How to Create Your Free Gift
One of the items you must have to grow your mailing list is a free gift on your website. The purpose of this gift is to entice your website visitors to give you their name and email address.
Getting people to your website is one thing but chances are they may not return. When someone subscribes to your list, they are asking you to stay in touch with them. This will allow you to build a relationship and create an opportunity for that visitor to become a client or customer.
There are many options when deciding on the type of gift you will offer. You may choose to do a report, an audio, video, a free sample of your product or an email course.
No matter what you choose, the gift has to be valuable and useful. It also needs to answer one of your visitor’s most urgent problems (which is why knowing your target market and choosing a niche are so important.)
Your gift should be something a person can consume in one sitting. We’re all busy and if you send a 100 page ebook, it’ll be stored on computers never to be opened and read. Some guidelines are:
- Report – 5 pages
- Audio or video – 15 minutes
- Email course – 7 days of SHORT emails with one action step per day that takes less than 15 minutes to do.
Creating a Report
Create this in your favourite word processing program aiming for 2-3 of typed pages. At the end you must include a strong call to action: the next step to get more from you. This may be to book a call with you, sign up for an inexpensive starter program or product, or enroll in your membership. The final section of the report will be a brief bio about you. Then create an attractive cover for the report and convert the whole thing to PDF format.
Audio or Video
There are numerous ways to record audio. You can:
- Use a conference call service such as Free Conference Calling (affiliate link) which will allow you to record and download audio
- Use a program such as Audacity (free) which not only has recording ability, but also editing options. (I use this program to edit client audios.)
To record video, it depends whether you will be on-camera or not.
- If you’ll be on-camera, you could use your smart phone or a video camera.
- You can also record a slideshow and then convert it to video format. I use Screencast-o-matic for screen recordings — the free account allows up to 15 minutes of recording time.
Email Course
This should be brief; I recommend a 7 day series with one lesson per day. Keep the emails short; one or two paragraphs at most with one action step the reader can perform in 15 minutes or less. The course will be delivered through your auto-responder service (more about that in a later article.)
The course may be purely text, audios, videos or a combination.
Once you’ve created your free gift, it’ll be time to consider an email management service.
What questions do you have about creating a free gift? Let me know by leaving a comment or, to get help with creating your gift, contact me today.