Teaching Sells

Brian Clark has a "Teaching Sells" process for building HowTo-focused Paid Site-s (Business ModelsForInformation), which he teaches over a 12-week period for $1000.

Things he teaches:

• How to target a vast audience with a niche angle

• How to have a unique, entertaining approach to content development

• How to choose the right medium for the right content for effective learning

• How to create content that sells itself

• How to effectively leverage the audiences of others with win-win proposals (Affiliate Program marketing?)

• How to develop multi-format content with free and inexpensive tools (Multimedia)

• How to build airtight paid membership websites

• How to choose the best Business Model for your topic and goals

• How to increase profits with advanced training and a la carte sales

• How to further leverage your skills as a highly-paid Consultant

He supports use of WebLog and other Social Media for promotion (Direct Marketing) of paid Invisible Content site.

Lot of focus on

• Virtual Community around seed content

• Multimedia (because "people don't like to read")

Free case studies

• Aaron Wall: originally wrote SEO EBook, sold 13k copies, found increasing update-support time vs lack of recurring income. Now charges $100/mo!

  • Feb'2011 - he does not find it an easy way to live. Ultimately the only things we have done which really are not cloneable (or worth being cloned) are: selling my time; the community vibe we created; specialty tools which are mostly valuable to a niche audience (like a domain hunting tool we offer).

• Joseph Bridge and James Bridge were web consultants, then started a Real Estate agency, focusing on online marketing. Wrote materials to train their staff to do the same thing, then turned it into paid-membership site (also $100/mo).

• Chad Board partnered with an established expert in email-list-marketing, turned his archives of written materials into a paid site (that hasn't launched yet).

They like to use Moodle as a CMS. (see more notes below)

Bundled Platform they have a deal ($10 off the normal $90/mo hosting) for: Simpl Web http://www.simplweb.com/teaching-sells

• Joomla CMS

• PayPal for payments (no Credit Card?) (I think this comes via A Member plugin)

  • or maybe not A Member: Tony Clark notes some issues with A Member integration with Joomla (but maybe he's saying Simpl Web has solved that).

• they won't host any custom code. So if you want something a little special alongside your content-access, you're outta luck

  • hmm, I wonder if signin issues a domain-wide cookie, so you could host the little bit of custom stuff elsewhere at a different hostname, and use the A Member cookie?

I'm pretty sure that Teaching Sells itself is built on Word Press, using Brian Clark's Thesis theme.

• Tony Clark says Joomla is by far my favorite general CMS. But Word Press is still my go-to for a simple, basic site - whether that be a quick niche membership site, basic website, or a blog. The reason for that is that it is easy to pick up and it's pervasive. So you have a lot of options for help (though that can be said of Joomla too, just many are intimidated by it). But if I'm doing anything more complex, I'd go with a more robust CMS.

  • another commenter on that same thread notes his happiness with Moodle (and recommends a particular book).

• Tori posted how she built her e-course in Word Press with Thesis. I plan to use a separate Wordpress installation for sales/info/landing pages, meaning that I can just restrict the enitre e-course installation to members only, and that I don't need complex membership levels and layers.

  • She also posted about why she didn't use Moodle. She notes The earlier version of Teaching Sells was built on Moodle, and it was pretty darn awesome.

    • Mar'2009: Tony Clark says The current version of TS is actually not built on Moodle. The original site was, but we decided to use a different approach for TS 2.0 so that we could demonstrate yet another site option. For the original TS site (which I would have kept if we weren't looking to demonstrate another option) the Moodle setup was used with no customization aside from the theme. That's what's nice - it works out of the box as a learning environment. The current site is all custom code, but the approach would work just as well using Word Press for example, or plain HTML pages. That's why we decided to change it up, to present some more options.