Managed Interactive Learning Environment (ILE)

If you want to run an online business, TeachingSells is a programme run by Brian Clark and Tony Clark that offers a way of understanding how to run a paid content business.

OM4 is offering a Managed Interactive Learning Environment (ILE) based on the original TeachingSells specification using WordPress, Moodle, aMember, Aweber, VBulletin and PostAffiliatePro

The Managed ILE product includes:

• Installation and Configuration
• Hosting and Administration
• Support

Partner with OM4 as your technology partner and enjoy the benefits of having your ILE administered and supported when your learning environment is up and running.

About the Managed ILE from OM4

OM4 is a services company. We provide a web platform for small businesses designed to help find customers and convert online. This means business websites that are active in helping build presence, attract visitors, open a conversation that converts to leads and sales, and to help follow up.

OM4 is now offering a service that answers the ‘How Can I Get An ILE’ question raised by some TS members. This is not an attempt to provide the lowest possible cost ILE and somehow find a way to make a profit through volume. Our ILE solution is designed to deliver a quality solution that enables you to focus on content and marketing rather than technical factors.

A Managed ILE – how it works

• You sign up.
• You fill out our Questionnaire with your requirements.
• We setup and configure your ILE
• You take ownership of your ILE and setup your content.
• We host, administer and support your ILE for you.
• You market and joint venture your way to success.

Our pricing is based on a setup fee and a monthly hosting and administration fee.

Our service includes the following components:

• Installation
• Configuration/integration
• Hosting
• Administration
• Support

To describe the software components we have included in the Managed ILE, I’m going to use the ILE roadmap.

It all starts with your parts list

The OM4 Managed ILE includes the following component parts:

• Website. A WordPress blog-enabled website at your chosen domain (mydomain.com), configured so you can update your website content at any time and integrated with aMember to allow access to premium WordPress content.
• Membership. aMember membership software, installed and configured so you can sign up members for your website using aMember products.
• Learning. Moodle eLearning software, installed and configured and integrated with aMember to allow you to write learning modules and make them available through aMember products.
• Forum. vBulletin forum software, installed and configured and integrated with aMember so your members get access to your forums once they pay their membership. And VBSEO if you want your forum to have stronger search engine visibility.
• Affiliates. PostAffiliatePro affilate software, installed, configured and integrated with aMember to trigger your affiliate tracking whenever a sale is made through aMember
• Email Autoresponder. Aweber Email Autoresponder, configured to accept signups from your website
• Payments. PayPal payments configured for your PayPal account and integrated with aMember to process aMember payments.
• Business Email. Google Apps installed and configured for your chosen domain so you manage your business email addresses (me@mydomain.com) and have shared calendaring for your team.

Finding a Home for Your Site

You can choose to have your ILE hosted on our US or Australian servers. We run Linux (Centos5), PHP5 and MySQL5 – hardened, tuned and patched. Regular performance monitoring is part of our routine, and we upgrade server capacity where necessary. We use RimuHosting for our US servers and OzServers for our Australian servers, and our websites are fast and reliable.

Incorporating server administration

Server administration will matter a lot for your ILE. When selecting a hosting provider, identifying who will administer your server is important. Will it be you? Will it be an administrator from the hosting provider? If so, do they understand the software you will be running for your ILE?

It doesn’t matter how much memory, disk or CPU capacity a server has if it falls over. If it is hacked. If a failure occurs and there is no backup. If your backup was lost along with your server. If there is a backup but nobody available to restore it.

Our Managed ILE is more than a hosted ILE. It includes server administration.

Reaching Your Prospects

We use the Aweber email autoresponder ourselves, and recommend it to our clients.

We have developed a plugin to make it really easy to include your Aweber mailing lists in your WordPress sidebar and get the formatting just right (some non-technical folk find that a bit hard to do if you just copy/paste the code snippet).

Using our service you sign up for your own Aweber account. You send us the sign up email and we configure it for you, along with your first email list. All ready for you to write your first email message for new signups.

Partners in Promotion – Tracking Affiliates

Getting your affiliate tracking setup means configuring the server software and integrating it with aMember. We do that for you.

You will want to be thinking about the creative for your affiliate banners (see our design option below as we can help with that if you need it) and arresting headlines for text links.

Managing Your Membership

aMember is a wonderful membership component, we’ve been using it for some time on our projects. We’ve worked with the CGI support team, and found Alex and his team extremely helpful and responsive when given accurate information about issues.

We’ll set aMember up for you, configure it and integrate it with vBulletin, Moodle, PayPal and PostAffiliatePro. We’ll also create your first aMember product if you need it (just a sample product if you aren’t ready with a real one just yet) and include it in your website.

That way you can see how it all works, and copy the existing product to create new ones. You’ll find it easier to learn how to run aMember that way.

A Place for your Content

Your ILE will include Moodle, installed, configured and integrated with aMember. With a consistent masthead (like your website), and logout synchronised with aMember.

We will also install vBulletin, so you can create the discussion forums for your membership.

For public forums we will include installation of VBSEO along with vBulletin (there is an extra software licence fee involved). VBSEO enables means us to setup your vBulletin to improve search engine results.

Choosing a Payment Processor

Your ILE will support payments with PayPal.

Design

A Graphic Designer will take your brief and prepare a custom design for your ILE. The design will be applied to your WordPress site (the primary point of contact) as well as Moodle, aMember, vBulletin (and PostAffiliatePro, in some areas).

WordPress Options

Your ILE will have a WordPress based website to use to present your offer to the world, allow new members to sign up for your paid content, and for existing members to login to your courses and forums.

Integration

We do this for you. Your ILE will have aMember integrated with WordPress, vBulletin, Moodle and PayPal.

You won’t have to use FTP. You only use your ILE through the software interface.

Administration

As this is a Managed ILE, it is now time to talk about administration. We have a fee for this, so I want you to understand what we do, and the benefits to you in paying us to do it.

Here are some of the administration tasks that we will do for you. Any one of these tasks could easily keep you tied up and NOT attending to the needs of your members or marketing your product. A website that is down has a remarkable way of focusing your attention on it, not your members.

Patches. The software vendors who provide the components of your ILE – WordPress, vBulletin, Moodle, aMember and PostAffiliatePro – will issue patches from time to time. Some of them for serious security vulnerabilities. As soon as vulnerabilities becomes known, the race begins to patch software before hackers identify exploits and start probing servers.

We watch for patches and install them as soon as we can, reducing the risk a hacker can get through to your site.

Upgrades. Every one of your ILE components has a team of eager developers fixing problems and developing new features.

New features can sometimes mean difficult decisions. If vBulletin issue a new integration plugin for Moodle, should you install it? It has an enticing new feature that goes with it, but will it conflict with the aMember/Moodle plugin and stop new sign ups? Hmm, not sure.

It is good to have a technical expert on hand to look into potential conflicts before they arise. The more software components that your website uses, the more you need to be ready to look into this.

Backups. Every night we will make a copy of your content – text, images, multimedia files. These backups are stored on your server. OM4 stores backups for:

• the most recent 7 days
• the most recent 4 weeks
• each month

One of the most common reasons for requiring a restoration from backup is somebody (it could be you) mistakenly deletes something they shouldn’t. Your server backups mean recovery is possible, you can call on your OM4 Webmaster to restore it for you.

Restoring some data to a production website can be hard if you haven’t done it before or thought it through beforehand. When multiple applications are involved, it is also important to understand the nature of the information and where the data is stored.

Offsite backups. We will also copy your backups to an account – in your name – on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Using S3 for backups costs little, and in addition to onsite backups you will also have offsite backups

Benefit to you: your ILE (your online business) will run with a complete set of onsite and offsite backups. Backups that you control and can restore from in an emergency.

Because up to date backups are under your control, you can easily verify that offsite backups are being kept. It also means if you ever decide you want to move your application elsewhere, you have the means easily at your disposal.

Recovery. This goes with backups. It is easy to overlook the fact that unless you have a way of restoring your backup within an appropriate time frame, your backup may be worthless.

Even for small scale recoveries from onsite backups, it can be hard to restore data unless an administrator has scripts in place that have been pre-tested. This requires planning and testing.

Recovering from a larger event is harder still. Because OM4 has multiple servers in multiple data centers, if an event arose that meant we lost service from one of them altogether (could be a major disaster, or possibly an ISP going out of business) we have plans in place to be able to restore websites to our other data centre. We have redundant name servers operating in multiple geographies to reduce service restoration time – DNS propagation times can slow a restoration down big time.

Recovering from unexpected events takes planning. When it comes to backup and recovery, having an administrator to plan and execute recovery helps turn a server into a home for your online business.

Security. We rely on hardening scripts that run over a server and lock down file permissions, delete unnecessary install files, remove test accounts and so on. If you have never had any issues you might wonder why anyone bothers doing this sort of stuff. If you wonder, search Google for ‘my site has been hacked’ and see if that changes your opinion.

DNS. Who will administer your DNS? Updating name servers is easy. But once you start with more complex businesses online, DNS rapidly gets involved. You may find it tricky to setup A records, CNAMES and 301 redirects – far better to have an expert administrator on hand who knows what is going on.

Support

Off the topic of Administration for now, but what about support?

Once you have your ILE up and running, what do you do if you need support? Finding experts in all these tools is hard the first time. It can be even harder when all you want is to solve one problem. It is much harder to issue a request for a solution to one problem on guru.com.

Not only do we propose to host and administer your ILE on an ongoing basis, we will also support it.

Fix. If we have set something up wrongly and it isn’t working, our support means we will fix it for free. You can email us or post to our forum for that.

Free Support. If you need general How To help, you can ask on our OM4 Forums. Support through forum request is free.

Paid Support. If you want us to help you run your ILE (for example, prepare a new banner, set up a new Aweber email list), we have paid support services you can use for all that. You can hire us by the hour. So that means you can do a lot of the ILE work yourself, or hire us to do it for you.  Frees you up to do the most important stuff.

Track Record

You’ve read this far, and perhaps by now you are wondering about OM4 and whether you can trust us to manage your ILE.

OM4 is based in Australia (Perth and Melbourne). We support businesses running on servers in the US and Australia.

We specialise in online marketing. OM4 helps businesses find customers and convert online, and we use 4 primary marketing approaches to do this: content marketing, search marketing, affiliate marketing and email marketing. We have a wide range of clients who operate businesses online – you can check out our portfolio on this site.

Pricing

The price for an ILE is broken down into three parts:

• Setup (for our upfront work installing and configuring your ILE)
• Hosting (monthly fee to share our servers and bandwidth)
• Administration (monthly fee to cover patches, upgrades, backup and security)

Setup

Setup fee for an ILE: $4,500 AUD or $3,500 USD

Our payment terms are three monthly payments, with the first payment due on commencement.

Hosting

The monthly hosting fee is:

• $100 AUD – Australian based server
• $70 USD – US based server

We monitor server capacity carefully.  If and when necessary we will upgrade server capacity to keep sites running efficiently.

Administration

The monthly administration fee is $90 AUD or $78 USD.

The fee covers patches, upgrades, onsite and offsite backups and security hardening across all the components of the ILE – WordPress, Moodle, aMember, PostAffiliatePro, vBulletin, VBSEO.

An ILE that did not include administration fees might cost less. But consider the value to your business of having an expert administrator attending to the needs of your ILE. And the value of having that same administrator up to speed – exactly the sort of person you would want to have available if your online business faced a critical situation.

Software Licences

You will need to purchase the following software licences for your ILE:

• vBulletin
• aMember (with vBulletin, WordPress plugins)
• PostAffiliatePro
• Aweber

You should budget about $719 USD to purchase these software licences – please wait for our detailed instructions before purchasing.

VBSEO is recommended if you want a public vBulletin forum to be more search engine friendly.

Ownership

Licences. You keep ownership of your software licences. That way if you ever need to move to a new technology partner, the move is straightforward. And for things like an email list, well you don’t want to try and migrate those anyway. If software vendors ask for upgrade fees in the future we’ll let you know so you can purchase.

Content. Our standard Terms of Service state that you retain the intellectual property in your content. If we develop content for you, ownership in the IP transfers to you on full payment of the agreed service fee.

Summary

The OM4 Managed ILE puts together the pieces so that you get the benefits of a full service technical partner. The solution:

• Allows for all ILE software components.
• Includes a graphic designer to do your design.
• Includes configuring your own Amazon S3 account so you can have full control over your offsite backups.
• Includes a website development package to help you get your public website ready for prime time.

Each of these components takes one item of complexity off your task list, enabling you to focus on the main game – preparing great content and course materials, marketing to your prospects, and enlisting the support of affiliates and JV partners.

How to Commence

Step 1. Register your interest using the enquiry form below and give me a high level view of your requirements and any questions you may have. I will be in touch to respond to any questions. Once all queries are resolved I will provide you with the sign up link.

Step 2. Sign up and complete our Questionnaire (confirming the details of your ILE)

Step 3. Purchase your ILE licences (wait for our detailed instructions before doing this)

Step 4. Participate in our milestone reviews during development.

Step 5. Take ownership of your new ILE.

Target date for delivery is 10 working days from completion of your requirement questionnaire.

Interested?

Please get in touch using this form.