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Hidden Goldmine
In
YOU
Turn Your Knowledge
Into
Profitable Online Courses!
Sean Seah Glen Ho Chris Chen
From an ex-military officer to a Multi-Million Infopreneur -
Sean Seah
On 27 March 2017, I sold my company for $10 million. That increased my
net worth by another 8 figures overnight.
It was just about 2 years ago, I was a nobody who had started this
company by starting a Facebook page from scratch! I was sharing my
passion on investing through the social media, something I was personally
not very familiar with at that point in time.
In 2 years, by trial and error, my fame grew and I created multiple
information products, from books, to online courses, to live workshops. All
these made me streams and chunks of income. Unknowingly, I had entered
the World of Infopreneurship and had became an Infopreneur.
An Infopreneur is someone paid for creating and/or sharing information.
Basically, it is the combination of two words, “Information” and
“Entrepreneur”, thus forming the word, “Info-Preneur”
Suddenly, the reason why an unknown Singaporean guy can create a
company worth millions became clear, it is because the world of
Infopreneurship is a decentralized, multi-billion dollar industry.
At the point in time when we write this book, the e-learning Industry alone is
worth more than $200 billion.
If you didn’t quite understand what this opportunity meant, we totally
understand as it is not something we learn from school as well.
The 2 key reasons why Infopreneurship can potentially make anyone
wealthy is this.
1. Information is a fast growing industry that sees no end. We are living
in an information age where the world has growing demands for more
information.
Just observe, what are people doing most of the time? Scrolling
through social media, reading blogs, watching videos online, all these
are examples of consuming information on a daily basis.
Corporations are also into what is known as big data analysis, in the
race to make sense of raw, unorganized facts, turning them into
useful information.
The rate of information consumption is not going to slow down and
hence, if you are able to jump on the band wagon and start producing
information, you may likely become a next millionaire infopreneur!
This is possible because of the 2nd reason.
2. Information is a decentralized industry. As less than a century ago,
the Infopreneur industry is owned by powerful media and publishing
houses.
We get our daily dose of information through the newspapers, radio
and television. Those who owned these were very powerful and
influential people of that time.
But take a look around and notice how things have shifted. Most of
the information consumed is mainly from the internet now. Examples
will be Youtube videos, Facebook and Instagram posting and as we
write, we are sure there are many new platforms created to connect
the world.
This ability where anyone, not just big corporations, can upload
information and potentially reach the world is what decentralization
means.
This means, you and I can create our own information product and
actually offer it to the society through the internet.
And as technology progresses, the means will become easier as time
passes! We can easily, create, offer, distribute our home-made
information product at the blink of an eye and see another 5, 6 or
even 7 figures of income flow into the latest payment collecting
platform, be it paypal, stripe or even our bank accounts.
In this book, we will be sharing with you more on the potential of the World
of Infopreneurship and how you can start participating and create your own
pot of gold.
We believe there is a hidden goldmine in everyone! The beautiful thing is
that unlike gold, which is a commodity, our hidden goldmine is our wealth of
experience, passion which creates useful information that is unique and
priceless. Hence, we are not subjected to price war and we do not need to
be a price taker but rather a price and trend setter!
Are you excited already? Well, we are for you!
Let’s dig in right now!
From an “F” student to a Founder of 2 International Education
Businesses - Glen Ho
For the past 3 years, I managed to generate more than $1 million
revenue just by sharing my passion with the world.
My name is Glen Ho, I am 29 years old this year. Currently, I am the
founder of 2 education business in Singapore. 11 years ago, back in my
polytechnic college days, I was studying Accounting and Finance. At that
time, I don’t even know why I chose to study that course.
It’s like, since my General Certificate of Education (GCE)‘O’ level result
allow me go enroll into these school, so “I decided to enter” that kind of
feeling.
But I never expected that I will dislike my polytechnic college life.
Because I really didn’t like my modules at all! These things are so boring
that everyday I was like dragging myself to school and hoping the day will
end faster.
Therefore, my academic results during the 3 years of college are having
all kinds of Ds and Fs in my academic report card. People around me
were like, “Glen, you have to study, so that you will get a good career,
earn good money and etc”.
I am sure, these sounds very familiar to you right? Because almost all
asian parents will say this to their children.
But I really cannot convince myself to continue studying. That’s why I
struggle to pass my polytechnic college modules.
As I worked as a tax accountant,I tell you, IT WAS HELL. Because, the
job is so boring that I feel like quitting after 2 weeks. This experience let
me think that I will never work in a 9 to 5 job for life.
So as you can see, me being a singaporean, with bad academic results,
and don’t know what I want to do also, my future seems very gloomy.
And that was when I came across stock investing, and made some
money in the stock market. Since then it has become my passion.But
now I am not going to talk about investing in this book. I am sharing with
you about passion.
So different people have different passion. Maybe some of you are
passionate about basketball.And Some of you are passionate about
music, right?
When you found your passion, naturally you want to share it with others.
Or go and find someone who has the same passion as you.
So I’m just the same, I really wanted to share about my passion to a lot of
people. Maybe I can even gather a community of people that shares the
same passion with me.
I was VERY excited about this idea, that I was always looking out for
opportunities to achieve this dream. But at that point in time, the only way
I know that I can share something to a lot of people at one go is public
speaking.
And I still remember the first time I do public speaking to only 11 people, I
was so nervous that I literally had leg cramp on the spot and fell down
during the middle of my speech.
It was so embarrassing!! Because I am So nervous once I step onto the
stage. It feels like, all the audience’s eye, they turn into guns pointing at
me.
At that point in time, I was ready to give up all my hopes and dreams
about building a community of people who shares the same passion.
That’s when, I heard about infopreneur and online course.So infopreneur,
if you don’t know, is someone who turn their passion, knowledge or skills
into information products like ebooks, online courses, audio lessons and
a lot a lot more.
The cool thing is that there is only little cost to produce any of that. And
the best part for me is, I no longer need to face the fear of public
speaking. Because, you can produce your information product without
showing your face or talk face to face with anyone!
I was SO BLOWN away when I knew about online course. And in an
INSTANT, I KNEW I have to produce my online course to share and
teach other people about my passion.
So after my online course was launched. Soon after that I was invited to
conduct live education courses to teach more people about my passion.
And eventually, I founded my first education business and invited to
travel all over the world to conduct trainings to share my experience and
knowledge to people around the world.
For the past 3 years, I managed to generate more than $1 million
revenue just by sharing my passion with the world.
I have never imagine I can reach where I am now. But thinking back, one
of the key reasons why I’m where I am right now is because I didn’t give
up on my passion.
You know, people always say, your passion cannot earn you a living.
They might be right, but that is because they are still living in the past.
They still have the old mindset that you just get a good certificate, get a
good job, and that’s it for your life.
In this internet era, we really can turn our passion into our source of
income by turning them into online courses. It doesn’t matter what kind of
passion you have.
It can be travelling, dancing, yoga, WHATEVER. You can TURN THEM
ALL into online course and people will pay you for it!
Because, this is exactly what happened to me.
From an ordinary school teacher to an International Infopreneur
Coach - Chris Chen
My first encounter with something related to Infopreneur, is when my father
bought me a box of cassettes for me to learn English 25 years ago.
These boxes of cassettes are what we call “information products”, one of
the main products that Infopreneur creates and provides.
Although cassettes have now been phased out, but people’s thirst for
knowledge is never-ending.
Since cassettes and CDs have become obsolete, information products
evolves into being in digital forms like ebooks, online courses etc.
And that box of cassettes, is probably how me and an Infopreneur’s life got
intertwined ever-since.
Back in October 2016, when I was still a school teacher, I was looking for
money because my father got retrenched and my family’s financial status
went downhill real fast.
So I went around searching online on what kind of other income source can
I bring in for my family other than my main job.
And during the process, I’ve done direct sales, drop-shipping, e-commerce.
But after doing them for a while, I don’t feel that they are the right fit for me.
Sometimes you just feel that you will never go long-term with the things that
you are currently doing right? That’s how I feel at that time.
And then I discovered about the opportunities of being an infopreneur.
So, what are the opportunities that I discovered?
1. You can share your passion, knowledge and or skills, something that
you are already good at, and people want to get to where you are.
This is perfect for someone like me who hated to just work for the
sake of working, because I love to have a job that I like doing and it
feels fulfilling.
2. You can work anywhere, anytime, as long as you have internet.
Because information products are not supposed to be bounded by
being a physical form or restricted by location.
Its full power will only be unleashed by digitalising it and putting it on
the internet, the world is your stage.
3. You can never lose money. Because we can literally produce a
product like e-books, online courses, out of thin air, without worrying
about logistics, manufacturing costs, rental and all kinds of expenses
that a traditional entrepreneur will be worrying about.
But the problem is, when I was searching for information about how to go
about doing and be successful with the information business, there was no
one who teaches you how to do it!
So what I did was I went for more than 5 courses, and because there
wasn’t any course that fits exactly what I want and need, I could only take 1
or 2 implementable skills or strategies from each course, mixed them up,
tested every method and eventually I came up with my own formula and
strategies.
In 2018 December, I launched my online course, and in just 3 months time,
I managed to enroll 300 students world-wide, and made myself 6 figures in
profit.
Up to this point as I’m writing this book (2019 December), I have more than
700 students world-wide and still counting, I have created 2 online courses
and the third one is currently in production.
This is how I made my name, and claimed the title of being the SEA’s 1st
online Infopreneur coach.
All in all, I spent more than 2 years of testing and 8,000USD to get to where
I am right now.
But thinking about it, with all the returns that I get from investing in that kind
of money and time, to me, is well worth it, because I can then duplicate it
for an unlimited number of times, and I can duplicate my methods to you
too, who is currently reading this book.
For me, the reason I want to write this book, is because I believe everyone
has their own expertise and their own unique experience.
Everytime I conduct trainings for people who want to be infopreneur, I will
always give them some stage time to share about their topics.
And their eyes SHINES! Because it’s their own passion! Nothing can bring
more life to a person than doing something they are passionate about!
This is how Sean, Glen and I came up with the book's title, because there
is a hidden goldmine waiting to be tapped in each and everyone of us.
Through this book, we hope to deliver a revolutionary message to the
world, and bring a meaningful change to your life.
Let’s start our Infopreneur journey together now!
Online Course: The Past
and Future ~Glen Ho
Why you should ride along with the e-learning trend?
In just 30 years ago, when we mentioned about learning, the only place
that comes into our mind is to attend lessons in school, read some books or
goes into a physical library in your neighbourhood to find the related books
& resources.
It is because, in the past, online learning is not known by many yet
compared to today.
With the internet being introduced and becoming more popular and
common these days, the way people do things have also changed.
Instead of just reading physical books and attending live courses, we
realised that there are an increasing number of people attending online
courses in the comfort of their home learning the same content that they
would be learning in physical live courses. And only investing in a fraction
of the amount in online courses compared to the physical course having
the same content.
This is because the online content provider have very low cost to produce
the online course content for the learners compared with someone who are
conducting live courses.
Whether we like it or not, the world is changing. People are now going
towards online in their everyday lives. For example, they are meeting
online, shopping online, knowing friends online, dating online, and learning
online.
Why you should create Online course
There are 5 reasons why you should create your own online courses right
now!
And the reason is B.E.L.L.S.
Building an authority(brand)
When you start to launch your online courses, the public will see you as
someone expert in your industry. And this builds up your brand and
Authority immediately.
Earn passive income
Being able to sell your online courses online 24 hours also means that
while you are sleeping, you online courses is still selling and make money
for you!
Learning is Flexible
Students can learn how they want to learn. Some people have unique
learning styles. By having the training online, you can allow the student to
learn at their own pace and even go back and review the material as many
times as they wish.
Little capital needed to produce
You just need your existing computer, camera phone and internet to
produce your online courses. Moreover, you can produce your online
course anytime and anywhere in the world, as long as there is internet
available.
Therefore it requires little amount of money to produce your online courses.
Scalable-Able to serve a lot of people
This is also my main reason why I wanted to sell online courses.
I still remember many years back, I shared my knowledge with my friends 1
to 1 and I thought that this was too slow. Because 1 day I only have 24
hours and there is a limit on the number of people I can share my
knowledge to.
2 months ago, I took 3 hours to finish and launch my new online courses
and currently it has reached more than 2,100 students online.
I believe, you can do that too!
Through online courses, you are able to reach a global audience, thereby
increasing sales opportunities.
There are no limit to how many customers buy your online courses.
This means that you make an one time effort to produce your online course
and it can sell to as many people as possible, again and again.
You Don’t Need To Be the
Best
You Just Need To Be
Better
~Glen Ho
I still remember, 5 years ago, one of my biggest dream and goal is to be a
public speaker. I am very determined to achieve this goal. After a long
consideration, I still do not know where to start to achieve my dream.
So I just HACK IT, JUST DO IT.
I started by sending out Short Message Service (SMS) to my closest 100
friends and family in my phone contact list and notify them that I want to
share with them the proper way of managing their finances in a 1 day
seminar.
Out of 100 Short Message Service (SMS)I send out, around 50 reply to my
SMS.
Out of 50 replied, around 20 mentioned they will join the 1 day seminar.
Out of the 20 who mentioned they will join, 11 people came on that day.
So I started my first ever seminar, which is me speaking to around 11
people. It was my first official public speaking event that I conducted
myself.
I was so nervous throughout the whole seminar that I literally had a leg
cramp and fell flat to the ground!
At that moment, everyone was shock and do not know what to do when the
speaker(which is me) fell flat to the ground.
In a nutshell, some of my participants assist me to the side and we end the
seminar early due to my condition. I still feel quite embarrassed of myself
whenever I shared this story.
After speaking to 11 people during my first seminar, someone actually
came to approached me asking if I am able to share my financial
knowledge to their crowd because the crowd are interested to learn about
better management of their personal finance.
I accepted the offer and I went to speak to 60 people, which is my second
official public speaking event.
During the period of time, I am very proud of myself and very happy.
Because I actually started somewhere to strive towards my goal of
becoming a speaker rather than staying at home and JUST PURELY
THINKING of being a public speaker.
Few weeks later, I'm being invited to speak to different events to share my
knowledge and experience in different events. This is exactly how I started.
And three years down the road I am invited to more than 9 cities like Hong
Kong, malaysia, vietnam, Taiwan and many more. And the largest crowd I
spoken to is 5,000 people at one time.
So what I'm trying to say is that we should always AIM FOR ACTION AND
NOT PERFECTION. because a lot of time, people always aim for
perfection.
And most people always wait for the perfect scenario or perfect timing to
happen.
But did it ever happen? Most of the time, NO.
If you take a step forward, things might happen along the way, and at least
there is a progress. We do not wait for things to happen, we make things
happen.
You definitely have dreams and goals that you want to achieve in this
lifetime. Instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity(which most of the
time will NEVER happen), you should take MASSIVE ACTION right now to
work towards your dream! If not, your dream will always only be your
dream.
In the next chapter, I will share with you whether you have what it takes to
be a millionaire.
Do not aim for PERFECTION, aim for ACTION!
-Glen Ho
Do you have what it takes to be a Millionaire?
There are three types of people in the world. Let me use a story to illustrate
it.
There is a group of people that they are trap in an island. They have no
food, no shelter, no water. They need to find a ship or escape to the
mainland in order to survive.
The first type of people are waiting, they are sitting on the island and
waiting for help. They are purely waiting for someone to save them. When
you asked them what exactly are they waiting for, they will say that they are
waiting for a big ship to come to the Island and bring them to the mainland.
Second type of people, are people who are looking for help instead of
waiting for help. They may swim to the nearby island to look for help, Call
for help or even attempt to shoot some fireworks to create signals that they
need help.
Third types of people are the ones that create opportunites for survival.
What do they do? They actually built a boat so that they can go to nearby
Island, or build a ship to go to the nearby shore. So the third types of
people are people who are creating opportunities for themselves.
This story applies to real life scenario.
The first style people are people who are always waiting for opportunities.
Always waiting for things to happen.
For example, when you talk to some of your friends or colleague and ask
them about what is their dream? What are their goals? Most of them will
answer that they want to climb the corporate ladder, waiting for promotion,
waiting for opportunities to come, waiting for salary increment and etc.
Can you sense that they are always waiting for things to opportunities?
Always putting their goals and dreams on another person's hand, mainly
based on external parties to influence their life path and directions.
Second type of people are people who are always looking for opportunities.
When you talk to this group of people, you will realise that they are always
looking for opportunities.
For example, they will be looking for good stocks to invest, looking for
mentors who have been there, done that, and learn from them and etc.
They are always looking for opportunities.
Third group of people, are people who create their own opportunities in the
Island. They are the ones that create their own boat, build their own boat
and get out of that island.
I learned that these are people who build a small boat to go to a nearby
Island. They are always creating stuff and create many opportunities for
themselves.
These grow people in real life scenario. Most of them create deals for the
business.
They set up their own business and create opportunities, so when they go
to a place whereby they are having a concert, the concert is nice,
everything is nice, but no one is selling drinks. So they can create
opportunities, by setting up a drink stock to sell drinks to the audience, So
this is the third group of people.
And guess what? Most of the financially successful people, do you think
they are mostly from group number one, two or three?
Let's make a guess…….
And you are right. Most of the successful people are either from group two
or group three. They are actually people who are hungry looking for
opportunities(group two) by reading books, attending seminars, looking for
mentors to assist them and etc. They are also ongoing looking at other
opportunities that they can have a collaboration with different business
partners or companies.
Successful people are also in the category of group three, people who
create their own opportunities. For example, Jack ma and Jeff Bezos, they
are under group three.
In the past, nobody had created any platform on the internet to buy and sell
products but yet they created it., From what I know, they are the ones that
create their own opportunities rather than waiting for things to happen to
them.
After knowing the characteristics of these three groups of people, do you
know which group of people do you fall into?
Next, I will be sharing with you what is the value you can bring to the world
and is that what you are heading for.
What is your VALUE in this world?
This story that I am going to share with you have literally changed my life
and my viewpoint of life. So there you go!
There was a time whereby a young boy asked his father, “What is the value
of his life?”
Instead of answering, the father told his son to take this rock and go sell it
at a market. If anybody asks the price, raise three fingers and don't say
anything.
The boy then went to the market and a woman ask, "How much is this
rock? I want to put it in my garden."
The boy didn't say anything and raised up three fingers and the woman
said: "three dollars? I'll take it".
The boy went home and told his father that a woman wants to buy this work
for $3.
The father then said: “son, I want you to take this rock to a museum, if
anybody wants to buy it, don't say a word and just put up three fingers”.
The boy then went to the museum and a man wanted to buy the rock. The
boy didn't say a word and put up three fingers, and the man said: "$300? I'll
take it".
The boy was shocked and went running home, and said: "Father, The man
wants to buy this rock for $300”.
His father then said: "Son, the last place I want you to take this rock is to a
precious stone store. Show this rock to the owner and don't say a word.
And if anyone asked you the price, just put up three fingers”.
The son then went to a precious stone store. He showed the rock to the
owner.
The Owner said: "Where did you find this Stone? It is one of the most rarest
stones in the world. I must have it. How much would you sell it for?”
The boy put up three fingers and the man said: "I'll take it for $300,000."
The boy not knowing what to say went home to his father.
Sharing to his dad that there's a man that wants to buy the rock for
$300,000.
His father than said : "Son, do you know the value of your life now?"
You see, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you were born, the
color of your skin, or how much money you were born into. It matters where
you decide to place yourself, the people you surround yourself with and
how you choose to carry yourself.
You may have lived your whole life thinking that you were $3 stone. You
may have lived your whole life surrounded by people that saw your worth
only for three dollars, but everybody has a diamond inside of them.
We can choose to surround ourselves with people that see our value and
see the diamond inside of us. We can choose to put ourself in a market or
put ourself in a precious stone store.
You can also choose to see the value in other people. You can help other
people see the diamond inside of them. You can choose the people you
surround yourself with wisely, that can make all the difference in your life.
In the next chapter, I will be sharing with you how you can create your own
successful and profitable online courses to add more value to the world.
Your MOST VALUABLE ASSET in the world is YOURSELF
3 tips to create a successful online courses
Most people focus on making a good online course by having a good and
insightful content to the public. However, the fact is that good and insightful
online course does not always lead to a profitable online course.
One example is writing a book. Amazon bestseller book is not equivalent to
best writer book. Robert Kiyosaki is the New York Times best-selling author
of Rich Dad Poor Dad.
As you can see, Robert Kiyosaki is the best selling author and not
necessarily is a best writing author. So a best selling online course does
not necessarily is best content online course.
Let me share with you 3 tips to create a successful and profitable online
course!
#1: Creating A Course You Think Your Audience Want(Not need)
A lot of people assume they know exactly what the audience need. The
truth is, people don’t always buy what they need, they buy what they want.
For example, Many people knows that they NEED to exercise regularly at
least 4 times a week but most people don’t do it. Instead, most people
WANTS to have soft drinks and unhealthy snacks and they actually buy
into it.
So before you spend hours and hours creating the content for a course that
nobody wants to buy, make sure you do some thorough market research to
check whether you actually have a ‘Wanting’ market for your online
course.
#2: Making the Session short and precise
These days, online learner has a very short attention span. A growing
majority are now accessing online education via mobile devices, and by
this also means they are likely watching your course whilst on the commute
to work, during their lunch break or while sitting on the toilet!
No matter how much effort you have put in, a module that exceeds 13
minutes in length is likely to have a very low completion rate, and anything
you say after that point could be missed.
For optimum engagement, retention and completion, keep your training
videos between 2-8 minutes in length.
#3: A proven marketing Strategy
Very common, Newbie course creator thinks that as long as the course
content is good, the online course will be sellable. This is so not true. The
most profitable online course are the ones who knows how to sell well.
In Conclusion, you need to at least have these 3 points to create a
successful online courses:
#1: Creating A Course You Think Your Audience Want(Not need)
#2: Making the Session short and precise
#3: A proven marketing Strategy
In the next chapter, I will be sharing with you what online courses are
popular in demand and how you can benefit from this idea.
What online courses is popular in demand?
Do you know that the Online learning industry is one of the fastest growing
industry in the world currently? It is projected to hit $325 billion by 2025
which is 300% growth rate since 2005!
I am going to share with you the TOP few online courses that has the
highest demand in 2019.
And all the results that I am going to show you is based on statistics in
multiple websites and my team personal findings.
The results below are not in sequence.
No.1- Computers and Technology
In these days and age, there are increasing activities and services that
involves computer and technology. Things like online business, online
meeting, online communications, online dating, online shopping, online
presense and etc.
As the demand for online activities increases, a lot of businesses are
tapping into the online industry to meet the increasing demand and
recruitment in this industry is booming tremendously for the last few years.
Because of this trend, there are increasing demand for online courses such
as
● Building a website
● Artificial intelligence (AI)
● Cyber Security
● Software programming (Phython/ Java/ PHP)
No.2- Business & Entrepreneurship
Business topics are always evergreen since many years ago till today.
Some of the popular online courses these days are:
● Affiliate marketing
● Dropshipping
● E-commerce
● Business & entrepreneurship fundamentals
● Digital marketing
● Social media marketing
No.3- Arts & Crafts
These courses also provide house-bound individuals such as stay-at-home
moms, artists, and individuals that are looking for an alternative source of
income that does not hinder their major day-to-day activities.
Some popular course under Arts & Craft are:
● Drawing
● Painting
● Calligraphy
● Photography
● Graphic design
● Interior design
So if you have any of the above hobby, do consider creating an online
course to turn it into passion income.
No.4- Health & Fitness
People have become very health conscious over recent years, and there is
a continuously rising demand for health-centric information and media on
the internet.
And some popular online course regarding health are:
● Diet and nutrition
● Meal planning
● Massage
● Herbalism
● Meditation
● Home workouts
● Weight loss
● Muscle building
● Sports
● Yoga
● Martial arts
Lastly,
No.5-Personal Development
Personal development has become a highly popular online course topic.
With the fast pace of today’s society, people have shown to be struggling
with the constant need to be better and do more.
With personal development courses, individuals gain an understanding of
how to build important skills to live a happier life.
some popular online course regarding personal development are:
● Investing
● Sales
● Communication skills
● Public speaking
So, is your passion under any of the 5 big topic I just mentioned? You can
start building your own online course now and start receiving passion
income already.
By sharing your passion to the world and start getting paid for it is definitely
a dream for most people in the world
Access The Pile Of
Gold In You
~Chris
It was back in December 2017, I decided that I’m going to create an online
course no matter what it takes.
Because I have seen the potential of how it can reach out to people all over
the world, and ultimately, you will be known and respected as an expert in
the field.
So I start to ask myself 2 questions:
“What kind of expert would I like to become?”
“What is the one thing that I can do for the rest of my life and won’t ever
feel tired of it?”
And I start to list down all the things I like and what I’m good at.
- I like imparting positive mindset.
- I like to play video games.
- I’m pretty good at being a leader.
- I have 12 years of experience dealing with difficult teenagers.
So on and so forth
And from there, I identify which are the topics that people are willing to pay
money to learn.
That’s how my first successful online course was born.
And later on, I discovered that what I did to find out the topic for my online
course was exactly the same as a Japanese concept that went pretty hot
globally.
It’s called “Ikigai” (生き甲斐)
Which means “The Reason for Being”
In Ikigai, you will find 4 circles.
What you love?
What you are good at?
What the world needs?
What you can be paid for?
Our ultimate goal, is to find something that fits in all four circles, and that
will be your Ikigai.
Now, let me run you through this exercise and find out your money-making
topic.
Step 1: What you love to do?
Firstly, list down everything that you love to do.
It can be something that you do in your free time, or something that makes
you forget all about time because you are so focused in it.
PS. For this exercise, don’t think too much, usually the first thing that came
into your mind, is the answer that you are looking for. So go with your gut
feeling, and trust your own instinct for now.
Step 2: What are you good at?
Once you have listed down what you love to do, list down what are the
things that you are good at.
What is the difference between things you love to do and things you are
good at doing?
For example, someone may love singing a lot, but whenever he or she
sings, they will be asked to stop singing.
Someone may love to play basketball, but the losing rate is much higher
compared to winning.
So things that you love to do, might not always mean that you are good at
doing it. Things you are good at, may not be something you love.
This is important for us to be clear of our strength so that we can further
proceed to find a good position for ourselves.
Step 3: What does the world need?
For this step, what we want to do, is to identify what are the things that
appeared in both “What you like to do” and “What you are good at”.
After you have identified, list them down if you think other people in the
world need it too.
It can be something that helps to solve a problem that most people would
like to solve, something that everyone would like to have to feel happy.
Step 4: What you can be paid for?
After you have identified what the world needs, now assess whether these
topics are something that people are willing to pay money to learn or help
them accelerate their speed of achieving something.
That is how you find your ikigai, which I call it “sweet spot”.
On the next page, I have prepared a table for you to do the Ikigai exercise.
So go ahead and do it, and we will move on from there.
What you like to do? What you are good at?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
What does the world need?
What you can be paid for?
And that’s it! You have found the topic(s) that you will never grow tired of
doing, and people will pay you for it!
Now, some of our partners after doing this exercise, don’t feel really
confident about their topics, mainly because there are already a lot of
existing courses out there teaching the same thing, and you may have
encountered the same problem as well.
Do not worry about it, because In the next chapter, I’m going to teach you
how to position yourself in the market so that your information product will
complement other people instead of competing against them.
Money Is In The Desire
~Chris
“Failure is the mother of all success”
Familiar eh? This is something that we were told ever since we were
young.
But I only realise how true this statement is when I failed at the first launch
of my online course.
Yes, you read that right, before I had my first success with online course, I
once failed too, and it’s a terrible one because I had ABSOLUTELY ZERO
SALES!
And I was devastated…
I thought I had found the perfect topic to turn into an online course, and it
will benefit everyone because I have so much experience in my topic!
But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
I started to analyse some of the successful online courses and try to find
out what are the common reasons for their success.
Turns out that, the only reason that caused my failure, is because I know
NUTS about marketing.
Let me explain a little bit by sharing this story with you.
There was once a guy who interviewed Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich
Dad Poor Dad”.
He asked Robert: “You know, I spotted a lot of grammar mistakes in your
book, and I don’t understand how you can still become a Best Selling
Author!”
And Robert replied: “That’s why I’m not a ‘Best Writing Author’, I’m a ‘Best
Selling Author’.”
The common misperception is that, as long as the content is good, it will
sell itself.
But this is so not true, and I am the living proof of this misconception.
Because without marketing, there is no way other people will know how
good your content is!
So I immediately dive myself into learning all about marketing strategies
that even global companies like Coca-Cola, or even Mcdonalds are using.
And it has made so much difference, that my second attempt in launching
my online course has become a total success because I manage to enroll
300 students in 3 months with my online course selling at 300USD.
What I have learned about marketing is that, having a product is simply not
enough, you have to position your product into a market that already has
existing demands for it to be able to sell.
There are three main markets that has existing, and endless demands,
namely health, wealth and relationships.
Let me give you some examples on how to position your product into the
existing market.
There was a Coca-Cola advertisement, showing 1 young man and 1 elderly
man sitting opposite of each other in a train.
The elderly man then took out a bottle of Coke and put it on the table, and
hint at the young man, as if asking him if he wants to drink.
The young man stares at the bottle of coke, and reach out his hand to take
it, but was stopped by the elderly man, asking the young man to look at his
phone.
The young man looked at his phone, and saw a
friend request from the elderly man.
He accepted the friend request, and the elderly man
gave him the bottle of Coke.
You can watch the advertisement by scanning the
QR code on the right.
So think about it, among health, wealth and relationships, which main
market did Coca-Cola position themselves into?
The answer is obvious, it’s the relationships market.
Gillette, one of the well known brands for men's grooming, their ads will
always show a well-dressed man with his beard shaved, accompanied by a
few beautiful ladies.
As if to tell us that by shaving the beard with Gillette shaver, men will
become more attractive to women.
Again, health, wealth and relationship, which one is it?
So you can see, all the big brands out there are using the same marketing
strategy, they position themselves into an existing market.
But for us, we have to go deeper than just position ourselves into these
markets. Because we are not as established and do not have the big
marketing budgets like those big companies.
What we are going to do, is to identify the main market, and then position
ourselves into the sub-market.
Let me list down some of the sub-markets for you.
Main Market Sub-market
Health 1. Weight Gain
2. Weight Loss
3. Daily Routine
4. Dietetics
5. Immunology
6. Mental Health
etc
Wealth 1. Investing
2. Entrepreneurship
3. Real Estate
4. Finance
5. High Demand Skills
6. Sales and Marketing
etc
Relationships 1. Love Consultation
2. Marriage Consultation
3. Dating
4. PR / HR Management
5. Leadership
6. Parenting
etc
The sub-markets that I listed here are just some of the examples that are
more common, there may be more sub-markets that were not listed here.
So if you can identify such market, feel free to position yourself in it.
After identifying the sub-market that we want to position ourselves into, we
are going to identify our ideal customer.
The reason why we want to do this is because we need to be clear who we
want to serve, so that we can craft a very targeted marketing message that
they will be able to relate.
Now, I need you to imagine an ideal customer who you want to help and
serve. Write down their personal particular and be as specific as possible.
Once you are clear with your ideal customer and your positioning, we are
going to do something interesting.
It’s called “Blue Ocean Positioning”
Be Smart
Be Like Jews
~Chris
When I was in the process of learning how to better market my online
course, I came across this Chinese speaker, talking about how the Jews
are smarter businessmen than the Chinese.
For example, when a Jews opened up a petrol station and business was
booming, another Jews will take the chance to open up businesses that
complement the existing business, for example car repairs, restaurants,
souvenir shops etc.
This creates a blue ocean for all business as all businesses complement
each other, because people go to this area for different reasons, some
might be there for food, some might be there because their car was down,
but once they are done with their own agenda, there is a large possibility of
them visiting other businesses.
Then he asked us: “And how do you think the Chinese do their business?”
If a Chinese opened up a petrol station and business was booming,
another Chinese will open up another petrol station, then more and more
petrol station will be opened up by different owner, and this area becomes
a red ocean.
So what we want to do is the same thing, we want to position ourselves in
this space such that we complement each other, instead of competing.
Now I’m going to share with you an advance strategy on how to do exactly
this.
I call it “Cross Pollination”
Advance Strategy: Cross Pollination
Please note that this is an advance strategy for a reason because it takes
some time for people to understand how it works and apply.
But since you have already bought the book, I don’t want to leave you with
a blank by not giving you everything that I know.
So, if you can get it in an instance, good for you! If you need some time to
understand, please don’t force yourself to do this.
What you need to do, is after you have identified your sub-market, you
have to find a way to package it such that it is able to fit into another sub-
market.
Let me give you an example.
----------------------Example Start------------------------
Imagine you have a kid right now. At some point, your kid is going to grow
up and they have to decide which career to choose, and they will be asking
for your advice.
Now, as a parent, how can you make sure that your advice will not ruin
your kid for life by giving them the wrong advice?
How can you guarantee that the advice you give them will allow them to
have job security for the next 10 years?
What if I tell you, there’s a research method that will allow you to identify a
job that will still be striving for the next 10 years?
You will be looking at statistics, data, so that your advice will be based on
research with supporting documentation, not by how you feel, or your past
experience that may have been outdated, would you like to know how to do
it?
Let me share with you how.
To be able to find a job that will be striving for the next 10 years, all you
need to do is to find a company that will continue to do well for the next 10
years, right?
If I’m able to find such a company, I’m very certain that the job
opportunities they provide, will also be striving for the next 10 years.
Simple enough, right?
This method is called “Value Investing”.
Because the concept of value investing is all about finding companies that
will be striving for the next 10 years or beyond.
With the same research method, you can use it to find out what are the
companies that will strive for the next 10 years and advice your children on
how to get the job oppourtunities they provide.
-----------------------Example End-----------------------
So what I did was, I just cross pollinated a skill (value investing), which is
widely known to be positioned in the investing sub-market, to the parenting
sub-market.
I just gave value investing a second purpose, other than investing to make
money.
And I can assure you, NO ONE in the parenting field as of the time when
I’m writing this book, is able to teach other people how to do the same.
If you know how to research companies based on value investing
philosophies, you are going to be SO BIG in the parenting space.
Let me give you another example.
One of our partners is a blogger, and her topic is on blogging.
So what are the sub-markets that blogging can be positioned under?
Some people might say that it is under marketing, some people might say
it’s entrepreneurship, some people might say it’s for family relationship,
because they can record all the fun moments together.
But what our partner did was very different.
She teaches other people on how to travel for free by maintaining a blog!
Immediately, she’s able to change her sub-market positioning to mental
health (because travel makes you happy), instead of all other sub-markets
that was more widely known for blogging.
And she was able to achieve USD2,000 in profit just 1 day after she
launched her course. Isn’t that amazing?
Can you see how powerful it is to be able to master Cross-Pollination?
Again, this is not something easy to do, because it requires a bit of
interdisciplinary knowledge, but I still want to give you my secret because
this is a rarely used but SUPER POWERFUL strategy that is going to help
you tremendously once you know how to apply it.
Now that you have done your positioning, you are pretty much good to go
now!
And there are a few indications that will tell you how much is your success
rate right now.
1. Are the people in this market actively initiating discussion on this
topic?
When people actively initiate discussion among themselves, it means
that the topic is important to them, and this is an indication that the
market is ready to pay money if you are able to provide a solution.
2. Are the people in this market self organising events on this topic?
When people self organise events on this topic, it means people are
passionate about it. And it’s easy to earn money from passionate
people, that’s why gaming industry generated almost $135 billion in
2018, and it’s forecasted to generate $230 billion by 2022, making it
the largest market in the world, all because gamers are passionate
people.
3. Does my target audience have the power and willingness to
purchase?
This is SO important, because without these two conditions, you will
never make a single cent. Power to purchase means do they control
their own money so that they can make purchasing decisions on their
own. Willingness to purchase means do they see the need to
purchase, simply put, does it help them solve the problem? If it
doesn’t, then they won’t purchase.
These indications are meant for you to refer. Other than finding out whether
they have the power and willingness to purchase, there is no need for
every one of them to be positive.
But of course, the more the merrier, which translates to higher chance for
you to achieve massive results!
Create more with L.E.S.S.
~Sean
When we talk to our students and partners about creating their online
courses, many of them feel overwhelmed and upon understanding more
from them, we realised that they have filled their mind with the imagination
that their online course needs to be “movie-like” quality production and also
they have to prepare their audience for a Phd level kind of lesson.
The truth is creating an online course is much more fun and easier than
you can imagine.
In this segment, we will be showing you how we create our online courses
using the L.E.S.S framework.
You may have heard of the term, “Teach Less, Learn More”. This is true in
many aspects as many teachers like to teach and pour out their wisdom to
their students when in fact most of the time, the brains of the students
already shut out any information as they are already mentally drained.
This idea of L.E.S.S is more is important when it comes to designing our
online courses.
What is the L.E.S.S Framework?
L.E.S.S stands for the following:
L = Lesson Objective
E = Essentials
S = Structure
S = Sugar and Spice
L = Lesson Objective
Creating a course is like cooking a dish!
The first step is to define exactly what we want to cook.
In crafting any online courses or any courses at all, it is of utmost important
to first define the lesson objective.
This means as a course designer, we have to clearly know this:
“By the end of this lesson, the student will ______________ .”
Our job is to fill in the blanks and be very precise of what the student will
learn and what abilities they will be able to develop.
For example,
By the end of “Speak Korean in 7 Days”, the student will be able to
converse in simple korean as a tourist.
By the end of “Lose Weight with the One Punch Man Workout”, the student
will be able to have the knowledge to craft a workout routine to help them
lose weight”
By the end of “The Dividends Investor”, the student will be able to buy
select and buy good dividend stocks”
At this point, one thing very important to note for course creators is to be
REALISTIC!
As course creators, we all want the best for our students, but we have to be
realistic that an online course cannot achieve everything!
For example, you cannot create a course where.
By the end of “Be a Heart Surgeon”, the student will be able to conduct a
heart operation on a patient with heart issues.
I believe in the future, technology will advance to a point where this is
possible, or perhaps the medical school has online courses to supplement
their lessons, but the online courses we are creating are meant for mass
markets and we do not want to over promise!
To make sure, that we do not over promise, the next activity is important.
This activity is to get us to define the different levels of competency our
students can and should achieve as he/she progresses.
For example, if you are designing a course for Korean Language
Level Outcome
Beginner To speak daily conversational korean as a tourist.
I.e About to ask for directions, tell the time, order
food.
Intermediate To speak korean like a local
I.e able to talk about daily affairs. Tell a story, read
the news.
Advanced To speak korean in specific context (Business,
Medical etc)
I.e be fluent in technical terms and jargons of
specific context.
Expert To be able to do fluent on the spot korean
translation and teach korean language
Another example if you are teaching stock investing
Level Outcome
Beginner To select and buy dividend stocks locally.
Intermediate To be able to select and buy growth globally
Advanced To be able to build and manage portfolio
Expert To be able to use options strategies and optimize
portfolio.
We had some partners’ whose topics are more of a hobby.
For example, Origami, baking, cooking, gardening, balloon sculpting .
These can be done via difficulty levels because of the number of steps.
See example “Have Fun with Origami”
Level Outcome
Beginner Able to complete 10 origami patterns that requires
less than 20 steps.
Intermediate Able to complete 10 origami patterns that requires
less than 50 steps
Advanced Able to complete 10 origami patterns that need
more than 1 paper to complete
Expert Able to create anything free style using origami
So lets have fun with this exercise for your particular topic. You can start by
asking, what does a competent beginner look like? Then you progress to
intermediate, advanced and expert.
If it is easier for you, you can work backwards as well. Start by asking what
does an expert look like and then progress backwards.
Define the levels for your topic
Level Outcome
Beginner
Intermediate
Advanced
Expert
So the first step of LESS is to have the lesson objective! And if this is your
first online course, we will recommend you create a course for beginners.
Once you have more than 1000 students, you can create an intermediate
course, then the advanced and expert levels courses.
E = Essentials
In the previous segment, we created our clearly defined Lesson Objective,
knowing what our student will be able to achieve at the end of our online
course.
This is of course assuming they complete our course of course. Like a
medicine or diet plan is meant to achieve results IF the person actually
consume it in full.
We mention this as we find many course creators take it very hard when
their students do not achieve the results.
This is an extremely great attitude for a teacher but at the same time, we
have to also know that while we can bring the horse to the water, we
cannot force the horse to drink (this is a famous chinese proverb).
Back to the example of creating a course is similar to that of cooking, we
want to first define exactly what is the dish we want to cook. Is it pizza? It is
fish noodles?
Once we have the clear outcome defined, the next step is to prepare the
ingredients. The ingredients needed for different dishes will be different,
hence it is important to list down all that we need.
We will now list down all Essential information that the students need in
order to achieve what we have stated in the Lesson Objective.
They need not be in any sequence as we will Structure them in the next
segment. In order to write down all the lessons Essential to the Lesson
objective, we will go through a 3 R process.
1. Rack
2. Research
3. Reduce
1. Rack your brain.
The first R is to Rack your brain.
This is to have fun and think of what the students need in order to meet the
lesson objectives.
Example for our “Korean Language Course”, the Lesson Objective is by the
end of the lesson, the student is able to speak daily conversational korean
as a tourist.
Process 1: Rack Your Brain
Course: Korean Language
Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak
daily conversational korean as a tourist.
List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives
1. Ask for directions
2. Count 1 to 100
3. Self Introduction
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Write down as many as you can think of. If you are stuck, its ok, this is only
step 1. But now, it is your turn to go ahead and start with step 1: Rack your
brain
Process 1: Rack Your Brain
Course:
Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson,
List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
The 2nd R is to Research.
This is a process of searching for what already works and adapting them
into our courses.
This is where we are really thankful for the internet as we can do research
in a blink of the eye. Gone are the days where we will have to travel to the
library or open up an encyclopedia to do our research which can be very
limited as well. (If you have got no idea what we are talking about… you
are probably too young! Congrats for starting young! Alternatively, perhaps
this book lasted through generations and reached the hands of someone in
another century… Cool balls!)
To do our research, we go to the internet and search for “[Your topic] online
course]”
In this example, we will Google “Korean Language Online Course”.
Due to copyrights issues, we will not do any screen shots here. But what
we do essentially is to click through to view existing courses and look at
what they are offering in their syllabus.
What we will do is to list down the items we get from our research.
Process 2: Research
Course: Korean Language
Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak
daily conversational korean as a tourist.
List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives
1. Ask for directions
2. Count 1 to 100
3. Self Introduction
4. The Korean Alphabet
5. The Family
6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant
7. Time and Date
8. Shopping in Korea
9. Showering in Korea
10. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that, over there.
11.
12.
As you can see, from our research process, we get more ideas on what
information our students need!
There may be a tendency to over research and get overwhelmed. So keep
your research to NOT more than 5 sites!
Ready to research? Let’s go!
Process 2: Research
Course:
Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson,
List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
The 3rd R is to Reduce!
Yes, you heard us correctly! The 3rd step is NOT to add more items. In
fact, it is to look through and choose ONLY the ESSENTIALS!
Example if we want to cook a pizza, garlic bread is not Essential, it is a
bonus!
In this process, we will look once again at our Lesson Objective and then
run through the list and be very critical on what are Essentials (Must Have),
and what are Bonuses (good to have).
It is common for a course creator to feel that everything is important and
that’s ok! But we also have to know what is really Essential to help meet
the Lesson Objective.
So step 3 is really to go through the list and REDUCE it. Strike out those
that are not really essential!
For example, we looked back at our Korean language online course and
decided that some information is not really essential and thus reduce them
(strike them out!).
Process 3: Reduce
Course: Korean Language
Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak
daily conversational korean as a tourist.
List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives
1. Ask for directions
2. Count 1 to 100
3. Self Introduction
4. The Korean Alphabet
5. The Family
6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant
7. Time and Date
8. Shopping in Korea
9. Showering in Korea
10. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that, over there.
11.
12.
After reducing the list to only the essentials, we have a good amount of
items to start structuring our course, which is the next step!
S = Structure
In the previous 2 segments, we have defined our Lesson Objective and
also listed all the Essential modules through the 3R process.
Here, once we have gotten all the ingredients, we will need to know the
process and sequence of putting the ingredients together.
In designing a course, there are typically 2 ways to structure a course.
Structure 1: Step by Step
Structure 2: Different Types
Let’s go through both structure and decide which is the most suitable for
your course. In some cases, it may be a hybrid.
Structure 1: Step by Step
The step by step structure is suitable for courses teaching technique where
beginners need step by step guides on technical aspects.
For example, how to invest, how to bake, how to create a website, how to
do Facebook marketing.
If your target audiences are beginners in your topic, a step by step
structure will be the most logical.
We will adopt this structure if the sequence is critical. For example, in order
to learn when to sell a stock, we need to first teach how to find, how to
select, when to buy before we can even teach when to sell.
In most lessons, there will be some form of logical sequence!
Structure 2: Different Types
Some courses may be a compilation of different types. Example will be 20
different exercises to workout indoors, or How to Fold 30 types of origami,
How to bake 10 types of pizzas. Or it can be 5 modules of Korean
language.
We will adopt this when the modules are not sequence dependent. For
example, when we learn the korean language, there is a module on
ordering food from the restaurant and also a module on telling time.
We can learn either first and hence the sequence is not critical!
For different types, it may be logical to arrange them in sequence from
easiest to most challenging if possible.
This way of structuring your course assumes that your audience has
already some basic understanding of your topic.
These are the 2 types of structures and in some cases, we can use hybrid.
Hybrid Structure
When structuring a lesson, we should logically place modules based on
step by step first, followed by type by type from easiest to the most
challenging.
Most courses will be hybrid that requires both.
For example, in the Korean language, we will need to first learn the Korean
Alphabets then we can learn the different modules.
Another example for different workouts, we will probably need an
introductory module on how to do warm up before we go on to different
modules of workout from the easiest to the most challenging.
So back to using our korean language course.
Structuring our Korean Language Course
We will first place modules that needs to be sequenced first before we can
teach the rest. We will then sequence the rest of the modules by difficulty
level.
S/No Module Remarks
1. The Korean Alphabet Needs to learn this
first
2. Self Introduction Level: Easy
3. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that,
over there.
Level: Easy
4. Ask for directions Level: Medium
5. Time and Date Level: Medium
6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant Level: Hard
7. Shopping in Korea Level: Hard
Another way is to make lessons into a logical flow. For example for this
korean course, we are creating it for tourist to be able to speak korean
while travelling to Korea as a tourist, we may want to list the courses based
on a logical sequence.
For example, a tourist in korean will first arrive at the airport, then will need
to get transportation to the hotel etc.
So the course can look something like this as well.
Structuring our Korean course based on sequence
S/No Module
1. The Korean Alphabet
2. Self Introduction
3. At the Airport
4. Taking public transportation
5. At the hotel and ordering food
6. Asking for Directions
7. Shopping in Korea
There are different ways to structure our courses but the rule of thumb is to
first look through the list the sequence those that needs to be taught first
upfront, then sequence the rest either via a logical flow either by difficulty
level or by chronological sequence.
Once we have this out, the blueprint of our course is almost ready. We will
now go on to the finishing touch, making our course interesting by using
“Sugar and Spice”!
S = Sugar and Spice
We have our Lesson Objective, Our Essential Modules, Our Structure! It is
like we are prepared to bake our pizza with a clear outcome, essential
ingredients and also the sequence of baking! But before go into the actual
baking, it is time to add some sugar and spice to make our pizza a
delicious one.
In the previous segments, we have been focused on making sure we are
FOCUSED. We are clear on what we want our students to achieve and
went into bare minimum to make sure that we are not distracted by
modules that are not essential to our outcome.
It is like baking a bare pizza. We need the dough, we need flour and
perhaps that is it! But a plain pizza without any toppings will be difficult to
eat. It is time to add sugar and spice into our dish! (We recommend eating
less sugar in real life for health reasons, but you get the point).
Have you ever attended boring lectures? The lecturer babbled on and on
about important essential lessons while students struggle to catch up or
even stay awake?
Some studies claim that the attention span of human beings are short and
hence long lectures do not work. But at the same time, have you sat
through a 3 hour movie and was captivated throughout?
What is the difference? An interesting 3 hour movie can be much easier to
bear than a boring 30 min lecture! The difference is simply the effort of the
designer in making the time for the audience interesting and engaging.
To make our courses interesting, we have a framework named,
“Q.U.E.S.T”. It is a way to add Sugar and Spice into our lessons! Q.U.E.S.T
stands for the following
Q = Quotes (Use Interesting and thought provoking quotes)
U = Unknown Facts (Start our modules by “Do you know…” will usually
create interest in our audiences)
E = Examples (Using related examples is useful to teach technical
concepts)
S = Story (Nobody can resist a story!)
T = Test Your Audience (Start your modules by giving your audiences a
quiz and/or make them participate!)
Using Q.U.E.S.T
Now let’s go into how we can use Q.U.E.S.T to make our content more
interesting and enticing.
Typically, we will suggest using one of the Q.U.E.S.T at the start of any
modules or any posting on social media to make the content more
interesting and to capture attention.
Q = Quotes
We can start our module by using interesting and thought provoking quotes
from famous people.
For example if our topic is about investing and we want to teach a relatively
dry topic known as portfolio mamagement, we can start with a quote by
famous investors such as Warren Buffett.
“Investment rule number 1, never lose money.
Investment rule number 2, never forget rule number 1
~ Warren Buffett”
What does it mean to never lose money and how is it possible to never lose
money in investing? The secret is to a strong portfolio management
system.
As you can see, it makes the topic more interesting as compared to merely
say that portfolio management is important and we have to pay attention in
this particular module.
Basically, the internet is filled with famous quotes. All we have to do is too
google search for the particular topic and quotes.
With a simple search, we can find many interesting quotes related to
almost any topic we want.
Here are examples of weight loss quotes:
“Exercise should be regarded as a tribute to the heart.”– Gene Tunney
“A diet is when you watch what you eat and wish you could eat what you
watch.”– Hermione Gingold
“You didn’t gain all your weight in one day; you won’t lose it in one day. Be
patient with yourself.”– Jenna Wolfe
Here are quotes on learning a new language:
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come
from and where they are going.” - Rita Mae Brown
“He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.” - Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” - Charlemagne
We can find many quotes to inspire or even humour our audiences if we
just take the time and effort to make our subject interesting.
Of course using Quotes is just one method. Let’s go through the rest of
them.
U = Unknown Facts
Another way to start our modules is to share an Unknown, Preferably Fun
or Shocking fact!
For example,
“Do you know that the Korean language is the largest language isolate in
the world.
This means unlike most Asian languages that share a language family like
Mandarin or Japanese, Korean language is a language isolate.”
We do not speak Korean at all and guess how do we find out about this
fact? Yes, the answer is simply to search for “Fun Facts Korean Language”
Another fun fact for stock investing…
“Do you know that since 1916, the Dow Jones index has only been positive
52% of the time but yet from 1916 to 2019, it is already up by 25,568%!
This means if you look at your investing account daily, half the time it will
seem as if you are losing money since the account will be lower than the
day before about half the time. But the truth is the stock market is going
higher over time!”
As you can see, whenever we start our modules with “Do you know…” and
introduce an Unknown Fun or Shocking fact, we can capture the attention
of our audiences!
E = Examples
Creating an online course is like cooking a dish!
This is an example of how we use examples! When using examples, we
need to use related examples and common so that the audiences can
actually relate.
If we use an unrelatable example, it defeats the purpose! So say, instead of
using the example of cooking, we say that creating a course is like creating
a nuclear bomb…
Of course if we are speaking to nuclear bomb scientist, it will be relatable to
them. So unless our online course is “How to create online courses for
Nuclear Scientist”, it is not advisable to use that example.
Since we are creating courses online and they can reach almost anyone
globally, we can use universally known examples.
So if we are creating a course on investing, we can use these examples.
Screening for stocks is like dating. We want to choose stocks which we can
marry and last long term instead of going into bad relationships.
Building an investment portfolio is like building a sports team
Knowing when to sell a stock is like knowing when to lay off an employee
As much as possible, we aim to use examples that are commonly relatable.
Granted not everyone understands dating, sports or working in a company,
but these are relatively more common examples compared to nuclear
bombs.
S = Story
When I was 15 years old, I had a Physics teacher who had a weird temper.
He would flare up easily but once that happened, he will quickly diffuse the
situation with his quick sense of humour.
For example, there was a time while he was writing on the board back
facing the class, we started talking and got a bit rowdy.
He turned and looked at us, “Class, you are getting noisy. Please stop
talking and be quiet.”
We quickly stopped talking.
My teacher glanced across the room with his warning glare and turned
back to the board and continued writing.
The silence was short lived as the students started whispering to one
another and the noise level quickly grew to that of a marketplace.
All of a sudden, my physics teacher slammed the board with his palm and
yelled at us,
“YOU GUYS ARE TOO NOISY! SHUT UP!”
There was an immediate silence. This situation became tense and
awkward. Our teacher’s face was red with anger and his eyes were raging!
He looked at us, took a deep breath and asked gently, “Do you know why
you should be quiet during my class?”
No one dared to answer or make any noise.
After waiting for a couple of seconds, he explained, “That’s because there
are students in this class that may be falling asleep, and if you are noisy,
how are they going to get a good sleep?!”
We all broke into laughter!
There were many more such instances and he was a memorable teacher.
Most of the students in the class did well for physics that year, not because
of his anger management issues, but his ability to create humour on his
feet and his ability to use relatable examples.
But best of all, he used stories to make us remember important physics
concepts. I remember he made up a story of Jackie Chan executing a flying
kick towards an opponent. In the story Jackie Chan successfully injured the
opponent but he broke his ankle as a result of the power of the kick. This is
to teach us a principle known as Action Force equals to Reaction Force,
something which I remember even until today.
Story-telling is probably one of the best tool for making lessons interesting.
It brings our student into a different frame of mind where a movie starts
playing in their head.
Just as how we started this segment with the story of the physics teacher, a
picture will form in your head. You will see a classroom, which a physics
teacher writing on a board. This makes learning easier as our brain can
remember pictures easier.
So begin your modules or social media posting with stories!
To tell a story, we need to have 4 key settings and 3 key elements.
The 4 key settings are:
1. Who is the protagonist?
There needs to be a main character in the story. If you are sharing your
personal experience, the protagonist can be you.
2. When did this story happen?
“Once upon a time…” This is the way we know a story is coming when we
were young. By stating a time frame, our ears and mind is tuned up, ready
to receive a story.
Instead of once upon a time, we can start our stories with
“In 2005, I was working as a waiter and ….”
“2 weeks ago, I was having lunch with my friend when…..”
“When I was a young boy, my father told me….”
As you can see, once we add a time frame, we know a story is coming.
3. Where did the story take place.
Whenever we watch a movie, the first scene will typically depict the
location. It can be a school setting, an outdoor farm setting, a soccer field
setting. Again, this allows the audience to paint a picture.
4. What happened?
This is basically the main story. We should aim to reveal all the Who,
When, Where and What within the first sentence so the audience are
quickly drawn into the story.
For example, I started my story with
“When I was 15 years old, I had a Physics teacher who had a weird
temper.”
This one sentence would have described the 4 key elements
Who: My Physics teacher
When: When I was 15 years old
Where: School (This is implied as the protagonist is a teacher)
What: It is not described but there is a clue that it is about my teacher who
has a weird temper.
Besides the 4 key settings, we need the 3 key elements: an issue, a climax
and a resolution.
Back to my story as an example,
Element 1 - The issue: The class became noisy while teacher was writing.
Element 2 - The climax: My teacher flared up and had an outburst of anger
Element 3 - The resolution: Teacher created humour and eased the tense
situation.
Story telling takes practice but we are sure everyone of us has lots of
experiences that can become interesting stories when we apply the 4 key
settings and the 3 key elements.
T = Test Your Audience
When is the korean word “Oppa” used?
a. For anyone to address an male older than them
b. Only for female to address an older male
The answer is b.
Starting our modules by testing our audience can be a way to keep them
engaged. By testing your audience, what we mean is really asking them
engaging questions.
It was be trivial quiz, personality test or even asking for their opinions.
Which title is better?
Which book cover is nicer?
What should be the title of my book?
These are powerful ways to increase chances of engaging even using in
social media posting too.
Of course, the key principle is to engage. Hence it is important to ask what
kinds of questions are engaging.
From our experience, the question asked should actually have certain need
for the audience to think!
So a question like,
“What is 1 + 1?” will not be engaging and in fact may be insulting. Of
course unless there is a twist involved to a simple question.
Conclusion
So there you have it, 5 ways to add Sugar and Spice by using Q.U.E.S.T.
Remember to start your modules and your posting by using one of them!
The Best Way To Test
Market
Is To Put Money Into Your
Pocket
~Chris
By now you have heard the story of me from having complete zero sales,
to being able to enroll 300 students in 3 months.
One of the reasons for the drastic jump of my result is I learned to only go
into a market after I know EXACTLY how the market is going to respond.
Which means, I want to make sure that people are going to buy it before i
go full out into producing my online course.
Imagine, you have written a book, you spent 6 months to write it, you are
happy with the end product and you expected TONS OF SALES when you
launch it.
But 1 day, 2 days have passed, and you got zero sales.
Not a very good feeling, huh? Especially after you spend 6 months of your
precious time, it seems all your effort just went down the drain.
So, before I even began my second launch, I asked myself, is there any
way to test the market before I start producing my online course.
And I drew inspiration from how big companies like Apple do preorders for
their products.
Many of you know that Apple will always organise preorders when they
announce their new iPhone.
But do you know why they do that?
It’s not because they want to keep you anticipated, it’s not because they
want to generate hype.
But because they want to see how much demand is there from each
different market, so that they know how many to manufacture, and how
many to send to each different countries, over manufacturing is going to
cost them a lot of money.
Think about it, when they are doing a preorder, what did they just sold to
you?
It’s actually just a picture of the new iPhone and a few words that explains
why the new iPhone is good, that’s it!
This is how another of my secret sauce is born, I call it “Success Prelaunch
Masterplan”.
The rationale behind “Success Prelaunch Masterplan” is very simple, I want
to get people to pay me money first before my product is ready, because
this is the most accurate market response that you can have.
Imagine you open up a shop, and you tell all your friends and families
about this good news, they will congratulate you, they will say it’s
awesome, they will tell you that they will come and support.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will pay you money for your
product.
Let’s be brutally honest and face head on to the truth, if people aren’t
paying money for your product, it means your product has no demand, as
simple as that.
So, unless people are paying you money, all the nice comments and
encouragement that they might have given you, is as good as none.
It’s the hard truth I know, and I have learned it the hard way, but the good
news is you don’t have to go through the same thing as I did!
Here’s what you need to do for the “Success Prelaunch Masterplan”
1. Craft a survey to understand market sentiment.
This part is very important, because a survey is the best way to understand
market sentiment, other than looking at data and analytics. In order to do
that, there are 3 things that your survey needs to achieve.
Firstly, you need to be able to know what’s their motivation. Because
everyone’s motivation might be different, your motivation of acquiring the
knowledge and skills that you want to teach might be different from other
people.
Some people might be because of families, some people might want to
achieve bigger success, some people might want to achieve more
happiness.
So it’s really important to know what most people want from your online
course.
Secondly, you need to be able to know what’s their obstacles that keeps
them from achieving the result they want.
It may be because of time, monetary constraints, or it might be because of
their family opposing.
Understand what keeps them up at night, what they are worrying about, will
help you to be able to craft a better solution and a better marketing
message for them.
Last but not least, you need to be able to know what’s their dream lifestyle
or outcome, because no one buys an information product just for the fun of
it.
They all want to learn something, solve their problems and achieve higher
height. So it is important that you understand what kind of outcomes do
they want in order to tweak your information product a little bit to suit their
needs.
This is how a model survey looks like.
Name:
Email:
Age Group:
Gender:
Country of Residence:
Why do you want to know how to do (your topic)?
(Ask for their motivation)
What is your difficulty in doing (your topic)?
(Ask for their obstacles)
How would life be different if you know how to do (your topic)?
OR
How would life be different if your answer in 2 is no longer a concern?
(Ask for their desired lifestyle or outcome)
2. Send it out to gather answers to craft marketing message
Once you have crafted your survey, send it out to people who are
interested in your topic to gather data on what is their sentiment.
And this is where things get interesting, because we are going to use the
answers they give us, to craft our marketing message.
For example, we have a partner who wants to teach other people how to
travel for free. So We asked her to craft out a survey to gather answers
from her audience.
The following are some of the answers from her survey.
Why do you want to
travel for free?
What is stopping you
from travel?
What would your life
be if you can travel
for free?
I want to live a carefree
life
Work I can create more
memories with my
family
Because I want to
experience the world
Always worrying about
my budget
I can have the freedom
of travel to anywhere I
like
I want to go out and
see the world
Money, cannot have
better experience
I can have a better
travel experience that I
never had before
And the following are her marketing message.
Do you dream to Live a Carefree Life and Travel the World without
worrying about overspending?
Do you wish to Create Precious Memories with your family and friends and
embark on a life Full of Adventures?
Do you want to have the FREEDOM to Travel to Anytime Anywhere You
Want without forking out a single cent?
Can you see how she made use of the answer to craft her marketing
message so that it speaks to her audience?
This is the power of survey. When done right, there is no way that your
product doesn’t sell, because we sell them exactly what they wanted.
3. Announce your preorder
After you have crafted your marketing message, all we need to do is to just
announce to the world, that we are currently in the middle of creating an
online course, and they can enjoy a preorder discount of XX% (you can
decide the percentage) if they make the purchase now.
That’s it!
Now just wait and see how the market reacts, if you start receiving money
through whatever payment gateway you use, props to you! If not, keep on
tweaking your marketing message until it works, it’s that simple.
Building Your Expert
Status
~Sean
In 2018, I was at a Japan conference and had the chance to speak
alongside Steve Woznaik, co founder of Apple Inc. He was sharing how he
and Steve Jobs created Apple and made it one of the most valuable brands
on earth.
I am pretty sure most of us have heard of the Apple brand. To me, it is a
very weird name for a computer or electronic company. Imagine naming
your company or phone after the name of a fruit…
And what does “google” mean anyway? (Turns out it was a misspelled
word for googol, a mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100).
In this segment, we will be discussing, what is a brand and how we can
build one. And as the examples above show, brand is not just a name but
the feeling we give the target audience.
As we study in branding, there are just too many varied definitions and
since this book is all about being practical and helping our readers build a
business, we will jump into the practicality of branding instead of argue over
the definition.
But in essence, for this branding exercise, we want our readers to go
through a 5C process to build an effective brand.
The 5 Cs are
1. Clarifying your Brand Identity and Message
2. Channel strategy
3. Content strategy
4. Credibility building
5. Calendar Planning
Step 1: Clarifying your Brand Identity and Message
The first step in branding is to first define your brand identity and your
brand message.
Brand identity is the “face” of your business. For example, when you think
Mcdonald’s, some things come to mind. The golden arches, the mascot,
how the restaurant look etc.
When we say “Nike”, it will be the tick logo and the slogan “Just Do it”.
The things that we associate to a business is what we know as brand
identity. Each business may be different. It can be just name (Like
Starbucks), the logo (The Nike Tick), the mascot (like Colonel Sanders
from KFC) or even colour scheme (like google).
We have to choose some brand identity if we want to build a brand.
At this point in time, the more important issue is to decide if the brand is
built around the person or a business. We can build both actively as well,
but when we are starting out as an Infopreneur, it is better to focus on one.
The easiest way to start is to build a brand around you, the teacher.
That’s how most of us started building the business, by building a brand
around ourselves. And as we progress, we start to brand it around a team
and a company and there is where we start to create a logo, a slogan etc.
You may be similar to us and want to start by branding yourself first. There
is where it is easier to be invited for keynote presentations when you build
yourself as an authority in your domain.
But if you want to start by building a business, you will have to start thinking
about the logo, the slogan etc. We will not dive deep into this area but from
studies, we have come to a conclusion that most importantly, what you
choose resonates with you and your mission first.
Step 1b: Clarifying Your Brand Message
Your brand message is the feeling and ideas you want the audience to
associate your brand identity to.
This means, whenever they see your brand identity, what do you want
them to think.
In fact, let’s do an activity.
Using Apple as an example again, what are the words you will use to
describe Apple and its products? What does their brand represent? How
does having their product make you feel?
Write some words in the box below:
So what did you write? Some words we may associate apple to maybe:
Sleek, simple, sophisticated, lifestyle, expensive, freedom, innovative.
Even if you didn’t write these words, do you agree that these words seem
to represent what Apple is?
The key is that Apple had specifically branded themselves to be associated
to some of these messages.
It is time for you to define what is your brand message.
Answer these questions below:
Imagine you are now a well recognized Infopreneur.
1. How will your fans describe you to someone who does not know you
yet?
2. What kind of personality will you be known for?
3. Is there a famous person that you will be associated with? (Some
people will say that you are like the person, only better and in your
own style)
4. What are some words, people will use to describe you?
Now look at what you have written above and zoom in to 3 key ideas. And
from the 3 key ideas, prioritize and zoom into 1 key idea. Who do you want
to be known as and known for?
The other remaining ideas will also add up to your own personality, But we
will hold dear to the main 3 key ideas.
If there are too many messages, it is difficult to build a brand.
Once we have the 3 key ideas, let’s move on to step 2, channel strategies.
Step 2: Channel Strategies
After you have defined your brand message, you will have to decide on the
channels to spread your messages.
In this time and age of social media, it is getting easier to build a brand as
compared to the past where we have to depend a lot of traditional media.
We will not dive too deep into social media strategies as each social media
channel will be another book by itself. From our experience, the specific
strategies to optimize the social media channel will definitely help in
branding building, but in the initial stage, it is more important to just put
your brand out and start observing how your audiences respond to your
brand.
As we speak, we believe there are more and more social media platforms
being created and they are evolving along the way.
But to get you started, it will be smart to go where the masses are, which
will be
1. Facebook
2. Youtube
3. Instagram
4. Linkedin
We recommend you focus on 1 channel initially depending on which
channel is most aligned to your brand message and speaks most to your
target audience.
Once you have decided on the channels you want to focus on, we will
move on to step 3, 4 and 5.
Step 3: Content Strategy
Question: What kinds of content makes our audiences tick?
Answer: Content that they want!
Notice that the answer is not content that we want them to have, but rather
content that they want. Too many times, we see starting infopreneurs
getting very excited and started posting enthusiastically on social media but
after some time, they begin to experience burnout.
Upon talking to them, they get burnt out mainly because they do not see
any results. It is like dieting and exercising for an entire month but not
seeing any weight loss at all.
Well, you know as well as I do that it is impossible not to see any results
after 1 month of dieting unless something is not done correctly
Similarly, if you keep posting on social media and you do not see your
audience being engaged, or there isn’t any increase in following, something
is not done right.
One of the common reasons that we found in most aspiring infopreneurs, is
that they are posting content that does not speak to the audience. In many
instances, it could be using too much jargon that audiences could not
understand in the first place.
There was one of our students who was teaching mandarin. His posting
was in mandarin, teaching common mandarin words. He wasn’t getting as
much engagement as he had wanted.
Initially he thought that the market for teaching mandarin was saturated and
he couldn’t get any new students,
But upon reviewing it with him, the problem was clear.
Because he was teaching mandarin, his target audiences are those who
could not understand mandarin and are interested to learn. So if his posting
is in mandarin, his target audience could not understand his posting.
It should have been an English posting, teaching common mandarin words.
The key strategy for content, is to have your audience in mind!
Think like your audience and ask yourself what will you want to know. Well,
on second thoughts, perhaps it is better not to get you to think! Just like our
mandarin teacher thought that the postings will be excellent ones, but they
turn out not to be, thinking and assuming may turn out to be a disaster.
So instead of thinking and assuming what our audience may want, we can
simply do research and find out exactly what our audiences want.
In order to do this, we can go to the most popular search engine in the
world, Google. (It will be amazing to know if this is no longer true.)
In google, when we search for a particular topic, there will be suggested
topics too. For example:
Do you realise that there is a segment that states, “People also ask”
Even as you type your topic in google, suggested searches will be
displayed as well.
Do you realised how powerful this is? With a few strikes on your keyboard,
you suddenly has access to what are the most popular searches in the
world surrounding your topic. These are information that will cost a lot in
the past to gather. In fact, we know of firms who are still paying millions to
get information like these, simply because they have not read this segment
in our book. Haha...
Perhaps this will change with time but doing simple research like this will
give you ideas on what to post in your social post channels.
These posts will be more relatable to your audiences and you will see more
results!
Another way to make post more engaging, is also to deploy a strategy that
we taught earlier.
Using Q.U.E.S.T!
As a recap:
Q = Quotes (Use Interesting and thought provoking quotes)
U = Unknown Facts (Start our modules by “Do you know…” will usually
create interest in our audiences)
E = Examples (Using related examples is useful to teach technical
concepts)
S = Story (Nobody can resist a story!)
T = Test Your Audience (Start your modules by giving your audiences a
quiz and/or make them participate!)
Remember, as an Infopreneur, Content is King and the way we use it
determines our success!
Step 4: Credibility building
As we build our brand, we will want to sprinkle Credibility posting into it as
well.
This means we would want our audiences to see us as an expert in our
domain without us telling them we are experts.
Here are some suggestions on how to be seen as an expert. These are
strategies that we used ourselves.
1. Publish a Best Selling Book
2. Be invited to speak on stage at conferences and high profile events
3. Be featured as a guest on other media
4. Branding by Association
5. Higher Quality Videos
Publish a Best Selling Book
Publishing a best selling book is one of the most powerful ways to be
branded as an expert.
With so much content created for our online courses, we can compile them
and create a book.
In this decentralized information world, we can simply self publish our
books instead of going through a publisher as well.
The key to having this book is then to publicize it and make it known.
But imagine having your own best selling book, your status as an expert
will be elevated!
Be invited to speak on stage at conferences and high profile events
How does being a guest speaker at conferences and universities sound
like?
Yes, you will sound like an expert!
When you have the chance, you should actively reach out to organizations
that you would like to speak at.
And if you have a book, you can offer to sponsor some of your books at
their conferences.
This increases the chance of you being an invited speaker!
Be featured as a guest on other media
This can be a youtube channel, a guest Facebook post or cross post in
instagram.
When you are a guest featured in another media, your credibility increases.
Of course the big game is to go on national tv or the news.
We have used our books to appear as guest on these medias as well.
Branding by Association
Another powerful way is to brand yourself with other famous experts in your
domain.
Ways you can do that is
1. Attend any events featuring these experts and take photos with them
2. Request for an interview
3. Ask for a testimonial for your book
4. Attend their classes or get them as mentors if possible
Personally we love to continue to attend classes and improve. So these are
opportunities to be associated by being trained by other experts.
Step 5: Calendar Planning
Finally, all the 4Cs above will not be meaningful if we do not consistently
post out in the media and reach out.
So it is important to have a media calendar.
Depending on how much resources you have, you can post on social
media accordingly.
For a start, you should plan to post 3 times a week.
So schedule it into your calendar!
Example to post at 8am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
And you can even set themes. For example
Mondays will be weekly vlog
Wednesdays are mini lectures
Fridays will be related news for that week.
Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun
Weekly
Vlog
Mini
Lectures
News of
the
Week
Weekly
Vlog
Mini
Lectures
News of
the
Week
Weekly
Vlog
Mini
Lectures
News of
the
Week
Weekly
Vlog
Mini
Lectures
News of
the
Week
Posting these should be fun as these are things related to topics you are
passionate about. If you start to get bored researching on these topics,
perhaps it is the wrong topic to begin with
So there you have it. The 5Cs to create and build your brand!
Go for it!
Education and Duplication:
Expanding Overseas
~Sean
In Nov 2014, we started an education company and by Dec 2017, we were
in more than 24 cities globally, making a couple of millions in revenue.
It should be the goal of all businesses to go global as it is not only good for
branding purposes, it is also a natural growth process.
The good news about being an Online Infopreneur, is that global expansion
does not require as much effort and capital as traditional businesses.
In fact, once we post our courses online, it is somewhat international
already.
When we expanded our education business overseas, we had to take note
of many issues such as
1. Cultural Issues
2. Translation
3. Working with Local Partners
4. Working with Legal Issues
5. Taxation Issues
And many more depending on the countries we are in.
Each country and even each state is different in terms of culture and
business procedures.
But when we started building our business online, most of the issues are
not as tricky. Probably the only one that is still relevant will be translation
issues if we want to translate our courses into another language.
If you are interested to translate your course into other languages, it will be
wise to do some research to see the market size.
As of 2019, these are the top languages in the world
1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion speakers)
2. English (983 million speakers)
3. Hindustani (544 million speakers)
4. Spanish (527 million speakers)
5. Arabic (422 million speakers)
6. Malay (281 million speakers)
7. Russian (267 million speakers)
8. Bengali (261 million speakers)
Of course, the market size is one consideration. The other consideration
will also be your personal goal. For example, if one of your goals is to set
up an education business in Japan, then it is logical to have your courses
translated to Japanese.
Here are some sites to help with your translation
1. www.rev.com
2. www.Upwork.com
Conclusion
We are blessed living in the Internet age where it is easy to expand our
businesses globally and potentially reach the entire globe! So go forth and
spread your passion and message!

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Hidden Goldmine in You (Amazon Best Seller).pdf

  • 1.
  • 2. Chief Editor: Seow Wei Kai & Yap Yuan Xin All writings credits belong to the respective writers. All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its authors. It is not a recommendation to purchase or sell the securities of any of the companies or investments herein discussed. It is sold with the understanding that the authors and publisher are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, investment, or other professional services. The authors and publisher specifically disclaim any responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, professional or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.
  • 3. Hidden Goldmine In YOU Turn Your Knowledge Into Profitable Online Courses! Sean Seah Glen Ho Chris Chen
  • 4. From an ex-military officer to a Multi-Million Infopreneur - Sean Seah On 27 March 2017, I sold my company for $10 million. That increased my net worth by another 8 figures overnight. It was just about 2 years ago, I was a nobody who had started this company by starting a Facebook page from scratch! I was sharing my passion on investing through the social media, something I was personally not very familiar with at that point in time. In 2 years, by trial and error, my fame grew and I created multiple information products, from books, to online courses, to live workshops. All these made me streams and chunks of income. Unknowingly, I had entered the World of Infopreneurship and had became an Infopreneur. An Infopreneur is someone paid for creating and/or sharing information. Basically, it is the combination of two words, “Information” and “Entrepreneur”, thus forming the word, “Info-Preneur”
  • 5. Suddenly, the reason why an unknown Singaporean guy can create a company worth millions became clear, it is because the world of Infopreneurship is a decentralized, multi-billion dollar industry. At the point in time when we write this book, the e-learning Industry alone is worth more than $200 billion. If you didn’t quite understand what this opportunity meant, we totally understand as it is not something we learn from school as well. The 2 key reasons why Infopreneurship can potentially make anyone wealthy is this. 1. Information is a fast growing industry that sees no end. We are living in an information age where the world has growing demands for more information. Just observe, what are people doing most of the time? Scrolling through social media, reading blogs, watching videos online, all these are examples of consuming information on a daily basis. Corporations are also into what is known as big data analysis, in the race to make sense of raw, unorganized facts, turning them into useful information. The rate of information consumption is not going to slow down and hence, if you are able to jump on the band wagon and start producing information, you may likely become a next millionaire infopreneur! This is possible because of the 2nd reason. 2. Information is a decentralized industry. As less than a century ago, the Infopreneur industry is owned by powerful media and publishing houses.
  • 6. We get our daily dose of information through the newspapers, radio and television. Those who owned these were very powerful and influential people of that time. But take a look around and notice how things have shifted. Most of the information consumed is mainly from the internet now. Examples will be Youtube videos, Facebook and Instagram posting and as we write, we are sure there are many new platforms created to connect the world. This ability where anyone, not just big corporations, can upload information and potentially reach the world is what decentralization means. This means, you and I can create our own information product and actually offer it to the society through the internet. And as technology progresses, the means will become easier as time passes! We can easily, create, offer, distribute our home-made information product at the blink of an eye and see another 5, 6 or even 7 figures of income flow into the latest payment collecting platform, be it paypal, stripe or even our bank accounts. In this book, we will be sharing with you more on the potential of the World of Infopreneurship and how you can start participating and create your own pot of gold. We believe there is a hidden goldmine in everyone! The beautiful thing is that unlike gold, which is a commodity, our hidden goldmine is our wealth of experience, passion which creates useful information that is unique and priceless. Hence, we are not subjected to price war and we do not need to be a price taker but rather a price and trend setter!
  • 7. Are you excited already? Well, we are for you! Let’s dig in right now!
  • 8. From an “F” student to a Founder of 2 International Education Businesses - Glen Ho For the past 3 years, I managed to generate more than $1 million revenue just by sharing my passion with the world. My name is Glen Ho, I am 29 years old this year. Currently, I am the founder of 2 education business in Singapore. 11 years ago, back in my polytechnic college days, I was studying Accounting and Finance. At that time, I don’t even know why I chose to study that course. It’s like, since my General Certificate of Education (GCE)‘O’ level result allow me go enroll into these school, so “I decided to enter” that kind of feeling. But I never expected that I will dislike my polytechnic college life. Because I really didn’t like my modules at all! These things are so boring that everyday I was like dragging myself to school and hoping the day will end faster. Therefore, my academic results during the 3 years of college are having all kinds of Ds and Fs in my academic report card. People around me
  • 9. were like, “Glen, you have to study, so that you will get a good career, earn good money and etc”. I am sure, these sounds very familiar to you right? Because almost all asian parents will say this to their children. But I really cannot convince myself to continue studying. That’s why I struggle to pass my polytechnic college modules. As I worked as a tax accountant,I tell you, IT WAS HELL. Because, the job is so boring that I feel like quitting after 2 weeks. This experience let me think that I will never work in a 9 to 5 job for life. So as you can see, me being a singaporean, with bad academic results, and don’t know what I want to do also, my future seems very gloomy. And that was when I came across stock investing, and made some money in the stock market. Since then it has become my passion.But now I am not going to talk about investing in this book. I am sharing with you about passion. So different people have different passion. Maybe some of you are passionate about basketball.And Some of you are passionate about music, right? When you found your passion, naturally you want to share it with others. Or go and find someone who has the same passion as you. So I’m just the same, I really wanted to share about my passion to a lot of people. Maybe I can even gather a community of people that shares the same passion with me. I was VERY excited about this idea, that I was always looking out for opportunities to achieve this dream. But at that point in time, the only way I know that I can share something to a lot of people at one go is public speaking. And I still remember the first time I do public speaking to only 11 people, I was so nervous that I literally had leg cramp on the spot and fell down during the middle of my speech.
  • 10. It was so embarrassing!! Because I am So nervous once I step onto the stage. It feels like, all the audience’s eye, they turn into guns pointing at me. At that point in time, I was ready to give up all my hopes and dreams about building a community of people who shares the same passion. That’s when, I heard about infopreneur and online course.So infopreneur, if you don’t know, is someone who turn their passion, knowledge or skills into information products like ebooks, online courses, audio lessons and a lot a lot more. The cool thing is that there is only little cost to produce any of that. And the best part for me is, I no longer need to face the fear of public speaking. Because, you can produce your information product without showing your face or talk face to face with anyone! I was SO BLOWN away when I knew about online course. And in an INSTANT, I KNEW I have to produce my online course to share and teach other people about my passion. So after my online course was launched. Soon after that I was invited to conduct live education courses to teach more people about my passion. And eventually, I founded my first education business and invited to travel all over the world to conduct trainings to share my experience and knowledge to people around the world. For the past 3 years, I managed to generate more than $1 million revenue just by sharing my passion with the world. I have never imagine I can reach where I am now. But thinking back, one of the key reasons why I’m where I am right now is because I didn’t give up on my passion. You know, people always say, your passion cannot earn you a living. They might be right, but that is because they are still living in the past. They still have the old mindset that you just get a good certificate, get a good job, and that’s it for your life.
  • 11. In this internet era, we really can turn our passion into our source of income by turning them into online courses. It doesn’t matter what kind of passion you have. It can be travelling, dancing, yoga, WHATEVER. You can TURN THEM ALL into online course and people will pay you for it! Because, this is exactly what happened to me.
  • 12. From an ordinary school teacher to an International Infopreneur Coach - Chris Chen My first encounter with something related to Infopreneur, is when my father bought me a box of cassettes for me to learn English 25 years ago. These boxes of cassettes are what we call “information products”, one of the main products that Infopreneur creates and provides. Although cassettes have now been phased out, but people’s thirst for knowledge is never-ending. Since cassettes and CDs have become obsolete, information products evolves into being in digital forms like ebooks, online courses etc.
  • 13. And that box of cassettes, is probably how me and an Infopreneur’s life got intertwined ever-since. Back in October 2016, when I was still a school teacher, I was looking for money because my father got retrenched and my family’s financial status went downhill real fast. So I went around searching online on what kind of other income source can I bring in for my family other than my main job. And during the process, I’ve done direct sales, drop-shipping, e-commerce. But after doing them for a while, I don’t feel that they are the right fit for me. Sometimes you just feel that you will never go long-term with the things that you are currently doing right? That’s how I feel at that time. And then I discovered about the opportunities of being an infopreneur. So, what are the opportunities that I discovered? 1. You can share your passion, knowledge and or skills, something that you are already good at, and people want to get to where you are. This is perfect for someone like me who hated to just work for the sake of working, because I love to have a job that I like doing and it feels fulfilling. 2. You can work anywhere, anytime, as long as you have internet. Because information products are not supposed to be bounded by being a physical form or restricted by location. Its full power will only be unleashed by digitalising it and putting it on the internet, the world is your stage. 3. You can never lose money. Because we can literally produce a product like e-books, online courses, out of thin air, without worrying
  • 14. about logistics, manufacturing costs, rental and all kinds of expenses that a traditional entrepreneur will be worrying about. But the problem is, when I was searching for information about how to go about doing and be successful with the information business, there was no one who teaches you how to do it! So what I did was I went for more than 5 courses, and because there wasn’t any course that fits exactly what I want and need, I could only take 1 or 2 implementable skills or strategies from each course, mixed them up, tested every method and eventually I came up with my own formula and strategies. In 2018 December, I launched my online course, and in just 3 months time, I managed to enroll 300 students world-wide, and made myself 6 figures in profit. Up to this point as I’m writing this book (2019 December), I have more than 700 students world-wide and still counting, I have created 2 online courses and the third one is currently in production. This is how I made my name, and claimed the title of being the SEA’s 1st online Infopreneur coach. All in all, I spent more than 2 years of testing and 8,000USD to get to where I am right now. But thinking about it, with all the returns that I get from investing in that kind of money and time, to me, is well worth it, because I can then duplicate it for an unlimited number of times, and I can duplicate my methods to you too, who is currently reading this book. For me, the reason I want to write this book, is because I believe everyone has their own expertise and their own unique experience. Everytime I conduct trainings for people who want to be infopreneur, I will always give them some stage time to share about their topics.
  • 15. And their eyes SHINES! Because it’s their own passion! Nothing can bring more life to a person than doing something they are passionate about! This is how Sean, Glen and I came up with the book's title, because there is a hidden goldmine waiting to be tapped in each and everyone of us. Through this book, we hope to deliver a revolutionary message to the world, and bring a meaningful change to your life. Let’s start our Infopreneur journey together now!
  • 16. Online Course: The Past and Future ~Glen Ho Why you should ride along with the e-learning trend? In just 30 years ago, when we mentioned about learning, the only place that comes into our mind is to attend lessons in school, read some books or goes into a physical library in your neighbourhood to find the related books & resources. It is because, in the past, online learning is not known by many yet compared to today. With the internet being introduced and becoming more popular and common these days, the way people do things have also changed. Instead of just reading physical books and attending live courses, we realised that there are an increasing number of people attending online courses in the comfort of their home learning the same content that they would be learning in physical live courses. And only investing in a fraction of the amount in online courses compared to the physical course having the same content.
  • 17. This is because the online content provider have very low cost to produce the online course content for the learners compared with someone who are conducting live courses. Whether we like it or not, the world is changing. People are now going towards online in their everyday lives. For example, they are meeting online, shopping online, knowing friends online, dating online, and learning online. Why you should create Online course There are 5 reasons why you should create your own online courses right now! And the reason is B.E.L.L.S. Building an authority(brand) When you start to launch your online courses, the public will see you as someone expert in your industry. And this builds up your brand and Authority immediately. Earn passive income Being able to sell your online courses online 24 hours also means that while you are sleeping, you online courses is still selling and make money for you! Learning is Flexible
  • 18. Students can learn how they want to learn. Some people have unique learning styles. By having the training online, you can allow the student to learn at their own pace and even go back and review the material as many times as they wish. Little capital needed to produce You just need your existing computer, camera phone and internet to produce your online courses. Moreover, you can produce your online course anytime and anywhere in the world, as long as there is internet available. Therefore it requires little amount of money to produce your online courses. Scalable-Able to serve a lot of people This is also my main reason why I wanted to sell online courses. I still remember many years back, I shared my knowledge with my friends 1 to 1 and I thought that this was too slow. Because 1 day I only have 24 hours and there is a limit on the number of people I can share my knowledge to. 2 months ago, I took 3 hours to finish and launch my new online courses and currently it has reached more than 2,100 students online. I believe, you can do that too! Through online courses, you are able to reach a global audience, thereby increasing sales opportunities. There are no limit to how many customers buy your online courses. This means that you make an one time effort to produce your online course and it can sell to as many people as possible, again and again.
  • 19. You Don’t Need To Be the Best You Just Need To Be Better ~Glen Ho I still remember, 5 years ago, one of my biggest dream and goal is to be a public speaker. I am very determined to achieve this goal. After a long consideration, I still do not know where to start to achieve my dream. So I just HACK IT, JUST DO IT. I started by sending out Short Message Service (SMS) to my closest 100 friends and family in my phone contact list and notify them that I want to share with them the proper way of managing their finances in a 1 day seminar. Out of 100 Short Message Service (SMS)I send out, around 50 reply to my SMS. Out of 50 replied, around 20 mentioned they will join the 1 day seminar. Out of the 20 who mentioned they will join, 11 people came on that day.
  • 20. So I started my first ever seminar, which is me speaking to around 11 people. It was my first official public speaking event that I conducted myself. I was so nervous throughout the whole seminar that I literally had a leg cramp and fell flat to the ground! At that moment, everyone was shock and do not know what to do when the speaker(which is me) fell flat to the ground. In a nutshell, some of my participants assist me to the side and we end the seminar early due to my condition. I still feel quite embarrassed of myself whenever I shared this story. After speaking to 11 people during my first seminar, someone actually came to approached me asking if I am able to share my financial knowledge to their crowd because the crowd are interested to learn about better management of their personal finance. I accepted the offer and I went to speak to 60 people, which is my second official public speaking event. During the period of time, I am very proud of myself and very happy. Because I actually started somewhere to strive towards my goal of becoming a speaker rather than staying at home and JUST PURELY THINKING of being a public speaker. Few weeks later, I'm being invited to speak to different events to share my knowledge and experience in different events. This is exactly how I started. And three years down the road I am invited to more than 9 cities like Hong Kong, malaysia, vietnam, Taiwan and many more. And the largest crowd I spoken to is 5,000 people at one time. So what I'm trying to say is that we should always AIM FOR ACTION AND NOT PERFECTION. because a lot of time, people always aim for perfection.
  • 21. And most people always wait for the perfect scenario or perfect timing to happen. But did it ever happen? Most of the time, NO. If you take a step forward, things might happen along the way, and at least there is a progress. We do not wait for things to happen, we make things happen. You definitely have dreams and goals that you want to achieve in this lifetime. Instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity(which most of the time will NEVER happen), you should take MASSIVE ACTION right now to work towards your dream! If not, your dream will always only be your dream. In the next chapter, I will share with you whether you have what it takes to be a millionaire. Do not aim for PERFECTION, aim for ACTION! -Glen Ho
  • 22. Do you have what it takes to be a Millionaire? There are three types of people in the world. Let me use a story to illustrate it. There is a group of people that they are trap in an island. They have no food, no shelter, no water. They need to find a ship or escape to the mainland in order to survive. The first type of people are waiting, they are sitting on the island and waiting for help. They are purely waiting for someone to save them. When you asked them what exactly are they waiting for, they will say that they are waiting for a big ship to come to the Island and bring them to the mainland.
  • 23. Second type of people, are people who are looking for help instead of waiting for help. They may swim to the nearby island to look for help, Call for help or even attempt to shoot some fireworks to create signals that they need help. Third types of people are the ones that create opportunites for survival. What do they do? They actually built a boat so that they can go to nearby Island, or build a ship to go to the nearby shore. So the third types of people are people who are creating opportunities for themselves. This story applies to real life scenario. The first style people are people who are always waiting for opportunities. Always waiting for things to happen. For example, when you talk to some of your friends or colleague and ask them about what is their dream? What are their goals? Most of them will answer that they want to climb the corporate ladder, waiting for promotion, waiting for opportunities to come, waiting for salary increment and etc. Can you sense that they are always waiting for things to opportunities? Always putting their goals and dreams on another person's hand, mainly based on external parties to influence their life path and directions. Second type of people are people who are always looking for opportunities. When you talk to this group of people, you will realise that they are always looking for opportunities. For example, they will be looking for good stocks to invest, looking for mentors who have been there, done that, and learn from them and etc. They are always looking for opportunities. Third group of people, are people who create their own opportunities in the Island. They are the ones that create their own boat, build their own boat and get out of that island. I learned that these are people who build a small boat to go to a nearby Island. They are always creating stuff and create many opportunities for themselves.
  • 24. These grow people in real life scenario. Most of them create deals for the business. They set up their own business and create opportunities, so when they go to a place whereby they are having a concert, the concert is nice, everything is nice, but no one is selling drinks. So they can create opportunities, by setting up a drink stock to sell drinks to the audience, So this is the third group of people. And guess what? Most of the financially successful people, do you think they are mostly from group number one, two or three? Let's make a guess……. And you are right. Most of the successful people are either from group two or group three. They are actually people who are hungry looking for opportunities(group two) by reading books, attending seminars, looking for mentors to assist them and etc. They are also ongoing looking at other opportunities that they can have a collaboration with different business partners or companies. Successful people are also in the category of group three, people who create their own opportunities. For example, Jack ma and Jeff Bezos, they are under group three. In the past, nobody had created any platform on the internet to buy and sell products but yet they created it., From what I know, they are the ones that create their own opportunities rather than waiting for things to happen to them. After knowing the characteristics of these three groups of people, do you know which group of people do you fall into? Next, I will be sharing with you what is the value you can bring to the world and is that what you are heading for.
  • 25. What is your VALUE in this world? This story that I am going to share with you have literally changed my life and my viewpoint of life. So there you go! There was a time whereby a young boy asked his father, “What is the value of his life?” Instead of answering, the father told his son to take this rock and go sell it at a market. If anybody asks the price, raise three fingers and don't say anything. The boy then went to the market and a woman ask, "How much is this rock? I want to put it in my garden." The boy didn't say anything and raised up three fingers and the woman said: "three dollars? I'll take it". The boy went home and told his father that a woman wants to buy this work for $3.
  • 26. The father then said: “son, I want you to take this rock to a museum, if anybody wants to buy it, don't say a word and just put up three fingers”. The boy then went to the museum and a man wanted to buy the rock. The boy didn't say a word and put up three fingers, and the man said: "$300? I'll take it". The boy was shocked and went running home, and said: "Father, The man wants to buy this rock for $300”. His father then said: "Son, the last place I want you to take this rock is to a precious stone store. Show this rock to the owner and don't say a word. And if anyone asked you the price, just put up three fingers”. The son then went to a precious stone store. He showed the rock to the owner. The Owner said: "Where did you find this Stone? It is one of the most rarest stones in the world. I must have it. How much would you sell it for?” The boy put up three fingers and the man said: "I'll take it for $300,000." The boy not knowing what to say went home to his father. Sharing to his dad that there's a man that wants to buy the rock for $300,000. His father than said : "Son, do you know the value of your life now?" You see, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you were born, the color of your skin, or how much money you were born into. It matters where you decide to place yourself, the people you surround yourself with and how you choose to carry yourself. You may have lived your whole life thinking that you were $3 stone. You may have lived your whole life surrounded by people that saw your worth only for three dollars, but everybody has a diamond inside of them. We can choose to surround ourselves with people that see our value and see the diamond inside of us. We can choose to put ourself in a market or put ourself in a precious stone store.
  • 27. You can also choose to see the value in other people. You can help other people see the diamond inside of them. You can choose the people you surround yourself with wisely, that can make all the difference in your life. In the next chapter, I will be sharing with you how you can create your own successful and profitable online courses to add more value to the world. Your MOST VALUABLE ASSET in the world is YOURSELF 3 tips to create a successful online courses Most people focus on making a good online course by having a good and insightful content to the public. However, the fact is that good and insightful online course does not always lead to a profitable online course. One example is writing a book. Amazon bestseller book is not equivalent to best writer book. Robert Kiyosaki is the New York Times best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. As you can see, Robert Kiyosaki is the best selling author and not necessarily is a best writing author. So a best selling online course does not necessarily is best content online course. Let me share with you 3 tips to create a successful and profitable online course! #1: Creating A Course You Think Your Audience Want(Not need) A lot of people assume they know exactly what the audience need. The truth is, people don’t always buy what they need, they buy what they want. For example, Many people knows that they NEED to exercise regularly at
  • 28. least 4 times a week but most people don’t do it. Instead, most people WANTS to have soft drinks and unhealthy snacks and they actually buy into it. So before you spend hours and hours creating the content for a course that nobody wants to buy, make sure you do some thorough market research to check whether you actually have a ‘Wanting’ market for your online course. #2: Making the Session short and precise These days, online learner has a very short attention span. A growing majority are now accessing online education via mobile devices, and by this also means they are likely watching your course whilst on the commute to work, during their lunch break or while sitting on the toilet! No matter how much effort you have put in, a module that exceeds 13 minutes in length is likely to have a very low completion rate, and anything you say after that point could be missed. For optimum engagement, retention and completion, keep your training videos between 2-8 minutes in length. #3: A proven marketing Strategy Very common, Newbie course creator thinks that as long as the course content is good, the online course will be sellable. This is so not true. The most profitable online course are the ones who knows how to sell well. In Conclusion, you need to at least have these 3 points to create a successful online courses: #1: Creating A Course You Think Your Audience Want(Not need) #2: Making the Session short and precise #3: A proven marketing Strategy
  • 29. In the next chapter, I will be sharing with you what online courses are popular in demand and how you can benefit from this idea.
  • 30. What online courses is popular in demand? Do you know that the Online learning industry is one of the fastest growing industry in the world currently? It is projected to hit $325 billion by 2025 which is 300% growth rate since 2005! I am going to share with you the TOP few online courses that has the highest demand in 2019. And all the results that I am going to show you is based on statistics in multiple websites and my team personal findings. The results below are not in sequence. No.1- Computers and Technology In these days and age, there are increasing activities and services that involves computer and technology. Things like online business, online meeting, online communications, online dating, online shopping, online presense and etc. As the demand for online activities increases, a lot of businesses are tapping into the online industry to meet the increasing demand and recruitment in this industry is booming tremendously for the last few years. Because of this trend, there are increasing demand for online courses such
  • 31. as ● Building a website ● Artificial intelligence (AI) ● Cyber Security ● Software programming (Phython/ Java/ PHP) No.2- Business & Entrepreneurship Business topics are always evergreen since many years ago till today. Some of the popular online courses these days are: ● Affiliate marketing ● Dropshipping ● E-commerce ● Business & entrepreneurship fundamentals ● Digital marketing ● Social media marketing No.3- Arts & Crafts
  • 32. These courses also provide house-bound individuals such as stay-at-home moms, artists, and individuals that are looking for an alternative source of income that does not hinder their major day-to-day activities. Some popular course under Arts & Craft are: ● Drawing ● Painting ● Calligraphy ● Photography ● Graphic design ● Interior design So if you have any of the above hobby, do consider creating an online course to turn it into passion income. No.4- Health & Fitness
  • 33. People have become very health conscious over recent years, and there is a continuously rising demand for health-centric information and media on the internet. And some popular online course regarding health are: ● Diet and nutrition ● Meal planning ● Massage ● Herbalism ● Meditation ● Home workouts ● Weight loss ● Muscle building ● Sports ● Yoga ● Martial arts Lastly, No.5-Personal Development
  • 34. Personal development has become a highly popular online course topic. With the fast pace of today’s society, people have shown to be struggling with the constant need to be better and do more. With personal development courses, individuals gain an understanding of how to build important skills to live a happier life. some popular online course regarding personal development are: ● Investing ● Sales ● Communication skills ● Public speaking So, is your passion under any of the 5 big topic I just mentioned? You can start building your own online course now and start receiving passion income already. By sharing your passion to the world and start getting paid for it is definitely a dream for most people in the world
  • 35. Access The Pile Of Gold In You ~Chris It was back in December 2017, I decided that I’m going to create an online course no matter what it takes. Because I have seen the potential of how it can reach out to people all over the world, and ultimately, you will be known and respected as an expert in the field. So I start to ask myself 2 questions: “What kind of expert would I like to become?” “What is the one thing that I can do for the rest of my life and won’t ever feel tired of it?” And I start to list down all the things I like and what I’m good at. - I like imparting positive mindset. - I like to play video games. - I’m pretty good at being a leader. - I have 12 years of experience dealing with difficult teenagers. So on and so forth
  • 36. And from there, I identify which are the topics that people are willing to pay money to learn. That’s how my first successful online course was born. And later on, I discovered that what I did to find out the topic for my online course was exactly the same as a Japanese concept that went pretty hot globally. It’s called “Ikigai” (生き甲斐) Which means “The Reason for Being” In Ikigai, you will find 4 circles. What you love? What you are good at? What the world needs? What you can be paid for?
  • 37. Our ultimate goal, is to find something that fits in all four circles, and that will be your Ikigai. Now, let me run you through this exercise and find out your money-making topic. Step 1: What you love to do? Firstly, list down everything that you love to do. It can be something that you do in your free time, or something that makes you forget all about time because you are so focused in it. PS. For this exercise, don’t think too much, usually the first thing that came into your mind, is the answer that you are looking for. So go with your gut feeling, and trust your own instinct for now. Step 2: What are you good at? Once you have listed down what you love to do, list down what are the things that you are good at. What is the difference between things you love to do and things you are good at doing? For example, someone may love singing a lot, but whenever he or she sings, they will be asked to stop singing.
  • 38. Someone may love to play basketball, but the losing rate is much higher compared to winning. So things that you love to do, might not always mean that you are good at doing it. Things you are good at, may not be something you love. This is important for us to be clear of our strength so that we can further proceed to find a good position for ourselves. Step 3: What does the world need? For this step, what we want to do, is to identify what are the things that appeared in both “What you like to do” and “What you are good at”. After you have identified, list them down if you think other people in the world need it too. It can be something that helps to solve a problem that most people would like to solve, something that everyone would like to have to feel happy. Step 4: What you can be paid for?
  • 39. After you have identified what the world needs, now assess whether these topics are something that people are willing to pay money to learn or help them accelerate their speed of achieving something. That is how you find your ikigai, which I call it “sweet spot”. On the next page, I have prepared a table for you to do the Ikigai exercise. So go ahead and do it, and we will move on from there.
  • 40. What you like to do? What you are good at? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 What does the world need? What you can be paid for?
  • 41. And that’s it! You have found the topic(s) that you will never grow tired of doing, and people will pay you for it! Now, some of our partners after doing this exercise, don’t feel really confident about their topics, mainly because there are already a lot of existing courses out there teaching the same thing, and you may have encountered the same problem as well. Do not worry about it, because In the next chapter, I’m going to teach you how to position yourself in the market so that your information product will complement other people instead of competing against them.
  • 42. Money Is In The Desire ~Chris “Failure is the mother of all success” Familiar eh? This is something that we were told ever since we were young. But I only realise how true this statement is when I failed at the first launch of my online course. Yes, you read that right, before I had my first success with online course, I once failed too, and it’s a terrible one because I had ABSOLUTELY ZERO SALES! And I was devastated… I thought I had found the perfect topic to turn into an online course, and it will benefit everyone because I have so much experience in my topic! But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I started to analyse some of the successful online courses and try to find out what are the common reasons for their success.
  • 43. Turns out that, the only reason that caused my failure, is because I know NUTS about marketing. Let me explain a little bit by sharing this story with you. There was once a guy who interviewed Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. He asked Robert: “You know, I spotted a lot of grammar mistakes in your book, and I don’t understand how you can still become a Best Selling Author!” And Robert replied: “That’s why I’m not a ‘Best Writing Author’, I’m a ‘Best Selling Author’.” The common misperception is that, as long as the content is good, it will sell itself. But this is so not true, and I am the living proof of this misconception. Because without marketing, there is no way other people will know how good your content is! So I immediately dive myself into learning all about marketing strategies that even global companies like Coca-Cola, or even Mcdonalds are using. And it has made so much difference, that my second attempt in launching my online course has become a total success because I manage to enroll 300 students in 3 months with my online course selling at 300USD. What I have learned about marketing is that, having a product is simply not enough, you have to position your product into a market that already has existing demands for it to be able to sell.
  • 44. There are three main markets that has existing, and endless demands, namely health, wealth and relationships. Let me give you some examples on how to position your product into the existing market. There was a Coca-Cola advertisement, showing 1 young man and 1 elderly man sitting opposite of each other in a train. The elderly man then took out a bottle of Coke and put it on the table, and hint at the young man, as if asking him if he wants to drink. The young man stares at the bottle of coke, and reach out his hand to take it, but was stopped by the elderly man, asking the young man to look at his phone. The young man looked at his phone, and saw a friend request from the elderly man. He accepted the friend request, and the elderly man gave him the bottle of Coke. You can watch the advertisement by scanning the QR code on the right. So think about it, among health, wealth and relationships, which main market did Coca-Cola position themselves into? The answer is obvious, it’s the relationships market. Gillette, one of the well known brands for men's grooming, their ads will always show a well-dressed man with his beard shaved, accompanied by a few beautiful ladies.
  • 45. As if to tell us that by shaving the beard with Gillette shaver, men will become more attractive to women. Again, health, wealth and relationship, which one is it? So you can see, all the big brands out there are using the same marketing strategy, they position themselves into an existing market. But for us, we have to go deeper than just position ourselves into these markets. Because we are not as established and do not have the big marketing budgets like those big companies. What we are going to do, is to identify the main market, and then position ourselves into the sub-market. Let me list down some of the sub-markets for you.
  • 46. Main Market Sub-market Health 1. Weight Gain 2. Weight Loss 3. Daily Routine 4. Dietetics 5. Immunology 6. Mental Health etc Wealth 1. Investing 2. Entrepreneurship 3. Real Estate 4. Finance 5. High Demand Skills 6. Sales and Marketing etc Relationships 1. Love Consultation 2. Marriage Consultation 3. Dating 4. PR / HR Management 5. Leadership 6. Parenting etc The sub-markets that I listed here are just some of the examples that are more common, there may be more sub-markets that were not listed here. So if you can identify such market, feel free to position yourself in it. After identifying the sub-market that we want to position ourselves into, we are going to identify our ideal customer. The reason why we want to do this is because we need to be clear who we want to serve, so that we can craft a very targeted marketing message that they will be able to relate.
  • 47. Now, I need you to imagine an ideal customer who you want to help and serve. Write down their personal particular and be as specific as possible. Once you are clear with your ideal customer and your positioning, we are going to do something interesting. It’s called “Blue Ocean Positioning”
  • 48. Be Smart Be Like Jews ~Chris When I was in the process of learning how to better market my online course, I came across this Chinese speaker, talking about how the Jews are smarter businessmen than the Chinese. For example, when a Jews opened up a petrol station and business was booming, another Jews will take the chance to open up businesses that complement the existing business, for example car repairs, restaurants, souvenir shops etc. This creates a blue ocean for all business as all businesses complement each other, because people go to this area for different reasons, some might be there for food, some might be there because their car was down, but once they are done with their own agenda, there is a large possibility of them visiting other businesses. Then he asked us: “And how do you think the Chinese do their business?”
  • 49. If a Chinese opened up a petrol station and business was booming, another Chinese will open up another petrol station, then more and more petrol station will be opened up by different owner, and this area becomes a red ocean. So what we want to do is the same thing, we want to position ourselves in this space such that we complement each other, instead of competing. Now I’m going to share with you an advance strategy on how to do exactly this. I call it “Cross Pollination” Advance Strategy: Cross Pollination Please note that this is an advance strategy for a reason because it takes some time for people to understand how it works and apply. But since you have already bought the book, I don’t want to leave you with a blank by not giving you everything that I know. So, if you can get it in an instance, good for you! If you need some time to understand, please don’t force yourself to do this. What you need to do, is after you have identified your sub-market, you have to find a way to package it such that it is able to fit into another sub- market. Let me give you an example.
  • 50. ----------------------Example Start------------------------ Imagine you have a kid right now. At some point, your kid is going to grow up and they have to decide which career to choose, and they will be asking for your advice. Now, as a parent, how can you make sure that your advice will not ruin your kid for life by giving them the wrong advice? How can you guarantee that the advice you give them will allow them to have job security for the next 10 years? What if I tell you, there’s a research method that will allow you to identify a job that will still be striving for the next 10 years? You will be looking at statistics, data, so that your advice will be based on research with supporting documentation, not by how you feel, or your past experience that may have been outdated, would you like to know how to do it? Let me share with you how. To be able to find a job that will be striving for the next 10 years, all you need to do is to find a company that will continue to do well for the next 10 years, right? If I’m able to find such a company, I’m very certain that the job opportunities they provide, will also be striving for the next 10 years. Simple enough, right? This method is called “Value Investing”.
  • 51. Because the concept of value investing is all about finding companies that will be striving for the next 10 years or beyond. With the same research method, you can use it to find out what are the companies that will strive for the next 10 years and advice your children on how to get the job oppourtunities they provide. -----------------------Example End----------------------- So what I did was, I just cross pollinated a skill (value investing), which is widely known to be positioned in the investing sub-market, to the parenting sub-market. I just gave value investing a second purpose, other than investing to make money. And I can assure you, NO ONE in the parenting field as of the time when I’m writing this book, is able to teach other people how to do the same. If you know how to research companies based on value investing philosophies, you are going to be SO BIG in the parenting space. Let me give you another example. One of our partners is a blogger, and her topic is on blogging. So what are the sub-markets that blogging can be positioned under? Some people might say that it is under marketing, some people might say it’s entrepreneurship, some people might say it’s for family relationship, because they can record all the fun moments together. But what our partner did was very different.
  • 52. She teaches other people on how to travel for free by maintaining a blog! Immediately, she’s able to change her sub-market positioning to mental health (because travel makes you happy), instead of all other sub-markets that was more widely known for blogging. And she was able to achieve USD2,000 in profit just 1 day after she launched her course. Isn’t that amazing? Can you see how powerful it is to be able to master Cross-Pollination? Again, this is not something easy to do, because it requires a bit of interdisciplinary knowledge, but I still want to give you my secret because this is a rarely used but SUPER POWERFUL strategy that is going to help you tremendously once you know how to apply it. Now that you have done your positioning, you are pretty much good to go now! And there are a few indications that will tell you how much is your success rate right now. 1. Are the people in this market actively initiating discussion on this topic? When people actively initiate discussion among themselves, it means that the topic is important to them, and this is an indication that the market is ready to pay money if you are able to provide a solution. 2. Are the people in this market self organising events on this topic?
  • 53. When people self organise events on this topic, it means people are passionate about it. And it’s easy to earn money from passionate people, that’s why gaming industry generated almost $135 billion in 2018, and it’s forecasted to generate $230 billion by 2022, making it the largest market in the world, all because gamers are passionate people. 3. Does my target audience have the power and willingness to purchase? This is SO important, because without these two conditions, you will never make a single cent. Power to purchase means do they control their own money so that they can make purchasing decisions on their own. Willingness to purchase means do they see the need to purchase, simply put, does it help them solve the problem? If it doesn’t, then they won’t purchase. These indications are meant for you to refer. Other than finding out whether they have the power and willingness to purchase, there is no need for every one of them to be positive. But of course, the more the merrier, which translates to higher chance for you to achieve massive results!
  • 54. Create more with L.E.S.S. ~Sean When we talk to our students and partners about creating their online courses, many of them feel overwhelmed and upon understanding more from them, we realised that they have filled their mind with the imagination that their online course needs to be “movie-like” quality production and also they have to prepare their audience for a Phd level kind of lesson. The truth is creating an online course is much more fun and easier than you can imagine. In this segment, we will be showing you how we create our online courses using the L.E.S.S framework. You may have heard of the term, “Teach Less, Learn More”. This is true in many aspects as many teachers like to teach and pour out their wisdom to their students when in fact most of the time, the brains of the students already shut out any information as they are already mentally drained. This idea of L.E.S.S is more is important when it comes to designing our online courses. What is the L.E.S.S Framework? L.E.S.S stands for the following:
  • 55. L = Lesson Objective E = Essentials S = Structure S = Sugar and Spice
  • 56. L = Lesson Objective Creating a course is like cooking a dish! The first step is to define exactly what we want to cook. In crafting any online courses or any courses at all, it is of utmost important to first define the lesson objective. This means as a course designer, we have to clearly know this: “By the end of this lesson, the student will ______________ .” Our job is to fill in the blanks and be very precise of what the student will learn and what abilities they will be able to develop. For example, By the end of “Speak Korean in 7 Days”, the student will be able to converse in simple korean as a tourist. By the end of “Lose Weight with the One Punch Man Workout”, the student will be able to have the knowledge to craft a workout routine to help them lose weight” By the end of “The Dividends Investor”, the student will be able to buy select and buy good dividend stocks” At this point, one thing very important to note for course creators is to be REALISTIC! As course creators, we all want the best for our students, but we have to be realistic that an online course cannot achieve everything! For example, you cannot create a course where.
  • 57. By the end of “Be a Heart Surgeon”, the student will be able to conduct a heart operation on a patient with heart issues. I believe in the future, technology will advance to a point where this is possible, or perhaps the medical school has online courses to supplement their lessons, but the online courses we are creating are meant for mass markets and we do not want to over promise! To make sure, that we do not over promise, the next activity is important. This activity is to get us to define the different levels of competency our students can and should achieve as he/she progresses. For example, if you are designing a course for Korean Language Level Outcome Beginner To speak daily conversational korean as a tourist. I.e About to ask for directions, tell the time, order food. Intermediate To speak korean like a local I.e able to talk about daily affairs. Tell a story, read the news. Advanced To speak korean in specific context (Business, Medical etc) I.e be fluent in technical terms and jargons of specific context. Expert To be able to do fluent on the spot korean translation and teach korean language
  • 58.
  • 59. Another example if you are teaching stock investing Level Outcome Beginner To select and buy dividend stocks locally. Intermediate To be able to select and buy growth globally Advanced To be able to build and manage portfolio Expert To be able to use options strategies and optimize portfolio. We had some partners’ whose topics are more of a hobby. For example, Origami, baking, cooking, gardening, balloon sculpting . These can be done via difficulty levels because of the number of steps. See example “Have Fun with Origami” Level Outcome Beginner Able to complete 10 origami patterns that requires less than 20 steps. Intermediate Able to complete 10 origami patterns that requires less than 50 steps Advanced Able to complete 10 origami patterns that need more than 1 paper to complete Expert Able to create anything free style using origami
  • 60. So lets have fun with this exercise for your particular topic. You can start by asking, what does a competent beginner look like? Then you progress to intermediate, advanced and expert. If it is easier for you, you can work backwards as well. Start by asking what does an expert look like and then progress backwards. Define the levels for your topic Level Outcome Beginner Intermediate Advanced Expert
  • 61. So the first step of LESS is to have the lesson objective! And if this is your first online course, we will recommend you create a course for beginners. Once you have more than 1000 students, you can create an intermediate course, then the advanced and expert levels courses.
  • 62. E = Essentials In the previous segment, we created our clearly defined Lesson Objective, knowing what our student will be able to achieve at the end of our online course. This is of course assuming they complete our course of course. Like a medicine or diet plan is meant to achieve results IF the person actually consume it in full. We mention this as we find many course creators take it very hard when their students do not achieve the results. This is an extremely great attitude for a teacher but at the same time, we have to also know that while we can bring the horse to the water, we cannot force the horse to drink (this is a famous chinese proverb). Back to the example of creating a course is similar to that of cooking, we want to first define exactly what is the dish we want to cook. Is it pizza? It is fish noodles? Once we have the clear outcome defined, the next step is to prepare the ingredients. The ingredients needed for different dishes will be different, hence it is important to list down all that we need. We will now list down all Essential information that the students need in order to achieve what we have stated in the Lesson Objective. They need not be in any sequence as we will Structure them in the next segment. In order to write down all the lessons Essential to the Lesson objective, we will go through a 3 R process. 1. Rack 2. Research 3. Reduce 1. Rack your brain.
  • 63. The first R is to Rack your brain. This is to have fun and think of what the students need in order to meet the lesson objectives. Example for our “Korean Language Course”, the Lesson Objective is by the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak daily conversational korean as a tourist.
  • 64. Process 1: Rack Your Brain Course: Korean Language Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak daily conversational korean as a tourist. List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives 1. Ask for directions 2. Count 1 to 100 3. Self Introduction 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Write down as many as you can think of. If you are stuck, its ok, this is only step 1. But now, it is your turn to go ahead and start with step 1: Rack your brain
  • 65. Process 1: Rack Your Brain Course: Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
  • 66. The 2nd R is to Research. This is a process of searching for what already works and adapting them into our courses. This is where we are really thankful for the internet as we can do research in a blink of the eye. Gone are the days where we will have to travel to the library or open up an encyclopedia to do our research which can be very limited as well. (If you have got no idea what we are talking about… you are probably too young! Congrats for starting young! Alternatively, perhaps this book lasted through generations and reached the hands of someone in another century… Cool balls!) To do our research, we go to the internet and search for “[Your topic] online course]” In this example, we will Google “Korean Language Online Course”. Due to copyrights issues, we will not do any screen shots here. But what we do essentially is to click through to view existing courses and look at what they are offering in their syllabus. What we will do is to list down the items we get from our research.
  • 67. Process 2: Research Course: Korean Language Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak daily conversational korean as a tourist. List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives 1. Ask for directions 2. Count 1 to 100 3. Self Introduction 4. The Korean Alphabet 5. The Family 6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant 7. Time and Date 8. Shopping in Korea 9. Showering in Korea 10. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that, over there. 11. 12. As you can see, from our research process, we get more ideas on what information our students need! There may be a tendency to over research and get overwhelmed. So keep your research to NOT more than 5 sites! Ready to research? Let’s go!
  • 68.
  • 69. Process 2: Research Course: Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
  • 70. The 3rd R is to Reduce! Yes, you heard us correctly! The 3rd step is NOT to add more items. In fact, it is to look through and choose ONLY the ESSENTIALS! Example if we want to cook a pizza, garlic bread is not Essential, it is a bonus! In this process, we will look once again at our Lesson Objective and then run through the list and be very critical on what are Essentials (Must Have), and what are Bonuses (good to have). It is common for a course creator to feel that everything is important and that’s ok! But we also have to know what is really Essential to help meet the Lesson Objective. So step 3 is really to go through the list and REDUCE it. Strike out those that are not really essential! For example, we looked back at our Korean language online course and decided that some information is not really essential and thus reduce them (strike them out!).
  • 71. Process 3: Reduce Course: Korean Language Lesson Objective: By the end of the lesson, the student is able to speak daily conversational korean as a tourist. List down all the Essential Information to help meet lesson objectives 1. Ask for directions 2. Count 1 to 100 3. Self Introduction 4. The Korean Alphabet 5. The Family 6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant 7. Time and Date 8. Shopping in Korea 9. Showering in Korea 10. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that, over there. 11. 12. After reducing the list to only the essentials, we have a good amount of items to start structuring our course, which is the next step!
  • 72. S = Structure In the previous 2 segments, we have defined our Lesson Objective and also listed all the Essential modules through the 3R process. Here, once we have gotten all the ingredients, we will need to know the process and sequence of putting the ingredients together. In designing a course, there are typically 2 ways to structure a course. Structure 1: Step by Step Structure 2: Different Types Let’s go through both structure and decide which is the most suitable for your course. In some cases, it may be a hybrid. Structure 1: Step by Step The step by step structure is suitable for courses teaching technique where beginners need step by step guides on technical aspects. For example, how to invest, how to bake, how to create a website, how to do Facebook marketing. If your target audiences are beginners in your topic, a step by step structure will be the most logical. We will adopt this structure if the sequence is critical. For example, in order to learn when to sell a stock, we need to first teach how to find, how to select, when to buy before we can even teach when to sell. In most lessons, there will be some form of logical sequence! Structure 2: Different Types Some courses may be a compilation of different types. Example will be 20
  • 73. different exercises to workout indoors, or How to Fold 30 types of origami, How to bake 10 types of pizzas. Or it can be 5 modules of Korean language. We will adopt this when the modules are not sequence dependent. For example, when we learn the korean language, there is a module on ordering food from the restaurant and also a module on telling time. We can learn either first and hence the sequence is not critical! For different types, it may be logical to arrange them in sequence from easiest to most challenging if possible. This way of structuring your course assumes that your audience has already some basic understanding of your topic. These are the 2 types of structures and in some cases, we can use hybrid. Hybrid Structure When structuring a lesson, we should logically place modules based on step by step first, followed by type by type from easiest to the most challenging. Most courses will be hybrid that requires both. For example, in the Korean language, we will need to first learn the Korean Alphabets then we can learn the different modules. Another example for different workouts, we will probably need an introductory module on how to do warm up before we go on to different modules of workout from the easiest to the most challenging. So back to using our korean language course. Structuring our Korean Language Course We will first place modules that needs to be sequenced first before we can teach the rest. We will then sequence the rest of the modules by difficulty level.
  • 74. S/No Module Remarks 1. The Korean Alphabet Needs to learn this first 2. Self Introduction Level: Easy 3. Indicating Things in Korean, this, that, over there. Level: Easy 4. Ask for directions Level: Medium 5. Time and Date Level: Medium 6. Ordering Food at The Restaurant Level: Hard 7. Shopping in Korea Level: Hard Another way is to make lessons into a logical flow. For example for this korean course, we are creating it for tourist to be able to speak korean while travelling to Korea as a tourist, we may want to list the courses based on a logical sequence. For example, a tourist in korean will first arrive at the airport, then will need to get transportation to the hotel etc. So the course can look something like this as well.
  • 75. Structuring our Korean course based on sequence S/No Module 1. The Korean Alphabet 2. Self Introduction 3. At the Airport 4. Taking public transportation 5. At the hotel and ordering food 6. Asking for Directions 7. Shopping in Korea There are different ways to structure our courses but the rule of thumb is to first look through the list the sequence those that needs to be taught first upfront, then sequence the rest either via a logical flow either by difficulty level or by chronological sequence. Once we have this out, the blueprint of our course is almost ready. We will now go on to the finishing touch, making our course interesting by using “Sugar and Spice”!
  • 76. S = Sugar and Spice We have our Lesson Objective, Our Essential Modules, Our Structure! It is like we are prepared to bake our pizza with a clear outcome, essential ingredients and also the sequence of baking! But before go into the actual baking, it is time to add some sugar and spice to make our pizza a delicious one. In the previous segments, we have been focused on making sure we are FOCUSED. We are clear on what we want our students to achieve and went into bare minimum to make sure that we are not distracted by modules that are not essential to our outcome. It is like baking a bare pizza. We need the dough, we need flour and perhaps that is it! But a plain pizza without any toppings will be difficult to eat. It is time to add sugar and spice into our dish! (We recommend eating less sugar in real life for health reasons, but you get the point). Have you ever attended boring lectures? The lecturer babbled on and on about important essential lessons while students struggle to catch up or even stay awake? Some studies claim that the attention span of human beings are short and hence long lectures do not work. But at the same time, have you sat through a 3 hour movie and was captivated throughout? What is the difference? An interesting 3 hour movie can be much easier to bear than a boring 30 min lecture! The difference is simply the effort of the designer in making the time for the audience interesting and engaging. To make our courses interesting, we have a framework named, “Q.U.E.S.T”. It is a way to add Sugar and Spice into our lessons! Q.U.E.S.T stands for the following Q = Quotes (Use Interesting and thought provoking quotes) U = Unknown Facts (Start our modules by “Do you know…” will usually create interest in our audiences)
  • 77. E = Examples (Using related examples is useful to teach technical concepts) S = Story (Nobody can resist a story!) T = Test Your Audience (Start your modules by giving your audiences a quiz and/or make them participate!) Using Q.U.E.S.T Now let’s go into how we can use Q.U.E.S.T to make our content more interesting and enticing. Typically, we will suggest using one of the Q.U.E.S.T at the start of any modules or any posting on social media to make the content more interesting and to capture attention. Q = Quotes We can start our module by using interesting and thought provoking quotes from famous people. For example if our topic is about investing and we want to teach a relatively dry topic known as portfolio mamagement, we can start with a quote by famous investors such as Warren Buffett. “Investment rule number 1, never lose money. Investment rule number 2, never forget rule number 1 ~ Warren Buffett” What does it mean to never lose money and how is it possible to never lose money in investing? The secret is to a strong portfolio management system. As you can see, it makes the topic more interesting as compared to merely say that portfolio management is important and we have to pay attention in
  • 78. this particular module. Basically, the internet is filled with famous quotes. All we have to do is too google search for the particular topic and quotes. With a simple search, we can find many interesting quotes related to almost any topic we want. Here are examples of weight loss quotes: “Exercise should be regarded as a tribute to the heart.”– Gene Tunney “A diet is when you watch what you eat and wish you could eat what you watch.”– Hermione Gingold “You didn’t gain all your weight in one day; you won’t lose it in one day. Be patient with yourself.”– Jenna Wolfe Here are quotes on learning a new language: “Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.” - Rita Mae Brown “He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” - Charlemagne We can find many quotes to inspire or even humour our audiences if we just take the time and effort to make our subject interesting.
  • 79. Of course using Quotes is just one method. Let’s go through the rest of them. U = Unknown Facts Another way to start our modules is to share an Unknown, Preferably Fun or Shocking fact! For example, “Do you know that the Korean language is the largest language isolate in the world. This means unlike most Asian languages that share a language family like Mandarin or Japanese, Korean language is a language isolate.” We do not speak Korean at all and guess how do we find out about this fact? Yes, the answer is simply to search for “Fun Facts Korean Language” Another fun fact for stock investing… “Do you know that since 1916, the Dow Jones index has only been positive 52% of the time but yet from 1916 to 2019, it is already up by 25,568%! This means if you look at your investing account daily, half the time it will seem as if you are losing money since the account will be lower than the day before about half the time. But the truth is the stock market is going higher over time!” As you can see, whenever we start our modules with “Do you know…” and introduce an Unknown Fun or Shocking fact, we can capture the attention of our audiences! E = Examples
  • 80. Creating an online course is like cooking a dish! This is an example of how we use examples! When using examples, we need to use related examples and common so that the audiences can actually relate. If we use an unrelatable example, it defeats the purpose! So say, instead of using the example of cooking, we say that creating a course is like creating a nuclear bomb… Of course if we are speaking to nuclear bomb scientist, it will be relatable to them. So unless our online course is “How to create online courses for Nuclear Scientist”, it is not advisable to use that example. Since we are creating courses online and they can reach almost anyone globally, we can use universally known examples. So if we are creating a course on investing, we can use these examples. Screening for stocks is like dating. We want to choose stocks which we can marry and last long term instead of going into bad relationships. Building an investment portfolio is like building a sports team Knowing when to sell a stock is like knowing when to lay off an employee As much as possible, we aim to use examples that are commonly relatable. Granted not everyone understands dating, sports or working in a company, but these are relatively more common examples compared to nuclear bombs. S = Story When I was 15 years old, I had a Physics teacher who had a weird temper.
  • 81. He would flare up easily but once that happened, he will quickly diffuse the situation with his quick sense of humour. For example, there was a time while he was writing on the board back facing the class, we started talking and got a bit rowdy. He turned and looked at us, “Class, you are getting noisy. Please stop talking and be quiet.” We quickly stopped talking. My teacher glanced across the room with his warning glare and turned back to the board and continued writing. The silence was short lived as the students started whispering to one another and the noise level quickly grew to that of a marketplace. All of a sudden, my physics teacher slammed the board with his palm and yelled at us, “YOU GUYS ARE TOO NOISY! SHUT UP!” There was an immediate silence. This situation became tense and awkward. Our teacher’s face was red with anger and his eyes were raging! He looked at us, took a deep breath and asked gently, “Do you know why you should be quiet during my class?” No one dared to answer or make any noise. After waiting for a couple of seconds, he explained, “That’s because there are students in this class that may be falling asleep, and if you are noisy, how are they going to get a good sleep?!” We all broke into laughter! There were many more such instances and he was a memorable teacher. Most of the students in the class did well for physics that year, not because of his anger management issues, but his ability to create humour on his feet and his ability to use relatable examples.
  • 82. But best of all, he used stories to make us remember important physics concepts. I remember he made up a story of Jackie Chan executing a flying kick towards an opponent. In the story Jackie Chan successfully injured the opponent but he broke his ankle as a result of the power of the kick. This is to teach us a principle known as Action Force equals to Reaction Force, something which I remember even until today. Story-telling is probably one of the best tool for making lessons interesting. It brings our student into a different frame of mind where a movie starts playing in their head. Just as how we started this segment with the story of the physics teacher, a picture will form in your head. You will see a classroom, which a physics teacher writing on a board. This makes learning easier as our brain can remember pictures easier. So begin your modules or social media posting with stories! To tell a story, we need to have 4 key settings and 3 key elements. The 4 key settings are: 1. Who is the protagonist? There needs to be a main character in the story. If you are sharing your personal experience, the protagonist can be you. 2. When did this story happen? “Once upon a time…” This is the way we know a story is coming when we were young. By stating a time frame, our ears and mind is tuned up, ready to receive a story. Instead of once upon a time, we can start our stories with “In 2005, I was working as a waiter and ….” “2 weeks ago, I was having lunch with my friend when…..” “When I was a young boy, my father told me….”
  • 83. As you can see, once we add a time frame, we know a story is coming. 3. Where did the story take place. Whenever we watch a movie, the first scene will typically depict the location. It can be a school setting, an outdoor farm setting, a soccer field setting. Again, this allows the audience to paint a picture. 4. What happened? This is basically the main story. We should aim to reveal all the Who, When, Where and What within the first sentence so the audience are quickly drawn into the story. For example, I started my story with “When I was 15 years old, I had a Physics teacher who had a weird temper.” This one sentence would have described the 4 key elements Who: My Physics teacher When: When I was 15 years old Where: School (This is implied as the protagonist is a teacher) What: It is not described but there is a clue that it is about my teacher who has a weird temper. Besides the 4 key settings, we need the 3 key elements: an issue, a climax and a resolution. Back to my story as an example,
  • 84. Element 1 - The issue: The class became noisy while teacher was writing. Element 2 - The climax: My teacher flared up and had an outburst of anger Element 3 - The resolution: Teacher created humour and eased the tense situation. Story telling takes practice but we are sure everyone of us has lots of experiences that can become interesting stories when we apply the 4 key settings and the 3 key elements.
  • 85. T = Test Your Audience When is the korean word “Oppa” used? a. For anyone to address an male older than them b. Only for female to address an older male The answer is b. Starting our modules by testing our audience can be a way to keep them engaged. By testing your audience, what we mean is really asking them engaging questions. It was be trivial quiz, personality test or even asking for their opinions. Which title is better? Which book cover is nicer? What should be the title of my book? These are powerful ways to increase chances of engaging even using in social media posting too. Of course, the key principle is to engage. Hence it is important to ask what kinds of questions are engaging. From our experience, the question asked should actually have certain need for the audience to think! So a question like, “What is 1 + 1?” will not be engaging and in fact may be insulting. Of course unless there is a twist involved to a simple question. Conclusion So there you have it, 5 ways to add Sugar and Spice by using Q.U.E.S.T. Remember to start your modules and your posting by using one of them!
  • 86. The Best Way To Test Market Is To Put Money Into Your Pocket ~Chris By now you have heard the story of me from having complete zero sales, to being able to enroll 300 students in 3 months. One of the reasons for the drastic jump of my result is I learned to only go into a market after I know EXACTLY how the market is going to respond. Which means, I want to make sure that people are going to buy it before i go full out into producing my online course. Imagine, you have written a book, you spent 6 months to write it, you are happy with the end product and you expected TONS OF SALES when you launch it. But 1 day, 2 days have passed, and you got zero sales. Not a very good feeling, huh? Especially after you spend 6 months of your precious time, it seems all your effort just went down the drain.
  • 87. So, before I even began my second launch, I asked myself, is there any way to test the market before I start producing my online course. And I drew inspiration from how big companies like Apple do preorders for their products. Many of you know that Apple will always organise preorders when they announce their new iPhone. But do you know why they do that? It’s not because they want to keep you anticipated, it’s not because they want to generate hype. But because they want to see how much demand is there from each different market, so that they know how many to manufacture, and how many to send to each different countries, over manufacturing is going to cost them a lot of money. Think about it, when they are doing a preorder, what did they just sold to you? It’s actually just a picture of the new iPhone and a few words that explains why the new iPhone is good, that’s it! This is how another of my secret sauce is born, I call it “Success Prelaunch Masterplan”. The rationale behind “Success Prelaunch Masterplan” is very simple, I want to get people to pay me money first before my product is ready, because this is the most accurate market response that you can have.
  • 88. Imagine you open up a shop, and you tell all your friends and families about this good news, they will congratulate you, they will say it’s awesome, they will tell you that they will come and support. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will pay you money for your product. Let’s be brutally honest and face head on to the truth, if people aren’t paying money for your product, it means your product has no demand, as simple as that. So, unless people are paying you money, all the nice comments and encouragement that they might have given you, is as good as none. It’s the hard truth I know, and I have learned it the hard way, but the good news is you don’t have to go through the same thing as I did! Here’s what you need to do for the “Success Prelaunch Masterplan” 1. Craft a survey to understand market sentiment. This part is very important, because a survey is the best way to understand market sentiment, other than looking at data and analytics. In order to do that, there are 3 things that your survey needs to achieve. Firstly, you need to be able to know what’s their motivation. Because everyone’s motivation might be different, your motivation of acquiring the knowledge and skills that you want to teach might be different from other people. Some people might be because of families, some people might want to achieve bigger success, some people might want to achieve more happiness.
  • 89. So it’s really important to know what most people want from your online course. Secondly, you need to be able to know what’s their obstacles that keeps them from achieving the result they want. It may be because of time, monetary constraints, or it might be because of their family opposing. Understand what keeps them up at night, what they are worrying about, will help you to be able to craft a better solution and a better marketing message for them. Last but not least, you need to be able to know what’s their dream lifestyle or outcome, because no one buys an information product just for the fun of it. They all want to learn something, solve their problems and achieve higher height. So it is important that you understand what kind of outcomes do they want in order to tweak your information product a little bit to suit their needs. This is how a model survey looks like. Name: Email:
  • 90. Age Group: Gender: Country of Residence: Why do you want to know how to do (your topic)? (Ask for their motivation) What is your difficulty in doing (your topic)? (Ask for their obstacles) How would life be different if you know how to do (your topic)? OR How would life be different if your answer in 2 is no longer a concern? (Ask for their desired lifestyle or outcome)
  • 91. 2. Send it out to gather answers to craft marketing message Once you have crafted your survey, send it out to people who are interested in your topic to gather data on what is their sentiment. And this is where things get interesting, because we are going to use the answers they give us, to craft our marketing message. For example, we have a partner who wants to teach other people how to travel for free. So We asked her to craft out a survey to gather answers from her audience. The following are some of the answers from her survey. Why do you want to travel for free? What is stopping you from travel? What would your life be if you can travel for free? I want to live a carefree life Work I can create more memories with my family Because I want to experience the world Always worrying about my budget I can have the freedom of travel to anywhere I like I want to go out and see the world Money, cannot have better experience I can have a better travel experience that I never had before And the following are her marketing message. Do you dream to Live a Carefree Life and Travel the World without worrying about overspending?
  • 92. Do you wish to Create Precious Memories with your family and friends and embark on a life Full of Adventures? Do you want to have the FREEDOM to Travel to Anytime Anywhere You Want without forking out a single cent? Can you see how she made use of the answer to craft her marketing message so that it speaks to her audience? This is the power of survey. When done right, there is no way that your product doesn’t sell, because we sell them exactly what they wanted. 3. Announce your preorder After you have crafted your marketing message, all we need to do is to just announce to the world, that we are currently in the middle of creating an online course, and they can enjoy a preorder discount of XX% (you can decide the percentage) if they make the purchase now. That’s it! Now just wait and see how the market reacts, if you start receiving money through whatever payment gateway you use, props to you! If not, keep on tweaking your marketing message until it works, it’s that simple.
  • 93. Building Your Expert Status ~Sean In 2018, I was at a Japan conference and had the chance to speak alongside Steve Woznaik, co founder of Apple Inc. He was sharing how he and Steve Jobs created Apple and made it one of the most valuable brands on earth. I am pretty sure most of us have heard of the Apple brand. To me, it is a very weird name for a computer or electronic company. Imagine naming your company or phone after the name of a fruit… And what does “google” mean anyway? (Turns out it was a misspelled word for googol, a mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100). In this segment, we will be discussing, what is a brand and how we can build one. And as the examples above show, brand is not just a name but the feeling we give the target audience. As we study in branding, there are just too many varied definitions and since this book is all about being practical and helping our readers build a business, we will jump into the practicality of branding instead of argue over the definition.
  • 94. But in essence, for this branding exercise, we want our readers to go through a 5C process to build an effective brand. The 5 Cs are 1. Clarifying your Brand Identity and Message 2. Channel strategy 3. Content strategy 4. Credibility building 5. Calendar Planning
  • 95. Step 1: Clarifying your Brand Identity and Message The first step in branding is to first define your brand identity and your brand message. Brand identity is the “face” of your business. For example, when you think Mcdonald’s, some things come to mind. The golden arches, the mascot, how the restaurant look etc. When we say “Nike”, it will be the tick logo and the slogan “Just Do it”. The things that we associate to a business is what we know as brand identity. Each business may be different. It can be just name (Like Starbucks), the logo (The Nike Tick), the mascot (like Colonel Sanders from KFC) or even colour scheme (like google). We have to choose some brand identity if we want to build a brand. At this point in time, the more important issue is to decide if the brand is built around the person or a business. We can build both actively as well, but when we are starting out as an Infopreneur, it is better to focus on one. The easiest way to start is to build a brand around you, the teacher. That’s how most of us started building the business, by building a brand around ourselves. And as we progress, we start to brand it around a team and a company and there is where we start to create a logo, a slogan etc. You may be similar to us and want to start by branding yourself first. There is where it is easier to be invited for keynote presentations when you build yourself as an authority in your domain. But if you want to start by building a business, you will have to start thinking about the logo, the slogan etc. We will not dive deep into this area but from studies, we have come to a conclusion that most importantly, what you choose resonates with you and your mission first. Step 1b: Clarifying Your Brand Message
  • 96. Your brand message is the feeling and ideas you want the audience to associate your brand identity to. This means, whenever they see your brand identity, what do you want them to think. In fact, let’s do an activity. Using Apple as an example again, what are the words you will use to describe Apple and its products? What does their brand represent? How does having their product make you feel? Write some words in the box below: So what did you write? Some words we may associate apple to maybe: Sleek, simple, sophisticated, lifestyle, expensive, freedom, innovative.
  • 97. Even if you didn’t write these words, do you agree that these words seem to represent what Apple is? The key is that Apple had specifically branded themselves to be associated to some of these messages. It is time for you to define what is your brand message. Answer these questions below: Imagine you are now a well recognized Infopreneur. 1. How will your fans describe you to someone who does not know you yet? 2. What kind of personality will you be known for? 3. Is there a famous person that you will be associated with? (Some people will say that you are like the person, only better and in your own style) 4. What are some words, people will use to describe you?
  • 98. Now look at what you have written above and zoom in to 3 key ideas. And from the 3 key ideas, prioritize and zoom into 1 key idea. Who do you want to be known as and known for? The other remaining ideas will also add up to your own personality, But we will hold dear to the main 3 key ideas. If there are too many messages, it is difficult to build a brand. Once we have the 3 key ideas, let’s move on to step 2, channel strategies. Step 2: Channel Strategies After you have defined your brand message, you will have to decide on the channels to spread your messages. In this time and age of social media, it is getting easier to build a brand as compared to the past where we have to depend a lot of traditional media.
  • 99. We will not dive too deep into social media strategies as each social media channel will be another book by itself. From our experience, the specific strategies to optimize the social media channel will definitely help in branding building, but in the initial stage, it is more important to just put your brand out and start observing how your audiences respond to your brand. As we speak, we believe there are more and more social media platforms being created and they are evolving along the way. But to get you started, it will be smart to go where the masses are, which will be 1. Facebook 2. Youtube 3. Instagram 4. Linkedin We recommend you focus on 1 channel initially depending on which channel is most aligned to your brand message and speaks most to your target audience. Once you have decided on the channels you want to focus on, we will move on to step 3, 4 and 5. Step 3: Content Strategy Question: What kinds of content makes our audiences tick? Answer: Content that they want! Notice that the answer is not content that we want them to have, but rather content that they want. Too many times, we see starting infopreneurs getting very excited and started posting enthusiastically on social media but after some time, they begin to experience burnout.
  • 100. Upon talking to them, they get burnt out mainly because they do not see any results. It is like dieting and exercising for an entire month but not seeing any weight loss at all. Well, you know as well as I do that it is impossible not to see any results after 1 month of dieting unless something is not done correctly Similarly, if you keep posting on social media and you do not see your audience being engaged, or there isn’t any increase in following, something is not done right. One of the common reasons that we found in most aspiring infopreneurs, is that they are posting content that does not speak to the audience. In many instances, it could be using too much jargon that audiences could not understand in the first place. There was one of our students who was teaching mandarin. His posting was in mandarin, teaching common mandarin words. He wasn’t getting as much engagement as he had wanted. Initially he thought that the market for teaching mandarin was saturated and he couldn’t get any new students, But upon reviewing it with him, the problem was clear. Because he was teaching mandarin, his target audiences are those who could not understand mandarin and are interested to learn. So if his posting is in mandarin, his target audience could not understand his posting. It should have been an English posting, teaching common mandarin words. The key strategy for content, is to have your audience in mind! Think like your audience and ask yourself what will you want to know. Well, on second thoughts, perhaps it is better not to get you to think! Just like our mandarin teacher thought that the postings will be excellent ones, but they turn out not to be, thinking and assuming may turn out to be a disaster.
  • 101. So instead of thinking and assuming what our audience may want, we can simply do research and find out exactly what our audiences want. In order to do this, we can go to the most popular search engine in the world, Google. (It will be amazing to know if this is no longer true.) In google, when we search for a particular topic, there will be suggested topics too. For example: Do you realise that there is a segment that states, “People also ask” Even as you type your topic in google, suggested searches will be displayed as well.
  • 102. Do you realised how powerful this is? With a few strikes on your keyboard, you suddenly has access to what are the most popular searches in the world surrounding your topic. These are information that will cost a lot in the past to gather. In fact, we know of firms who are still paying millions to get information like these, simply because they have not read this segment in our book. Haha... Perhaps this will change with time but doing simple research like this will give you ideas on what to post in your social post channels. These posts will be more relatable to your audiences and you will see more results! Another way to make post more engaging, is also to deploy a strategy that we taught earlier. Using Q.U.E.S.T! As a recap: Q = Quotes (Use Interesting and thought provoking quotes) U = Unknown Facts (Start our modules by “Do you know…” will usually create interest in our audiences) E = Examples (Using related examples is useful to teach technical concepts) S = Story (Nobody can resist a story!) T = Test Your Audience (Start your modules by giving your audiences a quiz and/or make them participate!) Remember, as an Infopreneur, Content is King and the way we use it determines our success!
  • 103. Step 4: Credibility building As we build our brand, we will want to sprinkle Credibility posting into it as well. This means we would want our audiences to see us as an expert in our domain without us telling them we are experts. Here are some suggestions on how to be seen as an expert. These are strategies that we used ourselves. 1. Publish a Best Selling Book 2. Be invited to speak on stage at conferences and high profile events 3. Be featured as a guest on other media 4. Branding by Association 5. Higher Quality Videos Publish a Best Selling Book Publishing a best selling book is one of the most powerful ways to be branded as an expert. With so much content created for our online courses, we can compile them and create a book. In this decentralized information world, we can simply self publish our books instead of going through a publisher as well. The key to having this book is then to publicize it and make it known. But imagine having your own best selling book, your status as an expert will be elevated! Be invited to speak on stage at conferences and high profile events How does being a guest speaker at conferences and universities sound like? Yes, you will sound like an expert!
  • 104. When you have the chance, you should actively reach out to organizations that you would like to speak at. And if you have a book, you can offer to sponsor some of your books at their conferences. This increases the chance of you being an invited speaker! Be featured as a guest on other media This can be a youtube channel, a guest Facebook post or cross post in instagram. When you are a guest featured in another media, your credibility increases. Of course the big game is to go on national tv or the news. We have used our books to appear as guest on these medias as well. Branding by Association Another powerful way is to brand yourself with other famous experts in your domain. Ways you can do that is 1. Attend any events featuring these experts and take photos with them 2. Request for an interview 3. Ask for a testimonial for your book 4. Attend their classes or get them as mentors if possible Personally we love to continue to attend classes and improve. So these are opportunities to be associated by being trained by other experts.
  • 105. Step 5: Calendar Planning Finally, all the 4Cs above will not be meaningful if we do not consistently post out in the media and reach out. So it is important to have a media calendar. Depending on how much resources you have, you can post on social media accordingly. For a start, you should plan to post 3 times a week. So schedule it into your calendar! Example to post at 8am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And you can even set themes. For example Mondays will be weekly vlog Wednesdays are mini lectures Fridays will be related news for that week. Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun Weekly Vlog Mini Lectures News of the Week Weekly Vlog Mini Lectures News of the Week Weekly Vlog Mini Lectures News of the Week Weekly Vlog Mini Lectures News of the Week
  • 106. Posting these should be fun as these are things related to topics you are passionate about. If you start to get bored researching on these topics, perhaps it is the wrong topic to begin with So there you have it. The 5Cs to create and build your brand! Go for it!
  • 107. Education and Duplication: Expanding Overseas ~Sean In Nov 2014, we started an education company and by Dec 2017, we were in more than 24 cities globally, making a couple of millions in revenue. It should be the goal of all businesses to go global as it is not only good for branding purposes, it is also a natural growth process. The good news about being an Online Infopreneur, is that global expansion does not require as much effort and capital as traditional businesses. In fact, once we post our courses online, it is somewhat international already. When we expanded our education business overseas, we had to take note of many issues such as 1. Cultural Issues 2. Translation 3. Working with Local Partners 4. Working with Legal Issues 5. Taxation Issues And many more depending on the countries we are in.
  • 108. Each country and even each state is different in terms of culture and business procedures. But when we started building our business online, most of the issues are not as tricky. Probably the only one that is still relevant will be translation issues if we want to translate our courses into another language. If you are interested to translate your course into other languages, it will be wise to do some research to see the market size. As of 2019, these are the top languages in the world 1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion speakers) 2. English (983 million speakers) 3. Hindustani (544 million speakers) 4. Spanish (527 million speakers) 5. Arabic (422 million speakers) 6. Malay (281 million speakers) 7. Russian (267 million speakers) 8. Bengali (261 million speakers) Of course, the market size is one consideration. The other consideration will also be your personal goal. For example, if one of your goals is to set up an education business in Japan, then it is logical to have your courses translated to Japanese. Here are some sites to help with your translation 1. www.rev.com 2. www.Upwork.com Conclusion We are blessed living in the Internet age where it is easy to expand our businesses globally and potentially reach the entire globe! So go forth and spread your passion and message!