There is quite a bit of hype out there about knowledge products. Many people use the term to mean slightly different things. This blog post walks you through a general definition of ‘knowledge products’, some of the most common formats of knowledge products, and how you can use them to grow and strengthen your business.
So, what are knowledge products?
Put simply they are products that have been created to sell knowledge.
Also known as digital products, e-products, online courses, and all of the other individual types listed below.
Knowledge products are a way of conveying the information that you have in your head to other people. Within a business, these products are a way for people to pay you for your expertise and knowledge without the requirement of you being there in real time.
The key to making any knowledge product a successful part of an existing business is to strategically design it, or them, to sit alongside the other things that your business offers. If designed well they can complement any other offerings whether your business sells services, physical products, software as a service (SAAS), or anything else.
Knowledge products can have many benefits for businesses (and overworked business owners). For now, let’s look at what knowledge products can be in more detail.
What types of knowledge products are there?
There are many different kinds of knowledge products. Some are more commonplace than others. Some work better with certain types of information than others.
The list below contains the most common ones, but really anything that allows you to share your knowledge has the potential to become a knowledge product if it could be valuable to your ideal customers, and you can monetise it. To be clear here however – a knowledge product does not need to be monetised to be valuable to your business.
Lead Magnets
Most lead magnets are knowledge products. They are designed to give the people who read them some information, or guidance.
If you aren’t sure what I mean by lead magnet, I’ll briefly explain. Lead magnets are free things that are given away usually to encourage people to sign up to a mailing list. A lot of them are PDF downloads but they don’t have to be, they can be modules of online courses, webinars, audio recordings, dynamic quizzes, and some other things too. A successful lead magnet is anything that engages a potential client and makes them think that signing up to hear more from you and about what you do is a good idea. Often the most successful lead magnets help a potential customer to solve a problem, or to understand a problem, or to clarify their next steps. Designing the right lead magnet for your business is a balance between helping your potential clients and not entirely giving away the knowledge that you sell.
Online Courses
These can be delivered in many different ways using the wonder of the internet. They can be live using web conferencing software like Zoom. They can be pre-recorded and uploaded to a course platform like Kajabi. They can be a mixture of both of these. They can be all video. They can be all written. They can be a combination of the two. They can include worksheets and homework, but they don’t have to. They can be self-study. They can include assignments, marking and/or feedback. They can be delivered via Dropbox, or as a series of emails. The list goes on.
You may have come across certain ‘rules’ or expectations for online courses, but really any knowledge that is broken down into a curriculum to take a student from not knowing or understanding something through to knowing or understanding it can be made into an online course. The how of delivering the course best will come down to what works for you and your students.
Courses can range in length from mini courses which may only take your students a few hours to work through, to signature courses which can take your students months to work through. The most extreme end of this scale is fully online university level courses, where 3- or 4-years’ worth of high-level content is delivered entirely online. My MSc Digital Education was a fully online course, and it was incredibly well designed and delivered. However, the events of 2020 forced many universities to rapidly shift courses that had originally been designed to be delivered face-to-face to an online delivery and this was done to varying degrees of success. It is challenging to change delivery this way, and takes time and planning, and some trial and error.
Offline or IRL (in real life) or in-person courses
Courses that are delivered in person as training sessions, bootcamps or workshops are still knowledge products. The in-person versions of knowledge products have somehow gotten a less trendy reputation in the last decade, but we all learn and engage differently when we are doing something in real life as opposed to virtually – sometimes learning in-real-life is just better. Offline courses can be excellent ways to get your knowledge out into the world. And if you are less comfortable with technology, or new to teaching, they can be a great way to build your confidence before then creating an online version of the same content.
I think that there is a misconception that creating an online course is easier and cheaper than creating an in-person event. Whilst it can be relatively straight forward to put together a simple online course, a big signature online course will be complex. It will also probably need to be edited and updated over time. And yes, while you can resell the material parts of an online course over and over again the costs of the customer service aspects of repeatedly delivering an online course and any ongoing maintenance soon add up.
That’s not to put you off of either choice, it’s just a warning that the social media driven view that creating online courses is an easier and cheaper way to bring revenue into a business when compared to in-person events is often misleading.
Hybrid or blended (partly online and partly in person) courses
These were super trendy before the chaos of 2020 hit and everything was forced entirely online for a while. A hybrid course delivery gives you the best of both worlds. The self-paced advantages of having some course materials online, and the connections and interaction of having some parts of a course delivered in-person. Logistically these can require a bit more planning. Working out what parts of a curriculum will be best for a student to learn in-person and what will be best for a student to learn online can be a case of trial and error. But this type of knowledge product has advantages, especially for longer courses where the in-person parts increase student motivation and engagement that does naturally tend to dip over time in online learning environments.
Online workshops
Similar to online courses but usually significantly shorter. These are delivered entirely via the internet and often run between 1 hour and a full day or two. The most successful online workshops involve a lot of student interaction, and have time and tasks included to allow people to apply the knowledge to their own situation as the workshop takes place, as well as after it finishes.
Offline or IRL (in real life) or in-person workshops
These are also quite straightforward – similar to online courses but much shorter. Generally, they are quite interactive and allow students opportunities to apply what they are learning during the workshop, and are delivered in person.
As we move away from social distancing and staying at home these are having a bit of a surge in popularity. I believe this is due to people becoming fed up with staring at computer screens all day, and missing human interaction.
Hybrid or blended (partly online and partly in person) workshops
As with hybrid and blended courses, these are a combination of online and in-person delivery. It is usual for the online parts of the workshop to either be preparation work for the in-person part, or to be follow up work after the in-person part.
Working out how to divide your curriculum between the two parts can be tricky and will often need a bit of trial and error – collect feedback from your students and then decide if you need to make any changes for next time.
Webinars
A traditional webinar format is less interactive than an online workshop. The idea being that the student is there to learn something, more than to learn to apply something themselves. But, as with many of these things, the strict definition of webinar is not really important here.
Webinars are often used as a part of a sales funnel in the online education world. They can be delivered pre-recorded or live and used as a teaser or introduction to a longer online course. This is a lead generation tool, usually free, and can work really well. This is because whilst you teach a small part of the content from your online course in a webinar your potential customers get to know you, see how you teach, and trust that you are the teacher for them. Webinars do not have to be used this way in your business, however. Similar to a workshop they are a way to teach small, concise bits of knowledge and can be successfully sold as products in their own right.
Books (printed)
So, we all know what books are, right? Seems like an obvious way to give your knowledge to other people, doesn’t it? But books are often an overlooked part of the knowledge product industry or seen as something that other people can do (just not me). I believe (but this is just a guess) that this is because of the perceived difficulty of writing a book and because of the daunting nature of the publishing industry. That’s not to say that I believe that writing a book is easy but if you compare it to writing a similar in-depth online course, you are probably looking at around the same amount of work. Yet book writing often gets discounted for being too hard before people even begin – I’m not sure if this is because the amount of work that goes into online course creation is often overlooked, or because many of us believe we can’t write well (because of education systems that drive the love of creativity out of us and reinforce the wrong things), or simply because we grew up with books that inspire and that’s leaves us with a whole lot of comparsonitus fears.
If you are considering writing a book to get your knowledge out into the world you have plenty of choice in terms of publishing and self-publishing now, and freelance editors, inclusivity readers, and proof-readers are all relatively easy to find. At the end of the day, with changes and advances in self-publishing, writing a book that is a part of your business offerings can have many advantages for you and your business.
Ebooks (delivered in a digital format such as PDF, or via an ereader service)
Similar to books but only available electronically these can be cheaper to produce than books (although print on demand services are making it much more accessible to self-publish physical books now). An advantage of ebooks over physical books is that if you chose to simply create a PDF, rather than self-publish on an ereader platform (such as Kindle), then you have complete control over every part of your book. This means that if you want to write a book that isn’t a traditional length then you can. If you want to write a book that has a lot of photographs, which can push physical printing costs through the roof, then you can. Another advantage of this kind of ebook is that you can fully control how you sell and distribute your book, making it easier to roll it into bundles with your other products.
Workbooks (printed or delivered in a digital format such as a PDF)
Similar to books but designed so that readers can work their way through the knowledge and tasks to help them to reinforce their own learning. Workbooks are often an accompanying element to a workshop or online course but can be sold as knowledge products in their own right. They are ideal in fact for any knowledge that lends itself well to a series of questions and guided tasks.
These can be physically printed, self-published, or electronic only versions. And similar to the ebooks discussed above, there are advantages and disadvantages to each of your publishing options.
Planners
These can be physical or electronic or both, and are sometimes similar to workbooks, although usually have a calendar element to them to help people to plan. These are ideal if you are using your knowledge to help people to create something as they are very practical – supporting with time management and allocation across a whole project.
Audiobooks (delivered on an app, or CD, or via a website, or an audio platform)
Most of the things I mentioned in the book section apply to this audiobook section too. Most commonly audiobooks are created as read-out-loud versions of traditionally published books, however with improvements in the accessibility of sound recording and editing technology it is becoming increasingly realistic to self-audio publish books. This is currently not as common as other forms of self-publishing, however.
Ideally, an audiobook is created alongside a book as a way to reach other audiences – many people prefer to listen to books, or certain genres of books, rather than to read them. There is no reason that an audiobook cannot be a standalone product however, if it is likely that your ideal clients would prefer an audiobook. Just be aware of the constraints of any audiobook platforms that you plan to use when trying to decide if this is the right knowledge product for you.
Audio courses (delivered on an app, or CD, or via a website, or an audio platform)
Audio courses have been popular for decades, available via the post and on cassette well before many other forms of knowledge product existed. More recent technology has improved the quality and streamlined the delivery of audio courses, making them simpler to produce. They have some advantages over online courses as they are often less time consuming and cheaper to produce, but do not work as well for visual learners (which I’m sure you didn’t need me to tell you). You can of course create an audio course with a companion workbook to integrate some visual elements for your students.
Audio courses are often popular with people who do not want to spend more time looking at a screen and for those who want to learn whilst they are doing something else such as commuting or housework. Some of the bigger online course platforms have begun to integrate audio course features recently as their popularity has begun increasing.
Podcast (publicly available on the major podcast apps)
Clearly not all podcasts are really about imparting knowledge, but many are meaning that they can fit into the category of being a knowledge product. It is becoming increasingly straight forward to record, edit and distribute a podcast, with many well-known online business owners having at least one podcast. Often these are created as free products, as a way to generate leads and to build trust with potential clients but there are also ways to monetise podcasts. I am absolutely not a podcast expert and would send you over to Lucy Lucraft’s Instagram if it is a podcast expert that you are looking for – her online course to guide you through starting a podcast is great.
Private podcast (restricted availability via specialist software)
These are exactly the same as podcasts but (through some technology magic that I don’t really understand) they are published privately. They often sit behind a paywall, or within a closed community such as a membership. In contrast to an audio course, a paid podcast does not tend to only focus on a specific teaching area. Podcasts are generally broader across a topic or topics over seasons. They can also be used in a similar way to a newsletter, giving listeners a chance to get to know you over the episodes.
Consultancy Sessions
This is partly a service as well as a knowledge product, but in essence you are being paid for your knowledge. These are often the simplest way for you to begin selling your knowledge as all you really need (apart from the knowledge itself) is to work out what to charge and the logistics of delivering each session (e.g., Zoom or in-person etc.) and getting paid.
In contrast to most of the other knowledge products I have discussed on this post, consultancy sessions are you selling your time on an individual basis. I recommend adding these to your offerings as a part of a broader set of options because it is very easy to become burnt out and overworked by running lots of individual sessions.
Retreats
These clearly are not always knowledge focused but can be a great way to teach people. Retreats are an opportunity to shut out the rest of the world and focus on something. If you are teaching something that people could benefit from an in-depth focus on, then a retreat might be for you. A disadvantage of retreats is that they are resource heavy to create, involve the added layers of hospitality and logistics of travel planning, but if your audience is likely to be willing to pay for them, they can be great fun.
Many retreat centres also offer white labelled services, where you and your customers come for the teaching and the learning, and the retreat centre takes care of the hospitality side of things. As with any of the knowledge products listed here that requires a substantial outlay to create I would not recommend venturing into to these until you have an audience who are ready and willing to buy from you.
Virtual retreats
Clearly these are not always knowledge focused either. Similar to retreats but carried out online they don’t have quite the same appeal as the world isn’t shut out in the same way but they can be accessed by more people. Some of the more successful virtual retreat I have seen involve sending physical products and gifts to the participants alongside the virtual events. This means that everyone can create a bit of the retreat wherever they are joining from.
Conferences
Conferences are all about knowledge sharing. Often, they focus on a topic or industry rather than an individual business and usually have many more speakers than the rest of the knowledge products discussed on this page. Just like retreats these are heavy on the outlay and organisation and logistical planning but can be very valuable events.
If conferences seem like they might work for you, your business, and your knowledge but you aren’t ready to even think about organising one then you can apply to be a speaker or presenter at an existing conference. Some conferences pay their speakers, others don’t. Some offer free tickets to speakers, others don’t. Some will cover travel expenses, others don’t. So, bear these things in mind when looking for opportunities for yourself and don’t be afraid to pitch yourself when you find ones that you like.
Virtual Conferences
Much the same as conferences, but again delivered virtually. These have a lower cost to get set up but are also less engaging to most participants when compared to the in-person conferences. This can be combated in similar ways to those mentioned in the online retreat section, and you can also consider including virtual mixers and networking events alongside the knowledge parts of your virtual conference but be warned these often come across as cheesy and can put people off.
Blogs
Blogs are usually publicly available on a website but can still be monetised if you’d like them to be. It is more common however for a blog to be created to showcase knowledge, to provide information to people, and to bring an audience to a business – like this blog is. Most blogs are used as an SEO (search engine optimisation) tool to bring traffic to websites and to build know, like and trust with readers, some of whom will later become clients, rather than as saleable knowledge products. Blogs do not have to be entirely written, they can include images, infographics, videos, and audio.
Private Blogs
Similar to private podcasts but delivered in a written format these are often members only and can be delivered via a subscription service such as Patreon. Sometimes these are just stream of consciousness and the attraction being that people want to know what the writer specifically thinks of certain topics. Sometimes these are topic or industry based. The world is your oyster.
Newsletters
Again, the main purpose of newsletters in not usually as a knowledge product, but they are often used to deliver knowledge and depending on the balance of content newsletters can be knowledge products. Commonly these are delivered by email. There is an argument for the regular delivery of newsletters (e.g., weekly/fortnightly) to keep audiences engaged, but there is an increasing understanding that people have lives that are controlled by more than attention spans and business best practises, so the choice is yours.
The most common way newsletters relate to knowledge products within a business is by generating interest in them via linking to blog posts, sales pages, asking questions during the development of knowledge products to gauge interest and to ensure the content of any products is useful to your audience.
As with most of the other stuff on this list, if you are building it, you get to choose what you use it for – don’t let anyone else’s perception of what something ‘should’ be stop you from creating the knowledge products that suit you are your company.
Paid Newsletters
Like private podcasts but in a written format, these commonly delivered by email and as a subscription service, for example via Substack. These tend to be purchased because a customer likes someone’s take on things and want to keep up with what they are interested in or run by artists/writers/poets as a way to make their work more widely accessible. They can be great knowledge products for specialists in an industry too, each newsletter sent covers more of what is going on in the wider field along with the author’s take on things. This might seem like a good idea for many people but consider how aligned your audience and other offers are first. If I were to create paid newsletter in this way for example, I would likely need to consider a different target audience (digital education professionals and teachers) to my current one (small business owners and entrepreneurs). This doesn’t mean that a paid newsletter would be a bad idea for me to have, but it does mean that it would need marketing differently to the rest of my offerings, which strategically thinking would be more work (with limited return) than I can ideally take on right now.
Videos
Some of the most popular knowledge products out there are video based. This is because they are easy to watch and readily available. Videos can be part of one of the above forms of knowledge product (yes even books) or can standalone on a platform like YouTube. They can be monetised in many different ways and used as lead generating and trust building tools. If, like me, you aren’t keen on being on camera you can still use video in lots of different ways – you can film slides with you talking over them for example. It is also possible to learn to not hate being in front of the camera, and as much as I personally do not enjoy being filmed it is a skill that is worth its weight in gold in most modern businesses.
Social Media Content
Clearly not all social media content is knowledge based, but the line between content marketing and knowledge products can be quite thin. Social media marketing is generally used to allow customers and potential customers to get to know you better, to allow them to develop trust in you, as they also see that you are an expert in the things that you are talking about. However, there are several successful knowledge ‘sellers’ who sell different levels of social media access as a part of their offerings – some of them utilising the Instagram Close Friends feature in a similar way to a paid membership service. To make this work for your business you need to work out how to strategically use social media to help you reach your business goals, whatever they may be.
Flash Cards, Prompt Cards, and Other Printed Card Sets
Not all knowledge lends itself to printed cards sets but if you do have something that will work as a set then it is usually worth considering. These can be bundled with other products and books, used as promotional materials at in-person events, and be a great way to teach things to people who learn by touching and moving things. A great example of a printed card set that is useful to lots of people, and that fits nicely with the other knowledge products in a business is the PR Tips set by Lucy Werner (I also highly recommend both of her books btw).
Memberships
These are usually delivered via subscription and including several of the above knowledge products along with some kind of community, with opportunities for interactions with other members. There are so many different ways to create and deliver a membership, but the most successful ones tend to offer a wide range of ways to engage and access knowledge.
The End of the List
There are many other things that could be included on this list, but these are the most common, probably because they are the most commonly monetised. That does not mean that you can’t successfully monetise some other way of selling your knowledge. It just has to be something that your ideal clients would find valuable. And, as I mentioned earlier, you do not need to create knowledge products for monetising only. Knowledge products make excellent lead magnets and can be used to showcase your expertise in numerous ways.
What’s Next?
That’s up to you.
Don’t let this list overwhelm you.
Simple start with the question; what do you think you and your business, and your customers would benefit from next? Then ask yourself how can you begin to make that thing a reality?
xxx
