MBA1744 Why Live Courses are So Hot Right Now

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business Advice you can count on 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in April 2014. And in today's lesson you'll learn why live courses are so hot right now. In the last 12 months, online live courses have gained a lot of traction and popularity. Why? Well, that's what we get into in today's lesson. What are the advantages of running a live course versus one that's recorded, where people can watch the recording at their own time? On Are they more profitable? Will they help your business in the long run? Can you scale it? One of the reasons why people don't do live is because they feel like a recorded course is easy to scale. And the results that I found with my own experimentation as well as speaking to other online course builders. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Episode with a stat. It's pretty staggering. There was a study done by Katie Jordan from the massive Open Online Courses, an organization that studies the results of, you guessed it, online courses. We're talking about private courses, courses that are part of some sort of platform Like Udemy coaches that offer courses, the whole gamut. And they found that students of a paid course, of course they actually paid money for, had trouble completing the course. In fact, only 15% of all paying customers, all paying students, completed the course on average. It's even lower. If the course was free. It can be as low as 5% if the course was free. And a lot of us offer online courses or short courses as opt ins or so you might be thinking, Omar, what's the big deal? As long as these courses sell, we're good to go. No, that is a big problem. When your students don't complete your course, they don't get the result that they were intending. You need your students to get results for several reasons. Number one, it's hard for you to say that your course delivers on its promise. If you don't have enough people getting that, they don't get that actual result. Number two, there's a big difference between somebody getting that result and not getting the result. Regardless if it's your fault or not, whether they just forgot about it or got lazy, it could be totally not your fault. It's irrelevant. When your student doesn't get the result, they're not going to feel so great about the purchase. They'll have buyer's remorse. Third, you need success stories. You need people that actually have said, hey, I've done this course, I completed it. This is the result. This is amazing. The more of these, the easier it is for you to sell the course in the future. In fact, your product sells itself through these customer stories. So recently there's been a wave in live online courses, courses that people attend live. It's a live video broadcast. And I started to research this about a year ago. I had breakfast with a fellow entrepreneur, Brian Harris from Growth Tools, and he was running live courses and asked him, why are you doing live and not recorded? So people can just watch whatever they want. He said, well, we found that our completion rates are as high as 95% when it's live. When people pay money and they have to watch it live to get the benefit, they're going to show up just like they would normally show up to maybe a course they took in a community college. The other thing that Brian did is that he didn't offer a replay. He said, you're going to show up, you're going to learn, you're going to take notes, you're going to implement. There's no reason for the replay. The replay is encouraging people not to show up and not to complete the Course, it's a very big, bold move. But it worked for him and he would get success story after success story. And it really snowballed and allowed him to get some real traction with his courses. So I asked him, what about profitability? Well, he says, given the fact that it's a live course and I go back and forth with them, people ask questions, we even people on hot seats and they get on camera, the value of this live course is way higher versus a recorded course. So therefore I can charge more a recorded course. I could probably charge about $97 for the same type of material or result when I moved it to live. He charges $500 a person. Now, you might be thinking, omar, this sounds great, awesome. But how do you scale this? This is one of the challenges. A lot of people think about online courses that, hey, with a recorded course, I can scale up, people buy it anytime they want, they can attend anytime they want, and it kind of sells itself. That's just not true. A lot of people know that if they've sold courses online, that's why people do so they can fill as many people as possible so that they have an enrollment day, so people feel the urgency to sign up. So online courses don't sell themselves just by being there. Now you can scale a live course, you can do in the form of a webinar. And we talk about this at Webinar Ninja, our webinar software where they run a series webinar is what we call it and they offer different sessions. You can even make it paid with our stripe integration Shameless plug. But the point I'm making here is this is not one on one. You can have a classroom of people, 30, 40, 50 people, and it still can be productive and you can still bring people on camera. And because you're charging more, you can make more and therefore don't need to have thousands of students every month. Now I've been running some small experiments with these online courses. I actually first ran a one time session, two hour session on how to start a podcast. I charged for it. It was a live training session and it went really well. The feedback was fantastic. People actually implemented what I taught and there was a lot of interaction and it was probably in terms of content versus result, a great ratio. They got plenty of content, but they also got the result of starting their podcast because they felt, hey, I'm on this live call now in this live class, I gotta get the most of it. I've now transitioned into a three day challenge. This has become very popular in the last six months or so, people running the online challenges, but live. So it's three one hour sessions and I do this as a way to bring in customers. So I actually run a three day challenge on how to build your own marketing and sales funnel. If you're a coach or a trainer or you're teaching online or you sell courses. And I walk people through in the three days how to build that. Now, I don't charge a lot for this. I actually charge $37 for this three day course, three session course. Now, the reason why is one, I'm doing this so I can get qualified leads, so I can get people that actually are interested in my product, Webinar Ninja. Number two, I need them to put skin in the game. They have to put some money down so they can actually feel committed and they show up and they participate. That's really why I'm charging $37. And three, full transparency. It allows me to cover my advertising cost of bringing in that lead after the three day course and its full value. I spend about 10 minutes giving them an offer, my product, my service, so they can implement what I just taught in the three days with far greater ease with my software. And I'm running these three day challenges every single month. I just fill up the challenge, we run it and then we run another one the following month. Now, yes, you're not going to cover every time zone in the world, but that's okay. You can rotate, you can change the time to suit different time zones the next time you run your next live course. Now, some things that surprised me when doing these live courses is one, the interactivity. There's so much interactivity on these courses, it blows away anything I've done that's not live. People asking questions, people commenting, people cheering people on. It's just like this compact time of interaction that creates a sense of energy and it really pushes the students to accomplish their goals. Number two, many of the questions that people ask, a lot of people have the same questions in their head. So by me answering questions live and everybody hearing that answer live, they really get a lot out of it. Three, when I bring them on camera, it gives me a chance to really focus on their business, their problem. They can share screen, we can look at their copy. It becomes a hybrid coaching online course which is really, really cool. And your students get a lot of value out of that. Something they just can't get when it comes to a recorded course.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, I highly encourage you to get started with experimenting with live courses. If you're a course creator, if you're a coach, a trainer, this is a great way for you to scale your knowledge. My advice is to start with one masterclass, a two hour masterclass. You can charge like $100 for it. That was the price point I started with. It was a good sweet spot. I included a workbook with it and it's basically group coaching. It gives them a chance to ask questions, get specific information that they need for their business, for their life, and you get a ton of materials for testimonials and case studies for your website. There's also a huge hidden benefit that I haven't talked about is that you learn so much about your customers when you interact with them live, one on one. You learn so much about the problems they're facing, the issues they have, and you're able to start thinking about how you can resolve those issues with future products and offerings. You just don't get that type of information, that type of intel with a recorded course. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love it here, hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's absolutely free to subscribe. So go ahead and do that on your favorite podcast app. Whether it's Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Himalaya. We're on every single one of them. So just go ahead and smash that subscribe button. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. With a live course, you need to give a little bit more of a heads up in terms of when you are doing this course to your email list. To your audience. I recommend about three weeks at least because they have to show up on that day and time. It's like planning a trip, right? So it's a lot easier for people to register and attend for something that they that is recorded or something they can watch a replay for. But if it's live and they have to be there, give them as much heads up as possible so they can put it in their calendar. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.