Selling Your knowledge Online: 10 steps

Posted on 29. Jun, 2010 by Michael in Online Marketing

Selling your knowledge online is a process which involves a number of steps. Get these steps right and you’re on your way to a successful business.

1. Have a passion for some aspect of knowledge. It might be helping people improve their management skills. It might be informing people about company law, it might be guitar playing, gardening, or helping people through a personal problem.

2.Find a niche: Niche marketing is what most successful online businesses are all about. Finding a niche and marketing to it. Niche marketing is essentially about finding a hungry crowd that are looking to solve a problem and not finding any. Don’t create something then expect to just sell it. The great thing about selling knowledge online is that it is easy to find a viable market. Find what people want then provide it.

3. Just a word of advice here – you don’t have to be an expert when selling knowledge or information online, you simply need to point people in the right direction to get the knowledge they need or just recommend others’ products for which you get a commission.

4. Communicate with your niche through others’ blogs and discussion forums. Get a feel for what they are looking for and the issues and problems they would like to resolve.

5. Set up a lead generation page or a ‘squeeze page’ with a free download that a visitor can get if they put their name and email into your sign up boxes.

6. Create a product or service. Write a short ebook on the topic you think they’d be interested in. Better still get some to write it for you. You can do this on elance.com. Send them a list of 10 possible chapter titles and get them to create an ebook for you. Even better again find an affiliate product that someone else has created (and which relates to your audience’s problem) then sell that for a commission

7. Collect sign up names until you have 100 or so then make an offer to them that you think they would be interested in. You can do this using a product called icontact or aweber. This way your market is coming to you rather than you having to go to it.  Make your offer via emails. Check out how to do email marketing in my other post  here…

8. Set up a simple, low cost pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords. This will drive people who are desperate for what you offer to your sign up page. Although this costs money it is in my view the best chance of getting immediate, high quality leads to your page.

9. If you get sales from this then you know that some are interested and you can create another similar product or offer a course of audios or videos, CDs, a coaching programme, a more comprehensive report. If you don’t get sales then you know you need to tweak your offer – the title, the content, your style.

10. If you make sales from these then create other products. There will always be a small proportion of your audience that wants more from you. If you don’t, then communicate with your audience. Try to get more detail on what they want or need. This needs to be a genuine engagement and not just a blunt way of getting them to buy your products. You can do an online survey and ask them the main problem that they are trying to solve within the area you can offer responses

Tip: Don’t bombard people with sales offers. Just offer good content and valuable information on a regular basis. They may not buy the first, second or third time around but they may well buy the 7th, 8th or 9th time. I know someone who has an autoresponder running with 100 automatic messages in it! He’s found that some people still buy on the 98th message, having previously ignored 97 of them. So don’t give up!

This 10 step strategy is a simple way forward to understand the basics of selling knowledge online. Simple does not me easy however and most marketers are forever tweaking details in their strategies to make them more effective – so expect to do the same. Any business of value and genuine help to others is build slowly and carefully.

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Tags: information products, internet marketing, niche marketing, online marketing, online selling