Get motivated to take enthusiastic action that will help you turn that dream into reality. One step at a time and you will surely achieve anything.

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

My Online Courses & Products. Day One

This is an adventure in setting up sites to sell products and courses. I've no real experience except minor E-Bay that we've all done. But I've read many articles and seen many videos so lets get started.

Firstly, I've found that it's unusual to be given the whole story and secondly I can see that you have to be dedicated, hard-working and versatile. You must take action and keep taking it to keep the ball rolling. And In think you have to start on different fronts before you even begin to sell anything. You could just have a page selling your product or services but, unless you have e-mail addresses for dozens of people who you can tell an who will buy then nobody will know about you. So it's basically 3 things. You need your products, you need people who will buy from you, and you need somewhere to store them to be delivered (order fulfillment). 

To find new potential customers you really need to look at several ways.  I've listed these out here:

A blog
Facebook
Website
Landing Page
Articles
Video
Auto Responder

Before we begin lets look at each.of these elements.


Your Blog
Your blog should be a articles or videos posted on a regular basis. They must have top quality content and be relevant to your topic. So if you are setting up a course or membership site about Dogs then each article should be about dogs inj some way. Maybe dog training, dog exercising, dog diets, dog illnesses, dog as a companion.

No matter how knowledgeable you are I'd suggest you need to keep researching so that you become an authority. Once you are recognised as an authority you'll find your courses or membership sells better and more people sign up for longer. You need to become an authority so you firstly don't run out of material to write about and secondly so what you write is reliable and true. Your members will come to rely on you.

A really good way to build up your knowledge is to ask members what is their biggest concern and to write and tell you, You may have to check this out or you may be able to advise straight away. Whatever is the situation you should use those questions as part of your course or membership site. Answering questions will also bring in new members because they might look for the answer on Google and so come to your blog, or else they may be tld about you by the person who originally asked the question.

Facebook

You'll need to set up a Facebook Page in addition to your personal page. Or set up a Facebook Group. If you don't know the difference then a Page is run by you as your official authentic page that others can follow, receive updates in their News Feed and interact with you. So for example I could have a Page Mike Leahy's It's a Dog's Life.
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A Group is also run by you but this is for a group of people with a similar interest. The Group can be Open whee anyone can join, or a closed group where the administator authorises membership of anyone applying to join. Members discuss issues between themselves.

In my opinion a Group is better for you with a course or membership site. It allows transparency between members and yourself, and it brings members closer to you, they will get to know you, like you and trust you. When that happens your members will buy more from you or recommend you.

Both Pages and Groups have to be set up and managed. This takes time and effort which we will go into later. You can use both for announcements, photos and videos, thanking members, giving them news, asking them to share and so build up more followers, members and customers.

Website
We all know what a website is. And before you needed to be technically minded to produce but now its simple. There are free websites around but you may need to spend a little here and pay fr hosting.Hosting is like the ground space and then we build the house with different rooms for different purposes. In a house you have the kitchen, bathroom, dining room, lounge and so on. In a website you may have an opening page, an "about" page, a page with products or services that you are selling, a blog, and perhaps others. 

We get our hosting and then build our website, or we may have a pre-build house and move it onto the hosting site. Then we send out messages to our friends that we have moved or built a house and they can contact us or visit us. 

Your first website might consist of a page with your products, an opening page and a blog. So you can welcome people people and they can see you are alive and kicking, on your blog they can see interesting videos and articles that will instill confidence and a product page where they can order. There should be an auto-responder on each page. (See auto-responder below).

Once you have built up confidence you can send out e-mails and take potential customers right to a product page where they can purchase. But I feel this won't happen overnight unless you have a list of names or friends with lists who can recommend you.

Landing Page
The Landing Page is the product page where people are sent to see your products and place an order. So it may be part of your website or in addition. 

Articles
You need to start writing articles. But you can buy them There are sites such as www.fiverr.com where you can have articles written at a very low cost. Articles with really good content are important. Articles should be about what you are selling but should not be a sales pitch. They should be everything except selling the product. That comes later. 

Take a look at some blogs and articles online. Go to Google and type in your subject "Dogs" and look down. You will find articles of course, and many will be on blogs. Check them out. Then try being more specific "Dog exercising" for example. 

If you haven't written much before then try reading an article, writing some notes about what is written then write your own original article. Not good at spelling and general grammar? Ask a friend or someone in the family to help you. People are always happy to help.  Go to Google and type in "Help with writing an article" and you'll find how to write, grammar, spelling and much more. If you are using a word-processor then switch or auto-correct and words will be underlined that are spelt wrong, after you finish try spell-check. There is no excuse.

Be regular with article writing, at least one a week. Soon you'll have build up a large blog.

Video 
Video is now critical to online success. You can have video about products, about you, about your business and much more. The big problem is that nobody likes talking on video. We'll talk about that later. Video is so simple today. You just need a smartphone, that is all to capture simple video. Point and shoot. 

Obviously it gets more complicated as you want to make better video but its not necessary t start. Your videos can go on Facebook, Youtube, your website, Landing Page, and on your blog. For simple everyday videos I take and don't edit I go to www.socialcam.com where I post up and this gets sent automatically to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. If you want to see go to "Mike Leahy". here's an app which I highly recommend this, and its free.

Take the plunge and make some video. Try talking over. Just keep it private until you are confident. Stick with me and I'll make you a Video champ.

Auto-responder
You need to set up an auto-responder. There are several available. There are some free to start ones and that's what I'd recommend because you can upgrade or download the data and take elsewhere.

Right. An auto-responder is a system that asks for information such as e-mail address and name and puts that data into a list that you can use to send  e-mails too. But there bis much much more. You can send a series of e-mails that you have written as a package so someone might get an email ever 2 days after they fill out the form. They might get an e-mail when you have a new product and then a follow-up in a day or so. There are many combinations. We'll go into more detail when I set up an account.

And Finally
And the most important attributes you must have is to take positive action and the second is to be able to write (or have someone who can do this for you) articles, front up videos and become the brand.

Sound difficult? Well it isn't really. Like everything it's difficult until you start. So the time you waste because you are afraid to start is money lost.



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