ProBlogger: 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses

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5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses Posted: 19 Jul 2016 07:00 AM PDT By ProBlogger expert Sam Nordberg. Online courses are the hottest thing right now. Everyone seems to be launching their own course, and looking for ways to make what they believe is "passive income" – but here are five of the biggest makes people are making with their online courses right now: 1. Not thinking about who they are writing for When you are creating a course, you need to think really carefully about the end user. Who are they? How much do they know already? What do they want the outcome to be? How do they want to consume the information? If you really want people to learn from your course, and get results from it, then you need to make sure the information is carefully targeted to meet their needs. Imagine you were writing a course on nutrition. There is a big difference between writing a course for a professional athlete who really wants to fine tune their diet, and writing a course for someone who has been clinically obese for many years, and needs a lot of support to start from scratch. Think carefully about who you are creating the course for, before you start creating. Really focus on a single, specific need. 2. Trying to fit everything in It took you years to learn everything you know. One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating their own course, is to try and share all of their knowledge. I get it, you want to add value, and make sure that you give them as much as you can. The problem is, there is no way they can absorb all of that information, and actually start to implement it, all in one go. It took you years to develop your skills and get to where you are, it will take them a while too. Focus on delivering smaller chunks of information, with a bigger focus on implementation (that is getting your students to actually try doing things) rather than just giving them lots of information. 3. Just recording videos and making PDFs A course is more than just great content. Sure, videos and PDFs are useful way to provide information to a student, but there is more to a course than simply content. Before you start throwing together your content, consider the following: – What support will they need? – How will you get them actively involved? – How will you get them to implement what they have learnt? – How will they know if they are getting it right/wrong? – What might they need before the course or after the course? A course is a process, you take your students on a journey from beginning to end. Before you start to put content together, it's worth thinking about that journey as a whole. 4. Not providing support I'm sure you've seen it… you land on their sales page, and you have the two options: buy it for less money and just get the content, or pay more money and get their assistance/support/coaching to help you. Here's the problem… If they know that you'll need support to help you get better results, then why don't they make it part of the course? Why can you buy a course with no support? One of the biggest problems with online learning is the lack of support. Students need someone to turn to. They might need help understanding the content, maybe they have technical problems, or maybe they just need to talk it over to really understand what they have learnt. If you know that your students will need support of some kind (or simply, you know that they will get better results with support) then make sure it's available to them. You can look into providing a forum, or support group, having live calls, or even providing phone and email support for them. Note: There are occasions where a course really doesn't need support. Maybe the content is fairly basic and self-paced. If this is the case, feel free to sell the course without support. 5. Thinking courses are great passive income Don't get me wrong here, courses are a great way to LEVERAGE your income, and they allow you to spend your time one-to-many, rather than one-on-one, but they are certainly not passive. At least, not to start with. As you've seen so far, there is more to a course than just putting your content online and charging people to access it. You'll need to promote your courses, help students sign up, answer any questions before, during and after, provide live support, help students to implement… and much more. Courses are a great way to help your audience. Courses are a great way to leverage your income. Courses are a great way to help you monetise your knowledge. But they are not completely passive. As with anything they require some hard work to set up, and lots of support on the way through. You can definitely outsource some of that work, but be aware that to begin with, you're going to be putting in some hard yards. Courses really are a great way to grow your business, and to help you spread your message…. Just keep these simple things in mind as you start. Really think about who you are creating the content for and what they need to know Don't try and squeeze it all in. Little bits of information that they actually use, is much more valuable than lots of information they never get around to Think about the whole process, not just the content Make sure your students get the support they need And remember, it might be hard work to start with, but it's definitely worth it in the end. Sam Nordberg shows people how to take their passion and knowledge and create an online course that sells. You can learn more about her here and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter. The post 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses appeared first on ProBlogger.       Related Stories My Blogging Income Breakdown for the First Half of 2016 Could Marketing Automation Be Hurting Your Blog-Reader Relationships? The 4 Rs That Show a Brand Your Blog is Influential

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ProBlogger: 10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement

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10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement Posted: 18 Jul 2016 07:00 AM PDT This guest post is by Josh Sayers of Adventure Connections One of my biggest bugbears in the world of marketing are people that do not have Twitter. It's a free platform that has over 310 million active users, and unlike the monster that is Facebook, doesn't meddle with your timeline (too much). Whether it's engaged with is a completely different matter but with these Twitter tips you should see a rise in your performance! Retweets and reply tweets broaden your network, your audience, and your profile – which in turn drives traffic to your blog and customers to your product or service. Ready to jump in? Share other content I could say that the key to success is being unique but that would just be a down right lie. Hundreds of people are becoming "Twitter famous" for quite frankly, stealing other people's content. The most notorious being The Fat Jew and most controversially The Lad Bible – both whom now give credit to their original posters. Retweeting popular and unique tweets is a great way to boost how your brand is perceived. If you are sharing content that people like, people will begin to follow you as their source of great content. It's also a lot more ethical than claiming other people's tweets – something that may actually decrease your brand perception. Just remember to only share posts that you think your fans will like. If you're selling Harley Davidsons, don't share anything to do with Justin Bieber. Remember to geotag The geotagging tool was added to Twitter in 2014 and is a fantastic way to boost your engagement and add extra flavour to your tweet. Rather than simply tweeting "bbq" you can add a location such as "Vondelpark, Amsterdam" and all of a sudden your tweet becomes a lot more exciting and much more relatable. People that are interested in the location / event will be searching for the location and you'll be in the mix. Add some colour to your profile If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the average length of a word is 5 characters, then adding an image to your tweet boosts your character limit to 5140. Almost every tweet includes an image in 2016 and why wouldn't you? The average media post quadruples the length of the tweet! Quotes tend to get me the most RT's, they're relatable, shareable and it gets me onto more feeds. A great free tool I use to create free graphics is Snappa. After 100 million GIFs were shared in 2015, Twitter rolled out their new GIF searching tool in February 2016. An amazing tool to add emotion and reactions to a tweet but you can also use GIFs to boost your sales – yes, a direct way to improve your ROI! Create your own Gifs using Gif Maker or Make a Gif and create beautiful clips to show your special offers! You want a treat? For 4 days only, everything on Bezar is 25% off! Enter code HOWBEZAR25 at checkout. pic.twitter.com/aakNpGZhiu — Bezar (@bezar) July 9, 2015 Twitter are now not including media links within the character limit so you no longer have to choose between good content or an image. Make your account appealing Making your account visually friendly is a surprising way to improve your engagement. Make your icon memorable and different. It's one of the only things that makes you stand out on the timeline. A great tool I've used in the past is Tricked-Out-Timeline which merge your icon and header. Just ensure that your icon is still works on its own. Ask your fans Struggling to see what your fans like? Ask them! Twitter has its very own poll feature which can give people the option to vote anonymously to your question. If you're looking for a more personal answer it's always best to simply tweet the question and people can reply directly. Remember to pin your question to your profile so that it has a longer lifespan! When you've grown your brand you can even hold a twitter chat, encouraging people to engage with you! Optimise your content Optimisation is a word that is engraved onto every marketer's skull, but with Twitter's limit you are limited to what you can say. The SEO god that is Dan Zarella recently produced a table featuring the most retweeted words, which include "you," "blog" and "top." As always, experience is the key to success, see what time you are getting the most engagements and work from it. Across the board, the best time to tweet is 13.00-15.00 – aka lunch time but if you are an international brand you will have to tweet at various times and see what's best for you using your Twitter analytics. If you're struggling for content, ensure that you are reposting the same content. Twitter isn't going to penalise you for duplicate content, and as there are roughly 6000 tweets going out every second, your customers probably didn't even see your first tweet. Just spread them out so if people browse your profile it's not blatantly obvious that you are regurgitating your content. I use Hootsuite to schedule my content, writing a few different tweets about the same blog / page one after each other and then spread them out across the week. Whether you like it or not, emojis are on the rise. They add emotion to your tweets and brighten the mood, changing your brand perception from "robot tweeting machine" to "actual human being". This is a good thing but beware that emojis are not universal and whilst some people may see a smiley, another may see sarcastic yellow face. Follow sprees How to boost my followers? The question on every Twitter users mind. Whatever you do, do not buy them and don't bulk follow people from your competitors. Instead follow relevant businesses. If you see a post that is relevant to your business then follow people that also liked it. You then begin to build a loyal, organic fan base that are actually interested in what you are posting. @ people If you're writing about a topic and mention another writer's work, @them. You're giving them more coverage so chances are they'll also promote it to all of their followers! You can tag up to 10 people in images, a great technique to notify people without using up your character limit! If you're writing about a subject that has already been covered, or improving on another similar article, use Google's search operator to see who has previously shared the similar article. They liked the other one, so they'll also like (and share) yours too! Note that it will not list the post if they used a URL shortener. Use links wisely If your CTR is slacking, statistics say that placing a URL 25% through your tweet is much more successful than placing it at the end. I'm a big fan of URL shorteners such as Bitly. It makes the tweet look a lot cleaner and friendlier. However some people may have trust issues as there's no way of seeing where the link leads to. Just remember not to include a sales link in every single tweet. You want your account to be 80% friendly, light-hearted content and 20% sales. Make use of hashtags Hashtags are without a doubt Twitters most successful tool. It's how people find content, how people share content and a fantastic way of establishing your brand. When posting about an event, hashtag a location, most cities have auto-retweeters that will automatically share your content to their thousands of followers, all of whom are interested in the location you are posting about. Just remember: #don't #hashtag #every #word. It breaks up the flow of the sentence and although it broadcasts your tweet further, tweets with a singular hashtag are 69% more likely to get retweets that those with two or more. Plus, nobody searches irrelevant hashtags such as #the. Post a tweet and then schedule another with a different hashtag. Twitter is all about trends, always jump on the bandwagon. If there is something remotely related to your industry, use the hashtag. Thousands of people are looking at the trend and if your post is of a high quality, you're bound to get a retweet or two. You just have to be on the ball and post on the go. I recently tweeted about the Game of Thrones episode as it was the number 1 trend and got 30 likes within 6 hours. They’re never going to beat that episode. 10/10 #gameofthrones pic.twitter.com/rGgvlHJ8sY — Josh (@JoshSayerss) June 20, 2016 If you try my tips, I'd love to know how they helped you! I look forward to reading about your experiences in the comments! Josh helps manage the Adventure Connections website, who specialise in organising corporate events in the UK. The post 10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement appeared first on ProBlogger.       Related Stories How Facebook Gets It’s Creep On and Knows What Ads To Show You How to Rock Instagram to Promote Your Small Business 7 Steps to Snapchat Success

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