Course Building Mistakes

Welcome to a new week…. and issue #493 of this newsletter.

Little crazy when you think about it. When I started this newsletter (under a different name), I never really thought about the fact that one day I’d be writing my 500th issue. And yet, we’re getting close to that point.

Anyhoo…

This last week, I finally finished up the big reorganization of all the videos and courses on my site into the new video library. During that, I got a chance to get the bird’s eye view again of a lot of my old training material on the site. Stuff I made upwards of 15 years ago.

And I made some big mistakes. 🤓

I’m going to tell you about my screw-ups in this issue. If you create any online courses for your business, this is something you should know.

Also, let’s talk about how best to host your videos. Because that’s another biggie I tackled internally…. by moving a TON of stuff out of Vimeo.

Sometimes, the best lessons are the ones I can tell you about because of my own experience.

So, let’s dive in….

Featured This Week

How To Create Online Courses On WordPress Without An LMS Plug-in

In this video, I will show you how to create online courses on WordPress without using an LMS plugin. We will just use custom post types.

Building Online Courses? Don’t Mess Up Like I Did.

Last week, I finished the transition away from Learndash and into the new Video Library. In the process of doing all that, I ended up re-encoding some of my older online courses.

And MAN!…. things have changed!

And I’ve changed. Look at this baby nerd face from one of the videos from Blog Masters Club…

That video was from probably about 2009. So, it has been awhile. It is almost embarrassing. 😳

But, in looking at all of these older courses at once and doing it here in the present, it is also obvious how much things have changed. And I’m not just talking about my handsome looks. 🤓

People used to crave information. They wanted expertise. People would pay out sometimes large sums of money for these online courses and they wanted bulk. I remember back in the day when it was fairly common to see courses being launched for $1,997.

Always those “7”s. Funny stuff. 🤪

The Blog Masters Club particularly is just a testament to the times in which I made that course. It is 16 freakin’ modules. Numerous hours of nerdy-ass Dave talking. Basically trying to stuff everything I could into that course. And frankly, if I’m being honest, most of what I was talking about doesn’t even matter.

Of course, I have more age and experience now to be able to say that, but I admit that that course was a lot of fluff. Sometimes interesting fluff, but…. fluff. And it was far too bulky and long.

Over time, I got a little better at it. But, still, there was too much theory. Almost as if I was trying to impress people with my massive intellect. 🤪

Funny how much perspective you get with age.

So, I had all these courses. With lotsa lotsa videos. PDF worksheets, transcripts and the like. Broken up into these big lists of modules and lessons. It is the kind of thing you almost feel like you NEED something like Learndash just to keep it organized.

I mean, I managed to impress myself all over again with just how complex I made things for myself. I did a good job at that! 🤓

But, it was all just too much.

I would never do it that way ever again.

Frankly, if members-only training content that you create has so many pieces to it that something like Learndash is necessary, you might have just gone too far.

People don’t want more. They want less.

They don’t need you to try to impress them with your narcissistic need to show them how smart you are and how much you know and stuff the whole kitchen sink into a collection of videos nobody would have the patience to watch anyway.

They just want the outcome. They want it quick. They want all the fluff removed. They want the TLDR.

Frankly, people are inherently lazy and impatient. It is also why AI tools are getting so popular. People just want their AI overlords to give them the summary version of whatever they want lickety split. Or, just do it for them.

If I were to create an online course today, I’d probably do it like so:

• It would tackle a specific topic and specific outcome, not try to be some PhD thesis. (You know PhD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, right? 😜 )
• I would do everything I could to make it as short as possible, but very outcome driven. My rule would be that it should be consumable in under an hour. The whole thing.
• It should be able to fit in one video. You can use jumplinks and chapters if needed to jump around, but one video. Makes it a heck of a lot easier to manage, too.
• I’d provide as included materials anything I could to make it as simple and doable as I could.

Simple and to the point. Don’t flood people with information, but guide them with simplicity.

We’re all stuffed with information. Much of it useless and just noise. Don’t add to it. Your customers don’t want to buy information. They just want an outcome.

Plus, when we over-complicate things for them, we do it for ourselves, too. We end up buying fancy plugins to manage all this stuff, with tons of moving parts. All for something that might not even be necessary.

Keep it simple for them. And it is simpler for you, too.

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This Week In Concierge

Last week, we made some forward movement on a few client projects, but things were a wee bit slower because I was knee deep in finishing up the video library reorganization for the Blog Marketing Academy site.

That is always one of the fun struggles of this business. I can only work on one site at a time… and sometimes it has to be my own site. 🤪 So, that is a fun juggling act.

Of course, much of that could be alleviated by William (my Concierge sidekick), but I’m still in the process of getting him grooved in with membership site stuff. Working with some of the deeper “plumbing” of the sites is something I’m still doing, but that will need to change.

Here’s what else we are doing for Concierge clients….

• About to fully migrate a client’s newsletter list for him from Mailchimp into FluentCRM. Already got his site set up to send email through Amazon SES. Mailchimp is costing him $140/mo, so this will be a nice savings for him.
• Building a system to allow employers to purchase “seats” for employees to do courses on their site.
• Pretty much re-building another client’s membership site from the ground up.
• Building another “mini membership”. Just a client login with a one-screen portal where the customer can see their submissions and results.

Most of my Concierge client sites are membership sites. Not all of them, but most. But, whether your’s is a full blown membership or something smaller, the whole point of

WordPress Quick Bits

FluentCRM Gets A Another Update. Last week, FluentCRM was updated to 2.9.23. And it is funny how they do these small incremental version number increases, yet the features included are a kinda significant. This week, they did another small update, but one of the things this one does is allow you to use a custom date field as the basis for a delay within an automation. The result is…. we now FINALLY have a way to trigger off emails on specific dates, different per customer. For instance, now this is an easier way we could use an automation to send off membership renewal reminders. Perhaps I’ll make a video about it. 😇 More on this update here.

Domain Price Increases. Got a notification from Namecheap about some new price increases going into effect on September 2nd. The increases are relatively small, but this is something you’re seeing across the board as the core domain registries increase prices.

FluentBooking Update. FluentBooking has been updated to 1.5.20. Some of the enhancements in this update include multiple bookings at once, duration for Zoom meetings, payment info added to calendar event lists, and some other things. Read the full changelog here.

Gravity Connect. If you’re a user of Gravity Forms, then GravityWiz is launching a new product suite called Gravity Connect. The idea is to simplify connections to third-party services, starting with Notion, Google Sheets and OpenAI. Read more about it here.

WP Bakery 7.9 Released. New color picker and stuff. Read more here. Honestly, I wouldn’t usually even bother to tell you about this, tho, because I am no fan of WP Bakery. In fact, we recently untangled it out of a client’s site because it was causing all kinds of errors when we tried to update PHP to version 8. This plugin uses shortcodes behind the scenes, looks and works a lot like Divi (which I also don’t particularly like) and…. well, I told you about this update only to tell you how much I dislike it. 😜

Dear WordPress. Kevin Geary is a big name in the WordPress space. And he put out a video called “Dear WordPress“. Some plain-talk about the current state of WordPress… and a tease for his upcoming EtchWP tool. This will be an interesting one to watch.

Unhappy With Your Site’s Performance?

Fixing the performance of your website is often confusing. Lots of jargon. Lots of advice… most of it confusing. And truth is, it is a pretty holistic thing to tackle. You need to have a “big picture” understanding of what’s going on. You can’t just install a plugin and be done with it.

When you book WP Speed Fix, we’ll fix up your site’s performance scores. And we’ll do it together. I have the experience and all of the tools. And we’ll get it done.

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Let’s Talk About Your Videos

Hosting online videos – especially for membership sites – is something that has come up many times with my clients and others. So, considering I just spent all this time reorganizing my own videos, I thought I would share a few tips and strategies with you here.

First, always back up every video you make locally. Don’t ever put yourself into a position of being reliant on a “cloud” service to keep those things safe. In the process of reorganizing things here, I found I had stuff hosted on Vimeo and nowhere else. So, I spent some time ensuring I had all the important stuff backed up and organized right here in my office.

Also, I recommend giving your video descriptive filenames. Something where you can look at the video file and know what it is about. Over the years, I was sloppy with this and it definitely makes organizing things pretty gnarly when I need to open it up to see what the hell I was saying. 🤪

Try to keep videos self-contained. If you apply what I talked about above for single-video training, this gets easy. When you have a course that comprises of a bunch of little videos, it gets annoying to organize. The re-encoding of videos I was doing was all about merging them together so I had less actual videos to work with.

I’m a big fan of Presto Player and it is what I use. It gives me a lot of control over the video experience on my site, whether it comes in from Youtube or via my private hosting. I also like Presto’s ability to have video chapters and video jumplinks that are stored in the “Media Hub” along with each video. That makes each video self-contained, complete with it’s own navigation.

For public videos, use Youtube. It is where all the eyeballs are.

For private videos, I use Bunny.net Stream. While Bunny has it’s own video player you can use, I use Presto’s built-in integration with Bunny. So, I can drop a video into my Bunny account and it automatically processes and then shows up inside of WordPress so I can embed it into my player. Easy peasy.

Yes, I know some use Amazon S3, but that’s too complex. Bunny is like Amazon, but easier to use and more automated. Amazon has gotten too corporate and nerdy.

Vimeo Pro is a good option at $240/year, but I just cancelled it. Bunny (especially with Presto Player) is what I prefer. It also happens to be much cheaper.

Wistia? Forget it. Way too expensive with more limits. Honestly don’t know why people even bother.

If you roll with Presto Player and Bunny.net, I don’t think you’ll be compelled to switch. You’re in control of the videos (especially when backed up locally) and you won’t be slave to a high recurring fee. Bunny is “pay as you go” and insanely cheap. I usually put $20-$30 on my account at a time and it lasts multiple months.