How to Give Away Free Ebook Using Your WordPress Form

The Atomic Habits’ author, James Clear, has built his email list for 6 years before he released the book. By the time he published the book, he had almost half a million people to tell about it. But how do you attract that many people to give you their email? In this post, we’ll explore one way to build your email list, by giving away a downloadable PDF (like a free ebook) on your WordPress site, using Ninja Forms.

How to give away free ebook on your WordPress site

To follow along, you’ll need the free, core plugin of Ninja Forms. Get it here.

1. Create the PDF and upload it to WordPress

Using your favorite tool, create the PDF you want to share. Canva, Google Slides, Photoshop, anything works as long as it generates a .pdf file. For this post, I use Google Slides to create a single-page PDF (don’t do this).

After you get your PDF, upload it to your WordPress media library. You can do this by going to Media > Add New, or by clicking the Add Media button in your new post window.

Then go to the ‘Upload files’ tab, and drop your PDF file, or click ‘Select Files’ and choose your file.

Now that the PDF is uploaded, you can add the link to the PDF wherever you want. In an email, on a page. This is the link to my PDF. See where I’m going?

2. Set up your form to capture emails

Create a new form with Ninja Forms. Add the fields you want people to complete before they can download your PDF. Make sure you at least have an email field, because that’s what we’re here for.

Keep the questions short and targeted. Studies show that shorter forms have higher conversion rates. Only ask for essential information that you can use now and leave out questions that merely satisfy some vague curiosity: every time you cut a question from the gating form, you’ll get more responses to the remaining questions.

-Nielsen Norman Group (read this article to learn more about when to gate content)

In this example, I only have the email field and the submit button. But if you’d like, you can add other fields to help you qualify leads.

3a. Link to the ebook from your success message

After you’re done with your form, go to the ‘Emails & Actions’ tab, then to the ‘Success Message’ action.

Include the link to the PDF in your success message. Click the ‘Media Library’ icon (shown in the image below), choose your PDF, and insert it into the message. The link to the PDF will appear, but the text will be the title of your PDF. Simply replace this with your text, like ‘Click here to download your ebook’ in my example.

That’s it! Now, every time someone completes the form, they will be able to access the ebook.

3b. Or send it in an email

Another way to do this is by sending the ebook via email, instead of in the success message.

In the Ninja Forms builder, go to the Emails & Actions tab, then add an Email action if you don’t already have one.

Here are the default settings for the email action.

Because you want to send the email to the email address that’s submitted, replace the ‘To’ email by clicking on the merge tag icon (see below). Then click the email field that we’ve created in step 2.

You might want to edit the Subject, too. But one thing that you have to include in the message is the PDF link. Just repeat the step described in 3a to insert the link.

Tada! Now the link will be emailed to everyone who submitted the form.

3c. Redirect to a download page

If you want a more complex-looking download page than the basic success message, you can always build a page yourself and attach the download link there. Then, go to ‘Emails & Actions’ tab, then choose the ‘Redirect’ action.

Simply paste the download page URL to the URL field in the action settings.

Step up your form game

Sync with your favorite ESP or CRM

If you’ve followed the three steps above, you’ll already have the emails of your visitors recorded in your WordPress database. You can always export the submissions, and then import them to your ESP or CRM manually. Or, you can get one of the add-ons listed here, so you can integrate your form with Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Salesforce, HubSpot, and many more!

Get people to pay for your PDF

Think your ebook is worth more than an email address? Or did you have free ebook offers already on your WordPress site? Get one of our payment gateway add-ons to require people to pay for the ebook. You can choose from PayPal, Stripe, Elavon, or Recurly.

Start giving value by offering a free ebook on your WordPress site!

Offering a free ebook, in exchange for an email address, is a great way to build trust and demonstrate your expertise. Plus, you’ll have an email list that you can tap anytime you want to broadcast a message. Let us know what kind of PDF you offered and what you ended up building in the comments below!