Fix your leaky bucket

I want to share with you a tactic that helps to leverage your existing website traffic to get more conversions and leads – without spending more money on advertising or SEO.

When you’ve got a website, it makes a lot of sense to try to get as many people to it as you can.

After all, if you’ve got more traffic, then surely it’s going to lead to more business, right?

While investing in more traffic can help, it’s not always the best use of your marketing time and money.

If your website isn’t set up to make the most of the traffic you’ve already got, then simply adding more of it can be like pouring more water into a leaky bucket.

Instead of putting your effort into pouring more water in, you can fix up the holes so you’re not losing so much through the leaks.

This is much the same for your website.

When someone visits your web page for the first time, they might not yet know, like or trust you enough to buy from you or engage with you just yet.

Even if you have really great sales pages, it can be a big jump between someone first learning about you to someone buying from you.

Worse still is that if they browse but don’t buy, then you don’t have a way to contact them again (except for with retargeting ads, but that’s for another post).

They end up leaking through the cracks in your website funnel.

Your best bet is to offer something that’s between a web page visit and buying from you.

A kind of “stepping stone” that gives your prospect lot’s of value, rapidly builds trust and guides them along the buying journey.

This is where a lead magnet comes in. 🧲

A lead magnet is a valuable resource that you offer to your website visitors in exchange for their contact details (typically their email address).

It has high perceived value to your target audience, it’s consumable within a short amount of time, and quickly demonstrates your authority, expertise and trustworthiness.

Think checklists, free guides, blueprints, webinars and short video courses. These are all types of lead magnets that can be used.

A lead magnet has a high amount of leverage, because you only need to invest in creating it once then use it over and over again to generate leads.

You can even have multiple lead magnets at once to attract leads using different angles and solving different problems.

The key to a good lead magnet is to always add value.

Ideally, your lead magnet should also be a logical stepping stone towards the main offer that you want your prospects to buy.

Here are a few real world examples of lead magnets:

Marie Forleo – Free Writing Class
Main offer: The Copy Cure Course
Lead magnet: 7 Day Free Writing Class

SuccessWise – Marketing Plan
Main offer: Marketing Plan Certification
Lead magnet: 1 Page Marketing Plan Canvas

SYSTEMology – Systems Training
Main offer: Done for your business systems
Lead magnet: Systems Masterclass

(By the way, I recommend all of the above resources and personally use them!).

Hopefully by now you can see how a lead magnet can be a useful tool to fix the holes in the leaky bucket that is your website and marketing funnel.

Stuck for lead magnet ideas?

One easy place is to Google “lead magnet headline ideas for [your industry]”. Or better yet, put that exact phrase into ChatGPT and see what ideas come back.

Choose one that you think will resonate with your audience, go ahead and create it, then offer it on your website to fix those traffic leaks!

If you’re interested in a template to help making lead magnet creation easier, let me know and I’ll send it over.