The Online Learning Market

Do you ever wonder why internet marketing gurus teach you all their money-making secrets via their online products and membership sites, rather than just using that knowledge to make more money for themselves? Well, it is because they have discovered that the ‘online learning’ market is absolutely huge! And combining that with a ravenous ‘internet marketing’ market, they can often make more money ‘teaching a man to fish’ than doing the fishing themselves!

Due to a variety of demographic, technological and social trends, online learning is growing rapidly and is predicted to hit $52.6 Billion by 2010. Internet usage continues to increase…With the rise of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the Internet has evolved beyond being simply a delivery mechanism for digital files to becoming a community of interconnected individuals. This trend will likely continue migration from large homogeneous communities towards smaller niche communities. People will join those niche communities that they are interested in for business or personal reasons. As bandwidth continues to increase, we’ve seen the type of material available online go from text, to images, to audio and now video (even live streaming video). The content that can be delivered over the internet is becoming richer and more useful for learning purposes. And the technology is often free and getting easier to use. Socially, the ‘cocooning’ phenomenon has also increased leading towards more home schooling, tv watching, internet usage. With rising commodity prices such as gasoline the trend is towards less travelling by car, plane or other means.

According to Regina Lewis (2005), over 4 million students are enrolled in online schools and universities (and that number is growing 30% per year). There are many benefits to online learning:

-flexibility, including anytime, anywhere access to instructors and information
-student-centered teaching according to their individual learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) as well as at peak learning times which can be evenings for some students
-repeatability – students can watch videos or view articles and diagrams over and over
-less intimidating than classrooms for some students who are quiet or shy, can think about answer before responding
-access to experts from around the globe, not just those in a student’s city
-’chunkability’ – the ability to focus on one small topic rather than be overwhelmed by too much information
-younger students who grew up on the internet are more comfortable in this environment
-reduced travel costs, with the record prices of gasoline these days
-part-time learning, where many adults have full time jobs

Education is becoming increasingly important, resulting in the need for continuous learning just to compete in today’s economy.

Whether you sell affiliate (ie. other people’s) products, or create and sell your own products you will need to educate your customers. In other words, you need to ‘pre-sell’ your customers by providing ‘useful but incomplete’ content to them. To complete the information they will need to buy your product or service. If you create your own information products for sale these are also educational in nature.

This educational content can be in a variety of formats these days such as:
-blogs (WordPress.com, Blogger.com or your own blog)
-social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
-podcasts (mp3 audio files)
-videos (webcam or camcorder)
-screencast videos (using Camtasia studio for example)
-diagrams (PDFs, images)
-software (creating multimedia).

Notice that this variety of formats appeals to different learning styles which is important.

So if you’re planning to sell anything online or better yet, sell your own information products you will need to be able to create content in at least some of these formats, and publish it all over the web.