Point A to Point B: The Simple Map That Decides What You Give Away First

You sit down to create a lead magnet and stare at a blank page. Should it be a PDF? A video? A five-day challenge? Most people guess, throw something together that feels roughly useful, and wonder later why the opt-ins trickle in instead of pour in. Vic Strizheus spends this lesson arguing that the guessing is the whole problem, and he gives you a simple map that removes it entirely.

Why do so many lead magnets miss even when the content is good?

His answer starts with a distinction most beginners skip past. Amateurs copy whatever landing page or freebie is already working for somebody else in their niche. Professionals build their own, because copying tells you nothing about why something converts, only that it does for someone else’s audience.

To actually know what your market wants, Vic runs through the research he does before ever writing a headline: surveys through tools like SurveyMonkey, reading the forums and Facebook groups where your prospects already gather, subscribing to competitors’ email lists from a separate inbox to study exactly what they send and how often, and what he calls intelligence campaigns, small paid tests run purely to collect answers to one question, not to sell anything yet. As Vic Strizheus puts it, “there is no voodoo going on”. It’s listening, systematically, before you ever try to speak.

What is results in advance and why does it decide your entire lead magnet?

The centerpiece of the lesson is a simple diagram. Picture a line with point A on the left and point B on the right. Point A is where your prospect is right now, frustrated, stuck, not getting the result they want. Point B is where they want to end up. Between those two points sit three or four milestones almost everyone in that market has to pass through, in order, to get from one side to the other.

In his own niche, Vic breaks it down to four: find something worth promoting, build a landing page for it, drive traffic to that page, and convert that traffic into buyers. Once you know the milestones, the job of a lead magnet gets almost mechanical. You take just the first milestone and teach that one piece, free, in full.

Most people try to overcomplicate a very simple thing

That’s the line he keeps returning to. Most marketers try to cram everything they know into one lead magnet, hoping more content reads as more value. Vic’s argument runs the other direction: pick one milestone, explain it better than anyone else in your market bothers to, and let that single moment of clarity be what makes a stranger trust you.

What actually makes a lead magnet convert once you’ve picked the topic?

Beyond matching a real milestone, Vic lays out a short list of what he checks before he ever publishes one:

• A specific, memorable name, not a generic free-report label.
• A promise aimed at one desired outcome only, never several at once.
• Quick to consume, ideally somewhere between five minutes and an hour, never a book someone has to finish before they’ll trust you.
• At least one genuine aha moment buried inside it, something the person didn’t expect to learn for free.
• A look and feel that matches how good the content actually is, since a sloppy presentation quietly erases the value underneath it.

He illustrates that last point with the gap between actual value and perceived value, using a Rolex sitting next to a Timex as the example. “there is an actual value and there is a perceived value”, as he frames it, and most of what determines whether a stranger opts in has more to do with how the offer looks and feels than with what it materially costs to produce.

Underneath the lead magnet sit two more pieces he covers briefly here: the hook, a single-focus promise usually carried in your headline, and the call to action, repeated two or three times on the same page rather than buried once at the bottom. Together, the milestone map, the lead magnet, the hook, and the call to action are what turn a guess into a landing page built on an actual read of your market.

The full lesson walks through real examples of each piece and how Vic tests them against each other. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

All right, so the first step to capture mastery, like if you want to build a really, really successful business on the internet, okay, you need to understand what the first step is. And that first step, my friend, is understanding some strategies and some psychology that goes on behind the landing pages. You know, so many marketers, you know, they're just shooting in the dark and they have no clue, you know, what's working or why do they do certain things. And a lot of people are just trying to copy other people and not really knowing whether it's going to work for them or not.

Well, I don't want to run my business like that and you don't want to run your business like that. You want to be very precise, you know, you want to get to the point to where you know, right, what's going to work, what's not going to work, right? And you do that by being very strategic about your business. So, in the last video, I talked about the importance of, you know, of capturing your own lead, right, and building your own list.

And it's very important for you to have your own. Your own capture page with whatever it is that you're promoting out there. Listen, amateurs, they don't do this. Professionals, they all use custom landing pages and custom capture mechanism, right, and that allows them to stand out, that allows them to, you know, to control their own front end, to control their own business, to control, you know, their success and their destiny, okay?

And that's what you're going to do. That's what I'm going to teach you, okay? So, let's talk about some strategy and psychology stuff here. It's going to get really, really good.

Listen, I'm going to show you, you know, examples. I'm going to show you what, you know, my stuff. I'm going to take you behind the curtain. Listen, you will really get a lot from this training, okay?

So, again, before we start talking about traffic, you need to understand this, okay? Because if this is not, you know, if you don't understand this, nothing else will really matter. Traffic is not going to make you successful, okay? Now, there's three components that we really need to address here.

Component number one is a lead magnet. Component number two is, you know, what I call a hook and then the call to action, okay? Again, very simple. You know, I told you there's nothing to it, right?

There's just three things you need to understand. Like, when you're creating your landing pages, when you're creating your capture mechanism or your capture machine is what I like to call it, right? Just keep in mind three components. What's my lead magnet?

What's my hook? And what's my call to action, okay? And then what you do is you strategically modify it and you optimize each one of those components individually, okay? Okay?

When we talk about optimization, I believe that's, you know, later on in the, you know, in this training here. When it comes to optimization is you take one of these components and you optimize it, okay? Then you take another one, you optimize it, you split test it, and you get to the point to where you literally can have a, you know, a 70% or 80% converting a landing page, okay? So let's talk about what these are.

So the lead magnet, and this might be a little bit of a review if you watch the free, video series from Internet Traffic Formula launch, but a lead magnet is essentially, it's basically, it's a piece of value that solves a specific problem in your marketplace, okay? That you offer in exchange for an opt-in, that you offer in exchange of, you know, some sort of a contact information. That can be an address, that can be an email, a phone number, whatever, right? Now, and you can be in different markets, you can be doing different things out there.

This applies to virtually everything, okay? Whether you're, you know, offline brick and mortar, you know, whether you're online info marketer or an affiliate marketer or, you know, multi-level marketing, multi-level marketer building a team or network marketer, direct sales entrepreneur, right? You can apply this to virtually anything and everything that's out there, okay? In fact, I know some offline companies that started to apply, you know, giving away lead magnet in exchange of, you know, a prospect's contact information, and they have tripled the revenue.

Okay? This stuff works. Now, here's what's important, okay? Before you can address and kind of give away or give them information that addresses a specific problem in the marketplace, you need to know your market, don't you?

Okay? So, how do you know your market? How do you, like, if you're an info marketer, okay, how do you know your market? Well, you can know your market.

There's different things we can do, okay? As strategic marketers, okay? Again, pay attention to this. Don't just watch this video, my friend, from a perspective of just watching it and just, you know, just to get that information.

I want you to be watching this from a perspective of, you know, being very strategic, okay? Because every single thing I do in my business, okay, whether from posting something as simple as posting a Facebook, you know, post to running, you know, a campaign to, you know, to tweaking my business to just doing anything in my business, there is a strategy and there is a reason for every single thing that I do, okay, in the business. I don't do stuff just for the sake of doing it, okay? Now, to know your market, you can do surveys, okay?

So you can go and you can create a survey, okay? You can go to, like, surveymonkey.com and you can survey your, you know, you can create a survey, for example. You can post a survey on your Facebook and if you have some followers or you can even run an ad, like a Facebook pay-per-click, right, targeting people who are in your market, okay? And you can, you know, you can do that.

I'm going to show you how to do surveys a little bit later on, okay? You can just look at it. You can look in the forums of what people are talking about in your particular niche, okay? What are their questions?

What are their concerns? You know, what are they talking about? So this is how you can gather some intelligence. You can go to, like, Google groups, right, and just pay attention to what folks are talking about.

There is different events and workshops going on in your niche, in your marketplace, right, in your industry, whatever you are a part of, okay? If you just kind of, you know, listen, listen, we got two ears and one mouth. We should be listening twice as much as we speak, right? Unfortunately.

Or fortunately. It depends how you look at it, right? A lot of people, they just speak twice as much as they listen. Well, I'll tell you one thing.

I listen twice as much as I speak, okay? And so I want to hear what people are talking about at the events, and I want to hear what their challenges are, right? You can also, if you have customers or clients, you can survey them, okay, see what they're telling you. You can pay attention to social media.

You can pay attention to your competition, okay? Take a look at what your competition is doing, what they're talking about in their ads. You can talk, you know, look at what they're doing in their emails. Okay, what kind of emails they're sending out.

One thing that I would recommend you do is if you want to get really strategic about your business is open up a different email account, okay? Like a Gmail or Yahoo or whatever. And just go and opt in and subscribe to your competition's email, okay? And just see what they're talking about.

Just see what they're sending out to their list, how they're communicating. And you'll be able to see, right, strategically, and you'll be able to pinpoint, you know, some of the, you know, some of the flaws and some of the challenges that's going on in your industry, right? What your competition is talking about so that you can address it. You can go and you can, you know, you can participate in community, right?

There is, you know, there is like Facebook groups and there is, you know, generally if you're in any kind of niche, there is usually a community of people who gather at places, whether it's physical locations or online, right, in a cyberspace and social places. And you can just, you know, talk to them, right? You can also deploy what I call intelligence or intelligent campaigns, okay? What you do is, again, you, I would actually spend money.

Now, you might not do this right out of the gate, but this is something that I like to do from time to time. I would literally deploy something I call the intelligence campaign, okay? So, I would spend some money on marketing a particular, advertisement, okay? A particular post, let's say on Facebook, okay?

And I would actually pay money to get information and just to get people to fill out the survey, okay? I'm not necessarily selling anything. I'm not necessarily making money out of that. But I would actually spend money, right?

Maybe I'll dedicate $50, you know, a month or something like that, right? Just to gather intelligence and I would post, I would run different campaigns. I would actually run different advertisement campaigns in different places just for the sake of, you know, getting people to take a survey in exchange of some sort of a lead magnet that I will give them at the end, okay? So, I'm basically killing two birds with one stone.

Check this out. When I run a campaign that basically says, you know, hey, what is your number one challenge in, you know, insert an industry or a niche, okay? What is your number one challenge in making money online? What is your number one challenge in growing giant tomatoes?

What is your number one challenge in, you know, in training your kids how to, you know, how to party or whatever, right? Whatever your niche, whatever niche you're in, my friend. What is your number one challenge with weight loss? What is your number one challenge in growing your, you know, your chiropractor practice, right?

Whatever, okay? This applies to everything. And so, you can say, fill out this survey and get a free blank, okay? Report, you know, video or whatever.

Or something else, right? That reveals, you know, whatever, okay? So, you're giving them something in return when they fill out a survey, okay? Now, when they fill out a survey, what you're getting is they're telling you what they want, which you have the data, that gold, okay?

Number two is you have their opt-in because they opted in, okay? And number three is now you have a list that told you exactly what they want. And guess what? Your job is to basically find what they're looking for and present it to them.

And boom, you're making money. Does that make sense? So, again, we're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But here is the diagram that will make sense to you, okay?

This forever changed my business. Now, I did not invent this. I'm not going to take the credit for it. I learned this from one of my mentors.

And this is called results in advance, okay? So, check this out. Let this line represent, you know, let's say point A, okay? This is your prospect, your potential customer.

They're not happy, okay? And then point B is where they want to be, okay? They want to be happy. So, I'll give you an example from my industry, from my niche, okay?

I'm in the internet marketing niche, okay? I serve people who, you know, want to earn more money on the internet. They want to build their businesses online, right? They want to grow teams on the internet.

And they just want to be, you know, maybe they want to sell more stuff online. So, that's my kind of people, right, that I serve. And so, from just looking at the overall, right, the industry and just paying attention to what's going on in the industry, from surveying people, from just being active in the community, there is… I know there are several things that people… There are several stages that people have to go through in order to get to that end result or the end destination, okay? Which is where they're happy, where they're making money, right?

And, you know, they have more time freedom. They work from home. Life is awesome, okay? This will be true for virtually everything out there and for virtually every industry that's out there, okay?

So, there is typically three or four or five things that people need to go through like milestones in order for them to go from point A to point B where they really want to be, okay? So, for example, in my industry, there is four main things that people… Let's say if somebody is not making money and they get started and they want to make money, okay? Well, there is… If you just break it down, what are the four main things that people need help with or four main milestones that people have to go through in order to get the, you know, in order to get to that ultimate destination, okay?

Well, in my niche, first of all, before somebody, you know, can make money, they need to have something to promote, okay? So, they need to find an offer, something to promote. Once they found an offer, when they have something to promote, they need to create a landing page for that offer. Something that I teach, something, again, I'm teaching you, right, how to do so that they don't rely on somebody else.

They rely on themselves, okay? Thing number three is they need to get some traffic to that landing page promoting that offer, okay? These are the milestones. And then thing number four is they need to be able to convert that.

They need to be able to convert that traffic into sales. So, here's what I can do, okay? I'm being very strategic about this approach and when I market anything, okay? Knowing this about my marketplace, what I'm going to do is I'm going to deploy, I'm going to deploy some lead magnets, okay?

Whether it's a PDF report, I'm going to give away a video, I'm going to give away a webinar, I'm going to do a teleseminar or maybe a mind map, you know, cheat sheet, you know, maybe I can record an audio, I'm going to give away a piece of software, some sort of a sample, whatever. Any one of these, right, can be my lead magnet. And you know what I'm going to do? Here's what I'm going to do.

Check this out. I'm going to take one of those components, okay, one of those four things, just one, and I'm going to say, let's say that I'll take the first one, okay, finding an offer. Well, check this out. If somebody wants to make money on the internet and they're, they're, they want to make money well, first of all, they need to have something to promote.

So, I can create a video, okay, and I can say, hey, free video reveals how to make money on the internet, step one, okay? Or I can say, here's how you can make, start making money on the internet, step by step, okay? And then that first video would reveal step one in the formula or step one on this timeline here, which is, hey, excuse me. In order for you to make money online, you need to have something to promote, right?

See, something as simple as that, but most people don't think about it, okay? Most people try to overcomplicate a very simple thing, and if you, as a marketer, you'd be very strategic about your marketing, and if you just break things down and simplify things for people, my friend, people are going to love you, okay? People are going to be opting into your stuff. They'll be paying attention to you because most people out there, most other marketers, out there, they're trying to deliberately overcomplicate things so that they keep people confused and so that, hopefully, people come back and buy more stuff from them, and in return, it just backfires on them, and they don't even understand it.

They don't even know, right? I'm telling you, if you just take a concept, take a framework, and break it down to the ridiculous, simplify it down to the ridiculous, okay, and then give people step one of four, okay, as a free value. Free piece of value. You see what I'm talking about?

This is called a lead magnet. This is something I can give away, and then guess what? I can record another video, or maybe I can write out a PDF, right, and just teach people how to create a landing page. Again, the information you're learning here, guess what?

You'd be very strategic about it, and you can go out there, if your niche is teaching people how to make money online or start a business, you're learning here, right? Take this information, package it. Package it your own way, right? Rephrase it, reframe it, and you can give it away as a lead magnet, okay?

Cool stuff. Now, here are some golden tips, as I call them, when it comes to lead magnet, okay? Now, I like to have my lead magnets have a unique, sexy, memorable name, okay? I'm going to show you some examples here in the next video, okay?

Really, really cool. If you can make your stuff stand out, it's really good, okay? The lead magnet must be very specific, okay? I'm going to show you some examples.

It must speak to the desired end result of your prospect. Again, we talked about that. That's very important. It must be easily and quickly consumed.

So, I don't want to give away a book, okay, as a lead magnet, necessarily, because, you know, if somebody's going to take a week or a month to read a book, okay, chances are they're not going to do any business with me because, you know, they haven't consumed the lead magnet yet. Does that make sense? So, I want my lead magnet. I want my lead magnet to be very easily and quickly consumed.

Generally, you know, if that can be consumed within anywhere from five to five minutes to an hour, you know, that's ideal. I want to create a positive expectancy in my marketing, okay, in my lead magnet. So, when people go through my lead magnet, they, you know, I want it to be able to simplify it so, so nicely and keep it so simple so that when people look at my stuff, they're like, you know what, I think I can do that. I can see how I can do that.

And if you can create a positive expectancy, you know, they didn't even implement what I told them, right, but just from watching you explaining stuff and just from watching you showing stuff, if they can say to themselves, you know what, I can do that, that looks simple, that looks easy enough, that creates a positive expectancy, okay, and what it does is those people, they will unconsciously, they will bond with you, okay. Again, you don't even, you know, there is no voodoo going on. You don't need to rely on any of the, you know, the, you know, new age persuasion tactics.

You're just basically being real and you're basically doing stuff that 99.9% of other marketers are not doing, okay. And so, naturally, people, you will become like this magnet. If you can explain a problem to somebody. Better than they can explain it, better than they can, that they can explain it, listen, they will follow you, okay.

They will unconsciously be attracted to you. They will naturally think that you have the solution, okay. And then if you can explain the solution to them, man, it's over. I'm telling you, it's over, okay.

So, keep that in mind as you, you know, as you're creating your lead magnet. And I'm going to show you some examples again. It's going to be really good. Now, the lead magnet that I will give you.

It's going to be given away. I want that to have high perceived value, okay. What does that mean? Well, there is an actual value and there is a perceived value, okay.

So, the actual value of a, of a Rolls Royce, for example. Do you think it's $500,000? I seriously doubt it. I mean, it's an up, you know, it's an upscale, you know, BMW is what it is, you know.

What's an actual value of, let's say, a Ferrari? You know, or a Lamborghini? Or what about like an actual value of a Rolex watch? Okay.

I mean, what's the difference between a Timex and a Rolex from an actual value? Okay. Well, not much. Really, not much.

I mean, Rolex, yeah, it's better. I mean, it's made in Swiss and everything. But is it worth, is it actually worth, you know, 500 times more than a Timex or 100 times more than a Timex? No.

You know. But perceived value is when people look at something. And they, you know, and like, for example, there is an American Express black card, right? There is a regular credit card and there is a black card.

And, you know, to get to a black card, right, you have to spend like $250,000 a year with American Express. And you have to have this perfect credit, all that good stuff, right? And then they give you, you know, a chance or an opportunity to enroll in this black card, which you have to pay like $5,000 a month or a year. Just to have it, okay?

Now, what is it doing? Well, it's a freaking credit card. It's the same credit card as a normal one, right? But people strive for that because it got a perceived value that's high, okay?

It's exclusive. You know, how can you create high perceived value in your marketing? Think about it, okay? Well, you can do that by, A, making your stuff be really good, okay?

You can do like if you're going to do a video. Do that. Do a good job in the video. You know, if you're going to do a video, look your best in the video.

I'm not talking about dressing up in a suit and tie, but really, you know, be present in your video. You know, what that's going to do is it's going to, when people go through your stuff, they will look at you if you're going to do a video, right? And if you're just present, if you're just engaged, if you're talking to that video camera like you're talking to that person like as if they're standing next to you, does that make sense? They will have that perceived value that's going to be huge, okay?

They will not know what's going on, but they will be attracted to you, okay? Or maybe you're giving away a software, okay? Softwares have high perceived value, right? If you design your software, listen, invest in a good designer, you know, a graphics designer, and make the software look really, really good, okay, on the outside, on the cover, okay?

If your perceived value, you know, if you're giving away some kind of DVD or something, right, and you're marketing offline, you're going to be sending the DVD out to people, listen, invest in a good designer to create a really good-looking cover for the DVD, okay? Does that make sense? Or an e-book or a website, right? If you're creating a landing page, you know, make your stuff look really good, okay?

Because if your stuff looks amateur, it does not have, you know, the perceived value is not there. Does that make sense? So, again, simple things that most people don't think about, okay? Also, in my lead magnet, I want to create an aha moment for people at least once.

So as I go through my lead magnet, let's say it's a video, okay, and I talk about a particular topic, I want to explain it in a way so that, you know, it's very simple for people to understand, and I also wanted to include at least one aha moment for them. I want to share with them something that they did not think would be there. Does that make sense? Whether it's, you know, you give out some of your best content, right there.

You know, if you are creating a, you know, if you're going to do a webinar, right, put your best foot forward. Listen, with the launch of Internet Traffic Formula, what we did, and the reason this launch was, you know, ended up being ridiculously successful is because, you know, we put our best foot forward in the prelaunch content, you know? I gave away some really, really good stuff, right, in a prelaunch. Okay?

I've invested in a really good videographer, right, to shoot the prelaunch videos, to make the thing look, you know, to make it have a high perceived value, and I gave away really good stuff. I created positive expectancy, right? Again, if you just go back and just kind of model the launch of Internet Traffic Formula and just kind of break it down, now with this perspective, knowing all these things, right, now you can go back and, you know, and you can see that we had, you know, we created positive expectancy. We made it easily and quickly to be consumable, right?

We spoke directly to the desired end result. We were very specific, right? And, you know, we had a sexy name, you know, Internet Traffic Formula. There was a formula to success, right?

It had a name. So we literally, we had all of these components integrated within the, you know, ITF, Internet Traffic Formula prelaunch, okay? All right, so next let's talk about the hook real quick here. The hook essentially is, it's a big promise.

And, you know, usually in the headline, basically it's the benefit that your lead magnet will provide. It's what you're promising that they will get, okay? That's your hook. And again, I'm going to show you guys examples and it will make sense to you.

Now, I want my hook to be very, very specific, okay? I want it to focus on just one thing and one thing only. A lot of people, they try, you know, they're not specific in their marketing. That's why their opt-in rates suffer and they're not monetizing their traffic to the fullest like they could.

Like they could be monetizing the traffic because they keep their focus kind of scattered, right? They, you know, they're not specifically focusing on one thing in their hook, in their promise, okay? That's a big mistake. Again, I want my hook, my headline to speak directly to the market's desired end result, okay?

And then call to action, it's, you know, here are a couple of tips for you. Again, I want it to be very direct. I would like personally to have at least two to three call to actions per day. Three call to actions on the page, okay?

On my landing page. Now, guys, we're talking about the landing page here still, okay? This is still Capture Mastery. I'm explaining to you some psychological things and some strategical things, right?

That you need to understand what goes on kind of behind the curtain, right? That is not visible but it's there. And when you implement and when you create it from, you know, with knowing all these things, right? Then you have your, you know, then your landing page.

Your landing pages will convert better, okay? Here's something else that works really well sometimes is unusual looking arrows, okay? Sometimes that can help conversions. Again, I'm going to show you some examples.

One thing that I've discovered that allowed me to eliminate a lot of the fake emails that people enter sometimes, right? Is I just, you know, add this little magical phrase. I say information will be emailed or will be sent to the email address provided above. And usually I put that under the, you know, the call to action button, okay?

And that proved to reduce the number of fake emails that people enter on my landing page. Therefore, allowing me to create, you know, better audience, obviously capture better emails. And if I capture good emails, my open rates are higher, right? So now when I'm sending out emails because the email is going out to the actual email address and not a fake email address.

Right? And people actually get my emails. Well, more people open my emails, right? And more people get to my, you know, get to see my stuff.

Okay? So, yeah, that's, you know, that's call to action for you. What we're going to do next is I'm going to show you some examples of some, you know, some strategic landing pages and landing machines, you know, capture machines, right? Is what I call them.

And I'm going to walk you through them. You know, we'll give you the strategy. Okay? I'm going to break down why, you know, I created the way I created them.

And then so, you know, I want you to take a look at them so that you can have something you can model after. Okay? So with that being said, I'll see you in the next video.