(Case Study) How I got paid to create a free lead magnet

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Hello and welcome to the Scope. My name is Shelly Hitz and I'm excited to share with you a case study. Today it is raining and lightning and all sorts of things here. This is not normal for Colorado Springs. Today I'm going to share with you a case study. This is how I was able to get paid while I was creating a free lead magnet. A lead magnet is basically just a free training that I offer to build my email subscriber list. And last week some of you may have joined me for my free 5 day live video challenge. It was an amazing challenge. It ended up becoming a full blown course. I just gave tons of information, shared an 18 page checklist and if you haven't joined yet, you can get access to the training to the checklist. It will be available ongoing at ShellyHits.

So I created this challenge. I created it live on Facebook, live on my business page and then I have it now in my member area for a lead magnet. It will continue to bring new people to me for my email subscriber list. It will continue to help me grow my list. But how did I earn money while I was creating a free training? This is something that I have been doing on a more regular basis and have been seeing success with. It's called a Tripwire offer or a small product. Basically on the thank you page of your free signup, you offer a separate product that's related for somewhere between seven and $97. This particular product was was a $10 offer and it was for my training. That's all about creating pre recorded videos on your iPhone. So if you're interested in live video and going live on Facebook live from your mobile phone, you may also be interested in doing prerecorded videos and I have an entire training on that and so you could get it for just $10. Now just full disclosure, you guys know I'm real with you. I'm honest. I am not about hype. I'm not about like, you know, trying to make things seem better than they are. I'm just real and I let you know what happened. Well, anyways, I was setting up the challenge and I didn't set up the Tripwire offer until I had already promoted it to my list. So the majority of people who signed up for my list didn't see this offer on the thank you page because it wasn't ready yet. And so what happened is I decided to put in the members area the offer as well. So if you sign up@shellyhits.com live video you'll be able to see exactly how I've set it up. The way it works is you sign up for the free training and then on the thank you page you get the offer for the $10 training on prerecorded videos. And then in the member area, once you confirm your email subscription in the member area I have little red down arrows and those arrows point to the offer. So let me pull it up for you so I can kind of walk you through how I did this. And so in the members area there's little red arrows going down and it says, love this live video challenge. If so, eas easy iPhone videos is a perfect add on for you. This additional training will help you create prerecorded videos that look professional to help you get more exposure and sell more books, all from your iPhone for just $10. Today you'll get instant access to my easy iPhones course. Get started here and then you can see where that thank you page is. It's@shellyhitz.com easyiphonevideos and then I just put a really short description. It said what you will get. Learn how to never run out of topics to share on your video. The exact equipment I use, including a $20 microphone that plugs right into your iPhone. The two iPhone apps I use to create professional intros and outros in just minutes. Discover my step by step video script so you never freeze up on camera. Learn how to configure your iPhone settings to make 100% sure you record the highest quality videos. And then I have a couple more bullet points. It's just a real simple little offer at the bottom. I haven't sold thousands of dollars worth of this product. It wasn't like I am going to get rich off of this. But I've sold 12 of these so far and this is just the beginning. This will continue to be available ongoing. It's an evergreen funnel. It's an evergreen offer. So anytime someone signs up for my free live video challenge, they'll have the opportunity to upgrade to to the prerecorded video training. And so I've already made $120. Yeah, I mean that's great. I mean it was a training I had already created. I already have available in author audience academy. It wasn't a ton of extra work for me. It maybe took an extra hour or two to set up, but it's Always then going to live inside this free training, be able to give a little bit of additional income. And this is part of the strategy that I teach in the Author Automation system. This is the one system I really recommend that you set up first for selling more books. And when I was really just looking back and trying to see like what has worked for me to sell more books and I was like kind of going back and saying, okay, what was the systems that I used? I realized it's this Author Automation system system. And this month I'm going to be following up on that system and sharing even more through the rest of this year. Helping you in authoraudienceacademy.com set this up for your books and products. And in this Author Automation, it's how to sell more books without being pushy or self promotional. By working smarter, not harder, so you will have time to do the things you love. Just being honest. I've been successful, but it's been stressed success. Like Shalene Johnson says, we want to work towards smart success, not stressed success. And so I want you to work smarter, not harder. I want you to learn from my mistakes, all the scrambling and all of the things that I've done the hard way. I believe in the 8020 rule. So 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results. I have reverse engineered my success and I've went back and I've looked and there is a system and there is that 20% that's produced 80% of the results. What you're going to learn in Author Automation, the system I'm teaching you inside authoraudienceacademy.com is you'll learn how to find new ideal customers on a daily basis to start sell more books and grow your email subscriber list. All on autopilot. Plus this strategy that I'm going to teach, it's free. It is completely free. It's not Facebook ads. It's not something that you're going to have to put additional money into. You will have to put a little bit of sweat equity. It is going to take a little bit of work. Did I say that four letter word? Again.

Most marketers that are trying to sell you things will not tell you that give you the real deal. But it will. It will take a little bit of work and maybe a lot of work depending on where you're at in the process to set it up. But then once you have it set up, you'll be getting new customers, new leads on autopilot. Very cool. You'll discover how to Set up a system that helps you instantly increase your income with your existing traffic without hard selling. I know you. I mean, I know my tribe, at least my lifers, my audience, they tell me all the time they want to be able to sell more books without being pushy and self promotional. So I'm going to show you how to do that and you'll actually be able to wake up to sales that come in even while you sleep. It's an amazing system that once you set it up, it will work for you. And then you'll finally be able to add the number one missing ingredient most authors leave out of their marketing plan. This one step can make or break your success over the long term. I've worked with a lot of authors and I have seen this is probably one of the number one mistakes. And so I'm actually going to be teaching an exact system and I'm going to be showing you exactly what to do, the exact steps, walking you through. And it's going to be available for the members of authoraudienceacademy.com so if you're not yet a member, I would invite you to join us. And I probably will be doing a free webinar at some point on this author automation system to kind of tell you a little bit more about what that actually entails. And then if you actually want the how to, you can definitely get all of that inside Author audience academy. But I want you to work smarter and not harder. I want you to get more out of the work that you do. I want you to be able to profit from even creating free training. Like this is stuff that anyone can do. I mean, a lot of people are doing it, but I'm just noticing that I'm having more success doing this. Just offering that small offer on the thank you page and in this case I also added it in the members area. So you can see my entire process and exactly how I set it up@shellyhits.com live video. You'll get my free five day live video challenge, which people are just talking like, I mean it's not me. People are just like just loving that training. I was on Facebook live like over an hour, three of the days. But it was good stuff. Like we actually. I had you make decisions, I had you fill out your checklist, I had you like do all these things and now I'm watching, you know, people are starting to send me the live videos they've created as a result of the challenge. So you'll get the challenge for free and then you'll see how I offer the $10 training for the pre recorded videos inside that free offer. So already, like I said, it's made me $120. I'm not getting rich off of it, but I was able to get paid for making a free training, for providing free value and it wasn't a hard sell. I didn't have to say, hey, go buy my $10 product. It was just all set up, it was all automated and those sales continue to come in. I've had three sales within the last hour so I know that it's going to continue to be a process that will continue to add to my sales. Let's just think about it for a minute. If you sold $120 worth of products and let's say you're selling a $2.99 book on Kindle so you get about like a $2 royalty on that, it would take you selling 60 books to earn that same amount of money. And I was able to earn that by selling twelve $10 products. So many authors are missing out. You can set these up easily and use services like Gumroad and other things to add to your income. So I'm so excited to share these strategies in depth with you within Author Audience Academy. And let me know, let me know what's working for you. I always love hearing case studies. Case studies are like it's what's working right now, real time. It doesn't mean it's going to work the exact same way for every single person. There's specific things you need to set up and that's what I'm going to be helping you with and teaching you inside my Academy, which is but it does show you something. Success leaves clues. So it's really important to watch and see what are those people doing that are successful again? My name is Shelly Hitz. I am the creator of Author Audience Academy and I'm also the creator of the five Day Live Video Challenge. It's completely free and you can sign up for it@shellyhitz.com livevideo and I'll see you on the inside. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.