How To Make Money Online From Home Via Knowledge Commerce

Make Money Online From Home Via Knowledge Commerce … If You’ve Always Wanted To Work From Home, Or If Circumstances Have Made It Imperative

Are you desperately attracted to working from home as a lifestyle? Or have the current global distressing circumstances – or perhaps your own family situation – forced you to examine the option of permanently working from home?

It really doesn’t matter whether you’re making a conscious choice to go for your dreams or you’re being pushed into this thought-stream by what’s happening around you. I want to tell you that you are the brink of huge, huge profits and a big inflection point in your life, if you pursue the opportunity life has thrown at you.

There is a line of work from home that requires very little money to start. It can be done at whatever pace you desire, to earn however much money you desire. And it’s easy to get the skills for, if you don’t already have it. What’s more, it’s an area where you can’t fail because it just asks you to convert your existing knowledge into cash piles. It is called Knowledge Commerce, and people working on their own from home, in their coziest pajamas, are making millions.

At Solohacks Academy, all we can say is, if you choose to go this way (as we did), be ready for the big benefits and exhilarating challenges, and enjoy the ride to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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1. How Do You Begin In Knowledge Commerce?

Inside every one of us is some knowledge we may have gained professionally, or just by being passionate about something. It may be knowledge you didn’t even consider would have buyers, if you sold it to others who wanted to know what you know.

These days, more than any other product you can sell, knowledge of any kind is in great demand. If you haven’t thought of converting what you know into money, you should. It takes barely anything more than a laptop, and a bit of writing skill, to gain big.

a. Find Your Unique Niche To Excel In

All of us are good something. It may be an area we’ve dabbled in professionally, or an area of deep personal interest or a hobby. It could be a cause we love to support. Or it could be an interest we’ve always had, and if only we could turn it into a business, maybe we ourselves would enjoy the days and months of greater exploration of the area.

Whatever it is, you don’t have to be someone other than your own self to discover what excites you and make a business of it. You just have to pick something you feel great and energized to be absorbed in, day after day. Your Knowledge Commerce business in this line would require you to look around for a way to enthuse, excite or teach others what you know, in your favorite area of life.

In online businesses, so much is made of “finding a profitable niche”. The idea that most people get stuck with is that we may have to set our own enjoyment aside, and start a business in a deliberate and calculated way. But how long can you stay interested in a topic you don’t half love, just because it’s a “profitable niche” according to some experts? On the other hand, I believe, we all owe it to ourselves to pick an area or topic we love to be engaged in, and to find ways to make that profitable. You can make anything profitable, if you give it time, and a lot of TLC. So upturn the old ways of thinking about business.

b. Locate Your Precise Target Audience

After you’ve decided on your topic of interest to build your knowledge business around, you need to zero in on your ideal target audiences. Now, this is a fine art in itself. Use the tactics we call “micro marketing”. In micro marketing, you address small groups of people. You get to know their pain-points in depth.

Your marketing communication gets very concentrated on their needs. Your words resonate with these small audiences better. You relate to audiences at an emotional and empathetic level. Your audiences instinctively begin to feel that you know them and their issues very well. They feel as if you are writing for them, almost on a one-to-one basis.

Here is an example of how this may work. One Knowledge Commerce gardening expert sells a course suited to owners of “houses with garden space of at least five square meters”. He offers intensive kitchen gardening consultancy. Another fitness expert focuses on building knowledge products for men with “shoulder-dislocation sports injuries”. See how they have all found smaller segments within larger audience segments? That’s the trick.

c. Check Your Demand And Competition

While you’re looking for small audience segments to cater to, you also have to ensure that there are enough people in that segment to give your business a lot of customers, right? Now how do you find out whether a segment has enough people in it to produces a good amount of sales potential for you?

That’s easy. Use a free tool like Ubersuggest. Just Google the keyword (the name of the segment) into Ubersuggest. Let say, you type in “kitchen gardening” as a segment you are exploring. Now in Ubersuggest, see that I have highlighted two columns.

One is the regular monthly count of people interested in searching for this topic. It is healthy – around 3600. At the same time, the competition is healthy too. People are willing to pay high as a Cost Per Click (CPC) if they are bidding for this keyword to get traffic to their site via paid ads. You can be sure that where there are people betting more money on a keyword, it’s a profitable niche.

2. Build Your Audience Before You Build Your Products

Once you’ve targeted your niche, your audience segments, and your likely demand vs. competition situation, what do you then do? You don’t create any knowledge products yet. Instead, you start blogging like the blazes. When I say “blogging like the blazes”, I mean something like planning to write a steady stream of at least 100-150 posts on topics of interest to your audiences in about 3-4 months. Why do you start with blogging and not products? Read on …

a. Start Blogging … It’s The Only Way To Sell Anything Online

People online don’t come to buy things, they come to get information before they buy. They like to educate themselves before buying. They like to hear the reviews of their friends and peers about any brands they are considering.

They don’t want advertising from products and services brands. They want “information” and “knowledge”. They want to know a lot so they don’t buy on the say-so of the seller. They want to make up their own minds.

Given this climate of “information-seek” that happens online all the time, sales of products is a result of that information-gathering. Sales becomes a by-product of the quality of information your brand puts out. Plus, after reading many of your articles and posts around a topic of interest, your readers grow to trust your word – and then when you make a purchase recommendation, and have the products to recommend, they become predisposed to accepting your word as an authority on that topic. They do as you say.

This method of marketing – called “content marketing” – is a direct antithesis to pushy hard-sell advertising. Content marketing is THE ONLY WAY anything can be sold online, because that is the nature of the online marketing beast. There is no other way people online will buy anything.

That’s why blogging is so important. Repeated and regular publishing of blog posts from you on your niche topic, gradually builds market trust in you as a subject authority – and then you can sell what you want to, when sufficient trust is built. In fact, as more and more trust builds, you can sell products of higher and higher prices. It all begins and grows with your blogging.

One more thing: if you build your target audience before you build your products and services, your own subscribers and loyal community of readers will suggest to you the kind of products they may like to buy. This way, if you get your ideas from your audience, you’ll never waste money making dud products that have no demand. You’ll have a verified, solid potential customer base to sell to, because you tailored products to their taste. The more followers you have, the more accurate will be their feedback to you on what may sell well.

b. What Should You Try To Blog About?

You have to look for the pain-points your target customers have. For example, if your subject were “kitchen gardening”, it’s likely your readers will have lots of doubts … for example, how much minimum land they will need, what type of soil or compost is best for which vegetables, which herbs can be grown together or by the seasons, how to handle organic kitchen gardening, what to do for persistent pest attacks … and so on and so forth.

If you sat yourself down to brainstorm all the possible queries people would have on the topic, or the problems they’d face once they get started, what are the bets you’ll end up with hundreds of customer pain-points?

Every week or month, make it a point to add to your list of pain-points or questions your audience is likely to have. Check AnswerThePublic or Quora to see questions people have around your topic (both free). Don’t waste time writing random posts. Your blog exists solely to answer your target audiences’ pains, problems and queries.

When answering people’s queries and problems, blog post by blog post, ensure you offer some very practical solution steps and a lot of detail. Make someone who has a likely query get the full answer to satisfy his query. That’s called blogging quality.

If you need a course on how to blog there are tons of free ones. There’s one from Hubspot, complete with blog templates that you can use.

c. Capture A Lot Of Readers As Subscribers

If people come to your blog or website and read just one post, you have achieved something – but it’s nowhere near enough. In marketing circles, it is said that until you touch a customer at least 12-14 times, he doesn’t convert into a potential buyer. So you need your reader to read more of your blog posts, and get it into his psyche that you are his best go-to authority.

How do you get casual visitors to turn into people with such loyalty to you? You put a “Subscribe To My Mailing List” capture form on your site, to get readers to become email subscribers.

Offer a small, free, intriguing ebook as a bribe. Get as many readers to become subscribers. Then every time you write a new blog post, tell your subscribers and the general social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram) that you’ve done this new post worth visiting and reading. Since you’re writing so much, hopefully you’ll pop up everywhere announcing your new posts. Be uber-visible around the Internet.

When you get people onto your emailing list and they repeatedly return to your site to read more and more of what you write about, you ingrain it into them that you are an expert they can trust, and rely on for consistency and authority. They will begin to value your opinions and recommendations. That’s when selling becomes the easiest thing to do. It is a slow climb to the top of the trust hill, but once you’re on the other side and have hordes of trusting followers, you can sell them whatever they want from you.

3. Spend Less, Earn More, With The Money-Maker Mind-Set

A lot of success you can achieve as a Homepreneur in Knowledge Commerce comes from spending with caution, and earning by gradually increasing your traffic and customer-conversions. Then slowly raise your prices. Most important for all this is a money mind-set.

Many people emphasize many other challenges that Homepreneurs have, but I believe, acquiring the money-mindset will help you make short work of any other challenges you may have. Read on, for more information on the spending and earning of money …

a. What Does It Cost To Start In Knowledge Commerce?

Now here’s the dilemma. If I say it costs zilch to start a knowledge commerce business, you may jump at it and want to start straight away. But I know you won’t keep up with the business. People seldom pursue something that comes at zero cost. They don’t get serious.

A Knowledge Commerce business costs very little to start up. But the good thing is that small cost. If you are ready to make that small investment, I feel sure you’ll stay motivated to make it succeed. Spending even a very small amount to start something keeps you committed to succeeding with it. That’s human psychology. So don’t look for “free”. If you want to succeed badly enough, you’ll always find this small starter money.

Your likely set up and recurring costs

To start this site of ours, for Solohacks Academy, which you are reading now, this chart below shows exactly what we spent to start up and then run monthly and annually. If you are ready for costs of this level, you can get really far (as we did). In fact, we’ve been on this cost structure for years, without letting it escalate.

Here is exactly what we spent:

Most people don’t believe us when we say this is about all we continue to spend even now. That’s because they are so used to seeing big numbers on screen, by big experts, who declare that big quality comes only at big prices. That’s rubbish.

(There are also others who say we don’t even need to spend as much as we did. They may be right, but we didn’t want to start our site and blog on someone else’s free platform (like Blogger or Medium). We consciously chose to get our own piece of real estate on WP Engine, so that our blog is not at the mercy of the rules of anybody else’s free platform.)

Incidentally, the more cost-conscious you are, not just to start with but over time, the sharper grows your business acumen. And you discover innovative ways to manage without spending to get the same, or even better results, than you would if you threw good money at your business. I am a great believer that a business must earn for you, and you should only spend what you can recover. Anything more is frills you can do without, with a bit of savvy.

Besides, there’s one more axiom to consider. Whatever you are willing to learn, and do yourself, saves money. Outsourcing is the “money-drainer”. If you look at the budget we’ve lived on for years, you’ll see how we’ve consciously preferred some frugal choices and done away with any frills and fancies we could have bought. That’s what you should do too, to see results faster. Simple truth is that you can’t spend money faster than you earn it.

b. What Can You Sell Through Knowledge Commerce?

If you bend your mind to it, you can think of ever so many types of knowledge products and services you can offer, in your niche knowledge area … at varying price points. Here’s a starter list to get you going. Remember, you can scale any of these products and services. You can start with low-cost quick information products or services in these formats. Then increase your offerings to in-depth, high-priced, comprehensive products in the same formats.

The Big Four Products you can sell are these:

1. Ebooks
2. Courses
3. Membership Sites
4. Coaching/Consulting Services

Other than these, here’s a whole list of marketable services and products:

1. Short Reports/eDocs
2. Video Tutorials/Screencasts
3. Resource Lists/Tool Kits
4. Checklists/Calculators
5. Templates/Worksheets
6. Guides/Whitepapers
7. Webinars/Seminars/MasterClasses
8. Group Coaching/Customized Tutoring
9. Video or Podcast Learning Series
10. Email-Based Training Sequences
11. Allowing Paid Guest Posts From Renowned Writers
12. Powerpoint or Skype Presentations
13. Interviews/Case Studies
14. Guided Do-It-Yourself Projects
15. Done-For-You Services In Your Niche
16. Collaborative Online Events With Other Experts
17. Online Research Assistance Services
18. Creation Of Libraries of Images, Music or Video Clips
19. Customized Collated Knowledge Packs
20. Developing Your Own Saleable App or Tool
21. Developing a Jobs Board In Your Niche

Our articles on our blog teach you several ways to earn from selling products that use your knowledge to make money. We also show you how much to charge, how to create your services and market them

If you’re delaying because of starting-jitters, we have our popular “Done-For-You StartUp And Training Package” where we set up your business, site and blog and run it for the first three months, while training you to take over after that. You get the roadmap and the right trajectory to proceed along the success path.

c. A Money Mind-Set Is The Most Vital Thing For A Homepreneur

Many well-meaning, money-conscious Homepreneurs do start businesses frugally and wisely … but since success takes a fair amount of persistence and patience, they soon lose their “hang-on-ability”. They start “frustration-spending”. They became tool-buying junkies. Itchy fingers and a lack of discipline is common, midway through the business growing process, when you begin to give in to rash money practices when results seem slow.

This is exactly what a Homepreneur should never do. Stay within budget. Put in the elbow grease. Do the daily process, and learn to enjoy the process, without constantly watching the horizon for the money. This is not just advice for a home-based knowledge business, that’s advice for life. I can guarantee money will come. For some, it comes quickly. For others, it takes more time. In either case, there are many who lose their heads, either when there is no money or when there is some money. Don’t become one of those.

The second mind-set challenge is to know what to do when you start earning some money. You think all that money can now either be spent by you personally, or by your business, right? Wrong!

You may justify using 100% of that earned money by saying, “I deserve a salary, I work so hard”, or “My business has to grow and it needs this fertilizer” … but the real millionaires are the ones who always diligently put into savings at least 40% of whatever they earn – whether its $5 today, or $50,000 tomorrow.

If you get into the mind-set of always saving 40% of whatever you earn, and only treating the remaining 60% as available money, your life will never ever hit the edge again. In fact, it’s the proven way to get rich. Millionaires and billionaires always set aside those savings, and then when the savings get big over time, they invest that money in financially sound avenues that increase returns on that saved money.

And you can’t wait till you have lots of money to do this either. It’s a habit to cultivate when you are earning very little, so it grows on you as a natural instinct when you are making the big bucks. So do wait for that earned money to start coming, don’t lose your senses, and stash 40% of it away before you do anything else. It’s easy-peasy to practice this when you are making small bucks. Make this one promise to yourself. You can do that, can’t you?

In Summary …

• If it’s always been your dream, or you’re being pushed into working from home by circumstances, you are the brink of huge, huge profits.
• There’s a business line called Knowledge Commerce, and people working on their own from home, in their coziest pajamas, are making millions.
• These days, more than any other product, knowledge of any kind is in great demand. If you haven’t thought of converting what you know into money, you should.
• Find your unique niche, locate your target audience segment, check your demand and competition – and then start blogging like you’ll never stop.
• Blogging is the only way to sell anything online, and besides, you have to blog your answers (in detail) for the pain points your target customers have.
• You can sell a lot of knowledge products through Knowledge Commerce. Stay frugal on your expenditures. Avoid frustration spending as you wait for results. Save 40% of whatever you make. All these are millionaire habits.

So What Are Your Thoughts? Do Share!

This post is incomplete without your input. The community of Knowledge Commerce solopreneurs would feel galvanized to hear from you … so do share your thoughts on this topic with us, in the comments field below this post.

Related Reading

This post is part of a series that elaborates on “Make Money Online Without Investment Via Knowledge Commerce“.

Other related posts you may like to read are these:

• How To Make Money Online Freelancing In Knowledge Commerce
• How To Make Money Online On The Side Via Knowledge Commerce
• How To Make Money Online By Writing For Knowledge Commerce
• How To Make Money Online As A Student Via Knowledge Commerce
• How Beginners Can Grow Passive Incomes … 10 Suggestions
• Make Money Online Without Investment Via Knowledge Commerce
• How To Make Money Online For Beginners in Knowledge Commerce
• How To Make Money Online By Answering Questions In Your Niche
• How To Make Money Online From Blogging In Your Niche
• How To Make Money Online Affiliate Marketing In Your Niche
• How To Make Money Online Genuinely Without Getting Scammed

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