Early Exit #35: The Secret To Finding More Clients
How giving away something crazy valuable for free can generate hundreds of leads.
You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.
Last week: Hiring a Virtual Assistant (Part 1)
Giving away a free playbook is one of the best ways to grow your consulting business.
Just ask Jordan Brunelle. Jordan is a PPC consultant who released a free product called the Ultimate PPC Lead Generation Playbook on LinkedIn. He received over 1,000 comments from people asking for access.
And that was just the first post! Jordan promoted that same playbook again a week later and netted another 300 comments.
But here’s the best part: he started booking meetings every day with new prospects for his consulting business.
This all happened about 3 weeks ago. I recently caught up with Jordan to understand how he did it and what the results were (spoiler: more clients at better prices).
Oh, and I spent the weekend creating a free Notion template to help you create and share your own free playbook too.
Let’s go 😎
The Backstory
Last year I released a paid product called the Competitive Conquesting Playbook. I wanted to productize the knowledge I’d gained from consulting and share one of the most successful plays that I run with my consulting clients.
I brain dumped everything into a Notion document, organized it into four sections, slapped a price on it, and shipped it to the world on LinkedIn and on my (much smaller) newsletter.
That playbook made around $900 which is awesome! Jordan was one of the people that kindly purchased it.
While Jordan wasn’t super familiar with Notion, my template helped give him the basic structure to start making what became his Ultimate Playbook.
But Jordan took a different approach to releasing it: he gave it away for free on LinkedIn.
When I spoke with Jordan last week, he said:
I’d rather get one client every 6 months instead of making another couple hundred dollars right now selling a course
He is totally right. If I could go back in time, I’d also release my playbook for free on LinkedIn to attract new clients for my consulting business.
But how did he actually build his playbook? How much time did it take him?
Building the playbook
Jordan spent 10-15 hours building his playbook over the course of a week.
While that might sound like a lot of time, think of it a an investment that will pay dividends down the road. Here’s why:
You can repurpose small chunks of that content into LinkedIn posts over months
You can send it to anyone who is curious if you really know what you’re talking about
It pre-sells prospects on your skills and abilities. Prospects come into a discovery call ready to buy from you
And if your playbook blows up on LinkedIn like Jordan’s did? That’s just extra validation that you know what you’re talking about.
How to release your own playbook
Jordan used two tools to create his playbook:
The world of Notion templates is huge. I’ve helped sell over $100,000 of Notion templates and I used to have a podcast where I interviewed Notion template creators.
When I was making my playbook, Notion was the natural choice based on my experience with it.
Gumroad is also the distribution channel of choice because:
There are no monthly fees (they do charge 10% of every paid product you sell)
It lets you collect emails
It integrates with Zapier so you can build automations
Launching a product on Gumroad is as easy as making a cover image, writing up a description, and pasting in your Notion link.
Then when everything is ready? Post it on LinkedIn, Twitter, or anywhere else you have a following,
Jordan’s Results
In total, Jordan’s two LinkedIn posts received over 1,300 comments. However, some of those comments were him responding to people, so the number of unique comments is around 700 which is still a huge amount of interest.
Jordan asked people to leave a comment on the post to request access to the playbook. This is smart for a few reasons:
Comments = engagement, which the LinkedIn algorithm likes
More engagement helps reach more people
Jordan then manually messaged the Gumroad link to everyone who commented on his post. From ~700 unique comments about 400 people actually downloaded it for free (which is a ~60% conversion rate).
Gumroad automatically sends the download link after purchase. Jordan also used Zapier to drop everyone who purchased into his Mailchimp account to jumpstart his newsletter.
Here’s the most impressive part: Jordan’s had dozens of of calls with prospects since releasing his playbook and he’s in the final stages of closing three new clients on a new pricing model.
All because he released something for free!
Have I convinced you to try this yet? Good, because I built something that will make launching your own playbook super easy.
Introducing the Playbook Builder
I spent the weekend making a Notion template that makes creating your own free playbook super easy.
It’s called Playbook Builder and it’s 100% free to download for Early Exit Club subscribers.
Playbook Builder is the fastest way to create your own free playbook.
It includes:
Pre-built shells to drop in your content (so you don’t waste time building it yourself)
Free Canva templates (so you can make your Notion and Gumroad store look amazing)
A fully-built reference playbook (so you know if you’re on track)
Try it out and tag me in your LinkedIn post when you release it!
Cheers,
Nick
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