I work for an online company that delivers help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and knowledge to thousands of startups and small businesses in all corners of the world and whenever I explain to folks I meet what I do, I consistently get asked the same question “Given my what I know, how could I monetize it and make an income by becoming a small business consultant”? I am always willing to provide guidance as I am fortunate enough to spend a major amount of the time of my day interacting with small business owners and personnel who are always willing to talk about their problems and needs.

This is the advice that I offer:

The web is a great place for finding customers and it makes it easy to speak to 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 coaching and help them identify and solve issues.

Information marketing – package and sell your expertise to businesses through the Internet

What I am about to tell you doesn’t just apply to small businesses. You can repackage and sell your expertise in a electronic format such as video, audio or documents. The tools to create professional standard content are readily available on the web. Making a course in easy to consume internet formats is now straight forward and doesn’t cost much to do. You just have to be prepared to spend a small amount of time understanding the packages. The purpose here is to produce some valuable content that you can either sell or give away to customers to encourage them to do business with you.

You should start by deciding what you want to achieve. Consultancy and Information marketing go hand in hand and if you do both can be very lucrative as the consultancy will provide you with the questions, the answers to which could be turned into content and sold over and over again.

If you are starting from scratch with no customers but have expertise you know would be in demand by others then plan to create a no longer than 120 secs video to promote yourself and your expertise to your potential client(s). Unless you know the prospect(s) exact problem then make the video generic and usethe following format – S.T.A.R (Situation or Task, Action, Result). Be creative and concise. Now deploy 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 privateon the Web or even on a disk and post it, again follow up with a call.

This method is ideally suited to situations where you are individually targeting target(s). You should always focus on building a list you can interact with and make sales to. Consistent interaction with your list will reveal peoples needs that will help you define what to sell. The more people on your list the more consulting and information marketing opportunities you will discover. If you would like to discover more about how to do this then follow any of the links in this article. I would be delighted to help you.

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