Marketing and Profiting Off Of Your Knowledge
Let’s assume that you’ve been using a product or service for a few months and you are marketing, say MLM health products, to a new market. You are relatively new to the company’s products because it also sells new products but you are now familiar to them and you know almost everything about them. Don’t you think you are the right person (best position at the moment in time) to profit off of your knowledge by hosting paid for lessons on using the products while making more sales, producing product use booklets and distribute at a fee or even include the cost of the booklet on the product price to give it away as a package? No one would be better than you, right?
Then, how do you go about selling you knowledge? The rules of producing best sellers still stands, ‘sell the value in the products and not features’. Tell prospective customers why someone would need your products and how they could benefit from switching from present products over yours. If this is done well, you have a best seller, No! The major challenge becomes taking the product to the customers. Recall that we are talking about both the products that you are selling and your knowledge in any package you want to sell with.
Taking Products to Customers
Taking products and services to consumers is called marketing. Several methods can be used, but I prefer cheaper ones because they tend to be more sustainable. Anyway, the choice is yours:-
- Your warm market – You warm market is anyone you know on a first name basis. This included friends, colleagues and friends. These are the people you may sell your products on one-on-one basis. You may take time to list them one by one so you are better positioned to group them for better targeting. Listing people you’ll be contacting is a good form of record management; and you do need the list for your business.
- Use leads to get the word out – Leads are contact details that identify individual targets. If its business you are after, you’ll get contact person’s names, phone numbers, location and postal address. A list of leads can help you target distribution of leaflets and invitation cards for meetings. Leads can be
sourced from newsletters, mailing lists, network marketing lists, buyer lists, random phone number selection from directories, etc.
Leads allow for the following to occur:
- Reach other parts of the country that you normally wouldn’t reach on your own
- Get a majority of the interested as the NOs wont bother to respond
- Extend your reach beyond the warm market (people you know)
- Street and door-to-door postcard distribution – Traditionally, one would use the post office to distribute postcards. However, using the post office limits interaction and limit explanation to only the information on the card, yet if you hand people on the street, some may want to know more and get answers instantly.
You do need a well designed postcard, leads and some form of transport. The quality of the card used may not be an issue, just use a quality paper if your budget is constraint.
- Meetings – Meetings are a backbone to many marketing initiatives. Meetings can be an effective way to introduce someone to new products. The major challenge is convincing people to come. People generally shun business meetings and you must be persistent and consistent to gain their favor. It works best inviting potential customers to a central place like a hotel conference room or a city hall. This doesn’t necessarily mean that meetings held in private locations are not effective.
Many people have good products that they haven’t sold even to a single customer because they don’t have the courage to do proper marketing. Many are shy and fear ridicule from friends and other funny reasons. It is unfortunate for them because the world of success belong to the brave.
Knowledge is power useful for selling products as well as the information itself through acceptable packaging such as ebooks, books, audio CDs and DVDs. You surely can profit off of your knowledge if you really want to.
