Today, we're going to talk about why so few people finish courses
and how to make yours pop before we begin though, Neil, I want
to apologize because we're both under construction right now.
So we apologize for the background noise.
So I'll start first that gives some, get some context around this.
I believe the number is when it comes to online courses.
If it's just self-serve 98% of people do not finish.
So we're talking 2% of people finish.
Now, when you flip it around to something like a cohort based
course, which I'll talk about in a second I believe the completion
rates a lot higher, we're talking 90 plus percent, or even 70,
80 plus percent is very high.
And what a cohort based course is I invested in a company called me.
And I'm actually doing a cohort based course for them right now,
basically it's called leveling up how to build your first business,
build your dream business.
The difference is for a self-service course.
So let's say you see a lot of internet marketers selling courses
for maybe 200, 500, $1,000 online.
And it's just a lot of videos that you watch, right?
And a lot of times it's information that you can get
online for completely free.
The experience that I'm going through with Maven right now is
it's, they're actually doing a course for the course creators.
And it's been a pretty amazing experience and it's pretty grueling.
So every Tuesday, every Thursday, we meet for two hours and there's
a different section each time and there's different instructors and
we all get in, there we go Brady bunch mode into zoom and there's
homework that we have to finish and they go into breakout rooms
and they keep it all engaged.
I'm happy to go a little deeper later, but I'm just saying that
I've never gone through a program or a course where it's actually
kept my attention and I felt the need to be engaged because I felt
like I was part of a community that was a lot bigger than myself.
Have Neil and I we've done a lot of courses in the past.
I'll say this experience at least is a little different and
we'll dive into the details.
The other thing that I've learned, I've done quite a bit.
Of course.
And Eric's right.
Majority of the people never finished the course and the core
stuff does do a little bit better.
Why I've also found it.
If you can do the cohort based stuff.
We did, that was pretty interesting and it helped improve the efficiency
rates of people completing, which means they got value referred.
More people didn't ask for as many refunds is we would
actually do a weekly call based on where you were in the lesson.
So we would have.
It's not really like a core, but it's rolling.
So we had every week we would have calls for people who finished
the week, one lessons every week.
We would also have calls for people that finished the
week, two lessons, et cetera.
And if you had eight weeks of lessons every week, we had
eight weeks worth of calls.
And by, having those calls and trying to hold people accountable
and telling them all the goodies that they would get for being
on those calls and some of the extra stuff that we would do
a lot more people showed up.
Would complete that week's lesson.
And the reason being is they didn't want to be that person
who didn't know what they were talking about or look foolish.
So they're just more likely to complete, and we found
that to work extremely well.
Yup.
And so the key thing here, we're talking about engagement at
the end of the day, how engaged are people if you're doing.
If you're doing a weekly call, there's a reason for people to
continue to stay engaged because they also feel like they're getting
more support and they feel like they're part of a community.
If you put them into Facebook group, you have someone supporting there.
So I do think the community manager aspect is very important.
The coaching aspect is very important and it doesn't have to be you
coaching, and if you're going to do, if you're going to add in more
of a level of support here, you're going to have to hire more people,
which means you probably need to charge more for your course, right?
It's hard to get by charging a hundred, 200, $300 for a course,
you're probably going to have to charge upwards, maybe 2, 3, 4,
$5,000 for this type of stuff.
And you just have to keep in mind that you're delivering an
outcome at the end of the day.
And if you're.
You're helping people build relationships with each other.
That's super powerful on its own and you shouldn't short-change ourselves.
So I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with courses.
I think there's a delivery problem and there's a quality problem.
And I think, if you want to surpass and everyone else and make
yours pop, then I think this is your ticket to doing so, Neil.
Yeah, I think we've pretty much covered everything.
If you want to learn how to grow your course business, more, check
out marketing school.io/life.