Joomla Software Template

Ever wondered how other businesses are able to grow to support 10 or even 100 times the number of customers?

If you're the kind of person who finds themselves needing to explain the same thing time and time again before it sinks in then putting your expertise online might just be the thing to do it for you.

Suppose you could get your knowledge to hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of people by only needing to do it once, how would that change the way you worked? The way you spend your time?

You might want to let customers know more about your business. Or, you might be releasing a new product and you need to let your customers know more about it, or how to fix it.

Some companies have whole departments who do this for them. They spend millions every year coming up with the best way for getting the information to the people who wanted it. Or people who need it.

There are whole businesses who specialise in these sorts of things and would like to charge other businesses millions to help them put together what's known as an "ecourse".

It begs the question, "What's so special about an ecourse and why is it of such interest?" Doesn't it?

Ecourses: simple yet very effective

An ecourse is basically a series of emails on a specific topic, that goes out automatically to subscribers. Your customers could sign up for ecourses on a regular basis to learn more about topics of interest to them. Offering ecourses to your website visitors is a marketing method that often results in increased sales.

What is great about ecourses is that they are maintained and delivered using a piece of technology called an autoresponder. Lessons or messages in an ecourse can be set for distribution at specific times. You get to decide how many lessons or messages and how often they are sent to your subscribers. You write out the information and you put these as lessons or messages in an autoresponder series, set the timing for each lesson or message to be sent, and the rest is automated. You can even decide whether to have lessons delivered daily, every second day, every third day, or any other time frame that you think works best for your subscribers.

As flexible as you want to be

Ecourses are commonly used to market products or services. For example, suppose for a minute that you sell beauty products. You might want to teach your customers on the best uses for you products, how to apply them, how your customers can benefit from their use. You could simply develop an ecourse that teaches your subscribers how to use your products in a step-by-step manner. And you could schedule for each new lesson to be sent the following week.

An ecourse can be written for almost any product or service as long as you plan the type of information that you want to share.

There's a bit of work involved. But not too much

Planning for your ecourse involves working out what you want to cover, who your target subscriber is and what product or service you are selling. Next you may want to work out out how many lessons or messages you're going to send your customers and how often you are sending them. Typically, ecourses are 5-10 lessons or messages where one lesson is sent every couple of days.

The frequency however is dependent on your product and how much time you expect your customers to devote to your course. A customer may need to practice each step before going onto the next one so you might want to wait a little longer between lessons. Or, your ecourse may involve teaching a sequence of steps that your customer can do daily.

After deciding what your ecourse is going to look like, you are now ready to write your the lessons/messages and load them in to your autoresponder. The interval for each lesson is set for the number of days after the person has signed up.

Make sure to check your spelling and grammar for all your lessons/messages. Your goal is to make the lessons and messages look and sound as professional as possible. Don't forget to run a test by sending each lesson to yourself. This will allow you to review what your subscribers will see when they sign up for your ecourse. It will also allow you to check if all the links you include are clickable and work well.

And the benefits...

After these steps, you are now ready to advertise, promote and make some income with your ecourse. Seriously. It's has been shown that an ecourse introduced into a regular business can actually deliver between 10% and 80% ROI. Which is quite good given there's a low entry barrier to starting.

And, if you're asking, we're in the process of producing our own ecourses designed to help you, or perhaps someone you know, to quickly develop the skills to use different internet technologies in your business. You may know people who might be interested. Share this article with all of them because we're aiming to come up with some interesting and valuable information they can easily apply to their business.

If you're interested in learning more about how to use a specific piece of technology in your business, drop us a line. We're eager to develop stuff that's of use to you.

Related Reading

	Making Sense of Online Learning: A Guide for Beginners and the Truly Skeptical ISBN: 978-0787969820
	e-Learning by Design ISBN: 978-0787984250
	From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur: Make Money with books, E-Books and Information Products ISBN: 978-0470050866

---