What is a freebie?

In this blog post, I am going to explain what exactly a freebie is

If you are somewhat familiar with email marketing then you have probably heard this word before

But maybe you don’t fully understand what it means

But I am not only going to explain what a freebie is

I am also going to show you how you can create one

So let’s get this tutorial started

What is a freebie?

A freebie is something that you give away for free in exchange for people’s email address

Why?

Because you want people on your email list to market to them and also to build a stronger connection with your audience

Having your audience on your email list is a great way to build trust and a more personal connection between them

And you also 100% own your email list

So if your Pinterest account or another social media account got banned

You would still have your email list and you could still keep in touch with your fans

What can a freebie be?

Freebie can be a lot of things

It can be a useful checklist

An online course or an e-book

Or maybe a template or a 5 day email course

So long as you are giving something away for free that is a freebie

How to create a freebie

Now I am going to show you how you can create a freebie for your audience

First, you have to know what kind of problem can you solve for your audience

Can you give them a useful checklist that will help them?

Can you create an online course that will teach them something useful?

This is something that you need to figure out

Because free stuff is always great

But free stuff that will actually help them is even better

Now I am not going to do anything super complex for this tutorial

I am just going to create a simple checklist

It probably won´t be the best checklist ever but it is good enough for this tutorial

Step 1 sign up with an email marketing service

In order to have an email list, you need to use an email marketing service

The email marketing service that I am currently using and i would highly recommend for beginners is Convertkit

Click here to sign up for a free 14-day trial with Convertkit

It is completely free you don’t even have to put your credit card numbers in

And creating a Convertkit account is nothing crazy

It’s just like signing up for an account anywhere else

If you are not a fan of Convertkit here are some other email marketing services that you can try

Constant contact

Mailerlite

Mailchimp

Step 2 Creating your freebie

Now it is time to create our freebie

I am going to create a checklist for this tutorial

But you can create whatever you want don’t be afraid of being creative

Like i mentioned earlier a freebie can be a template ,online course, e-book basically anything as long as it is free

I am going to use canva to create my checklist

Click here to sign up for a free canva account

They have a free forever account but it is kind of limited

And if you want to have access to all of the pictures you will need the premium version

Okay so after you create your Canva account you need to be on the homepage

And all we need to do is type checklist in the searchbox

And canva will give us a premade template that is perfect for creating checklists

You can select any type of template that you like or just start with a blank template

This is the template that I am going to use

Editing things in Canva is easy

You can basically do everything with your mouse

You can just click on what you want and drag things where you want them to be

You can click on something and then change the color of it

And when you want to type something just click and start typing

And you can select text and other cool things from the left side of your screen

And don’t be afraid to make mistakes because there is an undo button there for a reason

This is how my checklist looks

I know this is nothing crazy but that’s okay because i am just using it for this tutorial

And when you are finished editing your checklist then you are ready for the next step

Step 3 Connect Convertkit with your wordpress website

Okay now it is time to give our checklist away for free to our audience

The first thing that we need to do is connect our Convertkit account to our WordPress website

If you just want to promote your freebie on your social media accounts and not on your blog

Then that’s cool

But you are probably missing out on a lot of potential subscribers

Now we need to go to the wordpress admin dashboard

And then click on plugins

Click on add new

And type convertkit

And then when you find the convertkit plugin press install and activate

And then we need to go back to our convertkit account

And click on our profile which is in the top right corner of your screen

And click on settings

And then we are going to copy our API secret

And our API key

And once we have copied our API secret and our API key

We need to go back to the wordpress admin dashboard

And click on settings

And click on convertkit

And then paste your api secret and api key

And then click on save changes

And now your convertkit account should be connected to your wordpress website

Create your sign up form

Okay now that we have created our checklist/freebie

And we have connected Convertkit to our wordpress website

It is time to create something that allows people to download our freebie in exchange for their email address

I am personally going to be creating a basic sign up form for this tutorial

But if you want to create a email pop up or a landing page or whatever then go ahead

The First step is making sure that you are on the homepage of convertkit

If you are not on the homepage you can get there by clicking on the grow button and then clicking on landing pages and forms

And then you just need to click on the create new button

And then we are going to select form

And then we are going to select inline

And then Convertkit will give us a ton of template options that we can use

I am going to select this one

But you can select whatever you like it really does not matter

And i am going to edit it

Editing in convertkit is easy

You can click where you want to type

And you can click where you want to change your colour

Basically just click and start editing

This is what i created

It looks good enough and it gets the job done

But now i need to insert the checklist into my newsletter so people can download it

All you need to do is go to the top right corner of your screen and click on settings

And then click on incentive

and then click on download

And then insert your checklist file

And then click on save

And then it is all done

How to publish your freebie on your website

Okay now it is time for the last step of this tutorial

And that is publishing our freebie on our website

And because we have connected convertkit with our wordpress website

All we need to do is just copy and paste some code

Yep….as simple as that

So we need to go to the top right corner of our screen

And click on publish

And then click on wordpress

And then copy that code

And we now just need to paste it

You can paste it on your blog post or your homepage

I am just going to do it at the end of this blog post

And that’s pretty much it

Thanks for reading