You’ve heard it before, but it merits repeating – nobody likes to be sold to, but they do like to buy. The way people like to buy is find information and then slowly build trust with the provider of that information. Nothing sells like great educational content. If that’s true than no one sells better than someone that teaches.

Think in terms of educating and informing a growing audience of prospects and your brand will become the brand of choice. (It doesn’t hurt if you can entertain them a little in the process.)

Some idea starters

• You can create videos featuring you showing customers how to do something online.
• You can have your best customers tell their stories about how your service helped them.
• You can take your best presentations and create virtual copies that can be viewed anytime night or day.
• You can create tutorials that show people how to use your product’s advanced features.
• You can create screencasts that teach people how to do the things they want to do.
• You can create a virtual tour of your offices featuring a message from the CEO.
• You can post the audio tip of the day to your blog.

Today’s rich set of software and web based applications makes the creation of teaching tools an absolute snap. If you want to gain a significant competitive advantage I would suggest you seek out some of the following tools and start to develop your own multi-media information products and tools. Let the teaching, I mean selling, begin.

Slideshare (web) – this free service allows you to upload Powerpoint slides from presentations and turn them into virtual slideshows with a built in player.  You can also add and sync an mp3 audio and you have a slidecast

Screenflow (mac) or Camtasia (pc) – these programs allow you to film what you are doing on your computer. So, if your lesson is about some software program or web application you can create what have become known as screencasts and show people how.