97. How do you create a freebie?
Want to get more site traffic? 📈 Then you need to create some freebies! In this educational ep, hosts Phil and Lauren walk through their process for creating freebies from start-to-finish. From selecting keywords for your freebie name to creating a memorable design, the hosts detail how to create freebies that boost your site traffic and email subscribers more than ever before.
Episode transcription
Phil
Before we dive into this week's episode, I just want to let you know about our newest course Instagram mastery. This course gives you the secrets to quickly improve your Instagram growth, engagement and content through lifetime access to 20. Plus easy to follow videos, tutorials, and planning worksheets. This course is designed for busy people get actionable steps to push your brand forward on this platform, learn only what's important to master Instagram take action and grow with lifetime access to continue learning. I cover feed stories live igtv, even Instagram reels. when used properly, your Instagram is an incredible lead generation tool. And I'll show you how, as the thank you for being a valued listener to this podcast, use promo code therapy 50. all caps to get 50% off the full price of the course our way of saying thanks for listening. Now onto the show.
Phil
Well, hello, welcome to Brand Therapy. I'm Phil.
Lauren
And I'm Lauren.
Phil
And this is the podcast where we help you position, build and promote your brand. We're happy you're here. It's just us today, we tend to do this every other episode, we you know, we invite a guest and then the next week means it's just the two of us, I have to say we should give some shout outs to those of you that have said very kind tweets and DMS saying that you listen to the podcasts and saying you love the podcast. Thank you for that.
Lauren
It makes my day someone sent us an email the other day just to say how much they enjoyed it.
Phil
I think that maybe in future episodes, we should start a new segment called voicemail. I'm not ready to start it today. But I think we're we go here we get new ideas. I think we should start this in the future. So if you're a fan of the podcast, send us a little message and say hello. And I'll send you a little audio link. And you can tell us what you like or what you think and say Hello, little interaction. So speaking of interaction, we are going to be talking about one particular way that you can interact with your audience, which is hopefully growing, if it's not growing yet, it will be growing once you start incorporating this strategy into your marketing.
Gotta say, for a long time, this is something I knew I should be doing. But it's something I wasn't doing, quite frankly, until about a year ago, routinely, at least.
Lauren
Yeah, yeah, freebies can completely change your marketing exposure, point blank. I always viewed freebies as tricks to get like I saw it as a form of trickery, where you're basically bribing someone to get on your mailing list. But once I walked through how to use keywords everywhere, and how to think about the sort of SEO opportunities that come with being a freebie, my mind was completely changed. And I was on the freebie train.
Phil
Yes, yes, we didn't do it for a long time, because at least for me, I make all of our worksheets and all of our freebies, that's not something I delegate to people on my team, maybe I should but I, I'd like to be involved with that. And for me, it's similar to designing a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation that I would deliver. It's hard for me to delegate it because almost the action of creating it is helping me decide how I want to communicate that freebie value, but it's very time consuming. And I had a hang up on this for a long time thinking that my freebie needed to be perfect. That I need to just spend 10 hours which by the way, I did spend 10 hours on my first freebie and I'm mortified about that. Now I crank them out in about an hour and a half.
Lauren
No, don't be mortified because that is one of the top freebies that are on Phil Pallen calm. So yes, that's you're on tons of traffic and tons of email subscribers because of those 10 hours that you wisely invested into this freebie. I
Phil
I remember at the time being like, when is this going to be over? But I know but the point is, I did spend a long time on that. But now looking back on it, I would tell people don't spend that much time on your first one. Set a time limit for maybe an hour or two for your first one. And we'll get into some specifics on formats that I think will work for you that have worked for me. You know, we'll talk about that. Maybe we'll split it up into, I mean, how do you want to attack this exciting topic?
Lauren
So, I thought a lot about this. Okay, I wrote down a few quick notes three minutes before. I think that creating a freebie from start to finish can really be plotted out in three separate stages. First, plan second, design, third, promote So planning your freebie I think let's start there with figuring out what your freebie is going to be, what value are you going to offer? What's that topic that you're going to cover that you think is going to incentivize someone to subscribe to get it.
And I guess I'll just dive right in and talk about my favorite tool keywords everywhere. We've mentioned it a few times on this podcast before. But basically, keywords everywhere are kind of like a way to dip your toe into SEO without being an SEO expert. Keywords everywhere cost, I think it's like, you can buy credits, and those credits are worth a certain amount of cents. And then you can invest those credits into finding out the actual specific SEO results. But Oh, you've got it up on the screen.
Phil
Anyone who's watching the YouTube exactly version, we're recording audio for our podcast audience first, but sometimes when it's just the two of us, we also hop on to videos, if you want to watch that you can head over to our podcast show notes. We pop it up on YouTube, and sometimes we livestream it. Lauren, I think it actually might make sense for you to share your screen in a second because you've actually got it installed. I don't know which browsers so I don't have it installed yet.
But the idea of keywords everywhere is one of our SEO tools, as Lauren mentioned. And it helps us understand search volume, what people are looking for things like competition, I think we can talk it out and kind of explain what people should look for. Because the tool can be a little overwhelming to know how to use it.
Lauren
Of course, of course. So basically, keywords everywhere is an extension that you add to your browser. And the way that I kind of think of it is that it adds an extra layer of information on top of the Google search form, like a search display that we're all very familiar with. So it seems really overwhelming at first, but it's actually not overwhelming at all. It's very, very simple. So I've got good old Firefox loaded up. I'm going to type in personal branding first.
Phil
Oh, you love Firefox.
Lauren
I love Firefox, although I don't love it so much right now, honestly. But that's okay. Well, that's a conversation for another day, another episode.
So I typed in personal branding into google.com, press Enter. And now I can see just like what we all normally do see all the different definitions and links and articles related to personal branding.
Now what's cool about keywords everywhere is it adds that extra layer of information in a few different places. So I can see that right below personal branding at the top what I searched for 74,000 people searching for personal branding as a term per month. And the competition for that is point 07
Phil
Point zero 7 cents. What does that mean?
Lauren
There's a cost per click listed. ignore that. It's too complicated with my mind. Maybe if you're smart, you can figure it out. I don't worry about stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. But the key thing to look at here is competition. So I read that if what you're searching for has the competition of point 2 or lower, you have a chance of actually ranking for that particular search term. So it's pretty cool. So this one here, personal branding has a competition of point 07, which is lower than point two. And given that 74,000 people search for personal branding every month. That means that Phil for your website, personal branding needs to be used pretty much everywhere. Because there is a really, really strong opportunity to rank for that.
Phil
So 74,000 searches a month is a lot and point a lot 07 for competition is low. So those are both good indicators as they work together.
Lauren
Yes. And basically what that's meaning is that there are very few resources that are meeting the volume of searches for personal branding, at least from how I understand right.
Now, there's one other thing that is really important to note is that competition isn't the only thing that you should consider, as you mentioned Phil, search volume is important.
So you might have a term that's got a competition of point 01 like the lowest it can possibly be, but if only 400 people are searching for it per month, I mean, it doesn't really matter. That's not going to be your freebie. Maybe it's a blog post if you're really passionate about it, but that's not going to be your freebie because the goal of your freebie is to cast a net out as wide as possible, so you can get subscribers and be exposed to people who are searching for your content as a solution to something.
Phil
Great. And this is the exact process we use to create our freebies which by the way, some of you might have one or two. We have 16. At least at the time of recording this episode, we have 16 freebies soon to be 18. This is how we grow our email list.
Lauren
And this year alone, I mean, granted, sometimes people, individual people are subscribing for multiple freebies at once. And this is not a unique number. But from January to end of September, almost 5000 times someone has signed up for a freebie on your website.
Phil
Yes.
Lauren
Which is crazy, because there's been minimal promotions. It's just up there.
Yeah, exactly.
Phil
Once it's done, it's done. That's great as you can promote it on tools like Instagram and Pinterest, etc. But once you let it run its course, it doesn't disappear. One of our top performing freebies is, and I want to talk about what keywords everywhere show on the sidebar in a second, but can you type in a branding checklist for new businesses? Do you think that will come up and Google, branding checklist for new businesses?
Lauren
Let's see.
Phil
Do we come up?
Lauren
Well, not for me, not for me. But I’m also in Canada, like it also depends on the person you're logged in and things like that. But regardless, I know that branding checklists for new businesses is really successful on your website.
Phil
We have a lot of people who find it.
Lauren
It could be coming from Pinterest like not necessarily Google, YouTube as well. Yep, YouTube, but you bring up a good point, and so on keywords everywhere. As you mentioned, there's kind of a right rail that's now shown up on your Google search results. And there are basically two boxes that can display more information.
So the first box is related keywords. So as you can remember, I typed in personal branding, volume was really high, competition was really low. That's awesome. But if I want to get even more specific, and let's say I want an even lower competition, or a just a different kind of different, or more specific search term than just personal branding, I can load my metrics in keywords everywhere, which basically just means I'm cashing in the credits that I bought from keywords everywhere for a couple dollars. And then it shows you a list of other related keywords to personal branding.
So for example, what's come up is personal branding examples got over 5000 people searching for it, very, very low competition of point 03 personal branding strategy 1600 people searching for it per month, point two competitions. So Phil, on your new website, personal branding strategy should probably be the name and title of one of the pages, personal branding PDF, which we've got personal branding tips, etc. It goes on and on and on. And what's cool about this is that it actually keywords everywhere will actually rank the results by volume. So the most high volume searches are going to be up top. So you don't even really need to pay attention to what's at the bottom, you can also export to CSV if you really want to nerd out and do multiple searches. So that part is really cool.
And then the other section on the right rail that I love is people also searching. So it's not like an apples to apples comparison of personal branding. It's not directly related, but it's basically summarizing some other situations or searches that are kind of related to personal branding that you might want.
Phil
Give us a few.
Lauren
Okay, let me load my metrics.
Phil
Sorry for spending all your credits. And don't be intimidated by this. By the way, don't be intimidated by the credits because you buy like 100,000 for $10. So they last forever.
Lauren
Yeah, I bought credits once and I use this probably five times a day every day and I yeah, I can't even remember when I bought them it was so long ago.
Anyway. So we've got a few people also searching for us that showed up in the related keywords but some other ones have come up. They're really interesting, like personal branding quotes. So Phil, like a blog post that summarizes your 10 favorite personal branding quotes or personal a freebie, that's personal branding, quotes that will directly inspire your brand. You know, you can see where that goes. Personal Branding books, why is personal branding important.
Phil
To the exact title of a YouTube video that I have?
Lauren
Yes. And so these got more and more granular, right? Like these are now getting into the hundreds of volumes, at least in the case of personal branding. I would say don't go below a 500 search volume for anything, even a blog post unless you're just personally very passionate about the topic. But ideally, your freebie is being searched for in the thousands So that way you get high search volume. Love it.
Phil
Okay, so we've talked about planning, maybe let's quickly take an example. That's not me. If I give you 30 seconds to come up with a topic, a freebie for one of our listeners, let's take Kate, who's Instagram handle is asweetwhim. She does French macaroons. They're amazing. So what?
Lauren
And she's a macaroon business.
Phil
Yes, she's an Orlando pastry chef. But she specializes in macarons and cakes. Okay, so if you had to come up with a freebie topic for her, what would it be?
Lauren
Okay, so first, I'm searching for great pastries. Over 300,000 searches per month. So that's really popular. I'm going to load people also search for because I just get the most specific ideas. And it is okay, so pastries, recipes come up at the top. And it has 49,000 searches, and point 02 competition, high volume, low competition. So she could do like five pastries, recipes that'll change your life, or five pastries recipes that only use seven ingredients like whatever it is to add that little extra flavor, forgive the pun. There's also another option French pastries. And that has 33,000 searches per month and point 04 competition again low. So it could be like five French pastries that are easier than you think. Or my five favorite French pastries, recipes, etc.
Phil
You did that in a few minutes. And I thought I mean I did what I always do, which is put you on the spot, but it's too damn hard every time . It's to demonstrate that you don't have to overthink this, I actually want to segue now from planning your freebie to designing your freebie. I'm gonna take over this section because as I mentioned. I mean, we have a team, they help us with all of our client projects. But still, there's things that I hold on to that I can't delegate and freebies are one of them.
I create most of my freebies in one of two programs, keynote, which I love using just you know, for, you don't always have to design slides, you can change your canvas, your document size, and make it actually 8 1/2 x 11. Or whatever size you're using whatever country you are. And I also use Google slides or Google docs, but normally Google slides for freebies as well.
I'm actually going to share my screen and walk through what I think are the three easiest formats for a freebie.
What I'm showing on the screen disclaimer, I don't have available for free download. These are freebies that are in our course, email mastery. In email mastery, we obviously talk about email marketing, which is a huge part of designing a freebie collecting emails, we also often talk about the value of email, over social media, you have more ownership over access to your subscribers, right? Have a social media channel, decide Okay, they're going to change the algorithm and all of a sudden, you can't access your followers that you've worked really hard to grow so unfairly. It's unfair, that's on, you know, that's their decision, not you. So the thing with email, people don't change their email addresses, you have access to them once you earn their email address.
So I think and I'm going to share my screen for this. There are three common formats, at least, that I use for freebies. Let's look at probably the most complex one first, then we'll go to the easiest, which is an ebook. This is the first one that I launched. I'm showing on my screen right now, for those of you watching the video, a template built in Google slides, which is again a part of our course email mastery if you're interested. But this basically gives you a template where you can just substitute text in images if you're interested. And this is something that maybe requires a little bit more designed to create an ebook. Maybe you've got a friend who can help you if you're not savvy with this. But ideally, you're not overthinking it, you're keeping it simple. An ebook doesn't have to be 100 pages, it can be 10 pages.
Remind yourself that people actually appreciate things that are shorter and more concise. Don't we put this pressure that we have to like to write a novel, but actually people don't want a novel because they don't have time to read something like that. Like, we want to be able to get it quickly and take action. So an ebook is one of three templates that you can use when designing your freebie.
The second is what I would consider to be probably my favorite one, which is a checklist. This is the easiest format. If you're just getting started and you're overwhelmed with where you should start and what you should do, start with a checklist. This literally should take you no longer than an hour start to finish. Every single content creator business owner could create a checklist. And, some of my most successful freebies are checklists. I mentioned one or two Earlier, branding checklists for new businesses, I think if it's not our top, it's second or third. It's up there. It's up definitely. So to actually just make a checklist of things that people should do recipes, workouts, like cleaning, organization, I mean, the list goes on checklist format is awesome.
The last one I'm going to mention which we have a template for is called worksheets. And so it's kind of a synthesis of the other two, it allows someone to actually go through a series of questions to arrive at something. And we have lots of these. And these have also done well, helping people write their brand sentence, identify their target market or target audience.
Now is probably a good time to mention to people also, they can go onto our website and see our freebies, we have 16 total, it's crazy. But if you go to philpallen.co/resources, we have freebies there that you can actually check out and get inspired. If this is a topic that interests you, I also like not to plug it but I'm going to plug it email mastery goes into detail more than just this episode on creating your freebie and giving you templates to be able to create it even faster. But I thought in this episode, why not also share my screen and bring them up- ebook, checklist or worksheet. Those are the easiest formats for designing your freebie. And the software that I use is usually Keynote. You could also use Microsoft Word. And then I also love browser based tools like Google slides or Google docs. There you go.
Lauren
Perfect. And then the last step is promoting your freebie. So I think that's something people get confused with is once you've created your freebie, you've got your ebook, you're really really proud of it. You want to promote the world being like I've made an ebook here, it is so exciting. But that's a very, very high level. So I think the key when you're promoting is you need to think about a specific problem that your freebie is solving and give very, very, very detailed examples that help kind of paint a picture of your freebie and really make it completely irresistible.
Because just having a freebie isn't enough. You've got to be solving a problem.
Phil
And I think two people like to create it. And they think that it's just going to market itself. And it's not. And don't just market your freebie the week that you create it actually resurface it for people. This is one of the things we do like yes, we always choose one freebie for the month. And I use that as my link in my bio, which I sometimes change. But I try to change it at least once a month. And sometimes they're not the newest one that I create. Sometimes I go back and create others that people may not have seen people that have followed me the last six months. Yeah, you know, I wouldn't have seen one that I made seven months ago. So don't be afraid to promote it often. And when relevant and include it in creative places like your email signature, or your link bio on Instagram, I think Don't be afraid to promote it. It's just generally good advice. And a good reminder.
We raced through this, we've probably spent a bit longer than we plan on the first tab. So we race through point number two and three.
But the whole point of this podcast is that you can turn it on and learn something in less than half an hour. Hopefully that's the position you're in.
We'd love to hear from you #brandtherapy where we can continue the conversation. I'm @philpallen
Lauren
I'm @thelaurenmoore.
Phil
And if you enjoyed this episode or any other episode, you've got to let us know. We told you at the beginning we might even start this new voicemail segment. If you have an extra second go to the iTunes Store leave us a review five star five star that helps other people discover this podcast and we work very hard to create it. We try to stay right on schedule around half an hour and we're at that point. So thank you. We'll see you back for the next episode of Brand Therapy, and we appreciate you.
Lauren
Bye bye.
