In this step-by-step guide, I’m going to show you how to create an affiliate marketing lead magnet to build your email list and scale your online business.
A lead magnet is basically something you offer on your affiliate marketing website or a sales page in exchange for your reader’s name and email address.
Let’s jump into it.
Table of Contents
Lead Magnet Types For Affiliate Marketing
Quite typically, you might see the following formats:
- eBooks
- Guides
- Reports
- Case studies
- Presentations
- Archived Information
These are just ideas to get the juices flowing.
Typically for affiliate marketing, you’re going to be messing with the top five.
For now, we’re just going to start with an eBook lead magnet, because this is what I think works the best for affiliate marketing.
So, let’s jump into how that happens.
1. Brainstorm The Topic
Step one, what you want to do is brainstorm ideas for your affiliate lead magnet.
And I recommend using Buzzsumo or Ahrefs for this.
So, what you’re going to do is in either of these tools, you want to sort topics by the number of:
- Twitter shares
- Facebook shares
- Pinterest repins
It’s fairly indicative of how interesting or how talked about a certain topic is.
Let me just demo how to do this with Ahrefs.
So, what we can do is we click on content explorer.
You type in your niche, language, and then you sort by Twitter shares.
What you’re going to get is a bunch of results. Now let’s take a look at some of these in the “make money online niche”.
One of them has 740 shares on Twitter and it’s a review.
The second one, 673 shares on Twitter and tons of shares on Pinterest as well and it’s a beginner guide on how not to make money online.
After you’ve done this, you want to do a sanity check.
Basically, just ask yourself, does your lead magnet idea really lend itself to being a lead magnet that people would want?
This is extremely important.
I’ve definitely wasted time and money on a bad topic that just simply doesn’t get clicked on and downloaded.
And there’s a decent chunk of work that goes into this whole process and a fair little bit of money so it’s worth your time to just get this right.
And a lot of the time it’s just having a good sanity check.
Let me just give you some examples.
If you you want to target other affiliates a good lead magnet title could be:
“STRUGGLING TO START IN DIGITAL MARKETING AS AN AFFILIATE – Discover the 6 pillars that will make you successful and truly earn money as an affiliate without leaving your home!?
Why is this clever?
Well, because downloading this, you know exactly what you’re getting and it’s evergreen.
Or if you’re in the weight loss niche the title could be:
“LOSE UP TO 10 POUNDS IN 06 WEEKS WITH THIS POWERFUL DETOX FORMULA“
💡Pro Tip
Btw, all the lead magnet examples that I just showed you are available inside Builderall Funnel Club among hundreds of done-for-you lead magnets and sales funnels.
A bad lead magnet example might be:
“Top 10 SEO tools for 2021.”
Why is this bad?
Because tools change all the time, it’s not evergreen.
Remember, these guides are graphical, and getting them redesigned all the time is not going to be a good usage of your time.
2. Create a Catchy Title
Some general rules of thumb are:
✅ Keep it short – don’t go over 50-60 characters
✅ Use numbers – Listicles and numbers always work well on the title.
✅ Use power words in your tilte – “mega” “best”, “definitive”, “ultimate”
✅ SEO optimize – you can rank your lead magnet on the search engines if you want
✅ Be inclusive – try not to exclude people on your title, it’s just going to slow down the number of clicks.
And one piece of advice, don’t date your guides, don’t say like, this is the guide for 2021.
Some title examples:
- “The New Niche That Gives You An Unfair Advantage Over Any Other Product On Popular Affiliate Networks“
This is actually from my Top Affiliate Training.
And why is a catchy title?
Because it contains curiosity. People want to know what is the “new niche”
Another example would be:
- “Evergreen On-Site SEO guide”
What does this imply being evergreen? It means you won’t have to download any other ones. It means it’s always going to stay updated.
The next would be:
- “132x your website profit. The biggest wins from three case studies“
So, more numbers just showing case studies, so you’re going to find all the information you need to mimic this for your own website.
3. Write The Lead Magnet
First off, the question you ask is who’s going to write the dang thing?
Do it yourself if you’re the industry expert. If it really matters that you get this right, if you’re the best in the industry on this, you care about the branding of this, then write it yourself.
But most of the time we’re in niches that we’re not necessarily the experts.
Maybe it’s a diet niche and you just have never tried the diet. In that case, outsource it, if you’re not the expert if you’re busy or you’re just a bad writer, or any combination of the above.
💡Pro Tip
If you don’t want to write content for your lead magnet yourself, you can some AI copywriting tools. The best is actually Conversion AI because this tool has something called “Long-form assistant” which allows you to generate long-form content.
#1. Outline
The first thing you want to do when you’re getting the lead magnet written is you want to create an outline.
Don’t just hand this over to a writer and say, “Hey, I want a lead magnet for this”.
You can want to give them some instructions.
Establish credibility
First is the introduction. What you want to do in the introduction straight away is establish credibility.
You want to let the reader know why they should be reading the rest of this thing, why you are important in this niche, why they should feel like this is a good decision to download this guide.
You show them what you’ve done in that niche, what your accomplishments are, what it was like when you first got into the niche and had issues with it, and then what was like when you broke past these, how excited you’re going to share, all these informational pieces with them.
All of this kind of stuff builds credibility.
Link back to your website
This is also a great place to link back to your website, get them back to the website and get more traffic and then get them into your social profiles as well.
Word count
In the outline, you’re going to have a word count. Usually, you only need about 1000 to 2000 words maximum. Don’t tell your writers to just go have a heyday with them.
Most of it is graphical
People don’t want to like download these huge, big, long texts they got a PDF for a reason, they want some visual explanation for this so give that to them.
Think about a recipe book
What if you’re in a diet niche or in some kind of fitness niche and you’re giving people recipes for protein recipes, you’re not expecting to get 3000 words on that.
Recipes are quite short so keep it brief and go mostly graphical on this.
Providing the subtopics you want to cover
If for example, it’s a recipe book, provide the recipes or the names of the recipes, they can do the rest of the work and find out the ingredients and how to cook it but give them the general things you want to cover in this guide.
#2. Conclusion
The last part is conclusion.
Get them back to your website & social media
The goal with the conclusion, number one is to get them back to your website.
Also, take advantage of this that you got their attention, get them to opt-in to your social media. Create “add me on social media”, button and include YouTube, Twitter, Facebook page, all that kind of stuff.
Get them to opt-in. There are just more ways to get a hold of your audience to keep them within your wheelhouse and possibly get more traffic to the website eventually.
Pitch them something
The second goal would be to pitch them something. And which one you focus on, kind of just depends on what you have to offer.
If you’re an affiliate website and you don’t have your own products, you don’t have any info product, just get them back to your site and get them reading again.
For example, after downloading my affiliate marketing ebook, I pitch my course.
4. Design The Lead Magnet
Now, after the whole thing’s written up and kind of design the thing.
#1. Cost
Fortunately, it’s not that expensive of process.
If you want to design your lead magnet yourself you can some free affiliate marketing tools. I personally use Builderall Magazine Builder where you can find many ready-made lead magnet templates.
If you want to outsource this part, I highly recommend 99design. This typically costs anywhere between $50 and $300.
#2. Specifications
Let’s talk about pecifications on lead magnet.
First, make sure that it matches the color branding of your website or sales page. If your website’s blue, then put a lot of blue in the branding and maybe match the font as well.
The content itself behind the cover, mostly graphical with custom visual explainers.
What we don’t want them to do is simply take your words, draw a border around it, maybe throw in some generic icons and stuff like that.
That’s not interesting. You want them to get what they’ve paid for. I want to see graphical visual explainers of the concepts that I’m talking about.
After that, just leave the rest up to them.
At the end of the day, they’re designers or creatives, you’re likely not.
There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, but most of the time, I’m just going to give them these general guidelines and then leave the rest up to them.
#3. Cover
Now with the cover, use highlights from your primary action color. I mentioned before, if your website’s blue, maybe your primary action color is orange or red, so have tinges of these colors come up as the primary action color.
Remember you might be putting this lead magnet in your sidebar so using a little bit of color from your primary action color for your call to action is going to draw the eye over to that thing and increase your optins.
Another word of advice. The words found on these guides need to be visible.
5. Review The Lead Magnet
Here’s what to look out for.
All text, no graphics.
Make sure that they’re not getting lazy with all texts, no graphics.
Unfortunately, this happens more than you would like.
Not successfully illustrating a concept.
So, if you’re talking about something that the designer has no idea about they might illustrate it incorrectly so just view over it and make sure the process looks correct, it’s going in the right direction, et cetera.
Weak branding.
If they do your branding incorrectly if they got your colors wrong, the font wrong, stuff like that, that also goes into not matching, and color scheme, and pretty much just looking at everything I mentioned before and making sure that they’ve done the work and they’ve followed you back.
6. Create a Thank You Page
Last step, create a thank you page for your lead magnet.
Basically, what is a thank you page?
It has a few functions.
Number one, it gives them freebies.
This is what they came for. They opted into the guide.
Once they do some double optins with the emails and stuff like that, they’ve confirmed that they want to be on your list. You’re going to send them to a thank you page where they can download their freebies.
Here is an example from my Top Affiliate Training.
And if you have multiple lead magnets, I recommend showing them all on one page. It’s a great start to a relationship.
To build your thank you page, you can check free sales funnel builder like Builderall.
You can also check out my tutorial on how to build a sales funnel from scratch.
7. Track Your Downloads
You want to know from which traffic sources you’re getting the most downloads of your lead magnet. If you end up running PPC ads or any kind of ads to proactively try to get more opt-ins and leads, this is what you use as a conversion event on Facebook to show Facebook’s algorithm that yes, they did the right thing, do more of that.
Whenever a visitor goes to this thank you page, that’s considered a conversion to Facebook, that’s what they are optimize for.
For tracking your affiliate marketing lead magnets I recommend tools like ClickMagick or Voluume. I’ve actually written about both of these affiliate tracking software in Voluume vs Clickmagick comparison.
Affiliate Marketing Lead Magnet Example
Now, if you want to look at what I’ve done for businessolution.org, you might’ve seen this before already. I have my eBook on “How To Start Affiliating Marketing Business in 2021”.
This is of course geards towards affiliate marketers.
Feel free to check this out here.
Conclusion
So, this is how to create a lead magnet for your affiliate marketing business. I hope it was helpful and now you’re ready to collect email addresses and build your email list. If you have any questions, make sure to leave a comment down below!
