Why I’m Renewing My Subscription To Teaching Sells Without Thinking Twice
I’ve hesitated to write a review of Brian and Tony Clark’s Teaching Sells for the last three months because I wanted to see if it would pass the most important test of all for me: Would I actually renew my subscription?
The answer is, emphatically, Hell yes.
Of course, you have to understand I’m a little biased when it comes to this recommendation. You see, I’ve been following Brian Clark’s blog, Copyblogger, from it’s early days (less than 600 subscribers) to now (30,000 subscribers). More importantly, I’ve been following his directions on how to write persuasive copy, and it’s paid off in spades:
- I’ve landed on the Digg.com frontpage 4 times
- I’ve learned how to make posts that people love to comment on
- My sales copy has improved (and so have my sales)
So when Brian announced Teaching Sells, I went ahead and ordered it, sight unseen. You just reach a point where you can trust the quality of material enough to simply get your hands on it.
What Is Teaching Sells All About?
The short answer is that Teaching Sells will show you how to do the things that Brian himself did to build a powerful and successful online presence (and revenue stream). The program is actually a collection of web-based courses, downloads and forums that let you not only soak in the information, but talk about it with the authors (and other Teaching Sells members) as well. This combination of course material and conversation is called an Interactive Learning Environment, and really increases how much someone can get out of the material.
Disclosure: Here, I’m biased again, having spent 4 years working with one of the bigger e-learning vendors and another 3 1/2 years working with a cutting edge 3-D simulation training startup company. I’ve seen firsthand how much more effective training becomes when you can interact with it, either by choosing your learning style (reading / audio / learn-by-doing) or simply talking to people about it.
The members area sums it up like this:
- Teaching Sells is your step-by-step guide to getting started in the future of paid content today. These initial five courses will provide you with a complete methodology for building interactive learning environments that sell.
What Are The First Five Courses?
Keep in mind that there are additional course modules (think of them like book chapters) added throughout each week, so the course is always growing. But so far, the current lineup looks line this:
- How To Create Content That Sells
- How To Effectively Market Interactive Learning Environments
- How To Create Killer Multimedia Content With Quick And Easy Tools
- Seven Profitable Business Models For Interactive Content Developers
- Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software
New courses that start this week (along with their descriptions) are:
- Educational Marketing: Persuasive Promotional Content That Prompts Action
- Our advanced promotional topics will teach you how to use free reports, blog posts, teleseminars, webinars and viral videos to persuade with “under the radar” educational marketing techniques.
- Advanced Positioning and Creative Adaptation Strategies
- These advanced marketing topics elaborate on one of the most important parts of the Teaching Sells approach (and marketing in general). Discover how to differentiate yourself from the crowd and creatively put a fresh spin on even tired topics.
- Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites
- The initial Teaching Sells training teaches you how to build robust “flagship” membership sites. Some of the business models we reveal in the core training require the ability to quickly churn out multiple membership sites in multiple niches, and these topics show you how to make that happen.
- Multimedia Storytelling – When the Medium is NOT the Message
- These advanced content topics teach you cutting-edge techniques to creating audio/visual content that knocks people’s socks off and keeps them happily subscribed. Even better, it’s all done with the tools you learn about in the core training.
Where I’m Going With All This
I’ve been wanting to create a subscription-based online training system, and Teaching Sells came along at just the right time. Fingers crossed, in 60-90 days my partners and I will have it rolled out. Teaching Sells has saved me a lot of time by laying out a lot of the how-to information that would have taken me a good amount of trial and error to discover. I don’t mind paying for someone to clear the path ahead of me, and in all honesty you shouldn’t be, either.
In fact, here is the single question you should be asking yourself:
- Am I interested in having people pay me on a monthly basis to learn from my expertise?
If you are, then Teaching Sells can show you how to get there. Now, aside from the fact that I was pre-sold on this program by almost 2 years of quality training via Copyblogger, I would have bought on the strength of these three questions (which you should also ask yourself)
- How much is my content worth?
- How much money do I want to make selling my content?
- What’s a more profitable use of my time: Creating new content, or splitting my time between creating content and learning how to sell it (from scratch)?
It was a no-brainer business decision to me, and as long as the value I’m getting from my subscription to Teaching Sells far outweighs the cost, I’ll stay subscribed. Because I’m not some Brian Clark fanboy – I just like investing the money to learn things I don’t want to research so I can spend more time doing what I love to do and earning money from it.
Take Action: Learn more about Teaching Sells by clicking here right now.
Teaching sells sounds like a great product, but is it worth the investment of a monthly subscription? Couldn’t you get the information from other sources like copyblogger, problogger, etc?
David -
Absolutely, you could get the info by digging through other sources (Problogger/Copyblogger included), but as with any other product, the value lies in having concepts organized and laid out in a way to make learning it quick and easy.
It’s the same concept as coaching – when I deal with clients they almost *always* know what they should do in some way shape or form … but having someone crystalize the 100 different possibilities into a streamlined, “what to do next” gameplan is what’s valuable.
Given that I’m an e-learning veteran I’m finding that some of what’s covered in the course is part of my current knowledge base, but it’s still valuable to have someone who is currently executing it give me a streamlined game plan an a host of other tips I wouldn’t have thought of.
Of course, the other advantage is that with the forum, I can ask Brian/Tony Clark (as well as other members) specific questions.
Per your question about “is it worth a monthly subscription,” you have to ask yourself how much your time is worth and is it worth it to have someone do the research, lay it out in front of you and provide support. In my case, it’s a “Hell Yes.”
I’d say it’s not much different than your “Double Your Dating” eBook … I could search the web for plenty of dating articles, or I could invest some cash for someone to filter out all the things I *need to knw* about dating and organize organize it in a way that saves me time. In that case, I’d prefer getting eBook ‘coaching’ from someone who is doing it right now.
(And technically, I guess I should say I don’t apply to this example because I’m happily married and not looking to double my dating!)
BTW, David, I’ve followed what you’ve done with Altitude and was impressed by the buzz you generated with your business quiz. Kudos to you, and thanks for your question!
Ditto- Charter member here and no plans to unsubscribe.
Janice Cartier’s last blog post..72 Million and a Ball of Twine
I actually did start out in the first wave and did unsubscribe, simply because I did think there were enough other ways to get to the information without a monthly membership.
I also found the format challenging for my particular learning style.
Bottom line: I thought Teaching Sells was a high quality product and wouldn’t discourage anyone who thinks they’d find it useful. It just wasn’t the right tool for me, nor did I think it unique enough from other resources easily available for free to continue the membership.
P.S. –
What I found challenging about the format is that I didn’t find it streamlined at all. I know they release things in a stream of modules, but there was a lot of material to go through from the start and a lot of ways to divert attention and I would get overwhelmed by the volume, yet at the end seemed to not be fully satisfied with my depth of understanding of the material.
I’ve actually taken multiple university-level classes in an online format and didn’t struggle as much with keeping track of where to go next in the materials or feeling overwhelmed with the materials. Perhaps it was the tool the university used, or the presence of weekly teleseminars with the professor that kept me on track.
I chalk it up to different people learning differently. Learning Sells is still a quality product. It just wasn’t working for me.
Since the program has closed its doors to new members (they reached their 1000-member limit), I know you can’t get a new membership until they open up again mid-2009. I’ve gotten mostly what I hoped to out of the site already, and I have a membership account that’s paid up through 9/28 for sale. It’s a $97 per month membership, with full access to 14 interactive training courses (they’re still adding new content, slowly), active web entrepreneur forums (with access to Brian Clark & Tony Clark), and a full library of awesome PLR content for free use on your sites. $97 value, paid up through the end of September. If you think you can get some value out of it, I’m willing to trade it to someone for just $40.
Contact me at cody |at| thrillingdesign |dot| com if you’re interested.
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