Every online entrepreneur understands the importance of building their list of prospects and customers. Whether offering a free opt-in incentive, or selling a product or service, your customers should feel like they receive many times more value than they are expecting. This is true with list building content upgrades, just as it is with everything else you do.
What Is A Content Upgrade?
The name implies, a content upgrade is extra information that upgrades the content that someone has just read. For example, let’s say your reader has just read your blog post about ‘Cooking The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie’. If that web surfer has read your entire post, that means they are very inclined to receiving more information on that same topic.
Offering a checklist or report with ’10 Quick and Tasty Cookie Recipes’ would make sense as a content upgrade in this scenario. Improve on the information you offered in your blog post, ‘upgrading’ the knowledge, information and/or resources on that topic in exchange for that reader joining your email list.
More Value, Quickly Delivered
Checklists and other lists make great content upgrades. Your reader can digest the information quickly. Web surfers these days are highly distracted, and have short attention spans. They don’t want to commit a lot of time towards consuming content, even if that content provides value. So make your content upgrade short and sweet.
You should also make your content actionable. Describe a ‘simple win’ scenario where your reader can notice some real improvement in his or her life because of the information contained in your upgrade. In the above example, a short checklist that offers 10 quick recipes is a high value resource by anyone who was reading your cookie blog post.
Build Your Email List
The quicker someone can experience and benefit from your content the better. That is why content upgrades for building email lists seem to work the best when they are short pieces of easily digested content. On your side of the equation, this means you can make multiple content upgrades quickly and easily.
Your reader gets a quick win. They don’t have to spend all day reading a lengthy piece of content. They can realize value very quickly. You don’t have to spend as much time in the production process as creating traditional opt-in bribes, your conversion rates soar, and you add one more happy follower to your email list.