This is part 5 of a 7-letter series about creating more opportunities in life and business.
“Your LinkedIn has been restricted.”
That’s the message I got a few years ago after a few attempts to log in. All I got was a blank white screen. My sister had texted me asking “are you still on LinkedIn? I can’t find you.”
As I stared down my restricted social cell, I kept telling myself “don’t panic” because LinkedIn had been my main marketing channel. I had spent the last year prior to that using it to tell people about my author’s journey, and I was about to announce my new book in a week.
But no access.
That’s when I understood the importance of direct access to your audience.
Rented Opportunities:
If you don’t own direct access to people, you will not be able to consistently attract high-value conversations that lead to opportunities.
There are people out there that have large followings on social media but don’t know how to convert that into a business.
They build up followings with no end in mind.
Consistently paying rent to the social landlords until they choose to evict you. It’s better to own access to your audience. 1000 true fans is more valuable than a million false followers.
Writing online is just a means to an end.
The goal is to build trusting relationships. You do this by converting strangers to followers to contacts – people you can reach by email, phone, or physical address.
With contacts, you own the channel to communicate with them. You can pick up your phone and text, email, or call them.
There’s no middleman in the conversation.
The Blockchain is another way to do this, but that’s another story.
Until you own access to your audience, you’ll keep paying rent to Meta, LinkedIn, and X to have conversations with people.
The goal is to convert social audiences into accessible contacts. You do like the Godfather: “you give them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Step 5: How to create a lead magnet that works so you can build mindshare and own access to your audience (give ‘em an offer they can’t refuse)
I started building my list with my crowdfunding campaign for my books.
My offer then was “follow along to get inside scoop on my publishing journey.”
Most of the people then were really just supportive friends and family, but there were also aspiring authors who were curious to learn what it took to write a book. So they joined in on my contact list. Two years after publishing my first two books, I started writing my weekly newsletter. I asked whether people on my list would want to hear from me every week, thinking most people would unsubscribe. They didn’t. I was pleasantly surprised.
The newsletter became a sandbox for me to practice my writing, stay accountable, and stay in contact with people.
Create something valuable that would let people give you their contact information.
You’ll have a list that you own and nurture, put you in front of the right audience, and increase your chances of having the right conversations and creating serendipity.
Here’s how to go about your lead magnet creation.
1. Understand what’s going on here:
As the name implies, a lead magnet pulls in prospective buyers with an enticing offer.
The best way is to start building a relationship with that prospect by giving something away for free.
However, you aren’t really giving something away for free.
When you give out a free lead magnet, they will not pay you in dollars or Bitcoin, but they pay you with their attention.
Do you know how valuable that is?
It might be the most valuable thing in the world right now. People are inundated with information but attention remains limited. It’s a privilege for someone to give you their contact information and choose to read your email or stay in contact with you.
Keep this in mind as you build out your lead magnet.
2. Plan your lead magnet:
What does a lead magnet look like?
It is a tangible thing that your audience receives to help them solve a problem and gain a benefit. It could be a PDF document, a checklist, a webinar, an email course, a whitepaper.
The person you want to stay in touch with gives you their email address in exchange for the valuable thing (lead magnet) you created.
So how do you create a valuable lead magnet? Start by thinking about the audience you want to attract, then put it in this content pillar incubator and answer these following questions:
CONTENT PILLAR INCUBATOR:
- What “big problem” am I solving in the world?
- How can I solve that problem as quickly as possible for someone?
- What would be “step 1” to solving this problem?
- Why does someone need this solution NOW?
- What is the story nobody else is telling about this problem?
- How could I solve this person’s problem in a way that would BLOW THEIR MIND?
Write your answer to these questions to orient you on what to build and share.
This is exactly what I did when I started creating this free ebook here to help people live a more creative life.
Start with a plan
3. Write your lead magnet:
Flesh out each section of your lead magnet.
If you are starting from scratch, that’s fine. Use notes from your narrative bank and the magnetic messaging structure in step 3 & 4 to plot out ideas. When in doubt, write out what you’re going to help your audience with in a list and them in actionable steps.
If you already write a newsletter, or post online, or your company has documentation that your customers and employees find useful, you can easily repurpose that into a free document or webinar.
For instance, I’m going to turn these series of emails into a lead magnet (coming soon).
Follow the content creation assembly system in step 5 to Plan – Draft – Edit – Publish, with only 15 minutes a day.
4. Distribute your lead magnet:
Once you have your lead magnet, you want to create a landing page for it.
This is the important interface, where people will provide their email address to get your enticing offer. A lot of companies spend millions to drive people to these pages and continuously tweak it to maximize conversion.
But don’t overcomplicate this when you start. Keep it simple.
Here’s what your landing page should have:
- Title: Main State the benefit (e.g. Increase your business revenue in 30 days)
- Subtitle: Explaining how to get the benefit (e.g. with a 7-step system that allows you to find clients, talk to them, and start working with them)
- Image: (Optional)
- Fields:
- Name
- Email Address
- Submit Button
That’s it.
You can build these in less than an hour using KIT or Leadpages. I’ve used both. For ease, use KIT. It allows you to create a landing page and provides the email delivery system to send your offer to the person’s email.
Great, you’ve created your page, you can deliver your offer.
But how do you get traffic to the page?
Well that’s where social media comes in.
Remember, in the content assembly system in step 5, we created 5-7 LinkedIn posts? Well, every time you post, is an opportunity to share this one landing page of your offer.
Place it in your comments for posts that do well. Place it on your bio. Share it in other people’s newsletters.
This is the one interface you will now use to attract and stay in contact with people.
5. Sequence and nurture relationships:
Once your audience gets your offer, make sure they have a thoughtful first experience.
First make sure you give them every opportunity to get what they came for.
Send it as a document, webpage, an email reminder. Then tell the person what to expect from you. If they are going to be in your weekly newsletter, let them know. If you think it will be beneficial to get on a call, perhaps offer a one-time consultation.
Once they are in your contact base, nurture the relationship. Send helpful tips in the form of a weekly/monthly newsletter. You can do a mix of a weekly newsletter and a monthly webinar. It’s up to you and your cadence.
Now you can consistently nurture the relationship, and have the ability to drive discovery conversations that lead to high-value opportunities at the drop of a dime.
Live Rent-Free & Build Mindshare:
Attention is a limited resource.
Be at the top of people’s minds when they think about the best way to solve a particular problem. Some people call it having mindshare. When you build a lead magnet, you offer something in exchange to have the opportunity to build mindshare and tap into that valuable limited attention that people have.
In this letter we briefly touched on discovery and distribution but that’s where a lot of work happens.
In the next letter, we’ll talk about how to build an inbound engine for discovery.
- Step 1: Clarify your “authority signal”
- Step 2: Turn discovery into opportunities
- Step 3 & 4: Build a conversation starters: with narrative banks and structure
- Step 5: Stack Content Like a System
- Step 6: Design a Lead Magnet That Works {you’re here}
- Step 7: Build Your Inbound Engine
- Bonus: Warm Up Outbound with Content
Yours truly,
Nifemi
