Adapting to a changing world - why you never finish your online course

The Business of Psychology

Adapting to a changing world - why you never finish your online course

Links for this episode:

Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp

Psychology Business School

Do More Than Therapy Membership

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Welcome to today's episode of the Business of Psychology. I am looking forward to talking to you today about a topic which I get asked about all the time, and I find myself saying similar things about all the time, but I've never thought to record a podcast episode on it before. Actually, that surprises me because it's a topic in which I feel the need to rant a little bit, and usually those topics do come out in the podcast! Today we're talking about this myth that if you create an online course, it will be less work for you because you just create it once and then it continues sitting on your website and making you money for years and years to come. And it just isn't true. It particularly feels untrue to me at the moment because I'm right in the thick of making big changes to Psychology Business School and the courses that we have within that. I'm putting in a lot of hours on changing all of that, and when I look back over the few years that I've been running Psychology Business School, every year we've introduced major big changes, new masterclasses, new experts, new templates, there's always something and it wouldn't be good if there wasn't. So we're going to talk today about why that is essential and how you can benefit from that as a process, because I do think as psychologists and other mental health professionals, we often buy into this idea that we can make something perfect, and then invite people to use it. If we're going to be successful in the online space, creating online courses, or any other resources, I think we need to be a bit more realistic and turn that on its head, because you can't create something perfect. You can create something good enough for the time being, and you can continue to improve it in accordance with feedback, but as the world changes and as people change, what was perfect one day won't be perfect the next day, so you're going to need to keep updating it.

The reason that I'm recording this episode today, rather than last week or next week, is actually because a couple of days ago my friend's husband mansplained to me that I apparently have the perfect business model because online courses are passive income that can earn money with no additional work. That's literally what he said to me, and I kind of rolled my eyes discreetly, but then agreed politely because I'm averse to conflict in coffee shops and I just wanted to extricate myself from the conversation as quickly as possible. But deep down, I was really strongly disagreeing with this, and it's provoked me to come and talk to you about it today. But also, I'd like to hear your thoughts and your experiences, because I know quite a few of you are creating your own online products, so consider this the beginning of a conversation and I'm very interested to hear your contribution as well.

Today, we're going to think about all the reasons that you can't just let an online course sit on your website making money, not if you want it to be good anyway. And then I will talk a little bit about my thinking with some of the updates that I've made to my courses recently to give you an example of how that might look in practice.

Life changes for your ideal clients

Firstly, the biggest reason that you cannot allow your online courses to just sit on your website making money, is that life changes for your ideal clients. Think about how tone deaf courses recorded in 2019 would seem now. I can't think of any subjects where if you're an online course creator, you wouldn't have had to re-record your entire course, pre and post pandemic. The examples that you use in your teaching need to reflect current context, or there'll be an extra barrier for your learners to jump over in order to get the most out of it. As we all know, from any teaching that we've done in our careers, people really struggle with that, they need examples to be concretely linked to the way that they live their lives, or they're going to really struggle, especially when you're introducing new psychological concepts to people. So that is really, really important and that is the number one reason that you are going to be in there updating your course really regularly if this is the path that you choose.

Expectations of online learning change dramatically over time

Secondly, people's expectations of online learning changed dramatically over time. At the moment, people are used to consuming online courses that are a series of pre recorded videos along with some PDFs. I think that's going to change. I wouldn't be surprised if over the next five years, audio courses delivered via private podcast feeds become much more normal and people become used to having that at least as an option when they download your course. I might be wrong, but that's a trend that I see emerging and what we can be sure of is that there will be changes in expectation. Think about 10 years ago; the idea of doing an online course when you get a login, and then you watch a load of videos would have seemed ridiculous to people. Now, it's accepted as commonplace in a lot of industries. So it's worth watching out for the trends and making sure that you're adapting the way that you deliver your content to what people's expectations are.

Changes to the evidence base

The third thing that I thought I'd mentioned, even though I probably don't need to for this audience, is a little thing called the evidence base. When I look back at the course that I recorded five years ago, or it must be nearly six years ago now, it was called ‘Enjoy your Pregnancy' (not my favourite title) and it was basically an introduction to the fundamentals of CFT for people who are struggling in pregnancy. And most of what I put in that course is still what we would have as the backbone or the infrastructure for a course today. But I know so much better now. There have been lots of updates to the evidence base that would help me select different techniques, maybe focus on different issues. When I reviewed it, there was just so much that I felt needed to change in that course, in order to reflect what we know now. And again, I think you'd struggle to find a subject in our industry that isn't like that. Certainly when I think about my marketing and business courses, those need to be updated every few months. There's no way that I could let Psychology Business School or anything from the Do More Than Therapy Membership languish for a couple of years, because the online space changes all the time, but so does the psychological evidence base. So I found it to be a common theme with all of my courses that I become dissatisfied, and need to update them to make sure that they're reflecting the latest evidence base.

Adding bells and whistles

The fourth thing, which you might not consider now, but might make you want to continuously go in and tweak things, is that as you start to make money, you can add bells and whistles and things that. They're not essential to the content of your online course but they're going to help people to consume them and get the most out of them. It could be something little like making interactive quizzes; that costs money, you have to get the tool to do it or pay somebody to do it, and that might not be an option for you when you start out, but when you've got a bit of revenue behind you, those things become possible and you'll probably want to implement them when you've got that bit of money. It's amazing how much money you will spend continuously improving, but those things become opportunities that you can take and I think it's really important that you expect that and factor into both your cash flow and your planning for the year. What I would really hate is for anybody to take, say my roadmap to a successful online course, and think, right, I'm going to implement this, I'm going to spend maybe three months getting my online course up and running and then I can move on to other projects, I don't need to allocate any time to this going forward. Because that just isn't true, you are going to want to be in there really regularly updating stuff.

Responding to feedback

That brings me on to point number five, which is that you will want to respond to feedback. If you manage to get your course in front of you know, even 5 or 10 students, they will start to tell you really helpful stuff about what could be structured differently, what could be presented differently, what would be a more meaningful example, or what would be more helpful for different learning styles. I'm always learning things like what I thought worked as a video would be better as a checklist or a spreadsheet even, or a graphic is required here because people didn't quite understand it when I was talking it through. There's so many bits of feedback, nuggets of information that you can glean from your students, even if you only have a few going through it. You will find that there's little things that you want to tweak all the time based on that feedback. And sometimes you'll want to do a major change in response to that feedback.

Changes I'm making

That brings me on to the changes that I'm making with Psychology Business School and the Do More Than Therapy Membership, because those are major changes and I'm making them in response to what I've learned from my students and about my students as they've gone through. So I suppose I should come clean; the big change is that I'm bringing the two things together. Previously, Psychology Business School has been our foundation course for people setting up in private practice; you get all your templates, we focus a lot on setting your fees correctly, the vision for your business, business planning, your marketing strategy, getting your first clients, making sure that your website speaks to people properly, all of that stuff. And then the Do More Than Therapy Membership is basically like a growth membership, so at the heart of it we've got the roadmap to a successful online course, but there's also workshops in there from industry experts telling you how to create a podcast, self publish a book, there's all sorts in there that's all focused on this idea of making more impact by reaching more people outside of the therapy room. And typically, people will go through Psychology Business School, and then come and join us in the Do More Than Therapy Membership afterwards. That made sense when I set it up and it was the way that a lot of courses that I've been through myself were structured, so I was kind of following a pathway that I'd seen work well in other places, so it's not that that wasn't right at the time. Again, the subject of perfectionism; it was fine and it was good enough for the time being, but what I've learned from my students as I've been delivering this over the past couple of couple of years, is that actually the six months that I was giving people to complete the Psychology Business School course simply wasn't long enough. And when I look at the content, of course it wasn't, it didn't take me six months to do all of that stuff, it's an ongoing process. You might cover all of the content easily within the six months, and it's perfectly possible to do that, but you're still going to be implementing and making your business plan a reality over a year plus. And that's just true, that's just the way that life is. So I didn't feel very good about the fact that this arbitrary six month end was imposed on people, and that a lot of people would come back to me and say, "oh, I'm really behind, I'm not going to manage to do it by the deadline" and it was inducing all of this kind of panic and angst and people not feeling good enough as a result of that. And I felt that I was responsible for that, because I'd set this unrealistic deadline up in people's heads. So I wasn't happy about that and I wanted to change it and set people's expectations up a bit differently, so that they would be kinder to themselves and give themselves longer to cover what really is quite weighty material. I also felt that the pathway that I'd envisaged of people getting their business foundations set up and profitable and working really well for them, and then when they've got that stability, branching out, and making more impact and reaching more people with all the 'passive' income stuff, I actually felt that because the two things were seen as separate, that wasn't coming across clearly enough to people and a lot of people were confused about what path I was recommending them to take. Some people would come in to Do More Than Therapy, and actually they didn't yet have some of their key processes sorted out, and I would want to send them back to Psychology Business School stuff, but I couldn't because their membership didn't give them access to that. So it just kind of wasn't making sense for me.

The other thing that became really evident is something that people really value in Psychology Business School and in Do More Than Therapy are the legal templates that Claire Veal, our specialist lawyer, provides. It was really confusing to me, to be honest, to work out which templates belonged in which course, because there's so much overlap, and obviously you need to update your templates every year. Claire updates them for us with the latest stuff that's been going on in the legal world, any new wording that's recommended. She's very thoughtful, and goes back to all of our templates and makes them fit for that year, so obviously it doesn't make sense for people to lose access to those, or for people that come in on Do More Than Therapy to never have access to those, and that wasn't sitting right with me either and I found myself really wanting to give them to everybody. Obviously I couldn't because some people had paid for access to all of them and some people hadn't. Ethically I had to be tough on myself about that, but I was finding it really difficult because I knew how much they would help people, if I could share them with everyone.

Another thing, which has always played on my mind slightly, was that Do More Than Therapy was cheaper than Psychology Business School. So Do More Than Therapy was £47 a month, whereas Psychology Business School is £725 for six months, which works out as £125 a month. The reason for the price difference was those legal templates, because obviously it's not cheap at all, for me to provide those, and so Psychology Business School just needed to be a bigger investment. But as you'll know, if you've listened to this podcast, when I started my business I really didn't have a lot of capital behind me (that's a massive understatement, I really had none!) and so for me to be able to join (the person that I was) I would need it to be the most accessible price point that it could be. It didn't sit right with me that the people at the beginning of their business who were likely to have the least money, were paying more than people who were the owners of thriving practices that were just looking to accelerate that and take it to the next level. That doesn't make sense does it really? Not at an ideological level, even though it kind of did from a business perspective. I was getting that feedback from time to time as well, people struggling and telling me that they needed to spread their payment out over more months, and all of this stuff.

Delivering the right fit at the right moment for our ideal clients

So the changes that I'm making are really in response to all of that stuff that I learned from my students. I'm not beating myself up and feeling that I did the wrong thing when I set it up before, this is just the lifecycle of online courses and memberships; they're never done, we always have to change and adapt. I think over the next couple of years, the world is going to continue to be in flux and we're going to continue to need to find creative and different ways to support the same people. So I think even if you don't have an online course, but you've got another type of offer, whether it's therapy, one to one, group programmes, coaching, whatever it is that you offer, we all need to be thinking flexibly about how we're delivering and making sure that we're delivering something which is the right fit at the right moment for our ideal clients. We just cannot afford to be complacent about that. I'm certainly not going to be complacent about that and I'm bringing together Psychology Business School and the Do More Than Therapy Membership into one membership, which will be called Psychology Business School (because I'm not very creative, really, when it comes to titles for things - I like things to be quite Ronseal, does what it says on the tin) and I think in reality, that's what it is, you're always working on your business and if your business is thriving, that's when you have the ability to get out there and do more than therapy and make more impact, because we all know that when you're broke, it's very difficult to do that! And also, savvy business is about having more influence and making more impact too. So for me, it makes sense to call it all Psychology Business School going forward, and when we go live with the new membership, which will be September the 30th, you'll obviously be able to see the new pricing. It is overall a price increase, I've got to say that, but the monthly instalments will be slightly more affordable. It's not massively more affordable, because we've added in more templates, more legal stuff to go along with it to make sure that it's fully comprehensive. But it is slightly lower monthly instalments than people were paying for Psychology Business School.

So that is why those changes are coming and I hope that that has helped you think about the updates that you might need to factor into your diary for anything that you're creating, any service that you're providing, any product that you're creating. Please don't buy into the myth that it can just sit there and earn you money. I literally want to throw my laptop out of the window when I see adverts of passive income workshops that claim that. There's some big players out there telling us some stuff which is frankly not true, so I thought I would share that reality with you and let you in on my thinking on why I'm changing the stuff I'm changing so that you can make a realistic plan for your year ahead and what you're going to be spending your time doing.

I hope that's been helpful. As ever, I'd really love to continue this conversation with you so do come and find me. I'm over on Instagram @RosieGilderthorp and I'd really like to chat with you there.

Membership Changes - Join Now!

Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that we are making some big changes at the moment to