How To Tell If People Want Your Course (Without Building An Authority Site)
If you’ve read my blog over the past week, you might have read this article where I went on a sort-of rant about how a lot of people create products without knowing what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.
What prompted this rant was that I was looking for information on testing the viability of a project I’ve been working on.
Now, during that time I found a lot of sites that gave this information. The problem with their approach was that a lot of the methods I found involved having a massive audience already. Things like:
- Sending out surveys to your email subscribers
- Running a kickstarter campaign
- Judging which blog posts did better than others
- A/B testing offer pages for other products on your site
These are all great, but you need to have an authority site do these. You need a lot of inbuilt traffic.
Anyone who has built an authority site knows that it takes time, effort and the blood of your first born to get your authority site to the point where you have meaningful data.
Sure, you can buy traffic. But buying traffic is complicated and it’s cold and mostly untargeted traffic so it won’t respond in the way that real customers would to an offer.
In short, nobody wants to build a whole authority site with the view to selling a high-ticket course without knowing whether either the site or course is actually going to be viable.
So that leaves us with a conundrum. How do we find out whether our course is viable without having a ton of traffic or spending inordinate amounts of time building an information site on the chance that we’ll have enough customers to make it worth our while in the long run?
How To Test An Idea Without Testing It
I like solving problems. It’s how my brain works.
During my years of solving various problems, I’ve come to realise a simple truth: Most problems have an easy and straightforward solution.
Let’s say you want to see if creating a course is viable. The obvious answer is to see if anyone else is doing it.
So, if you’re thinking of starting a course, go to Udemy, Codeacademy, Tutsplus or wherever else sells online courses in your niche and see if there are people offering the sort of subject that you’re thinking of teaching them.
If they are, then congratulations… it’s viable. Don’t overthink it.
If there’s nobody offering a course on your subject, then go on to the next step.
Do Colleges Etc. Offer Courses In Your Subject?
Online course creation people could do worse than looking at vocational college prospectuses. I’ve had more than a handful of niche site ideas and other project ideas from looking at prospectuses.
Most little vocational colleges have classes of maybe ten people at a time. They’ll sell out and even have massive waiting lists. This is because in-person courses have physical limits; you only have one tutor, you have limited space and there are only so many hours in the day.
Online courses can replicate this without any of the barriers. They can also attract a global audience.
Most people who create online courses make the mistake of writing about stuff that’s already saturated online. There are probably a million people currently trying to create the next big “make money with Instagram” courses, but there might not be any creating material for most of the courses you’d see in a prospectus.
The fact is, if a local college runs a course in your subject, there’s a market there, because the higher costs and lower profits mean that courses that don’t make any money don’t last very long.
If you still haven’t found confirmation that your course is going to have a market, go on to the next step.
Search for Fifteen Questions That Are Directly Targeted To Your Market
Most answers to product creation questions can be answered by simple Google searches. For instance, the course I’m currently creating was a “maybe” in my mind until I sent out a search for the following question:
“Is there anything that’ll teach me X in a structured way online?”
Now, I didn’t find an answer to this question when I googled it. Instead, I found half a dozen people asking a variation on that question.
Ultimately, that’s some confirmation that people are looking for what I’m offering, plus they’re looking for the “structured” identifier – ergo, they’d like a structured course of some sort.
Search for a few of these questions and see if you get any hits for interest.
Failing All Those Things, Ask On Reddit
Failing all of those things, (and do them first,) you can force the issue.
Go to Reddit. Force the questions as though you were a consumer.
“Is anyone else interested in X, and are there any courses out there for me?”
Something like that will give you some good answers. It’ll tell you whether there are competitors and it’ll tell you whether people are interested.
It might also give you information about whether it’s a good idea or a waste of time as well, but bear in mind the biases of reddit and online forums in general. (i.e. everyone is an expert whilst still being overwhelming sceptical and critical of everything.)
Final Thoughts
This list of ways to find a target market for an online course isn’t in any way conclusive. You’ll find your own experiments to try (and obviously you’ll leave them in the comment section below!)
However, you can find quite a bit of information by doing the above, and you’ll probably get more than enough information to decide whether your course idea is a dud or whether it’s worth looking into some more.
All without spending a penny.