbreaking labour, spending money on advertising or spending hours in the gym.
Of course, your lead magnet needs to actually deliver on the benefit you promise. Otherwise, all you’ve given your audience is evidence that you’re a lier!
The Secret Method to Easily Building a High-Quality Lead Magnet
You can ‘kill two birds with one stone’ by creating a high-quality lead magnet while you write the initial content for your blog.
Here’s how. Decide the title or subject of your lead magnet. Write down the titles of each chapter. Large topics can be split into sub-chapters. Each chapter and sub-chapter of your lead magnet is now the topic for a blog post.
As you write each blog post, you will also be writing a chapter for your eBook or online course. This allows you to simultaneously write your blog and create a lead magnet. Imagine your lead magnet has twenty chapters. If you write twenty 1000-word articles, one for each chapter, you would end up with a 20,000-word eBook.
Another advantage of this approach is that it keeps you motivated in the early days of writing your blog. Before they have built a following for their blog, people tend to think, “What’s the point? Nobody is reading what I write”. However, if you write your early posts for your lead magnet as well as your blog, you know that the articles will be read whenever someone joins your mailing list.
This approach also helps you break the project into bite-sized chunks. I much prefer the idea of writing a single high-quality 1000-word article each day than the idea of trying to tackle a 20,000-word monster. You’re less likely to rush if you’re focused on an achievable goal such as a daily 1000-word article.
Although this approach will save you the trouble of writing the whole lead magnet from scratch, you still shouldn’t just copy and paste your blog posts word for word into an eBook. You’ll need to make some adjustments to ensure the content fits the new format.
Won’t People Notice?
Possibly some people notice will but why does it matter? It’s not a secret. You own the content on your blog; you can use it as you please. You’re not charging money for your lead magnet, so why would anyone be bothered?
Yes, they could have found the information on your blog without giving you an email address but the lead magnet offers an upgrade on the initial blog posts.
If your lead magnet is an online course, then clearly it is sufficiently different from a series of blog posts. The information is in an entirely new format!
The same logic could be applied to a downloadable eBook. With an eBook, your audience has the information in a nicely presented format. The eBook saves your audience the trouble of trawling through twenty different blog posts and offers them a way to consume the content offline.
In any case, a month or so after you’ve released your lead magnet your early articles will be buried under your latest content. It’s relatively rare that someone will go through your entire blog history, particularly when your blog has been up and running for several months.
Conclusion
This approach to creating a lead magnet makes use of one of the most important skills of content marketing. That skill is the art of repurposing content into new formats.
Use this approach to make the best use of your time and create something high-quality. The more value you can create for your audience the better. It is a win-win situation for both you and your audience.