In today’s day and age, we do not have a lack of information available to us. In fact, it’s the complete opposite, we have too much information. Let me ask you this: “Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the number of options or the amount of answers available?”
Here’s my experience – when I’m looking for certain information on Google, I often get overwhelm by millions of results. Of course I’m not going to go through all but even still, just a few pages of results can feel overwhelming to know which choice should I pick.
Q: “Do you know why people are willing to pay for information even it is freely available?”
The top reason why people are willing to pay for information is not necessary for the information itself. It’s more for the convenience of getting the content/solutions they’re looking for from a trusted source in one central area – aka membership sites.
So nowadays it’s less about the information and more about the convenience of saving people’s time. This is why people are willing to pay to save themselves time. They’re just not willing to sift and sort through hundreds or thousands or millions of results.
As an information marketer or content creator, your goal is to package what you know and provide it in a convenient way that saves people’s time. Over time, you’ll become the trusted source that people can rely on to help filter all the information and give people the nuts and bolts of what they need. Furthermore, when you can put it in a central location so that they don’t have to search all over the Internet; it makes people’s lives convenient!
Here are 3 psychological strategies that you can use
#1 What And How Technique: When you publish free content, your free content should only tell people WHAT to do. Your paid content shows people the process HOW to do it.
Example: If you’re showing people how to publish a digital book online, your free content tells people what tools they need to prepare, and where to publish their book. Your paid content shows them step-by-step how to do it, and tactics to monetize their book online.
#2 Useful But Incomplete: Your free content is useful but incomplete in some way. Your paid content provides the full solution. I’m sure you’ve seen this done many times.
Example: Let’s say you’ve got 12 proven strategies to help people make extra money from home. In the free content, you share 3 of your best strategies and then you offer the remaining strategies as premium content. This is a very effective strategy to generate interest and income from the other 9 strategies that are contained in your premium offer.
Here’s something to keep in mind. Never ever hold back on the free content that you give. It serves you tremendously well if you share with people your absolute best stuff upfront.
#3 Inconvenient Format Vs. Convenient Format: Your free content is delivered in an inconvenient format, and the paid content is delivered in an extremely convenient format.
Example: You provide a free training, but people must show up live to attend the training.
It isn’t a situation where somebody could access your training at their own convenience. It’s based on your schedule, and people have to attend live. This is the inconvenient part.
Now if people want the convenience of consuming your training at their own schedule, then there’s a cost to that. You could provide the training recording, the transcript, and some other extra goodies bundled together. Your training is still the exact same content.
Can you see it now…
… how you can use free content to naturally set up paid content? There is always a percentage of people willing to pay for convenience. So isn’t it time for you to start monetizing your content considering it’s free to create yourself? What do you think?
