How Your Online Course Offer Has The Wrong Idea About Value, And What You Should Be Doing Instead
In the online courses market, there’s a misconception that bigger is better.
- High profile launches with mountains of “bonus” content.
- 6 month long programs
- TV quality video production
All these are trying to to push prices up to the magic $2,000 mark that every guru seems to think is a badge of honour they have to earn.
Training products have a unique set of selling problems:
You can’t try them out before you buy them.
Whether or not they work depends as much on the buyer as on the quality of the product. If they don’t do the work then the product won’t get the result for you.
You can’t demonstrate the product at work, you can only describe it, and talk about the transformation.
It’s easy to confuse value in the product over value in the result.
Unethical marketers know this and they prey on it relentlessly.
They know that only a tin fraction of buyers will take action and they they’re judging the value in the product. They give all sorts of worthless extras to blow up the perceived value of the product.
Take just one example.
Every marketing course owner know you can’t sell without traffic, so they’ll slap on one of the following as a bonus:
A facebook ads course that teaches one creative, one strategy, one audience.
Unless you hit that perfect ad on your first go (which never happens) the likelihood is you’ll need to invest a lot more time and effort in traffic building to get to where you need to.
But they ticked a box, dealt with your objection, and now they can get the sale.
What if they took a more honest approach?
What if they admitted that building a business was a complex jigsaw and that they could only deal with one problem at a time?
What if they broke the steps down so you could deal with each one as and when you needed it?
What if they promised a smaller result, but with more certainty of actually getting you there?
To do this, you need to find ways to reducing the learning steps, not adding to them
Write down the most immediate goal that your planned product will help your customer with, then try to cut everything else that doesn’t contribute to this.
My experience is that more people will complete the learning and get on with actually doing something useful towards that goal. More action = more results = more testimonials = more sales.
Now you’ve got a flywheel of a business spinning that you can keep going with a lot less effort.
The world is getting more impatient, and the businesses that get results quickly will win
The mega-course that promises to teach you everything you need to know is as outmoded as most college courses have become. By the time you’ve got through the learning phase, it’s out of date.
A much more sure-fire way to success is a smaller goal, but with much wider distribution, and at a cost with much less resistance.
A bigger volume of sales will get you the feedback, word-of mouth, and testimonials you need to start looking at higher ticket products on the back-end, but you’re definitely not selling that kind of product as someone’s first purchase.
So, give yourself a break and ship something small, and ship it early. Get that wheel spinning already!
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