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Launching an online course or product: Platforms and Process

This summer I set out to launch an course for people seeking to enter the medical marijuana business in PA.   I wanted people to pay for the course online and planeed to deliver much of the content through recorded course modules.    I had never launched an online course before so I had some research to do.  In this post, I'll share what I learned. 

Besides the actual course content and interaction, there are three key components to consider in launching an online course:

1) The Online Course Studio

2) The Online Course Back Office

3) The Online Course Marketing 

The Studio - online platforms for recording the course

The first key decision involved recording the course material.   I planned on having multiple faculty members collaborating from different locations, needed the ability to visually share a presentation and (ideally) the video of the speakers.   Having had too many negative experiences with online technology failing, reliability was important to me.   I looked at a number of platforms including Adobe Connect, WebinarJam and GotoWebinar.    

WebinarJam has an excellent price point and a wide range of sophisticated features.   However, as a frequent user of Google Hangouts, I couldn't get past the fact that WebinarJam is built on top of the Google Hangouts technology.    I've found this technology to be fine for informal meetings and conversations with other team members, but way too unreliable to use with clients or serious business meetings.   Maybe this will change over time, but I wanted my classes to go off without a hitch and couldn't take the risk.  It's also possible that WebinarJam is built on a more reliable version of hangouts then I use casually.   This platform is definitely worth a close look!

AdobeConnect was almost my first choice.  This industrial grade platform has a range of capabilities that go beyond a webinar platform.   I can manage course catalogs, track learner progress, develop tests and more.   At the end of my evaluation, I decided it was overkill and overly expensive for my fledgling training company.   

The final choice came down to GotoWebinar.   I had experience with its little sister, GotoMeeting and found it to be reliable and effective.   It has a simple interface but it has never failed me.   (Once I forgot to push the "record" button and had to re-do a 1 hour course as a result - but I can't blame GotoWebinar for that).   GotoWebinar allows me to easily set up a new event, send out invites to panelists, record and publish the resulting recording.    Publishing your recorded module can be done through a managed interface which captures names and emails for future contact when someone accesses your platform.   I also like that GotoWebinar allows you to optionally record video of the participants in addition to whatever is showing up on your desktop.   For me, that was usually a PowerPoint presentation.   I found that having dual monitors made management a lot easier - although a single monitor can be used to pull this off. 

 

GotoWebinar allows you to capture live video with presentation

 

 

 

Setting up a new webinar is simple

 

 

Managing the polls, questions and live interaction are all manageable.  The user interface for the questions and polls could be improved, but we've used them with success in our online course modules.

 

Once live - you can chat with panelists ahead of time, get the audio/video right - and THEN broadcast

I refer to GotoWebinar as my virtual studio.   Using the cameras built into our laptops and a headset (or even built in microphones), you can record and integrate anyone with a laptop (or smart phone) and internet connection.   As I told many of our faculty, it works better if we are in different rooms, each on our separate "studio" portal.   Once you put multiple people in the same room, you need different kinds of audio and camera equipment.   GotoWebinar keeps it simple and straightforward to produce an online course.  

Of course, these aren't the only games in town.  Webex from Cisco, Google Hangouts and Join.Me  represent other online platforms for collaboration and recording.

The Online Course Backoffice

My next question is how to process the back-end?   I considered using Paypal directly from my Website and I looked at an eCommerce platform called e-Junkie (promotion shown in the button below).

After evaluating the options, I settled on a platform called GumRoad.   This platform makes it easy to add modules to your course... 

 

Adding course components is drag and drop - with different publishing options 

In addition, GumRoad processes credit card payments.   For $10/month, the processing fee is 3.5% plus $0.30 per transaction.   Students are given a platform that they can log into and access their course material.   One feature I'd like to see is a more in-depth review of which modules were viewed by each student.   At this point, I only get which modules were viewed.   

GumRoad makes it easy to create new versions of your product, something I'm experimenting with as I re-purpose many of my modules to an "online only" version of the product.    They also have an affiliate process which allows me to share links with special discounts that can be credited to partners willing to promote my class. 

GumRoad support is currently through email only.  This can be a little frustrating if you want to talk to a person.  At this time, that's all they offer - but my experience is that they do respond in a timely manner.   GumRoad fit the need I had for managing my courses and collecting revenue.

The Online Course Marketing

Your Website should have a strong landing page for your course offering.  A well-designed landing page can mean the difference between converting the sale or losing the sale.  

I found that using live information sessions through GotoWebinar, promoted in advance through social media and email marketing, were the most effective conversion tools.   Since I recorded the information sessions, I could embed the video into my Website's landing page.   This powerful combination worked well to drive course sales.

 

A strong landing page that gives detail and a flavor of the instructors can help convert customers

For interested parties, I use the Divi Wordpress Theme and it makes editing and manipulation of pages like this easy to do.

Conclusion

The combination of GotoWebinar, GumRoad and a strong Wordpress theme are used to create an online course offering.   The beauty of this platform is that it is easy to use, accessible to all Internet users and can be easily reconfigured and re-purposed to future needs. 

Do you have some online course tips you'd like to share?   Please leave a comment for us!

Three Website Checklists for Creating a New Website

I've been project managing the construction and launch of new websites for twenty years.  I've also found that, no matter how much planning we do up front, something falls through the cracks.  Something always causes a last minute fire-drill.   As a result, I've decided to create these three Website checklists for use before, during and after a the development of your next website.   Where appropriate, I'll mention some of my favorite tools to help with Website development, in case you want to check them out.  (Full disclosure: this post contains affiliate links for products or services mentioned in this article.)

This is for a basic, mostly content oriented website.   Custom programming, eCommerce or highly interactive sites are likely to require many additional steps.

The Pre-build Checklist - This list includes the stuff you need to know before you get started on your new website.  Note that we mostly reference website's built in Wordpress.  Most of these steps don't depend on a specific platform and apply to Drupal and other platforms. 

• Identify and review all the roles on the project (The Boss, Client POV Spokesperson, Sales Representative, Project Manager, Web Designer, Web Developer/Programmer, IT/Technical including Webmaster, Database Admin, SEO Specialist, Analytics Specialist).  The Boss is the person who gets called if someone is dropping the ball in his organization. 
• On the IT front, its important for the Designer and Developer to have access to the hosting area.   In addition, make sure you identify the person who controls the Domain registration and the email system.   This is really important to have in place before launching the website.   You don't want to lose access to your business email because you didn't plan for this step. 
• Establish regular check-in times and method.  Whether you use GotoMeeting, a business conference service like freeconferencecall.com or just a 3-way phone call, meeting weekly is a good practice. 
• Agree on a sitemap.   A sitemap is an outline of the pages in your website.   You can do something simple in PowerPoint or you can use a tool like slickplan.com to provide a framework behind every step in the website building process.  Deciding on what's in, what's out before you start building will save you a ton of time!
  

  Slickplan allows you to build and track your sitemap
• Agree on who will provide content, including text, images and any videos
• Agree on expected timeframes for the stages of the project
• Review example Websites that the Client POV Spokesperson and Sales Rep both like.  This should inform your site's aesthetics.
• Provide the designer with high quality graphics for logos and specifications for color schemes.  No logo? try 99designs for an inexpensive way to create one.  

The Build Checklist - This list includes those steps you need to make sure you have a clean and successful Website build.

• Determine where the Website will be constructed and who will have access to the development site.  Some Internet Service Providers, like WPEngine and SiteGround,  provide built-in staging areas for Wordpress sites.   
• Decide on your Calls to Action and where they'll be placed. 
• Create wireframes of your home page and key supporting pages, like About Us, Contact Us, Blog Posts, etc.  Balsamiq is a great tool for creating
  wireframes. 
• Have the Designer and Developer create some mockup pages using a Wordpress theme that they recommend.  Themes are pre-configured designs that can be used to quickly create a high quality website.  One of our favorite wordpress theme sites is Theme Garden.
• Have the Developer review the plug-ins that will need to be purchased.  If you're building a Wordpress site (my favorite website platform), you have access to thousands of options.   Yoast is a good source of quality plugins for SEO and Analytics.   WooCommerce can help with sites that are using eCommerce to sell products.  Security is important.  I like BulletProofSecurity.  And BackupBuddy is a convenient tool to ensure your site is always backed up
• Once the themes, colors, logos, sitemap and page content has been identified, the Designer and Developer can begin building the website
• Content is developed for each page in the website and integrated into the design
• The SEO Specialist and Analytics Specialists make sure that every page is configured for SEO and Analytics.   I like Google Analytics.  It's free and powerful, but some commercial web analysis tools claim they can provide even better information.  
• Someone (usually the Project Manager) will QA the pages as they are deemed "complete"
• When everything is in place, the site is ready to launch

The Pre-launch Checklist - All done? Here is the checklist to make sure you have everything you need to complete this website and keep the Boss happy. 

• Make sure the email has been properly addressed in switching to a new website.  Not all website development projects have to worry about this, but its best to double check
• Make a backup of your existing site... just in case.  This is an insurance policy that you can call upon if there is a disaster
• Make sure the Webmaster is ready to switch the old site out and the new site in, including any domain registrar modifications that might be needed
• If possible, plan for a soft launch day when the team can test the site and make sure nothing is wrong (e.g. a weekend or evening)
• Make any configuration changes necessary to robots.txt
• Move the new website from staging into production
• Do another Quality Assurance pass before announcing it to the world
• Announce your new website to the world!

I hope that armed with these checklists and a healthy dose of luck, you will have a smooth and pain-free website launch.  

Let us know what works for you?    Leave us your favorite steps in the comments and we'll add the best ideas to our post. 

 

5 Steps to the Best Use of a Tight Marketing Budget

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are often struggling to balance their need for great Internet marketing and their limited budget. In today’s post, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the marketing basics that business owners can use to drive results on a limited budget.

This blog post is geared towards business owners with a website, a solid understanding of their customers, a knowledge of your competition and a sense of your brand message. If you don’t have every one of these elements, conquer these goals first – and then return to this post.  See Step 1 for an easy self-diagnosis for your businesses marketing maturity.

Step 1:  Diagnose your Current Needs

Our first stop on this tour is to take some time for this 5 minute tour of the Internet Marketing Pyramid of Needs. This is an internet marketing maturity model that I built years ago after having worked with startups, small businesses and mid-sized businesses. (Disclaimer: I’m a partner in the business that runs this site, but I believe that using this model to gain a basic understanding of where your business stands vis-à-vis internet marketing maturity can be helpful in determining what you need.) 

Assuming that you have already mastered the understanding of your business model, your competitive landscape and your product’s value proposition in the marketplace, you can move to working on your digital marketing. 

Hubspot’s marketing grader is a good place to identify some of the holes in your Website and  how you can improve your on-page SEO marketing.  You can add some of your best competitors to see how they stack up against your business.

Step 2:  Claim your Local Profiles

If you don’t know what this is, you need to. Google Places is the blocking and tackling of local businesses.  Your most valuable searches on Google are going to be from active shoppers who don’t already know your brand.  When they search on:

Chocolate shops in Wayne

Philadelphia eyeglass repair

Getting auto repair estimates in Berwyn

Your Google places page is one of the easiest and most potent ways to show up.  You are, quite literally, placed “on the map” by Google. 

Example of a local search in Google - and the local businesses that show up on the map.

Step 3: Enable Free Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free.  It is an incredibly powerful Website tool built and provided to the world for free by the the $290 Billion behemoth that has been turned into a verb.  Google wants to be as useful (and important) to you as air. So they've invested their money into their free search utility, their free email platform (gmail) and their free analytics tool (Google Analytics). In each of these 3 cases, they are so good that they are practically category killers. If you aren't using these free tools, you are losing ground to your competition.

In order to sign up for Google Analytics, you'll probably want a gmail account (also free).  Once you've created the account, ask your Web designer or Webmaster to install the analytics code into the header of your Website.  

If they don't know how to do this, find another Web designer or Webmaster. 

Google's checklist for using Google Analytics is here.

Step 4:  Give People a Reason to Interact with You

So you have a Website, but now you need a conversation starter. How to do that?

Make sure that your Website has a blogging capability.   That is where you will announce the answers to your marketplace's problems.  

What do you write about?

Solve a problem.  Help the do-it-yourselfers.  Give away some of your secret sauce. In the process, you will show people that your company is the go-to team for problems that are too much effort for them. 

If  you really answer the question, then people will link to your answer, +1 it and like it. Like all good answers, your answer will probably raise more questions in the reader's mind. This is the place to offer offer time to talk more in-depth about their specific needs.

Invite people to sign up for your newsletter at the end of the answer. Give people a way to contact you with more questions.   

When sharing this kind of content, your primary objectives should be focused on:

1. Build your house list.  The house list refers to your database of contacts who have engaged with your business - or at least shown an interest in the past.  A Sign up for our Newsletter!  button or link needs to be a very visible call-to-action on your Website
2. Drive sales. The Contact Us form can be used to collect prospect names, phone numbers and emails. Always make sure your phone number is easily found by the reader. Many businesses are still mostly person to person, phone-initiated sales environments. 

This step could easily have been named Blog Your Butt Off.   To get inspiration to do exactly that, check out this video of Marcus Sheridan from Postwire / Inbound 2012 conference.

Step 5: Email Marketing

Despite what your kids might tell you, the rest of the world still very much runs on email.   Email serves an important function in the digital communication eco-system, so it isn’t going anywhere soon.  In fact, seasoned digital marketers might not want to let you in on the secret.  Email marketing provides the highest conversion rate of the digital channels  - sometimes pretty dramatically. 

Email Marketing is a big topic.  Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, iContact, Constant Contact and more have emerged to help business owners drive results from their “House List”.  Take some time to research them before settling on one.   Check out our post on comparing these powerful Email Marketing alternatives.

If you invest the time and effort to do these 5 Steps, then your business should see marked improvement over the next year!  You may also be interested in checking out our 25 Nearly Free Ways to Market your Business post. 

In the comments below, please weigh in with your own marketing ideas - or success stories with these techniques.   

 

Free eBook: "How to Use Pinterest for Business" from Hubspot

Pinterest has been hailed as the fast growing site of all time. It's currently at over 12 million users and growing steadily. Besides the powerhouse it's become, why else should businesses and bloggers be paying attention? Mashable recently reported Pinterest drives more traffic to blogs than Twitter. 

Marketers can get a piece of the action and this free "How to Use Pinterest for Business" eBook from Hubspot promises to do just that. It covers how to grow followers, increase traffic, find leads, convert sales and it includes case studies of brands successfully leveraging Pinterest to grow their business.

Review of Hubspot's Inbound Marketing System – An Entrepreneur’s Perspective

I started using Hubspot a few years ago as part of my digital marketing business.  After watching a demo of the tool's capabilities, we decided to try using Hubspot within our company.  We quickly introduced it to some of our entrepreneurial clients as well.   I don't use Hubspot in my Philadelphia marketing consulting business today.  I'll explain why later, but first...

Using Webinars to Grow Your Business

Whether you’re a multi-national corporation or an aspiring entrepreneur, webinars can play an instrumental part in reaching your target market and growing your business. They provide a platform for you to engage with your core audience and allow you to showcase your expertise to your target market at the convenience of you and the listener.  You can easily record webinars and post them online so that your audience can listen to them whenever and wherever. You can let your users help you promote your brand by encouraging them to share the webinar on their social media channels.  In this post, we’ll talk about webinar best practices, and provide a comparison of the best webinar platforms online.

Content is King – SEO Best Practices

If you want your Website to rank high on major search engines such as Google, your best shot is to develop a list of targeted keywords and then build specific WebPages with content focusing on these keywords.  SEO is done best before the Webpage is built; first you develop the strategy then implement by developing a targeted Webpage focused on your targeted keywords.

Optimize your Website for Local Search – Part 2

Part 1 of this installment focused on local business listings and optimizing your Pay per Click campaigns to maximize your investment in targeting local search.  Both strategies laid out in Part 1 should be fairly easy to accomplish; Part 2 is a more complicated and time consuming strategy to maximize your investment in targeting local search.

Optimize your Website for Local Search – Part 1

Chances are as a small business or an entrepreneur the products or services that you offer are targeted to a local area.  When this is the case it is very important to develop your search engine optimization strategy with a plan to attract localized searches.  If you are a pizza shop in Philadelphia it makes logical sense to target searches of people looking for a pizza shop in Philadelphia or if you’re a lawyer in New York it is logical to target searches looking for a lawyer in New York and not someone looking for a lawyer in California. 

SEO – Optimize Your Blog for High Search Engine Rankings

One of the primary reasons to operate and maintain a blog about your industry is to gain high search engine rankings to assist you in driving targeted potential customers and clients to your business.

Because blogs are updated on a daily or weekly basis they naturally have an advantage over static Websites or Websites that rarely has content changes or additional content. Blogs also naturally receive better rankings because blog posts typically include lot of targeted keywords that helps Google rank your blog for specific targeted keyword phrases.

Even though a blog will naturally gain better rankings, there are still optimization techniques that will assist in gaining high Google and other major search engine rankings. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. Both blogging sites give you the flexibility to optimize your blog for high search engine ranking.

From an optimization standpoint, blogs are not very different from Websites. Keyword driven content and incoming relevant links are still keys to your SEO success. The competitive advantage of a blog is from the frequency of keyword driven postings. By posting daily or multiple times per week, Google and other search engines will quickly take notice and index and rank your blog.

Some Blog Optimization Tips:

• Write an interesting title that correctly describes your blog post.  Your title should captivate the user to read more and possibly attract other Website operators to link to your blog post.
  

• Try to use the most important blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant and assists Search Engines in ranking your Website for those targeted terms.

• Utilize the H1 tags - Your blog editor should allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags.  H1 tags is a specific style that search engines recognize as a title to the page and the importance of the keywords within this title

• Turn on the feature that allows you to control the name of the sub directory that the post exists within.  Use your most important 2 or 3 word keyword phrase, placing a dash between each word. (professional-financial-services)

• Make sure the name of the webpage matches your blog post title; this is referred to as URL Rewritten Permalinks.  In addition, most blogging platforms will allow you to add an SEO widget that will assist in the optimization of your blog pages.

• Don't forget about your archives.  They are full of great keyword driven content that will be picked up by search engines.  Make sure these are always turned on and linked from your homepage.

• Link your blog from your corporate Website and any sister sites.  Also invite other relevant Websites to trade links with your blog to increase your incoming links.

Again, the key to a successful search engine optimized blog is frequent keyword driven postings.  It may not be necessary to write up a full article every time you post, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is all you typically need.  One trick is to split a larger blog post into two sections (part 1 & part 2).  Posts the first part one day, and then post the second part the next day.  This will increase the frequency of your blog posts without a lot of additional work.

  

Article written by Jason Lomberg, SEO Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs