Online course building for smart fellers - part 2
Published: Tue, 04/04/17
Time for part 2 of my interview with the esteemed Danny Iny and how to get paid from your online course *before* you even finish building it:
BEN SETTLE: I'm curious about this, so the way you're doing that, where you're kind of building it, not all at once, but as you're kind of, I don't want to say making it up as you go along, but you're building it in a very specific, counter-intuitive way than most people do. Is that a function of your training in the educational field, because you're teaching people about learning?
DANNY INY: No, not at all. It's a really great question. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the people who struggle with this the most are teachers who sign up for our program.
BEN SETTLE: That's interesting.
DANNY INY: They're used to creating these long, detailed lesson plans. You know exactly what you're going to teach. The challenge is, let's say you're in a school. You're teaching 5th grade math, or whatever. You're not the first person to teach 5th grade math. You're teaching from a textbook that already exists. That's not to minimize the value of a great teacher, but largely speaking, the problem is a known problem. You know what you're trying to solve for.
Most people who say, "I have something that I know. I have knowledge. I have expertise. I want to package it up. I want to deliver it to people in an asynchronous, or semi-synchronous way, in a way that they can learn and expand their abilities, make their lives better, and I can get paid for making that happen," you're not following a template. You're creating something new. You don't know how people are going to be successful with it and where they're not going to be successful with it. You need to be able to adapt on the fly, so it's not about, making it up as you go is a really interesting way of articulating it because it's not exactly what you're doing, but it kind of is. It kind of is in the sense that, when you talk through a problem with someone, it gives you additional insights into the problem, so I think you should start with an outline of what you're going to teach.
Let's say it's a 5-week program. Let's do a quick hypothetical. Ben Settle, the master of writing email copy and sending daily emails. If you were to create a pilot course about writing daily emails, you might say, "Well, it's going to be a 5-week program, and there are a few big areas people need to understand." I'm just making this up.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, I'm following you here.
DANNY INY: Maybe they need to understand what makes for an effective daily email. What is it meant to accomplish. They need to know where they go for ideas, so they never run dry. They need to know how they can deal with people who don't like the daily emails, and people who reply, how to manage the conversations that ensue because of that, so that's three. Maybe there's a technology piece around working with auto-responders. Maybe you'll throw in a bonus session at the end where you're going to critique people's emails and help them get better.
These are 5 pieces of content, but just because they're 5 pieces of content doesn't mean they're going to go in that order, so you're going to take them, rearrange them so that people can actually start applying as you go. Maybe you start with the theory, so they know what they're trying to accomplish. You get them set up with the auto-responders. You start them writing emails. You teach them how to deal with the conversation. Then, you show them how to keep getting new ideas, so you've got a structure, now.
You're Ben Settle. You know this stuff inside and out. You can go and say, "I'm going to sell this program, and figure out the details later," not because you're making it up as you go, but because you already know this stuff, and you're just going to put it on paper later, really flesh it out. Now, the thing is, you don't want to flesh it out all on your own, because you're Ben Settle, which is a huge advantage, because you really know your stuff. It's also a huge disadvantage in that it's been a really long time since you were a person who wasn't sure what to do when it comes to writing email copy. It's hard for you to relate to the problems people are going to have, and the challenges they're going to experience, so rather than writing up a long, detailed curriculum, you have your high-level outline. You're going to create, before each lesson, a detailed outline. You're going to talk through it. You're going to explain it. You're
going to ask people questions, and you're going to see what questions they have, and what stuff comes up, and that is going to inform your next week's outline. It's going to change a lot.
I've had so many people who are like, and I work with some pretty high profile people, very successful, best-selling authors, and they're like, "No, no. When I produce something, it's got to be great," so they create these massive outlines for all of their lessons. They deliver their first lesson, and they come back and they say, "I totally missed the mark. I've got to throw out the rest of my outlines and start over." I was like, "Well, I told you that would happen."
BEN SETTLE: I have another question for you. When we're talking about online courses, we're not necessarily talking about eBooks here. Is there a specific kind of course that you're talking about here, where it's almost like a college course, and it's over a certain amount of time? We're not talking about Evergreen products right from the start. Are you talking about teaching it in a 5, 6 week, however long it might be, and then packaging it for later as Evergreen, or how does that work?
DANNY INY: That's a great question. I think most courses can be made Evergreen. Pilots often shouldn't be. The reason for that is when you're doing a pilot, when you're doing your first run of things, there's always a trade-off between all the work that goes into making it permanent and, like you said, Evergreen, versus being able to deploy it quickly. I don't want people to invest a lot of time and energy into making something permanent until they know they've got it right, so the process that we teach is great for getting your idea out there, getting some money in the door, testing it, but once you've done it, once you've had a good result, taking what you've done and then packaging it up so that it's Evergreen is totally doable and very worthwhile.
My course, we offer for people to sign up all the time. We don't always have big open enrollments, but we do bring students in on an ongoing basis. Case in point, your community is going to be invited to joint the Course-builder's Lab, if that's what they want to do. That's on an Evergreen basis. By the way, this is a course that is, it's not just a bunch of videos and a membership site. I personally hate that model. I think it doesn't help people very much. We have videos, we have content, it is released, not on a week-by-week drip, but based on how you complete the content, and you get support from a coach. You get all of that and it's Evergreen. You can Evergreen just about any kind of model, but when you're doing it for the first time, Evergreen is a structure that will allow you to collect less feedback from people, which will make it harder for you to improve it and make it better.
BEN SETTLE: You know what this reminds me of? I like to use this analogy for a lot of things, because everybody understands it. It's kind of like opening a feed sack. If you know, like a feed sack for farm animals, or a sack of flour, either way. If you pull that string wrong, and it goes down the middle, everything falls out and it's chaos, but if you pull it neatly across the top, everything is fine. The way you're doing it sounds like you're pulling it neatly across the top, as opposed to most of us, we just dump the feed all over the place and hope it all makes sense.
DANNY INY: That sounds about right.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah.
DANNY INY: I hope that's the way it is.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, it sounds like you're engineering it from the very beginning like that, and that's good. Like I said, a lot of this is counter-intuitive to how, I'm as guilty as anybody, although I don't do courses the way you do it. I can see how this would have benefited me 5 years ago, when I first launched my flagship thing.
DANNY INY: It would work exactly the same way with an eBook. I don't like the format of an eBook for a pilot because you're going to spend a lot of time writing the damn thing. You're going to put it out there, and then you're kind of crossing your fingers and hoping it goes well, but if it doesn't go well, you're not going to know why. Was it Chapter 2, or Chapter 3, or Chapter 4 where you lost people? It's almost impossible for you to know that, so hypothetically, if it's all going to be written, maybe you don't need to do webinars, or live video, or classes. Maybe it's just an email course. Maybe every week, you're going to send them a lesson, and it's the equivalent of a chapter in an eBook that you're writing, and give people the work to do, and give them the opportunity to reply and ask you questions. See where they're getting stuck. Refine it. When you're done, package them up. Make an eBook.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, that's a real simple way for someone to get started, if they don't want to mess around with all the technology.
DANNY INY: The whole approach we teach, people always ask me like, "How much technology do I need?" I say, "I can't tell you for sure without knowing what you're going to do because different courses are different," but my bias is always as little technology, as simple as possible, until you've got it out there, you've got proven concept, you're making money. Then, you can figure out the more complicated stuff, if you need to.
BEN SETTLE: Would you say that not doing that, and starting out with all the bells and whistles, and all the complex stuff, and the $300 a month funnel software, and all these other things, that those are some mistakes that you see a lot of people doing when they're building their own courses, is that pretty common?
END PART 2
To get a seat at this Thursday’s training I'll be hosting with Danny's team about how to build a course in 60 days or less (and get paid *while* you build it), zip on over here to register today while you can:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/course
Yes, that's my blatant affiliate link.
The training will teach you what you need to do this.
But, for ongoing support, structure, and hand-holding to make sure it all goes smoothly, there will be a pitch at the end that, in my humble (but accurate) opinion is well worth getting if you have trouble building courses.
What?
You're scared of pitches?
You're a precious little snowflake who thinks everything in life should be free? Then you shouldn't even be building a course, son. Or, be in business at all, for that matter. Grow up.
For everyone else?
The adults?
You're in for one helluva treat.
Ben Settle