Bill Myers - September 17, 2009

A few years back I was invited to provide technology training at the corporate headquarters of one of the largest businesses in the world.

As I toured their vast offices, I noticed that taped to almost every computer monitor was a hand-written, photocopied 'cheat sheet' of the commands needed to operate the computer.

When I asked about this, I was told that since most of the employees had little computer training, it was simpler to just provide them a list of keyboard commands, rather than send them off for a few weeks of education.

The handwritten cheat sheet increased productivity, reduced errors, and was a quick way to bring new employees up to speed on computer use.

From a product developers perspective, creating 'cheat sheets' like this for popular software products can be a great way way to attract visitors and customers to your web site.

For example, a cheat sheet on how to find all the secrets within Google could be quite handy.

And even if it was distributed for free, it might be a great way to pull qualified traffic to your web site.

Creating these cheat sheets can be fairly simple. All you need is a little time, a word processing program, and the reference guide for the software you will be creating a cheat sheet about.

And of course, if you have already created a cheat sheet you use in your business, that too could be the basis for a new product or service to offer your customers.

If you want to see an example of what these cheat sheets can look like, check out the Google cheat sheet at http://tinyurl.com/kvupt8 (a pdf file).