Why Creating Free Content is Essential for Growth

Episode Transcript:

Welcome back to another episode of the Book Your Dream Clients podcast. Today, we're going to chat about creating free content and why it's essential for your growth. So sit back, relax and enjoy it.

As a coach, your main goal is to book with clients, grow your business, gain exposure, increase your following traffic, all of that stuff. And one of the things that is missed is creating free content. And I remember wondering why would we create free content when our goal is to create an income for ourselves? Like that just seems crazy to me. And then once I started creating it, I started to see how this actually is very positively impactful for my business. And when you're doing it for so many years, you sometimes forget that other people might not be where you are. So it's important for them to start the journey. So the best way to start that journey for them is to get some visuals in your head. So let's picture your home, where you live, and that's where we want people to go. And your home is your website, working with you.

Now we're expecting the world to know where we are and how amazing we are by just standing in our home and not giving any directions or vehicle to get to where we are. That's a mistake. Number one is assuming that having a website is good enough. And assuming that posting on Instagram is good enough. And assuming that you are going live every day is enough. Cause it's not, we don't need to. I'm just going to bust a myth right now. We don't need to be pushing the vehicle for other people in order for our business to grow. I don't know how many times I get on calls with students and clients. And they tell me, I post on Instagram every day and I spend so long trying to think of what to say. And then I go and do this in Facebook. I spend so much time.

I'm trying to think of what to say. And it's like, if you didn't push your vehicle, it wouldn't go anywhere in your business, it wouldn't go anywhere. There's so many red flags running your business. That way you might not feel well one day or your kids might not feel well, or maybe you just don't want to work, but you have to because you didn't do anything, prepare yourself. If you're not getting clients, unless you push everything manually yourself. And I don't want you to run your business that way anymore. That is not sustainable. And it breaks my heart to see, you know, busy moms, they're raising their babies and they're working or they're stay at home and they're working their tails off trying to get their business going. And they are trying so hard. They don't even see that this can actually be really easy if we just set up the foundation and give the right directions to people.

So let's go back to our house, our website, where we want people to go. We want people to come to our site so they can apply to work with us. Right? So if we don't have that vehicle in the map, it is almost pointless. So what we're going to think about now is working backwards. We already have our goal in mind, right? We already know what we want. Right? That's the easy part, but then how do we make it happen? So then we get to start walking backwards. You need to open the door. You need to start walking out of the house. How could people actually get to your house? Well, of course you could run ads. You could run traffic ads, you can do all these things. That is probably not in the cards, if you're just starting. Cause you're like, I'm trying to make money, not spend money, right?

No problem. I built my business running organic marketing for years and I haven't run ads in months right now. And I'm recording this in January. And I have shared this before. I turn off my ads in October. And I have had October, November and December with the biggest months that I've ever had in my business. And I spent $0 on marketing. December was the biggest, October was the second, November was the third. So the reason why my business was very successful in quarter four was because I have a strong, organic marketing plan. A strong organic marketing plan starts out with you being generous. And it starts out with you really valuing your own knowledge and expecting people to want it. Okay? So it starts with you first. It starts with the belief that you have something that people want, right? You've worked really hard to get to where you are.

You know a lot of stuff. And other people are looking for answers to solve a problem and your job is to solve that problem. And you can do that for free. Don't be afraid to do things for free. I know there are a lot of people out there who say, don't do anything for free. Why not? What, what can possibly go wrong from helping people? That just kind of blows my mind when people say you don't need to be creating three V's, you don't need to be creating free content. And I'm wondering, how did you start your business? I'm sure that you did it this way. Why not? Why not teach people how to do things, how you did them instead of jumping into step five and then totally confusing everybody. I want you to start a step one. I want you to build your foundation strong and I want you to be generous because again.

How can you go wrong with being generous and you know what? You're never ever going to be too generous. So don't worry about what if I give away too much free information. That's not possible. Blow their minds, make them think that this is the most absolutely amazing thing they've ever had. They can't believe they got it for free. And what could it possibly mean to work with them to actually invest in them? If this free PDF that I just downloaded, is that helpful for me? I'm totally in. And I want to work with this person. Okay? That's our job here. Your freebie is the what and the why. Here's what you need to do. Here are the steps. Here's the checklist. Here's the roadmap. Here's the what? Right? You're not showing them the how. So if you have trouble setting some boundaries with how much you put in your freebie, you're not going to include the how.

So I'm taking this podcast episode for example, I'm not going on my screen, showing you how to create a freebie, how to get inspired, to create a freebie, how to make your landing page, your thank you page, your sales page, your client onboarding. I'm not showing you how to do any of that. If you want to learn how to do that, you work with me or you join my program. See how that goes. I'm giving you free content via podcast. You can download my free reason by listening to the commercials on my podcast, but that is me telling you what you need to do in order to insert title of the freebie, the transformation, the positive moment, the positive thing is going to happen to them once they actually carry through and follow your instructions. Okay?

Now that we got that cleared, we need to continue on with the process. So if you have trouble thinking of ideas for freebies or it doesn't come easy to you and you don't have a billion pieces of paper notes, scribbled everywhere with brainstorming ideas. Then what you can do is go over to Pinterest and go get inspiration over there, or going to Answer The Public and get inspiration over there and create your freebie. Okay? You have to have many freebies. A great starting point is maybe just create one a quarter or one a month for a while. I used to create one a month for a few years. Now, I just do them when I feel inspired, because I have a lot of reviews out there that are working really well for me. 

So what happens when that freebie is finally released out into the internet? It is hopefully properly being promoted on social media. Facebook and Instagram are quick hits. So you can promote your, your freebie on an Instagram post on the story, all those things, right? But they're short-lived. People see them for a second. And then, then they forget about it. So you're going to have to create some kind of consistent marketing plan to keep pushing that freebie. You can schedule stories. You can schedule posts like every Wednesday. Do that, have them click the link in your bio, go to your website, download the freebie. Easy-Peasy do that for Facebook to do it in your Facebook group, do it on your Facebook page. Keep pushing it, keep doing it until you feel like a broken record and then keep doing it some more. Don't assume people are going to remember your content. You have to keep reminding them.

Those are the quick hits. Like I said, the biggest thing that you need to do to have long term longevity for your freebie to bring traffic over to your website. Pinterest is gigantic for traffic. I still get tons of subscribers every single month from a podcast, from a blog post that I wrote four years ago when I was pregnant with Violet. And right now she's three. So I remember writing that blog post, if it works for me now, it's going to keep working for me more every single year. And so are all the other blog posts that I've written or all the other freebies that I have on Pinterest. It's going to get better every single day. 

And the hardest part about Pinterest is getting started. We've got to create pins. We have to share, we have to have a plan, but it is so important to have in your business. If I didn't have Pinterest, I wouldn't be building my list for free every single day. The way I do, I would have to probably spend, you know, $10- $20 on ads every single day to get the results that I get for free by doing this. 

So if your freebies out there, you have pins, you have social media graphics, people are landing on your landing page saying, yes, that tells me, I need you to make sure that you have an amazing landing page, because if you're getting traffic to your landing page, it better be good so we can convert them so we can get high conversions. I would love to see you get 60 to 80% conversion rates on your landing pages. It's possible. You don't need to use any fancy software. You can use your website if it looks good on mobile and a desktop or you can use Lead Pages, I love Lead Pages. So you can use something like that. Those are my favorites, but then you have to dive even deeper into the strategy. You can send them to a beautiful thank you page. And then you can carry them on the journey. I have so many blingy subscribers. They will download something from me. They'll land on my thank you page. They'll see something else that they want. Boom, 20, 30 freebies later, they have a library of Lindsey Maloney, of all the free content that I've created over the years. And it's going to help them build their business. And that makes me so happy.

Why is this important? It's important because you need to show people that you are generous, that you care about them. You care about their journey. It's important because it shows that you are the expert in your field. And it's important because it builds your business. It builds your list. Your list is yours. You could lose your Instagram followers, your Facebook group any day, right? But your email list is yours. You worked hard for that. So if you're not seeing consistent growth in your email list every day, it's because you're not creating free content for people. Put it on your website, put it everywhere. Talk about it. I mean, go crazy. Talk. If you have questions about it, let me know. I'd be happy to help you, but don't listen to the people who say free content isn't necessary to grow your business.

It is. I have heard women who have an amazing business only because they run Facebook ads. And when the Facebook ads don't work, their business stops. You don't want that for you. I want you to be a strong business with a strong foundation that knows that it's always growing all the time with people who are dream clients. And they know that, you know, if they decide to invest in ads, it's just the cherry on top. It's just building onto something that's already growing. I hope that makes sense. And if you need help, please again, let me know and feel free to go and download some of my freebies. You can go over to the freebie vault  and go crazy there. And also I'd love for you to join us in our free Facebook group, dreamclientcommunity.com. And I check in there all the time. So I can make sure that I'm supporting you in the best way that I can. Thank you again for listening. I will see you in the next episode.