6 Powerful Ways To Monetize Your Opt-In Freebies [Ep. 97]
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*A big thank you to Travelpayouts for sponsoring this episode on creating profitable opt-in freebies!
Interested in learning how to monetize your opt-in freebies?
Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be going over 6 unique strategies for making money through freebies!
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:
- How to monetize your freebie content
- Ideas to using freebies as a segue into your paid offers
- Creative ideas for increasing your affiliate income through freebies
- And more!
How To Monetize An Opt-In Freebie [Podcast Episode Audio]
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Free Resources To Help You Grow & Monetize
Monetize Your Opt-In Freebies With Digital Products [Free Guide]
One of the best ways to make money from your opt-in freebies and email list is to also have digital products to sell to your audience—which is where our sponsor, Travelpayouts, comes in.
If you’re looking for new ways to monetize your blog beyond ads and affiliate links, one great option is creating and selling digital products.
To help with this, our friends at Travelpayouts have published an in-depth guide that walks you through everything you need to know about launching your own digital products.
➡️ Click here for the guide on launching digital products.
Whether it’s eBooks, courses, or printable travel guides, this post covers how to choose the right product, create it, and market it to your audience.
If you’ve been thinking about adding an income stream, this guide is full of practical tips to get you started—even if you’re brand new to selling digital products.
Free Travel Blogger Resource Library
To help you really jumpstart your blogging success, I’ve added 55+ blogging resources like printables, video tutorials, and workbooks into a FREE resource library for travel bloggers.
These resources are meant to help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and with less overwhelm!
➡️ Click here for the free Travel Blogger Resource Library.
Create Profitable Opt-In Freebies With These Helpful Tools:
ConvertKit (includes a 30-day free trial, no credit card required). If you want a profitable email marketing strategy, it’s important to have a feature-rich and user-friendly email marketing platform—like ConvertKit. My affiliate link gets you a 30-day free trial — no credit card required! Alternatively, you can join their free plan here.
Mailerlite (free for up to 1,000 subscribers). Mailerlite is another great email marketing tool that is free to start. Some of my favorite free Mailerlite features include automation, landing page builders, 24/7 chat support, and more.
Keysearch (snag 30% off with code “jessieonajourney30”). Doing keyword research can help you get a sense of what people are searching for, so you can create opt-in freebies and products that help them. My go-to tool for content planning and keyword research is Keysearch, a robust and budget-friendly tool.
Interact (get 14 days free). In my opinion, this is the best personality quiz maker! It comes with quiz templates and examples that help make it easier to create your own personality quiz. Plus, you’ll be able to connect your quiz to your email marketing platform to grow your email list and will get access to analytics to monitor the effectiveness of your quiz.
6 Ways To Make Money From Freebies [Guide]
You’ve probably heard about how opt-in freebies can help you grow your email list, but did you also know you can use them to monetize your travel blog?
The beauty of an opt-in freebie is the person using it has gone beyond a passive reader. This is someone who liked your content enough to join your list and learn more from you.
You also know that they’re invested in the topic you’re sharing about.
For instance, if someone reads your blog post sharing solo travel tips they’re of course interested in the topic; however, if they grab your free solo travel email course you have a pretty good idea this is something they’re really interested in learning about.
But, how does this help you increase your income? This is exactly what we’ll be going over, specifically how to earn money from freebies!
🎉 Also, don’t forget to grab access to my FREE Travel Blogger Resource Library. Get access to 55+ resources that can help turn your blog into a profitable business—including a workbook on how to use opt-in freebies to grow your email list and, for paid ChatGPT users, a custom Opt-In Freebie Ideas Generator GPT.
Important strategy note
I’ll be sharing ways you can utilize affiliate marketing in your list-building and opt-in freebie strategy. As a reminder, whenever you promote an affiliate, you should clearly disclose this.
Strategy #1) Include affiliate links in the content
This is probably the simplest way to increase your affiliate income through opt-in freebies. And it works for essentially all types of content—cheat sheets, workbooks, email courses, workshops, you name it!
For instance, let’s say your niche is solo travel and your opt-in freebie is a free solo travel email course. The first thing you might do is include a resource list in the welcome email that shares your must-pack items as a solo traveler.
From there, you can link relevant solo travel resources within the course content. I actually have a free Savvy Solo Traveler email course myself, and one of the emails I send is all about safety. In that email, I link to my favorite safety essentials like a personal alarm and pickpocket-proof clothing.
You might even kick this strategy up a notch by including a video tutorial on how to use the product, an anecdote sharing how it helped you, or an original photo showing you using the product that adds authenticity and helps make it clear you aren’t just promoting something to make money.
Strategy #2) Create a free quiz with affiliate-optimized results
A free quiz is another type of opt-in freebie, though the strategy is pretty different. You can promote free quizzes in your blog posts, YouTube videos, and other content as a way to help make the content more actionable.
For instance, if you blog about NYC, you might create a quiz that suggests the perfect New York itinerary based on someone’s personality. I actually have this exact NYC quiz on my NYC Photo Journeys site.
While I prompt people to join my email list, I don’t make it mandatory as, at least in my opinion, it’s not a great user experience to ask people to spend time taking a quiz and then gatekeep their results.
Instead, something you can do is offer a bonus or some kind of value add if they subscribe—like more in-depth results, a list of relevant discounts, or, if sticking with the NYC travel example, a bonus guide on how to score cheap Broadway show tickets.
Within the quiz results themselves, you can include relevant affiliate links where appropriate, such as Viator links to tours they’d love or Expedia links to recommended hotels.
Strategy #3) Turn popular opt-in freebies into paid products
For this strategy, you first want to identify your opt-in freebies that have proven their popularity. Because so many people are grabbing the freebie, you’re getting vital information on what a large part of your audience needs help with.
From there, you can turn this opt-in freebie into a paid product—either by re-packaging the freebie or building on it by adding extra insights, bonus materials, or direct access to you, such as through a private Facebook group, group calls, or Voxer Office Hours.
To bring this to life, let’s go over some examples related to the RV travel niche:
a) If your opt-in freebie is an RV Cooking eBook with 5 recipes tailored to RV kitchens, your paid product might be a more in-depth 50-recipe eBook with shopping lists and meal planning guides. You can even take this a step further by turning it into a membership with live cooking demos and a community forum for sharing tips and tricks, or a regular paid newsletter sharing RV-friendly recipes and cooking tips.
b) If your opt-in freebie is an RV maintenance checklist, your paid product might be a detailed RV maintenance video series with step-by-step guides for each task and downloadable maintenance logs.
Remember, you can grab Travelpayouts’ free guide to launching profitable digital products to help with this.
Now, if you’re thinking, “That’s great, but I don’t even understand what it means for an opt-in to be high converting,” let me share some tips:
-Before you can say whether an opt-in freebie is converting well, you need to get enough eyes on it to determine whether people want it or not. If only a handful of people have even seen your opt-in freebie landing page, that’s not enough data to really determine if people want it or not.
-So, what is a good conversation rate? In an article by LeadPages, a landing page creation platform, they say:
“Broadly speaking, a common conversion rate for an email opt-in landing page is between 5% and 15%. The companies with the most success tend to convert at around 20-25%. And the very cream of the crop achieves conversion rates of 30% or higher. But, in a lot of respects, these numbers are arbitrary…We think that the “best conversion rate” is any number higher than what you’re currently doing. Even a one percent bump in conversion will take your business to the next level.”
Now before we move on to the next strategy, I also wanted to mention that you can use this strategy of analyzing popular content to come up with opt-in freebie ideas too.
Look at your most popular content—whether it’s a blog post that gained a ton of traction or a topic you consistently get asked about—and turn that into a cheat sheet, case study, or something else to get people onto your email list.
Strategy #4) Create a tripwire funnel
A tripwire funnel is a low-cost, limited-time discount on a product. Typically it’s triggered when someone grabs your opt-in freebie.
After entering their email address, they’ll be taken to a “thank you” page that has the tripwire. It’s meant to be a “no-brainer” offer because it’s such a great deal.
This, combined with the fact that it’s only possible to purchase for a very short time—like, say, 15 minutes—creates a sense of urgency and encourages people to purchase.
One key thing to note here is the tripwire and opt-in freebie should attract the same audience and solve the same problem, but the opt-in offers more of a quick win while the product is typically more robust or teaches a larger strategy.
So, if you’re opt-in freebie is a Free Miles & Points Tracker Spreadsheet, your tripwire might be an Advanced Travel Hacking Strategies eBook or a Travel Hacking Masterclass for 50% off.
Once you have this all setup, trigger your tripwire by promoting it everywhere—including in high-visibility places like within your top content and at the top of your homepage, like in your main menu.
Additionally, you might collaborate with other bloggers in your niche, such as by swapping guest emails that cross-promote your opt-in freebies for quick growth. I share more about this strategy in this tutorial video:
Strategy #5) Focus on sponsorship
There are a few ways to go about this.
The first is to reach out to brands to see if they’d like to sponsor your opt-in freebie directly. I’m actually working on a collaboration like this right now with Travelpayouts, who are not only sponsoring this podcast episode but also a free affiliate marketing challenge I’m putting together in late fall.
Side note: if you’d like to be kept in the loop about that, make sure to grab access to my free Travel Blogger Resource Library, as this will add you to my email list.
Getting back to our strategy, another option is to reach out to brands and ask them to sponsor an email or newsletter. Many bloggers overlook email as a sponsorship option, but if you have an engaged list you can have brands sponsor content, just as they would on Instagram, TikTok, or your blog.
To help you put this strategy into practice, I’ve added a sample Sponsorship Pitch Template as well as a Sample Sponsored Email to the free Travel Blogger Resource Library.
Additionally, here is a video tutorial that goes over my favorite template for pitching brands about sponsorships:
I recommend making outreach—whether you’re looking to work with brands or collaborate with other bloggers—a regular part of your blogging workflow so that you’re regularly increasing your visibility and income.
Strategy #6) Use email strategically
When someone grabs your opt-in freebie, they’re essentially telling you that they’re interested in the content you’re sharing and they want help solving a problem. So help them.
According to Constant Contact, email marketers earn, on average, $36 for every $1 spent. That is a great return on investment!
Plus, you own your list. Unlike social media, where you don’t own your followers or your account and where you have to battle changing algorithms, you have the opportunity to get into most of the inboxes of your subscribers—as long as you follow best practices.
Along with letting your subscribers know about new free content, like blog posts and YouTube videos, you can also share paid offers with them too—like your own products, affiliate offers, and sponsored offers. This is an essential part of any email newsletter strategy if you want your list to be profitable.
To see success with this though, make sure to nurture your email list. I find that it’s helpful to give more than you ask for, with about a 4:1 ratio of give-to-ask content.
This means for every email where you’re really pushing for people to make a purchase, you should send about 3 emails simply being super helpful.
Final thoughts on creating profitable opt-in freebies
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to increase your blogging income with an opt-in freebie.
I also want to thank our sponsor, Travelpayouts, for helping to make this episode possible. Don’t forget to grab their in-depth guide to creating and launching profitable digital products.
While you’re there, make sure to grab access to the free travel blogging resource library. There are a ton of resources in there on growing your community and increasing your blogging profits.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.
Happy blogging!
These Past Episodes Can Help You Make Money With Freebies:
4 Clever Ways To Monetize Your Email List
How To Launch & Grow A Substack Newsletter (21k Subscribers!)
Create A Free Challenge That Grows Your Email List & Income
What To Send To Your Email List To Engage Your Community
How To Grow Your Email List Fast With A Free Bundle Giveaway
7 Types Of Emails That Can Boost Your Travel Blogging Income
How To Write Better Emails With Email Storytelling (Examples Included)
How To Grow Your Email List (For Free) As A Blogger
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