Ruth Poundwright [00:00:00]:
Most of us think of freebies as list building tools. But the smartest thing I have done in my business is to think of them as the first step in my sales process. Not in a gross pushy way that means that they’re not helpful, but in a way that actually serves my right people and that serves my business by designing them to more naturally lead to sales of my offers. And AI has made this so much easier to test without burning myself out. So in this episode, I’m going to walk you through how I’m thinking about freebies now and what’s working in terms of turning freebies to sales. Welcome to the Soulful Sales show where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hi and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. So I have been thinking a lot about freebies lately, partly because I have been in a really creative phase of my business, not just with new paid offers, but also with freebies.

Ruth Poundwright [00:01:02]:
And a lot of that is down to the fact that I have finally got a process for creating landing pages, opt in pages really, really quickly thanks to AI which has changed what feels possible, which has allowed me to focus more on the creative side of things and to get AI to set up the marketing side of things to actually get them out into the world. But also it’s just something, something I’ve been seeing with my clients and my members having one freebie and expecting it to do all the things. And I think that we need to change the way we think about freebies. So that is what this episode is all about. So what I will say is that it used to be that creating a freebie was a lot, a lot of work. Not just creating the actual content for the freebie, but also spending hours creating the page, creating the copy. The truth is, now that I can create new freebies in a fraction of the time time. I am not, by the way, and I need to make this very, very clear.

Ruth Poundwright [00:02:02]:
I am not advocating to just churning out freebies with AI copying and pasting and not putting that human work into it anymore. For sure, that is not what I’m talking about. But AI does make it quicker. It does help us to shortcut the process. And for me it certainly helps with that part between creating the freebie and actually getting it live on the page. So setting up the opt in form and all of that stuff. AI is also changing the game a bit when it comes to the types of Freebies we create. So we’re not just limited to static PDFs and checklists.

Ruth Poundwright [00:02:40]:
AI means that we are able to build interactive tools, things that people can use and engage with rather than downloading and forgetting. They can also live on our website and we can update them over time if we need to. We can create custom quizzes, custom planners, diagnostics, all of that stuff. Things that give people a specific really tangible quick win, which I think is really important for a strong freebie. And this wouldn’t have been possible for most of us without that kind of techie knowledge even a year ago. Right? And actually just a quick shout out here I am going to be talking about building these kind of interactive freebies specifically inside the Aligned AI Lab in July. So if you’re interested in that, it’s a really low cost option. You can go to ruthpoundwhite.com forward/lab to read more about that.

Ruth Poundwright [00:03:34]:
But this is not a promo for the Aligned AI Lab. What I really want to say here is that all of this stuff combined has led to a real shift in the way I’m thinking about about freebies. It is so much easier to test different options to find out what works for you. Which is why I want to be encouraging you not to just be one and done with your freebies and to have one freebie that you expect to do all the heavy lifting in your business. I certainly don’t feel that way about paid offers in our business. And in fact, let me see if I can find it. I have an episode about it’s episode 85. Should we have one signature offer or multiple offers and choosing what works for you? The same goes with freebies.

Ruth Poundwright [00:04:17]:
And, and part of the argument I made in that episode 85 was the fact that limiting yourself to one signature offer makes it way, way harder to experiment and find what works. Even if the signature offer business model was the right business model for you, because I do believe that different business models suit different types of people. It just makes it really a lot harder to find out the right offer for the market that will actually sell if you are putting all of your time and energy into one offer. So the same goes for freebies. But there is a really important caveat to this and that is the fact that if have a solid freebie yet, please don’t think that you need to go ahead and create loads and loads of freebies. One well thought out freebie that is directly tied to a paid offer of yours is a really, really important foundation of your business. Okay, so don’t skip that and don’t get overwhelmed thinking you need to do way more than that. What I’m talking about now is kind of the next step on from that.

Ruth Poundwright [00:05:16]:
So if you’re really at that stage where you don’t have that one freebie yet, then please do be be okay with just having one freebie. But the pattern I often see is that we have a main freebie and we leave it for ages and we wonder why it’s not leading to sales, or why our list growth plateaus, or whether it’s really engaging people. And I think that it’s. Honestly, I don’t think that that was ever the right way to do things. But the fact that we have this AI support and you know, I, I know that so many of you listening to this are limited on time, energy and capacity. And I know even though we know we should be doing things, it’s hard to find the time and the energy to experiment with different offers. But these AI tools make it so much easier. And something that I’ve already been practicing in my freebies when I did have capacity, was to create really specific freebies tied.

Ruth Poundwright [00:06:08]:
So, for example, if I was speaking at a summit, I would create a freebie that was a workbook with all prompts and questions directly related to the talk I gave in that summit. That’s a really simple way to tie a freebie to a specific collaboration you’re doing. But we can also create individual freebies based on the offers we’re launching. Again, that was something else I used to do regularly. So for example, I might be launching a course about a specific process and the freebie would be a checklist about that process. Now, thanks to the ease of building these interactive tools, it could be a calculator that helps people see their return on investment in a process or the energy that they’re going to have to put in or something like that. And yeah, I really want to encourage you to think about creating these kind of micro freebies in that way. So something that can give someone a really, really quick win, but that is also very tied to something that you want to sell in your business.

Ruth Poundwright [00:07:05]:
And that’s the next step that I want to talk about. So obviously when you create a freebie in your business, you can monetize that freebie immediately by adding a tripwire to that offer. So a tripwire is basically usually a low cost offer that people are presented with immediately after opting into a free thing. So that is always something I would advise to help you, you know, get paid for the freebies you’re putting out there. And and this is a process I teach in depth in the Soulful Sales Society membership, which you can read more about@ruthpoundwhite.com forward slash SSS. Basically, you want to make sure that you are making some sort of offer immediately after people sign up for your freebies, which helps you increase the chances that people will become a buyer. And if you are running paid ads, it will increase the chances that you will make the money back that you are spending on ads sooner. But of course, and it’s very understandable, most people are not going to just pay for an offer immediately after downloading a freebie.

Ruth Poundwright [00:08:04]:
It’s an option for them, but it’s not something that we expect that most people will do. So generally a few percent of people will buy that offer. Most people won’t. But it doesn’t stop there. If we are smart about the freebies that we are creating, and if we are willing to create these freebies designed around these micro wins, these very tangible desires and outcomes that people want in their business, then we can then more specifically tie them into the offers that we really want people in down the line. So yes, it will be brilliant if they sign up to our offers immediately after joining up for the freebie. But it’s not just about that. It’s about how our freebie is tied in with the desires of the right kind of people we want in our main offers down the line in our business.

Ruth Poundwright [00:08:51]:
And that is the key I really want you to think about when it comes to the topics of your freebies. What is a first step? What is something that they need to do before they’re ready for your offer? What is a step they need to do early on that would complement nicely with your offer? And it’s not about leaving stuff out of the freebie. And actually I should make this clear, giving people too much in a freebie is actually going to increase the chances that they do nothing with it. So it’s not about deliberately leaving stuff out or a freebie being incomplete. It is complete, but only around a micro doable step that’s way, like I said, more doable because you are keeping it small. And then if they want some more of that, you make it clear through your nurturing emails and the way that you sell after the freebie that you are around to help them with that in more detail detail or for the next steps when they are ready for them. Does that make sense? And I know that some of you listening to this Might think that, oh my goodness, this all sounds like a lot like, I get it. I know that if you are running on fumes and listening to this thinking, I got to create more freebies, I got to think of different topics, I got to do more selling after the freebie.

Ruth Poundwright [00:10:03]:
Now, like I said earlier on, if all you need to focus on right now is that one freebie that is still worth focusing on and you can go and focus on that and you can come back and do the rest when you have more capacity. How, however, the other reframe that I want to offer you is the fact that when you get in this mindset that not everything rests on one individual freebie and you can hopefully be more in a mindset of this imperfect experimentation and getting things out there quickly, using the tech at your disposal to help you take over some of that grunt work to help you put it out there, then it takes some of that pressure off. Because not every freebie has to be the winning freebie. We get to test the different things in different places and see what works. And it may be that taking that pressure off and experimenting more is the shift that you needed to make it easier. So my advice to you would just be to pick something you have coming up. So maybe you are speaking at a summit, maybe you are running a launch, maybe you’re guesting on a podcast. Just build one freebie for that, start with that and see how it goes.

Ruth Poundwright [00:11:08]:
And another tip I will give you is it’s not about actually completely redoing a freebie or doing a new freebie every time. It can also be just a shift in the messaging of the landing page on the freebie to make it more tied to the reason they’re opting in. So, for example, I’ve been part of a couple of AI summits recently. I could use the same freebie, but on the landing page, speak to the specific topic I did for each summit, if that makes sense, and tie it into why they would want to sign up for the freebie. And again, if you can get that workflow down with AI to help you edit your landing pages, it becomes so much quicker and easier to get this stuff out there and test it over time. So yeah, that’s what I want to say about freebies. Don’t expect one freebie to do all the work in your business. Make sure that you are setting yourself up for sales as quickly as you can with that tripwire offer.

Ruth Poundwright [00:11:59]:
But also in terms of the connection, the topic of the freebie, the win of the freebie, the desire people have when they sign up to that freebie has to the desire they have when they sign up to your paid offer as well. And this is actually what we’re working on in detail in the Soulful Sales Society membership this month. We are going through the entire strategy of tying your freebie into your paid offers and setting them up to more naturally lead to sales both immediately and down the line. I have got AI prompts if you want to use them. AI is always optional. I have a mixture of people who love AI, who are agnostic to AI, or who really dislike using AI. So absolutely welcome to take them or leave them. But I’ll help you figure out the topic of the freebie.

Ruth Poundwright [00:12:45]:
I have prompts and AI shortcuts if you choose to use them, I’ll help you figure out how to tie it into your paid offer and you will have the accountability of getting it done that week. And if you get it done, I will promote your freebie to my entire audience. So hopefully you will get some sign up straight away. But obviously the real win is having that accountability to actually doing it. So if you want to join in that you can go to ruthpoundwhite.com forward/done to read more about the get it Done week, the freebie boot camp and your options for either joining in as part of the Soulful Sales Society membership or getting it as a one off standalone offer. So yeah, if you have had I should make a new freebie or I need to improve my freebie or I need a freebie that actually converts on your to do list. This is your chance to actually get it done. Get it off your to do list because I know how it feels to have this bigger picture marketing stuff on your to do list for so long.

Ruth Poundwright [00:13:40]:
That was me for such a long time. Really overwhelming to set up these systems and now that I have given myself permission to experiment that I am using AI in a way that’s aligned for me not for creating all of the content content but for really streamlining the work that goes into that content creation allowing me to be more creative. I am having such better results creating different freebies for different offers and really figuring out what speaks to my right people and what leads to sales down the line. So I look forward to working with some of you in that Get It Done week. Like I said, go to ruthpoundwhite.com forward/done to read more about what we’re doing and yes, see you inside. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community@ruthpoundwhite.com community or my personal favorite, Join me inside the Soulful Sale society membership@ruthpoundwhite.com membership and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.