205 – A powerful and easy promotional device: Tom talks Ecourses

Episode 205 – Ecourses
[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 two hundred and five of Screw the Commute podcast. We're going to talk about E courses today. And this is e mail. E courses is what we're gonna cover. Now, I've got a quick announcement about our podcast app. Make sure you grab a copy at the app store. You can do lots of cool stuff conveniently right from your mobile device and you can download it from the app store or you can go to our Web site at screwthecommute.com/app and we've got complete instructions on how to use the darn thing because it'll do all kinds of fancy stuff for you. And as a thank you for listening, makes you grab a copy of our e-book, How to Automate Your Business. I'm just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes and enabled me to handle up to one hundred fifty thousand subscribers in 40000 customers without pulling my hair out. So this is a $27 e-book. It's yours free for my thanks for listening. So grab it over at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're there on the download page, we've got an extra download that some people are charging four five and six thousand bucks for. So make sure you go over there to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. All right. 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 online business or both. Why not do both is when I say I've been living this lifestyle since nineteen ninety four, almost twenty six years now. So check it all out at IMTCVA.org. And if you happen to be military put a slash military there. We've got some great deals for you. If you're law enforcement or first responders, contact me and we've got a special scholarship for you also.

[00:02:25] All right. Let's get to the main event. E courses. Now, the term E course is used for lots of online courses in this episode. I'm talking about the most simple one, which is an e mail e course. Yes, you can link out of your e-mails to audios or videos to jazz it up, but you don't have to to get started. You could literally have your first course done in a couple hours from now. Now you can have paid or free courses and I'm going to go into that a little bit later. You can use ecourses is what they call ethical bribes to get someone to opt into your email list. You can use ecourses to introduce prospects to your expertise and then sell them a more advanced course or other products you have and you can charge for them to make money right up front. And I've done all of these. In fact, my first free ecourse, free ecourse brought in $7000 the first week. And you're probably saying, well, how could that be? Well, each part of the course gave great free information. And at the bottom of each part of the course, I had a brief line that said and then I'll tell you what they said in a minute and they had a link to take them to a sales letter for $199 product. And in the first week, about 35 people bought the CD. And then I ran that E course for several years until the C.D. became obsolete.

[00:03:55] OK, so how do you begin creating your email e course? The first thing you do is break down your topic into its logical sections. Each section would become an individual email. For instance, if I was going to do an ecourse on tennis, I would obviously break it down into its parts forehand, backhand, serve, volley, stroke placement, court movement and all those different aspects of tennis. And I would write each e-mail with some good tips on each part of tennis. And if it was a free ecourse, I would lead them to buy my tennis DVD. If it was a paid ecourse, I would make the instruction more in-depth. And guess what? I'd still lead them to buy the DVD where they could see the techniques in action. Maybe I'd give them a discount code since they purchase the E course. Or maybe I wouldn't. At any rate, I'd lead them to something else to buy. If I was a tennis coach, maybe I'd offer local lessons or critiques of videos where the player would video themselves and send the video to the coach to be critiqued for money.

[00:05:09] Now don't make the mistake that one student of mine made and and wait until the last email I have like a seven part ecourse to offer anything for sale. No, no, no. You are wasting time. You are hoping that the person actually gets to the end of your course. You're holding back. Gung ho people from giving you money. Don't do that. Nobody is going to complain if you give them 90 percent good info and maybe 10 percent offering them something to buy. Don't make that mistake. Each part of the E course should have something they can buy. Now, you don't have to be obnoxious about it, just put in a simple line. I told you I was going to tell you this if you're really interested in this topic. Check out my multimedia C.D. Simple as that. That's not obnoxious. Nobody's gonna care if they click. They're gonna go to a sales letter. Now, another thing I could do for fancier E courses, either free or paid, is put links in each e-mail to either videos or audios on my web site. Yeah, I could send them to YouTube, but you're better off sending them to your web site where you can display all your products and services and get your Web site visit count up, which looks good to Google. Now speaking of Web site visits. Another way to handle your e-mail course is just to send an e-mail that doesn't have the information in it. It just tells people the next part of their course is ready and gives them a link to click to your Web site to read the course or watch it or listen whenever it is. This method requires the person to be connected to the Internet to see your course. Some people may want to get the email while connected to the Internet and then read it off line. Let's say if they're traveling, you have to decide how your audience may consume your Ecorse and make decisions on how it's delivered. This is less and less of a problem with many airplanes and airports having Wi-Fi and good 4G and now 5G connections.

[00:07:23] All right. Now let's talk a little bit about whether your course is going to be paid or free. And the differences between the two. My opinion is that if the course is free, it should be delivered once per day while the prospect is hot. Maybe it was just given away or maybe it was used to get someone to opt into your email list. If it's a paid ecourse the person buying it is obviously more gung ho than a person who simply got it as a freebie. These people pulled out their wallet and gave you money. So you have more options here on how to deliver it. You can still deliver it once a day. But let's say it was an extensive ecourse and you even assigned homework that would take them a while to complete. Maybe you delivered that course once a week instead of once a day. As long as you tell the buyer upfront what to expect, you'll be fine. And you won't get complaints. And while I'm talking about paid ecourses, let me tell you about a guy who wanted to buy a new BMW and pay cash for it. He made a paid ecourse that was fifteen hundred dollars and included homework and a critique of the homework. He sold twenty one of them and bought his BMW. And I can't help but tell you my I mean spirited, funny BMW joke. Here it is. What's the difference between a BMW and a porcupine? On a porcupine, the prick's on the outside. Sorry. BMW owners. I couldn't help it. You guys sit here and amuse myself, folks, I got to do something. Another thing people ask is how many parts should be in the ecourse and how long should each part be? All of this is subjective, but I generally make mine five or seven parts and free ones are not as extensive as paid ones. Now, whenever someone asked me how long something should be like an E course or I get a lot of questions like that for e-books, my answer is always the same. Make it so great that people can't believe they got so much value for so little money or for free. You follow that rule and you'll build a great reputation and people will want to give you money for your paid stuff because they know they will get great value.

[00:10:01] All right. Now, as part of the entire deal, if you want to make money from your E course. You will be sending people to sales letters if you've been listen to me for a while, you know that copywriting is the number one skill I've developed that's made me the most money. And I think you're crazy if you don't get this skill. So check out my course at copywriting901.com and also listen to episode 13 at screwthecommute.com/13 where I teach you five critical copywriting skills.

[00:10:37] All right, now you got to think how the course is going to be delivered automatically. Well, we use what is called a sequential order responder, and most marketers would tell you that sequential order responders are one of the most powerful things ever invented for online marketing. So you load up each part of your course into your sequential auto responder, and when someone signs up for it, either by opting into your email list or purchasing it, the auto responder starts delivering the course automatically on whatever schedule you tell it daily, weekly or whatever. We use and promote kickstartcart.com for 18 years now, which has unlimited sequential auto responders email broadcast and it's your complete shopping cart system where we give free and unlimited one on one tutoring to teach you how to use it. Now I cover shopping cart systems in episode 10, so that would be screwthecommute.com/10.

[00:11:41] OK, before we finish up here on E courses, I wanna do a quick sponsor message and then I'm going to show you an advanced technique that will save you tons of time on your ecourse. Now 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 you have kids, nephews, nieces or even neighbors who are wondering if they should burn up hundreds of thousands of dollars and then end up broke with mountains of debt and no marketable skills from going to college or university. You just got to watch this webinar. You got nothing to lose and everything to gain from taking a little time out and watching this. But be prepared to be mad because colleges are raising the tuition. So just out of nowhere. They're inflating grade point averages to make it look like the students are smarter when in fact the testing shows they're dumber. And the kids are only spending 8 hours total per week preparing and going to classes. You're gonna freak when you see this webinar and you can also download the audio to listen to it, by the way. But I'll tell you what, I don't think I'd want to mortgage my house to pay for that kind of stuff when in short order. These young people could get really highly marketable skills, not just young people. Anybody that has these marketable skills, every small business on earth is desperate to have somebody take this over for them, their email marketing, their blogging, their social media, all that stuff. So watch the webinar and you'll find it at screwthecommute.com and then click on webinars and you can either watch it or you can download the audio. And like I said, be prepared to be mad. But if I can help you, give us give me a call and we'll talk about your future in online marketing.

[00:13:41] All right. Here's one advanced trick before we put this episode to bed. So e-mail can be funky. And in the beginning, pretty much all my email got through and people got their E course delivered with no problem. But as spam filters got tighter, I started to get emails from people that they got parts 1, 2, 3, let's say 6 and 7, but they missed 4 and 5. So I had to stop whatever I was doing and email them manually parts 4 and 5 and with the volume we do. This was becoming a big hassle. So here's your advanced technique. Put all the parts of your course in one big PDF file and upload it to a page on your Web site that no one knows about except you. This is called a hidden page. In each e-mail, of your course, you put the following statement. And if you need to rewind to write this down, go ahead. Here it is. If you missed any part of the course or if you're so gung ho, you can't wait to get the entire thing. You can download the entire course here. And then you give them a out or what the statement is now. And then you give them the hidden link. When I did this, I really can't think of anyone who missed parts of my courses for years after that. This eliminated the hassle of emailing missed parts of the course. It helped out the gung ho people that they were most excited that one to go through it quickly. And those are the people who spend the most money, too. And it also gathered all the material in one place in case I wanted to turn the E course into an e-book.

[00:15:24] So there you have it, folks. Get busy on creating your first E course. It can pay off royally for you. Check out all that copywriting stuff for copywriting9O1.com. Check out kickstartcart.com. Check out the all this stuff will be in the show notes, by the way, folks, so you can click right over. Listen to some of the back podcast in case you missed it. All right. I will catch you all on the next episode. See ya later.

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