QA 54 – How do you decide what to charge for and what to give away for free

In today's Q&A, we are helping Eric understand how we decide what content to charge for, and what we give away in our online business. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "When we see the same question again & again, that's a good signal that we could create a product for our audience"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Elementary Librarian Google Adwords Keyword tool Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today's Q&A mini podcast where we answer your questions about online business. Today's question is from Eric Walker and Eric says, "You give away so much of valuable, free stuff on the Flipped Lifestyle website such as tutorials etcetera, things that a lot of people would charge for. How do you decide what to sell and what to give away? Are there any criteria?" SHANE: We've been on a string of easy names lately; have you noticed that? The last three people have been Joe, Matt and Eric. JOCELYN: I know, thanks for that guys. SHANE: Thank you for that; or people are once again – maybe they are putting in false names now that we actually can read instead of purposefully trying to stumble us over the names or something like that. All right, so let's jump in to Eric's question here. How do we decide what to give away for free and what to sell? Well, there are a couple of principles that guide our thinking on this and also just some more things that we have come up with on our own. The first thing you can always do when you are evaluating what you should charge for is, you can tell people what to do but you charge them to show them how to do it. For example, we can guide you through the process that you have to go through to start an online business. One of those things is, eventually, you're probably going to need to start a website. So, I'll tell you, you need to start a website, you need to have content on it, you need to get a logo made; these are all the things what to do, all the things you should do when you are creating a website. So people get a really good overview and a lot of people might be able to figure that out just from that list of what to do but then we can go back and we can create a product that shows you exactly how to do it. We just created a course that's about to launch, I think, in about a week or two; by the time this podcast comes out, it's probably already out there over at Flippedlifestyle.com and it shows you exactly how to set up a WordPress website. 20 videos, 10-20 minutes a-piece, and we go through every step. How to install WordPress, how to get hosting, how to write your first blog post, what you should be writing about when you start it. We actually charge to show people step-by-step, hold their hand, how to do something. Another rule that a lot of people go by is the '90/10' rule where you give away amazing content. 90% of everything that you create, you just give it away for free and then you hold back maybe 10% of the content. Maybe it's that critical step, that thing that kinda connects all the pieces of the puzzle together. That's what you sell. So you give away as much free value as possible. A lot of people might be able to only need that 90%, they can figure the 10% out but there's always going to be a portion of your audience willing to go ahead and pay you for that 10%. JOCELYN: It's really important that you give people some valuable, free content because if you don't, why would they be willing to pay you? If your free stuff is not very good, then they're probably not going to jump and say,