Give Away Your Best Stuff to Capture Attention

Give us this day…,
originally uploaded by Mr. Kris.

Over the last year, I’ve had quite a few conversations with small business owners about what’s appropriate to “give away” and what should you charge for.

As part of that conversation I mention a relatively new term that comes from an old concept — the “Free Line.”  This is really an updated sales funnel and perhaps the best explanation I’ve seen comes from Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey.

The internet has put traditional business models on their ear — with all this giving away and free applications — it’s freaking out and confusing those of us who grew up in the traditional world where you actually trade value for money.  With the internet bust, we learned that you couldn’t just give EVERYTHING away and that advertising pays – but it isn’t always as profitable as we thought.

So what do you give away and what do you charge for?

Let’s just get one thing straight – you must give SOMETHING of value away – so that your target audience can get a tasty sample of what you offer.  But where do you stop?

Here’s how to start the process – ultimately the decision will have to be yours, but this will help.

1. Make an a la carte list and descriptions.  Sit down and make a LONG list of everything you could potentially offer to your audience.  Don’t judge it yet – just list it.  Here are some things that might be on that list: blog posts, free newsletter subscriptions, press releases, podcasts, etc.
2. Take your list and start converting them to index cards or categories where you can start detailed bulleted descriptions of what might be included in these general categories because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the same things you give away, you could charge for.  So how much detail do you want to go into?
3. What do your customers value? Now that you have YOUR list – go to representatives of your audience and find out what they REALLY value.  This might be easy, might be hard, but it’s definitely necessary.
4. Create your free-line map.  Now you can start laying out what information will give general readers a taste and involved readers something to pay for that they can sink their teeth into.

Happy Mapping