Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s are all the rage right now…and for good reason. But they don’t seem to make decent money…or often any money.

Many of them follow the ‘freemium’ business model by giving away their course content for free but then charge for other things like job placement, certification, licensing, and a whole range of other related things.

Freemium doesn’t really appeal to me. I guess I’m just not an open source kind of guy…I wanted to start my own online school…but I wanted to charge for it.

…so I did.

Amazingly enough, people pulled out their credit cards and signed up. Hundreds of people (and counting). Here’s how I did it…

The Breakdown…

My online “school” is called Elder Academy, and it specializes in teaching Internet Marketing. That’s it. In our first two months, we’ve had just under 300 paying students sign up – and that’s after spending virtually nothing on marketing (but I’ll get into that in a bit).

Why teach Internet Marketing? Three reasons. First, since I was going to charge for admission, I figured that the content needed to be specifically focused on one general topic.

Second, I’ve got seventeen years experience with Internet Marketing (as well as coding). I’ve published a bunch of best-selling books on the subject, built one of the internet’s earliest banner advertising exchange websites before selling it to a publicly traded company at the height of the dot com boom or the late 90’s, built some super popular SEO software, and basically just figured I should teach what I know.

Third, I just like Internet Marketing…it’s what I do, you know?! Besides, it’s really hard to find hype-free Internet Marketing training online. So much of it is the cheezy “Get Rich Quick” flavor of late-night infomercial type hypeware. Sane training based on solid proven principles and techniques…there’s got to be a market for that!

The Name…

First things first…why call it Elder Academy? I was of two minds here. I thought that it should either be named after a person – like many colleges (to give it a more academic feel)…or named after the subject matter (Like Intenet Marketing Academy or IMAcademy or something like that).

I went to school at Washu in St. Louis and just about everyone who’s gone to school there hates that name (am I right?!). It’s getting better, but few people outside the community know anything about the school even though it’s a top tier institution. Washu? Oh you mean in D.C.? Washu? Like out in Washington State? Washu? You mean George Washington U?

I always thought Washu should change their name to Eliot University. Washu was originally founded by William Greenleaf Eliot (grandfather of Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot) as the Eliot Seminary and the Eliot theme still runs through the school today.

The alumni club is called the Eliot Society, I was named a Thomas H. Eliot Scholar while there, my Economics major was housed in Eliot Hall before they tore it down and built a new econ building a couple years ago… Eliot! It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

So I thought I might swipe that name and use it myself…but then I thought..”Hey, my last name is Elder…Elder is kinda like Eliot only more badass!”. So the website became Elder Academy.

The Curriculum…

So far I’ve got eight courses and two clinics, with more courses being added each week (as soon as I can create them). The courses are:

• Jumpstart Search Engine Optimization
• PHP Programming For Affiliate Marketers
• Kindle Publishing and Marketing
• Thin Affiliate Niche Website Domination
• Upsell Riches: Selling More At Checkout
• Propel Membership Website System
• Blog Bootcamp: How To Start a WordPress Blog
• Digital Marketing eBook Library
• Kindle Publishing Clinic
• Blog Bootcamp Clinic

The courses are made up of screencast videos that I created using Camtasia 8, saved in mp4 format, hosted on Amazon S3, and then streamed within the membership area of ElderAcademy.com

Each course is between ten and twenty-five videos in length, and anywhere from two to six hours long. Some of them come with a pdf textbook, some don’t (mostly depending on whether or not I had already written something in the past that I could spruce up for the course).

The First Course…

The first course I created was the PHP Programming for Affiliate Marketers course. I basically took my best-selling book of the same name and turned it into a video course. In it I teach the absolute basics of PHP programming by using PHP to create an auto-updating affiliate website.

I just mentioned the course on a couple forums and was amazed when fifty people immediately signed up.

After that I built my Kindle Publishing Course, then the SEO course, and on and on. In the beginning it took between one and two weeks per course to create the videos, edit them, etc but now I’ve got it down to about a week per course. Most of the time is spent editing them.

That’s basically what the courseware looks like. Pretty straight forward. I wanted to be as simplistic as possible and focus the eye on the videos without distraction.

Directly under each video is a comment section where people can ask questions and get answers from me as well as other students. Students actually do ask questions and it can get pretty interactive at times…which is great!

The Website and Courseware Platform

So how did I throw this thing together? Basically I used wordpress to handle most of the heavy lifting. I built a custom theme to look the way I wanted it to look, and a plugin called S2Member to handle the automation of signing up new members, logging them in, showing them the specific content that they paid for, keeping non-students out, etc.

I had to fiddle with both my WordPress theme as well as the S2Member plugin to get them to do exactly what I wanted, but it wasn’t too much work. Just a little php tweaking here and there. If you’re interested in creating membership type websites, check out my Membership Website System course at ElderAcademy.com 😛

I designed the logo and graphics and the look and feel of both the front end of the site and the back end members area of the site myself. Again, I tried to keep things as simplistic as possible from a design standpoint.

Payment…

For a payment platform I used Paypal. Why? Because most people are familiar with Paypal and comfortable using it to buy stuff online. Plus it doesn’t cost anything to use Paypal until someone orders something, at which point Paypal takes a commission. Also, the S2Member plugin is configured to use Paypal, leading to one less thing to worry about. You can get S2Member to use different payment platforms, but it feels like Paypal is the default.

…and maybe most importantly, Paypal has a feature that will autobill monthly for subscriptions. So you can sign someone up for…say…$19 a month and paypal will bill and collect the money automatically each month until the person cancels the recurring payments. And that leads us to…

Monetization Strategy…

Like I said, Paypal is set up to handle recurring monthly charges, and I may switch to a monthly model in the future. But just starting out I decided to forego that strategy and instead focus on two other models; namely:

• Pay Per Course (one time fee)
• Pay For General Admission for All Courses (one time fee)

I opted for the Pay Per Course model initially because when I first started the site, there were very few courses in my curriculum! I couldn’t charge $149 for “all the courses” when there were only one or two courses. So I opted to charge per course until the curriculum grew to a suitable number.

I’m actually getting ready to add the second option – a one time fee for all the courses – pretty soon; maybe when I hit ten courses.

I’m still playing with prices, but have pretty much landed on charging $49 per course for an individual course and $149 to $199 for admission to all the courses.

My system is set up so that once someone signs up for one course, they can add other courses whenever they like from their member dashboard. I’ve also built a little coupon code system that allows me to give out coupons to people for discounts.

Order Flow…

So here’s how the order flow basically works when a new student signs up. To start off, someone clicks on one of the course description pages on the main site. At the bottom of the page is an order button that takes them to the checkout page.

After entering in any coupon codes that the person may or may not have, they’re sent directly to Paypal. Once Paypal takes their payment information and charges them, they’re automatically redirected back to ElderAcademy.com and the S2Member plugin kicks in giving them the option to create their username and password immediately.

The system also shoots out an automatic email with a link where they can sign in and register their username and password at a later time if they like.

Once the person registers for access to the membership area of ElderAcademy.com, they’re asked to sign up for the course email list. I use Aweber for that.

Next the student is redirected to their “Member Dashboard”. This is a password protected section of the site where they’ll find a link to the specific course that they’ve purchased, as well as a list of other courses they can “add to their account” in the future.

From there the student can click the link to their courses and begin watching the videos.

Reception…

So far the reception has been universally positive. People have nothing but nice things to say about the courses and I’m seeing many students add additional courses to their accounts as time goes on. I went out of my way to under-sell and over-deliver on the course content and people noticed.

I offer a no-hassle 100% money back guarantee and so far nobody has asked for a refund. What’s more, people are interacting in the courses, asking questions, getting involved, and generally watching all the videos in each course right away.

The Future…

Like I said, I’ve done very little paid marketing so far…mainly because I’ve spent most of the last couple months furiously cranking out courses. Once I hit ten courses, I plan on stepping back from course creation to focus on marketing the site for a while.

Sure 300 students is nothing compared to a Udacity or Coursera, but I’m just getting started. Besides, this is a very narrow niche compared to the big guys. I’m thrilled at the numbers so far. They more than prove the proof of concept and give me the confidence to continue on.

And besides, 300 students might not compare to the tens or hundreds of thousands of students at the big sites like Coursera…but mine are 300 paying students…and that’s huge.

I’ve set up an affiliate program that will pay out 50% commissions on every course. I hope to begin recruiting affiliates soon (I’ve had a half dozen sign up but none seem to be actively promoting the site yet).

I find that I really like creating these courses and teaching people…and really enjoy chatting with my students and answering questions. I’ve got a list of about twenty other courses I want to create, and will probably come up with more after that.

One of the nice things about having an active “student body” is that I can get feedback and learn what kind of courses they want…then create them.

I may or may not recruit other “Instructors” in the future…it’s definitely something to think about. Maybe I should try to raise some money to really make a go of it. I think it’d be really cool to hire a half dozen instructors and really flesh out the curriculum, but we’ll have to see.

Stay tuned!

Oh yeah, and be sure to Like Elder Academy on Facebook to get updates!