Do you have decades of experience and expertise that is worth something to a knowledge hungry world? Is it locked up in your grey matter? Not structured or packaged?
Today most of us are knowledge workers. It might be in finance, marketing, technology or public relations. Have industry knowledge that is highly valued? Businesses buy expertise and knowledge workers to add value to their businesses.
Maybe its time to sit down, outline and unlock that knowledge for your benefit. You may even have a part time hobby and passion that could be bundled up into an online course or ebook to be monetized.
Blogs and the ability to self publish is opening up opportunities for “you” to be paid for your knowledge and creativity.
The rise of the online creative
The freedom to publish that blogging provides, is powering a new revolution of knowledge sharing, expression and creativity that is unprecedented.
Closet cooks are both demonstrating and displaying their culinary skills via video, recipes and teasing photos on foodie blogs.
Photographers are taking us on their local and world journeys. They are revealing corners of the globe that are exposing hidden cultures, geography and private lives for us to glimpse at like voyeurs. They are published to blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
Even teenagers create fashion that surprise us and is uploaded to YouTube and shared to a global audience.
Have a passion and some expertise and add a dose of technology and publish online. You can build an audience of thousands.
But there’s a problem
I was recently viewing a TED talk by Jared Diamond and he posed a question to a problem that is worth answering.
“How should we use our old people?”
This question was framed in a way that starts the journey in how we can come up with solutions to help societies grow old better. This dilemma has been created because modern society values youth and beauty over wisdom, age and experience. This has in part been created by the rise of technology as wisdom and knowledge in the past lay within the minds of the elders of the tribe.
Today we just Google knowledge.
It has made the finding of knowledge a technology solution. This is taking away the importance and role of the elders of our society.
So what does technology not touch that our wise older generation can still offer? Jared has a few suggestions.
- Experience
- Understanding of human relationships
- Ability to help other people without ego getting in the way
- Leadership
- Networking
- Interdisciplinary knowledge eg history, politics and economics
- Supervising
- Administrating
- Advising
- Strategizing
- Teaching
- Synthesizing
- Devising long term plans
But there is a solution.
A solution
The technology that is the problem can also be the answer that taps into that wealth of wisdom and experience of decades. Help, build awareness and train the older generation to package, publish and promote their decades of knowledge, experience and insights on blogs and websites.
Here are some tips on how to package your knowledge to sell on your blog.
The first step to packaging your knowledge
So how do you approach packaging your knowledge?
The simplest place to start is to write a book. It can start with a short ebook. It doesn’t have to be long. Make it 10-15 pages. That’s the practice part. This is where you can distil your knowledge into chunk size bites that will help you start structuring and synthesizing your knowledge.
Then you can write a longer ebook that can also be turned into a printed book. There are a variety of “on demand” printing services that can assist you to create a print version. Blog posts can also be re-purposed and turned into chapters with some editing and rewriting.
The premium packaging of your expertise
The next steps are to add premium packaged versions of your knowledge.
If you want to take your ebook content to the next level you can supercharge your content by adding premium media and content.
Here is how you can turn a $29 eBook into a $3,000 product. This is how it can be done.
- Add a podcast version – now you can charge $97
- Add a Camtasia video version of the eBook where you record the screen shots in a video format while chatting through the eBook content – Sell that product for $597
- Add interviews with experts – Sell product for $1,097
- Offer personal coaching as part of the package – Sell for $2,097
- Put it in a DVD package – Sell it all for $3,000
You can also then put on a live 2 day seminar and sell the tickets for $2,000. So you have written your ebook how do you go about being paid for it?
How to get paid for your packaged expertise
Once you have created your product(s) to sell on your blog you need an automated way to sell and deliver the ebook or video tutorial download. In the past this meant some tricky programming to integrate different systems to deliver the download and to process the credit card transaction.
This has changed.
The Selz platform can be setup in a matter of minutes and can be used to sell both digital and physical products.
Selz has been developed with the modern online entrepreneur in mind. Using Selz you can maximise your sales effortlessly without having to spend precious time on the mechanics of running an online business. Selz hosts the ebook or video for you and automatically delivers the files when a customer purchases them. Selz also makes it easier to build a customer email list as it integrates with three of the most popular email systems Aweber, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. By connecting it up to your email platform you can build your email list for marketing your next book or online course.
What about you?
Have you a wealth of knowledge that is wanting to get out? Have you decades of experience and “know how” that the rest of the world could benefit from?
Have you thought about productizing it?
Are you already selling your knowledge on your blog and website. Look forward to hearing your stories, insights and ideas in the comments below.
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