Building an online business rather than face-to-face one has had a different set of challenges. Most online educators appear to be extroverts, which I am not, I’m a INFJ to be specific! (You can take a free quiz here) I have spent a lot of time searching out people with successful online businesses who are also introverts.
Creating online courses has taken in my own experiences of participating in online courses as well as looking to experts in the field. The current figure shows 3% of people who buy online course complete them. How can I improve on that figure for my courses? Here are some of the questions I am asking when creating my courses:
- What does it mean to ‘add value’? As we are all time poor, having a 200 hour course is not particularly appealing to me. I want the bare bones and no fluff!
- Hour long videos are hard to schedule into a day compared to short and snappy videos.
- Death by PowerPoint exists outside the corporate world, who knew!
- Our attention spans are fairly short these day, instead of long videos on a topic, a small consumable video with an immediate action works wonders
- Being in a Facebook group of hundreds of people is not a fun experience either. It’s not my idea of support and accountability when it’s who shouts the loudest gets an answer! It’s often hard to find things afterwards as there is no structure in place.
- Combine that with a need to have a regular break from social media. Facebook groups are not then ideal in the long term
- Lifetime access does not help me to complete the course. Deadlines do that, the courses where there was limited 6 month access are the ones that I have successfully completed and got the most out of.
I am also curious as to how I can grow my business without working any more hours. We are all looking for work/life balance, as an entrepreneur it is just as challenging as working in the corporate world. There are many distractions that can take away focus, but I love this article on monk mode mornings and found it one of the best ways to be productive. So you probably won’t find me on Social Media or answering emails in the morning as I will be busy writing my new book or a course!
I have a long-term plan of where I see my business growing. As with many businesses, it will have leaps and bounds along the way, when I need to move to a different platform as I have outgrown it. Taking on staff and training them to support customers and so on.
Having a vision means keeping things very simple and not adding on bells and whistle or being diverted (well not too far off track!).
It is a simple focus of where I want my business to go and enjoying the journey!
