Creating an ebook lead magnet is one of the best ways to turn website traffic into leads. It’s the perfect tool to offer to your website visitors to get them to opt in to your email list and become a subscriber. With an ebook lead magnet, your ebook should be a good fit for your website visitors. It should also connect your visitors to your products.
Here’s an example of one of my ebook lead magnets, Niche Blogging For Profit.
Creating An Ebook Lead Magnet
To create an ebook is pretty simple. You only need to be able to create a written document on your computer or laptop and turn it into a pdf. If you can’t do that from your laptop, you can use one of the many pdf converters you can find online for free. I’ve used this free pdf converter tool before.
To create your cover you can use software, or simply pay someone on Fiverr.com to do it for you. I paid someone to create the cover for Niche Blogging for Profit. Just $5 and you’ll get a nice cover for your ebook. Ideally, get it in 3D for promotion and 2D (see below) to place on the inside of your ebook.
I’ve created several ebooks over the years and they work really well as lead magnets. See affiliate marketing books pdf for the full list of my ebooks.
Using Ebook Lead Magnets
Ebook lead magnets should be used to get your website visitors to opt in to your email list. Your email list is then used to sell your affiliate products by building trust, delivering value and occasionally promoting your products. An ebook should therefore be aligned with your visitors purchasing something from you which helps them in a similar way.
As an example, I’ve used many ebooks to get people onto my email list. However, the best performing ebook is affiliate marketing for beginners, see below:
The reason this ebook does so well is that it’s a much better match for my product range. The product I promote the most through my list is The Six Figure Mentors program which offers training and education for people wanting to earn an income from the internet. So, affiliate marketing for beginners is much better at being the “stepping stone” to this product than Niche Blogging For Profit is.
“Niche Blogging” is a strategy in its own right. It tends to be more suitable for people who have more time and less money – hence “niche blogging for profit”. People who sign up for my niche blogging ebook tend to not be so likely to sign up as an SFM Mentors member. Perhaps this is because they have more time than money and hence want to blog for an income. People with more money and less time tend to be better customers for the products I recommend.
Customer Avatar
The customer avatar should therefore be determined before you go to work on your ebook lead magnet. If you get it wrong, and spend time creating an ebook which isn’t a good fit for your potential customers, you could spend a lot of time working for nothing.
“Niche bloggers” are the wrong target audience for my product range and although I do occasionally get purchases from people who opt in for the book, it’s not as well targeted as affiliate marketing for beginners.
To come up with lead magnet ideas, it’s a good idea to look at your affiliate products, or your service, if you have your own business.
- What problem/s does your product/s solve?
- Who would be most attracted to your products and why?
- Where are these people?
- What are they looking for online?
- How can you create an ebook lead magnet based on what you know?
Setting Up Your Lead Magnet With Your Autoresponder
Once you’ve created your ebook, you’ll want to offer it on your website so that people can access it by signing up to your email list. There’s lot of software you can purchase such as Lead Pages, which can help you do this. But you can also use a simple autoresponder. You’ll be needing this anyway in order to collect emails and send out your messages automatically.
I use Aweber which has a number of opt in forms you can use to create your lead magnet. You can even add your ebook picture to your opt in form (see below).
Ideally, get your subscribers to opt in and then send them your ebook directly to their email inbox. This is better than offering it on a “thank you” web page because it ensures they have opened your email and therefore seen your very first automated message.
If you hand your ebook over to them on a thank you page, there’s no incentive for your subscribers to open their email inbox; so it’s much easier for them to miss your follow up messages! You don’t want this!
Marketing Your Lead Magnet
Once you’ve set up your email capture page on your website, it’s a good idea to promote your ebooks through blogging and sharing your ebooks wherever you can.
One of the best strategies I’ve found is to type the title of your ebook into Google’s free keyword planner.
You should find a number of keywords which you can create content around. Start with the least competitive keywords and work down.
You can see how competitive a keyword is by doing a Google search for the term and looking at the number which comes up on a desktop computer. Try this with and without “quotes” to see what comes up.
Write an article for each of the keywords which comes up and be sure to showcase your ebook in each one.
Facebook For Traffic
You can also use social media platforms to find suitable people to offer your ebooks to. Another simple strategy is to use your ebook on your Facebook bio, and any social media platform for that matter. Link it to a landing page on your website where people can find the book by opting in.
Once you’ve done this, you want to connect with people who fit your customer avatar. Join groups and interact with like thinking people. As you get to know them, they’ll search your profile and find your ebook. It’s a great little strategy if you put in some work every day.
See free traffic sources for Clickbank for a free Facebook strategy.
Using Quora For Traffic
Once you’ve written a number of articles around your ebook topic, you can get people to your content through Quora – the question and answer website. To do this, you need to find questions which your ebook gives the answers to. Offer good, in depth answers on Quora and leave links to your content which surrounds your ebook, or directly to your ebook landing page.
You need to be careful here too because Quora will delete your answers if you are obviously spamming your website links to the site. You need to offer some genuine help and advice in your answers first. Quora does allow this but there’s a fine line between spamming and giving genuine answers. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
