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I’ll never forget the first freebie I ever created and put out onto the internet: a free guide to help you grow your Instagram following. I wrote all the copy in a Word doc and even hired a graphic design student to make it pretty. I tossed it out to my audience and within hours I had a few hundred new subscribers on my email list. It was an exhilarating feeling seeing people jump onto my list in exchange for the free value I was offering. After that, I was hooked. Over the years I’ve made over 75 different freebies to help me grow my email list and in the process, I’ve learned what makes a freebie generate leads successfully.
Effective Freebies Deserve a Fresh Update
Building out a corner of the internet for our businesses means we’re creating within an ever-changing landscape with rules that are constantly shifting. We have to adapt and update regularly, otherwise our work can quickly look outdated and irrelevant, and sometimes overnight! So, like every other aspect of running an online business, the lead-generating freebies that are working for you have to play the same game.
Freebies have the opportunity to pave a pathway for lifelong customers. No matter the type, they’re working overtime to bring new faces into your ecosystem and, ultimately, guide subscribers to your paid offers. Even just one irresistible freebie can convert a curious lurker into someone who follows you through every iteration of your business.
A common mistake people make is that they create a free offer and then they set it and forget about it. For us, reworking and refreshing our top-performing, lead-generating freebies is a consistent practice. They’re on autopilot, sprawled out across the internet, linked up in blog posts, and bubbling up on Pinterest to target new customers and serve people for free. That means we need to schedule regular check-ins to see which ones are performing well and how we can keep them fresh and effective! So, what does that entail?
How to Use Freebies to Optimize Your Lead Generation
1. Examine Your Top-Performing Freebies
Before you start the editing process, take a look at your numbers so you can set yourself up to use your time effectively. I always recommend having at least two freebies running so you can see what your audience favors and what they are excited to exchange their email address for.
Take inventory. What freebies are getting the most action? Which ones are effectively generating subscribers for you? Which are truly generating leads and achieving their goals? Start there.
It might feel counterintuitive at first, especially if you’re a problem solver because your underperforming freebies will pull at your attention. There’s absolutely a time to evaluate their underperformance, but giving your time to your best free offers first means they can stay out there and work hard on your behalf while you update the rest. In time, you might not even need your less effective freebies if your top-performing ones are really driving results for you!
My business had a few obvious outliers performing best from my full lineup of freebies! From a free 5-day email list-building challenge to the “Ultimate Pinterest Guide” to our “How to Start a Podcast from Scratch” free download, we quickly saw which opt-ins were moving the needle the most and put our focus and attention on those first.
Depending on how many lead-generating offers you have, pick your top few. You don’t want this to be an overwhelming project, especially if you know you might get stuck in a loop of editing, designing, or rewriting. The focus here is improvement, not perfection.
2. Optimize Your Freebies
What does the process of “optimizing” a freebie mean? When it’s time to dive into the editing process, we start by running through a series of questions to create our task list. This helps modify our optimization process for each individual offer because some might need more work than others.
Does the freebie still align with our brand and messaging style?
A focus for my brand is that all my offers truly feel like they’re coming from me because they are! The way I used to speak to my audience 4-5 years ago isn’t exactly how I write or show up today, so I like to make sure the voice of the verbiage feels right. We do a read-through of the freebie from beginning to end making sure nothing feels too fluffy. We also flag where we need to update the design.
Does the freebie’s content still deliver high-quality and valuable guidance?
I want my free content to be so good that people think to themselves, “If she’s giving this away for free, I can’t imagine what I’d get if I paid for an offer.” You don’t need to give everything away for free, but you want to make sure that there is true value inside your guide.
Your “exact process” might have gone through 5-10 new iterations since you created your last freebie. While your freebie doesn’t have to shift every time you do, you do want to make sure that the advice inside it is still something you stand by and know your audience would find valuable in practice.
Think about your readers doing every step that you recommend — would they still be able to get through it seamlessly? Is it clear and concise? Are there any missing steps you need to add or outdated links you need to remove? This can be what stops your reader from converting into a paying customer!
Does the freebie have any time-sensitive language or outdated pop-culture references?
Sometimes when we’re in the midst of the creation process of a new lead-generating freebie, we might miss the fact that we’ve dropped something in there that feels more timely and less timeless. This mistake can make your readers feel like they’ve opted in for guidance that is no longer relevant.
3. Translate Your Optimization to Your Freebie’s Supporting Content
Once you’ve walked your freebie through the editing process, it’s time to dive into the supporting copy that helps your freebie successfully pop up to your new leads. Getting the freebie editing done first will help the rest of the process flow much faster because you’re mentally fresh on what someone will get when they get their hands on your free offer.
Think through everything that hosts your freebie, specifically your evergreen content.
Here’s a quick checklist to help your review process.
Landing page
Thank you page
Delivery or confirmation emails
Ads (social media, Google, Pinterest, and other websites)
Website pop-ups
Pillar blog posts (i.e. blog posts that have your freebie as their MAIN call to action)
Automated, recurring social media posts
Evergreen mentions in content
This is also an opportune time to think about new ways to get your lead-generating offer in front of fresh eyes! I like to think about fun ways to talk about our freebies on a podcast episode and, more recently, I like to schedule ways to bring them up organically through our weekly email updates.
4. Relaunch Your Freebie
This kind of process might feel like something done behind the scenes, but you don’t have to hide the update and let the same ol’ system roll on as usual. While your evergreen and automated process will continue to do that work for you, a little concentrated boost from you could help kickstart a new wave of leads that an automated process simply cannot provide. You likely have tons of people in your audience who’ve never downloaded this particular freebie (or who aren’t even paying customers yet!). They might not even know you offer this specific guidance and have been wishing to get their hands on this process!
So, I recommend relaunching your freebie with excitement and intentionality! You don’t have to drop a link to your freebie in the P.S. of your next email or feel like you have to keep it lowkey just because this freebie isn’t technically brand new. You can skip the bells and whistles, but give your refreshed freebie a mini-spotlight wherever it feels right for your business.
Send out an email or two to your whole email list (or a segment that would super appreciate this offer versus your entire list). Create a dedicated in-feed post or Reel about its main value points. Write a new blog post that expands on ONE point inside the freebie and link it up as your call to action.
A good reminder here is that we’re always talking way less about our offers than we think we are. That’s the nature of operating your business behind the boundaries of algorithms and their ever-changing rules. I remember launching my book and feeling like I was giving annoying levels of hype, and then I was shocked to find out that there were so many people on launch day who had no idea I’d written a book at all! So, don’t be afraid to be loud and proud about your offer and its value!
5. Schedule Your Next Freebie Update Check-In
How often you should update your free offers is entirely up to your discretion and, honestly, how much your business and processes have changed! Sometimes you go through a season where your brand, voice, and the internet have all gone through massive shifts, which means your offers are impacted too. Sometimes you have a year or two where everything stays relatively the same.
But if you want to make sure this doesn’t slip into the background for too long, drop a date in your calendar for a year from now to double-check all your freebies for another potential round of optimization. You can save and duplicate this process for next time, making the work even easier and saving your time and creative energy (which is highly valuable for business owners and content creators!).
Turning Optimization into a Habit
The ultimate goal here isn’t only to update your top-performing lead-generating freebies, but it’s also to get even better at optimization. An online business doesn’t come with ‘check engine’ lights (and not even a grammar-bot can make sure our copy is exactly what it needs to be!), which means we have to consistently get under the hood to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Schedule these little reviews however often feels right for you and your business, but don’t skip on booking them. It makes the bigger overhauls much easier because you have so many high-quality, relevant, effective pieces to work with! Optimization as a consistent habit is a skill that rewards you with a business that runs well while you sleep, adventure, live, and feel that itch to map out your next big goal.