I’ve been thinking what is the best way to start a conversation with potential new clients that I’ve never worked with in the past, I’ve been thinking what is the best lead magnet for service businesses for cold traffic.

What Is A Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an offer you give away for free to people visiting your site in exchange for their email address.

The lead magnet is meant to prove your expertise or value to someone you have not worked with (or sold to) in the past, so they can start down the process of know like and trust.

Know like and trust is a principal where you get to know a business, decide if you like the way they work and if they can be trusted.

You’ve probably all signed up for a PDF download, that’s a lead magnet, or signed up for a free video course or attended a webinar, all examples of lead magnets.

You get the freebie then there is usually a follow up email sequence to improve the know like and trust process.

Do Service Businesses Need Different Lead Magnets?

I’m selling a service, so I’ve been pondering if I need a different type of lead magnet than say someone selling products (information or physical).

To get people to work with me, I need to prove I’ve got the expertise and that I’m a good person to work with.

I’m not sure PDFs of videos are the best way to do this.

Things I’ve Tried

I’ve tried a lot of things over the years here’s what I’ve found

• pdfs – I’ve written eBooks about WordPress and used them as a downloadable offer, they are good but don’t show what it’s like to work with me.
• courses – I’ve created screen cast courses to teach people about how to do something in WordPress, the trouble with this is a person wanting to learn how to do thing X in WP doesn’t want to hire someone to do X so I’m attracting the wrong people
• videos – I’ve created specific videos with a squeeze page to collect an email before the video can be viewed, same thing as the course
• nothing – My quote is the lead magnet, this works but only for people who know me, have been referred to me or my website has done a good job a KLT.
• blog updates – is that really valuable anymore?  Get an email address in exchange for regular updates form my blog.  This highlights my writing but not what my working procedures are like.

Other Type Of Lead Magnet

There are other lead magnets out there, that I’ve not tried but are worth a mention:

• webinars – get people on a webinar and explain what working with you is like
• trip wires – sell something at a low cost and upsell them to a more expensive item, for example sell a cheap productised service then offer a complex service.
• free services – let people work with you for free to let them experience your service and gain KLT then upsell future services, the problem with this is it attracts low quality clients wanting free services and high levels of support for that freebie

What I’m Trialling Now

I’m trialling a new lead magnet and I would like to know what you think.

I’m building up a series of free audits where I’ll check your site over for problems and tell you how they can be fixed.

If I do a good job hopefully I can sell the services to fix the issues noted.

The benefits of this are that the audit has a predefine scope, it does not take too long to create an audit, it is very specific to that person’s WordPress sites.  It proves my expertise and understanding of the problems specific to their site.  I’ll include a narrative on how I will fix their site in the audit.

I’ve got two audits planned, a security audit and a performance audit.

With these audits I can the questions is your site secure or is your site fast enough.

I’m going to start with performance because all I need to do a speed audit is the URL, the barrier to entry is less, I don’t need a login to check performance.  The performance audit is lower on the KLT ladder.

I’m going to run cold paid traffic to my audits.  As usual I’ll report back if things work or not.

What I’m Offering

My free performance audit will be to show you how fast or slow your WordPress site is loading, I’ll run your site through a performance tool and discuss why it is slow, I’ll record a screencast video of me doing that audit and how your site speed can be improved.

You’ll get an experience where you get to see my expertise, get to know me (you’ll see this pretty face talking you through an audit) and a very tailored experience of your own site.

It’s small in scope (about 5 minutes per audit) it’s valuable to that person, they will see where their issues are, it’s very specific to that person, I’m showing issue on their live site not a video on how to find their issues.

Wrap Up – What Is The Best Lead Magnet For Service Businesses?

Answers in the comments, what do you think is the best lead magnet for freelance service businesses, what do you think of audits?

If you want a speed audit click through to my audit page and complete the form, I’ll review your site and create a video audit of why your site is running so slowly and what can be done to speed things up.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash