Has the online course bubble burst? How to adapt to the future of selling knowledge based content.

Your Dream Business

Is there still money to be made from selling online courses? A while ago, online business expert Pat Flynn argued that online courses are in decline due to oversaturation, low completion rates, and the availability of free information online. He’s not wrong but in this episode of the podcast I offer my own insights on the future of online courses and strategies for course creators, membership owners, and coaches to adapt to the many changes that are happening in the online business space.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

1. The Evolving Landscape: The online course market is becoming increasingly competitive, with more creators and free resources available.
2. Focus on Engagement and Accountability: To stand out, course creators must prioritize engagement and accountability to motivate learners and drive results.
3. Explore Alternative Models: Consider live courses, workshops, and membership models as complementary or alternative approaches to traditional online courses.

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LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

Transcript

Are online courses dead? They are oversaturated. People aren't completing them and sales are low. And let's face it, you can get free information anywhere on the internet. And with AI, do we really need to buy another online course? And if you're a course creator, Is it even still a viable business? Today, I discuss all of these things. Pat Flynn did a YouTube video a few months back that talked about why he is stopping selling knowledge based things. And I am going to unpack the things that he said and also give you my opinion on what I think about what he said. Do I think horses are dead or do I think there are some things that we can do to help combat some of the really valid points that he shared? Whether you're a course creator, membership owner, or a coach, this is going to give you a really valuable insight to the online industry and what is happening right now. And some of the things that you can do to help ensure that you maximize your sales and create products and [00:01:00] services that your customers are going to want to engage with. And most importantly, gives them the transformation that they're looking for. This is not an episode to be missed. Welcome to the Your Dream Business Podcast. I'm your host Teresa Heath-Wareing. An international bestselling author, award winning speaker, TEDx speaker, certified coach, and the host of this number one ranked podcast. I am so excited to guide you on the journey of creating a business and life that you not only love, but one that perfectly aligns with you and the season of life that you're in. In each episode, I'll share with you easy, actionable, and insightful strategies to grow your online business. Plus we'll be diving into some mindset tools and strategies that keep you focused, motivated, and are going to stop you from getting in your own way. So if you're a course creator, membership owner, or coach, you are in the right place. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of your dream business podcast. [00:02:00] I'm Teresa Heath Wareing, your host, and I'm here to help course creators, membership owners, and coaches grow their online businesses. Teresa: We have so many people come into the online space, the space that I've been in for 10 years now, and yet, so few of them seem to grow it to where they replace their done for you and one to one income or give themselves a substantial income that they are hoping for. So my job with this podcast is to help you grow an online business to the level that you want it, be it five figures, six figures, seven figures, or even more. So today's episode is all about online courses. and the possible demise of them. Let me explain. I have become a bit of a YouTube fan. Rather than sitting down and putting the TV on and watching normal TV or binging Netflix, I appear to just be watching YouTube stuff. Now, don't judge me, but my husband and I love a bit of homesteading stuff. So [00:03:00] we watch a lot of that. And if it's just me on my own, I often watch business stuff or personal development stuff. And A couple of months back, I was watching some videos, which surprisingly, it's taken me this long to do a podcast about it, but I think it's really useful to do it. It was a YouTube video from Pat Flynn that was titled stop selling info and do this instead. And basically why he thinks courses are dead. So what I'm going to do in today's episode is I am going to take you through what he said. I'm going to give you my opinion, and I'm also going to give you my thoughts and some of his thoughts around. what you should do instead if courses are dead. And even if you're not currently selling courses or have no plans to, I really think this is still going to be super interesting because it actually talks about the shifts that have happened in the online space and why they may affect different things that we do as online business owners. So one of the first things he talks about is the fact that people aren't buying online courses [00:04:00] anymore. Now I have a saying in the club, which is you don't need another course. So I am almost backing him up with his theory here of you don't need another course, stop buying online courses. I have bought my fair share of online courses. I have sold a fair share of online courses and I have helped Many, many, many, many business owners sell their online courses too. And what Pat was saying and the, the graph he showed was that during the pandemic, his courses hit an all time high in sales. Now I can attest to that, that during the pandemic, the online business space really thrived because. Suddenly the whole world is online and therefore it made perfect sense that we were going to suddenly do a lot more online stuff and this attracted a whole load of new people in to the space and they discovered the online world so during the pandemic I did not at any point put my feet up and furlough myself. I [00:05:00] worked really hard because it was super, super busy. And then what he showed was after the pandemic, his sales dropped dramatically. Now, I also concur to this because not only, and I think this is the key thing, not only is it that the core sales dropped, I think online stuff in general dropped. And there are many reasons for this. One of them is that we had spent the last year or two online and people were tired of doing online stuff. They were tired of Zoom meetings and courses and sitting at their computer 24 hours a day. Although I have to say, interestingly enough, I ran some in person events after the pandemic and they weren't working as well as they were used to either. So honestly, I think the whole industry and business and marketing in general was going through a real change and shift, but basically it has [00:06:00] decreased. People who buy online stuff has decreased, but I don't want you to worry about that for the time being. So let me go on to one of his other points as to why he feels like courses are dead. People don't complete them. And again, this is exactly coming back to my, we don't need another course because people buy courses and, and we're really good at selling them. Okay. People in the online space are very clever. We have some really cool marketing tactics that basically sell an online course, like it's going to be the dream and it's going to fix all your problems. But the truth is, you have to do the work. And I don't just mean go through the course, which it's a thing in itself. I mean, actually then take action on the stuff that you've learned and people aren't doing it. In fact, the stats for people in the online space, completing courses is really low, like three, four or 5%. Like, Not very high at all. Those are the people who [00:07:00] fully complete a course. So if you imagine if someone is selling a course, they sell a hundred places. There is a really small amount of people who are actually doing the work. And the thing is, if you're a course creator, you want people to do the work because if people do the work, then you get testimonials. Then you get to prove your concept and then you get to help sell some more. So those were two of his kind of big points. The other thing he talked about, which is a really fair point, is it's saturated. The information industry is completely saturated. When I started my online business back in, well I don't know what year it was, but it was 10 years ago. I should be able to work that out. Quick maths, 2004. No, 2014. Oh my goodness. 2014. That's right. It's 2024. Hey, listen, you're not here for my math skills. FYI. When I started my business, it was unknown. Like in the UK in particular, this online thing was really like, what is [00:08:00] this? And I actually would say in parts of the UK, It is similar. Like there is still, there is still parts and industries and people in the UK that still don't know about the online business world. However, it is way more saturated than it used to be. But more importantly, it's It's not that the online world is saturated. It's the fact that the knowledge is saturated. As I said at the beginning of this episode, I watch a lot of YouTube. I learn a lot of things on YouTube and that's the truth we have available to us. I mean, it's a wonderful, amazing place we live in where we can literally just YouTube something and find out how to do it or what it is or why it's important. So there is very little information out there that is not available for free. So you can go and like this podcast, I've done 300, what is this? 364 episodes. There is so much content out there. So one, it's completely free and there is so much available to see, but also we have AI [00:09:00] like. this wondrous wizardrous thing that we can just type into AI and say, please tell me this, please give me this, what is this? So the landscape is not the same as it was. And that I agree with, I agree with the landscape has changed. The online course sales were going up, they hit a peak in pandemic. They've been tracking down since I, he proved it with his graph and he's very honest about his results. I get that people don't complete them. I totally unbordered that. And we live in an age of information where we can find out anything. So with all that being said. What did Pat say? And what are my thoughts on what we have to do? Because if that is the case, what is there for us to do? Well, actually the good news is for those of us who really care about our audience and really care about them achieving things and getting results and having the transformation, [00:10:00] which is a hundred percent me. And I'm sure because you listened to this podcast, it's a hundred percent you. The good news is we can still do things in order to help our audience do that. We just need to tweak the way we do them. So we are less likely to be able to make a huge amount of money by just doing evergreen, set it and forget it stuff. Create a course, sell it over and over and over and over again. Now I'm not saying people won't buy it. Absolutely people might buy it, but are they going to complete it? Possibly not. Have I done the same myself? Absolutely. I am really strict now on what I buy and I only buy very specific things that I need and that is something I talk about in the club and in my accelerator programs where they have access to me. I say, unless it is something very specific, we are not creating another course as in I am not giving them another course. I am only delivering content. So for instance, at the time of recording this, we had someone come in and talk about productivity because it's [00:11:00] who I work with and they're amazing. We've got someone coming in to talk about chatbots. In fact, there is an episode very quickly, I think it's next week, in fact, talking about chatbots because it's a really cool strategy and we should be looking at it. We might have someone come in and talk about very specific things where we have a gap of knowledge. I am not just putting out a course in, in my stuff just for the sake of teaching them stuff. So what are we going to do if people can get information? If they're not completing the courses, we need to go back to why are they buying them in the first place? And the truth is they want a transformation. And what Pat calls it is we need to give them implementation. Instead of just straight up giving them access to the information, they don't need information, they need implementation. And what I call it is the transformation. Because they're buying the course to have a transformation, but the problem is they are not implementing what they are given in the course, so they're [00:12:00] not getting the transformation. So what we need to enable people to do is to help them with the transformation, help them achieve the thing that we want them to do. And That is the, that's the key bit really is helping them achieve the thing that they want to do and giving them more help in doing that than just producing a course. So what are some of the things that you can do other than maybe just a course? So I've got a few options for you and some of these I have done, some of them I do. So we have got the live course element because in order to get the transformation, they need a few different things. And this is why I've always been a fan of I have an accelerator program where they get one to one calls with me. I have a membership where you get to get on a coaching call with me. I do one to one work. I do have some courses, but also I do a lot of paid masterclasses and challenge and paid workshops where they get to ask me questions because [00:13:00] one of the things that people are missing when they buy an online course is the ability to individualize the content to their particular case. So just because I would do a process for a lead magnet, okay, that process will work no matter what industry you're in and no matter who your customers are. However, there are certain things that I would do differently based on different industries and different people and different customers. So what they're not able to do with the course, and one of the ways I want you to think about it, is how can you individualize or how can you match the content better to the person consuming it? Because what we want to know always is if someone's got a really good idea, we want to go, but will that work for me? And in able to say, will that work for me? It means You need to understand who I am, what my, who my customers are and what I offer them, and then match the information you have about the [00:14:00] thing against those things and tell me what is going to work best. So they're missing that. They're missing the fact to match it to them and where they are. The other thing that they're missing when they buy an online course is they're missing the accountability aspect. So the fact of Okay, first off, this course is going to work perfectly for you, but this is what I would tweak. And secondly, when are you going to take the action and do the thing? And then the final thing that they could be missing is the review part of it. Because as we know, if you are in the online space, everything is a trial and error and we need to look at it as a trial and error. We need to look at it as, how can I learn from this thing? What can I achieve from doing something, whether it's the result I wanted or not, what have I learned from it? So those three things I think are the things that you can't get when you buy an off the shelf online course with no other bits other than just work through the course yourself. You don't get the individual, [00:15:00] individualization. God, it's so hard for me to say that. to you and your business. You don't get the accountability and the taking action bit and you don't get the reviewing the results to see if it works. So how can you create a course that is going to do those things? So one of the things that you can do is create a live course. Now, this is something I have done a number of times. I had built my list, which was a list building course. And it was over the first time I ran, it was over 10 days. I nearly killed them. It was a lot of work over 10 days. Then I ran it over three weeks. Then I ran it over a bit longer because every time I ran it, I learned. And that's the other thing. If you are sat there thinking you just want to create a course, having never sold it before, and you want to literally just sell it over and over, that's really not the most awesome of ideas because you're going to need to test it. What do people want? What are they resonating with? What aren't they resonating with? What is missing? What questions are they asking that your course is not [00:16:00] doing? So actually running a live course just generally is really good practice, but that is a way that you can hold them accountable. You can personalize the information to them and their business, and you can help them review it. So live courses are really, really good. The other thing a live course does is it gives them an element of community, which is the other thing that they might not get when they buy a course. So if they are buying an off the shelf course, an evergreen thing, where they just purchased it themselves, you have no community in that. And again, one of the things that helps people get results is that accountability, which I said already, but the accountability with their peers, as well as. with you who is helping them run the course. So like I said, live courses that are either over a set period of time or, and this doesn't have to be three weeks, three days, 10 days, whatever. This could be months. This could be a 12 month program. In fact, something I'm working on at the moment will give support over 12 months. [00:17:00] The other thing that you can do, which I have...