I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.
Free lead magnets are cutting your growth by 2/3rds
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I've completely stopped creating new lead magnets for my business. Why? Well, I could go over the same old ground and once again hammer you with the messages of...
But, there's another reason. One which is - in my opinion - more important and underpins the other two. In fact, this underpins the entire success of your growth strategy. Look, running ads or paying for any marketing for your business comes down to one thing. The economics. If you have to spend $100 to acquire a customer then you need...
It's not rocket science. It all comes down to getting that investment back ASAP and then increasing the LTV to turn a healthy profit. Free lead magnets make this three times harder. Let's say you have a free lead magnet that has a 30% opt-in rate (the average CVR), and the thank you page is a self-liquidating offer. You're paying an average $3 per click for your ads. Which means you're now paying $9 per view of your paid offer. That free lead magnet filter is tripling your...
And this is all assuming that the free lead magnet is a perfect tie-in with the paid offer. If there's a mismatch here, you can expect even lower CVRs on the paid offer. There was a time when this approach worked. When ads were cheap and people were more receptive. But that time has passed. Efficiency is the name of the game now, and the most efficient method of running ads is to look at how you can get that payback period as short as possible. You do that by putting the paid offer at the front, and not hiding it behind a free lead magnet. Pete "paid offers up front" Boyle P.S. - If you're questioning how you can run ads direct to a high ticket offer - you don't. You create a small offer that identifies buyers and then ascend them to the HTO. I teach you how to craft that initial offer in the $1 Product Challenge. |
Growth Models
I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.
Picture this... You've identified the problem in your business. Where things break down and money is being lost. You analyse, design the fix, and set everyone on the path to implementing that fix. Time to pop the champaign right? Nope. After you've built that awesome fix, you see... nothing. No improvements, no meaningful changes, no new sales. And you're back to square one. It's a problem I see a lot. People fixing the symptom, but completely missing the cause. here's what I mean. I worked...
If we were to sit down and go through all the things I've done right in my career, and then all the things I've done wrong... ... the time split would be like a 10/90 split. I've failed so much more than succeeded over the years. They're good teaching moments. But, one of the more dangerous things in business isn’t choosing the wrong tactic. It’s committing to it. Once you’ve got buy-in from yourself or your team, you want it to work. So you keep pushing it longer than you should. Case in...
A big name marketer shared the results of a study he did last week on how brands are marketing in 2026. Long story short, most of them are... Cutting ad spend Cutting content/online PR Removing agencies ... all because the lead quality is trash. It went on to explain how people are moving back to in-person marketing and the established methods are dying off. Which ain't exactly true. Look, brands are cutting spend. And yeah, I agree that in-person stuff - or at least non AI stuff - is gonna...