Teaching Online – Part 3

by

Structure – Part 1

Top-down

Putting together a system or process is the best way to handle almost any task, large or small.  After realizing that you want to teach a subject to others, the best way to approach building that process is to think about its structure.

If we look at the structure of an American university, receiving an education in a particular discipline is broken down into several strata.

First we have a school, like a school of business, or a school of fine arts.  That school teaches one overarching subject matter (business, fine arts, physical sciences, etc.), broken down into degrees.  To earn a degree (bachelor of marketing, or masters in painting, associates in physics, etc.), you take courses.  Each course is made up of lessons, perhaps grouped into modules.  Using an outline format, the structure might look something like this:

  • Acme University
    • Johnson School of History [school]
      • Bachelor of Arts in Early American History [degree]
        • History 101 [course]
          • Module 1: Ancient History
            • Lesson 1: The Last Ice Age
            • Lesson 2: The Earliest Humans
            • Etc.
        • History 102
        • Etc.

Running a university is a complicated business.  Teaching a subject, especially online, doesn’t have to be.  Many people who look into teaching online are somehow convinced that they must build a complex top-down structure like a university.  This isn’t true!  It’s actually much easier and stress-free to work bottom-to-top.  Keep this phrase in mind: Simple Is Best.

Bottom-to-top

The best place to begin is with a simple, complete lesson.  What one thing do you want to teach interested parties?  Think of buying a sandwich at a fast food restaurant.  It’s one thing that you can get that satisfies a particular need; consuming it stops you from being hungry.  That single menu item is made from a few larger ingredients (say: chicken patty, veggies, sauce, and bun).  There’s a process the employees follow that might look something like this:

Greet customer → Take order → Receive payment → Build sandwich → Deliver it

When you think about building a teaching system online, your main job is to put together a single lesson, the way a fast food employee might build a sandwich from a few ingredients.  Instead of patties, sauces, veggies, and a bun, your ingredients are content, composed of one or more media (video, text, audio, graphics, etc.) into a lesson.

I highly recommend starting with a single lesson first!  Don’t worry about starting your own university – build a lesson out of content first.  Then, over time, build more lessons.  As you progress and get feedback from testers and actual students, you can string lessons that are logically linked into modules, and modules into entire courses.

Then, and only then, should you begin worrying about offering a series of courses.

Packaged Courses vs Live Workshops

One popular way of presenting lessons is to prepare the lesson media, and then make it available as a self-directed consumable content.  That is, the student learns by going through the lessons at their own pace.  If it takes an hour to finish the lesson, they move to the next one at the end.  If it takes a week, that’s fine too.  If the next lesson is available, they can move on immediately, or begin when they feel ready to do so.

Another way is the tried and true IRL (In Real Life) method of presenting the material live on a given day at a given time.  This would be like attending a traditional college course, visiting a room where the professor makes individual presentations on a set schedule.  Or it could be a live presentation over one or many days (a webinar).

Perhaps the optimum solution for teaching a complex subject is a combination of pre-recorded content and one or more live interactive experiences.  Those could be held online, or even in person in a physical location.

Quizzes & Tests

According to the website Edutopia, “(T)he most useful kinds of tests are the least time-consuming: quick, easy practice quizzes on recently taught content.”  Quizzes and tests establish and reinforce retrieval practice, or simply – retrieving information from memory.  Not only do quizzes help a student assess their own level of learning, they reinforce being able to access the information and techniques presented to them by their educator.

I think of a quiz as a short series of interrogative questions about information just presented (or most recently presented) to a student.  If the student is graded on their answers, the grade carries little weight towards their final score.  A test, on the other hand, is a longer and more involved series of questions regarding a large set of information, which has probably been presented over a longer time frame.  If graded, test scores carry more weight in determining the student’s final course grade.  We’re probably all familiar with the concept of mid-term and final tests from our time in school.

In addition to the opportunity for self-assessment for the student, quizzes especially offer the educator the ability to gauge how well they presented information to students, and tell them what material may need to be reviewed in an alternate format.  Quizzes can also open a dialog between students and educator about particular sections of the content.

There are considerations when designing a quiz or test, especially when it’s part of a self-paced educational program with limited interaction from the educator.  Edutopia also finds that “. . . well-constructed multiple choice tests, with clear questions and plausible answers (and no all- or none-of-the-above choices), can be a useful way to assess students’ understanding of material, particularly if the answers are quickly reviewed by the teacher.”

Many students and educators have a bias against quizzes and tests.  Many students feel anxiety when presented with a testing situation.  Some educators don’t believe that quizzes offer enough value beyond the stress they cause students, and the time they can take away from the presentation of information.

Personally, I firmly believe in offering students the opportunity for self-assessment after nearly every lesson.  If the educator can then review the results and speak with the student, so much the better.

Although testing has traditionally been used as a way to come up with a “final grade” for a student, it’s most important feature is in training students to retain and recall the information presented in a course or program.

Read part 1 here. Read part 2 here. Read part 4 here. Read part 5 here.

Teaching Online – Part 2

by

What Do I Teach?

If you’re already considering teaching online, you probably have one or more subjects you think others have an interest in.  If, for some reason, this is the first time you’ve thought of it, the answer is easy: You can teach anything you want.

Yes, it’s easier to prepare lessons on a subject if you’re an expert on that subject.  Whether you gained the knowledge from experience or from taking a course yourself, you can begin making an outline of lesson plans, creating content, and then presenting those lessons to interested students.

But you can still teach a subject you know nothing about.  Don’t get me wrong here – you don’t want to simply make up lessons!  But there are options.  You can team up with an expert in the subject and help them create lessons.  Or you could research the subject, and build lessons from content you create.  NOTE: It’s not only unethical to steal content from others, in some areas you can be charged and prosecuted as well.  Just don’t do it.  You only have to be slightly more knowledgeable than the students you’re teaching.  As they say, teaching is the best way to learn.

How Do I Start?

If you already have a subject you want to teach, the best way to start is by setting down all the information you want to teach.  You can do this as either an outline, or in a list (bulleted or numbered).  You can create the list with a word processing program, a text editing app, or with lined or graph paper and a pen or pencil.  Use whatever you’re comfortable with.

Give yourself time with this step.  Often, people can’t set down all the information they know about a subject on the first pass.  Write down what you can, in whatever order it comes out of you.  Then – walk away.  Leave your information alone for several hours, or even a couple days.  When you come back, you might see some holes where you left out information.  Write that down as well.  Walk away again.  The next time you come back, you might think of other information you want to pass along.

Once you’ve got most of the information on your subject dumped out in an outline or list, start trying to put it in a logical order.  Simple, basic information should be presented first.  Then, slightly more advanced information.  Finally, the higher-level information where learning it relies on having learned basic and intermediate facts and skills.

Finally, you’ll want to go back to the most basic of information to be taught, and start breaking it down into short, digestible packets of learning.  In other words, lessons.  What facts, info, skills and techniques can be presented here?  What kind of content is needed, and what’s the best media to use to impart it?

The Curse of Knowledge

Many humans have a cognitive bias when it comes to teaching a subject they know, or communicating with someone.  We assume (often wrongly) that people have the same knowledge and experiences we ourselves possess.  This bias can also be called The Curse of Expertise.

You need to actively put yourself in the position of your students, who know absolutely nothing about your subject area.  Only by doing that can you make sure you impart all the information required to learn the subject, in the order the information needs to be learned.

Once again, after you’ve plotted out the information to be imparted in your lessons, leave your list for a while before coming back to it with fresh eyes.  Ask yourself, “If I were new to this material, is this all the content I would need to learn this particular lesson?”  Again, many of us may not get this complete on the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th try!  Be patient with yourself, and be willing to admit that refining the information is an ongoing process.

Read part 1 here. Read part 3 here. Read part 4 here. Read part 5 here.

Teaching Online – Part 1

by

Lessons

The basis of nearly every online teaching system is the lesson.  A lesson is basic instruction about a single subject.  Some examples: not about all footwear in general, but about tying a shoelace; just the Battle of Waterloo, not the entire Napoleonic War; not “Cooking with eggs,” but “Introduction to the egg.”

The ideal first lesson should be self-contained.  Future lessons might reference back to what the student learned in the previous lessons (ie, “Making an omelet” could reference info from “Introduction to the egg”), but should not assume knowledge not yet covered.

The information presented to the student is the content of the lesson.

Content

Content is simply information that teaches the student something.  For online courses, this content can be presented in almost any media that can be provided digitally.  It could be text (provided as a word processing document, a PDF, or even text on a picture); it could be audio, like a recording of an old radio broadcast; it could be video, like a clip from a news program or an educational skit produced by a professional company, or even a live Zoom webinar; it could be a graphic, like a photograph, or an informational graph representing collected data.  A presentation prepared as slides in a program like PowerPoint can also be part or all of a lesson.  A lesson can be made of one or more of these media.  For instance, a slide presentation could be a combination of text, graphics, voiceover audio, video clips, and even incidental music.

Starting Simple

There’s a phrase I like to use when talking about most subjects: Simple is best.  This is true for both students and educators.  A student beginning the study of a subject should be presented with a simple lesson, and immediately rewarded for consuming the content.  For instance, at the end of the lesson “Introduction to the egg,” you might ask the student “What’s the yellow part of the egg called?”  When they correctly answer “the yolk,” you can do anything from having your lesson state, “That’s correct” to setting off digital fireworks and airhorns.

Your content should be simple as well.  Present the information in at least one medium that’s easy for you to create.  While you could set up an entire kitchen with multiple cameras, there’s no reason why you couldn’t present “Introduction to the egg” as text with a few pictures as illustrations.  The written lesson is much faster, easier, and less expensive to produce.

Teaching Software

Many people considering providing online education get caught up in trying to decide the best platform to use.  They begin the whole process by asking themselves and others, “Which software should I use?”

I understand the concern!  I began my own exploration of teaching online with the same question.  What will happen down the road when you’ve created tons of content, but the platform turns out to be crap?

I have a heretical answer: it doesn’t matter what software you use.  Pick the one you can afford, and learn it.  Then, start using it to present your first lesson to students.

When I say “afford,” I’m talking about cost and not price.  Price is the dollar amount someone tells you to take out of your pocket.  Cost could include dollars, but it often includes time and other non-monetary investments, like research (what are your peers and competitors using?) and testing.

There are platforms that will host your lessons, along with thousands of others, and provide you with the framework to assemble your lessons out of your media.  There are others that force you – or allow you, depending on your point of view – to create your own website and host all the software and media yourself.

I started out paying for a hosted platform, but now own licenses for two educational platforms that I can use on sites I build and direct myself.  Again, it doesn’t matter what software you use to present your educational system.  What matters is that you and your students can understand how it works from either side, and that you can and do create content for lessons.

Read part 2 here. Read part 3 here. Read part 4 here. Read part 5 here.

Funnels via Instagram

by

As I’ve said before, a funnel is just the automated way of leading a prospect or customer through your sales process. Making it simple is best. I’ve talked about digital or online funnels before. There are some basic aspects or parts that make up funnels, and a given funnel may have some, many, most, or even all the parts built into it. Those parts might include:

  • An advertisement, or some way to entice a lead to enter the funnel
  • A headline
  • A greeting
  • A statement of the problem you solve
  • The solution you provide
  • Your offer, which may include –
    •  – the main offer
    •  – an upsell
    •  – a downsell
    •  – a cross-sell
  • Collection of contact information
  • Collection of payment
  • A thank-you page
  • A confirmation message
  • One or more educational or relationship-building messages

A short & simple lead generation funnel might consist of a problem statement, the offer of a lead magnet, collection of contact information, and a thank-you/delivery message. It’s always best to “strike while the iron is hot,” as they say, and offer something for sale immediately after you collect their contact information, but we’ll go into that in a few minutes.

It’s now possible to create a funnel directly within the Direct Messaging stream of Instagram, using DM automation software. Traffic is often the single biggest problem and expense for those creating a funnel. Any Instagram account with 10,000 or more followers already has the potential for a steady stream of traffic.

DM automation tools (my marketing agency uses a tool called Chatmatic) allow you to automate conversations with prospects, based on them DMing an Instagram account. Chatmatic also lets you initiate a conversation with someone who interacts with a post or an Instagram Story that they’ve posted.

The conversation is the funnel – you don’t need complex pages, or to even take the prospect away from Instagram, where they’re comfortable. The DM automation tool makes it possible to offer the prospect choices (“Is your basement too wet, or too dry?”, “What size shirt do you wear? Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL” etc.), collect contact information like email or mobile number, and even deliver a digital file or information by offering a button with an embedded URL.

Since the DM automation tool can collect contact information (name, email, mobile number, birth date, etc.), you can then move this information to an email list or similar contact database. Most importantly, you can use the funnel on Instagram to reach back out to your prospect within 24 hours and offer to sell them something that is related to the problem your funnel addresses. As an example, let’s say you sell household heating & cooling solutions, and your automated conversation was about problems with the prospect’s basement. Once you collect their contact info, you can offer them a PDF about basements, and why it’s important to keep them at a constant temperature and humidity level. Within Instagram’s 24-hour contact window, you can follow up with that prospect. If they’ve said their basement is too wet, you can offer to sell them a dehumidifier. If it’s too dry, you can offer them a humidifier. If they take either offer, you can then offer upsells (“Keep your new machine in top shape with our maintenance kit: normally $250, now only $198”) and downsells (“Don’t need the complete kit? Get just the brush and cleaning fluid for $49 plus S&H”) on the sales page on your website, or even from the Instagram conversation itself.

By moving the prospect’s contact info to a list, you can then continue to build a relationship with them, and send them marketing messages. Why is moving followers “off the algorithm and onto your list” important? Instagram’s current system will show your posts only to about 8% of your followers. An email message is likely to be seen by around 16% of your list, effectively doubling your contact ability. And SMS, or text messages, are opened within minutes by approximately 90% of the recipients!

If you’re serious about using Instagram to make sales, you simply must build a list, and then follow up with a sales message. Ideally, by SMS.

Own The Offer

by

In a previous article, I said that building and having a relationship with people online, and then monetizing that relationship, requires three steps:

  1. Owning access to those people
  2. Owning the product or service that you offer to those people
  3. Owning the sales process (or store) that offers your product or service to your target audience

I discussed building a list, and building relationships with the people on that list. This time, I’ll be talking about your offer.

Build it yourself?

There are a lot of folks out there selling products and services to people. Maybe you’re an on-the-road salesperson, or maybe you’re selling as an online affiliate. Do you create or manufacture those things? No. In our world today, very few people create a product or service from scratch and sell it to the end user. Am I suggesting that you personally have to hand-craft what you’re selling? Again – no.

Establish a compelling reason

In this case, what I’m suggesting is that you should create a compelling reason for your prospect to buy from you, as opposed to anyone else. Any product or service has competition, even if you don’t see it as a direct threat. I’ve worked with a number of schools offering lessons in karate, dance, and gymnastics. In a lot of cases, the managers of those schools saw other schools teaching the same subjects as their competition. Some, however, knew that staying home and watching TV was their competition, as is playing video games and other sedentary activities. So in this case how do you sell something that you own?

Each offer that you make should have an added “spice”: you need to include something that only you can give to your prospect. What is that one thing that people can only get from you? Sales managers and marketers might call this a USP, or Unique Selling Proposition (or Point).

What makes your offer unique?

There are any number of things you can add to your offer that make your product or service unique. It might be something physical, like color or size. It could be the way the item or service is presented, which is one reason why chain burger joints sell you a burger for $5, and your local steakhouse charges four or five times that much for essentially the same product.

Packaging and delivery are also ways to differentiate yourself. I had a client who was putting together a cleaning service, and she was considering lowering her price below what others were charging. I suggested that she arrive in a tuxedo, leave a rose when finished, and charge a premium price. Her costs went up minimally, but she was able to charge substantially more for her service. Delivering a product in a hand-crafted wooden presentation case makes it unique – something you won’t get if buying the same product elsewhere.

USPs for digital products

If you’ve created a course or an ebook that covers a given topic, I can guarantee you that you have competition. Again, it’s not so much that another book or course covers your subject area, it’s that people can simply not watch or read. People can view a movie, read a mystery series, or simply go to bed instead of consuming your content.

But what happens when you do have a direct competitor? How do you get a prospect to choose you over someone else’s offer? You must have a USP that they simply cannot get from someone else. Again, this could be content, like covering a subject that your competitor does not. It could be media – your video course as opposed to my ebook on the same subject. It could be an extra, like offering downloadable forms with your ebook, or access to a video interview with an industry celebrity.

People who offer affiliate products are very aware of having to offer extras, or bonuses. On the launch of any given product or service, there are a million folks out there flogging the exact same product. Why would you buy from me, as opposed to persons A, B or C? My bonuses, of course. These make my offer unique (at least in theory). During my offer, I’ll tell you that you can’t get these bonuses elsewhere. As long as that’s true, then I have a chance at earning your business.

Owning the product

First, you need to build a list of people and their contact information, a list that you own and control. Next, you need to begin building a relationship with the people on that list.

When you have an offer for the people on that list, you should make sure that the offer conveys the idea that there is some part that they simply cannot get from others. Again, it could be a physical aspect, or a particular feeling or emotion. It could be the delivery method. The important part is that the product or service that you are promising is somehow unique to your offer. In this way, you own whatever you’re selling, regardless of competition.

In my next article, I’ll discuss owning the sales process.

Own The Relationship

by

I see a lot of people who build their following on Instagram and other social media platforms. Much like the dog who chases a car – what do you do when you catch ’em?

Having an online business with the “best” (however you define that word) product or service means nothing as far as sales goes. It’s the relationship that you have with your target audience that allows you to make on-demand sales. Many Influencers have well over 100k followers – some even into the millions. But simply having a certain number of people who follow you, or the influencer you want to connect with, is in no way a guarantee that you’ll be able to sell products and services to those followers – or even reach them with your message.

Instagram and other online social media platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms, not for your benefit but for theirs. Right now, a post made by an account on Instagram reaches only about 8% of their followers – 8,000 people for every 100,000 followers. And when I say a post “reaches” 8% of an audience, that in no way guarantees that they read it, or take any other action based on that post. At best, you can expect about 30 percent of those 8,000 followers to respond. That means out of 100,000 followers, only 2,400 interact with you based on that post.

Building and having a relationship with people online, and then monetizing that relationship, requires three steps:

  1. Owning access to those people
  2. Owning the product or service that you offer to those people
  3. Owning the sales process (or store) that offers your product or service to your target audience

If anyone else controls even one of those steps in this process, you cannot own the relationship with the individuals in your target audience. It can be taken away from you at any time, either temporarily or permanently.

If you have followers or fans on a social media platform, they can disappear at any moment, and so can any influence you have with these people. You must start moving them off the media’s algorithm and onto your own list. A “list” is simply a contact list, where you have an individual’s permission to reach out to them with the contact point they’ve provided to you. For the past several years, I’ve focused on building email lists with my clients.

Depending on factors like message frequency and interest level, email lists have an overall open rate of approximately 16%. Right off the bat, this is double the interaction rate of a social media post. From 100,000 people, you’ll get about 16,000 people to see your message. Using the same 30% action rate example, this means 4,800 people will take some kind of action based on receiving your message. That’s double the number of people from a social media post alone.

Recently I’ve been working with clients to collect mobile phone numbers, and encouraging them to reach out to their list via SMS message instead. Why? Because studies show that over 90 percent of people who get an SMS message read it within 10 minutes of receiving it. Let’s say your list is only 25,000 individuals – one-quarter the number of followers we’ve been talking about. That means approximately 22,500 people will read your message within 10 minutes of sending it. Again using a 30% action rate approximately 6,750 individuals will take action based on that SMS message. That’s a forty percent bump in interaction from sending an email! If you’re selling at a price point of one-hundred dollars, that could be an increase of over $195,000 with a switch to a different messaging medium. That is, of course, based on the assumption that you own the relationship with your clients and prospects.

In just the last few months, Instagram has made it possible to automate direct messaging. Within that automation, you can collect personal information, including contact information like email address and mobile number. That makes it possible to automate list-building from within a direct messaging sequence without your prospect leaving the Instagram app.

But list-building is only the first step down the road towards monetization. I’ll explore owning your offer, and owning the sales process, in upcoming articles. I encourage you to reach out if you want to know more.

Swiss Army Knife of Marketing Software

by

Software development is a multi-billion dollar industry, so it is not surprising that new tools are often released to meet the growing demand.

When it comes to online businesses, there is no exception.

Marketing tools are essential for any company, including traditional businesses looking to go online, existing digital companies or any individual Internet marketer who wants to build an income from home.

However, with so many choices out there, which one is the most suitable?

Taking a closer look at the marketing software community, no shortages of options will come up in your research.

There are tools for creating websites, building sales funnels, and developing shopping carts so payment can be processed online.

While these are essential tools, the problem that many business owners face is that those products do not seem to be the most suitable for them.

For example, traditional business owners may find that the available products are overly complicated, especially if they do not have the technical skills to run the systems.

Then, there may also be aspiring entrepreneurs who are just starting out, and the high cost of all the available tools means that they are out of their budget.

Finally, there are just too many tools that a new business owner needs, and requiring to subscribe to dozens of tools on paid monthly plans, while needing to understand and manage all the accounts, can quickly become overwhelming.

Because of all these reasons, that’s why GrooveFunnels was created.

GrooveFunnels is a suite of online business tools designed for business owners, but without the complexity and the expensive price tag.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite, because GrooveFunnels is not only easy to use, it is also free.

When members sign up for a free GrooveFunnels account, they get immediate access to a website creator, funnel builder and shopping cart software, all of which allows them to have everything they need to start selling products and services online.

This is especially helpful for those with little to no technical knowledge, because the entire suite of tools are so simple to use that even computer illiterate folks can copy and paste, drag and drop and click and scroll their way to creating professional-looking websites with sales funnels capable of taking online orders.

Not only that, but the free GrooveFunnels account can also add unlimited products, create sales funnels, build branded websites with full navigation, use custom domain names, sell products in just one click, and offer upsells, downsells and order bumps to customers.

Astonishingly, GrooveFunnels also has a powerful affiliate program built in, which means that members can easily start their own affiliate programs and have their own affiliates promote their products for them.

Such a robust software suite is typically unheard of in the software development industry, much less one that is being made available for free.

For those who are looking for the new best way to build funnels and sell digital products, and would like their own complete digital products and services online sales system for free, now is the time to get started with GrooveFunnels.

Scott Gardner
https://groovepages.groovesell.com/a/AkmhGTibUP6Z

Donate In Their Name: Make Your Client The Hero

by

Most of my clients arrive by word-of-mouth, which is great. I reached out to a prospect the other day, who was referred by one of my existing clients. I offered them a small freebie. The prospect was initially hesitant, until I mentioned that my existing client – whom the prospect knows – had donated this service to them. Wow, were they impressed!

A note of warning – don’t say something like this if it isn’t true! Make sure you check with your existing customer to make sure they don’t mind doing this.

In addition to the prospect being impressed, my existing client was as well. I offered to give something to someone they know, in their name. How cool is that? The product or service you offer doesn’t have to be super expensive, it just has to have a perceived value. The receiver gets something useful, and the giver looks like a hero. And that’s the point.

There are a number of things you can “give” to existing customers to show you appreciate them. I’ve talked about this before in posts about loyalty programs, and customer retention strategies. A discount is great, but a hand-written card is better. Above both of these is letting your customer appear as the hero to someone else.

I make it a practice to ask all my clients about their favorite charities, especially local ones. When I’m sending out holiday or event cards (again, written and addressed by hand), I often include cards to those charities, letting them know that my clients mentioned them as being a good cause. Even though the card is from me, I make sure my client is mentioned prominently. In other words, I make my client the hero. My clients often hear about that card!

Offering to provide a product or service in the name of your client is, very obviously, also a great way to find new clients!

Processing...