How to Find Free Giveaways for Your Blog (To Get Email Leads)
Building an email list is a great way to increase the engagement of your audience. A more engaged audience will lead to more sales and more money in your pocket.
If you just starting out, and trying to build a landing page, collect emails to build an email list, you might have no idea how to create an lead magnet. What would be a good giveaway, that has some value so people would give up their ‘best email address‘, but you don’t give away something ‘too valuable’, right? So, where can you get free giveaways from, that you could use as a lead magnet?
Lead Magnets
Getting email leads is not that difficult: you need a simple opt-in page and a giveaway product, also called a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. (Getting good leads is a different matter…). But where do you find free giveaways for your website?
The giveaway product can be something physical, or more often a digital, downloadable piece of content.
It can be something YOU have created such as an ebook (or ebooks), checklists, templates, video(s), podcast(s) etc. or something that you have bought (and for digital contents, have the right to give it away to your audience).
Let’s have a look at those that someone else has made, and then you use them as a lead magnet.
Where to Get Giveaways From?
As a beginner it can be very intimidating to create something that ‘reveals a secret’, or teaches something that could not be learned elsewhere. Especially true, if you feel that you are not an ‘expert’ in the area, just someone who has a blog about something they enjoy. Although you can start working on your own e-book or info-product that you can give away even if your are not an expert, but until its ready (you are ready), you have two options:
- Buy something really cheap and then ‘give it away’, but charge for postage and packaging (the initial cost of the item would be covered by the postage fee)
- For digital products, the best place to find free giveaways for your blog / website is a PLR site.
Find Cheap Physical Products to Give Away
You best bet here is DealExtreme, AliExpress or Alibaba. If you have not heard of them, they are the biggest online retail sites in China. You can literally buy ANYTHING for a ridiculously low price, often with free postage.
DealExtreme has an entire category for the $0.99 and below, but you can filter by <$1.99 to<$4.99 too, anything above $5 is in the ‘luxury’ category.
Aliexpress is very similar to Amazon, you can find a lot of products in every category. You simply put them in your basket and wait for the delivery to arrive. As they come from China, delivery can take up to 2-4 weeks, so this must be considered.
Alibaba is slightly different. You can contact the manufacturer directly, make custom-orders etc. You also get a discount for higher quantities.
If you manage to find anything around $1 (there are surprisingly lot of items for $0.99 or less), you only need to charge a dollar extra for postage and you practically have a free giveaway.
I know it sounds a bit cheating, but believe me, lots of people do this…it is still much better than buying something for $0.99 on AliBaba and then selling it on Amazon for $5.99, although a lot of people make out a living off that too.
Anyways, it can be a great lead magnet. So even if you order something more expensive from Alibaba or Aliexpress as your ‘giveaway’, with a combination of other, charged-for products in line and a good email campaign, you can easily make a nice profit on it.
Giveaway Digital Products – PLR
PLR is short for Public Label Rights. The creator of these products allows 3rd party sites to use their products as their own. There are different levels though of what they allow you to do with their product. I am most interested in the ones that you can to put your name and logo on and then sell it or give it away as your own.
The Most Common PLR Products
You can find software, videos (tutorials), ebooks, graphics (logos, infographics, clipart pictures etc.), audio (music & sound effects that you can use in videos and podcasts), templates (even complete done-for-you website templates for various niches) with public label right. So if you’d like to get free eBooks to upload to your website for people to download them for free, a PLR eBook could be perfect for you.
Can I Give Away PLR Products for Free?
There are thousands of PLR products that you can give away for free. The usage rights are always clearly indicated for every PLR product. But it is also true that there are a lot of PLR products – and most of them belongs to this category – that cannot be given away for free. (But you have the right to sell them for money, and you set the price.)
Where to find PLR products
There are quite a few PLR sites where you can get access for a limited number of products for free, or unlimited access for a yearly fee, or lifetime access for usually around $100. If you have multiple websites in different niches, it comes really handy that you can test out different giveaways. You also have access to thousands more that you can sell either through your website or on Facebook or Amazon for example.
What are the most popular PLR sites
PLR Database
- Highest value
- Fresh PLR products
- 25,000 PLR products, free access to 1,358 of them
I have found this the best PLR site of the ones that I have listed here, in terms of how up-to-date and relevant the products are. The FREE membership account comes with ‘unlimited’ free downloads, access to training and forums.
PLR-database has almost over 25,000 products in their library. There are Exclusive and Platinum products as well, these are only available if you pay the membership fee. Membership starts from as little as $4.08 a month ($49 paid yearly) to $10 a month, it can be cancelled at any time.
ID PLR
- 200 free products
- 12,500+ plr products
- done for you landing page and hosting for PLR products
- lifetime access for a one-off fee
IDPLR has gone through a bit of a revamp recently, the biggest upgrades that they have implemented are the landing page creator and the hosting service. Some of the PLR products – especially software – can take up more than 500Mb of space, so hosting them on your website is not a great idea.
If your audience starts downloading them, you would quickly use up your bandwidth. So IDPLR offers you free hosting and they have also integrated a sales page / landing page creator that you can use, you just need to hook it up with your email responder.
Although there are ’only’ 12,500 PLR products (you can download 200 for free after registration), IDPLR also has 200,000+ PLR articles in every niche imaginable. You can just grab these articles, re-format / revamp them for your keywords and publish them on your blog.
An eCover creator is also included in the membership account: you can literally replace the cover of an eBook and claim it as your own.
As for access fees, IDPLR is very cost-efficient as the GOLD membership only costs $89 for unlimited lifetime access.
InDigital Works
- 200 products with the free membership
- landing page creator and hosting,
- eCover creator
InDigitalWorks is literally the same as IDPLR, I am not even sure if they are two different companies. Or it may be just because they both used Clickbank to build out their website? Anyways…Same amount of PLR products (probably the same PLR products), hosting, sales page and landing page creator, eCover creator etc.
The only difference is that you can upgrade to life-time Gold Membership for $79.
Unstoppable PLR
- Buy one product with resell rights
- You can promote PLR products for 50% commission
Unstoppable PLR is a little different from the ones above. Here, you can buy OR promote PLR products. Ie you either buy them and then you can base your own branded product, course etc. on the products you have bought; or you promote those to other people who are looking for PLR products that they can tailor to their needs (and then intend to re-sell them) and earn 50% commission.
I included it in this list because most of the product packages include plenty of different individual ‘products’ like ebooks, articles, videos, podcasts, imagery. You can select one of those as your giveaway, and charge for the rest, or you can build a course around it that starts free (e.g. first 3 lessons are free) but the rest would be available for paid members only.
Create Your Own Lead Magnet
If you DO have the content that you can turn into an e-book then there are a few free software that I can recommend.
Canva (www.canva.com)is a multifunctional design tool. It has a free and a paid for version. Even the free version is great to create stunningly looking, eye-catching info-charts and info-graphics (it can be used to design your own logo too, or to get more royalty free stock photos for your website). There are plenty of font-types and templates that you can adapt to your needs.
It also has an e-book creator, so you can design the front cover and then convert your content into an e-book.
Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) is quite an old program, but its free and does everything you may ever need to create an e-book. You can export your e-book into any well-known and less-known file format. It works on any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac).
ePUBee (http://epubee.com/maker.html) is a plugin for Microsoft Word. As you write your e-book in MS Word, you can export it into a .pdf or an .epub file with one click.
Conclusion
To be completely honest with you, I am not a big fan of lead magnets and giveaways. If you dig deep down and ask yourself, why you need a lead magnet, the answer is that you want an engaged audience, whose contact details (ie email addresses) are in your pocket, so you can pitch your product after 2-3 emails.
If your lead magnet is as good as it promises and solves a real problem in an easily digestible way, than that’s fine. Most of the time though, these ‘lead magnets’ over-promise and under-perform. Sadly, people have used to it and don’t expect much from a freebie. It is really difficult to make a lead magnet with a catchy name (catchier than the next one), AND deliver on the promise. So it ultimately the result will be over-promising and under-performing.
If there is one (two) things that will suffer a damage from a ‘under-performing’ lead magnet is your reputation and user engagement. Quite the opposite of what you wanted in the first place.
Which one is better? 100k emails on your list, with 5% open rate and 3% conversion rate, or a 10k email list with 50% open rate and 20% conversion rate?
If you have a really great lead magnet with awesome content, why would not you just publish it on your blog? If you put out great content consistently, people will want to be on your email list, regardless if you promise them a freebie or not.
You might like this too: How To Get On Google Page One – Create Content That Ranks
Andre Chaperon (tinylittlebusinesses.com) has some very interesting thoughts about how to make your audience more engaged. Before you set up your email campaign, it’s worth a read.
What do you think? Have you ever found a lead-magnet that actually delivered on the promise it had made? What was you reaction?
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