One of my principles is “Pay for Work and Not for Talk”. That sounds like I should probably advocate for giving away lots of free content.
And I do. But it’s also a little more complicated than that.
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Should you be giving away content for free? Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today’s video I want to talk about the concept of giving away content for free and whether you should be doing it or not.
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Short Answer: Yes, Give Away Content for Free, Sell Your Product/Service
So the short answer is probably, yes. You should probably be giving content away for free.
The kind of core thing that I think most businesses should be thinking is: give away as much content as you can for free and sell your product or service.
That’s that core to kind of really good, ethical marketing because what you’re doing in that process is you’re showing with your content that you know what you’re talking about. You know how to do the thing you’re doing. You know how to sell the product you’re selling. You know that the product that you’re selling is good quality and you’re giving the customers that reassurance by giving away all that content.
But What Happens When You’re Selling Content?
Now, where this becomes a little more iffy, a little more questionable a little more, you know, you have to be a bit more refined about this approach is when what you’re selling is knowledge. And there are definitely different approaches to this. There is no blanket approach. There’s no easy quick answer to “Should you be giving away your content for free?”
The reason being that sometimes when what you’re selling is content – when the product is content – then you want to make sure that you’re not giving away all of your best stuff for free so that when people pay you for the content they’re actually getting good content. And sometimes this is very valid, this is very ethical – sometimes it is ethical to sell content.
This Opposes One of My Core Principles
This comes in direct opposition to one of my principles, so I’ve had to think about it quite a lot.
One of my principles is Pay for Work and Not for Talk (I talk about it in this video). And I think this is where we start walking into a grey area. Selling stuff that’s just information feels to me a little bit like “paying for talk”. But the thing is sometimes that information has been produced by years and years of experience, and years and years of learning and pouring over things and experimenting. And that is valuable and should be paid for. People should be paid for spending the time on all of that expertise and learning.
So this is where it becomes a little bit like…
“Well, do I charge for this or do I give this away for free?”
I think the blanket recommendation I can give is try and give as much as you can for free but make sure, always make sure, that the people who are paying you, the people who are giving you money, are getting real value from you. And that it’s better value than what you are giving away for free.
Create an Ethical Model that Funds Giving Away Content for Free
Now, I would encourage you that, if you are having to walk into this grey area, that you try and create a model that’s more like what I said at the start of the video. Where you can give away your content for free because you’re selling a product or service at a higher price point that’s paying for all of that content.
What that does is it facilitates you giving away that information, giving people access to information that should be available to everyone and allowing you to still get paid but for the work that you do, for the expertise, for when people really want deep and useful work from you, they’re paying well for it.
This is How I Operate
This is how I operate my own business in that I give as much content as I can for free. I give as much, actually, of my time as I can for free because then the people who can afford it and the people who want my deeper help they then pay me for that.
And I would encourage you to try and create a model like that but I fully recognise that that is not always the way it can be done and some of my clients don’t. They sell content but they sell content that they’ve built, you know? Like frameworks and structures that they’ve built that are going to be really useful to people and is worth paying for.
Long Answer: Spend Time Thinking About It!
So, the longer answer is that it’s a grey area and you should really discuss it and you should really think about it. Spend time thinking. It is really, really important to take time out – especially when it comes to pricing – to spend some time really thinking about it and really thinking about whether this price makes sense and whether this price is ethical.
If you need help thinking it through please feel free to get in touch I will be happy to help think it through, be a sounding board, bounce ideas around.