How To Set Up A Lead Magnet On WordPress

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Do you want to offer a lead magnet on your WordPress website but don’t want to pay hefty prices for plugins and subscription services? There’s no need to spend a cent to get a professional looking subscription page.

If you are a new internet marketer, looking to increase your presence online, then the first thing you should do is create a website and grow your email list. This is where your lead magnet comes in. In this article I’ll lead you through the decision making steps and process I used to create a completely free and fully functioning landing page, content and email delivery system.

Lead Magnet Delivery On WordPress

The concept is simple: You offer something of value for free and in return you collect email addresses from your subscribers. However, setting up a lead magnet on WordPress isn’t necessarily as straight forward as it may seem.
In it’s most basic form, here’s what you need:

1. You need a thing to give away, usually an eBook that would be of interest to your subscribers
2. You need a form on a webpage to collect information from subscribers
3. You need to be able to integrate that form with an autoresponder so that you can save your subscriber details
4. You need to be able to serve your giveaway to your subscribers and maintain security on your site.

Your giveaway, needs to be something of real value. Make it attractive and worthwhile. If you create something that goes above and beyond, and really amazes the reader then you’ll have a fan.  To ensure that you get your subscribers coming back for more, you really have to make it special!

Allow Data Entry With Forms

The form will allow data entry – names and email addresses. The data is saved in a database in your WordPress directory. There are some excellent plugins that will do this task for you. The most common form creator is Contact Form 7. Contact Form 7 will integrate nicely with a variety of autoresponders, notably MailChimp.
When you use a form plugin, you will be given a shortcode that you can use to embed the form in any webpage you choose. You are going to need to tweak the form a little so unless you know some CSS or are willing to learn, then I see a trip to Fiverr on your horizon very soon.

Each autoreponder will have an interface that can communicate with one or more form builders, and most have their own form builder as well. Each have their own limitations that you may or may not be able to live with. I wanted to be able to build multiple, different forms. This would give me the ability to collect leads from different campaigns, serve them different incentives and save the subsequent data to different lists. So, the most common marriage or CF7 and MailChimp is a no-go, because MailChimp  free plugin only allows one form. But there is an equally good, if not better solution that I want to tell you about. Let’s talk autoresponders next.

Keep Lists and Automate Emails With An Autoreponder

The next thing to consider is your autoresponder. This piece of software/service performs several tasks for you. It maintains a list of your subscribers and provides tools to allow you to automatically send emails to your list/s.
The subtitle of this post should be “…without paying $ for subscription services”, because I wanted to create a guide that helped newcomers get their foot in the door. And so right off the bat, there’s some big players in the autoreponder market that I’m not even going to consider. Services like Aweber and GetResponse are the industry standard, but their services are expensive, and if you’re just starting out, prohibitively so. On the budget end, the most popular contender is MailChimp. MailChimp seems great for those just starting out. They have a free lite service and don’t charge unless you want to manage a list of over 2000 subscribers.
However, I found a couple of limitations that were a real deal breaker for me:
1. The free version of the MailChimp for WordPress plugin only allows one form to be created. This is a real headache if you want to have multiple lists and/or plan to offer content upgrades on your site. Content upgrades are the same as lead magnets, but the idea is that they are targeted to your audience, like I mentioned above. Thus, you’re going to need more than one form… Even if it’s not something you want to do now, I think the option should be there in the future. And I certainly didn’t see a reason to spend $59 a year for the premium plugin to overcome this limitation
2. The only free 3rd party form plugin that it does integrate with is Contact Form 7. This form plugin has a serious limitation in that you can’t (easily) re-direct to another page after signup. That means no Thank-You page and complicates the process of delivering the giveaway.

So here’s my solution. MailPoet.
MailPoet is quite simply amazing. I say this as an independent user. I am in no way affiliated with them. I just think their software is streets ahead of anything else out there in the free end of freemium autoresponders.
MailPoet allows multiple lists, has a great, easy to use Plugin. Forms are customizable with a little CSS knowledge and you can re-direct on completion. That means when your new subscriber gives you their email address, you can respond in kind with a lovely Thank You page. Craft it carefully and this page can also be the portal for the giveaway download.
Like MailChimp, you can run a list of up to 2000 subscribers, and after that the cost of entry to get on the Pro ladder is actually quite affordable.

How To Manage The Giveaway Delivery

You are going to need somewhere on your website to store your giveaway. I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re giving away a PDF document, but the process would be the same for any digital file.
In addition, you are going to need a page that has access to the storage area.

In practice what this means is that we need a plugin that can manage downloads, and we need to create a Thank You / Download page in our WordPress site.

For this task, I use a plugin called WordPress Download Manager. There are others out there, and I encourage you to do your own research. However, Download Manager is very well regarded, it is feature rich and has one piece of functionality that I think is very valuable, and couldn’t find in it’s competitors: it hides the address of the download page from the user. So, when someone hovers over the download link, they can’t see the address that the download is coming from. Nice.

When you click on ‘Files’ within Download Manager, you can then upload a new file by clicking on the ‘Add New’ button. This will open a WordPress page editor, with some extra functionality. The giveaway is uploaded by clicking on the ‘Select Files’ button in the right sidebar. The page can be given a name. Remember – you don’t need to give this page a memorable or understandable name. It should mean something to you, but it should not be easily guessable. You must add ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ tags to this page and remove it from WordPress search. I’ll explain this is the next section “A Note About Search Engines”.

I don’t change much else on this page other than the ‘Page Template’ in ‘Package Settings’. I set this to ‘Default’. This lists the least number of fields with the download and makes the link look neater in my opinion. Next, also under Package Settings’, click the ‘Icons’ tab and select the appropriate icon for your file type. This makes your Thank You / Download page look a lot nicer. Click ‘Publish’ to save the page and return to the Files list. Now, you should see your giveaway and alongside it, the shortcode that you need to embed in your Thank You / Download page.

Security is an issue for us, but we need to remember that this is an eBook that we are giving away for free. We just need to make our link obscure because we would rather have users sign up with an email address rather than just get a free book.

A Note About Search Engines

There is one more security point. Our Thank You page contains our download link, and is effectively a shortcut around the form to the free download. We don’t want this page to either:

  1. Show up in search engine results
  2. Show up in a WordPress site search

Pages that contain the noindex meta tag in their html code will not be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. You can simply edit the relevant WordPress header.php and insert the code to noindex the page, but I don’t do it this way. It’s is actually a pain in the butt to manage if you plan on doing this more often. I prefer to use an SEO plugin. Then all I have to do is check a tick box to noindex the pages that I want hidden. No worry and hassle free. Plus, there are the added benefits of SEO plugins. I have begun to use SEOPress for it’s ease of use.

Next, I stop pages from appearing in WordPress site search. It makes sense for any site pages that contain content that is meant to be read by everyone to be available through links or menu items. Any other pages should be hidden. If this sounds odd, then think category or tag pages, or your page with your download link. If you do this, then site search will only find posts related to the search term. Of course, this is an approach more suited to smaller websites, but it does make logical sense. If you are unsure what I mean, then check out this article for a run down on the difference between a page and a post.

To do this, you’ll need to add the following code to functions.php:

//Exclude pages from WordPress Search
if (!is_admin()) {
function wpb_search_filter($query) {
if ($query->is_search) {
$query->set(‘post_type’, ‘post’);
}
return $query;
}
add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’,’wpb_search_filter’);
}

That’s pretty much it for the overview.

Guided Set Up – Lead Magnet On WordPress

Here’s a breakdown of what you need to do and in what order:

  1. Install Download Manager plugin
  2. Install MailPoet plugin
  3. Install an SEO plugin like SEOPress.
  4. Upload the giveaway to Download Manager. Copy the shortcode for the download
  5. Create a Thank You page in WordPress for your new subscriber and embed the shortcode from Download Manager into it.
  6. Create a new list in MailPoet for your subscribers
  7. Create a new form in MailPoet for the offer. Copy the shortcode for the form
  8. Create a landing page for your offer and embed the MailPoet form by using the shortcode from step 7
  9. Edit your MailPoet form and update the ‘After submit’ setting to be the page you created in step 5.
  10. Use your SEO plugin to ‘noindex’ your Thank You Page and the page created by Download Manager to store the giveaway.
  11. Edit Functions.php to exclude all pages from WordPress search.

WordPress Lead Magnet Set Up Summary

So, as you can see there’s more than one way to go about this. You could quite happily choose to go with the ever popular combination of MailChimp and Contact Form 7. I do hope you see the advantages of the method I have laid out here. Using MailPoet’s combined autoresponder and form generator and integrating this with WordPress Download Manager gives you a much simpler solution that solves the problem of having to pay for overpriced plugins to get basic functionality.  In my opinion, the ability to re-direct to a URL from the form on completion is a very basic requirement.

Batteries Not Included: What Else You Need To Do

This guide is by no means extant. There are other elements that you’ll need to add in order to complete the whole process. What I aim to here is provide a technical overview, and omitted from the process are several design elements.
You will also need to do the following:

  1. Create a helpful giveaway that adds value or solves a problem
  2. Design a Landing Page to showcase your giveaway
  3. Design a Thank You / Download page

Thanks for reading. All comments are welcome.

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