{"id":4767,"date":"2020-10-02T14:21:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T04:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/adventures-with-lead-magnets\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T23:49:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T13:49:25","slug":"adventures-with-lead-magnets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/adventures-with-lead-magnets\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures with Lead Magnets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today I\u2019m going to share about lead magnets, and how you can follow a system to figure out which lead magnets to include on your site, if at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One advantage of running multiple sites, is that we get to experiment more and learn faster. 
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This is important because there are hundreds of case studies online from somebody who achieved something once, or twice, and then blogged about the process. 
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In my experience, these make great starting points for your own experiments, but they\u2019re far from guaranteed to work every time, and can sometimes be counterproductive, if they\u2019re not particularly repeatable.
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When we read a new case study or even a tip someone shares in a Facebook Group, we set out to try and replicate it across multiple sites. Even if it only works on one site, that\u2019s still a win, but we\u2019re looking for tools we can use over and over again.
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If you\u2019ve read my earlier post about the first things to do after buying a site<\/a>, you\u2019ll know that I typically follow the same game plan every time. Our approach to experiments is looking for something new to add into the game plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why Lead Magnets?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Very briefly, for those not in the know, a lead magnet is essentially \u201cA reason for someone to give you their email address\u201d.
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Usually it\u2019s some kind of free PDF that you will receive if you subscribe via an opt-in form. 
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There are much better resources on lead magnets here<\/a>.
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Let\u2019s take a step back though and ask ourselves, why bother with a lead magnet?
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To do this, it\u2019s best to see how email list growth has evolved over the years.
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Back in the early internet marketing days, \u201cSubscribe to our newsletter\u201d worked well enough. 
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This naturally became ineffective over time, so the concept of a lead magnet was created.
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You had to give your audience something for free in order to get them to sign up to your mailing list.
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This gave birth to what most people do now, namely, an ebook or some kind of PDF that people rarely sign up for. When they do, it\u2019s typically of poor quality anyway.
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\u201cHey random web visitor, here\u2019s a free ebook that you\u2019ll never read. Can I send you emails you\u2019ll never read too?\u201d
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Can They Be Used For Every Site?<\/strong>
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A lot of simple \u201cAmazon affiliate\u201d sites might not be best suited to an email list, so many owners of this type of site don\u2019t bother. 
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It\u2019s worth building out your site to try and capture audience members in an email list though. 
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Even if you just start building complementary articles that aren\u2019t typical amazon affiliate style posts, you\u2019ll eventually start getting visitors who are looking for information rather than quick product recommendations. 
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You should be doing this anyway, as it makes your site a better resource. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The More Specific The Better<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Those who do a good job with lead magnets offer something more compelling, and deliver great value with it, turning website visitors into fans, and eventually customers.
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If you can do it right, it\u2019s one of the best ways to get people into your funnel. 
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The problem we all face though, is that it takes a lot of effort to get right, and in many cases it might not be worth the hassle!
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At Onfolio, when we are having adventures with lead magnets, we start out looking for the 80-20. What\u2019s the best we can get with the least effort?\u00a0
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This is because we don\u2019t want to spend weeks writing an excellent eBook only to discover our audience isn’t interested in it at all.
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Therefore, we start out by testing a few different topics, and seeing which one performs best.
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Usually we cobble an eBook together from some of our blog posts, so that people can receive the thing they signed up for, but we don\u2019t have to go to the hassle and cost of making an ebook only to find out later it wasn\u2019t popular.
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Once we have identified something that people sign up for, we go back and make it a higher quality eBook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Coming Up With Ideas<\/strong> 
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The general gameplan we follow is:
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    \n
  1. Visit Google Analytics and find the most popular articles, or most popular topics. We\u2019re looking for the top 3-4 topics to test. This usually is just a case of seeing the topics of the top posts, and figuring out if you can offer a free report or ebook going into more details. Of course, if you have a high traffic site with dozens of pages that get 1,000 views, just focus on the top 3-4 posts, or move on to step 2.

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  2. Next we try to figure out topics that might be suitable for site-wide lead magnets. Only the best articles get their own one initially, so if a page doesn\u2019t get more than 20% of the traffic, we don\u2019t give it a unique lead magnet. We only want to create 3-4 total.

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  3. \u201cSite-wide\u201d lead magnets can be hard to ideate if your site covers a lot of different topics. The next thing you can do is ask yourself if there are any bundles of articles that are related. Let\u2019s say you have a marketing blog and 10 of your articles are about email marketing – now those 10 can all have the same lead magnet. 

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  4. Once you have chosen 3-4 topics and got lead magnets created, you can start running tests to see which ones get more opt ins. The most popular ones can be added to the \u201csite-wide\u201d topic, which basically means any article that doesn’t\u2019 already suit those lead magnets gets shown one of the generic ones. You can also test this against a 5th \u201cgeneric\u201d lead magnet.

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  5. Bonus tip -> You can also think what the next step is. After they\u2019ve signed up, what are you going to do? Promote a product to them? Send them some articles? By working backwards from the end goal, you can come up with a lead magnet idea that might not be the most popular, but will attract the type of audience member who will end up paying for something at the end of the funnel.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I think that last point is something a lot of people forget with email marketing. Don\u2019t just think \u201cHow can I get people on my list?\u201d, instead think \u201cWho do I want on my list and what am I going to sell them?\u201d and work backwards from there.
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    You might end up with a smaller list, but engagement will be higher and conversions will be too.
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    You could also make a second generic list for a wider audience if you\u2019re unsure what to promote to people initially.
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    Implementation<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    We use Thrive Leads<\/a> for our lead magnets, though there are plenty of other good tools that will allow you to perform split-tests and similar.
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    We typically do the following:
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      \n
    1. Set up an opt-in form for every lead magnet. For the generic \u201csite-wide\u201d opti-ns where we are trying to capture the generic traffic, or traffic that doesn\u2019t fit into the 3-4 topics we identified earlier, we might split-test 2-3 different ideas. 

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    2. Run the tests for a week or two (depending how much traffic you get) to see which ones are more popular. If an opt-in form has 1% or higher conversion rate, we keep it, if it doesn\u2019t, we test a different call-to-action message. If after a few messages it still doesn\u2019t have high conversion, maybe this lead magnet doesn\u2019t appeal to people and we will test a different form. 

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    3. For the ones that we keep, we then do more tests to see if we can get even higher conversion rate. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      There\u2019s a good article from Thrive Themes here<\/a> about this.
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      Summary<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      There\u2019s a lot to unpack in this article, and I\u2019ve tried to keep it actionable without being overwhelming. If I could summarize it, I\u2019d say you should test a few different ideas, and then test a few different forms\/messages for each idea. Once an idea is validated, you can make a better ebook.
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      Also, you should move a few steps ahead and think about the end goal, then work backwards from there. You don\u2019t want to get the \u201cmost\u201d optins. You want to get the most of the \u201cbest\u201d optins, which might mean picking something that only applies to a smaller % of your audience.
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      In a future article, I\u2019ll cover the email funnel in more details.
      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Today I\u2019m going to share about lead magnets, and how you can follow a system to figure out which lead magnets to include on your site, if at all. One advantage of running multiple sites, is that we get to experiment more and learn faster.  This is important because there are hundreds of case studies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":2072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,10,514,19],"tags":[],"dipi_cpt_category":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4767"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58274,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767\/revisions\/58274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4767"},{"taxonomy":"dipi_cpt_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dipi_cpt_category?post=4767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}