Archive for online learning
Getting Repeat Customers
Posted by: | CommentsOver the past few days I’ve been talking about how huge the online learning market is and the importance of educating your potential or actual customers. Potential customers need to be ‘pre-sold’ before they buy and content is great for the search engines. Actual customers will pay for educational material via online courses, videos, DVDs, books, etc.
When selling other people’s products via affiliate programs, I use a variety of methods to educate my readers such as articles, blog posts, videos, diagrams, twitter/facebook posts and so on. But I also create educational content for sale, also known as information products. I’ve chosen for the time being to sell information products that are completely digital – in other words the content is fully online. This is for a variety of reasons such as no physical delivery to worry about, and I can improve the content over time based on feedback from my customers. It’s also great for the customers because they get instant access to the content.
Information products could be e-books (I do PDF files), audio files (mp3s), videos, or web pages. I create my content in Microsoft Word and ‘print to PDF’ using a free PDF driver. For video I use a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. I also bought 3 point lighting and a background with support frame to make the videos more professional. You can attach these files to an email or send the customer an email with a link to a web page. I’ve automated this process using a service called 1ShoppingCart. When someone buys a product, 1Shoppingcart handles the payment and sends the customer an email with the product location (either attached or via a link). The beauty of digital delivery is that it is automated and the link expires after 24 hours so that it can’t be shared with others.
It’s great to sell information products but it will be challenging to find an ever increasing number of customers. If you know the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients. This is because a small number of customers will buy from you again and again. This means you either need to have a large number of products offerings or you can set up what is called a membership site, members-area, or continuity program. I’ve set this up myself over at Online Guitar Coaching for learning how to play guitar.
The idea is that you create a protected, members only area that houses all your content, in whatever format you choose. I prefer to protect a series of web pages that contains the content such as videos, PDF files, etc rather than just a directory of files. I’ve actually created 7 courses which are a hierarchy of pages in a structured format. You can also ‘drip’ content over time, where you might deliver a module of content once a month, week, etc.
To get this working I now use Wordpress (free), hosted on a HostGator Server, with the Wishlist Member plugin. It’s actually pretty easy to set up. Let me know if you have any questions.
Educate Your Market
Posted by: | CommentsIn 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!
The Online Learning Market
Posted by: | CommentsDo 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.
