How Microsoft Excel By Infinite Skills Makes Money
By Richard
Something a little different! As you can imagine this is an information product for people trying to learn their way around Excel. What you might not realize without doing anymore research is that this product sells for $99 and has sold over 24,481 copies! Buuuuu yao!!
It’s a terrific example of what can be achieved when you teach people an important skill – the kind of skill they can use to increase their earning capacity…kaching styles.
What skills do you have that would help people earn more money, get a rise, land a better job etc?
As you can see with this case study, it’s possible to crush it by teaching something as basic as Excel 2010 for beginners!
Let’s look at why Infinite Skills did so well.
First of all, the product is delivered as an online course with most of the teaching coming through video – think narrated screencasts where the presenter literally walks you through Excel. This format makes learning Excel sooooo much easier (and fun) than conventional methods like books and allows students to learn at their own pace (compared to in-class presentations).
Oh that brings up another big point; the product is a like for like replacement for expensive $1000+ real world courses.
Which makes me ask…what can you create an online course in that could replace expensive ass real world courses?
Everything from how to speak Dutch to how to cook Russian food could possibly work, as does salsa, yoga etc etc.
Best of all, this ideation technique is simple. Just Google around for real world course providers, get their course list and then go through it one by one. What can you do an online version for?
Why else did this course kill it?
Udemy. Udemy is an online platform for creating, marketing and delivering an online course. ie all you need to do as the expert is create the content and upload it. Udemy does the rest, as it provides user friendly technology and backend, and via it’s internal search engine, email list (this is huuuuuuuuuuge, just like it is with platforms like App Sumo*!) and website, it markets your course. Just like AppSumo does with info products.
* The guys at App Sumo mentioned that something like 70% of their sales come from email campaigns to their lists!!
All this stuff is done for you. Amaaaaazing. Especially for those of you reading this right now and thinking you don’t know how to do all the technical stuff like create a website, work out hosting, setup a membership plugin, integrate email marketing, setup a payment gateway, work out an affiliate program etc etc.
With Udemy you can kill procrastination brought on by fear of the unknown. You can focus on what truly matters…creating the content.
Also, what it fantastic about Udemy is that they only take 30% or even less; 15% if the purchaser is a referral from your own website/blog. Udemy has some competitors in this space such as Traindom, but whoever you go with, just get going!
PS if you didn’t do the math earlier, let’s assume Infinite Skills referred none of the 24,000+ purchasers…still, what did they make? $1.7 million!
There may have been some corporate/wholesale deals in here, but still, we’re talking north of a million for a 9.5 hour video course! Now obviously this is a massive success story. But even the more modest successes, eg aPhotoshop Crash Course with 2,371 students at $40, is a resounding success.
Visit Microsoft Excel by IS or check out Udemy where case study originally spotted