How to Create an Online Class On Your Blog – Part 1

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So I have a couple of blogs, a few affiliate websites, a couple of eBooks and an audio guide on my resume, and I’m hoping to add another product within a month that will add HUGE potential to my income stream. An online class.

This is a monumental undertaking for me, because it involves audio, video presentations, transcripts, worksheets, integration of a membership platform, and all of the marketing that goes along with it. It should be fun!

My plan is to sell this online class (or upsell it with a discount from those who purchase my study guide) and have it be the most dynamic and user friendly study resource for the LEED exam. It is a lot of work, but the potential for earning thousands a day is there, if I do it right.

Outsourcing?

There is only so much a person can outsource for a project of this caliber. As you know, I’ve already redesigned intheleed, which I talked about in my June monthly income report – which was definitely outsourced. There is no way I could design something that looks so beautiful myself. In addition to the website redesign, I did hire a voice talent to read scripts that will be used as the audio portion in the class, which also syncs with the video slideshow presentations. And in case you’re wondering – the designers and the voice talent are both from the U.S.

For the slideshows and the worksheets that will be included in the class – I would save much more time and money by doing it myself – just because it would take a long time to explain to someone exactly how it should be. With a lot of subjects, I’m sure this could easily be left for someone else to do, but with my particular subject, which is a study guide for an exam – it has to be a certain way.

How does it work?

The plan is to have it like this:

People purchase the class, and are sent an email with a login and password. They can login on my website and will be directed to a class overview page, which will have an introduction video by me explaining how to use the tools. The overview page will also give the ability to download all of the lessons, in video and audio format, from one location. There will be a large button for lesson 1, with a list of the other lessons below in case people want to skip around.

The class has value because each lesson (which is essentially a chapter in my study guide), has both video and audio formats, as well as a downloadable transcript for each. This hits all types of learning methods to meet everyone’s needs. In addition, there will be definitions that can easily be seen while someone is watching/listening to the presentation – and worksheets and quizzes that go along with each.

What’s nice is that anyone can go through the program as fast or as slow as they want, limited only by how long each of the lessons are.

Some Unknowns

The biggest concern is the capability of incorporating a membership type website onto my blog, which allows only people who purchase the product to view certain webpages. Luckily, I think I found a solution: a fancy wordpress plugin called WP-Wishlist. With this plugin, you can integrate a membership website onto your webpage, and you can set which pages are protected and only shown to customers. It also integrates with shopping carts and handles payments, which is perfect. I may hire someone to figure this out for me, but I may do it myself just because I want to learn.

Do any of you have any experience with WP-Wishlist? If they have an affiliate program and you want to earn a little bit of cash from my purchase, I’ll click on the first one I see in the comments below if I do decide to go with it, which I’m pretty sure I will. I know there are other programs like aMember, but I’ve heard really good things about WishList.

Another unknown is how exactly I will market this. I may do a planned launch, which means I would create a buzz about it beforehand, send information out to my email list, and even hold a free webinar that promotes the product at the end. It’s pretty cool, and I wish I knew more about The Product Launch Formula, however there is actually some excellent product launch info in the Internet Business mastery Academy, so I’ll definitely be re-lisetning those particular lessons.

How This Will Affect You?

Well, as always – I keep track of almost everything I do online just so you can learn from my success and from my failures. It is my hope that while creating this online class, I will be able to show you exactly how I do it so you can do it too if you wanted to. Is there something you wish to teach people? Are you not that excited about just writing an eBook? Well maybe an online class is for you, and hopefully I’ll help you get there too. (That rhymes!)

Actually, we’ll probably end up helping each other because I may ask questions along the way concerning different parts of the process.

My first question is related to presentation material. I’d like to stay away from using powerpoint and slideshare, and use a more dynamic teaching tool for my slideshows and material. Have any of you heard of SlideRocket and/or Prezi? They look like amazing presentation software platforms that I’m thinking about using. If not, take a look at each and tell me what you think.

Which do you like: SlideRocket, Prezi, or other?

Note: These How to Create an Online Class posts will not be a linear series of posts like my “How to Create an EBook” posts were.

Tagged as: wp-wishlist

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