Coaching call: How can I create free content that doesn’t give it all away?

Today I am coaching Lou Ellis who is a kitchen coach seeking to help busy women spark a passion for cooking! Lou is currently working towards her next launch and having difficulty identifying the sweet spot between creating and offering free content and delivering too much for free. Today we chat about the strategies to get comfortable with your content offerings.

In this episode we chat about:
– How to structure your free content to address the problem that your audience is facing whilst moving them closer to the solution.
– Why creating ‘trend bucking' content can be instrumental in attracting your ideal customer!
– Key strategies behind what your free content should be communicating, ensuring it is at all times supporting your key message.
– Identifying how simple content tweaks can shift your audience's perspective and create more clarity on your product benefits.

 

Today's episode is a live coaching call with one of my Launch Magic students, Lou. Who is really struggling at the moment to come up with free content topics in the lead-up to her online course launch without creating content that gives away everything that's inside her paid product? She's really struggling to find that sweet spot between being helpful and delivering enough value. 

And giving everything away for free and accidentally not helping her audience by giving everything away for. 

 

My name's Lou and I'm a kitchen coach. I'm a mama now, and before that, I was a salad slinger around the Sydney CBD. So I used to deliver healthy, amazing, homemade with love lunches around the city. And I stopped that and then I started teaching people how to do this because I found a way to hack the system, and create meals that were delicious and simple to make without needing to rely on a recipe and rely on someone else's flavour combinations to tell me how to cook for myself. 

So, my new program is called Fig Jam, which you get the acronym, or you don't, you can go Google that one. And I give you the confidence to be an amazing cook so you can whip up meals without needing a recipe. And I teach you basic cooking methods, which I believe everyone is chronically lacking.

 

How to structure your free content to address the problem that your audience is facing whilst moving them closer to the solution.

Your biggest challenge, I suppose, or what you've reached out to me with was that people are wanting free recipes from you, and that's traditionally what you have given them right as your free content.

But now leading up to this launch of Fig Jam, finding that you obviously need to be sharing different content and you don't know what to share without giving it all away is roughly your challenge in a nutshell. 

I want to touch on what you said just before about how you like to give them a recipe out now and then just to keep them sort of on that list and keep them consuming your content. Why do you feel like you need to do that? I know obviously, they've worked for you in the past, but why do you feel like that's something that's going to help your audience in the lead-up to your launch?

 

It's a very interesting question, and I've been asking myself the same thing every time. Like, I just got to send them a recipe and maybe they're getting a bit ruffled by me, you know, speaking the truth, or it's not landing right. I feel like I'm so far advanced that I'm not in my customer's problem anymore, so I'm overlooking so many things that I could just be speaking too many steps ahead of where they are.

 

It's not actually the problem that you don't have time. It's that you don't have the skills to just whip up a meal with what you've got in the fridge.

The problem is, it doesn't sound like you could give them all of the free recipes in the world. They think that's going to solve the problem, but you're actually doing them a disservice because you are moving them further away from the solution. It's like saying you don't need a recipe.

You can save time by just whipping something up with basic kitchen skills and what's in the fridge. But then, on the other hand, you're like, Oh, but here have a free recipe. I know you're contradicting yourself with those two things. 

And the problem is that those free recipes they're going to just keep collecting, the more free recipes that they have, the more overwhelmed they're going to feel, the longer it's actually going to take them to choose what to cook for dinner, what to cook this week, and they're probably going to end up ordering Uber Eats.

So it's very contradictory. They were never going to buy your cost because all they want is free recipes. And that's just why they were following you. And because you're so straightforward, like some not, that's not going to resonate with everybody, but it's going to resonate with the right people and we don't need everybody to sign up for your course. 

 

Why creating ‘trend bucking' content can be instrumental in attracting your ideal customer!

There's no shortage. It's Pinterest, There are all of the other recipe accounts. Let them all share the free recipes. How you can stand out is by not sharing the recipes. That might be your point of difference. It might be talking about how the free recipes are actually hurting them. 

And maybe even a piece of content around that. Your story about why you used to share free recipes because you thought that was helping them, and then you came to realize that the best way you could help them was to give them the skills to do it themselves without needing a recipe.

That could even become the story behind why you created a launch. It could even become the story about why you do what you do because you've realised that there are all these busy people out there who they're ordering Uber Eats while they've got a bunch of celery going off in the back of their fridge because they've spent too long looking for a recipe to use what's in their fridge, and they still haven't found a recipe. So they've just gone for takeaways.

 

Key strategies behind what your free content should be communicating, ensuring it is at all times supporting your key message.

But the whole point of your content in the lead up to your Launch and lead up to doors open is that you are sharing content, showing them why it's important that they learn how to cook without a recipe so that when you open doors to your course and you're like, Hey, here's how you can learn how to cook without a recipe, they already know why they need that.

And you are showing them, well actually the quickest way is to let go of that recipe and cook with the skills you've got, the ingredients you've got. You know what, what you've already got, rather than being so rigidly stuck to this recipe that's taking you so much longer.

And that's going to be your biggest challenge. And the whole purpose of your content in the lead-up is to show them what's going to save you time in ditching the recipe. And then you can segue into that beautifully with your story of how you used to give out all these free recipes, and yet the people you were giving the recipes to still didn't have the time to cook.

And you realised that you were even though the recipes you were given were simple and fairly easy to do, you were doing them a disservice because it was taking them longer because they were overwhelmed. They had too many recipes to choose from, et cetera. They needed to go to the supermarket just to buy the ingredients for this one recipe, et cetera. And then you realised the best way that you could help people to save time in the kitchen is to train them with the skills to whip up a meal without a recipe.

 

Identifying how simple content tweaks can shift your audience's perspective and create more clarity on your product benefits.

I think a lot of the time when we're selling something, like, particularly if it's a course or some other kind of digital product, we forget that we're not just selling the course. We also are selling the method, the solution. Like in your audience's case, the problem is they don't have enough time to cook recipes.

The transformation that you're giving them in the course is that they can just whip up recipes really quickly and easily, and they stop buying takeaways and all of the ripple effects. Then the solution there is ditching the recipe, but you need to sell them on ditching the recipe before you can sell your course.

There's just so much to think about. This method is easier than changing your course completely because the other option would then be to give them what they want. Great. Here's a course on how to save time in the kitchen, but that's probably not going to be as effective as what you are delivering with Fig Jam as it currently is.

It keeps them in that disempowered place, which is the worst spot to be in with food for something that's so natural, the fact that we can't feed ourselves or we're uninspired to feed ourselves. It just blows my mind and I've been there. So I know the struggle but I just wish for everyone on planet Earth to not have this problem.

You don't need to change everything. Just remember, when you're going through and creating that content and editing any content you've already created, is this supporting my key message that ditching the recipe is how you're going to save time with your cooking or whatever you choose that key message to be?

And showing them, You are spending so much more money by being rigid, by rigidly following this recipe. And that's where it's really useful to have these skills to whip up your meals without a recipe.

 

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