Email Course Project Update

I’ve developed a home study course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now LIVE, is called Stumble Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.stumblerush.com/.

A Change to the Business Model

If you saw my introduction to this email course project then you are probably wondering what business model I am talking about, as I never mentioned one. Well, exactly!

The first thing I started to do was to begin outlining a content plan for the course. Within about half an hour I had 14 distinct parts, all of them very substantial and I knew I wasn’t finished. I soon realised that this would simply be way too much work if all I was going to get out of it was an email address.

The problem is that I said the course would be free and it would kinda suck if I went back on my word, so what to do? What I noticed as I examined the content was that a lot of what I wanted to say was not only reasonably advanced, but it would require significantly more effort on the part of the reader to get anything out of it.

In other words, I can write a basic guide that will allow anybody to get some decent traffic from StumbleUpon but for those who really want to maximise their results, they are going to have to put the work in. Knowledge of basic human nature tells me that not many people are likely to do this so that advanced content would be wasted on many readers.

A Basic / Advanced Course Split

So my idea is quite simple - I shall provide the course in two halves. The first half will provide everything that you need to know to effectively use StumbleUpon to get a decent amount of traffic and this will be completely free. The only thing I will ask for will be the email address to deliver the course to.

The second half of the course will delve into more advanced topics and this will have a price tag. I’m not sure how much I will charge yet. I’m open to suggestions. It’s looking like the whole course will be about 20 parts, hopefully with a fairly even split. I’m thinking around $20.

Course Delivery Schedule

One of the problems with a course that schedules material based on a set time frame is that you can never find a schedule that will suit everybody. It will always be too slow for some people and too fast for others. As a consumer, I dislike having to wait X amount of time before the next installment - I would much rather have the whole thing up front and be able to study it at my own pace.

However, from the point of view of a marketer that won’t do at all because we want to be able to keep emailing the prospect in order to have an excuse to sell them something don’t we? Sounds horrible when I put it like that! But basically that is the essence. In my case I only have one product to sell, which is the advanced course, so if the prospect chooses to buy it I have no need to keep bugging them with emails and I would have them on a new list of buyers anyway.

Therefore what I intend to do is allow the prospect to buy the entire course (both the basic and the advanced halves) and this will be delivered instantly in its entirety. Thus there are two incentives to purchase:

1. People wanting the advanced material
2. People who can’t wait and want it now

You’ve probably noticed the downside for me - if I intend to provide the whole course instantly then I have to write the whole thing before I can start selling it. That’s a major bummer as originally I was going to start promoting the thing as soon as I had the first couple of installments done. However, on the flip-side I am an editaholic (yes I know that’s not a word) and I constantly go back and edit previous work on the basis of later work so if I was releasing it as I went along I would have to fight that urge which would annoy me.

Opening Up To Affiliates

It dawned on me a couple of days ago that offering something for free wasn’t necessarily the best way to get a large audience for your product. Offering people an incentive to promote it usually yields better results. Therefore from the outset I will be looking to setup an affiliate system for this and offer at least 50% commission. It always annoys me when people offer less than 50% for a digital product that costs nothing to duplicate and distribute.

Thankfully there are several sites out there that handle the affiliate stuff for me so it’s not something I have to worry about. I’ll probably use PayDotCom as I use them successfully as an affiliate and my friend Josh has recently warned about the problems with the ClickBank business model.

Preparing For Marketing

So far I have done two major promotional pushes and each time the email marketing campaign was by far the most effective. This is simply where I spend some time emailing bloggers to ask them to promote my product. I take the time to carefully check that the blogs in question have previously blogged about my subject matter so that I can be fairly sure that their readers would find it useful.

To do this with StumbleUpon is very easy - I have setup a Google alert for the word ’stumbleupon’ so any time somebody blogs about it I can check it out and if the post is something to do with marketing then I note down that blog. I’ve also noted down the various blogs that have blogged about StumbleUpon in the past from my lists of roundup posts that I had previously collected.

As I mentioned when I initially reviewed Matthew Sherbourne’s book on StumbleUpon Traffic, so much has already been written about StumbleUpon already that there is no shortage of information out there. This is actually good for me because it gives me a large number of blogs that could potentially be interested in helping me promote this course.

Content Format

I subscribe to quite a lot of newsletters and lists and I’d say around 90% of them use plain text emails to deliver their content. How archaic is that? I really dislike plain text. I’m thinking that I will create a stand alone PDF file for each installment of the course. This will allow me to embed images, make use of formatting and organise the content with proper PDF bookmarks.

This will make it easier for me to write and hopefully will be a more pleasant experience for the consumer. Also, those PDF’s may just end up getting spread around which could bring me a little traffic over the long run.

Aweber Competition Closes Tomorrow

I am going to use AWeber to deliver the course and I have not yet signed up. I have setup a competition to win me as a referral and there is one day left to get your entry in. There are only a handful of entries so far so you’ve got a good chance of winning so why not have a go.

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