The Links are In
After a fairly long break at Christmas (unintended), I've had a chance to put the links into my Website to allow people to buy the online classes now.
I wrote sales copy for each of the classes, then I put a big button on each description page (at the top and bottom if the description was long) that says "Register for this class now!" The person can click the button and be taken to the shopping cart immediately.
It's pretty slick. Then I sent out my e-mail newsletter to tell people that the classes are ready for sign up. My newsletter goes out to about 340 e-mail addresses. And guess what? Two people have already signed up.
I'm offering half-price to people who sign up before January 14. I guess I feel that I need to compensate them for the risk that they're taking by signing up for a class without the classes even being ready yet. Plus I'm hoping to generate some word-of-mouth once the classes start benefiting people.
My target date is January 20, 2005 to have all the classes ready. Originally I had said January 15, but I found out I'm in a seminar on Jan 15-16, then I'm out of town on the 19th, so I thought I'd better start things on the 20th.
But my REAL deadline is to have the classes up and running by February 1, because that's when my full page ad in Massage and Bodywork magazine hits the subscribers. They pay me for my columns by giving me ads in the magazine. It seems like a good trade, because I'm getting quite a few e-mails and phone calls from people as a result of the articles plus the ads. M&B magazine has over 50,000 subscribers in the U.S.
So far so good. Yesterday, I also tried to get one of my old Windoze laptops converted over to Linspire. I'm doing this in anticipation of setting up a server we have sitting here (under my feet) as an audio-video server for the Moodle classes. Basically, I'm hoping I won't have to take up costly hosting server space with all my audio and video files and just store them here on this server that's currently doin' nothin'. We'll see if I can get it to work. Linspire is useful to me because I don't know Unix, and right now the server is running Red Hat Unix, which would take me forever to learn. Linspire is an easy GUI that sits on top of Unix.
My problem with Linspire is that I couldn't create a disk image on a CD that the Windoze laptop would recognize. Everytime I try it, I either get a validation error when I'm creating the CD disk image, or the Windoze laptop just ignores the CD and boots away on Windows ME. (Yes, I said Windows ME.)
That's it for now. Good progress, but still a ton to do.
2:36:17 PM 
|
