Welcome to the final episode of Season 4. This is the episode where you get just me! I’m going to reflect on all of the conversations I had this season, the biggest takeaways, and how they will be implemented on our educational site, Come Alive Academy.
A foundational part of the learning arc this season was understanding the difference between membership sites, subscription-based models, course creation, and learning management systems.
Chris Lema, Chris Badgett, and Kyle Maurer all discuss this in their episodes. Here’s Lema’s summary:
Membership Site: “A membership site protects content. There are people who belong and don’t belong, and the belonging is created for a purpose: content creation.”
A Subscription: This is focused on a financial arrangement, with the notion that you have to choose to pay regularly to receive the product.
Online Courses or an LMS: Online courses feature sequential learning, support, analytics, and pre and post-learning. You utilize an LMS to power this course.
Plan your courses and know your audience:
Before you start, make sure you dive deep and understand who you are speaking to.
Joe Casabona, Founder of Creator Courses, and Cameron Mattis of Teachable both discuss the importance of this in their podcasts. Consider:
- Who is your ideal student?
- What is their intent?
Use tools and metrics to learn about your users. What interests them, what doesn’t, what are the engagement rates of your courses, what is the engagement duration?
Engagement:
Look at the people who have stuck around and completed your courses.
Travis Northcutt of Member Up emphasizes why you should be tracking the students who are sticking around and completing courses. What are they doing and how do you get more people to do those things?
Mattis discusses another important part of engagement: teachers. As a teacher, it is important to understand yourself and your strengths. He defines good teachers as:
- Teachers who are providing a transformation for their students.
- Teachers who are humble.
- Teachers who are teaching an actual skill where you can see something come out of it.
Phases of launch:
Chris Badgett, Co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, offers interesting insight into what he considers the stepping stones to launching your project.
- Expertise: sharp skills, able to identify opportunities.
- Community Building: able to connect and build a list.
- Content Creator: able to understand what the learning path for the modern learner looks like. Online courses are different than regular classrooms. When you design learning content, it has to be so engaging that there is no chance of your student walking away from your content.
- Technologist: able to wrap all of this in technology and market it globally.
- Marketer and business manager.
Little wins and micro courses:
Ray Villalobos of LinkedIn Learning stressed what you need to do as a teacher to help your students succeed:
- Make your course intent and outcome clear.
- Quick start the learner with little wins to encourage them and keep them motivated.
Power of niching:
Chris Lema, Vice President of Products at Liquid Web offers the example of his client who did tutorial videos on African male haircuts. This displays how focusing on your strength and appealing to the right, specific target audience can be incredibly successful.
Pricing:
Kyle Maurer, known for his podcasts Get Options and WP Round Table, encourages you to focus on course usage and high or low touch products. Once you can identify which of these categories your products fall into, you will be able to determine what you should be charging for your services. Take a look at how often your customers have to choose whether or not to renew their memberships. If they are given the option to leave or stay on a monthly basis, this may be hurting your retention rates.
Find a balance between making it worth it for yourself and being of value to your clients and customers.
Looking forward:
These next few months are going to be exciting! Season 5 is already under way, and we will be learning from a diverse field of experts. Stay tuned!
Thanks for listening. I appreciate you!
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