I have a confession, I'm a couponer. NO I am not some crazy lady with 50 jars of mustard and 100 jars o pickles (who has room for that?) in her garage (I don't have a garage) but I do buy things in multiples when the price and coupon are right. I'm telling you this not to convert you, there are a million blogs you can go to for that, but to give some background into this class. See, I've been doing this coupon thing for over 4 years now, and over time I've had a lot of people approach me and say they wish I would teach a class. So I recently decided to give it a go.
This is a quick post for me to get my thoughts on how I'm going to do this, and what I'd like to accomplish with this. I guess you could call it an experiment, and this post is the post that outlines the experiment. There are a couple different things I would like to do with this class, and of course i have ideas for expansion down the road. For right now I'm going to think about the class.
I believe that I will make a handout to go with my class. This one will have some pictures, a copy of my class outline, some useful charts and examples. I'd like to keep it to under 10 pages ideally as my printer is broken so I'll have to pay for copies. Still, I feel the handout will add a great deal of value to my class and justify the cost of the class for the customer. I would like to have the class at my local library, as I feel this lends a bit of credibility to my class, but I need to speak with them about it. I don't know cost, and if they don't do it then I will definitely have to rent a space, which will mean more $$ out of my pocket to start with. I will test interest in some surrounding towns after this class is finished and decide if I will offer my class outside my local town. Charge for the class will be around $20, although I'm thinking of different special rates I could apply.
That's the general plan for my class. Ideally expanding into surrounding towns would be best. My town is small enough, and so are they, that I can't really see offering the class more than a couple times a year. The population numbers just aren't there. If I had 3 towns though, that I gave the class in twice a year, and say I average 5 students per class @ $100 profit that's an extra $600 a year. Nothing that's going to make me rich, but that's pretty much my car insurance all year. Or say Christmas and birthdays, or a vacation, well, you get the idea. Here's where my idea veers away from traditional local thing to online business as well, because I seem to always think in online terms.
I recently read a very interesting comment by a lady in one of my online selling groups. We were actually discussing the current disagreement between Amazon and publishing houses over the cost of ebooks, specifically for the Kindle. This lady was sharing her experience of self-publishing on the Kindle platform. She wrote a romance novel, self published on the Kindle, then offered her book for free for x amount of days, this boosted her rankings and when she went to charging for her book ($2.99) her high rank helped her to continue to sell her book for a short time frame after the free trial. She said she made and initial $5,000 off that first burst of sales, and still got small payments from time to time today. Stay with me here, I'm not rambling and this has a point.
This got me to thinking that I've always wanted to publish a book, and I recently downloaded a free ebook from Amazon that was on how to publish on the Kindle. Originally I was thinking I would write one of the fiction book ideas I had, and I still plan to, but then I started making my class outline. I realized that from that outline it would be a fairly simple matter to write a small ebook on the subject and publish to the Kindle platform. I plan on offering it free for a few days at launch, and whenever I have a class make it free again for 24 hours after each class, being sure to tell students that they can get it for free during that time frame.
Obviously I'm hoping for results similar to commenter I mentioned above, a small boost in rank from the free times, and a boost in sales following when it's no longer free but still ranked highly. Using the class(s) to help with this is, I think, a good idea. I'll also ask students to leave a review of the book, hopefully they'll like it, and between this and the higher rank it should help me stand out from the page of other books on how to coupon. We shall see, and I will follow the Kindle book progress in seperate posts from the class posts. While they go hand in hand with each other, from a how to and how did it do standpoint they are vastly different.
So my one experiment is really two. They are related in a way, but completely different ways to make money. Both have the potential to provide a small income over time, and one has the potential for a large initial profit. It should be interesting and a fun way to try and make a little money before the holidays. Of course if you're already brainstorming what class you could teach, you could also start brainstorming a book to go with. Below is the link to the ebook I was talking about, it's a small book published by the Kindle people themselves on how to publish on Kindle. I would like to find some great blogs about kindle publishing and I'll include links when I find some :)
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