Why write a blog and surrender your best ideas?
Why write a blog or create eBooks and other content to give away for free? There's a feeling like you're giving it away. You're scared that if you give it away, you'll have nothing left to sell.
What if I write everything I can think of and then the well is dry? What if I've got nothing left to sell?
What if I get a customer and then every time I tell them something, they're like: Oh yeah, I read that on your blog already.
It's not going to happen.
Two reasons why you should write a blog and give away your best stuff
(1) Rinse and repeat
Firstly, once you've written up all the ideas you can think of, you can repurpose them in lots of different ways.
Chapter three of your eBook can become a blog post, or a whole series of blog posts. It could become the script for an animated video or simply the next email to your customers.
Need something longer? Expand on the key points and flesh it out into a whole new book.
Need something shorter? Summarise the key point into a snappy tweet, an infographic or a poster.
(2) A deep well
Once you've truly dug deep and written everything you know, your well will be deep.
You might just find that, having written up everything you know, your perspective has changed. Now that you’ve cleared all the easy ideas out of your head, you’re free to think and write at a deeper level.
The initial batch of writing will give you plenty of content to draw an audience in across multiple channels and when they arrive, you'll be ready to explore those themes at a deeper level.
A simpler way to think about it is this: Have you ever woken up in the morning with nothing to say? You went to a great party the night before and talked all night and you’ve woken up with nothing more to say? Of course not. Every experience or conversation is fuel for the next one.
How to give it away and keep your audience hungry
You might be thinking, okay, maybe I’m not going to run out of stuff to say but if I give it all away, I’ll have nothing left to sell.
It’s easy to think you have to hold something back. Keep the good stuff behind the counter, for the paying customers only.
Maybe that used to be true, in the old economy.
In the old economy, value came from scarcity. If I was the only one in town that had what you needed, you had to come to me. People learned to conceal and protect what they had to keep it this way.
But now we live in the connection economy, scarcity has lost its power. Now you can buy anything you want with a click, it doesn’t matter what town you’re in.
Anyone can learn anything they want for free on YouTube. All the best universities in the world are posting all their lectures online for free.
The point is not so much that these things are free. More that they’re available, they’re accessible. The barriers are down.
In a world where information is so widely available, what is the benefit of holding yours back?
Putting walls up to protect what’s yours does not convince your customers to pay for entry. They’ve already learned to ignore the locked gate because it’s so easy now to find another one that's not locked. The lock on your gate is a neon sign directing your customer to go find your competitor.
So how do you make money if you write a blog and give it all away?
The secret for that is to give away the cake, but hold onto the recipe. Let them taste it. Let them come back for more. But you don’t have to show them how to make their own.
That’s what they'll pay you for.
In other words, you can share all your best tips and strategies. Explain to your audience everything they need to know. This shows that you understand their pain and you know how to make it go away. You can even tell them what it takes to make it go away.
But the exact steps they need to take, that’s the part you can hold on to. That’s the part you keep behind the counter. And that’s how you can create revenue from your free content.
