The Teaching Sells 20-Step Process for Building an Online Business
By Brian Clark
http://teachingsells.com
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Copyright © 2009 Unglued Media. Some rights reserved.
The 20-Step Roadmap to a Successful Online Business
Teaching Sells is as comprehensive as a college-level course in the online training business. But in case you’re wondering, no university teaches this topic. And… unlike many college courses, this isn’t abstract theory and fancy ideas that don’t work in the real world. This is about building your online business, with step-by-step guidance… from people who’ve done it several times over. On the next page is a diagram of the 20 steps you’ll complete to make your online business happen (and detailed descriptions follow the graphical process map).
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Designing Your Course
2. Choose In-Demand Subject 3. Uniquely Position Your Offer
Teaching Sells 20-Step Process
4. Create a Learner or Buyer Profile 5. Identify Learner 6. Develop Learning Objectives
1. Understand Key Concepts
Seven Business Models
7. Tie Objectives to Business Model
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Developing Content
9. Identify Potential Activities 10. Identify Course Topic Areas 11. Develop Curriculum
8. Research Source Material
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Launching & Marketing
16. Prospect Marketing System
Multimedia Content
13. Develop Introductory Content
12. Select Media
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Build Your Site
14. Build Membership Site
15. Launch Strategy
17. Site Copywriting
18. Joint Ventures For Launch
19. Community Development
20. Ongoing Marketing
©2009 Unglued Media | http://teachingsells.com
1. Choose an in-demand subject This first step is critical. When it comes to adult education, you can’t force people to learn what you think they should learn. You’ve got to teach them what they want to learn.
2. Uniquely position your offer Also critical is differentiating yourself with unique positioning in the marketplace. Whether you think about it as a USP or a purple cow, you must stand apart from the competition and be remarkable.
3. Create a learner/buyer profile Who are these people you’re trying to teach? What problem or pain exists that a training program can fix? What learning styles are dominant among this group? You can’t get people to buy if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach and teach.
4. Identify learner benefits and ultimate benefits Adult learners are obsessed with “what’s in it for them.” You must identify the realworld benefits that people are seeking, and the ultimate root benefits that drive the desire to learn. Very few people are willing to pay you just for the “love of learning.”
5. Develop learning objectives Once you understand the real-world benefits that your prospective learners seek, you can then design your training program to satisfy those objectives. These objectives should remain firmly in mind while you develop training content.
6. Tie learning objectives to a business model There’s more than one way to create a business model around commercial education. When you understand learning objectives, you can figure out what model is optimal for your specific learners. For example, will educating your members naturally lead to a purchase that you can make happen? If so, you can charge less for the initial training and attract more customers.
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7. Research and identify content source material Where will the content of your training program come from? Is it based on your expertise and experience? Is it based on researching, synthesizing and re-formatting multiple existing sources? Do you need to partner with a credentialed expert?
8. Identify potential activities and exercises Activities and exercises are the tools you’ll use to make lessons concrete and applicable to the real-world. Or, you can provide a real-world road map that shows people how to apply the topics to achieve their goals.
9. Identify course topic areas Now that you know what people are actually trying to achieve and become, you know what you need to teach. Many people get this entire process backwards and start with topics they assume people need to be taught.
10. Develop course curriculum Now, take your topics and weave them into an overall curriculum. Not only should your curriculum have a dominant theme, it should be telling a story that leads to understanding and action.
11. Select media formats for initial content Back when you developed a learner profile based on your research of the market, you will have explored the likely desired learning style of your prospective learners. Do they prefer text, audio or video? Learning psychology demonstrates that all people benefit from a blend of media formats, so often you’ll use the format that best suits the content.
12. Develop introductory content Now you’re ready to develop your training content. You’ll find it to be much easier thanks to the work you did upfront, but you should also include elements that attract and hold attention while engaging learners at both an emotional and logical level in order to remain memorable. Now, will you develop the content yourself, or strategically outsource it?
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13. Build membership site No matter your business model, you’ll need a website with a publicly-accessible front end and a members-only back end.
14. Launch strategy and offer Next, it’s time to plan the introduction of your site to the world, and figure out what offer is best for attracting paid members to a new program. No matter how many members you attract at first, you’ll be actually getting paid to teach the course. Plus, since your program is only getting better every week, you can constantly “relaunch” the site and attract more members.
15. Prospect marketing system You’ll need to develop an educational content marketing strategy that attracts new prospects and builds a relationship with them over time. This can be created once and automated with an email autoresponder.
16. Site copywriting What’s the appropriate selling strategy for converting prospects into paid members? Amazingly, you’ve already discovered all the benefits your prospects seek, since your training program must make those benefits achievable in order to be effective. Now it’s time to effectively communicate how your content delivers those benefits.
17. Joint ventures for launch No existing audience? Develop a killer program, and others will do the pre-selling for you with an endorsement (and give you better results than advertising). You’ve located these prospective joint venture partners through your initial market research, and now you just need to strategically contact and negotiate with them.
18. Community development One of the benefits of interactive learning environments is the community of learning that develops with the guidance of the instructor. Real-world benefits are why people join, and community is why they stay.
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19. Ongoing content development Depending on your business model, you may be creating content (or outsourcing it) on a continual basis. Or, your training may be of limited duration. Either way, it’s smart to start off with initial content, and then keep going while taking into account member feedback and learning assessments. You’ll end up with better content in the end.
20. Ongoing marketing As mentioned above, any membership-based program can be “re-launched” over and over using free persuasive educational content. You can even release parts of the course itself as an attraction strategy. Remember, if your membership site is constantly adding new content, it’s constantly getting more valuable.
Here’s the good news… the entire Teaching Sells training is designed to teach you how to accomplish all 20 steps. Explore the Teaching Sells Teach and Grow Rich course descriptions for all the details.
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