How To Sell Your Expertise In Three Easy Steps

Published in

The Startup

5 min readOct 5, 2018

You’ve had several years of experience in a field that you’re passionate about. This could be anything from photography and graphic design to marketing or real estate. You could turn this experience into a valuable resource and make money from it.

I’m a digital marketer. And apart from offering my services, I’ve been able to monetize my expertise through mentorship programs, e-books, and live workshops. There are tons of options if you already have the resource: the expertise. So I’m going to provide you with a few easy steps to help you get started.

Step One: Define Your Expertise And Its Benefits

The first step, of course, is to have a clear idea of what your expertise is and whom you can help. In other words, you need to clearly define what problem you can solve.

For example, let’s say you’re a conversion rate optimization expert. So, the problem you solve is low conversion rates. You provide online businesses with practical tactics to optimize their websites and increase their sales.

Step Two: Start Building Your Community

In order to sell your expertise, you need people who will buy it. So, the second step of the process is to build a community of loyal fans who hang on your every word. This process might take quite a while, as you need time to attract a relevant fan base and win their trust.

You need to start by creating highly valuable content that your target audience can access for free. This is a great way to start getting their attention. And if you produce useful, high-quality content consistently, you could eventually earn the trust of this audience.

You will need to set up a blog, through which you can regularly deliver useful information to your audience. You could even have a YouTube channel and create a series of videos that can help them.

But it’s not enough to simply create content; you should also work on promoting it to attract the audience of your choice. Join relevant groups on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. You can interact with group members here and eventually start sharing your content with them.

I even answer questions on Quora to gain more visibility among a relevant audience. You could add links to relevant and useful blog posts in your answers. You might even want to invest in sponsored posts to ensure higher visibility for your content.

Step Three: Decide On The Packaging

Packaging is a vital aspect that you should consider when you’re trying to sell your expertise. This is important so that your target customers know exactly what they’re spending their money on.

You can start by identifying what your community needs and wants from you. Do they only want your expertise? Or, perhaps they want to maintain a human connection in addition to your expertise. In this case, you would do well with face-to-face consultations and live workshops.

If time is a critical factor for your audience, however, you will need to look for ways to deliver quick solutions to their problems. In this case, online courses and webinars would be the perfect channel for delivering your expertise to them.

When considering what your audience wants and needs, it’s important that you avoid making assumptions. You could ask them directly on social media, or you could even conduct a thorough survey to understand them better.

Google Forms is an excellent platform that you can use for free, and it has pretty much everything you need to conduct surveys such as this. You could also use SurveyGizmo as an alternative option.

Once you have a clear idea of what your audience wants, you can start considering the perfect delivery method. As mentioned earlier, you could have face-to-face sessions or live workshops in case your audience prefers a more personal connection with you. But if you’re planning to deliver your expertise through online media, here are a few options:

Create Online Courses

Online courses involve creating a series of materials through which your audience can learn how to do something. This can be in any format, including video, audio, calculators, checklists, written material and more.

Platforms like Kajabi can help you develop any kind of learning module and set up a sales page for your courses. There are tons of existing templates that you can customize to create your own professional website for hosting your online classes. It also lets you automate your email campaigns to market the course and nurture leads.

Host Live Webinars

Live webinars enable you to distribute your knowledge while engaging with your audience at the same time. Through a live webinar, you’ll be able to provide in-depth information and guidance to your audience. Consider ending the webinar with a feedback or Q&A session to further increase engagement.

Write E-Books And White Papers

If you’re planning to deliver your expertise in a written format, e-books and white papers are excellent options. They are normally used as lead magnets, which are distributed for free in exchange for email addresses. But you can also charge people for high-quality e-books and white papers that contain in-depth information.

I recommend using a tool like Adobe InDesign to produce professional quality e-book designs. It is a highly advanced tool and comes with plenty of graphics and style elements, so you can turn a plain e-book into an eye-catching publication.

What’s Next?

These are the initial steps you need to take to start selling your expertise online. Once you’ve decided on the packaging, you can start promoting the product. Share the news across all your social media channels to inform your existing audience. And don’t forget to invest in ads to attract a new and relevant audience.

Originally published at Forbes.com.

About The Author

Shane Barker is the Founder and CEO of Content Solutions and Gifographics. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.