Online Courses Almost Killed My Business

I used to be 100% in the business of online courses. And even now, I have a lot of clients who create and sell online training of some kind. So…

No, it isn’t dead. But, I tell you one thing…. my own business almost died because of it. And if I hadn’t made a massive shift in my business, I might not be here talking to you right now. Because… things changed. A LOT.

I’ll tell you about it below. And also what I see as the 2-3 business models people are pivoting to most as they shift from a full concentration on selling online training.

Let’s do it…

FEATURE ARTICLE

Is The Online Course Business Dead?

I’ve talked before about my big business pivot into client services – from a business model that relied primarily on online courses and online training.

The pivot began in 2021 – and grew from there. By 2023, I was leaning hard into client services. And today, my business sells barely any online training. Concierge is now the core offer of the business. This is a far cry from the old days of a big course library and “The Lab” membership site I had.

Now, this wasn’t some move I made on a whim. Because here’s the blunt truth…

My business likely would not exist today if I hadn’t done that. And that’s because the online training model was in the process of DYING. And dying hard. My sales were dropping. I literally remember having a few weeks back then where the business only brought in a few hundred dollars during the week. It was pathetic. Couldn’t live that way.

There I was…. with a site and an email list… and I could barely sell any of my products. It was getting harder and harder to do. And on top of that, I was just getting tired of the friction.

I wasn’t alone, either. I know others in the info product business have seen the same. In fact, while driving my RV back from the Keys last week, I was listening to a podcast interview of Ryan Deiss. He ran DigitalMarketer.com…. which was one of the biggest brands in the space. And he talked about how their sales dropped about 80%. Around the same timeframe.

Now clearly, every market is different. Selling in the online marketing niche is quite different than selling in more narrow, more “real world” niches.

But, here’s the truth…

The info product and online course publishing business is not dead, but it will never return to its heyday. After COVID, it spiked. But, it quickly died off. And it is never coming back. And here’s why…

• Abundance of freely available content. Let’s be honest, there isn’t much you can’t learn to do by watching Youtube. Plus, there’s just so much noise vying for people’s attention that people don’t have the desire or the willingness to sit there and consume a bunch of videos they’re being asked to PAY for.
• AI. More and more, when somebody wants to know something, they ask AI. Not only that, AI comes with this inherent promise of…. doing it FOR you. I mean, people used to buy big training courses on writing email copy to sell things…. and now they just have AI write the damn email. 🥴

Now, there’s the thing…

Even if those of us who KNOW better know that AI cannot and will never do the best job at some of these things… it doesn’t matter. The average consumer will always take the shortest path to outcome – even if that outcome is average. AI tools are cheap to free… and they do a good enough job at many things. That’s WAY more attractive than some big pile of videos being sold to them from a sales letter they’re too distracted to even read.

So, what do you do? As a business owner, do you just pack up and go home and realize that the AI overlords won? 🤪 That there’s no hope of making any money anymore?

No. But, you do need to think about what IS working.

First of all, training in fields that are “real world” and physical still work fine. AI cannot do anything in the real world (yet). So, learning real world skills, learning to build things, learning skills with your hands… online training still works fine. You’re still competing with all the free info on Youtube, though.

The way I see it, here’s what is working best right now…

#1 – Pivoting Into Services

Yep, same as what I did. Just take the things you were selling online courses on… and offer to do it FOR them. Plus, in a lot of niches, there are a lot of potential offshoot, related services you can offer.

Keep in mind, even coaching is a service. But, usually, we’re talking done-for-you kinds of things. Your job is to move your customer closer to their end goal – at speed. Remove the pain. Make their lives more convenient. That is never going anywhere.

My business is basically now a media publishing business…. with a service delivery side. It is a cool combo, actually. I enjoy it. 😎

#2 – Sell The AI

You can turn AI into a deliverable… by training AI tools in YOUR content, YOUR methods, YOUR techniques. And then, set up that AI tool so that your customers can use it.

You’re not selling them anymore the HOPE that they can do the thing after they watch all of your content. You’re just now directly selling them the AI tool, all trained up in all of your stuff, and it will just help your customer DO the thing directly.

Works perfectly… because people want speed. And AI holds that promise. You’d just be leaning into that and selling the AI tool versus selling them all the background info.

#3 – Building The Community

Relationships with other human beings of similar interest and goals are something that is never going anywhere. And you can be the facilitator.

Now, this doesn’t mean just go out and install FluentCommunity and sell access. 🤪 Because, there’s a ton of community sites out there, too, and that’s a whole other level of noise out there that can be tough to sell. But, two things come to mind about this one:

• Combine things. For instance, have some cool AI tools (see #2), but the community surrounds it. So, people will have access to the tools (not courses, but tools) and have the community there, too.
• Think more personally. As in, in-person experiences. Real live events. Actually get people together in the real world.

That business model will always exist.

And so…

Are online courses dead? Has that ship sailed? No…. but it sure is different now. And there are headwinds now that there didn’t used to be.

The core human desires never change. People will always seek solutions to their problems. They will always seek the transformation. But now… information is a commodity. It is plentiful. And people are less willing to pay for it because…. frankly, there’s rarely a need anymore. It isn’t “the economy” why people aren’t buying online courses as much. It is because the economic value of that information isn’t what it used to be. It is… information inflation.

So, you just move your business closer to the end goal. By offering direct services, selling them the tool(s), and/or building the connections people will always seek.

WordPress News & Updates

Review Signal’s hosting benchmarks are back after a three-year break. Kevin Ohashi finally fired the WordPress hosting benchmarks back up… and to pull it off he built his own open-source load-testing platform from scratch. Automattic’s Pressable swept nearly every tier (perfect uptime, fastest static response), and newcomer BigScoots posted the fastest raw hardware in enterprise. The closest thing we’ve got to an honest scoreboard for whether your host actually holds up. See the 2026 results

Gutenberg 23.3 is testing a drag-and-drop dashboard. The wp-admin home screen has looked the same forever, and now there’s an experiment that lets you add, move, and resize widgets like Lego blocks. Behind an experiments flag for now, but it’s the first real preview of a dashboard overhaul people have been asking about for years. What’s new in 23.3

There’s an official WordPress browser extension in the works. It detects when you’re on a WordPress site and drops the edit / wp-admin / new-content shortcuts into your browser toolbar instead of the front-end admin bar. No telemetry, no tracking… and they’re recruiting testers ahead of 1.0. It’s on GitHub

Elementor handed its AI assistant the keys to everything. Angie’s new “Super Admin Mode” lets it read and write your files, query the database, and run PHP directly. Handy for fixing things fast… and a genuinely huge attack surface to hand an AI. Back up first, and read what it’s about to do before you click yes. Elementor’s writeup

Bluehost will now build you a whole site from a single prompt. Their new AI builder asks a few questions, spins up a fully hosted, domain-ready WordPress site, then sticks around to make edits by conversation. The bar for “I made a website” keeps dropping… whether that’s a good thing depends on what you’re actually trying to build. Bluehost’s announcement

WooCommerce shipped an AI Product Advisor (beta). It scans your catalog, flags the products with the most room to grow, and suggests one-click improvements… and it builds a “tone profile” first so the copy sounds like you and not generic AI mush. Worth a look if you run a store. On the Woo dev blog

Malware is hiding its instructions inside Steam profiles. GoDaddy found roughly 2,000 infected WordPress sites pulling their marching orders from invisible characters tucked into Steam Community comments. Clever, sneaky, and a good reminder that “my site looks fine” isn’t the same as “my site is clean.” GoDaddy’s breakdown

Wordfence’s Q1 report: vulnerabilities are way up. 2,738 new WordPress vulnerabilities in the first three months of the year (up nearly 24%), with the “common and dangerous” category almost doubling. The boring advice still wins… keep things updated and ditch the plugins you don’t use. Read the report

The Kadence “lifetime” deal keeps getting messier. Now that Liquid Web owns Kadence, lifetime-bundle holders are learning that “access to all future products” apparently doesn’t cover the new Kadence-branded stuff, and at least one buyer is loud about feeling baited. The reminder I keep coming back to: a “lifetime” deal only lasts as long as the company that sold it. The backlash, at Search Engine Journal

Somebody built a Hall of Shame for plugin nag screens. Dismissed.fyi is a public database of every annoying admin notice plugins throw at you… 3,000+ notices across 2,000+ plugins, ranked by who’s the worst. WP Rocket, Yoast’s Duplicate Post, and WPForms are all sitting near the top. Weirdly satisfying to scroll. Take a look

FlyingPress 5.5 is out. The caching plugin rebuilt its preloading engine to hit your server less, added support for scoped Cloudflare API tokens (instead of handing it your whole account), and now lets you filter Core Web Vitals data by country or page. Solid maintenance release if you’re running it. The changelog

A new (and free) alternative to WooCommerce Subscriptions just launched. Milo handles recurring billing for Woo stores… trials, sign-up fees, plan switching, mixed carts, even a migration tool to pull you off WooCommerce Subscriptions. The core is free, with a $149/year bundle for the premium stuff, versus the $299+/year Woo charges. It’s brand new so nobody knows yet how it holds up in the wild… but the pricing alone makes it worth keeping an eye on, and I may put it through its paces myself. Take a look

TECH FOCUS

Using AI To Build Custom Tools For Your Website

Have you ever found yourself using (or even paying for) a WordPress plugin that you really only used for one little thing? Or perhaps only used a small portion of it?

Or, you use a super bloated plugin for some fairly simple function. A plugin that throws notifications all over your admin panel and slows your website down?

Well, with AI, even non-programmers can now do something about it.

For one of my Concierge clients, I’ve been helping him make some customizations and improvements to his membership site. Things which are really specific to his site and his audience. Just last week, I launched a custom bookmark plugin on his site… so his members can bookmark videos around his site, make notes on their bookmarks, and organize them.

He was paying for a bookmark plugin. Frankly, the plugin sucked. Didn’t work the way he wanted. But, he used it because there wasn’t anything better.

So, I built it for him. Works beautifully. Used Claude Code to build it. Blows the snot off the paid solution he was using before. 😎

Even on my own site, I’ve now coded some in-house solutions:

• EmbedPress is super large and I only needed it for PDF embedding. So, I built my own PDF embedder. Lean and mean…. and works exactly like I want it to.
• Link shortening plugins like Pretty Links are unnecessary for most people. All we need is link redirects without all the bloat. So, I built my own. Works exactly like I want it to.
• On a much bigger scale, the entire backend setup that I use to track Concierge records… is all custom-coded.
• My entire admin dashboard is fully customized to be my executive dashboard, enabling me to track my business metrics in one spot. No “Quick Draft” BS or third-party plugins advertising crap on my dashboard.
• The site notifications system I have on my site is custom to BMA.

I use AI (Claude Code in my case) to build these tools.

There is still very much a use case for premium WordPress plugins. But, sometimes, you just need some functionality on your site in a specific way and you just can’t find it in any pre-built solution. Or sometimes… a premium WordPress plugin just doesn’t give you enough value to justify the license cost because you just don’t need everything it does.

Because of AI, site owners have never been more capable of just building the plugins they need – specific to themselves.

Now, don’t get me wrong…. it is still a skill. I bring plenty of skill and knowledge to the table to get Claude Code to do what I have it do. I couldn’t just tell Claude “build me a cool plugin” and watch it pump out a masterpiece while I scratch my butt. 🤪 Doesn’t work that way. But…

It is a skill worth spending time to get better at.

It doesn’t stop at WordPress plugins, either. You can build self-contained tools and even full applications. You can build interactive tools for your customers and members that really raise the value of what you do for them.

More and more… you don’t need to decide what to do with your site based on what plugins you can find. These days, you can start with exactly what YOU need/want on your site. And then build specifically that thing.

If you’re a Concierge client and you have some custom tool potentially in mind for your site, reach out and let me know your idea. I might be able to help you build it. Or perhaps provide a little guidance on how you can best use AI in your own business.

In fact, I think helping my clients get AI set up safely and be able to use it might be something I spend a little time on. 🤓