How to Decide Which eLearning Content Should Be Free vs Paid

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett discusses how course designers may choose which e-learning materials should be paid for and which should be free in this episode. He emphasizes that while many producers are afraid to share too much information for free, free material is actually crucial for gaining a following, developing credibility, and creating authority. Introductory ideas, concepts, brief advice, blog entries, tutorials, webinars, podcasts, or mini-courses that assist individuals in learning about the subject and grasping its fundamentals are examples of free content. These tools serve as a marketing engine that attracts new students to the ecosystem and motivates them to continue participating. Conversely, sponsored material need to concentrate on providing learners with deeper results and actual transformation. This includes advanced lectures, certificates, coaching, community access, organized, step-by-step training programs, and effective templates or tools that enable students to accomplish a particular objective more quickly and with greater assistance. Chris offers a straightforward test: if the information primarily raises awareness or teaches an idea, it may be free; but, if it aids in a major shift or the implementation of an entire system, it should be paid for. In general, he advises course designers to reserve the organized systems and results-oriented training for their premium paid products and to provide more worthwhile free content to expand their audience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re gonna be doing a solo episode on how to decide which of your e-learning content to make free versus paid. There’s a whole free versus paid dilemma when you’re creating an online course or a membership site, a coaching program, an online education company. There’s this tension between what kind of free content or free products should I put out there versus premium content That’s only for my paying customers, students, or members. So there’s a fear of giving away too much for free. And, but it’s a super important one because it dramatically impacts your growth, your scale, your profitability, and your brand authority. Essentially free content, fuels paid success. So that’s the way to think about it. If I had to guess, and you’re out there listening or watching, most people don’t give away enough for free. But there are some that give away too much and just put it all out there and can never monetize. So both problems are bad, but the more common problem. Is people not giving away free stuff. They get a little too in their head about protecting their intellectual property, and a customer has to pay me money in order for me to help them at all kind of thing. That’s not the right mindset for growth and scale. So essentially the core principle is that you use free content to attract and then paid content to create the main transformation. Or benefit. So free is about discovery building trust, audience building, and paid is about deeper outcomes and implementation or implementation support. That’s more direct. So there’s like also like within the ping bucket of e-learning content. There’s things that can be very cheap, and then there are things that can be very expensive. So think about free content as creating awareness, low cost content, courses, memberships, coaching calls, whatever that create activation. But then the most expensive thing is actually what creates the transformation. So let’s. Talk about what makes really perfect free content. And to clarify...