Should You Drip Feed Content On An Online Course?
This week, I’ve been writing articles on creating an online course.
For the regular readers, you can skip the next few lines, but for those of you who are joining us at this late stage, here are the subjects I’ve covered:
- The Two Key Ingredients To An Online Course
- How To tell whether Anyone Wants Your Course
- How To Structure and Plan Your Course
- How To Sell Your Course
Today I’ll be giving my thoughts on something a bit more specific: Should you drip feed content to your students on your online course?
What Is Drip Feeding?
Drip feeding is quite a self-explanatory term; when you buy an online course, you’ll either get everything given to you in one big download (or it’ll all be available at one-time online or wherever) or you have it drip-fed to you; you’ll be able to access some of the material at the beginning of the course and other materials will be released to you as and when the course creator decides.
Depending on the goals of your course, you might decide to let everyone have all the materials in one-go or you might decide to drip feed them the content over a period of time. There are reasons for doing both which I’ll discuss next, and I prefer one over the other, and I’ll talk about that in the section after.
To Drip Feed Or Not To Drip Feed Is Quite Product Specific
In this series of posts, I’ve tried to keep things as vague as possible so as to make it all relevant to everyone. Essentially, an article about creating a “make money online” course is going to be absolutely useless to a guy who wants to teach people how to do basket weaving. I’ve tried to cover everyone.
How you deliver your materials is going to be product specific. If you’re creating a video course, then you’ll probably need to make those videos available online where you won’t incur bandwidth charges. If you’re doing an email-only course, then you’re going to need to make sure your material is small enough in file size that it won’t get rejected by your customer’s email provider. The list goes on.
This is true for drip-feeding content versus giving it all in one-go.
If, for instance, you’re selling a course on “How to Improve Your Wardrobe” you’re not going to send a person a video to “choosing socks” in one week and then make them wait until the next week to find out how to buy trousers that match the socks… because the information is useless on its own and that’d just be annoying anyway.
On the other hand, if you’re selling a “Get ripped in six weeks” course, then you don’t want everyone jumping ahead to week six exercises and injuring themselves.
Whilst I can’t answer the question for your course specifically, I can say that the decision will be made for you in the planning stage. If you don’t know whether to drip feed your material or not, then you haven’t finished your planning yet, and you need to go back and do that.
It’s better to go back to the drawing board before you engage in an action, because the longer you leave fixing issues like this, the harder it’ll be to change anything.
Right, so, we don’t know whether to drip feed or not. Here are my personal thoughts on the matter though.
That Said… My Thoughts On Drip-Feeding Content
Throughout these articles, I’ve written that a key part of anyone buying an online course is down to the decision to get structured material.
For that reason, I think that drip feeding is better than not drip feeding content.
In fact, I’ve practically rewritten the course I’m working on specifically so I can drip feed the content because it’s a superior way of delivering the information.
When a person has to get one update, learn the material, use the material, wait for the next update, get the next update and repeat the process, you’re forcing them to engage as you want them to. Essentially, you’re the annoying teacher at school who had the uncanny knack for making you pay attention even when you wanted to doze off at the back of the class.
The more engagement a customer has, the more they’ll pay attention, the more they’ll work on the material you give them, the more they’ll trust you and the less likely they’ll be to say, “Man… this stuff is boring and not new… I want a refund.”
That’s one reason I prefer drip feeding content. Of course, it also becomes a selling point in-and-of itself.
Think about those weird chef things for middle age women. “Not only do we give you a diet plan, but we’ll cook it for you and deliver it to you every week.”
That’s much more likely to sell for a high price than a cookbook. It also builds a recurring relationship with the customer.
That Point In The Wider Perspective
To widen the “drip feeding as selling point” idea, think of everything and every reason you have for creating each specific part of an online course. Most of the decisions you’ll make will be subconscious or “common sense” … but only to you.
Every reason, every decision and every piece of information you include is its own selling point.
Final Thoughts (For Now)
That concludes my findings on creating online courses for now.
I’m putting a lot of work into this current project, so no doubt I’ll be adding to the collection of thoughts on the subject at a later point.
Hopefully you’ve all got a ton more information on this subject than I have… so throw in some comments below (or on any of the articles) with your thoughts.
Tomorrow, it’s back to regular business with the next update in the niche site challenge.