Does it make sense to give away premium content? I might be ringing the gong and saying that infoproducts are dead!

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Hey, folks. When I announced on Facebook that I was giving away my Always Be Shipping course for free, I got a lot of questions, the main one being, “Why?” So I wanted to make this video for you and let you know why I’m giving away Always Be Shipping for free.

There’s several reasons. The first one is that I have moved my business away from providing content or information for sale and moved it towards a services business. This was a strategic decision based on the changes in the marketplace.

There are more and more and more and more information or content providers – whether that is information sold as an information product, or bloggers or podcasters, or any number of ways that people can distribute information. It seems like the world has kind of gotten the hint that information is going to be free. Even if I have a really great secret strategy for ranking number one in Google and I package it in an infoproduct, someone is going to buy that product and then they’re going to put it on their site for the public. So trying to keep information secret seems like a futile effort.

That was one of the reasons why I’ve moved my business away from information being the product. It only makes sense then when I’ve got some really good information like Always Be Shipping (it has over 90 videos I believe in it) to put that out for folks to enjoy because it is the highest quality product that I’ve ever produced. It’s something that I’m very proud of. And given that I’ve moved my business away from producing courses for sale, I’d still want you guys to have access to it.

So if you don’t have it already, you can go to MichelleMacPhearson.com and enter in your email and sign up for Always be Shipping and you’ll get access to all of the course modules.

Another reason that I moved it to free is because there’s a few small changes. One of the things that we talked about in the course is Google Reader. Google Reader, as you know, has been shut down. It’s not a huge deal and all that you need to do is sign up at Feedly and it does the same thing

There’s a few small changes like that in the marketplace, technical changes that I don’t want to remake 90 videos to discuss. So it didn’t feel like the right thing to do to continue to sell a product or to attempt to sell a product that did have some bits and pieces that needed updating.

So what I did when I put those up for free is that I did make a note and suggest alternatives for the couple of things that needed updating.

The other thing that made me decide to move towards Always be Shipping being a free product is that when it came out, we were at the very beginning of this content marketing effort. Everybody was still really hung-up on SEO.

When I started making the course, it was right before the big initial Panda update – Panda or Penguin. It was right before the initial one of those hit. We’ve obviously seen that get into a worse and worse and worse situation for people whose businesses are focused solely on SEO.

We’ve seen since then so many people transition to a business that is not based on SEO, whether it’s paid advertising, whether its content marketing. SEO is no longer the cornerstone of the majority of people’s businesses from whom it was a cornerstone then.

The course is focused on content marketing and the course is focused on syndication of that content that you’re creating – getting it out there, using that as your SEO in a way. I mean good content is going to attract people on social and it’s also going to attract Google and Bing and Yahoo.

But at the time, it was a new concept and what people still wanted were those tips and tricks, “SEO tips and tricks please” served on a silver platter. And we do have quite a few tips and tricks in the course for syndicating content and that kind of thing. But the whole breadth of it is not tips and tricks. It is about a solid long-lasting content marketing strategy and plan for your business.

It is a course that is actually even more relevant now when it was originally produced. I also think with the market consciousness kind of opening up to content marketing and hearing about it from a ton of other people like Quick Sprout, like Neil Patel, like CopyBlogger. Now, everything is spouting off about content marketing and so the marketplace is more open to that. So I wanted to share this material with them because that’s what it’s about. It’s what everybody is talking about these days. They’re talking about it because it’s a good strategy.

It’s something that obviously, I’ve tapped into back then and that I want to share with you now. I hope that you’re open and ready to receive it because this is where the marketplace is going and this is going to be the survival strategy for those Panda’s, those Penguin’s, the Google slaps, the whole thing. You’ve just got to start doing content marketing because once you’ve got good content marketing, like I said, you’ll attract the search engine traffic on its own so that becomes something that you’re not worrying about.

And with that good content, you can now run those paid ads or you can now get that social media attention that you’ve always wanted because you’ve got the good content to back it up.

So head on over to MichelleMacPhearson.com, enter in your email for free access to Always Be Shipping. I hope that you enjoyed the course. Leave a comment in the course index that you’ll get access to and let me know what you think. Alright, thanks! Bye bye.

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