AP 1233: How Do I Promote Free Content and Get More Customers?

AP 1233: How Do I Promote Free Content and Get More Customers?

Pat Flynn: What's up for everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 1233 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and entrepreneurs, just like you. And yes, entrepreneurs plural.

We're talking with Aneliya and Pierre who are over in France doing some pretty incredible and very, very smart people things with relation to science and sports, right? So they're like, multiple PhD, master, like, super smart people number one. And number two, they are working with athletes and organizations to help basically bioengineer performance. And they have a website Sci-Sport.com. So Sci-Sport.com, and they wanna know how to get this out there and how to, you know, turn this into a business model. And they offer a lot of free things, but they also offer some paid things. And, and how do we scale this up?

So a really amazing conversation and you'll hear both Aneliya and Pierre here in this episode. And again, their website is Sci-Sport.com.

This is a good one, hope you enjoy.

Pat Flynn: Aneliya and Pierre, welcome to AskPat. Thank you both so much for being here today. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Aneliya Manolova: Thank you for having us.

Pierre Debraux: Yeah. Very excited to be here.

Pat Flynn: This is really cool. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your company and, and what you do. Aneliya maybe we could start with you.

Aneliya Manolova: First of all, I'm Bulgarian. I did my PhD research in France about, biomechanic with Pierre. So we started our company since 10 years ago. We are two researchers who write articles on scientific basis about science of sport. And, we try to communicate with many people and vulgarize the scientific research to help them to understand more what they do on daily basis and how they can manage the method of training, optimizing their performance, helping to, to prevent injuries also.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, Pierre, tell me a little bit more about the kinds of sports that you're focus on. Are you focused on all kinds of sports or just certain sort of sports?

Pierre Debraux: Like Aneliya just said, our goal is to, to fill the gap between the field and research. So we don't have a specialty, per se. We are working for anything, any sport and not only the sport, we are also working for health and for people who are just want to be in better shape or in better health. So we can apply what we know and what we do for everything.

Pat Flynn: I gotcha. So not just the professional athlete or the sports team, but anybody who wants to live their best life and be healthy and perform at a top level.

That's fantastic. I'm sure that with the decades of research that you've done, there are many, many things that you can do to help people tell me about the business model of the company. Is it simply you write reports and then people buy them? Or how does the, the business model work?

Aneliya Manolova: A little bit of everything. We write reports and we work with federations. Also with the enterprises.

Pierre Debraux: We started a website and everything was free. The content was free and still is free. We wanted to help many people and we didn't want to have a, a barrier with some price gate. So at the time when we started just after finishing our PhDs, it was free and we did that during 10 years and to leave because at the end of demands, we have to live.

So we have on the side, we have an online store where, we were selling some, some sports accessories. It help us to live and to grow and to start to build our community and people to, follow us. But almost two years ago, we started an online platform, online e-learning platform for, to be exact that's where we, we started to sell our, our course and our, our knowledge, if, if I can say.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, where is that available? Like, what's the website? So in, in case people are interested in checking it out.

Pierre Debraux: Oh yeah. So the, the website is Sci-Sport.com and there is an English version. We are, we are trying to translate ourself, all the, the stuff we, we do. Everything is in French. The part where we, we sell our courses, it's called Sci Sport School and it's School.Sci-Sport.com.

Pat Flynn: How do I spell, how do I spell the website? Just so so people can.

Pierre Debraux: Yeah, so it's sciences of sport. So it's Sci-Sport.com.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Sci-Sport.com. I just wanna make sure we get it for everybody, cuz they're gonna be interested in this and I can see it is in French, although it is translated a little bit.

Okay, fantastic. So you have some educational material you're working with different enterprises and companies and things like that, which is great. So tell me what's on your mind. How can I best help you today? Where you, where do you want to go in this conversation?

Aneliya Manolova: Our questions are, and our debate are often about the prices. Because we our main goal is to satisfy people. We want to give them great quality of our work, and this is the main goal. We can't compromise that. Most of the time we work a lot for a very long time, we don't calculate our time, our writing is not like, oh for 200 words, so we must sell it for this price.

No, we spend a lot of time to, to have a quality. And that's why we, we have a difficult time to, to find the, the right prices.

Pat Flynn: Understood. Yeah. So pricing could be very difficult. I think a lot of it has to do number one with who is it that we're selling to, right. If you're selling to the person down the street or your neighbor, you're gonna charge one thing.

But if you're obviously selling to a company or a franchise or some executives, then you can charge a little bit more. But you also have to consider, well, what is the value? What are they going to get? I think it's very smart of you not to charge based on how many words a book might be or how much video there is in something it's always going to be coming back from, well, what is this doing to help this person, right? What is the value? What are they getting? What's the transformation in many cases, one way to start thinking about pricing is what else might they be paying for to get to that goal? Many people who are maybe more professional, for example, a professional tennis player, professional swimmer, they're likely going to be paying a lot of money for coaching, for physical therapy, for all the kinesthetics and all those kinds of things.

So you know that they're already investing a lot of money into those things to help them, but if they were to get your information, how much more would that help them? And can you base that price compared to the other things that they're already paying for? And that's why you can charge probably a lot, if you are targeting those who are at that level, but of course, like you said, accessibility is important.

You don't want to tell somebody, no, I can't help you because you can't afford this. And that's where a lot of times content marketing can come into play. Right. Because you don't wanna also give everything away for free. Because then you're not making any money and can't build your business. You can't reinvest that money into something that can help more people.

And then also there's this idea that, well, if you give away everything for free, then it might not be worth anything. So there's less perceived value there. So generally speaking the way to have a good balance of helping the most people as possible, but also getting paid for that would be, there's a couple different business models, right?

You could do content marketing for free, where you're sharing a lot of the information free for search engines, for anybody looking for it. If anybody comes your way and wants to learn how to do something really quick, you can point them to an article. Maybe it is a section of your book that's popped out and shared for free, but that will hopefully get people excited to go deeper with you and then spend money to invest in what it is that they're getting on the other end. Right. We talked about the value that they're getting on the other end.

So that's one way to do it. Another way to. Is to actually give the information away for free, but in order to implement it in order to get accountability in order to get access to you, you could charge for that. Right?

So the content maybe is what gives people the idea that you can help them, but then if they actually want you to help them personally, Then they might need to pay for your time in, in that case, right. Per hour, per job, or per project. So that's a way to do it another way that you might be able to generate an income through this information that I think could be very valuable, would be through speaking on stages to people who this information would be very relevant to, you know, that I'm sure there are events that you could speak at where you could display this information that you've researched and found that could really be valuable for people.

And a lot of companies will pay to have you on stage to present this information. And then of course you could sell your book and sell your courses. You could also give people free access to parts of the course that they would be interested in to get them, okay. I can get it for free, cool. I'll check it out.

But then the rest of it is locked. They have to then pay to unlock the rest of it, because now they know they like you and they want the rest of this information, or they have confirmed that it is actually of value and helpful for them. Therefore they want the other things. There's a few ways to go about doing it.

Have you explored any of those ways to help more people, but also, you know, generate more revenue before?

Pierre Debraux: Yeah. Mainly what we are doing. It's the, the first option that we were talking about is the free content in the, the social media and Instagram, Facebook. We are not doing YouTube, but we are presenting in Facebook and Instagram and we are growing. Two year, we we, we found a new way to communicate our our ideas and our, our work and it's specific to the platform and it works great. And it allows us to share more content, to reach more people and to sell more of what we are doing and what we are proposing. It's relatively, relatively new for us to, to sell the, the courses.

So right now we have two big courses, one big and, and one smaller. It works well. We are very happy with the, the results, but we are working on, on a, our next course and the next course we want, we want it to be bigger. Because, the subject is bigger. It's more interesting. We know that a lot of people in our subscribing in our subscriber are looking for the, the answer and the, the solution.

And so the, we understood the concept of value and the concept, or that we are selling a solution and not a product, but we wanted to have it right. I mean, how to know. If it's not too cheap, or if it's not too expensive. I mean, by that, that we can sell a course, for example, for 200 Euro or us or us dollar, but at the same time, we can sell it for 50, but how to know maybe the course we can sell it for 400 and we can make a discount at 200.

That's where we are trying to, to adjust things because we are looking for searching for, we know that we sell everything we do we sell to professionals. We help coaches and personal trainer to help their clients. So we are not sitting to the people who go to the gym to be in better health. We are sitting to the coach who help these people.

Pat Flynn: Gotcha. That's really helpful. And number one, it might be interesting to research. What else are those coaches and professionals paying for? Like I said, and what are those price points? Because if you find that all of those things are hundreds of dollars, but then you charge 50, they're not gonna believe that what you have to offer is a value.

There's a range that they're used to paying for information like this, that combined with what is the outcome, right? The value that like we were talking about, you can move your price up to be premium. This is the best that you'll get and you cannot get this anywhere else. So therefore we are charging more and that is the higher level, the, the high premium sandbox, or you can go a little bit lower in that range, but knowing where that range is, is very important. So lower range, because you want to help more people and have a wider reach.

Okay, or really high level you'll have less buyers, but they will be much better quality buyer. Right. That's really important to know the range that you can then determine, okay, ours should be up here or ours should be down here.

I usually recommend, especially if you know, you have the best material to stay more on the upper end, because then your perception of your brand in the market becomes upper end.

If you start feeding products that are always lower. Then you become the cheap solution. Right. And you know, when people share you, oh, get it. Because it's cheaper versus do you wanna be perceived as, oh yeah, you should invest in this because it's the best. It's a little bit more expensive, but it's worth it.

Right. So it'll take a conversation between both of you to kind of understand where you wanna go and it might be smack in the middle because you want people to see it as valuable, but also accessible too. But that range is gonna be important. And so some conversations with your future customers and people in that space could be really helpful to see what are they investing in, because that way you at least know that you are not completely undercharging or completely overcharging to a point where they see that price and they're already making up a story in their head. Oh, that's probably not good, cuz it's so cheap. Or that's too expensive for me to even think about. Right.

Does that help a little bit in terms of finding that, that right price? It's gonna take some time, but I hope that that helps a little bit.

Pierre Debraux: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.

Aneliya Manolova: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And I'm guessing, I mean the nice thing is if you want to play in the premium pricing range, a couple things happen. Number one, you'll get a better quality student, like I said, but you'll have the ability to have more focus on them. If you charge less, you'll maybe have more people. But you might have more people who ask more questions who are going to cause maybe more problems or you won't have the time to personally help those people at that higher level, maybe at the high level, they also get some time with you to chat, which you wouldn't offer. Those who are at the lower price.

Another thing that happens is just you'll have more direct connection to them. So you can get feedback from them more. You'll want to take better care of them because they are investing a lot more and you'll have more time to do that. And then, like I said, the perception of just of you in the market.

The cool thing is that many people try to go premium, but they can't back it up. They don't have the information or the experience. And I think that the decades of experience that you have and the PhDs that you have, that is something that should be included in the value of what it is a person's getting. That is something that will differentiate you from somebody else who might be sharing a lot of the same things or trying to share a lot of the same things. They don't have your qualifications. So it would be almost a disservice to charge so little with the background that you have. A disservice to your students, but also to yourselves. I mean, you've earned the right to charge more for this premium content to this particular audience.

So a very common mistake, for course, creators and content creators is to undercharge. And you have probably more qualifications than most to charge more. So I, I want you to focus on that charge what you're worth for sure.

Aneliya Manolova: Yes.

Pierre Debraux: Yeah. Thank you, Pat.

Aneliya Manolova: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, you're welcome. It's something that I think everybody needs to hear from time to time, even myself. Because, we have to balance, again, you wanna help as many people as possible, but you also know that you have something valuable that you should charge for.

And I'm so glad that you're on social media, because that is how you're able to help people far and wide. And I would imagine that those posts and those reals or the Facebook posts or whatever are helpful. So therefore you are already helping a lot of people there. Now we can, for those who wanna go deeper charge the premium price to help in a premium way, those professionals. And so, yeah, that's, those are my thoughts.

Pierre Debraux: I think you're right. And just to add a little something at the end that, that maybe we spend too much time to do free content. I mean, we are still doing free content and we are enjoying it because we, we love to share and we love to, to give information to people, but we spend so much time doing, doing this, that it was hard for us to start selling. I mean, we share everything we did. We have more than 200 articles on our website and it's, it's a lot of works for us and we do that full time.

And when we started selling, we were afraid of, of selling.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Me too.

Pierre Debraux: And now that we did it and it worked at the first time we have a, the first course, the first launch, it was fantastic for us. It was a, a great week. And now the problem has just shifted is to find the right price. Yeah. You help a lot with that.

Aneliya Manolova: Thank you very much.

Pat Flynn: Good. Oh yeah. You're welcome. The thing that I was afraid of when I was selling for the first time was I was already. Giving that information away for free. Now I'm packaging it and putting it into something that I'm gonna charge for?

I had a big dichotomy in my, my head about that. But again, like you said, you get those first results. You see people who are getting value from it and you just want to do that more. And yes, the price changes. I change my price the first time after I started selling too. So you're doing all the right things, you're just in the middle of it. And you're never gonna nail it the first time. But I think that as you take every step you take as sort of experimental. Trial and error. You're going to just like in your research, right? You do the research, then you implement it may or may not work out, but you've given yourself the best chance.

Then you go and do it again. Right. And, and that's where you are now. So I'm, I'm very proud of you guys. I would continue to do the social media outreach because that is how you're gonna get more people. And the beauty of this is eventually you'll get to the point where you have, you know, your set number of courses and they're there.

They're selling and they're kind of automated, right? You can get people in there as long as you find new people, they'll be put into your email list or your into your system, and they'll find you. You can keep cranking away at finding new people and, and having your impact done on the front end there, and then a deeper impact for those who wanna work more closely with you later.

So just words of encouragement, keep going. And then one more time, people can go to Sci-Sport.com to check out their website. I see your ebook there. And again, it's in French and stuff. You can see also the Twitter, Instagram, Facebook on the Instagram page. Just let me go there really quick. I'm curious about a thousand followers there.

Really good inspirational posts, very helpful. Pullups and cardio and different. Okay. This is great. This is great. Keep up the good work. You guys. Thank you so much for coming on today and I hope this was helpful.

Pierre Debraux: Yeah. Thank you, Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoy that conversation with Pierre and Aneliya over at Sci-Sport.com. Coming from a different angle than what we often hear here on the podcast, as far as the kind of work that they do, but it's all the same principles as far as getting in front of people, providing value and getting them interested in all the other things that you have to offer.

So I'm really excited to see what they do with this information. And again, getting into the more English speaking or you know, American organizations and, and companies and athletes and professionals is, is where there's gonna be a lot of opportunity as well. And I know that's where they want to go too. But again, you can check 'em out, that's Sci-Sport.com to see all the crazy smart things that they're doing over there.

It's really amazing, actually. I was just reading it earlier, but there is a French version and an English version of the website when you go there. So go ahead and check it out.

Thank you so much for listening in. I appreciate you. I hope you enjoy this episode. And I look forward to serving you in the next one.

So keep up the great work. And as Pierre and Aneliya mentioned, they are members of SPI Pro they're in there with the mastermind groups and stuff. And, and I do wanna invite you to come in and check it out and apply at SPIpro.com. You can see if it's bright fit for you, and if it's not, we have some other options for you as well, to help get you going to where you need to go.

Cause that's what we're here to do. We'll we'll help you get there, right? That's our new mission statement. We'll help you get there. Anyway, I appreciate you. Thank you so much. And I look forward to serving you in the next one. Cheers and peace out.

Thanks for listening to AskPat at AskPat.com. I'm your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sarah Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. AskPat is a production of SPI Media.

We'll catch you in the next session.