Create a High-Converting Freebie: The Complete Guide

Note: This blog post has been updated to accurately reflect the series I wrote all about lead generation strategy 🫶

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Buckle up, because we’re about to dive deep into building your entire lead generation sequence, from ideation, to marketing, delivery, and beyond 🚀 (aka we’re about to skyrocket your email list growth)

Throughout this guide you’ll see tons of links to other blog posts. These links go into even more detail than what’s covered in this guide. I suggest taking a peek at each of those posts once you’re ready to tackle each individual step.

A freebie is like a beautifully-crafted invitation that brings someone into your party…your party being the killer brand and suite of courses you have goin’ on. Here’s the outline we will follow for getting your amazing freebie out the door and into the hands of your future students:

1. Intro Into Lead Generation Strategy
2. Choose Your Freebie Format
3. Create and Design Your Freebie Content
4. Write an Incentive Email
5. Create a Form on Kit
6. Write a Welcome Email
7. Write Nurture Emails
8. Create an Email Sequence on Kit
9. Design Your Landing Page
10. Create and Place Your Links
11. Market Your Freebie
12. Bonus: Ensure Your Website is Following Privacy Laws

Intro into Lead Generation Strategy

Before we get too far, let’s go over some basics about lead generation.

We’re all here with the ultimate goal of promoting our course, right? Good. Just want to make sure.

One of the ways we can get in touch with potential course students is through lead generation. If everything goes as planned, we get to create lead generation tools (aka freebies, opt-ins, lead magnets, etc) that invite someone to join our email list.

Growing our email list is important so that we can continually provide subscribers with our expert advice, support, and valuable courses that help them in their own journeys.

Now that we’ve established the importance of building your email list, let’s move on to an overview of different types of freebies we can create.

Choose Your Freebie Format

One of the fun things about lead magnets is that they come in all shapes and sizes. Well, we actually want to keep freebies on the smaller-end so that our audience is able to quickly complete it…so maybe not all shapes and sizes.

When someone is able to quickly complete your freebie, they get a boost of confidence by easily knocking out a step towards their goal. Ideally, we get them excited about taking more steps towards their goal, and down our sales funnel 😉

Once you’ve determined the general content you want to cover in your opt-in (ideally a common problem, an answer to a question you always get, or step #1 towards a goal, etc) you’ll need to choose the best format to present this info. Here are some of the top formats for freebies in the course creation world:

• Checklists: a list of tasks to complete to solve a problem
• Resource Lists: essentials students need to begin their journey
• Quizzes: a way for your audience to learn more about themselves
• Worksheets: action-oriented prompts to make tangible moves towards a goal
• Planners/Calendars: schedules to help students organize their activities
• Calculators: answers to important number questions
• Self-Assessments: define where students are in their journey
• Roadmaps: an overview of the entire pathway to achieving their goal

Create and Design Your Freebie Content

Honestly, this part might be one of the easiest steps for you in this whole process. That’s because you have tons of knowledge in your niche and creating content around it feels natural for you.

You’ve already determined your topic and format, so now it’s just about organizing your ideas and getting the words (or numbers) on the page.

I suggest first writing your content without worrying about how the whole design is going to be formatted. That way, you can choose all of the information you want to include and you won’t be limited by a pre-designed template.

Once you’ve gotten your content together, it’s time to either create your own design, or opt to use a template. Make any updates to the template as needed, finalize the document, and export it as a pdf.

Write an Incentive Email

An “incentive email” is what we call the email that delivers your freebie. Your reader is incentivized to join your email list because they are receiving your freebie in return. We need to write this email before we create our opt-in form simply so that we can easily copy/paste it into the form sequence.

I go over more details about writing an effective incentive email in another post, but there are a few key points to keep in mind. The most important of these is to keep the email short and sweet. The idea is to remove as many barriers as possible so that someone can almost ✨effortlessly✨ join the party (your email list).

Create a Form on Kit

Are you ready? The next one is a bit of a doozy. Ok, not really, it’s just lots of button clicking and some typing!

In this step we create your freebie form on your email marketing platform-of-choice. My fav is Kit and if you’d like to use my link to try it for free, I would very much appreciate it 🫶

Head on over to this post that goes through the step-by-step tutorial for creating the freebie form!

Write a Welcome Email

Once you’ve gotten your freebie form locked and loaded, it’s the perfect time to sit down and write your welcome email.

Since readers consent to join your email list as they download your freebie, it’s only fitting to send them a little note welcoming them to the club. It’s great to mention the topics you normally cover in your emails and to build a little excitement about what’s coming next for them.

More details about exactly what to write and best practices are in this post all about nailing your welcome email.

Write Nurture Emails

After your welcome email is sent (we’ll get to the actual sending part next), it’s a great idea to send a few nurture emails.

Really quickly, let’s give ourselves a little visual of where we are in the process of bringing a future student into our world, to give us a better idea of why we are sending nurture emails.

It’s almost as if we have given them a personal invitation (our freebie) to come over for a party (our brand's world). They show up at our front door where we give them a big hug, bring them in, and get them acclimated by telling them what the plan for the night is, where to put their shoes, grab some food, etc (our welcome email). After they’ve gotten a drink and grabbed a snack, we start introducing them to other guests and showing them around the house (you guessed it, our nurture email).

Nurture emails are a way to give your new bffs (I mean your subscribers) a more tailored introduction into the content you provide. Since we are creating these nurture emails alongside your new freebie, a sequence of emails that relate directly to your opt-in will make your subscriber feel like you are taking them by the hand and helping them along their initial journey.

I recommend creating a sequence of nurture emails that either relate directly to steps in your freebie, or provide additional context and encouragement. I go over specific ideas in my post that breaks down exactly how to write your nurture emails.

Create an Email Sequence on Kit

Another tech-related step! This one is all about how to actually send those welcome and nurture emails you just wrote.

Like the step where we created a form, this step will be completed on Kit’s platform. For a detailed run-down (including screenshots), check out my post about setting up your email sequence and automations.

Design Your Landing Page

I love love looove web design so I think designing your landing page is one of the most exciting parts of the whole freebie creation process.

Depending on your skillset and personal preference, you can either tackle designing your own landing page or hand all of the important materials (your copy, images, form code, etc) over to your fav web designer (hint: I’d love to be that gal)!

Creating your landing page isn’t a gargantuan task - you’ll just want to keep in mind the most important elements: displaying a tangible image of your freebie, writing crave-worthy copy, and properly inputting your form code from Kit.

Create and Place Your Links

We are getting sooo close to sharing your freebie with your future students! With our landing page in place, we now need to strategically place links to this page so that people can easily find it.

The three top places you should have links to your freebie are: your website, your social media, and in your emails. I know, absolutely ground-breaking…riveting even!! (Jk)

In all seriousness, it’s important to take the time to carefully and properly place these links. If we complete this step in the right way, new followers, readers, and site visitors won’t miss this amazing opt-in we created with them in mind!

Market Your Freebie

So what happens when no one simply stumbles upon your website and finds your freebie? Well, honestly that’s bound to happen if you aren’t driving any traffic to your landing page.

Get fun and creative with how you market your freebie. Talk about your freebie on social media, in your current email list, and even during real conversations with people.

There are countless formats of content you can create about your lead magnet - the sky is really the limit here. But don’t worry, it doesn’t need to be too complex. I’ve even heard of people having success simply posting a video of them scrolling through their opt-in and doing a voice-over!

However you choose to share your opt-in, it’s important to always stay true and consistent to your brand identity. By doing this, you’re building more trust and recognizability along the way.

✨Bonus: Ensure Your Website is Following Privacy Laws

Once you begin collecting any sort of information from website visitors (ahem, name and email on your form, analytics data, etc) legally you need to have a Privacy Policy and a GDPR-Compliant Cookie Consent Tool in place.

I personally use and recommend Termageddon for all of your website-related legal policies. The team over there will take you step-by-step through implementing your legal policies AND they regularly update them so you don’t have to worry about rewriting every time a teensy requirement changes.

The team at Termageddon has generously given my readers a code to get 10% off their first year of payment. Simply use code “PAIGE” at checkout. (Heads up, I earn a commission each time someone uses this code, and I thank you so, so much!)

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That’s it, everyone! You’ve made it! I cannot wait for you to grow your email list and your community of loyal students for your courses.

If you used this guide to help you create your freebie, I would love to hear about it. Send me an email and tell me all about it! 🫶

If you got stuck on any of the website/design related parts, feel free to reach out via my contact form. I’d love to help build your brand identity and website!