In the first part of our five part series, on how one of our members went from $0 to $130,000 in sales each year, we looked at various WordPress membership plugins used to restrict access to premium educational content. Now, in the second part of our series we’re going to take a deeper look at the WordPress eLearning Platform he used to educate his students. You might be surprised to find out just how simple the platform was. In our next post we’ll speak more specifically about individual eLearning tools, but for now we just want to speak generally about their educational platform. E-LEARNING PLATFORMS SHOULD BE FOCUSED ON LEARNER OBJECTIVES Our member’s first year in business gave him an opportunity to ask his students questions, get feedback and make revisions to his online learning platform. He used his second year in business to analyze that feedback and make changes to advance his e-learning platform. This particular eCourse seller quickly realized that one of his biggest competitive advantages was that he had the skills and resources to create high quality, in-depth and often interactive content that wasn’t being created elsewhere on the web. One of the reasons he could create such high quality content was because his student’s were paying a premium to access this course ($200 for each enrollment). As most eCourse sellers should, he was funneling some of this money back into the creation of more high quality content that he would then upload and deliver on his eLearning platform. At first the platform was very basic. The platform consisted primarily of a section of his site that was restricted using a WordPress membership plugin so that only paying students could access his content. The platform, as we’re about to discuss in our next blog post, will quickly become much more complex, but for now his educational platform is really quite simple. In a recent podcast we spoke about how it’s important not to over-complicate what is required from your Learning Management System (LMS). Sometimes, all that’s required is the digital equivalent of two chairs and a table. DESIGNING YOUR E-LEARNING PLATFORM: START FROM THE END When designing your e-Learning platform it’s easy to get overwhelmed or excited about all of the unique features you could add to your online course. However, at the end of the day you need to ask yourself if those educational tools really help your students progress towards their educational goals. There is no point in over-complicating your e-Learning platform if it’s not necessary. This was the attitude of this particular Academy Of Mine member in their second year of selling courses online. His focus was on finding out what his student’s wanted to know and then hyper-focusing on content and strategies that would help his students achieve those goals. For example, as we’ve already mentioned, this particular member was selling new-media courses online. He found out that his students wanted templates to use to create their own projects, they wanted access to the fonts the teacher was using, they wanted step by step video tutorials that went beyond the basics and they wanted opportunities for in depth discussion and review of their own work. Once the teacher was better able to define his students’ goals, he could better adapt this eLearning platform to suit their needs. It’s kind of like working backwards. First figure out what your students want your platform to be able to do… and then design your platform to do those things. So this particular eCourse vendor really spent the majority of his second year focused on his students’ goals and developing content to help them reach those goals. The beginnings of his more complex e-Learning platform was in the making, but it really wasn’t totally developed until he started using and testing various e-Learning tools which is what we’re going to talk about in our next blog post in the series (seen below). MY FIRST 5 YEARS SELLING COURSES ONLINE Year 1: Finding the Right WordPress Membership Plugin Year 2: Developing the eLearning Platform Year 3: Thinking About eLearning Software & Tools Year 4: Course Management System - Focus on Student Goals Year 5: "Being There" - The Inclusion of a WordPress Chat Plugin  

In our last post in our 5 part series about selling courses online we looked at the e-learning platform from a general standpoint. Now, during this blog post, we want to dive deeper into the case study and explore how in this particular eCourse seller used their third year to further refine their student back-end by adding various e-learning software and tools that were aimed at helping students complete his online new-media course. THE GOALS OF E-LEARNING SOFTWARE The tools used in an online learning platform generally have one of two primary goals. 1. To help the students reach their educational objective. 2. To keep the students engaged in the online learning material. The second point is really only important because it supports the first point. Everything you do, including the tools you use to teach online, should be focused on learner objectives. THE PROBLEMS THAT E-LEARNING TOOLS NEED TO FIX There are obvious advantages to online education since it breaks many of the time and space restrictions that have plagued traditional learning environments. However, online education has its own set of problems that need to be addressed by online teachers, since teachers are not meeting in the same physical space as their students. In a recent interview we did with Rosemary M. Lehman, Ph.D. on the topic of online course design, she mentioned that students drop out of their online courses for the following reasons: Feelings of isolation Frustration and disconnection Technology disruption Student failure to make contact with faculty 
Inadequate contact with students by faculty Lack of student and technology support Lack of instructor participation during class discussion Lack of clarity in instruction direction or expectation 
Lack of social interaction. However, she also mentioned that these issues can be overcome by proper planning and the right e-Learning software. She goes on to mention the following 5 points as ways to help overcome some of the obstacles mentioned above (or prevent them from happening in the first place). Creating activities that orient students to the course and help them meet each other and develop trust and community
. Provide that Syllabus that shows the big picture of the course Include forms for formal and informal conversations Provide individual and group feedback Be flexible to accommodate students’ needs. SPECIFIC TOOLS TO HELP YOU SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS Up until this point we’ve discussed the problems and some general ways to overcome those problems, but what are some specific e-learning software applications or tools that you can use to do those things? Below we’ve created a list of tools that will help you solve various e-learning problems. 1. Communication tools: As mentioned above, students often feel "isolated" in their online courses. For this reason it’s important to include some type of consistent communication into the system. The problem is, for many teachers, that individualizing all communication can be overwhelming (even impossible depending on the size of your eCourse). Therefore, it’s important to use email software that will allow you to create customized emails by using templates that can insert unique student information into them (such as names, grades etc). This helps you save time, while at the same time personalizing your students’ experience. Below we talk about different Learning Management Systems. Most of those systems have integrated communication tools built right into them. For instance, you can send emails when a student registers for a course, when they pass a quiz, when they complete a module and so on. 2: Instructional design tools: At the foundation of your eLearning company you’ll likely be using some type of LMS. Our particular member in this case study was using WP Courseware, but you can use any other options available to you a well including WooThemes Sensei, WP LMS or LearnDash to name only a few. The great thing about many of these plugins and software packages is that they not only provide great communication tools, they also provide countless other tools such as grading and progress tracking tools. Again, these tools help solve some of the problems mentioned above because they help show students a clear path from beginning to end. This helps students stay connect to their online course because they can "see" where they are as they progress through the material. 3: Video tools: Tools like Vimeo Pro or Wistia help you publish high quality HD footage and protect your "student only" content using the various privacy settings built into those platforms. 4: Gamification tools: In a recent case study we found that gamification lead to a 260% increase in student activity on one of our member’s sites. You can gamify your own eLearning site using tools like CubePoints or achievements for WordPress. 5: Community tools: And lastly, if your LMS doesn’t give you as comprehensive as a social community as you would have liked, you can always add-on community plugins like BuddyPress or WP Symposium. We hope you found this tool list helpful. MY FIRST 5 YEARS SELLING COURSES ONLINE Year 1: Finding the Right WordPress Membership Plugin Year 2: Developing the eLearning Platform Year 3: Thinking About eLearning Software & Tools Year 4: Course Management System - Focus on Student Goals Year 5: "Being There" - The Inclusion of a WordPress Chat Plugin

In this first part of this 5 part series we talked about restricting content on your eLearning site so that only paying students can access your premium educational content. Next, we talked generally about building your e-learning platform by "starting from the end".  After that, we got more specific and talked about individual e-learning software programs that you can use to help enhance your student experience. Now, we’re going to deeper into the topic of designing your course management system to meet the needs of your students. That is, after all, the single biggest defining element that will either make you or break you as an eCourse seller. There will be a moment when your online students will be able to tell if they have achieved what you told them they would be able to achieve if they took your online course. Students, especially adult learners, are looking for tangible results. They want to see, at a minimum, progress towards their educational goal. In the case study we’re currently diving deeper into, our member focused their 4th year on making sure their students were hitting their educational targets. If his students were not hitting their educational targets, he saw it as his fault, not his students’ fault. During this 4th year, he took the time to really zero in on areas where he could be making improvements to help his students achieve their desired result. In this blog posts we dive deeper into methods he used to analyze and act on that data. STUDENT OUTCOMES WILL BE THE NEW GOLD As online education gains in popularity, students will rightly demand more from their educators. The democratization of education has been great, not only for teachers who now get access to students without having to go through the traditional school system, but also for students who now gain access to a growing number of highly skilled teachers who are competing with each other. Through the process of competition, teachers who can’t prove their worth, or the worth of their eCourses, will be weeded out. Students will demand to see results. This new dynamic is putting a new performance pressure on teachers. It’s making them more accountable to their students, which we think is great! COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND STUDENT OUTCOMES There are a couple of things our member did to make sure his students were reaching their goals. The most important thing he did was implement student progress tracking software into his system. You can do this to keep a finger on the pulse of many important features of your online course. Essentially the tracking software is any type of data collection software that tells the teacher how their students feel they are doing and it provides an opportunity for the students to tell the teacher or program administrators how they could be doing better. When the eCourse administrators look at all of the collected data, they will be better able to tell if there are any glaring holes in their educational platform. For example, let’s say we’re teaching a course on how to make a paper airplane. Let’s say there are 10 steps involved. We’ve created content to walk students through each step. Each step of the way students are required to upload a picture of their paper airplane so the teacher can review their work, make recommendations for improvement and just generally make sure the student understood the step so far. You don’t want to allow a student to progress in your course if they’ve made a big mistake in step 3 because that mistake will just compound itself by the time it gets to step 10. Your goal is to get students to master each step before moving onto the next step. That is why your course management system needs to have a series of checks and balances to ensure mastery is being obtained before you allow a student to progress. So how do you do this? PREREQUISITES AND LOCKING CONTENT Well there are a couple of things you can easily do to ensure you enforce mastery each step of the way. The first, and most obvious is to "lock" content be assigning a prerequisite that needs to be completed before that particular "step" can be completed (or even viewed). This forces online students to progress through their eCourse material a linear order from step A to Z. The good news is that most LMS’s have this content locking feature built into them. You can even take it a step further by requiring that students achieve a certain grade (for example 75%) on a test at the end of the "step" before they can progress to the following step. This helps ensure that they really understand the concepts contained within each course module. However, what often ends up happening with most new online course is that at some point through the educational journey, the teachers will find their students’ work to be only satisfactory… not great. Unfortunately, many teachers allow their students to progress to higher levels in the online course even thought their performance is starting to lag behind. This process of not enforcing mastery each step of the way often results in final projects that are less than impressive. Therefore, we recommend all of our members who are selling courses online take the time to analyze the steps where mastery isn’t obtained and to find ways to fix the issue. Sometimes you need to add additional steps. Sometimes you need to give students more practice. You might need to re-design your projects or add additional course material. You really need to address these quality issues on a case by case basis but you get the idea. MY FIRST 5 YEARS SELLING COURSES ONLINE Year 1: Finding the Right WordPress Membership Plugin Year 2: Developing the eLearning Platform Year 3: Thinking About eLearning Software & Tools Year 4: Course Management System - Focus on Student Goals Year 5: "Being There" - The Inclusion of a WordPress Chat Plugin  

Welcome to the last step in this series of blog posts on how one of our members went from earning $0 / year to $130,000 / year selling courses online. The last step we’re about to explore took place in our member’s fifth year of selling courses online when he decided to test the synchronous learning options available to him by implementing a WordPress chat plugin into his site which allowed him to communicate with his students in real time through his own online course chat room. His students immediately loved the new live lectures he was offering. It allowed him to more closely interact with his students and it even gave his students an opportunity to get to know each other better. In a lot of ways it humanized the educational process for his students… and for him. Up until this point he spent a lot of time creating high quality content for his students and paying a lot of money for professional video production. That being said, his students always existed to him in a fairly abstract sense. There was something about the live online lecture setting which allowed him to see who his students really were. In the past he was in contact with many students through email, but there was something unique and valuable in the live online classroom setting that wasn’t being achieved though asynchronous teaching methods. At the end of each of his live online lectures he used a survey plugin which helped him better refine that particular lecture for future classes. He would ask students to rate him on a scale of one to ten in the following four areas: 1. Interactivity / variation of media used 2. Instructor’s depth of knowledge 3. Level of new knowledge gained by students 4. Enthusiasms and passion on the topic being taught He would then allow the students to provide feedback on the parts of the live lecture they liked most, as well as provide feedback on the parts of the live online lecture they would like to see improved. Not surprisingly, the average live lecture score was over 93%. Student’s loved the new addition to their online courses and many ranked these live online classes as their favorite feature of their particular eCourse. At first, only a text based WordPress chat plugin was used to facilitate teacher / student communication. However, shortly after the chat room’s introduction, he introduced video, white-boarding, screen-sharing and collaborative documents into his platform help guide the live online lectures. WHAT ARE THE BEST WORDPRESS LIVE CHAT PLUGINS? There are many live WordPress chat plugins available for eCourse vendors. Picking the right one is essential because you’ll rely heavily on it for teaching your online classes. Software disruptions can cause major student dissatisfaction and cause teacher stress levels to sky rocket. In this case, in an effort to save money our client started using ChatRoll which is a cheap option, but in our experience (and based on various other user reviews here and here for example) very unreliable. It caused more than a couple of nightmares to say the least. Our member had to cancel countless classes due to the hosted chat software being down, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they then had to deal with many angry and frustrated students. So put time into finding the right WordPress live chat plugin for you. We found that self hosted options are much better because they will be as reliable as your host is. As long as your website is running the online chat software will work. That is why in this case our member switched to using cometchat software which integrates perfectly into the WordPress platform and even works well with WP Symosium which they were using as their community platform. MY FIRST 5 YEARS SELLING COURSES ONLINE Year 1: Finding the Right WordPress Membership Plugin Year 2: Developing the eLearning Platform Year 3: Thinking About eLearning Software & Tools Year 4: Course Management System - Focus on Student Goals Year 5: "Being There" - The Inclusion of a WordPress Chat Plugin  

The term "e-learning solutions" is a very broad term and could encompass many things. Here, at Academy of Mine, we see the eLearning industry as a bit fragmented, so we’ve made it our goal to try and bring the fragmented pieces of the puzzle together in a quest to make the lives of non-techy eCourse vendors a little bit easier. However, bringing the pieces of the puzzle together is the easy part, making them "play nicely together"… Well that’s another story. The problem with many e-learning solutions is that they are often designed in an isolated way, sort of as "stand alone" options, without regard for how they will interact with the other parts of the eLearning ecosystem. Generally speaking, each piece isn’t designed to fit into the bigger picture of what online educators are really looking for. Sure, each piece might do a great job of what it’s supposed to do. But, if it doesn’t function properly with the other parts within the complex system, then what’s the point? E-LEARNING SOLUTIONS COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS Let me give you a few examples. Let’s say you find great Learning Management System Software to help you administer your course online. However, the website provider you host your website on may not have the right version of php installed for the calendar component of that particular LMS to function properly. So do you get a new host or a new LMS? Or maybe you’re looking to stream video between your teachers and students, but again, maybe your host won’t allow you to have Red5 installed on your server. Again, do you ditch the idea of streaming video, or do you get a dedicated server which will allow you to install Red5 on the root directory? Or Maybe you’re using WordPress as your LMS (as many of you are), but what if your LMS isn’t compatible with your eCommerce software? Or let’s say you’re running a WordPress Chat room (for your live lectures). Depending on which chat plugin you’re using, your members profile images might not be used at their primary chat profile picture. Your members might need to upload their profile picture twice, in two different places, which of course isn’t ideal and can cause quite a bit of confusion amongst your students. Some of these "bugs" are small, and in fact, may even be able to be ignored. However, others are big enough to stop your entire system from working. The list of compatibility issues can go on and on and on (as many of you know who have tried to develop online courses by yourself). MAKING THE PIECES PLAY NICELY TOGETHER When you’re offering a course online, the reality is, that you can sometimes have hundreds of these "moving parts" that you need to make compatible with each other. Offering an eCourse online requires a very dynamic system. It can be quite complex, especially if you plan on doing it right. That’s where Academy of Mine comes in. We create a "mash up" of the best eLearning solutions for our members to use. Best of all, not only do we give our members the training platform to teach online (that works "out of the box" because we’ve already made the pieces "play nicely together"), but we also give our members the marketing platform to be able to promote and sell their courses online. E-COURSE MARKETING DATA = UNFAIR ADVANTAGE Our members have a huge edge over the competition because we provide a "dashboard" where they get access to data pulled from a variety of data centers (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Majestic SEO, Moz etc) that show them: How they are doing and where they are ranking for the keywords they are actively trying to rank for. What keywords have high global search volume, and low competition (this gives our members a "quick win" and a fairly instant boost in traffic. Where conversations are happening online (blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter etc) so that our members can be notified of those conversations so they can then go and add their voice to the discussion. The ability to reverse engineer the top ranking sites for any keyword to find out what they are doing to win the race for that particular search phrase. You can then compare your own site, in a side by side comparison, to find out where you are in the race and discover what needs to be done for you to rank higher. Essentially, our platform is so much more than just an e-Learning platform and we like to think of ourselves as the only e-learning platform option for entrepreneurial minded educators. We have, not only your students’ learning objectives as one of our primary focuses, but also your financial goals as an eCourse seller. If you’d like to learn more about our eLearning solutions you can visit our homepage or go and take our demo site for a ride!

Do you have an idea for an online course but don’t know where to start? Do you feel a bit overwhelmed by the eLearning options that are available to you? For instance, which Course Management System will you choose? Which platform should you design your eLearning site on? How much should you charge for your eCourse? How will you accept payments? Well, if you’re at the starting line, and crouched down in the runners starting position, but you just can’t seem to push forward, then you might find a free little productivity tool that uses the pomodoro techniques called Focus Booster helpful. I’m using it to write this blog post right now. And it’s working… but how? FOCUS BOOSTER FOR E-COURSE CREATORS Focus Booster is a simple timer. How will it work? Well you can use it in a couple of different ways. First, you can use these types of productivity tools to help you get started. Maybe all you need is someone (or something) to give you that first little nudge you need to start moving forward. It’s often the task of starting the project that stops us from making any progress on it at all. You can use Focus Booster as a countdown tool to your "start time". For example, just set it for 5 minutes. When you hear the bell it’s time to begin. Essentially, you’re giving yourself the equivalent of the starting pistol "bang" that runners hear at the start of a track and field race. Sometimes we just need to hear that audio cue to start a process in motion. Secondly, you can use productivity tools to help you move forward in creating your eLearning courses. These tools can help you manage the time you spend on each task. For example, let’s say you have the goal of completing 2 course units today. For simplicities sake, lets assume both are podcasts you plan to use as lectures within your eCourse. You can use tools like Focus Booster to establish completion deadlines for each task. It helps you put the pressure on and gives you both audio and visual reminders of how much longer you have to complete the task. PARKINSON’S LAW This is important because eCourse creators often find themselves slaves to Parkinson’s law, which is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Which is a fancy way of saying: if you give yourself 2 days to complete a task, it will take you 2 days. If you give yourself 4 days to complete the same task, it will take you 4 days. So although these time management tools are simple, they work because they help us fight back against old Mr. Parkinson. I’m using it to write this blog post right now and I’m down to 9 more minutes longer to complete this post so I’m going to wrap it up here to ensure I have some editing time. But before I do let me tell you a little bit about the science behind the tool. HOW IT WORKS: POMODORO TECHNIQUE You can go to the Focus Booster website (I’ve included the link below) to learn more about how the software works, but I’ll summarize it here for you with a quick quote from their website. The pomodoro technique uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals (referred to as ‘pomodoros’ or ‘pomodoro sessions’). These intervals are separated by breaks (the standard is 5 minutes). Pomodoro time management is based on the theory that frequent breaks can improve mental agility. Are you interested to see if it can make you more productive and help give you the push you need to start or complete your eCourse? Well the tool is free so you can go give it a try by visiting the Focus Booster website here.

If you’re creating educational video courses for distribution online, and you’re looking for nothing more than a platform to release your content on, then Vimeo On Demand might have exactly what you’re looking for. Vimeo has traditionally been a place for filmmakers to upload and share their work, but recently Vimeo took their services a step further by creating a platform that allows filmmakers to sell their content online. Essentially, customers can watch trailers for films and then enter their credit card information right into the system for easy access to the content. However, when you visit the Vimeo On Demand homepage you’ll think this service is exclusively for filmmakers. Vimeo uses phrasing like "upload a trailer" and "upload your poster" and language that sounds directed towards filmmakers, not educators. SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ECOURSE SELLERS? At first glance this service doesn’t seem to cater to the needs of eCourse creators at all. However, a quick search I found a category called " instructional" where I found a small selection of educational material being uploaded that meets Vimeo’s content requirements. Edupreneurs are using the platform to sell their photoshop, guitar, kitting and magic classes online. PRICING FLEXIBILITY AND GENEROUS SPLIT Vimeo is a great company. We use them for our own services and we host all of the videos from our eCourse Astro School through our Vimeo Pro account. It should be mentioned that you need to have a Vimeo Pro account in order to qualify for Vimeo On Demand. However, if you qualify for the service, the profit splitting is very fair. They use a 90/10 split model with the content creator keeping 90% of their profits. RENT OR BUY COURSES The best news is that their pricing system is totally flexible. Some people are selling courses online for only $30. Others have the option to "rent" their courses for a certain duration of time for even cheaper ($2 - $3 for example). Then there are eCourse sellers offering very high quality, in-depth and feature rich courses that are selling for much more. Take a look at the animation course being offered for $350 below. It’s going to be interesting to see where Vimeo takes this "instructional" category. It doesn’t seem to be their focus right now. I even found it a little difficult to find this page in the first place. However, I think they will quickly realize they have an incentive to try and recruit more online educators who would like to use their platform to sell courses online since many educational products have higher price points. Vimeo taking a 10% cut of a $350 e-course is much better than a 10% cut of a $10 documentary. Of course volume counts… but who says that eCourse sellers can’t out-sell filmmakers? It will be interesting to see where this goes.

In this hour long free documentary, filmmakers Jeff Root & Bhawin Suchak give their audience a "fly on the wall" perspective on how kids learn when adults don’t impose a curriculum on them them to. A truly inspiring glimpse into our abilities to self educate.

If you’re selling courses online you’re probably in a few different arenas promoting your educational products. You might be building landing pages and great content using various content marketing strategies. You’ll also likely be active in social communities like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. And if you’re like most of us you’re likely also spending a lot of time building up digital relationships with others in your niche and getting a good amount of traffic from your top referrals that way. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of all of these marketing activities that are driving traffic to your website and helping you convert that traffic into eCourse sales. But you need to know what traffic sources are helping you convert the most visitors into paying students. Do you know this information? You can answer in this poll if you do. BUT ALL VISITORS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL Imagine you spent 30 hours of your time this month promoting your eCourse. For simplicities sake let’s imagine you spent: 10 hours on content marketing and SEO 10 hours on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube LinkedIn etc 10 hours focusing on getting new referral traffic from related sites in your niche Now let’s say at the end of the month all of this effort brought in 36,000 visits and 25 conversions for a total eCourse sales volume of $10,000. Not bad right. Splitting our time between social, SEO and referral traffic seemed to work great. Or did it? YOU NEED TO DIG DEEPER At Academy of Mine, even though we’re impressed when our members achieve numbers like this by using our platform and services, we’re not truly happy unless we know they’ve deconstructed that data to find out which promotional activities led to the most eCourse sales. This of course let’s them refine their efforts and ensures higher sales volume next month. Data analysis is one thing, but knowing what that data means, and then taking action based on your findings are two totally different things. A CASE STUDY The numbers I mentioned above are almost real numbers. The client in question didn’t spend 10 hours on each activity, but they did achieve those sales and traffic numbers as you can see here: DRILLING DEEPER In the graph above you see our member had a total of 25 sales spread across all of their efforts. They could likely duplicate their efforts next month to see similar results. But we’re not interested in our members achieving similar results. We want them to achieve better results. So we ask that they dig deeper. Let’s look deeper into three different tabs you’ll see above (referrer, engine and social) REFERRALS As you’ll see below, referral traffic lead to 8 out of 25 conversions which is 32% of all sales. So in terms of spending time on getting mentions and links on strong websites and blogs in your niche, this seems to be a good way to spend your time. But in fact, if we look closer, we’ll see this particular member is not spending enough time on this activity. Their referral traffic has double the conversion rate of their site average. Not only that, but referral traffic seems to stay around longer (avg time on site) and visits more pages. So this lets our member know that this is a marketing activity they should be spending more time on. But before we find out how much more time, we first need to find out how search traffic and social traffic stand up against this traffic source. If we have a limited amount of time to spend each month, and we make the decision to spend more time here… well obviously that means we need to cut the time we’re spending on other marketing activities. This is the beautiful science of refinement based on data. SEARCH ENGINES Next, our member can click on "engine" and be taken to a page that shows how well traffic from search engines converted. This data is interesting because although this is where they received the bulk of their eCourse sales from, the conversion rate is actually lower than the site’s average. They get the majority of their site’s traffic from search engines, but that traffic has a very low "revenue / visitor" metric. Again, this member should flag this data and drill deeper to find out 1. if they can increase the CR of search traffic and 2. if they can increase their search volume by producing more high quality content that helps convert visitors into paying students. SOCIAL Lastly, let’s take a  look at social. Here we have an interesting case because we only had 1 eCourse sale through social (drilling deeper I can see it came from YouTube). Now, if the member was spending their time equally on all activities (SEO, social, referral traffic) then this data would clearly indicate that it’s time to re-prioritize and re-strategize or dump social marketing all together. However, they didn’t’ spend anytime on social this month so the data doesn’t really suggest that should cancel their efforts. They need to give it an honest shot before they put it on the cutting block. If, and only if, after spending enough time on the platform they find the traffic from social less valuable then it would be time to make a decision on which activities to engage more in and which activities to engage in less. What do you see in this data? What would your strategy or advice be to our member?  

In a recent blog post we deconstructed one of our client’s sites to find out which traffic sources were making them the most sales. We didn’t look at PPC, but we looked at search engines, social and referrals. When the data comes back it’s always fascinating to go through. There is so much powerful information in the data that you don’t need to be an expert to understand. You can see the traffic source / conversion rate case study here. However, we thought it would be fun to create a poll for our audience to answer the same question. Where do the majority of your eCourse sales come from? Are you paying for them through an AdWords Campaign? Are you building digital relationships and getting a lot ot traffic through referrals? Are you actively engaged in building a successful affiliate marketing campaign? Or are you, like many of us, engaged in an active content marketing campaign in a quest to chase the long tail of search? We’re curious to know. Please take the time to fill out the poll below. Once your answer has been submitted the results will be visible. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.