List Building Strategy #3: Create an Irresistible Lead Magnet or Content Upgrade
eBooks are popular.
But so are slightly easier-to-produce lead magnets like checklists or multi-part email courses.
It doesn’t really matter what kind of lead magnet you decide to produce as long as it’s super easy for your readers to digest AND it promises to solve a pressing problem for them relatively quickly.
Which means that even some of the most interesting content out there isn’t irresistible.
Think about it, which lead magnet would you be more compelled to download:
A 20-page ebook titled ‘10 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing’
– or –
A 1- page checklist titled ‘7 Must-Dos to Make Every Email Campaign More Profitable’
The second one, right?
Sure, the 20-page ebook would probably be incredibly interesting… and maybe even more beneficial than the checklist.
It’d also be more difficult to produce than the checklist.
But difficulty & benefit aren’t the ultimate measures here.
The ultimate measure is how many people willingly and happily sign up to your list in exchange for the lead magnet you’ve got to offer.
So irresistibility, in this case anyway, trumps length and effort.
****Note: In no way are we promoting being lazy with your lead magnets. You still need to deliver SOLID value. But with that first opt-in, easier & shorter is often the way to go.
But what happens if someone comes to your blog, loves what they’re reading and wants more, but your lead magnet is on a totally different topic?
Enter the content upgrade
A content upgrade is almost never something that’s overly involved to produce… it can literally be as simple as offering a download of a PDF version of the blog post.
Just cut & paste. Export as a PDF. And boom, content upgrade.
If you feel like doing a bit more ‘work’ on the content upgrade, take 15 minutes to turn the main action points into a checklist.
If you have a handful of posts that get a higher amount of search engine traffic than others, add content upgrades to these.
You know people are highly interested in what you’re talking about, so making sure you hit them with an offer that’s exactly tailored to the information they’re looking for will really increase your subscriber percentages from your traffic to that page.
For example, in this Backlinko post, Brian Dean talks about how he added a content upgrade that was nothing more than a well-designed 10-item checklist.
And his result?
A 785% increase in conversions.
He used to only convert 0.54% of his visitors to that blog post, but with a simple, irresistible lead magnet, he upped it to almost 5%. It was a small, easy-to-implement change that made a huge impact.
Here are a few ideas for your next content upgrades/lead magnets:
- Templates
- Swipe files
- Scripts
- PDF version of the post
- Additional resources
- Checklist version of the post
- Additional items that are not listed in the post
