It is quite a nice writeup by a professional blogger who decided to share his knowledge.
This article is featured on PeoplesGist.com but written by Blogger Dave. Read and enjoy
Been mulling over how to start off this post without sounding like an elitist jackass, but then I remembered that on the internet, you can’t voice an opinion without entering yourself in another round of everyone’s favorite game – “I! … Can’t! … Win!” – so I’m just going to dive in.
If your online business model is centered around free, then you are training your audience to devalue you.
Disclaimer: There will be exceptions to this rule, and if you’re one of them, I applaud you. Keep doing what you’re doing and ignore me. But if you’re putting out lots of content, not making good money and burning yourself out in the process, read on.
I’m talking primarily about blogs and newsletters here. The past few years of explosive blogging growth has created a sort of information “arms race,” where everyone is trying to pump out more and more free information, because by God, that’s what everyone else is doing. That’s had some good, bad and ugly consequences:
- The Good: Bloggers are getting massive exposure and building big businesses for themselves. That’s fantastic. Kudos to every soloproneur who has built up a following and a revenue stream based off of the proof-of-authority that their blog provided. You rock.
- The Bad: The more business your blog helps brings in, the less time you have for blogging. There’s a fine balance between running a business and running a blog. Sure, you can hammer out excellent content and make scads of people happy, but at the end of the day you still have to do the stuff that pays the bills. It’s hard to keep up with a blog, the comments, the newsletters, etc., when you’re doing it all gratis. (James Chartrand has a great post on “sweatshop blogging.”) So naturally, you branch out into products and services.
- The Ugly: If you’ve conditioned your audience to expect “nothing but free,” they can get downright nasty. I’m going to wager that 95% of my readership falls into the “I understand how economics work” category and wouldn’t get nasty themselves, but I see it all the time on other blogs. Once a “nothing but free” blogger starts selling something … well, they’ve just plain old “sold out” to these folks.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against “free” – I’m against “freeloaders.”
There are some people out there who want a magic formula handed to them on a silver platter for free. In fact there are millions of them.
Millions. They are everywhere. And they will crawl all over you if you dare sully the world of “free information” by charging for something, because they’re conditioned to “free.” (The ironic thing is these people tend to be the least likely to take action on what they’re learning anyway, which is why they more free stuff).
Free has it’s place, and I love me some free. Hell, I’ve got almost 75 pages of free workbook goodness at the
Launch Coach Library, and there’s more coming. Why? Because free is a great attractor. It lets people taste the goods, see what you’re all about and get a true sense of whether you’re for real or not. And if you do it right, your free stuff is so good it helps people get real results.
But free is expensive. Not to the person receiving it, but the person who is creating it. I probably put 30 hours into producing those workbooks, and an additional 10 hours this month writing blog posts and tweaking this blog to make it snazzier for you. That’s an entire 40-hour workweek. For free.
Think of your weekly paycheck (or if you’re self-employed, just divide your monthly income by 4.33).
That’s some damned expensive “free.” But we do it happily, because we know if we’re positioning all that free right, then our “right people” will find us and hire us to do more involved things.
That’s the nature of the game, and I think it’s pretty damned cool. I love the idea of being able to interact with all of you – who are coming here on a free basis – whether you pay me or not. I know enough of you will purchase stuff that can build your business to make it worthwhile. And
Jonathan Fields speaks to this better than I do.
But if all you do is free, people don’t see how expensive it is for you – and they don’t appreciate you.
If you’re conditioning your audience to expect free as the status quo, then you’re in for an uphill battle. They will – more likely than not – rail against you when you start charging. Maybe not when you’re small, but when you grow, and you have a lot of readers, the “free tribe” will come out to complain. I see it again, and again, and again.
It’s heartbreaking to build up a big readership and then discover they won’t convert to customers … I saw more than one “A-List” blogger struggling with that last year, and it wasn’t pretty. Things got pretty nasty when they started selling things. Since all they did was free – for ears – free was all their audience wanted.
What you’ve got to do is pull in an audience who wants free – but not for freeloading’s sake. You want people who are looking for free so they can “taste the goods” and see if you’re the kind of person who they want to do business with.
If you’ve been conditioning your audience to expect “nothing but free,” here’s how to start turning that around:
- Set up consulting and consulting packages. Whatever you’re expert at, start offering for sale at a per-hour or per-package rate. Make this prominent on your blog. Your audience may not be ready for it (especially if you charge the premium rates that you deserve), but they don’t have to buy it. The point here is to warm them up for the fact that – as @ElizabethPW puts it – “This is not a freaking non-profit.”
- Roll out a few “starter” products. This isn’t as hard as you think – you can do my “How to Turn a Beer Into a Product” weekend challenge and have one done in a few days. Lots of people already have. Or get on the waitlist for the More Buyers Every Month Group Mentorship (opening in a few weeks to a few more members)
- Work your way into bigger things, and ignore the freeloaders. Keep building up a product line, and focus on the people who are happily using your stuff and getting results. They’re the ones you’re here to serve.
I could sum up with something eloquent here (maybe?), but Brian Clark of Copyblogger said it best:
What’s your take? Touch base in the comments below.