Nobody wants your 15 at-home workouts

I asked my Tuesday call who knows what a lead magnet is. Every hand went up.

Then I asked who actually uses one. Almost nobody.

I think what happens is you learn what a lead magnet is exactly one time, you make one, and then you never touch the idea again for the rest of your career. Mine sat untouched for years.

Strip it down and a lead magnet is just a trade. You already know precisely what you want out of it, which is their name, their phone number, and their email. The trade only happens if you also know what THEY want.

That second half is where all of us fall down. Facebook ads are the same trade in the most naked form possible: you hand over money, they hand over contact information, and both sides got exactly the thing they came for. Nobody's confused.

Then we sit down to build our own and produce fifteen at-home workouts.

Nobody wants that. We make it because we can make it in an hour out of stuff we already had, and we hand it to somebody standing in front of us who feels nothing.

This came up because a guy on the call was working a farmer's market booth and wanted to give away a free personal training session. Reasonable idea. Wrong crowd, and it took me a second to see why.

Those people have not decided to walk into a gym at all. That's the entire gap you're trying to close. Handing them a free session asks them to do the exact thing they've been avoiding for two years. If they wanted a free session, they'd have found you already. You're not lowering the bar, you're pointing at it.

The idea that actually worked came from somebody else in the room, and it's better than anything I had.

Find out which vendors are going to be at the market. Then build a dead simple meal plan around the food being sold thirty feet away. That's it. Trade it for a name, a number, and an email.

Look at the difference. One is built for you, from your existing stuff, worth roughly nothing to the person holding it. The other is built for them, about the exact tomatoes they are standing in front of RIGHT NOW, and it costs you an afternoon.

And whatever you end up handing out, get all three. Name, phone, email. Every time, at every free thing you ever do, forever. The number of times I've run something nice and walked away with a warm feeling instead of a list is not a number I want to write down.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.