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In today’s Q&A, we are helping David figure out how to create a lead magnet that solves a quick problem so he can grow his email list for his online business.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question from David Bilbey at homestyle.education
- Flip Your Life community
- Guide to using the Google Keyword tool
- How to Create a Sales Funnel Template for Your Online Business
- Foodtruckr
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast again this week. We are glad to have you here. Today’s question comes from David Bilbe and David writes in and says, “Shane and Jocelyn, you are so relatable.” Thank you, David, we appreciate that. “I have started a homeschooling blog at homestyle.education. I am struggling to come up with an idea for a lead magnet. I am a software developer, so I have the possibility of writing some sort of software, but I’m still struggling to come up with something. How do you create a lead magnet that is not a topic you plan on covering by blog posts and how do you create something that doesn’t take six months? It would take me a long time to write software. Should I do this or should I do something else?”
JOCELYN: Hi David, this is a question that we actually get a lot and I was just talking to somebody yesterday in our Flip Your Life community about this very issue. People make it out to be a lot harder than it really is when really all that you need to do is just solve a problem for your audience. And this is where a lot of people get confused because they want it to sound nice and –
SHANE: Huge, and long and epic.
JOCELYN: You know, give everybody their hopes and dreams but that’s not what people care about. People want to solve a problem; they want to immediately stop a pain. So, that’s what you really need to think about when you are starting to write your opt-in magnet, or your lead magnet. You need to solve a quick problem for your audience so that they know that your content is good and they’re ready to move on and consume your paid content.
SHANE: For your example David, like you got homeschool curriculum, I did a quick Google search in the Google AdWords keyword tool and we have actually a video that teaches our members in our Flip Your Life community how to use that tool, how to go in and find keywords that are specific to your niche. I went into the Google AdWords keyword tool and I typed in ‘homeschool’ and I looked into some of the words and I found some things like ‘homeschool programs’, ‘homeschool curriculum’, ‘how to find homeschool curriculum’, and one of them was ‘how to find accredited homeschool curriculum’. So you could create – you can see that there’s thousands of people, this one has 2400 searches for accredited homeschool curriculum. You can go in and say, ‘Get my free download on the top ten, accredited homeschool curriculums’ and you just create a one-page PDF that is a list that solves that problem. People are out there actually searching for the answer to that question. They want to find homeschool curriculum that is accredited, that meets national standards, that’s going to make sure their kids are learning the things they need to take state and national tests and then bam, you create a ten-page PDF, it’s got a link to all the best curriculums, maybe those are even affiliate links or something like that to those programs and you now have an awesome lead magnet that solves a problem in seconds for thousands of people that are actually out there looking for something in your niche.
JOCELYN: And a lot of times, people will want to do something like this and say, ‘50 reasons why homeschooling is great’. Well, that’s not solving any problems and that’s why a lot of times people fail. So, what I’ve been telling our members is that you need to treat this like a tourniquet rather than a band-aid. Stop that bleeding, don’t just put a band-aid on it. You want to really make it something that’s going to stop their pain and –
SHANE: Immediately, yeah.
JOCELYN: – that’s going to give them the benefit and they are going to say, wow, this is great, I need to see what’s in that.
SHANE: So if I’m a parent and if I look for accredited homeschool curriculum, bam, your thing pops up, you got this thing that says, ‘Here are the ten best accredited homeschool curriculums.’ I click the button, I give you an email, I get a PDF and I say, this one, this one, this one and this one thank you David, you just solved my problem. I wonder what else David has. The next time I get an email from David, well you solved my problem immediately, you told me the ten best accredited homeschool curriculums right away so when you send me an email, I’m going to listen to you because you solved a problem quickly. You put that tourniquet on, you stopped the bleeding, you stopped my pain point and now I’m ready to maybe even see what else you have. Do you have homeschool curriculum or do you have a review? Maybe you can link all ten of those curriculums back to your website. Ten blog posts, ten reviews for each program with an affiliate link for that accredited program at the bottom of it. So basically when you are thinking of a lead magnet, it’s got to solve a problem quickly. One problem fast, be done, people don’t have time to read, you know, a 600-page e-book or use a complicated piece of software, or watch some 30-minute video. They want something fast, they want something now, solve the problem, think of something you can solve in a search. If they search for a word, can you give them what they are searching for quickly? That is what a lead magnet should actually do.
JOCELYN: Your products for sale can actually be a continuation of your lead magnet so that’s just something to think about. People get like a preview or the first couple of chapters, or something like that for their larger products. So that’s definitely something to keep in mind as well, if you have a larger product but maybe you want to give people a little glimpse into it that’s going to help solve one of those problems and then the rest of your product may solve more problems.
SHANE: And just because something else, to touch on the second part of your question that’s not on your blog, you said, how do I create a lead magnet that I wasn’t going to cover in other topics. You should be covering the exact topic in your lead magnet all over the place on your blog and anything, any content that you create, can become a lead magnet somewhere else on your blog. You don’t have to, you know, have this exclusive unique thing in your podcast. For example, we have a sales funnel template that we use as a lead magnet all the time. That was actually created and given away for free in one of our podcast episodes but now every time we mention sales funnels on our blog, we create an opt-in box where we’re like, ‘Hey, do you want our sales funnel template?’ That’s covered somewhere else on our blog. We have blog posts and we have podcasts that talk about that exact topic but we still use that all over the place because always remember that people are discovering your blog page by page. And they may come in and read a page or two or three but most of the time, 90% of your audience only sees about 10% of your blog at any given time because they’re not getting the entire big picture. If you have 100 blog posts and I find you for one specific thing that I searched for, I’m not going to sit and read all 99 of your blog posts. So, you need to be using content from other blog posts to say, ‘Hey, I talk about this here. Click here, give me your email and I’ll forward you on to collect those emails.’ So you can – your lead magnet can be something that you cover exactly in your blog in another place. Pat Flynn’s Food Truckr website, he wrote 50 blog posts and then he turned it into an e-book that was sold for like $25. It’s the 25 blog posts in order, organized to produce a goal but it’s the same exact content that’s on his blog. But instead of searching all over his blog, you can’t find anything, he’s got a nice neat e-book that he sells. So you can always cover information in your lead magnet in other places, the blog, it doesn’t matter, just make sure that you are delivering it in a way that shows value.
JOCELYN: If you need specific help with your lead magnet, like the next steps to do, or just help and questions about it, head on over to our Flip Your Life community. You can find more about it at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife.
SHANE: Until next time guys, we’ll catch you on the flip side. Get out there and take action and flip your life. We’ll see you next week.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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David Bilbey says
Thanks for answering my question guys! Not trying to be nit-picker, but the link to my site is broken… 😉 Thanks again!
Jocelyn Sams says
Thanks David, I fixed it! Somehow a ” got into the URL.
Mark says
This was my favorite episode. Although most of your shows are awesome this was a game changer. Lots of actionable take aways I will be replaying in about 5mins to see what else I can glean out of it. Thanks so much for the detailed discussion!