If you’re an entrepreneur and into online marketing and planning to create a video-based digital marketing course, you’ll want to look at SkillShare. This is also a great place to start because they let you upload individual lessons rather than having to create a full-length course.
Lessons must be 10 minutes or longer, however most videos range from 15-25 minutes long, on average.
Best of all, there’s no approval process, so you can get started right away.
It’s one of the best places for those who are just starting out because there aren’t a lot of requirements and it’s really easy to put out a simple course just by uploading a single lesson.
Here’s the link:
Another course marketplace that I really like is Teachable.
Teachable provides you with the ability to fully brand your course, including creating and customizing a complete online school using their easy website building tool.
You are charged a 5-10% commission fee per sale unless you choose to upgrade to a paid membership plan but when just starting out I recommend testing out the free plan to get a feel for how things work, and then upgrading later.
You can find out more information here:
https://teachable.com/pricing/comparison
Now you have a platform to sell your course, you need to ensure that there is a market for it…
“Validating” your market simply means taking steps to ensure that the market is there and that there are people likely to pay for a course on your chosen topic.
It’s clear to see why validating your market is so important, right, and this is important for any business venture, including internet marketing?
You don’t want to spend a lot of time working on a course that no one is willing to pay for.
Here’s how to validate your topic:
Then, run a test by entering these questions into places like:
Google.com
Why not start with the major search engine? You’ll be able to quickly spot the number of blog posts that address these questions as well as uncover social media accounts, and websites that cover this topic.
Pay attention to all of the following:
Are there any actual courses already available?
Try adding “course,” “lessons,” and “training” to your search terms in order to come up with relevant results.
Are there relevant ads on the page?
If so, chances are it’s a profitable niche market and one worth taking a closer look at.
Do videos appear on the first page?
If you’re finding lots of links to YouTube videos after running your search, it’s a good sign that the topic is in-demand.
Amazon.com
Run your searches through Amazon and pay attention to the number of books available on the topic.
Take things a step further by reading reviews left by customers, as well as the overall ranking of the top 50 books.
Udemy.com
Udemy is one of the leading marketplaces online when it comes to selling courses, but it’s also a goldmine of information when researching niche markets and possible digital products.
In fact, Udemy is one of the easiest ways to not only evaluate the profitability of any course topic you’re interested in, but you’ll be able to instantly come up with a complete outline in a matter of minutes.
Quora.com
Question and answer websites like Quora make it easy to conduct niche research and get a feel for what your market is most interested in. Browse for trending questions and open discussions, paying close attention to the thought leaders who commonly provide answers.
I hope this has helped you come up with a few ways to validate your topic.
Next, let’s look at a powerful way to deliver your course…
Have you ever seen a live session in action?
One of the most powerful ways to deliver your course related content is with live session training.
This lets you schedule meetings with all of your students which obviously will increase engagement and get people excited about your information.
Live sessions have huge impact on the overall value of your course and can really help you stand out in competitive markets.
The more you engage your audience – the more popular your course will be.
Make sense?
Here’s a great marketplaces where you can create a course designed around live sessions:
WizIQ: https://www.wiziq.com/
WizIQ has been around for more than 10 years and continues to thrive as a centralized community for live classes and popular courses.
WizIQ supports all file formats, so you can create a course that offers a variety of content ranging from video to audio, as well as include quizzes, surveys and tests that serve as auxiliary components.
Finally, let’s look at some ways to ensure your course is profitable from the very beginning…
I’ll leave you with a few last-minute tips and strategies to help you launch your course and maximize your income.
These 3 or 4 tips can really make a difference to the profitability of your online courses so please consider them carefully.
The four main content formats you typically see in online courses include: video, audio, text and digital downloads (like PDF’s, workbooks, spreadsheets, etc.)
For that reason, you should always include at least a few video based modules in your course.
Successful courses always have a targeted, clear title that appeals to the majority of their market.
It tells your prospect what the course is about and gets them excited about the possibility of earning 6-figures a year.
Don’t stick a price tag on your course without doing research. You want to make sure that you’re focusing on goal-oriented pricing.
You want to set a reasonable price without under valuing your content.
You also need to keep your personal goals in mind, such as:
And finally,
A course is a natural steppingstone to upsell from so keep this in mind when creating and pricing your course.
A course lets your leads get to know you!
I’ll leave you with a course checklist that will help you create a profitable course that will stand out to your audience.
Step 1: Validate your topic idea
Make sure you’ve researched your market in order to verify overall demand and give your course the best chance at success.
Step 2: Create your Course Outline
Building a course from scratch can take time but if you work with an outline you’ll have a strong foundation for your training product. It will also help ensure you stay focused while covering the most important steps needed for your students to be successful.
Step 3: Create your Course Content
Try to provide a variety of formats, and always include at least one video module in your training program.
Step 4: Give your course a sexy title
Come up with a powerful, attention-grabbing title that will stand out in the market while giving students a clear idea as to what your course is about.
Step 5: Launch your course!
Chances are you’ll sell access without doing any off-site marketing of your own, but if you really want to maximize your income you should do your best to connect with your audience and make them aware of your training program.
Spread your marketing message via social media, create a Facebook group only for students, create a lead page that offers a free incentive for those who subscribe to your list and always be on the lookout for new ways to increase visibility.
If you want to know more about creating a profitable online course, check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
Are you a social marketer? One thing that is hard to do sometimes is to interpret what actions mean on social media. The fact is, not all actions even matter. It’s important to know what matters and what doesn’t and this may vary between the various social media platforms.
* Leads – How many new leads did you get from the action you performed? If you set up a freebie guide and marketed that, how many people signed up and downloaded it? If people downloaded a freebie, how many who did that took further action?
* Engagement – When you make a post, how many people respond in some way to the engagement? What was the point of the engagement? Did the audience do what you thought they’d do?
* Reach – How many people shared your post? How far did the post reach, meaning how many people laid eyes on it and shared it? If a lot of people shared it, you might consider adding more content like that.
* Impressions – When you boost a post on Facebook, how many impressions did it make versus how many people saw it, shared it, and engaged with it? What did they do afterwards?
* Funnels – With your analytics software you can set up a means to testing out your funnels to find out which type of funnel works best. This can help you identify holes in your plans to reach your goals.
* Unique Visits – It’s important to know how many unique visits you get each day, where they came from, and what they did after they got there. Did they convert? Did they sign up for anything? Did they download something? Did they search your site?
* Repeat Visits – Having a lot of repeat visitors is a sign of a healthy site with a lot of content for the audience to read and look at. What is the percentage of repeat visitors versus new traffic? If it’s low, what can you change? Are you targeting your audience correctly?
* Bounces – Are people coming to your website and then leaving before doing anything? If this rate is high, then that means something is wrong. Find out where the links are coming from and try to determine if the content is badly targeted or not.
* Exits – How and what page are people using to exit your website, and if they came from social media where did they come from? Can you pinpoint what is making them leave? What you can do to encourage them to stay or to convert them in some way, for example by using an exit pop-under?
* Time on Site – How long are your visitors staying on your page and what exactly are they doing while they are there? What do they read the most? What do they watch the most? What exactly are they doing that keeps them on the social media site? If they’re only there a short time, what did they do?
* Growth – How fast are the visitors to your social media page/platform improving each month? Is it going up or down? What actions affect growth? How can you do more of those things to keep growing your website and your influence?
* Response – When you create a post, how long does it take your audience to respond and what type of responses do you get? Are they commenting, liking, sharing, retweeting and so forth?
* Inbound Links – How many others are sharing your social networks and causing people to link to your social media networks? Who is sharing your platform more and why?
You may be tracking email sign-ups, clicks or sales. It’s up to you what a conversion means and if your social networking is deemed successful or not.
The more you can understand your competition, the better business you’re going to have. You can learn so much from them – especially if they’ve been around longer than you have.
* Google Alerts – This is an excellent, free service. Sign in and choose keywords, names, and more to search for. Then, set up how often you want to receive the alerts in your email inbox. You can scan each email to find information about your competition that you can use in your own business.
Link – https://www.google.com/alerts
* Social Mention – Use this cloud-based search engine to search websites, blogs and more for mentions about your competition. Then you can go take a look at what they’re doing. Identify the gaps in their offerings and you can outshine your competition in no time.
Link – http://socialmention.com/
* Website Grader – While it does ask for your website and not your competition’s (and your email address), you can still use it to check the health of someone else’s website. The information you will receive is page size, page speed, redirects and more, including how many requests for the site have been made. It also tells you how they’re doing on SEO and more.
Link – https://website.grader.com/
* Link-Assistant.com – Using this downloadable software you can study keywords of your competitor’s site so that you will know what keywords they’re using. You can then use them on your own website to nab their traffic.
Link – http://www.link-assistant.com/
* SocialAdNinja – You can use this software to copy and make your competitor’s ads your own. Of course, you don’t copy them exactly, as you are selling your own products, but this will help you duplicate the most successful ads online.
Link – http://www.socialadninja.com/
* KeywordSpy – This software is an amazing way to profit from your competition’s hard work and research. You can find out what keywords they’re using, what they’re spending for AdWords, their ROI estimate, and much more.
Link – http://www.keywordspy.com/
* Open Site Explorer by MOZ – You can get a lot of information about your competition from this cloud-based option. You can get information about the links that come into the site and the anchor text used, and you can even compare five sites. What’s more, it’s free when you sign up.
Link – https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/
While social media marketing is powerful, it is important to try to get them off these platforms and onto an email list that you own. If you want to know more about growing and nurturing an email list the right way, check out the featured resource below for a free Simple List Building report; download, read it and take action 😊
If you want to increase your sales and expand your outreach, you need to position yourself as an authority in your market.
An authority can:
The first step in your journey to positioning yourself as an authority in your niche is to ask yourself two important questions:
Seems like two rather easy questions, right?
Because ultimately, all people are about is “what is in it for them?”
They need to know how you plan to help them, what you bring to the table and how you will solve their problems.
Authority marketing is about positioning your business in a way that you become the logical choice when someone is making the decision who to turn to for help, advice, products or services.
Your goal is to become the go-to person in your niche, or at the very least, one of the first names that come to mind when someone thinks about who to turn to for help with specific topics.
Note that I didn’t say “specific markets or niches”, I said topic.
That’s because it’s always best to position yourself so that people identify you as an authority on a very specific topic or category rather than the market as a whole.
For example, rather than trying to establish yourself as the authority of all things related to blogging, positioning yourself as someone who is known for teaching people how to drive traffic to blogs, allows you to connect to a specific audience.
This will make your marketing campaigns far more effective and targeted than when casting a wider net.
Trust me, it’ll cut down on a lot of research, trial and error and testing as well because you’ll be able to spend the majority of your time researching that one specific segment of a market and learning everything you need to know about it.
So, begin by taking some time to decide what area of your niche you’ll venture into. Then you’ll be able to study that segment of the market thoroughly, create a plan of action and execute quickly.
Sounds obvious, right?
You need to know WHO you your audience really is and HOW you can help them.
In fact, knowing your audience is one of the most important things you can do when trying to establish yourself as an authority in your market.
This goes beyond just creating a quick overview of your average customer. Instead, spend time on the same websites, in the same circles and on the same platforms that they do.
Always put yourself in your customers’ shoes. They don’t care about your personal goals – they care only about themselves and their needs – and above all else, how you will help them solve a problem.
Read that again: you’re the only one who truly cares about your business growth. Everyone else just cares about how your business can personally help them.
This means that your focus should always be on identifying key areas in your market where people are struggling.
Then you can use that information in many different areas of your business, such as: coming up with customized products and services that fill that need, developing a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) that offers a promise to solve that problem and creating marketing campaigns that trigger your audience into taking action.
Thorough market research is the key to success when it comes to gaining the advantage of becoming an authority.
Those who overlook the importance of truly understanding their audience even before they create a business plan or launch a marketing campaign will quickly discover just how difficult it is to gain traction.
In fact, without knowing your audience, you’re venturing into a market blindfolded with little chance of success.
On the flip side, putting time and effort into researching your market and connecting with your core audience early on, will make all the difference in your ability to create in-demand products and services that are a no-brainer for your customer base.
You’ll be able to stand out from the crowd, position yourself as an expert and easily convince people to give your brand and business a chance.
And your marketing campaigns will be far more successful and ultimately, cost you less in terms of time spent tweaking and split-testing campaigns. Because you’ll know what makes people tick.
Are your ads mainly geared towards highlighting features rather than the benefits?
Are your campaigns structured in a way that personally connects with your core audience and goes to work at solidifying your brand?
Do they help position you as an expert?
When it comes to the psychology behind successful brand building and authority positioning, it often hinges on your ability to demonstrate empathy.
The more you do this, the easier it will be to resonate with your audience and connect with your customer base. You’ll come off as more personable, approachable and as someone who truly has their best interests at heart.
There are 3 basic types of empathy: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate.
Cognitive empathy is also known as perspective-taking. It’s the ability to think the way someone else thinks, to imagine you’re them and see how they’d react to something.
It’s a useful skill, especially in marketing, but not exactly what you imagine true empathy should be. Empathy should have an emotional component if it’s going to go the distance.
Emotional empathy is when you inject emotional triggers into your campaigns, ads, sales copy and general content.
How do your customers feel when they look at your ads or read your content? What emotions do you stimulate with your communications, campaigns, emails?
Emotional empathy allows you to feel what others do, like when you hear someone laughing and you smile without knowing exactly what they’re laughing at.
It’s contagious. And when you learn to inject this kind of emotion into your overall brand, your ability to connect with your audience will become one of your super powers. J
Finally, compassionate empathy is the ability to identify someone’s emotion and act on that with a solution.
In this way, you’ll create something that not only takes their feelings into account, but gives them a logical solution to that emotion.
Example: Someone is stressed out because they’re unable to pay their monthly bills. You understand their concerns, what keeps them up at night and act on that with a solution: a business opportunity that will help them gain financial freedom and eliminate stress.
Stress is the emotion you identify and your business positions itself in such a way as to become the solution to eliminating or addressing that emotion.
And it doesn’t have to be a negative emotion either. Someone could feel elated that they have discovered that blogging is a great way to connect with people and help them but they need to know how to create that blog, launch that blog and grow that blog.
All of this comes down to knowing your market so you can position yourself as the expert and authority they are looking for.
They’ll feel they need you, that you’re the solution to their problems and that you truly understand how they are feeling and what they need most.
That is how you’ll stand out in your market 🙂
If you want to know more about leveraging the power of authority marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free report that expands on this post; download, read and take action 🙂
It’s common to find several existing misconceptions about something that people do not properly understand either because of knowledge gap or ignorance. As a business owner, it is important that you debunk these misconceptions so that you make an informed business decision.
Whether you are running a company with huge turnovers or trying to get a startup off the ground, affiliate marketing can be a very effective method of enhancing your brand awareness and increasing the amount of sales.
You can achieve so much while avoiding the usual hustles associated with marketing campaigns. These are some of the misconceptions about affiliate marketing that you need to correct as an entrepreneur or as someone that is interested in earning money off of it.
This is actually not true at all. Some people imagine that immediately you set up the system, customers will start rolling in as the revenue grows. Affiliate systems require a lot of work and dedication to succeed.
It will eventually pick up but through time and effort.
Some companies cannot even dare attempt to use affiliate programs because they assume that only businesses that operate in popular sectors can thrive with it.
You just need to find the right team that actually understands the business and industry and can help you realize your goals and objectives.
Google made changes to its algorithms for SEO and somehow made link building outdated.
That may discourage affiliate systems that heavily relied on the old methods to increase awareness.
However, there are still several ways to make use of search engine optimization to enhance brand awareness. Affiliate marketing is also very much relevant to Google because it has provided alternative resources to users.
Never compromise quality over quantity. Getting your links on several sites does not automatically mean that you’ll get more conversions.
Find a small but dedicated number of affiliates that will do a proper job and generate higher sales numbers.
Even though research has shown that affiliate marketing is not easy, you can really use it your advantage once you understand the basics. You just need to come up with a proper strategy and ensure that it is implemented well.
The internet is filed with people trying to get rich within a very short time. That said, there are also several users on the internet who wake up on a daily basis to take advantage of those looking to make easy money by promising them things that are nearly impossible to deliver on.
Affiliate marketing has presented a new frontier for internet scammers to prey on the unsuspecting public. How then can you spot these scams and avoid the stress of losing your money to people who only want to take advantage of you?
Maybe you have come across those affiliate programs on the internet that ask you to pay some joining fee. They conveniently ask you to do so using your credit card.
Do not pay any fee to join an affiliate program because a genuine merchant will never ask you for cash to be part of the system. Your credit card information may be stolen and none of the promises made to you by the scammers will be delivered.
Some merchants will try to show you how you can be a millionaire within a few days. If that were the case then they’d be relaxing somewhere on a beach enjoying their wealth instead of convincing people to join their programs on the internet.
These scammers will purport to show you successful affiliates who have made it big by participating in their programs. They will display figures and statistics to try and convince you that their claims are true.
One thing is for sure, if those assertions were true, the merchant wouldn’t even need to talk about his program because information travels fast and people would be flocking to it.
Knowledge is power and if you are armed with information, nobody can take advantage of you. Most people get scammed on the internet because the fraudsters prey on their ignorance.
Many people also just hop onto search engines without any idea of what they are looking for. Arm yourself with knowledge and use it as a weapon against internet scammers.
Anyone can make a career out of affiliate marketing but not everyone who attempts to succeeds. You should be ready to work hard and choose those programs that are genuine and that will provide you with an opportunity to grow.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
A series is a good way to keep people tuning back in for more. It works the same way on television – you tune in weekly to see what happens next after you’ve seen a cliffhanger or an upcoming episode snippet.
But what can you do a series on for your blog?
Then you can break down each step of your implementation process over the next several days. If it’s a text product, do a chapter a day. If it’s a video product, do a video a day.
Always link to the previous and subsequent blog posts so that a new visitor who happens to land on your blog in the middle of it can find their way back to the beginning.
Step-by-step tutorials also make a great series for you to blog about. For example, let’s say someone wanted to know how to start a container garden. You could go through a different topic each day, such as:
Q&A sessions with your audience work well for a series, too. Invite your subscribers to ask any questions they have – you can even schedule certain days to be “Mailbox” days where you answer audience questions.
If you’re not doing a series but posting individual blog posts, there’s a whole host of options for you! Make a list of these and try to mix it up on your blog so that you’re not using the same old approach on a continual basis.
Top tip lists make great blog posts. These are tips you gather and then blog about, explaining each one. For example: 7 Ways to Fall Asleep Faster, 6 Ways to Say No to Sweets When You’re on a Diet, the Top 3 Tips to Help You Save Money at the Grocery Store, etc.
Reviews were mentioned in the last section as far as series that you can do. But they can also be done for individual blog posts. You don’t have to draw it out if it doesn’t call for it – or if it’s for a tangible item that you want to go over.
Rants about a topic can generate a buzz for your blog. You don’t want to be nothing more than a person who rants all of the time, but if you find something in your niche that needs to be exposed or discussed, don’t be afraid to talk about it!
Curated content is something that everyone is buzzing about in the blog world. You can use short snippets where you quote or reference something from a magazine, news site, book or other blog and launch a discussion about it on your blog.
Then you add your own commentary about it. For example, you might be writing a blog post about hot flashes – and the Mayo Clinic has an article about it. You can take a quote from that, link back to the full article, and discuss their findings.
Think of it like a dinner party where you say, “Oh did you hear about …” and then you add your own opinions, insights, and even disagreements about the subject matter.
Categorized posts will help you develop content for your blog. Some people map out the categories for their blog as they go. But if you have categories ahead of time, it can help you develop content just for that purpose.
For example, if you ran a health blog, you could do a post on health tips for boys, girls, teens, men, women and seniors. Then you can go through your editorial calendar and say, “I haven’t done anything on senior health this week, so I’ll do that today!”
Breaking news is always beneficial when blogging. Usually, this will help you see a spike in traffic because it’s new and there won’t be as many posts about it as there will be later.
Set up a Google Alert so that you get notified when news happens about certain topics. But also go out and search Google and specific news sites for breaking topics yourself.
PLR (private label rights) can give you great ideas. You can buy PLR for about $1 per page – and just rewrite it or use it as springboard content to give you an idea of what to blog about for that day!
Guest bloggers will often seek you out once your blog becomes a traffic hub for a particular niche. You won’t want to accept everyone who requests a spot on your blog.
But you may want to use a guest blogger from time to time, as long as they continue with the purpose and direction of your own blog. You can approach people or post blog topic jobs – sometimes you’ll pay for the post and sometimes the blogger will be happy with a link back to their own site.
Or, you can find new bloggers who are eager to get some experience under their belts. Either way, make sure the piece is suitable for your audience and don’t let the topic veer off course.
If you really want to know more about the power of blogging, you can take a look at the Rapid Blogging Blueprint training course or if you just want a few pointers for now you can grab the featured resource below for a free blogging report; download, read it and take action 🙂
