The Seminarz

I work for a Saas company that provides help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and knowledge to thousands of startups and small businesses worldwide and whenever I explain to people what I do, I consistently get asked the same question “Given my years of experience, how could I capitalize on this and make earn a living from small business consulting? I am always happy to offer my opinion as I am privileged enough to spend the majority of my day talking to small business owners and workforce ready to chat at length about their problems and needs.

Here is my response:

The web is the perfect medium 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 valuable insights and help them identify and solve issues.

Information marketing – repurpose and sell your expertise to small businesses everywhere via the net

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 systems to produce professional standard material are widely available on the network. Constructing a educational piece in simple to use web ready formats is now simple and inexpensive. You just have to be prepared to dedicate a small amount of time learning and practicing with the software. The point here is to produce some valuable content that you can either sell or give away to customers to persuade them to do business with you.

You should start with thinking through your objective. Consultancy and Information marketing can work together and if you do both can be very profitable 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 needed by others then plan to create a two minute video to promote yourself and your expertise to your target(s). Unless you know the prospect(s) precise problem then make the video generic and adhere tothe following format – S.T.A.R (Situation or Task, Action, Result). Be creative and concise. Now upload 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. Follow this up with a phone call. If you know the specific nature of the target(s)problem 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 approach is ideally suited to situations where you are individually targeting market. You should always focus on building a list you can interact with and make sales 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 more people on your list the more consulting and information marketing opportunities you will find. If you would like to understand more about how to do this then click on any of the links in this article. I would be very glad to help you.