Whether your business is in affiliate marketing, network marketing, blogging or eCommerce or you are a service-based business, you need a constant stream of leads that you can talk to everyday about your product or service.

This blog post was inspired by an email I received from a reader of the blog who was in the direct sales industry.

Her question to me was:

One thing I’m stumped on as well is what value to give others … I’m feeling like I can’t yet position myself that way as I’m still trying to figure it all out.

I realised that a lot of people knew they had to get leads into their business but did not really know the process for getting those leads.

So I decided to create this piece of content in the hope that it will give you some insight into what you should be paying attention to, on your online journey.

What You Will Learn:

• What are leads and why you need them in your business
• How to attract leads with a lead magnet
• What’s the best format for your lead magnet
• How to create your first lead magnet
• How to promote your lead magnet
• 3 Major reasons why you may not be getting leads in your business

What Are Leads and Why You Need Them In Your Business

Leads are people who may be interested in what you have to offer. They are prospects who have seen or engaged with your business before and have asked for more information from you, to help them consider whether they want your offer.

So let’s say for example, you have a blog and on that blog you have created a content upgrade for A Blogging Blueprint Guide.

The person who provides their name and email address to receive that content upgrade, becomes a lead or subscriber that you can re-market to via email.

Consider the example of a brick and mortar store. When someone walks into a store, they become a lead to the store owner as someone who may purchase their item.

You can therefore see and understand why having leads in your business is necessary.

If every lead you generate to your business has the potential to purchase your product or service, then that lead is profitable and helps your business make money.

So if your business, whatever it may be, is not getting leads on a daily basis, then that is a major problem.

If no one knows that you are open for business and they are not seeing your content or you are not talking to them about your content, then there is no way for them to be inspired or encouraged to purchase your product or service and you should aim to fix that.

That is what this blog post is for and I hope that by the end, you will work on generating your first lead or subscriber for your business.

Once you know how to generate a lead, you will know how to get more of them as it’s simply a matter of repeating the process.

How To Attract Leads With A Lead Magnet

First of all, let’s address the topic of what exactly is a lead magnet.

A magnet attracts things to it right? Well a lead magnet is something that attracts leads to it.

So it is any piece of content that will attract your visitor to become a lead. They become a lead by exchanging their contact details, whether their name and email address, for that piece of content.

Therefore if you’d like to generate leads for your business, consider creating a lead magnet.

Your lead magnet should be something that is of a high perceived value by the visitor. Think for a moment, about your niche and what do you perceive as valuable information, that you know, that you can teach to others?

This should stir your ideas for your own lead magnet.

My subscriber said that

I’m feeling like I can’t yet position myself that way as I’m still trying to figure it all out.

Don’t think that you cannot create a valuable piece of content because you’re new to all of this. I like to think that everyone has something that they can teach to others. If you’re struggling for ideas here are a few places you can go to for help:

• Ask people who represent your ideal client or customer what their biggest problem is?
• Go to niche-related forums and see what people are asking. Don’t know any forums? Ask Google.
• Do you belong to any Facebook groups? Get suggestions from the members by asking a question about their biggest problems.
• Look at what your competitors are doing. Model after their lead magnets. You can even opt into their email sequence to see what they’re saying to their leads.

And if you’re still unsure what valuable content you can create, there are websites that can help you with this by offering their own products for sale which you can then give away.

These products are known as Private Label Rights products. In internet marketing, private label rights is where the author of the product sells the intellectual property rights to the purchaser, giving the purchaser the right to use their work and mark it as their own.

So if seller A creates an article or eBook and sells it to person B, person B can now claim to be the author of the article or eBook when they buy the private label rights to the product.

Some great PLR websites are:

• IDplr.com
• The PLR store
• Resellers Superstore

If you are concerned about creating your own valuable content to be used as a lead magnet, then you can purchase products from the above websites and use it as your own lead magnet.

What’s The Best Format For Your Lead Magnet

A lead magnet can come in the form of a PDF report, an eBook, a video, a short email course, a podcast, a checklist, a workbook. The list is endless.

You can decide what form suits you and your audience and if you don’t know, then split test it.

The form may also depend on what you want to teach. Do you need to be visual in conveying your information? Maybe a video is the best way to deliver the message.

Can the information be documented and will be easy to understand? Then text may be the better option.

How To Create Your First Lead Magnet

Make sure that your lead magnet looks professional and attractive. Even if you do have a good piece of content to give away, sometimes the way our lead magnet is designed can turn a would-be prospect off.

It can also lead to unsubscribes if there is no motivation to finish going through the content because of a lack of proper attention in compiling the lead magnet.

For designing eBooks, PDF reports or any text document, I would recommend Canva or PicMonkey. These design tools are awesome for crafting the perfect report.

For creating videos you can use Screencast-O-Matic to record your video and upload it to YouTube or Wistia.

If you’d like to incorporate images into your lead magnets you can use Unsplash which has some beautiful, royalty free images or Shutterstock which provides millions of royalty-free stock images.

Aside from the design, make sure that your headlines for your lead magnets are interesting.

No one is going to opt in for your lead magnet if the hook is boring. Here are a few things to consider when writing your headline:

• Does it solve a problem? Example, 21-day challenge to lose belly fat
• Make it specific. Example, 10 ways to work from anywhere in the world
• Is it easily digestible? Example, free home-buyers 15 point checklist
• Does it arouse curiosity? Example, learn how I generated $10,000 in under 2 months without a product. This last one I actually did and wrote an eBook about it. 🙂

How To Promote Your Lead Magnet

Where exactly does your lead magnet fit into your marketing? Obviously it needs to be the centre of everything that you do for your business because it is going to help you meet new people who you may end up working with one day.

If you have a website or a blog, you can start filtering your visitors by installing your lead magnet there. If you’re using WordPress as your content management software, you can install your lead magnet on the top bar using a plug in like WPFront. Do you see that top bar right on top of this blog post? That’s what it will look like.

If you don’t yet have a blog, learn how to start one here. 

You can also use LeadPages to create your landing pages and publish it on your WordPress website or blog by using the LeadPages plugin.

If you do not have a website or blog but still want to get leads for your business, LeadPages can act as a standalone landing page which you can promote via traffic channels such as Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.

This is how I am able to generate leads from Facebook by simply adding a link to my landing page and asking people to opt in for my lead magnet.

I do the same for Pinterest (you can check out Pinterest Traffic Avalanche for a Pinterest traffic strategy).

3 Major Reasons Why You May Not Be Getting Leads In Your Business

So you may already have implemented some steps to getting leads but you’re finding it difficult to get one person to bite.

Here are a few things to consider:

You do not have enough traffic

Traffic is an absolute necessity for any business. From traffic you get leads. So if your traffic numbers are low, then this could be a good indication as to why you’re not getting any leads into your business.

Consider traffic generation strategies that increase the number of visitors to your website. The more people that see your website, the more people are likely to opt in for your lead magnet if it’s a good one. 

A good opt in rate for any lead magnet is 40-50%. So if you have 95 visitors to your landing page per day, that would mean that you can potentially have 38-48 leads per day.

Increase your traffic and get more leads.

People do not want your lead magnet

As already mentioned, if your lead magnet is boring or not enticing enough, people are not going to opt into it.

A good way to see what type of lead magnet works, is to test it with your audience.

I would recommend having two to three different types of lead magnets (if you are just getting started and don’t yet know your audience, make your lead magnet brief content) and see what is converting.

Once you know what your audience wants you can then create better lead magnets based on their desires.

Your landing page is not attractive

How your landing page/lead magnet looks to a visitor, is a good indication of whether they will trust you enough to provide their contact details in exchange for your lead magnet.

Poorly designed landing pages can cause visitors to abandon the site without even considering what it has to offer. When designing your landing page, I recommend using software that will create professional looking websites.

I use LeadPages because it is inexpensive at $37/month and their templates are beautiful. Do not be tempted to use free landing page software. Some do not allow you to track important elements of your marketing, their functionality is clumsy and frankly they can make your website look spammy.

When you’re starting a business, be prepared to invest in these tools if you want to stand out and be considered an expert by your audience.

Wrapping Up

I have given you the 411 on leads and how to get them for your business. These steps can be applied to any business model.

In fact, if you know how to create a lead magnet and what type of lead magnet to use in your business, then you’re on your way to selling your products and services.

Here’s a useful and very simple formula for you to remember when building any business:

Traffic + Leads = Sales

That’s it! That’s all there is to generating sales. Have a stead flow of traffic from traffic channels like Google, Pinterest, Facebook or YouTube, direct the traffic to a blog or website, offer them a freebie which is your lead magnet and follow up with them in an email sequence to generate the sale.

This was a super long post! Show me some love in the comments and let me know what you thought! 🙂

Related Articles:

• The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Starting A Successful Blog
• The Ultimate Email Strategy For Bloggers and Marketers
• The Complete Guide To Automated Sales Funnel For Any Business 

Cheers,