Memberium Expert Advice: Your Online Courses Do NOT Live in a Vacuum
As a Memberium expert, I meet a lot of business owners looking for ways to reach more people. They want to grow the impact they have in their industry, local area, maybe even the world and are looking for ways to do that. It could they tried something that worked in one city and now want to do that in another city. I could be they see opportunities to sell more to the same customers they already do business with.
The thing I’m saying as a Memberium expert is that launching an online course isn’t something you do in a vacuum. It’s something that can be a step forward in the growing of your business. You are just adding another way to offer it.
Memberium Expert Discuss How the Hours Limit You
When you are a subject matter expert, your work typically involves working with people one-on- one either in-person or via Zoom. It requires that you take the little time you have available and you dedicate it to serving just one customer. You are limited in how much you can make because of the limit on the hours you can work.
Business owners will often forget that they have a healthy following. There are a lot of people that would like to do business them, but they can’t. They either aren’t available for lack of time or you are too expensive. You have to charge a lot for your time so you can make a decent living. But because your one-on-one price must be high and because you don’t have enough time, there a lots of people that would do business with you if you could find another way to deliver it.
Memberium Expert Explain Potential Online Course Formats
Don't limit yourself to thinking an online course is a do-in-yourself course with no interaction with you. It could be a way to teach what you already teach using a combination of online tools. Your goal should be to take a step in the direction of better leveraging yourself. Instead of teaching just one person at a time, you teach several. It’s what happens when you present in front of an audience. You present using the same materials you use to teach in-person, but you are leveraged across an audience.
How does that affect what you can charge for what you do? It could be that when you charge in the 10s of thousands for what you do in person, you can now serve people for a few thousands. Let’s say it’s $2,500 and you can teach it to 40 in an online course format. That’s $100,000. That’s a big difference.
An online course can take the similar approach. You can offer your online course as the core material or have it serve like the textbook for your course. You teach from the materials they can access online and your make yourself available to answer questions. For many people wanting to learn what you teach, that may be more convenient than meeting with you in person. They can go through your materials at their convenience, maybe even late at night or early in the morning, working around their schedules. You can make them feel supported by giving them access to you in different ways.
This makes a big difference for people.
You can allow people to reach you via email. You can set up office hours at set times of the week where you make yourself available via Zoom. You can record these calls and make them available to future students. If you get the transcripts for the calls, which today can be done very inexpensively, you can index those and make them searchable. Those can become a knowledgebase that grows and, if done right, can become a really good way to support students for students buying a do-it-yourself version of the course.
What I see happen a lot is people purchase the course and learn what they hoped to learn from it. That process educates them so the become better clients. They understand what you do clearly and gain more confidence around working with you. In an online, your materials will showcase you and what you can deliver for them. It gives customers an appreciation for what it is they are taking on if they choose to do it themselves. Many will learn by taking your course that it's more cost effective to hire you to do the work for them. They may also learn to believe that working with you assures them of getting the results they need reducing the risk that doing it themselves will give them less than satisfactory results.
As I said before, when you start, your online course doesn't have to be standalone. You can see it as a more natural way to take your first step into that online course building world. This is definitely a good way to learn what you need to learn, understand your customer's journey when buying from you and provide you with the business intelligence to make an online course offering based on the best of what you learn.
Hope this helps!