If you’re looking for a way to generate more passive income in your business, adding a tripwire offer on your website is certainly a smart idea. If you’re not familiar with this term, a tripwire offer is a small paid offer you present to someone after they opt into a freebie on your site. For example, if you offer a free ebook on your site, a good tripwire offer might be a $20 mini-course that dives deeper or expands on the topic covered in the free ebook.
Now that you know what a tripwire is, it’s important to understand the components you need to set one up on your site. A lot of entrepreneurs think setting up a tripwire requires a ton of tech skills or fancy tools — so this stops a lot of people from ever even experimenting with this potential passive income stream.
Here’s the good news though, you really only need 4 main components to set up a tripwire on your site. (And since you’re reading this post, you probably already have one of them!)
In today’s post I’ll break down the specifics of each component and share tools to consider, so you can set up a tripwire offer on your site — the simple way.
If you’ve opted in for freebies and you might think that it requires a ton of tech or some fancy tools, or you have to pay a lot of money for these websites to make everything work, but you really don’t. So today I want to break down the four things that you need to create your tripwire offer.
So the first thing you need for a tripwire is a freebie.
To start, you need to offer freebie. And if you’re reading this post, chances are, you already have a freebie (or multiple freebies) available on your site.
All you really need is some type of free content — like an ebook, a worksheet, a free training, etc. — that your audience would find valuable enough to give you their email address in exchange for it. This component is key because tripwires work especially well when whatever you’re offering (at a small price) relates to the freebie content someone has just opted into receive.
Once you have your freebie content good-to-go, encourage people to opt in with calls-to-action (CTAs) in your blog posts or with a pop-up on your site. As soon as you have a solid freebie displayed on your site, you’re ready to incorporate the next essential tripwire component…ecommerce.
The next thing that you’ll need is an ecommerce plugin.
And yes, this really does work best if you have a Wordpress website. It’s really difficult to do tripwires on Squarespace just because of some different limitations.
If you already have an ecommerce plugin, great. You can just continue probably using that if you don’t have one yet, there are two that I would recommend. WooCommerce is great if you are intending to sell both physical and digital products through your website. Easy Digital Downloads is another plugin and this is actually what I use. There are really just less things to mess with – it’s really simple and straight forward like the name of it says.
Once you’ve set up your products you can just grab a short code and embed that on any page or post. The nice thing is that both of these plugins are free and they do have paid add on features or extensions that can be installed for further functionality. For example, I have an extension that allows me to add buyers to my email list and ConvertKit. It doesn’t do this automatically, so that’s why I needed the extension.
The third thing you’ll need is a countdown timer.
So a big part of what makes a tripwire offer effective is that it’s really only available for a limited time. So you save $10 on this ebook and it’s only available for 10 minutes and then that page expires. So personally I use evergreen countdown timer. Again, super simple, it’s free. You just tell it like I want this countdown to last 10 minutes, grab the short code, put it on the page, you’re good to go. Another popular option though is deadline funnel. It’s $37 a month, but it also works within email. So you can actually use trip wires or countdown timers for limited time offers like within ConvertKit.
And then lastly, obviously you need your tripwire offer.
The whole purpose of the trip wire is to, part of the whole purpose of a trip wire is to encourage people to make a decision to buy quickly. That’s why lower price, smaller digital products work so well. So again, think about something $30 or less that you could offer, um, like workbooks on demand workshops and masterclass replay, something of that nature. But if you don’t have a product like that, you could also offer discounts. So if you do strategy sessions consulting, this could be a great way to say, Hey, you can book a strategy call right now and Save, you know, $20 $50 whatever.
