Giving Free Content vs Giving Paid Content

5 replies
Hey!

I am new to internet marketing. I started by creating a landing page, get visitors to it and hoped to make big money through an affiliate product. Well, it didnt work out that way and I dont have the money to test everything around landingpages (like 60$ per proffessional page).

So I decided to go for a solid approach - a blog. Still in the dating niche, where I know whats going on. My plan was to create the blog for men who want to be better with women. I wanted to place around 20 articles in 5 categories on the blog and make a free 8-week-Newbie-Bootcamp for the email subscriber to build trust.
To make money, I wanted to recommend information products as further reading in each week of the email (referred to the specific topic).
Well, I started to take notes for the weeks, wrote down the first version and just realized, that I made an actual good product. If I edit everything and go deeper into the content, I could create a 12 week program to transformate a whole newbie computer geek into a person, who will succeed with women and in life. Of course not the whole transformation, but definitly enough to get the ball rolling really fast.

So, as I said, I am not good in marketing yet. What would you guys do?

a) Take the program and give it out as free content to make money through affiliateproducts?

b) Sell the program as a whole. For that, I would have no idea what to write in the email newsletter to get people to sign up. I mean every marketer has a "10 Things men do wrong" - ebook for free when you subscribe. I do not like this idea. I want to give out real value.

David
#content #free #giving #paid
  • Profile picture of the author Phillip McGough
    I would go with giving it out as free content and making money on the back end with affiliate products, but I would not advertise that it is free because then you attract people looking for freebies and not actual buyers.
    You could probably even make your first 8 weeks free, turn your site into an on going paid membership site and add on to the information month by month.
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  • Profile picture of the author kingde
    Originally Posted by davidg93 View Post

    Hey!

    I am new to internet marketing. I started by creating a landing page, get visitors to it and hoped to make big money through an affiliate product. Well, it didnt work out that way and I dont have the money to test everything around landingpages (like 60$ per proffessional page).

    So I decided to go for a solid approach - a blog. Still in the dating niche, where I know whats going on. My plan was to create the blog for men who want to be better with women. I wanted to place around 20 articles in 5 categories on the blog and make a free 8-week-Newbie-Bootcamp for the email subscriber to build trust.
    To make money, I wanted to recommend information products as further reading in each week of the email (referred to the specific topic).
    Well, I started to take notes for the weeks, wrote down the first version and just realized, that I made an actual good product. If I edit everything and go deeper into the content, I could create a 12 week program to transformate a whole newbie computer geek into a person, who will succeed with women and in life. Of course not the whole transformation, but definitly enough to get the ball rolling really fast.

    So, as I said, I am not good in marketing yet. What would you guys do?

    a) Take the program and give it out as free content to make money through affiliateproducts?

    b) Sell the program as a whole. For that, I would have no idea what to write in the email newsletter to get people to sign up. I mean every marketer has a "10 Things men do wrong" - ebook for free when you subscribe. I do not like this idea. I want to give out real value.

    David
    Use a content strategy
    • Give away the what and sell the how
    • Give away the story and a few techniques but tell them that those techniques would work 10x better with another technique you want to sell them (if it's true)
    • Describe and give for free a solid technique so it's complete but perhaps a little hard to totally 'get' without further help and sell the workbook, examples, quickstart and long version
    Signature

    **** Learn fast and simple ways to tackle challenging business topics DaveKing.org/about ****

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  • Profile picture of the author Rory Singh
    You seem to have a good idea.

    Why do you say it didn't work?

    Did you not generate enough traffic?

    For me personally, I know that in order to succeed in IM I have to be 'self' reliant. I don't focus on making new products. Instead I focus creating traffic 'daily'.

    The traffic is my 'work' or 'job' online.

    The money is made by sending 'targeted' traffic to my cookie cutter system.

    X amount of visitors converts into a sale (less than 5%).

    X amount of the leads that I collect buy later.

    And some never buy at all.

    That's the IM game.
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    • Profile picture of the author davidg93
      Originally Posted by Rory Singh View Post

      Why do you say it didn't work?
      I let someone make a landingpage for me for 60$ and then i started to add traffic from 7search.com (I tried adknowledge and several other sites, but everywhere u had to pay 500$+ as first deposit). So I wasnt able to really "test" everything out. On 7search I had 300clicks overall (250 on the term keyword "dating"), 6 subscribers and now conversions.
      Now I take the approach of a lot more work, but really solid content. My goal is to make this website my first passive income stream, so I have to work maybe 2hrs a week on it. At first with 50Euro/week. With that skillset of producing a website, which gives me 50euro/week, I am able to set up a couple more to get >1000Euro/month. That is an extremly nice amount for myself as a student.

      I kept thinking about my product and how I want to give it away. My idea is:

      The 12week program:
      I produce the 12week program and will give away 2 weeks for free for my email subscriber. To that 12week program, I already have ideas to give out some bonus content. (So 12weeks plus 3bonus topics)

      OnPage-Articles:
      A ghostwriter is going to write 20 articles for the website (I dont have time for that and 10$/article is really good for his skillset. I give him sources and he writes it). The contents of the articles are really solid information.

      Email-Newsletter:
      In my email newsletter I will give away "special" content and little secrets, tips and tricks for special situations. These tips are really nice to have and sound extremly interesting to a customer in my opinion. They dont receive a method or so, they just a bunch of tricks and tips. (how to get a women to buy you lunch, drinks etc). They actually get baited through the 2 free weeks.


      1) What do you think about this idea?

      2) If I really want to sell the whole product: How much should it cost? How can I define a price?

      My customer is the pale World-of-Warcraft geek who has no idea about social interactions. He is, of course, frustrated because he probably never had a girlfriend or any success with women. I take him from scratch and tell him Step-by-Step the way to become the type of person, people will like and women find very attractive. (Like a "get to life"-program with the special path directing women)
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  • Profile picture of the author Slin
    I'd use it as free content to drive traffic.

    Try to really spruce it up and see if you can't get it to go viral, that's the key right there, try to get those things to really pick up!
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