How to Turn Blog Posts Into Lead Magnets - Ashley Mann

You can find Ashley and the free resources she offers (including the Online Business Checklist mentioned in this presentation) at AshleyMannCoaching.com

00:01 Hi, this is Ashley Mann with Ashley Mann Coaching and I wanted to share some thoughts with you on how to get lead magnets to convert at a really high rate by making them super targeted to the person who is seeing them at the time they are seeing them. So what I mean by this is I primarily am a Blogger by background. My first online business was a content website that when I sold it was getting around a hundred and fifty thousand website visits per month and I still have a couple of blogs i have a business blog now at my coaching website <a href="ashleymanncoaching.com">ashleymanncoaching.com</a> and I also have a jujitsu related blog that's like a hobby of mine. 

00:46 So I still am primary a Blogger but this would really work for any type of content including social media content or video content. And the idea here is that you're not just thinking, OK, I need a lead magnet. What can I come up with as a lead magnet? Then stick it all over your site, the same lead magnet. I think sometimes people get locked into this idea of they have one static lead magnet and that's their lead magnet. 

01:12 And while that can be a good thing, if you maybe you're going on podcasts all the time and you have one offer that you're directing everyone to toward, it's a good thing to have a related lead magnet that leads into your offer. But I find that there's a higher conversion rate if you actually tailor your lead magnets to the people that you're speaking to so if you're going on a podcast, maybe adjust your lead magnet so that it's more targeted to that specific audience. I'm, I'm going to give you some examples of how I've done that. So I actually start by looking at the content I'm wanting to create. 

01:51 It might start by looking at content I've already created that is Evergreen and is doing really well, like one of my top performing blog posts. Or it might start with deciding to target a particular keyword. I'm doing keyword research and I see an opportunity and I think, OK, I think that can be both a a good performing, high performing piece of blog content as well as a conversion opportunity. So one example would be with my jiu jitsu blog. 

02:21 When I was doing keyword research, I saw that a lot of people were Googling the term like BJJ basics or BJJ basic positions, wanting to learn the first basic positions of jiu jitsu. So I thought, OK, that's an opportunity and I decided I'm going to put together a lead magnet that's a little guide to the basic positions of jiu jitsu. Then I'm going to write A blog post that gives that same content and put those two together. So the lead magnet and the blog post work together to bring in the person that's looking for basic jiu jitsu positions. I did another thing with my Ashley Mann coaching blog. I have an article that's called Starting an Online Business follow this checklist. 

03:10 The blog post itself gives you all of the information it's very detailed about all of the fundamental pieces of an online business having some way for people to sign up for emails and some way some type of lead magnet to start with and then an offer and basically like, what are all the pieces you need? And then at the end of the article and embedded in the middle of the article, there's a form and I use by the way, kit used to be convert kit and it makes it really easy to quickly create forms and stick them wherever you want them but it doesn't matter which software you use, all of them can do this. 

03:44 Basically, I put the form in the middle of the blog post and at the end of the blog post and the form says, do you want this blog post in checklist form? Here you go and so it just, it's like making it easy for people to they're reading an article and then they can immediately take an action that's related to that article. It's not here's a lead magnet that's completely unrelated that you may or may not be interested in it's here is the next step for you to take that is directly related to what you came here to look for. And that is what I think about every time I create an A lead magnet is what are people looking for that brought them to me and what can I give them that will give them the next step. 

04:25 One more example would be with my first online business i mentioned it was ARV blog. One of my most popular pieces of content was a blog post about how when my husband and I were living full time in an RV in a cold climate, how we would prepare our RV for cold weather so I wrote a very detailed blog post that was like, here are the all the steps we take here's how we insulate the windows here's how we made our homemade DIYRV skirting all of the details that somebody is going to want to refer to later when they actually need it. 

04:59 And then at the end of it and also in the middle of it, I say here's a checklist for all of this stuff so you can have it to reference later and that got a very high conversion rate because the people who came there looking for that specific information now have an easy way to turn that information to, to remind themselves of it later they can send it to their inbox they can search their inbox without having to find the article later so I'm making it easier for them and I'm giving them something they immediately need. And one other thing I've recently changed that I think is any improvement on this. 

05:34 In the past, I would design a really beautiful PDF download checklist in Canva. And it looks nice, but you can't, I mean, I don't know how many checklists you've downloaded and then never used because are you going to print it out or are you going you can't check the boxes unless you it's a fillable PDF but even then, where do you save it so I actually for my online business checklist decided to just make it a Google doc with with like check boxes. And I realized this is way better for a business owner because they can just save a copy to their Google, Google Drive and when they're actually working on their business, they can just go through and check the boxes and actually use the checklist so this doesn't have to be fancy you don't need to spend a lot of time on the design. 

06:23 You definitely want some kind of a picture that makes it appealing but once they've joined it, they, they're not. I mean, once they've joined your list, once they've signed up for it, they're not thinking about, is this a pretty design they're thinking about is this something I can use? And the more usable you make it for people, the more likely they are to value it, which of course is what gets them moving on down your funnel to hopefully taking a, making a purchase eventually so hopefully that way of thinking about lead magnets where you center it around the content and match it to the content will help you get a better conversion rate for your lead magnets.