It was once in style to claim that mailing lists no
longer worked. The opposite seems to be true now: on
every forum, marketers and business owners proclaim
the power of using an opt-in form and a newsletter to
make sales from follow-ups. I personally suggest this
method, as it has been proven time and time again to
produce higher conversion rates than attempts at
direct sales.
With that being said, it is important to determine
the best way in which you can create such a mini e-
course to use for your given products. I personally
suggest one of two ways.
Regardless of which you pick, you will want to start
with a market research phase. Your goal here is to
determine what it is exactly that potential readers
would be looking for in an e-course. If you already
have a site that receives traffic on this given topic
or niche, you will want to setup a poll or send out
surveys to your customer base. If not, you will have
to conduct keyword research to determine what people
are looking for most.
Once you have selected 5-7 topics for your e-course
(depending on the length you want your course to be),
you will then want to determine if you should create
the course yourself. Now, if you're unfamiliar with
the topic and do not feel comfortable with the quality
of your own writing, you will want to hire a
ghostwriter to complete the e-course for you. You can
do this by soliciting a skilled professional on
http://www.elance.com or http://www.guru.com. Clearly
describe what you want in the course and which sources
you would like them to use for reference information.
This will help you to determine whether or not they
are borrowing material directly from sources; it will
also ensure that you get exactly what you are looking
for.
Now, if you want to create your own e-course, you can
simply research the information on the given topic,
break it up into 5-7 articles; and then write those
articles yourself. Once you have completed those
steps, all you will have left to do is load the course
into your autoresponder, setup an opt-in form, and
then begin driving traffic to it.
When creating the course, there are a number of
important things to keep in mind. Perhaps most
important of all, you will want to determine how you
are going to monetize your e-course and whether or not
that method will be effective.
I personally suggest that you choose from one of
these forms of monetization:
1) put the actual course
on your site, send out links to it in emails, and put
Adsense ads in and around the course;
2) sell advertising space in the course;
3) scatter affiliate links throughout the course in appropriate
places; or
4) sell nothing throughout the entire course; at the
end of the course, attempt to upsell the reader with
some special offer.
Regardless of how much experience you have writing or
working with autoresponders, you can create an e-
course on any subject; and, in doing so, you can
drastically increase your conversion rates.
