I was going to send this out yesterday, but the day passed and I still hadn’t done it. I’ve been working on creating a new program. I’m just like you, I love to tutor. I don’t only enjoy teaching tutors; I also enjoy teaching student’s subjects. You may or may not know, I was a nurse for five years. I loved helping patients, but hated all of the crap that can sometimes come from working in a hospital. When I started my business (the same time I was at the hospital), it was rough, when I started doing well in my business, I decided that I couldn’t do both.
I have mentioned before that as a tutor you need to create a standalone product. As one person, you only have so many hours a day that you can tutor. When you have a product, it can teach subjects for you and make you a bit of money in the process.
I decided a year or so ago that I wanted to tutor something related to nursing and the NCLEX test. I knew there was a market for it, I also knew that people needed it (and would pay for it) and that I could help fill that need. I tried a couple of different tactics, which didn’t work. When you create a new product, you don’t have to have the whole project completed before you do some testing. I did a math program, a video flash card, and an NCLEX tutoring program (one on one) – each of these programs taught me several different things from customers that I talked to. They helped me come up with another idea (the fourth one).
Here is the process I use –
- Have an idea.
- Research to see if it has an audience, do a little research on pricing.
- Gather some information about questions that customers want answers to and check out current products.
- Create an outline. Normally I like 4 or 6 modules / months of content. This product was going to be an NCLEX product and students normally take the test within a couple of months after school, so it needed to be compact – so I decided on a four-week program. I like to drip the content – this means customers get access to a segment of content (a week or a month) – then 7 days or 30 days, they get access to the next bit of content.
- Create the first segment of content. Build a sales page.
- Do a soft launch – advertise a little bit and get some customers (hopefully) – if not set the project aside. Go back to #1.
I am always a bit nervous when I start the advertising. For this project I got five sales in 2 days. Each of the weeks of content had seven days of content. Each of those days had videos etc. that I needed to create, so that’s what I’ve been up to. This morning I finished recording week 4 Saturday and Sunday, next week I’ll work on the ‘Bonus week” and setup an affiliate program. So we have been busy. The great thing is now I can tweak, tune, refine the content, but it will always be there. I spent a couple of hundred hours creating it, so far the return on that time investment is only a couple of bucks an hour, but we’ll share with you what it is at the end of the summer.
Next time I’ll share with you how we set up things. Why don’t you share what you’ve been up to, just shoot us a comment on our Facebook page?