Are you building your business or someone else's?

I've had courses online for almost two years now. And I've learned a bunch of lessons, and ultimately my experience boils down to are you building your business or someone else's?

Over that time I've tried different hosting providers, and evaluated the services of others. Some of those providers are listed on this blog.

I don't intend this post to bash these services, and I might mention some by name. But I'm doing this because of the lessons I learned from it.

I started hosting with Udemy, as many people did, and still do.

• Free to start
• Had a simple payment percentage split
• Easy interface
• Allowed me to contact and promote to the students
• Could host free and paid courses

As a busy consultant, this seemed ideal. I could ignore:

• all the infrastructure requirements. 
• Put my course live quickly and have people buy it. 
• Create a free course as a lead generation and upsell the paid course or ebooks or consultancy without having to build an email list

Perfect.

Until.

The 'partnership' that I thought I was part of, changed its rules.

Now Udemy

• Free to start
• Easy interface
• Host free and paid courses - but can't promote paid courses to free students, and can't promote non-Udemy products to either, 

I can't use it to promote. So all the traffic I've sent to Udemy and built up the student base for, I can't promote to for my consultancy, training, ebooks etc.

Oops. Costly Business Lesson learned.

But, as a consultant it takes time to move courses off the platform and on to new ones, so my inability to respond to changes of the hosting company has meant that I have continued to build their business, but not grow the future business prospects of mine.

But I've finally responded now and moved on to a white labelled hosting service called usefedora.

Full disclosure - if you use that link and sign up, you'll get $100 free credit with usefedora, and so will I. But I'd include the link to them anyway. Since my business depends on their services, I'm happy to promote it.

Useedora is good for me because:

• I have an existing area of expertise that I'm known for
• I can market to my audience through my blogs, courses, ebooks etc. So I'm not dependent on anyone else driving traffic or promoting my course.
• I have access to the email details of the people who sign up to the course so I can contact them directly without interference from the course hosting company

For other people Usefedora would suck because Udemy is great when:

• You are not going to market your course
• You want to sell the course at a low price, and with numerous flash sales that knock it down to $10
• You basically want to sell lots of courses at low price
• You don't want to upsell to the students
• All your products will be Udemy courses - because that's all you can promote to Udemy students. Not ebooks, not webinars, not face to face training.
• You don't care if terms and conditions change, because you just want to dump a course on the market

And when I create my 'self help products', and 'knock up an ebook quickly for cash schemes', then I'l use Udemy, because:

• Udemy have trained their students to expect a discount market for courses, so you want to sell cheap and sell lots
• I won't have an existing contact base to market to, so the only way I'll get visibility for my product is through their "buy any of these courses for $10" promotions
• I won't upsell from it, because each product is niche and not part of a long term strategy
• I don't plan on supporting the students, the course is just for revenue
• The courses aren't part of my long term business plan, so they don't help me grow my business, they are just experimental sources of revenue

If you actually want to build your business, and make online training a part of that business, but not the whole focus then you need a hosting partner who:

• shares the customer email addresses so you can market to them
• takes a fair share of the course payment to cover hosting costs - because you need them to stay in business as much as they need you to stay in business, and they are less likely to change their terms and conditions

Keep in mind. Are you building your business? Are the people you are partnering with, helping you build your business? Or are they putting blocks in your way, that ultimately help them?

I host my courses with usefedora and I'm happy to pay a monthly fee, for a higher payment commission, because they give me the flexibility to contact my students and use my online courses as one part of my business, and I can use it to grow my business.

Other online hosting companies probably do this to.

So check...

Does your hosting company give you access to the customer emails? If not, do they have rules about what you can contact the students about, and how often?

If they do block you, or have rules, then there are providers who don't, and if you want to grow your business rather than theirs, then this will be important for you.

Do you have an audience to market to? If not, are you prepared to build one, and live with lower sales until you do?

If you are not prepared to build your business, and market your course. Then online training is not part of your business plan, and you should go for an online vendor that brings in the students, or will make your course visible to the students that other instructors have brought to the platform.

Do you want to spread your courses wide across multiple hosting companies, or use one or two because you want to focus your marketing and support energies?

I want to be very specific about where I spend my time, so I can't afford the time to jump between multiple vendors and multiple support systems. Hence why I need to choose between hosting companies, rather than using them all.

Ask yourself: Are you building your business? Or helping someone else  build theirs?

I'm not trying to suggest that any course hosting vendor is 'bad'. But they may not be 'right' for your  situation and your business. And be prepared to take action if they are not, or if they change so that they are not.

I've uploaded my courses to 5 different companies and software now, and cancelled them on 3 platforms before launch. You do need to experiment, but be very clear about what you need, and have the courage to change, if your needs are not being met.

Notes on "How to Advertise"

My notes on "How To Advertise" by Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas

References and recommends:

• Claude Hopkins - Scientific Advertising
• Ian Ogilvy - Ogilvy on Advertising and Confessions of an Advertising Man

From "Confessions":

• "You cannot bore people into buying"
• "Committees can critcize advertisements, but they cannot create them"
• "Compromise has no place in advertising. Whatever you do, go the whole hog"
• "The consumer is not a moron. Don't insult his or her intelligence."

Ogilvy Philosophy: Research. Results. Creative Brilliance. Professional Discipline.

Codify experience into principles.

Strategy:

• What is our objective?
• What action do we want consumers to take?
• Who are we talking to?
• What is the key consumer benefit or core idea?
• Why should they believe what we say?
• What should our tone and manner be?
• What is the personality of the brand?

• Don't give up the high ground. Why people ultimately buy the product.
• Don't labour the obvious
• Don't use price as a strategy. provide value.
• Don't use popularity as a strategy. popularity is a result not a reason why.
• don't confuse attributes with benefits e.g. fast (attribute), saves time (benefit)

Strategy Checkpoints:

• Be single minded. give up some points to make the important ones stand out
• Make it fit an overall plan
• Keep objectives reasonable
• keep strategy short and easy to understand
• Decide where your business will come from - e.g. new or existing customers?
• Make a meaningful promise to the consumer
• set yourself apart
• relate the unknown to the known - what does your product replace? why is it better?
• keep your strategy up to date

Execute

Promotion

• Make them strategic - grow organically from the marketing plan and brand
• look for big ideas you can repeat year after year
• pretest promotions
• track the results
• keep it simple

The product. Not the display. Is the hero. Can the product sell itself when shown in use?

How should I price my online training course?

Price is hard.

I see many people putting the price too high for the value I think they provide - particularly on Udemy, because of the massive discounting that goes on through that platform.

Next time I create courses I'll be aiming for smaller courses about 3-4 hours, at about $39 - $59

My current course is about 18 hours at $175 - $299, so I'm pricing at about $10 to $15 an hour. 

But I'd advise you not to worry about price yet. 

Focus on content and scope. And benefit to the student.

Experiment with the tools and technologies because it takes time to learn how to edit these videos etc.

I will say however that the general advice "see what other people are doing, then price a little under that" sucks. If you don't offer anything that is better value, or better quality, and can't be sold for the same price (or a little more) then don't enter that market.

Focus on the value you can add, then price accordingly.

Use other courses as guides for what you like, and don't like, and do something different.

But make sure that your course, your content, your approach, your scope, and your pricing, are true to you, and you can justify the price on its own terms based on the value your course adds, not in terms of reference to the competition.

What software should I use for creating online training?

I advise you to record and edit on Windows, using Camtasia

I tried a bunch of other tools, but for Windows Camtasia is great. 

I also have Camtasia on the mac, but I don't use it for editing, I export to mp4 and edit on Windows. I think the editing on Mac doesn't flow as well. And I wish the two versions shared the same file format.

Apparently people also like screenflow on the mac, and I think if the Mac was my main machine I'd use that. But I'm sticking to camtasia on windows.

I have also used bbsoftware in my early days when Camtasia seemed too expensive, and it was good, but Camtasia was better - again evals for 30 days so you can experiment.

I have used sony vegas cheapy edition, and it too was good, but not really aimed at the screen capture and editing that I do for my training.

What microphone should I use for recording online training?

I use the blue yeti for all my recording now

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Microphones-Yeti-USB-Microphone/dp/B002VA464S

Amazing the difference in quality.

I don't use the livechat for any recording any more - apparently the gaming headsets are the ones to go for, if you go for a headset mic. But this was great quality at a low price, when I started. But if you can, start off with the Blue Yeti and don't experiment with others - so many trainers I know, all use the blue yeti. And they do so for a reason - it is great.

I have my blue yeti on a boom stand.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000NTZK12/ref=pe_217191_31005151_dp_1

Because the blue yeti stand picked up vibration and noise when I was using the keyboard, and this avoids this problem for me. I do a lot of screen capture, hands on computer stuff in my training.

Many trainers avoid this by doing the audio track separate from the video track. I rarely do that, but on some lectures that seems appropriate.

I had to buy a thread adapter: a generic Microphone Mic Clip Stand Thread Adaptor 3/8" to 5/8" Connector, to connect the mic to the stand

I also bought a generic pop shield which works fine for me

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000L99XWG/ref=pe_217191_31005151_dp_2

Which Mailing List tool should I use?

One of the constant refrains you hear from online marketeers is "Build an email list".

And when you teach online, regardless of which platform you host your courses on, you will want to do your own marketing. And a mailing list is the easiest way to do that.

When I created my first online course, I had a mailing list for the people who had purchased my first e-book. I used this mailing list to send a discount to the course and over the course of a month had 120 people taking my course.

I have used a whole bunch of mailing list software.

I've settled on mailchimp. I'll explain why.

• Free if your list never grows beyond 2000 people
• Easy to maintain multiple lists
• Easy to embed subscription forms
• More reasons to come...

I started with mailchimp, manually uploading my sales list for the e-book to build the list. Easy with the csv importing. (I now copy and paste into the import box online from a spreadsheet).

It looked like I was going to exceed the 2000 people on the list, just from e-book sales, so I started to look for alternatives.

This was a mistake. I recommend you let your list grow. Even if your list expands beyond 2000 people on mailchimp, you can still keep growing the list for free. You just can't send any emails to the list unless you purchase some credits or a monthly plan.

I tried a few of the php mailing solutions but they all felt very Web 1.0 compared to the ease of use of mailchimp. Not just for me, but for subscribers. Unsubscribing with many free solutions I tried involved sending 'unsubscribe' emails. This was fine back in the early 90's but isn't really very good for today's users.

I tried some desktop tools. These were easy to use, but again the unsubscribe was harder than it needed to be and I had to jump through hoops to create the subscribe forms.

I've probably lost about 5 - 10 days, investigating mail solutions, trying them out, writing custom code to handle subscribe events and unsubscribe etc. In retrospect, I would rather have that time back, and have spent the money I could have made over those days, on a payment plan for mailchimp.

But, mailchimp still looks expensive to me for a monthly plan. I do not send out a lot of mailings, so paying for a monthly plan of unlimited emails doesn't work for me.

But mailchimp do a PAYG plan, where you purchase credits. This is how I plan to use it. I will either, set a budget for each advertising campaign and buy the necessary credits. Or buy a lump sum of credits and use them over time - probably the latter.

You see at the moment, I'm building my lists. I haven't sent many mailings. I don't have any credit in the system. But I have created sign up forms on many of my prominent blogs. To build up a base of emails that I can use later.

I did a quick comparison of  the different email sites. Campaign Monitor also looked quite good. As it has a PAYG plan as well.

MadMimi looked like the cheapest for a pay monthly. But I ruled out pay monthly.

If you send out a lot of mails per month, then a pay monthly plan will make a lot of difference to you. And presumably you will get the money back on sales, so you can offset it. I don't work that way yet so PAYG works well for me and with mailchimp I could pick a PAYG plan which would work out at 0.5 cents per email, pay on a campaign basis.

If my mailing plans change and I get a lot of subscribers and start sending out a log of emails then I can move to a pay monthly plan. But if you are uncertain about your use case, then mailchimp allows you to build up lists and gather subscribers without having to commit to a pay monthly plan.

10 things I need from an online e-training course hosting service

I've had a look at a fair few online training course providers now.

And new providers seem to pop up frequently.

The list below is how I evaluate them.

• How easy is it to create the course?
• How easy is it to migrate my existing courses?
• How fair are the payment terms?
• Can I update my course?
• Can I communicate with the students?
• Does the site look professional?
• Are the other courses selling?
• How well does the GUI work as a student?
• Do you allow free courses to be released?
• Can I opt out of some of your promotions and new features?

There are other factors I use but the above are the most important at the moment, since they are the criteria that I have used to reject existing vendors.

How easy is it to create the course?

This relates to the user experience for creating the course.

If I have to type in a lot of information for each lecture I add, then it is going to take a lot of time.

Simple things help:

• Automatically creating thumbnails, rather than having me upload them.
• Just a title and description - no tags, or categories, etc. etc.
• Multi-page GUI for a single entity will kill me

How easy is it to migrate my existing courses?

• I already have courses.
• I can code.
• If you have an API then I can write a conversion routine and probably have my course up and running in about an hour.
• If you have an API and a good GUI then your platform might become the 'master' platform from which I migrate to the other platforms. This would mean that you would get all the updates first and become the main platform I promote.
• Do you support automated import from other platforms? (Currently I haven't seen a single platform that does this)

How fair are the payment terms?

I'm using your service because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of hosting, support, payments.

And I expect you to take a percentage of the sales cost because of that.

But it has to be fair.

And it has to be commensurate with other providers. Remember you are in competition with them.

If your terms say you'll promote the course. Then you better promote it, otherwise you're not living up to your end of the deal, and don't deserve so much commission.

Can I update my course?

I update my course because the technology it teaches, changes. Your GUI needs to allow me to update it.

Hopefully you have an API I can use to automate updates.

By the way - an API isn't mandatory for me, since I'll happily reverse engineer the HTTP calls and create my own API on top of your GUI, but I know this is brittle and I'd rather have my life made easy for me.

If you don't support updates, then the answer is a no-no.

Can I communicate with the students?

Learning isn't a 'shout from the mountain' process. It requires interaction. I need to be able to interact with the people on the course, and communicate via bulk processes.

Yes, some of the communication might try and upsell to new courses (particularly if this is a free course), but it will also be to provide information.

I'm happy for you not to share the emails, but you need to provide a working communication platform.

Does the site look professional?

My sites are shoddy at times. But they tend to push the boundary of what I think the minimal level of shoddiness is.

An online training platform has to look good, and feel good.

If your layout is bad. If the images haven't scaled well. If the GUI has obvious bugs. I'll walk away quickly.

First impressions count. If I'm put off, prospective students will be too.

Are the other courses selling?

If you list how many students are on courses then I'll look and see how other instructors are doing.

If they're not selling well, then I'm not signing up.

How well does the GUI work as a student?

I try and sign up as a student to see how the experience works from the other side of the fence.

If it isn't cross platform. If it doesn't work on mobile and tablets. If it is clunky and slow.

I won't put people through that.

Do you allow free courses to be released?

This costs you money. Not me. So I expect the payment terms to reflect this.

But free courses are a great way to experiment with the platform and try out the features without committing.

If you have free courses, and a communication feature. Then I can use these as an up-sell mechanism and you'll probably find all my courses on your site.

Can I opt out of some of your promotions and new features?

I evaluate your features at a particular time.

I expect you to improve over time.

But if you fundamentally change the engagement model then I need the ability to opt out, or I and my course will walk to the competition.

e.g. Udemy recently offered Certificates of completion. A new feature that they thought would be a vote winner. Not for me. But they allowed me to opt out. 

These are just the things I look for at the start. 

Not I haven't covered, length of videos, or streaming quality etc. etc. There are absolute basics that I expect you to get right, and they are so obvious and fundamental that I lump them into the user experience bucket.

I look forward to new course vendors coming out. And when they do, I'll probably add to my list.

What do you look for?