The Sophists obtained new students by giving free “lectures” in public. These talks were pure marketing – attempts to convince any parent listening that his child could benefit from a Sophist education.
Regarding content, they concentrated on three different areas: politics, dialectics, and rhetoric. In the case of the former, Sophist teaching is often referred to has relativistic humanism as expressed in the saying “man is the measure of all things”. The intent was to apply education to real life, acquire knowledge of how to live a political society, and avoid discourse about things that couldn’t be understood, such as the nature of the gods.