The long-awaited dream of home office has become something achievable for specialists in various fields, without them needing to change professions.

Teachers, consultants, artisans, trainers, and many other professionals are discovering that the internet allows them to take their knowledge and services far beyond geographical limitations.

Online business: how to transform your work into an online venture

The first thing to make clear is that you don’t necessarily have to quit your regular job to have your own online business.

Depending on your goals, there are a few options to consider:

• Working exclusively with an online product/service;
• Having an online and offline business at the same time;
• Transition your work from offline to online gradually.

Define your goal.This is the first step in launching your online business.

Before taking any action, conduct a brief assessment.

Start by making a list of what you already own that can help build your online business. For example:

• Website
• Social media pages
• Email list
• Online audience

If you already have all or some of these resources, you’re off to a good start.

TIP: To create your audience in the virtual world you can also take advantage of the customer base you already have from your offline work.

The next step is to list exactly what you need to have an online business that delivers results.

– How to build an email list for your business

1. Start by creating a product

The first thing you need to decide is what will sell. What knowledge do you have that you would like to share with others?

Think about what you are really good at and what you would enjoy teaching to others.

Don’t get attached to a topic just because you THINK it will sell more. Nobody is truly excellent at what they don’t enjoy.

Next, think about how you can “package” this knowledge to offer it to someone.

There are several types of digital products:

• E-book
• Online course
• Live online group classes
• Consultancy
• Services

To begin, choose a product that is simpler to implement, where you can test your idea.

For example, if you are a painter and want to teach residential painting, you could start by offering a one-hour online workshop covering all the necessary materials to get started and the basic principles of good painting.

If this material has good adhesion, you can think about organizing a course to explain more advanced painting techniques, such as painting on metal, wood, textured surfaces, and so on.

Notice that even the work of a painter, which is essentially in-person, can be transformed into an online business.

The biggest challenge when it comes to transform your area of ​​expertise into a digital product it’s narrowing down your ideas to a specific topic and deciding between the different formats you can explore.

– 7 Types of Infoproducts to Increase Your Online Sales

2. Choose an idea and test it

Here’s a very important tip: Don’t start creating a complex product without first testing whether your idea is well-received.

To do this, talk to people who are interested in the topic you want to discuss.

Talk to acquaintances, join communities and forums focused on the topic, search online for similar content.

Ask questions. You want to understand what people want to know, what difficulties they face, what interests them.

Once you get those answers, then it’s time to make a sketch of your product.and start selling.

That’s right, sell before you have the product ready.

Creating an online course or even an e-book can take considerable time and effort, so you want to make sure you have an idea with good sales potential before creating the full version of your product.

– 3 ways to validate your idea before creating online courses

3. Launch your product

For those starting a business, this part is, initially, more important than having the complete product.

This is the stage of idea validation.

If your plan is to have an online course, for example, start with a simple live event.

With this event you will be able to obtain valuable information, such as:

• Validate your idea obtaining confirmation that there are people interested in what you have to offer.

• You will likely answer questions, which will help you understand what your audience wants to know.

• These questions can give you new content ideas that can then be included in the full version of your product.

• You’ll be able to get an idea of ​​the value you’re delivering, which helps you to price your product.

You can even offer a free initial workshop to help grow your audience a little, but you should sell the next one.

This is where marketing strategies start to take action, and our main tip is, if you don’t have a large audience, don’t invest in mass marketing strategies, invest in personalized approaches.

The reason is that mass marketing converts leads into paying customers at only about 0.5%. This means you would need 200 interested people to get a single paying customer.

However, it’s normal for those who are starting out to have a small audience, so you should also start small.

Focus on being personal. Make it a point to talk to each person in your network. This approach usually has conversion rates of 10% and 50%!

Therefore, while mass marketing may generate one or no sales, personalized marketing can reach 5, 10, or even more people, depending on how many you manage to approach.

– 5 marketing tips for beginners

4. Sell your product

Okay, now that you’ve agreed that personalized marketing is the best strategy, let’s see how you can sell your live event.

To do this, let’s go back to the list of everyone you know. Use your email list, social media followers, friends — basically everyone you can reach.

So, divide these people into two categories:

• People who might be interested in your product: Contact them in person and extend an invitation, such as “Hi! I’m giving a painting class and I know you’re interested in the subject. Would you like to participate?”

• People who are not interested in your product:Talk to them too, but change the subject to something like, “Oh, I’m going to give a painting class, do you know anyone who might be interested in participating?”

Remember that asking questions doesn’t offend anyone, and when done this way, there’s no pressure at all.

Moreover, people love to help, so even if they don’t remember anyone at first, they’ll keep your offer in mind as soon as they find someone who might be interested.

5. Automate your online business

The final step in this process is to create the complete version of your product and automate your online business.

The automation aspect encompasses two parts: product and marketing.

Automating a product means making it ready to be sold at any time, not depending on your interference.

When you create an e-book or an online course, for example, they are ready to be purchased at any time.

Automating your marketing means moving away from a personal approach (or hiring a team to handle those interactions) to a system that promotes your business for you. Again, it doesn’t depend on your direct intervention.

Don’t try to do both at the same time – if you do, it probably won’t work well. Focus on automating one at a time.

Popular automated systems include email marketing, sponsored ads, recorded videos, etc.

Regardless of how you automate, your goal is to guide people to discover your product, learn more about it, and buy it without you needing to be heavily involved in each step of the process.

– How does automated email sending work?

Create your online business and expand your opportunities

Having an online business is a great opportunity to make a living doing what you love and helping people at the same time.

If you can easily solve someone’s problem, that person will want what you have to offer, and believe me, this applies to the most diverse (and unthinkable) areas of work.

As a house painter that can now sell his skills online, several professions have already found a new way to operate in the virtual world. Simply teach what you know how to do very well.

And it doesn’t even have to be a profession; any knowledge can be transformed into an online business.

Here in Coursify.me we host successful online courses that cover a wide variety of topics. We have courses on folk dances, religious studies, plasma jets, and even how to win at Playstation games.

See, even if your idea doesn’t seem to have an audience, don’t give up before testing and proving it.

If you find a market niche with very low competition, even if at first glance it seems like there aren’t many people interested, it can end up becoming a great online business.

Take that first step! In a year, you’ll look back and regret not having started.

A complete e-learning platform, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for those who want to create, sell and promote courses on the internet.

Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, the platform is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System.

– Learning Management System: What is it?

To learn more, visit our website, try the platform and start changing your future.

The post How to turn your work into an online business appeared first on Blog Coursify.me.

Benefits of applying a satisfaction survey in online courses 

The satisfaction survey is an excellent tool for anyone who creates and sells online courses. 

– Learn how to sell courses online

By discovering what your students think and expect from your courses, you can develop more focused teaching material, correct errors and make adjustments based on concrete data.

A good online course meets your students’ expectations, which is good. But, an excellent online course exceeds students’ expectations, and that’s great. 

After all, when something offers an above average result, people tend to comment about it and this is the most economical and effective form of advertising that exists.

A well-qualified course is also an excellent business opportunity. 

If your material pleased, you can take the opportunity to offer complementary courses to the same students who have already had a good experience with your brand and will certainly feel more secure and interested in purchasing another product of yours.

– Benefits of Recurring Payment for Online Courses

Then the question arises: how to identify the level of satisfaction of my students? Very simple: ask them! 

Conducting a satisfaction survey is relatively simple, as long as it is applied correctly, with well-defined purposes and committed to improving services, aiming at the real satisfaction of your customers.

For a satisfaction survey to bring results, it does not need to start from a complex, full of elaborate and time-consuming analyzes. Even because it needs to be easy to understand.

Keep in mind that no one will want to take a few minutes to complete your survey if it is long and, moreover, complex.

If you’re asking someone for something, do your best to make that person’s life easier.

Ways to apply a satisfaction survey

The next question that often arises is: how to apply a satisfaction survey?

Where to find people interesting for your business and willing to respond? Well, we can say that the Internet makes this task a little simpler today, considering that a few years ago it was necessary to go to the streets to approach people.

The social networks, for example, facilitate the meeting between consumers and businesses.

– 6 ways to sell on social networks

It is also quite simple to send questionnaires by email, WhatsApp, SMS, websites, forums, chats and other online media, so that your students can respond when they can, stressing that the purpose of the research is to improve the quality of the course.

Net Promoter Score

A very efficient methodology used as a student satisfaction survey is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

– NPS as a marketing strategy for online courses

This methodology is based on a simple question: 

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how much would you recommend this course to a friend?”

This single question allows you to quickly measure the customer’s feeling towards the company, after all, there is no greater indication of satisfaction for a company than being indicated.

Since the customer shows a high possibility of referencing your business, he certainly trusts the structure offered by your company and the way it delivers the product or service.

For the calculation of the NPS, passive assessments are disregarded (score 7 or 8). Then take the percentage of promoting customers (score 9 or 10) and subtract the percentage of detrimental customers (score 0 to 6).

The formula for calculation is as follows:

% PROMOTING CLIENTS – % DETRACTING CLIENTS = NPS

The result is a number that ranges from -100 to 100. For example, if you get 20 responses, 12 promoters (60% of the response, or 0.6) 4 liabilities and 4 detractors (20% of the answer, or 0.2), for the account we have:

0.6 – 0.2 = 0.4 (40%)

If your score is low, it means that you have many detrimental clients / liabilities, indicating that improvements are needed in your course. 

Among the various benefits of NPS, the following stand out:

• Simplicity
• Agility in analysis
• Planning tool
• Long-term measurement
• Increase in the number of students

The success of any business depends on the satisfaction of its customers. Offer your students the best possible course and stay tuned to what they have to say. 

Use feedback positive and negative in favor of your business, always improving.

4 Tips to prepare a satisfaction survey for online courses

A satisfaction survey is a direct and efficient channel of communication with your audience. 

This tool offers an opportunity for the student to leave his opinion, express his dissatisfaction with something that did not meet his expectations and also praise what exceeded.

Some of the information that a satisfaction survey for online courses can offer are:

• Understanding the audience’s perception of the classes;
• Collect suggestions for improvements, comments and opinions;
• Assess the quality of the material / content.

Important tool for the instructor to improve his courses more and more, and in this way to retain students, check out some tips for developing an effective satisfaction survey:

– Strategies for retaining students

General evaluation

Brief and effective method of evaluation, request a general note for your course. Remember that no one likes to spend a lot of time answering questions, so to make it easier, use a numerical scale for the guest to determine the overall score. For example, from 1 to 5, with 5 being the maximum score.

Evaluation of the main aspects of the course

Determine the main aspects of your online course and ask questions for the participants to evaluate each one of them separately. It is important to maintain the same scoring mode, so if you have already used the numerical scale method, continue with it. In addition to making it easier for the interviewee, it is easier to compare the items and understand what they liked more and less.

Open questions

Always leave a space for the interviewee to write whatever they want. Compliments, suggestions or complaints, all of these explanations are important and can help you obtain relevant information to improve your online course.

Indication

Here we return to the Net Promoter Score method. An excellent way to measure satisfaction with the course is to ask if the person would refer you to others and if they would do a next module, for example. These are recurring questions in satisfaction surveys and will also indicate whether customers were satisfied with your course or not.

Analysis of results

To assess the result of your satisfaction survey, analyze the overall score and the number of people who said they would refer you and return to the next module. 

If most of the answers are negative, it is necessary to review the evaluation of each item individually and find out what is not pleasing. 

However, if the vast majority of responses are positive, it means that your online course has had good results and you are on the right track.

The analysis of the results of each question can be done by adding the positive results and the negative results. Questions that have a greater number of negative responses need more attention.

Finally, prepare a report with all the results obtained to guide you during the planning of the next classes, ensuring that your quality is even higher.

Use the right platform to improve your students’ satisfaction

There are many different resources you can use to make your online courses a sales success.

But, for that, you need to host your content on a platform that provides all the tools necessary for virtual learning.

Elearning platform, Coursify.me has integration with content platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. In addition, the user can upload videos, texts, images, audios and any other material that is hosted on Dropbox or on his own computer.

Soon, Coursify.me will launch a new feature, which will allow the creation of questionnaires, quizzes and tests. 

– New features of Coursify.me

This new resource will help in the development of even better and more complete online courses, and may even contribute to the application of a satisfaction survey.

Attending schools, companies and professionals in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is a dynamic Learning Management System, ready to serve you. 

– Whats is a Learning Management System

To learn more, visit our website, test the platform and start now to create and sell online courses.

The post How to make a satisfaction survey for online courses appeared first on Blog Coursify.me.