How I Gained 1,200+ Email Subscribers and 4 Figures of New Revenue with a Free Product.

Hey friend,

A few weeks back, I ran a training for one of my high-ticket programs, a 60-day cohort called the LinkedIn Inbound Machine.

As I was preparing and giving my students an in-depth breakdown of the importance and application of lead generation assets for their funnel and thus, business, I realized I was missing this important part of my funnel as well.

This made me think.

And, as the creative whirlwind I am, I came up with the idea and brought this into existence in a few days.

In less than 2 weeks, I gained 1,200+ email subscribers and it resulted in 4 figures of cash collected down the line.

Here’s the full breakdown of the process:

Disclaimer:
In the nearly 1000 days of my creator existence, I’ve launched approximately 20 products, of which most failed. So, me sharing this success story with you isn’t to brag about how good I think I am. It’s to help you understand and hopefully execute a similar process.

Step 1: Ideation

Here’s how I came up with this valuable free product:

I thought of myself what’s the main problem my audience faces:

“Not being able to generate leads through LinkedIn”

While this is a big problem and can’t be easily solved with a digital product, there are a few sub-problems I can solve with a DIY digital product.

One of them:

How to write a LinkedIn Post that makes my audience take action and send me a DM.

My solution:

Give my audience the in-depth breakdown, in a templatized form, of my best-performing LinkedIn Posts.

Posts that have generated 100s of leads and bottom-line, resulted in 5 figures of new revenue.

Et voila, the free product was “born”

Note: if you don’t know the needs and desires of your audience yet, you always want to validate your idea, before you start building your product. In this specific, I skipped this step, just because I understand my audience very well and thus I solely acted on my gut feeling (which is ofcourse based on countless interactions with my audience).

Step 2: Validation

As I said in the step above, for this specific product, I kinda skipped the validation stage, because I trusted my gut instinct (not always a good thing).

In 95% of the cases, you want to validate your idea first.

Quick how-to:

1. Publish a post where you speak about your idea, and how it helps your audience to get from their painful to pleasurable situation.
2. Ask your audience if they want to have it (if it’s paid, include this part - important)
3. Read this 11-step breakdown (a bit outdated) on how to validate your idea and turn it into a product

Here’s an example of a validation post for another product I recently launched, the LinkedIn Audience Accelerator:

Ok, back to the story.

Step 3: Creation

Especially with creating these free products, I aim to keep things as lean as possible.

Hence the reason the initial landing page didn’t have many bells and whistles.

Just the name of the product, the outcome it will give my audience (if implemented), and some social proof by adding the results it gave me.

Secondly, the actual product.

In this case, “nothing more” than a simple 4-part email sequence, which obviously performs really well:

Lastly, I’ve created a really simple automation flow in ConvertKit to guide subscribers the right way.

Step 4: Promotion

Ok, the next step.

A step where I - with recent products - massively “failed”.

Well, I took my lessons and improved my promotional game.

Here’s how I approached it this time:

First, we’ve got launch day:

• I wrote a simple and short post starting with the results the templates got me.
• As the branding guy I am, I made sure to have a fitting image to grab more attention
• I talked about the fact it was free (attention-grabber as everyone likes free stuff)
• I spoke a little bit about the problem it solves (“not being able to generate leads”)
• I added a simple CTA (“get to the comment section to get this”)
• I asked people to like the comment (so it got pinned)

Et voila.

The post performed way better than expected, both in conversion as in engagement.

Huge win.

So…

As the marketer I am, the next two days, I pushed it again:

I went for a combination of direct messaging and more from a ‘problem’ perspective.

Both posts performed really well and got more quality people into the product.

After these two posts, I made sure to include a clear CTA in the other posts I published that week.

It’s funny to see that my audience witnessed the fast growth of the lists, which ofcourse, makes up for more social proof.

Then around a week later, I decided to push one more direct post to promote the product (for now).

Step 6: Results

The moment you’ve all been waiting for.

Right?

The results.

After a week and a half of intense promotion. I was very aware of the fact that I “exhausted” my audience quite a bit.

The sign-up stats confirm this:

(but, I’m aware of the fact that interest is always highest at launch day and then slows down - nothing to worry about)

At this moment in time, 1174 legends have gotten the training and so far people love it.

Here’s what one of the students had to say about the “3-Day Content Conversion Challenge”:

And then ofcourse, the biggest question you might have:

“Jessie, how did you make 4 figures in net revenue from a free product?”

Here’s the short answer (as I’ll expand on this strategy in the near future):

After people completed the “3-Day Content Conversion Challenge”, I gave them the option to do more.

More in the form of more action.

And, to be specific here:

The LinkedIn Audience Accelerator - a 30-day training to build a consistent writing habit on LinkedIn, grow your following, and in some cases, generate high-quality leads. With a vibrant community that supports each other massively.

This is a paid training, but according to the students who’ve run through it, a no-brainer in terms of investment.

Wanna know more about this training?

You can check it out here.

Allright my friends.

That’s it for this week.

I hope this was helpful, and even more: I hope this gets you fired up to start ideating, creating, launching, and promoting your own product.

Let’s fricking go 🚀

Chat soon.

Your Personal Creator Guide,

Jessie

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