CHRIS BROGAN

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How Online Courses Changed My Business

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Online Courses
I’ve been teaching online courses for the last three or four years. When I started out, it was because Julien Smith told me that I ought to teach people how to create their own blog topics. That evolved into Blog Topics: The Master Class, and since then, I’ve launched a dozen or so more.
Over time, online courses came to represent over 70% of my revenue. That wasn’t overnight, and it wasn’t immediately intentional. But I want to explain how online courses changed my business, and I want to further explain the potential for you.

How Online Courses Changed My Business

My work consulting has always been fun. I get to speak to huge companies in one capacity or another. I’ve worked with Google and Pepsi and Coke and Disney and all kinds of other great people. I love being there in person and sharing ideas and thoughts and trying to help guide people’s efforts to grow their capabilities and connections.
But one drawback of an in-person engagement is that you can only do and say so much. Unless I’m going to embed with the company, I’m usually only there for a day or two. Even if I were to work on retainer, that’s just a lot of check-ins and nothing as methodical as I found that I was able to deliver in a course.
Plus, there’s the cost. I charge a lot for my time. To get me on a plane once a month isn’t inexpensive. So, I started thinking about whether I could deliver the baseline parts of my strategy and learning via courses. And the answer was yes.

What Goes Into Building an Online Course

We just reopened Online Course Maker for another week of registration. I’ve been excited to work with over 500 course makers on their offerings, and it’s been neat seeing what people want to cover in their own courses. It’s also teaching me what goes into making a good online course.

  • Work from a strong framework to guide what will be delivered.
  • Build the learning so that it’s bite-sized and modular.
  • Solve a specific problem and show a specific area for potential gain.
  • Courses work better with a community element.
  • Make definitive how-to information that gives people a way to advance their understanding.

Beyond this, I’ve learned that there’s a lot of technology questions, that people have huge marketing and sales education needs, and that people are nervous about wiring everything together, so they hesitate. On that last one, I’ve learned that having 500+ classmates to help you through that hesitation is what seems to signal the wins for people.

Check Out Online Course Maker

If you’re thinking about delivering online course materials, I’ve built out a really simple framework to help you turn your ideas into content, how to price and sell it, and how to deliver the final product. Check out Online Course Maker and see if you’re ready.
(Note: the doors are only open til May 5th at 11:59pm ET. If you miss that window, it will be a while before we offer the next class.)

My Ideal Buyer Partner

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Chris Brogan

The people who work best with me are trying to grow their business. They may or may not be employees of some other company, but they want to grow their business, their part of the story. They are looking for next-level advantages.

My ideal buyer partner is trying to better understand the digital space. Maybe they were told “just use social media” and nothing happened. They tweeted as much as everyone else. They started a blog that nobody ready. They started (and likely abandoned) their email newsletter.

What I Do To Help

Over the last several years, Owner Media Group (and formerly Human Business Works) has helped everyone from the big guys like Sony and Microsoft and Google and Disney with some of the above, and we’ve helped individuals like you with the same.
Mostly, I share strategies and approaches for making this all work for you.

Current and Upcoming Projects

  • Belong: Insider’s Group (coming) – a media powered community incubator, where we work with partners to help better develop the community they serve and improve their marketplace opportunities. This is a kind of mini-mastermind with the primary goal being cross-member support and pollination.
  • Belong: Earn More Customers (coming) – use media and community efforts to develop a bigger and more engaged customer base. This covers the mechanics of developing a better online presence to serve your offline or online business. I fix a lot of your “broken” experiences in this course.

  • Online Course Maker (next class opens April 28th) – stop trading hours for dollars and learn how to help others via an online course. Over 500 makers are currently developing ways to help the community they serve.

How I Deliver These Projects

  • Webinars – A quick one-hour-ish dive into a strategy and related tactics.
  • Private Membership Groups – Ongoing access to myself and others seeking to grow their capabilities and connections.
  • Courses – Deeper dive work to get you fully set up to succeed.
  • Speeches – Strategy & vision work from the stage (or in the boardroom).
  • Consulting – Deep dive work either in person or virtually. (I do this sparingly these days)
  • Retreats – We’re planning a few in-person deep dive retreats for people looking to get even more out of their growth and learning.

Referring An Ideal Buyer Partner

Depending on which of the above best suits you, there are a few ways to refer people.

  1. It’s always best if someone joins my newsletter. That tells people pretty quickly whether they’ll like my style or not.
  2. If you’d like to earn money for your kind referrals, we have a great Affiliate program, where on MOST offerings, we pay 50% commission to you.
  3. For speeches, please refer to my speaking page.
  4. For Consulting, please scroll down my about page and use the contact form there.
  5. The retreats will be announced on the newsletter.

What I Most Want to Do

My goal in explaining all this is to be sure that if someone’s struggling with the strategies, tactics, tools and connections to succeed in developing out their digital presence to serve their offline and online business, that people know how to reach me and get the help they need.
When I don’t know how to help someone, I often know the person who does. I’m very happy to refer people where it makes the most sense.

Now, are YOU going to make a post like this and help others understand YOUR ideal buyer partner or customer?

100 Blog Topics for Your Business

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Digital business Mastery Seven years ago, I wrote a post entitled 100 blog topics I hope you write. A lot of them still hold up rather well. But I thought it might be fun to give you a NEW list of 100 blog topics to make your own. So if you’re looking for blog ideas, or just a whole new list of things to blog about, I’m hopeful this helps your writing.

Please feel free to share this list, but please link back to this page to do so. Thanks!
Oh, and edit these to fit your specific business. They’ll work.

100 Blog Topics

The first 20 are for helping you differentiate and build business

  1. How What I Do Helps You Grow Your Business
  2. Get More From Your (Whatever Product/Service You Offer)
  3. How We Start an Engagement With You (onramping process)
  4. Build Your Own (Business or Project) With Our Help
  5. Meet Our Customer of the Week(Month)
  6. Learn How to ____ With ___ (customer you love)
  7. Stretch Your Budget By (something to do with your product)
  8. Industry Insights That Could Impact Your Business
  9. Need to Reach Us? Here are Many Great Ways to Connect
  10. Set Aside 20 Minutes Each Day to Do This

Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting

  1. What We Do Instead of Advertising
  2. How Can We Help You Do More Business
  3. Why We Don’t Worry About Competitors
  4. Others Compete on Price. We Compete on Value
  5. The People Who Work Here
  6. We Asked Everyone in the Office for Their Philosophy on Success
  7. Another Perspective on Your Current Situation
  8. Comparison Shopping is Difficult. Let Us Help
  9. Why You Won’t Find ____ At (Our Business)
  10. Does ____ Matter to You?

PicMonkey Photo editing made of win

I call this next set the “you probably won’t dare to use these at your company” set.

  1. When It All Goes Wrong
  2. Confessions From Past Mistakes
  3. How We Deal With Trouble Reports
  4. We Can Handle Criticism, Especially If You Help Us Grow
  5. Where Do You See Us Falling Short?
  6. We Asked Everyone in the Office for One Personal Failing of Theirs
  7. Here’s What Would Make Us Fire You as a Customer
  8. We’re Sorry And Here’s How We’ll Make It Up To You
  9. Forgetting Something? We Sure Did
  10. Listening Better And How It Will Strengthen Our Relationship

Blogging:The Master Class

Here are some fun ones!

  1. What We Do When We’re Not Hard at Work
  2. Stop and Smell the Guns N Roses – Our Playlists
  3. Collaborate With Us on a Selfie Project!
  4. And You Thought You Knew Everything About Us
  5. Listen to our (CEO, whoever) Belting Out (some popular song, poorly).
  6. Easter Eggs We’ve Hidden in Our Website SO FAR
  7. This Has Nothing To Do With Our Business, But It’s Cool (do this sparingly, though)
  8. Is There More Going on Here Than Immediately Obvious?
  9. Sparta! Our Favorite Movies and How They Relate to (Our Business)
  10. I See What You Did There

OptinMonster

It’s always someone’s first time on your site

  1. Start Here
  2. The Big Picture About (company/site/project)
  3. Whatever You Do, Be Sure to Do This FIRST
  4. The Essential 101 Guide to ____ (whatever you do)
  5. Making Your (something about your business) Into a Habit
  6. When Should You Revisit Your (strategy/purchase/something to explain timing)
  7. Get the Most Out of Your (product/service/experience)
  8. Have You Visited Our Other Properties? (Facebook, YouTube, etc)
  9. Meet the Founders
  10. If Only I Knew This When I Started

Blogging:The Master Class

Some Thought Pieces

  1. How Mobile Technology Impacts (your business or product or their space)
  2. When Budget Limitations Strike, Do This to Improve Your Chances of Success
  3. If We Started This Business Ten Years Earlier (or 10 years later)
  4. The Global Opportunity for (whatever you do)
  5. A Completely Different Take on (whatever you do) Using Low Tech Methods (tools, etc)
  6. What (your business) Would Look Like in the Real World (or online, if you’re in the real world)
  7. The One Big Guiding Principle That Explains Our Path of Action
  8. Are You Ready For (some impending technology shift)
  9. Does Anyone Really Use a Laptop Anymore? (or any tech you want to poke at)
  10. How Will the Population Growth of Baby Boomers Affect (your business)?

Timely Website Calendars

Getting personal can have a big impact

  1. What You Don’t Know About Me – Yet
  2. Where I’m From: An Interview With Our Staff About Their Origins
  3. What Your Kids Can Teach You About (your business)
  4. Our Favorite Foods and What It Tells You About (your business)
  5. A Brand Is What They Say About You – Here’s How That Applies to Us
  6. If (your business) Were a High School Yearbook
  7. Client/Customer Stories That Make Us Love Our Job
  8. If I Didn’t Work Here/ Didn’t Do What I Was Doing
  9. The Biggest Challenge I’ve Yet to Accomplish
  10. What the Benefit of OUR Hindsight Can Teach You

Blogging:The Master Class

Participatory posts can be pure gold

  1. Ask Us Anything
  2. Caught in the Wild – Show Us Your Office Environment
  3. We Asked Our Customers to Draw Us a Picture And Here’s What We Got
  4. Ten Of Our Customers’ Logos Redesigned by Our Kids
  5. If You Ran (our business), What Would You Do Differently?
  6. Come Work Here for a Week and Change Our Business From Within
  7. Twenty Photos We Liked from Your Instagram Streams
  8. Shared Wisdom from Our Weekly Tweet Chat
  9. We Pretended We Were 7 Other Blogs. What Happened Next Will Change You.
  10. Your Best Questions Answered Loudly

OptinMonster

Give people recipes and they’ll see how to use your services

  1. How to Start a (business you could start with your product/service)
  2. If You Run a (business like you serve), Here’s How We Fit In
  3. Six Ways You Can Use Your (product/service) to Make Money (save time, etc)
  4. Use This (other company’s thing) To Really Up Your Game
  5. Bring a Friend to (your site) and Here’s How You BOTH Benefit
  6. Do This Before The Next Conference You Attend
  7. Want to Turn Other People’s Business Cards Into Actual Business?
  8. You Know What You Want and We Know How to Help You Get It
  9. A (some customer segment)’s Guide to (Using Your Product/service)
  10. Beyond Day One – Get The Most From Your (thing you sell)

Blogging:The Master Class

And a little potpourri for you

  1. Sure We’ve Said This Before. Repeats are Good for You
  2. A New Look At Our First Offering (to refresh your products)
  3. Our Take on Big Data (or some other random concept)
  4. What a (something odd) Can Teach You About (the field you work in)
  5. You’re Doing It Wrong
  6. (X) Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started
  7. Are You Doomed to Fail Just Like (insert dead company)
  8. The Biggest Mistake (people like them) Make
  9. How to Recover From a (whatever goes wrong in your field)
  10. Finish Strong – What We Know About Helping You Close Sales

Blogging’s Great, But It’s Part of a Larger Digital Business Platform

I want you to peek at Digital Business Mastery and see if you think this might help you get even further along in your business goals online. If you want more about blogging specifically, there’s also Blogging:The Master Class, a course that’s drive lots of business value for people like you.
Glad you’re here! Enjoy!
Chris BroganChris Brogan is the world’s leading authority on owning the game you most want to win. He is CEO of Owner Media Group, a sought after public speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of eight books and counting. Learn more about him at chrisbrogan.com

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100 Blog Topics Chris Brogan PDF

The Single Most Effective Change I Made to My Digital Presence

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Chris Brogan People ask me quite often whether the world of social media has changed much. The answer is yes. It’s changed a lot. There are lots of details to think about. I’ll give you those. But I also wanted to share the single most effective change I made to my digital presence.

What’s Changed In Social Media

Here’s a quick list:

  • Then: conversational. Now: promotional.
  • Then: thoughtful sharing. Now: shovel it over the wall.
  • Then: “I’m hungry for lots of great information.” Now: “I’m drowning in information.”
  • Then: just being here is great! Now: where are MY people?

To me, this isn’t exactly bad. I’m not pining for the good old days. You can still do a lot of the “then” choices, if you are conscious about it. No one’s pushing you to do anything specific (unless you’re silly enough to try and figure out algorithms like Klout).

But it also means that something has to change in your tactics, lest you make the mistake of thinking your strategy and efforts are the bees knees.

Find Your Freaks

The biggest change I made to my digital presence is that I stopped trying to please everyone and I started serving the very specific community I’ve had the pleasure to serve. From that one change, a lot of things have happened. I don’t blog here at [chrisbrogan.com] as much. Instead, a lot of the good stuff is hiding in my newsletter.

Further, instead of working tirelessly on more and more free information that people are going to treat as free (“I’ll just read this later, meaning never.”), I put a lot of my effort into building low cost but valuable information projects like the Owner’s Mastery Foundation Group and my new Digital Business Mastery course. It’s not that I don’t provide free information. My newsletter is free. This blog is free. My magazine is free. BossFit is free. Instead, I just add a lot more value to the not-free information, because the people who are choosing to consume that information are really doing something with it.

And finally, I work hard at finding my freaks. I had an amazing telephone conversation with a very smart guy today. I knew within two sentences that he was part of the Monchu. I actually offered to grab up Gary and jump on a plane to England to hang out with him because I know that I can help him grow his business. But is this new guy a freak? Absolutely! The best kind. Passionate like the best of them. And so he’s a freak I want to know and spend time around.

And Is This Effective?

Let me ask you this: are you creating digital material to get comments? Are you creating digital material because you hope people like it (and you)? Swell! That’s great. But me? I’m building something, and I need to gather up the people who want to work on their growth and goals in the ways that I can help. If I can’t help you, I don’t want to take up your time. And that is definitely effective. For you and for me. Because you don’t have to waste time going through material of mine that you find uninteresting or not immediately helpful, and I don’t have to worry about how better to serve you.

I’m having the best experiences of my life right now thanks to the experiences coming out of the newsletter, and projects like OMFG and DBM. And the biggest project of mine is yet to come. But you might not hear about it here. In fact, I know you won’t. So sneak into the newsletter, or lurk here. Either way, I’ll know what to do.
Rock on, freaks. : )

Owners and Marketers are Two Very Different Things

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Magazines I run a business magazine called Owner magazine and I helped Jacqueline Carly cofound her magazine, BossFit, about fitness and health. As owners, the goal is “grow the business.” It’s pretty simple. And I like to think of it that simply. But this got me thinking just how much of a difference there is between owners and marketers. And I can illustrate this with one crazy and lovable dynamo of a guy.

My Chocolate Store Doesn’t Know Who Gary Vaynerchuk Is

The owner of the little chocolate store in town has no idea who Gary Vaynerchuk is. I know because I asked her. But I was being silly. She doesn’t know who I am, except that I like her iced coffee. But if I tell her what Gary says about how to sell better, she gets it and loves it. She just put her first Facebook page together. She’s not sure why she did it, but she knows that people seem to use Facebook a lot.

As an owner, she needs sales. What she doesn’t need are spreadsheets that tell her how to find the best influencers in the community. Who’s the influencer in the small town chocolate shop Klout bucket, I wonder? She doesn’t want to “join the conversation” as much as she wants to understand how it could possibly be that she’ll post pictures in Facebook and this will somehow drive people to her store.

Marketers, quite often, find themselves forced into filling out spreadsheets, trying to “stay current” with “trends.” They worry that they’re not utilizing the best SnapChat strategy (shudder). They might try to get my chocolatier to create an ebook about chocolate.

But Gary Vaynerchuk Sells

Where “marketers” (and I use the quotes to separate out those with the title versus the skill) go awry is that they forget that marketing is a function of sales. And where the best marketers come from is learning that marketing is really sales+customer service+a great story (in roughly that order). Gary knows this. Gary sold the hell out of wine. He sells the hell out of whatever he is working on. If you haven’t seen him sell the crap out of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook (affiliate), you ain’t seen nothin’ like real selling in action.

If you tell Gary you bought the book, he might ask you why you didn’t buy five copies. (Kind of joking, kind of not.) He believes in it. He KNOWS it’s the answer to some of your challenges. He’s nearly religious about it. That’s not marketing. It’s pure force of will. There’s no trend analysis at play. Gary wants you to buy the damned book, read it, love it, do the work, and reap the rewards.

Marketing is Sales+Customer Service+And a Story

I mean, if I had to pay someone to market for me, for Owner magazine, I would want them to tell me how they’d help me get more business, get more subscribers, while maintaining the value. I’d want them to tell me the story of the Owner community, of how the people I’ve got the pleasure to serve will use what we do. And then I’d want them to sell and service those same people with outright love and passion.

Sometimes, people tell me they’re afraid of sales, and that’s why they’re marketers. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. The question would have to be: If I hire you, how will the money I spend on you add to the money I make by selling my product or service? If you answer that with “I’ll help you join the conversation,” that might not cut it.

I’ll admit this is a somewhat “in progress” thought. I mean, I know what I think. I’m trying to make my output of it more useful. What’s your take on this?

CHRIS BROGAN MEDIA

The easiest way to contact me is through email. That’s me. Not some assistant. Me. How’s that?

[email protected]

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