How to Use Lead Magnets to Market Your Existing Articles

Bringing in an audience for articles you’ve published months or even years ago is tricky business, even for well-established blogs. There are plenty of tips out there for driving traffic to old posts whether by promoting evergreen content via social media or by repurposing old articles into new blog posts, but there’s one thing that people often overlook: lead magnets.

Traditionally, lead magnets are seen as the destination, not as the referrer. That means that you drive traffic to the lead magnet without the expectation that the lead magnet will, in turn, drive traffic to any additional content.

We don’t believe that’s the only way to benefit from lead magnets and we’re going to explain why.

How Lead Magnets Bring Back Old Blog Posts

Use Old Posts As the Basis of Your Lead Magnet

The first way to market your existing articles using lead magnets is to use those articles as the very basis of the lead magnets you’re creating. The trick is to find the articles that have proven interest but whose value has waned over time. To do this, go into your analytics package (for most of us that will be Google Analytics), look for posts that are at least one year old, which have a decent amount of traffic, and which have a higher-than-average time on page.

These are the posts that are most likely to do well in lead magnet form for two reasons:

First, these posts are clearly high quality in terms of getting people to read through to the end. It’s almost impossible to quantitatively judge the quality of something, but a high time on page is a good signal.

Second, these are posts that have done well historically but haven’t gotten much attention recently. That means you aren’t going to cannibalize your traffic.

Once you have a list of these posts you should begin to look for themes. Ideally, you’ll have between five and ten posts that fit your criteria that can be grouped together in a lead magnet

Then, it’s as simple as copying the content, styling it, and publishing the lead magnet. If that last part sounds like a pain, we automate the entire process in Beacon.

Link to Old Posts as Reference Material

In addition to making your old blog posts the basis of your new lead magnets, we’re also big believers that linking back to your old material can be a boon for traffic.

This will create a cycle wherein you continue to engage readers. First, they land on your blog and decide to download a lead magnet. Then, in the lead magnet, they see links to your blog that supplement the information in your lead magnet. This then brings them back to your site where they can either continue to consume your content or finally decide to sign up for your service.

This sort of virtuous cycle is incredibly powerful at not only driving traffic to both new and old posts alike, but also at increasing the number of new users and customers that you can attribute to your content efforts.

The Smart Way to Feature Lead Magnets on Social Channels

In a perfect world, we’d tweet about an article, see it picked up by the relevant segment of our followers, and see it organically spread for years to come as it educates and enlightens people far into the future.

We don’t live in a perfect world, though, which is why we need to constantly re-evaluate our social strategies when it comes to lead magnets and how they relate to old articles.

Share With Every Article

Once you’ve created a lead magnet based on your older blog posts, you’ll find that you’re suddenly in possession of a very powerful asset. What we mean is that instead of linking to old articles and trying to get people to click on old, recognizable links, you can instead market the lead magnet as a new and updated version of your classic posts.

You should do this every time you post a new article.

The sequence will look something like: publish a new article, post on social media about how the new article contains a link to a lead magnet that features years of wisdom updated for the present day, and finally watch people come to consume not only the new article but also sign up for the recycled lead magnet.

Make Use of Unique Features: Sign Up Forms, Snippets, etc.

One of the best ways to draw attention to your repurposed lead magnets is by making use of the built-in features we find on many social networks.

Among our favorites is Twitter’s feature that lets people sign up for newsletters with one click. This lets you send out a single tweet with a button that allows Twitter to send users’ email address directly to connected services like MailChimp.

We’ve seen that this can have a big impact on the number of sign ups for lead magnets companies see. If you post a tweet offering a downloadable PDF that collects your best posts on a particular theme and enable this benefit through the click of a single button, you’re going to quickly find the audience for what you’re publishing.

If you’d like to find out more about this, there’s a great post on getting it set up here.

Boosting Your Email Effectiveness

[bctt tweet=”Publishing lead magnets based on old articles doesn’t just impact your social media marketing, but also your email marketing.” username=”beacon_by”]

Increasing Email Opens and Click Through Rates

When you create your lead magnet you should notify people via email that there’s a new lead magnet available. We know that many people try to avoid sending non-newsletter emails to people who’ve signed up for a newsletter, but we disagree.

That’s because if people have become interested in your content enough to give you their email address, there’s a very good chance that they’re interested in anything and everything you’re going to create. That includes lead magnets.

The email you send out should be focused on two things. First, it should advertise the lead magnet that’s available, what it offers, and how it will change how they do x, y, or z. Second, they should emphasize that the lead magnet isn’t just a bunch of new, experimental writing promoting unproven tactics, but that instead, the lead magnet is a collection of proven wisdom that has been borne out for years.

This combination of promising an improvement for your readers along with the credibility that comes with time is a great selling point that will boost not only your email open rates, but also your click-through rates.