Q: What kind of lead magnet is most successful for growing a blogger’s mail list?
The best kind of lead magnet is one you create yourself.
That makes it 100% unique so it won’t be something offered by any other blogger or marketer.
However, creating something like this does take time and effort to create and many bloggers use what are called Private Label Rights (PLR) products as lead magnets.
These are reports, ebooks, audios or videos that are created by someone else who has sold you the rights to use their material.
Whatever option you decide to go with, make it congruent with your site.
So, for example, don’t offer a report on how to improve your golf swing on a site that’s about cats.
Most website owners offer one lead magnet on their site – a kind of “one size fits all” approach.
Another approach is to offer different lead magnets at the bottom of posts, that are tailored to that post.
So, say you’re in the internet marketing niche, and you have one post about email marketing, you could offer a lead magnet about email marketing strategies at the bottom of this post.
In this example of a lead magnet, a free training course is being offered
Another post might be about affiliate marketing.
On that post you could offer a lead magnet that tells subscribers the best affiliate programs to join.
And so on.
In the old days, each lead magnet would have been linked to one list.
So the more lead magnets you gave away, the more lists you had to manage.
Now with the addition of automation rules to autoresponders, you can set up a campaign (an email series) for each lead magnet what all feed into the one list.
Using the automation rules, you can trigger what email series a subscriber gets sent so you can control their flow through the emails on your list based on what actions they take.
This also allows you to segment your list so you can identify what topics your individual subscribers are interested in.
Then, when you want to promote a product – on list building for instance – you can send emails only to those interested in list building.
This ultimately improves your email open rates and deliverability.
The lead magnet is what gets them in the door, so to speak.
It’s always worth testing variations of your opt-in form and lead magnet to see which variation gets the best response.
More often than not, the initial opt-in form and lead magnet don’t get good conversion rates.
Testing and tweaking will slowly improve that conversion rate.
It could be something as simple as the wording in your opt-in form headline, or maybe a different cover image of your lead magnet.
This technique, known as Split Testing, is used by all the best marketers.
And they do it continuously.
Lazy marketers throw an optin form together and slap it on their sites and never go back it.
And then they wonder why their conversion rates are so low.
A successful lead magnet simply gets someone onto your email list.
You need to have a plan with what you do with those subscribers into the future.
Typically, they should get a series of emails related to the topic of the lead magnet.
Many marketers start hitting their subscribers with promotions and offers as soon as they sign up.
This is a hard-sell approach that generally doesn’t work.
It’s better to warm up your audience by providing valuable information first.
That means not promoting any products at all in your first few emails.
Or doing a soft sell – a “by-the-way” approach in the P.S. of an email.
You need to build trust with your subscribers before they’ll buy anything from you.
And remember that they are first and foremost people, and not ATMs for you to withdraw money from.
Treat them the way you’d like to be treated.
And if you’ve ever had a bad buying experience online, don’t put your subscribers through something similar.
Treating them with respect will reap dividends in the long run.
This is a question I originally answered over on Quora.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
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