Are you looking for freebie ideas? You’re in the right place! Whether you’re a small business looking to grow your email list for the first time or you want to expand your freebie library, you’ll find some great opt-in ideas throughout this post.
Keep reading to learn all about fun freebie ideas to implement today!
This post is based on the recorded podcast for The Unexpected Entrepreneur.
What are freebies?
A freebie is a free opt-in that you provide to someone visiting your website in exchange for their email address. This allows you to further nurture them and hopefully convert them into a client in the future.
With a freebie, you want to provide a quick and actionable win. Don’t put so much into your freebie that it makes it impossible for somebody to get anything out of it.
Also, be sure to have an email sequence with your freebie that nurtures new subscribers. You could consider layering your freebies so you could add a second freebie to the email sequence if you want to get advanced!
However, if you don’t have any freebies at all right now on your site, just worry about creating the freebie and making that delivery sequence so only that first email where the person receives the freebie.
Then, as you start to get a little bit more comfortable with the idea of making freebies, go ahead and make that welcome sequence!
Our favorite suggestion for delivering a freebie is Flodesk! Grab a discount on our resources page.
Best Freebie Ideas for Creatives
Checklist
Idea number one is a checklist. This can be really basic, but you can provide a checklist that somebody can work through with steps on how to achieve something.
Some ideas could be how to prepare for your brand photo shoot, how to become a website designer, or even how to take photos at night!
To make this more helpful, consider opening it up in a PDF editing software after you make it in Canva or whatever design tool you love using. Add checkboxes so that it’s interactive and people can check things off on their computer.
Because let’s be honest, most of us probably don’t own a printer and wouldn’t print out a checklist that we got as a freebie. So really try to think about how you can make it as easy as possible.
I’ve also made checklists using Notion before. So you could just make a free Notion page and just add little checkboxes with the checklist, then just share it and then share that link. That works really well for me!
Quiz
Idea number two is to make a quiz. I found this to be a really helpful and successful opt-in. It was the most popular freebie that I had when I first started my business, and it still collects emails for me today.
Be sure that whatever freebie you decide to make does connect back with the services that you want to offer. You don’t want there to be a disconnect!
As an example, I’m a website designer, so I have what platform is best for you? quiz.
Basically just ask a bunch of questions about what kind of business they’re running and then at the end they get an email that says, hey, this is the platform that’s best for you.
This also works well for me because I know that a lot of my audience is mostly best suited for Showit, which is what I specialize in.
So my quiz isn’t rigged or anything. It does give you up to six options or six results, I think. So like you could get Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix. There are tons of options.
But I’ve noticed most people who take my quiz do end up getting Showit, and that’s just because I know my audience well, which in turn then helps me to sell my show at web design services.
Other ideas could be something like what’s your photo shoot personality? What color best describes your business if you are a brand designer, things like that.
Mini Course
Idea number three is to make a mini course. So this can be a hard one because you really don’t want to give away too much, but you still want it to be helpful.
So one idea for this is to just take part of a course you’ve already created and just take a little chunk or even just a little video on that and kind of use that as your freebie and then you could use that to kind of funnel people into your actual course.
Another idea is to create a mini course that leads into your offerings.
So let’s say you’re a brand designer who doesn’t like to do all of the brand strategy questions because you find that a lot of your clients aren’t fully sure who their dream clients are and you really want them to be ready to work with you by kind of having a lot of that stuff figured out.
So when you ask, they know the answer. You could create a mini course, walking them through how to figure all of that out so that they have it all done.
Workbook
Idea number four is to create a workbook. This is a similar idea to a checklist, but it is more interactive and not everything needs to be a workbook.
Sometimes a checklist works better. However, again, kind of going off that brand strategy idea that would work better as a mini course or a workbook than a checklist because it requires a lot more thinking.
Another workbook idea could even be something fun, like what to wear to your photo shoot. And you could guide people through how to pick outfits that aren’t clashing with their location while having them go through what they already have in their closet.
Templates
Idea number five is a pretty popular one, and that’s to make a template. So many people love templates. I know I’ve downloaded a lot of free templates over the years.
For the most part, I found people love canva templates because everyone can use them. This applies more so to designers and social media managers, but you could probably find a way to spin a template to work in your favor as a freebie.
As an example, I have a one page Showit template that people love, and I also have an Instagram links Showit template.
These work great too, because in the end, people can kind of get a glimpse of my Showit templates for free, which could then in turn make them possibly come back to my shop and buy one of our full templates.
Audit
Next is another of the great freebie ideas, and that is to do an audit of some type. So audits are a freebie that I found people flocked to.
But keep in mind, you’re definitely trading your time. It’s not something that you create once, and everyone can download, so it is really best to offer this when things are slow.
I’ve also found audits to be really high converting. So when I do this, I have had people immediately message me after receiving them and they’ll be like, oh my gosh, can I just hire you to make these changes?
And it has ended up in custom websites being booked as well as my VIP days. I used to do brand audits and found that those were really successful.
I’ve since switched to website audits after solely focusing on website design in my business. To do this, I just use zoom to record a five minute video of me exploring my website and offering actionable feedback.
Services Guide or Prices Guide
Idea seven on this list of freebie ideas is to make a service guide or a pricing guide. And I will tell you this is the most popular opt-in I’ve ever done.
So you can just create an opt-in form for people to access their pricing if they want to see it and have it redirect to a hidden page on your site with your pricing info.
Another option too is to just have it lead to an email sequence with the info. I’ve gotten around 180 email sign-ups just from this pricing guide as of now, and a lot of my clients tend to come from those optics.
Masterclass or Recorded Webinar
The last idea is a Masterclass or a recorded webinar. I have yet to try this one, but I do have a lot of friends in the business space that have done this and found it worked well for them.
You could host a live masterclass and record it to later turn it into a free opt-in that leads to your offers. Or if you’re more introverted like I am, you could consider just recording yourself doing a masterclass, not live, and then posting about it at the end.
Be sure to share one of your offers that relates back to that masterclass, though.
I hope you found this helpful and I’m so excited to see what you create out of all these freebie ideas!
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KP’s design journey began in book publishing, but she fell in love with the truly limitless possibilities that web design presents. Since then, she’s been helping photographers and creatives become the no-brainer option for their dream clients before they even get on a call.
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8/22/22
Published On:
Krystianna Pietrzak
