An ethical bribe, also known as a lead magnet is something you offer to your potential subscribers at no cost in exchange for their names and email addresses. This could be a report, an audio, video, e-course, mind map, checklist, cheat sheet, etc.
However, what you offer must be something that your potential subscriber considers to be valuable and useful, or offers a solution to a problem they are having in regards to your niche. At the same time your ethical bribe should be something that is low-cost for you to create. This is why an information product is the best ethical bribe.
Never offer visitors to your squeeze page anything that is widely disseminated over the internet. After all, if your prospective subscribers can get the same product anywhere, why would they want to give you their name and email address in exchange? More than likely they won’t which means they will leave without subscribing to your list.
Your ethical bribe needs to be so good, that you blow away your subscribers. You want them to think that if your FREE content is this good, your paid product must be really awesome. Your ethical bribe should contain very specific techniques that enable your subscribers to get results. For example, if your ethical bribe is about traffic generation, you might include 2 or 3 of them with step-by-step instructions on how your subscribers can apply them. Of course, your paid product and the products in your sales funnel will expand on these instructions as well as include even more methods.
You want to share high quality content that is very specific to your niche and useful for your subscribers. This is so you acquire a targeted list of subscribers as a targeted list will be much more eager to purchase the products you promote to them. Use Jimmy D. Brown’s ‘useful but incomplete model’, which basically says that you should create an ethical bribe that provides excellent information, but leaves out something critical so that subscribers must purchase your product in order to make the strategies in your ethical bribe useful.
You need to strike a balance by providing high quality information that keeps your subscriber wanting more but that is lacking in some way which of course your paid product will provide.
People will be more willing to give you their name and email address if what you are offering is something you have created specifically as your ethical bribe and is not available anywhere else. However, they don’t only want something they consider valuable, they also want something that is easy for them to consume. So, you may get higher opt-in rates if you offer them a mind map, cheat-sheet or one-page list of the tools you use in your business which make common tasks easier or quicker to do.
