Freed online English course helps teachers and students to share in its success
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Free used to get noticed, but does it always now? Paid makes money but only if you have some to advertise it in the first place.
Free has a reputation for meaning incomplete or sub-standard. It also really needs volume and to continue to be funded a reasonable chance of becoming number one. It isn't really inclusive and doesn't really promote market diversity. Paid has more kudos but comes at a premium and those advertising costs have to be paid for somehow. It also only puts profits into the bank accounts of wealthy shareholders and top executives.
So what do you do if you have a great digital product that you need to sell to make money but can't afford to advertise to make sure you get noticed?
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Last year I was asked to speak at the ETCon2 online educational conference by award winning edu-blogger Kirsten Winkler. She asked me and some other online language service providers to talk about communities and the power of crowdsourcing. I had been wrestling with the whole free v paid conundrum like everyone else but then it struck me that we could sell our content very cheaply because it was digital, making it affordable by virtually everyone in the world. I called it freed content (All of 'free' with a little bit of 'paid'..the 'd'). Content that was almost free. Our ebooks cost from just 25 US cents per hour to buy and the more you use them the cheaper they become.
More recently, I realised that we could do something a bit different in the world of educational publishing and encourage our teachers and students to become our sales team. I had found a way to deliver our product so that it could be secure and totally flexible (i.e. uploaded into virtual classrooms to teach without any DRM issues). At around the same time we had started to get a lot more glowing reviews from teachers and students using EOT. Hence we now have freed content that enables our user advocates, teachers and students, to earn a decent commission from selling it to their friends and colleagues via their blogs and social media profiles in places such as Facebook.
It is almost free to buy, but will reward the loyalty and efforts of those who use it and tell their friends about it. If a student buys an ebook and then sells four to his classmates his content is effectively free.
If a teacher buy an ebook and then sells four to their colleagues in their LinkedIn group then their teaching materials are effectively free.
Once they have sold four copies they are earning money and have become the sales and marketing department for English Out There. That's not their only earning potential. A teacher buying a complete set of EOT courses effectively becomes a franchisee and can set up in business online instantly with six 60 hours courses that are proven to work.
It is still early days, but the noise is growing and teachers and students who have experienced English Out There have signed up as sales affiliates and are promoting the content on their blogs and social networking groups.
Above are the videos of my presentation from the ETCon2 that took place inside a wiziq.com virtual classroom. Below is the presentation without me babbling on!
Presentation and Q&A with Kirsten Winkler (E Teachers Academy), other presenters were Kevin Chen (Italki.com), Bernhard Niesner (Busuu.com) and Jason West of Languages Out There. We all had a slightly different take on the subject but seemed to agree on a number of fundamentals.
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