Information is the currency of the new gold rush in the Information Age. Your website—and more specifically, your blog—gives your business or organization the ability to disseminate a lot of helpful information to potential clients who are panning for information gold.
One of the things you’ll hear social media or inbound marketing gurus talk about is “giving away expertise.” For many of us that sounds counter-intuitive. Why in the world would we want to give away the very thing that sets us apart from our competition? And isn’t our expertise the very thing that many of us are trying to sell in the first place?
Those are valid questions. But here’s the key to this “giving-away-expertise-for-free” idea. You’re not giving away gold bars—you’re giving away nuggets. Just as a single small nugget of gold isn’t going to make someone rich, a small nugget of information (though valuable and helpful) isn’t going to solve someone’s business problems.
And what happens when a prospector finds a small gold nugget in a stream? He invests in more equipment and goes digging for more. The same thing happens when you dole out valuable, helpful information. Business prospects will look to you in hopes of finding the “mother lode.”
The kind of information you give away should be genuinely helpful, but you aren’t going to give away your “secret sauce.” If you’re a builder, for instance, you can help people avoid some common mistakes in building a new home, but they’re not going to learn how to actually build a house from your blog. If you sell shoes, you can help people discover how to find shoes that really fit well and last, but these people aren’t going to start making their own shoes. And when you pass on helpful information, you set yourself up as an expert in your given field. And when it comes time to build a home or buy a quality pair of shoes, chances are you’ll be on the “short list” of businesses they’ll look at.
So give prospects some gold nuggets. It can lead to gold bars for you!