One of the online course platform vendors (Thinkific) recently released a report on how to make your first $100K from online courses.
It got me thinking. [Read more…]
15 Ways to Grow Your Course Business Today
Want to take your learning business to new levels? Here are 15 ideas you can take action on today. [Read more…]
The Key to Avoiding Online Course Failure
Online course failure. I was prompted to write about this topic because of a conversation I had recently with the financial director at an organization that is not getting good sales results for its online courses. The critical part of the conversation went something like this: [Read more…]
Hitting Your Strategic Sweet Spot with the 3M Model
Ever struggle to determine whether an idea is a good one? Whether it is really a good fit for your business, something that really deserves to be pursued? In this post, I share a deceptively simple visual I use for focusing my business ideas.
I call it the “3M” model – not because it has anything to do with Post-It notes (though those can be useful!), but because it focuses on three factors that I think are essential for success with a business or even a specific product (like an online course).
These are: market, means, and motivation.
In a nutshell, there has to be demand for the product you plan to sell (market), you have to have the capabilities necessary for creating and delivering it (means), and for real success, you have to truly driven to create significant value through making the product available (motivation).
If any of these factors is weak or missing, your efforts will be off center – as suggested in the graphic above – and you will either fail entirely or be much less successful than you could be.
I cover each of these areas in more detail in what follows and also include links to a range of tools I hope you will find helpful. [Read more…]
Are you undervaluing what’s unique about your course?
I decided to write this post in response to some common questions I get from Learning Revolution e-mail subscribers. These include:
- Questions about which platform is really “best”
- Questions about whether people will really be willing to pay for content that does not seem all that unique (to the writer)
- Questions about how to protect content from being downloaded, shared, copied, etc.
- Questions about the best course designs, formats, media, etc.
On the surface, these may see like completely unconnected questions, but they all suggest underlying assumptions about what does or doesn’t make a course valuable. None of these, I would argue, is the most important factor. The most important factor, the thing that makes your courses unique, is you.
I don’t say this to make some sort of “woo woo” touchy-feely point. No, my argument comes from cold hard business facts: [Read more…]
