How would you describe yourself?
I think the answer to that from most
of you is I'm a course creator and quite right you would be too.
So the question I have for you today is how much of your time is spent creating
and promoting your content, and how much of your time is spent
administering your course platform, your learning management system,
your blog or website, updating your WordPress installation,
updating your web hosting and doing things that simply aren't creating courses.
Think about all these administrative items
and write them down and estimate how much actual time you spend on these.
When you consider these admin tasks
in terms of the time you sink into them and how you could make that time more
productive and potentially profitable, you probably reframe the tools that you're
using and whether they are helping or hindering you.
You're not a system administrator.
You're a course creator.
That's where your talent lies
in delivering value to your audience through your courses.
Admin tasks won't pay the bills.
They're a cost to your course business,
whether you're administering them yourself, which takes away time from your
other tasks, or you're paying someone else to do the administration,
which increases your costs and reduces your profit margins.
Students don't buy admin tasks.
They buy your courses.
That's why you should set up your course creation workflows to give you as much
course and content creation time as possible.
You should also consider this
administration time when picking things like learning management systems or
editing software and things like website platforms.
Let's consider learning management systems.
There are many LMS's out there, but I'm going to pick a couple
of examples, mainly because I've used them both, and they're very different in terms
of how much admin time that you need to apply to administer them.
Learndash is a popular learning management system, or LMS plugin for WordPress
and in many of my projects I started out using this as a low cost and adaptable way
of getting courses up and running on an existing WordPress website.
A few years down the line, as my courses and the student numbers
grew, Learndash started to become a bit of an administration nightmare.
You need to keep it up to date regularly,
you need to make sure that as your student numbers grow, that you have a powerful
enough web hosting plan to make sure it runs well for your students,
and that's not factoring in the fact that it runs on top of WordPress,
which itself has to have its themes, plugins and core files constantly updated.
Then there is security.
You have to make sure that you're running
robust security software with a good firewall properly set up.
I used to use the Wordfence plugin,
which again needed its rules set up properly to protect the website.
Then there was web hosting, which whatever hosting companies tell you
is not a set and forget. You have to update PHP, update your hosting security and as
you grow this only becomes more of an issue.
Setting up all this and keeping it all up to date with such a time suck and would
have been prohibitively expensive to outsource to a competent web agency.
I was supposed to be an educator, not a system admin and I certainly didn't
enjoy these technology admin tasks one bit.
Let's take a look at the other end
of the spectrum and think about software as a service
learning management systems. Take something like Thinkific for example,
they take care of all the administration hosting updates and technical backend.
You just log in and create your courses,
that's it.
Ever since I've been using Thinkific I've spent all my time focusing on creating
courses and content and freeing up the administration time means I have
the space to do a bit more digging into things like reports and analytics
that help me understand how courses are serving students.
I apply this principle of action versus administration to all my own tools.
It's the reason I use a Mac over Windows,
it's the reason I use Camtasia over Final Cut Pro,
it's the reason I use Audacity over Adobe Audition.
It's the reason I use Thinkific over Learndash.
Sometimes when you put the simple acquisition costs of computers, platforms,
software and tools down on paper one looks cheaper than the other.
But before you blindly consider a tool based on price alone,
think about what it could cost you in administration time and productivity
and factor that into the mix too before making a decision.
What technology stack issues do you
struggle with in your course creation business?
Got a question about this? Let us know.