We’ve been listening to you, so we’re offering lead magnet ideas so you can create your own content upgrade to grow your audience. We’re even including great lead magnet examples and lead magnet templates you can utilize yourself. In fact, we created three videos explaining how to design your own editable workbooks, cheatsheets, toolkits, and checklists. We’ll even explain how all can be used as a freebie, lead magnet, or content upgrade in your online course.
Why three videos? Since we know we all have and use different software, we created a video for each Google Docs, Pages, and InDesign to give you some options when creating your awesome new lead magnets. But before we get into the details of the videos, let’s answer why content upgrades (or lead magnets) are important.
Your lead magnet should be a juicy piece of content that helps solve a pain point and makes your targeted audience’s life easier—whatever your sphere or niche may be. In exchange, they’ll give you their email address.
Designing and promoting content upgrades or lead magnets are not just limited to online course creators either. If you are an author or writer, use them. An artist, use them. A blogger or YouTuber, use them.
Once your audience signs up to get your free resource, two things happen:
Here at Teachable, we strongly support giving out free content to your audience.
These are all examples of types of lead magnets:
Now, to make a lead magnet (resource) your audience loves, it needs to check off these six boxes:
These six boxes hone in on your audiences wants, needs and desires to encourage them to give you their email address.
Effective lead magnets will help you build your email list quickly, attract potential customers, and make it much easier to sell your course. Additionally, many types can be easy to create and boost your content marketing strategy.
As mentioned before, worksheets not only help grow your audience, but also increase the perceived and real value of your course. Any extra material you include with your course content, like a workbook, cheatsheet, timeline, checklist, can be used when promoting your course, either on your sales page or landing page, in your emails, or other social media posts to incentivize people to buy. They can also elevate various pricing tiers.
The value of bonus content is tremendous. It shows your students that you care about their success. They’ll see that you took the extra time and effort to create assets to refine concepts, organize ideas, get the insider details, track progress, and ultimately help them remember what they learned.
All of this will only contribute to the success of your students. More success from them, also leads to more success for you via their glowing reviews and testimonials about your course.
Now once you create the lead magnet and use it to grow your audience, it doesn’t mean that it’s the last time you can use it. Reuse it!
You can keep sharing it with your audience in many ways, like
Each of these methods will allow you to share your resource with an interested audience and collect more email addresses.
This video covers creating editable content upgrades in Google Docs. Although Docs is a bit cumbersome and does not have all the advanced features as Adobe InDesign (or even Apple Pages), it’s a widely accessible software that allows you to create bonus content that is easily shareable and editable. Plus, it’s 100% free.
In this video, we walk you through creating a content upgrade that can be used either as a tool kit, a cheatsheet, a worksheet, a workbook—and all can be editable.
One important thing to note about using Google Docs is how to share the worksheet with your audience after you’ve created it. Don’t share the direct link of the document. Instead, go into the document share settings (blue button in the top right corner), and make sure the share link has the “Anyone with the link can view” setting.
Then copy that shareable link, and give it out to your audience. This way, they have to create their own copy of your document so they can write it in or edit it however they want. Otherwise, everyone will be working off your original copy, and it will change each time someone uses it.
Alternatively, if you are creating a cheatsheet or toolkit that is more informational vs. needing to be editable, you can export the document to a PDF and share that with your audience too.
In this tutorial, we show you some basic features, like creating styles, checklists, making tables and other editable elements that will allow you to have a workbook in no time.
The good thing about using Pages is that if you’ve used Keynote, the layout and functionality are very similar, which will make using it much easier.
One thing to watch out for is Pages’ text wrap feature. Whenever you create a new shape or text box, it automatically adds text wrap around the object, which when it appears on the page, it looks like it deletes elements you’ve already created.
Don’t fret though. Nothing is deleted. It has just been pushed out of the way. All you need to do is select the element you just added to the page, click on arrange, and under the text wrap drop down where it says automatic, change it to none. Then if it has pushed other elements away, they will reappear.
Since InDesign is a more advanced design program, we created this video on the assumption that you know how to use the basics of InDesign. It is an advanced video, not a step-by-step setup guide. We walk you through setting up certain elements that make creating an editable workbook much easier. Plus, we’ve shared a few of our favorite tricks too.
If you’re just starting out with designing resources, don’t feel like you need to use this program. It is an advanced software tool, and as we’ve shown in the other videos, you can create beautiful content upgrades and lead magnets without it.
We can’t write a post about lead magnet ideas and templates without sharing design resources with you.
If you’re still on the hunt for the lead magnet ideas and templates that are right for your business, check out this post on developing a strategy to build your audience using lead magnets.
A lead magnet is free or bonus content given to people, typically in exchange for their email address. This could be in the form of a free downloadable e-book or access to a special video. Your lead magnet should be a juicy piece of content that helps solve a pain point and makes your targeted audience’s life easier—whatever your sphere or niche may be. In exchange, they’ll give you their email address. You’d gate this content, so that the only way it’s accessible is through signing up for your email list. It’s a win-win. Your audience will get your awesome guide. And you get to add them to your email list.
Effective lead magnets will help you build your email list quickly, attract potential customers, and make it much easier to sell your course. Additionally, many types can be easy to create and boost your content marketing strategy. These are all examples of types of lead magnets: toolkits/resource guides, free mini-course, checklists, handouts, downloads, worksheets, webinars, video series, podcast, video content, and free trials.
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