If you’re selling your knowledge or expertise online and you’ve being doing so for a while you’ll be familiar with the rhythm of your own online course sales on a month to month basis. There are some ups and downs, but for the most part your eCourse sales will stay in relation to your site’s traffic and Conversion Rate. In fact, it’s surprising for most edupreneurs who are just starting out selling eCourses just how static the numbers stay when your selling environment (competition, website traffic, sales pages etc) stay the same. Most course vendors will monitor their Conversion Rate (CR) each month and many eCourse sellers find that numbers stay surprisingly consistent. That being said, there is a natural rhythm or fluctuation that should be expected on a month to month basis. Most eCourse veterans are familiar and comfortable with these slight variations. For example, a CR of 1.1% this month and a CR of .08 next month probably isn’t the end of the world and won’t raise and flags. It’s likely just the natural rhythm of your eLearning site. A CASE STUDY We love using case studies at Academy of Mine. All of you familiar with our edupreneur blog will know that we often post information about data collection and how eCourse sellers can use data to help them grow their course. However, data can be used for more than just growth, it can also be used to help identify and then fix any issues with regards to dropping eCourse sales. Let’s jump into this conversation by looking at one of our member’s sales graphs below. You’ll see they average $10,306.67 in eCourse sales / month. However, their sales range from about $7000 to 12,000 / month. Also notice in May there was a big drop in sales. Should they worry? I’m not sure… we have to dig deeper. LET’S START BY LOOKING AT SALES LOOKING AT SALES ALONE DOESN’T GIVE US THE WHOLE PICTURE. Seeing a drop in sales doesn’t mean much unless you draw traffic into the equation. A drop in sales is nothing to worry about if a drop in traffic caused the problem (in that case, diagnosing the traffic loss is important because fixing the problem will simply mean fixing your traffic issue). Looking at the chart below you’ll see that May’s drop in sales had nothing to do with traffic as traffic remained fairly consistent. BRINGING THE SITE’S CONVERSION RATE INTO THE PICTURE We’re getting closer to a clearer picture if we have a problem on our hands here or if our member’s dip in May was simply part of the natural rhythm of their eLearning site. An easy metric to help you figure this out is your eCourse site’s conversion rate (CR). In this case study the member has a CR between 0.39% and 0.59 for these 6 months (which is low because they have a high priced online course). The numbers below represent numbers less than 1%. For example 48 means 0.48%. The average conversion rate for these six months was .46%. As you can see this member’s best month for sales was also their best month for traffic and also their best month for conversion rate. When we look at their lowest sales month (May) we see that it was also their lowest month in terms of CR (.39%). However, the fact that they jumped back up the next month gives us a bit of breathing room because .39% isn’t lower than the previous low month (which means it’s not out of the normal rhythm of the site). Take a look for yourself below. BUT WHAT IF CR, TRAFFIC AND SALES WERE DIPPING If you’re looking at your online course sales numbers and you see consistent dips outside of the normal rhythm of your eCourse site, first make sure that the dips are proportionate to dips in traffic or dips in CR. You need to be able to properly diagnose the problem by looking first at your data, before you can even think about a strategy for fixing the issue. IF THE DIP WAS CAUSED BY A DECREASE IN TRAFFIC If the decrease was caused by a decrease in site traffic the first thing you need to do is drill deeper and find more specific metrics. Site-wide traffic isn’t really the best indicator when looking for problems with sales. The reason is that you might have popular posts on your blog that may or may not have much impact on your bottom line. If a page that has little impact on your bottom line becomes popular in search engines you might see a jump in traffic and be surprised by the fact that it doesn’t have much impact on sales. In this case, looking at site-wide traffic stats will artificially deflate your CR which might make it look like you have a conversion problem when in fact the problem lays in developing a better content marketing strategy. For this reason, it’s best just to tally up the unique visits to your eCourse landing pages (your main course sales page(s). This will give you a better indication of your most important site traffic. The traffic that either entered on one of your main landing pages, or was funnelled there by one of your blog posts. If, after looking at this data, you find out that indeed your sales slump was caused by a substantial decrease in traffic you need to re-strategize your content marketing and general traffic campaign. We have a great post entitled Improving Search Ranking for eCourse Sellers that gives you one strategy on improving your search ranking for long tail search terms. We also have another post entitled eCourse Traffic Sources that Bring the Most Enrollments. There are, of course, thousands of other strategies. But those posts should help get you started. IF THE DIP WAS CAUSED BY A DECREASE IN CR If your traffic levels stayed consistent but your sales dropped due to a decrease in your eCourse site’s conversion rate, then you need to strategize differently. There are a few things you can do if you find this to be the issue: 1: Source of traffic: Different traffic sources have a different impact on CR (See this post on Finding Out Where Your eCourse Sales Come From). Some referral sources just convert better. So even if traffic remained consistent, you need to dig deeper to see if you lost a high quality referral partner, or started ranking lower for one of your better converting search terms and maybe higher for a lower converting search term. 2: Competition: If you’ve looked at the data above but you don’t find any major changes in your site’s traffic sources then you might need to do some basic research to see if you have a new competitor. You might be sharing your niche’s market share with another company that you were not aware of. Are they offering a superior product or offering a similar online course at a lower price point? This could be the reason for your drop in sales. 3: Outdated Site: Another reason that you might be seeing lower sales numbers is because over the years your eLearning site may have started to look outdated. Site aging is a natural process but requires your attention once in a while. Sometimes a decent design update is enough to jolt your site back up to normal sales levels. CONCLUSION In the end, it’s up to you to 1) find out if you have a problem or if the drop in sales in part of your eCourse site’s natural rhythm 2) Properly diagnose the problem by identifying what’s contributing to the dip in sales and lastly 3) Implement a strategy (like this one) to bounce back. Good luck!  

Create a practical starting point before every lesson for your students. If you have ever had experience with sailing, or know someone who has, you may have heard about or experienced first-hand the sense of freedom that comes with it. Being out on the open water with nothing but the wind and the tide to guide you along can be soothing, calming, and relaxing. Unless there is a storm, of course, but that is a story for another day. YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN OF YOUR E-COURSE Along the way though, there will be instances when the boat captain may decide that it is appropriate to drop anchor and stay in a particular spot for a set amount of time. The anchor keeps the boat firmly in place, allowing it to sway and rock to and fro along with the waves, without a cause for panic amongst the boat’s passengers. Once the time is right and the conditions are ideal, the boat’s captain will decide when to pull up anchor and continue to sail to another rendez-vous point along the way back home…or perhaps somewhere else nowhere near home at all! Regardless of the conditions or the reasons, the captain of the boat is responsible for the safety, security, and best interests of the passengers. He or she must also make sure that passengers are enjoying themselves and having a good time out on the open water. But through it all, the captain is the one guiding the boat’s passengers on their tour, and is the one person ultimately responsible for getting them to where they have expected to go. As the teacher and facilitator of your course, you are the captain of your student’s boat, and an orientation board is your anchor. THE PURPOSE OF AN ORIENTATION BOARD An orientation board can be virtual (posted online) or literal (presented in-class), but in practical use it can be incredibly useful to you and especially important for your online students. Typically, an orientation board is an outline written onto a blackboard, whiteboard, or SMART Board just before teaching a lesson, and it includes: 1) date 2) teacher’s name 3) length of time to be spent on the lesson 4) method of learning confirmation at the end of the lesson (i.e. oral quiz, small test, group activity, class discussion, etc.) 5) lesson title 6) lesson number designation (if it is part of numbered series of lessons in your curriculum), and most importantly, 7) list of teaching points that will be covered during the lesson. Some educators may refer to this type of outline as an "agenda," but it really is so much more than that. As the anchor for your students’ "tour" through your online lesson, the orientation board is the source of security that allows the ebb and flow of discussion in your eClass to move freely without restraint, yet maintains a locked position to keep the online class on-target and more importantly, on-topic. Adolescent students can be easily distracted from a lesson, but adult conversation can digress into a tangent just as easily! But the presence of an orientation board for every class, and introduced at the beginning of every class, gives your students a very clear sense of routine that they can expect and look forward to for each of your lessons with them. It helps to keep them engage with the lesson because it gives them something tangible to "buy into," since they can see for themselves in advance what goals you are setting out for them to achieve and learn that day (See this blog post on the importance of giving your students a good understanding of the "big picture"). As well, it gives you a clear indication of where you want your students to be content retention-wise before and after every online lesson. This kind of knowledge will help you make the necessary adjustments required if you see that your students need to catch-up (if you do not manage to cover all of your teaching points in a particular class), or if you are free to take your time and go a little further in-depth with another teaching point (if you find yourself ahead in a lesson). For further exploration into the benefits of an orientation board, please read the next blog article, Anchoring the Lesson for Your Class - Part II.

The finer aspects about creating a practical starting point before every lesson for your students. In the previous blog article, Anchoring the Lesson for Your Class - Part I, we explored the concept of having an orientation board for every online class, and how it can serve as the "anchor" for your e-lesson’s teaching points. As the "captain" of your students "boat tour" through your online lesson, you are the one ultimately responsible for getting them where they expect to go, and the orientation board is a great tool to help you do just that. It can be a virtual board (posted online), or a quite literal one (a whiteboard, blackboard or SMART Board) propped up in front of students in a classroom. Regardless, each board will have the following seven elements: 1) date 2) teacher’s name 3) length of time to be spent on the lesson 4) method of learning confirmation at the end of the lesson (i.e. oral quiz, small test, group activity, class discussion, etc.) 5) lesson title 6) lesson number designation (if it is part of numbered series of lessons in your curriculum), and most importantly, 7) list of teaching points that will be covered during the lesson. HERE AND NOW FRAME OF MIND Although something as mundane as the date may not seem important, it really sets the right tone for your online class by establishing a "here and now" frame of mind for your students, and focuses them on the current lesson. It also has the subtle yet useful aspect of keeping chronological order of your lessons and the teaching points they include. Of course, when it comes to the teacher’s name - your name - it does not necessarily need to be included, but it is not a bad idea to periodically ensure that your students know who you are and how to get in contact with you. This kind of information (if you have it in your course details online) can include your "virtual office hours;" this would be information letting your students know what time of day and what days of the week you are available to be contacted for answering any questions. As helpful and accessible as you may want to be for your students, you also have a life too! TIMELINES AND PACING Speaking of timelines, outlining the length of time that you expect to spend on teaching the lesson gives the students an idea of what kind of pacing may be involved, and it also serves as a reminder to you to stick to the schedule in your lesson plan. And while sticking to that schedule, you will more than likely have several points planned out in your lesson where you will ask questions of your students to gauge their content-retention, and an end-of-lesson follow-up activity to sum up your teaching points is a good idea as well. It is a great way wrap up your lesson and to get your students in the right frame of mind for their next lesson. Of course, letting your students know about this end-of-lesson activity in advance - through inclusion on the orientation board - will go a long way towards encouraging student content-retention and minimizing stress over the unknown. While avoiding the unknown through inclusion of the lesson title seems obvious enough, some educators like to work with the abstract and run a stream- of-consciousness type of lecture running with a particular theme or motif rather than a specific topic, and this approach may not really translate well over to eLearning. However, what may be useful to eLearning is the presence of a lesson number designation for each of your lessons or classes. While it may not be necessary at all, something like this could be quite useful if your lesson is just one part of a much larger, progressive curriculum that you are offering across a multiple number of courses online. A SAILING ANALOGY Finally, the list of teaching points that will be covered during the lesson is the pièce de résistance of the orientation board. You are the captain, your class is the boat, your students are the passengers, your orientation board is the anchor, and your list of teaching points is the pre-planned tour route with every anchor-drop point scheduled in advance. This is where the analogy used in the previous article really starts to come into play in our discussion. Much like the passengers of a boat tour, your students have signed up to take your online course and are expecting to be taken on a journey somewhere special. Your job as their teacher is to take them on that trip, but it is up to you to decide the best way to get there, and it is up to you as to what stops to make along the way. Each teaching point marks where you will "drop anchor" with your students and discuss all the content involved within that part of the lesson, and like the anchor dropped during a tour stop, you are free to explore all the elements of that teaching point without fear of floating away with the open seas of discussion. You can answer questions, debate different aspects, learn new areas of study together as a group, and all the while anchored to the teaching point you are currently on. Once that teaching point is completed, you can continue on to the next one, the one after that, and so forth until you get to your destination - the end of your lesson! And the end-of-lesson confirmation activity can be likened to a vacation resort post-trip questionnaire for quality assurance purposes, where you as the teacher (boat captain!) can take stock and look for areas to improve for the next lesson. Happy sailing, and bon voyage!

At Academy of Mine we help both big and small eCourse sellers market and sell their online courses. One of the benefits of managing both big and small members is that we have great "marketing hindsight" because we learn from our bigger members and share our findings with our smaller members. One area that we’re particularly interested in is the area of link outreach. Often overzealous eCourse vendors that are just launching their first eLearning site will launch a link outreach campaign to help give their site a strong promotional push right out of the gates. They might try to get links through: Blogger mentions Facebook likes Social shares Press releases Product reviews Guest posting opportunities APPROACH IS EVERYTHING: BE HELPFUL The best thing about managing larger members’ sites (many of whom are actually much larger than our own company) is we get access to the players on the other side of the table: The popular bloggers, the thought-leaders and the digital trendsetters. These are the people that everyone want’s to build some type of digital relationship with. These thought-leaders are also the same people that get overwhelmed with countless outreach emails each day. Because of this, they have to developed a keen eye capable of weeding out all of the outreach emails that come into their inbox each day. So now you’re probably thinking "but my eCourse really is great and I want them to talk about it". Well that’s a great attitude to have… but your approach will determine how successful your outreach campaigns are. YOU THINK OF THOUGHT LEADERS AS A DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM… THOUGHT LEADERS THINK A BIT MORE HIGHLY OF THEMSELVES I can speak from experience (managing Academy of Mine’s email inbox on occasion) that the majority of outreach emails we receive often get deleted before they get opened. We simply get too many to even consider opening and most of us here have developed a highly trained eye to be able to identify low quality outreach campaigns (skim, delete, repeat). Emails are quickly deleted when they scream "me me me". These emails arrive when someone wants us to use our voice or strength in our niche to help spread the word about their product or service. Getting a thought-leader to talk about your eCourse is like getting someone with a megaphone to talk about you. So it’s never surprising for leaders in any niche to get these types of emails. In fact, it’s expected. The problem is that these emails are often so out of touch with the needs of the leaders in an industry that they might read something like: "Dear [http://wwwacademyofmine.com/contact]. See attached press release and feel free to share with your audience. I think they would love to know about {product name}. Email me if you have any questions." Or maybe "Hi academyofmine! Your blog posts about {topic} are great! Please share the following article from our blog with your readers. Thanks" To me it’s shocking that such email outreach campaigns exist because I’m on the quality control side at Academy of Mine and I know how hard we work to ensure we provide in depth and helpful content to our blog readers. A post is worth a lot to us. It’s often the first touch-point someone has with our company. We don’t take the responsibility of good content lightly. So why would be published canned content or a press release? So for those of you who are guilty of sending out emails like the ones above, here are some facts about companies like Academy of Mine who are thought leaders in our field: WE BUILT OUR AUDIENCE ON TRUST 1. We have decent size audience (using techniques like this) because we’ve built that audience’s trust. We didn’t build that trust by spamming them or posting press releases. We built that audience by publishing content like you’re reading now. The second we stop respecting our readers’ desire for quality is the second they stop showing up to our site. So when you’re doing an outreach campaign, at a minimum, you need to be aware of this sensitive issue. GETTING BUSY DOESN’T MEAN GETTING STUPID 2. We might be busy and overwhelmed with the amount of work we need to do but that doesn’t mean we’re desperate for content. Publishing content on a consistent basis is hard work no doubt. But quality bloggers and thought-leaders are never so busy that they will fill a content gap with a low quality piece of content. For example, when we’re sitting around a board table during a busy period and someone brings up that we’ll be too busy this week to publish on Thursday and Friday, our marketing department isn’t excitingly waving their hands in the air saying "oh I know. We got an email from company X asking us to promote their product for them. We could just publish their canned press release they are distributing to 100 other blogs and free article sites on those days that we have nothing to publish from in-house content". Just because bloggers and thought-leaders get busy… it doesn’t mean they get stupid. Again, you need to be sensitive to this reality. These are the two "macro" considerations you really need to think about before you ever do any outreach. Everyone who’s worth contacting will be concerned about quality and almost all of those people could use a bit of help (because they are busy people). Maybe they could use help with content, an idea, a collaboration, a lead… who knows. But you need to ask yourself "how can I respect your need for quality while making your life easier"? So remember… put yourself in their shoes. Below we’ve posted 3 strategies to help you create better email outreach campaigns based on our personal experience and the experiences of the thought leaders whose sites are run through Academy of Mine. 1. DO YOUR RESEARCH: MOST BLOGS ARE NOT PRESS RELEASE OR REVIEW SITES So you’ve designed an amazing eCourse and you want people to know about it. It’s normal that you would look where your audience already is by doing some smart prospecting. But once you know where they are (say on a blog for example) you need to know how to approach the owner of that blog. The worst approach is sending an email telling the blog owner to promote your eCourse. Why would they do that favor for a total stranger? Remember, that the rules of offline marketing exist in the world of online marketing. For example, Imagine you’re standing in a room with other customers and business leaders in your niche. Everyone is going to have a different reasons for being there, different goals and different strategies for connecting with others in the room. However, if you were someone in this room, one of the least impactful ways for you to approach anyone in that room would be to approach them, introduce yourself with a scripted introduction, and then hand them a flyer promoting your eCourse telling them to tell their friends and family. They’d likely politely accept your flyer only to throw it in the closest garbage can a few minutes later. So if this technique doesn’t work in the real world… what makes you think it would be a good technique to use in the online world? Before you go up to someone you need to know who they are, what they want, what problems they have that you can solve and how you can make their life better or easier. It usually involves a series of steps. Getting what you want often doesn’t happen during the first conversation. Therefore you need to manage each digital contact using a spreadsheet or some type of digital contact or Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). Academy of Mine eCourse sellers get access to a CRM that helps them handle the very complex world of navigating digital relationships. Here is a quick snapshot: 2. PROVE YOU’RE NOT A ROBOT Next, before you send your outreach emails make sure that you prove you’re not a robot to the person you’re sending it to. Again, those of us accustomed to receiving dozens of "promote my stuff for me please" emails on a day to day basis have quick ways to look for subtle symbols that help us weed through the junk. For example, if someone took the time to write "Hi everyone at Academy of Mine" vs. "Hi everyone at academyofmine" it would show us that they are likely not using a script to compose the introduction of the email. A human would need to write that email to put the spaces in the right place and capitalization on the right letters. 3. KNOW MY NAME BEFORE YOU ASK ME OUT. KNOW MY LAST NAME BEFORE YOU ASK TO MOVE IN WITH YOU Lastly, before you contact thought-leaders asking them to help you…. help them first. The more useful they think you are, the more helpful you’ve been to them the more likely they will be to let a stranger into their inner-circle. Don’t approach thought-leaders asking for free advertising or publicity as a stranger. Get to know them first. CONCLUSION Leaders in any niche have to use various sorting strategies not because 99% of the emails they receive are poorly intentioned or the products are low quality. In fact, in our case, many of the products we’re asked to promote are amazing. But we need to delete 99% of emails because we don’t have the time to strategize ways to genuinely fit those products, services or ideas into our current system or content marketing strategy. So don’t go out there and ask someone for free links or free publicity. Industry leaders have no incentive to give that type of support to a stranger. You weren’t creative enough to find anther way to spin it for them and they don’t have the time to do that type of strategy work for you. So the best option in that case is to delete your email. However, it doesn’t need to be that way. It’s just that the responsibility is on you to find creative ways to make your link outreach proposal irresistible bait. Good luck!    

Promoting an online course takes a lot of time. First, there is the building of the course. Next, you have the building of the platform. Lastly, you have the task of both promoting your online course and doing the administrative work that comes along with running your own eLearning company. A daunting task to say the least and far too much for most people to handle… which is a good thing. Let me explain why. MOUNTAINS ARE GOOD. IT KEEPS THE UN-FIT AT THE BASE…. LOOKING UP…. WISHING Building an online course is like climbing a mountain. However, when you’re building an online course you can’t see the submit. It’s hidden behind the clouds. You have your expectations of course… but how high can you go? How long will it take you to get there? And lastly… will it be worth the journey? Those are all good questions to ask. However, it’s the fact that it’s hard, time consuming and intimidating that stops most people from trying in the first place. So at Academy of Mine we see this barrier to entry as a gatekeeper. Or a sort of… how should I put it… "competitor control manager". The fact that you can’t see the summit is a good thing. It means there is inherent risk involved which will keep those lacking in entrepreneurial spirt on the sidelines. This leaves plenty of climbing room for the risk-ready edupreneur! After all, if it was easy, everyone would do it and the market would be flooded with competitors right? So don’t think of the challenge as a bad thing. For eCourse vendors with patience and tenacity to follow through on their project, the unknown elements and the challenge of doing it make your life easier in the long run since you’ll be one of the brave few to give it a shot. A 6 MONTH CASE STUDY Before we go any further I want you to look at the traffic graph below which shows the growth of one of our member’s eCourse sites over the course of 6 months. Notice they started from scratch with zero visitors their first month.   YOU’RE NOT WORKING HARDER MONTH 6… IT’S JUST THAT YOUR WORK FROM MONTH 1 IS STARTING TO PAY OFF… FINALLY. In the 6 month chart seen above our member went from zero to around 3500 views / month (and generated about $3000 in sales in June alone). This member’s site is run by one person and they offer 1 course online. They are a bootstrapped company and have no outside investment. Everything they do, they do by themselves with the limited resources they have access to. They also have a full time job and therefore they can only contribute part of their time to building, promoting and running their online course. We’ve used this case study as an example because many of you will find yourself in a similar situation. You might have a limited budget, a family or a job that you need to take into consideration. This of course will likely slow your growth rate down. We could have used a more impressive growth chart for this case study (people with larger budgets, larger teams, more experience, no full time jobs etc), but this growth chart represents what’s possible for the average person starting from scratch who will be doing most things on their own. Even though it’s a modest growth chart, it’s important to note that in their second month when they only had 128 visitors to their eCourse site they were working their butts off. In fact, our member told us that their first three months were the hardest and most time consuming of all of their months. However, 5 months later they weren’t working any harder but their traffic continued to jumped steadily. Their month 6 numbers are their new "plateau numbers" (meaning that if the eCourse seller stopped promoting their eCourse right now they would still hover around this point). This is because the work they did in their first month is still paying off now. For example, maybe they wrote a blog post in their first month that is only starting tho show up high in search results now. Once you secure a position, it’s much easier to maintain it. DELAYED GRATIFICATION: IT FEELS GOOD AND BAD AT THE SAME TIME Every entrepreneur knows the benefits of not trading time for money. The chart above is testament to benefits of having a solid long term vision for your eCourse company. But imagine if things were different. Imagine if in their second month, this eCourse seller threw in the towel and gave up. And why shouldn’t they? They stayed up until 2Am working on their audio lectures, creating blog posts, formatting their content, designing the website and so on… and all for what? 128 visitors (none of whom purchased their eCourse). But if they threw in the towel at this point they would have missed out on the opportunity to earn over $3000 / month which they will now probably make from this point forward. It wasn’t easy and it required a lot of work, but it’s not magic and it shouldn’t be mystified. It’s a rhythm that most experienced entrepreneurs are very familiar with so they’ve learnt how to enjoy the ride. Creating an eCourse from scratch is a lot of work for no immediate payoff (or very little payoff). In the example above the first month of traffic saw 128 visitors, the next month saw a jump to 552. Still, a very small amount of traffic, but it’s a 331% increase in traffic. Which, if you look at it that way, is a huge jump! And the next month we’re over 1000 visitors and shortly after that we’re just under 4000 / month. So if you’re just getting started out and you’re still hovering around the 128 visitors / month mark, don’t be discouraged. We’ve all been there (including us). Just make sure you keep climbing upwards slowly but surely. Small gains in momentum quickly start to add up. If you’re looking for a a few tips on how to market your eCourse you might want to check out this blog post on data hacks for long tail marketing or this post on how eCourse sellers can improve their organic search engine ranking. Good luck!  

If you’re just getting started selling courses online you’re probably wondering how to best go about getting traffic to your website. At Academy of Mine we see many different eCourse sellers launch their companies online. Different members have different approaches, different sized teams and different budgets. However, we’ve noticed one common thread amongst all of our members… there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build a successful eLearning company, just as it takes time to build any company. BUT I’M ONLY GETTING 20 VISITORS / DAY! WHAT SHOULD I DO? For those of you who are just getting started, you might feel a bit discouraged when you login to your analytics account to find your traffic hovering around 20 uniques / day. On a good day you might have 25 visitors. Hardly time to celebrate. But what should you do? Obviously, you need to break out of this beginner’s starting position (which is a nice way of saying "rut") and start growing your eCourse traffic. AN ANSWER. BUT FIRST….. SLOW… AND… STEADY… WINS…. THE…. RACE Before you start reading the content below, you need to understand that planning and implementing  a solid growth strategy takes time. However, persistence pays off (as is seen in this 6 month case study, or this 5 year case study). It’s all about delayed gratification folks! START A CONTENT MARKETING CAMPAIGN FOCUSED ON QUANTITY…. YES VOLUME COUNTS Search engines favor quality content. We all know that. If users are engaging and spending time on the pages you create, Google and other search engines see those engagement metrics as a "signal" that helps indicate to them that web searchers value the content you’ve created, which in turn will likely push you up in organic search rankings over time. Those looking for shortcuts will likely be thinking "So what if I discovered 5 search terms, all with great global traffic volume, and I tried to optimize my site around only those terms?" Well, in our experience, these smaller static websites do not do very well in organic search. This is because Google not only values content quality… but they also value content quantity. SOME PROOF I don’t like making statements like this without backing it up with some hard evidence and data, so let’s take a look at the pages that rank really well for the search term "how to program". I pulled up data on the top 8 ranking pages for this term. Look below under the "pages" column to see the number of pages Google has indexed for these top ranking websites. Notice that the majority of the sites in the list are "deep" sites (i.e. they have lots of content). As you can see in the data above there are no "5 pagers" in the list of top ranking sites for that term. In fact many of the top ranking sites have many thousands of indexed pages. So if you’re going to compete for any term, the page quantity metric ("pages" column above) is an important metric to consider. After you know where your competition stands, you’ll need to set benchmarks for yourself so you can start overtaking them. Start off by aiming for 10 posts, then 25, 50, 100 and then it’s time to celebrate when you hit 200 posts. If you’re just starting out it pays to invest a considerable amount of time in content creation and publishing. If you’re publishing once / day you can hit your first benchmark in less than a month, and your second benchmark in less than two months. From a volume standpoint that might allow you to compete in the search engines. As you can see in our list above one site only has 16 indexed pages, the next lowest ranking site only has 254 pages. This helps show that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of pages to rank. Sure it might help, but smaller sites run by one or two people can still hit the first page of Google by engaging in some good ol’ fashioned hard work. Even us at Academy of Mine, beat out WordPress (a much larger site) for some of our main key-phrases. And please remember that page quantity / site depth is just one metric taken into consideration by search engines’ complex algorithms. There is no magic page quantity number, but in our experience our members usually start to see a pretty dramatic increase in site traffic and sales by the time they hit the 100 -200 indexed pages mark. Writing this much content is equivalent to writing a small book, but in our experience it’s the single most important investment you could make in your eLearning company if you’re just starting out. CREATING A VOLUME OF CONTENT HELPS BY: - Inspiring search engines to favor you in organic results (as seen in the data above). - Provides additional internal linking opportunities throughout your website. - Provides the opportunity for you to chase the "long tail" of search. - Your blog content will provide many of your visitors a first touch-point with your e-Learning company. These pages will be many peoples’ first time learning about your company. So write great content that makes a good first impression. But most importantly…. write a LOT of it! Good luck.  

We’re often asked "how much money can you make selling courses online"? There is of course no simple answer to this question. However, we thought it would be helpful to outline the progress that one of our clients made over the years. They spent the time to develop a high quality course content and they spent a long time promoting the course. The client has provided their metrics for us, but they wish to remain anonymous. All we can say is that they offer courses in the creative field. Let’s talk a little bit about their story. The online course was started by a small group of enthusiastic creatives who were skilled in different areas of their craft. They taught some courses in the "real world" but they noticed that each semester they simply re-taught the same information. They thought it would be more efficient for them, and for the students if they put their course online. This way students wouldn’t need to wait for the next enrollment date and the teachers could focus on developing new courses or refining the ones they’ve currently started, rather than re-teaching the same content over and over. Putting their course online seemed like the logical next step. However, they didn’t know how to get their course up and running. They didn’t know how to create a student backend, they didn’t know how to accept credit card payments from their website, they didn’t know about IP verification, conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization. They had a great idea for a course but they didn’t know how to put it online. This is where Academy Of Mine comes in. We got them up and running within 24 hours. AFTER THE SETUP After we set them up, they uploaded their course content and we consulted them on how to best use our platform to offer courses online. Their students now rank their course as an A+ in terms of 4 areas: 1. Depth of content 2. Interactivity 3. Personalization 4. Passion of instructors The started out slow and asked their students for constant feedback. They were able to use this feedback to make modifications on their course. THE INEVITABLE PRICE INCREASE The problem with their first round of feedback was that in order to implement the ideas the teachers were faced with a dilemma. To give the students what they wanted would require an incredible investment in time. Essentially they wanted more one on one support and interactivity. They wanted more "live" interaction with teachers and students. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, however at their current pricing structure (at the time is was $150 for unlimited access to the course). The amount of new content the students wanted created was pretty astonishing and it would not only take time to create it, but also to teach it. With their current pricing plan they would see themselves making less than minimum wage to teach classes online. Hardly the business strategy they were initially excited about. However, on another level, they agreed with the students… it would make the course better. Not knowing how to deal with the pricing issue at the time, and wanting to create the best course possible so they created the new content and they would deal with the low payments until they found a solution. Of course it would be easy for them to increase the price of the course. However, the problem was that even though all students liked the idea of the new content, there were some who said given the choice they would not spend the extra money on it and they were happy with what they had now. Not only that, but the founders of the course wanted to remain accessible to people from around the world. They felt the $150 price tag of their course was great value for money and students wouldn’t need to go into debt to learn what they had to offer. At a higher price they felt they would exclude many students. THE CREATION OF LEVELS After a few months of creating the content and testing it with the students they quickly realized it was a huge hit. At the end of every month they send their students’ surveys and the students were now grading the course from B+ to A-. But they still didn’t solve the problem of financial fairness to the course founders and teachers. So they decided to create "access levels" using the Page Restriction Plugin that comes bundled with an Academy Of Mine membership. They created two levels: 1. Silver 2. Gold The new content they created was "exclusive content" available only to "gold members". All currently enrolled students had their memberships setup as "gold" memberships. However, all new students who wanted access to the premium content had to pay an additional fee. The silver membership stayed at $150 and the gold membership was offered at $299. This allowed for a fairer distribution of enrollment fees to teachers who were going to be teaching these new live online classes and developing the course content. TYPES OF COURSE CONTENT At academy of mine we encourage our members to develop 4 types of content for their audience 1. Written content: This usually makes the bulk of the course content. The students read through the lecture notes in a linear order from start to finish. The course in the case above was sub-divided into 6 different "lessons" with anywhere from 1- 8 lectures in each lesson. The course architecture would look something like this: LESSON 1: - Lecture 1.1 - Lecture 1.2 -Lecture 1.3 -Lecture 1.4 LESSON 2: -Lecture 2.1 -Lecture 2.2 etc etc 2. Social content: The next type of content we recommend our clients create is "social content". This is mostly written content that is user generated. We offer our clients a "social platform" where their students can post on the community wall, each other’s timeline, join groups, add photo galleries or send each other private mail. Social content is great because it inspires group conversation. Student’s can add to the overall value of the course by recommended links, additional reading material, books, documentaries and so on. Debates can be started, work can be shared and students can help each other through the course. 3. Grading content: We also encourage our clients to introduce grading content into their courses. This usually takes two forms. On a basic level you can introduce small quizzes which helps stuent’s identify areas where they might not fully understand the concepts you’ve prested to them. An autmated software plugin can automatically grade the student’s quiz and offer them immediate results. However, there is also another, more in-depth grading tool. Most of our clients have "student grading centers" where student’s upload assignments for their teachers to review. Teachers will review most student work within 7 days. 4. Live content: Student’s really love the live feature of our client sites. Our client sites come installed with "live lecture calendars" where they can see the live lectures being offered this month. Then at pre-deteermined times they will login and take a course (in chat format) with an instructor who will walk them through the class using both text, video examples, photographs or other links that help them make their point. There are breaks for Q&A and and these seem to be really loved by students. 5. Video content: One of the elements that led to the price increase for the founders of the course we’re discussing was the desire of the students to have more video content. Creating video content can get expensive especially if you plan on high production standards. You’ll need good quality cameras, actors, microphones and an assortment of other production gear and personnel. In the case we’re talking about here, each video the founders planned on creating would cost around $500 - $2000 each for a 10 minute tutorial. 6. Audio content: Some of the tutorials that were more theory based and less based on an understanding of the visuals required audio recordings. Audio recorders were used mostly for interviews since that seemed to be the best use of this particular technology. 7. Other visual content: Photographs (both stock photographs and in-house photography) as well as screenshots of certain software programs needed to be acquired to help complement the written material. COST OF DEVELOPING COURSE CONTENT So how much does it cost to create all of this content? Written Content: The written content in the course in this example was written by the course founders. They spent many hours organizing and writing the content but they didn’t take any payment to write the content. They believed the course fees would help compensate the founders over time. They did hire an editor who charged them $500 to do a basic spelling and grammar check. Social Content: Social content is free to create since it’s user generated. You simply need the software plugins to manage such an activity. You also need patience because building a thriving social community can take time. Grading Content: Some grading content is free to create. For example quizzes take time to design and the software program to manage the automation of grading, but once it’s set up it runs itself. However, one on one grading does cost money. When the course in question first started the founders graded the assignments themselves to keep expenses down. Now since the course has grown the hire outside teachers to grade student work at a cost of $400 / month. Live Content: Live content requires that a teacher be present during the lecture. Therefore you’ll need to pay your teachers on a per lecture or per hour basis. When this course was first started the founders taught the classes for free to save on monthly expenses and to get student feedback on how they would like to see the live lecture section of the course take shape. Now that the course is grown, the founders have hired outside teachers to teach the classes. Each month the course now pays $600 / month in teacher fees. Video Content: Creating video content can cost very little if you don’t require high production standards or if you can rely mostly on screen-casts or basic "talking head" recordings. However, if you require actors, high quality sound recording, specialized locations and so on, the production fees start to increase. The the case above it costs the founders roughly $500 - $2000 / 10 minute video. Audio Content: Audio content is much cheaper to produce. A few basic website plugins and a couple pieces of computer software are all you’ll need to get started recording audio. The founders of the course estimate it cost them under $300 to get started recording audio interviews. Now that they own all of the software creating new content doesn’t cost anything. It just requires a time commitment to record, edit and publish. Other Visual Content: The founders also required stock images to help design their site and explain their creative concepts. They estimate that they spent $500 in stock photography and video to get their course started LAUNCH OF THE ONLINE COURSE Once the online course was launched, the first two months were dedicated to getting inbound links to the site from external sites. At the same time, the course used their blog create high quality content and internally link that content using relivant keywords that would allow the founders to access highly targeted searches. The first month of being live brought in $300. The second month brought in $700. In the third month the course was making $2000 / month and it continued to make $2000 / month for the better part of 6 months. During this time the course content was adjusted due to the feedback from the first round of students. SLOW GROWTH After the first six months the founders then went back to promoting the course by creating a blog with a deep pool of helpful content. They focused on creating in-depth content that was not being covered anywhere else. Slowly this content started to be indexed by search engines and slowly they started showing up for more and more keywords relevant to their niche. Sales grew from $2000 / month to $5000 / month by the end of the year. The next year the sales figured raised to $7000 / month and in their third year (this year) they were making $10,000 / month. ADDITION OF NEW COURSES Now they feel they are in a position where they can start adding new stand alone courses to cater to the same niche. These courses have a smaller, more specific demographic, but their is less competition in these fields. These courses have only recently been launched (within the last 6 months) but are already making between $500 - $800 / month. CONCLUSION The founders of the course have not used any paid-advertising to promote their online course. They rely on social media, positive reviews of their site and a strong search engine ranking in popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo to sell their courses online. Their goal by the end of the year is to have their newest courses making $2000 each($4000 total) which would bring their monthly average to around $14,000 / month. It’s not been the fastest growth but it’s appreciated by the students. Most importantly, it’s reliant on a strong course, hard work and quality content!

When it comes to choosing an LMS for creating and selling your courses online, there are plenty of options out there. But one of the critical features of any LMS must be an integrated "Social Platform" which is not just a nice to have feature but a "must have" for any modern LMS. Below are some of the features that make a Social LMS super powerful and effective for both teachers and students.   Interactive capability using  "Groups" and "Forums": For teachers and students to interact, a Forum style setting is a great idea where back and forth discussions can take place, members can share attachments like images, documents for quick feedback etc. The idea of a forum could be done in a couple of ways: a) Open Forum which allows any members to participate. This could be useful if you are just starting out with your LMS and want to build an audience. Think about it this way. If you are just starting out in the online education space and trying to create a business selling courses online, you will need to build a community that identifies with what you are offering and wants to be active participant in your community. An "Open Forum" is a great way of achieving that as you don’t even need to have online courses ready but can easily create engaging topics of discussion within your niche and invite members to participate. By the time you are ready to sell your courses on your platform, you will hopefully have created a tight knit community of members who already believe in you, have vetted your idea and now could be your first paying customers. b) Closed Forum only available to subscribed students to the course/LMS. This could be achieved by creating a pre-defined "group" which will only consist of the members within the course. This could be very useful if you want to restrict the interaction only to students and teachers who are applicable to a specific course. Messaging and Notifications:  A course within an LMS can have many students and it will be great if those students can actually talk to each other as well via private messages, getting notified whenever an instructor has updated anything on the course and many more features like these. Social Profile for the member:  Every Student and Teacher would have their social profiles automatically linked. This includes facebook, Twitter, linkedin, instagram etc which will enable speedier communication and also connection between the members. At Academy-Of-Mine, we are trying to do exactly this with our Social LMS within our online education platform. In fact, we have enhanced the Social LMS features based on constant feedback from our clients who have given us some excellent recommendations in terms of the features that they wanted in a social lms. When it comes to online education, there is so much room for innovation which can be overwhelming at times for a user. Platforms like ours are trying to make it easy for those entrepreneurs to quickly get up and running with courses online. If you are interested in a demo, you can see our demo site here  or contact us here

Who We Are: We are a team of three scholars working cross-continentally: Jori N. Hall, University of Georgia, Leanne M. Kallemeyn and Cliff McReynolds, Loyola University Chicago, and Nanna Friche, Danish Institute for Local and Regional Government Research, Copenhagen. In 2011 we started a conversation on differences and similarities in evaluation practice across North America and Europe. This conversation turned into a dialogue and a study on this topic. The purpose of our study was to explore how evaluation practice is conceived as reflected in articles published in the American Journal of Evaluation (AJE) and Evaluation, a journal supported by the European Evaluation Society. To explore evaluation practice across different contexts we found it useful to draw on the evaluation theory tree typology as articulated by Marvin C. Alkin and Christina A. Christie. This typology reflects the following three components of evaluation practice: (a) methods, (b) use, and (c) valuing. Lessons Learned: What we learned from this international comparison is that evaluation practice (as reflected in AJE and Evaluation) emphasizes methods, in comparison to use and valuing. By using Peter Dahler-Larsen’s discussion on evaluation societies we conclude that the "audit society," (e.g., the spread of auditing practices in society beyond financial institutions) might account for the trend of a methods-centric evaluation practice across continents. Based on this lesson we would like to invite evaluators and other interested stakeholders to engage in a global dialogue. We offer the following questions: 1) What methods are emphasized in different contexts across the globe in evaluation practice?  What are the similarities and differences in how evaluators conceptualize the role of methods in evaluation practice? (2) What are the implications for maintaining the current emphasis on methods dominant evaluation practice in local and global contexts? (3) Do we have a responsibility, as evaluators, to uphold other types of approaches to evaluation practice (i.e., evaluation for use, evaluation for contextual and cultural understanding)? If so, how might we go about enacting these understandings? (4) What, if any, additional understandings of evaluation practice do we want to maintain and uphold across continents? How can these understandings be maintained and upheld across continents? The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Research on Evaluation (ROE) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our ROE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Hi! This is Miriam Jacobson, a Doctoral Student, and Tarek Azzam, an Associate Professor, at Claremont Graduate University. We are talking today about how to use online crowdsourcing to conduct RoE (Research on Evaluation). Online crowdsourcing is a process of recruiting people online to do specific tasks, such as completing a survey, categorizing information, or translating text. We are currently exploring how access to the "crowd" can contribute to the development of new methods and approaches to evaluation. Lesson Learned: Crowdsourcing allows you to quickly and inexpensively recruit participants for RoE. For example, using Amazon’s MTurk (one of the largest crowdsourcing services) you can post a survey and receive hundreds of participants within a few days, for about $.50 - $2.00 per survey. Crowdsourcing also allows you to engage populations that are otherwise difficult to access for RoE studies, such as public constituents. Hot Tips: Consider whether your research is a good fit with participants on MTurk (also commonly called "MTurkers"), who tend to be younger and more educated than the overall public. To further understand who is participating in your study, remember to ask about relevant individual characteristics. When recruiting participants, be clear about what the task involves, the time required to complete it, and if applicable, any inclusion criteria for participants. Make sure instructions are clear for a range of people— if you aren’t sure, first pilot test the instructions. Treat MTurkers fairly—respond to email questions and promptly pay people for completing tasks. To increase quality, you can limit those completing your task using specific criteria, such as a minimum approval rating of 95% (this is a measure of satisfaction with their previous work), successful completion of 500+ tasks, and geographic location (currently you can select only countries and US states). Cool Tricks: Use crowdsourcing to: Pilot test a survey before administering it to a non-crowdsourced population (e.g., evaluation stakeholders). Study the effectiveness of different types of report language or data presentation formats. For example, you can post multiple versions of a report and see which best communicates the intended information. Involve MTurkers to operationalize evaluation-related concepts in a way that is understandable and relevant to a broad range of people. Engage large groups of people to code qualitative RoE data (e.g., open-ended survey responses, documents or videos) to quickly classify information and get an outside perspective on the data. The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Research on Evaluation (ROE) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our ROE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.