The way to make your LMS pay is to monetize your content. Look at training as an investment. You spend time and money developing it, so why not make it pay its way?
This is not a blank check kind of discussion. You have to do a hardnosed assessment to determine if your training can be tweaked and adjusted to meet market demands. Viral marketing may be the way to go. Your customers essentially use your content with their customers and so on. You would then cut a deal with your original customer that allows them to re-purpose your content.
For the sake of argument, let’s say you have come up with a good onboarding process to start a volunteer network. There may be commonalities in your training no matter who the volunteers work for. So you can make your program generic in nature and offer a subscription service or perhaps sell advertising space.
Or let’s say you are working in the health field and you want your customers to be aware of a new procedure involving your medical equipment. There may be aspects of that procedure that can bundled into a training module that can be on sold to other clients.
The other option, if you are selling a service, is to bolt on an e-commerce platform to your LMS. If you are selling sportswear for example, you can establish an e-commerce site with direct sales to your customers. But what if what you are selling is an intangible service, like market development and you have a downloadable checklist. That list could be used by any number of people in your customer’s network, and they essentially become a third party distributor.
One of the key components of monetizing your training is to protect customer financial data. This can be done with third party plug-ins like PayPal which have a solid system to broker credit card transactions.
You can also use PayForCourses, a plug-in for Moodle and Totara users that can be linked together so your content can be sold. The package advertises that it uses a secure shopping cart interface that allows you to sell any number of modules or courses.
As a Totara partner and Moodle Certified Partner, My Learning Space can help you navigate the often tricky business of getting your content to pay its own way. Contact us for a talk about how you can monetize your content today!