Make Marketing Suck Less

Hey rebels, happy Friday to you because I am recording this the Friday before this goes live. My friend and client, Dr. Crystal Frazee, she is also the leader of the Good Woman Rebellion, asked me if I had any resources about lead magnets and growing your email list because she knows that this is something that I talk to my clients about and I was like, oh, you know, I've never recorded a podcast episode on that.

But you know, I am happy to do a quick and dirty audio for you, for your community, because I have lots of thoughts on that. It's something. I talk about it with my community all the time, and then about an hour later, I got an email from my podcast producer Steve, who says, hey, the podcast episode for this week, it's 16 minutes long, but there's absolutely no audio.

And I was like, oh, well interesting. Why don't I just make this quick and dirty audio that I was planning to do for Crystal and her mastermind peeps and make it the podcast for this week on the Rebel Rising podcast, because I do have a lot of thoughts about growing your email list, how to do it in a way that feels good, because I do think it is really important to have a community.

I think it's really important to do it in a way that stands out that's a little bit different because there's so many quote unquote lead magnets that are just pieces of crap that just, you know, sit on somebody's hard drive and people don't even know how to open them. It doesn't even impact them. People don't even use them.

Your email list is such a great place for people to get to know you, to get to know your work. The people who opt in and say yes to you occupying their inbox space, they're there because they're interested in the work you're doing, they're interested in potentially working with you.

So how do you go about growing your email list? How do you create a lead magnet?

So the first thing I want to talk about is just ditching the phrase “lead magnet”. I've never loved that. I don't know who came up with it. It's kind of a stupid word, stupid phrase to begin with. It's so bro marketer. One of the best replacement terms I've heard for this is from Steph Crowder, she is a business coach and she calls it a community anchor because she really sees that first piece of content that people give their email address for as a way to build community. And for a long time, I've been calling it that with my clients, like, this is a community builder.

You're building your email community with this piece of content. I like thinking about it as that community anchor, to borrow that term, for stuff because you can give people language for how you work with people in that quote unquote lead magnet. That community anchor, that community builder. It just feels more relationship building and since I do believe that language creates our reality, I would rather be building an email community than be doing something sleazy. Like, let me magnetize you with my leads, with my lead magnet. It's just, just a little strange to me. So that's the first thing.

Let's think about it as your community anchor, your community builder. It's just a slight shift. 

Number two, we have to realize that the purpose of our email list is sales.

At the end of the day these people are here, they are raising their hands. They're saying yes because they want you to be in their inbox.

They are giving us their precious attention. So whatever that first piece of content is that they are raising their hand, that community building piece of content, it really needs to be. worth while.

So keep that in mind. When I work with clients, I work with them on their client journey (I used to call this their audience journey, but now I'm calling it or their client journey) and it should give people some type of transformation, some type of first experience of what it is like to work with you. Make it meaningful because this is their first time saying YES.

This leads me to point number three, make your community builder ridiculously useful.

As I mentioned in the opening, there are so many terrible lead magnets. One of my clients inboxed me this week and told me about a 58 page lead magnet he downloaded. He's never gonna read that. I would never read that. Like, I don't want a 58 page lead magnet. I want something that I can easily consume in about 10 minutes or less. I want something that can solve a problem. Give me a quick. Let me tell you folks, what it should do for you is give people that first belief shift that gets them on the way to working with you.

I work with a lot of different life coaches. I am lucky enough to get a lot of wonderful coaches from the Life Coaching School who want to work with me on their messaging. But when I'm working with them on their lead magnets, it's about finding out that quick when we can give them their lead magnet.

So for instance, if you are working with professional women who are having a hard time starting their day, and let's say you're working with professional women who have adolescents and what they're struggling with is that their kids never want to wake up in the morning. How can you help them solve that problem so that they can start their day in a more productive way. And the problem is not their kids, it's the way that they're thinking about their morning. So you have to give them that reframe in the lead magnet itself. And so once they realize like, oh, it's how I am thinking about the morning and how can I shift that, they're going to be so grateful, right? 

So what does is that quick win, that belief shift that you can give them in the lead magnet? Another option for opt-ins, lead magnets, community builders.

This brings me to point number four which is self-reflection.

One of the things that I'm a strong believer in is that the more you can make people think about themselves, the more they will see themselves doing business with you.

That's the premise of having a 3 Word Rebellion, is that you want people to hear your 3 Word Rebellion and immediately think like, oh, what does that mean? What does it mean for me? Like people always say, Oh, what's the 3 Word Rebellion and what are my three words? Right? Same thing with a lead magnet, a community builder, like I have been working on a quiz for the past nine months. Quizzes are a lot of work, but they shouldn't take nine months. But that's neither here nor there.

But quizzes are so amazing because they're self-reflected. We get to learn something about ourselves, and my quiz is all about finding the best way for you to make an impact in the world. So it's going to give you a roadmap for impact and influence. And so people can take the quiz and it's going to give them some recommendations for what to do next. What's their best pathway forward? Right?

So working in that self reflection piece can be an excellent way to build a relationship with your email community. Same with journaling prompts. My current lead magnet or community builder is giving a taster of the 3 Word Rebellion process, which is all journaling.

And then the final piece of this to ponder is, do you need a lead magnet, a community anchor, a community builder at all.

I know so many people who don't have one, but what they do instead, they create incredibly juicy, delicious content that you can only get access to if you sign up for their newsletter.

So, for instance, Paul Jarvis does this very well. He has his Sunday Dispatch that he sends out. Kelly Diels is another one. She does her Sunday love notes. She's also doing some incredible Facebook lives right now, and if you're on her newsletter list, you know when they happen because she tells you.

I've also been recommending to some of my clients who don't love the idea of creating a newsletter of, hey, how can you create bonus material to your podcast, to the videos that you're producing and putting out into the public? How can you create bonus materials that you only get access to if you opt in? So if you want to create some exclusive materials that supplement the content you're already putting out, then you can entice people to join your email community for that as well and then you don't need an email opt-in.

So that's my quick and dirty thoughts on lead magnets, or as I like to think about them, community builders or community anchors (Steph Crowder's words).

I hope that is helpful for your thinking about how you want to build your email community in a rebellious way.