“Show Notes”
Jamie is passionate about sales strategy, LinkedIn, social media, and sales training to help businesses improve their revenue and processes. Focusing on selling to different personalities! In this show, he talks about setting up an e-learning course, and we could do this as photographers. After being a podcast guest, the host asked Jamie if he wanted to make an e-learning course with him. They used software called Zenler for the course. Jamie provided the content.
When building a course, you need to think about who your target market is. And why do they need your course? You also need to think about the cost of the course. But the real key is what the value and outcomes people are going to get from taking part in this course.
For Jamie’s e-learning course, each module contained a module made into a video with Jamie talking over the presentation. Sam says that making the videos can put people off doing this. Jamie says to start with the end goal and think of recurring income to spur you on to create the resources. But it does take time. Sam also suggests running some of the course modules as webinars and then recording them. These recordings can be used for the e-learning course. This way, it’s part of your marketing.
Pricing is another challenge in working out what to charge.Introductory offers are good at the start, but then it’s also getting the affordable price. Jamie’s e-learning course also has an add-on option he sells where they can get some personal input at the end.
Sam asks what you need for an e-learning course. Jamie sayssome guides and workbooks would be good. Video, auditory and written resources for learning. It is also vital that your e-learning course is unique and different to whatever else is out there.
Jamie says creating the course is not enough. Promoting the course is a key part of the success of the course. The course will not sell itself. It’s essential to think about whether the people you already market to are the target market for your course or not.
• Marcus thinks getting some training to help you make the course and understand how people learn could be helpful. Although the course is a passive income, you have to put a lot of time and effort into marketing the course. It will not sell itself or print money for you.
Final top tips:
• Look at setting up an affiliate scheme so others can sell it
• Get testimonials and use those to promote the course.
• Tap into other networks
You can find James on Linkedin here
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“Show Transcription”
Sam: Hello, Marcus. How are you doing?
Marcus: I am very well. Thank you, Sam. Very well indeed. And yeah, how are you?
Sam: Good, good. Less well wrapped up than you. It doesn’t look warm in the UK at the moment.
Marcus: No, it’s a bit miserable, I’m afraid.
Sam: Excellent. Good. And we have a guest today, and he also is in his woolly hat ready to go, and he is not warm, is he? So Jamie Martin from Correct Careers Coaching is here. Hi, Jamie. Welcome to the show.
Jamie: Hi, Sam. Hi, Marcus. Thank you for having me on the show.
Sam: No problem. It’s great to join us. Thanks for joining us. And yeah, as with all our guests, would you like to introduce yourself?
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Jamie Martin, Managing Director of Correct Careers Coaching. This effectively is a sales training, LinkedIn training, and career coaching business. So a few arms to the business. My background and why I set up what I do is because I had a really fruititious career in sales over 14 years now, and a six year recruitment stint as well, which I did very well. I really enjoyed it. I then decided I wanted to be more of an entrepreneur. So I set up my business nearly six years ago, come in. And I started initially with sales training, speaking workshops, sales book. And then moving forward, working with businesses, sales and marketing strategy was really important, and career coaching I did just because I wanted to stay in recruitment but not still do recruitment. And you know, within that time, I’ve been doing other areas of sales, such as creating an e-learning course, which we’ll be talking about today. And you know, just fit in the needs of a business, anything related to sales and marketing strategy.
Sam: Well, there’s a lot there for us to go through, and we could talk about all sorts of stuff. But what we were going to talk about today was e-learning, just because with other guests we’ve had on the topics, that was a perfect one we’ve never talked about before. And I think, Marcus, you know, e-learning is something a lot of photographers could implement, isn’t it, as a kind of an extra income?
Marcus: Oh, mate, I tell you what, I’m making notes on this one because this is exactly what I’m thinking about doing. So yeah, well done, Sam, for inviting Jamie on.
Sam: So Jamie, I mean, so tell us first of all about your e-learning. What is it?
Jamie: Yeah. So it happened by fate, shall we say, although I think it’s a coincidence. So in running my business, I connected with people on LinkedIn and was introduced to a HR professional who runs his own HR business for HR consultants. And he said, did you want to come on a podcast? I think sales is a good area for this industry. So we did, had a good chat. And yeah, following that, he said, right, I like what you do. How about we collaborate and create an e-learning course together? And it was something always on my agenda. I had looked into, you know, different areas and, you know, resources and costs for something like that, because I’ve always thought it was a good idea. Marcus, I know you have a background in teaching. I have a psychology degree. We all can agree that everyone has different learning styles and everyone learns at different paces. There are different learning modalities out there. So what works for one won’t work for everyone. Some people might like this, you know, personalised stand up lecture, workshop style training. Other people might like to read a book. Other people might like to work at their own pace and do some sort of course. So that’s why it was always of interest to me. So we collaborated.
We used a software called Zenler. He was the one doing the technical side of the course. I primarily was making sure the content was provided. And what we focused on was sales training for his industry market, which was HR consultants. I worked with HR professionals in the past in various recruitment and sales related information. And this just seemed like a good idea to do, because also you could then rinse and repeat. You could then alter this for other industry sectors such as photography. You know, the benefits of having a lead earning course, you know, it’s so brilliant to people who can just say, right, I haven’t got the time right now to do, you know, a sit in training session. However, I can refer back to this e-learning course and do it at my own pace. So, yeah, that was the beginning of the of the course.
Sam: OK, amazing. And so is the course kind of the traditional videos, those things to read and quizzes type of thing? How does kind of if somebody goes in, what what do they get?
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone is looking to create an e-learning course, like anything, there’s a lot of due diligence and research needed. So you really need to think about who’s your target market, obviously, what that why would they want an e-learning course? So what’s the pain barrier? You know, I in my conversations regarding HR, you know, for some individuals, you know, they’re experts in what they do, but they might not be particularly very well in in LinkedIn and branding and marketing and pitching themselves and then closing conversations. So that was an area we looked at. So this course itself has five bite-sized modules. We did four of them, created an extra bonus on negotiation because we looked back at the course, self-analytics, self-reflection and decided, right, add some more to the course. We needed to think about pricing. We needed to think about how we were going to promote the course, the landing page, but more about the content. So what’s the value someone’s going to get from doing this course? What’s the outcomes? So there was a lot of guides, resources provided. There was a mixture between videos and, you know, readable content to make sure we looked at visual and auditory, you know, learning styles.
Marcus: How much content was there, Jamie, like video, for example, for your course? How many minutes or video did you have put together for it?
Jamie: Well, so there was certainly one sort of like longish video per each of the modules. So we would be talking through like a PowerPoint slide presentation to give commentary to the text on the PowerPoint, basically.
Marcus: Like a voiceover?
Jamie: Yes, a video voiceover. Yeah. So you could see us on screen and you could see the PowerPoint at the same time.
Sam: Cool. So I think that is a barrier for quite a few people, isn’t it? They think, well, how long is it going to take me to make all of this content? And that builds such a big thing in their head that they never kind of step forward. Now, as you said, Jamie, the first thing is actually to work out, you know, who are you doing this for and why is anybody going to be interested, which a lot of people skip that step. And then once you’ve done that and you’ve kind of done the research and you’ve worked out, you know, do you have any tips on that? Because I think that is a barrier, isn’t it? That, oh, my God, I’ve got to make so much video.
It’s going to be technically so hard. Well, you know, what am I? I think I just give up. You got any thoughts on that and how that can be made easier?
Jamie: Oh, yeah. You know, in everything in business, it feels like a mountain to climb. But you’ve got to look at the end goal. And like you said, the reasons why, you know, effectively, if this is going to help your target market, it’s a subscription based model. So once the course is created, you’ll be having a recurring revenue coming to you. So that’s real good benefits for doing it. It adds another element to your pitching bow, shall we say. You get to explain to people, oh, OK, if maybe working with me personally isn’t for you, why don’t you maybe have a look at this course or look at referral rewards or advocates for the course, which we also did as well. So, you know, it can feel like a lot to do. I mean, if you can collaborate, great. If you can work with someone who’s had experience of, you know, creating a learning course, fantastic. If you want to do it yourself, I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there to do that. I was fortunate to work with someone who, you know, has had experienced this, but we had to make sure we put a lot of energy and time in to make sure this course was going to work. And, you know, that does come with getting, you know, maybe, you know, getting a few free courses done to get some feedback. Anything we can change, it’s testimonials, and then we can really create the landing page to appeal to our target market.
Sam: That makes sense. I mean, one of the approaches I’ve talked to people about, which I think could work, is like you say, you’ve got different modules in the learning courses, running those as webinars and possibly free ones, like you say, to try it out. And almost you can always start with video those and do those as your initial videos. And maybe you want to come back later in the day and refine them and do some better ones. But if you’re thinking effectively, you can kind of be doing your day to day marketing and building up this course. They say, well, I’m going to do these webinars over the next six months. Bang, bang, bang. By the end, I’ve got all my videos and they’ve kind of done it as you go.
Marcus: Sam, is it timely to talk about the webinar that we’re going to be doing on the show yet? Are you ready to announce that?
Sam: Yes, Marcus. Yes, Marcus, we are going to do a webinar. You’re right. We have got a shoot. The top webinar will do details at the end of the podcast. But yes, it’s going to be about becoming a more premium photographer, being able to charge higher prices. So details in the show notes and at the end. Sorry, Jamie.
Jamie: No, I think a good one that you just mentioned there, hence why you’re doing a webinar is pricing. Pricing is a tricky one. You know, when you’re talking about an e-learning course, we had to think about a suitable pricing.So it was getting it was looking at some of our competitor courses, getting some research done, talking to people about what would they feel they would pay for maybe this value of course and content you’ll get in. And, you know, you would do your introductory offers, you maybe do your limited time lightning deal, shall we say. And then more importantly, it’s about sticking to a price that people can afford. Recently, we’ve gone back to, you know, providing the course at a reasonable price and then adding an extra second tier to the course where after completion, the course, if they want to work with me personally for an extra hour just to, you know, add on to the content they’ve done from the course, get that personable experience as well. You get an extra higher rate.
Marcus: So you’re using the course as like a lost leader and then you’re going to put a low price and then basically if they want to speak to you one to one, you can really bump up the price to put it basically.
Jamie: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good piece of marketing. But more importantly for the customer, you know, the course is great, but everyone has a different, you know, question. Everyone has a different need. So they might want that interaction as well, which is why they should think about steps like that.
Sam: Cool, OK. And then I don’t think we need to turn talk platforms really apart. There are loads out there, do some research, you know, we’ll put the link to the one you use, but there’s tons of different platforms out there and you can put them on your own website as well. So for somebody who’s not, who’s thinking, what do I do? Let’s say, you know, what do we need? So you said we need some videos, you need kind of written content related to the videos. Is that it? And we need some software. Is that kind of and then obviously the marketing, is that everything you need and you’ve got a course?
Jamie: Yeah, effectively, if it’s that simple, everyone would do it. I think it needs to, I mean, maybe you can help with this, Marcus, from, you know, your photography sort of niche there. I mean, I would say definitely some some guides, definitely like some sort of work that people might like to, you know, you know, learn in that style. Video, auditory, visuals, 100%. What would appeal to your course compared to maybe other competitors’ courses? That’s where the real USP is, unique selling point. So, you know, say if we looked at it around photography, what do you feel photographers would like to see in a course if they wanted to do a course for the areas of selling what they do for commercial photography?
Marcus: Yeah, I mean, there’s quite a lot. Now, I’m going to let’s get I’ll talk about myself here, because there’s one that I’m thinking of doing, which Sam’s alluded to, which is basically a course for brand new photographers about how to turn your one-off clients into subscription clients. And it’s all about skidding up and getting to be a better photographer and offering a better service. So so would that be a good approach to go down that route?
Jamie: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. If you’ve seen a target market out there for people who need those services, then yeah, absolutely.
Sam: Cool. And what you’re kind of saying, Jamie, is it’s a lot of competitor analysis, a lot of what’s out there, what are they offering? You know, what’s the price and how is yours going to be different? Because there’s no point you put in a new one out there. It’s just the same as what’s already there is that, you know, maybe make it slightly cheaper. You’re not adding any value to anything. It’s just going to be a competition. You need to find what you’re and it could be a similar content, but a different angle or a different way of delivering it, couldn’t it? But it’s got to be different in some way.
Jamie: Absolutely. The business world is constantly changing, especially, you know, in the digital world we’re in now. So it might be that clients you’ve actually worked with and think, oh, what problem did they come to me with? How have I helped them? Oh, this might be a good angle to put in the course. For example, we created the four modules initially and then we looked at another bonus stage, which was negotiation, because we kept having a lot of individuals saying we’re really we’re really stuck with negotiation. So we nearly did up to an hour module on right, you know, kind of like a Q&A or, you know, role play session of negotiation. If I was asking these questions, how will I handle this response? Because that’s what we feel at the time, you know, a market would need. So that’s what you need to constantly adapt and continually reflect and analyze, you know, how your course is doing and continue to add to it.
Sam: OK, yeah, and then I guess the other thing is, you know, as a photographer, you’re you know, people can often be struggling to get customers. If you’re struggling to get customers, you know, if you’re doing photo shoots, you don’t need that many of them. You know, there’s a limited how many days you’re actually going to be out there with your camera.
If you’re talking a course and for this to work, you’re talking a totally different scale of number for this to work, aren’t you? You don’t want you want much, much more. The whole point is you’re busy doing photography. So you want this to be getting money in without it needing to take your time. So the kind of the marketing needs to be really a big part of this, doesn’t it? Or it’s just not going to work.
Jamie: Agreed with Sam, you know, you’re from your expertise and website design and everything. You know, it’s not just creating the course. You’re right. How do you promote the course? You know, we’ve had global sales. We’ve won two awards for this course.
So, you know, what do you need to do to get this course out there? So obviously a landing page, put it on all your social channels, do your direct marketing, social media marketing as well. But Sam, you know, you were pretty more proficient with, you know, how to use the web. Any other areas? Obviously, we’ve got PPC, you know, we’ve got ads. What else could someone do to promote their course?
Sam: I mean, yeah, I mean, I think you’ve covered the main ones, haven’t you there? And yeah, and I guess it partly you were saying socials and stuff depends on who it’s aimed at. So for some photographers, maybe the course is aimed at the people who are already their customers. In which case, yes, that promotion on social, the promotion on email marketing would be great. But maybe you’re a great photographer and your course is for photographers, in which case all of your socials and all of your email is a useless because the people whose photos you took don’t want to be trained in being a professional photographer. The bride doesn’t care what to be a professional. Maybe she does, but most of them definitely don’t want to be a professional photographer. So it could be that your target audience you’ve got to almost start again with, doesn’t it? If you’re going down that training the photographer route, which a lot of photographers could do.
Jamie: Absolutely. And there’s no harm in redoing a refresh in your new client base. You know, LinkedIn and other social channels are good for that. You may have newsletters, you may, you know, and you can put these links on your email signatures and be and ask people, you know, would this be of interest to you? And in groups, use groups as well, you know, groups already created on these platforms. What about yourself, Marcus? Would you give any advice on if you were steering to a new target market? How would you approach them with a photography course?
Marcus: Before we just go into that, there’s something I think it’s worth saying. And it is, I mean, I think an e-learning course is almost like the holy grail for photography. You know, you don’t expect it’s a passive income. I mean, how many times can you get a passive income as a photographer? So I’m all behind this as well. But I would say as a person who’s always trying to improve the quality of things, I think it is. We’ve all done teaching qualifications. And so we know you’ve already mentioned some teaching terms already about different types of learning and all that. So I do think it is if somebody is doing this, I think it’s important to address to do some kind of learning yourself on teaching. I would do a PGCE or something if you’re serious about this. Would you think so, Jamie?
Jamie: Yeah, I agree, because communication has different elements to it, such as body language, tone and picture, voice, etc. So, yes. And obviously, you know what, actually what we say. So you do need to understand that because it’s all right. Someone having a course they’re looking at, but if they’re not really, you know, remembering the course, I think memory is another area to look at. Look at practicing memory techniques, which, again, I did in my sales psychology course, because you need to retain information. This is why I think Ealing, of course, has a real good benefit to it. We’ve all been in a training situation that everyone’s buzzed up for the day. It’s great. But what happens after the day? Do they go and apply the learning techniques? What are the results? What’s the outcome? What’s the feedback? If they are not applying what they’ve learned, it’s not going to be beneficial to them or business.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s good getting help with that. I think maybe, Marcus, you saying get a PGCE might be over the whole year, going to university might be perhaps over the top if you’re going to make an e-learning course, but certainly some sort of…
Marcus: Or bring in some advice from a teacher, bring in some advice from a teacher, because, you know.
Sam: Yeah, everyone knows a teacher. Everyone’s got a friend who’s a teacher, don’t they? There’s a lot of them out there. The other thing, though, Marcus, I wanted to pick you up. You said it’s great. It’s holy grail. It’s a passive income. Now, I don’t believe Jamie sits on his bum and does nothing to get his income from his course. Do you, Jamie?
Jamie: Absolutely not. You know, I mean, you’re not going to just rely on this e-learning course, if we’re being honest, especially if you’re creating it from scratch, shall we say. So it is a passive income. You still need to continue doing what you do in the business. But you also need to spend a lot of time and efforts into marketing out there. You know, and you might need to think, you know, is it going to be in location, different demographics, different industries, different target markets, different channels? How do I continually, you know, invest in this in this sort of course and make it bigger and better and continue to market it? It’s not just going to bring in this, you know, X amount of money each month.
You’ve got to put in the effort.
Sam: Unfortunately, there is a lot of people on social, isn’t there? And there’s a lot of that kind of image that I’ve done this. I now sit and swan around in my fancy car doing nothing, which is just not it’s not how the world works. You do still have to do the work day in, day out, doing the marketing to get that to work.
Marcus: And you’re not just competing on a local level, as you would maybe do as a photography. You’re now competing on a global level with an e-learning course. You know, it’s obvious to say that, but.
Jamie: Well, some sort of final top tips, you know, is if you’re going to create this course, maybe look at an affiliate program. So, you know, you get other people to help sell it for you and they can get some sort of reward for that as well. Definitely your testimonials, your feedback. You can add it on the landing page. You can get referrals from the same sorts of market. You know, when we just talked about earlier on about approaching the target market, which may be sort of newish. Well, you may only need a few customers and then you could say, right, do you have a network of individuals or anyone else within your supply chain? That might be of interest and get the course spread in like a business.
Sam: That makes sense, though, you did have a question, Jamie, for Marcus a while ago, which he skipped over. Can you remember what it was?
Jamie: Kind of just what I was saying, I nearly answered it myself. You’ve got to go after a new target market. Obviously, we all know new businesses. So in the photography industry, what advice would you give to picking up new sort of clients if he was going to do a photography e-learning course?
Marcus: Well, I would probably, you know, it’s pretty obvious this, but I would have thought stick to what you know. I mean, you know, I’m a branding photographer, so I’m doing a course about branding photography. Stick to what you know, because that’s where your expertise is. There are fashions in photography. Some things are in fashion and some things aren’t, you know, things come and go. So there’s a different taste that you might acquire to.
I mean, an example of that would be somebody like a guy called Peter Hurley, who’s been mentioned in the show before, who’s a headshot photographer over in America. And he just caught the zeitgeist for his e-learning and his learning packages. Exactly right for headshots, because as soon as he started teaching it, everybody wanted a headshot.
So it was like perfect. I know this is a difficult question and there’s going to be a million answers to this, Jamie, but can we just talk about maybe price and what is a good thing to be pitching your e-learning course at? Can we talk about that possibly?
Jamie: Yeah, I mean, it’s going to depend on the industry, your research, your competitor analysis. Those would be the only things I can really guide you on. I think it’s also a bit about A, B, test and trial and error, maybe start off a bit lower if it’s a new course. Get the customers, get the feedback, get the testimonials. And then by all means, you can increase the price. If you want to increase the price even higher, because you do see courses range from anything from just below 100, even up to 500 plus. And that would come with the amount of content and guides and value you actually have on the course. So you can increase price. But then I would increase more of the content on the e-learning course to waver that higher price.
Sam: You can also look at making it subscription, can’t you, as well? So there is the option, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s one off, sometimes it’s subscription. And a lot of people will just keep paying the subscription, whether they, you know, they’ve finished the course or whatever, or they don’t quite finish. So they keep paying. And so that can be a good way for the, you know, it to keep bringing money and even from the same people.
Jaie: Exactly. And a couple of options like a bronze, silver, gold, you know, level, you know, maybe you don’t want all the course. Maybe you want this area of the course. You’ve really got to appeal to people’s wants and not everyone’s going to want the same thing.
Sam: That makes perfect sense.
Marcus: Jamie, just before we wrap the show up, what’s the future for you, Jamie? I know you’ve got, you’ve got, you’re doing so many different things, but what’s coming up for you?
Jamie: I’ve been doing speaking, so I recently did a TEDx talk. So that was a big focus of myself in recent times. But mostly sales training for elite professionals and refresher sales training. I absolutely love it, what I’ve done from my background. I, my, my goal was always to share my achievements. That was my driver. And LinkedIn as well is a big focus of mine. So those would be the plans continuing moving forward.
Sam: Excellent. And we will put your LinkedIn profile on the show notes so people can get in touch and say hello. Right. That has been amazing, Jamie. Thank you. And yeah, a topic we’ve not really covered at all before, have you, Marcus? So that’s, that’s really nice.
Marcus: No, no. Really good food for thought there. And something, yeah, it’s worth thinking about. Definitely.
Sam: Yeah. Let’s talk about the webinar we’re coming up, which we mentioned earlier in the show. So we do have a shoot to the top webinar coming up. The first ever one. Very exciting. So it’s going to be about how you can move your photography business as a brand photographer up to the next level. So how you can charge more, get better clients. So Marcus is going to be talking about the photography side of that. I’m going to be talking about the marketing side and how you can promote yourself as a premium photographer so you can move away for scraping around for those low price jobs. All of the details are in the show notes. So you will be able to book on. And Marcus, I’ll see you next week.
Marcus: Brilliant. Thanks, Sam. Goodbye. See you next week.
