Online Courses

The easiest way to sell online courses to corporates

Posted byIan Brodie on January 21st, 2022.

Selling to corporates can be hugely rewarding. But it can also be incredibly slow and painful. Especially when you're selling something they've never bought before – like online courses.

Covid-19 has changed things somewhat and brought online courses up the priority list. But by and large, people in corporates don't like to take risks on new things, because those risks tend to be one-sided.

If things go well, the company gets the benefit rather than them personally. But if things go badly, it's often career-ending for them.

So if a large organisation hasn't bought online courses before it can be a long and painful process for them to make that first purchase.

Unless…the online course comes bundled with something they're already used to buying.

That's why the easiest way to sell online courses to corporates is often to add them on to existing work you're already doing for them or proposing to them.

Doing live training? Add an online version of the course as an option to help reinforce the learning after the course is over. Or for new joiners or others who weren't able to attend the live sessions.

Doing a live workshop? Add an online training option before the workshop so that workshop itself can make real progress fast rather than having to spend half the time getting everyone up to speed.

Doing a consulting project? Add an online training option to ensure that new processes and methods introduced in the project are implemented effectively and that the improvements stick.

Proposing a training project to a client with a strict budget, or where travelling to each of their offices is going to be prohibitively expensive? Use a blend of live and online training to make the project more affordable while still getting the benefits of live sessions where they're really needed.

There are all sorts of ways you can integrate online courses into live work. And they're all much, much easier to sell to clients than a standalone online course because they don't seem anywhere near as new and risky.

But the reality is that most people just don't offer them.

They propose the same old type of live sessions they've always proposed, rather than spending just a little bit of time to figure out how they can add online courses into the mix.

And in doing so, they miss out on potentially a huge opportunity to start selling online courses.

Because even if an online course add-on is only a small amount of revenue initially, it opens the door for more online courses in future – including standalone options.

Once you've delivered and your online courses are a known and trusted quantity, it's much, much easier to sell more of them.

But only if you can get that initial foot in the door.

Of course, this only works in situations where you're already selling other services to them. In upcoming posts we'll see how you can break in to brand new corporate clients using the same principle of decreasing perceived risk.

Online Courses

Quality vs Speed: Do We Really Need a Trade-Off?

Posted byIan Brodie on January 5th, 2022.

Hope this New Year is treating you well. I have some big plans and tons of new content I want to share with you this year about building online courses.

But today I want to focus on something that's been bugging me for a while. A kind of paradox if you like.

In my interviews with successful course builders I always close by asking them for one big tip they would give to a friend thinking about creating an online course that would most help them succeed.

Two themes have come up time and time again.

One is speed.

You never really know if a course is going to click with your audience until you offer it for sale. And you never know exactly what they want until you show them something and get feedback on it.

So one of the biggest keys to success is to get a minimum viable version of your course out there quickly, offer it for sale and get feedback on it. Don't wait until you've perfected it or got all the bells and whistles or a super polished presentation.

But the second big theme is quality.

With an online course, you're not just competing with local competitors. Your course buyers could (and often do) buy from anyone in the world.

Your course needs to stand out and be brilliant quality to succeed in a harsh red ocean of other courses.

And, of course, it seems like there's a trade-off between these two themes.

On the one hand, you need to pull your course together quickly and get it out to your audience to get feedback.

On the other, you need to ensure it's super high quality to stand out against all the competition.

This really bugged me at first.

Did I have to sacrifice one for the other? Or find some kind of happy medium trade-off? Or was one of the themes simply wrong.

But eventually, I realised that there's no trade-off at all…if you think more deeply about what quality means.

As a course creator spending all your time building a course it's easy to assume that quality means the production values of the course…

…an impressive website. High-quality videos. Forums, certificates, gamification, the whole learning management kit and kaboodle.

But that's not what the vast majority of your actual clients care about.

They care about getting results from the course. Fast.

Of course, if the website is super slow and they can't understand what the videos are telling them then they're not going to learn effectively and they won't get results from your course.

But as long as the production values are OK, what's really important is the effectiveness and practicality of what you teach.

Powerful ideas. Simple plans that work. Shortcuts.

You can get these across without investing a small fortune or slaving away for months over a fancy website.

Quick, practical videos. Templates. Copy and paste examples. Live sessions where you answer questions. Nothing that takes an age or needs super high production values.

But super valuable.

So if you're getting bogged down creating your course and it's taking ages, think to yourself “what do my best customers actually want from this course? What's quality to them?”

– Ian

PS – I very often find that when faced with a painful trade-off or two goals seemingly in conflict, there's often a hidden assumption buried in there that just isn't true (in this case that “quality” means high production values).

Look for those assumptions. Challenge them. And you just might find.a way to have your cake and eat it.

Online Courses

How a “distinctive point of view” is rocketfuel for your online course

Posted byIan Brodie on December 10th, 2021.

Last week I talked about how important it was to differentiate your course given the huge number of options your potential buyers will have online.

And one of the best ways to do that is to base your course around a unique methodology or “distinctive point of view”.

If you think about it, we all do what we do in different ways.

No one approaches marketing or building courses in quite the same way that I do. And no one does what you do in the exact same way you do it.

Normally we don't make a big deal out of those differences. We get on with doing what we do and getting results for clients and hope those results will speak for themselves.

But in the world of online courses, everyone will claim to get the same big results you get. Your buyers need some way of differentiating between courses and choosing the one that will be best for them.

Differentiating based on a unique approach is particularly powerful because:

• Almost by definition it's very difficult for someone to copy your unique way of doing things (whereas they can all claim they have great service, get great results, etc).
• Doing things differently means it'll feel different to anything your potential customers have tried before. If (like most people) they've tried courses in the past and not had much success, the fact your course does things differently will give them hope they can succeed this time.
• It's much more marketable. For example, no one is going to invite you onto their podcast or webinar to talk about how you do sales training the exact same way everyone else does it. But they will invite you on if you have a new and interesting approach their audience hasn't heard before.

Now when I talk about a unique way of doing things, I don't mean the mechanics of how you run your courses. That's important, but the fact that you split your courses into micro learning or do things more interactively or whatever isn't going to bring floods of new customers to you.

Having a unique approach means teaching your customers how they can do things differently in your area of expertise.

For example, when Brian Dean teaches content marketing for SEO he doesn't teach you how to create content your audience will value. He teaches you how to identify the influencers in your market and how to create the type of content they will value. Content they'll link to and share so more of your audience gets to see it and it ranks higher in searches.

Of course, it has to be valuable to your audience too – but the primary focus is on figuring out the type of content your influencers will link to and share.

When I first heard him express that concept years ago my initial thoughts were “wait, that can't be right…oh hang on…oh…yeah…that makes sense now you think about it…I can see how that works…and actually, it might just work for me”.

That's the kind of reaction you want when potential customers hear about your approach…

…a little lightbulb going off where they're a little puzzled at first, then they get it, then they begin to think “this might work for me”.

That's what powers them to find out more about your course and eventually to invest in it.

And you need to be able to trigger that reaction in just a few sentences. Perhaps with a course name and subtitle or a few bullet points, or an explanatory model.

We'll discuss how to do that in our next post.

Online Courses

Why would someone buy your course?

Posted byIan Brodie on December 3rd, 2021.

I went to the barber's yesterday and got myself a half-decent haircut.

For some unknown reason, there are three barber's shops in close proximity in our tiny village. So plenty of choice.

But not anywhere near the amount of choice you have when it comes to buying an online course. You can almost literally choose from any supplier in the world as long as the course is in a language you understand.

Which brings up the important question for course builders: given all this choice, why should someone buy their course from you?

In my experience there are 5 ways you can set your course apart from the very many others on the market. But only 3 I'd recommend.

You could, of course, make your course cheaper than everyone else's. Not a smart strategy and not one that is likely to last long as someone else is bound to undercut you.

You could try to make your course bigger and more comprehensive. A decent strategy for a larger organisation with the resources to do so. But not a great strategy for the likes of you and me.

The first viable strategy is to focus on a narrow niche that plays to your strengths. There's less competition in narrow niches, but they're usually big enough to sustain a solid business for a small firm or individual course builder.

The second viable strategy is to differentiate based on your own credibility, personality or relationship with your audience.

If you're a well-known expert in your field, have a long track record of success, or have built a strong relationship with an audience (e.g. your own email list) then that can differentiate your course from others.

People buy from people they know and trust and that relationship can be your edge, even if the course itself is similar to others.

And finally you can base your course on a unique methodology or approach.

Rather than just teaching standard material, if the core of your course is a methodology or model or approach that's unique to you it becomes impossible for competitors to copy.

And because the approach is different to what anyone else is offering it'll be new and compelling to potential buyers. And it means you can focus on teaching the unique aspects of the approach rather than covering everything related to the topic.

For very many people this will be the most effective way of differentiating yourself while minimising the amount of work needed to develop an effective course. And the reality is that we all have our own unique approaches to how we deliver our work – it's a matter of codifying and communicating them in a compelling way.

Using a unique methodology or framework comes across in many of the interviews on the Course Builders Hub.

And next time I'm going to explore how to use a unique methodology or “distinctive point of view” to create a course that's different and rather easier to sell.