I’ve realized I don’t believe in “lead magnets”—those well-crafted, information-rich freebies meant to bribe people for their email.
Their value was mainly in:
– saving research time (AI does that now)
– keeping insight behind an opt-in wall
In five years of running an expert business, I’ve learned:
Giving away your best thinking doesn’t cheapen it. It sharpens your perceived value.
Clients don’t chase secrecy. They pay for clarity, confidence, and competence. And nothing signals that faster than saying:
Here’s how I do it—take it. No catch.
I get the fear. If your service is easy to copy, guarding your method makes sense. But you and I are selling insight, not templates.
Stop acting like a vendor. Start acting like an authority. In a noisy market, structure is a signal. Visibility becomes leverage.
Share the small things:
– your onboarding checklist
– your proposal flow
– your intake questions
If your authority vanishes when someone downloads any file, you didn’t have much authority to begin with.
When you publish freely, you help the market get stronger overall, while signaling: I’m confident enough to share. Let’s see who else is.
That signal travels. Peers cite you. Clients trust you before the first call. Your ecosystem grows, and pricing power follows.
This isn’t generosity. It’s open-source authority: a strategy for trust, magnetism, and long-term pricing power.