chrisg.com

You might already have seen these videos from Michael Stelzner, maybe on another blog or you might have seen me tweet (about four times, heh) how good they are. If not, go take a look now.

Why am I pushing you to go look at videos on White Papers?

Very simple reason really. It’s because this approach to attracting business is exactly in line with what I have been telling people with Authority Blogging. You give away unique and useful information, you set out a compelling argument or approach, this builds trust and credibility. What I call flagship content could easily be a white paper.

The trick is, of course, to give away ideas and tactics, and sell the specific step by step and implementation. “If you would like advice on implementing everything you learned about here contact 800-…”. No hard sell, no cold-calls. You build your list and create sales leads purely through people being drawn to what you offer, not through pushing for deals.

This is a perfect approach for bloggers. We give valuable information away all the time.

Of course Mike is hoping that through his videos you will become intrigued enough to sign up to his list so you can receive them all. You really should. There is some great stuff there, especially if you have never written a white paper.

How do I know to trust Michael? You might remember back when I was writing over at Copyblogger, he was writing there too. He certainly impressed me with his depth of knowledge and most importantly his results.

White papers do bring in business. I know because they have worked for me when working for marketing agencies, and my free ebook has brought back leads from people I didn’t even know had seen it. I might call it a report, an ebook, a briefing or an article, but the ideas and approaches are always similar. Give info, get them hooked, reel them in.

Go watch the free videos, then if you already have a free ebook, take a look at the closing pages. Do you have a call to action there? If not, get one. If you don’t have a free ebook, consider writing one. You can achieve a lot with only 8 or so pages.

Of course if you are really stuck you could always hire me to create your flagship content for you (see what I did there?)

The last few posts have a bit of a theme. I have been thinking about the Cluetrain Manifesto and the books impact on our current Social Media thinking.

I asked if the authors authority had diminished, due to so many people having not heard of the book.

Most people agree that this legacy will live on. The proof I guess is that we are still talking about it.

What is your legacy? What are you leaving to future generations?

Are you working for profit today or something longer lasting?

In the last post we saw that Business Blogs can provide many benefits. How do you gain those benefits without turning your role into full time blogger?

It’s a common question. Clients often object to me that they just don’t have time to blog so much and they worry that if you don’t put in the effort then you can’t expect to reap the rewards.

Not all businesses have the money to outsource all the work, and sometimes finding people who can blog on your topic is a challenge in itself.

Though it is true that there is a lot of work involved in creating a successful blog, there are ways to make sure you are only working on areas that will bring results.

10 Tips for Top Blogging Efficiency

The following tips and tactics will help you put the effort where it is most needed and will bring you the best results. It does not remove all the work but will make sure you are not waisting any time on unproductive areas. To follow all ten points might seem extreme but in fact if you just take on one or two of the tips you should find you save some time.

1. Goals - Know what you are doing and why. How will you know what you are doing is working? What will tell you that you are on the wrong track? Are you working towards building links? Better search engine rankings? Generating increased traffic? Attracting more subscribers? Building up your sales? Know what you want to achieve before you launch and develop everything towards this aim.
2. Targeting - Once you know what you want to do, now work out who for. A large percentage of the time when I see business bloggers making little progress it is due to a cloudy idea of who their audience is, and a cloudier idea of how to reach them. Which audience can most help you achieve what you want to do? Remember if all you want is links then your audience is NOT likely to be customers, if you want sales then do not expect your links to go through the roof. While in a normal blog you can achieve both, if you are wanting to have the least amount of work then you need to make sacrifices.
3. Topic Focus - Again, with topic, you have to sacrifice, and focus on the topics that will attract your most needed audience. Forget about pleasing everybody, you have to work out which topics you can manage to build out and which you are going to leave behind. It might take some research to discover which areas of your subject are most compelling and most critical. Preparation before launch will save you a lot of time and guess work later on. Place a contact form or even a question box on your blog to encourage questions.
4. Time Focus - Writing focus does not just limit the topics you write about but also how you share the time. Your time will be spent on idea creation, writing and promotion. It is better to concentrate your time than try to steal five minutes here and there. Rather than trying to write five decent posts a week, try a couple of excellent posts. You do not have to have the ideas, write and publicize all in one go. Allocate your daily writing time to building up top notch articles. Perhaps one days writing time could be ideas and headlines, the next outlining, followed by fleshing out, finding images and illustrations, editing and promotion. In fact with this system you might find you are on a roll and can create lots more posts this way than trying to do everything at once. If you get into the flow you can batch and pre-post using the date stamp feature.
5. Testing and learning - Keeping abreast of developments can take time. Testing and educating yourself is essential but not for every single blog, and not for every member of your team. If you are working solo then you are going to want to stick to tried and tested tactics and have a very scientific approach to your own testing.
6. Tracking - If you are not monitoring your progress then how do you know if what you are doing is working? You need appropriate tracking and analytics BUT do not obsess over them every day. Once a week is probably sufficient. Decide the key metrics that tell you how well you are doing against your specific goals.
7. Distractions - There are work distractions and tech distractions. Some bloggers find it more productive to escape the office for an hour or two, work hard while getting heavily caffeinated, then come back to work. Tech distractions mainly affect the geekier amongst us, and it is a matter of self discipline. You already nominated your key metrics and your long term goals, keep your eye on the prize. Don’t be distracted by every shiny new gimmick that comes along, take a cold hard look at each development and work out if it will help you and your specific case. You don’t need to be an early adopter, let other people be on the bleeding edge and report back before you make any bold moves.
8. Housekeeping - Obsessing over housekeeping is almost as big a problem as obsessing over metrics. Work out what style works for you, a little a day or once a week tidy session. In general you can automate many things, like backups and spam prevention. One area you want to keep up on is comment approval, people like to see their comments appear quickly and you need to encourage conversation. Some even turn off comments completely but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you can resist adding widgets, tweaking your theme, and other tinkering, once you have a handle on spam and comments, there is actually not that much housekeeping that is actually required.
9. Easier Content - Your readers and customers could be an excellent source of guest posts, making your role more editor than writer. Also consider doing interviews, surveys, polls, and other type of valuable content that doesn’t take as long to put together. If you find it quicker to talk than write, consider a podcast or dictating your posts and have them transcribed. It would be best not to make easy posts a habit, but they can help you out of a fix.
10. Teamwork - Can team members spread the load? Are there tasks you can share with friends? You might not have the funds or type of topic that allows you to outsource all the work but there are other tasks that can be handed over to virtual assistants, marketers or writers. Lots of blogging work can be outsourced, housekeeping, promotion, research, editing, and so on. Also, while your topic might require specific expertise, you might find supplying a gifted writer the bones of an article speeds up the process as compared to you trying to put your facts into an interesting and readable post.

If all this still seems like too much work then perhaps a business blog is not right for you. Could you gain many of the benefits by having an infrequent newsletter and publishing the occasional article or whitepaper on your website?

Summary

Getting the most out of your business blog requires putting your effort where it counts. Share the load across your team or outsource the parts that you don’t have to be 100% involved in. Most of all, make each post count.

There is more to this subject than I can fit into one short article, but I hope this helps you find your best blogging approach for your situation.

Which other ways do you find help you get the most bang for blog for your business? Please share in the comments …

#1 & #2 Photo credits steve9567 chadmill

In the last post in this series I explained my preferred approach to business blogs. Let’s take a look at why you would bother creating a business blog. What benefits can you acquire by blogging?

As you would expect, I am a firm believer in the benefits of blogging for business, but I do know that blogs are hard work and that puts a lot of businesses off or leads them to have a half-hearted approach.

Business blogs are amongst the toughest type of sites to do well. I can’t name a single blogger who does the whole thing perfectly, but that’s fine because you don’t need to be perfect to gain most of the benefits.

Before taking on a tactic, any business needs to know what the Return on Investment (ROI) will be. There are three areas where blogs provide a return. Attraction, Stickiness and Conversion.

Each business will put a different dollar value to these benefits but they are the main results.

Attraction Advantages of Blogs

Blogs, when done well, attract. They attract visitors, links and attention. Which business does not want more attention? What would better search engine rankings mean to your business?

They attract through …

• Traffic - Search engine traffic, social media traffic and repeat visits
• Targeted Visits - Each post when topically focused will gain targeted visitors and search engines love focused articles
• Easy SEO - You do not need to be an expert with SEO, blogs are pretty well optimized out of the box, even better with free plugins
• Build Links - Write something useful or interesting and gain links from the blogosphere and Linkerati
• Internal linking - related, categories, tags
• Long tail searches - Over time you can build up some nice long tail traffic from posting regularly and attracting comments

Sticky Advantages of Blogs

Right from the beginning, website owners have recognized the value of repeat visits. Blogs are ideally suited to a business that wants to build a conversation with their customers without the increased effort of a forum. Also the advantage of being able to ask questions and get answers should not be overlooked. Community does not appear instantly but should be worked towards over time.

• Comments - Comments bring back the commenter and also other readers to see what is being said.
• Polls, Surveys, Voting - Interaction leads to interaction, they create engagement and interest
• Series - Leave an article on a cliffhanger or promise more information in a future entry
• Related posts, categories, tags - Go from one page view per visit to multiple pages with a trail of interesting content
• Popular posts - If you put your best stuff where it can be seen people will arrive through one post then see what a great resource your blog really is
• Subscriptions - There are multiple ways to keep updated with a blog, from RSS to Twitter. Let readers subscribe how they want and they will
• Regular Content - Just like the newspaper, people are more likely to come back when they anticipate seeing something worthwhile. Scheduled articles create momentum.
• Events - Create an event through Podcasts, Videos, Giveaways, Competitions, Memes, Projects, Carnivals

Conversion Advantages of Blogs

When I say that blogs help convert customers, people get confused and think I mean that blogs are better sales  pages. That’s not a blogs strength, they are more for the pre-sell, making the actual sale more likely.

• They build trust through repeated exposure and proven value over time
• Are read via “pull” rather than “push”, so you don’t feel a hard sell.
• You view on your own schedule and terms, consuming the information at your own pace
• Choice of media and length of relationship means more branding opportunities, written, visual, audio, interaction
• Build reputation on blog and off. Provide consistent on-blog experience plus references and testimonials off blog via links and quotes.

You still need your sales pages, blogs do not replace your existing conversion strategies, but strengthen them.

How to Create More Sales Through Your Blog

The sales approach is quite simple and fits into existing sales models. Think of what a good sales person does.

• Attract attention
• Identify a need
• Tell a story, evoke interest
• Describe and explain benefits
• Prospect imagines owning product, acquiring those benefits
• Desire builds
• Trust is established
• Offer is made
• Action taken

Now think of how you can do all of this using a blog.

1. Attract targeted visitors who have a problem you can solve.
2. Inform, advise, discuss.
3. Positive experience over time builds trust.
4. Visitor explores your offers and hopefully becomes a customer.

It’s up to you how strongly you put your offers before your visitors. You can see I am hardly in the “hard sell” category myself but there is no reason, providing you have established the trust and obvious value already, that you can’t be stronger in making offers and more targeted.

In the next post we will look at how you can gain all these benefits without having to spend all your time blogging rather than on your business.

Business Blogs are a mystery to many people.

• How does content produce customers?
• Aren’t blogs a lot of work?
• What is the least you can do to make a blog work for your business?

In this overview I aim to show you that, yes, there is work to be done, but it need not consume all your time.

Let’s start with the standard small business web approach of the last ten years.

• Brochure website containing some content
• Contact us form
• Adventurous might pay for some advertising, but not always the type that works
• Perhaps opt-in email list
• Rarely a web accessible archive

Seem about right? Most of the businesses, unless they are guided well by their designer or have developed their own knowledge of online marketing will find varying results from this approach.

I can’t count how many times people have told me the web doesn’t work for their business, that they have had a website for years and never gotten any sales from it. Of course what they don’t tell you is they haven’t marketed it other than paying to be in some directory that was sold them over the phone along with “Search Engine Submission” service for $50 a year.

Even larger companies can be found throwing their money away on 100% flash all-singing-all-dancing extravaganza “brand” sites that few prospects can find once the expensive banners are switched off, and fewer care about if they do find it.

What is wrong with this approach?

1. It’s all Me Me Me - Customers want to know what you can do for them, not what the directors wife does in her spare time and how pretty the new factory in Belgium is.
2. No marketing - Build it and they will come. So cliché, so not true.
3. No relationship - Sending out a newsletter is not a relationship if all you are doing is telling prospects and customers about your office bowling party results

The Business Blog Approach:

1. Set up your blog with full RSS feed, with ability to subscribe to via email via FeedBurner
2. In addition build a monthly newsletter through Aweber
3. Create Flagship Content, one large piece as a sign up incentive, and monthly Flagship Articles
4. Post several times a week, whatever you can manage (or afford if outsourcing) while maintaining quality. Twice a week is often enough.
5. Link out, comment on other blogs, guest-post, all to get noticed by fellow bloggers
6. Build community on your own blog by participating and encouraging conversation
7. Become active member of social media sites or hire someone who is

Why Flagship Content?

I know some of you will be thinking that looks like a lot of work. It is, but it is work that will pay off if you do it right. Right now there are thousands of business blogs being launched but one of the vital ingredients they miss is to provide Flagship Content. Why is this type of content so important?

• Useful - so people bookmark it, keep it
• Viral - gives you something positive to talk about and for them to talk about
• Gets you known for something good, represents you
• Promotes your site long term, not short term spike
• Attracts links, which attract more links
• Search engine rankings boost
• Attracts social media attention
• Strong Foundation to build on

Contrast this to what you often see on business blogs, rushed, half-hearted, self-referential, so-called news. You have to do something valuable, something that sets you apart. You have the content within you and your company, you just have to bring it out and share it!

Subscriptions and Offers

I mention you should have both feed and email subscriptions, and in particular an additional newsletter. Why is that?

You need to keep in touch with your prospects and customers. Remind them that you are there and can help them. Does your blog do that? Yes, but I would recommend your blog be all about giving information while your email blasts can offer them something or give them something.

A feed subscriber is one level of commitment, an email subscriber a bit more, customers and gold customers are your best buddies. Segment the lists, customers are ten times more valuable to you than prospects and they need to feel extra loved. Don’t be sending the same big offers to your feed subscribers and long term customers!
In most cases your list subscribers will enjoy your list if you just send them occasional offers, but even better if they can feel like a part of something useful to them.

Advantages of lists

• Customization and Personalization- With a feed what you write is what you get. Catering your message to an individual improves results and makes recipients feel more valued (when not done in a cheesy way)
• Sent on your schedule - Automated services send on their schedule, you can choose when you want to send an email
• Immediate alerts - Got some hot news or want people to react fast before a deadline? Send an alert.
• Segmented offers - A common approach is to split your customers into quintiles, with the top 20% customers getting the best deals. Maybe you will segment based on how long since you last heard from a customer, approaching defectors to bring them back into the fold?
• Valuable Asset - Your prospect and customer lists are like gold. They are so valuable. When you grow, nurture and control your own list, you are building an asset.

If lists are so good, why not just have a website with a list?

Well, you could, and sometimes a website with articles and an email list is all you need or should do based on your circumstances. Blogs are to be recommended though because they still have several advantages.

Bottom Line for Part 1

• Build something of value to customers
• Communicate with customers and prospects appropriately and regularly
• If you want to sell, make an offer

In the next post in this series I will outline why blogs have an advantage for business and how to get the best results from them.

Have you seen Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans“? You will likely see this excellent article mentioned on other blogs. It’s one of those posts I wish I had written, because I have tried to recommend similar ideas, just not as well.

What he says is that an artist can make a living from 1,000 true fans. Rather than aim to be mainstream success, or scrape a living from the long tail, you can earn a decent income by appealing directly to a fan base.

When I talk about Marillion and not trying to please everybody, that is what I am trying to get across.

Instead of spreading yourself thin trying to please a huge gamut of prospects, focus on delighting a specific niche. Really care for and nurture this smaller audience. Prove your value and never betray the trust they place in you. Now we are talking true lifetime value rather than grasping after a 15mins of fame. That’s success to me.

This is the strategy I put in place right here, on this blog, and it works. I don’t aim to have a huge audience, I want a smaller but more engaged audience. I want people to who are really interested, who come back, and bring friends. Rather than millions of page views, I want a happy and vibrant comment area, conversations and interaction.

One of the best things I have gained from blogging have been friendships and contacts. This should have been anticipated but instead still surprises me now. This networking side of blogging and social media is something that has come increasingly to the fore in recent years. I see it both as a good and bad thing.

Right from the start it was the social side of computer communications that drew me in. First the primative Bulletin Board systems over slow, noisy modems, then usenet and of course the rest is history. The point is at that time it was almost exclusively people making friends or helping each other. I took part in geeky discussions both for fun and professionally.

I never really went in for the swapping business cards kind of networking. To this day I am not entirely sure what you are supposed to do with LinkedIn and such. Luckily I haven’t needed to.

Despite my concerns, which I will go into, networking is something I recommend 100%. Networking is incredibly valuable to anyone who wants to get ahead in any kind of online business. We need the opportunities, support and resources other people can provide. Getting to know other bloggers, Twitterers and forum members could be long term the best time investment you can make, and certainly amongst the most fun.

There are two main downsides I see:

1. Faux Friendships - There are many people who only think about what they can gain from networking and so go out and “collect useful people”. Exacerbating this problem are all the blog posts, books and magazine articles advising you to connect with influencers. Nobody seems to think about the influencers. How many requests must the top Diggers get each day? How must it feel to be Seth Godin to be barraged with apparent overtures of friendship day in, day out? It is I guess like being wealthy and having to fend off hangers on who just want handouts or to be part of some entourage. It’s worth remembering these are people, not just a route to influence, traffic or the Digg front page.
2. Time Wasting Masquerading as Work - Social Networking can be extremely addictive. The more you do the more you want to do. You want to see what people reply to your latest message or you see how far you can get promoted in some points scoring system, how many friends you have, how many replies you get, how many endorsements or testimonials, and so on. The social side of sites can steal many hours and I have seen it happen with geeks and non-geeks alike, from dating sites, to eBay and Flickr.

What are the solutions?

I think the same solution works for both issues; maintain balance.

• Know exactly what you are doing, and why you are doing it
• be helpful,
• be authentic,
• be friendly,
• be honest
• … and treat people how you would want to be treated.

Rather than thinking what you can gain, think more about how you can help and what you have to give.

Think about it, who would you most like to make contact with? A grasping, selfish, demanding, faker or a helpful, friendly, generous, kind, fun person?

I think it is very true that like attracts like, plus many people have a good built in defense mechanism to protect against types who are just out for personal gain.

Be the type of person you would most want to contact!

Have you had any success in networking? How do you approach making new friends and contacts? What can you do about the fakers and takers? Please share your thoughts in the comments ….

Since I wrote about affiliate marketing I have had quite a lot of feedback. While there are a lot of people saying they are cautiously going to give it a go, many more have told me one of two things:

1. I didn’t make a lot of money right away so I gave up!
2. I’m removing all other monetization methods and going 100% aff!

Woooah!

Yes there is a great deal of money to be made in affiliate marketing, and it is possible to get a nice fat windfall occasionally, I did not intend to give anyone the impression it is all or nothing. In most cases the situation does not end up being home run or drought.

As with any blog revenue method it is all about trying things out, experimenting, and making incremental improvements.

I know what it is like, it is discouraging to try something and not see tangible results right away. Even more so when you are built up on it being the answer to all your prayers. But you must persist. When you succeed or fail, ask yourself why. In many cases the people who stumble a few times are those who make the best success longer term, they have learned lessons the people who have early success never do.

The great thing about affiliate marketing using blogs is it doesn’t cost anything to promote an offer. If you do it authentically and ethically there is zero risk. That means it doesn’t hurt to try and the offer doesn’t have to pay off right away. For a while now I have focused on clients and freelancing so my affiliate efforts have withered and I have long lost my first page rankings, but I still get lots of pleasant surprises in the form of commission cheques, sometimes for offers I can’t remember promoting.

Darren makes thousands each month from Amazon alone, that is without adding in income from the other programs he promotes. Adding appropriate Amazon links helps your reader find a good place to find a product, rather than looking sleazy it is friendly. You are probably going to get a product shot from there to illustrate your post anyway.

When Yaro tells you he makes a healthy mid 4 figures a month (probably sometimes more, this is Yaro we are talking about!) from affiliates alone, he is not talking about one super performer. In fact I am sure he would caution you against putting all your income eggs in one affiliate basket.

Think about it, this is a very powerful thing! How many posts will you create after a year? How many of those posts can legitimately carry an affiliate link? If you are in a product-rich niche then you are looking at a lot of posts, articles where the audience will expect shopping links. One sale from half would still add up to a sum that most people would be pleased with.

Of course the upside is you might find a great performer in one or two. That’s when the real fun starts. When you do
find a great converting offer it is time to put all your blogging skills behind it. Drive more traffic, write more posts, find intersections between the topic and your readers interests and needs.

Depending on your niche and your traffic this technique might not be right for you. All I would say is don’t dismiss it too early. It could be you miss out on something great, and I am sure you would change your mind when a nice affiliate commission arrives in the mail!

Picture cropped from a photograph by Yomanimus

It was interesting to see Yaro talk about Affiliate Marketing as I had also been having a discussion on the topic and wanted to share my own advice. Do check out Yaro’s post. The key point I want to repeat is this one:

Those early days taught me that patience is a virtue when it comes to building an affiliate marketing business based on a blog. I’ve learned a lot about what goes into effective affiliate marketing since then, yet in many ways, I still walk into most promotions completely blind and with little expectation. You never know how well something will sell and I’m constantly surprised by my results.

Many people go into each monetization technique thinking “this is the one where I make the fast, big bucks”. Yes, you can make money, good money, with affiliate offers, but do not be disappointed if you don’t buy that Ferrari right away.

Some people will know I started my online marketing career in the traditional way, building websites for companies, helping them sell everything from tomato ketchup to condoms. Having several successful campaigns under my belt I had to see if I could make money for myself as opposed to helping billion dollar companies make more billions. It turned out affiliate marketing on a shoe string was not quite the same as promoting the official site of a well known brand.

When you start out with affiliate deals there are three things that happen:

1. You get lucky and make a lot of money without knowing exactly how
2. You make a small amount of money, slowly
3. You lose a lot of money in PPC fees

For me I experienced all three. My first experience convinced me that I was a master marketer and before long I would be taking early retirement. Unfortunately competition soon moved in and wiped me out. My next attempts had me in the second two categories.

You can make a great deal of money with Affiliate marketing. I would say for most people they can make more money with Aff than advertising and certainly more than adsense. Most niches have a product or ten you can promote this way. The only thing to beat aff is to have your own products, but I don’t believe for most people they would need to be mutually exclusive. Most of the internet marketing gurus make as much money promoting each other as they do their own stuff.

I would say the “GoogleCash” method, where you drive traffic to offers using Adwords ads, while probably being the fastest route, is the most risky in terms of your own money. Blogging and small web sites combined with SEO are the safest. Luckily any losses I made were more than compensated when I finally found offers I could promote, had mastered the techniques and had Google Adwords battle scars to prove it. Around the time I made my money back I decided the pure affiliate stuff wasn’t for me and moved into just blogging.

The key for bloggers, particularly Authority Bloggers, is to not abuse the trust of your audience. Only recommend things you personally believe in.

You will see on this blog while I do not display advertising and make most of my income through selling services, I do occasionally post an affiliate link. On my photography blog there are a few more. Those links haven’t made me a fortune by any means, but they have brought in additional money, and all were for products I would vouch for. That would be my recommendation for how to get started, sign up for Amazon associates and do some book reviews, or find a merchant in your niche with an affiliate program that you can honestly recommend.

While it is true the more traffic you have the more money you will make, it is also true that with Aff the right audience is more important than scale. A smaller but more motivated audience will always beat a massive but disinterested one. I made several hundred dollars from an extremely niche product, a wireless flash slave unit sold on eBay with my DSLR Photography Blog because the audience and product was a 100% match.

Have you tried affiliate marketing? Think you will give it a go? Tried and didn’t like it? Share your thoughts in the comments …

As most people who read this blog know, giving away information is what I do. I write, answer emails, give away ebooks, give talks.

Thankfully I also pay the bills. The way I do that is by charging for information. Specific, bespoke advice, workshops, consulting calls, teaching classes.

So many times people have queried the strategy, they do not understand that I get to charge because of all the stuff I give away. As Chris Anderson says though in this interview, it is a model that works:

“The internet has enabled lots of businesses and business models to go digital. And one of the economic advantages of digital is that the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else.

“It’s no surprise that virtually all businesses on the internet are based on ‘free’ in one way or another.

“It can be just advertising-supported - where you give away one product to sell attention to advertisers. Or it can be an inversion of the traditional sample model. Rather than giving away 1% of the products as samples to sell 99%, you give away 99% of the product as free samples to sell 1%. This is what’s called the ‘freemium’ model.”

The challenge comes when people get so used to seeing you as a free source of information that they get odd about having to pay.

Thankfully my friend Liz Strauss has rescued me from this trap with a simple model to follow (check out the full article):

Now that I see I already have a working system, it’s easy to decide who gets how much for free. When people I hardly know asks me to do their homework now, I simply say, “I can tell you where you’ll find what you need.

If they push for me to help them, I say, “If you’d like me to do that for you, we’ll need a more formal arrangement to cover my time. I charge $XXX/hour for that sort of work.”

While your business model might depend on and benefit from giving away free information and ideas, it should never be free at the expense of your business. Your advice has value but only to the level you allow it.