I’ve created a new lead magnet for WP Dude, a five part e-course on the essentials of maintaining a WordPress site, you can get it hear.

Protect Your Content Marketing Efforts; Essential WordPress Maintenance Tasks

I’ve tried lots of different types of lead magnet over the year with mixed success, I thought you might be interested in learning what has worked and what has not worked for me.

What Is A Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a “thing” you use to entice people to hand over their email address when visiting your site.

The thing is usually something of value given away in return for that address, an ethical bribe to start an email conversation.

It can be a downloadable e-book, video course, audio, coupons or email courses.   I have even tried giving away my most valuable asset; time.

What Is It Meant To Do

Once the site visitor has handed over their email address you provide the “thing” and an ongoing conversation via email can being, you can send them updates from your site, make marketing offers the list goes on.

The point is the lead magnet breaks the ice and a relationship begins, they turn from anonymous site visitor to a person who begins to know, like and trust you and your business.

My Success Or Lack There Of With Lead Magnets

I’ve not had a great deal of success with my lead magnets over the years, perhaps my offer is just not interesting enough, perhaps

Here are the lead magnets I have tried over the years, and details of my success.

Video Training

I’ve got a suite of video training tutorials, I’ve had some success offering troubleshooting training, but not a huge amount, I don’t know if it’s the content or the way I presented it people e-shrugged their shoulders and said “Meh!” and moved past the pop up.

One thing I do get is lots of YouTube subscriptions, but they all come from YouTube not on site.

Membership Site

A number of years ago I started a paid membership site called the WP Owners Club, that ran it’s course and as a lead magnet I made this available as a freebie.

This was my resounding success, loads of people signed up for that for free protected content.

In then end this become untenable for me, the time needed to create new content took me away from doing billable client work, as my business became busier I just couldn’t keep it up.

Webinars

I love webinars they are an amazing way to offer value to a large number of people.

In exchange for their email for future marketing you can get people on-board and show them your value through a training session.

Trouble is, webinars are everywhere, people have become cynical, they know there will be a sale at the end.

Plus webinars force you to turn up at the appointed time, if you are time poor, it’s hard to run a weekly session to ensure emails keep coming in.

E-Books

I’ve written a number of downloadable e-books, and these have worked well for me.

In particular the one I wrote for the sister site of this one WebPolyglot.com,  “The 10 things you need to know before you build your multi language website”.

Packaging up your expertise in a free e-book is a great way to collect email addresses and show your expertise.

My Time

My most valuable none renewable resource.  I was offering people a chunk of my life force in exchange for their email address.

I’ve offered free site health checks, free security reviews, guess what I cannot give it away.

I had zero takers for any of my free consulting offers. It’s hard to hand over passwords to someone you don’t know yet.

E-Course

The current band wagon I’m jumping on is a multi part e-course. Do I sound cynical?  I’m a little jaded because I cannot find that nice balance of valuable resource for my potential clients and not taking up huge amounts of my time.

I love the way e-courses keep you front and centre in someone’s mind over a period of days.  I’ve joined e-courses myself and have bought products and services as a result.

Over a series of emails 5 in my part you get to introduce yourself to someone, show them your expertise and make an offering in a none sleazy manner.

Wrap Up

If you want to checkout my latest lead magnet, you can sign up from this link

On my 5 day e-course ” Protect Your Content Marketing Efforts; Essential Maintenance Tasks For Your WordPress Site” you will learn

• Why You Need to maintain your site
• How to backup
• How to Update
• How to secure
• How to optimize

What are you preferred lead magnets, lets extend this discussion to the comments below.

Photo Credit: Mario’s Planet via Compfight cc