Everybody knows that the best way to grow your business is to have people talking about it. But how will anyone have heard of you if everything is shut behind a paywall? Anybody can say they are a 'marketing guru', or a 'LinkedIn expert'; but giving away a little will prove it.
It might seem counter-intuitive but sometimes, it pays to give for free.
Think of it like a free taste. Have you ever gone to the ice cream store and received a little taster spoon of a new flavour? What do you do if you like the new chocolate-banana-orange? Most likely you’ll buy at least a single cone!
For a membership website, there are numerous ways to offer a free taste to newcomers to your site. This will allow them to directly experience what you and your services are all about, without taking any risks. Here are a few strategies for free content delivery:
Free gift for lead capture
A free PDF, video, tutorial email series or even an audio file such as a meditation can be a major incentive to become part of your community. Whatever your free file or content is, if it has intrinsic value to your potential customer, you have a good chance of being able to to convert that visitor into a lead. Let’s say you run a fitness membership. If you can offer a free PDF or video containing 3 valuable tips to get started on a 10-pound weight loss with little sacrifice, you might just have a winning piece of content on your hands.
Prospective customers are looking for two things when considering the exchange of their name and email address for a piece of your content:
Immediate help
Something they can use right now, today that will help them tackle a painful problem. A free guide to "Lose 10 pounds in a month" is a clear, valuable piece of content that speaks directly to someone who is desperate to lose some weight quickly. That person is likely to look at this free gift and say, "I need that now!!"
Reflects core values
Something that truly lets them see your core values and approach to their issues. Whatever your offerings are, the free taste should be a free taste of that. If you sell marketing knowledge for real estate agents, and you believe that winning in a competitive field like real estate requires more interpersonal skills than hard knowledge, your free gift will be consistent with your offerings if it has a title such as “3 soft skills you can master in a day to close your next real estate sale”.
As a reward for your generosity, you will have been granted permission to email them at a later time with more valuable tips, a newsletter, and information about your offerings.
SubHub is integrated with Mailchimp and Zapier, so you can easily employ just about any email marketing service to deliver a free piece of content. If you don’t have an email service yet, you can use SubHub’s built-in newsletter banner layout with the platform's file download functionality to do the same thing.
Niche authority
Valuable free content shows not only prospective clients, but also your members, that you are indeed the expert you say you are. That doesn’t mean you have to know absolutely everything there is to know about your topic. That isn’t likely and not possible to be practical. But if you know your audience, you know how to be one or two steps ahead of them.
It’s easy to figure out how to demonstrate that: ask your customers what topics they are interested in or stuck on, and write about those in your free blog. If your current members are interested in those topics, you can be fairly certain that prospective members are interested in those topics as well. You can easily provide a high-level blog post on the topic for the public, but offer more detailed information and coaching on the same subjects for premium members.
Repurposing content
Since you are most likely promoting your website on social media, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Sure, you will be generating some original content for social media accounts, but any free content you create for your website can double as a Facebook post, LinkedIn post, YouTube video or podcast episode.
At events, you can offer the free content as a bonus for attending or as part of a package of bonuses if partnering with another business owner in a complementary field. In our fitness expert example, let’s say you’ve partnered with a manufacturer of weight lifting products in a telesummit or seminar for prospective clients looking to lose weight. Everyone who registers for the event could receive a bundle of free products including your content.
The downside?
Is there a downside to offering free content? Yes, but only one: determining what should be free and what shouldn’t. It can be tricky.
How do you give away your 3 best tactics for weight loss while incentivizing the audience to purchase more content? Won’t the 3 tactics be enough? Why would they want to have more that they have to pay for?
The answer is they might not. But that’s okay. Here are 2 things to remember when offering free content on your site:
It has to be valuable
You don’t have to give away every detail, but you do want to tell them the gist of what they will get if they sign up with you for a paid product or service down the road. Let’s say it’s 3 things they can do today to start losing weight - and your core values are nutrition, exercise, and mind set. You can offer your 3 pillars or tenets at a high level without giving away any recipes or specific foods, exercise routines, or meditations. These can all be part of your paid service. But the high level “peek” is still an incentive and a perfect “taste” of what you do.
It takes time and effort
Here you are spending a number of hours on a piece of free content, and your brain is saying “Wait! I’m not even going to get paid for this content. Why should I bother??”
As long as your content has value, your brain is going to be wrong. You could very well get paid later on by newcomers who sign up for your free content based on its value to them. A prospective customer must be a lead first, before that person can become a customer. It’s very rare that a first-time visitor to a membership website will sign up right away unless they have been referred or already know about you.
So don’t be too worried about giving away your braintrust for free. Giving away a taste is a worthwhile investment while allowing you to save your deeper knowledge for paying customers.
Test the power of giving something for nothing. Open a free SubHub trial today.
