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October 2002 Product Development Technique
E-Courses
I can't think of an easier product to create than an e-course. All it is
is a series of instructional emails. In its simplest form they are just
plain text and don't require any fancy graphics. You could even email
them to the recipients one at a time if you didn't have an automated
shopping cart system like
http://www.kickstartcart.com
One of my most successful promotions is when I rolled out my Free 7 Day
Electronic Marketing MiniCourse. You can still take it (although it has
been updated quite a bit from the original) by sending a blank email to
minicourse@aweber.com Each
day for 7 days you will get an email teaching you something about
Internet marketing. Each issue is an educational piece, but it carries
along with it ads for my products.
At the end of the first week it was rolled out, the people that got this
ecourse had spent over $7,000.00 on my products. Pretty good for seven
free emails wouldn't you say?
Here's a reprint of an article I did for an online magazine:
HOW TO CREATE AND DISTRIBUTE AN E COURSE
by Tom Antion
E courses are credibility tools and they are also great
sales tools. You can easily create a course in your field of
expertise and either sell it as a product or give it away as
a give-before-you-get sales tool.
If it's a free course, you give good information, but you
don't give all the information. It's designed to be helpful
to people and not a blatant sales pitch, but if you gave
them everything, there would be no reason to buy anything
from you. If you are selling the course, make it very
comprehensive and don't hold back. You want the recipients
to really feel like they are getting value.
E courses are even easier to create than E Books. You don't
have to do any fancy formatting or heading tags or
conversions or anything. You just create it in Ezine plain
text Ezine Fashion. For a sample of my 7 day Mini Course
mailto:minicourse@aweber.com a blank email is fine. If you
are connected to the Internet right now, go ahead and click
on the email link above and send it. You'll get the first
part of the course back within a few minutes. Then each day
for seven days you will get the next section of the course.
AOL users beware. I had about 100 complaints that parts of
the course were never delivered. EVERY SINGLE ONE WAS
SOMEONE WITH AN AOL ADDRESS!
HERE'S A CHECKLIST TO CREATE THE COURSE:
=> Pick your topic.
=> Gather your material into related sections. Each section
will be one lesson in the course. Five sections means five
days to the course. If your material is complicated you
could do one lesson per week, but on a free course I would
recommend against it because it will take you too long to
get a return.
=> Write a welcome and introduction to the course along with
a list of all the upcoming lessons.
=> Don't skimp on any of the lessons. People can unsubscribe
from this and either ask for their money back or just
disappear from your list and then you won't have a chance to
sell them anything.
=> If it's a free course you should weave subtle hints into
the course that make people want to know more. You'll see
examples of this in my mini course. My goal was to show you
that you don't even know what you don't know about Internet
marketing and that not knowing these things will hurt you
and your family and give you warts or whatever the
consequences are. This is just one technique to make people
want to buy.
=> Once the course is written, arrange to have it distributed by
a sequential autoresponder company like Aweber or use a
shopping system like
http://www.kickstartcart.com
which allows you an unlimited number of e-courses.
NOTE: Don't forget to put hard returns at the end of each
line (at about 65 characters) of your course, or use an
inexpensive program like Text Pad to do it for you. If you
don't, you will likely have a lousy looking E course.
=> Now, promote the course to your distribution list, put it
in your handouts, mention it at your programs, and put a
notice about it on your website. Generally, tell people
about it anyway you can. I put it out to a list of about
11,000 and got over a 10% response in the first three days.
Those 1200 or so people spent about $7000.00 with me after
taking their "Free" course.
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Excerpt from "Click: The Ultimate Guide to Electronic
Marketing" by Tom Antion
"Click" is great for Speakers, Authors, Trainers, Coaches,
consultants and small businesspeople
http://www.antion.com/click.htm
Other upcoming topics
Back to October 2002 Index page
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