What’s the buzz about On Demand?

You may have heard a little bit about our new On Demand courses. Now that ruzuku’s On Demand feature has gone live, we want to tell you a little bit more about it and all the benefits On Demand can provide.

Our old model, which only allowed for Scheduled courses, meant a course had a fixed start and end date. Participants who missed registration were therefore left out and had to wait for the course to be offered again to sign up.

Scheduled courses are a great option, particularly if you are looking for your students to go through the experience of your material together as a group. While we still provide the Scheduled courses option, ruzuku now allows for the added flexibility of On Demand courses as well.

As a Guide, you choose a date to publish your course, and participants can sign up any time after that date. This allows people to register for your course at any time as long as registration is open — no one gets left out, and Steps and Activities will be paced as normal.

To set your course as On Demand, simply go to the Schedule & Price page under Manage Course, select the ‘On Demand’ scheduling option, and choose what date you’d like your course to become available.

Several of our Guides are already taking advantage of the On Demand feature. Marlene Hielema, our resident Image Maven, is hosting a course on the core fundamentals of basic photography — while it lasts for four weeks and four days, you can sign up and begin at any time without missing a beat.

Whether Scheduled or On Demand courses are your style is up for you to decide. We hope both options better facilitate the online learning experience for your participants.

Ruzuku powers Marlene’s photography business

Marlene Hielema is our resident Image Maven. As a photographer and teacher, Marlene shares her knowledge of photography and digital editing with others through her blog as well as her online courses on ruzuku. In this video, Marlene explains how and why she uses ruzuku for her business and gives advice to anyone thinking about starting a course on ruzuku.

Ruzuku Powers Marlene’s Photography Business from Ruzuku on Vimeo.

Curious to learn more? Sign up for one of Marlene’s courses!

Photography beginners will enjoy her Six Simple Steps to Shoot & Edit Camera Raw Files. Sign up here!

To learn how to better utilize photography in YOUR course, join Marlene for our FREE Better Content: Photography Course. Sign up here!

Ruzuku powers Mary Bartnikowski’s photography

For over twenty-five years, Mary Bartnikowski has been a professional photographer and traveler. Now, she’s looking for a way to share all of the knowledge she has gained with the world, and she’s chosen ruzuku to do it! In this video, Mary shares how creating her ruzuku course will help her reach more people than traditional means, such as one-on-one lessons.

Ruzuku Powers Mary’s Photography from Ruzuku on Vimeo.

If you’d like to learn more about Mary, visit her website bartnikowski.com and be sure to look for her ruzuku course coming soon!

Ruzuku vs. Auto-responders

Auto-responders such as AWeber and MailChimp can be a great way to first make contact with a customer, stay in touch over time and keep them informed about what’s happening in your company. These sites offer attractive features:

• They make building trust and confidence between the customer and your brand easy
• Emails can be customized for each recipient
• You can include copy of your message plus any supplemental downloads
• Scheduling auto-responders means you don’t even need to send the email yourself

This all sounds pretty great, right? So why not use an auto-responder to deliver a free e-course? If all you’re looking to do is provide regularly delivered content to your potential customers, then sure. But if you’re looking to build a community and encourage conversion, you should be using ruzuku.

Build Community

Ruzuku provides a destination where you can actually interact with your users. At the start of every step, your students will get an email from you outlining the activities for the step. So, not only are your customers getting regular reminders from you, but you’re also able to break down the content into more manageable chunks, so your potential customers don’t feel overwhelmed.

What’s more, ruzuku is designed around community interaction. Ruzuku discussions make it easy for people to talk about your lessons, ask questions and post additional resources. Not only can you provide a more hands-on experience for your potential customers (building a stronger relationship leads to higher conversion!), it also creates opportunity for your customers to help each other.

And just like auto-responders, you get to decide when content is available to participants and what attachments (video, audio, slideshows or documents for download) your students can access. But more than that, ruzuku also shows you how people are interacting with your content and with each other — something auto-responders can’t do.

Measuring Engagement

Auto-responders are great for reaching a large number of people. But what they don’t tell you is how people are interacting with your content. Someone could open up an auto-responder email, then delete it immediately, and programs like AWeber and MailChimp would still count these as “Opens” — leading you to inaccurately believe people are engaging with your material.

Ruzuku provides a Course Health page so you can see how participants are progressing through your course.


Health bars monitor when students complete an activity by checking it off. In addition to the content engagement, ruzuku also provides insight into your students interactions as measured by their Participation Score, which is a combination of Posts, Responses, and Comments. With all this rich information, you can easily see how engaged your customers are and make changes to content as necessary.

The Bottom Line

Auto-responders can be helpful in starting the relationship with your customers, but they fail to create a lasting connection with your students. With ruzuku, though, you get the opportunity to engage potential customers by building richer relationships that lead to higher conversions than simple auto-responders.

There’s no denying that we’re highly biased, which is why we encourage you to take ruzuku for a spin yourself. You’ll quickly see how Ruzuku trumps auto-responders for customer engagement. Sign up today and get a 30-day money back guarantee; if it’s not for you, we’ll refund your money. You can also sign up for Ruzuku 101 to take it for a spin yourself.

Ruzuku vs. Speaking Engagements and Workshops

The power of speech

Professional speakers can offer a compelling, motivating message, and they do so for a living. Prepared talks are the mainstay of many conferences and have enjoyed a renaissance thanks to new formats like TED’s 20-minute talks.

Many professional speakers also combine speaking with consulting, particularly though in-house arrangements with corporations. For example, Merlin Mann built his reputation as a blogger and now offers talks and consults to companies that want to improve their productivity.

A variation of this business model is to offer workshops, which typically focus on smaller groups and include hands-on activities and close, personal interaction with the instructor. We’ve dabbled in this arena ourselves, by offering workshops on user experience design (“User Experience 101” and “Practical Usability Testing”).

Well-delivered talks and workshops can be powerful, engrossing learning experiences. They often get high ratings from participants and can earn thousands of dollars in revenue.

So what’s the problem?

First, there’s pricing. Because the speaker has to appear in person (often requiring travel), talks, conferences, and workshops often charge registration fees of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That can be a major barrier to entry.

What’s more, attending a live event may inspire you for a day or give you some great new ideas. But this approach still doesn’t provide accountability or support for actually implementing the concepts once the event is over. A speaker might connect — powerfully — to 200 people in an auditorium for an hour, but that’s the last they’ll see of her.

Embrace and extend…

You can use ruzuku to complement and extend your speaking in several ways.

With our “UX 101” workshop, we created a “follow-up” course on ruzuku. Everyone who signed up for the workshop enrolled in the online course and received weekly summaries of key ideas from the workshop along with links to additional resources. Students could post questions and comments as they began to apply the ideas from the workshop into their own work.



Creating this kind of follow-up online activity can help you increase the value of your speaking engagements and workshops, allowing you to increase prices or enrollment.

Another approach is to create a distance-learning offer, based on your existing speaking or workshop content. You might have yourself recorded and then pull out audio or video clips to include on ruzuku. You could also consider offering scheduled webinars combined with resources and discussion on ruzuku. Angela Maiers has had success with this hybrid approach in her course on Digital Literacy.

Speaking engagements and workshops are a great way to initiate contact and generate ideas, but ultimately, they lack follow-through with your audience. By bringing the topics and discussions along to ruzuku, you can keep your conversation and content active for much longer, adding continued life and vibrancy to your brand.

Ruzuku vs. One-on-one Consulting or Coaching

Personal service works, but it never scales

 
One-on-one coaching is a great way for experts to connect with their clients, collaboratively develop strategies, and provide the accountability to implement those strategies. In the right context, coaching works. For example, in “Executive Coaching: It Works!”, published in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, the authors write:

Outcomes of this empirical study demonstrated that executive coaching is an effective method of leadership development… Results indicated that executive change occurred in 5 areas: people management, relationships with managers, goal setting and prioritization, engagement and productivity, and dialogue and communication… The success of this coaching program also suggests that investment in well-designed and implemented programs can contribute to leadership development and the retention of talent.

Evidence also exists that shows life coaching can improve personal well-being and flourishing (see “The Evidence for Coaching”).

However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Experienced executive coaches typically charge hundreds of dollars per hour. (Whenever a service has the word “executive” in it, you know you’re in trouble when it comes to pricing!) A company might pay $5K - $10K for a rising executive to coach over a period of time. That puts the service out of reach for the vast majority of people seeking to improve their professional skills (such as relationship-building, productivity, etc…).

Life coaching is generally less expensive but still not cheap. While the sessions can be quite helpful for clarifying goals and identifying my next steps, at around $100/hour they started to add up quickly.

Also, if you’re an independent expert who focuses primarily on personal coaching, you’ve already seen the other side of the challenge: you can’t scale your own expertise. That makes it impossible for you to earn additional revenue without booking more clients or charging higher rates.

From personal to online; from individual to group

Ruzuku can help you expand your offerings in two ways. First, it helps you easily share ideas (through articles and video), assessments, and activities with your clients in a secure, private online community. Second, it helps you facilitate group coaching and learning to complement your existing one-on-one services.

For example, Dr. Lisa Chu, a life coach who specializes in helping physicians, nurses and other care providers, created Self-Care for the Caring Professional, a ruzuku-based course for her audience. This course provides participants with core ideas about self-care that Lisa would introduce clients to in one-on-one sessions. She provides activities to apply the ideas, as well as encouragement and coaching as participants try them out.

Creating an online learning community of this type can make good business sense for both you and your clients. For example, suppose you create a five-week course on ruzuku and charge $199 for access. If you have ten clients sign up, that’s $2K in revenue. If you spend two hours per week facilitating the community, that’s 10 hours of “coaching time,” or about $200/hour. But because each individual client is only paying $199, you can reach a larger audience than you could previously. In addition, once you’ve created your structure and content on ruzuku, you can easily run a course many times.

At ruzuku, we promised to respect our customer’s time by providing an effective learning platform that allows experts, coaches and instructors to scale their expertise. We’re here to make good on that promise.

Is Ruzuku for you?

We designed Ruzuku for passionate, independent experts. Does that sound like you? You’re probably a good fit for Ruzuku if…

You want to help people learn and grow

Is there something (anything!) that you love helping people learn about? Here are some topics that current Ruzuku customers are passionate about:

• Photography
• Reducing stress and improving quality of life
• Education and digital literacy
• Business analysis techniques
• Shaping your personal story

You have a strong personal brand

You may already be helping people learn and grow by posting to your blog, selling your own ebook, or participating in forums and social media. Maybe you charge for your information, or maybe you don’t. Either way, what matters is the connection you make with your students and the joy you feel when you help someone move forward in their own understanding.

Like Marlene, “The Image Maven,” or Phil, “The Make It Great Guy,” you’ve worked long and hard to develop your identity and build awareness of what you offer. Now, Ruzuku can help you connect with your audience. Our goal is to get out of your way — to make Ruzuku simple and seamless, so your personal brand shines through. And that’s why your students pay you directly when they sign up a course — not us. In the coming months, you’ll see even more features that allow your personal brand to be front-and-center in every interaction your students have with Ruzuku.

You expect things to just work

Maybe you understand the technical side of the Internet and maybe you don’t. Either way, you want your online learning tool to be easy and pleasant to use for you and your students. We’ve launched Ruzuku and have gotten lots of positive feed back, but — like Lexus, but with less pretension — we’re never satisfied. We’re constantly working to improve the design and functionality of Ruzuku so it works better for you and your community.

If you want to learn more about Ruzuku, watch our introductory video. Or if you’d like a free 30-day trial of Ruzuku, drop us a note: freetrial@ruzuku.com .