In a previous video, I shared how to turn your knowledge into a steady source of income. However, a common question people ask is “what if I don’t have something I am knowledgeable enough in?” Or ”what if there are not many people interested in what I want to share?”
Well, the truth is that with digital media technology, the knowledge economy leaves no one behind. If you don’t have enough knowledge in a field but have enough interest and insight for an opportunity in that field, you can turn it into an income-generating business.
People have built multimillion dollar businesses using other people’s knowledge and information. You use such businesses every day but you may not have noticed. In this video, let’s look at the different ways you can turn other people’s knowledge into a profitable source of income. Before we get to it, I’ll like to invite you to subscribe to After School TV for more insightful videos like this.
In a nutshell, to build a business with other people’s knowledge or information, you need to leverage other people’s content to create your own product. Your product may be a book, a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a blog. You get other people to share their knowledge or experience. Or you review knowledge that is already shared by other people. Let’s look at some practical ways to do this.
1. Interviews
You’ve seen some of those podcasts, blogs, and even books by an unknown publisher or author focused on sharing other people’s knowledge. Podcasters invite and interview experts, bloggers publish interviews of experts and authors turn interviews with various experts into a book. For example, I wrote a blog on how to win a scholarship by interviewing about 16 multi scholarship award winners. The added advantage to this is that, by interviewing these experts, your readers will associate you with being an expert in that field. You learn as you speak with these experts, build your network as well as build a business and a brand.
People with knowledge and experience are almost always happy to share what they know. It gives them a sense of pride to know that people acknowledge and want to listen to what they have to say. So it’s a win-win for everyone. Interviews are a great way to create quality content from other people’s knowledge and make money while at it.
2. Content Curation
Content curation is the process of gathering and organizing information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. For example, I run one of the largest and most popular scholarship platforms for African students around the world. We don’t create this content from scratch. We simply research, find and organize them in a way that is easy for our users to access them. As the platform grew, organizations now reach out to us about their scholarship and other funding opportunities.
You’ve probably seen some of those top-ten YouTube channels. The authors typically don’t own the knowledge they share. They simply research and curate the information in their own voice. The idea of content curation is about gathering information around a specific topic in one place so that it is easy for people to access them. You save the reader the stress and time of collecting the information scattered across the web. If you target a niche that is highly sought-after; you can build a successful passive income-generating business from curating content. Your platform can be a blog, YouTube channel, or social media page. You can also publish a book from curated content.
3. User generated content
YouTube is a user-generated content platform; so are social media and most online forums. Wikipedia and Online courses market places like Udemy are also examples of user-generated content. The idea is to build a platform that encourages people to publish the type of content that keeps other people engaged on the platform.
We may call this YouTube page our YouTube channel. But in reality, YouTube owns all the pages. And we are all creating content for YouTube. When you are tweeting or sharing photos on Instagram and Facebook, you are generating content for these platforms. These businesses need us to keep creating content for them so that they can keep more people on the platform to keep serving ads for money.
Building a business based on user-generated content takes a lot of hard work and money. People that will be creating the content need to be assured that there are a good number of people waiting to read their content. No one wants to create content on a platform with few readers. If you have the resources, and have an innovative idea for a platform for user-generated content, by all means, go for it.
4. Product review
Blink is a book summarizing service that offers key insights from the top non-fiction books. The app is simply built on other people’s knowledge summarized into key insights. In other words, it’s a product review for books and the company behind it is worth over $35 million dollars.
There are different models of creating a business out of product reviews. There are many blogs and YouTube channels that are built mainly from the publisher reviewing digital or physical products like mobile phones and gadgets. And many of these businesses are generating above average revenue, sometimes enough for the owners to live their dreams. Product review is a practical way to turn other people’s knowledge or products into a steady flow of income for you.
5. Hire content creators
You can hire content creators to create or curate content for your blog or YouTube channel. Whether you are generating content from interviews, curation, or product review, or you are creating fresh content in your area of interest, you can always hire people to do the job for you. So instead of using your own time and knowledge, you can use other people’s knowledge; other people being the people you hire.
For example, the company behind Blinkist, the book summary service I mentioned, obviously hires book reviewers to review and publish the content on their platform. They got the idea, they hire people to do the job of producing the content. If you have the idea and money and don’t have the time to share your knowledge or are not knowledgeable enough in your field of interest, you can hire content creators.
Overall, it’s just a matter of understanding how to take advantage of other people’s knowledge without infringing copyright. You can interview experts and share their takes on hot topics; you can curate content; you can get the users to generate the content for you; you can create product reviews, and you can hire other people to create content for your platform. That’s how you turn other people’s knowledge or information into a business that generates a steady source of income.
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