The Difference Between FREE and PAID Content

I get this question all the time. What is the difference between my free content and my paid content? How do I differentiate the two? I don't want to give too much away, otherwise people won't buy my products. Well, first acknowledge that this is just a scarcity mindset. There are more than enough people in the world that can discover you and that would love to buy your products. Understand that content is a long game. So while you may be feeling like it's not working, it actually is. You just have to be patient. While there should be differences between your free and paid content, are probably not what you're thinking. Today I'm going to break down the key components that separate free from paid content. And while all these points are important and collectively make the biggest impact, the last one is probably the most important, so make sure you stick around to the end. If you want to know how to sell digital products online and create passive income in your life, but you don't really know where to start or how to put all the pieces together, then I highly recommend that you download my 5-step guide, How to Sell What You Know on Autopilot. Inside this guide, I will teach you how to find your big profitable idea and your target audience. I'll teach teach you how to build a business on generosity, and we'll go over the best type of digital product to build and how much to sell it for. And I'll also show you a simple system on how to sell that product online 24/7 without having to pay for ads. I've seen people use this exact system to build 5, 6, or even 7-figure businesses online, all while working under 20 hours per week. To get your guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide, or there's also a link in the description. Now, one of the biggest separators between free and paid content is convenience. Something commonly taught in the marketing space is to teach the what and sell the how. Maybe in a webinar or standing on a stage selling a product, that can be valuable, but not when it comes to creating free content. Here's a tip: put out your best content for free. According to tubefilter.com, there are over 500 hours of YouTube content uploaded every minute, which is about 30,000 hours of content per hour. And according to techjury.net, in the first quarter of 2021, there were over 5 million new blogs uploaded every day just from WordPress sites. That's crazy. With so much content being put out every second of every day, we as creators need to make sure that when people first discover us, that that first impression is so good that people want to keep coming back. And the way that we make people want to keep coming back is by giving them great content. Let all those other creators do their teach the what, sell the how, and keep teasing people while you focus on giving people actionable results. Our content should teach the what, the how, and the why. We have to have great content to create raving fans and a true community. Our free content should be better than other people's paid content because that's what's going to build deeper trust and authority with your brand over time. People should be able to get real results from your free content. So your content needs to be actionable, geared towards a specific demographic or group of people, and it needs to answer their burning questions. When you do that, people will think, man, if their free content is this good, imagine what their paid content's like. Nowadays with so much content, people want depth rather than width. It's like having a great barber, mechanic, or accountant. That's your person. And in terms of convenience in the online space, you're going to be seen as the go-to expert for these people. You're someone that they can trust. People won't have to go find a ton of different creators or get to know new personalities and the way that people teach things. When they think about your topic, whether it's dating, fitness, finances, or business, they're going to think about you because you're trustworthy and that you have the answers that they're looking for. I can think of 5 creators right now where if I want to learn something that's related to their topic I'm gonna go to that person. I would much rather go to that person for that topic than try and find a bunch of other people teaching something similar and waste all that time unless they happen to not have the answer that I was looking for. In terms of convenience, our paid content should have everything that they need to accomplish a specific result neatly organized in one place. If you have an online course that helps you get a specific result in a sequential order, that's so much easier than digging through blog posts and YouTube videos. How can you make your paid content more convenient for your students? The next big big difference between free and paid content is support. Look, comments and questions get left unanswered on social platforms all the time. Courses and programs that people pay for should give better support than free content. And I know that some people are really good at responding to comments. I do the very best that I can to respond to comments, but it's easy to miss things when it comes to your free content. And in terms of support, content is one way. Like right now, I don't know who you are in particular listening to this. I know that I have a specific topic that I'm teaching, that you may have been looking for that, but I can't answer your specific questions right now. Now, online course platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi have comment sections built into the course. As a creator, you'll get notified about any comments or questions that get added to your program so that you can respond to them in a timely manner. People pay for proximity, and that's why one-on-one coaching is so much more valuable than just an online course or even group coaching, because people can ask you questions directly and get a specific answer quickly. On top of that, your paid content should come with worksheets, PDFs, or slide decks, or different tools that can support the student further. For example, the online courses that I create, I'm probably on camera 10% of the time, maybe even less, whereas on my YouTube channel it's more of a talking head style video. The bulk of my courses are slide decks because I found that I can deliver a better product doing that, and it's also what separates my free from my paid content. People can also download PDF slides of each lesson, so if they just need a quick reference to one of the points that I made inside of that lesson, they don't have to skim through the whole entire video or audio file. That is another way to differentiate and add additional support just through the format alone. So in your paid content, how can you upgrade the amount of support that your students get? The next differentiator between free and paid content is structure. This is probably the biggest one, and it's what puts everything else together. Free content, while always valuable and actionable in answering people's questions, is more like buckshot, meaning that every single week or day that you put out the content you don't really have a step-by-step system for that content unless the piece of content itself is a step-by-step format. But for me, I come up with different topics and I have content buckets so that I can always have something to just put out. The purpose of our free content should be to get discovered, build authority, and capture leads, and of course be valuable in every one of those areas. Now, our paid content, like an online course, compacts all of our best content into a step-by-step system and that gets the viewer a specific result. For example, if you're a financial coach and you have a coaching program that helps people set up an entire automated money system that allows them to track their spending, automate their investments, and so on, your course should teach this person that goes through it step by step what to do in the beginning, middle, and end. Structure is what people pay for. And here's the thing: free content can actually be the same information as your paid content. The difference is that you're just putting out topics and answering questions, and there's no order in the pieces of content unless you're doing some sort of miniseries or something like that. And also, people are in a different mindset when they're looking for answers and content online compared to actually being inside of a course that they paid for. For example, when people are on social media, they get in the habit of just scrolling and glancing at a post or video for a couple seconds or maybe a couple minutes, whereas if people paid for an online course that was priced right, they would be more committed because they put money into it and they have skin in the game. So free content should always be adding value and getting people results while simultaneously setting the right viewers up to eventually buy your products. And we do that by always giving people a next step. And the best next step that you can give people inside of your free content to turn them into an email subscriber and ultimately a buyer is to offer them a lead magnet, which is exactly what I teach you in that previous lesson. Moving forward, do not hold back in your content. Get people actionable results, give them tips that they can implement that day, and make your courses structured with a bunch of support for a specific result. And also remember to pick up 5-step guide. I'll see you in the next one.