MBA1686 How Often Should You Update Your Online Courses?

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Of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because you're no chump, you know that if you get better, so does your business. That's why we deliver 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 $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how often should you update your online courses. We work so hard to put together great materials, great workbooks, great videos, great training. We launch re release it to the world. We make sales, but often we don't revisit the course. We don't update it, we don't improve it. We don't add value to not only our existing students that bought the course, but but to new students that are coming in for the first time. Many entrepreneurs, many content creators are sleeping on this strategy. By updating and improving your courses doesn't only increase your retention, but it allows you to add more value and therefore increase your prices. The launch of your online courses is just the beginning. It's just the start. This is when you should be gathering information to find out how you can improve it. And in today's episode I'm going to show you how to do that and how to periodically understand, update and improve your online courses so they don't get stagnant, so they don't get old, so you can continue to sell them for as long as you're in business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I produce hundreds of hours of online course content through the $100 MBA through webinar ninja. And I can tell you creating online courses can be exhausting. And once you finish it and put it out for sale, most of us don't really want to revisit it again. And I'm here to tell you, you have to. You have to, because you're missing out on some huge opportunities. Before we update it, we want to know what we're going to be working on, what needs tweaking, what needs improving. And right now, we're talking about the content of the course. I'm not talking about a typo here or there or poorly rendered video. These are things you have to fix and you have to kind of improve as soon as possible before we make our updates. I highly recommend, within the first month of releasing your course to some new students is to create a survey, an automated survey that gets sent out to your customers, to your students of your course to gather feedback. This not only will allow you to know what's working, what people love about your course, but also what's lacking and how you can improve it. You can create a survey for free with Google forms, and you can keep it short and sweet. But remember, the whole point of an online course is to deliver a result for your students. We have a course called the Automated Webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC and the goal of that course is to show people how to create and launch their own automated. Automated webinar in 30 days. That's the result that we want all our students to have, because if they get that result, this course will be a success. People will tell other people. We know it's going to have viral marketing if people reach that result. So understand that when people buy your course, they're looking for a result, and your goal is to make sure they achieve it. Now, obviously, they have to do the course, they have to take the course, they have to implement what you teach. And this is where the gaps are, and this is where you should be asking questions and probing in your survey. What stops them from completing the course? Do they need more accountability? Do they need more guidance? Was it too confusing? Did they not know where to start and where to you know, go next after the first or second module, was there any kind of accountability group or feedback loop with a Slack channel or a Facebook group? What about Q and A? You need to find out what is causing people not to get a result and you want to shore up those reasons as much as possible. Obviously, you can do amazing things and deliver the perfect course and experience. And if people insist on participating, they're not going to get a result. But if somebody did participate but didn't get a result, we want to make sure that you've done everything possible to support that result, to make sure that they get there. And this is how we improve our course. It's not just add another video, it's not just add another, you know, workbook that might help, but you might need to have a live call with an expert to come in and teach their area of expertise on a particular point or matter in your niche. You can take that recording and add it to the course. You might need to add an accountability factor, pairing your students up as buddies and they complete projects together rather than alone. This is more like an evolution of the course rather than updating. And of course, things change over time, right? The market changes, the resources that you recommend might change, they might evolve. There might be better and more efficient ways to accomplish what you're trying to have your students accomplish. So with an automated survey that can be sent out, with automated emails, maybe a survey that gets sent out every two weeks or after two weeks of completing the course, they get the survey. You have information coming at you all the time to improve it. Now, obviously it's not easy to be improving it every single day. If this is not the full time thing you're doing, if the course is not your full time business, you might be doing other things in your business, you might have other products, you might be doing this on the side with your full time job. What I recommend is dedicating a few days to make these improvements, to implement these improvements at least once a quarter. So every three months you're going to take a look at your survey, you're going to compile the information, you're going to prioritize some of the things that come up over and over, you're going to come up with some solutions and you're going to have a game plan. In the next three, four, five days, even week, you're going to say, how may I implement these solutions to improve my course? Now this is really going to do wonders for your course because every three months your current students that have access will Feel like, wow, I'm getting more value than I actually signed up for. This thing just got better. Let me revisit this content. When you open up the course again or you relaunch or remarket it, you can talk about something new. Just like a new iPhone that gets released. They say we have all these great features, plus all these new things that just came out. This keeps your course fresh. New always. By the way, this is not something I invented. This is something I got from back in the day in education, we used to update the curriculum of a course at least once a semester. We would analyze, take a look. Do we need to ask supplemental material? Do we have to change the way we deliver it? We'd even evaluate the exam and say, are we actually testing for the right things here? But with online courses, things move a lot faster. And this is why I recommend once a quarter. Now, if you have a quarter where you don't make a lot of improvements, you might make some aesthetic changes. You might add a couple of freebies, a couple new tools or recommendations. That's okay. Sometimes you can make sweeping improvements every single time. But by revisiting it every quarter, you ensure that you're doing everything you can. You're looking at the feedback again. You're doing your due diligence to make sure you're adding value to the course constantly. Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right?

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Every quarter, you're going to take a look at the feedback you got from your students. You're going to take a look at the market. You're going to take a look at what goal you're trying to achieve, what results you're trying to deliver for your customers, and brainstorm. How can I get better, how can I get them to that result faster, quicker, more efficiently at a higher success rate. People that obsess about this really win when it comes to online courses because the students get an ROI and they tell other people and you get incredible testimonials put on your website and you become a thought leader, become an expert in your area. People that are legit, people that actually do the work to get people results, they get noticed, they get talked about, they get written up about. So it may seem like a bit of extra work to do this every quarter, but it's going to be well worth it because again, adding value to the course and you can consider raising the price of the course every time you add more value. And I want to express something that's very important. Adding more value just equals better results, not more stuff. In fact, if I can get you to the results faster, quicker, more efficiently, with less content, with less things to go through, that's actually a better course because it's brief. It's getting me to the point faster. I don't have to do as much work, I don't have to spend as much time to get there. It might be other factors like I mentioned that allow me to get the results. So if it does that for me, if it gets my results faster, better, I'm willing to pay more than a course that I just buy and forget about and don't really implement, it doesn't really help me. There's plenty of them out there on the Internet. So it's easy for you to stand out by having a high value result driven course that's constantly improving. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. We're on every single app. Whatever you're using to listen to this right now, hit subscribe. And if you loved this episode, share it with a friend on social. Let them know what you love about this podcast. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. In business, just like anything in life, it's about growth. You're either growing or you're dying. It's very, very hard. I think it's nearly impossible just to stay the same. So you have to actively try to improve. Otherwise you're just not getting better. You're actually going the other way around. It's just like your health. You're either getting in shape, you're getting healthier and healthier, stronger, or you're getting weaker and weaker and less in shape. So be on the attack. Be in the positive. Work on it and it will reward you. Thank you so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. See you then. Take care.

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