#227: Your Next-Level Lead Magnet: The Step-By-Step Checklist

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina, Onativia here to get you excited about growing your audience and building your business with the right strategies in mind. I’m here to challenge you, to push you, and most of all, to help you take action. And this week, we’re diving into a big one lead magnets.

Specifically, we’re kicking off my lead magnet series because let’s be honest, guys, the landscape has completely change when it comes to lead magnets. And when I say lead magnet, I mean often someone is giving you their name and their email. So you can then build a relationship with them and ultimately nurture them to the sale. And this is one of the key ways that we as online marketers build our business.

So on today’s episode, I want to kick off the series and talk about how we need to reframe our minds around lead magnets a little bit and talk about how to really stoke engagement these days. And then I’m going to break down a step by step workshop a little bit in terms of checklists. So over the next few episodes, I’m going to break down what I think are truly valuable lead magnets, and we’ll tackle one lead magnet and episode and really think through kind of the mindset around each lead magnet so they can really be an engaging tool for you.

Before we begin, this episode is brought to you by our Done for You services. Yes, we do talk about the magnet and the customer journey as part of our Done for You services. We don’t just create beautiful courses that get results. We also help you start up with your marketing as well. If you want to apply for done for you go to course Creation Boutique Ecom slash course book a call with me and we’ll talk through your vision for your course.

Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about how the lead magnet landscape has changed over the last few years. Now, the advent of A.I. has really changed and disrupted how our clients and our students and our customers digest information and they have access to information that they didn’t have even five years ago. So easy to curate and just put something in to chat about.

And then I if I wanted to, for example, maybe I’m a nutritionist and I want to teach people how to start off a vegan diet, I can just say to Gamma, I churn out a ten page PDF that’s a thought starter of how people can get started with a vegan diet and it will turn it out. Now. It will be generic and it will not feature you and your stories, but at the same time people can get that information in very easy ways today.

So what do we do as marketers? What do we do as entrepreneurs? Well, we have to raise our game a little bit and we have to emphasize engagement and customization and thinking differently. Because when it comes to a powerful lead magnet, you want it one, to establish your authority and expertise, too. You want them to get a sense of who you are and your approach and how your unique.

So if everyone is searching right now, if anyone’s doing research and they’re looking for parenting experts, for example, and they’re looking for someone new, maybe they’ve tried three or four different parenting experts and they haven’t gotten the answers that they’re looking for. So your lead magnet needs to give them an idea of what makes you unique and how you stand out and why you’re going to be different.

You also want to give your lead magnet and make them feel like they’re getting a quick win. You don’t want them mired down in whatever you’ve given them and all of a sudden they give up because then they’ll never take the next step with you. So you want to have this criteria in mind when it comes to a great lead magnet.

Now, in this series, I’m going to walk through a few featured options that I think are working right now with either I’m using them or our clients or students. I do want to leave a note here, though. There is a caveat to me. This is a little bit of the next level of opt ins or lead magnets or freebies.

If you were just starting out, say you’re an author or you’re a new online course creator and you have nothing on your site that’s capturing emails, I want you to get something up immediately, even if it’s join my email list. Join the community here. New insights and tips. Okay. It is critical if you are getting traffic to your website that you have a lead capture on there.

I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity. So think of these lead magnet ideas as next level. Stage B stage two for you. If you do not have a lead magnet yet and think low hanging fruit, what’s something that you can grab quickly? Like a piece of content that a lot of people have said, Hey, I love that or that that cheat sheet that you used for our workshop was really helpful.

Or that handout you had gosh, really helped me really made an impact. Great. Put that up on your site and make that your immediate lead magnet and capture no judgment. I’d rather you take action as always on this show than wait for the perfect lead capture. Okay, so that’s the caveat here. Please take action. Please make sure that you have an email lead capture on your website.

All right. In the meat of this podcast, I want to specifically talk about what’s working now, and that’s a step by step checklist that I love. A great checklist, especially step by step, because they’re scannable, they’re actionable, and they’re completion oriented. It positions you as a true guide. Like we said at the beginning of this podcast, right? We want to we want to establish your authority.

Each step is a micro win. I said we want them to feel like they’re getting small wins each step as they check it off. Yes, a little win. It’s easier to produce than a full guide, and to me it’s easier to promote than, say, an e-book. Now, when you’re thinking about your checklist, I want you to start with the end in mind.

Okay. What’s the pain point? What do you want to deliver for them? How are you going to do it in a way that goes beyond something that they can find? And I know it’s so frustrating that we have to think that way now, but that’s the way we need to think. We need to say or think to ourselves, okay, how do I go beyond what chapter CBT will explain?

And a lot of it is the step by step, but the stories and examples that you provide inside of your content that is worth downloading and going beyond I or you give social proof, you share results. So oftentimes I’ll download somebody you’ve seen. This guy is all the time where someone says, I just had $1,000,000 launch, download my secrets.

I just lost all this weight. Download my my cheat sheet or my checklist that’s critical to giving them that social proof. So you want to think in terms of what’s been a success. How can you build on those results and show them the step by step? All right. Now it’s time to workshop a checklist. And what I think is important in, say, a step by step checklist.

For this example, we’re going to talk about launching a webinar, which again, you can finally Chantry t, but let’s talk about some little personal pieces that you can add to this to make this checklist really work for you. So as step one, you could say nail the promise. Okay, so you’re teaching them how to build their webinar. Of course, it starts with the outcome.

My favorite question, what’s your outcome? So their action to take in this checklist could be right. A one sentence webinar promise tied to a clear outcome, and you could give them a formula in 60 minutes, you’ll learn how to blank, so you can then blank right for them to get something out of the webinar. Now you’re going to tell them we don’t want vague outcomes, we want it to be super, super clear.

All right, let’s workshop a checklist for a few minutes. If I’m approaching a new checklist as a lead magnet, let’s say I want to teach my folks how to do a step by step webinar launch. And I’ve just come off the heels of a launch and I want to work through my proprietary formula of how to do it as much as possible, right?

Without overdoing it in terms of it’s free, it’s a lead magnet, it’s not a paid offer. So I want to give the bones of how I just launched this webinar and a lot of times and you guys download these as, as much as I do, I bet where somebody just did $1,000,000 launch. You want to learn the secrets, download that checklist here or somebody just recruited ten new clients in a month, like figure out my secrets here without cold calling, right?

Without cold calling or sales calls. Okay, great. I’ll download your step by step checklist. So I think figuring out the promise around it and why this checklist is so valuable and oftentimes there’s social proof tied to it is, number one, what is that juicy promise that no one else can provide that even catchy beat didn’t just have $1,000,000 launch?

 

And I’m not saying million dollar launch. That’s a big one. And it doesn’t have to be $1,000,000 launch. Say you figured out how to do a successful virtual yoga practice and you’ve really cracked the code in terms of these classes. It could be how I recruited 50 yoga students in 30 days for a prolific practice. Maybe that’s not the exact title, but there’s the promise based on social proof, based on a success that you have had.

So let’s route your checklist as much as possible in some kind of success, because I won’t have that. So that’s number one, the promise that is rooted in social proof. Number two, I want you to tell your story about how you saw that success. And again, it doesn’t have to be $1,000,000 launch. I just want to lower that expectation a little bit.

When you’re teaching people, success can come in many different ways. So the second piece is I want you to tell your story of success that should be front and center on that checklist. In terms of where you started the before the after, the good, the bad, the ugly. We need to share our stories because that’s what separates us from I.

That’s what makes us so powerful. And that’s something that I can’t get from JAMA. I write that I can’t get from JAMA. So making sure you’re sharing your story, maybe it’s a letter before the checklist starts or click here for a video before check before downloading my checklist, or with your checklist, you have a video whatever way you want to do it.

I want you sharing your personal story. Okay. Then the third part, then you’re going to break it down. You’re going to have your steps. You look at my posted exercise, which is four courses, but it also can be for a free lead magnet if you think about it. And you’re going to think about three, four or five at most, seven steps.

Sometimes I see these ten step lead magnets. It’s too much. When I work for Tony Robbins, he would always say people can think three, four, five at most, seven. You might want to just keep it to five steps, whatever that feels like. After that, people get a little overwhelmed. And as a reminder, it’s a free lead magnet, right?

It’s not a paid piece. So you want to give them value. You want to give them quick wins, but you don’t want to overdo it. So you’re going to think overarching what are my three, four or five, seven steps and then you’re going to have your steps. And this is where I can help you a little bit, right?

In terms of, okay, how am I going to fill it out in terms of what are those different steps that I need? So going back to launching a webinar like some of my steps could be I have to choose a title, I have to pick a day time, I have to build a registration page, I’ve got to map out the email sequence, etc. So I’m going to build that out as part of my lead magnet.

Now, as a step four, after you figured out your steps and you’ve got a skeleton outline, I want you to go back and add some richness to that. So if you’re talking about, say, mapping out the email sequence, I want you to add stories or examples of a way that you had your email sequence stand out where everyone else was doing X, you did Y, you did pithy emails, you tested longer form emails, you did case study emails upfront, like how did you mix it up?

How did you do something different? Because again, air is not going to bring in these different stories. They’re just going to tell you you need to map out your email sequence, right? That’s my voice, guys. So as a step four, you’re going to give the stories, you’re going to give the examples, you’re going to give the richness. Then as a step five, you’re going to wrap it up in a bow and bring in your story or your examples or your launch or whatever it is based on again, and you’re going to make it personal and you’re going to engage them.

So it’s not just a stale checklist with steps about how to launch a webinar, because again, anyone can do that these days. So you’re going to bring back your story, you’re going to bring it back to your approach and why you’re different and why should it potentially work with you, And then you’re going to give them the next steps, right?

Like whether to listen to your podcast, maybe you have a trip wire. I’ll link to my trip wire episode that I did at the end and and you’re going to tell them why you okay and you’re going to loop it back around. So, so, so important versus just churning out a PDF, right? We can do that these days.

We can go to chat beat, Hey, how do I launch a webinar? But you bringing yourself to it and that’s social proof and the mistakes you’ve made. Maybe you have boxes in a box with every step and you say, Hey, here’s a key mistake that I’ve made along the way when I used to do webinars. So maybe that’s part of the checklist.

I thought this here’s a myth, here’s a myth buster. Each one I thought I had to launch this 14 days out. But the truth is, 7 to 10 is actually better. Or whatever the myth buster is. Bring in these little elements, these little quick read. People love that kind of stuff when they’re looking at lead magnets. And one more thing to make this more personal throughout your document, throughout your checklist, have little call to actions to get in touch with you, to post on Instagram or wherever you have different posts, engage them LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever it is, Keep referring them back to your content, to your posts so they can engage with you.

If you have a community, tell them to engage with your community. This is how we separate ourselves from I again, by giving it that personal feel, that connection. That’s what we want. At the end of the day, we want our lead magnets to feel like they’re directly connected to us and that’s how they feel trust, that’s how they feel heard.

And that’s the gateway to a powerful relationship with them. So don’t discount that. All right. In the next few weeks, I’ll continue to walk through some lead magnets that I’m a huge fan of that I feel like are working now. If you have any questions or want to get coached by me, hit me up at Hello at course Creation Boutique e-comm and until next week go create be you and be brilliant and get it done.