Trying your hand as a Moodlepreneur can, and should be exciting, rewarding and potentially life changing. However, any experienced Moodlepreneur will tell you for every moment of “high” there are multiple moments of “low,” “stressed,” “lonely,” and “throw-in-the-towel.” We’ve put together the follow five points from our experience selling Moodle courses to help you achive more highs and minimize the lows:
Trial your Moodle course before you take it live
This doesn’t just mean asking a few friends to go through the course material and point out flaws that need fixing. It means trying to convince people to buy it. Not only does this check that the course itself is sellable, it also hones your sales and marketing skills. If you can’t convince someone by talking to them in person or by email and social media that the course is worth buying, then there’s no reason to believe lots of people will buy it when you scale up to a full product launch.
Try selling your course to a small group before you launch it. That group can be as small as one person whose judgement you trust. If you see their eyes light up when you pitch the course to them – and the light hasn’t entirely gone out after they have taken the course – you’ll know you’re onto a winner. Pre-launch sales testing is a great opportunity to ‘productize’ your Moodle course and make it as sellable as it can possibly be.
Think about offering payment plans
When setting a price for your course, it’s tempting to think that your diligent research into your target market has led you to finding the sweet spot on pricing. And indeed, many people might be happy to shell out $100 or $1000 or whatever price you have decided upon. But don’t forget that not everybody has that cash spare right now. Offering a means of spreading the payments can lead to increased sales because it can enable customers to click “Buy Now” without worrying too much about the immediate impact on their wallets. Find out if this is possible with the ecommerce system or payment gateway you use.
Be prepared to answer questions about your course
Unless you have some type of full-time customer support, get ready for your new role as customer support representative. Questions will come in on email and social media from customers and prospects. These range from “Help! I can’t log in” to “Are you going to offer further courses on this subject?” and “In question 3 of Test 2, I think answers A and B are basically the same. Can you clarify?”
Try to pre-empt the questions you can think of by adding them to an FAQ section on your site. Going forward, add to this section other questions and answers that keep coming up.
Be ready for some emotional highs and lows
Things can go wrong. Your hosting service goes down two days after you’ve launched the course. Someone else launches a similar course at around the same time as yours. You don’t make any sales at all in the first week. An irate customer calls demanding a refund. You get tired out. You realize you’ve wasted money on an advertising channel that doesn’t produce any sales. Your payment gateway hits a glitch and someone is charged twice.
People who succeed at selling Moodle courses have developed the resilience to bounce back from these problems. Imagine some “bad” things happening to your business. How are you going to react? Will you cry “disaster!” and hide under a blanket, or will you deal with the issues as best you can so that they are forgotten in a few days?
Try not to link the results of your first course sales results with your worth as a human being. It’s a business, and business have highs and lows. You’re just there overseeing it all.
Don’t discard a poorly performing course – rework it.
If a course doesn’t sell well, you may want to discard it and create another one. But it might be better to rework the existing course and re-launch it. After all, you had a spark of enthusiasm that led to you creating the original course. Maybe you just haven’t managed to communicate that enthusiasm in the ideal way, or could improve upon the course structure or content to make it more appealing, easier to complete, more satisfying. Maybe the course is fine but your marketing wasn’t up to scratch.
So don’t throw away courses that don’t sell well on the assumption that they are duds. The time and effort you put into creating them can still bear fruit with a little reworking. See it as another testing and development phase leading to an improved product.
This Moodle Practice related post is made possible by: Course Merchant, the leading provider of eCommerce, Training Management and Digital Marketing software for the Education and Training industry. Click here to learn more.
3 Responses
Are you trying to mimic the clickbaity style of Outbrain, 5 things nobody tells you about bla bla, this wierd trick to make women obsess over you, bla bla thing that the professionals don’t want you to know. The thing is your articles probably have good content and ar not actual listicles, though I find this style of headline so annoying I have not actually read the article.
I’ve changed the look of my Moodle site with a fantastic bootstrap theme. Yet, wondering what a person can do to make the pages look awesome.Take a look at this background theme, I know it was professionally done but each page sports visual ascetics. I love it! How can I do the same? Can you direct me to a place where I could learn how? Could you email me at [email protected], I want to be sure I receive your response. Thanks a ton ahead of time.
Hi Marcus, no this is someone’s course page. I wanted specifics in the theme itself, how to set up consistent pages through out the moodle site like this. It doesn’t have to be the same color I just want to know how its done lol This is a Moodle page 🙂 I love how its set up.