I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
A lead magnet is a free, valuable resource offered in exchange for someone’s email address — a checklist, guide, or quiz for example –designed to attract an audience and begin a relationship with them.
This morning I began thinking about next steps for building out my book marketing platform. I haven’t finished the book manuscript yet, far from it. But it makes sense to get going now on reaching out to people who might eventually like to buy and read it. I read a few articles about Meta’s Andromeda advertising system, a new way of determining which ads are shown to which users on Instagram and Facebook (and soon, Threads). And I started thinking about what ads might drive people to buy my book.
But that’s getting ahead of things. Instead of trying to get someone to immediately buy the book, a better flow is likely to get them to sign up for a newsletter. That way they can become familiar with my ideas and my voice and if those are appealing to them once the book comes out, they can buy it then.
So I want to advertise the availability of a lead magnet in exchange for signing up for a newsletter.
Chat says the lead magnet should be easy to produce, emotionally resonant with the book’s themes, immediately useful to my audience, and position me as a thought partner in the sphere of midlife romantic reinvention.
And it provided the following suggestions:
- “The Midlife Love Reset Checklist”
- “5 Patterns Blocking Your Next Great Relationship”
- “Are You a Reckless or a Reckful Lover? A Quiz”
- “The First 3 Chapters of Reckless in Love” (early teaser)
- “The Modern Midlife Dating Manifesto”
- “What You Actually Want in Love: A 20-minute Clarity Workbook”
I’m not thrilled with any of those ideas. I think I’d like to do something like “5 Midlife Online Dating Mistakes (and What to Do Instead)” as another option Chat and I came up with together. Here are the five potential mistakes I might cover:
- Creating a checklist of who you are looking for vs being open to who shows up
- Extensively planning what kind of relationship you desire instead of allowing possibilities to unfold.
- Prioritizing conventional physical attractiveness (your own — e.g. by using old photos when you were younger/skinnier and theirs — by swiping left if someone doesn’t immediately attract you with their photos) instead of finding muthal emotional and physical attraction.
- Discarding someone if there isn’t an immediate spark instead of allowing connection to develop over time
- Assuming that you and your potential partners are fixed as to who they are instead of allowing for growth and becoming
Next step: write the lead magnet! But then in order to use it I have a lot of other tasks to do:
- Set up the website and landing page where people can sign up for the newsletter and download the guide (I already have a new Substack created under a pen name that I might use for this)
- Add some content to that website so that people can peruse more of my ideas before signing up
- Create my first ad and give it a go!