The business climate today has become so competitive that it’s truly hard to differentiate yourself from the herd. Everyone is using the web and social media to reach out to potential customers– your potential customers–and many of them are doing a pretty good job at it. They have custom graphics, a nice tag line and a horde of low-cost or free offers not to mention a well performing website.
So how can you compete?
You can spend lots of money to upgrade your web presence and buy expensive ads with Google and Facebook. You can do massive canvassing with print media. You can buy billboard space and even put graphics on your car or truck.
Unfortunately, that’s what everyone else is doing.
So let’s take a step back and think about this for a moment.
When you buy a product or service, what do you look for?
If you are like most people you are looking for good quality, knowledgeable service and a good price. To find this you’ll do some research on the web and possibly look at some review sites like Yelp, or Consumer Reports. You’ll ask your friends and family for their opinions.
What you really want to find is an expert. Someone who knows the business or product you’re looking at and give you an honest opinion.
It can be hard to find an expert. Many of them charge a LOT of money for their knowledge and limit their exposure to the public. Some are in academia, others work for large corporations.
So what does the average person do? They buy a book or download a document from someone in the know. They look at qualifications, background, and testimonials.
They spend money to gain knowledge.
So here is the million dollar question: Why not become an expert?
Why not put what you know into a book, magazine or article and sell it to people who want an expert opinion?
If you have been in business for any length of time, you’ve gained insights and experience. You know what works and what doesn’t in your particular field. And here is the kicker… you have UNIQUE insights and experience. You have knowledge and experience that no one else has.
It’s this UNIQUE knowledge that you need to write down and provide to others. The good news is, Google has realized that 10% of their search inquiries are for in-depth expert information, and they are now providing custom links to this data. Currently many of these links are going to well established companies, news organizations, and academic institutions.
Here is one about the little plastic building blocks, LEGO’s…
This listing shows up at the bottom of Google search results, and as you can see, is from established media outlets. If you can get one of your articles here, it will give you instant credibility, not to mention a huge influx of web traffic. This will require writing an custom in-depth article and setting custom scripts that tell Google what it is about.
While this might be a good area to research, you can take this idea and expand it further. Here are three avenues you might want to explore.
- Write multipart blog posts under 1,000 words and link them together.
- Write an In-Depth Article of 2,000 to 5,000 words and post it.
- Write a short Kindle eBook of 10,000 to 15,000 words
A common strategy is to put together multiple blog posts that encompass a larger article, and then create a Kindle book from the posts when you are done.
Here are some expert Kindle books on LEGO’s
These individual books sell from $9.99 to $11.99, so you can see the profit potential from this expert knowledge.
In future posts we’ll take a look at the individual article types and give you a step-by-step guide for creating them. For now, I would suggest that you put some ideas together for in-depth articles, outline the benefits and features, and start compiling.
