If your current lead generation strategy offers a free workshop for people, your conversion rates are not that great. Say you’re a financial advisor offering a social security workshop or a chiropractor offering a pain-relief workshop; I’ll show you a simple way to double, triple or even 10x your numbers.

The best part? It works great, no matter what industry you’re in.

Here’s the scoop:

Let’s assume, for demonstration purposes, you’re advertising in a newspaper with 10,000 readers. And let’s assume that you’re a chiropractor offering a free pain-relief workshop to people with chronic back pain for the same demonstration purposes. What you need to do first is to look at it from the bullseye perspective.

The outermost circle is all of the 10k readers. That’s the widest net you can possibly cast with your ad. All of the eyeballs are available. Of course, that’s unrealistic. Not everyone has back pain, and not everyone reads your ad. This means you need to go one step closer to the bullseye, the next inner circle: All readers with back pain.

This is a smaller number than the 10,000 above, but it is still much higher than the conversions you are currently getting. Unfortunately, as it stands, you have no idea what that number is. (But there’s a way to find this, as you’ll soon see.) Next circle down is all the people with back pain who are also interested in your workshop.

That’s your current conversion.

Say, this number is 60. 60 people with back pain have read your ad, raised their hands, and come to your workshop. Out of these 60 people, there are 20 who, after the workshop, have booked a consultation with you.

And that’s your bullseye!

This is a person who loves everything you’ve said and has gone through all of the steps. They read your ad and responded; they came to the workshop and scheduled an appointment with you. In other words, this is your five-star prospect. Now, here’s where it gets interesting:

To increase the number of people in your bullseye, you need to increase the number of people attending your workshops (Obviously.) But you won’t achieve that by tweaking the copy of your ad. No matter how awesome you make it. You can only do it by making all the readers with back pain VISIBLE.

There’s one problem:

Since you don’t know how many readers with back pain there are, you also don’t know how many of them are intrigued by the headline of your ad enough to read the whole article… but don’t want to or can’t make it to your workshop.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is, even if they’re not ready to come to your workshop, they’d still love to get the information from you if you would offer it to them.

Can you see where I’m getting at?

That’s right. The only thing you can do to make THOSE prospects visible is… to change the offer of your ad. Instead of a free workshop, offer them a free book, and your conversion numbers will go waaaaay up!

How do I know this?

Because I’ve seen it happen a number of times before. We were able to more than triple the conversion rates with this one change alone. A measly 0.5% response to a free workshop jumped to a 2% or 3% response rate to a free book! And here’s the thing: The people who would later come to your actual workshop are a subset of people who raise their hand for a free book.

With one important difference: Now you know who they are. You have, say, 150 more prospects with back pain that were invisible to you before. And you are able to start a conversation with them!

Now you can keep educating and motivating them… keep inviting them to your workshop… until they become ready to attend.