Your Recipe for a Perfect Lead Magnet

I got a great question inside of my Creator MBA community the other day:

“How can I create a lead magnet that's interesting and exciting, without looking like it’s incomplete on purpose? Most lead magnets teach you 10% and then sell you the other 90%. But that feels like I’m tricking my prospect.”

I tend to agree with this sentiment.

People can tell when you’re holding back the real information and that can feel like a trick. And once people feel tricked? That erodes any trust you’ve built with them.

Luckily, there’s a more honest approach to creating valuable lead magnets that naturally lead customers to your paid product or service. And that’s what I want you to learn today.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Outline Your Customer’s Journey

To start, it’s important to consider the overall journey your ideal customers are on. This is the journey you help with, with your paid products and services.

Make a list of everything your ideal customer needs to figure out in order to accomplish their big goal. And then organize your list by the most logical steps.

For example, let’s say you teach people how to make world-class pizzas at home through courses and cookbooks.

As someone who’s working on this personally, I know just how hard this journey is.

Think about all of the steps you have to get right to make a great pizza:

• Make good dough
• Roll the dough out well
• Choose the right sauce
• Choose the right amount of toppings
• Heat up the pizza oven correctly
• Get the pizza on the pallet correctly
• Rotate the pizza the correct way
• Get the time, temp, and ‘doneness’ just right

If you’ve ever made homemade pizza in a pizza oven, you’ll know this is easy to read and VERY hard to do.

I messed up my first ten pizzas, stomping around my house and cursing the pizza gods.

Step 2: Select the ‘early narrow’ problem

If we consider all those steps together, one step is especially critical in the early part of making a pizza.

The dough.

If you mess up the dough (the very first step), then the rest of the journey will be a lot more difficult — probably impossible.

Compare that to messing up the last step — you might just have a pizza that’s a bit too burned. And that’s not the end of the world.

So getting the dough right is what I call an ‘early narrow’ problem. This is a problem that, when solved, unlocks the rest of the ‘wider journey’ for your customer.

These early narrow types of problems make wonderful lead magnets. And you can solve the complete problem without holding anything back! You can teach people how to make excellent dough they can use for their home pizza ovens, start to finish.

Step 3: Solve the problem & sell the remainder

By identifying this early narrow problem and solving it, you’ve done a couple great things:

• You haven’t tricked anyone. You told them your lead magnet would solve their dough problem, and you delivered on your promise.
• You unlocked the remainder of the journey for them. You ensured they can do the first critical step successfully, so they can continue on their journey. And in doing that, you become a trusted guide early in their journey who helped them advance their skills.

You’re now the logical choice to continue working with to get even better. You’ve demonstrated your expertise, helped your potential customer, and built trust early on.

Now, at the conclusion of your lead magnet, you can mention the remaining problems and position your pizza courses and cookbooks as the solution to the rest of the journey.

“Now that you have the perfect pizza dough, you’re ready to join 1,000+ other students in transforming your dough into world-class home pizza. If you found my dough lesson helpful, consider joining my course today where you’ll learn the secrets to rolling your dough, choosing the correct toppings, and a complete masterclass on using your pizza oven to produce pizzas your family will swear came from Italy!”

This is how lead magnets should function. And I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Your Lead Magnet Recipe

• Write down all of the steps your prospects need to take in order to reach their ultimate outcome.
• Arrange the steps into a logical sequence.
• Identify an ‘early narrow’ problem - a crucial early step that, when solved, unlocks the rest of the journey.
• Design a lead magnet that 100% solves that narrow problem. And give it all away generously.
• Sell the remainder of the journey in a simple video, email series, or inside of your lead magnet.

I hope this sparks some inspiration for creating a valuable lead magnet that doesn’t feel like you’re ‘tricking’ your potential customers.

This is one of 200+ small lessons inside of my flagship course, The Creator MBA. It’s a logical, step-by-step course that teaches you how to:

• Find a profitable online idea
• Differentiate yourself in the market
• Build a full marketing plan
• Execute the plan online
• Capture traffic
• Create a strong offer
• Use automated email to guide prospects
• Use metrics to improve your business
• Build systems and processes to grow
• Manage the day-to-day of your business
• And more…

If building a lean, profitable internet business is a goal of yours, you can learn everything I know by joining 4,000+ other entrepreneurs inside.

Not ready yet? Start executing what you learned in this issue. It’s time to get cooking.

See you next week.