What a year it has been so far. I have worked so hard so I could take the summer months off while the kids are not in school. And finally, just now, I have passed over the last of the content to my publishing partner and I can sit back and enjoy the sun until September. I take all holidays off with the kids, and midterms and whatever other days they are off. I work fully around the kids so it's not full time the days I do work. Sounds good right!!!!! Well sometimes it’s a pain but nevertheless, it's what I decided to do while the kids are young.
The joys of selling premium content is that you can make it once and sell many times. Digital products are a fantastic recurring revenue stream if you get it right!!!! Facts are, I now have myself in a position if I stop creating content today, I would still have some sort of income for at least the next 5 years, although it would reduce a lot over that time and would need to be supplemented probably after the second year.
In terms of production and publishing of premium content I have achieved a lot this year.
• 4 Course sent to publishing partner in the UK.
• 2 Courses published on Udemy – 1 in hand.
• 2 Course Published on The Excel Club – 2 in hand.
With content in hand I have plenty of new premium content available to publish over the summer months.
Premium Content Distribution Routes:
If you are considering making premium content to sell, online courses are a great place to start. The distribution routes I use are detailed below.
Make once * sell many times * in many places = max revenue.
That’s my formula for success.
Most of the work I do, I do not give exclusive publishing rights. That way I can publish and sell in many places.
All my B2B business has moved to my publishing partner in the UK. I had a fantastic meeting with them mid-June and have agreed on content for Sept to Dec. Sales here are good as they exceeded my B2B sales prior to the move. Payment is annual and is based on royalties, but the first payment is in and I know where I stand!!!!
Udemy, well as you all know from previous posts on the topic, I dropped in sales last year substantially and even with the newly published courses I have not regained the ground I lost. I have however regained the title of Best-selling Instructor on not one, but 2 of my courses.
And I have reached over 55K students. These are great achievements. Payment here is monthly.
Skillshare and Other course selling platforms – I don’t have much content on these platforms, and what I have does okay. All courses published to Udemy in the last 9 months will also be shared on other platforms. Payments are monthly so the sooner I start uploading the better 😊
Theexcelclub.com is a little different in that I have not been pushing sales at all. This is my own site so I have full control. Thankfully the sales from both of the above are paying okay so I am not reliant on sales from TheExcelClub. As I had taken such a long break from blogging and interacting with people and students, I felt like I was starting from scratch. This has allowed me to focus on growing my traffic, increasing my email list and pushing the learn and earn steem activities. My call to actions has not been to sell, but to sign up with me, or to sign up for a steem account and take part in the activities. I wont talk about the calls to actions performance in this post, let's leave that for another one!
With traffic I crushed it. I was hoping to get to 10K monthly visits by June. My unique visitors are around 8K and my monthly visits are just over 11K. Happy!!!!
Finally, I was contacted by Alison.com as they were interested in publishing some of my premium content. I have agreed to go ahead but have not yet started to upload the content. In terms of revenue, it’s a quarterly payment so I don’t really expect to see any revenue till early 2020.
Really, are you going to sit back until September?
Na, not really. I have shed loads of premium content I need to publish over the summer. Setting up courses on different platforms is rather time-consuming, but its revenue generating so I am only losing out by not doing it.
I have enough content ready for my weekly blog posts and learn and earn activities ready till September, so I will continue to push my traffic and growth. I want to get to 20K a month by the end of the year, do you think I can do it?
The kids are off school obviously and we have a lot of activities organized, but my infill time will be spent on steem, most probably with @steemclan and winning Satoshis Treasure.
Really impressive Paula, proud of you!
Lend us a tenner will ya? :P
I've worked my poxy ass off this year and im actually most happy with my gain in traffic after my long year off......thats stats in excel course did well and is still selling - you had your chance!!!!!
Wadda mean I had my chance? I been taking some of your courses for free and paying you in tokens :D
That is amazing I think you can do anything you put your mind to 20k to the moon!
I would so love to get to 20K, they say that the magic number before you really see momentum.
Congrats on getting to a place where you can spend more time with fam in the summer and still have new content to publish :) That is awesome! Seems like you are killing it
Yea but I'm tired, I need the break. its been a hard few months. I haven't even spent much time on steem
Do a lot of students come in organically from the site itself or is there a large promotional effort behind it ?
Over 50% of my traffic is organic, but to get this far has been a lot of work
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Wow! You are a machine!
Well done.. Hope you reap the rewards for many years to come..
lol a grumpy machine!!!
Congratulation! You need to have an strong mindset for that!
stong mindset or the need to put food on the table!!!!!
congrats this is awesome, I think I'm going to have to come to you for tips. I wanted to or have been meaning to put together a comprehensive SEO course along with other digital strategies that have worked for me and my clients and I think people could really benefit from
hehehe I will take your SEO and digital strategies course,. how soon can you have it together :-)
Funny there are a few people now I have said I would help from steem on this line of work. Maybe I should set up a group.
Many online instructors like me, are subject matter experts that make courses and then realize we gotta sell them too. so we have to learn SEO and content marketing and all that other stuff too. looks like you got it the right way around :-)
I've created the outline already and started creating the first few but I haven't had the time to complete it because of well work that brings in revenue. I have gone through other SEO course and I feel my product would be superior due to my expertise.
Your post just brings back the motivation to do it, I will try and focus on doing it over weekends but I've got a fair amount of client work to sort out at the moment so its always on the back burner
This is great paula. Nice to see that your hard work is paying off and growing your sales. It would be lovely to get to the point that you have enough income coming in from existing content to live on that anything you do from there is a bonus. Hard work pays off.
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I did take 2017 and most of 2018 off.........well when I say off, I didn't produce any premium content and was here dossing on steem. Come March next year I should be in the position to take a year off again...but then i was considering actually getting a real job for a while
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Do you think your sales results would have been worse if you just generated content for your website, kept an email newsletter and sold your courses exclusively there?
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long story short, I sold courses that I delivered online but my sales were b2b, not online generated. I wasnt blogging or promoting it online. however I live in ireland and b2b is small in this sector. so I started blogging late 2016 with the aim of growing online presence and sales. But I found steem in 2017 and stopped blogging till 7 months ago, so I never gave this part of my business a real go. I had only stated to build momentum before I stopped. I only started again in Nov.
online customers have different expectations, they want offers and stuff all the time so mixing this with my b2b was not working. so I moved my b2b so I can focus more on the needs of the online market. now my call to actions on my own site are not for sales because I am trying to push this learn and earn thingy I am doing ( which involves steem) and too many calls to actions for users confuses them and just doesnt work.
my sales now, are more then they were last year. So to answer your question, No, I did not have the traffic to generate the level of sales I have now. Yes I had an email list of 5K+, but that's nowhere near the size of the email lists other have.
Thanks for replying! Your list is way bigger than mine. I have only 4+k. But it makes sense to focus on b2b. They have different mentality in terms of positioning and prices.
You are an Amazon publisher right? (Seen the link on your profile) how is that working out for you?
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Small trickles every month... Steem ROI is better for me.
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Magnifique! you 're doing great paulag such a cool inspiration for bloggers!