I hope you enjoyed my previous article How to Identify Needs and Problems in Your Market. Now let’s discuss how to create a high-value content offer. Now, a high-value content offer is a valuable piece of content that you’d give away in exchange for somebody’s contact details. It’s like a trade (or an ethical bribe) of getting someone’s contact details in exchange for a piece of information. But where do you start? And how do you create this piece of information? What kind of information should you even put together?

So, let’s start thinking

What is the best type of high-value content offer that you can create? Well, the quickest and easiest one is a free report or a free presentation. And essentially what you want to do is look at all of those questions that your audience was asking when we discussed the Target Research Strategy. So:

• what were the most frequent, burning questions?
• what were the struggles that they were having?
• what was the question that just kept on coming up over and over again?

Find out the main question that everyone in your market wanted to know. And what was the most desired outcome? What were their hopes and dreams? Was there a specific result or outcome that they were looking to achieve?

So basically, you want to use that information and use those questions for titling your free report. For example, you might be a PR consultant, and you are wondering what is the best high-value content offer to produce for your marketplace. Again, remember not to make any assumptions about these things.

The whole reason that we walked through the Target Research Strategy is so you could find out what are the exact questions that your market is asking, and what are the things and the solutions that they are looking for. So you basically want to dress up the title of that free report in a way that is super compelling. And that is exactly where a lot of people get it wrong.

A lot of people may use the term “lead magnet” or other things in the form of a free report or a high-value content offer, and they say “yeah, I tried that and people weren’t immediately throwing money at me.” And that is because you can’t just create some shoddy free report that is so general, like: “If you’re interested in PR, these are some things that you should maybe  know”. It’s just too general, it is not intriguing, and it is not going to strike a chord with anyone.

You need to think of titling that report in a way that is really the cheese for that market and that it is the thing that people want the most. So, it might be, a “5-Step System on How to Get Your Business Featured in Forbes, BBC and the Huffington Post in the Next 5 Days”. Sounds much better, right? That is an irresistible high-value content offer. Anyone who wants to get more press for their business, they are going to want to know how to do that. That’s a very good high-value content offer.

One thing you need to know is that creating these free reports and these high-value content offers is that it is not like you just want to knock off this report and it is just a wretched, makeshift little report that doesn’t give away any real value, and they downloaded it only to find out that it is a promotional piece about your company. That is the wrong way to approach it.

The very first transaction you are making

Remember that this is the very first transaction that you are making with your marketplace. You are selling this piece of content in exchange for their contact details. And you need to deliver and you need to have that WOW factor with your high-value content offer. It needs to blow them away with the amount of value that you are providing.It doesn’t need to be your life’s work. It doesn’t need to be some 40-page epic thesis. It simply needs to be small, actionable content that they can implement, and get instant wins, and then it leaves this question in their minds: “Well, if they’re giving this information away for free, imagine what they’d be providing on their paid services.”

So, I want to make that clear distinction here. This needs to be actionable, and there needs to be a lot of value in that. You cannot cheat people with insignificant content inside your free report. This whole thing is about creating a lot of value in your marketplace and building loads of goodwill, and believe me you will be compensated handsomely for doing this process correctly.

So the different types of high-value content offers that you could use are:

• free reports;
• case studies;
• cheat sheets;
• swipe files;
• road maps.

Anything that you can tie some content around so that is going to be a quick and easy win.

If there is a heavier financial commitment associated with your services, you could think of doing a video series, a webinar, or a mini-course. However, what you really need to think about is just getting the wheels moving, and the quickest and the easiest type of high-value content offer to create is definitely a free report, and it is definitely a place that I suggest you start with. And once you’ve done a few of them and you’ve got some momentum and clients coming in, then you can start to get creative and make something a little bit more substantial.

The title is very important

So after you’ve done the research in your marketplace and you’ve found out what those questions are that keep coming up, you’ve written the title for what that high-value content offer is going to be. Now I want you to increase the volume, the desire and the intrigue for that. So, let’s say, for instance, you are a wedding photographer. How do you like the title “7 Little-Known Things That No Wedding Photographer Would Ever Tell You Before Taking A Deposit”? Or if you are a a mortgage provider and your title is “How to Reduce Your Mortgage—4 Little Known Things No Bank Would Tell You.” Or you can use a strategy like “X Ways to (do) Y”.

Be sure to use numbers in the title of your free report. The reason why is that numbers give your mind a mental object to wrap around and think “I wonder what those five things are”. Think about how much more compelling it sounds – “5 Little Known Things That No Web Designer Would Dare Tell You” vs. “Some Things That Web Designers Won’t Tell You.” Having that number “5” on there makes you wonder, so there is a bit more of intrigue around it.

You definitely want to use words like “shocking”, “alarming”, and “little-known”, so you can spice up the title and make it a little bit more irresistible. And the most important thing is to really isolate and extract that number one, hair-on-fire question and have that in the title of your free report. Also, you can promise the solution to that problem in your high-value content offer.

So at this stage, what you really want to do is write out the titles of possible ideas for high-value content offers, and get creative, have some fun with it, try to make it as irresistible as possible. You need to write out at least 10 to 15 of these titles and maybe show it to your friends, or think about them yourself. Think about what would be the most irresistible for you, if you were in the marketplace. So your potential clients won’t be able to move past that without downloading it and without giving you their contact details. Go ahead and do it!