Selling what you know on the internet feel like an impossible task. With 7.5 million blog posts published and 720,000 hours worth of Youtube videos published – every day. I can understand why you’d feel this way.

Even online education sites like Udemy already has 250,000 courses including ours.

Yikes – Khan academy has made all their education available for free.

Ok, I’ll stop there as I’m probably making it seem even more impossible.

Regardless of the way we feel about the ‘crowded information market’ there’s still plenty of space left at the party.

What you’ll need to know is – how to get invited.

To help understand how to get invited let’s look at how knowledge has been sought after through the years.

What you know is always in demand

I won’t go too far in history to the times when Kings of lands demanded his advisors seek out the most knowledgeable person to meet his every demand.

‘’I demand the finest swords maker in all the land to lead my armoury’’.

Imagine for a moment you’re the maker of the fine swords and are hired for the most prestigious role in all the land. The question I have for you is – would you lead every armoury, in every region, across the land?

If you’re wise, you wouldn’t. Instead, you’d enact the principle of leverage. You’d find people with similar knowledge in every region and hire them to lead that particular regions armoury. Then leave the actual crafting of the swords to the blacksmiths.

So here is an example of a skilled knowledge worker creating a network effect and hiring more knowledge workers to fulfil the King’s contract.

Fast forward to today and the concept of a knowledge worker is widely established. It was first established in management circles by the modern management guru Peter Drucker. (Who by the way is without a doubt one of the top 10 people to study if you have any desire to build a successful online business).

Anyway, he has seminal lectures and books on the topic of the knowledge worker. For the purpose of this post I’ll crudely sum it up with this definition:

Knowledge Worker

A knowledge workers main capital is what’s in their head.

These are both early examples of an individual selling what they know.

The shift in what is valuable – what you know

Why this short history lesson is important is that it shows us how an individual who produces value in the world is perceived. And how things change. Because the good news is, we’ve shifted away from the days where a person fulfilling one task on an assembly line is perceived to produce high value. What someone knows, often a combination of – their experience, specialist knowledge, problem-solving, project management (and more) is of much higher value.

But this is just the beginning because if you’re on our site then you’ll have a different goal. You don’t want to be hired. Instead, you want to build an online business. And sell your knowledge to as many people who want to hear what you’ve got to say.

That’s a step beyond a knowledge worker. And we’ll call that person an entrepreneur.

In the context of this post, an entrepreneur has a unique ability to combine knowledge and practical application. In other words – not only theories but also do.

A true out and out entrepreneur will then hire other knowledge workers to then scale their business.

And once we put your knowledge into the context of entrepreneurship the opportunities to convert what you know into value are limitless.

But before we get to the juicy bit let’s look at what came next on the timeline of selling what you know.

Turning what you know into money

If you’ve got a spare couple of weeks to burn in the discovery of what money, power and influence can be produced from what you know. Then I recommend diving into the life of Alan Greenspan by reading Sebastian Mallaby’s book – The Man Who Knew.

What you’ll discover is a form of pre-internet consulting. Where an individual (Alan Greenspan) was paid considerable sums of money to advise the government through research, predictions and data. In other words – Alan Greenspan charged money for what he knew.

Alan Greenspan’s a good example of turning what you know into an advisory (consulting) business. Knowledge is similar to a product or service in that, the more difficult the problem your knowledge solves – the more you can charge for it.

Selling what you know on the internet

As promised let’s get to the juicy bit.

Along came the internet which gave everyday knowledgeable people an opportunity to scale. Something Alan Greenspan couldn’t do. Arguably his influence had incredible scale but he personally had to ‘attend the meeting’.

Whereas you’ve got an opportunity to share what you know on the internet and reach thousands of people?

You can do this using platforms such as:

• WordPress – Blog, Learning Management System
• Udemy – Online education platform
• YouTube – Video sharing platform
• Facebook – Multi purpose sharing platform
• Instagram – Image sharing platform
• Medium – Article sharing platform

The list goes on and on. Take my post for example. I have the ability to share my knowledge with say a thousand readers. Take our introductory course for example and we as an online business have shared our knowledge with 24,000 people and counting.

As a business, we’ll then convert this into sales through various channels. For us, it’s typically – consultancy and education programmes. The rest of the time we like to focus on applying what we know and starting our own online businesses (Truly tapping into the power of selling what you know on the internet).

Here the example is turning what you know into sales on the internet.

Selling what you know on the internet: Summary

Tapping into what people know has evolved over the centuries. From a small group of knowledgeable people to consultants charging millions. To the introduction of the internet meaning, anyone can share their knowledge. At scale. And get paid for it.

To turn this into reality for yourself is to know to get to work. Firstly by understanding what you have to share. And then who to share this with.

This combination will get you to start selling what you know on the internet. It’s so important in fact, it’s exactly the first activity we’ll get you to focus on when studying our BATON framework.

Until then I hope this post has left you with the confidence that there is plenty of space for you at the party if you have the knowledge to share. With the invent of the internet, it’s all just getting started.