Here's why courses you've taken in the past
for your handmade business have failed you in this video.
I'm going to be sharing with you why picking the right course
for you is so important for your business success
and the nine reasons why so many other courses out there just fail to deliver.
Hey, my name is Mei and I help makers artists
and designers make a consistent income from selling their handmade products online.
So the reason I created this video is threefold number one.
It's to help you choose the best course for you.
If you're shopping for a course
for regardless of what the topic is to if you're an educator yourself,
maybe you sell a course or you teach classes.
This is going to be a great video to share with you.
What makes a good course. And three,
of course, I do want to share with you what I think my course is especially good.
But anyway, when I started my coaching business creative Hive I
didn't know anything about how to teach effectively,
you know, I had all the knowledge that I wanted to share with other
people on how to build their own handmade business,
but I didn't necessarily feel confident transferring that information to someone else
and personally.
I felt like it would be really irresponsible of me to try to teach you
something without having a deeper understanding.
Standing on how people learn best.
There is a whole world and strategy behind the process of learning called instructional design.
You can go to college and get a degree
for that that tells you that you do need some education on how to educate other people.
So I took the time and invested money and energy into learning how to be a better teacher.
I took a few courses Megan almonds do teach is a great course Megan is just A really
great teacher with an actual background in teaching
and Academia and she has some really great online courses you can take
for jewelry design photography and business besides Megan's course.
There is also a class on blueprint previously known as craftsy,
which is I there's been reports saying it's going to
close but the course I took was taught by Gwen bortner called how to teach it.
This course is mostly focused on how to teach craft classes,
but I did still find it to be Are useful besides these two classes,
the biggest teacher for me was simply
and having consumed hundreds of other online courses myself
because once you experience
and understand the styles of different teachers
and courses you start to pay attention to patterns that just don't work
and the ones that are very effective.
I don't consider myself to be a very good student or learner.
I actually find learning things quite difficult and growing up.
I was never the smartest kid in class
and I did actually struggle through school and I have anxiety just thinking about my school days.
Like literally that is the stuff of my nightmares.
So I've definitely given this topic a lot of thought
so whether you're a teacher yourself
or a student this video will help you understand how to find or design successful course.
The very first thing that makes a course fail you is not giving enough examples
when you're learning something
new for the first time you're inevitably going to learn some new Concepts that you didn't
know before there will always be a learning curve with anything.
But what can even out that learning curve
so that you understand it faster
and easier is with the teacher giving you examples
I once bought a course from a woman who had paid over a million dollars in sales then in a year
and She had new strategies that I wanted to learn about.
But when it came time for her to teach it,
she spent all her time talking about the theory of the strategy and unfortunately,
never gave any practical examples the example.
She gave wasn't very practical or relevant.
So they were pretty much useless.
So what she was trying to teach was the idea of how to successfully create a
suite of digital products to sell the concept behind.
It was that it's very important that you design a number of different products.
That complemented each other very well.
So that people will automatically want to buy the other products you have for sale.
This was a course about how to sell digital courses,
but the only example she gave was going to the grocery store
and seeing an aisle where ice cream products were all put on the Shelf together
for your convenience.
Like, you know, you had ice cream cones. They were put right
next to the chocolate syrup in the sprinkles.
I think there's certainly value
and giving analogies which I think was more of what that was to explain a more difficult.
got or abstract concept but it should be accompanied with practical
examples examples help you understand how to use that concept
and apply it to yourself because then you can see how it was applied
for something else examples are essentially a demonstration of the
concept if the theory part of learning something
new is the telling then the examples are the doing you need to have both in order
for a person to effectively learn something new and habit It stick so generally speaking.
I always strive to think of and give specific examples in anything.
I teach especially if it's teaching it to someone who is a total beginner in that topic.
It takes effort to think of those examples
and I think unfortunately this is
what sets up some teachers to fail from the beginning number two is there are a lot of
courses out there that are just not organized enough.
So in the last few months, I've been spending more time learning how to speak Mandarin
and how to sing.
I spend a lot of I'm doing research on the best courses out there
for those things and a really great way to research if a course is right for you or not.
It's to find free videos of that teacher teaching.
There are so many singing courses out there. And for the ones that sound remotely good.
I searched the teacher's name on YouTube so I can get a sense for their teaching style.
There's this one particular course that all the blogs
and influencers talked about as being the best and I was very close to buying it,
especially since I saw that this teacher Response to their students questions
and gives them a lot of support which is super important to set you
up for success and I'll talk more about that in an upcoming point.
But unfortunately this teacher was super disorganized
and after spending half an hour watching his free videos.
I didn't feel any more clearer on how to sing better
when you're learning how to do something especially if it's a
larger skill that's going to take you months.
If not years to learn like learning a new Language or learning how to build a business,
you know, these aren't things that you can learn in just one
day or one week with topics like these it's very important that the teacher is good at organizing
all of the different lessons that teach you that one big major topic
because without that organization you can feel very overwhelmed very
easily and you're much more likely to quit and give up.
Number 3 on that same note with this particular singing teacher.
I was able to watch some of the free video lessons from his paid course as a teacher.
This is a great opportunity right to show your best work to
someone who might potentially be your customer
or student.
But unfortunately after watching it, I was left feeling quite overwhelmed
because this teacher had a habit of using very technical language.
I've taken private singing lessons before and I'm not tone deaf,
so I wouldn't consider myself an absolute.
Dinner for the most part washing these free videos made me feel like the
teacher was talking in a foreign language like I understood
what he was saying,
but I didn't understand the purpose of what he was teaching.
So that made it information that was not practical
or usable by myself that leaves me feeling unaccomplished
and when your students feel that way again,
they're going to feel overwhelmed and frustrated about moving forward.
So even if there is very technical jargon and Whatever it is,
you're teaching you should always establish or Define those technical words first as well.
As the reason why you're taking the time to teach
it or in other words how it's relevant to the student.
I don't know about you but I get frustrated
when I'm watching something and I don't know why I'm watching it.
Like what is the benefit to learning this thing?
And how will it help me number four courses that aren't sequential also tend to not do
well for the student.
I experienced this when I was researching online.
Chinese courses there was one in particular that seemed really cool
and was very highly rated for a good price.
I watch some of their free videos to get a sense for their teaching style.
And I really enjoyed what I saw but upon further research.
I found out that they're paid course is really just a collection of
different videos teaching you different Chinese words.
So for example, they would have one video of talking about stranger things the TV show
and the Chinese words you would use under that topic of that TV show.
And then they would have another video talking about eating barbecue.
At first. I thought these were pretty practical
and relevant words to learn a different language
because I'm likely to want to talk about those things.
But when a course is just a collection of different videos without any grand scheme
design on how each video ties to the next that makes it
so that designing a curriculum becomes my the students responsibility.
I'm a believer that the curriculum should be designed by the Knowing how to use your
course and which video you need to start with
and which radio video comes next is as important as the individual lessons within the course,
especially when you're learning something big like a new language
or how to build a business the order of when you learn certain things is super important,
for example in handmade business. It doesn't make any sense to teach you how to do
marketing before I teach you how to price your products
because of your products weren't price correctly
and if you're doing marketing and Hopefully making sales for your products.
You're not going to be profitable and that's not a good thing.
It is very important that you learn how to price your products
correctly first before you do marketing number five.
And I think this is a very common problem that happens with
online courses is the teacher doesn't deliver on
what they promised on the sales page the other day.
I bought a product where I was under the impression.
I would be getting about 60 different email templates
for sending broadcast emails to my Burrs the sales page promised these email
templates would be fill in the blanks my understanding of fill in the blanks is that
the majority of the email was already written out
for me in a generic way with Blanks on specific parts of the email
so that I could insert and write my own information into the email template.
Unfortunately, when I got this product these weren't email templates,
but they were more of question prompts the emails were not written out at all.
But instead there were a list of questions that I was supposed to answer
and my answers group together will then make up the entire email had I known that this
was what the product was.
I wouldn't have bought it
because the value I saw in this product was the promise that
most of the email will already be written out
for me and that would have been a huge Time Saver.
I know this happens a lot and you've probably experienced this yourself,
especially since so many gurus out there teach online course
creators to really hype up their marketing
and copywriting on the sales page for their products.
Unfortunately some teachers take this too far and start to describe their products in a way.
That's no longer accurate. And then this gives a lot of online coaches a really bad rep.
Number 6 and this is a huge pet peeve of mine is where the teacher waste your
time with super long videos that weren't edited
and just fluff everywhere.
There are a lot of coaches out there who teach course
creators to teach their topic to a live audience
for like an hour and then they would just take the recording of that video
and turn that into a lesson in the paid course.
The problem with this is that it takes more time than necessary to explain
something to you something that could have taken 10 minutes to teach ends up
requiring an hour of the students time to go through
and I have no patience for that nor the time.
I understand that some teachers are also strapped for time.
But I think a better solution to using that recording is with hiring a video editor to
cut out specific chunks of that one hour video into broken down subtopics that way You
don't have to sit through an entire hour
and listening to the teacher role call their students
or to answer questions that had nothing to do with that topic
and my right there is a time and place for using those recordings,
but I don't personally believe that they should make up the bulk of the course.
Unfortunately, I have seen
and met a lot of insanely successful teachers out there
making millions of dollars who do it this way.
So it proves that it can still
work or maybe that people are more patient with this problem than I am.
I am a huge stickler to getting my customers and students the best experience.
I possibly can so you will not see me doing this anytime soon number seven.
And this will for sure cause you to fail
is when you don't have access to the teacher or a forum or group to ask questions.
I took so many courses when I was first learning how to build out my jewelry business
and at the time this was mid early 2000 a lot of courses did not
come with any sort of student Community
or access to the And the problem I had was not being able to apply the course to my specific
and unique business.
I acknowledge that every student in business is different.
We all have different goals
and personality types and products that were selling right
so I could have sold my assailant a business system
course for a lot less money than it is priced at now.
If I remove the group coaching component to my course altogether,
but I know that would just be a bad idea that would set you up
for failure from get go because as good as my courses at the end of the day,
of course is still a course
and people will always need help applying certain Concepts to their own business
or applying certain Concepts to their own personal situation some
Concepts taught in the course don't apply to some students
or sometimes you're just struggling to understand
something and watching a lesson 10 times isn't helping having a discussion about it can be
very helpful being able to get support like this will accelerate
your Or progress with any course
and if you find a course out there where you can't get that kind of support.
I would just run the other direction
unless it was maybe like an easy concept
or easy topic that you're learning number eight courses that are too focused on projects
and don't spend enough time on explaining the theory or the concepts or vice versa.
This was something I experienced
when I took private singing lessons the teacher I worked with was super talented herself
and right from the beginning.
We were already learning how to sing lots of different songs that
Project based Learning System is very encouraging
and motivating for students
because you get to see what your learning translate into actual application.
That means I wasn't just learning theory and music notes,
but I was actually singing real songs,
and that's very rewarding right however you And also take that learning system too far.
I stopped learning from that teacher after several lessons
because I realized that I had become dependent on her to learn a new song.
She wasn't breaking down the technical Concepts to me enough
so that I could take those Concepts and apply it myself to a different song and as a teacher myself,
I believe you get a much better
and richer learning experience
when you are first taught the technical
and Theory based Concepts at an intellectual level and then doing the practical.
We'll work. We're actually producing something that way
you're not just learning how to do something.
But you're also learning why certain strategies are concepts are important
when you learn the why you are truly learning the skill in a way that
people cannot take it away from you number nine
and I have fallen into this trap several times myself is
when you sign up for a course where the goal of the course was not aligned with your
own for example,
as I mentioned before there are a lot of singing courses out there.
Some of these singing courses or designed to teach you how to sing on Pitch.
It's a course about singing but my goal is to sing well and confidently in front of an audience.
It doesn't make sense for me to sign up for the course on how to sing on Pitch.
I think this is the biggest reason why if you've taken other courses before
for your business that you didn't have success with it
because it's likely that course wasn't built for handmade business owners.
There are four major business models out there a
Service-based business like Interior Design Services
or Graphic Design Services
and educational based business model like with creative Hive where I'm teaching you something an
affiliate marketing model where you're promoting other people's products
and finally a business model that's product-based like my jewelry business.
These business models are all very different and require very different strategies.
So if you took a course that was designed for service-based business owners.
It is very likely you will have a hard time applying it to your handmade.
Google product business ultimately teaching is a skill.
Most people who do something. Well don't teach it.
Well, if you're overwhelmed with options
for taking a course the best ways to learn from someone who both excels at teaching
so you can be confident in their ability to transfer their knowledge to you
and also excels at doing so you can be confident in the quality of their lesson
and the results you can have with them.