Here are some of the benefits of giving away free content.
Attract New Clients
As I mentioned above, if you set up an effective sales funnel, you can lead people from your free content to your paid content. But, you need to start with valuable free content, to show people why they want to work with you, or pay for even more valuable content.
Let’s say you are trying to make more money as an affiliate marketer for baking products. What would attract a larger, more enthused audience, sales, promotional posts everyday, or a mix of fun, easy recipes, video tutorials, and helpful downloadable recipes, checklists, and tips? I think the second.
If you want to attract more people to your product or service, and grow your email list (which is smart) so you can keep communicating with those potential customers, you need to give away something good for free.
If you are trying to sell your e-books, why not take one small section of your book and turn it into a new blog post, with the option at the bottom of buying the complete book? Or create a useful download that people can get for free, they can sign up to your newsletter list to get it, and then you can keep sending them useful information, as well as mention you have a paid product that they would love, because it’s filled of super valuable info.
Giving people a lot of value up front shows them that they would likely benefit from your paid product or service.
Improve Your Search Rankings
When you’re starting a website, or trying to increase your website traffic, creating a blog is a great way to increase your website traffic, and get more visibility on search engines.
Read How to Start a Blog for Business
If you are trying to get more website traffic from (let’s use the example from above) people who want to learn about baking, and people who would want to buy baking products, you obviously need to entice them with relevant content.
Writing blog posts geared to the keywords those people are searching for is how to start creating a content library on your blog, so that anyone searching for certain keywords find you and your website.
Some useful keyword tools:
By researching the keywords your ideal audience is searching, you can gain insights into what kind of blog posts you should be writing.
Share Your Knowledge
When you’re getting started, how do people know that you know your stuff? Well, they don’t.
Sharing important and useful content through blog posts, videos, social media posts and podcasts, shows your potential customers that you actually know what you’re talking about.
When someone searches ‘social media sudbury’, they should find my business in the map, as well as one of the top organic spots. When they click on my website, you can find all kinds of free content on social media; my podcast, my blog posts, and video tutorials. I try to give away a tonne of content so that I bring people a lot of value up front and let people know that I am actually knowledgeable about social media.
If you visited my website and couldn’t find any information at all, you might click off and visit the next website. But you want to share a bit of what you know, so that you can gain trust with your potential customers, and show people you know your business.
Innovative Kitchens by Design, a Kitchen Cabinets company in Sudbury, Ontario provides highly valuable information to help their potential customers design their ideal kitchen. If you want to design a new kitchen, or have questions about new kitchen cabinets, they provide all that information on their blog– for free! How awesome is that.
One of the best things about sharing information, is that you control what you share on your blog and videos. You get to decide the topic, the tools, and the strategies. You basically get to create your own lesson plan, specifically created to help your community learn about something. And if you don’t share that information with them, they can find it from someone else- so it might as well be from you!
Are you worried about creating a blog or vlog for your business? Share with me in the comments!
