ep013: Should You Create an Online Course?

I have frequently heard from practitioners that tell me that they think they should create an online course or they’re thinking of creating an online course.

They come to me asking what I think or asking for help with that. It’s either something they’re wondering about, should I do this or they already have it in their list of goals and projects they plan to complete. There are tons of digital marketers and online business service providers out there promoting and selling this idea that creating an online course is the path to success, to financial success in particular.

You may see other practitioners in your field, particularly in the online space, particularly on social media platforms like Instagram selling online courses, and they appear to be successful.

This model is out there and it can look very attractive. It can be very compelling and you may be thinking that it’s potentially the answer for you to build a more profitable and successful business. That’s why I wanted to do this episode. That’s this is for you in the case that you’ve wondered whether you should create an online course, or maybe you already put it as a project on your to-do list.

What I’m going to do in this episode is share some questions and considerations for you to take into account in deciding whether that’s truly the right move for you in your business right now. I’m definitely going to be exposing some myths and truths about the online course model because I want you to be able to make the right decisions for you and ultimately to create a business that you truly love. So let’s dive in.

Welcome to the Business Revolution Podcast, where practitioners and coaches that provide services in health, wellness, and education, come to learn the business side of things like marketing, pricing, hiring, finances, all the things you need to streamline and organize your business, create steady and predictable income, serve your clients even more deeply and reach your full potential as a business owner. If you are a skilled, experienced practitioner of your craft that has or wants to have a profitable and sustainable business doing the work you love, you’re in the right place. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s get into this episode.

So when a practitioner comes to the Practitioner’s Business Round Table, that’s the monthly gathering I host for practitioners to come network and get free coaching and input on business from me, (I’ll put the link to that in the show notes on my website so you can sign up if that’s of interest to you), or when a practitioner comes to me in a discovery call to find out if and how I can help them with their business, that link is in show notes as well, they come to either of those places and they tell me they want to create an online course and ask me for help with that, the first question I ask in response is why, why do you want to create an online course?

There are three main reasons practitioners tell me that this is something they’re looking at doing.

Number one, they say they’re thinking about it in order to make more money. So they think of an online course as another income stream to add. It’s another thing to sell. Generally speaking, as I’ll get into in this episode, the folks that say this are not currently making the income they want to be making in their business, it’s not consistent, it’s not a lot, so an online course seems like a way to add income. That’s the number one reason I hear.

A second reason I hear is to provide a cheaper offer for people who can’t afford their regular services.

Then a third reason I hear is from advanced practitioners with advanced businesses who think about it as a form of scaling.

So scaling a business is not the same as growing a business, scaling a business means that you’re increasing the capacity of the business to sell more and serve more people. These are practitioners that are totally full in their one-on-one or group programs, and they have more demand than they can fulfill so they see an online course as a potential way to scale and serve more people and continue increasing income. I’m going to address each of these, but first, the most important part of this episode is to define what an online course actually is.

We need to define that because I see that different people have different ideas of what that means and that is part of what leads to confusion and lack of clarity around whether this is the right path for you. So this is why I want to talk about all this today. I want to get into all the myths and truths behind an online course model so you can see more clearly whether it’s right for you, but you might just find in my definitions of what an online course is, that it’s not what you were thinking.

So I’m going to encourage you to listen through to the end and hopefully you walk away with some clarity to help you see the next step in your business.

So let’s define what I mean by online course. A lot of people use that term course or online course as a blanket term, to describe lots of different ways to serve your clients. I don’t. An online course, the way I’m defining it and talking about it in this episode is a digital product. It’s a prerecorded curriculum of some sort that a customer buys whenever they want. It’s available for purchase, anytime they start it whenever they want and they move through it at whatever pace they want.

It is a DIY model, so do it yourself. The customer is on their own with the content. It’s like, self-study, that’s a term that used to be used back in the day. Before the internet there were self-study courses and they’d be delivered to you in these big binders of paper along with maybe some CDs or DVDs. Then with the development of the internet, there’s much easier, quicker, and cheaper ways to deliver that content.

To be clear, this is a self, what I’m talking about, when I say online courses, a self-study model. That’s why this model is considered passive income by so many people, because you don’t need to be present for the customer to buy and consume the course. That is how I’m defining an online course. Now that’s definitely very different from what I frequently refer to as a program. If you’ve listened to episode four, stop selling sessions and start creating programs, then you know that I strongly believe that programs serve clients better and make your business more successful.

So a program to me is a service. You, the practitioner, are present with your client, working with them in some way. For example, you might have a pre-recorded curriculum of online lessons that may exist in your program, but you are actually leading your client through that curriculum. You’re meeting with them regularly, instructing them, guiding them, helping them apply, whatever they’re learning. That is very different from a self-study online course, from my perspective anyway. So my definition of a program is a service based model that involves you working directly with your client.

That can be in person, that can be online, that can be one-on-one, that can be in small groups. It’s however you choose to work with your clients. But my definition of an online course in this episode is a digital product that a customer buys and completes completely on own.

Now we have a clearer definition of what I mean by online course and in this episode, I’m addressing, should you create an online course? So let’s go through those three main reasons that practitioners, that I hear practitioners say, they’re thinking about creating an online course, why they’re creating an online course and address whether this self-study type of online course, what’s commonly called passive income.

Let’s see if it will actually address those three reasons. Reason number one was to make more money. Specifically, when practitioners are telling me this, they are folks that are not making the income they want to be making in their wellness business. It’s not consistent. It’s not a lot. So an online course seems like a way to increase income.

Here’s the reality. Selling online courses is a very different business model than selling services. It’s a product-based business rather than a service-based business. The marketing needed for a product-based business is very different from that of a service-based business and the sales process in particular is very different between the two models.

So this business model of creating and selling online courses, I just want to provide a little context and history of it. It’s been like the gold rush of online business. It has been the get rich quick scheme of our time and it’s already been around for several years now.

If you’ve never heard this there’s a phrase that something like one calendar year is like seven online years. I mean, the online world has just grown and progressed so much, and it moves so quickly. So this model has been around and I believe that it’s fading, but it’s still being pushed and promoted by the biggest names in online business because they were the first, it really is just like the gold rush. I’m born and raised in California, and this is where I am right now and I perhaps shouldn’t assume that everyone knows what the gold rush is, but I am assuming that even if you’re in another country that you know something about it.

Essentially gold was discovered in California, mid 18 hundreds and it created a wave of, mostly men in the beginning seeking to get rich. It was this opportunity. They hear about gold; all you have to do is go into the mountains and use these methods to get it and you get to be rich.

So waves of people started moving to California displacing the people that were on the land here already, and all hoping to strike gold and make it rich. Now, did people strike gold and make it rich? Yes, some of them, them and many, many, many more did not. Now, additionally, because there was such an influx of immigrants into what became the state of California, whole industries naturally grew up to support that population of minors and people coming to try and find their riches and try and strike it rich.

So transportation services, laundry services, I think prostitution was a fairly bustling industry, all these services needed to support and provide for all these men who are coming to try and find gold. That is very much like what the online course industry and gold rush has been like. The people early to the game did strike it rich, did find great success financially in that and there have been many, many, many more people who didn’t or who haven’t.

There are still people trying and just like the gold rush. There has been a huge industry of support and adjacent and peripheral services to facilitate the online course industry. There is a massive industry of support services that exist around this with marketers selling all the pieces that the gurus teaching this whole thing say that you need to execute a successful launch of an online course.

So there’s people helping you create the digital marketing funnels and the Facebook and Instagram ads funnels and the lead magnets and the email sales sequences and the list building strategies and the winning sales page copy and they’ll layout for them. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

There’s people who do that for you and there’s people who teach you how to do it for yourself. If you’ve found yourself hooked into that world, it’s no wonder that you’re convinced that creating an online course is something you should do. That’s what they’re doing, is they’re selling that wish and that dream that you can, oftentimes the messaging is get rich and quit your corporate job.

I know that you listening are not in corporate jobs, you are existing wellness practitioners, but that is often who they’re targeting because this model is old enough and starting to fade enough that they have to get to brand new markets that have never heard it before. So right now, that’s largely people who are working in jobs and it’s here’s this alternative to your job.

So if I sound cynical to you, perhaps I am, I don’t feel cynical. I feel like I’m just looking at the reality as it is. I have been in business long enough to have watched this peak and I’ve watched a lot of people be exploited by this. So I do want to state the reality and share that. That doesn’t mean that online courses are all bad.

So let’s look at some of the factors that I think are really important to look at as to whether an online course or creating an online course is something that might be right for you. First of all, let’s talk about client results. If you were called to do this work that you do, to truly help people, then designing your business to help get your clients, the best results possible is a priority.

So if you’ve been listening to this podcast or following me for any amount of time that this is one of my guiding principles, it’s one of my guiding questions, is how can you design your services to provide your clients with the best possible results for them? This to me is one of the most important things I help practitioners do.

Well, an online course, remember, we’re talking about self-study courses, the kind that are said to provide passive income, they’re basically the opposite of designing your services to get real results for your clients. One reason is because of the completion rate. According to various sources, the percentage of people that complete an online course is anywhere from 2% to 13%. It’s pretty hard to get the data on that because there’s no incentive for private companies to report their completion rates, especially when they’re so dismal. But we do know overall you can Google and see what sources do provide some numbers.

Overall, the numbers are really low. You might find somebody online bragging about their high completion rate of like 40%. I saw that when I was doing a little research for this episode. 40%, like that’s like big, big brag numbers, 40% of people who bought our course completed it, or 40% of people who buy our course completed, is what you might see.

That still means six out of 10 people that buy a course don’t complete it. Those are like the best possible numbers. Now, anecdotally, you can also just look at yourself or ask around, have you bought online courses that you never completed or maybe never even started? I definitely have. Most people you ask have too. So a question to ask yourself is, am I willing to create and sell an online course if most people never even finish it and therefore don’t get results.

Now, personally, I’m not willing to do that, but that’s me. What about you? Now later in this episode, I’m going to talk about how you can serve your clients powerfully and really help them get results with an online program. That’s the word I use, program to describe well, to describe the programs and those can be online or in person. I’ll talk about that more towards the end of the episode, but just remember here, I’m only addressing that DIY self-study online course model.

So that’s one issue to look at when considering whether to create an online course is client results and what you want and expect from your business regarding client results. If you are okay with people buying your course, but never finishing it or not getting results, which, again, definitely doesn’t vibe with me. To me, that’s prioritizing the money over impact, but you may have really valid reasons for that, so if that’s okay with you, then let’s keep going and looking at some of the next issues.

The second issue to look at in considering whether to create an online course is how to market it and sell it. What is required to successfully market and sell an online course. This is where I think a lot of practitioners get pretty confused because it’s very different to sell a product than it is to sell a service. For a product, which is what an online course is you need a traffic-based approach to marketing and sales.

That’s the opposite of a relationship-based approach, which is probably what you use now and is very, very effective in a wellness practice. A traffic-based approach uses digital marketing to get as many people, that’s the traffic into your funnel as you can. You build a large email list by offering a lead magnet, then you create email sales sequences, and sales funnels to sell your product and then you run ads to get people into this funnel.

The big, like seven figure gurus that promote this model they spend tens of thousands of dollars every single month, just on advertising to get the return. So when you hear about somebody with their seven figure launch, or even six figure launch, what they’re telling you is the gross income. They’re telling you how much they sold. They’re not telling you how much they had to spend to make those sales. Another really important thing to understand is that in a product-based business model, most of your time in your business needs to be spent on marketing.

If you want to create an online course and you want to make significant income from it, you will have to spend most of your time as a business owner, building, maintaining, and optimizing a digital marketing strategy. Because most wellness practitioners I talk to want to spend less time doing marketing and more time helping clients I’m guessing that the requirement to spend most of your time on digital marketing, on the digital marketing that’s needed to successfully market and sell an online course is probably not so appealing to you. That’s why we’re doing a reality check here.

Now it’s easy to have the fantasy that, but if I build it, they will come. If you create the course, some of the people already in your world, some of the people already visiting your website or on your social media platforms, they might buy it without much or any effort from you. Yes, that can happen. Especially if you have a bigger list or a bigger following, you can definitely get sales, but it’s not going to be a lot.

You might get a sale or two here and there every now and then, I mean, could be up to maybe a few each month. I’m talking about. If you are not really actively marketing it with marketing funnels and sales funnels. You might still get some sales here and there. But the question to ask yourself is it worth your time to take the time to build an online course, like that’s create the curriculum and the content put it all together in an online learning platform?

Is it worth it to you? If you were only to get, say a handful of sales every month or even every year, and maybe it is worth it for you. In fact, maybe you already have content already created that could easily be repurposed into an online course. If that’s an easy project for you that takes very little time or energy, maybe you want to try it, but you’re unlikely to sell it without you actively marketing it.

So do you have the knowledge and strategy and tools to do that? I will note that I have done this myself. So I ran a free five-day challenge for, I don’t know it maybe a year, year and a half as a marketing event. It taught a step-by-step process and I decided to stop running the free challenge live because it wasn’t having the impact that I wanted it to have in that it wasn’t leading people to take the next step to join my programs.

So it wasn’t effective for the purpose that I wanted it to be. However, it was great content. So I decided that it was no skin off my back. I mean, it really took zero time and effort. It was already created. It was already prerecorded. All I had to do was have somebody on my team just package it up in a slightly different way.

I already had the online learning platform where people could purchase it, very, very little effort to repurpose it into an online course, gave it a price and that’s out there available and I don’t market it. So it does get a couple sales every year. People find their way to it. You can find it if you go to my website and the resources tab takes you to what’s mostly a free resource library, but that’s a little paid product in there.

But here’s the thing I can see on the back end that even people who buy it are not completing it. I did because I was running it live, I did all the gamification and all kinds of incentives to complete it and most people don’t. So, again, back to that, I’m really not interested in accepting someone’s money if what they’re doing with me is not getting them results, or if it just becomes one of those courses that somebody buys and never does.

I don’t want to be part of that personally, but that’s me. Your content may be different. You may be fine with being able to offer something that already exists for you. So if you have something that’s easy to put together, if it’s just repurposing other content, maybe you want to experiment with that.

If you happen to have a very large audience already, that’ll be easier than if you don’t, because you can simply put it out there and offer it to that already existing, large audience. You still have to talk about it and actively market a product in order to sell it. If you don’t have a large following, which to be really clear, you don’t need to have, if you’re offering one on one or small group services, but if you did want to start selling a digital product, you’d need to start pursuing a traffic-based approach where you’re actively building an audience and building a list.

Another question to ask is or another issue to look at is if it’s a low-priced product, which online courses usually are, is the return on your marketing investment, whether that’s money or time or both, is it worth it to you?

I see most online courses particularly in the wellness space in the hundreds of dollars, so less than a thousand dollars, let’s just say $500 on the high end. I mean, I see people selling things for less than a hundred dollars even, but let’s just say it’s $500. Just think of how many people you need to buy that to actually make a decent income.

You can’t count the gross sales. If it’s 500 bucks and 10 people buy it’s not like you’re taking home that $5,000. You have the business to support. You have all that software to pay for that’s doing that marketing. So you might need to make double that. Is that worth it to you. These are some questions to ask yourself when trying to determine whether an online course, an online self-study DIY type course is right for you.

So that issue of the price, this actually brings us to the second reason people tell me, anyway, that they’re thinking of creating an online course. The second reason I’ve heard is a practitioner will say, well, I want to provide a lower priced offer for people that can’t afford my regular services.

Usually this comes from a practitioner that is regularly attracting people that are not willing or able to invest in working with them. So I want to address this problem without an online course. if you are regularly attracting leads that say they can’t afford your services, it likely means that your messaging is not dialed in so you’re not calling in the right people and or that you don’t have an effective sales process, one that clearly demonstrates to your prospective clients, the value they’ll get from the services you provide, and one that filters out wrong fit folks.

In episode three, on the biggest pricing, mistakes practitioners make and how to fix them, I go into more depth on this. I talk about how the phrase “I can’t afford that is often used,” even when it’s not really about the money. I do that you do that we say I can’t afford that about things that are just not important enough for us to prioritize our spending on. We don’t value some things as much as other things that we do spend our money on.

So if you really want to see what your values are, you look at what you spend your money on. That tells you. Again, go back to episode three, if you haven’t seen that. In the meanwhile, beware of believing people, when they say they can’t afford your services.

That’s often a blanket term, just thrown out there to say that they haven’t seen, to say, instead of saying directly, I don’t see the value in this, or I don’t trust you. You didn’t make this clear to me that this is important, or they may simply not have the courage in themselves to take the risk of investing in themselves. They may actually really believe in you, but don’t yet have the courage to really take that step forward for themselves. Oftentimes all those reasons are what’s behind somebody saying I can’t afford your services.

So if that’s who’s saying that, then ask yourself, is that who you want to spend the time and energy and money creating an online course for, especially when completion rates are so dismal and most people don’t complete them.

So let me just quickly share some alternative ways to address those, those people, the ones who say they can’t afford it. First of all, learn how to do a great consultation where you clearly connect with your prospective client and are able to communicate the value and results, they can get from their work with you. You can learn more about that by listening to episode five, which is called how to get more clients without more marketing.

A consultation is part of your sales process and creating an effective and repeatable sales process is one of the most powerful steps you can take in your business for its growth. It will get you more clients and better clients, and you won’t hear, “I can’t afford it” as an excuse or as a blanket term that hides the real reasons they’re not moving forward.

That said, when you learn how to do an effective consultation, your perspective clients will tell you the truth. It may be the truth that they want to invest in themselves. They have the courage to move forward and do the work, but they truly cannot find a way to come up with the money and in an effective consultation, they will be direct and clear about that because you are going to create space for them to be direct and clear about that.

In a future episode, this season, I will be addressing scholarship models, payment plans, and ways to create more equitable access to your programs. Look for that, that episode will be in this season.

If you have people coming to you that you want to serve, perhaps from historically oppressed communities or marginalized identities that have less access to capital than people with more privileged identities, then why give them an inferior product in the form of an online course, which has such low completion rates rather than giving them access to your actual program, which is designed to provide clients the best results possible?

Another way to provide for people that aren’t ready to move forward, or aren’t ready to invest is to offer free content through your marketing. In my business, I offer a lot of free resources and content. This podcast is just one example, and it’s a, win-win. My content, both markets, my business, creating leads and prospects and it gives the people who are not going to take that step forward to join one of my programs, valuable mindset shifts and new perspectives that I know will help them in their businesses if they really take it in and apply it.

Notice that I said mindset shifts and new perspectives. That’s what people need in order to be inspired, to move forward in their journeys. Offering tips and tricks to your audience that can be useful, but really only if people understand the why behind them, the big ideas. So your marketing should be focused on providing shifts in understanding and perspective and less on how to content.

Help people shift their beliefs in what’s possible for them. That’s far more empowering than selling them a course that they may never complete. And you can do it for free.

That brings us to reason number three, that practitioners tell me they want to create an online course and that’s as a form of scaling. So these are practitioners that are totally full in their one on one or small group programs, and they have more demand than they can fulfill so they see an online course as a way to scale and serve more people.

Usually, these practitioners are really busy. Their schedules are full. They have no space to do anything but serve the many clients they have. So it may be totally appropriate at this stage to add an online course. But if this is you, I would want to make sure that you’ve increased your and your business’ capacity in other ways first.

I just want to say, this can be a terrible stage of business to be in if you’re so busy, because you may be already feeling the early signs of burnout. I don’t even need to explain what burnout is because if you’ve ever felt it coming on you know exactly what it is. It is a rough place to be.

But if you take the steps necessary to streamline your business and create more space for yourself, then it’s a wonderful stage of business to be in because you’re making a great income and you love your work and you have space. You really can only love your work that much. If you have space for yourself and your personal life for being creative for your family, for whatever your life is outside of work. Even within work, your goal at this stage of business, if you are busy, busy, busy is to create more space.

So to do that first, you want to streamline all of your business processes, including how you work with clients. You need step by step processes, or what many refer to as standard operating procedures for everything, for scheduling clients, for billing for the client sessions, much more in your business.

Then you want to automate and or outsource as much of that as you can, so that you are not spending your time and energy doing things that technology or another person can do better. As far as outsourcing hiring help can be key. The first hire to make is likely to be an administrative assistant and then your next might be another practitioner that serves your clients; depends on your business.

But what saddens me is when busy, busy, busy practitioners resist hiring help because they see it as an expense as something that just takes their income away rather than a really effective and I would say essential investment in creating more space and ease for you and your business.

So if you have this busy, busy business, your mission at this stage is to free up your time and create space in your life so that you can stop being so busy and start doing things that bring you joy again, including being creative in your business. Now I’ll just note that if you have a busy practice like this and you want help creating systems and streamlining your business processes so that you can have more space in your life while still making a great income just reach out to me. I can help with this. The link to schedule a discovery call is in the show notes or on my website at joannasapir.com.

Now, when you’re making good money in your business and you have space in business to be creative, that’s when creating an online course could be great, but it’s got to come from a place of creativity rather than scarcity. Then let me just propose that when you have the space to be creative, your online course might actually be less about creating another income stream and more of a form of marketing to provide your leads and followers with inspiration and shifts that help them move forward in working with you and really doing the real work. That online course might be paid, or it might be free.

That depends on your business and who your market is. But I am confident, I know that if you are coming from a place of creativity and service, that you can make an online course work for you and enjoy doing it too at that stage of business.

Okay, so if after hearing all of this, you’re like, oh, Joanna’s just a negative Nancy and busting my bubble on this idea, I had to create an online course, if that’s you and you’re actually still here listening, I hope you do hear that. I think there can be a time and place for an online course in your business. It’s just after you’ve already built a strong business where you know exactly who your bullseye clients are.

You design programs for them to take them on a journey to achieving their goals and get the results they’re after. Your marketing is calling in those right people and inviting them to take next steps with you and you have a repeatable predictable sales system that converts the right people into long-term clients. Additionally, you have streamlined the systems and processes in your business so that you have space to be creative.

That should all happen first before creating an online course. Maybe all you needed from this episode was to get clarity on the difference between a program and a course, as I defined it. A program can be online and you can run a program in groups or one on one, and a program can have pre-recorded curriculum.

But the difference is it also involves you working with your clients to guide them through that program and provide the support they need to get the results. I am a strong advocate for building programs for your clients, because you get to design your programs to provide the best possible results for your clients. Also programs don’t require a traffic based marketing and sales approach that turns you into a full-time marketer.

With programs you get to build relationships and enroll, great fit clients that you love working with, and that are committed to their own growth and taking the journey they’re going to take with you.

What you don’t want to do is to mix up those two models, the self-study courses versus guided programs. That mix up is what happens because the whole online course industry is very loudly promoting that traffic-based approach to marketing and sales, using sales funnels, and simply put, that’s not going to be an effective way for you to enroll great fit clients in your programs.

If you’re a wellness practitioner working directly with your clients, you need to have a consultation to enroll them where you meet them and make sure that you can really help this person and make sure that they’re committed to doing their end of the work. A sales page, which is the digital marketing, the traffic-based sales approach doesn’t allow you to do that. It doesn’t allow you to make sure that this is a great fit client.

Okay, that’s it for this episode, if you are new to me or this podcast, and you are an innovative wellness practitioner and want to learn more about how to build a resilient and sustainable business with long term clients and steady, predictable income. I invite you to get my free training on the client champion formula, where I lay it all out for you. That link will be in the show notes, of course. If you have specific questions about what I’ve talked about in this episode, I invite you to sign up for the next Practitioner’s Business Round Table. That’s a free monthly gathering where you show up and we can dive into what all this means for your business. See you next time.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast and you want to apply what you’re learning here in your business, did you know that you can meet directly with me and ask me questions and get my help when you come to the Practitioner’s Business Round Table? The Practitioner’s Business Round Table is a free gathering for innovative practitioners that I host each month. We meet live via Zoom and when you sign up for a spot, you have the chance to submit your questions beforehand, to get them answered by me at the round table discussion. You can grab a seat for the next Practitioner’s Business Round Table by going to joannasapir.com/roundtable.

Let’s go deeper. Come learn more about how to build a fulfilling and profitable practice with long-term clients and stable income. I hope to see your face there.