Can you turn your expertise into a business?

Yes.  In an earlier post I talked about some things moms should think about when starting a business.  One of the easiest things to do when starting a business is to leverage our expertise in something and turn it into a business. But I find a lot of moms don’t do that or don’t think they have any saleable expertise.  You would be surprised at what makes the foundation for a good business.  First of all, if you have worked or are working, you have probably built up a considerable amount of expertise in your field.  The first question to ask yourself is could you take that knowledge and turn yourself into a consultant or freelancer.  If you’re  mom looking for work at home or freelance opportunities this might be a great first step in starting your own business.

If what you’re looking for is some flexibility (rather than say, more money), becoming a freelancer might be the perfect way to go – on the one hand there is no learning curve for your own business.  You will have to become good at marketing yourself and some administrative tasks (like tracking expenses) that my never have entered your mind before.  But you won’t be like the mom who was an IT Project Manager who decided to start up a line of t-shirts (umm see the About section for more on that silly mom).  In that case the mom was learning everything from what makes a good t-shirt design, to web design, shopping cart selection, online marketing, networking and t-shirt production capabilities.  It was an overwhelming amount of information to take in, and a lot of mistakes were made, which is why, quite frankly I started this blog – so you don’t make them too….

But hey, I get it – as an IT project manager I was done – I couldn’t imagine this being my life long career, so I was compelled to go forward and start my business from scratch. Ha!  But you dear reader, are much smarter. You’re going to think about leveraging your experience as the foundation of your business.

Now, say you’re pretty certain your day job is not the foundation for a business you want to be in – what are you going to do?  Dig deeper to come up with an expertise to start your business in.   How, you wonder, can you turn your skill in re-upholstering flea market finds into a  business (without having to start re-upholstering 100 chairs a month?)

It’s called information product marketing.  I love this idea, and have been experimenting with it on GirlMogul — with a pretty good amount of success for reasonable amount of effort.  Information product marketing is fairly simple – it’s when you have a skill or know how about something that other people want to acquire.  You create a product – usually digital – like a pdf document, a how to video, etc and showing people what you know and you sell it to them.  Over the internet.  You create the product once.  It’s virtual, not physical and you can sell it over and over again.  Your main focus, once the product is complete, is finding customers.  And what’s one of the beauties of it – selling something that you never have to carry inventory for, or pack up and ship and take the UPS store or the post office.  Beautiful.

In fact a lot of internet marketers recommend you starting with an information product because the start up costs are mostly time and effort on your part – not money.

Still, you’re probably wondering – what kind of expertise do I have that I could start a business in?  The fist question is to think about what you know and are good at.  Do you have a hobby, a skill, a knowledge about collectible dolls from the 1980s?  Once you list our everything and I mean everything you’re good at, then it’s time to find out if your interest is one in 20 million or 1 in a million.  Because with the power of the internet and it’s broad scope, if enough people online are searching for your expertise, then you can sell it to them.

Watch out for more on information marketing.  And if you have a traditional business like a children’s clothing retailer – don’t discount information marketing – I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from it to help grow your internet search engine presence and subscriber list.