I love the internet! It has given people access to information and resources never before possible – and much of it is FREE! So much is free in fact, that many have become irritated when they actually have to pay for services and information.
I have been meaning to write this blog post for some time now… not to make anyone feel bad or negatively rant and rave, but to make sure those who don’t create and sell content online stop to think about the “cost of free.” I have been asked many times, “Why do you do all of this?” “How are you making any money if you give all these things away for free?” and other similar questions.
First let’s look at the reasoning behind doing or offering things for free in the first place. I’ll talk about myself since really, that is the only thing I can speak of with any authority. I do a lot of things for free in the information side of my business. Here are some examples –
1. This blog. Always free and usually added to 3 – 5 times a week.
2. Videos – promotional and mini-tutorials.
3. Monthly Ask Calls – always free if you listen live, sometimes free even if you don’t.
What costs are involved in these free services?
My blog takes time to write and promote via social media. Time that I could use to create my own art for licensing. It is also ‘self-hosted’ so there is the yearly cost of registering the domain name and paying for web hosting.
Videos take time to create, edit and upload to YouTube – which is free. I recently purchased a new video camera and wireless mic so I could create higher quality videos. I upgraded my computer so I could do better screen recordings for tutorials – some free, some for purchase.
Monthly Ask Calls – this is the most expensive piece of “free” that I do.
• Each “Ask” expert website is registered, designed and hosted by me. (So money and time.)
• It takes time to ‘woo’ the experts we all love to hear from. Explain the website and the Ask Call process, how it works and why they would benefit from participating.
• I paid to move all the Ask websites to a WordPress platform to help consolidate time and effort in managing the sites. I also have someone maintaining the sites on a monthly basis, which again, costs money.
• I pay for a service that collects your questions – because getting each one in my email was creating a crazy amount of work to sort and select.
• I usually use a free service for the live calls but sometimes pay for a bridge line (the number you call in to.)
• It takes time and software to record and edit the audios. I pay for a monthly service to add and store audios used throughout the Art Licensing Info family of sites.
• TIME – I estimate that each monthly call takes me at least 8 hours of time when you account for all the activities that take place to plan, host, prepare, edit and promote. That doesn’t even include the time and expertise of any industry experts that share their knowledge on a call.
Not to mention the time and monetary costs of classes and networking events to learn how to do all of these things!
So why do I do it?
I could certainly spend all of my time creating art and focusing on my licensing. But I enjoy teaching and writing – I really missed it when I was first building my business. I enjoy the rewards of hearing that the resource I am building about art licensing is helping artists to learn and understand what used to be a confusing and mysterious thing.
I offer a lot of free services for two reasons – first, to make information accessible to everyone, regardless of their income or ability to buy information at the moment. I also do it so you get to know me and the other experts who are sharing their knowledge and offering coaching or other services on the site. You will feel more confident buying an eBook, signing up for a teleseminar or coaching if you have an idea of who you are working with ahead of time.
At the end of the day, in addition to knowing I have helped and inspired others, this is part of my business that needs to support the systems that run it and needs to be worth the exchange of time for money.
The internet is a great place to get something for nothing, but an equally good place to find valuable information for sale. Support those who you feel add value to your life and business by also supporting the for-fee part of their business.
Here’s to your creative success!
– Tara Reed
P.S. Here’s another article HOW TO COMPETE WITH FREE about how companies can afford to offer so many services for free – including FreeConferenceCall.com – the site that helps me offer the free Monthly Ask Calls. Thanks Free Conference Call!
Free content is a marketing strategy used to attract potential customers. They view the content on youtube, ezine articles, blog posts, etc and come to our site. But the challenge is getting those people you trained to expect free content to pay for things. It’s like when ‘they’ told us not to lower our rates to match the competition, but now a lot of things are free. I guess the hope is that some percentage will pay for things while the rest don’t probably adhering to the 80/20 rule 🙂
Tara,
Thanks for writing this – it needs to be said. There is a lot of great free info on the internet but at the end of the day the old adage, “You get what you pay for” still very much applies. The thing that many artists don’t get is that they often pay a huge price for things in “opportunity cost”. Meaning that all those things they do themselves for free using information from the internet take up time which should be spent creating art or calling galleries or collectors.
One of the big differences between businesses and hobbyists (and I’m not bagging hobbyists – just making a distinction) is that businesses use their own resources on what they do best and outsource (and pay for) everything else. This always turns in the most profitable results. And if you want to be a commercially successful artist (and not just someone who calls them self a professional) you need to think like a business.
Daniel.
Free content is today’s advertising. It is the method by which those with something to sell attempt to get the attention of buyers. Just as advertising costs money, so does free content. It is one of the costs of doing business in today’s world.
Most free content ends up being just an overview. To get the nuts and bolts, you have to buy the product.
While all of us are guilty of wanting to get as much as we can for nothing, we are still willing to pay for things we want badly enough.
The problem comes when the “product” doesn’t deliver the detail the buyer expects.
Absolutely Nancy! Hopefully you never have a problem with a for-purchase product I make or recommend not delivering! 🙂 Thank you for commenting!
Hi Tara! Thanks for directing me here after we exchanged tweets about my second thoughts re: posting a keynote speech – audio and slides – for free on my blog. Because my social media session at a conference was overcrowded, I offered to present a webinar for those who couldn’t get in. Then, I decided to post it with free access on my blog.
Giving away free information does build trust and also demonstrates what you can do. As one successful consultant told me, “I tell everyone exactly how my system works. Then, they hire me because although they could manage the projects, they know I can do it better and faster.”
The presentation I posted is a high level overview that traverses the world of social media in about 60 minutes while setting the framework for next steps. Letting people know how to take the next steps is where conversion comes in. Thanks for prompting this discussion, Tara.
Barbara — perhaps my readers might like a link to your amazing free info… then they will be even that much more ready to buy when we unveil our upcoming for-fee event!
Hey Tara! Excellent post. I have a line of thought about ‘free’: basically, I believe free became the norm online because of the atrocious way people conducted business in the past. Previous generations have tons of examples of being taken or bambozzled so when the web generation came into it’s own, they decided to take the line that online commerce was somehow evil (except of course when it came to stock options, but I risk digression) and that the world has the right to everything for free.
Except that’s not quite the whole story either…truth be told, one hell of a lot of people are just plain BAD at commercial pursuits, and if everything is free, they can assuage themselves that they’re now doing the ‘right thing’ by giving it away, and it relives them (they think) from having to think about, build and execute a successful business.
And there is no real free, as you point out. There’s also a whole bunch of people who are more than willing to mop up everything they can for nothing, and are very smug about it.
So yes, free is a perfectly valid method of lead generation and of establishing credibility and adding value, and while I know YOU understand this, the sad fact is that the majority of people have no real idea how to monetize their online businesses.
There has to be a transaction somewhere.
Free is a good part of the mix, but having profitable transactions is what makes the world go around – based on a sound exchange of value. Good for buyers. Good for sellers.
Thanks for adding to the discussion! Great insights into the why and how of the internet freebies! Which I love but I also do my best to support those whose free products enhance my life or knowledge if I can by becoming a paying client.
Hi Tara,
I think you do a great job of explaining *why* it is so important to do these free activities. It’s something that I do also (webinars, white papers, etc), and I think the whole concept of FREE is really scary for a lot of large companies (hence, my blog post – thanks for the link!).
I would go even further than Chris Anderson, though, and say that giving away ideas is a good thing. Ideas are easy to come up with, so why not give them away?
What you can charge for is *implementation*. Anyone can have an idea, but not anyone can execute on that idea. That’s where you can add value – knowing how to actually *do* something with an idea.