LISTEN TO THE PODCAST Are you selling courses online? If so, did you enter into the market with the assumption that you need to scout for students and teach them for a pre-determined amount of time before allowing them to complete your course and move onto the next stage in their lives or career?   If you use this educational framework you’re not alone, many course sellers do. It is, after all, the way most of us were taught. Therefore, it’s not surprising to find out that it’s the way most of us teach.   But it’s time to question this approach. Is this the best approach for your online education company’s needs? Is this the best approach for your students’ needs? Or do you just use this educational framework because it’s what you’re familiar with?  In this podcast we address this issue with author and entrepreneur Jeff Cobb who has nearly two decades of experience in learning technology. He challenges the "1 time transactional approach" to education and asks online educators to explore ways to build stronger and ongoing relationships with their students that meet their needs as lifelong learners.   IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT: Lifelong learning and what the "other 50 years" are. Why thinking about online education as a one time educational transaction may be hurting your online education company. Why schools are slow to adopt lifelong learning initiatives. New content creation challenges for lifelong educators. The link between freelancing, lifelong learning and online education. Why lifelong learning makes educational institutions more accountable to student outcomes.   SHOW NOTES: THINGS WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Jeff Cobb’s "Leading The Learning Revolution" Website Buy Leading the Learning Revolution on Amazon  

In a recent blog post we talked about how gamifiying a client’s educational site led to a 260% increase in student activity. However, in that case study we mentioned that it was something else, not gamification, that led to the biggest increases in student participation… and that was something much less trendy and much less technologically advanced. It was simple "proactive" rather than "reactive" teacher/student communication.   With proactive communication the responsibility of initiating contact with a student in an online learning environment falls on the shoulders of the teacher (or learning institution). With, reactive communication on the other hand, the teacher will primarily only respond to student initiated comments or questions.   After reading the book "Motivating and Retaining Online Students: Research-Based Strategies That Work" by Rosemary M. Lehman (Ph.D) we decide to test the impact that implementing a proactive rather than reactive communication strategy would have on overall student engagement results. But first we needed to find a client who was ONLY using reactive communication with their online student population.   One of our clients volunteered for this experiment. They told us that "In the past we put a lot of the responsibility of the community in the students’ hands. However, we didn’t realize that we didn’t really give our students much incentive to be part of that community. We just gave them the platform and walked away. The community existed as a good idea in an abstract sense [to us] but it never really started to take off until we made it our responsibility and not our students".   So we got to work on this clients site and we set up a system of communication where they became a much more active voice in their own online community. They posted questions, started conversations, created case studies and introduced students to each other who had similar interests. The result? A 1200% increase in student participation!  

Academy Of Mine recently chatted with Michael Linsin (see his website) about his book "The Classroom Management Secret". It’s a book dedicated to helping teachers working in a bricks and mortar setting effectively manage their classrooms. However, we thought it would be interesting to chat with Michael about how some of the concepts within his book translate into the world of online education. How does classroom management be integrated into your course design, Learning Management System (LMS) and your strategy as an online teacher?  You can find our interview with him below. Enjoy! THE INTERVIEW Hello Michael and thanks for chatting with us and our education blog readers today about your experience as a teacher. You talk about many things in your book but let’s start by talking about classroom organization. You mention that in a bricks and mortar setting that the classroom environment should "match your call for excellence". How do you think this could translate in the online classroom or online learning environment? Obviously, online educators don’t have the problem of stacked boxes and messy desks. But what are some of the things that online teachers can do to create a well organized learning environment? In many important ways an online teacher sets the tone for the class by how well they communicate what specifically students need to do. This is a primary thought and concern for online students. They want to know what the requirements are, from meeting times and reading assignments to homework and tests. A teacher who lays it all out from the very beginning, in a clear and detailed way, communicates their care and concern for their students—letting them know through their actions that they are their number one priority. This positive first impression relaxes students and frees them to focus on learning. When students can see and experience upfront that the teacher isn’t just going through the motions, but cares about them and their success, they’re compelled to give more in return. You also mention that in a bricks and mortar setting it’s important for a teacher to be present, not only in formal classroom settings, but also in "informal settings" such as the hallway or other gathering places where students meet. Can you explain the importance of this? What’s accomplished by meeting students in these informal settings? Can you speak specifically about how this might apply to adult learners in an online environment as well? Building relationships with students through your likeability and willingness to interact outside of class, and with no strings attached, provides a traditional-school teacher with tremendous influence to both curb misbehavior and spark greater motivation for learning. In an online setting, although you may never meet your students in person, your likeability is still important. You can still build a level of rapport through your humor, your smile (if Skyping), and your calm, organized presence. Your personality alone can improve interest, motivation, and a better learning experience for your students. Combating boredom is something most teachers need to think about (in both the online an offline worlds). You mention that students have four desires: The desire for adventure, humor, challenge and fascination. How could you see these translating online? If you’re Skyping a lecture or discussion, then it translates perfectly. Including these elements will cause students to become more emotionally invested in their learning. It will cause them to participate more, pay closer attention, and dig deeper into the subject area. In other words, your class will become not just another hoop to jump through, but rather something they immerse themselves in so deeply that their final grade takes a backseat. They learn for the sake of learning, because they’d rather do that than watch their favorite television program. When you can make your class something your students look forward to, something they’ll remember years later, everything else comes much easier. The last question I want to ask you about today is praise. I really like when you state in your book that "every time you praise you student for something that didn’t involve hard work or a certain mental toughness to accomplish, a sliver of their dignity is taken from them. As if a sinister voice whispers, "piisst! Hey, you in the third row. Yeah, you with the smiley face sticker. You know you didn’t really earn it, don’t you? Your teacher just gave it to you because average is all you’re capable of." You mention that teachers need to keep their eyes peeled for "true accomplishments". Once those genuine accomplishments are identified what things can you do to acknowledge the accomplishment and how can this translate online? In a traditional school environment it can be anything from a head nod to a note folded over and taped to a student’s desk. As long as the gesture is genuine and based on true accomplishment, there are any number of ways to praise students. Generally, though, private and subtle moments of acknowledgement tend to be more effective and more meaningful than the public, over-the-top variety. An online course shouldn’t in any way limit a teacher’s ability to point out exceptional work. It may take a bit more creativity, but it’s important enough to find a way. It’s one of the primary ways we give feedback, letting students know they’re on the right track and giving them a jolt of energy and confidence to push their work to levels they didn’t know they were capable of. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today Michael. To our blog readers if you’d like to learn more about Michael’s book "The Classroom Management Secret" you can do so by reading more about the book on Amazon here. 

Are you interested in seeing how a site running on the WordPress platform can be transformed into a powerful Learning Management System? Well we hope that you are because that’s what we want to show you today. WHY CHOOSE WORDPRESS TO HOST YOUR LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM? One of the biggest advantages to running your Learning Management System off a WordPress install is that WordPress is open source software developed by a passionate community of coders. But it’s not just the open source software itself which makes it valuable, but it’s also about all of the amazing theme and plugin developers that are designing programs to fit within the WordPress framework. So compared to other Learning Management Systems, WordPress gives you the potential of getting much more than just a powerful open source option… you get a whole host of tools including marketing plugins to help you sell your course online, social plugins to keep your students involved and beautiful website themes to impress your eCourse site visitors. And best of all new educational WordPress plugins are being developed all of the time to meet growing demand. So you don’t have to worry about the software going out of date (or looking out of date). There are other non-WordPress open source software options available on the market, and many of them are quite powerful, but from a design standpoint they leave a lot to be desired. The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it’s a platform that has a community surrounding it that’s not only interested in the power of the platform… but also in the look of the platform. It’s really a win-win for both teachers and students. A WALKTHROUGH OF A WORDPRESS LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN ACTION Academy Of Mine actually runs our clients’ site off of a modified version of the WordPress platform. We also install many advanced plugins like Scribe (for content marketing), Authority Labs (for search ranking tracking), CometChat (for video chat), WP Symposium (for social widgets) and thousands of dollars worth of WooThemes extensions and themes. These licenses normally cost people hundreds of dollars each month. However, because we have developer licenses for these companies (which cost us a lot of money) we can integrate these WordPress plugins into our clients’ Learning Management Systems at a major discount. If you’re interested in seeing a working copy of a WordPress Install setup as an LMS please check out our working demo here.

If you’re going to be offering a course online you’ll need Learning Management Software (LMS) for your online educational environment. Learning Management Software is more formally known as a Learning Management System but you’ll hear the phrases thrown around  interchangeably. There are important differences between the terms, however, generally when people mention that they’re looking for Learning Management Software they are more often than not stating that they are looking for a platform which will allow them to offer their course(s) online. So if you’re in this group of educators where do you start? Well you should start at the end. At the very end. Let me explain. WORK BACKWARDS AND START AT THE END Learning Management Software can be as complex or as simple as you want. It’s easy to get excited about the many interesting features of an LMS without thinking about how useful they will be for your online course users. You need to ask yourself questions like "do my online students need this feature to help them achieve their educational goal"? Or "do my online teachers need this feature to be better able to teach or administer their online course(s)?". If the answer is "no" then you might want to consider doing away with the feature. As we mention in this podcast, sometimes all you need your Learning Management System Software to do is provide the digital equivalent of two chairs and a table for the teacher and student to interact. If you don’t need more… why complicate things? Start with your students’ educational objectives in mind and go forward from there. LMS features need to be "must have" tools for the sake of educational advancement not "nice to have" tools for the sake of technological coolness. ASYNCHRONOUS VS SYNCHRONOUS FEATURES Next you need to decide how you’re going to teach your online course. Will you use asynchronous technologies, synchronous  technologies or a combination of both? Asynchronous technologies break the time space barrier and don’t require that teacher and student be online at the exact same time. However, communication can still take place through discussion forums, emails, video tutorials, wikis, lecture notes and blogs (to name only a few asynchronous technologies). Or you might decide to teach using synchronous technologies that require student and teacher to be at the same digital place at the same time. For example, an audio / video conversation through Skype would be considered a synchronous technology. Knowing which of these two methods you’ll use will help you start to define a list of features you would like your Learning Management Software to have. GRADING AND TRACKING FEATURES For a lot of adult learners and lifelong learners grades are generally not considered as important as having some tangible new skill to take away from their learning experience at the end of their journey. After all, at some point your students will likely know if they have learnt what it is you set out to teach them. Finding a way to incorporate progress measurement tools into your LMS is hugely important and will likely become more important as learner outcomes is becoming increasingly important as education becomes a more competitive field. This could mean the inclusion of features like grade-books, progress bars, progress reports and so on. TEACHER CONVENIENCE Learning Management System Software not only needs to meet the educational needs and students, but it also needs to meet the teaching needs of educators. For instance, how will teachers be notified when a student submits an assignment? How do they communicate with students? How do they access the class’s grades? How do they send out bulk communication to their students? How are their online classes organized? An LMS needs to be equally concerned with teachers’ needs as well. A PLATFORM THAT UNDERSTANDS STUDENT NEEDS The technology used within an LMS is pretty fascinating… but it can also get pretty complex and daunting pretty quickly. Don’t’ forget, you’ll be the one working with the LMS all of the time. You’ll know it inside and out. Your students on the other hand may not "get it" as quickly as you do. An LMS needs to be designed in a way that is intuitive and inspires the student to stay involved and engaged in their online course experience. An LMS which is overwhelming or complex will just add to the feeling of isolation for the student. You don’t want students focused on the technology. Instead, you want them focused on the content and their unique educational journey. For this reason, no matter how simple you want your LMS to be, it’s always nice to include a short video or tutorial in their first section of their course that walks them through the LMS software they will be learning on. This tutorial should teach them how to send emails, contribute to conversations, submit assignments and so on. That way, once they are done educating themselves on the technology, 100% of their energy can be put into their course work. SOCIAL FEATURES In a recent blog post on online course development we chatted with Rosemary M. Lehman, Ph.D. whose book "Motivating and Retaining Online Students: Research-Based Strategies That Work" points out that some studies show that as many as 50%-70% of students drop out of their online courses! one of the main reasons that students give for dropping out of their online classes is the "feeling of isolation". For this reason, it’s almost always beneficial to find a way to incorporate some type of social platform that allows your students and teachers to interact using both proactive and reactive communication strategies. IT’S NOT JUST POWER… IT’S BEAUTY TOO Lastly, don’t underestimate the importance of educational beauty. What is educational beauty you ask? Well I’m not entirely sure… but it’s just something you know when you see it. For example, when your standing in the hallway of your university and you feel proud to be there. In another interview we conducted on the topic of classroom management strategies, author and teacher Michael Linsin points out that traditional school classrooms should be designed in a way that matches their call for excellence. Why should it be any different for an online school or classroom? Design your educational website in a way that makes your students proud to be enrolled in your eCourse. Good luck!  

Deciding on a Learning Management System can be difficult. With so many features to consider which option is the best for you? We’ve included a Learning Management System Comparison chart below for you to look over. Under the LMS comparison chart you can read more about the companies in the list (as well as others). However, it should also be mentioned that each LMS option suits end-users needs differently. For example, larger learning institutions like universities and colleges will probably opt for a service is Blackboard or WebCT. Sure they are expensive, but they are also really powerful programs that do everything these larger schools need them to do. Options like WebCT and Blackboard don’t really cater to the individual course seller or subject matter expert. Options like Udemy are great for teachers who want to teach online but who aren’t entrepreneurial or technologically inclined and don’t mind sharing up to 50% of their course enrolment income with a company that handles the business and tech side of things. Options like Moodle and ATutor are great for teachers, entrepreneurs or subject matter experts who have knowledge of coding and design. These open source options don’t necessarily work the way you want them to "out of the box". They offer great LMS skeletons… but you need to put the meat on. They need to be configured to meet your design adn technological requirements. It should also be mentioned that open source options aren’t necessarily "free". For example, incorporating video chat into Moodle might cost you an additional $600 / year. These "add-ons" can add up quickly. Not only that but the software is fairly complex so, depending on the features you install and activate, you might need a fairly expensive hosting platform to host your "free" LMS. Lastly, these free open source options generally require a massive amount of "tweaking" to get them looking professionally designed. In our opinion, they tend to look a little bit outdated out of the box. And there is us. We offer an option which is catered to entrepreneurial minded teachers and subject matter experts. We give you all of the enrolment and sales tools you need to sell your online course as well as powerful Learning Management System software. At the end of the day it really depends on who you are and what your teaching goals are. We’ve included the URL’s to each of the sites in the comparison chart below. Take a look around their sites, and visit their LMS demos if they have one. Good luck!   Your LMS CostWebsiteWebsiteInstalled / Setup For YouInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment OptimizationEnrollment OptimizationKeyword TrackingKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?Take a % of Sales?Hosting & Domain Registration IncludedHosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgramBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledeCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Private SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsAbility to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareBuilt in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesDesign & ThemesLMSLMSStudent Profile PagesStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrading CenterGrade TrackingGrade TrackingProgress BarsProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?Allows Multiple Courses?Moodle$0Open SourceWebsitemoodle.comInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment Optimization10 accounts under one domainKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?Hosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesLMSStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrade TrackingProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?ATutor$0Open SourceWebsiteATutor.caInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment OptimizationKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?Hight priority support!Hosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesLMSStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrade TrackingProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?Academy Of Mine$199per monthWebsiteacademyofmine.comInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment OptimizationKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?testHosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesLMSStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrade TrackingProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?Blackboard$5000 +per yearWebsiteblackboard.comInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment OptimizationKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?Hosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesLMSStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrade TrackingProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?Udemy%50 up to 50% / enrollmentWebsiteUdemy.comInstalled / Setup For YouEnrollment OptimizationKeyword TrackingSEO Page EvalutationsTake a % of Sales?Hosting & Domain Registration IncludedYour Own Domain URLBuilt in Affiliate ProgrameCommerce EnabledPrivate SSL Certificate Ability to Sell SubscriptionsCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM)Built in Newsletter SoftwareDesign & ThemesLMSStudent Profile PagesPrivate Student EmailLive Group ChatAudio / Video ChatWhiteboarding / ScreensharingCollaborative DocsPrivate Video EmbeddingFriends / Groups FeaturesGrading CenterGrade TrackingProgress BarsAllows Multiple Courses?   BEST FREE LMS: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS FOR ONLINE COURSES 1. Academy Of Mine: While not technically a free option we offer services many of the free options don’t. First of all, many of the fee options don’t let you sell your course. So you can offer your course, but you can’t make money from it. With us, you can sell and make money from your online course. Secondly, a lot of the free options leave a lot to be desired from a design standpoint. You can check out our live demo to see how our learning platform looks. And thirdly and most importantly, we believe we’re better than free… because we actually make course vendors money. Our services pay for your small monthly fee many times over. We help our clients make thousands of more dollars on a month to month basis. The way we see it, if we cost you $200 but we make you $3000, we’re not really costing you money. And you keep 100% of your enrollment sales. So in a way… we’re kind of better than free! But if you’re interested in truly free, 100% free… then check out the options below. There are a lot of great options available for those of you who don’t want to monetize your course or want to try to do it on your own. 2. MOODLE: Moodle is a free web application for educators and probably one of the most popular free LMS’s on the market today. It’s open source software so it’s constantly being upgraded and developed. However, you might find that you need to hire third parties to help you customize the platform to help you achieve your educational needs. Just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost you money. However, you should test it out. It might work for your needs right out of the box. 3. .LRN: This LMS (pronounced "dot learn") was originally developed at MIT, .LRN is used worldwide by over half a million users in higher education, government, non-profit, and K-12. It comes out of the box with a lot of great teaching tools (forums, assessment, calendar, grading, evaluation, surveys, syllabus, file storage and a lot more). 4. eFront: Offers a "freemium" LMS where the core of their software is open source but their hosted solutions cost between $85 - $1990 / month. 5. Dokeos: Is another open source learning platform. It has pre-built quiz templates and course authoring tools. If you’re on their website you can go to their "videos" page to see a list of their tutorials on using their PHP based platform. This will give you a glimpse into how the course admin back-end looks as well. 6. Sakai: Another open source option is Sakai. As is stated on Sakai’s website "Each day community members share thousands of interactions - building and improving the software, requesting help, collaborating on projects, and enjoying the relationships that result from this work". 7. ATutor: It’s great when LMS websites allow you to see a functioning demo of their Learning Management System (like we do). ATutor does this well. At Atutor you can click on "try the demo" to test drive this LMS. It has plenty of great features and a lot of functionality. and it’s also open source so it’s constantly being improved and updated. 8. Blackboard CourseSites: Blackboard is a big name in online education. Many really big universities, corporate organizations and governmental agencies use their main educational LMS called "Blackboard Learn". However, they’ve released CourseSites to the community of individual teachers and academics. It’s a great free option, but of course, since it caters to individual instructors there are limitations imposed (for example only 500mb is allowed uploaded, only 5 courses can be added). 9. Latitude Learning: This is another really feature rich "freemium" LMS. You can use their Learning Management System for up to 100 users. This is a great option for individual teachers teaching really small classes. If you want to go beyond 100 users it will costs you around $2 - $4 / active user. The LMS ad-ons (such as the virtual classroom which costs $600) will also add to the costs of the LMS if you’ll need these ad-ons for your online program. 10. Schoology: Another "freemium" option with a lot of great features for both individual teachers and enterprises. Their LMS comes with many interesting and visually impressive features. For example, an online grade-book, attendance sheets and a student usage tracker. 11. ILIAS: A SCORM certified open source Learning Management System. ILIAS is a multipurpose tool that can be used as a flexible course player, as an authoring tool, but also as a communication and collaboration platform. 12: Udemy: Is an interesting option for those looking to sell their courses online. Of course, with us you keep 100% of profits but you pay a small monthly fee but with Udemy because they handle the marketing of your online course, customer support, hosting and those details they take 50% of your course sales but there is no monthly fee so you can teach your course for free from their website. We hope you found this list helpful. We actually have a really great 40 minute podcast on the topic of creating an LMS for your online course. It’s packed with great information and it’s free to listen to of course.

You know those annoying pop ups that you install software to block or immediately close once you see them popup on your screen? One might have even popped up when you visited our site today. Well guess what? They work! We were testing one of our member’s eCourse site recently who, at the time, wasn’t using popup advertising to capture email addresses. They had a great email newsletter campaign in place and their email signup conversion rate was great. But no popup. In a recent case study we conducted on this client’s site we found that an email newsletter subscriber was worth $4.99 (compared to $1.20 for a regular website visitor). The value of a newsletter subscriber was therefore 315% more valuable than a regular visitor. This of course is due to many reasons, but namely that newsletter subscribers were able to learn to trust this particular eCourse company because they were sent high quality educational content on a weekly basis. After receiving this free educational content and being reassured of course quality they decided sign up and pay for access to this eCourse seller’s flagship online course. Knowing that newsletter subscribers are so much more valuable than a regular website visitor naturally leads people selling courses online to want more email subscribers right? There are many things you can do to get more opt-in email subscribers. You can play around with the sales copy of your newsletter sign up form, change the placement of the form, change the colors of the form, or you can even change the email bait itself (i.e. an ebook, white-paper, free class, free tutorial etc). You’ll get to a point in the optimization process where your tweaks start having smaller and smaller impacts on your conversion rate (CR). It’s at this point where you should be asking yourself if there are any other macro tweaks you can be making to push your opt-in rate even higher. This is generally when the option of incorporating popup advertising comes up in conversation. Some Academy Of Mine members use popups, others don’t. It really boils down to personal preferences. However, to date, we’ve never installed popup software on a member’s site which has had a negative impact on their newsletter sign up rates. It always leads to increases in sign ups. THE CASE STUDY Here’s an example from this month. One of our members was getting about 73 opt in newsletter subscribers / week on their online course website. We then ran a test (keeping all other sales elements and behavior the same) where we incorporated a popup advertisement which promoted access to free course material in exchange for the site visitor’s email address. After running the test for a month this particular Academy Of Mine member was able to average 131 opt-in newsletter subscribers / week (up from 73 / week). This is an 80% jump in subscribers! A huge jump to say the least. And if you remember from our previous case study, each newsletter subscriber was worth, on average, $4.99 to this eCourse seller. The difference between 73 to 131 newsletter subscribers is an additional 58 subscribers / week (232 / month). And since each newsletter subscriber is worth $4.99 this increase in email opt-ins has lead to roughly $1157 in additional enrolment income each month. Doing no additional advertising, other than having the popup software work for you while you sleep. SO WHY ARE ALL ECOURSE SELLERS NOT USING POPUPS? IT’S "THE LINE" The trouble for most online course sellers when it comes to incorporating popup software into their site is that they feel it will have a negative impact on their image. Or maybe they personally have a dislike for this type of advertising so they refuse to explore it as an option. Popup ads are, after all, more obnoxious than most website advertisements. Even if your site visitors are not interested in the ad they still need to engage in it to close it. Other forms of advertising are much more passive and much easier for your site visitors to ignore. However, passivity isn’t necessarily a good thing when it comes to marketing your online course. Being overly passive can hurt enrolment sales as much as being overly aggressive. In the former case you’re not doing enough, in the later case you’re doing too much. It can be a fine balance but essential you need to establish your advertising "comfort line" which balances passivity with aggressiveness. For example, if you found out that using a call center would boost enrolments would you hire telemarketers to promote your educational company through unsolicited calls? I personally wouldn’t do it even if I knew the financial results would be favorable. The telemarketing method simply crosses my "comfort line". Five years ago I might have said the same for popup advertisements. However, I don’t’ feel the same about them today. And it’s not just because popups work… it’s because popup technology now gives us greater control over how our ads are served. Let me explain. POPUP CONTROL Popup advertising can be served in many different ways and the possibilities are growing every day. You can serve a popup ad only after a visitor has visited a certain number of pages or been on your site for a certain amount of time. Alternatively a popup ad can be displayed only when a visitor is on a particular page. Best of all, if a site visitor says "no thanks" and closes the popup you can set most popup software programs not to open again for that site visitor for a set amount of time. For instance, you could tell the software program not to open again for that site visitor for another 30 days. That way your visitor can visit your site anytime between now and then and not have the repeatedly hit "no thanks". However, maybe in 30 days from now you have a new offer, or they are more familiar with your site so they want the content you’re offering for your opt-in subscribers. HIGH QUALITY POPUP "BAIT" Which leads me to my next point. And that’s that your newsletter "bait" is generally some of the highest quality content on your site. So from your site visitors standpoint there is generally good reason for them to give you their email address. As a course seller you’re saying "I’m willing to part with some free content if you give me a chance by parting with your email address". It’s a low risk win-win. So if you’re selling courses online but not using popup software… maybe you should be? Or maybe it’s crossing your line. Either way… it’s worth thinking about.

If you’re looking for online course and learning software you’re essentially looking for two parts of the same puzzle. The first part of the puzzle is the course selling front-end where you can promote and sell your online course. The second part is the student back-end where you (or your teachers) will teach the students who have enrolled in your online course. Each of these puzzle pieces require totally different software to be installed. For instance, your online course selling front-end doesn’t require a Learning Management System (LMS), grading features or student profile pages. Similarly, your student back-end doesn’t require e-commerce software or content marketing analysis (as the pages will be hidden, so only students can see them). So let’s start putting together the puzzle. THINGS YOU NEED YOUR ONLINE COURSE FRONT-END TO DO Your online course selling front-end isn’t unlike many other commercial websites. The marketing, sales and e-commerce tools are just adjusted to fit the needs of an eCourse company. You’ll likely want: High quality hosting to handle all of the dynamic scripts you’ll be running (many will require you have root access to your server which means you can’t use a cheap shared hosting platform). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software installed which will allow you to track your "head" and "long tail" search terms over time. Affiliate program software installed so others in your niche can promote your online course. Content marketing software to help you uncover search terms with a high payout potential and low competition. Content Delivery Network (CND) which takes your static content and stores a copy close to your site visitors actual location which speeds up website page load times dramatically. Search engines also favor faster loading sites. E-commerce software and an SSL certificate since you’ll need to be able to security sell your online course form your own website using the latest in encryption technology. Website themes and design work that will help you earn your visitors’ trust through good web design. Newsletter marketing software that will help you stay in contact with student leads. And maybe even popup advertising software (in this case study a popup led to 80% more leads) This is just a partial list, but you get the idea. THINGS YOU NEED YOUR STUDENT BACK-END TO DO Your student back-end is very different than your course selling front-end. Your student back-end will not be a typical website at all. It requires very specific software installations that are designed specifically for online education companies. You’ll likely want: Learning Management System Software (LMS) to handle the back-end educational framework (grade-books, student profiles, integrated communication between teacher and student etc) Video content protection (for commercial content): You’ll need to be able to protect your video tutorials so that only paying students can see them. You want to restrict embedding to only certain pages, and you’ll want to disable downloads. Social & communication tools like audio, video and text chat. Integrated video chat can get quite complex depending on which route you go. Many integrated systems require Red5 of Adobe FMS be installed on the server’s root. HOSTING IS WHERE THINGS FALL APART For both your eCourse selling front-end and your student back-end you’re going to need a website host capable of handling all of these pieces of software. The wrong version of php or MySQL installed will render one or more of these software packages dead. Finding a host capable of handing such a dynamic system can be difficult and often expensive. A cheap $20 / month shared hosting package won’t work. E-COURSE SELLERS MAKING THE INVESTMENT HAVE A COMPETITIVE EDGE If you were to add up all of the hosting and software costs you’re probably looking at close to $1000 / month on the conservative side of the spectrum. Sure you can do it cheaper as well. You can forgo the commercially developed, high quality software platforms for a DIY approach and then get a cheap $20 / month shared hosting package to host your basic no frills course content. However, the education companies making the investments in the features discussed above are going to have a massive competitive advantage over you. When push comes to shove you’ll likely find yourself close to last in the business race. The eLearning industry, because of its explosive growth and earning potential, is getting very competitive very quickly. THE PROBLEM IS… THE E-LEARNING "BUSINESS" IS FRAGMENTED The problem for many smaller vendors of online courses is that the companies that offer all of the necessary software, hosting and features are spread out all over the place. The market is  really fragmented. You need to find a company for LMS software, another for your SEO needs, another for newsletter marketing, another to protect your video content, another company to manage your affiliate program and another company for content marketing software. And worst of all, there are no guarantees that the pieces of the puzzle will fit together (compatibility issues are VERY common in the world of online education). For example, maybe your Learning Management System doesn’t function properly on your host. Or maybe your affiliate software doesn’t work with the latest version of your e-commerce software. The list, of course, can go on and on. THE ONLY ALL IN ONE SOLUTION So Academy of Mine was started by course sellers for course sellers. We understood that the Best Search Engine Optimization software wasn’t going to be developed by the same company that was developing the best Learning Management Systems. So we’ve found all of the software that "plays nicely together" and we install it on our members’ eLearning sites. We know it can be difficult and expensive to find, and then buy, each of the individual pieces of the puzzle separately. So what we do is we get the dedicated servers required to host such a dynamic educational site and then we buy "developer licenses" for the software. We then share these resources with our community at a huge discount. So for example, if one of our dedicated servers is costing us $300 / month, you might only pay $10 / month for the hosting platform. It’s like a hybrid system between dedicated and shared. Similarly, if a designer was going to charge you $100 each for 50 of their themes we’ll give you access to all 50 themes ($5000 worth) for only $10. The list of examples can go on but you get the point. If you’re interested in this "all in one" solution please visit our homepage or check out our pricing page here. We can get you setup by the end of the day today. Or check out our explainer video below:

An open source Learning Management System (LMS) such as ATutor, Moodle or Sakai have many advantages over commercial or proprietary options available on the market today. However, there are also some drawbacks to going the open source LMS route. There is really no one right way to approach the issue of open source vs. proprietary online course software. It really depends on what your needs and goals are as an educator, entrepreneur or subject matter expert. WHY DO YOU WANT OPEN SOURCE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Most people looking for an open source Learning Management System are generally doing so for 2 primary reasons: 1. Open Source means "free" in many cases. 2. Popular open source LMS’s are seen as stable options that are constantly undergoing development. There is great merit to both of those assumptions. However, both assumptions require further examination. FREE ISN’T NECESSARILY FREE IS IT? When a company doesn’t have resources they may have a hard time attracting the right kind of talent. When you look at most of the open source options available and then you look at a company offering proprietary LMS software, like Blackboard, you can see immediately that Blackboard has the resources to put into feature enhancement and design. Not to single out any open source option in particular, but most leave a lot to be desired from a design standpoint. Sure, many of them are very powerful options with great features, but software strength is only one piece of the puzzle for most people offering or selling courses online. They want a platform that they can be proud to present to their students. Looks aside, the assumption that open source options are free also needs examination. Most open source options don’t cost any money out of the box, but their are "freemium" version of the software available to those that want to upgrade to get access to more features. In some cases those features can end up costing a lot (sometimes even more than proprietary options). Again, the same goes for design. As we’ve already mentioned, the design standards "out of the box" for many open source LMS’s won’t inspire people with a strong eye for design. Which means in many cases you’ll be hiring designers and coders to help you tweak the code to bring it up to your own visual standards. HYBRID OPTIONS? There are hybrid options available and this is the route we’re most interested in at Academy of Mine (in fact it’s a hybrid system we run our members’ eCourse sites off). Or take this site you’re on now for example. We’re running on the popular open source WordPress Platform. However, our design was built by a premium theme developer who designs WordPress themes.  Similarly, many of the extensions running on our site (like our banking extension) was built by third party developers who charge us licensing fees to access their "add-on software". In the end it usually ends up being a mash up of plugins, extensions, themes and software installs that end up making your online course website work the way you want it to. The open source community, after all, can’t cater to everyone or everyone’s interest. So businesses come in to help innovate, add value and carve out their own niches. On our members’ eLearning sites we use both open source Learning Management Systems and proprietary LMS’s (depending on the member’s needs). one hasn’t proved to be better than the other. It’s just that each one fits the needs of the teacher, course vendor or subject matter expert differently. If you want to see how a few of the more popular online course software programs fare against each other you can view our Learning Management System comparison chart. Or if you’d like to see a working copy of our own hybrid LMS you can check out our demo here. Or watch how it all works below:

Not only do Learning Management Systems do different things, they are also designed to meet the needs of different groups of people in different ways. As we discussed in our post on Learning Management System Comparisons, a local school board will have different technological requirements than an individual course seller who wants to bring their course about dog training online. Generally speaking, Learning Management Systems like WebCT or Blackboard are used for larger educational institutions like colleges or universities, while LMS’s like the one we offer are used more by individual course sellers. ENTREPRENEURS: IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS If you’re someone from a school board, college or university then this post will probably not be valuable to you. However, if you’re an individual subject matter expert, teacher or entrepreneur then this post will help you sort out what you should be looking for in a Learning Management System. First of all, different Learning Management Systems do different things, and the things they can do that are the same are often done differently. For instance, two different LMS’s could have integrated and internal email communication for teachers and students to chat privately back and forth. However, the design, technology and integration of that feature could be handled different on both platforms. Again, using integrated email as an example, maybe one system automatically sends notifications to a student’s personal email address when they get a note from their teacher through the LMS. In another system, on the other hand, notifications might not be sent out. This is of course, a simple example, but you get the point. The features that most Learning Management Systems have built into them are: Student profile pages Grade books Progress tracking tools Grading forums Blogs and wikis Integrated email communication Quizzes Surveys Groups Conferencing technology (text, video, audio) Screen-sharing platforms White-boarding platforms Educational gamification features Class calendars Community activity streams and much more Of course the list can go on. However, it’s important not to get overwhelmed by the features of different Learning Management Systems. As we discuss in this podcast, sometimes all you need is the digital equivalent of two chairs and a table for a student and teacher to exchange ideas and work. We believe it’s better to start with the question "what are my students’ goals". From this point you can start working backwards to find ways for your LMS to help support those goals. Otherwise you risk having gratuitous LMS features for the sake of having the features… not for the sake of the advancement off your students. If the features aren’t necessary for your students’ educational progress then they end up just taking up space. AN LMS IS ONLY ONE SMALL PIECE OF THE PUZZLE FOR THE INDIVIDUAL COURSE SELLER If you’re an educational entrepreneur looking to sell a course online, you’ve probably been told you need a Learning Management System to deliver your course to students. And while that is true, it’s really an oversimplification of a much more complex process. Not to scare you away from your idea about bringing your course idea online, but in order to be competitive you’ll need much more than an LMS. You’re going to need an entire eCourse business framework. That framework needs to do many things including hosting, security, email marketing, affiliate marketing, eCommerce integration, content analysis, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) monitoring and tracking and much more. Having the technology to teach online is great, but without these other features, you’ll have no students to teach. If you’re an educational entrepreneur you should watch the video below to learn more how you can get your Online Course Software as well as all of the other pieces of the eCourse business puzzle!    

In a recent post on selling courses online using a WordPress Learning Management System we talked about why we love using WordPress LMS Plugins as a way to build an online education website. Essentially, if you’re a teacher and you’re thinking about bringing your course online, you at least need to give the WordPress platform consideration as your online course website solution. WordPress not only provides a powerful framework which helps you deliver your eLearning content, but WP also provides countless extensions and plugins to help you optimize your site for course enrollments, achieve high organic search ranking, increase your opt-in newsletter subscriber rate and much more. It’s’ so much more than just a teaching platform. It’s also a great eCourse sales platform. Not only that, but there are a countless WordPress design companies that are working hard to help people style their WordPress websites in such a way that meets their brand’s needs. There are, of course, other Open Source Learning Management Systems available on the market today, but many those systems are not supported by such a large or strong community of design focused people. Sure, these alternative open source LMS’s are often powerful, but take their demos for a test drive and see what you think. Some of them haven’t progressed passed 1990′s design standards. This is hardly an option for eCourse sellers that want to impress their students with professional themes and designs. At the end of the day, you’re looking for more in a platform than just teaching plugins. You need the whole package, and WordPress is one of only a few affordable options available that can provide this for you. Another great thing about using WordPress to sell courses online is that, because it’s such a popular publishing platform, new educational add-ons are being developed all of the time. With online education gaining in popularity each year, developers are stepping to the plate to give teachers and subject matter experts even more powerful teaching plugins and student progress monitoring tools. As online education continues to become more popular, it’s likely that student outcomes are going to be considered the "new gold" in the world of online education. Educators who can help students meet their educational objectives, and prove that they’ve done it through some kind of quantitative monitoring software or plugin, are going to have a huge advantage over educators who don’t have the systems or software in place to measure how much, and what quality of learning took place. So much of the discussion today is on online course design. As time passes, we’re seeing the discussion shift to the statistical monitoring and graphing of student progress. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the WordPress community. A LIST OF SOME GREAT TEACHING PLUGINS FOR WORDPRESS Below you’ll find a partial list of some of the most popular plugins for teaching online. WP Courseware LearnDash WooThemes Sensei

One of the biggest benefits of being an Academy of Mine member is that we’re obsessed with the small details often overlooked by entrepreneurs and teachers selling courses online. For instance, did you know that there is a correlation between site speed and organic search ranking? In fact, a site’s speed impacts more than just organic search engine ranking. Other consequences of poor eCourse site speed performance include: Lower perceived credibility (Fogg et al. 2001) Lower perceived quality (Bouch, Kuchinsky, and Bhatti 2000) Increased user frustration (Ceaparu et al. 2004) Increased blood pressure (Scheirer et al. 2002) Reduced flow rates (Novak, Hoffman, and Yung 2000) Reduced conversion rates (Akamai 2007) Increased exit rates (Nielsen 2000) Are perceived as less interesting (Ramsay, Barbesi, and Preece 1998) Are perceived as less attractive (Skadberg and Kimmel 2004) We know that search engines and site visitors reward fast loading sites so it’s in our best interest to help our members achieve fast page load times. So how do we do it? A CASE STUDY Let us give you an example. We recently had a new member sign up who has been selling their course online for the last 3 months, but ran into too many problems doing it on their own so they signed up with us. However, before we transferred them over to our servers we wanted to do some tests. Essentially, we wanted to measure their "before and after" site speed details. To measure site speed, you can use tools like Pingdom, Google Site Speed or GTmetrix. Just to give you an example of what’s average for more robust sites (like many eLearning sites), at the time of this writing Ebay had a site speed of 5:07 according to Pingdom. Ebay is a great site with lots of dynamic features so it’s never going to win a speed race. There are many faster sites online. However, it’s Ebay’s dynamic features (the parts of the site that slow it down) that make eBay worth visiting in the first place. It’s always a delicate balance between great website features and site speed. eCourse owners often find themselves in the same predicament. For example, they might have amazing features within their online course software, but those features might slow their site down to a crawl if too many users are using them at the same time. Which essentially was the issue in the case study we’re about to look at. THE BEFORE PICTURE Before this member joined us they had a site speed of 5:15. They were paying around $100 / month for a VPS server.  However, their host didn’t publish much relevant information about the server’s specs. Which was a bit surprising since it’s more common for shared hosting providers to hide that information since most people who sign up for shared hosting aren’t deeply concerned with processing power if they are only willing to pay $20 / month. These people often just want something cheap that does the trick. But like most things in the world, usually "cheapest" and "greatest" aren’t found in the same sentence together. That’s especially true when it comes to hosting. Since cheap shared hosting providers can’t sell their packages on server specs, they instead focus on gimmicky (and mostly untrue) statements like "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited space" or "99.9% up-time". For example, Hostgator, one of the most popular shared hosting solutions online, touts a 99.9% up-time guarantee, but just this week they had over 15 hours of downtime in one day and tens of thousands of customer complaints. You don’t have to be a math guru to figure out that it doesn’t add up. SO WHAT IMPACT DOES A SERVER HAVE ON SITE SPEED? Okay, so let’s get to our case study. In this example we took our new member off their old server and we put them on one of our dedicated servers. Not surprisingly there was an immediate increase in site speed. They went from a page speed of 5:15 to 2:70 (a 47% increase in speed!) THE JUICY STUFF! A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN) Then we took it a step further by setting them up on our Content Delivery Network (CDN) which essentially takes the static elements of their website, uploads them to different "clouds" around the world, and then delivers those website elements to visitors based off that particular visitor’s location. So a visitor visits their site from NYC, that visitor would be retrieving their site details from a server in NYC. However, if a visitor came to their site from London, then that visitor would be served their site content from a server in London. Adding their site to our CDN account took their site speed from 2:70 to 2:39 (a further 11% decrease in page load time). In total they had a 53.59% increase in site speed by becoming an Academy of Mine member. OUR SERVER SPECS WHEN YOU FIRST SIGN UP When you first sign up with Academy of Mine you’ll be put on our basic dedicated server with a limited number of other clients. It’s like a hybrid system between shared and dedicated. Our server specs are: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 3.3GHz, Turbo 3.7GHz 4 Cores, 8 w/ HT 8,883 CPUMark Score 12 GB RAM Dedicated servers are great because you don’t have to worry about the many pitfalls of shared hosting. If you’re selling courses online you’re probably running Learning Management System software which requires a substantial amount of processing power to make run smoothly.  At Academy of Mine we’ve setup our hosting environment to be able to handle that bulky software efficiently. Similarly, we’re always monitoring our hosting environment so you don’t have to. And our up-time is great. Last month our up-time on our starter dedicated server was 99.916%, and the month before was 99.932%. Best of all, since Academy of Mine manages our clients’ sites, our members don’t need to worry about someone uploading a rogue script that would bring down the entire system (which happens often in the world of shared hosting). We control everything on our end to make sure the hosting environment runs smoothly. We hope you found this case study helpful!

In this 5 part blog series we’re going to look at an Academy Of Mine member’s educational site that was launched 5 years ago and we’ll look at the financial benefit that online education has had for them as an individual eCourse seller. We’ve been with this site from day one so we have great insight into what made this eLearning platform perform so well from both a financial and educational standpoint. This particular eCourse seller’s journey began when they became frustrated with the high price of tuition and inefficient ways of teaching. After a lot of planning and even more hard work, they brought their comprehensive new media eCourse online and sold it for a $200 one time fee. This eCourse seller could offer such an in-depth eCourse for such a low price because he was using asynchronous teaching technologies and wasn’t required to be physically present and therefore he didn’t need to charge students his regular hourly fee. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there was no work involved. Quite the opposite. It just meant that, as the teacher, he could do the work once (creating video tutorials, writing content etc) and have his students benefit from the educational material for many years to come. In this 5 part blog series we’re going to look in-depth at the overview of this eCourse seller’s progress by looking at each year of their entrepreneurial journey on a year by year basis.  The reason we think our blog audience will find value in this case study is because many of you offering, or planning on offering, courses online may feel overwhelmed with the amount of work it takes to get an eCourse off the ground. You also might currently feel like you’re lost in the middle of the forest and have no idea what to expect when you come out on the other side…. if there even is another side. At first it can feel like a huge investment in both time and money. So you’re probably wondering if the risk is worth it. Well we can’t answer that question for you specifically, because the answer to the question depends on so many variables and changes on a case by case basis. However, what we can do is provide you with an overview of how someone else built a course, navigated their way through the forest and came out on the other side a winner. As you’re about to see in this case study, five years of hard work paid off in the end and this eCourse seller is now making over $130,000 / year in sales! However, when this eCourse seller first started out he was making less than he was making from his regular job. Much less. However, today he is making more than he could have made teaching the same subject at a college level. Take a look at the 5 year sales growth chart below. For many of you in the business of online education, you’ll probably be curious to know what type of traffic level needs to be obtained before you are able to support sales levels like the ones provided above. Well it’s obviously it’s not that simple, as many different elements play a role in determining enrollment growth. However, traffic is a major contributor to enrollment and sale growth so below we’ve included a traffic chart showing website visitors over the course of the same period. As we’ve mentioned, there is risk associated with taking this path. Just as there is risk associated with any entrepreneurial journey. That being said, in our experience, online course vendors who understand that starting a business (in the education industry or otherwise) is hard work, and are willing to put in that work will often be compensated for their efforts and risk. Not always… but most of the time. The case study we’re using today is a good example of realistically what the financial benefits of online education can be for edupreneurs. We used this case study specifically because although we have other members outperforming this eCourse vendor… we also have other members under-performing this eCourse vendor. We wanted to use an example from the "middle" that would provide insight into what’s possible for individual course sellers, as this case study looks at a course that was started by just one person. Many of you who read our blog are in the same position as this eCourse seller was when they started out. You might have limited resources and you’re doing it on your own. So hopefully this provides you with some insight into what the possibilities are under those restrictions. In the following 5 part blog series we’ll look at each year one by one. You can start by going through the years 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  

As we start our 5 part series on exploring the 5 year growth of an eCourse company, we’ll start at the logical place; the platform. It should be mentioned now that our members’ sites use the WordPress platform to facilitate teaching and learning. So for much of this first part, we’ll discuss various WordPress membership plugins that allow you to restrict access to your eCourse content. To make the educational system work within the WordPress framework you need to adapt the basic WordPress platform to work like a Learning Management System. Most of our members run private online courses that are accessible on a "pay per use" basis. Therefore, it’s important that our members setup a platform that allows them to restrict access to certain parts of their site so only paying students can access those premium pages. So how do you do this? Well … let’s start with the foundation. If you’re selling courses online you’ll have two parts to your site. You have the course selling front-end where students can pay for access to the course, and then you’ll have the course back-end where students can access your restricted educational content. USING A WORDPRESS MEMBERSHIP PLUGIN TO RESTRICT ACCESS TO COURSE CONTENT Once you have your course ready for delivery, you’ll need to find a way to restrict access to only paying students (or clients, members or employees. Essentially, whoever you need to train).  There are many ways to achieve this depending on which WordPress membership plugin you decide to use. The registration process can be almost 100% automated or you can make it a manual process setting each student up, one by one, along the way. No matter which option you choose you need to find a way to make the two sides (front-end and back-end) "talk" to each other. Once a student signs up on your front-end they need to be registered in your back-end. Not only that, but their restriction levels need to be set depending on which of your courses they signed up for. For example, if you’re selling two courses online but a student registered for only one course, then not only do they need to have a new account created for them, but they also need to be restricted access to only the course they’ve paid for. As you can see, WordPress membership plugins are not only used to block a section of your site. These plugins are required to do many complex tasks. AUTOMATED REGISTRATION VS. MANUAL REGISTRATION Automating the registration process obviously can save you a lot of time, but depending on your eCourse company it might not be your best option. You might instead want to use tools like Role Scoper or Press Permit. These WordPress plugins can seem quite complex on the surface, but they are also very powerful and give you a full range of control over who can access your content. These can be great plugins for eCourse sellers who have complex tiered pricing or tiered access levels. However, if you’re interested in automating the process you’re going to need to find a way to make your two systems (i.e. your course selling front-end and your student back-end) "talk" to each other. Essentially, you’ll need your system to work like this: When a student signs up for one of your courses from your front-end, your back-end will need to be relayed their signup information so it can set "conditions" based on the course they paid for. For example, if a course seller was offering two courses for sale on their educational website, they would need their system to be able to communicate restriction levels based off of a new student’s registration details. Let’s say, for example, that a student registered for just one of their two courses, the system would need to be able to understand which course they registered for, grant them access to that course and restrict access to the other course. There are various plugins that can do this from WooThemes Sensei. If you go this route, you’ll also need to download various extensions to make this work including: WooCommerce, Groups and Groups for WooCommerce. By using those extensions together you can setup an automated tiered membership site. Or, if you’re using WP Courseware you can use the magic members plugin to help you automatically enroll new members into your course based on a new users membership level. Lastly, if you’re using WPLMS their system is already integrated with course restriction levels allowing you to restrict access to each course based off the student’s registration records. THE DECISION TO GO WITH MANUAL REGISTRATION In the case study we’re looking at in this 5 part series, our member decided to go with a manual registration process. They wanted to go this route for various reasons. First, their course was being offered at $200 which meant that they didn’t expect to deal in great volume. They were hoping to achieve 10 enrollment sales / week ($2000 / week) and they thought that setting up each student manually wouldn’t take that much time. Which it doesn’t. Secondly, it gave them an extra layer of security as they needed to manually add each user to their back-end meaning absolutely nobody could take their online course unless they themselves, as the site administrator, setup a new student in their back-end. Lastly and most importantly, they setup their system manually because they had a fairly complex system of "tiers" and levels of access. At a basic level they had 2 different courses and various restrictions within each course. Basic "course", "group" or "user" restriction levels were just not going to work in this case. Their more complex system allowed users to scale their course to their needs. Students could pick and choose which parts of their course they wanted to pay for and therefore get access to. This route is a little more time consuming, but it allowed this particular eCourse seller to meet the "architectural" needs of their online course. 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 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.