List Building Challenge – Action #1

“Subscribe to our Newsletter” is quite possibly the dumbest call to action ever to litter the internet. It might have worked back in the 90’s when “You got Mail!” made people feel special. But, today? Ha!

Today, you need to give people a damn compelling REASON to subscribe to your email list. And that reason is simply an opt-in offer, otherwise known as a lead magnet.

Now, for most of you, I would imagine the concept of a lead magnet is nothing new. However, ask yourself this…

Do you have only one or two lead magnets?

If so, then time to get busy. Because…

The more lead magnets you have, the easier it is to grow your list.

Not everybody who comes to your blog will be interested in the same things. Not all people think the same. So, you ideally want to have a library of lead magnets available. Every time you publish a piece of content on your blog, you pull out the most relevant lead magnet and attach that to the blog post as the call to action.

Now, this could seem like a lot of work. But, there’s good news…

In my experience, it is usually the shortest, most direct lead magnets which convert best.

We’re talking checklists, resource lists, very short tutorials perhaps. And these things convert far better than some 50-page ebook they’ll never read anyway.

Here’s some ideas:

• Create a page on your site with a list of resources or reviews to apply something covered in a blog post.
• Take one of your top-performing posts and use a service like Beacon to easily turn it into a well-formatted downloadable PDF.
• Create a checklist or worksheet to go along with a blog post.

PDF’s are not the only way to go. If it is easier for you, just create your lead magnet on a PAGE on your site. Be sure to hide it in the site navigation. Also, use your SEO plug-in (such as Yoast SEO) to set the index settings to “no index” and “nofollow” so that this private page will not be indexed by search engines.

The concept, though, is simple.

Create a new lead magnet. Keep it useful, but short. Don’t spend a ton of time on this… and don’t you let me catch you trying to create some 50-page ebook nobody will ever read.

There’s nothing inherently hard or arduous about creating a lead magnet.

You should be doing it regularly.

And every one is a new opportunity to build your list. It is an asset you can use long-term.

Need some help knocking this one out of the park? I’ve got a mini-course on this that gets right to the point.

ACTION ITEMS:

1. Create a short list of a few potential new lead magnets you could create for your blog.
2. Sit down and create one of them.

Boom. 🙂

– David