Using business knowledge for marketing (ebooks, e-reports and e-guides)

Businesses that use their knowledge to market what they do are trying to tell potential customers about their competence and ability.
At the less complex end of the spectrum, some businesses are more concerned with attracting search engines than with teaching potential clients anything useful. They tend to use article marketing, with search engine friendly links to their websites. However the articles tend to be of low value, many are just glorified adverts and the grammar can be suspect.
At the far end of the spectrum there are prodessional market research companies which write and publish market research. Examples are Frost and Sullivan and Datamonitor. They can charge many thousands of Pounds for each report, but these reports serve as a major injections of skill and knowledge for those companies which purchase them.
In the middle there are companies which allow small businesses to sell each other business reports. These do allow potential customers to learn more about commissioning or buying products and services, and can avoid bad and potentially costly purchasing decisions. Examples in the USA are PayLoadz, BooksWealth and in the UK a business support service called Gibli.
There is a conflict for small business however between expecting everything digital to be free on the internet and recognizing that some things are better if paid for.
There are two issues here, and they both relate to business time. If the knowledge a business needs to learn is available online, but is difficult to find, it might take a business person some hours to find this by repeated searches. The cost is not just the entrepreneur's time, but the missed work that could have been done during this time. There is also the risk that even after searching for some hours, the knowledge is not found.

So businesses are beginning to recognize that using business knowledge is both a good way the promote themselves, and as a good way to solve problems and avoid risk.