A Blueprint for AI Lead Magnet and List Building
We all know that list building is essential to your online business. When people click through on a link to go to your lead magnet landing page, you want the offer to be irresistible so that you don’t miss out on the opportunity to build your list.
These visitors to your site have shown some interest in your content, but you only have one chance to capture their name and email address. If you fail to create an opt in offer and page that converts well, you will be wasting your efforts with traffic generation.
Building a list gives you the opportunity to cultivate relationships with your target audience, which will ultimately increase your profits. One area that many marketers struggle with is understanding what makes a compelling offer, followed by their inability to craft a high converting landing page.
You can’t simply do the bare minimum in offering a freebie and expect people to willingly sign up and hand over their contact information. Your offer must address their most pressing pain points or goals, and be presented in a way that lowers any barriers or hesitations.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools allow you to conduct deep research into the lives of your prospective customers so that your lead magnets are viewed as highly relevant to their needs and wants.
AI tools can assist you with research and brainstorming, the creative process through to completion, and the design and copy of your landing page. If you are someone who has struggled to build a list, or you are just starting out with the list building, you can use the information below to help you navigate the process with ease.
There are many different AI tools that you can choose to use for your lead magnet and list building efforts. Two of the most popular ones are Google’s Bard AI tool and ChatGPT.
Discover Winning Lead Magnet Ideas using AI-Powered Customer Insights
To get started, you first have to uncover the needs and wants of your target audience. Even if you think you already know, you can take your ideas and enter them into your AI tool and ask for additional ideas for your lead magnet topic.
AI has the benefit of being able to gather and analyze information across many different platforms, such as search engines, keyword tools, social media platforms, and more – something that would take you a lot of time and effort to do on your own.
For our example in this post, we are going to use the niche topic of Internet marketing and our demographic is going to be senior citizens. There is a growing number of entrepreneurs who are supposed to be in retirement, but for one reason or another, have decided to launch a second career online.
These individuals usually have some sort of insight and experience that they want to share with others, whether it’s from their previous career or from their hobbies and interests.
Their reason for pursuing a career as an online entrepreneur might be something rooted in a desire to be useful and social with others, or it might be a financial matter where they need to supplement their retirement income.
We’re going to use AI to find out what their needs are, and try to find something that will be beneficial to a large number of senior subscribers. Keep in mind that you can always create multiple lead magnets and landing pages for different purposes.
How to Prompt AI For More Ideas
Because we’ve already listed a couple of reasons why senior citizens may want to start this type of career, we can include those in our prompt to our AI tool when asking for more ideas.
We will use the following prompt: “Give me a complete list of pain points or goals for senior Internet marketers. I already have financial struggles, wanting to be useful and share information, and a need for socialization. What other things would make a good lead magnet topic for this demographic?”
Bard returns one good reason: learning new skills. As we know, the learning process is something that experts say can stave off dementia, so this is a good reason, but likely not for the majority of senior marketers.
ChatGPT replies with reasons like staying current with technology, balancing work and life better, dealing with burnout at their job, and overcoming ageism – in addition to some others.
Those are some interesting options. We know that studies show people are working later in life than ever before, many into their 70s. So giving them the ability to semi-retire with a work at home online career is a great slant to go with.
With this topic, you can touch on all of the other struggles and goals mentioned – such as the financial aspect, ageism in the workplace, work/life balance and more.
Ask AI For Ideas Based on The Ideas it Provided
The next thing you want to have AI do is help you understand your prospective subscriber and what hesitations they may have about pursuing this type of career. When they are online looking for information about it, and land on your opt in page, you want your lead magnet to touch on those important issues so that they will sign up to learn more.
We will prompt AI like this: “I want my lead magnet to target seniors who are still having to work or who want to work, but who don’t want to have a career in the corporate world anymore. People who are ready to be their own boss and gain the freedom to semi-retire, have flexibility and still earn money and contribute to society with their expertise. For people wanting this kind of career, what concerns might they have about becoming an online entrepreneur?”
Now, we are going to be able to see the concerns they have that you can address in your lead magnet. These include things like:
* Lack of experience
* Fear of failure
* Lack of time
* Lack of technological skills
* Financial uncertainty
* Lack of direction
* Isolation
* Branding and positioning as a senior
You’ll then need to analyze the issues it returns (combined with what you already know, too) and come up with the finalized topic for your lead magnet. You can also prompt AI like this: “Based on all of this information, give me some ideas for topics for a lead magnet for this audience.”
Some of the responses it will give you include things like:
* A guide or video course on starting an online business for seniors
* A checklist of things to do before starting an online business
* A list of resources for seniors who want to start an online business
* A free eBook on a topic related to online entrepreneurship, such as social media marketing, SEO, or email marketing
Because you want to cater to people who are considering pursuing this career option, the first response will probably be the best option for you to consider. A simple guide on starting an online business for seniors can be comprehensive, yet leave a lot of room for future promotions of courses and products.
Use AI-Inspired Titles and Outlines That Resonate with Your Audience
Once you have your topic chosen, you can work with AI to come up with a title that you feel will be attention grabbing and an outline that will deliver the information in a comprehensive and effective manner.
The first thing you want to do is come up with a title that you can use so that you can begin creating your graphics and other branding material on the side. Don’t just ask your AI tool to give you a single title idea, but instead, ask it for a certain number that allows you the ability to mix and match certain words or phrases.
We are going to prompt AI like this: “I want to create a lead magnet that is a guide to starting an online business for seniors. Give me a list of 20 or more possible titles and keep them short.”
If you don’t instruct your AI tool to keep them short, they will often come up with very lengthy titles that are similar to something you would see in a headline within a blog post.
You want your lead magnet title to be able to fit nicely on an eCover, if you’re creating a report, or on any branding graphics, and AI will sometimes create titles that have two lengthy components joined by a colon mark.
The responses you’ll get include many options for you to consider. Some of them won’t have anything to do with seniors. For example, it might say: How to Start an Online Business at Any Age (which might be a student, not necessarily a senior).
Bard was guilty of delivering more titles without any reference to seniors than ChatGPT. Here are some of the better title ideas the two of them came up with combined:
* The Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business for Seniors
* How to Start an Online Business and Retire Early
* A Senior’s Guide to Building a Profitable Online Business
* Starting an Online Business: A Step-by-Step Guide for Seniors
* The Senior Entrepreneur’s Handbook to Online Business
* Senior Entrepreneurs: The Beginner’s Guide to Online Business
* How to Build a Passive Income Stream That Will Support You in Retirement
Analyze the Results and Ask AI for More
There are some things that stand out in terms of wording, such as step-by-step guide, beginner’s, and retirement or retire. You can go back to AI and ask it for new title ideas using those word combinations.
Here are a couple of new options:
* A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Online Business in Retirement
* Retirement Redefined: A Beginner’s Guide to Starting an Online Business
The second one is a great option, so we’ll go with that – but instead of beginner’s, we’ll change that word to senior’s. So the title will be: Retirement Redefined: A Senior’s Guide to Starting an Online Business.
I personally like this title because it gives us the opportunity to cover many different issues for seniors as entrepreneurs, but if you wanted to focus on one particular struggle, such as finances, you could ask AI to help you develop titles or slants that have to do with that one issue.
For our slant, we are going to prompt the AI like this: “I’m writing a lead magnet report called Retirement Redefined: A Senior’s Guide to Starting an Online Business and I want it to include the information a senior would want to know to get started, including addressing their concerns. Create a comprehensive outline with many chapters for my lead magnet.”
You want to ask for many chapters, and in fact keep prompting AI to expand even more with additional chapters until it begins to include things that aren’t relevant. That way, you can pick and choose what goes into your lead magnet.
Bard gave us an outline with an introduction that specifically addresses seniors, followed by the basic steps for online entrepreneurs such as picking a niche, creating a site, marketing your business, managing expenses, and overcoming challenges.
ChatGPT had some similar items such as the introduction, online presence, marketing and challenges – but it also included more detail about the planning phase, legal and financial considerations, and tools and technology.
So we can mix it up a bit. Let’s pull what we like from the two AI machines and feed it back into it, asking it for a comprehensive outline based on what we put together from both tools.
Ask AI to Expand on Your Outline
We’ll prompt it like this: “Here is my basic outline for my lead magnet. Improve it with a more comprehensive outline on these topics and give me chapter titles that I can use in my report. (insert the outline topics you chose).”
Sometimes it will expand on some issues and sometimes it won’t do much to improve it if your outline is already good as is. Bard does give some extra tips about writing our lead magnet, specifically for seniors.
For example, it tells us to avoid terminology they may not know, to make it succinct and to the point, to use visuals whenever it would help convey the concept, and to add extra elements to give more value.
Now we want the AI tool to write better headlines, something it didn’t really do initially. You can enter each one individually and get several options, or just ask it to redo the section titles with new headlines that are hyped up.
By the end of this exercise, you should have a solid title for your new upcoming lead magnet, as well as a comprehensive outline that will allow you to either write your lead magnet from scratch yourself or have your AI tools help you do the job.
Save Time By Leveraging AI to Write and Edit Your Lead Magnet
If you choose to write your lead magnet yourself, you can always use your AI tool to simply edit your work after the fact. Not only can it clean up any spelling errors, but it can address any typos or deficient information that you may want to expand upon.
For now, we’re going to discuss the process of getting AI to create your lead magnet for you. This is a process where you want to have a lot of oversight so that you can steer it in the right direction to deliver exactly what you want and need for your lead magnet.
AI has a habit of either giving too much information or not giving enough if it’s not prompted the right way. You want it to be brief with the introduction, but more comprehensive throughout the rest of your lead magnet sections.
We will prompt AI like this: “I want you to write this section without going into great detail because it’s an introduction online. Don’t give solutions, just talk about the explanation, concerns, and benefits in general. Here’s the outline for the section: I. Introduction A. What is an online business? Give examples that include info products, affiliate marketing, and more. B. Common concerns for seniors starting an online business C. Overview of the benefits of online business for seniors (Increased flexibility and work-life balance, Control over your own schedule, Ability to earn income while pursuing your passions, Opportunities for socialization and networking).”
By prompting it this way, ChatGPT delivers a perfect beginning for your lead magnet that introduces the concept to your audience and lets them know you understand their concerns, too.
Proofread the AI Results!
Sometimes, you’ll read through whatever AI delivered back, and you will feel as if it is off track in terms of the tone or style. If this is the case, you can always redirect it to show a different type of emotion, whether it’s more motivating and uplifting or empathetic to their struggles.
You want to go through your outline and have AI craft each section for you individually. Don’t simply give it an entire outline and expect it to write an entire eBook because it has limited space available to reply.
In fact, if your outline includes many subsections, you can take each of those subsections piece by piece and have your AI tool right that for you so that you can read through it and edit it to perfection.
If you want to, you can use multiple AI tools so that you can pick and choose which paragraphs are put into your lead magnet. If you do this, make sure that you read through the final draft to ensure that it all makes sense when pieced together like this.
When I ran that prompt through both ChatGPT as well as Bard, the results were very different. While they both touched on the same concepts, ChatGPT wrote in a paragraph format that was typical of an info product, while Bard delivered excessive bullet points, which is often typical of an AI tool.
AI Has Drawbacks
AI is a wonderful tool for using to research topics and target audiences, to brainstorm and have a creative breakthrough for your outline, and even to help the lead magnet take form as a beneficial report.
However, there are drawbacks to using AI content. Sometimes, it will misinform your readers, so you have to make sure that whatever it is teaching in those pages is something that you stand behind yourself.
You want to make sure that every point within your lead magnet is something that supports the main idea of the topic, and that AI hasn’t veered off too far into territory that isn’t relevant.
Sometimes, you’ll find that there are areas it has missed, and you have to redirect it to expand on certain ideas. For example, in the report we had AI write, it delivered this paragraph: “In order to further refine your business strategy, it’s important to define your target audience. This may involve creating a customer avatar or identifying specific demographics that are most likely to be interested in your products or services.”
Instead of just including that very brief information, you can ask it to expand on how to create a customer avatar with an example. So we’ll prompt AI by saying: “Please expand the part where you say: This may involve creating a customer avatar or identifying specific demographics that are most likely to be interested in your products or services and give an example of how they can do this.”
One thing that AI doesn’t have is the ability to personalize the content or add your stories to the lead magnet so that you begin to build a rapport with your new subscribers.
If you have the talent and ability, you can simply write those yourself and weave them into the pages of your lead magnet. But if you don’t feel confident in your writing skills, you can simply share the story in a crude format with AI and have it work it into the report for you in a more polished and professional manner.
Use AI to Impress New Sign-Ups
Even though your prospective subscribers aren’t going to know about this ahead of time, it goes a long way in retaining subscribers when you can over deliver to them whenever they access their expected downloads.
On your landing page, you will have given them details about the free gift you are promising in exchange for their contact information. But if you want to solidify their decision to sign up to your list, you can include some unexpected gifts that are relevant to their needs and that hold true value to them.
AI can help you develop these bonuses that will impress your new subscribers. You can prompt AI like this: “Give me a list of bonus items I could include with my lead magnet called: Retirement Redefined: A Senior’s Guide to Starting an Online Business that you just wrote.”
It will give you, in more detail than what I am providing below, the following ideas:
* Checklist for starting your online business
* Template for business plan and strategy
* Access to exclusive webinars
* Video tutorials
* Resource guide
* Case studies
* Q&A sessions
* Private Facebook group access
* Free consultation
* eBook(s) on related topics
Whether you choose to create one of these items, or all 10 of them, your new subscriber will be pleased to see additional items in their download file or on the download page, and it will probably make them stay subscribed to you for the sheer fact that you give a lot of value at no cost.
Use AI to Create the Extras for Your Subscribers
At this point, you can simply prompt AI like this: “Create #1 for me.” It will then create an example of the checklist that you can plug into a design tool like Canva so that it looks professional and printable.
You can also prompt it like this: “Give me a script for a webinar idea to use as a bonus for my lead magnet gift.” Or, ask AI: “What are some ideas for a video tutorial they might like?”
Once it gives you the ideas, have AI create the video script and storyboard for you. Simply say, “I like the idea about how to create and manage a YouTube channel to promote their business and reach a wider audience. Can you script and storyboard this and make sure it’s written for my senior audience?”
The script and storyboard will look similar to this, telling you what to say and what to show on screen:
Script:
Step 1: Creating Your YouTube Channel
To create a YouTube channel, you’ll first need to create a Google account. Once you have a Google account, navigate to YouTube and click on “Create a Channel” in the top right corner. You can then choose a name for your channel and customize your profile with a profile picture and cover art.
Storyboard:
Step 1: Creating Your YouTube Channel: On-screen demonstration of creating a Google account and navigating to YouTube, with voiceover instructions
Anything in the list of ideas, AI can either do for you or map it out for you so that you can create it yourself with AI’s guidance on what to show and what to say. You may want to include a variety of AI-generated bonus gifts because you never know what media format your target audience will prefer.
Enhance Your Landing Page with High-Converting Messages and Designs By AI
You can have the best lead magnet in the world, but if your landing page is not impressive to your visitor, chances are, people won’t sign up to your list. Your page has to ooze professionalism and the text has to be right on point regarding their pain points or goals.
A landing page has just a few elements, all of which AI can help you with. First and foremost, it has a headline, which is the first thing people will usually see when they land on your page.
AI tools are pretty good about hyping up your headlines for you, but you want to get several versions so that you can piece together a headline that you feel is most effective.
Keep in mind that some tools are less generous with their hype than others, so you may want to use a variety until you get what you need. We will prompt AI like this: “I need a headline for my landing page where I’m giving away my lead magnet called Retirement Redefined: A Senior’s Guide to Starting an Online Business.” What are some effective headlines I might want to use?”
AI will deliver a variety of options. Some basically restate the name of the lead magnet, which we don’t want. Instead, we can choose from some other motivating headlines like:
* “Retire on your terms: mark learn how to start an online business as a senior!”
* “Unleash your entrepreneurial spirit and build a profitable online business!”
* “Don’t retire, inspire! Learn how to build an online business in your golden years!”
If the headlines aren’t quite what you want, you can always steer your AI tool with certain power words and phrases or keywords that you want included in your primary or sub-headline.
Another element of your lead magnet landing page are the bullet point benefits your visitors will want to know before handing over their contact information. If AI has written this for you, it will usually have a record of what it has created, but otherwise you can feed your report or the outline into AI to have it help you with the bullet points.
You can prompt AI like this: “I need 20 very strong bullet point benefits about why seniors will want to download this free gift.” It does a great job of mapping out benefits like this:
* Discover how to start an online business you can run from anywhere in the world during your golden years!
* Finally pursue your passions and hobbies and make money doing what you love as a senior!
* Retire on your own terms and embrace a flexible entrepreneurial career as a senior citizen!
So using these three specific benefits, they get to work from anywhere, which is something that is important to seniors who want to travel, they get to earn money from doing something that they love, and they get a flexible schedule as well.
You still need a call to action that can be placed above your opt in form, so you can ask AI to help you with this task by prompting it like this: “Give me 20 strong call to action statements that get seniors to sign up for this free gift.”
You will get results that range from short and punchy to extremely long, like “Discover how to use your skills and experience to create a profitable online business.” That’s way too long for a call to action statement!
Ask AI to shorten them up and punch them up. It will then give you better options like: “Don’t let age hold you back – get your FREE guide now!” Or, it might say, “Join the growing community of senior entrepreneurs with this FREE guide!”
AI can help you with everything from the headlines, bullet points, and call to action statement to the wording that you put on the button. It can also help you figure out what the best design or look for your landing page might be.
Prompt AI like this: “What should the design look for my landing page for this report look like? Don’t give me generic tips – tell me what you recommend for this particular demographic and topic.”
It will give you tips about choosing a font that’s easy to read for seniors, and having an uncluttered layout. It will tell you to use images specifically of seniors working on their computer.
When it comes to color palettes, it will tell you to choose colors that are easy on the eyes, including Blues and greens that are more muted. It will also instruct you to use clear wording and to possibly include a testimonial from another senior who has successfully started an online business to help build trust and credibility.
AI is a fantastic assistant that can help you in the lead magnet and landing page process. You’ll want to use a mix of tools available to you and learn how to guide the machine into delivering exactly what you want.
Never settle for something that you feel doesn’t represent you. AI is easily redirected, and you can even ask it, “What do you need from me in order to complete this task?” It will tell you exactly what information to give it in order to get your desired results.
There are definite difference between BARD and ChatGPT that make having an account with each very useful. Note that BARD is not available in the EU or Canada.
GPTzign – An AI Tool for Funnel Creation
You can use the methods shown above to create your lead magnets and landing pages for any niche. It is not hard to do. However, there is more to creating a sales funnel than just these two items. You have sales copy, video sales letters, email series, etc.
To keep it as simple as possible and keep myself organized, I use a tool called GPTzign to do all this with ChatGPT. It is set up to help you use AI to create Sales Copy, VSL’s, Emails,Lead Magnets & More. It creates the prompts for you and you only need the free ChatGPT account.
First you define your product, give it an idea of your target market, the general tone of the results and the style of writing. The you begin the process of expanding on your target audience and identifying their goals and pain points.
Here is a screen shot of the beginning process that also shows all the options for content. You can see the prompts it creates at the bottom.
You copy and paste the prompts into your AI engine and then copy the responses back into GPTzign. You can see all the types of content for which it creates the prompts for you and, of course, you can use any niche the ChatGPT knows about.
Here is the lead magnet section:
In addition, many of these types of content have multiple options that you can create. Here are the options for Video Sales Letters:
That is just the beginning.
You can do it all manually as I have described above or you can check out GPTzign now.
