The Idea
I started this second blog to chronicle my work and the experiments I am running on my main blog. And, for the last six months, I have been doing just that – I documented in detail how I grew my email list from 3 new subscribers/month to around 500. The focus was the email list – and partly, it still is (stay tuned for my next experiment on that – as the data is looking to be very promising).
Now – I want to tackle another challenge – and that’s going to be launching an infoproduct – a Video Course to be exact. I have already created one last year with Packt Publishing – and the grueling 6 month process resulted in my Spring Security Video Course.
The Spring Security Video Course
It was quite the learning experience to go through this process – from building the actual code (that was the easy part), going over each section with colleagues to make sure someone else can pick up and understand all the concepts that I was introducing, all the way to scripting and slowly recording the material. I’m not quite happy with the first few sections of that course – by the time I reached section 8 I had learned so much that I wanted to re-do sections 1 through 3 (I did manage to re-do small parts, but not completely).
Now, having done all that, I’m planning to do it again – this time for myself. So – the plan is simple – go live with one or two Video Courses in 2014.
The obvious question is – what should the course be about? It’s not that I’m in need of ideas – just the opposite – to many options look good right – at least on paper. My blog is mostly focused on Java, Spring, Spring Security, Persistence and a host of other technologies. And in the last few years, I’ve been working with Machine Learning algorithms – mainly Recommendation Systems, Classifiers, clustering logic and the like – so that’s a topic near and dear to me as well.
Hence – the plan.
The Plan
The plan is simple – instead of me choosing what this course will be about – I’ll let my readers pick the subject. Or rather, I’ll pick based on the data, and the data is email signups (I haven’t forgotten email).
What I’ll do is put up a landing page with 6 course ideas – and then an individual page for each one. People will sign up for the courses they like and ignore the rest – and the first one that gets to 250 signups – that’s the one I’ll build (first).
See? Simple.
The Execution
I’m in the process of building the individual landing pages for each course myself (I’m using leadpages), and I’m working with a designer for the main landing page. All of these will live on a subdomain of my main blog (like this site does) – products.baeldung.com (I’ll update this article with links to these as soon as I have them up and running).
The Conclusion
This is the first in what’s going to be a series of articles documenting the entire process of creating and launching the video courses. The next steps will cover:
- Creating the product pages with leadpages
- Driving traffic to the product pages from baeldung
- A/B tests on baeldung – test out different ways to link to the product pages
- Setting up Analytics and tracking how each traffic source converts
- Traffic Sources – Paid Traffic?
- Running A/B tests on the individual product pages
- Keeping the email lists warm
- Getting to 250 signups
- Probably a lot more
The next few months are going to be exciting.
[sc:end-article]