One of the best ways of monetizing your blog is by creating informational training products to sell on your site. But if you want to do this effectively, you’re going to have to specifically engineer your product so that it gets your students the exact result that they are looking for.

In order to do this, you have to consider the various learning styles and make sure that your particular training course caters to each of them.

This way, all of your students no matter what their style of learning is, will get the desired results and have nothing but praise for your course.

In this article, we are going to look at:

• The 7 basic learning styles
• Ways of building each of them into your product
• The 4MAT learning system
• How to create effective training videos

You can be the best marketer in the world and sell thousands of courses, but ultimately, your success in the long term comes from how well the course delivers the actual results promised.

So the main thing to focus on is that your course DELIVERS the transformation that your students are trying to achieve.

Having said that, let’s dive deeper into how you can structure your course in the best way to ensure that it works and gets your students the results they want.

The 7 Basic Learning Styles

People are known to have 7 primary learning styles, and we are going to explore each of them in detail and find out how you can apply these to the training material that you put together inside your products.

1. Visual Learning Style

The visual learning style applies to a huge portion of the human population, and it’s one of the ways that you can use to make your content more appealing and effective.

People who learn by pictures and imagery are referred to as ‘visual’.

They associate things in space and that’s how they learn. These types of people are very spatial in their thinking process.

It can sometimes prove to be tricky using the Internet’s digital platform to try to teach about stuff that is out in the real world.

Things that you apply away from the computer are hard to get across via such a digital medium, but there are ways around that.

One such method is by using photos, images, diagrams, and other such things to get around that limitation.

Use this to your advantage by providing pictures and diagrams in your content. Include anything that helps to clearly show whatever it is that you are talking about on screen.

These forms of media can help you show what you’re talking about in a much clearer way and that’s why it’s important to use this to help you create effective training.

2. Oral Learning Style

There are a lot of different ways that you can use audio, sound, and music in your training courses. It’s always a great idea to have some audio aspect to any of your programs.

Whether this is the spoken word which is one learning style, or showing demo clips so your students can actually see and hear something happening, this makes a lot of difference to your training courses because it takes the things that are in the ‘real’ world and makes them real on screen as well as through the speakers at the moment.

But how do you put this learning style to work in your own training?

Using videos in your courses is a great idea that takes care of this and the previous learning style that we discussed here. Your visual students get to see it, and they will also be hearing it happen.

3. Verbal Learning Style

This is the kind of learning that you get through podcasts, for example, and while this is often with audio, it’s just the spoken word.

Verbal learning also translates over to the written word, and that’s why it’s such a great idea to have transcripts of your podcasts and similar materials. You can also pair verbal learning with written checklists and action plans to make those lessons even more effective.

4. Physical Learning Style

This one comes down to having an actual sense of touch such as when you handle the thing that you are learning about.

But how on earth do you apply that when dealing with a digital learning platform? Simple, just build in exercises where you tell the students exactly what to do and how to do it.

Get them to apply whatever it is you’re talking about in your course. By actually carrying out the exercise, it helps the whole thing feel more real to them when they are working on something with their own hands.

5. Logical Learning Style

A lot of people work extremely well when they have a clear system to follow.

Take engineers, for instance, they reason out how something works and when they can see how one part leads to the other, the entire process becomes easy for them.

You can also provide this type of learning in your training course. When you design your course to essentially be a system, your students will have an easier time making sense of each aspect of it.

Make sure your training modules go in a particular order, and you can even have them check each one as they complete them.

Building this action plan-type of thing into your training is an easy way of creating a system that has a logical sequence through the entire course.

6. Social Learning Style

Some people learn best when they are in groups or when interacting with others. You see this a lot in schools where teachers get students together around a table to work on something in groups.

So how can you put this into practice in your digital training program for those of your students who learn best under those conditions?

By coming up with a community or group for your students to come together to learn.

Whether it’s a private Facebook Group or a bulletin board, that group environment will serve to benefit those who learn more effectively in social environments.

You could even teach classes in a live setting such as a webinar or something similar so that your students have the camaraderie of interacting with others, being there with them, and hearing them ask questions, and so on.

Providing such a social element of learning will greatly benefit those people whose primary learning style is social.

7. Solitary Learning Style

Some people would rather learn by themselves, and would probably shy away from getting involved in the groups, forums, and other social scenes that you create for your other students.

That’s alright too. But just ensure that the courses that you create take the solitary learning style into consideration, as well.

These types of students do very well with the other learning styles such as visual, audio, physical, verbal, and all the rest. All you have to do is to ensure that you give them the guidance they need to get through the training.

If they prefer to go off and do all the stuff on their own, that’s fine, but you should be there to make sure they’re on the right track.

For instance, you could provide them with checklists for what they have to do and what comes next, give them exercises so that they can apply the stuff you teach on their own.

Those are the 7 main learning styles and how you can use them in your courses. But there is another system that is worth looking at if you’re creating informational training products.

The 4MAT System – A Natural Learning Cycle

The 4MAT is an awesome learning tool that can be broken down into four basic parts:

The ‘Why’

Here you start off with the meaning. Ask yourself what it means to you and why you want to learn that particular thing and how it’s going to apply in your situation.

The ‘What’

From the ‘why’, you come to the ‘what’.

This is where you go over the concept of the things you’re going to be doing and how they work. In your course, you could show some diagrams on the screen to show the concept of what you’re talking about, which would also cover one of the learning styles.

The ‘How’

Once you’ve got that covered, you can move on to the third aspect of the 4MAT learning system, which is the ‘how’. This is where you literally show your students the skills.

You can walk them through the entire procedure and let them see exactly what it is that you’re doing.

The ‘If’

This is the part where your students are going to begin to apply what they are learning to themselves. This part involves those exercises that you put into your training course.

It’s important that you insist from inside your training that they should go and do those exercises right away because if your students only watch your videos, look at your beautiful pictures, listen to your audios, or read your written content and never implement these things in their lives, then all that information won’t connect and they won’t receive the outcome that they want from it.

This is why it’s vital to get them to start applying and doing what you’re teaching so that they can translate it into their own lives.

This is the only way that they will get the results that they want to achieve from your training courses.

Applying 4MAT To Your Course Structure

Applying this to your training structure is easy.

For instance, if you are putting together a video for the training, you can start by explaining why your topic is important. Make sure your audience understands what they are about to learn is important to them.

Next, you go into the concept (the ‘what’) which is where you show them what to do. Afterward, go into the ‘how’ which is the main part of the entire training video or training piece. Clearly show them the steps to take and demonstrate it for them.

After that, show your students how it all applies and then tell them to go and apply it for themselves.

You could end the training video by restating the ‘why’ all over again. This is your chance to explain to them the benefits of why they should go and do this right now.

Now you know a simple and effective structure that you can use when putting together your informational training products.

Between the 4MAT and the 7 basic learning styles, you have a lot of options for your courses and programs. You can use these guidelines to create the type of training that actually connects and helps your students achieve their desired results.

A Few Considerations

Keep in mind that the kind of language that you use in your information product is extremely important.

Don’t use words that are hard to understand or else you will lose a lot of your students early on. That’s not to say that you should speak to them as you would a second grader, but you have to avoid using unnecessarily complicated words.

If there’s some complex terminology that you can’t avoid, then at least provide definitions inside your training. Don’t just assume that your students will know what the jargon means.

This is important advice because one of the major reasons why people ask for refunds on information products is because they don’t understand a lot of what is inside the course, and rather than waste time trying to figure it all out, they find it easier to just ask for their money back.

In Conclusion

If you don’t already have an information product of your own, it might be a good idea to get started on that right away. Use what you’ve learned here to create your own training content that will get real results.

And remember, you don’t always have to do it all yourself. There are ways of outsourcing most of the work to people who have the experience to help you create effective training content that works.

In our next article, we’ll look at the actual steps to creating training courses, stay tuned!

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published July 31st 2018