119 | Why I changed my mind about freebies

0:00 Hi there! Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman, and in this show, I share tips, tidbits, and resources for herbalists and nutritionists who are in private practice. Today, I wanted to give you some behind-the-scenes information about a change that I am in the midst of making relating to freebies on my website. If you have read my book, Write Better Newsletters, you'll know in the book, I talk about how several years back, I decided to just let go of any gating of my freebies, meaning you do not have to sign up for my email list to just get the freebies that I have on offer. My thinking there it was essentially that if somebody wants to be on my email list amazing I would like to have them but if all they want is the freebie and they don't actually want to hear from me every week I really don't want that energy on my you know I want to be sending my weekly practitioner notes to people who actually want to receive them so I thought why not just make it easy for people to, get what they want without having to sign up for my email list so I went through and I changed everything so that you could just click to download and my freebies, and I had a setup where I could email them to you, and or email them to you and add you to my mailing list depending on what you wanted.

1:10 So recently I've been thinking about this and I've had kind of a change of heart around the whole thing and some of it has to do with just the way that my business is structured, some of it has to do with how things are working in the world today, and some of it has to do with AI and how AI is interacting with websites. So let me share why I've decided to start requiring an email address to get my freebies. Well, for the first thing is that I read, or I didn't read, I heard on a podcast, I wish I had bookmarked it, or I could remember which one. I believe it was an NPR podcast, but I can't be sure. Anyway, the hosts were talking about how a recent study had shown that, I forget if it was 60 or 70% of Google searches don't end in a click anymore.

1:57 Meaning people are just reading the AI summary the AI summary of whatever their question was without actually clicking through to verify anything this was a little bit of a shock to me because I actually have those AI summaries turned off because I'm specifically trying not to use them, so I hadn't realized that was, quite so pervasive and I'm also finding like wow on my own website, overall traffic is way way down and I think it has to do with what's happening I do know that. Things from my website are showing up in AI search results for people. I'm getting people saying, oh, I found you through ChatGPT or what have you. So the landscape is definitely changing. And, you know, I know that AI tools are very sophisticated at this point and that putting, my freebies behind a, it's not a paywall, but requiring an email address isn't necessarily going to be a major, road bump for AI scrapers that are going through and gathering content.

2:53 But I also thought you know these freebies are things that I put a lot of time and love into and I would just rather them have a speed bump in front of them, even though I know the speed bump is not 100% accurate and so on and so forth but it does make it a little bit more complicated and makes it a little bit more challenging for some you know one of these AI, scraping tools to get to that material and I am working on creating some more freebies I have some great ideas that are going to be coming out in the fall. So I thought, you know what, I think that my mind has changed on this. I think that for right now, I'm just going to have freebies so that people can, put in their email address, they can get the freebie email to them.

3:37 And if they truly find my practitioner notes that go out once a week to be incredibly bothersome, or they're not reading them or whatever, there is an unsubscribe button in every single one, they can just click that and leave the list. So that's kind of my thinking, that. I've evolved and the situation has evolved over time. And so I'm going to be doing it differently. And maybe I'll try this for six months and change my mind and say, oh, no, never mind. I think the old way was better and go back to it. But for right now, this feels more in alignment with the way that I want to be moving through our current landscape. So I'm in the process of all the back end stuff that goes into setting up, you know, email, you know, setting up the email, the process of getting an email, you know, having these freebies emailed to you, depending on which one you want and so forth.

4:26 I am still not a big fan of what they call the funnel, where you get one of these freebies and then you get 17 emails trying to get you to buy something. My plan is I'm going to send you the email with the link to the thing that you had wanted. I will send you one follow-up email in case the first one fell through. I know that happens to a lot of people. And then I'm just going to pop people into my regular practitioner notes email list for them to go about their merry way and unsubscribe if they want. I'm going to be keeping a really close eye on unsubscribes from people who've come in through one of the freebies. And if I notice that most people are getting the freebie and then unsubscribing, I may go back to a different, you know, to the old method or think of something different.

5:09 And that's just something I'm going to, I'm going to be watching over time. So there you go. I've been doing this rearranging behind the scenes. I also rearranged my navigation menu to make it easier to find some of the free, resources that I have available. So a lot of tidying under the hood has been happening at Bloom and Grow these past few months. If you want to check it out, you can go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies and see what's on offer. Like I said, I'm going to be adding some more, a couple more things I have in mind for the fall. So stay tuned. And you might see that some of them are still just download. They're not behind the email yet because it takes a long time to get all this set up and I'm doing them one by one so, I'm making my way some of the free like I have a couple freebies that are just classes that are available on YouTube and so those I'm just like if they're on YouTube people can watch them, great go for it but the other ones I am going to put behind that email the email gate and just play with that for a little while and see what happens so the big takeaway here is not necessarily what you should do with your freebies if you have them or if you don't have them I'm not saying you need them.

6:10 That's certainly not my implication. But what I wanted to do is just give you an example of changing your mind. My mind. I'm changing my mind here. Because this is what happens when you're in practice. Your thinking shifts, the landscape shifts, things are different. And so you might have said like, oh, this is what feels really good for me right now. And then a few years later, something else might feel really good. And that's okay. That's part of adapting to your environment and adjusting to the conditions that you find yourself in. So if you need to change your mind, feel free to do so. I hope this gives you a little bit of wiggle room to reconsider some of your own strategies. If you need to, if you get to where they just don't feel right on your heart, it's okay to change them and see what happens and you could change them back if you need to.

6:52 All right, I hope that helps. If you want to check out the freebies, like I said, go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies. Or if you want to just sign up for my practitioner notes and you don't care about the freebies, you can do that on my website as well. I'll put the links in the show notes. Otherwise, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. I will be back soon. Thank you so much for the work you do and take care.