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TRANSCRIPT
BRIAN CLARK
Overview
Build Your Online Training
Business the Smarter Way
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Overview
Brian Clark
Brian: Welcome to the first lesson of our core training entitled Build Your
Online Training Business the Smarter Way. I’m your instructor, Brian Clark, and
I’m the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital.
I’m super excited that you’re here, and I have no doubt that you’ll get a lot out
of this course. As many of you may know, I started teaching online course
creation back in 2007, but this is my first new training program on the topic for
several years. I’m really excited to dive in with you.
Of course, the fundamentals remain the same, and so do the mistakes and
pitfalls that I’m going to help you avoid. The great news, compared to 2007, is
the mainstream acceptance of commercial online education. Back then, some
people were skeptical when I predicted how huge online education would
become, but they’re not skeptical anymore.
It’s a $15 billion a year industry, and it’s only going to get bigger. From that
standpoint, there’s never been a better time to get started creating and selling
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high-impact online training to satisfy the on-demand lifelong learning needs
that we’re all going to face as we get into the future.
To get us started, I want to give you a quick overview of the course, which is
also a roadmap for creating and selling online courses. It’s important to see
how everything fits together from beginning to end. Ready? All righty then, let’s
go.
This roadmap actually breaks into five distinct phases of the overall process.
Designing your course
The first phase is designing your course, which includes some of the most vital
preliminary work that you’ll do as an online education entrepreneur. In our very
next lesson, I’m going to go over some key concepts.
Don’t zone out on this one. This is critical. It’s important to know the core
concepts in creating content that sells and the mindset of the online training
entrepreneur. You need to understand the growing role e-learning is playing in
society as well as the fundamental principles of creating a course that people
actually want to spend money on.
Next up, we’re going to figure out how to choose an in-demand subject. When
it comes to adult education, you can’t force people to learn what you think they
should learn. This isn’t grade school or even high school. You’ve got to teach
them what they want to learn.
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After that, we’re going to get into positioning your course and your offer. It’s
critical when you’re selling any kind of information to differentiate yourself with
unique positioning in the marketplace, even if someone else is basically
teaching the exact same thing. And as you’ll find, that’s actually what you’re
looking for.
Whether you think about it as a unique selling proposition or Seth Godin’s
Purple Cow, you’ve got to stand apart and resonate with people in a stronger
way than your competition does, and we’re going to dive into that pretty
heavily because it’s so important.
After that, we’re going to learn how to create a learner profile, or an avatar, as
you may have heard that terminology. Who are these people that you’re trying
to teach? What problem or pain exists that a training program can fix? What are
their learning styles? These are all important things that you have to figure out,
and you can’t get people to buy if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach
and teach.
Next up from there, we’re going to identify learner benefits and the ultimate
emotional benefits that they’re trying to achieve through taking your training.
Adult learners are obsessed with what’s in it for them, just like they are about
buying cars or anything else.
You must identify the real-world benefits that people are seeking and then also
dive into those emotional, root benefits that drive the desire to learn. It’s
unfortunate, but very few people are willing to pay you just because they have
this burning love of learning.
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Next up, we’ll develop learning objectives. You’ll notice that at the beginning of
each of these lessons, I will tell you exactly what we’re trying to accomplish.
Once you understand the real-world benefits that your prospective learners
seek, you can then design your training program to satisfy specific, concrete
objectives. These objectives should remain firmly at the front of your mind
while you develop training content, because that will keep you on the right
track.
Business models
Next up, the second phase is figuring out your business model. This is so key to
some people who are really great at teaching, are really great writers, are really
great content creators, but business isn’t their strong suit.
On the other hand, we’ve got hardcore entrepreneur types who may not be
as well-versed in instruction or design and in creating engaging content. Even
then, you may not understand exactly how each business model operates at an
optimal level for the type of training that you’re creating.
What we’re going to do is then take those learning objectives that we identified
and tie them to a specific business model. There’s more than one way to create
a business around commercial education, and I’m going to offer you several
different approaches and also the context within which they’re most
appropriate.
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When you understand learning objectives, you can figure out what model will
work best for your specific learners. For example, will educating people
naturally lead to a purchase of something else that you make happen through
the act of teaching? If so, you can charge less for the initial training and attract
more customers. These are the type of variables and scenarios that we’ll be
diving into.
Test with MVP
If you’ve been anywhere in the last five years, you’ve heard of the lean startup
movement and also the concept of the minimum viable product. There are
many ways to test the hypothesis that you come up with when trying to identify
a market of learners and trying to identify a topic that people are willing to pay
for.
There are several ways that you can figure out if you’re on the right track before
you actually go through the process of creating the whole course.
In fact, I will recommend to you strongly that you not create an entire course
before getting appropriate feedback. Number 1, as to will people buy this?
Number 2, they can give you feedback that allows you to write the book in real
time, if you will, based on what you’re actually hearing instead of just inside
your own head and guessing.
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Developing content
The fourth phase of the process is that finally, we actually get to developing
content. I know so many people who just dive right in and start creating
content and end up with something that no one wants or that was a little bit off
the mark because they weren’t doing the course creation like a real teacher.
A real teacher is in a classroom and has feedback cues, puzzled looks, looks
of understanding. All of that stuff is important to understand whether the way
you’re teaching and the way you’ve designed the course is actually viable.
We’re going to do a lesson on researching and identifying content source
material. Where will the content of your training program come from? Is it
based on your personal expertise and experience? Is it based on research and
synthesizing, reformatting multiple existing sources of information? Keep in
mind, that’s exactly what a teacher does. Do you need a partner with a
credentialed expert -- one or more? All of these are viable approaches, and
we’ll examine each one.
Next up, we’re going to talk about identifying activities and exercises to make
the education, the training come alive. The activities and exercises are the tools
you’ll use to make lessons concrete and applicable to the real world. Or you
can provide a real-world roadmap that shows people how to apply the topics
to achieve their goals. Anything that makes the lessons more concrete and
tangible will aid in the success of your students.
Next up, we’re going to identify course topic areas. Now that you know what
people are actually trying to achieve and become, you know what you need to
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teach. Many people get this entire process backward and start with topics they
assume people need to be taught. This is one of those classic mistakes that I’m
going to help you avoid.
Next up, you’re going to develop your course curriculum. Take those topics that
you’ve identified, and weave them into an overall curriculum. Not only should
your curriculum have a dominant theme, but it should be telling a story that
leads to understanding and the ability to take action -- very important concept.
We’re not just talking about text or just audio or just video, as I mentioned
earlier. The learning style of your members is critical. You’ll generally find that
you’ll attract a dominant learning style, and you can cater to that, but the best
approach, of course, is to provide content in multiple modalities.
Back when you developed that learning profile that we talked about earlier
based on your research of the market, you’ll have explored the likely desired
learning style of your specific learners. Do they prefer text, audio, or video?
Learning psychology demonstrates that all people benefit from a blend of
media formats, so often, you’ll use the format that best suits the content. As
you see, here at Digital Commerce Academy, we follow that very philosophy of
content delivery.
Next up, you’re going to develop introductory content. Now that you’re ready
to develop your training content, you’ll find it to be much easier thanks to all
that work you did upfront. You should also include elements that attract and
hold attention while engaging learners at both an emotional and logical level in
order to remain memorable.
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Are you going to create this content yourself? Are you going to strategically
outsource it? How are you going to complete the business of content
production, which is crucial?
Next up, you’re going to have to build your site. No matter your business
model, you need a website with a publicly accessible frontend and a
members-only backend. The Rainmaker Platform is excellent for this. If you’re
interested in that, obviously, you can check it out on your own.
Launching and marketing
Finally, phase five is launching and marketing. What’s your launch strategy and
offer? That is critical. In fact, when you first introduced a course, the offer is
almost more important than anything else, anything more than fancy
copywriting or maybe the right affiliates or joint venture partners. This is the
time to plan how you’ll introduce your new course, your new training site, to
the world. What’s the most effective selling strategy to launch your site and
convert prospects into paid members?
Amazingly, the research you’ve already done on learner benefits will be
directly applied to your sales materials for the launch and ongoing marketing.
It’s the beauty of selling information in that you are baking the marketing into
the product itself.
You’ve heard that over and over from various places, regardless of whether it’s
an iPhone or a car or a training course. Bake the marketing in. Make it desirable
by design. The great thing about this approach to creating courses is that you
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are doing exactly that, again through that preliminary work that we’re talking
about.
Then we need to talk about creating our marketing machine. You’ll need to
develop an educational content marketing strategy that attracts new prospects
and builds a relationship with them over time. This is the stuff we talk about all
the time about nurturing, generating leads with content keeping them engaged
throughout the average buying cycle and giving them the information they
need in order to learn more from you and that would be in a paid context.
We’ll be talking about partners out there, finding the right affiliate or partner
when you launch. If you don’t have your own audience, this is critical, and it’s a
beauty that I’ve always said about having something to sell.
If you don’t have an audience, you can borrow someone else’s audience if you
construct a deal that’s good for them. If you develop a killer training program
and others will do the pre-selling for you with an endorsement and give you
better results in advertising for sure, you’ve located these prospective joint
venture partners through your initial market research.
Again, the work you do upfront is where a lot of your backend success comes
from because you learned the players in the market. You figured out what was
going out there. You’ll understand the dynamics that would lead some of these
people to work with you to get started, which is always key.
Remember, even if you don’t make a dime off your initial launch, you now have
a list of buyers. You have an audience of buyers, not prospects, and as you’ll see
throughout this course, that is the most valuable thing you can have.
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We’re going to talk a little bit about community development as well. One of
the benefits of building what we call ‘interactive learning environments’ is the
community of learning that develops with the guidance of you, the
instructor, or the producer of the site, if you will. So you’re working with other
subject-matter experts.
The real-world benefits of knowledge are why people join, and community is
why they stay. It’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over my course
of time doing this -- that it’s very hard to sell someone in joining a paid
community -- that the other people that they are learning from in addition to
you are the reason that people stay. Don’t negate the power of community as
the reason why you’re able to retain people as opposed to the reason why you
get them to join in the first place.
Then finally, we’re going to talk about your ongoing marketing. This is the final
aspect of the final phase. Any membership-based program can be re-launched
over and over using free persuasive content. You can even release parts of the
course itself as an attraction strategy.
Remember, if your membership site is constantly adding new content, it’s
constantly getting more valuable, and you have to figure out ways to leverage
that value that you’re creating just by being in the course of business.
The next thing that you’re going to experience with this course is that I’m going
to walk you through lesson by lesson, step by step, through each of these
elements that we’ve just covered. By the end of it, you should be in a really
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great position of succeeding in the online training business. You don’t have to
wait to the end to get started. In fact, I would love it if you would work
concurrently through each step with me but, of course, that is up to you.
That is it for this overview. I will be back soon with Lesson 1.
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