Want to grow your email list? This post will show you how to create a lead magnet (or opt-in incentive, or freebie) that will …
Attract the right prospects
Entice them to hand over their email address
Allow you to nurture the relationship before you ever ask for a purchase
Creating a valuable gift to entice people to join your email list sounds straightforward. But there are a few nuances to building a lead magnet that prospects find irresistible.
We’re going to cover them all right on this page.
In this article, you’ll get everything you need to create a lead magnet in a single afternoon.
You’ll get:
A step-by-step process for creating an ebook lead magnet so you can follow along and get it done
A list of lead magnet ideas for inspiration
A free lead magnet template so you can create your downloadable in a single afternoon
It’s easy to make content marketing mistakes, especially when you’re first using online content to promote your business.
People like you and me — people who actually care about the audience we want to reach with our content — can come out winning when bad content marketing proliferates.
Why?
Because we know better.
Let’s start by looking at content marketing mistakes straight in the eye with an unflinching gaze …
The most common content marketing mistakes:
Unfocused content that rambles on and on
Content that looks like a big, unbroken “wall of text”
Overtly promotional content that reads like a sales brochure
“Lite” content that is too short on details to be useful
Content that’s unoriginal or (even worse) boring
Visually dull content with zero images of any kind
You’ve seen these mistakes. Maybe you’ve made them yourself from time to time.
Truth is, in 2020, it’s more challenging than ever to stand out online.
I believe bad content is a good thing for those of us who truly care.
You see, there’s a process of natural selection happening right under our noses online.
And those of us who take the time to learn a process for creating consistent, high-quality content that genuinely serves our audience?
We’re going to come out on top of the evolutionary heap.
Choose to avoid making content marketing mistakes
There are two types of people creating content on the internet today:
People who create high volume, low-quality content. These people aren’t getting results the way they used to. And …
People like you and me, who genuinely care about the audience we want to attract. We’re willing to put in some time and effort to create content that stands out.
This month I’m celebrating the tenth anniversary of BIG Brand System. And I’m thinking a lot about the power of focus in business.
The importance of focus in business can’t be overstated.
When I look back on these past ten years, I can see that when I put my head down and focused on hitting just a handful of milestones, my business grew by leaps and bounds.
And when my focus was scattered?
Sadly, I ended those weeks (and sometimes months) without much to show for the time I spent at my desk.
That’s hard to admit.
But if there’s anything I’d like BIG Brand System to share, it’s what I’ve learned from my successes and what I’ve learned from my mistakes.
Because, my friend, if you can learn how to focus on online business in a way that helps you be successful faster, all my mistakes will have been worth it.
Learn how to harness the power of focus in business using the five simple steps I share here.
Read on to put them to use in your online business starting now.
Wondering how to succeed with your online business — but feeling a bit overwhelmed as you build it?
Truth is, there’s Too Much Information out there. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, welcome to the club.
You’re in very good company.
C’mon in and stay a while, my friend.
Because right here on this page, I’ve gathered some of my top (free!) resources in one place. No need to click around the entire internet.
If you need online business tips and tricks, you’ve just found a whole page of them — complete with a free quiz that will clarify your best next steps, free worksheets, two free workshops, and more.
All in all, there are more than 17 free online business resources on this page, divided into the categories below.
Ready to find how to succeed with your online business — without feeling overwhelmed?
Fonts have a “personality,” and if you tune into what their shapes are trying to say, you can make those traits work for your business.
Let’s say on the other side of your town a company is developing an upscale neighborhood high on a hill overlooking the ocean. They’ve decided to call it “Grandview Estates.” Their tagline is “Rising Above the Rest.”
[Pretty snobby, right?]
Now let’s say you’ve been asked to design the sign that will sit at the entrance to the neighborhood.
You’ve been told that the sign needs to “reflect the caliber of people we want to attract to our estate properties.”
Ready to grow your audience and profits — and make new friends in the process? The joint venture examples here are the answer!
The joint venture approach is perfect for you if you’ve built an audience and established your authority already. It’s a way to leverage your professional relationships in a way that benefits both parties.
The joint venture examples here can grow your email list and your profits faster than anything else you do in your online business.
Your audience grows because your joint venture partner presents you as a trusted resource to their audience.
There are lots of benefits and a few things to watch out for in these types of partnerships.
In this article, I’m sharing joint venture project examples and ideas. I’ll also share examples of what to avoid when creating joint venture partnerships.
These cautionary tales come from my personal experience! I hope you benefit from the wins I’ve experienced and the mistakes I’ve made.
Ready to grow with joint ventures? Read on.
The benefits of joint venture partnerships for online business owners
In the best joint venture partnerships, both partners benefit. They leverage the goodwill and good name of both people or businesses.
When you approach joint venture partnerships with care, each audience benefits, too.
When deciding who to approach to partner with you, ask yourself:
Will the partner’s audience feel the partnership directly benefits them?
The partnership must feel like a natural combination — the best of two worlds.
Joint venture partnership examples
The perfect joint venture partner for you is someone with an audience of people who will be interested in your topic.
Let’s look at some examples of good joint venture partner matches (and a few bad ones, too).
You sell a course about writing a personal memoir.
Your audience consists of budding authors with a story to tell. They’re in the second half of their lives and want to leave a legacy in the form of a book.
PERFECT JOINT VENTURE PARTNERS:
A joint venture partner who offers editing services.
A joint venture partner who writes about self publishing.
A joint venture partner who sells a course on marketing books.
NOT-SO-GREAT JOINT VENTURE PARTNERS:
A joint venture partner who offers home improvement courses to people in the second half of their lives. (Same audience but no direct connection between the topics.)
A joint venture partner who has courses on telling your personal story. (Direct competitor to your product.)
Remember, your joint venture partner doesn’t have to have an audience that’s an exact match to the audience you want to attract. But their audience must be interested in your topic and want to learn more.
Beware these joint venture dangers
Be cautious when deciding who to pair up with, especially if you decide to co-create a product or offer a service together (examples below).
Long-term partnerships demand that you do due diligence and find out how the person you want to partner with runs their business.
Avoid entering into joint ventures with:
Partners without a proven track record in business
Partners who aren’t responsive to your emails and messages
Like anything else in life, watch how your prospective partner behaves rather than what they say. Their current behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
It’s important to start with a legal agreement that spells out division of workload and terms for terminating the partnership.
In the heat of excitement over a new partnership, it’s hard to imagine terminating the agreement! But it’s essential to hash out how termination will happen.
Six joint venture examples
Joint venture partnerships range from simple to complex. Here are six joint venture examples, starting with the easiest to implement.
Joint venture marketing
Joint venture affiliate offers
Joint venture educational presentations
Joint venture sales presentations
Joint venture bundles
Joint venture/co-produced products or services
Read on for details about how these examples work.
Example 1: Joint venture marketing
Joint venture marketing can be as simple as a “preferred provider” mention in an email or on a website.
Where appropriate, you can reciprocate across your platforms and recommend each others’ businesses.
This is different from recommending specific products (that’s the next example). In this case, the partners endorse each others’ businesses.
That can sound like this: “When it comes to learning ___, I always turn to ___.”
If it only makes sense for one partner to recommend the other, the promoting partner can be paid for placing a recommendation in a newsletter or on a website.
Joint venture affiliate offers allow one or both partners to earn a commission for recommending a specific product or service.
In this joint venture example, any affiliate offers compliment or expand on what the offering partner already sells. They offer an affiliate product or service that is perfect for a subset of their audience.
Example:
You teach advanced stock trading techniques. Your courses and services are designed for people who have years of experience trading stocks and want to trade at a professional level — but as a hobby.
You don’t want to teach complete beginners. But you know a portion of your audience is beginners. They don’t understand the basics and want to master them so they can become more proficient.
You are approached by someone who has a course called “Stocks 101: Everything You Need to Know to Start Trading Today.”
The product owner offers you a 25% commission on every sale. You add affiliate links to this product every time you talk about beginning stock traders on your blog or in your emails.
Example 3: Joint venture educational presentations
Joint venture partnerships don’t have to generate profit immediately. Instead, you can focus on list building, like in this joint venture example.
How do you build your email list with a joint venture partnership?
Offer educational information to a partner’s audience in exchange for an email address.
This means you ask the partner’s audience to sign up for the information that’s hosted in one of these places:
Your own webinar platform
Your own website
Your social media page or group
Your email marketing provider
To get access to the information, the partner’s audience must join your community.
Example 4: Joint venture sales presentations
Joint venture webinars are a fantastic way to deliver valuable, dynamic information to a fresh, new audience.
The partner’s audience signs up on your webinar platform so you have a way to deliver the webinar replay and follow up with your product offer.
Make this easy for your joint venture partner by providing them with:
Pre-written emails that can send to invite people to sign up
Promotional graphics they can use to share the event information
Pre-written social media posts they can copy/paste to promote the event
Be sure to contact prospective partners well in advance. Because this is an event that will need promotion, they’ll have to weave it into their already planned promotions so they don’t overwhelm their audience.
Example 5: Joint venture bundles
Want to really wow your audience with an unforgettable offer?
This joint venture example takes a bit of effort to put together, but it’s well worth it.
Create a one-of-a-kind offer by bundling your product or service with a complimentary product or service your partner offers. Create a brand-new “not available anywhere else” bundle.
These bundles work best when there’s real synergy between the audience and the products offered.
Ideally, you’ll discount the bundle so that the products together cost less than the single product on its own.
Example:
You teach quilting to beginners. You have a $400 course called “Beginning Quilt Making” that teaches the basics.
You partner with someone who has an audience of crafters, some of whom sew. That joint venture partner has a $200 course called “Learn to Sew in 7 Days.”
You bundle these two courses together during your presentation and — during the limited time promotion — sell the bundle for $395.
You agree to keep $295 ($105 less than your usual course price) and your partner agrees to keep $100 ($100 less than their usual course price).
Your audience gets a bundle of products that make sense together. And they’re able to purchase them at a deep savings compared to buying them separately.
Example 6: Joint venture/co-produced products or services
This is the most advanced of the joint venture examples I have for you in this article.
I have created two products with joint venture co-creators.
We had complimentary areas of expertise that we brought to the table. Together, we came up with courses that were richer because we both contributed to them.
Before you join together, speak frankly about your expectations, work habits, likes and dislikes. Really get to know each other. You’ll be working closely with this person — are they someone you want to spend lots of time with?
It’s also important to spell out your terms of separation!
That may sound counterintuitive. But in the case of many projects (as was the case in my two joint venture partnerships), business and personal changes may cause one or both partners to need to pivot their focus.
Having a well-thought-out joint venture partnership agreement that spells out how you’ll terminate the partnership helps each partner feel secure as they more forward.
If you’re working to scale your business, use the joint venture examples here to map out a plan for leveraging your professional relationships to grow your business faster.
