118: Public Facing Content vs. Private Group Content: How to Share Content Publicly Without Givin...

Are you struggling with what content to create publicly and what content is only for our paid subscribers? On this episode, I've got 3 strategies to help you balance the content from both free to paid while loving on your subscribers and engaging with new potential subscribers. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today's topic of discussion came from a question inside my membership Launch Your Box recently. Betsy asked, how do we balance what content we give away for free and what we reserve for our paid subscribers? Now Betsy has the lettering box and recently launched the wax Sell Club, and she sold out with over 120 new subscribers on her first launch. So let's just start by congratulating Betsy. I have interviewed Betsy before on the podcast, so if you want to learn more about her subscriptions and her journey, you can check out episode 93 here on the Launch Your Box podcast. But if your subscription box business provides any type of teaching component like Betsy's, She teaches lettering and wax seal techniques. You probably have this constant push and pull with yourself on wanting to share enough to create interest and excitement, but you don't want to give away the valuable content that your paying subscribers are receiving. And so you've probably felt this, like this push and pull of what do I give for free versus what do I give my paid members? And it's a hard balance. And we're going to talk through that today. In this episode, we're going to explore different strategies and techniques that you can use to keep your public content fun and engaging while still protecting your paid content. Okay, the goal here is to have balance. You want to give your audience a taste of what it's like to be a subscriber, but you also want to provide value and exclusivity to your subscribers. So you want them to be getting exclusive content that nobody else is getting. That is the value of your subscription box. We put a monetary price on that. That is part of the value of being a subscriber. Not only do you get these supplies, but now I'm going to teach you how to not only use the supplies, but a lot of times these kind of DIY subscription boxes really help you make specific projects. So either way, we want to provide value to our subscribers, and that creates a monetary dollar amount for your subscription box. Okay, so I'm going to break this down into 3 strategies on what you can do publicly versus privately for your paying members. Okay, so number 1, share the what, not the how. And I say this a lot, and we can do this with anything that we do. Share the what, not the how. Okay, publicly, I want you to share your box opening. I want you to share what your subscribers are receiving. But this is also a great time to share and show what can be made with the supplies from the box, but not how to do it. Share the what, not the how. Okay. So what we want to do is we want potential subscribers to see the value of what they're getting in the box. And also what I just talked about, the value of what they can make with that box, what they can create, what they can learn. We got to show them the value. And the other thing is we still need them to join the subscription to learn how. We need them to join the subscription to number one, get the supplies and number two, get the knowledge. That's the value. The total value of our subscription box is the product and the teaching components. So we can't give all the teaching components away for free. You can do this, share the what, not the how in a couple of different ways. And I've kind of bullet pointed them here for you. So if you're a note taker, if you're a podcast note taker listener, I've got some notes for you. You can do this with a live unboxing, okay? You can go live, you can do an unboxing. You're just sharing the what, you're not sharing the how. You can do this with unboxing posts. So you could do different pictures of your unboxing and the different components of that box, and you can share those as static posts. You can also do a live with some of the finished projects. Talk about what they are. You can also do that in static posts as well. You could do an image of the finished project and then the raw supplies laying next to it, like this is what they used to make this. And so that's, that's one way you can do that. Now I'm going to tell you how I do the share the what, not the how, not with my subscription box because I don't teach anything with that subscription box. But I'm going to talk to you about— so you can relate it to how I do Launch Your Box. So with Launch Your Box, we do this with our blog posts. We create a lot of content for Launch Your Box because we need to show people the knowledge that they can gain by being a member without giving it away. So it's the same push and pull that Betsy is probably feeling with teaching lettering or teaching how to use the wax seals or whatever it is that you've got in your box. It's the same way with my membership. Membership, but I need to show them the value of being a Launch Your Box member. So we use our blog posts to do that. That's part of our content. We tell the what in the blog post, but we reserve the how to do it for our membership. So we tell them what they need to do in a blog post, like this is what you need to do. And then we say this is how you need to do it inside the membership. And a lot of times we've, we take them through step by step to make it easy for them to do it in the membership. And we also provide resources like guides and swipe files and PDFs and worksheets. And so we create an easy path for people inside our subscription box versus people on the outside just watching. We're giving them some content, but not really enough to get them where they need to go. And that goes into number 2. Number 1 was share the what, not the how. And number 2 is give it to them incomplete. They need or want to know more, and that requires them to be a subscriber. My mentor, Stu McLaren, he's— he tells this, he says this all the time. You need to give them incomplete. You need to make it messy. You need to make that public-facing stuff incomplete. So that the membership is easy to consume and it is the complete package. And so here's when I think about doing a subscription box, and especially one like Betsy's where you're teaching how to use the supplies or how to make a project with the supplies. We can share small sections of the how-to, but we don't put it all together for them. Okay, so for Betsy, that might be how to hold a pen to get the best up or down stroke. It could be how to replace the tip on your stamp for the wax melt subscription. So these are small little how-tos, but in— subscribers are going to get the full how-to. Step 1, do this. Step 2, do this. The complete package. If we're going to give content on the outside, we're going to give some incomplete information. We're not going to give them the full package. Another way that you can do this is you could use sped up videos so people can see the process and the making of it, but not the exact techniques or the how-tos that you would do on a slowed down version. So using those fast sped up videos, if you are doing a painting tutorial or a craft project, going through them really fast so they can see the process in a few seconds, but they don't get the step-by-step how-to. It's really incomplete. The other way that you could do this is you could share a smaller project that could be used with the same supplies, and this could be a bonus for your members as well. So not only are you creating public-facing content with these smaller projects, but now you're creating a bonus lesson for your members. And an example for this would be the way that I do Monday Momentum. So if you follow me on social media, that's, it's under How to Start a Subscription Box. Every Monday I go live and I do a live public-facing session called Monday Momentum. And all that is is a shortened version of some piece of content that I'm teaching in the membership. Or it's a shortened section of some other content that I've created. I know that's really vague, but I'm trying to explain it to you in a way that you could use it. And so every Monday they get a little tidbit to help them build momentum during the week. And people can see what kind of teacher I am, what kind of subscription box coach that I am. They can get value from that. But the people inside my membership always get more than that 20-minute tidbit. And also the people in my membership, because I stream it into my membership and I stream it publicly, the people in my membership feel like they're getting a bonus dose of Sarah every single week. And I'm giving— I'm getting their week started off right with one little tip, one little action item that they can take right now. But in reality, It's one little section of a complete training that I've already done. And a lot of times I reference the complete training, um, on that live so that people that are not Launch Your Box members see that there is more to what I deliver inside the paid membership. And that's what I'm talking about here. Say that you have a tiered tray subscription box. Okay, where you make all the little components of a tiered tray. And typically there's like 3 to 6 items on a tiered tray. Maybe just once a month you're teaching one of those components, what you're doing, you're making one of those little items on the tiered tray. You're not teaching the whole thing. The whole thing is taught inside your paid subscriber platform, but maybe just one simple little piece of that you get to do publicly and that gives people a taste of what's to come when they're a paid member. So number 2, give it to them incomplete. They want and need to know more and they, they'll become a subscriber. So give it to them incomplete. That's my strategy number 2. Number 1, share the what, not the how. Number 2, give it to them incomplete. And 3, connect, don't teach. Connect, don't teach. The way to do this is to go live and use items from the box to create the projects. But instead of teaching them what you're doing, you're just talking and connecting with your audience and subscribers. When questions come up, because they will, if you start attracting people to your live streams, they're going to start asking questions. You can explain what you're using and that it comes from that month's subscription box and that your subscribers have the entire instructional video inside their group or membership portal. And so that way they can see you creating that. It creates that FOMO, it creates that fear of missing out. Like, oh, she took those components and made this beautiful thing. I wanna be a part of that. But you didn't give the step-by-step. Step 1, do this. Step 2, do this. Step 3, do this. You're just making it while you're connecting to your audience on a livestream. My friend Damon Oates from Deco Exchange does this so amazingly well. He will go live a couple of times a week and he will take some supplies from his subscription box and he'll say, these are from this month's box, let's make something tonight. And he just starts making it. He's not saying, I'm cutting this, I'm cutting, you know, 6 strips of 10-inch ribbon, I'm using this and this. And he's not giving you the how-to. He's just sharing it with you and connecting with the audience. He's talking to the audience. He's saying hi to the audience. He's talking them through. If they have— if they ask questions, oh, where'd you get that floral? Oh, it was in this month's supply box. Or maybe it was from a past month's supply box. And so he's just talking, but he's not doing step by step by step. One other thing that he does inside his paid content, he gives a better angle of the project. So he'll give an overhead view of what he's making in the paid membership, the paid subscription. But on the public-facing He does a view where you can see his body and the project. So the project is smaller, so you can see his hands moving and he's talking to you. So he's front-facing, but you're not up close on that project like you would be if you were one of his members. And so that's another way that people can see the value of your products. They can connect with you on a personal level and realize how much they get by joining your subscription. For my business, for my subscription box business, for Framed, I don't have a teaching component, so it doesn't relate to that. But anybody listening here that maybe doesn't have a teaching component like me for your subscription box, this could just be working and connecting with our audience. You don't always have to show up and sell stuff to be able to livestream. I could totally just start pulling and shipping orders. I've done that before. I've gone live, I had a stack of orders, and I'm like, hey, y'all come pull and ship orders with me in the warehouse. And I've got my little laptop on my rolly cart, and we're rolling around the warehouse picking orders and pulling them, walking over to the shipping desk and shipping. And I'm just talking to my customers, I'm showing them what someone else had ordered, and every time I do that, it creates more orders. It creates someone going to my website and, oh, I want that too. And so that's one way that you could just work and connect. Another way is when you're folding boxes, why don't you just grab like your big old Sonic drink? If you're from the South, you know what I'm talking about. Do they have Sonics? Do they have Sonics in the North? I don't know. They probably do. But big old Sonic drink, grab a stack of boxes and just start folding them and talk to people while you're folding the boxes. They love to see the processes. So that's a way that you can just livestream and give them some content and just connect with them. So think about different ways that you could connect even if you don't have a teaching component. If you do have the teaching component, just show up, make it, but don't teach them how to make it while you're live, okay? So that's number 3, connect, don't teach. Sharing public content without giving away paid content is all about finding the right balance. What I see so many times with our members is that they hide everything that they do behind closed doors for their subscribers. Okay? Nobody sees what happens inside their subscription or membership. And so what happens is we don't nurture our audience and we don't help them understand what it's like to be a subscriber. By doing more public-facing content, we actually create more engagement from our subscribers and drive more interest from those that aren't subscribers. I want you to come back for this next mini episode. I'm digging into another question from one of my members regarding, do we need a Facebook group for our subscribers or not? It goes hand in hand with this conversation on this episode, and I can't wait to break that down for you. On another episode of the Launch Your Box podcast. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist, and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.