Users interested in free content - now what?
Without thinking too much about business prospects, I decided to offer free curated educational resources to a niche I'm close to. I received quite a lot of interest and I would like to think about how to move this forward and figure out how to monetize it while staying true to the 'mission statement' as much as possible.
I'm feeling a little overwhelmed regarding next steps.
So far, my idea is to create a website which collates existing useful information and tutorials on my target topic into one place. I am then planning to create my own tutorials (blog posts and videos) which I'll link on the website. I'm also planning to create a mailing list.
- Have I made any serious mistakes so far?
- Is there a big rush for me to engage with these users even though I don't have any resources prepared yet? What should I say to them and when?
- With regard to monetization, should I continue on this 'free resources' path and introduce strategies like ads?
- I've read that it's extremely difficult to monetize education content unless you're going the 'online course' option, since people associate that with college and prestige. Is this something that currently stands in my way in terms of success?
- Are there any stories, anecdotes or lesser known resources you could point me to with regard to creating, distributing and monetizing educational content? I've already started combing through some of the well known essays/posts.
Thanks!
It's awesome that you found people interested in your content. The question is, how many of them are ready to pay for it?
If you aren't collecting their emails, do that - create a mailing list and capture their emails. If you can share with them the stuff you are working on, give them updates. In my opinion, giving users free resources builds your authority and can hopefully translate to better conversion later, once you offer them a paid product.
Doing an online course (I assuming videos course here) is time-consuming. I would try to monetize something that's easier and quicker to produce. You don't want to spend months and months working on something, only to find out that no one is prepared to pay for it.
I have created an ebook before - I started by creating a pre-order on Gumroad (https://gumroad.com), a simple website (even though I spent way too much time on it :)) and a sample chapter I would send anyone who was interested in it. I got the first 100 people to sign up and some of them pre-ordered. By the time I was ready to release it, I got around $2000 in pre-orders. After that, I started creating a video course - even though it follows the e-book, it was still a lot of work and you can't update it as fast as you can update an ebook. One mistake I did was that I messed up the video course launch and I gave everyone who pre-ordered a book, a free video course. I sold about $2000 of the video course, but I have a feeling I would have sold more if I haven't given it away for free :) The other website where I sold the book as LeanPub.com.
I just released a free resource yesterday that people can sign up and download (got 140 emails). My plan is to create a couple of more free resources to give away and then pitch a paid product after that.
I hope this helps!