What a lead magnet is (and why you need one)

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.

What in the world is a lead magnet and why do you need one? Anyways, Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author coach and the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. In this training. I'm going to talk to you about what a lead magnet is and why you as an author, need one, if not multiple, and how you can really just visualize the whole process. I'm going to be filling out my flow chart here with you and just helping you visualize the process of what this really looks like. In one of my recent Take Action Challenge webinars with Author Audience Academy members, I shared this exact illustration. And so many of them were like, oh, now it makes sense. Now I understand. Now I realize what a lead magnet is and why I need one. So I wanted to share this with you today. So this is not a perfect illustration, but it really just helps you. It gives you free framework. It gives you an illustration to kind of understand what a lead magnet is. A lead magnet is a free digital gift you give away to people who join your email subscriber list. This whole process should be automated. You should not be manually sending things out. You should have everything set up to work 24, 7 for you, building your tribe, your lifers on autopilot. And so what I want to show you for first, though, is you need to have those target readers. And what I'm going to do is I'm not saying your readers are fish, but for this illustration, we're going to say that your target reader is a fish.

And like I said, this isn't a perfect illustration. It's just something to help you understand it better. So these are your potential readers and customers.

We all want more of these, right? So we have these fish, but how do we capture those potential readers and customers? How do we get them to even know we exist? How do we get them to even know we have a solution to their problem? We have the books and the trainings and the things that they need to overcome whatever pain point they have. One of the best ways to do that is through a lead magnet. So for the sake of this illustration, I'm going to say the lead magnet is your bait.

Do we have any fishermen in the house? You know, you Use different bait for different types of fish, but the lead magnet is the bait. So the lead magnet is what you're going to use to entice your target reader, your target ideal customer to you. And you say, hey, I have this free digital training. I have this free checklist. I have this free challenge. I have something that you want and it will solve a problem for you. Come and get it, you know? So that's the bait. Now the next step is a landing page. The landing page is that page on your website that someone lands. There should be no other distractions. Some people call it a squeeze page or an opt in page. But a landing page is where they will be able to put in their name and email address to sign up for your email list, your subscriber email list, in order to get that free gift. So if you go to writingweek.com that's one of my landing pages. The there's nothing else you can do. You either have to make a decision to sign up for my free seven day nonfiction writing challenge, or you have to make a decision to click away. That's the only two decisions. So a good landing page is going to not have any other nav bars and headers and all of that sort of thing to distract people. It's just going to have that landing page. The landing page is the hook. All right? So you have the fish coming in. They sense the bait. They're like, ooh, I like that. I want that. Yeah, I need to write more. I need to be more productive in my writing. You know, they come to writingweek.com and they find that bait. Well, the landing page is the hook. It's what hooks those fish. Your target reader, your ideal customer. It hooks them into your tribe or into your email subscriber system. That means that you can follow up with them. That means they are now in your system.

For each of these landing pages, for each of your email subscriber lists, you should have a separate list in your email subscriber service. So it's a new list. I want you to think of that new list, that list like my writing week list. I have a separate list in getresponse for that particular lead magnet. And that list is like a fish tank. So that's where you hold, in a way, those leads, those potential readers and customers. You're gathering them into your fish tank, into that particular list that you've created in your email subscriber service. And then once you have them, once you have your potential readers and customers, those fish, they have been attracted to your bait, your lead magnet. They have come to your landing page. That's your hook. They've entered their name and email. Now they are in your fish tank, your list in your email subscriber service. Now it's your responsibility to follow up with them. So you have your follow up emails, which I call the nurture or which a lot of people call, we call that the nurture sequence. These are the emails that should be automated. You should have these scheduled in your autoresponder. You should not be sitting behind your computer sending them out. And they should be the same emails that go out to every new person that subscribes to that particular list. And there should be a specific order and a specific thing that you're doing in those emails. But that nurture sequence, it's like feeding your fish, cleaning their tank. So you're feeding them. I was just visiting with my sister and her family and my two nieces. They were actually fish sitting for a neighbor that was on vacation and they had to remember to feed the fish every day and they were instructed to clean the tank at least once a week. And so just like you would need to take care of fish if you had a fish tank, you need to take care of and nurture your email subscribers, you need to take care of them and not just leave them hanging, feeding and cleaning the tank. And then as a bonus, and this is something I've talked about recently in my recent trainings is on your thank you page, you can have even more results. Save your thank you page. And the way you can do that, go back and watch. One of my recent trainings is all about setting up a small product or a tripwire offer. I have several of these ranging around from seven to ten dollars. And you can often when you sign up to like for instance, when you sign up to writingweek.com on the thank you page, you'll get an opportunity to join the full 30 day challenge for, for $10. And that may change. I mean I always say test, tweak and track. So I'm always tweaking things and things may change at another time. But thank you page can give you more results. And that's like breeding. It's like you're breeding your fish and you're multiplying your efforts with this. And I know a lot of authors, a lot of authors are missing out on the follow up sequence and on this thank you page offer. So many of you just don't have it set up. And that's why I have created the author automation System. It is a system I've used since 2012 consistently. I've been publishing books since 2008, but I've been using this particular system since 2012. And not only does it bring you new leads and you know those fish into your system, into the bait you have to offer in the hook on Autopilot. Once you have it set up, it runs 24. 7. But I also show you exactly how to set up this thank you page for that $10 or $97 offer anywhere from $7 to $97 so that you can earn more money from the visitors and the subscribers you already have. Many times. It's just serving them. It's not all about just the money. It's about serving them to the next step, giving them the next thing they need in the process, serving them in a way that's going to help them and it's only going to help them grow and do even more. You have that thank you page and then a lot of people do not have these follow up emails scheduled. They only send out a broadcast email every once in a while and they don't have an autoresponder sequence. And so that's where we're also going to be going through that process of setting up that system and exactly the different emails to write. We have templates for you and all sorts of things to help you in the process. Yeah, so that is a training inside Author Audience Academy. I go step by step into the exact process of setting up your landing page. Setting it up. I use the most common email providers and I actually show you on my screen with those specific email providers. Then I actually have a plugin, Authors Leads Plugin that you can get if you're an Author Audience Academy member. Just email me if you don't have it yet. I can let you know how to get that if you're a member. And then I also give some other recommendations as far as how you create the landing page. You can just simply create it on WordPress. That is the easiest way. Just create a page on your site, remove the sidebar and everything and just create a page on your WordPress site. I am personally right now using leadpages, but I'm also going to be testing a new system, Thrive Leads, and testing that out as well. There's a ton of different things you can do, but I walk you through step by step through the process in the training in authoraudienceacademy.com I'm going to be following this up with another video. It's going to be part two of this training on lead magnets. And so if you're available and you just want to join me for the next video, I'm just doing these back to back. And it's going to be five keys to creating an irresistible lead magnet. I wanted you to understand what a lead magnet is for first before I went into this. And so that's going to be the next training. And I hope that you can catch that training. And I will see you next time. Thanks. 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.