Episode #002: Free Vs. Paid Content - Which Should It Be?
Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast
Episode #002: Free Vs. Paid Content - Which Should It Be?
Today’s Episode:
Welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast! We are taking on a big topic in the online marketing industry. We are going to be talking about when content should be free and when we should charge for it.
We are trying to change the way people think about marketing. In this episode, I am going to share why I think taking a counter approach to the norm is what is going to work in the future. I saw four ways to give information freely without giving away so much that people don’t want to work with you.
Show Notes:
[01:13] I have noticed this trend over the past few years that quality information has become more scarce as content has become more plentiful.
[02:42] If you are afraid that people won’t buy from you because you have given freely, there are plenty of people giving away freely and running successful businesses.
[03:59] Businesses are taking this approach of giving freely and getting wildly successful results.
[04:27] Zach shares how his 5-Day Launch Challenge blog post drives sales.
[05:47] It is okay to give people some information and offer them a deeper level of information inside your programs.
[06:05] He shares 4 ways to give information freely without giving away so much that people don’t want to work with you. People expect podcasts and blogs to be free and easy to read.
[06:55] When people do buy into something, they are more committed.
[07:33] People who spend money have more incentive to use your content because as a society financial commitment feels more intensive than time commitment.
[08:08] Some people will take your free content and get results.
[09:50] In a sea of saturation and sameness, it is easy to stand out. Giving freely sets you apart.
[10:46] Quality content gets better reach. When we create amazing content people will share it for us.
[12:50] Quality content also makes you more likely to rank in Google and be discoverable.
[13:18] Organic content is great but when you layer in paid advertising you can market to all the people that are engaging and reading your really good content.
[14:14] You are actually creating quality content that attracts new viewers and you can advertise to those new viewers to bring them deeper into your fold.
[15:10] When you provide high-quality content and you give this content away you deepen the level of trust with your audience.
[16:21] Content to give away for free: guides, ultimate guides, how-to videos, walkthroughs, training, webinars, training series. Paid content: fill in the blank templates, quality walkthroughs that are over an hour, action plans, and video training accompanied by resources or downloads.
[17:24] People buy a course or coaching for access to you, sequence of information, and condensed information.
[18:10] It is not about withholding information. It is about gively information freely in the context you can provide it.
[20:28] Lots of people create massive brands around how-to content.
[21:54] If you are holding back the information that you give away, just try putting out more free content.
[22:39] The most powerful thing we can do is just show up, give freely, and for those that want to go deeper present an opportunity.
[23:17] It is easier to stand out when you truly serve first.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
Welcome. This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, Episode Number Two.
Hello, beautiful people. I am so excited for today's podcast because we are taking on a big topic in the online marketing industry. Now if you listen to episode zero, If you haven't, I recommend you do, you know that we are trying to change the way that the industry operates. We're trying to change the way that people think about marketing, the way that we think about growing, the way that we think about our list, our memberships, our courses. And there's one topic that's always gotten to me and I think things have really shifted around this topic in the past few years and I want to talk about it.
And more importantly, I want you to understand why I take a somewhat counter approach to the industry and what people are saying that you should be doing and really get down to brass tacks about why I think taking a counter approach to the norm is what's going to work in the future. Now you might be like, "What the heck is this guy talking about? This is so cryptic. Zach, where are you going with this?" Well, let me just dive right in. I've noticed this trend over the past few years, that quality information has become more scarce as content has become more plentiful.
So what's happening is that people are still publishing blogs, they're publishing podcasts, but they've become a really like high level almost I don't want to say unusable because there's still lots of great information out there. But they've become so focused on getting you into the next step of the funnel that the value is missing in some of the content that's being published. Okay? I think that there is a lot of the reasoning behind this and we'll get into that today. But I think a lot of you listening have seen this in action or inaction and you've started to wonder to yourself, "How much should I be giving away for free?"
As information and content seems more plentiful, actionable content and actual information feels more gated than ever. So in today's episode, it might feel a little different than what you would expect, but we are addressing when should it be free and when should we charge for it? Now I think that if you're afraid to give away your information because you think, "Oh my gosh, if I give away good information, people won't buy from me because the blog post will do everything they need." It's really a fear or scarcity-based issue. Now I don't want to go too far down the mindset rabbit hole, though we will talk mindset on this show down the road.
But I just want you to understand that if you're afraid that people won't buy from you because you've given freely, you just have to understand that there are plenty of people out there giving way more information way more freely and they're still running successful businesses. I'm going to link up to in the show notes neilpatel.com. Neil runs a wildly successful SEO company, software as a service company, online information business. He has a successful YouTube channel and he just gives so much content. And not just content, but I actually remember when I was starting with content marketing, he had this multiple chapter guide on his blog that walked you through how to create a content marketing plan, no charge, no nothing.
And it took a while, but believe it or not I actually became a user of one of his softwares for one of my businesses. Because when we were ready for that step, we knew that we could trust him because his information was so good. Here's the thing. I want to talk about the root of this question, because I really think that what people are asking is, "If I give stuff away for free, why would people want to buy from me?" And I use Neil as an example not because we haven't done this in our business, but because I want you to understand other businesses out there are taking this path and getting wildly successful results.
The thing that you have to understand is that the common statement that I hear in the marketplace is give them the what, sell them the how. And we really need to dissect that because I'm not saying that you should give out every step of your process with an extensive how to guide. But I want to let you in on a little secret. We wrote this blog years ago called the Complete 5-Day Challenge Launch Strategy. And the Complete 5-Day Challenge Launch Strategy was basically how to launch with a five day challenge. And it's a few hundred words long. It's really not crazy, but it walked through how to come up with the title of your challenge, the way that we promote our challenge, how to drive organic traffic, how to get referral traffic, how to run the five-day challenge, how to connect with your audience in the challenge. And then it offers them the opportunity to buy our $97 product.
What's really cool about this is that we get a lot of organic traffic to this page between 300 and 400 visits a month just from Google. We're not advertising this page. We're not marketing this page right now. We may down the road, but the reality is we're simply promoting this page organically. And when people land on this page, some of them naturally buy our next product. Even though the post basically says, "Here's when to send the emails, here's how to come up with the plan." This post actually drives sales.
And this is not our longest post and we'll talk about epic posts in a minute. But what I want you to understand about this is that I think it's okay to give people some information and offer them a deeper level of information inside your programs. And so this is where I think the concern comes in is like, "Well, how deep do I go? How much do I give?" And so I want to talk about four ways to really give information freely without giving away so much that people don't want to work with you.
The first thing that I want to say is that people don't pay for blog posts and people don't pay for podcasts. And you might be like, "Well, what are about membership blog posts or membership podcasts?" Absolutely. But I'm talking in the general sense people expect podcasts and blogs to be free and easy to read. What that means is that you can give freely on these, but people aren't spending the money or making any investment to be into that content.
Now there's a whole nother myth on here that's like the more you pay for something, the bigger the transformation. And we'll talk about that in another episode. But what I want you to understand is that when people do buy into something, they are more committed. Whether it's $10 or $1000, there's a higher level of commitment when someone buys something. And most people in my opinion subconsciously know that when they commit to something they're taking action.
And so visiting your blog or listening to your podcast, yes, it's a time commitment, but it's even bigger financial commitment to invest in the next step. So understand that you're giving people the opportunity to commit at a deeper level where they're kind of paying in a sense to take action. Let me say this a slightly different way. People who spend money have more incentive to use your content because as a society, financial commitment feels more intensive than time commitment. Okay? We don't have to like that. We don't have to be in love with that sentiment. But the reality is that we know when we pay for something, we tend to get better results. So that's the first thing. Understand that people are more invested when they buy from you. So simply putting out incredible information means you are encouraging people to take the next step.
The second thing that I want to point out is that some people will take your free content and get results. Y'all, that is a good thing. Okay? We have this ultimate guide. We'll link it up in the show notes called the Ultimate Guide to Your First 1000 Email Subscribers. And it could probably use an update to be honest. It's been a couple years old. If you go search it on our website, you'll find it. But I want you to understand that we are really just giving freely the information it takes to build your email list. And in theory, somebody could take them that entire guide, run with it and grow their email list.
They could seriously grow their email list a pretty dramatic amount by following that guide. So why would I give it away for free? Well, the reality is because I want people to start trusting me. Okay? I have made this observation for those of you who are listening and don't know, I run an agency where we manage ads for people's funnels and launches. And I've made this observation which is that less and less people are buying cold from a webinar. Less and less people are saying, "Yes, I will buy your $1000 course right off a webinar because I trust you in 45 minutes."
Because honestly the marketplace is just getting more saturated. More and more people are coming in. More and more people are offering courses and trainings. And it's harder to discern who to work with. I think that's just the reality. But the other thing I want you to understand is that in a sea of saturation and sameness, it's easy to stand out. What we get told is that in a saturated market we need to stand out and in a saturated market we need to be different. But what I'm saying is in a market where everybody's trying to sell you all the time, giving freely sets you apart. And so we write these blogs that still get traffic, still get page views.
We wrote a couple of blogs where we were talking about how to launch your entire course in 60 days and that blog over the last 30 days has gotten over 100 visits. And you might be like, "That's not a ton." But y'all, think about it. If you write these epic pieces of content and you do it on a regular basis, you're going to be able to start to see the results and it's going to add up over time.
And so that brings me to my third thing that you need to think about which is that really quality content gets better reach. How many times have you read a post where you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is so good. I'm going to share it with my friend. I'm going to post it on social media" that's not news? Like realistically, when's the last time that happened? For me it's pretty darn rare. I very rarely find a piece of information that I go, "Oh my gosh, this is so good that I have to let everybody know about it."
What if your content did that? What if your content was so good that people wanted to share it, right? When we create our epic blog posts, we find that people actually share them. People actually put our content out into the world for us. People share our Facebook posts. People share our blogs. People talk about what we're doing. And it means that we are creating really good content. Because a 500-word blog posts about how to run Facebook ads isn't going to cut it anymore. We actually wrote this really long form guide called How to Launch Your Course with Facebook Ads in 2021. And it's just this really long form blog posts that does pretty well. It's still in the process of kind of ranking in Google. So we haven't seen a ton of Google traffic, but what we did see is that when we launched it, we got hundreds of views in a short period of time and people started sharing it on social media. And that was really, really powerful.
And so I just want you to start thinking about the value of really quality content. Not to go too much on a tangent, but there are actually business owners who literally run their entire business building content that is shareable, Pinterest-able, Google-able and they market themselves and they just promote their content. I want you to understand that quality content also makes you more likely to rank in Google and be discoverable. Now I'm not going to get into how do you rank into Google and how do you show up? Because what I've found from my business is that by just creating consistent quality content, more people come to our website, that more people find us, that more people click our content, that more people opt-in. Okay?
And that coming to the last point which is, yes, organic content is great. But when you layer in paid advertising, you can market to all of the people that are reading and engaging with your really quality content. So for example, what we do in our business is I told you we have that blog post about how to launch with a five-day challenge. When somebody read that blog post, we actually run Google ads to them that show them how to get to the product. So if you read a blog post about how to run a five-day challenge, you're going to see from Google ads opportunities to buy our Challenge Launch Toolkit. That's just Google ads.
Also with Facebook ads, we can re-target people who have been to our website. We can re-target people who are engaging with our podcast if we put show notes on our website. And so as a piggyback on number three, I want you to understand that you are actually creating quality content that attracts new viewers, and you can advertise to those new viewers to bring them deeper into your fold. And as a little bonus I just want to throw this in. There is like when you were getting started with your business, when you were getting started with your journey whether you teach health and wellness, gut health, yoga, painting, watercolor, dog walking, dog training.
When you were first dipping your toes into the water, what is the content you wish was there? Especially if you're in business, have you ever made a big scary investment without knowing much about that person running the course of the program and then thought, "Oh my gosh, did I make the right choice? Should I not make the right choice? What's going to be inside?" When you provide high-quality content and you give this quality content away, you deepen the level of trust with your audience.
So let me just do a quick recap of some of the stuff that we covered. If you're kind of wondering like, "Why should I be giving stuff away for free?" Well, number one you can rank higher in Google and get more organic traffic. Number two, that traffic is more discoverable. Number three, it builds a much deeper level of trust. And four, there are clues out there that this type of marketing works. Because as content has become plentiful, quality information has become scarce. And in a sea of sameness, standing out is easier when you create high-quality content.
Now up to this point, we really just kind of talked about why you should be giving away really good content, but we still haven't really addressed that root question of like, "If I give stuff away for free, why would people want to buy for me" or it's higher level question, "What do I give away for free?" So let me kind of tell you how I decide what I'm going to give away for free. If this was like the straight shooter Zach, "Just tell me what to give away for free." So giving away for free would be guides, ultimate guides, how to videos, walkthroughs, trainings, webinars, video series with quality information in them. That's what I'm giving away for free.
What I'm going to hold behind my paywall is fill in the blank templates, quality walkthroughs that are broken down over an hour, action plans that people can actually take and implement, video training that's accompanied by resources or downloads. Okay? I know that's really high level and I want to actually point out one more thing which is that there could be crossover. So I might take a piece of my course and give it away for free as like a blog post with an opt-in and I've done that before. And you might be thinking, "Oh my gosh, if I give something away for free, can it be in my course later?" Y'all, yes. Okay?
Because I think one other thing we need to touch on is what do people buy a course, training, coaching for? They buy for access to you. They buy for sequence of information so they don't have to go finding it all over your blog. And they buy it for condensed information to get it quicker, faster, easier across the finish line. So the reality is if I were to make a course called Your First 1000 Email Subscribers and I talked through everything in that blog post, but with a Facebook ads walkthrough and a workbook and bonus videos, and maybe a training on your first email funnel. That's my paid product, even though the free blog walks through the exact same steps.
So again, you need to be thinking that it's not about withholding information. It's about giving information freely in the context that you can provide it. So for me, we try to write four to six epic blog posts a year, which are minimum 4,000-word posts that walkthrough a very specific thing in our industry that attracts new customers, new engagement, new sales, new shares, all that good stuff. We try to do that several times a year, plus we've launched this podcast where we kind of go against the grain and talk about why we disagree.
Now, I want to address one last thing which is people are now saying, "If I create how to content, then people won't get results." And I want to say that I don't think that's true. Okay? There's a lot of talk in our industry about like, "Oh, well, if you don't actually change the way people think about their business, their life, their weight, their et cetera, they won't get results." Y'all, there is some truth to the fact that people need to believe in themselves. They need to trust the process. They need to trust you. They need to trust themselves. I'm not saying that's not true.
What I am saying is YouTube is a thriving place. And you're [inaudible 00:19:21] like, "What does that have to do with anything?" But just hear me out. YouTube is a thriving place built on how to videos. Okay? I have a couple of friends, Mike and Justin over at Primal Video on YouTube, over a million subscribers. And I'm just going to read them a couple of their video titles so that you can get a sense of what's going on. Okay? How to Create a YouTube Channel with almost six million views. What's the Best Video Editing Software for Android, 2.4 million views. How to Make a Thumbnail for YouTube Videos the Easy Way, 2.3 million views.
Y'all, they run a massively successful business. They have a membership, they have affiliate marketing, they have YouTube revenue and their business is built on how to information. So one thing that I love to tell people is that when I'm trying to change the way I think or I'm trying to evaluate something in the marketing industry, I like to look at different industries. YouTube is a totally different world and yes, you can be famous on there for your personality. But lots of people create massive brands around how to content.
I'll give you another example just to really solidify this. Think about all the recipe bloggers who get book deals. This is a wildly normal thing for food bloggers to be creating recipes and then get a call to offer them a book deal or they put in the work to get a book deal. I don't want to say it just falls in their lap because it's not what I mean. But what I am saying is if the argument we were making was true, if free content prevents paid opportunities, then how could recipe bloggers, food bloggers put out hundreds, if not thousands in some cases of recipes still get a book deal, still have people buy their book and still have people joining their memberships, meal planning programs and backend offers?
Because the reality is the free information is not the same as the paid information in the sense that there is an investment, there is a deeper level of access, sequence and condensation. And there's just a clear line. That's it. It's a clear line where it's like you're going to get the resources to make it happen and the support to bring it to life versus I'm telling you what and how to do it.
I want to leave you with this final thought on this topic which is if you're holding back the information that you give away, I challenge you to just put out more free content. Some of the most successful people that I know create content that serves. And a lot of us are here to make a deeper, bigger impact personally in our life and professionally with our clients. And the truest way to make an impact is to serve. And is it really of service to hold back information because we think people need to shift their mindset or change their beliefs or change who they are before they learn?
I would argue that the most powerful thing we can do is show up and give freely. And for those that want to go deeper, present an opportunity. So with all of this being said, I challenge you to do one thing. Get out there and create a really epic piece of content. Give it away. Write the amazing blog posts. Record the podcast episode that's an hour long and walks through your entire launch process. Send out the workbook that you would have charged for, but you just want to build goodwill with your audience. I'm not saying give the shirt off your back, but I am saying It's easier to stand out when you truly serve first.
As we wrap, I just want to remind you the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast is going to be coming out every week. And because we are returning on the scene, we would love it if you could leave us a review. So take a moment, head into your app, drop us a review, let us know what you think of the rebranded, updated, improve new and amazing show. And we'd super appreciate that.
And if you got lots of value out of this episode, don't be afraid to screenshot it and tag me @heartsoulhustle on Instagram. That is my handle as of right now, but that may be changing soon. I would be so honored to see you watching, listening. I guess not watching, I guess just listening. I'd be so honored to see you listening and I hope that you got tons of value out of today's episode, and we'll see you on the next one.
