Building Your Email List Part 3

Ultimately, the lead magnet is about building your email list with targeted customers willing to pay money for other products and services that you have created, or that you promote from other people as an affiliate.

Lead Magnet Success Secret #2 - Solve One Big Problem

But, in order to create the lead magnet you need to do just one thing right. That is to identify one big hairy problem that you can easily solve for your audience with a free offer. It can be a checklist, an app, a report, an eCourse, or a webinar that teaches them how to do something. It’s up to you what you pick to create for your lead magnet, but it has to do one thing and only one thing very well. Solve a problem.

For example, if you have a food-related blog (let’s say it’s a group devoted to using a specific product like an instant pot or electric pressure cooker), you could make a chart that they can look at and with one glance find the cooking times of commonly cooked items. They can print it out and put it on their fridge with a magnet so that it’s always available. This type of item will definitely get them to sign up for your email list in exchange for the printable.

What’s awesome about this idea is that it’s easy for you to create simply by looking up some information, using your own expertise, and then making it look pretty as well as fit on one page. This is something that all of your audience will love and ONLY your specific audience will love. This is important, because you don’t want to make your lead magnet too general so that you can avoid freebie seekers.

The free item needs to be easily to consume, branded, and solve just one problem. If you make it too hard and large, such as a 350-page eBook, you’ll overwhelm them with information. It will be like drinking water from a fire hydrant; they’ll become confused and end up not using the product and therefore not having a good feeling from your offerings - even if it’s truly excellent. If it’s too much, it’s simply not a good lead magnet.

Solve their problem, one problem, but leave them wanting for more information and education. For example, your real goal might be to sell your specialized cookbook for the tool your target audience is using. Therefore you would not give them the chart and a huge free cookbook. No, give them the chart, and then promote to them the cookbook through follow-ups in email.

Next time I will talk about how important it is to choose the right technology to create, promote and deliver your lead magnet if you really want to use it to build a responsive email list.

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