7 “Must Dos” for Running Successful Webinars

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Are Webinars part of how you create and deliver online education?

If they are, then you probably realize you are far from alone – the Web is jam packed with Webinars, many of them free, and a lot of them of pretty low quality. Whether you are trying to make money directly through selling Webinars or indirectly by using them as a means of lead generation, you need good ways to stand out from the crowd.

Running successful Webinars isn’t rocket science, but it does require some basic knowledge about the medium and attention to details. To help you out, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Leading the Learning Revolution, updated and adapted slightly to reflect my ongoing experience with Webinars. [Read more…]

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Empowerment is Your Business Plan

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Photo of businessman as superhero

I was really struck by some data that came out of a Pew Internet Research report on lifelong learning a while back.

According to the report, 61 percent of U.S. adults have “little or no awareness” of the concept of distance learning.

And, while 74 percent said they had engaged in some sort of personal learning activity in the past year, only 16 percent had taken an online course. The numbers were actually worse for professional learning.

Maybe the percentages are better in some other countries, but I doubt they are enough better to escape the core lesson. Namely, there is a good chance a big part of your prospective audience is unlikely to participate in an online course.

It’a sobering thought, but I think it is actually an incredibly useful one for any knowledge end learning entrepreneur.

Why? Because you shouldn’t really be in the online course business. [Read more…]

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Are you offering enough exclusivity?

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Image of red carpet with spot lights

I’ve noted many times before that edupreneurs need to focus on delivering valuable, discernible outcomes and be as clear as possible about articulating those outcomes as part of the marketing process.

A big part of delivering value, of course, is the content you provide. But, in many ways, this is the easy part. It is the explicit part, and it is usually what is most easily copied by your competitors (no matter how much you are convinced you have some sort of “double secret” approach to your topic.) [Read more…]

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A “Universal Strategy” for Course Entrepreneurs?

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Chess Board - Strategy Selling Courses

Recently, I spent the day with a client’s board and various other stakeholders hashing out the strategy for their education business. This is an organization in a highly competitive learning market – lots of companies and individuals course entrepreneurs competing for business.

It was a situation where it would be easy to think that investing heavily in technology or producing the best possible courses would win the day. But, really, everyone in the market is pursuing this approach to the greatest extent possible. It is, as one astute board member put it, “table stakes” at this point.

There are, of course, some competitors in this market who will take the low price approach, but that wasn’t a strategy that made sense for my client (any more than it does for most education producers).

So, what to do?  [Read more…]

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When to Consider the Udemy Model

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Are you a landlord or a tenant?

If you have read much of what I’ve written on online course platforms, you know I am mostly not a fan of the approach offered by platforms like Udemy and its alternatives – what I call the “market maker” business model.

The gist of this model is that one company – basically, a “landlord” – creates a market place in which individual course producers or other companies – basically, “tenants” – can sell their courses, usually in exchange for paying the landlord a share of the revenue.

Now, if you happen to be the landlord – as Udemy is – this model is fantastic. You create a highly-scalable content engine that generates a continuous revenue stream. If you are the tenant, on the other hand, this model usually limits your options in a number of ways, including: [Read more…]

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