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As an independent professional service provider looking to succeed online you’re going to encounter one fundamental problem. You – your time, your skills, your personality, your charisma – are not scaleable.

No matter how well you market yourself, and how much business you bring in, you can only do so much of that work yourself. Once you’re fully booked, you’re fully booked – you can’t take on more work until you stop doing something else.

How to scale your online business

There is one absolutely vital thing that you do own, however, which is valuable and truly scaleable: that’s your knowledge. By packaging your expertise effectively, and turning it into a product rather than a professional service, you do two things:

1. You make access to your expertise more affordable to a much wider audience
2. After the initial investment of creating your knowledge product you’re free to sell it to as many people as you can without much additional demand on your time and resources.

But how do you go about developing a product based on your knowledge and expertise?

Dave Navarro, AKA “The Launch Coach”, has built a successful online business showing people just like you how to do exactly that!

I’ve been working through Dave’s excellent free online marketing workbooks in the LaunchCoach Library. The workbooks take you step-by-step through:

• 7 steps you can take to playing a much bigger online game
• 7 steps to networking yourself to A-Listers
• 7 simple income streams that you can actually create
• How to start making real money with your product in just 3 days

The thing I like most about Dave’s style is that he avoids the usual marketing hype of your typical online “gurus”, and gets straight to the meaty stuff that’s really valuable to people like you and me who are looking to turn our expertise into a scaleable online business.

I’m not a “guru.”  I’m just a guy who’s pretty darned
good at teaching people how to do things in a simple
step-by-step, you-can-do-this manner.

Dave Navarro – The Launch Coach

The free stuff that Dave offers is amazing – but if you’re looking to fast-track your online product creation and promotion skills, you should check out his latest offering

Two downloadable Workshops — 10 great training modules — that show you how he built his own online business, and that could be just the catalyst you need to kick start your online business.

I’m certainly going to check it out. You’ll find all the details on Creating Products that Sell & Building a Responsive List on Dave’s site.

Gordon Murray of eWrite in Cork is apparently considering chronicling the trials and tribulations of product development in his blog. As Conor points out, there are naturally concerns and challenges for any business in opening up to very public online scrutiny… concerns surrounding intellectual property, and the time and effort involved in maintaining and updating a vibrant and compelling blog.

But open, honest communication is what it’s all about in this Web 2.0 world. The interactive web is about much more than pushing a marketing message — it’s about engaging in conversation, dialogue, debate.

I have to agree with Conor: this is a great idea. Brave souls like Gordon, who embrace the opportunity to engage with their audience online, to build a vibrant community around their brand that transcends the boundaries of their organisation, will, I believe, reap very real dividends down the line. Who knows, the community Gordon builds through his blog may even contribute constructively to the product development process — solving problems, making suggestions, requesting features….

Not so many years from now, collaborative product development will become the universally accepted norm. Sharing experiences and harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd will be as natural as checking your e-mail in the morning. But for now its still bleeding edge… still the province of trail-blazers like Gordon Murray.

So go for it Gordon… and good luck. I for one will be looking on with interest.

Chronicle the development of an app and a business? | Argolon