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I initally started with the aim of rolling out a number of courses based around peer-to-peer learning i.e. you learn by marking and commenting on other students essays. This soon to be too broad a definition and I therefore decided to concentrate on one specific course (www.rusdens.com/career) this is a free program with the intention of cross selling additional premium courses after proof of concept - there is also a viral aspect to this approach with students being invited to get feedback on their essays from their facebook friends.

I have been running this for a few weeks promoting with adwords,handing out flyers and commenting of related blogs. Unfortunately response to date has been disappointing low and I now have a couple of options ;

  1. Keep pushing on with this approach, increasing the marketing effort

  2. Segment even further ex. career development course for specific sectors

  3. Develop new courses which could be targeted at small business and may be easier to sell

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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3 Answers

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If your students are still in school, they're not looking at things like AdWords. Facebook and/or Twitter is a more appropriate medium.

If your students are employees somewhere doing continuing learning, it might be easier to reach out to training departments. They hold the pursestrings.

I would recommend doing the first 10-20 sales yourself. That means no AdWords, literally pick up the phone or email and start trying to contact those departments. When they reject you, try to figure out why. (Money? Interest? Subject matter? ...) This is how you learn what you really ought to build and how to sell it.

Once you understand exactly how and what to sell, AdWords are a way to scale.

On blogging -- instead of leaving comments (which almost no one reads), write (quality!) guest posts. Much more time and effort to accomplish, but 100x the effect.

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Thanks for the feedback, I think you're right in highlighting the importance of clearly defining and understanding the potential customer. I have always intended the courses be targeted towards employees somewhere doing continuing learning however initially was targeting the employees themselves rather than training departments who I felt were already bombarded with people selling training courses. Having said that I think your advice on speaking to training departments directly makes alot of sense and I'll try this over then next few weeks. I'll let you know how it goes – Nigel May 31 '10 at 0:34
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How long did it take to develop this?

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Probably about 4-5 months to date (remembering I'm mostly working evenings and weekends) Reseach and developping idea - 1 month Setting-up website - 2 months Writing course - 1 month Promotion - 1 month – Nigel May 31 '10 at 0:39
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Don't give up just yet. A few weeks is a very short time - these things take months. I like the idea.

Jason gave you some really good suggestions. Use them to refine your marketing strategy.

Also, use the feedback you get about your product to improve it.

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Thanks Zuly, I'll let you know how it goes. – Nigel May 31 '10 at 0:40

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