On one side of The Free Line is information that you get for free. On the other side, information you pay for. Pretty simple.
Information marketers such as the uber-successful Eben Pagan like to talk about “Moving The Free Line.” Instead of giving away a nickel’s worth of information, give away hundreds of dollars worth of information. Then, the theory goes, you can sell thousands of dollars worth of information. (Or, if you’re Pagan, tens of millions of dollars of information.)
But there are a couple of rockstar types – actual rockstars in this new digital world, not just guys or gals who say they are rockstars – with, arguably, completely different approaches to The Free Line.
Chris Brogan. Most things he touches turn to gold – he wrote a best seller called Trust Agents, and he’s constantly out there speaking and meeting with people. (Gee, he even has a Small Business Newsletter.) (And he gave us one of the more popular posts from the Area 224 blog last year; an interview you can read here.)
A Brogan Approach to The Free Line – a $9.97 a month blog advisory service. Which is interesting because, as someone who has been out there in the blogosphere since before it was called that (1998, according to his site), there is a TON of information out there from Chris, about blogging, that you can get for free.
Here, The Free Line is moved way into the expensive category, and the “Pay Line” is at under $10 a month. So the value here is not just in the how-to you’ll get from the newsletter, but in the fact that Chris Brogan is aggregating his own information, sharing with you the good stuff in regular intervals, and using the service to help “coach” you along.
So, when we learned that Ferriss was coming out with a new book called “The 4-Hour Body,” we pre-ordered it. So, apparently, did about a zillion other people, as the book is now number 4 on the Amazon best-seller list.
A Ferriss Approach to The Free Line – One concept in his newest book is called “The Slow Carb Diet.” Given my own age and newfound need for middle management, I am diving in with both feet and giving this diet a whirl.
Now, Ferriss has always been a proponent of “the companion site” – where anyone with a copy of the book can login and get so much more information than is found in the book. Worksheets, tools, links, those sorts of things. NOTE: “anyone with a copy of the book” meant, in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, a password would be something like “the fifth word in the third chapter.” If you can’t find that somewhere, you probably don’t deserve all of the “free” content.
What intrigues this cub reporter about The Free Line for The 4-Hour Body is the Slow Carb Cookbook. Cookbooks are a unique animal – and another one that has changed because of the onset of the Internet. This one, available via instant, free, PDF download, is one that could be dressed up in hardcover and sold in stores for $20.
What he’s giving you is less of a cookbook and more of The Manifesto to the Slow Carb Movement.
Your Own Free Line
Where do you draw the line? How much do you give away? How much is free?
Maybe you’ve got a $30 E-Book, but you need to explain to the world that you can deliver on $3000 worth of content first.
Maybe you’re a high-priced consultant and you charge hundreds an hour – but you need to demonstrate that you are indeed worth that much.
In any event, don’t be afraid to draw The Free Line – and figure out when to move it, what to hold back, and how much to charge for your expertise.
Thanks to the inimitable Saul Colt for the inspiration here.
“Everybody is an armchair marketer.” This was one of the quotes floating around back in my HR Consulting days. (I was part of the Marketing team for an HR Consultancy. It was fun, I learned a ton. More on that later.)
Saul Colt — feel free to follow him on Twitter — first got me thinking about “advice” and “the right way” and “social media” (all three; I’ve thought about each separately before) when he said something to this effect:
There is no right way. Do what works for you.
And there we are.
So, I’m guilty — a little — with this “Be Holistic” and all that. Not my intention — it seems that everybody’s an armchair social media marketer, too.
But the goal is not to point out that You’re Doing It Wrong…but, instead, to point at some folks who are doing it right.
Then, you make the decisions based on what works for You. Your business. Your social time.
Did you ever get the feeling that some marketers have the magic touch?
That some communicators just, well, do it better?
Ever wanted to know the tricks – the ones that make you seem like you’re getting 80 hours of work done in 40? The ones that leave your boss scratching her head, saying “how did he DO that?”
Underground Strategies – Join us for the webinar on 12/9. Here’s the downlow:
Oh, and the really cool thing is that tickets stay at $35 for this Webinar – virtual event, all you need is a phone and a computer – until Monday night (12/6), when they magically go up to $49.
AND – we’re going to randomly select TWO registrants to receive a copy of Holistic Social Media – the complete course – a $90 value.
(We think there are THOUSANDS of dollars of tricks and strategies in the complete course…but that’s a subject for another day.)
Back some 20 years ago, I was returning from college for Thanksgiving weekend. Took a plane, and we left Syracuse bound for Cleveland, then Northern Indiana. The first half of the flight was fine. It’s that second half that was rocky – something about the weather conditions, flying over Lake Erie, and a choppy, choppy ride.
Then: a bolt of light and a nice, loud, explosion on the right side of the plane.
It wasn’t until maybe 10 minutes later when the pilot came on and said “this plane was hit by static discharge, but all planes can handle static discharge, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
It wasn’t until I landed about an hour later that I was finally able to get the real story:
The plane had been struck by lighting.
Lightning is scary stuff, it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature, and all that…but this has stuck with me for years – a not-so-pleasant experience for us, but the pilot in charge had everything under control. And the system in place – the plane and its engineering marvels – handled the lightning strike as if it was another day at the office.
So, are you prepared?
Is your Marketing Plan capable of withstanding Static Discharge?
We’ve pointed back, again and again, to the value of the SWOT Analysis in any business planning. Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities.
THREATS.
Your business might not get struck by actual lightning tomorrow – but you could run into a bump in the road, positive, negative or just plain goofy.
We do this semi-religiously – not just for our own site, to augment the Google Analytics stats we get, but for others as well, to see who’s blowing smoke and who is worth looking at.
As of this morning, the stats for October are up. Area 224 has seen a nice spike in traffic – for which we want to thank you.
“Thank you.”
Compete happens to be one of the Underground Tricks we like to share with folks on our webinars (and you can still sign up for BOOM Camp 2010, starting Tuesday, at this link: http://boomcamp.eventbrite.com/?discount=BOOMTIME.) Compete is pretty darn cool, in our opinion.
They work on a Freemium model, so you can get much more than what’s available for free if you sign up for a premium plan.
BTW, if you’d like to see our stats for October, here’s a snapshot.
