Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

Why Most of My Content Is Completely FREE

11 Nov 2022 · 1 min

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A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation (Mike Andes hosting, Gary Vaynerchuk guest) about the tradeoff between providing free content and directly monetizing it. Gary argues creators often lose the balance between “jabs” (free value) and “right hooks” (asks) when monetization works; he states roughly 80–82% of his content is free. Mike Andes expresses agreement and says he also favors producing a lot of free content so that customers who find it valuable will eventually discover his paid offerings.

Chapters

What I've noticed for a lot of people over the last decade is when something's working from a monetization standpoint, you start losing your balance of jabbing and right hook. And I think the more things like this where you can provide upfront value with no clear path to transaction, finding that balance is a challenge for everybody and most of all when it's going well. So I don't have a good read on how much free content. Yeah, we do. We do. About 80%. 80%. So there you go. So there you go. So then I would say 82%. Yeah. Because I mean that, Grant. Because what I do know is that people have a much longer life cycle when they disproportionately bring value.
So the debate here is, do you go for the transactional sale and try to use your content to sell things to customers, or do you create value and content without any expectation of a sale like Gary's talking about? Now, I tend to believe and have really fallen into the camp of what Gary talks about, creating a lot of content and free stuff for people. And if they think it's valuable, they will eventually find the things that I am trying to sell.