Hey there,
It is Matthew Larsen, back with my daily newsletter.
In today’s email, we will talk about why your free lead magnet should be some of the best work your business produces. If you are a frequent reader, we talked about the VAR Rule for Lead Magnets earlier this week, but I think I missed an important point so I would like to expand it here.
What Is A Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is a free asset or special deal offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact information.
It will usually be something like an eBook, whitepaper, PDF, checklist, video, or course, although it could really be anything.
Someone enters their name, email address, or phone number into a form. You send them the lead magnet, and you now have their contact information.
A good lead magnet does at least five things for you:
Collects contact information
Identifies people interested in the problem
Demonstrates the quality of your thinking and establishes you as an authority
Builds trust
Moves people toward your paid offer
It is also an extremely high-leverage asset.
You may spend dozens or hundreds of hours creating it once. After that, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or potentially millions of people can consume it without you personally explaining the same information to every one of them.
Your Free Product
A lot of people view a lead magnet as a burden or something they need to check off on a to-do list.
They block off an hour or two, slap some information into a Google Slides project, create an opt-in page and delivery email, and never think about it again.
I think about it completely differently.
I view a lead magnet as one of my products.
Even though it is free, someone is still “buying” one of my products when they download it.
They are just paying with their time instead of their money.
Before someone buys from you, they do not know how good or bad your paid product or service is.
All they have to judge you on is your free stuff.
If your free stuff is bad, or you have no free stuff at all, they will probably assume your paid service is bad.
If your free stuff is great, they will probably assume your paid service is great.
Your lead magnet is often the main thing they use to decide whether you actually know what you are doing.
Giving Everything Away
A lot of people worry about “giving it all away.”
They say:
“If I teach them everything I know, they won’t hire me.”
This is the opposite of the truth.
People, especially busy and successful people, do not want to perform the entire service themselves.
In many cases, they do not even want to know how to do it.
They just want to know that YOU know how to do it.
If your lead magnet convinces them that you understand the problem and know how to solve it, they will be more likely to hire you.
The lead magnet should be the information-only side of your paid service.
It needs to be directly connected to the thing you eventually want them to buy.
There is no point in identifying people interested in one problem, establishing authority around that problem, and building trust with them if your company sells something completely unrelated.
What Should You Create?
In general, your lead magnet should be a complete course or masterclass teaching someone how to do what you do.
Take your service and break it down into every step involved in completing it, from the very beginning to the very end.
Then show them exactly what to do for every step in extreme detail, with nothing held back.
This solves the problem of choosing a topic.
You are not creating some random five-page checklist because someone told you that you need a lead magnet.
You are teaching the complete information side of your service.
Creating it this way also gives you something you can use internally to train employees because every part of the service is already explained.
Some of these lead magnets can run hundreds of pages when they are done properly.
“Oh my God, hundreds of pages? I don’t want to make something that long.”
See, I have just identified who is going to “make it in life” and who isn’t by saying that.
Creating an insanely long lead magnet should excite you.
It becomes your masterpiece, and it helps you stand out from the endless sea of competitors with terrible, slapped-together five-page PDFs.
People will read 1,000 pages if the subject is interesting to them.
They will not read five pages if it is not.
The right people will consume it.
Treat It Like Your Magnum Opus
A magnum opus is someone’s greatest and most important piece of work.
Your lead magnet about how to perform a business service is probably never going to become as famous as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
That is not the point.
The point is applying the same mindset, level of effort, and ambition.
Make it about everything you know.
Include every piece, part, and step of what you do.
The complete lead magnet becomes your main body of work. You can then break the individual sections into 10 or 20 smaller lead magnets.
Your lead magnet needs to be your very best because it is the primary thing you will be judged on.
It should not be something you create once and forget about.
It should be a frequently updated, lifelong piece of work that you never stop improving.
Hope this was worth your time,
Matt