I lead a Saas company that supplies help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and expertise to thousands of startups and small businesses in all corners of the world and whenever I explain to people what I do, I consistently get asked the same question “Given my years of experience, how could I use this and make earn a living by becoming a small business consultant”? I’m always ready to give wisdom as I am privileged enough to spend a major amount of the time of my day communicating with small business owners and workers who are always willing to go into detail about their challenges.
Here is my response:
The online world is the best way for finding customers and it makes it simple to interact with them and sell your expertise. A lot of small businesses turn to the internet to find knowledge or trusted advisors who can provide them with new knowledge and help them fix key challenges.
Information marketing – package and sell your expertise to businesses through the Internet
Make no mistake this opportunity isn’t just to be found in small businesses it’s equally applicable to large businesses. You can repackage and sell your expertise in a multimedia format such as video, audio or documents. The software to produce excellent content are readily available on the world wide web. Making a tutorial in easy to consume internet formats is now simple and inexpensive. You just have to be prepared to spend a small amount of time learning and practicing with the systems. The objective here is to generate some valuable material that you can either sell or give away to customers to encourage them to do business with you.
You have to begin with the end in mind. Consultancy and Information marketing go hand in hand and if you do both can be very lucrative as the consultancy will provide you with the questions, the answers to which you can repackage and sell in digital format and sold over and over again.
If you are starting from scratch with no customers but have expertise you know would be useful to others then make a very short video to present yourself and your expertise to your prospect(s). Unless you know the target(s) exact problem then make the video generic and usethe following format – S.T.A.R (Situation or Task, Action, Result). Keep it short, interesting and sweet. Now deploy the video to your website/blog or even YouTube if you don’t have the former and send the target(s) an invitation by e-mail containing a personal message and a link to the video. Always follow this up with a phone call. If you know the specific nature of the marketproblem then don’t make the video public, just put it somewhere secureon the Web or even on a disk and post it, again follow up with a call.
This method is ideally suited to situations where you are individually targeting market. The one objective you should be constantly pursuing is the creation of a list that you can converse with and sell product to.. Treat the people on your list well and they will tell you their needs to which you can match and your content products. The bigger your list the more opportunities for consulating and selling information products you will unearth. If you would like to know more about how to do this then visit any of the links in this article. I would be more than willing to help you.
