A free download is the most ordinary thing in marketing, and it gets explained backwards nearly every time. The giveaway is the small part. What you're actually after is permission to write to one person a second time, and everything worth having here comes out of the second time.
Six hundred followers and not one address
You have followers somewhere. Six hundred, or two hundred and eleven, or a number you stopped checking. You post on a Tuesday and forty of them see it, and which forty is decided by something nobody has ever explained to you.
So when you finally have something to sell, the only route you have to the people who already like you runs through a company you have never spoken to.
The shortage here isn't audience. Every person you have reached in four years of teaching belongs to somebody else's software, and the arrangement can change on a Wednesday afternoon with no warning and no appeal. Teachers who have had the same twelve people in the room since 2022 and still have no way to email a single one of them know exactly how that feels from the other end.
A free thing, offered in exchange for an email address, is the plainest way out. It is also slow, and I'd rather say so here than at the bottom of the page. You will not have a list by the weekend. What you'll have by the weekend is eleven people, and eleven people who asked to hear from you is a better position than six hundred who never did. It builds at the pace of your teaching: all year, and you notice it in February. And it cannot rescue a course nobody wants: if the paid thing is wrong, this only makes the wrongness arrive sooner. We are also small and new next to the places most practitioners keep a mailing list, which is fair to hold against us.
The free thing should finish something
Most giveaways are a summary of something. Seven tips. A checklist. The five mistakes people make.
Summaries feel generous while you're making them and land as nothing, because the reader half suspected all seven already, and the file goes into a downloads folder to be dealt with by whoever they become next year. Nobody has been taught anything. You have proved you can make a list, and the thing you're selling is that you're good in a room with somebody who is stuck.
So give away something with an end on it. A single practice, recorded, eight minutes long, that they can do tonight while the kettle goes. One exercise you take every new client through in the first session, written out exactly as you say it. Something that starts and finishes and leaves them slightly different at eleven o'clock than they were at ten to.
That's a lower bar than it sounds, and a completely different experience for the person on the other end. They haven't read about your teaching. They have had a small piece of it.
While I'm here: "lead magnet" is a horrible phrase. It sounds like a part you'd order for a car. The people who teach this for a living talk about baiting hooks and capturing leads, and you can hear in the vocabulary that the person on the other end is being thought of as tackle. Call it a first lesson instead. It's more accurate, and it'll change what you make.
Four that work for practitioners
- The real first lesson of the course you sell. Not a taster built to leave them wanting. The actual lesson. Anybody who finishes it knows what the other eleven are like and has already made the decision.
- The thing you say in every first session. Every practitioner has one. The explanation you have given four hundred times and are faintly bored of. It is your best material and you've never written it down because it feels too obvious to you. It is not obvious to them.
- One recording they can use tonight. Short, finished, usable without you. If somebody plays it twice, you're in a different relationship with them than you were on Sunday.
- One decision, made easy. Which of three things to start with, for a person in a particular situation, answered flat out rather than hedged. Practitioners hedge in public because they are careful people, and nobody can act on a hedge.
Whatever you pick, it wants to come out of the part of your subject you know cold, which is usually not the part you find most interesting.
Day three is where this is won or lost
Here's the part that separates a list from a folder full of email addresses.
Somebody downloads the thing on Sunday night. If nothing arrives afterwards, then eight weeks later when you write to announce a course, you're a stranger with a sales pitch, and they'll have forgotten handing over the address at all. Every unsubscribe you get that morning will be deserved.
What has to happen instead is four or five short emails over a fortnight, written once, sent in order without you. Not a newsletter. One thought each, two hundred words, the sort of thing you'd say to somebody putting their coat on after a class. Did you try it. Here's the bit most people get stuck on. Here's what I'd do next. By the fifth one you're somebody they know, and the course you mention in week nine is an offer from a person rather than an interruption from a brand.
In CourseSpaces those are drip emails, attached to the free thing and triggered by what the student does with it. You write them the same evening you write the free thing, while you can still remember what you were trying to teach, and after that they go out on their own to everybody who arrives. It's the highest-value hour of work anywhere in this, and the one everybody skips, because the download feels finished the moment it exists.
Making one takes an evening
The free thing is a product like any other, priced at nothing. A course with one section in it, or a single product holding one recording and a page of text. You publish it, and it gets a page of its own with a sign-up on it, built in the sales page builder.
Nobody has to get past a card or invent a password before they've read a word, because guest checkout handles a free product without any of that. If you've already written the page for the paid course, it's worth knowing that the words that work out loud are not the words that work in writing before you write this one.
The paid course sits on the same account, behind the same login, in your colours. When somebody who took the free thing buys the real one, nothing about their world changes. There's one more thing on the dashboard they already have.
Their name lands on your own client list
Everyone who takes it appears on your client list, which belongs to your account rather than to an app you post on, and you can see who opened what and how far in they got. When there's something worth saying you write to all of them at once as a broadcast. You can also bring in a list you keep somewhere else, pasted in or uploaded as a spreadsheet, so the nineteen people from that workshop in 2023 finally go somewhere other than a notebook.
When this is the wrong thing to spend an evening on
- There is nothing to sell afterwards yet. A first lesson at the top of a staircase with no stairs is unpaid work. Build the paid thing first, even roughly, then come back.
- You teach one to one, three clients a month, and you're full. Your limit is hours in the week, not names on a list. A waiting list does that job and takes ten minutes to set up.
- Nobody will put their name next to your subject. A good deal of what practitioners do is private enough that an email address feels like too much to hand over, and a download landing in a shared family inbox is a real problem for whoever asked for it. If that's your work, the free thing belongs somewhere it can be read without signing anything.
- The follow-up is never going to get written. If those four emails won't exist, the download is a file leaving the building and nothing else. Better to know that tonight than in eight weeks.
What it costs
$47 a month, one plan. The free product, its page, the drip emails, the broadcasts and the client list are all in it, alongside unlimited courses and products, 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant at 1,500 messages a month, communities, chat and coupons. There's no tier where the emails live, because there's no second tier.
We take 0% of what you sell. You connect your own Stripe account and keep everything except Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, which everybody pays everywhere. The trial runs 30 days and doesn't ask for a card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee after it.
Pick the eight minutes of your teaching you'd happily hand to a stranger. That is the whole decision. The rest of it is an evening.