Instant Lead Magnets (Easy Peasy)

Well, at this point, I should debate whether to call this issue “the Afternoon WP”. 🤪

Yeah, I’m a wee bit late on this one. The family and I were out for a weekend RV trip and I decided not to bother using my time there to pre-write the newsletter. And this morning I had to get the rig back into it’s spot and unpacked.

So, I’m a little late. Hope you don’t mind. 😇

Got a metric ton to get done – both business and non-business. And, the family and I are leaving again in about 3 weeks to head down to the Florida Keys for a few days. So, I need to rock it like I mean it here.

What’s coming up in this issue:

• A simple strategy for rocking out high-conversion lead magnets to build your list without any fuss and complexity
• WordPress Quick Bits
• An often forgotten feature of WordPress that is super convenient once you begin using it

Let’s go…

Creating “Instant” Lead Magnets

For many years now, it has been preached from the rooftops how important it is to build your email list. That’s something we all know. But…

The way to do that has always been the lead magnet.

Something you offer to give them for free as a way to earn the opt-in. Done right, that lead magnet would be such that it would be of interest to the types of people most likely to become a customer of your’s.

So, lead magnets come in all forms. Could be worksheets, checklists, webinars, videos, ebooks, cheat sheets, you name it.

But, the format of the thing doesn’t matter. Not NEARLY as much as the hook and how interesting it would be to people looking at it. In other words, function is way more important than form here.

So, one way that we can make this whole thing easier for ourselves is to remove all complications out of the idea of the format of a lead magnet.

No big ebooks. No time spent creating fancy PDFs. No need to record a webinar or any video.

Just… write an email.

The idea is simple: You create simple content upgrades for your blog posts or videos. Simple things… but with a great hook that will be of strong interest to the people reading that particular post or watching that particular video.

Write up that lead magnet content into a simple email and drop it into your CRM. Not as a broadcast campaign, of course. This is going to be an automatic email sent to them by your CRM.

The mechanics of this are simple…

• Simple optin form embedded into the blog post.
• When they optin, it will instantly send them the exact content upgrade.

So as not to be annoying, make the optin form such that it does NOT take them to some “thank you” page or something when they submit. Just tell them it will be waiting for them in their inbox and that they can keep reading. Don’t remove them from the page they’re on.

In my toolset of FluentCRM and Fluent Forms, how I would set this up is pretty simple…

1. Form asks for email.
2. When form is submitted, we add a trigger tag. A trigger tag is just a tag you can add to a marketing automation to act as a trigger and start it. As part of the automation, you’d remove the trigger tag so that it doesn’t sit on their profile.
3. That automation would instantly end them their content upgrade. Additionally, I’d add them to a welcome automation.

That’s it, really.

None of this is any new, novel concept. All it is is a way to remove any considerations or complexities around the idea of creating highly relevant and engaging lead magnets. Because too many people don’t develop out their lead magnet strategy because it seems too overwhelming and they feel pressured to impress people with big, fancy downloads. Truth is… nobody really cares about that.

You can make these things as easy as writing a blog post. Or an email. Because that’s all it would be.

And if creating lead magnets becomes much quicker like this, then you can have a bunch of them across your site. All placed in the most relevant, high-converting locations. All delivering value. All building a beautiful, segmented email list on automatic.

You know what? You can even make these content upgrade emails from repurposed content you’ve written elsewhere. Don’t even need to re-invent the wheel here. All that matters is that it is highly relevant and helpful to the person on your site… at that moment, and to what they’re currently looking at on your site.

Even if ultimately you’re sending out a weekly newsletter like I do, this army of simple “instant” lead magnets will be building your list much faster than just “Hey, subscribe to my newsletter”

This Week In Concierge

Here’s a bit of the activity from last week among Concierge client sites:

• Fixed a quick “site down” incident while I was in the RV with my family. Hey, it happens. 🤷‍♂️ Gladly, not too often.
• Researched options for corporate umbrella accounts for a membership site
• Built footer opt-in form that looks integrated with the site and made it work with ConvertKit
• Multiple site migrations
• Lots and lots of questions answered and itty-bitty requests. 😎

A lot of projects underway, too. In fact, enough where I definitely am now at a point where I need to look into hiring somebody to assist and help move projects along faster. I can’t say I look forward to hiring again, but this is just part of the growth process as my business has evolved into a client-focused business.

This coming week, need to hit multiple client projects and make some headway. This will include another site conversion to Kadence, a new credit system built for a membership site, moving a site away from Digital Access Pass to a more modern setup, and more.

WordPress Quick Bits

BuddyBoss Gets Updates. BuddyBoss has gotten the ability to do scheduled posts within groups and the activity feed. Useful for pre-planning your community engagement. Check out their video of the update. And for the fully monty of updates from BuddyBoss, you can check out their release log.

ShortPixel Releases FastPixel. ShortPixel is the image optimization service I use for myself and Concierge clients. It works great. But, for a long time, ShortPixel has been also doing some things for overall site performance and not solely images. They’ve now released a new plugin called FastPixel. This looks to do similar things to tools like PerfMatters or WP Rocket, but the whole thing is cloud-based. Perhaps I’ll check it out more in-depth later to see how it performs. It does some with a monthly fee because it is cloud-based, so it’d need to be really better than localized tools to justify that. We shall see.

Life After Page Builders?. Anna Bovelett wrote Is There Life After Page Builders? It is her take on what it has been like to stop using page builders (Elementor, in her case) and fully embrace WordPress’s native Full Site Editing. She definitely hit on some of the issue that come along with using page builders. Of course, I agree with her since I stopped using builders like Elementor and Thrive Architect some time ago now. I use Kadence instead. But, this is also one of the beauties of WordPress…. that we can all pick the tool and setup that works best for us and our workflow.

Gravity Forms Code Snippets. If you use Gravity Forms, there’s now a convenient library of over 900 code snippets you can use to modify aspects of Gravity Forms. The library is hosted by GravityWiz, a creator of addons for Gravity Forms. Cool resource!

Finding Ya Some Hooks?. Wanna connect with your nerdier side with WordPress? Then you may find this reference of all available WordPress hooks useful. If you’re not familiar, “hooks” are spots in the WordPress code that you can “attach” your own custom code to. That’s about as basic as I can explain it. You can also check out the Captain Hooks plugin.

How To Easily Manage Your Calls To Action Across Your Whole Site Using Patterns

Ever been writing a blog post and you KNOW you need to be putting a relevant call to action within the blog post, but… you just don’t? Because it feels like a hassle or time consuming?

Or better yet…

You’ve got calls to action littered all throughout the blog posts on your site and you’ve kinda lost track of what’s going on. Probably a bunch of them are outdated.

(Don’t ask me how I know this happens. 😇 )

Well, in case you haven’t realized it yet, WordPress provides a way to make this simpler.

It is called “Patterns”.

A pattern is basically a reusable block of content. You can build it using the native block builder of WordPress and then set it as a pattern. Then, anywhere else across your site, you can reuse that block of content by simply dragging it into place. Here’s where you will find patterns:

In the same dropdown where you would choose blocks to add to your content, you will see Patterns. In there, you will likely see a bunch of pre-built patterns you could use for various purposes. But, you can also create and use your own.

The cool thing is that you can also categorize them to make things easy to see. In this case, you will see I have a category called “CTAs” (short for Call To Actions) and I have a pattern in there to insert an “ad” for my WP Speed Fix service.

It gives a nice preview and everything so you don’t even need a good memory. 🤣

To create a pattern, you just build what you want using the block builder. Then, select the entire thing. Then, in the contextual menu you will see an option to “Create Pattern”.

Give it a name, categorize it if you want, and then leave the little toggle to make this a “Synced” pattern.

A synced pattern means you can edit that pattern in one spot later and it will change it in every location of your site… instantly. Super convenient! 😎

You can create and use patterns for anything that fits your strategy. Ad blocks, opt-in forms, content blocks that you use a lot, etc. Whatever makes your life easier.

It doesn’t even have to be a “synced” block. Perhaps you want to use a pattern just to streamline some fancy formatted section of your page but you intend to change the content every time. Well, the pattern makes a huge time-saver.

Bonus tip: Install the free plugin called Reusable Blocks Extended. This plugin provides an interface where you can view all of your patterns on one screen, easily access them and edit them. You can even get a list of what pages/posts on your site where the patterns are in use.

Patterns are a massive time saver and convenience. And a lot of people don’t even realize it is there and built into WordPress. Might as well use it!