[Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 9: Are you giving away too much with your free content?

Hello, and welcome to this episode. Let me ask you a question. How do you differentiate between your free content versus your paid content? If you’ve ever thought: if I’m giving away free content why would anyone pay me for my products or pay me for my programs? If you’ve asked those questions, then you are definitely in the right place.

Episode 9: Are you giving away too much with your free content? – Podcast Transcript

How do you differentiate between your free content versus your paid content? If you’ve ever thought, if I’m giving away free content why would anyone pay me for my products or pay me for my programs?

If you’ve asked those questions, then you are definitely in the right place. Hey, Thrivers. I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of Thrive Video Academy and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving creator.

Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to become a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with people you love or downtime for yourself. You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through, so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my secret weapons to help you dig deep and do the work it takes.

I’m so honoured and grateful to have the opportunity to share this together with you, right here on the thriving creator podcast. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started.

We’re going to talk about your content creation strategy and the difference between what content you should be having as part of your free content that you create for social media, whether that’s Facebook live videos, whether that’s YouTube or whether that’s IGTV, that’s your free stuff.

And what’s the difference between that content that you create and the content that you have in your paid programs, in your courses, in your packages and in the services that you offer? When it comes to creating free content on social media, there’s a really popular school of thought and that is that you should always give away your best stuff.

And the idea behind this concept is that if you give people upfront value, value for free, it gives them an insight into what you can provide if they pay you. If they’re getting a taste of what you can offer for free and that’s blowing them away, then the idea is that your paid stuff is even better.

People think if this free stuff is so good, their paid stuff must be like the bomb.com. I am definitely a big believer in free content. I show up on YouTube videos which is free stuff that I put out.

You can access YouTube, my YouTube video is for free. I do Facebook lives. And I really believe in free content as a way of building your business as a way of getting visibility and as a way of reaching more people.

But the problem that I feel that people make with free content, and I am definitely guilty of this myself, and it’s not necessarily saying that free content is bad ’cause I definitely believe free content is a very valid and a very sustainable way of creating visibility for yourself, of creating a brand and building a brand and becoming an expert in your field, but the problem with giving away free content and its particular type of content the problem that happens is something that I like to call, the truffle oil effect.

Now, if you look up the truffle oil effect on Google, you probably won’t find anything because I made up this concept last night. And the idea of the truffle oil effect, I actually came up with the name.

There was an episode of celebrity apprentice ages ago. And in that episode, the artist, little John, he was in a challenge with his team. And I can’t remember exactly what the challenge was, but they had to create some dish and they had a budget and they won the challenge with the dish that they created.

Not just because they put truffle oil in it, but they put truffle oil in it. And it was one of the things that made it stand out. And then little John said something along the lines of, you can sprinkle truffle oil on a do-do and that do-do will be that amazing.

This truffle oil effect happens when you create free content, specifically free content that’s based on quick fixes, that’s based on hacks, tips and tricks. And it’s really easy to create this content because it’s what everyone wants, everyone wants five tips to lose weight quickly.

Everyone wants the 10 tricks to lose belly fat. Everyone wants all of the hacks, the tips and tricks to lose weight, to make more money. You name it. And it’s really frustrating. And I know that there are no quick fixes.

There are no silver bullets. There’s no magic wand that you can wave, regardless of which business category or business niche that you’re in, that can really help people get results. Quick fixes are not the way to get them, that people desire them so much.

And when you create a lot of content that is all quick fixes and hacks, it’s just these silver bullets that don’t actually work. What you’re actually giving people is a sprinkle of truffle oil. They think it’s the real thing.

They think it’s going to help, but it’s not. And if you know anything about truffle oil is not made using real truffles. It’s synthetic. It’s made in a lab to produce the aroma of truffles. You’re not getting real truffles, just the illusion of it.

And it’s extremely cheap to produce because it’s all like fake and it’s all for a premium. All in all it’s really nasty stuff like quick fix content. And it’s not really helping people get what they need and it’s not helping them get the results and it’s not helping them transform.

It’s not really helping them move from where they are now to where they need to be. And the problem with your free content, if you make all of your free content just a constant stream of hacks, tips, and tricks and tactics, this decreases the perceived value of your business.

And I’ve fallen for this trap and I’ve done it as well, because it’s easy to do. You can see from keyword research, everyone wants quick tips. Everyone wants tricks and hacks, but what ends up happening is that you end up creating content for all of these more mundane things in your niche instead of high value stuff.

And what that does is that you attract people and you train people to treat you like a concierge, like a Google, like an IT helpdesk to come and fix things as opposed to have them come to you for the high level, high value stuff and the genius stuff that you’re really, that you have, that you can offer.

That’s the problem that happens when you create all your free content based on just tips, tricks and hacks, right? Truffle oil effects, it cheapens the value of what you can provide and then it trains people to treat you like a Google, like a concierge.

And if you’re ever getting questions like, oh, why doesn’t this work? Or if you’re getting questions, people ask you questions that they can simply Google that’s because you’re training them to do. And as I said, I have done this myself.

I’ve created a lot of content in the past that’s a lot of tips and tricks. And as a result, people treat me like a concierge for those videos. And why are you asking me? I’m not your 24/7 concierge service.

But I’ve trained people to treat me like that. And that’s not what you want. That’s definitely not what you want. What do you need to do instead? Instead of focusing purely on tips, tricks, and hacks, what you want to do is focus on having your free content really just narrow down on three things.

The three things that can really help people transform. And let’s go through what these are. The first thing that your free content really needs to deliver is that it needs to create a desire for your paid products and your paid programs.

And you can do this without doing purely tips, tricks, hacks, and silver bullets by highlighting a pain or highlighting a gap. I really believe that you can create valuable content and introduce people to your framework, your system, or your unique knowledge and solution without it being tips, tricks and hacks.

It can be more in depth and it can be valuable content. I really believe that. The first thing that you should be looking at creating content, your free content on, is content that creates a desire for what you have to offer.

The second thing that you should focus on in terms of your free content, and that is content that helps build the beautiful know, like and trust factor. All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.

And all things not being equal, people still want to do business with their friends. If you can develop know and trust so that people feel like they know you, that they’re friends with you, it’s more, it increases the chance that they will actually buy from you.

If you can focus your content on building this, building the trust factor that they feel that you’re the expert, you’re their friend, you’re the person that they go to, this is the content that you want to focus on creating over tips, tricks, and hacks.

And you can do this by being relatable. And your content can be relatable in terms of sharing your mistakes and sharing your learnings. I told you how personally, I’ve made the mistake of creating content that has resulted in people treating me like a Google, when I’m not a Google.

And your learnings, because we’re all human and showing your mistakes and showing your learnings and vulnerability makes you relatable, in my view anyway. It also helps build connection because it’s much easier for someone to relate to you if they can see themselves where you were and vice versa.

You know what their experience is because it’s where you once were. So that will help you want to build that connection and be relatable. And any content that helps build know and trust, the whole point of it is that it helps position you as an authority.

And I feel that if we get into content that has more depth than your tips, tricks, and hacks, then this really helps move the needle on positioning you on building a trust and for people to actually want to buy from you. The third thing that I want you to focus on in terms of your free content is content that offers a transformation.

As I said, we all know that there is no silver bullet, regardless of what solution that your prospects are looking for. There’s no quick fix that will really work. It may be just this truffle oil where it gets them more high on the scent and they feel like, it’s what they want, but it’s actually not real.

The content really needs to focus on moving them from A to B and moving them from where they are now in their struggle state, in their pain state, into where you are, where they want to be, in that hope island, in that place of desire.

These are the three things that you need to focus shifting your content to so that it really does help you help create desire for your products and services as the first thing. It helps build know and trust and positions you as an authority.

And thirdly, offers a transformation. If that’s what you need to include in your free content, as you can see, we’ve shifted from cheaper tactical content into more content that has a lot more depth and content that will serve your business and serve your prospects in a deeper way.

What do you actually put inside of your paid content? This is whether you sell information products or courses, the stuff that I would reserve for my, for your pay content is a framework.

Anything that you’ve created that’s a system don’t give it all away in your free stuff. I know it’s very tempting because you want to help them have the full transformation, but you want to reserve that for people who pay for your actual courses.

You also, in your paid contents where all your templates are, it’s where all your scripts are for me, I also have all my detailed work workflows and all of my instructions. All of the things that I’d classify as your unique knowledge.

And it’s all of the things that you’ve developed as a result of the experiences that you’ve had. And if you watched my last video on your ideal customer and your customer avatar you’ll know that I talked about the concept of who your customer avatar really is.

And your customer avatar, in my view, is the past version of you. And the future state is where you are now through all of your knowing and all of your experiences. And the knowledge that you have that got you to your future state, that’s your unique knowledge, right?

No one else has the same experience as you. They can’t possibly have the exact experience that you had, that transformation that you had. Your unique knowledge is your experiences and your knowing and all of that stuff needs to be reserved for your actual paid programs and your pay packages services, and all of that magic.

That essentially wraps up the content for today. We covered quite a few things actually. We talked about how hacky tricky tip free content really actually hurts your business. And it creates the truffle oil effect, all aroma and no substance, which is not what we want for you.

We want you to have content that has more depth, of content that helps build your business and helps really transform your prospects. And then we talked about the content that you should be delivering instead. We talked about content that creates desire, content that helps build know and trust.

And we also talked about content that offers transformation. And then we talked about what content you should save for your actual paid programs so that you’re not giving it all away for free.

One last thing before I go, I created this podcast as a reminder that you are not alone in this. Growing with video is hard and I want to be here to help and guide you and others through it.

If you found this podcast episode helpful, please leave a review. This helps apple and the algorithms put my podcast in front of more people just like you. I’d be incredibly grateful. Thanks for listening.