By Deborah Carraro

Today we’re going to talk about how to create an ecourse. If you’ve been online for any length of time, chances are you’ve signed up for an ecourse. Many online marketers and online entrepreneurs offer an ecourse as an incentive for opting in to a newsletter or to help promote a product.

So let’s talk about what ecourses are, why you need them and how to put one together.

An ecourse is essentially a multi-part autoresponder series on a particular theme or topic. They are important because they allow you to build a multiple-step sales process.

Let’s say you visit my website iDeborah Marketing but decide not to purchase on your first visit. If I have no way of capturing your visit (no special report or ecourse optin) then I may lose your lead forever.

But if I can entice you to opt-in to my mailing list, then I can send you my value packed information about why article marketing is important and expose you to my offer again. So the ecourse gives you the opportunity to learn more about my product and how it can help you and helps me help you decide to say yes to my offering.

To set up a ecourse you will need an account with an autoresponder service like aWeber or Marketer’s Choice.

There are three main ways that you can send your ecourse:

  1. as a series of text messages
  2. as a series of HTML messages
  3. or a combination of the two.

I have also seen mini-ecourses sent as audio or video files but we won’t be covering those in this tutorial. For our purposes, we’ll be sending written ecourse lessons.

Let’s start with the easiest method: text messages.

Click play below to view the video on how to set up a text-based ecourse.

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An alternative to a text-based ecourse is an HTML based ecourse. This would allow you to add more brandable content to your mini-ecourse and enhance the lessons with illustrative graphics, audio and video content.

Click play below to view the video on how to set up an HTML-based ecourse.

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The third method of setting up an ecourse is to combine both the HTML and text based messages. With this method, I take all of the HTML files I created for my ecourse and upload them to my web server.

Click play below to view the video on how to set up a combination HTML & text-based ecourse.

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And that covers the three methods that you can use to set up your automated ecourse. Ecourses are one of the truly proven ways to boost sales and there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have one. This tutorial will help you set up the technical aspects of your ecourse. Just excerpt some valuable pieces of content from a product you want to promote and you’ll be able to create the lessons easily.

If you’d like a copy of the templates I used in this tutorial, click here.