MBA1555 Q&A Wednesday: Should I keep my online course open, or do an “open & close” launch?

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Helpful business advice every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, email me over at Omar100- MBA net and I'll answer it right here on the show. Today's question is from Barry and Barry asks. I'm launching a brand new online course. My question is should I make the course available online for anybody to enroll at any time or should I do one of those open and close launches where I have a launch period, I close the doors and then I open again a couple months down the line? Not sure which strategy is best. Would love your insight. Love the podcast.

Thanks so much for your help Barry.

Great question Barry. I've seen online courses sold in both ways successfully. So we'll talk about the pros and cons and what I recommend for your first online course. We got a lot to cover so let's get into it. Let's get down to Business. So Barry is launching an online course and he wants to know, should he make the course available, open and ready for people to enroll at any time, or should he do an open and closed launch? Open and closed launches are very popular in online courses where they say, hey, here's the enrollment date. This is when you can enroll and this is when enrollment closes. And usually it's about a two week window, maybe a week sometimes, and then they close the doors. You cannot enroll until later on. If people visit the website, for example, they're told, hey, enrollment's closed. You can sign up for the waiting list and then it opens up for enrollment again after some time, maybe two months or so. And Barry wants to know which one to do. He's launching his first online course. Both methods are going to be okay. There's no like dramatic or fatal move here. But I do recommend an open and closed launch for your first online course. Why? Because when you have a cohort, you can really learn a lot from them. You can find out what's going on and you, you can compare it to your second cohort. And having the open close time allows you to really iterate and improve the course or aspects of the course. So when the next cohort comes on, you can compare results. Now, from a marketing standpoint, a lot of people use the open close method because it creates real scarcity. It pushes people to sign up for the course now, not later. And it actually results in a lot of sales. Many people believe it actually makes more sales than having a continuous open car or open course at all time, or I should say all times. So, you know, you really can do both, and I've done both. But I find the open close launch is great, especially if you're trying to figure out how to improve the course, how to perfect it. The interesting thing is, if this is your first course and you have a small audience, the open close launch and that hype and that kind of scarcity is going to have its limitations because you don't have much of an audience yet. It works really well when you have a large email list and people are waiting for it and you're building buzz and you're doing previews and you're saying, hey, this is the open day, this is the enrollment day that you were going to open up. Make sure you sign up because we're going to close the doors and there's incentives for the first few days and all that kind of stuff. But it's still beneficial from a learning standpoint. A lot of newbies will not Go open closed. Because they're like, I want to sell this course, I want to continue to make money, thinking it's just going to be kind of holding them back from selling the course or making some revenue if they close the doors. But I have found in my experience that you kind of have to trust the process and you don't have to close the doors for a very long time. You can close it just for the duration of how long the course takes to complete. And that could be, you know, 30 days. The other thing I really love about open closed courses is if you have some sort of group, like a Facebook group, where people are commenting and socializing and asking questions, that cohort of students, they really become tight each other, they become friends, they might even collaborate on projects later in the future. And they're all in it together to see it through, to see the course through until it's finished. And then, you know, they kind of celebrate at the end and say goodbye. And then you experience the same thing for a whole new group of people when you open up again. So there's definitely a sense of value for the customer when it comes to that community aspect when you have a cohort. So with our actual course, the Hundred Dollar mba, we had an open close launch when we first started and then for a period of time, we had it open for a long period of time, just open. People could buy at any time, no open close date. And then we closed it for a period of time, made some improvements actually for over a year and then we launched it again and now it's open and available to people at any time. You have to remember, our course is quite low cost, it's a low entry Point, it's $100. And a lot of the open close courses retail for a whole lot more. So it actually makes more sense for high value, high dollar amount value courses. So courses that are $500 or above. I think the open close kind of setup really lends itself to that type of purchase. Also, if you have several courses, sort of like an a la carte type of setup that you have on your website, having it available at any time makes more sense. Uh, something like masterclass.com makes sense that they have their, their courses available at any time because they have so many courses. But if you have like a flagship course that's $2,000, I would recommend the open close effect. I highly recommend you follow some people that do this very well. Brian Dean is very good at this. He launches courses and closes them for his site, backlinko.com. he does courses on SEO as well as YouTube SEO, and if you're just part of his mailing list, you'll get a feel of how he launches and how he closes and all that kind of stuff. And he's a good model because he does it ethically, he does it properly, and he's professional.

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Great question. Barry is launching a new course. Wants to know if he should have it open indefinitely or have it open closed launch. If this is your first course, highly recommend you check out the open close launch. There are some things you can learn There are some things that you can learn about launching and open close launches from Jeff Walker. He has a course that's about $2,000. I've taken this course back in the day, maybe about 10 years ago. He's been around for a long time, but he has a book about product launches. If you just look it up on Amazon, it's actually called Launch. That book is actually just as effective as the course, in my opinion. I think the course actually walks you through step by step, but the book will get you the basics. Read that book. It'll walk you through his whole formula of launching. The vast majority of that material is useful. There are some things I disagree, but some things I disagree about his philosophy. But for the most part it's really, really a good formula for you to follow if you're just getting started. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you have a question you want to ask on Q and A Wednesday, just leave me an email over@omar100mba.net I'll make sure I answer it right here on the show. Don't forget to hit subscribe if you love the show. Leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show and of course share the show with your friends and family. Go ahead and share it on social right now. Tell everybody what you love about the 100 RMBA show. It's the biggest compliment you can send us. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I like to remind all new entrepreneurs or anybody who's launching something new, the launch is just the beginning. You're going to have many, many opportunities to make money, to grow, to be successful. If the launch doesn't go as well as you expected, that's okay. You have plenty of time to do it again and again and again and improve and imperfect and make up for your losses. Don't be so hard on yourself. Creating a product, creating a business, launching it to the world. Not easy. Most people fail. Most people quit. Most people don't even try. So the fact that you did it is an accomplishment in itself. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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