Choose and build a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a complete solution to a narrow problem, given away free or at a significant discount, to attract ideal customers. Each part of that is load-bearing: complete, so it actually finishes something; narrow, so that finishing it is possible; and aimed at the customers you want rather than at everybody.

Set it against your core offer — the products or services you exchange for money, plus the terms of that exchange. You have many offers scattered through a business; the core offer is the one you make the most money from. Everything on this page is about the thing that runs in front of it.

1. Why the free thing earns its keep

Time spent on you today makes money spent with you tomorrow more likely. Time is a real investment, and for most people it is a smaller one than money, so it is the cheaper first step to ask for.

Run both paths side by side. Show a core offer to a low-trust list and somebody in enough pain may well buy — whole businesses are built that way, and the take rate might be one in twenty-five or one in a hundred depending on what you sell. The worked figures on this page are invented. They are there to carry the shape of the comparison, not a rate you should expect. Now put a narrow, valuable, free thing in front of the same list. A share of them take it, because the only thing being risked is time. A share of those consume it and conclude you are good at this. You have made a promise and kept it, so when you name the bigger problem they still have, you are making the core offer to a high-trust group instead of a cold one, and the take rate moves.

The mechanism is not generosity, and saying so plainly keeps you honest about it: you do this to make more money, by building trust and delivering value in advance.

Everyday versions of the same effect. A bar that puts out salty nuts for free sells cold drinks. A warehouse club ran food sampling for years, not by accident but because it drove sales — somebody tries twenty things, likes one, and buys a tub of it they would not otherwise have bought at all. The cost of the samples is the cost of delivering the lead magnet, and it comes back in the purchase.

One consequence: the sample has to be good. A bad free thing loses the sale it was meant to open and gets talked about besides.

The diagnostic. If you are not getting enough leads, it is usually the lead magnet that is not good enough or not attractive enough to your ideal audience. Check that before you buy more traffic.

The cost case, in numbers. Even a free thing that costs money to deliver should lower what a customer costs you, because the extra engaged leads more than pay for it. On either path, a customer costs what one engaged lead costs (the advertising, plus delivering any free thing), divided by the share of engaged leads who buy. Say that advertising the core offer directly costs $600 for each engaged lead and one in four buys: each customer costs $2,400. Now put a free thing in front that costs $20 to deliver. If it is good, far more people respond, and the advertising behind each engaged lead falls to $55, so $75 all in. Even at a buying rate of only one in fifteen, a customer now costs $1,125. Fewer of them buy, but the cost of an engaged lead fell eightfold, so the free path wins. The figures in this example are invented. It follows that spending more to deliver the free thing can pay: a better free thing draws more people in and sells more of them.

Flag: whether to put a free thing in front at all. One reading: advertise the core offer directly first, because that may be all you need; put a lead magnet in front when buyers want to learn more before they buy, which is common when what you sell is expensive. A second reading, on SOP 209, section 4.1: asking directly returns more up front, while a lead magnet returns more over a longer horizon and scales further, so choose by how large you want to grow. This page does not settle which reading is right.

2. The order of the work

The steps are announced in one order and worked in another. Announced: how this was worked out; why lead magnets matter; what and who; how to deliver it; how to solve it; naming; ease of consumption; quality; and building the next step. Worked: what and who, then how to solve it, then how to deliver it, then the same final four. This page does not settle which reading is right. Sections 3 to 9 below follow the worked order.

3. Pick the who and the what

Every problem you solve creates the next one. Leads solved leaves you with sales; sales solved leaves you with delivery; delivery solved leaves you with churn; churn solved may leave you with scaling operations — and at the top of that you are back at needing more traffic. Problems are not removed, they are traded for better ones.

So take the broad thing you actually sell and break it into the micro-problems in front of it. Selling somebody's house is broad. In front of it sit: what is this house worth, how do I raise its value, photographs, cleaning, landscaping, staging. Every one of those is narrow, which is exactly what makes it a candidate.

Pick one and solve it free. Solving it helps them and, at the same time, makes the remaining problem more obvious — they still have to sell the house. The test to apply before you commit: does this narrow solution reveal a next problem that only your core offer solves? If it reveals nothing, pick a different problem.

4. Pick how you solve it — three types

1. Reveal the problem. An assessment or diagnosis. A site speed audit that shows what the load time is and what it could be; a posture analysis; a termite inspection. You are not fixing anything, you are making a problem visible that they did not know they had. This works best on problems that get worse while you wait, because then the urgency is implied rather than manufactured.
2. Give a free trial. A taste. Limit the number of uses, the quantity, the length of access, or a combination.
3. Give one step of a process that has many steps. One coat of three. One of ten fixes for a slow website, with the other nine named. One treatment out of a combined approach.

All three work with any business. The same site-speed business can audit the site, host it on a faster server, or fix one of ten problems — three different lead magnets from one core offer.

5. Pick how you deliver it — four mechanisms

1. Software — you give them a tool that does a job. A calculator, a spreadsheet, a dashboard.
2. Information — you teach them something. A course, a lesson, an interview, a talk, a list of mistakes to avoid.
3. Services — you do the work for free. Run their ads for a month; audit the site; apply the first coat.
4. Physical products — something they hold. A chart, a sample, a book, a piece of equipment.

Three solution types across four delivery mechanisms gives twelve combinations to choose from.

Notes worth having before you choose.

Services are underrated. Free work is unscalable and it visibly costs you something, and both of those are why it generates goodwill out of proportion to its size. It also puts you in contact with the person while you do it, which is when selling is easiest.

Stay close to what you sell. The nearer the free thing sits to your core offer, the better it works. Give away branded T-shirts and you will attract people who want a T-shirt, not people who want your services. The same T-shirt could be an excellent lead magnet for a company that sells apparel printing. No lead magnet is good or bad on its own — it is right or wrong for the core offer behind it.

6. Name it, and test the name

How good the thing is decides whether the leads you get convert. What you call it decides whether you get the leads at all. Once the headline is written, eighty cents of the advertising dollar is already spent.

Two worked results, each with a rounded multiple beside it, so take the direction and not the decimal:

Change tested	Result and its rounded multiple	What the arithmetic gives
Re-cutting the first five seconds of a short video	4,000 views became 850,000 — and 4,000 counted as a failure at that account's scale; put at a 200-times increase	212.5 times, so the round number understates it slightly
Removing one word from a subtitle	Split 70 to 30 in favor of the shorter line; put at "three times", then "two and a half times"	About 2.3 to 1

Neither figure is wrong in direction and both are loose in size. Carry them as evidence that the naming is worth testing, not as effect sizes you can plan against. A second reading puts the subtitle split at 71 to 29, about 2.45 to 1. This page does not settle which reading is right.

How to test it:

1. Run ads. A sample large enough to decide on costs very little; a spend of fifty dollars is usually enough to get one.
2. Run a poll to the audience you already have, on every platform you are on, and add the results up yourself.
3. Post the two options and ask for comments. This gets you engagement as well as an answer.
4. Message people directly — followers, friends, contacts in your phone. Asked earnestly, most people answer, and it is enough of a directional cue to decide on.

The signal to watch for beyond the vote: somebody picks one and then asks when it is coming out. That is the name working.

7. Make it easy

People do what is easy for them, so hand them options — and what that means depends on the delivery mechanism you chose.

• Information: cover the consumption preferences. Where one operator's book runs as text, audio, video and print, the split across the four is almost perfectly even — so offering one format only would have missed roughly three-quarters of the people who would have consumed it. Worse, some would opt in for a format they do not use, so you collect the lead and never earn the sale.
• Software: make it work on a phone and a computer, and on both major mobile systems.
• Services: available at more times, in more ways, on more days. A free back assessment offered only at seven on a Monday morning is a free thing nobody claims, and the person down the street who will see them at any hour gets the lead instead.
• Physical products: simple to open and simple to use, with no instruction sheet needed. Good packaging design is so rarely encountered that people keep the boxes when they meet it.

8. Make it good

Zero fluff. Hold nothing back. If somebody wants the whole thing built and run for them, that is the core offer; the knowledge itself can go.

If you are worried about giving away your one valuable thing, that is a skills problem wearing a strategy costume. Learn another valuable thing, give the first away, and sell the second.

The market judges you on your free work, not your paid work. Round numbers: 99.9 percent of the people who encounter your stuff will never buy anything, and that is fine — but they will form an opinion, and their opinion reaches the people who would have bought. Give away something thin and you discourage buyers directly, and then you get asked about by people who trust the person they asked.

The underlying reason: people buy on a prediction of future value, because they cannot know the value until after they have paid. The cheapest way to make somebody predict they will get value from you later is to give them value before. Make the free thing exceptional and the paid thing exceptional.

9. Create the next step

People forget the last step. Write the call to action: what to do, in clear, simple, direct language. Do not be clever. Be clear.

Put links to your next offer inside the free thing itself, so whoever uses it finds the next step; this is one of the tactics seen to work.

Then give a reason to act now, and know which lever you are pulling:

• Scarcity is limited quantity. Ten of them exist, available forever, and when they are gone they are gone.
• Urgency is limited time. Unlimited copies, but not after tomorrow.

Both together is ideal, and either one on its own still generates significantly more demand than neither. If no honest reason presents itself, remember that the reason matters less than having one — any reason at all is more compelling than none.

10. Check it against the four tests

A great lead magnet does four things:

1. It engages ideal customers — they see it and want it.
2. It gets more people to engage than the core offer alone would, which is the whole financial case for the extra work.
3. It is valuable enough that people actually consume it, not merely claim it.
4. It makes the right people more likely to buy.

The fourth carries a condition people skip. If somebody unqualified does not like your lead magnet or gets nothing from it, that is the magnet working, not failing. Repelling the wrong buyers is worth as much as attracting the right ones. If you want higher-quality prospects, raise the quality of the lead magnet.

11. What this page does not cover

Targeting, paid-media buying and the sales conversation that follows the engaged lead are not covered on this page. The four ways to get the lead magnet in front of anybody are on SOP 12.