The Balance Between Educational Content and Giving Away Your Services for Free

As an educator, you will likely have come across lists of content ideas that include educational content. This can include how-to guides, quick tips, and FAQs. But as an educator, you might feel a bit conflicted about giving away your services for free.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the value of educational content as well as how to strike a balance between enticing customers and not giving away too much for free. Take a look below to find out more now.

The Value of Educational Content

Educational content has its value for many different types of businesses, not least for educators themselves. Whether you teach a foreign language or dance skills, educational content can help potential customers to trust you. If they can see your skills before they pay, they can do so with confidence.

Other benefits include reaching a wider audience as people search for educational videos and tutorials as well as lending credibility to your business by showing people you actually know what you’re talking about.

Educational content is a great marketing strategy, but there are risks involved too.

Risks Involved in Utilising Educational Content

The risks of putting out educational content include the following.

• Devaluing your own content: Offering too much to your customers for free devalues your services. It means customers expect more from you for free and are less willing to pay for what you offer.
• DIY culture: Everyone wants to fix things themselves these days. For those offering services like plumbing, people might want to avoid paying for services. For those looking to learn a new language, they might decide it’s easier to just teach themselves. Offering too much for free will mean that people think they can actually do it without engaging your services.
• Time management: If you’re spending all of your time creating free content, you might not have enough time to create the content that actually pays the bills! Free content is great, but you need to focus enough energy on your actual services to make them worth paying for.

Striking the Balance

Finding the balance between free promotional content and actual paid services can be difficult, so we’ve provided some of our top tips below.

1. Offer enough to engage potential customers: Make sure your content shows your skills as an educator but doesn’t give away enough that they can go off on their own after watching.
2. Utilise CTAs: Call-to-actions are marketing tactics used to promote your services. For example, at the end of a short video on conjugating a verb in the present, you could add a CTA like ‘Want to learn how to conjugate in the past tense? Check out my language services at the link in my bio.’
3. Teasing services: Another way to advertise your services is to offer partial solutions. Instead of showing someone everything they need to edit together a video, offer them a basic introduction to the software and then tease in-depth services at the end.
4. Focus on common issues: Small issues that everyone has are unlikely to impact your bottom line. If the issue is common, it’s likely at least some other accounts are creating educational content for it. By focusing on these issues, you can draw in those looking to go deeper.

Educational Content Ideas

Educational content varies depending on your industry. For example, a piece-to-camera lesson on using adverbs correctly works for a language teacher, but for a web development educator, you might do better with screen recording and voiceovers. Some formats work best for some industries, like quick tips for learning to write, whereas longer, tutorial styles work better for someone teaching their audience how to fix a tap.

So, what educational content is there that you can create? Below are some of the basic formats you can use. Consider how they fit within your niche and choose the best ones.

• How-to guides: Tutorial-style videos work well if the issue you’re trying to teach is more complex.
• FAQs: These work well on Instagram Lives or in longer YouTube videos. You can ask for questions in advance, or if doing it live, look at the comments.
• Blog posts: If you’ve got a website, it’s the perfect place for written blog content. This type of content allows you to go in-depth and really get into the details of the issue.
• Infographic: For easy topics, use a basic infograph. This kind of content can be shared easily on Instagram too, giving you a wider reach.
• Interactive content: On platforms like Instagram, you can have your audience answer questions in a poll style. This can help you to understand what your audience knows and where common misconceptions occur. It can also boost engagement. You can even answer questions on the next slide to ensure that users get the most out of it.

Monetising Your Content

If you’re creating lots of educational content for free, and you want to find a way to make money from this, you’ve got lots of options. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram allow you to easily monetise your content for subscribers so that you actually get paid for your educational content.

Other options for monetising include using a newsletter platform, like Substack, or a service like Patreon. This allows monthly subscribers access to content that you create and ensures that you’re paid for your services.

Final Thoughts

Educational content is a great marketing strategy but it can sometimes feel like you’re giving away a lot for free. Striking the balance is important and you’re always the best judge of that, use these tips to guide your own content in a way that promotes your work but still ensures you get paid.

If you’re struggling with content output, then Rokir can help. We’re a full-service digital agency offering tailored solutions to all your digital problems.

We can offer content creation services on top of social media management and website development. Contact the team today to find out more about what we can do for you.