MBA2382 How to Drastically Improve Your Online Course + Free Ride Friday
2 Feb 2026 · 9 min
Podcast episode (Free Ride Friday) in which host Omar Zenhom teaches three core ingredients to dramatically improve an online course: a compelling outcome, live interaction, and proof you can teach. The episode includes multiple commercial ad reads (QuickBooks, Dell, Discover, 1-800-Flowers, Tremphya), a giveaway announcement for a lifetime membership, and closing advice to focus on better-not-more course design.
Chapters
Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Powerful business lessons you can count on. 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 back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to the hundred dollar mba. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free on Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn how to drastically improve your online course. I'm going to share with you three ingredients, three things that you can add to your course that can make it easier for you to market, sell and deliver your course to your students. Listen. Creating an online course that's successful is not as easy as it looks. Most of us work really hard on it, launch it, and then crickets. We want to stop that from happening. So I'm going to share with you how to do that in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Let's make sure your online course is a success. Let's start with the first most important ingredient you have to have to make sure it's a blockbuster. Course number one is a compelling outcome. Most webinar topics are just absolutely lame. They don't really give people what they want. For example, how to train your dog like a pro. People don't really care about training their dog like a pro. They don't want to be a pro dog trainer. They want their dog to behave. This doesn't interrupt any patterns. This doesn't get anybody's attention because it's sort of mundane. You need your course to be about something that people actually want and compels them to take action, to pay attention, to check it out and to buy a better course. Title and outcome would be how to get your dog to obey your every command in one week. That's what people want. They want their dogs to just do what they say. When I tell you to sit, you sit. When I tell you to stop barking, you stop barking. This is compelling because it actually addresses the real problem. If you have a course right now, take a look at your course title. Is it compelling enough? Does it get people to actually buy? Because this is actually what they want. Too many of us are trying to be too slick, too smart, too savvy, and we, you know, basically trip ourselves up. You might be asking, what about a title that says how to how to grow your email list in 30 days? My opinion is they don't want to learn how to do it. They want the result. They want to grow their email list in 30 days. They want to actually have the end result that's compelling. So a compelling outcome is the number one ingredient. You might need to change your course. You might need to change what you're teaching, but you're doing yourself a favor because you're allowing people to pay attention and want to buy your course. It's actually going to get you more sales, more visits, more traffic, more word of mouth. Think transformation. What will your students become? Who will they become after taking your course? What will they be able to do? What is the actual outcome? Ingredient number two, live interaction. Live interaction is so important nowadays because people need to know they're on the right track. Live interaction allows people to ask questions, get a bit of coaching, get some feedback. But most of all, live interaction increases your value, meaning people will buy your course simply because they know there's going to be some sort of live interaction, whether it's a weekly video call or even live chat or whatever it might be. But the point here is that the buyer sees A higher likelihood of achievement when there's live interaction. This allows them to say, hey, this course is worth buying because I have a good chance of getting the outcome because of the live interaction. I like incorporating weekly calls, video calls, because it allows me to build a community, allows me to help people see how the lessons apply to their own life and business, but it also allows them to get more of what they signed up. For Me, they want to learn from me. And the same goes for you. They want to learn from you, they want to interact with you. They probably learned about the course because they like you and they like your style or they saw a video of you on social media. So give them what they want. Give them some live interaction. It makes them feel like they can make it happen. The other thing is that live interaction encourages accountability, allows people to say, hey, somebody's got my back. They're going to hold me accountable week after week or whatever it might be to make sure that I do what I need to do to achieve the outcome. We all need a kick in the rear end sometimes, and that's okay. Give that to your students. Live interaction is a great R and D tool. Research and development. Record your calls and then download them and transcribe them. Why? Because on these calls, your student's gonna ask questions. They're gonna ask questions about the course, gonna ask questions about their challenges, their fears. Will this work for my business? How do I get started? All these types of questions. Guess what? These questions can be your new FAQs on your sales page. You can start using the same language in the same way your students are describing their problems on the sales page. This is absolutely brilliant and a must do for any course creator. It's free RD and it's a great way for you to use real life marketing material for your sales pages. Lastly, live interaction gets you better results and you want better results. You want your students to get better outcomes so that you can have those case studies and testimonials on your sales pages. These things will sell your course better than anything else because it's showing you can transform people and get them the result they're looking for. Think about it. Do you have a better chance of getting your students the outcome they're looking for if they just had a standalone on demand course or if it also included live interaction? Live calls where you can hold them accountable, push them, get them to do the work, allow them to ask questions and clarify things and get them unstuck, unblocked, and a chance for you to motivate them of course Live interaction is going to do that and it's going to just get you better results. A measurable better result than not having live interaction. Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card.
They accept Discover at Renaissance fairs?
Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times.
With the times.
You're playing the loot.
Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right? Discover is accepted at 99% of places.
That take credit cards nationwide, based on.
The February 2025 Nielsen report.
Looking for a Valentine's gift she'll truly love? 1-800-flowers.com knows what she wants. For 50 years, 1-800-flowers has helped guys like you get it right, delivering millions of fresh Valentine's roses nationwide. 1-800-Flowers offers premium fresh cut flowers backed by their seven day freshness guarantee, plus same day delivery when you need them on time. Valentine's is coming up and bouquets are selling fast, so don't wait on this order today at 1-800-FLowers.com. sXM. That's 1-800-FLowers. Com. SXM.
All right. The first ingredient was a compelling outcome. The second one was live interaction. The third, to make sure your course is a success, is proof you can teach. I'm talking about on your actual sales page. On the page where you sell your course, you should have some proof that you actually are a pretty decent teacher. Why? Because that's how they're going to experience the course. And many great teachers are not doing this. I can't tell you how many sales pages I've seen with no video and no proof that this person actually knows how to explain a topic and drive home results. This is why I highly recommend anybody who's selling a course to have a sales video. And in the sales video, you actually teach a concept from the course, giving them a test drive of what it's like to be taught by you. By doing this, the viewer of this video and the potential customer on the sales page is gonna say, wow, this person actually gave me an aha moment. And they unlocked something I didn't know before. They've helped me understand something and I like it. It's pretty cool. Where do I buy? By not having proof you can teach and having this in your video, you're leaving it up to their imagination. And many people are going to say, hmm, maybe this is boring. Maybe this person delivers things in a very dry way. Maybe they're not a good teacher. Maybe the videos are low quality, the course is low Quality. So don't let them assume all these negative things. Get in front of it and show them that you can teach. By doing this, you're using your ultimate tool, teaching as your sales tool. It's an amazing tool because you don't have to be an ultimate salesperson. You just gotta show them by teaching. Teaching is a new selling, guys. And if you're selling a course, showing them that you can teach is the best way to sell the course itself because you're gonna be teaching throughout the course and if they get a taste of it and they love it, they're gonna want more. This also gives you an opportunity to show your personality, show your teaching style and give them a taste of what the course is all about and what you're going to be covering. That's why I always say that your sales video should be sort of like a mini version of your course and the production quality should be as good or if not better than your actual videos in the course to win them over and make them feel like, yes, I can confidently buy from this person because they know what they're talking about. They know how to deliver and transfer that skill. And I know that this is not a shady character. They're putting their face in front of me. They are getting in front of their product and standing behind it. This builds trust quickly and allows you to turn a buyer that's on the fence to a sold buyer. Somebody who's like, sign me up. Well, they have it. Those are the three ingredients I highly recommend you have in every online course to dramatically improve it. A compelling outcome. Number one. Live interaction is number two. And number three is of course proof you can teach. All on the sales page in your sales video that wraps up today's lesson. But the episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Nick 349731. That's the handle on Apple podcast. Nick says concise. Five stars. If you're someone like me that can't listen to two hour interviews and you just want to get to the meet right away, this podcast is for you. I love how concise the episodes are. No fluff, full of value and really feels like you're getting probably better value than an mba. All for free. Definitely a podcast. You can binge and get a ton of value. Highly recommend. 5 stars. Thanks Nick for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride to the hundred dollar MBA program showing you how to become a better entrepreneur 100% guaranteed over at 100mba.net thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA Show. Hey, if you've gotten any value from the show, if you've been listening for some time and think it's all right, you'd be doing me a huge favor by hitting, follow or subscribe. It does wonders for our exposure and helps other people find the show. Thanks in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm a big believer that we should focus on trying to get better with our products, our services, our courses, our whatever and not really focus on more better, not more. Build a better course. Don't make it the biggest course ever with a million modules. If the course is great and it delivers it in a concise way, even better. That's why I always try to remind myself better, not more. Don't add more things to your plate or more things to do or more confusion to your product. Just make it better. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of.
For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severe severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tremphyaradio.com.
