Clever Cash Generation

by gcot
Filed under Money & Career, Money Making Ideas

Have you ever thought that you might have valuable knowledge to pass on? Do you want to turn your knowledge and expertise into an income-generating machine? Do you want to be able to pass your knowledge onto others at a price that enables many to be able to afford it but that allows you to make a healthy living? Do you want to be able to reach more people than you could face-to-face? Do you want a business that you can run from home and that involves very little initial investment? Do you feel that you have a short course or workshop’s worth of information inside you?

If so, then producing and marketing e-courses may be perfect business for you.

If you want to set up in business but the idea of securing products from wholesalers, tying up capital in stock, dealing with storage and logistics, etc. doesn’t appeal to you, why not consider the alternative of selling online training courses? There’s a considerable and growing demand for specialist knowledge on the Internet, and people will pay for great products that enable them to improve their lives. Not only can you become actively involved in helping others to realize their potential, you can improve your own financial prospects too. With clever marketing and affiliate promotions, there are superb opportunities for wealth generation and you can start an e-course business at minimal cost. You don’t even need a website initially because you can begin to sell your e-courses through sites like eBay, ads in newsletters and and even through your e-mail signature file. You can also use more traditional routes to market your courses.

You can begin to develop your marketing skills through selling other peoples’ e-courses as an affiliate but for maximum profitability, there’s no substitute for creating and reselling your own products. You have the opportunity for fantastic mark-ups (you set the price that you think will be most attractive to your target market), your costs are very low (website hosting, merchant fees for credit card processing of orders etc.), and you have complete control over your course content, its profitability, positioning and life cycle. You are in a perfect position to modify it to take advantage of user feedback. In fact you might choose to beta test it on a few users by allowing them to do your course for free in exchange for constructive feedback and testimonials that you can use to market your product.

In order to succeed in the competitive marketplace of online training you need to come up with a course that people want, write it well and market it effectively. What do you already know how to do? Can you narrow it down to a 10 step or fewer process? Great, you now have the basic structure for your course. Now you can begin to fill in the detail. You’ll need to do some market research in terms of finding out how many lessons are appropriate, how frequently they should be delivered and how long each lesson should be, which is where you group of beta testers can help. Would your course be better delivered as a 30-day, one e-mail/lesson a day course or a seven day intensive, for example? Do you want to offer multiple levels of service e.g. level 1 lessons delivered via e-mail, level 2 lessons delivered via e-mail with additional e-mail support and level 3 lessons delivered via e-mail with additional coaching/teaching sessions, with different fees for each level. These and other questions can be answered by trying your (almost) finished product on selected members of your target market.

In addition, look at your competitors’ courses and analyze them in great detail in order to find out how you can make yours a better product. Also, look at how they promote their courses and decide whether you want to adopt a similar strategy or to try something different.

Once you’ve got your course written, many functions can be automated, leaving you free to come up with new products, market your business, and generate a few new revenue streams.

In order to succeed you need to develop your customer list. This is normally achieved by an opt-in email service, wherein you provide a newsletter and some free offers to attract your clients, and then you regularly email them with appropriate products, services, and ideas. The opt-in nature ensures that your customers want to learn about what you have to offer.

You might also want to maximize sales by affiliating with other sites that will sell your e-course to their customer base. They do the selling and you pay them a percentage of your sales revenues, normally around 50 percent. You do similar deals with them, your advantage is even greater, and you receive 50 percent of sales of their products. Moreover, as you produce and market more and more products, revenues can increase.

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