List what you would normally charge for
Open a blank page and write down the five questions clients ask in your first paid call. Next to each, write the answer you give. These answers are your best material. They are exactly the material most people keep back.
Pick one answer to publish this week. Choose the one a prospect would value most and that you can explain in about 800 words, or one 15 minute video.
Draw the line between method and implementation
Write two columns. In the first goes the method: the steps, the checklist, the numbers, the templates and the reasoning. In the second goes implementation: doing it for them, doing it with them, tools that speed it up and accountability that makes it stick.
Publish everything in column one. Sell column two. Readers who can do it alone will do it alone, and they were never going to pay you. Readers who value their time will ask for help.
Apply the result test
Before you publish, ask: could a reader get a real result from this piece without ever paying me? Run through it as if you were the reader and had never met you. If any step says "contact me to find out", you wrote a teaser.
Teasers are easy to spot. They gesture at an answer and then withhold it, and the audience feels the withhold. Fix it by adding the actual number, the actual wording or the actual template.
Package it as one complete asset
A good free asset is complete and easy to use. The formats I would pick are a checklist, a template, a teardown of a real example or a worked calculation. Use Notion or Google Docs to write it, and Canva if it needs a clean layout.
Give it a plain title that says what it does, such as "A 10 point checklist to review your sales page". Keep the first screen free of jargon. Include one example with real figures, and say which figures are invented for illustration.
Publish it ungated first
Put the whole piece on a page or a post, not behind a form. The point is trust, and a form adds friction before the reader has seen any value. When it has proved itself, add a second version with a download for people who prefer a file, and use that one to grow your list. The long-term view is in Build owned distribution before the rented kind betrays you.
End with one clear next step
Finish the piece with one line that offers help with the part you left to implementation. For example: "If you would rather have someone set this up with you, reply and tell me where you are stuck." Keep it short and make it a single ask.
On LinkedIn the same idea is covered in Teach what you'd normally charge for. To give the piece a spine, use Publish a point of view, not content.
Common mistakes
- Publishing the intro and gating the useful part.
- Giving away second-best material and keeping the best for clients.
- Writing something so broad that no one can act on it.
- Having no offer at the end, so the trust has nowhere to go.
- Giving away the method and then offering nothing that saves the reader time.
How you know it works
- Readers tell you they used the checklist or template and what happened.
- Some people write to say they will do it themselves, and others ask you to do it. Both prove the piece worked.
- Enquiries mention the free piece by name.
- Your sales calls start further along, because the prospect already trusts your method.
- Each new free asset is better than the last, since you know it goes out under your name.
