How to Create the Perfect Lead Magnet for Your Business

Your email list is one of your most powerful assets.

With a dedicated email list, you can build more trust with your audience, sell more products, and constantly put yourself at the front of your customers’ minds.

But a lot of businesses struggle to acquire dedicated email subscribers.

A big part of that is due to lackluster lead magnets.

(A lead magnet is a “bribe” that offers something your reader wants in exchange for an email address.)

But with a good lead magnet, you can avoid this issue and build your audience rapidly.

That’s what we want to help you with today.

By following the process below, you can create the perfect lead magnet for your business.

Choose the Right Type of Lead Magnet

Different types of lead magnet ideas work for different audiences. When choosing a type of lead magnet, consider your audience, your business, and the main problem that you help solve.

With this in mind, let’s’ look at some quality lead magnet ideas…

Cheat Sheets. Cheat sheets are easily digestible. Your readers know exactly what they’re going to get – and they know they can get the knowledge quickly. The best type of cheat sheet is one that helps your readers solve one of their biggest problems. It should be no longer than 1-2 pages.

Here are some examples:

• The Conversation Cheat Sheet: 5 Conversation “Hacks” to Connect With Anybody
• The Muscle Building Cheat Sheet: 3 Workouts to Quickly Build Muscle
• The Confidence Hacks Cheat Sheet: 5 Hacks to Instantly Boost Your Confidence

Checklists. These are easily digestible as well. Here, you help your readers complete a process that relates to the problem you help solve.

Examples:

• The Kindle Checklist – 35 Steps to a Best-Selling eBook
• The Blog Creation Checklist – 20 Steps to Create Your First Blog
• The Instagram Checklist – 7 Steps to a Viral Instagram Post

How-to ebooks. These are a bit more in depth than checklists and cheat sheets, but short enough so that they’re still easily digestible. Instead of a checklist or a cheat sheet with sets of steps, a how-to ebook explains something in a simple way to your reader.

Examples:

• How to Invest for Beginners: The 3 Things You Need to Know
• How to Stop Procrastinating
• How to Build Confidence in 3 Simple Steps

Toolkits. Which kinds of tools are most important to your prospects and customers? Which tools help them solve their big problems? A toolkit is simply a list of tools like this.

Here are some examples:

• The 5 Tools I Use to Manage My Finances
• The 7 Tools I Use to Take High-Quality Photos
• The 3 Tools I Use to Create the Perfect Lead Magnet

Derive It from Your Main Product

Okay, so now you should have an idea of what type of lead magnet might work best for your business…

But what should you include in the lead magnet? Well, let’s think about it for a second…

The ultimate goal of building your email list is to sell more products and keep your customers coming back for more. So, you’re going to be sending them promotional content and other types of content related to your products or services.

So, if your main products were centered on how to build an email list, you wouldn’t want to your lead magnet to be about something unrelated, like how to create viral videos.

Why? Well, the people who sign up for that lead magnet might not be all that interested in building their email lists.

A much more effective lead magnet might be a toolkit for creating the perfect lead magnet, or a cheat sheet with lead magnet ideas.

People who sign up for those lead magnets will be more interested in content about how to build an email list.

Put simply, your lead magnet should be related to, and even derived from, your primary offering.

Maybe it’s a piece that you’ve broken off from your main offering, or a few tools that help solve the problem that the primary offering aims to solve.

By taking this approach, your email list will be more engaged and responsive to you.

Feature It Prominently on Your Website

It’s nice to have a perfect lead magnet—but poor placement on your website, won’t do you any good.

So, how do you feature it prominently on your website? There are a few ways to do this…

A Non-Spammy Exit Pop-Up. Some pop-ups are spammy, but yours doesn’t have to be. And with the right type of pop up, you can get a lot more email subscribers. Here are three rules for a non-spammy pop up:

1. Have it pop up when visitors move their mouse to exit the page.
2. Create an eye-catching design with photoshop.
3. Don’t have it pop up more than once per day.

As for pop-up software that makes this process easy, Ninja Popups is a great software to check out.

The Sidebar. When your lead magnet is on the sidebar, it’s always in view to your readers. It will get a lot of impressions, and give readers tons of opportunities to opt-in.

The Top of Your Homepage. Ideally, your lead magnet will be the first thing your readers see when they go to your website. When it’s featured at the top of your homepage, it will jump out and grab their attention. If they’re interested in the lead magnet, they might just opt-in and become a subscriber right away!

With the right lead magnet, you can rapidly grow your email list and sell more products. So, don’t wait any longer! Use this lead magnet strategy to create the perfect lead magnet for your business, and start getting more subscribers today.

What types of lead magnets have worked best for you? Let us know in the comments below!