Who is getting paid?

Hi Russ-

Great question. I'm sure some folks will chime in on this thread, but you might want to check out another, similar thread on selling courses:

http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/7997/47365.aspx

Thanks for the reply, Dave. Yeah, I'd seen that thread already. A bit of a different case than I'm talking about. I'd like to get a group of people together who are already in the business of creating courses, then selling access direct to end users. I'm doing pretty well at it but want to brainstorm some issues with others who are doing the same thing.

Hi Russ,

Although I haven't published such a course yet, a friend and I have done a fair amount of research.

We're leaning towards creating membership site(s) with a tool such as Wishlist Member or MemberWing-X. The courses would be available to those who have bought specific membership levels.

Some of the big Internet Marketing Gurus manage their courses through Magnetic Sponsoring.

Jim

Howdy, Jim. I tend to use a more brute force method - I create a PayPal payment button, then after people pay they're taken to a page that supplies the password. Upside is that it's low tech and easy. Downside is that everyone gets the same password (making it easy to pass around). One of the membership tools I've played with a bit is aMember. It works pretty well, but I just don't like the aesthetics of it.

I also have some more advanced sites that do their own databasing. They're clearly the best way to do it, but also the most difficult to implement and maintain.

I guess not many people are selling access to their own courses. I would have thought otherwise. Maybe most people in here do it as a job for a company, or develop under contract to others.

Hey Russ,

I've been working with a colleague to look at options and put a plan together.The options / requirements we're looking at include some asynchronous facilitation / discussion elements and offer some presence / identity features in addition to launch and track of content modules. One of the systems on our short list is Ruzuku. For the price, it's hard to ignore. They integrate payment and also offer the facilitation and connection features we think add the human touch that can be absent from an exclusively self-paced module.

We also thought about customizing a Wordpress installation to do something similar. I think this could also work but would require quite a bit of customization.

Hi Russ,

Thank you for the feedback.

I'll keep you posted about what I learn.

It would great to have a way to manage course sales to corporations. For example, corporation ABC buys a course for 100 of its' employees. Employees join the course through the corporate link. The system ensures that there are not more than 100 students from corporation ABC.

There would be an LMS and a forum that could be optionally dedicated to the corporations' employees.

Haven't found anything like that yet.

It seems that there are two approaches.

* Start with an LMS and work out the membership management.
* Start with a membership solution and work out LMS details.

Any ideas?

Thank you,
Jim

I use WordPress and Wishlist Member for the Elearning Blueprint. The blueprint is more of a reference site than a course, but some of the principles involved are the same.

I'm not sure that I would recommend Wishlist Member, but when I've looked for a replacement, I haven't found anything really appealing. I agree that aMember isn't very good-looking or intuitive.

An additional challenge is that many membership site programs assume you're selling individual access directly to consumers, so if you're actually selling group access to a business, you might have to customize or force things. Wishlist lets you determine how many IP addresses can use a single log-in, so one team of X people can share a log-in but can't spread it throughout the entire organization.

The "sell-your-course" sites assume that you're selling a linear, screen-by-screen course. These give you the advantage of LMS-style tracking for clients who need it, but they limit the formats you can use. For what it's worth, of the more than 500 customers of the blueprint, only two have asked if they can track users, and both were fine with the fact that they can't. (Again, however, it's more of a job aid than a course.)

Finally, I recommend avoiding PayPal. I'm one of those PayPal horror stories. PayPal froze my business account with all the money in it when someone else used my SSN somewhere in Minnesota. PayPal notified me of my lockout with an email in which they flatly accused me of stealing my own SSN, even though they had received and approved all of my proof-of-identity docs two months earlier. After several intense phone calls, I got unlocked again and left.

It's definitely worth it to go through the minor hassle required to be approved by a real merchant account provider and Authorize.net. Not only will you be treated professionally, your money will go directly into your own FDIC-insured bank account.

Russ, if you set up your mastermind group, I'd be interested in joining.

Steve, thanks for pointing out Ruzuku. I had forgotten about them. They have a lot more format flexibility than the sites that assume you're selling a screen-by-screen "course."

This isn't a freebie, but does look nice and depending on your size, could be an option: http://www.memberclicks.com/products/index.html. There does seem to be a gap in the market for solutions that don't fit either the education model or corporate model. Many of my clients are looking for LMS lite and as vendors of custom e-learning, there are probably a few out there who would be interested in what you are suggesting. I'm following this thread with curiousity

I'm real late to the party.  Hope someone is still listening.  I've been successfully selling my courses to individuals for a couple of years using a 'lazy' model I developed in cooperation with an industry organization.  But as Bob Dylan says, 'The times they are a changin' and I'm looking to improve my practice, expand my horizons and ultimately generate more income.  Please include me in any off line discussions