Nearly every entrepreneur has knowledge that can be identified, packaged, and shared. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look. Here are 6 questions to spur your creative thinking.

1. How do you do what you do?
You likely spent a great deal of time and effort learning how to do what you do. Others will pay for that knowledge—to shorten their own learning curve, avoid costly mistakes, and achieve greater success than they could on their own.

2. Have you created new ways of talking about old issues?
For decades, people have been writing about how to lose weight. You’d think everything there was to say had already been said—yet new diet books come out every single year. That’s because people are always coming up with new theories, methods, stories, or perspectives. You can do the same in your industry.

3. Do you have new insights into your business, industry, or clients?
Share them. Hint: You don’t have to wait for insights to hit like lightning bolts. There are ways to cultivate them, such as looking to completely unrelated industries to see what ideas can be adapted to your own business to create new approaches.

4. What do people outside of your industry not know?
What’s standard knowledge within your industry but virtually unknown outside of it? Open the door on this insider information. It’s fertile ground for training and education products.

5. Can you ask questions that will help others come to useful insights?
You don’t need to have all the answers. Often there is value in asking the right questions and helping people find the answers themselves.

6. Can you anticipate the future?
Look at what’s happened within your industry in the past. Examine factors that contributed to its formation and growth, revolutionary changes that have altered the field, and important developments that have already occurred, especially over the last 12 months. If X led to Y, and Y led to Z, what can you guess about where Z might go? Help people prepare for, or participate in, that future.

What are some other questions that have been helpful to you in developing knowledge products?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal underlines what we’ve been saying for years: the book makes the expert. Business people with books get noticed.

Think of it this way: When it comes to your business reputation, you’re either a rock star or a wannabe.

If you’re like the vast majority of the people in your industry, you’re virtually anonymous. You might have lots of expertise, great ideas, and new methodologies, but you’re not making the most of them. You feel frustrated because you know you could take your business farther—you just don’t know how.

Rock stars, on the other hand, are celebrities. They stand out in their market against a sea of faceless competitors.

Very few business people ever garner the reputation of a rock star. But you can bet that those who do, have knowledge products of one kind or another. A book is still the most prestigious but other products work, too. What’s important is that these products serve as springboards, continually pushing their author’s message to more and more people, and continually propelling the author’s reputation to new heights.

Is it time for you to break out and become a business rock star? (Or, as we like to say here at Highspot, a thought star™.) What steps will you take in 2011 to get you there?