You know your stuff. You’re an expert. How do you turn that into revenue?
There is a huge demand for tutorials on how to do anything on almost any subject. From learning digital art techniques taught by industry pros to learning to play a musical instrument like the double bass. Just look at the success of Udemy or the number of “how to videos” on YouTube. Many Udemy instructors have made substantial 6 or 7 figure incomes from courses.
But now many are waking up to the benefits of selling courses and video tutorials from their own blog.
This post will show the steps involved in getting started with creating and selling tutorials from your blog and how to turn your blogging passion into profits.
Step 1. Consider the 3 ‘Ps’ of selling your content
I’ve got a simple process that I use when selling anything from my blog. It’s a process that keeps me in check and ensures I stay on the right track.
The process is:
- Planning
- Production
- Promotion
Sure I may have completely made them up, but I can guarantee that they work.
Planning
Is where you get everything down on paper. Without a solid plan to build upon, you’re going on guess work. Plan out what your tutorial is going to be about and what will be included. Work out the process for creating your product and how you’re going to promote it and sell it.
Production
Is the process of actually making your tutorial and other support material. In our case we’re creating a tutorial, therefore you need to film it, edit it and add the finishing touches such as PDFs and handouts for people buying it.
Promotion
Is where you start building a buzz around your tutorial. At this point you’ll be utilizing the power of Social Media, your email list, affiliates of your products and many other methods I’ll touch upon later.
Step 2. Find the best tools to create your tutorial
The subject and style of your tutorial will determine the format it will come in. Let’s say for example, that you’re demonstrating how to build a landing page. For something like this your best choice might be a video of your screen with you talking through the process as you go along.
There’s a multitude of tools around to create videos like this, so here’s a few to get you started
- Camtasia – Probably the most popular screencasting software around, Camtasia offers everything you need to record, edit and publish your tutorials. You can record on-screen, customize to your heart’s content and even share your videos on Social Networks.
- Jing – If you’re not ready to upgrade to a pricey package like Camtasia, you might want to consider Jing by the same company. Jing is similar in that it allows you to capture your screen and audio, however its free version is limited to only 5 minutes of recording time.
- TinyTake – This is a lightweight and completely free screen capture tool for Windows and one that’s been recommended to me. Similar to Jing, TinyTake can record videos and capture your screen. However with TinyTake you’re not limited by time and further features such as annotation and uploading makes this a great free alternative.
Step 3. Decide how you’ll sell your tutorial
Selling your video is going to be one of the more important things to do. You might not be that familiar with what’s involved and the resources that are out there for you to use.
Try not to worry – we all start from this position at some point. It’s a learning curve like anything else and today I’ll point you in the right direction.
Selling your tutorial from your blog makes sense for a number of reasons:
- You don’t have to give away a huge chunk of profit to pay fees for selling through platforms like Udemy.
- You have the benefit of keeping your audience right there on your website.
- Which will help people stick around to read your content and find out what else you offer.
You might think that setting this up would be a headache. But it doesn’t have to be. Here’s a few ways you can do it.
a. Use WooCommerce to set up an eCommerce store on your blog.
WooCommerce is one of the more popular ways to sell physical products online for WordPress users. You install the plugin, add your products and set up your payment system so people can purchase from your website. You can use WooCommerce for digital files, however it doesn’t have a few important features that are useful for tutorials like streaming or multiple file downloads.
If planning on using WooCommerce, remember to check your hosting plan for any limits on storage or bandwidth that might be affected by selling tutorials. And check that it won’t conflict with your current Theme.
b. Sell directly from PayPal with its native Purchase button.
PayPal has long been the popular option for selling individual products from an existing blog. You send the customer the item as a link via email once they’ve purchased. You can use PayPal for Digital Goods. This allows buyers to download your tutorial from your website. It is more complex to setup, and isn’t an option if you don’t have a friendly developer or some developer skills yourself.
c. Setup an eCommerce store in minutes with Selz.
Selz is relative new comer to the eCommerce market. However, it’s already popular with creators wanting to sell their tutorials because it combines an easy to use interface with lots of features for selling downloads. Selz handles the payments as well as PayPal, automated file downloads, plus you can give customer’s video trailers or choice of streaming your tutorial.
Here an example of how IronKlad use a 40 second video trailer to help sell their digital art tutorial.
You can embed a buy button, widget or basic online store in any site with a quick copy and paste of a few lines of code. Alternatively, you can create a online store for your tutorials as a website. It’s a great option if you don’t want to mess around with code, and you can get started for free.
Step 4. Inject your passion into your promotion
Remember that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you came up with the idea of selling your tutorials? What about the first time you hit the publish button on one of your posts?
Hold on to that feeling!
That’s the feeling of passion. It’s what drove you to start this whole process and it will see you through to other side with gusto. Utilize your passion while you product your tutorials and during your promotion stage. It makes you look and sound genuine, your passion is authentic and so this will shine through when you talk about the benefits of your product.
This is how Geoff Chalmers, sells Double Bass tutorials.
You can see from his Facebook page that he loves Double Bass instruments, and so do his followers. This an example of how Geoff Chalmers successfully promotes his tutorials on his Facebook page.
These tools will help you to reach your audience effectively and transmit that enthusiasm you have:
- Hootsuite – Use this to schedule your promotional Tweets across multiple Social Networks, monitor responses and get detailed analytics on how you’re doing.
- FollowerWonk – Can help you determine when your audience is online and the best times to schedule your Tweets for the most visibility.
- LeadPages – Use this great tool to create visually stunning landing pages to promote your product to blog visitors.
Step 5. Check how you’ve done
So you’ve made your tutorial, promoted it in every way you can think of, you’ve successfully made a lot of sales and things are starting to die down.
What do you do now?
Now you look back at everything you did and pick it apart. Analyze the data you’ve collected such as social shares, volume of sales, how much profit you’ve made, how many people ended up on your email list etc and identify any stumbling blocks.
More importantly with this information you can pin-point ways to improve the next time round, making even more profit from your passion.
Final thoughts
Everybody has some expertise or knowledge that someone else would be willing to pay for and tutorials are a fantastic way to earn money from a blog. This post shows how you can package and promote your tutorials in a way that can earn you money. Remember, you’ve got the same opportunity to earn a six or seven figure income from your tutorials as those instructors on Udemy. The next step is up to you.
Guest Author: Geoff is one of the team at Selz, the simple to use eCommerce platform. He is passionate about helping people turn their passion into a online business. Follow him on Twitter or find more from Geoff on the Selz blog.