Organising My Own Academy
I have had my own Six Minute Strategist Academy for several years but it has not really been at the top of my marketing strategy – something that needs to change.
As I have 41 published courses in this Academy, it represents an enormous body of work and commitment of time and resources on my part. Its time it started to earn its keep.
The first step is to organise my courses into three distinct groups – which represent the subjects I create courses on.
Entrepreneur Finance
Digital Marketing
Online Course Expertise
Entrepreneur Finance
This topic reflects my Investment Banking expertise and covers everything from Venture Capital Finance to Business Development. These courses do particularly well on other platforms and I know that they have been created with Entrepreneurs in mind. I am very proud of these courses and will definitely be adding to the suite in the coming months.
Digital Marketing
This topic covers everything that I do to develop my own digital business. So if this Digital Marketing Diary became a course, this is where it would belong. Here I am covering Copywriting, Linkedin, Public Speaking, Fiverr and Webinars – to name just a few topics. As my business develops I always document what I do and these become my next courses – sharing my expertise and experience with you.
Online Course Expertise
As one of the early adopters in the Online Course business, I have been making courses now for five years, this is where I share that expertise and experience. I love creating courses and helping other digital entrepreneurs to do so too. This is where you will find all my Online Course expertise concentrated.
I have also standardised all my course images and labeled them with a topic label to make the Academy easier to understand when students first arrive. The images are also colour coded and I have organised them by topic. The memberships and bundles are at the top (more on these in a moment).
I have also sorted out the categories in the Academy to reflect the topics so now its much easier to use the category search to find what you are looking for.
Membership and Bundles
A great way for my students to enroll is through my Six Minute Strategist Academy Memberships or course bundles. From an instructor’s perspective, developing a membership is a great way to enhance your business as these cash flows become regular, providing you manage to keep adding members faster than you lose them. Students leaving a membership is perfectly normal – its called churn – and the trick is to keep your rate of new subscribers significantly higher than your churn rate.
I have had a subscription for all my courses which is currently $27 a month. This covers over 40 courses so represents amazing value. I also recognise that some of my students are only interested in one of my primary topics so one of todays tasks is to create three more memberships based on these topics. These will be priced at $12 a month, so its more economical just to take one or two if that is where your interest lies but there is still a discount for three by taking the Academy Membership.
I have also bundled my Webinar Courses into a group which enables me to sell them as a bundle for a one off price but these are not currently going to be made into a membership on their own. They are all available in the Digital Marketing Membership.
To Sum Up…
This sets up my Six Minute Strategist Academy not only for course sales, which should now be easier to deliver but also establishes the foundation for me to start to grow my membership which is a crucial part of my business growth strategy.
How Can This Help You
I want you to think about establishing your own Academy either in Teachable or Thinkific. This will allow you to start building your sales and your student body on a platform that you control.
Think about how you can organise it to make it easy to navigate around and easy to find courses.
Memberships should be an important part of your business strategy so at the very least set up a subscription membership for the whole of your academy. As you get more courses published, you can develop this if you have several different major course topic groupings into several sub-memberships as I have done.
Consider how you can group some of your courses into bundles. These can be priced attractively and the bundles themselves can be the subject of a promotion to your list at some point in the future.
If you have any questions about Digital Marketing, why not reach out to me and see how I can help you.
Membership Links:
Six Minute Strategist Academy Membership: https://thesixminutestrategist.teachable.com/p/membership
Digital Marketing Membership: https://thesixminutestrategist.teachable.com/p/digital-marketing-membership
Entrepreneur Finance Membership: https://thesixminutestrategist.teachable.com/p/entrepreneur-finance-membership
Online Course Expertise Membership: https://thesixminutestrategist.teachable.com/p/online-course-expertise-membership
Teachable Affiliate Link: Note you will not pay any extra but I may be rewarded if you sign up for a Teachable account.
