Educate Your Market

In yesterday’s post on the Online Learning Market, I explained how huge the e-learning market is and how we all need to educate our customers whether we sell our own or other people’s products. If you’re not educating your customers you’re probably not very successful today.

Today I want to give you some examples of how I educate my customers and what the different goals are for each. One of my main goals is to give you real examples that are working for me and others today, not a bunch of theory.

Adsense Revenue

I use YouTube videos with YouTube’s revenue sharing. Go to YouTube to see my free video guitar lessons.

I also have Adsense on my free guitar lessons website. Notice the right sidebar near the bottom has the Google ads.

You need to evaluate whether you want to get revenue from the readers or from businesses. I see it as a motivation question – Who is more motivated to pay for your content? Often times, businesses who want to be noticed by your readers are motivated to pay because they want to sell their products.

Affiliate Marketing

Sometimes in the YouTube videos I link directly to the affiliate product in the video description. Some people prefer to send leads to an opt-in page where they get their email address and market to them later. I do that in many cases too, but you need to mix things up and see what works. There’s something to be said for impulse purchases. They see your video or post, get pumped and go and buy.

In the right sidebar of the following sites I put some affiliate links in there, so they appear on every page. Here are some examples:
-Free guitar lessons
-Membership sites
-Work at home (this site)

Social Networking

I often blog on my sites to educate my readers. You can see that in this blog but also on the ones already mentioned. This is also good for the search engines as they will find your content and hopefully serve it up to searchers in your niche.

I use Twitter and Facebook to post links to these blogs as well. The goal is to educate my readers. I don’t do much of any selling directly in the social networking sites.

Email Marketing

I usually offer something of value to obtain my reader’s email address and build a relationship with them. Then over time I send them useful information that is hopefully helpful to them. You can see an email signup form at http://willkriski.com on the right sidebar. I use Get Response for email collection. It improves your chances of getting read (not filtered as spam) and allows you to send a series of automated follow-up messages and broadcasts to large groups of people all at once.

Articles and Other Sites

You need to get your educational content out there, not just on your own sites. One such site that takes articles is EzineArticles.com (my profile there). You can post your content on other sites such as Wordpress, Squidoo, HubPages, and help people in forums and other people’s blogs (via the comments area).

Information Products

A more direct method is to actually sell your own educational content. Here are some of my own examples:
-Overnight Membership Site Course – a video course on how you can set up and market your own membership site quickly
-http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/fretboard-blueprint – learn how to solo over chord changes and visualize the fretboard
-Get Rich as an IT Consultant – my e-book on how to make big money with IT subcontracting

Membership sites

If you want to create an online learning environment of your own, you might want to create a membership site. Here’s an example that I have created for learning lead guitar. This is a private members-only area where people need to sign up and pay on a monthly recurring basis. They need to login to get access to your site. I use Wordpress and the Wishlist Member plugin. I’ve created 7 video courses and continually add new content there.

So whether you sell your own or other people’s products, you will need to educate them first, which is often called ‘pre-selling’. So hopefully that will give you some real examples of how you can educate your readers, and how to monetize that readership!