Sandy Wardenburg Waggett explains that high-converting lead magnets—especially short checklists—work best when they remove an urgent pain point rather than trying to build trust with unknown visitors. Citing Myron Golden, she recommends designing lead magnets to resolve immediate problems so people will download without needing prior trust.
Chapters
People tend to like things in very quick and digestible form. So checklists usually are very high converting, so people will use checklists readily. And one of the things that I'll share that Myron golden, who is an expert in this area, he often tells us that if someone is coming to your website, you're trying to create evergreen content for them coming to your website, they don't know you, they don't trust you. Yet you don't want to come at your lead magnet from a place of trust, something that they would need to trust you and believe you in order to download it. You want to come from a place of taking away pain. So it's like if you slammed your finger in a door and you broke it, you would immediately go to urgent care or the ER because you need to get your pain resolved. You don't care what doctor they give you, you don't care what nurse takes care of you. You just care that you get that problem solved. So the trust thing doesn't matter at that point because your pain is extreme enough. So what you want to do when you're thinking of lead magnets is take them away from pain because they don't require a lot of trust in order to make that download.