How to use the internet to find small business consulting assignments
Posted By admin on June 20, 2009
I run a Saas company that supplies help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and wisdom to thousands of startups and small businesses in all corners of the world and whenever I explain to people what I do, I consistently get asked the same question “Given my what I know, how could I apply it and make earn cash quickly by becoming a small business consultant”? I’m always delighted to give my opinion as I am privileged enough to spend a lot of my day talking to small business owners and workforce enthusiastic to chat at length about their challenges.
Here is my response:
The online world is a perfect platform for finding customers and it makes it easy to get into a dialogue with 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 new methods and help them tackle 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 multimedia format such as video, audio or documents. The systems to construct excellent material are readily available on the net. Producing a course in simple to use web ready 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 mastering the packages. The point here is to produce some valuable material that you can either sell or give away to customers to persuade them to do business with you.
You should start by deciding what you want to achieve. Consultancy and Information marketing are great bedfellows 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 useful to others then make a very short video to present yourself and your expertise to your market. Unless you know the market precise problem then make the video generic and stick tothe 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. Always 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 secureon 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). The one objective you should be constantly pursuing is the creation of a list that you can converse with and sell product to.. Continual 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 find. If you would like to discover more about how to do this then visit any of the links in this article. I would be happy to help you.
