Irresistible List Building Lead Magnet Ideas for Seniors and Retirees

The two most pressing issues struggling marketers want to know more about are list building and traffic. The two go hand-in-hand. In order to build a list, you need traffic to your site.

But once those visitors have arrived, you have to have an offer that is unbeatable in terms of convincing individuals to hand over their contact information and agree to be contacted by you in the future.

There are several ways you can entice people to do this. Some people try to take the safe route, creating a common slant that doesn’t rock the boat or cause too much discussion.  But as you have likely learned by being a senior and/or retiree from all your experience, having a controversial or surprising message always helps far more in getting your message across.

A better way to handle it is to focus on topics and strategies that have your customers expecting great things from you. This is often intimidating to newer marketers, who don’t want to over-estimate the value they’re going to give and risk disappointing someone.

They start honing in on the question of whether or not the subscriber will feel like it was worth it to enter their name and email address. Instead of taking the safe route, you want to shake things up and make a splash as a formidable niche leader.  Think of your favorite teachers or coaches over your lifetime.  Were they boring or exciting?  Did they bring out good ideas or boring old ones?  Stories with surprise endings or just matter-of-fact stuff that put you to sleep?

Teach Them How to Cut Costs

One of the most important things to many of your subscribers will be money saving tips.  As a senior in life, you likely know the importance of that simple topic! Regardless of whether or not you are talking about the marketing niche, survival, or even weight loss, people need to know how to get the best results and meet their goals without spending a small fortune.

You can help your buyers shop smart by learning how to strategically evaluate the products and tools they are considering. You can show them how to use certain tactics – such as couponing or shopping during deal days – in order to get the most for their money.

Because of the fact that your lead magnet is free, and promises to help them save money on things they are spending cash on, it will go a long way to create good will between you and your new subscriber.

There are some people who charge an arm and a leg for a guide on how to save money, which kind of defeats the purpose. Instead, they want to squeeze as much out of their readers as possible, regardless of whether or not it hurts them.  Be smart and don’t be afraid to give away your best tips, tricks, strategies, etc.  No doubt you have more than one!  Giving away your best stuff will have folks coming back for more.

Give Them an Amazing Shortcut or Hack

Second to money savings, your prospective subscribers will appreciate saving time, too. Time is a commodity that is in short supply for most individuals. You might be teaching them how to fit exercise in throughout their busy day.  No doubt you have heard that a couple of hundred times during your lifetime.  Whether you are a senior or a younger marketer, staying in good shape throughout life is a constant effort.

Or, you could be showing them how to save time writing content for their blog if you’re in the marketing niche. If you’re in survival, you might be teaching them how to quickly and easily escape a dangerous survival situation, and they will appreciate having this knowledge.

If you are going with a shortcut or hack type of lead magnet, you can have an entire report about one particular hack, such as a report that teaches people how to meal prep in order to stick to a specific calorie count and avoid the temptation of eating junk food because they aren’t in a rush.

Or, you can create a report that is full of many shortcuts and hacks that will help your readers achieve more throughout the day in a shorter amount of time. When they are implementing your advice and freeing up more hours in their day, they will be more apt to return to your site for additional guidance that can improve their quality of life.

Press on an Extreme Pain Point

In just about every niche, there are one or more pain points that almost seems crippling to your audience. It can be an emotional reaction, financial, or even physical. You can address these issues with a lot of empathy, followed by solutions that will help them ease the pain they are experiencing.

It’s important in marketing to get inside your prospects head.  Some trainers call this joining the ongoing conversation in your prospects mind.  What are they worried about?  What are they dreading?  And then, think of how you can solve those problems for them with your product or service.

For example, there may be people in the weight loss niche that feel the pain of failure. They have been dieting for years, the scale is on a rollercoaster that goes up and down, and they are experiencing shame that won’t subside.

If you can help people ease their emotional wounds and get back on track, it will go a long way in building trust between the two of you. Failure is a great pain point to discuss in a lead magnet, but it’s not the only one.  If you have struggled with weight over your lifetime, as a senior or retiree, you have a story to tell to help relate to your prospects perceived problems.

You might also highlight issues such as not being able to afford things, whether it’s in regards to courses, training, or supplies. There is shame and frustration that goes along with lacking the money that you need to achieve your goals.

Whenever you want to create a lead magnet on a pain point, list the emotional, physical and financial problems associated with your niche. It might be something based on fear, anger, money, time, or even literal pain such as arthritis in some niches.

Pair a Guide with Over-the-Shoulder Videos

Most people who create a lead magnet do so by writing a short report, converting it into a PDF document, and zipping it up for their subscribers to download and read on their own time.

But keep in mind that not everyone likes to read. Video is one of the most popular media formats that people can learn from. Whether you are creating a slide presentation (free with Google Docs) or filming yourself on camera discussing a certain issue, they may absorb it better if it is presented in video as opposed to text.

There are also times when you can pair the two and gift your new subscribers a guide, along with a video series that helps show the readers what you’ve been discussing in more detail.

I do this with every article.  First, I write the article.  Then I take the key points, 5 or 6 of them and turn them into a 7-15 minute video.  The video can then link back to your blog article (like this one) for more info.  Advertise your video on social media… folks like short videos… and that will get you not only more video views, but more article views on your blog as well.

You may want to split test the two and see which type of media format offer converts better for you, including a hybrid of the two. It may turn out that you don’t present well with video, or your audience is one that prefers text instead.

Provide a Case Study They Can Follow

They say that the proof is in the pudding. No matter what niche you are in, your readers will appreciate the opportunity to follow along with a detailed case study that proves to them that you know what you’re talking about.

This could be a case study about how you used private label rights (PLR) to start earning $100 a day in a particular niche. You can show them how you shopped for the perfect PLR vendor, for example.

You might go on and share how you tweaked the content, where you posted it, and what monetary or other return you got from each item that you used. Make sure you give a detailed account of everything you did.

If and when you create a case study, keep in mind that your readers will not be as well-versed as you are about the situation. You want to speak to them and show them the process from a newbie standpoint so that they aren’t left with more questions than answers.

Devise a List of Top Tools, Courses or Leaders

In many different inches, you will consistently be asked by your audience about the best items that they should be returning to in order to achieve their goals. They may want to know about an email autoresponder tool, the best plug-ins that will help them get their blog search engine optimized, or who they should follow if they want to learn more about creating sales copy that converts.

If you can deliver a lead magnet that shows them the path to take whenever they want to invest their time and or money in tools, courses, and leaders, it will help them start off on the right foot and assist them in avoiding any missteps.

This also shows that you have a good ability to curate good information for your niche audience. That means, whenever they see that you have a new blog post – such as a top 10 product review list – they will eagerly devour that information in the future.

Make a Simple Checklist Out of a Long Process

When you’re creating an effective lead magnet, it’s not about volume. It’s about need and effectiveness. You can create a 100-page eBook and give it away free, but that doesn’t guarantee that anyone will sign up for it.

There are many times when a simple checklist will be all your visitor needs to sign up for your list in exchange for the free gift. For example, you might have a checklist of 20 daily marketing tasks that will grow your income.

Or, you could have a checklist 17 weight loss habits they should integrate into their day if they want consistent weight loss. Or, you might hand over a checklist of everything they need for a 72-hour bug out bag if you’re in the survival niche.

Reverse an Idea to Pique Their Interest

Everyone has typical slants such as, “Top 10 Tips for Success.” These are so common and numerous, that your customer may have become blind to those offers, or assume they have heard it all before.

Instead of using something that everyone else is doing, switch things up. You can pique the interest of the prospective subscriber by promising to show them why they are failing as opposed to how to succeed.

They may have been trying to figure this out for months or even years, and are tempted by your offer so that they can see where they’ve been going wrong. You can do this in many different niches, such as the number one reason why your body refuses to lose more weight.

Or, you might create one on 10 survival mistakes you may not know you’re making. These mysterious slants make people want to sign up just to make sure they aren’t doing something wrong.

Highlight a Top 10 List of Strategies or Things They Need to Know

While it’s always nice to get list of products, courses, and people to follow, it’s also important to know what tactics to learn so that you can achieve your goals. For instance, with weight loss, there are dozens upon dozens of diet plans you can cover.

Each of these actually works to help people lose weight, but they all have different pros and cons to following them. The same can be said for making money online. There are many different ways to send traffic to your website, both free and paid.

If you can help them separate the wheat from the chaff, it will position you at the top of their go-to guru list. Even if you only narrow it down to 5 or 10 as opposed to the number one best strategy, it helps them eliminate many different things that would’ve wasted their time in money.

Share Printables They Can Put to Use Immediately

Printables have become very popular online in many different niches. Whether you are mapping out your goals, journaling about your struggles, tracking your weight loss, checking off survival supplies, etc., being able to print out someone else’s readymade template or checklist – or even a journal page or calendar, can be very helpful and convenient.

There are many instances where people cannot find the type of resource they need in a major chain store or on a site like Amazon, and they don’t know how to make it themselves (or don’t have time to).

When you are one of the participants in the same niche, you will know more about what people actually need in order to stay on the right path to success. You may have created templates for yourself, and you can make blank ones for your subscribers to download, too.

Printables do not have to be large bundles of content. You can have a single checklist, one page printable and give that away as your lead magnet if it is valuable enough to your target audience.

Or, you can take the route where you do bundle up different types of printables for them to download and use in their life to make things easier. For example, with the weight loss niche you might give them a pack with printables for meal planning, pounds lost, calorie counts or carb counts, and more.

If you’re in the marketing niche, you might have a printable where you give them a checklist or planner printable with all of the tasks listed for an info product launch. That might include tasks such as recruiting affiliates, setting up their listings on their platform of choice, etc.

Creating an irresistible lead magnet is really summed up by being willing to take risks and be bold. Try to set yourself apart from the usual content they see on offers like this. When you’re able to do this, you’ll be positioning your offer as a no-risk enticement where their curiosity is more powerful than their ability to pass it by.

Don’t forget this!

Your lead magnet will do you no good no matter how well it is presented… unless you are building your email list with it!  In online marketing, it is critical to be able to followup with your prospects.  A statistic to remember is that 80% of all sales are made between the 5th and the 12th contact.  Sometimes even as high as 20 or more contacts are needed before your prospect will develop enough trust in you to buy your product or service.

So give your prospect LOTS of chances to learn about you and your product or service for which they are interested by emailing them lots of information:

• Product or service info of course
• Benefits of  your product or service
• Options to buy one or more
• Guarantees
• Refunds
• Options like color, quantities, sizes, etc.
• Payment options

The topics for you to write about are endless.

Also, don’t feel bashful about repeating topics or re-sending emails.  Typical open rates for emails are usually below 50%, sometimes WAY below.  So emailing your “non-openers” gives them a second chance to get your info.  I find if I send a second email to the “non-openers”, I get at least 50% of the original number in new opens.  So it’s like adding 50% to your chance to make a sale!  and email is FREE marketing when you have them on YOUR LIST!  Aweber is our autoresponder of choice.  Too many features to talk about here.

Where to get good PLR every week

The 5 Dollar Friday site gives away 24 or more pieces of PLR every week… at no cost. That’s right… FREE.

What they do is buy up software rights. They do sell the best of the best of course and for usually only $5 to $25. But the rest, worth anywhere from $7 to $70 is GIVEN AWAY for you to use as you see fit in your business. Every week they put up software valued in total of around $200 and give it away with no strings attached.

What can you do with all of that software?

A lot of it has articles that you can use on Social media as mentioned above.

Some of the PLR is actually software or training on how to be more successful in marketing.

You can put together packages of articles or similar software to give away as lead magnets. For example, you could collect all the PLR on YouTube marketing and put them together to train your group or tribe. Or you could sell to others!

As a senior or retiree, PLR will save you hundreds of hours in product development time by providing extremely high value for your marketing dollar… especially if it is free!

Bottom line is that PLR whether you pay for it or get it for free is a great way to build your business… and your income!

Next Article:

Fred “The Submarine Guy” Raley

Fred@SubmarineGuy.com

http://www.SeniorsAndRetirees.com

 

Pick the Best Business Model for Retirees

Pick the Best Business Model for Retirees

Running your own online business as a senior marketer starts by picking the best business model for your niche. There are several choices in online marketing that are suitable for anyone, especially those who want flexibility with their schedule.

These business models can be used to help you achieve the life that you want to live. Your choices can depend on how much you want to earn (and how fast), how much effort and time you’re willing to put into it, and how much (or how little) you want to learn.

One of the best ways to increase your income is to not only implement a single business model, but to have multiple ones to support you. You don’t have to do this immediately, but as time goes on, you can add on another business branch as you see fit.

Let Affiliate Marketing Pay for the Retirement You Desire

Your dream is obtainable. You can have the lifestyle that you want. It’s not out of your reach – regardless of your age. Some people have the desire to travel. Maybe that’s what you want to do, too.

You don’t want to be tied down to one location, but you still want to be able to bring in some extra money or even bring in the kind of income that can support your desire to travel all over the world.

Other people want to be able to spoil their grandkids. They want to buy nice things for them or have the freedom to be able to go places with their children and grandkids. To take them to amusement parks, day hikes, museums or to help financially support their family’s dreams.

Others want to have peace of mind when it comes to paying their bills. They don’t want to have to struggle to be able to do things. Seniors often find that when they reach a certain age, they either don’t have enough money or they want more so they can afford to do the things they want.

It’s not fun to get older and have to deal with financial pressure, too. Maybe you want peace of mind about your health. You don’t want to have to fret about paying for whatever it is you need to take care of.

If you need to go see a doctor, you want to be able to afford to go. If you want to join a gym or hire a trainer, you want the means to do so. If you want to buy exercise equipment, you don’t want to have to break your budget to get it.

The things that you need or the things that you want, can be yours through affiliate marketing. This is an industry that brings in billions of dollars each year and it’s open to anyone at any age.

You may not have heard about affiliate marketing before. An affiliate marketer is someone who makes money by promoting a product to others. You’re basically getting people to buy stuff through your referrals.

You find something you want to promote and apply to be an affiliate. Once you’ve been accepted as one, you’ll get a link that takes a consumer directly to that product or service.

You put that link up on your online blog, in emails or on social media. The way that you get paid is every time a person clicks on the link and buys through the link you’ve promoted, you earn a commission.

With affiliate marketing, what you’re doing is making a recommendation for a product or brand to an audience. This product can be tangible or digital. Tangible means it’s a physical product the consumer will be able to hold in their hands.

Digital means it’s an online product. An example of a tangible product is a dog leash. An example of a digital one is an eBook about dog training. You’ll be able to find products in many different categories that you can promote as an affiliate so you can have more than one area of income from this business model.

Create Courses and Lead the Way in Your Niche

The older you get in life, the more you know. You learn as you live. You have skills and experiences that not only benefit you, but have probably benefited others over the course of your life.

You may have helped people without even realizing that’s what you did. You’ve become an expert in your career. You know how to do things that can make a job easier. You know which mistakes to avoid.

You know the best resources to use to get the job done. And you probably know how to be more efficient at the tasks presented in the job you’ve held. With your personal life, you’ve gained a lot of wisdom.

You know how to handle finances. This is something that a lot of younger people struggle with. But you learned over time how to spend money wisely. You learned how to manage debt so that it doesn’t overwhelm you.

You’ve learned about things like keeping a good FICO score, how to find the best interest rate, and more. As time has passed, you’ve learned about relationships. You’ve learned the power of communication and how to handle conflict resolution.

You’ve learned about boundaries and how to make a relationship work despite differences. You’ve also learned how to handle toxic relationships and the kind of self-improvement everyone needs to experience.

If you’re someone who’s been divorced, then you know how to navigate through the legal situations that come up. You know more than someone who’s never walked down that road.

All this information that you’ve learned can be put to use. You can share this with other people and establish yourself as an expert online. If you’ve learned a lot about managing healthy relationships or you’ve learned how to survive something like an affair, the death of a loved one, or being in a blended family, you can take that knowledge and use it to make money.

You may have found success in business, and you were able to create a nice nest egg. You can teach others how to do the same thing. Or maybe you lost weight and became fit after 50 years old.

There are a lot of people who need encouragement in this area. They’re looking for someone to mentor them. They want to follow someone who can show them how to get fit, too.

Maybe you know how to play a sport well, such as golf. You can teach others to do the same. You can write eBooks where you share your knowledge. You don’t have to be a bestselling writer to do this.

All you have to do is write your wisdom down, get it edited and you can start selling. But you can also create video courses. Video yourself explaining how to do something or teaching others about relationships.

You might encourage them in their weight loss journey. You can tell what you did to work out. What foods you ate. What you did when a setback happened. You can also create a membership program.

In a membership, people are paying for monthly or weekly access to your knowledge. A membership can be done in many different ways. For example, you might offer a weekly report on a topic your audience wants to learn, or you might have monthly webinars where you’re teaching something.

You can use your experience to become a coach for others. You can do this one on one or through group coaching. With group coaching, you teach many people at once. One on one is more like a paid mentorship.

You help people work through problems, you brainstorm solutions and you offer advice where needed. Becoming a leader who creates courses can be very lucrative because you can have affiliates promoting your products and in the process, adding subscribers to your list, too.

Tap Into PLR and Low Content Profits

You might think that if you want to start an online marketing business, you’re going to have to come up with all of the content from scratch. That’s not true. It’s much easier to get started than you think.

You can start by tapping into PLR (private label rights) and low content material. You can use PLR to help you start any business. With PLR, you’ve bought the right to use someone else’s content.

This content can take many forms – including articles, eBooks, coloring pages, puzzles, journals, worksheets, flashcards, planners or checklists which can be digital products. You can also use these to create tangible products, too.

If you want to use PLR with tangible products, then you could do something like take PLR text you bought and use it on coffee mugs. You can use inspirational sayings, funny pictures, or motivational quotes.

You can do the same thing with wall art. You can buy PLR and use that to have wall art like pictures, canvasses, signs, and even 3D décor for sale. But you can also use it on clothing such as t-shirts, hoodies and more.

Some people put PLR content on stickers and sell those. These can be used for calendars, in planners, on journals and more. After you buy PLR, you can take this content and customize it.

You can change the color, the font, add or mix in other PLR content and sell it as your own product. Once you buy it, it’s yours to use, but you can’t pass the private label rights ownership on to others to use as their content, too.

You can then sell your tangible or digital download products on online platforms such as Etsy or even from your own site. You just have to create an online shop there and there are plenty of step-by-step tutorials to help you get started.

For the best success on Etsy, don’t just have one product to sell. You’ll want to launch your shop with several products ready to publish. This helps you rank higher in the search algorithm, making it easier for customers to find your brand new shop.

You can also sell your items through a platform like Shopify. This allows you to create your own shop on your own website. The advantage of using Shopify is that you can price your items higher and you’re not competing with other shops on the same platform like you are on places like Etsy.

However, both sites do have a lot of pros and cons. You just have to choose the one that suits you best. You can also sell something like coloring pages or coloring books using PLR content on sites like Amazon. Just make sure you make them unique so that Amazon doesn’t see it as duplicates of someone else.

Working for Others in Your Spare Time

Those business models may not be ones that you think you want to do. What you could do instead is start working for others in your spare time. You can do this online simply by tapping into your knowledge and skills.

One area you could get started in is freelance work. You don’t need much to get started in this and you can often do so without putting any money into it to start up. For example, if you want to freelance, all you need is a site where others can find you.

This could be a free website, a social media site, a group or a platform that has a lot of other freelancers. A well-paying category in freelancing is ghostwriting. If you can write well (and this includes things like spelling and understanding grammar), then you can ghostwrite for others.

The type of ghostwriting that you can do will depend on the client you work for. You may write an eBook for one client if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction. But you can also write things like reviews or blurbs for products.

You can ghostwrite white papers or speeches. You can write fiction novels. Some well-known authors use a ghostwriter. You write the material and get paid, but you don’t get the credit for having done the work.

You can also become an affiliate manager. This is someone who basically runs the affiliate program for someone else. This person usually takes care of finding affiliate marketers to recruit for an upcoming launch, answering questions, dealing with problems that arise and more.

You may decide that you’d like to become a virtual assistant. This is someone who handles administrative tasks like sending or responding to emails, making appointments, handling customer issues and more for clients.

Or, you could use your skills to become a graphic designer. This is someone works with visual content. You might create advertisements, make logos, work on banners, or do things such as make covers for books or pamphlets.

When you become a freelancer, you’re the one in charge. You get to decide how much income you’d like to earn. You can make it so that you’re working full time or you can let it be a part time job.

You also get to choose the hours that you work. You can work in the mornings or the afternoons. You can work in the evenings or do a split day. You can work solely during the week with all weekends off or you can work weekends only.

It’s all up to you. You don’t have to schedule yourself to take on more work than you’d like to do. You’re the boss and you get to decide how many projects you do as well as choose the clients you’ll accept.

You can use a calendar to schedule which weeks you’ll have projects due and if you want to take a month off and not do any freelancing, you can arrange that, too. As a freelancer, whatever area you work in, you’ll also get to set your own price.

Each category will have a low end as well as a high end for pricing. You can follow guidelines or you can determine what you’ll charge based on what you’re offering as well as your skill set.

Self-Publishing Books at Your Own Pace

The world of publishing is an exciting venture. While it can be difficult to break into traditional publishing, anyone can self-publish. There are no gatekeepers to prevent you from living your dream of publishing your novels.

This is an endeavor that’s perfect for seniors and you can publish nonfiction or fiction. Or, you can do some of both if you prefer to. You don’t have to follow a set schedule for writing and releasing your own books.

So there’s no right or wrong pacing. You can work in your own time frame – whether that’s multiple books per year or one per year. You’ll want to start by picking the right genre.

It’s important that you make it one that you love reading in so that you’ll enjoy writing those types of books. For example, if you hate reading science fiction books, you won’t enjoy writing them.

In order to build a successful career, you may want to consider publishing several in the same category in order to build a following of readers. When an audience hungers for your writing, it’s easier to sell books.

But don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself if you find that you started in one genre but you ended up not liking it as much as you thought you would. It’s okay to decide that you want to go in a different direction and start writing in another genre.

It’s also okay to write in multiple genres. Many self-published authors do this. You’ll need to understand what you’re doing – whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction – so take a little time to study the craft.

You can look up tutorials online for both types of writing. With nonfiction, you can use your expertise or skills. Or, you can research what’s needed to write the book. It doesn’t take a lot of money to self-publish.

You can do this on a shoestring. You’ll need a cover and you can find premade ones available for every genre or make one yourself. You can find them on places like Fiverr. You can also find covers for sale within social media groups.

You’ll want someone to edit your work or review it before publishing because some platforms will take your book down if there are too many typos or grammatical errors. This can result in lost income and you don’t want that to happen.

The books will need to be formatted. Some platforms will aid with this or you can hire someone to do it. When it’s time to upload the book, you can upload your document straight to some platforms, while others require the project to be put into a special format, such as mobi.

The platforms where you can sell your book include ones such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, KOBO, Smashwords, or iTunes. Choose your platform carefully and read all of the terms of service.

Some platforms are more restrictive about what you can do with your content once it’s published. For example, if you put your book in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, you can’t sell your book anywhere else for at least 90 days, where it will auto-renew unless you choose not to.

There is no right or wrong business model for you to choose. Take a look at what’s common for your niche and then compare it to the effort, time and money it takes to get going – including time spent learning how to succeed with it.

Things That Sell the Best for Online Marketers

There are three main topics that sell well online:

1. Love & Relationships
2. Personal Improvement (Brain & Body)
3. How to Make Money Online

Not being an expert on either of the first two, I chose #3; How to Make Money Online after reading a book called “The Lazy Mans Way to Riches.”

Although it was new to me, it seemed like a simple enough topic to learn and become an expert at.  I’ll admit, at first I thought you could just put up a website and make a million dollars overnight.  Turns out, that is not the case.

But once I learned how to use simple tools (nothing I learned in school by-the-way), it all came together.

and the thing is, the tools for marketing and selling on the internet are common across all three niches I mention above.   And the best thing is, it does not cost anywhere near what you would spend to start a franchise or store in a mall or any of those type of businesses.  Not even close!

For more info on starting your own business, please visit http://www.SeniorsAndRetirees.com

Next Article: How Retirees Can Use PLR to Brand Yourself on Social Networking Sites

Fred “The Submarine Guy” Raley

Fred@SubmarineGuy.com

http://www.SeniorsAndRetirees.com