Lead Magnets: With free templates and an organic traffic source

Building an Email list of opt-in users has become an essential part of the success of almost every business, be it online or otherwise. An email list helps the business turn one-time customers into loyal repeat customers and turn strangers into customers. In this article, we will discuss a strategy called Lead Magnet to generate leads for our business to grow our email list. First, we will discuss what is a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

In short, a lead magnet is a term in marketing given to a free offering, which is most likely a digital product, in exchange for the user providing their contact information. A lead magnet is usually implemented as a funnel, usually around two pages long, the welcome page and the thank you page. 

First, the user is pointed to the welcome page where they will be presented with Information about the free offering, such as details and reviews along with Information about the website that is offering the product so the user will know to who they are submitting their information. The welcome page also includes a form for submitting the contact information with a clear and specific call to action like "Enter your email to gain instant access".

Once the user enters and submits their contact information they would be pointed to the thank you page. Then the website will send the free offer to the user's email address and will be presented with a thank you message that states the offer was sent to the provided email address. There's another method that doesn't require sending an email, which is the one we will use in this tutorial, it depends on providing the user with a link to download the free offer on the thank you page directly. We will use the latter method in this tutorial as it's more suitable for beginners because it doesn't require sending emails or having a business email.

The cost, prerequisite, and technologies your need for this tutorial.

This tutorial is totally Free Of Cost. And we designed this tutorial for complete beginners with no previous knowledge or experience in marketing, programming, or anything else.

We will use Systeme IO to build and implement the lead magnet and host on their platform totally for free. Their free plan offers three funnels that can be lead magnets along with many beautiful templates that we can choose from. And that's all that we need for the purpose of this tutorial.

You will not even need to create the free offering yourself, as I will share with you a method to get them effortlessly for free later in this tutorial.

Creating the lead magnet funnel for free with Systeme IO.

Now we're done with explanations and it's time for the technical part. Here are the steps to creating and hosting your lead magnet funnel for free with Systeme IO.

Signup for Systeme IO for free and log in.

You just go to Systeme IO by pressing here. Click on the Get My Free Account button at the top right corner of the screen. Then provide your email address, and confirm your email by checking an email received from Systeme IO. Then You will choose a password for your account. This process will not take more than a minute. Then log in to your account and follow the next step.

Start creating the funnel.

Now click on "funnels" at the top in the middle of the navbar (If it's not in the navbar, click on "menu" in the navbar then click on funnels). Here you will see a list of the funnels you have previously created. So you will see an empty list in your case. To create a new funnel click on the Create button in the top right corner of the screen.

Choose a name for your funnel, choose "Build an Audience", and choose your currency. A simple two steps funnel is set up, a squeeze page (welcome page), and a thank you page. Then you can navigate between the squeeze page and the thank you page as you please, and choose a template you like for each, but make sure the template for the thank you page has a button so we can use it to download the free offer. Now is the time to choose the free offer.

Choosing a free offer for the lead magnet.

The free offer can be a video, an eBook, or any other digital product you choose. In this tutorial, we will choose an eBook. We will get a PLR eBook so we don't have to write one ourselves. What is a PLR eBook? A PLR eBook is an eBook that has private label rights meaning that once we download the eBook we can do almost anything with it, we can modify it, use parts of its content, resell it as it is, or give it away for free. 

There are multiple sources from which we can choose the eBook, I would suggest you choose from FreePLRDownloads.com as all of the items there are free and has PLR.

To build the lead magnet with you, I've chosen an eBook called "SEO Sergeant" about search engine optimization.

Edit the welcome and thank you page to fit your offer.

First of all, don't forget to hit save after you're done editing any page. Now that you've chosen the templates, it's time to edit them to include your offer. You can edit the URL of each page. And click on the edit icon on the right to edit the template. Edit the welcome page to describe your free offer. I've created this funnel. Then you need to edit the thank you page and include a button to download the free eBook. That is done by clicking on the button and going to the sidebar menu selecting the action when the button is clicked to download a file and upload the free ebook that you chose.

Drive organic traffic to your lead magnet with a free email list.

The lead magnet is, of course, of no use if it wasn't exposed to potential subscribers. So for this part, I will discuss a strategy that will drive traffic for your lead magnet for free.

This method is cold emailing a free email list. I don't mean the CSV files full of emails offered online. Some websites give you the ability to send ad emails to around 1000 random subscribers of their email list every 3 days on average from their own email address.

My favorite free email list provider is Listjoe. Their list consists of tens of thousands of subscribers and they let send 1000 emails to random email addresses from their list every 3 days. This is a great opportunity to drive organic traffic to your lead magnet.

A small note is that you will need to mask your lead magnet URL (example.systeme.io) because Listjoe has blocked users from sending emails containing the systeme.io domain. You can mask it with Bitly for free and submit your include the new URL in the ad email you send.

Check out the stats of your System IO funnel.

You can go to the funnel that you're using and click on stats. Systeme IO will show you the number of clicks and the number of leads that your lead magnet has generated.

Do not turn into a scammer.

A lead magnet is a very powerful tool to build your email list quickly. However, it can easily be misused. You should always give away products that are of good quality and those that you have personally validated. Tricking people into submitting their contact information by promising them an exaggerated version of the products you will actually send them will do more harm than good. Although your email list will grow, those subscribers lose any trust in your brand and will likely unsubscribe from your list or even report your emails as spam which can get your IP address or domain name blacklisted. Read our Article on how to avoid spam filters and reports here.