What if, instead of charging for your valuable knowledge, you gave it away for free?
At first glimpse this seems like a crazy concept but let me show you how it can work.
With a world full of websites that are all about how good you are and what you do, the information tends to blend into the background. The sites that are visited more often are the ones that have useful, helpful content, and these sites are shared more often too.
It may seem counterintuitive to put your intellectual property on display, but it actually builds your credibility and positions you as an expert. Will you lose a prospect that wants to simply learn from your expertise and do it themselves? Hopefully!
Wouldn’t you prefer to attract the customers who appreciate your value and want you, the expert, to implement the service or strategy for them? These are the higher value clients that will build your business. The ones who want to do it themselves have low budgets, if any, and will not be valuing your contribution.
At the end of the day, it is not the knowledge that is valuable, it is the smooth implementation of that knowledge. So share your knowledge, make your site more about value and less about you. Two weeks ago I had a look at my own website and realised I was talking about Sonic Sight and our experience and what we could do. I changed the home page to talk about what mistakes to avoid when making videos. I included a video that talks about the 5 mistakes when making a video. Hopefully it is helpful for the visitors to my website. It actually helps me too because it educates them on where the process can go off the rails.
Since posting that video I’ve noticed an increase in quality enquiries which have been easier to convert to new business. Just sayin’.
A great example of this concept in practice is Melissa Maker – Clean My Space . Melissa created a whole new side to her business by sharing quality and useful cleaning tips on her YouTube channel.
It’s a showcase example of how sharing your expertise can build your business. When Melissa Maker started making videos about her cleaning business she had no idea where it would take her.
Today she has over 175,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel and is an in demand public speaker as well as a successful business owner. Like all good social media creators she simply shared useful valuable information.
Melissa just kept true to delivering useful valuable content on her YouTube channel. Video by video more people subscribed until she was featured on the Today show in the US. Overnight her subscriptions quadrupled and her YouTube channel has become a second stream of income to her cleaning business.
Melissa identifies the regular posting of her videos as one of the keys to her success. She posts her video every Saturday between midday and 1pm. She was surprised to learn that people are waiting for the next instalment. Originally the videos were designed to bring attention to her cleaning business – Clean My Space. But now they have a life of their own, not to mention an income stream through advertising, joint promotions and speaking engagements.
Melissa says she is embarrassed now about the quality of her first video and has steadily improved production standards each time. She also acknowledges that if she waited until it was perfect she wouldn’t have started at all.
So what knowledge and expertise do you have that could be of value for others?
If you don’t think you have anything that people want, then you are probably forgetting that people are already paying you for what you do and what you know. So, whether you appreciate it or not, you are an expert in your own space of knowledge. So promote what you know, share it, video it, and shine.