Every person has at least some information or interest in information that they can potentially make
money with. The next step is to figure out the forms this takes and what actual benefits you stand to
gain.
Sell Information You’re Passionate About
As I’ve mentioned earlier, people simply do not have the time to chase after information and then filter
that material. They really cannot be bothered. Maybe they’re too busy, maybe they feel that they do not
have the proper expertise or the background to do it. Whatever the case may be, they would rather go to
somebody who is so passionate about a specific body of knowledge that they have put in the time,
effort and focus in compiling this information from third party sources. Think of it like going to a specialized librarian. If you’re looking to, let’s say, practice permaculture in a tropical setting, you can wrack your brains trying to go through all sorts of online libraries, chase down all sorts of arcane or obscure materials, or you can go to somebody who has an ebook or online course focused on that specific topic.
Get Paid to Talk About Stuff You are Curious About.
Another benefit of selling your expertise is that you get paid to talk about information that you are curious about. This means that you have all the incentive in the world to feed your curiosity. When was the last time that happened at your day job? Chances are, there is a big disconnect between what you do for a living and the activities and subjects that you are personally passionate about. When you sell your expertise in the form of a course, an online program, or some sort of book, you get paid to talk about stuff that makes you curious or which pushes you to investigate. This is actually one of the most fulfilling and gratifying benefits of selling your expertise. You’re not being paid to push a button. You’re not being paid to do something that you’ve done millions of times before and which feels like it drains your soul. Instead, you are being paid to really pursue your passions.
Get Paid for Others to Pick Your Brain
One of the most fulfilling things people can do on this planet is to interact with each other where their understanding is not only challenged, but enhanced. Let me tell you, when it comes to hanging out with other people, one of the most satisfying and rewarding experiences you could get is when you get that “aha” moment. When somebody shares something with you that you didn’t know before, or shared information with you that enabled you to realize something that you did not know before, the sense of discovery and putting pieces together in your mind is a very positive experience. It excites a lot of people. And you get this opportunity when you get paid for other people to pick your brain. They ask you question after question, and it’s your job to basically take those questions and mentally pick them apart and come up with an answer. You are not only challenging your present knowledge, but you’re also being paid to think. Let’s face it, not all of us are engaged at this level. Not all of us are getting paid to achieve that “aha” moment. You’re basically getting money to develop as a human being. What’s not to love?
Benefit From Passive Models of Selling Your Expertise
One of the key selling points of selling your expertise to others is the fact that you can develop a passive income stream. When you work for somebody else, generally speaking, you have to sell your time for money. That’s the exchange. You agree to show up at a certain time, at a certain place, to do certain things, and in exchange for that, you get paid. You trade your time for money. This is a serious problem because, obviously, there’s only one of you. You cannot be in two places at one time. Also, there are only 24 hours in a day. It’s not like you have an infinite inventory of time to sell at any given day. It is no surprise that a lot of people burn out from active income. That’s what this is. When you trade your time for money, you are engaged in active income. If you stop taking action, you stop earning. Passive income works the other way. You work once or you work very little, and then the asset that you create continues to generate money. The most obvious example of this involves books.
You put in work to write a book. You write that book once, but once you have published it at Amazon Kindle and it continues to sell many times over, you earn many times from a book that you worked once to create. In the brick and mortar world, a key example of a passive income is when you buy an apartment complex. You obviously have to work for the money to afford that complex, but once you bought it, every single month, your tenants have to come up with the rent. You just sit back and wait for the rent to come in. From time to time, the property management company sends people out to make sure that the building is in good working order. But for the most part, you don’t have to lift a finger to earn the rent money
that comes in like clockwork every single month.
That is the power of passive income.
The good news is, when you sell your expertise, the majority of these business models are passive in nature. You don’t have to be there actively coaching people on a one to one basis. You can write a book, or you can shoot videos that people can view at their convenience. You can show up at a webinar and be recorded. There are more passive versions of selling your expertise than active ones. You can stop selling your time for money.
Sell Your Personal Expert Brand
Wouldn’t it be great if you earned more money the more you learned? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you continue to grow your expertise in any kind of subject and end up getting paid more? That’s precisely the position you put yourself in when you sell your expertise. The more people buy your book, the stronger your brand becomes. The more seminars you give, the higher the likelihood that you will get interviewed or people would write about your seminars. In other
words, the value of your business grows by you simply doing what you do and reaching out to interested audiences and building an organic following for your expert brand. In other words, the more you sell your expertise, the more powerful your brand becomes.
Compare this with working for somebody else.
Now, you may be the best employee on the planet and you may bring a lot of value to the table, but at the end of the day, only your boss sees your value and it’s really up to that person whether they would promote you or not. It really boils down to their judgment call whether you’re going to make more money or not. This is not the case when you’re selling your expertise. Because when you impress one person, it’s not unusual for that person to tell another person. And then the people they know might be bloggers, so don’t be surprised if there are all sorts of blog articles written about you. Before you know it, people want to interview you and then your personal expert brand continues to grow every time you produce a product.
This is how experts build an author platform. They start out with books. They write down the things that they know in a particular specialized body of knowledge in the form of books. If enough of these books get publicized or if enough people buy these books and are impressed by your expertise, pretty soon they would want you to hold seminars or engage in one to one coaching. You can shoot a series of videos and ask people to pay a one-time fee or a monthly membership fee to access those videos. You make passive income when you do this because you only work once to shoot these videos, but you make money every time somebody signs up to view those videos. You obviously can make passive income every time somebody buys books that you have written in the past. Similarly, your brand can get so big that you can hold a live webinar. Prospective audience members get notified that you are going to be holding an online seminar over webcam. They then fill out an appointment form and pay a fee. They show up, and you answer people’s questions, and a recording is made so seminar attendees can have access to the seminar long after it’s over.
Finally, as word gets out about your ability to help people and the value of the information you have shared, you can make quite a bit of money doing one to one coaching. You can do this on Google Hangouts or Skype, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is people can pay you quite a bit of money on an hourly basis or even every fifteen minutes. Depending on your field of specialty, you can command hundreds of dollars per coaching hour. This is not unheard of. People have done this before. In fact, top earners charge quite a bit of money for every fifteen-minute block of time they spend coaching people over the internet. This can get all lucrative, and it all boils down to developing a solid personal expert brand.
