Archive | June, 2019

Just like any information product, creating an online course at Udemy allows you to do the work once and get paid over and over again, sometimes for years. “But ebooks and video products and so forth already do that – why an online course?”

Would you believe, because it looks cool? When you’re selling your course through your own website, you look just like everybody else pushing an info-product. But when you do it through a teaching platform like Udemy, you automatically get credibility and prestige points.

Plus Udemy will get you customers you never would have found in any other manner. True, they get a cut, but so would affiliates.

Another reason why you might want to create an Udemy style ecourse is this: By having an online course (or 2 or 20) you are automatically an expert in your niche. Imagine trying to sell a brick and mortar business a marketing package when they don’t know who you are. Now imagine selling that same package after you’ve shown them that you are a Udemy Instructor. See the difference?

Sure, you and I know that putting together a Udemy course isn’t rocket science, but to your prospect you are suddenly THE MAN or THE WOMAN who can ride in on that big shiny horse, save the day and fix their problems. Okay, maybe not, but their trust level in you and your expertise just increased by a couple of hundred points, easy.

Here’s yet another reason for creating a Udemy course: You can charge more than you can for a random ebook or video course. Which would you rather do – sell 10 THOUSAND copies of a $10 product, or 508 copies of a $197 product? It takes essentially the same work, yet on the higher priced product you need far fewer sales to reach that six figure number. In fact, just 1.39 sales per day for a year will yield you $100,000.

One last reason to consider creating a Udemy course: Your course makes for a terrific back end product. Let’s say you do sell a $10 product, or you guest blog, or you get interviewed, etc. Where do you send people? Yes, you can send them to a squeeze page to capture their email address, but where do you take them after that? Imagine if, on the ‘thank you for subscribing’ page, you invited them to take a peek at your Udemy course. You could also provide them with an expiring coupon. Even if just a few percent of them buy, you are now making significant money you otherwise would have left on the table.

This can be a self-liquidating method to build your list. Pay for advertising, make money on your Udemy course, and you can continually and almost effortlessly build your list – forever.

If you’re an expert on a topic and you haven’t thought about creating a Udemy course before, you might want to consider it.

Everybody knows you’ve got to set goals and stay acutely focused on those goals if you want to achieve anything in life. But what if “everybody” is wrong?

Let’s say you’re a coach and your goal is to win the championship. How do you do that? By focusing on all the things your team needs to do to get good enough to win. Daydreaming about winning isn’t going to be enough. You’ve got to practice, practice, practice.

Or you’re a sales person and your goal is to earn $200,000 this year in commissions, twice what you earned last year. How do you do that? By focusing on calling a certain number of good prospects every single day without fail. Otherwise you’ll continue to work like you have in the past, and the goal will likely be just one more thing you didn’t achieve.

Or you’re a writer and your goal is to write a 240 page book in the next 60 days. How do you do that? By sitting down and writing 4 pages per day. If you don’t focus on the process of writing those 4 pages a day, you’ll never achieve the goal.

Or maybe you’re in Internet Marketing. Wait – if you’re reading this you ARE an online marketer. So let’s say your goal is to earn $10,000 a month. How do you do that: By focusing on the goal? Or by focusing on your sales and marketing process? Of course it’s the day to day process that will eventually get you to your goal. Otherwise it’s all just pie in the sky and wishful thinking.

Obviously goals and your day-to-day focus can go hand in hand. But when you focus on the goal you naturally reduce your current happiness. You’re basically deciding that when you reach your goal, then you’ll be happy and successful. But not now. Not yet.

Conversely when you focus on the system that will get you to the goal, you’re focused on what you need to do right now. You can feel happy and successful each day that you focused on your system, whether that’s writing 4 pages for your book or contacting 15 potential affiliates.

You also have a weird thing happen if and when you achieve your goal if you’re not focused on the process – you tend to stop what you’re doing that got you there in the first place. If you focus on writing 4 pages a day, then you’ll have a new 240 page book every 2 months, or 6 per year. But if you focus only on the goal of having the book written, then once you complete it you’ll stop writing.

So how do you make the switch from goal setting to focusing on the systems that will get you the goals? Identify what needs to be done to reach your goal, and then spend your time doing those things. This way your goal will take care of itself and you’ll feel successful everyday, not just the day you reach your goal.

One more thing: They say you’re supposed to make your goal specific, measurable and time-bound. But if all we’re focused on is the goal, we can end up cheating ourselves to achieve it. Consider the salesman who was so desperate to meet his sales goal, he stole a major client from a fellow sales person at his company. Yes, he achieved his goal, but the victory was hollow and his reputation in the office was shot to pieces.

Conversely, sometimes when we simply allow ourselves to focus on the day to day process and systems that take us to our goals, we find we’ve reached an even better goal we hadn’t initially thought of. Consider another salesman who didn’t stress about the big goal, but instead he simply made sure he emailed 50 prospects a day, called 15 prospects and spoke with 10 prospects. This is what he did day in and day out. Yes, he met his goal, but in fact he exceeded it by all expectations and was hired away by another company to become their new sales manager.

Two sales people with the same goal but two different focuses – which would you choose? Personally I find that a big goal can stress me out, sometimes to the point of almost feeling paralyzed. But knowing that I have a system to focus on that makes everything simple and completely manageable lets me relax and get busy. And I usually achieve my goals well ahead of schedule, without the stress and with a continuing sense of accomplishment and happiness.

Try it – just for one month focus on the day to day process instead of the big hairy goal and see if it doesn’t make a difference for you, too.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the better your headlines grab eyeballs, the more money you can make. In fact, even a small improvement can add significant money if your sales funnel is set up with a high priced product or two. For example, getting 5% more people to opt into your list or open an email or buy a $7 product could result in another 1/2 to 1 percent buying your more expensive and profitable product. Over the course of a year that could easily add thousands to your bottom line.

One way marketers used to test headlines was through Adwords, back in the day when they were super cheap. A marketer would try out 2 or more headlines and see which one pulled the best. Seasoned marketers still test headlines with Google and Facebook ads, but if you’re on a small budget there is a less expensive way.

These days Twitter is the easiest and cheapest method for testing headlines, so long as you have a following. Simply choose what you think are your two best headlines, tweet them both and track the results.

First, the tweeting: To be fair you’d want to tweet both simultaneously, but that’s probably not the best way. Instead, tweet them both in the morning and again in the afternoon, about 20 to 30 minutes apart. So for example in the morning you might tweet headline A at 9:00 and headline B at 9:30. Then do the same in the afternoon but reverse the order.

Track your results with a good click tracking software like Click Magick or your own favorite tracker. When you’ve got a winner, test it against another headline, and so forth.

Now then… why use this method instead of split testing? Frankly, I prefer split testing when it comes to something like a squeeze page or a sales letter, but there are times when this Twitter method comes in especially handy.

Are you sending out an important email or series of emails for a big promotion? Are you getting ready to launch a product and want to have a good idea in advance which headline will work best? Using Twitter to test your subject lines up front can put you ahead of the game and into profit faster.