Lesson 1 of 7
What to give away
Before anything else you need one thing worth handing over for free. You do not have to invent it. It is already written down somewhere in your inbox.
Start here
The mistake almost everyone makes first
People sit down to invent a lead magnet. They think about what would look impressive, or what a competitor has. Then they spend three weeks on a forty-page ebook nobody opens.
You do not invent it. You already answer the same handful of questions every week — by email, on the phone, in the first ten minutes of every consultation. One of those answers, written down properly, is your free asset.
It works because it is proof rather than promotion. Someone reads a straight answer to the question they were quietly worried about, and decides you know what you are doing.
Four that work
Lead magnet ideas for a service business
Two pages, not forty. The test is whether someone can read it in five minutes and do something differently the same day.
A checklist
What to do, in order, before or after something that matters. The thing you talk people through on every first call.
A short guide
Two pages answering the question they always ask. Use their words as the title, not your industry's words.
A template
The thing you rebuild from scratch for every client anyway. A form, a plan, a letter, a spreadsheet.
A worked example
One real situation start to finish, with no names. People trust a specific story more than a general promise.
The fear
Give away the what. You still get paid for the how.
The worry is always the same: if I tell them how, they will not need me. It works the other way around.
The what is the thing that needs doing. Give it away. It is usually public knowledge anyway, and saying it out loud proves you know your work. The how is doing it properly in one person's specific situation, and that takes experience and judgement you cannot fit on two pages.
Give a straight answer and people think "she knows what she is doing" and call you. Give a vague teaser and they think "she is selling me something" and scroll on.
The test, before you publish anything. What did I just give away, and what am I still paid for? If you cannot answer the second question, the problem is not that you said too much. It is that you have not yet worked out what your real service is.
Ten minutes
Find your questions without staring at a blank page
Open your email and your text messages, and read the last twenty questions a customer asked you. Write down the five that come up most. If you would rather have help pulling them out of your head, paste this into Claude or ChatGPT.
Prompt: find what I should give away
It asks four questions before it writes anything. Answer them properly — vague answers in, vague guide out. And check any fact about your own industry before you publish it.
Where this goes
This is the first link in a chain
The guide you choose here earns you an email address, that address becomes a conversation, and the conversation becomes a client. Everything after this lesson is plumbing.
The finished version of that chain is laid out day by day in the free 7-Day Content Engine guide. If the part that interests you is being found on Google rather than posting more, that is what SEO services and a hand-built website are for. The posting itself gets faster with Uniqueme, and there is more on all of it on the blog.
Your task before lesson 2
Write down the five questions your customers ask you most often. Do not write the answers yet. Just the questions, in their words, not yours.
The seven lessons
Read them in order, or jump to the one you are stuck on
- 1 What to give awayYou are here.
- 2 Write it in two pagesDraft it in one sitting, using a five-part shape.
- 3 The page that collects emailsOne page, one job, and what to leave off it.
- 4 Set up your list properlyThe half hour that decides inbox or spam folder.
- 5 Tell people it existsWhere to put the link, and how to keep mentioning it.
- 6 One thing, six placesTurn a single idea into a week of content.
- 7 Sell what you knowCharge for the deeper version, with nothing monthly.