Pick a lead bucket, starting with the offer and lead magnet

1. The buckets for each method

1.1 Ads

Six bigger buckets improve ads; how they divide is open (section 7). In order:

Bucket, in order	Where it is taken up
A better lead magnet and offer, the place to look first, called the highest-leverage thing you can do	Sections 3 and 4 below
More ads, drawn from what the business already does: testimonial campaigns, unboxing videos, review sites, in-person events, lifecycle ads	SOP 210 — Set ad volume and harvest the ads you already have
Better creative: hooks changed to match customer segments, and broader hooks to break into new markets	SOP 212 — Make better ad creative with hooks, permutations and assembly
Targeting: start with interests and demographics, then climb the look-alike ladder toward the right customers	SOP 213 — Fix ad targeting and bid for return, not cheap leads
Bidding to reach the prospects who return most, on the platforms that return most, rather than hunting for cheaper ad platforms; maybe paying three times more for a lead that is worth ten times as much	SOP 213, the same page

These are the first five things, the ones that matter without a brand; a brand makes each far more powerful (section 7).

1.2 Organic content

Organic gets six buckets too, in this order:

Bucket	Where it is taken up
A better offer and lead magnet	Sections 3 and 4 below
More content	SOP 214 — Make more and better organic content
Better content	SOP 214 as well
Better calls to action	SOP 215 — Put calls to action on every platform
Better targeting	SOP 216 — Make content for the customers you want and build a brand
Repurposing	SOP 214, alongside more and better content

1.3 Outreach

Outreach has its own buckets, in order: a better offer and lead magnet; outreach in greater volume, with AI tools; more leads bought from brokers, pulled by software, or gathered by hand; better targeting through list enrichment done by AI; and split tests run on every component. An events process sits beside buying leads, and the split tests run weekly. Only the first is set out here; a cold list by scraping, a broker or elbow grease is SOP 27, section 3.

For ads and outreach alike, the offer and lead magnet come first: when ads bring in fewer leads than you want, check those two before anything else.

2. Take only the exit you need

Picture the buckets as a highway. You leave at the exit for where you are heading; nobody need stay on the road throughout. If one bucket is plainly your problem, work on it and do not swamp yourself with the others. Weighing routes by risk-adjusted return is SOP 186 — Pick the path up the mountain that fits your skills; a separate list of fixes for costly leads is SOP 197, section 2.

3. The offer: the bucket that touches all three methods

This bucket affects all three methods. Many people still run terrible offers, terrible lead magnets, or both; what follows is the common troubleshooting, the offer first.

3.1 Win on speed, risk or ease

Probably the most common situation, and especially true of home services: whether your offer is very hard or very easy to compare with someone else's, you have to beat others on one of three vectors. Be faster than the other business, less risky, or easier, or several of these. As strategy, pick at least one of the three to focus on. Kitchens, roofing or concrete, it makes no difference: the view here is firm that a faster route always exists, as does a reason to be less risky and a way to ease things for the customer.

Then the price. You might think you cannot afford that. The answer: that is exactly the reason to charge more, so the price carries the premium. You are no longer a commodity, and people will pay for it. The three vectors for a business with trucks and crews: SOP 205, section 6.

3.2 Speed: the same outcome in a third of the time

The question you are encouraged to put to your offer: if a customer's outcome had to arrive in one-third the time, what would that really take for me? Rather than saying it cannot be done or cannot be afforded, answer the question.

If the answer is paying contractors 50 percent more so they respond the same day or the next, fine. Next ask whether you can sell that to customers. If you can, you have a winner. If you cannot, go up market, to wealthy customers who value speed, risk and ease. When an offer needs work, speed is one of the first places looked at: what would finishing everything in a third of the time take for us? Going up market as a direction: SOP 93.

3.3 Risk: guarantee or insure the biggest fear

The second vector is risk. Can you insure against the customer's biggest fear, or guarantee against it? Warranties are one way in, guarantees another. Or, one of the personal favorites here, reportedly put in place with plenty of businesses: take out an insurance policy on whatever the customer fears most, and tell them not to worry, since you cover damages up to a stated amount and already hold insurance for it. Fold that into your costs; it typically comes to not nearly as much as you would expect. Guarantees: SOP 7 and SOP 8.

3.4 Ease: prepare the way

The third vector is ease. One way to think about it: how far can you prepare the way for the customer in advance? Is there anything to do at intake, or at onboarding? Can some prep or pre-work be done for them, so the experience runs that much more smoothly? So few businesses think this way that customers will almost always notice and value it. The view here is that these value vectors really drive the business; if you are suffering as a commodity, they are how you solve it.

3.5 Wrap what you sell in an attraction mechanism

The fourth point on the offer: you can always wrap what you already sell in a giveaway, win your money back, a decoy, pay less now or pay more later, and, last, buy X get Y free. If your thought is that you could just use cheaper leads, run one of these attraction offer mechanisms.

A giveaway with a runner-up prize. Run a kitchen remodel giveaway, say. Then contact everyone in second place, who missed the grand prize, and offer a second-place prize, a participation trophy: in one example, a $2,000 discount on their kitchen.

Which fits which business, in this view. Win your money back works very well where the business is more service-based and the customer has work to do. A decoy works well for a more transactional business. Buy X get Y free works in many different versions.

Buy X get Y free: more free than paid. The key is to give away more free than the customer pays for and set the price to match. One example: $100 a month for 12 months is $1,200. Offer six months bought with six free, or four bought with eight free; the second looks like a wild deal, but each of the four paid months is priced at $300. Four at $300 is $1,200, the same total.

One page each: SOP 61, SOP 60, SOP 62, SOP 64 and SOP 63, in the order named above.

3.6 The legal line

A caution comes with the mechanisms, carried here as a caution only: ask the legal people in your area. Laws on advertising differ by county and region, so confirm with your attorney that what you run is advertising compliant. Advertising law and compliance are not covered on this page.

4. The lead magnet

4.1 Asking directly against softening the ask

This one is super common. You might think a fairly big, well-known business could just ask for money; it does not really work that way. One such business runs ads that sell a paid in-person event directly, and ads for a lead magnet. The direct ads return more on ad spend up front, which is kind of obvious. The more interesting point: widen the time horizon and the lead magnet returns more overall, and, the part people miss, it scales better. A direct ask reaches only the warmest of the audience, two small segments by stages of awareness (SOP 118); the lead magnet draws far more people than those together.

Small is relative. It is small businesses that claim lead magnets do not work. But small is relative: maybe whoever is advising you makes five million dollars a year. Neither way is right or wrong. If a smaller sum is all you are after, you will certainly get a higher return by telling people to buy. If huge is what you want to get into, soften the ask, make acting more attractive, and build around it the process that turns people into buyers. A second reading, which decides by the price and by how much the buyer must learn first, is on SOP 13, section 1.

4.2 A quote request is not a lead magnet

Many of you have no lead magnet at all, home services above all: Google ads run to a website whose ask is to request a quote. Nobody wants to request a quote. Give people something in return for their contact information.

4.3 Match the dream outcome

Make it more enticing by giving people something they actually want: a better dream outcome, described in the customer's own words for what they want.

4.4 The three types, with the examples given

There are three types of lead magnet: reveal a problem, give a trial of the solution, or give one step of a multi-step process. The types are in section 4 of SOP 13 — Choose and build a lead magnet; the examples here add these:

• Reveal a problem. A piece on seven mistakes homeowners make fixing an HVAC system.
• A trial of the solution. A company whose one service is getting local businesses into the first, second or third spot in local map results for "near me" searches. Its lead magnet puts you in one of those spots free, then calls in seven days to ask whether you still want it; it reportedly works very well. If you can give a trial, you will get a great many leads, and easily.
• One step of a multi-step process, called a splinter offer. A fashion consultant's only ask was a booked assessment call; the preference here is to give an incentive. They settled on working out the customer's color palette, so the customer gets some value, and then on automating it, which she said could be done fairly quickly.

The pushback. The objection almost always met is that everything the business does comes as one. The reply: it does not, since every process has pieces. Someone who fixes doors can fix part of one, paint it, seal it, or just measure it. There is always a piece you can pull out and offer free or at a big discount.

4.5 Give one component away

Take an offer with four components, A, B, C and D, priced at $2,000. Pulling one out, say B, and giving it away at 90 percent off, or free, is often the more powerful move. Once someone has it, they want to buy A, C and D. Almost always, some version of this can bring a person through the door.

4.6 Big discounts, not small ones

This is also how to get what is preferred here: enormous discounts. The view here is that a 10 or 20 percent discount has no point, and the idea of one is disliked intensely. The aim is a discount big enough to change behavior, and a 90 or 80 percent discount will. That is affordable because it comes off something that costs very little, with the upsell process built into the main offer from there. This will help you get cheaper leads.

4.7 Why the leads stay expensive, and the favored fix

For many of you, the offer is simply bad, and that is why cheap leads will not come, whatever the business or market. You promise nothing on speed or ease and do nothing to reverse risk. Doing all three is not required: choose one and do it thoroughly, hammering it home. And in front of the offer there is nothing to give people cause to respond to your ads and share their contact details, so make something truly compelling.

A favorite way here of giving a lead magnet: hand out free what other people make you pay for. The more real it is, the more true cost it carries, the more likely it is to work. The offer is the same for organic content and outreach; it is raised because for so many it is the problem.

5. A lead magnet or an attraction offer

Asked what separates the two, the answer is that lead magnets are typically free, or typically very low in cost. An attraction offer, in the framing here, seen as a mechanism, wraps something already more or less fully formed in a different incentive, for example buy X get Y free, or a giveaway, or win your money back. The core deliverable stays; the mechanism around it makes it more desirable. With a lead magnet, its appeal against its value usually comes from nothing more than being free or very cheap.

6. When paid ads are closed to you

Asked for advice to brands where paid ads are restricted, the answer is that paid ads are not going to happen, unless you run them for what is called "not that stuff", and that it is still very tough. The view here is that restricted spaces typically turn to trade shows and conferences, making content, outreach and affiliate networks, which is where distribution comes from, depending on what you sell. The guess offered at such spaces was probably cannabis and firearms. Once the product was known, the answer was distribution and building the brand overall. For paid, one would rather collaborate with influencers, in this view; the fastest path to money would probably be such collaborations, used to open introductions for distribution.

7. What this page does not decide for you

• How the six ad buckets divide. Whether the brand is the sixth, and whether targeting and bidding are one bucket or two. Not established on this page.
• How many outreach buckets there are. The items named come to six only if one is split. Not established on this page.
• What "not that stuff" means. Not established on this page.
• Buy six, get six. It is offered beside buy four, get eight as a way to give more free than paid, yet it gives away exactly as much as is paid for. This page does not settle which reading is right.

8. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Confirm leads are the constraint, then find your method's buckets (section 1)
2	Take the exit for your problem; if one bucket is plainly it, leave the rest
3	Start with the offer and the lead magnet, which bear on all three methods
4	Focus on at least one of speed, risk and ease, and win on it
5	Ask what a third of the time would take; if it costs more, ask whether customers will pay; if not, go up market
6	Guarantee against, or insure, the biggest fear, and build the cost into the price
7	Prepare the way: intake, onboarding, pre-work
8	If you want cheaper leads, wrap what you sell in an attraction mechanism; check advertising law with an attorney
9	Replace a quote request with a lead magnet matched to the dream outcome, in the customer's words
10	Pick a type: reveal a problem, a trial, or one step of many
11	Give one component away, free or at a big discount, then sell the rest
12	A favorite here: give away something others charge for

9. What this page does not cover

The later buckets have pages of their own: content as targeting and the brand, SOP 216; outreach, SOP 217; conferences, SOP 218; list enrichment and screening, SOP 219; the weekly testing cadence, SOP 220. Advertising law and insurance are not covered on this page.