What Are the Best Tools for Lead Generation? Your Simplest Ideas.
All About Opt-ins and MVPs (Week 2)
Welcome to week two of our Working Lunch series all about opt-ins. This week we’re going to talk about creating a general opt-in. Here is the worksheet for this week.
If you missed week one, you can find it here:
A general opt-in is something that you can use at any time, no matter the context, to attract readers and give them a way to connect with you. It’s something that you know your ideal reader will enjoy and find value in.
It’s not necessarily tied to any one piece of content, the way a content upgrade (which we’ll talk about next week) would be.
This is what you’ll use as a popup offer on your own website or in the bio at the bottom of your Medium posts.
There is one golden rule when it comes to general opt-ins: Less is more.
You might think that offering an ebook or a class is a great opt-in because it offers so much value. And of course, it does. But, with that kind of value comes what the reader will perceive as a cost.
If you offer them a book to read, for instance, then they’re going to stop before they accept and ask themselves a question or two.
Do I have time to read this book?
Do I want to read this book?
Will it be any good?
Is this book going to be complete, or are they going to have to buy something to get the really good stuff?
Same with a class. Or anything that’s bigger than an impulse buy. And I know, we’re talking about a free thing–but it still feels like buying to the reader. They’re paying with their email address, their time, and their attention.
So the key is to find an opt-in that’s small enough that it doesn’t kick in those questions but valuable enough that it ties ‘good stuff’ to your name with the reader. In other words, you want something that’s very small but blows the reader away.
Here’s my own rule of thumb:
A general opt-in should be something connected to your main topic, that solves a problem for your niche, and that the reader can consume immediately and within ten minutes.
Let’s do a little brainstorming. I created a worksheet for you. You’re going to think about three things and make a list for each one.
What problems do the people in your niche face?
What are some solutions to those problems?
What opt-ins could you create for those solutions?
Now, take each of those ideas and run them through this matrix:
Is this opt-in an impulse buy?
How long will it take a reader to use this opt-in?
Can they get value within ten minutes of opening the email?
Give a score of 1 to 10 for each question and add those up. The closer you get to 30, the better the opt-in is. If you have a score of under 20, you probably need to rethink your opt-in.
You can do that, of course. There’s space on the worksheet for it. Think about your opt-in idea and brainstorm ways you can change it so that the score goes up. I used the example of a mini-course on the worksheet. As it stands, it scores fourteen.
It’s pretty easy to use–they just have to open an email every few days and read them. I gave it an eight. Because they’ll have to do the work.
But it’s definitely not an impulse buy. I gave it a two. And they won’t get much value in the first ten minutes. Another two.
When I thought about what I could do to increase the score–I realized that including a high-value immediate email would help a lot. And turning the class into just a PDF with all the information at once would put it well into the good opt-in territory.
Once you have your opt-in chosen, all that’s left to do is:
Create your opt-in. We like to use Canva for that. It’s free and easy to use.
Write a call-to-action sentence to put at the bottom of your emails. (We’ll talk more about how to do this during our live call on March 26th.)
Send an email to your current list.
Share on social media.
The fun part is when you start hearing back from your readers about how much they love what you’ve created for them.
Next week we’re going to talk about content upgrades.
Don’t forget about our LIVE working lunch call on Sunday, March 26th. Click here to register.
See you then!
Love,
Shaunta
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