196 – Learn and earn with online courses: Tom talks Online Courses

Episode 196 – Online Courses
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 196 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about creating and selling online courses. Now, this is way easier than people make it out to be. I'll show you that in this episode. And I'll also have a little bit on how to sell your course. Now, the same techniques apply to sell anything online. So you can check my other episodes if we go deeper into sales techniques. But I'll give you a little bit during this episode and I'll also throw in a few numbers from just one of my online courses to wet your whistle a little bit about how lucrative simple courses can be. Now Episode 195 this is 196, episode 195 was Noble Gibbens, and I wish more parents would treat their kids like this fantastic veteran entrepreneur. So go back and listen to that episode if you missed it. Our podcast app's in the app store, you can do lots of cool stuff. Conveniently right from your mobile device and save all your favorite episodes and all that stuff. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/app. Now, as the thank you for listening, make sure you grab a copy of our e-book, How to Automate Your Business. And just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes. All right. So that allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and forty thousand customers without pulling my hair out. And we sell this book for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free as my thanks for listening. And while you're on the download page, I got another thing that you're going to want to download, especially for this episode, because it has to do with audio. In fact, it's a it's a white paper on how I create quality podcasts. So you want to download that because some of your online course will be audio and you want to get good quality because you don't want to sound like an idiot. So check all that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Now our sponsor's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia Distance Learning School, which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own business or both. And I've been living this lifestyle since the commercial internet started in around nineteen ninety four so that's twenty five years, more than twenty five years now. And it's the best business I've ever been in. It's the lowest risk, highest return. And you can learn how to do it. And if especially if you're thinking about higher education, why go waste four years at college when you could instead of owing hundreds of thousands, you could make hundreds of that. So check out the school at IMTCVA.org. And we have scholarships for military spouses. Any kind of military, active duty or veteran. Their families, also first responders and law enforcement. We got big scholarships for them. So check it out at IMTCVA.org.

[00:03:48] All right. Let's get to the main event. This is creating online courses. Now, here's some things to do before you start. You got to choose a topic. And I've harped on keyword research like crazy since the first episode of this. And we're in episode one hundred ninety six now. So in both episodes, one hundred and thirty, which is voice search and Episode 1 is all about keywords. So you want to do your keyword research and and see if if there's a demand for what you're thinking about doing. And also check out are there other courses selling on this subject? Now if there isn't, there's one of two things going on.

[00:04:32] You either just hit the lottery, OK, because nobody else is doing it. And you'll make a fortune and sell all of them. But it's more likely that nobody could make any money with this topic, and that's why there's no online courses on it.

[00:04:46] So. So if there's lots of courses on it, that means there's a market. And so it's a good chance that you'll be able to make money on it. Now, I'm telling you, making a how to topic and that kind of seems obvious if it's a course on something that you're going to learn how to do something because how to stuff just sells like crazy. People want to learn how to do this. And and one of the things about online courses that one of the benefits, people aren't tied into long term payments like they might be on a membership site. And and I'm not ragging on membership sites because I love membership sites, but some people just don't want that monthly payment coming in. So doesn't mean there's anything wrong with membership sites because some people don't mind the monthly payment. But if you only have a membership site or you only have an online course, you're missing the other people that the the people that want an online course want the information on a specific topic now and are willing to pay for it. The people that don't mind being involved in a community and over time getting the stuff dripped to them. That's a different group of people. Why not have both? There's no reason not to. So I'm not ragging on membership sites, but one of the things about online courses is you can get somebody buy it right now. Another thing I really want to impress on on is that you do not have to be an expert to sell a course. Now, the more of an expert you are, it does make it easier to promote. But you do not have to be an expert with 20 years of experience to sell a course. That does not mean also that that I want you all you scammers out there to slap something together that's not current or it's full of B.S. and you're just making money because people don't know any better. That means is that you have heavily researched your topic and put together a how to course based on lots of credible information. You don't have to be 20 years doing it. But the more you do it, the more intricate you can make the course because you've got personal experience involved. But I've sold stuff that I'm not great at myself, but I know that it works. I've researched it heavily. I've checked with other people to make sure it works and get tips from them. And then I put together a course. All right. There's nothing wrong with that as long as it's quality information that's current.

[00:07:21] All right. Outline your course and I'm talking. This is before you start the thing and I'm going to talk about a really easy way to do this later. But I want you to start thinking whether you have enough information or you can research enough and there's enough substance for your course. I mean, if it's a really short course, you could still sell it. But it just would be cheaper. That's all.

[00:07:46] The next topic is picking a learning platform. Now what's a learning platform. Well, a learning platform is how the courses delivered. You know, if it's video or audio, multimedia, how they go through the course, I'm going to get into this a little deeper here shortly. But but that's the word platform's just a fancy word for how it's delivered.

[00:08:10] Now, if you choose your learning platform first, you can be building your course in the learning platform as you go. And before I rattle off a bunch of them and it's not going to be a comprehensive list because they're coming out all the time. I will tell you, I have never used any of them. I use simple a simple WordPress site with wishlist member and a couple other plugins to automate the whole thing and that's it. All the ones below, we'll have monthly fees ranging from a little bit more than my method, which is kind of a one time fee or a very tiny like monthly or yearly fee to make it work. To a lot more I mean, some of them are four hundred ninety nine dollars a month. Crazy. So here's some udemy and we'll have these. So I don't have to spell em all for you. Will have them in the show notes. teachable. Thinkific, hodia. Ruzuku. Learn worlds, learn dash wizIQ, zippy courses and also put a link in there to a whole list of somebody that talks about the pros and cons of each one. But now it's up to you to pick one that makes sense for you, and it's in your budget range.

[00:09:38] Now one of the words you'll see LMS a lot of times that stands for learning management system. So if you hear me say LMS, that's what I'm talking about. They have all kinds of different features in these things. Like students can take notes. They can perform exercises. They can complete exams to test their knowledge. And you don't have to build a Web site for this. And they I mean, like I said, this is what you pay for with these things as opposed to, you know, making your own site. The core software is, you know, you can upload your stuff to it easily. Usually the you can edit the look and feel of the classes. I said it just makes it a little bit easier to do the things you could do much cheaper with WordPress and a couple of plugins. Some of them have marketing features, they have course completion certificates and things like that. And the question you have to answer is, is will you use all these features and are they worth the money? I personally have bought tons of online courses and never once if I cared about a certificate. Now the graduates of my actual licensed school, it's a certificate school. It makes sense for me to be able to generate certificates for them. All right. So anyway, you got to pick a place that they have this or either do it yourself with WordPress.

[00:11:06] All right. Developing your course. So let's get back to that thing about outlining your course. This is a super duper trick, especially if you've chosen a topic that there is a lot of stuff for sale on this topic. That's my pizza shop theory. There's a big demand for pizza in the world if you do a good job at making pizza. You get your fair share of the business. If somebody else is already out there, they've thought a lot of this stuff out for you already. So this is my Amazon look in trick. So if you got Amazon.com and search for your topic books, come up on your topic. And there's a little thing above the icon for the book that says look in when you click on the book cover and you can look at the first part of the book or sometimes they have excerpts throughout the book. But you always get to see the table of contents. All right. There you do this for three or four books. You'll have a massive outline of the types of topics that need discussed for that book. And in fact, I usually buy some of them because, you know, nobody's invented the wheel. All right. So so you can look at read these other books. You can reference them in your in your course if you want. Great. You can put an affiliate link to the to the book you bought to make your money back from that book. So doing your research, a lot of people have done it for. So that's an easy way to get your outline is to look at table of contents is through the look in function of Amazon. Now, the main thing is that when you make a course, that things are in logical order. I mean, I've had people tell me they thought I majored in instructional design. So this is no, I majored in coming from a small town where we had common sense and we simply put things in proper order. Now, multimedia is best. Now this means you want stuff in different formats. Now my copywriting 901 course has video, PDF, audio plus tons of samples of everything I talk about in the course. And now you can have activities or even games. Now, gamification is a big thing. There are many good gamification techniques to get people engaged with your content to make sure they consume it. Now that's another issue. See if they don't use or what it's called, consume your content after they bought it. They probably won't buy anything else from you. So do whatever you can to get them involved in your training. Now, I'll talk a little bit more about gamification later. But I think the thing is episode 208 coming up will cover more in-depth gamification.

[00:14:01] Now, the next topic is drip or no drip. Drip means that people buy something and then they get a little piece of it. Every so often as they go. And that can make sense sometimes. And people can be okay with that sometimes. I particularly don't like that. I want to get everything all at once. And I want to go through it because I'm gung ho. Some people do the drip method because they're afraid they won't get paid if they have a market that's a little sleazy and refunds like crazy. Then they might want to only give them a little bit at a time as as they go. But for most professional markets, I particularly like it. Just give them everything and they may play it, or I'll talk about financing it for them. But that's a different story. But DRIP means that you're going to only give them a little bit at a time instead of the whole enchilada. All right, so in courses, you can have homework and call to action and you can still earn extra money from affiliate stuff or other products promoted in the course. Now, listen to this. I had a free E course that in the first week sold $7000 worth of stuff. Now. And I'm going to do a separate episode on ecourses maybe in a month or so. I think it's episode two hundred five, but. One thing you can do is make a free course and make your revenue from affiliate links or things promoted in the course, so that's a very common way and you can get a lot more people involved knowing you and that are going to grab a free course rather than a paid course, and then you get him excited in the course to buy other stuff.

[00:15:50] Now, another feature you can have in your course is a comment area, which is a place where people can talk about how they like the course or they can ask questions and you come in and answer them. Another thing you can do, either besides that or in addition to that, is make a corresponding facebook group just for people that bought the course so they can interact and engage and I have heard of some groups shutting themselves down, and rightfully so because of all the negative comments about their poor service and terrible course. That was a rip off. So. So you don't want to be that person. Another thing to think about is how long as each module. Now the trend now is shorter. I know myself if if I saw a 30 minute video. I wouldn't even start it in a lot of times because I'm busy. However, if I saw 10 3 minute videos, I would start it. And if it was good, I'd get sucked in watching for 30 minutes. I'd be in little chunks. So I would say the trend now is shorter, my copyrighting 901 course has some pretty long modules in it. But that but that was created a few years back. But I would say nowadays keep a much shorter. So now you got to decide on the best way to deliver your content. Now you you need to be aware of the different principles of adult learning. Some people want to see stuff. Some people want to listen. Some people want to read. Some people want to touch them. Be one activities to do so. So you got to do all of them. There's what I say, because you don't want to cut people out. You might be really great at making video and all you do is video while you're cutting out the people that just can't sit down and watch videos they've got are on the run and they can only do it while they're driving on the way to work or whatever.

[00:17:51] So having multimedia will mean you will sell more. It can be the same content is put out in different formats. Yeah. Think about what type of visuals you'll have. Are you going to have a community learning area in the software? Or maybe like I said, a Facebook group and you need them have a balance of visual audio and practical stuff so that everyone is engaged and they can really get a good learning experience because then they'll buy more stuff from you in the future. Now let's get a talk about getting your course material together. So let's say you're going to start at video. What you're going to create videos. You have some options you can setup where you are being videoed. Maybe you need to demonstrate how to do something. So you would set up a demonstration set where the camera could see you and your hands doing the demonstration. And in this case, you are in the shot. And by the way, I have in-person video training available and you can check it out at screwthecommute.com/videoweekend. Now, you don't even have to be seen at all to put together a great course on video.

[00:19:05] I'm pretty sure in my copywriting 901 course, if I think I'm trying to think I'm usually only using screen capture video, I don't think I'm seen at all in this extensive course. So what I'm doing is I'm showing you examples of copyrighting while I'm narrating the video. Now you can have all the bad hair days you want with that. Now I happen to use camtasia as kind of the gold standard gold standard for screen capture stuff. I think their screen flow and there's some cheaper ones. But but the camtasia is the gold standard. Some people use animated video and they just give their info to an animator. They can still use their own voice to narrate and speaking of narration. You can always hire someone else to narrate for you if you don't want to do it. I've found really great people on fiveer.com to do commercials for me, but for my training I want to be the voice on there because I'm the one that can think of things at the last second to throw in that maybe I forgot to put in the script or whatever. And I want them to connect with me personally.

[00:20:13] All right. For audio recordings, you can simply take the audio track off your videos. Now, the only downside to that is that people may get lost while listening because they can't see what was on the video. It is very easy if you want to instantly just take the audio, track off the video. Now, if you want to create audio content from scratch, you need two things audio recording software and a decent microphone. Now, if you're on a Mac, you already have great recording software in GarageBand. And if you're on a P.C., you can download audacity for free. I happened to use a little fancier software that's 20 bucks a month called Adobe Audition. Now, if you downloaded the freebie that I mentioned earlier about the automation book and the other surprise gift on the download page, that's about podcasting and it's going to tell you plenty about creating great audio. That's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Now, in your audio stuff, you probably want to let them either listen online or download and take it with them. So that's and that's going to be in an MP 3 format as the most common format. And when I say you need a microphone and recording software, you can record stuff right on your phone. No problem. It's just probably not going to be as high as quality because the little tiny microphone and you know, you're out and about and you're grabbing the phone your hands might be making noise on the phone. So it's not as good as sitting somewhere with a nice microphone in a quiet area and doing your recording like I'm doing right now.

[00:21:59] Written material. I create everything in Microsoft Word. But yeah, you can use any word processor and then convert it to PDF. Now gamification. Now this is something I'm going to cover in episode 208, which talks about all the ways you can get people engaged with your content. And what I want you to know is I'm not talking about mindless games like Candy Crush, although that could be something that you might want to do for certain situations, but you'll be amazed at the ways you can get people really involved with your content. So watch for episode 208 coming out later.

[00:22:35] All right. Before I tell you how to sell these things. I'm down on my hands and knees begging you to check out a particular webinar or pass it on to someone who could use it. It has to do with higher education. If you're considering getting retrained because you hate what you're doing or you want a better life for yourself and your family or maybe have kids or nephews or nieces or even neighbors who are wondering if they should burn up hundreds of thousands of bucks and then end up broke with mountains of debt and no marketable skills from going to regular college. I suggest you watch this webinar. You really have nothing to lose and everything to gain from taken. I don't know, maybe 90 minutes. All right. It's about an hour and a half. It's like sitting down with a Netflix thing and visiting screwthecommute.com and click on webinars. Now you can download the audio so you can take it with you on the road. You won't see the visuals of the books and things like that that I show you. But you can certainly get the info. But be prepared to be mad when you see it because of what colleges are doing to our young people. They're running the debt up. They're running the fees up. The the tuition are going crazy and they're faking the grade point averages. Listen to this. They're inflating grade point averages to make it appear that the young people are doing better. And then the testing is showing they're dumber. Right. And and they did studies that showed that like the average college student is spending eight hours total per week on class prep and going to class the rest of the time is eating, shopping and partying. I don't know if I'd want to mortgage my house to pay for that crap. So, yeah, I'm trying to get you to do my vocational school, the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, because not only I want you to do it, but you're going to get something good out of it. You're going to get an education that's in high demand and inexpensively and quickly. See because you have to figure in the loss of income cost over a four year college. If it's in the hundreds of thousands, just that alone, not including the books that are overpriced and outdated. I've just all this stuff is bad about watch the darn webinar at screwthecommute.com and then click on webinars.

[00:24:58] All right. Let's get back to how to sell your course. The main thing is you got to create really compelling and magnetic learning outcomes. This is where people look at your course and they say, well, what am I going to get out of this course? You have to make people want the benefits of having your course. And this is done with copywriting. Now you're going to hear me harp on copywriting all the time. That's why I developed my own course on copywriting, because you can create the best course in the world on your topic. But if you can't make people want to buy it with good copywriting, then you won't make any money and you won't help anyone with your course. And it's going to gather electron dust. I just make that up. All right. So go by my darn course and spend the month improving all your copy. And this is going to infiltrate everything you do, your videos, you shoot blog postings, you write, you're going to use subtle techniques. I'm not talking be obnoxious here, subtle techniques to move people to action. This has made me a fortune over many, many, many years. And guess what? If you like writing, you can do this for others that are too dumb or lazy to learn this critical skill. This is the number one skill in my entire 42 and a now a half years of formal business and really since I was 10 years old, writing flyers and put them door to door. So copyrighting901.com go by that course.

[00:26:33] All right. Now some other things you can do, like I said, there's other episodes on sales techniques and everything, but I might give you some here that are specific to courses and I'll give you some numbers that have something to do with the course I sold. So you see, wow, this can be a lot of money. So one thing you do is let them sample your course. So you give them a little piece of it and then to show them what it's like and how valuable it is and then you sell them the rest of it. Now I happen to sell my course, mostly my copywriting course anyway, mostly by a free webinar. So that in essence is a massive sample of what they learn. So I'll put a link in the show notes to the replay of that webinar so you can see how I do it. There's different angles you can use on webinars like we've identified 30 to 35 or so elements that can go into a sales letter. So one angle would be to give you a little bit on each element. But I chose the angle where I picked five really important elements and went way deep on this webinar, so just by those five elements, if you use them, you're going to improve your copywriting like crazy. But there's twenty five more you really should know about. So that's how I sell the course through that webinar. That's the angle I took was go deep on part of it and then sell you the rest or you can give them a little touch on each one and then sell them the whole thing to go deep on all. All right. So that's just different angles on webinar selling. Now, another thing I do is on the home page and you want to go over look at this at copywriting901.com. I lay out all the stuff that's in the course. All the modules are right down the right hand side of the page. But if you click on them. So you see like, wow, there's a lot of stuff here. And people are charging five and 10 grand for stuff is not as good as this. But you can see all the the modules that are in the course and all the freebies and all the bonuses there. But as soon as you click on them, it says, hey, oh, this is only for members and takes you to where you can buy the course. So you want to do that, show them the whole course and say, wow. But every time they click because they want to see something, they can't until they buy the course.

[00:28:57] So throw in bonuses and one of the bonuses I throw in that everybody tells me I'm crazy except I'm the one raking in the money is consultations. Nobody will talk to anybody anymore. They want to sell you everything. They want the most money with the least value that they give you. So I put in consultations almost always with my products. And here's the thing, folks. Couple things. And this is not my fault. It's just I'm using it to my advantage. If you offer a consultation, only a small percentage of people will take advantage of them. I mean, if I had to give all the consultations I owe, I'd have to hideout in Mexico. OK. But if somebody calls, I give them the consultation. And here's the thing. The people that actually call for their consultations are the most gung ho people, the most going to get the most success. Going to brag about you to all their friends and colleagues and going to buy more stuff from you because they believe in you and they made a connection with you. So consultations. I think you're you know, they say I'm crazy for giving them. I think you're crazy if you don't. How do you like that.

[00:30:10] All right. Now, another thing and this one, I'll give you some numbers. Finance options. So if you have a course for X amount of dollars, give them a finance option. Now here's my WordPress E course and we'll put a link to that. This is allows you to make world class Web sites like for I mean, literally, you could do it for about 20 bucks, but it's going to be more realistically if you really want something really nice. A hundred one hundred fifty or so. But you can't even talk to a web designer, a piece of garbage web designer, which most of them are for. Fifteen hundred. Two thousand. And way and way above that say so. This course is ninety seven bucks. I sell it through webinar. I give a finance option at the end. Now, let me give you some numbers here. So I think overall we sold about 700 of these, OK, at ninety seven bucks. One hundred and eighty of those people. Bought it on a finance option of three payments of, I think was thirty nine dollars. So that's one hundred and eighty sales that let's say it was only 150 sales that I wouldn't have had had I not given them a finance option.

[00:31:28] In other words, those people probably couldn't put a whole ninety seven bucks on their credit card. That's how close they are to their limits or they didn't trust me and they just want to make sure was good before they gave me all the money. I mean I could be but most of the time it's the other way around. People didn't have all the money but they really wanted it. So let's say about one hundred and fifty of them bought because of the finance option, which is it was one hundred and eighty. But I'm just trying to be conservative here. That's fifteen thousand dollars in revenue. I would have lost had I not given that finance option. And another episodes. I'm not sure what number. Right now I talk about finance options and upselling and things like that, how to actually implement them, but give a finance option on your course so you can keep the price higher. And I'd rather have that fifteen thousand dollars over. Let's say I think it was three pay. Yeah. Three months. Then not get that fifteen thousand at all. What do you think. And since it's electrons, even if some people pooped out and didn't make their payments, I'd still make fourteen thousand eight hundred. Okay. So and everybody did make their payments by the way, you know I hardly ever in my professional market lose anything from finance options. So make a finance option. All right. So. So they brought in a load of money. And I want you to see that. Like I said, I have loads of other episodes on selling techniques that you can go back and listen to, but make an online course. Seriously, it's it's. It'll take care of a faction of the audience that doesn't want to do membership sites.

[00:33:08] But wants the information. So listen to this again. Go through the show notes. Look at the transcript of this. And it's go through and start making your course and use the Amazon outline technique is actually a research tool to to see if there's more information out there on the topic that you're thinking about. And again, you don't have to be a 20 year expert to make a nice course on something. I mean, literally. You could make a really nice course. Now, don't claim to be an expert, but you could make a really nice course in probably less than a month by just buying a bunch of Kindle books for two or three dollars a piece, studying like crazy, trying what your topic is a little bit and then putting together all the best things you learned in a course and you might sell for years for you. All right. So again, I'm not telling you put out B.S. or crap that's not credible, but you don't have to be a 20 year expert to put out one of these courses.

[00:34:13] All right. Next episode is one hundred ninety seven Joshua Lee. He's a prolific online marketer and he believes balance is B.S. And I've been preaching that for years, but possibly from a different perspective. And so you'll hear both of our perspectives on that episode. And he's quite a quite a marketer, handled hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spends for companies and work for Google and all kinds of stuff. So check that out. One ninety seven. And hey, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe and leave us a review. So that helps to show out and grab those freebies at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And I will catch you on Joshua Lee's episode 197. See ya later.

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