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Is there a method to my madness?

Inspired by a Hangout I attended last week on hosting your courses on your own site, I have given a lot of thought as to why I am spending time promoting my courses on other sites.  So I think it is time I shared some history of my own site with you.

In 2010 I launched The Excel Club, which hosted one Excel course.  I had the site built by developers in India and I was pleased with their work.  I had the course accredited with some Accounting bodies here in Ireland for CPD and things worked very well. In 2012, I decided to go into partnership and expand the site to The Professional Training Academy, offering a suite of courses suitable for the CPD market.  Such a lesion did I learn.  We developed the site further, however there has been a serious breakdown between us and the developers.  We cannot have any further amendments done and they will not hand over the source code. Foolish as we were, we have our hosting with them too.  In addition to this, my business partner did not do as agreed or anticipated.  In fact, he ended up doing very very little.  Although the Professional Training Academy does host a suite of Business Skills courses and other courses, only the Excel courses really do well.

Last summer I lost faith in the site, I was working to pay back a loan to the other director, and he would still have a shareholdings, and I didn’t have the source code to the site. I stopped working as an on-line educator.  Come late December I found I was missing this a little so I decided late in December, I would utilise platforms such as Udemy & Coursmos, as the market they capture is much larger that my CPD market here in Ireland, and there is little or no overlap.

The Hangout last week, was about hosting your own courses on your own site, with the capabilities of Joomla.  So I have set myself a nice little feasibility study to see if I can get my site running this way and then move everything over without the need for developers.  This is a mammoth task for me, not something I factored in at the start of the year, but if I could do this, then I am free from one of my problems at very little cost.

This week, I also contacted the Professional bodies for accreditation on the Auditing Excel course, 2 from 3 have approved, and it’s a waiting game with the other. I ran a very small promotion, offering existing users 50% discount if they pre-register. Had I of sent a follow-up mail then this may have been successful, but unfortunately I did not get around to it.

In addition to this, I also began my research into my next course.  This will be on Charting or Dashboards, and I’m thinking it will take about 6 months to research and produce.

I would love to hear your comments and feedback, especially if you have encountered any of the same problems I have

NLN, P. (2015). Is there a method to my madness. The Excel Club.[blog site]. Retrieved from https://becominganonlinetrainer.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/is-there-a-method-to-my-madness/