Essential Steps To Commence A Scalable E-learning Business

E-learning and digital courses are evolving at a breakneck pace. The most conservative estimates put the market’s current value at least a hundred billion dollars or more annually.

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The basic definition of e-learning is a course that is accessed utilizing an electronic device. What was previously taught by correspondence has now been adapted to the digital age, as e-learning.

Why Is E-learning Big?

The reason it has become so popular is that people wish to enhance their skills. It is no longer enough to pass out of school, college, university and use the knowledge acquired to earn a living for the rest of your life.

The world is changing fast and an employee has to keep pace with it or risk being left behind. The huge penetration of the internet has made this feasible and thousands use these courses to upgrade their knowledge base.

The biggest players in the industry are Udemy, Coursera, and edX. Udemy, for example, offer courses about anything from Reiki to Ethical Hacking.

The biggest advantage of the industry is that there are no barriers to entry and nearly anyone can put together a course and start an academy.

It is not necessary that you have to be a Ph.D. to start selling your course. If you know yoga why not teach it to others and profit from it? As we shall see later it is excellent as a type of passive income and requires very little effort apart from putting it all together.

Steps To Build An E-Learning Business

Select your domain

What are you good at? It may be you are excellent at teaching about content writing or know everything about how to bake the perfect sponge cake. Of course, the basic assumption is that you are extremely good at something and know so much about the topic that others will be willing to pay for learning from you.

Of course, some topics are difficult to teach over the internet. For instance, it’s not easy to teach people how to swim or dance via an e-learning course. But many topics are exceptionally suitable and examples include computer languages, self-improvement courses, and yoga.

Create a course

A course has to have a very nuanced structure. It would start at fundamentals and build to more complicated topics slowly. It has to be reasonably quick for students to complete (no more than a couple of months) but not so fast as to create the misimpression of being an eyewash. 

For example, if you are going to teach about web development, you need to teach about the front end through Java, HTML and CSS, move to Advanced CSS and Bootstrap and complete front-end development with a project. This would be followed by back-end development consisting of Ruby on Rails, PHP, Node.js and more server side languages.

For some subjects such as programming, you can adapt from the existing curriculum of a college or university and for novel ones such as baking you have to teach in the same way you learned and develop your pedagogy through trial and error.

Create a mobile friendly site/app  

Your audience is on the move, which means they want to learn using their smartphones and tablets. And the world’s battling for user attention on their smartphones - via social media feeds, notifications, pop ups, phone calls, video calls, SMS, and what not. So, your e-learning portal/channel should not only be accessible on mobile devices, but also must be designed to be able to win this battle for attention.

Powerful e-learning apps offer a lot  - member accounts, personalized feeds, content delivery, personalized dashboards, offers and promotions, and more. To make the most of your app’ capabilities, work on a custom URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme.

The idea is to create links that point to specific locations, such as a specific screen in your mobile app. Get a web development expert on board and make the most of (mobile) Deep Linking, to offer easy ways for web audiences to connect to specific mobile app pages. This means that when you generate a lead from your expert blog-post, you can connect the reader from the post to directly the pricing/subscription plan page within your app.

Course delivery

The simplest way to begin is through YouTube videos showing the fundamentals and urging viewers to subscribe for premium paid content.

It is better to use learning management systems or LMS which are now available off the shelf. It consists of a software suite integrated into the site that is responsible for the delivery of educational material, tracking, and administration of the subscriber base.

You can avail top-rated open-source LMS tools such as Sakai CLE which offers chat, video tutorials, and integrates with Google Docs for free.

Some LMS tools are also available as WordPress plugins such as LearnDash and LearnPress. Most such tools have a “freemium” model and you would need to purchase the more advanced features.

Sales

This is probably the most difficult part of the business. First of all, you need to have a great website, followed by an excellent YouTube channel (even if you are teaching via LMS it helps to have a YouTube channel to introduce yourself to potential clients).

Build lively and frequently updated social media profiles on several platforms with Facebook and Linkedin being the must-haves.

Consider putting some marketing dollars in at least some amount of paid search engine marketing since you are new and do not yet have lots of views on your YouTube videos and traffic to your site. Alongside that start the process of SEO and make sure that you rank well for at least 8-10 keywords within six months.

Of course, if you can afford screen or air space on the TV and radio channels, that would help.  But don’t lose sleep over it, as this channel is expensive and there is no way to reach a particular demographic.

Become a contributing member of an internet forum (such as those for diet, slimming, yoga, computing) in that field and advertise your web URL in the signature. Not all moderators/admins allow this, but you could always slip in a link through your posts to a blog hosted on your domain.

You can do the same on Quora and Reddit without any fear of admins taking punitive action. It works well both as valuable back-links that help your SEO and to obtain new customers.

Conclusion

After this initial effort at setting up which takes a few months, it is mostly passive income. The business more or less runs itself and you could be on a vacation to Hawaii while fifty students learn from your website.

As your business grows, you would need to upgrade the site with paid software and plugins and host it on faster servers. But this is a business where scalability is built-in once the content has been created and the SEO process is underway.

Of course, you cannot expect to earn a thousand dollars every week overnight but at $80 per course and an average of ten students each month, you would have earned $10,000 in the first year and recouped your cost of SEO and web hosting.

As your experience grows all you need to do is add new content and tweak the existing ones. There is no daily effort required to run the business. By the end of the first 18 months, you would be earning enough to employ a professional marketing agency to drive sales and be on the way to earning your first million.