If you’re just starting your online business or have been working as a Tech Entrepreneur for a while, this might be one of the things you struggle with most – and it’s really not surprising.
There’s clearly a divide in opinion on this matter, so it’s likely that you’ll have heard strong arguments for both sides of the freebie issue.
On the one side, you have a lot of people saying “give, give, give as much as you can.” “Give all your best stuff away.” “It’s not possible to give away too much for free.”
Then on the other you have people saying that “if you give away too much for free, you’re devaluing yourself and your offers.”
And that people won’t take you seriously if you’re giving everything away.
A bit of a dilemma, right?
I mean, you don’t want to be seen as mean or stingy by not giving stuff away, but you also don’t want to be attracting the freebie-seekers who never want to pay for anything.
So, how do you overcome this and find a balance so that you can build trust and credibility without attracting only freebie-seekers?
Well, before I get into my take on this and what I’m now doing, I just want to tell you that there is, unfortunately no way to avoid freebie-seekers. They’re just a fact that we have to deal with.
There will always be people who either think they don’t need to pay for stuff or that they shouldn’t have to. They will take everything you (and everyone else) give for free, but will unsubscribe from your list the minute you offer something with a price tag.
That’s their issue – so just let them clean themselves out naturally and try not to get too caught up on it.
Maybe they’ll eventually realize that they can’t just wing it in their business without ever investing in things that will help them grow. Maybe they won’t, but it’s not your problem either way.
At the beginning of your business, you probably got really got caught up in believing that you should be giving away a lot of free stuff, and would drive yourself crazy trying to constantly come up with ideas for free things to create and send to people because you thought this was how to build the know-like-trust factor.
Now, here’s the thing: I am a believer in giving value, and of giving more than you ask in return; however, what it shouldn’t be about is the now-dominating expectation that people should be giving everything for free.
Many entrepreneurs burn themselves out by giving so much stuff away that when it comes time for them to offer paid stuff to people, they get crickets – even though the thing they’re offering was the exact thing people had asked for.
What they actually meant was, they wanted it to be created and given to them – for free.
This leads, not only to being completely burned out mentally and physically, but feeling majorly resentful and actually on some entrepreneurs giving up on their businesses completely.
It also creates unfair feelings of being greedy, when actually there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be paying for the things they want.
So, when it comes to the question of how much to give for free – there’s no right or wrong answer and you have to do what you feel comfortable with, but a good rule of thumb to follow is give the what for free and charge for the how – because the implementation and execution is where people will really see results and they have to be prepared to invest in themselves for that mindset shift of transformation to occur.
