Special tips to help your online business better leverage your expertise

by Jean Cannon

The services and products that you have been selling offline need to be broken up more for offline delivery and you need to put considerable effort into getting this right.



The first step you need to take is to carefully define your product. Sometimes things that are very clear to you, you may find that you have left out a simple step that is not obvious to you client and results in confusion and frustrations.



Your first big decisions are vital to your online business. These are deciding on the platform you will use and then how you are going to "chunk" the information.



The starting place needs to be thinking about your target client because if your product does not suit their needs they simply will not buy it.



There are a number of things you need to find out including what style of delivery suits your clients. Do they have high speed broadband or are they on a slower wireless connection or maybe on an even slower dial up. If your prospective client is in a remote or rural area, their internet connection may be so slow that it is necessary to post CDs to them because they can only receive limited size text emails.



You also need to be sure that you know and can cater for his or her learning styles. Some people learn best by reading, others learn by listening and most people benefit from having both. You may decide to send your client MP3 files that they can either burn to audio CDs on their computer or put them on an MP3 player or IPOD and listen to them while traveling or doing routine tasks. Thee are low cost and effective systems available to allow streaming downloads of audio files and also of video files. Or you may decide to send clients to a password protected webpage to download information



Busy People often don't have time to sit down and read and you may well be surprised at how many people can't read or have limited reading ability. I have actually trained a number of very intelligent people who for one reason or another did not learn to read but they function very effectively in the workplace and often hide their lack of reading so effectively that few people realize.



At the end of a day, busy people are often exhausted and unable to take in more information that needs left brain logical processing. If you can provide them an easy option that is relaxing to listen to or watch while they sit and relax with a drink it will be taken in by the emotional part of their brain and the learning may actually be more effective.



You also need to "chunk" your information into small bites with the size depending on how much they can take in at a time. You should put yourself in your client's shoes. You are working full time and trying to learn something new. How much can you take in at a time when you are tired? Careful planning is needed to deliver small chunks in a logical order.



Without going into your delivery platform at this time, you do need to think through the format of your information. The most common formats are Word and Power Point or their equivalent turned into PDF files to reduce the file size and secure the data to some extent. Which one you choose depends of your clients and the research into their needs and likes before you started. Both file types can be very effective. while pDF's of word processing files are smaller and useful for those with limited band with it is easier to put one idea per page with slides. You clients will find that this method works well for skimmers as well as those who read every word.



The critical thing is to do your market research first to that you deliver a good product market match. While you may well decide that the bells and whistles and high resolution video is wonderful if it does not work on your clients' computer or arrive reliable on his email he will not only be unhappy but unhappy clients do tend to pass on the word.