340 – Ya gotta get ’em to opt in: Tom talks Lead Magnets and Ethical Bribes

Episode 340 - Lead Magnets and Ethical Bribes
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and forty of Screw the Commute podcast.

[00:00:28] Today, we're going to talk about lead magnets and ethical bribes. They're also called. These are freebie incentives you use to get people to give you their email address. And it's an integral part to this building. And I'm telling you, having a big list and using it properly can mean an enormous amount of money for you.

[00:00:48] So now talking about this building for a complete episode on this building, I did that in episode 327, so you can go to screwthecommute.com/327, and it really means a lot of money for you. Hope you didn't miss Episode 339. Richelle Futch was here. She was Military Spouse of the Year at Fort Bragg. She got me invited to the White House to talk about military spouse employment and how my school was perfect training for that. And she had great insights on raising a family and running a business and being portable and all that stuff. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas that help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com, look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it and talk into your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you. And hey, put your website in there, too, so you can get a big shout out in front of thousands of people on a future episode.

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[00:03:51] All right. Let's get to the main event. Lead magnets and ethical bribes sometimes are called incentives. See, people are not going to join your mailing list just because they like your squeeze page. Yeah, when I first started, people would sign up for anything, but nowadays you almost have to pay them to give up their email address. So you need to offer them something valuable for free so that they will trade you their precious email address to get it. This is really important.

[00:04:23] People already receive lots of emails on a daily basis. In order to receive your emails, they will need to be convinced that you can provide valuable information and expertise that they don't already have.

[00:04:38] One of the most common and effective ways to do this is a free report.

[00:04:43] Now, this doesn't have to be an entire book, but don't make it so short that people are disappointed when they get it. See, the idea here is to provide value, but not give away all of your secrets.

[00:04:56] The next level of secrets will be provided in a paid product that you can use as an offer for sale later and a simple funnel or via broadcast email.

[00:05:08] You could also offer a secret audio interview and MP3 format or a video that explains something of interest that may or may not pay you an affiliate commission.

[00:05:19] See, some of these ethical bribes can be profit sources for you. So I've had great luck with E courses where your autoresponder delivers the course one part per day over a couple days or a week. A good autoresponder system will make it easy for you to set any delivery schedule you want, the reason E courses are good is because the person signing up has to put their best email address in because they won't get future parts of the course if they just put in a throwaway email address that they never check.

[00:05:54] And I know I do this myself when I want to get some incentive, but I don't want to hear from that person anymore. It's very common at this point. You might be thinking, well, you can't write or you don't have an interview or a video. Well, the answer is that you can outsource this work.

[00:06:12] You can purchase private label rights. That's called PLR Reports and ebooks as incentive. Private label rights means that someone else wrote the report or e-book and you buy the rights to be able to put it back out under your name. Now, the reason most people do not use PLA is because the quality is usually poor. But if you shop around by Googling PLA and then put your topic in there, you can find some really great quality reports and ebooks. But I always suggest that if you do use PLA products, that you add your own information, stories and training to make the product unique and personal to you. Remember, you want them to build a relationship with you and feel that you're the person to go to when it comes to buy stuff.

[00:07:01] But I would suspect if you're one of my crowd, you you may have tons of things you've already written or you could write to use as your incentive. Now, as part of your incentive, you can have offers to things of yours or affiliate products. Just don't be obnoxious about it. Make the entire document or whatever you're giving them as a freebie, all about selling them something else.

[00:07:26] This sends the message to the new subscriber is that all they're going to get is sales pitches from you and they won't get any free value. So if you act this way, they're most likely going to unsubscribe very quickly. What you absolutely don't want to do is make your incentives so pitifully small that you send the impression that, you know, you don't get much for dealing with you. Remember, this is your first introduction to a new person who could potentially do business with you for years. I mean, I've had some people in my last 24 years, OK, so being lazy and putting out crap as your incentive is just stupid.

[00:08:08] All right, so now I'm going to tell you about tons of things you can use for your ethical bribe or lead magnet, and another cool thing you could do is surprise the person signing up by giving them several unannounced bonus gifts. Again, you're sending the message that you always give more than expected. That's the way you want people to feel when they deal with you on all of these incentives. Make sure the incentive is designed to attract the right kind of person. It must be something relevant to the list. You're trying to build those, you know, good to give a fantastic incentive unrelated to the future, things you're going to be trying to sell. But if you do a personal sign up to get the fantastic incentive and then unsubscribe as soon as you send them another email that's unrelated. I mean, this is your fault, not theirs, so always be consistent in who you attract and then give them what they expected. If you do that, you'll have people staying on your list and buying stuff for many years.

[00:09:15] All right. So now I got a massive list of stuff. I mean, you've got to be able to find something in this list of things that I'm going to lay on you right now. And you probably want to get the show notes for this and go back and listen again. But here we go. So these are a bunch of things you could use as lead magnets, ethical bribes, incentives, freebies, whatever you want to call.

[00:09:39] All right. Special reports and of course, make sure the topic attracts the right kind of person.

[00:09:46] Another kind of special report is called a White Paper, if that's what it's called in your industry, put out white papers, videos, audios, ebooks.

[00:09:57] I just gave one on this podcast, screwthecommute.com/automatefree is a 27 dollar ebook. I mean, it'll change the course of your business if you're smart enough to download it and use what's in it. OK, it runs in my business. So an ebook and not to blow my own horn, but, all right, you're going to see I give you a tremendous value with this thing. Like I said, we sell it for 27 bucks. Checklists like you could maybe a big checklist of what to take on your next camping trip if you were camping oriented site cheat sheets. I have one on a Kindle eBook, tips and tricks and how to format a PDF e-book. Some of these, you know, they're kind of the same, but you call them different things. But that's my Kindle Cheat sheet. Templates are good, like fill in the blank, you could give off your copywriting sites, you give them a fill in the blank headlines and stuff like that, so anything where they can just fill in the blank is a template I told you about. Ecourse is one of the ones I do is the top 10 ways to make money speaking. You can go grab it at greatspeaking.com. I got another one top ten ways to be great on stage as a follow up to that. After they can make money, they need to be great on stage samples like sample emails where people just substitute their information so that be a sample swiped files, swiped files. It sounds like it's, you know, something cheating or bad. But that's a very common term in that if you see some advertising copy that you like, you get you swipe it and you save it and then you change it to suit your particular product. That's very common, totally ethical.

[00:11:53] Scripts like video sales letter, script or sales script or customer service script, whatever, you know, your field is.

[00:12:02] Another thing you call him is toolkits. I mean, what tools do you use for certain things that's very similar to a resource list, but tool kit is another way to say it, that people like and remember, this can be a profit center. If I use a particular tool that I tell you about in the tool kit or the resource list, if you go by it, it's probably going to be through my affiliate link. If I have one say now you have to disclose this nowadays where you didn't in the past. If you're in the programming stop, you could give him a web application that they could use on their Web site. You could put out an industry calendar of events. Now this you have to keep more updated. But still, people love that stuff. A daily planner on whatever your topic is, is if I'm trying to teach people how to public speak, maybe, you know, practice openings on Mondays and closings on Tuesdays, et cetera, workbooks for any any kind of topic, and let them fill in the blanks and inspiration guide with samples of what other people have done.

[00:13:10] So this would be if you let's say you were teaching Facebook ads, well, show a bunch of ads that other people have done and put commentary. And that's that be an inspiration guide for for them to duplicate those kinds of ads and use them themselves. Journals. People love those calculators.

[00:13:28] You can go to webmaster sites and get calculators that will do stuff that you can put on your Web site. So maybe it'll, you know, do mortgage rates are insurance rates or things like that. Case studies, if you have a more analytical audience, you you can go way in depth on something and they get a case study on a particular business that's related to them generators.

[00:13:54] I used to have this thing called a header generator. I can't remember who I bought it from, but it would make a nice header for a Web site, you know, so I didn't have to pay a graphic artist. It was beautiful spreadsheets. Sometimes the people that are real good with Excel can make a spreadsheet for your particular business so you don't have to try to program the darn spreadsheet yourself. I never been able to figure that out.

[00:14:18] Recipes, if your food side tutorials like instructions on how to do stuff, now we have them for our podcast app so you can go to screwthecommute.com/app and we just give it away.

[00:14:33] You don't have to opt in for that because we want you to get our podcast app. So we do a tutorial on how to use it so you can do tutorials and frequently and I make a lot of money doing tutorials on software products or software as a service or online services, show you how to use it. And then when you buy it, it's through my affiliate link infographics. These are pictures that are filled in with words that teach a certain subject or talk about a certain subject, webinars. You know, I'm a webinar freak. TomAntionwebinars.com.

[00:15:06] You see all our back webinars, but you probably don't want to give an incentive to an opt in something that's the public can get just by going for nothing and not opting in, making a subscriber only webinar. So it's special. You can give away event tickets if you have upcoming events.

[00:15:26] You can do sample chapters or a sample of your audio courses, your video courses, so samples, people love that or sometimes called excerpts.

[00:15:37] Transcripts of things are the now usually if you do a transcript, you want to clean it up a little bit because a transcript of an audio doesn't it doesn't really read that well compared to what you actually said. So you want to clean it up a little bit if you're using it as an opt in. Notes from live events are really powerful. If somebody couldn't go to a live event and somebody took good notes, those are good opt ins. State of the industry reports. Now, again, you got to keep those up. You can't put the same one out for six years in a row. That's just doesn't make sense. Predictions and trends. That's the same thing. Again, you have to keep updating it. Mind maps. People love mind maps of things so they can visualize what you're talking about. SlideShare. So a lot of people like the PowerPoint of a presentation, so that can be an opt in.

[00:16:34] And I got the bunch more here for you. But I want to tell you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever. I triple dog there. You have put something up against it that has the kind of value that this has.

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[00:16:56] So you can't get anybody to even talk to you at my level, let alone teach anything. We'll even take over your screen and show you where to click and it'll just accelerate your online success so much faster.

[00:17:11] Another unique thing is that I've kind of turned the Internet marketing world on its head a long time ago because guys at my level were charging 50 or 100 thousand bucks up front to teach you this stuff. Well, I said, you know, that's not right. That's not fair. And a lot of these people are rip offs anyway. You'll never get your value out of it. So I charged like a ten percent fee to enter the program. And then my success is tied to your success. So you got to make 200000 bucks for me to get my fifty thousand. All right. So so people love that. And seventeen hundred students later, it's still going strong. Also, you have an immersion weekend at the great Internet marketing retreat center where you actually live here in the house, of course, after the pandemic's over. And we have a TV studio next door where we shoot you on video, high quality. Give it give you all these marketing videos. I mean, just just on and on and on the value we pack on. Plus you get a scholarship to our school, which you could gift to somebody or use yourself for extra training. So it's there's nothing that compares with this anywhere. So love to talk to you about it. We'll even finance your entry fee. That's how sure I am that you'll get the value out of it. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:18:35] All right. Let's get back to the main event. Let me give you some more of these lead magnets, incentives, freebies, ethical bribes.

[00:18:44] That's all synonyms for the same thing to get them to give you their email address.

[00:18:49] All right. Another one is called a round up. This is a list of tips on a topic from lots of people in the industry that's called a roundup. That's a great thing. People love that. Now, here's here's one that sounds normal newsletter. You've heard that, right.

[00:19:03] But I got to tell you. I critique website, probably over 10000 Web sites I've critiqued, and people have a sign up for me to sign up for our newsletter. Well, that's not good enough anymore. You got to tell him what's what's going to be in it. What's the big benefit that they're going to get out of it?

[00:19:21] Say now another cool name for is it a vault or library? So it's a subscriber only vault to get access to all your different lead magnets and all your freebies and everything. So that's subscriber only vault. Quizzes, you could have some specific quizzes, we have one for my school, IMTCVA.org/quiz that shows you all the college rip offs, how the major colleges are ripping off people, survey results. So now this is something you got to keep up with. You can't run it for years and years at a time. But if you take surveys of people on your list, you can put the results up there as part of the incentive to sign up quotations. A lot of people love quotations. You can use them, get them for free. Just compile them all on your topic. Cartoons, there's some companies are using custom cartoons to their industry and there's cartoon makers. You can just put cartoon maker into Google and there's loads of paid and free ones. You can make your own cartoons. Free memberships so you can have a membership to Facebook, a private Facebook group or some other thing that makes it exclusive for your subscribers. And the last one I'll give you out here is there's probably I'm probably giving you 60 of them, so I don't have coupons. There are 50 or 60. I don't remember how many I got here, but people love a sale and coupons. If it makes sense for your business, give them a coupon.

[00:20:56] So there you go. Tons of options to get people to sign up for your list. And remember, go back and listen to Episode 327 for an entire episode on list Building, this incentive is just one sliver of the whole all the infrastructure and things you got to put together to both get them to sign up and then keep them signed up. So check that out. I got to tell you, it's the number one way people at my level make money. I want to see that from you.

[00:21:27] So check out the greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. Check out my school at IMTCVA.org and I will catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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