A Model For Giving Things Away · Ray Edwards Empire Builders

A Model For Giving Things Away

After today's session with Ray and our Empire Builders cohort, where the challenge was to own our dangerous ideas, I went and pulled something out of the recycle bin that I'd binned about four months ago.

Too 'out there', I thought at the time, because it collapses the orthodoxy rather than working within it.

I called it T.R.A.I.L.S.

T.R.A.I.L.S. is a backronym as the word came first, the trail of clicks people leave behind, then I built the six moves to earn each letter.

For years we all ran the same play. A squeeze page, a lead magnet, a form. A gate. Pay the toll with your email to get through.

And everything you handed over at that gate went straight into the freezer behind it. A cold store full of addresses, sat there frozen, mostly never touched, a fifth of them dead within the year. You told yourself you had an asset. What you had was frost.

So I took the gate off.

One thing first, so nobody swings at the wrong target. This is about cold and lukewarm traffic. Strangers. People who don't know you yet. Your warm list, your buyers, the ones already reaching for their card, keep mailing them, that still works. It's at the cold end, where the gate does the most damage and the email is worth the least, that this changes everything.

With no gate, the document flows. It spreads, gets passed on, even ripped off. And with no gate there's nothing going into the freezer, because you're not extracting anything to store. What you get instead is the click. Live, warm, out in the open. Someone acting just now, not an address freezing in the dark.

Load it with tagged links, each pointing somewhere on purpose. Then read the clicks, not the sign ups. A click is a real vote. A fake email is not.

Here's the part I keep coming back to. A squeeze funnel is a one way toll. They pay with an email, you hand over a PDF, done. TRAILS is a two way exchange. You give first, the whole thing, free, no ask. And in return, without you ever asking, they tell you what they actually want. The click is the silent half of that exchange. The reply is the spoken half, and on a post like this the reply is the comment box below. Value goes out, truth comes back. Both sides end up holding more than they started with.

And no, it isn't anti funnel. It's anti gate. Take the gate off and the path is still there. The funnel doesn't vanish. It moves to where the clicks land and where the offers live. And it quietly becomes business intelligence, telling you what offer the crowd actually wants.

I threw this out four months ago. Today it came back. Turns out a lot of what we treat as gospel is just habit that used to work under conditions that have since changed.

Tell me where I'm wrong and I'll either revise it or put it back in the recycle bin.

John Junk

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A Model For Giving Things Away