Eric's surefire method to build a mini-course

One of your objectives as an AdSense publisher should be to diversify your income base and to draw more traffic to your sites at the same time. A proven way to do this is by offering a “mini-course”, which is basically a sequence of emails that teach subscribers how to do something. For example, Brad Callen of SEO Elite fame offers a mini-course on “Search Engine Domination” (see the previous link to subscribe), although the course has gone beyond the “mini” stage and is up to almost 60 lessons now! The nice thing with mini-courses is that you have access to a targeted list of people who have willingly agreed to listen to what you have to say on a subject. While you can't embed AdSense ads in the emails you send them, you can certainly point them to pages on your sites that do have ads and also point them to products and services that make you money via affiliate programs. (Don't abuse your subscribers, though, otherwise they'll just unsubscribe… go for long-term retention.)

Here then is my surefire method for creating a mini-course, which I've used to create my Profitable Niche Discovery mini-course. It works because you do most of the things in reverse order:

1. Choose a topic. Make sure it's something you know and understand quite well, otherwise this method will be too stressful. (Use my course to help you choose the topic!)
2. Register for an autoresponder account. An autoresponder is critical, because it automates the subscription and email delivery process.
3. If you don't already have an appropriate domain, register one and setup your web hosting.
4. Choose a short but catchy title for your course. This title will be the first thing on the subject line of your emails, so it has to be something that will catch the subscriber's eyes in their inbox. Starting courses with the title, as in “Profitable Niche Discover, Lesson 3″ ensures that they can be easily found and sorted by the receiver.
5. Build the “squeeze page”. A squeeze page is a signup page that tells the potential subscriber what the course is about and what benefits they'll get from subscribing. Do not show ads on the squeeze page. The point of the squeeze page is to get someone to subscribe. Writing a good squeeze page is an art. Don't be too spammy, be truthful. Leave space for a subscription box. Of course, you haven't actually written the course yet, so your squeeze page is going to essentially become your course outline!
6. Now go back to your autoresponder and create the mailing list for the course. Give it a relevant name. Generate a subscription form and paste it onto the squeeze page.
7. Write the first lesson. The message subject is the name of the course plus something like “Lesson 1″. Be sure to thank the reader for subscribing and make the first lessons useful so they don't immediately unsubscribe! Promise that the next lesson will show up in 2 to 4 days after the first one.
8. If you want, you can place the text of your lessons on your web site instead of in the emails. This lets you display AdSense ads on them. It also lets you talk about topics that otherwise get filtered by the reader's spam filter. If you do this, however, do not use obvious URLs for the lesson pages. If a subscriber sees “Lesson1.html”, they may just try “Lesson2.html” immediately. Most courses suffix the lesson with a random character sequence, as in “Lesson1-kr.html”, to avoid this. The downside of putting lessons on your site is that readers have to click through to read the lesson.
9. Stop with the first lesson. Now announce your mini-course on your site, to your existing mailing list(s), etc. You might even place AdWords ads for it.
10. Wait until someone (besides you — always sign up for your own courses to test that everything's working) signs up for the course.
11. Once someone signs up, the clocks starts ticking. You have 2 to 4 days (whatever you said) to write the next lesson. (Autoresponders let you set a time delay between message deliveries.) Write the second lesson!
12. Now repeat the process. Each time you get the latest lesson delivered to your own mailbox, start writing the next lesson.
13. Continue this until you're done the course.
14. Even after you're done the course, send out an occasional new message with more information, bonuses, etc. Keep your list happy!

Nothing like a real deadline (there are real people waiting to hear what you have to say) to get the creative juices going…

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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