You may think sharing your experience and knowledge, gained over years and likely at considerable expense, is not a good idea. Sharing what you know and how to do it would mean your customers could do it themselves, no?

However, it is more likely that communicating your knowledge lets people know that you are good at what you do, that you’ve put time and effort into your skills, that there may be more involved than it appears. Even for services and products that actually relatively straightforward, you make it clear that it’s your ‘thing’ and you are someone to turn to for them.

Sharing your knowledge is likely to generate sales opportunities, and builds awareness of you and your brand. Both are pretty good outcomes!

So what sort of options are available for you to share your knowledge?

• YouTube Videos – If you search for a plumbing issue you’re facing, you’ll almost certainly find seasoned expert plumbers who answer this question in a quick, simple and easy-to-understand way. They aren’t “selling” their services to you, they’re establishing their expertise. If they’re doing it properly, their contact information will be available in case someone wants to call them.
• Podcasts – Podcasts are popular for education, entertainment, self-help and shared interests. Podcasts are easy to consume on the go, or in the car, or while exercising/commuting. You can start a podcast at relatively low cost -all you need is a microphone and a voice and a service to serve it from eg. iTunes. Podcasts let you share your personality, building trust with your audience, so be sure to ‘be yourself’.
• Books – Books are an easy way of establishing authority in your industry. It doesn’t have to be a full War And Peace tome (unless you want it to be of course!), it can be a short book or even a bite-size booklet. Once you’ve written your draft, there are a number of options to publish to readers; ebooks, printed editions, audio books for example. Often such a book is something you can use as a give-away in return for contact details to build your mailing list, or it can be something you pass on to new customers to help them understand the full picture.
• Digital Product – Creating a digital product is getting easier and easier with the advent of increasingly powerful yet cheap tools and services. The key is to think about the type of problems that your audience often deals with. Digital products are quick and easy to create. Ideally they’ll deliver value quickly, so that your customer gets an immediate return on their investment. What could your customers purchase and download immediately, that solves their immediate need based on your expertise?
• Courses – To really share your knowledge, you can teach it to others. Creating a course is a significant time investment because you are putting together something unique, and you’ll need a range of assets such as words, images, videos, and there may be templates or procedures/processes involved too. It’s not a short process when done well. However, when done well, a course is one of the best ways that you can share your knowledge. One thing to note, courses can scale up very well, up to hundreds of students. It could be the opportunity for you to create a revenue stream that is far beyond anything you’re currently doing in business. Take a look at something like Heights for a platform that makes it easy to build, publish and sell a course online (that’s an affiliate link by the way, as I use it too).