How to Start Earning With eLearning | With Johnny Beirne

Tim Cooper

Aug 09 2015

Discover how to profit by giving your students an incentive to promote you along with other proven ways to increase your earnings through online course creation.

With a solid background in digital marketing and more recently online course creation, Johnny Beirne spends a big part of his time helping others create and publish their online courses.

Why Online Instructors Should Start With a Blog

Apart from being critical for search engine optimization, blog posts are a far less daunting proposition to the new online instructor. They are a simple way to get information out of your head and onto the internet without having to worry about structuring and planning a full online course.

Writing short posts of 200 to 500 words is a great way to start sharing your information. It's a way for you to start building a relationship with your prospective students as it begins to establish you as an authority on your subject.

A good blog post answers a question.

You can then take your blog content and restructure it into an ebook or online course.

It's important to give a lot of value for free along the way instead of simply asking prospective students to purchase from you.

The Money Really Is In the List

Another important reason to maintain a blog site is to grow a list of prospective students. Providing a valuable resource in return for an email address allows you to build a list to market your courses to.

What Should You Include In Your Follow Up Email Series?

Your follow up series should build on the information provided in the resource you gave away to get the email address. It could be additional tips relating to the subject of your lead magnet or you could ask questions and request feedback.

You should aim at sending at least one follow up email per week for at least 4 weeks. These emails can of course be automated using any of the autoresponder services available. Johnny highly recommends ActiveCampaign for price and features.

Another option is to turn your ebook or email sequence into an online course and host it for free on your own Fedora school. Then offer that as your lead magnet. You can then drip feed the course as your email follow up or add additional information to your course and send email notifications to your students.

How to Use Webinars to Sell Your Course

Ideally the Webinar will equate to 20% of the course. You should be showing people the 'what' but not the 'how'.

A small percentage of people will be able to take the information from your Webinar and work it out themselves without purchasing your course. And that's okay.

A larger percentage of attendees will recognize the value provided in your Webinar and in fact will qualify themselves as being in need of your course. Some will purchase your course on the spot, some will think about it. This is once again is where a good follow up email campaign is very important.

Some people will recognize that they need your course but also need a little more help or guidance from you and here is where you can up-sell a coaching or consultancy package in addition to your course.

Encourage Your Students to Becoming Affiliates and Promote Your Course

Your best evangelist is a happy student.

It's one thing to ask your students to tweet about your course or to mention it to those who they believe may also benefit. They may do it, they may not.

If you give them an incentive to talk about your course then they are much more likely to take the time to promote. With an affiliate program you can nominate a percentage of the course fee that your affiliate will receive on each sale their promotion generates.

For example you can offer 50% of the course fee to your affiliate. You now have someone else investing in marketing and promoting your course.

Do you think giving away 50% of the sale to someone who is actively promoting your course is a good strategy? You bet it is!

You are gaining a student you may not have otherwise reached. You now have an additional student that you can market your other courses and services to.

Online Course Coaching and Production Services

If you're a seasoned and experienced online course creators, have you ever considered branching out into assisting others in the creation of their own courses? I know I have.

There are many individuals and corporations out there that know they should be producing online training programs for their clients or employees and don't know where to start.

There is a big opportunity to build a business in helping these people make their online course creation needs a reality. Create a service that takes the pain out of online course production.

Just like website development, contracted online course development is a blossoming industry.

To find out more about Johnny and the various services he offers check out the following sites -

Earning With Elearning - the ebook that has been referenced throughout this episode.

Speakific - interested in public speaking? Register for free here with promo code LAUNCH for 3 months premium listing for only 1 Euro.

JohnnyBeirne.com

Resources and sites mentioned in this episode

Fedora - Create your own online school

LongTail Pro - powerful Keyword Research tool

MindMeister - Mind map your online course ideas

Udemy

If you have a question about any aspect of online course delivery, from concept to market, please feel free to send me an email at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you and your question would very well feature in a future podcast.

I want to deliver relevant material so keep those emails rolling in.

If you enjoyed this episode please like, share and comment below. I would also sincerely appreciate you taking the time to leave me a rating and review at iTunes.