Creating a Lead Magnet for Affiliate Marketing: 4 Steps [With Examples!]

As you’ve probably heard before, there are many types of affiliate marketers!

You can blog, vlog, post, stream, build websites… You can even attend live events and share QR codes with your affiliate links… You can buy ads, or run an online community… Everyone’s style is slightly different, but many of the best affiliates find a tried-and-true method and stick with it!

With that said, one of the top ways to find success as an affiliate is through email marketing, which usually starts with creating a lead magnet for affiliate marketing. Whether you use free or paid traffic (or both), it’s important to remember: “the money is in the list.” Email marketing is still the most cost-effective way to connect directly to your audience, instead of relying on other platforms and exposure from algorithms.

If you can get your people to share their email through lead magnets, you can begin engaging and selling to them directly. Read on to discover how to create a lead magnet for affiliate marketing!

What Is a Lead Magnet for Affiliate Marketing?

A lead magnet is a gated piece of content that your audience is interested in. By “gated,” I mean the content isn’t freely available – the visitor will have to share their email address and sign up for your email list in order to get that content.

Once you have someone’s email, they become a “lead” – and the content they receive in exchange for their email is the “magnet.” Here are official definitions:

• Lead – A potential customer. A contact you can communicate with to build further engagement and encourage them toward a purchase.
• Magnet – A piece of content that attracts leads and gets them to share information like their email address.
• Email List – A list of leads who have opted in and can be targeted for email marketing, a channel you control.
• Funnel – The path you guide prospects through (from a visitor to a lead to a customer).
• Conversion – When a lead makes a purchase and becomes a customer.

A lead magnet is any content that attracts leads and encourages them to join your email list in exchange for valuable content. From there, you can target them with the affiliate products you’re promoting, or even your own products!

Why Create a Lead Magnet?

Lead magnets are the first step to email marketing, a powerful channel for personalized selling. Email marketing is the only channel you can 100% control. Lead magnets are the key step in converting “cold” traffic from a primary source like content marketing to “warm” leads you can continually promote affiliate products to over time.

Once you can contact your leads through email, you can engage with them, nurture their interests, and guide them toward purchasing your affiliate products. You can cultivate a relationship and become a trusted source of recommendations so you can market to the same audience even after their first conversion. Best of all, through email marketing you do not have to recapture your audience each time. You can send offers and engaging content right to their inbox.

But first, you need lead magnets. No one will just give you their email address, but many people will gladly opt in if you offer the right gated content. So, let’s look at how to do that!

Affiliate Marketing Lead Magnet Examples

Some of the best examples of lead magnets can be found through your partnered sellers. Brands that partner with affiliates may offer content you can use as a lead magnet. This includes free digital materials, giveaways, and gifts. These goodies are things that warm up potential leads. If they want the first thing, they’re much more likely to be interested in more products or content from your affiliated brands.

Here are two examples of ClickBank sellers who have already prepared lead magnet materials for affiliates to use. These can give you inspiration for making your own lead magnets!

Wealth DNA

Wealth DNA is a self-help brand. Their lead magnet landing page offers a brief PDF peek into the Wealth DNA method and philosophy. The page is very well designed, featuring an image of the product’s cover on a starry background. A timer counts down from two minutes, creating a sense of urgency below the “Free Download” button which leads to the lead conversion form.

This is a classic example of free gated content. Signing up is free, but first the lead shares their email address to make them available for future nurturing and email marketing campaigns.

Brain Training for Dogs

Instead of a prepared landing page that affiliates can point people to, Brain Training for Dogs provides affiliates with a toolkit of free content, giveaways, and resources that you can use within your own landing page.

In this example, you can grab a free giveaway PDF and video for a dog training game that you can use to attract new leads. This brand shares a ton of resources for affiliates, from sales copy to banners, pre-written emails, and promotional videos.

How to Create Your Lead Magnet

Creating a lead magnet is easier than it sounds. Most of the work is just figuring out what will “hook” your ideal audience. Your goal is to create content that your audience wants and would be willing to share their email to gain access to.

While some people will bounce after landing your landing page, a good lead magnet is attractive enough to draw a significant audience to sign up. These people are also likely to be responsive to further pitches for the same brands and affiliate offers within a similar niche, which is exactly what you want as an affiliate!

1) Get to Know Your Audience

The first step in creating your lead magnet is to know your audience. Target a niche, whether it’s a special interest, lifestyle, hobby, industry, or set of goals – and research the people you are trying to attract.

In the world of marketing, this is referred to as an ideal customer profile, or ICP. You the ones who will need to find your magnet desirable enough to sign up.

2) Choose Your Lead Magnet Type

Design or select magnet content that is attractive to your audience. There are many different options for creating a lead magnet depending on what you can create and what your audience would want to download or gain access to.

Take time to craft a high-quality magnet or acquire a good magnet from your affiliated brands. Here are a few types of lead magnet content you can choose from:

• PDF Downloadable
  • Guide
  • Checklist
  • Data report
  • Infographic
  • Whitepaper
• Giveaway
  • Teaser content
  • Free course
  • Free trial
  • Free product or bundle
• Recorded Webinar
• Contest Entry

Now, you may have an impulse to “hold back” and not give as much value as you could with your lead magnet, because they want to reserve that for whatever product you’re promoting or selling. But this is a mistake – you want to put your best foot forward with potential leads!

Remember, this lead magnet is most people’s very first interaction with your content and their first impression of you. If you can make it feel like it’s a little insane that your lead magnet is available for FREE because of the quality, then you’re in the ballpark!

3) Create Your Landing Page

Now, you can embed your lead magnet into a landing page. Make it vivid, attention-grabbing, easy to read, and in a style that will resonate with your target audience.

Direct them to the sign-up button and emphasize the rewards of getting access to your lead magnet. People are more wary of giving away their email and signing up for things than they used to be, even when they’re advertised as “free” – but a compelling message and a quality deliverable can still break through and earn you conversions.

A quick note: it’s hard to overemphasize the importance of your call-to-action on a page like this. You need something more than just “Sign Up Here.” Tease the benefit your audience will get with your lead magnet: “Yes! I Want a Well-Behaved Dog!”

We have an entire guide to creating a landing page for affiliate marketing that can give you more information on this important step! We also recommend checking out ClickBank’s landing page builder, Accelerator, if you’re not sure which tool to use for building a page to promote your lead magnet.

4) Build the Lead Magnet Funnel

Of course, a good lead magnet is only as effective as the funnel it’s a part of. Here’s what a proper lead magnet funnel looks like:

After all, it’s not the lead magnet that get you sales, but the pitch emails you send after a lead opts in that do the job. Your audience also needs a way to find your lead magnet, which means you’ll want to plan a top-to-bottom funnel strategy to get the right people into your funnel.

ClickBank can help you take advantage of this popular lead magnet funnel. Here are the steps:

• Direct Traffic to Your Lead Magnet – If it makes sense, optimize the SEO of your lead magnet landing page to attract organic clicks from your niche. Beyond that, use other marketing methods like blog articles, videos, and social media posts to get more eyeballs on your lead magnet. You can even run paid ads to promote your lead magnet, if the financials back out!
• Build a Landing Page – You have to host your landing page somewhere. ClickBank Accelerator can hep you generate a landing page that automatically captures emails with a built-in email opt-in form. You can also build your landing page privately if you have a website already.
• Embed an Opt-In Form – Make sure your landing page is successfully capturing email signups. In ClickBank Accelerator, the funnel is set up for you to ensure that you can add new email subscribers to your list automatically.
• Direct Leads to “Thank You” Page – Be sure to thank your new leads with a special thank you page where they can access their lead magnet content.
• Set up Email Autoresponder – Set up an auto-responder email series to thank them for checking out your lead magnet and encouraging them to stick around for more value. Then, set up future emails to pitch them on your chosen affiliate products, nurture your audience, and build a relationship with them for future affiliate marketing efforts.
• Offer and Conversion – If your lead responds to the pitch email, they will click through your affiliate tracking link to the seller’s offer page and complete a sale, which will be credited to your affiliate account. You’ve got a sale!
• Track Your Leads – Keep in touch with your leads and nurture your email list to develop a long-term audience that is receptive to other affiliate offers – or maybe even your own products and services!

I know this sounds a bit complicated at first, but once you’ve learned how to set up a lead magnet funnel, it can start to bring in leads and affiliate sales like clockwork. It’s well worth the effort!

Lead Magnet for Affiliate Marketing Wrap-Up

Lead magnets are an essential part of developing a long-term audience through email marketing and cultivating conversions that may require more digital touch points than just one interesting social media post. There are many options for creating good lead magnets that resonate with your target audience!

Not sure where to start? Go to ClickBank’s marketplace, look for affiliate products to promote, and visit their affiliate tools pages for resources like swipe files that you can use as lead magnets for those products with your audience. Or if you want to create your own from scratch, you can use the copy from their sales pages and other marketing materials as inspiration for your lead magnets.

With a lead magnet ready to go, you can build your landing page, thank you page, and email list with ClickBank Accelerator and continue to promote new affiliate products to your audience with an autoresponder, as well as occasional broadcast emails to the entire list.

After you’ve created a page with an opt-in form, you can begin capturing email addresses and delivering your lead magnet. Overall, it’s a great long-term strategy to build your email list and grow your sales with pitch emails, sending your subscribers new products that they’ll love!

The good news is, it takes less than 15 minutes to sign up as a ClickBank affiliate and generate your first tracking link!

Deploy Your Lead Magnet With ClickBank Offers

If you’re curious about affiliate marketing and you’re ready to grow your affiliate marketing skills, you will find a wealth of tools and opportunities here at ClickBank. Explore ClickBank Accelerator, our funnel-builder tool that provides all the resources you need to build landing pages, create funnels, and capture email lists – in one place! 

You can also level up your knowledge and skills through Spark by ClickBank, an affiliate marketing education platform that walks students through how to learn affiliate marketing for free traffic or paid traffic methods. You’ll find courses that can help content creators grow and monetize their content through affiliate marketing strategies, including my own “Profitable Affiliate Blogging Course” for making money using SEO and an affiliate blog.

Whatever route you take, good luck on your affiliate marketing journey!