How much free content should I share?
How do we expand our reach and how do we find our people online?
One of the most effective ways to find our people online is to put out really great free content. The challenges that small business owners face is we don’t have a whole lot of time to do that. So how do you create enough content? What IS enough content? How do you create it once and use it over and over?
3 Reasons Your Audience Will Invest After Consuming Free Content
Many experts worry that sharing free content will prevent their audience from investing to go deeper with them in paid programs. Here’s the thing: no matter what niche you are in, your audience can likely already find tons of free content related to the problems they want help solving.
Just because there is free content out there already related to what you do does not mean your audience will not invest at a premium level to work with you. Your audience will invest to go deeper with you after diving into your free content because you can help them three ways:
- Systems – you have a replicable and predictable way to get results
- Synthesize – you have done the work of sifting through all the “stuff” out there and have streamlined and packaged it into an easy-to-implement focus
- Speed – help them get faster results using your method
You likely see experts marketing all the time who have the cheesy sales pitch related to free content. It sounds a lot like “I’m going to share my three power secrets, BUT I’m only going to tell you one. If you want the other two, you have to purchase my program to see behind the curtain”.
This type of marketing does not feel good to the audience and, frankly, I can’t imagine that it feels good for the expert. The market has moved way beyond this type of approach.
How to Stand Out With Free Content
You can stand out when you change your mindset around free content and transcend this old school method of marketing. It’s okay to share your three secrets, and it’s okay to share your full system because understanding your system and being able to implement it are two different things.
The truth is if implementation was as easy as it sounded, we wouldn’t even be talking about this, right?
Your people invest because they know that speed in implementation is the key to getting the results they want. Show your audience how you help them solve their problem and they will want to go deeper with you.
How to Decide On the Right Free Content
We know that free powerful content is what’s going to attract people into the conversation with you. It’s what creates a first experience with you. The challenge is we don’t have a whole lot of time in creating that context, so the key is to focus on powerful content that you can create and then you can reuse over and over.
One of the easiest ways to figure out what that powerful content is is to think about the questions that your ideal, perfect clients have related to what you do. Click To Tweet
Ask yourself “what questions do my people have?” and make a list of those questions. That list becomes a powerful springboard for lots of ideas for free content. You can translate those questions into blog posts, social media posts, videos, e-books, Facebook Live topics, etc.
For example, one of my private client is a high-level executive coach. She knows one of the big questions her ideal client has is “How do I find more time?” We developed a series of free content pieces related to this questions including a long form social media post, short form post and short video (shot on her iPhone). She has leveraged these posts to get engagement from her audience before we move into her main launch for her upcoming course.
What is “Enough” Free Content?
I often hear from experts who have been told they need to create all kinds of free content before they can fill a paid program. It’s important to be realistic about the time you can spend creating free content.
When I first launched Create 6-Figure Courses, I had one piece of free content: a 60-minute webinar. This free webinar generated over $90k in revenue in my first two-week launch.
I did not have: website (only a course sales page), a blog, e-books, infographics, or anything else.
If I had to choose one piece of free content, hands down the webinar wins. I would recommend you start by creating a compelling, strategically developed webinar. We work on how to do this in our programs because it is a simple, proven method for sharing a free experience that enables your audience to decide if they are ready to do deeper work with you.
Summary
Share below what ideas you have about the questions you can help your people answer! This is how you can zone in on some really powerful content to attract your people.