Online course building for smart fellers - part 3
Published: Wed, 04/05/17
Here's part 3 of my talk with the ever-wise Danny Iny about how to get paid to build your online courses, before you even finish creating them:
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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?
DANNY INY: Yeah. The biggest mistake is what we talked about, people who invest all this time and energy building something before they've got absolute proof if the market wants it. I don't care what people told you, and how many people said they liked the idea, until people have given you money, you don't know that they really want it, so the biggest mistake is building it before you've got proof that people want to pay for it. Yeah, the second biggest mistake is that people get really focused on, like they want to get everything perfectly right. It's interesting because you'd think, "Isn't that great? Shouldn't they want to get everything perfectly right?" The challenge is that you can't get everything right without input from your customers, without input from your students.
You can invest tons of time, and energy, and money in bells and whistles, but you don't know if they're the right bells and whistles. That's the key thing. You can spend hundreds of dollars a month on funnel software, and auto-responders, and whatever, and webinar technology. Maybe what you're people need, they don't need any of that. What they really want is a transcript of your video. I don't know. There's a hundred, a thousand things you could do, and they're all going to cost time and money, but you don't need to do all of them. You might not need to do any of them.
It's such a waste to invest resources, especially when resources are scarce, on things that nobody even cares about. If you're going to invest, yes, invest. By all means invest, but make sure people want it, first.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, those assumptions can get us all killed pretty quickly, and not just course-building, but just in marketing in general. People go on with assumptions and things. Yeah, I've seen that. I've absolutely seen that. I've made video available to people, and nobody even downloaded the video. They just read the transcript, and vice versa. I've put a transcript of something up, and everybody's like, "Where's the video?" You just never know until, that makes a lot of sense.
Let's shift focus just a little bit here, to the launch process. I know, in addition to teaching people how to create courses, and build courses, and all the things you've been talking about. You actually show people how to launch them, as well. How important is having a good launch process? Is it just a matter of, "I learned from X, Y, Z guru, I'm just going to do what they say," or do you modulate this to the market, as well?
DANNY INY: Yeah, we modulate it, absolutely. I want to emphasize, first of all, like I get this question a lot. People are like, "Will you only teach me how to build the course, or will you also teach me how to sell it, or how to launch it?" The thing is, I understand where the question is coming from, because people see them as two separate things, but they're not. You cannot build a good course without involving students, without involving customers. If you don't make money in the process of building the course, I don't care what else you do, it's not a good course. It has to come together, so yeah, we teach people there are specific processes. Launching something that you've already got is very different from launching something that doesn't exist yet. It's not just that it's different, but in a lot of ways, it's superior.
Here's the really cool thing. We talk about this. We call it co-creation. Actually, there's some research I can bring into this. Are you familiar with the Ikea Effect?
BEN SETTLE: I'm familiar with the name. I can't put a context to it, though.
DANNY INY: Okay, so Dan Ariely, who's at Duke University, teamed up with some, he wrote Predictably Irrational and some other books on behavioral economics. He teamed up with some other researchers from, I believe it's Harvard and Yale. What they did is they had a whole bunch of people come into a room and build things. They had different iterations of the research, assemble origami art, build stuff out of Legos, and build Ikea furniture, hence the name Ikea Effect. These people came in, build their Ikea furniture, and after they built it, the researchers asked them, "What do you think this piece of furniture is worth? Let's put a price on it." Then the took those people out of the room. They brought in new people, and asked, "These things that are in the room, what do you think they're worth?" They found that the people who built them consistently were willing to pay more than the people who just came in the room and saw it.
There was one variation to the experiment, and this is fascinating, where they had people come in, build their Ikea furniture. I don't know about you, I'm not the handiest person in the world, so when I build Ikea furniture, you know, this piece is screwed in a little too tight, that piece is a little bit cracked. It's not bad, but it's not perfect.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah.
DANNY INY: That's what these people built. Then they had, they're actually professional Ikea builders. That is a profession. They had professional Ikea builders build the same furniture. They asked the people, "What would you pay for this versus that?" People were willing to pay more for the imperfect pieces they built themselves than they were for the perfect pieces that somebody else built. Now, to me, that's fascinating. The beauty of a pilot launch is that you have the opportunity of involving your market, of involving your students in the creation of the course, so they're going to be dramatically more invested. You can do more in sales with less to work with, often than you might think. It can be really, really powerful and surprising, and it sets you up for a lot of success further down the road.
BEN SETTLE: That's interesting. The way you build courses is, you're already launching it as you're building it.
DANNY INY: Yes.
BEN SETTLE: Okay, which is totally different than what everybody else out there's doing. I think people are going to read this and they're going to have their eyes opened. I didn't know what you were going to tell me, during this call obviously, but it reminds me of our talk, when we talk about audiences. It completely, radically changed the way I thought, and you're doing that now here, so thank you for that, Mr. Iny.
I know you use affiliates because I'm one of your affiliates, but do you use affiliates for when you're building your courses?
DANNY INY: In the context of a pilot?
BEN SETTLE: Yes.
DANNY INY: You can, but I don't recommend it. There's nuance to that.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah.
DANNY INY: You've got to get your pilot offer in front of people. You've got to get customers in the door. If there's no other way than through affiliates, then you should do that. My student, Dianne Holmes, she had no audience, and she filled her pilot with paying students, working off of a partner's audience, so that's certainly a viable and great way to go. My personal bias is that whenever possible, I don't like going to somebody else's audience with an untested offer, because, Ben, you're friends, and if I say, "Hey Ben, I'm doing something new. I want to see if your audience would like it," you might say, "Yeah sure," just because we're friends, but if that offer bombs, and there's an opportunity cost involved with what you're promoting to your audience, and maybe the delivery isn't so great because it's the first time I'm doing it, that just damaged the relationship. I wouldn't want to risk that.
Whenever possible, I'd say affiliates are great after you've validated that the market wants the offer, and that you know how to sell and deliver it. I'm all for referring with affiliates. We teach people how to do that. Our process isn't just about the pilot phase. It's also about what do you gather from that process, and then how do you go to a full launch and beyond? I'm all for working with affiliates, working with partners further down the road, and even at the pilot phase if you don't have any options, but usually, there are other options.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, you know, what I hear from you, I think this is why you and I get along well. I learn from you and it's like, "Oh, that's perfectly in line with the way I think," even though it's new information to me. You don't have so much a tactical approach, but just principle-based, like you don't want to ruin the relationship. You could make money doing it with affiliates when you're first doing it, but you don't want to risk that because you're thinking long-term, and just the way of doing business, it's better to not burn a bridge with another, not just a friend, but a potentially good venture partner later on, because they'll say, "Oh, we promoted that for you before and that didn't work for us. Why would we try it now?" I'm very big into the whole principle-based approach to business, rather that tactical, which is probably why I'm liking the way you do this, like merging the whole launch with the building of the course
at the same time.
DANNY INY: I appreciate that. Thank you.
BEN SETTLE: No, it's good, real good. It's different and it's refreshing. I'm telling you, my audience ... I'm like this in the email world. I'm not so tactical as I am principle-based, and I think this goes hand in hand. That's why I was joking with you earlier today. I emailed you and said, "Look, one of my biggest challenges is nobody has a product on my list, and that's why they can't use email yet, so you help me help us help ourselves." It goes right line in line.
Talking about launching, though, and I want to ask you this. I meant to ask you, actually, Oceans 4, believe it or not, because I like to get different people's opinions on this sort of thing. I think this goes hand in hand with what we're talking about. If not, well, I guess people get a bonus answer to something, but what is your opinion of these internet marketing launch strategies, and I see one going right now, as we're recording this, there's a big one going with a person I respect a lot, so I'm not going to name him, but I do. I just don't agree with how they do it, but I'm curious what you think. People get all their affiliates at one time, all promoting at the exact same time, as opposed to saying, "Okay, this affiliate, we're going to do this for you now, and then later, we'll go to another affiliate the next week, one at at time." What are your thoughts on that, because I see you doing things a little bit differently in that
arena, too.
END PART 3
To get a seat at tomorrow’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, with your own coach to guide you along and answer questions along the way, etc, 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.
More tomorrow...
Ben Settle