Email Course Update - Name Chosen, Domain Registered & Video on the Way

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/.

Sorting Through the Potential Names

I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of responses I had for a name for my course. I liked a lot of them. After going through them all I narrowed it down to the following shortlist:

• Stumble Traffic Explosion by me
• StumbleWave by Patrick
• Stumble Rush by Jason Gilman
• Stumble Traffic Storm by DaveK
• The Big Juicy StumbleUpon Guide by Internet Junkie

The last one adds an element of branding because of the Big Juicy Twitter Guide that I wrote. For the others, what I was looking for was a name that seemed to imply a big surge in traffic. I want a short name for the course (and the domain name) and then I can add a tag line to make the intention of the course clearer.

And the Winner Is… Stumble Rush

Thanks very much to Jason Gilman who wins a free copy of the course as soon as it is released. I have registered the domain www.stumblerush.com but there is not much there yet.

I’ve sent an email to Linda of eCoverSource who designed the cover for my WordPress ebook to enquire about having some graphics designed for the course. In the meantime I’ve just put a basic WordPress installation in the root of the domain and I’ll use that to house my temporary content as I write it.

Course Technicalities

I’ve been thinking a little bit about various technical details of delivering the course itself. One of the first decisions I wanted to make was the format for the course materials. Plain text is not good enough for what I want to do so I considered releasing each lesson as a PDF. I have now decided against that idea because it will encourage the sharing of the PDF files and I do not want this project to be another experimentation in PDF distribution - this time I want to capture the email address.

Therefore I have decided to host the content on a web page. This allows me to incorporate plenty of rich media such as images, video etc but I can secure these pages so they are only accessible to those who have signed up for the course. I am not exactly sure how to do this yet. This is one of the issues I need to investigate in the coming days and weeks:

• How to protect web content
• Where to host protected video content
• How to run a survey
• How to install and manage a support desk

It’s Time for Video Content

Notice that I mentioned video above. I’ve been doing this thing for six months now and still never made any kind of video - not even a little screen cast! However I have plenty of resources at my disposal including a nice series of Camtasia tutorials in one of the Teaching Sells courses so there’s no excuse not to get started with this now.

This course on StumbleUpon will lend itself well to video I think - its easier to explain something with a quick screen cast than with umpteen static images. Really, my WordPress book would have been better off as a video but then it wouldn’t have been an ebook so never mind!

With regards to hosting, my thoughts are that I would like to experiment with hosting any video created for the basic (free) course on public video sharing sites such as YouTube to see if it helps bring in traffic. The video would only be part of the course so to get the full benefit people would also want to read the accompanying text. I could thus publicize the course within the video itself and on the site where it is hosted.

Course Development Under Way

Aside from these little technical issues which I will be looking into, the majority of my time is now going to be taken up with actually creating the content for the course. With 20 lessons to develop, I have a lot of work on my hands!

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Stumble it!