🗣️ Transcript
Hello there and welcome back! In this lesson I’m going to reveal, amongst other things, the The #1 Reason People Buy Courses.
Because if we don’t understand that, we’re in trouble, right?
Here’s what you’ll lean:
- The simple reason behind most course purchases
- The important role played by the obstacle
- Why not every course solves a problem
So let’s ask the question now: why do people buy courses?
Well, I believe the answer is actually quite simple. And it’s the same reason people might buy a how-to book, or hire a coach or sign up for some training.
It’s because they want something, but they need extra help to get it.
So let’s say that I want to learn to juggle. I go to my local toy shop, buy a set of juggling balls and follow the method described in the little instruction booklet. Now, if that’s enough to get me juggling confidently within a short space of time, I won’t need any extra help. I’m self-sufficient.
But, if I follow the instructions and practice for an hour or two without making any real progress, and end up chucking the balls across the room in frustration, then I might decide I need some extra help. And that might lead me to buying an online course about juggling.
So I want something, and I recognise that I need extra help to get it.
Now, naturally, that “extra help” won’t always take the form of a course. It might be some free YouTube videos. It might be a “Teach Yourself to Juggle in 7 Days” book. It could even be hiring a juggling coach, if such a thing exists!
The point is, there are almost always several ways for people to get what they want, and learning from a course is just one way. When you create a course, you’re not just competing against other courses, you’re competing against other methods.
In reality, you’re also competing against inertia, indecision and procrastination.
Now this thing that people want but need extra help to get could be some kind of positive goal, like learning to juggle. Or building a successful freelance business. Or getting into better shape.
Or it could be that what they want is for some negative situation to disappear, like an unhealthy sugar addiction, a fear of public speaking, or a toxic relationship.
In fact, you can think of it like this: people buy courses because they either _want something they don’t hav_e, or have something they don’t want.
Just let that sink in for a moment: they want something they don’t have, or have something they don’t want.
Either way, they want the situation to change, but it’s a change they’re struggling to make on their own.
And usually that’s because some obstacle is blocking them.
It’s stopping them getting from where they are to where they want to be. And they need extra help to overcome it.
In my juggling example, my obstacle was that the standard juggling tips didn’t work for me. But it could have been not having enough time to do lots of practice.
With the freelance business example, the obstacle to success might be not knowing how to find high-quality clients.
And with the sugar addiction example, maybe the obstacle is a lack of willpower, or a hectic lifestyle that makes it difficult to avoid sugary temptations.
Generally speaking, the obstacles that stop people making progress on their own tend to follow certain themes:
- I don’t know how to do it (i.e., the steps required)
- The accepted methods don’t work for me (or are too hard)
- There’s too much advice out there and I don’t know who to listen to
- I don’t have the right skills to do it just yet
So that’s the #1 reason people buy online courses.
They want something, but need extra help to get it.
And that idea is the basis for how we’ll define your target market in the next lesson.
Before we get into that, I just wanted to integrate this whole idea with something else you may have heard.
Because it’s common to teach the concept that a successful online course must solve a problem for its target audience.
And that’s a perfectly good way of thinking about your market too: people with a problem.
But the reason I don’t focus on the problem upfront is that not everyone who buys a course perceives themselves as having a problem.
For instance, if I want to learn conversational Italian, just for fun, I probably don’t perceive myself as having a “poor grasp of conversational Italian” problem – I just want to parlare un po’ di Italiano, no?
So I personally prefer to think in terms of people wanting something but being held back or blocked.
But honestly, it’s two sides of the same coin. After all, if you want something but an obstacle is standing in your way, then that’s a problem, right?
Whichever way you want to look at it is fine, I just don’t want you to tie yourself in knots trying to recast someone’s deep desire as a pressing problem.
Okay, that’s it for this lesson. In the next one I’m going to give you the template for defining your market.
When you see how simple it is you’re probably going to:
- breathe a sigh of relief
- wonder why on earth I didn’t show it to you earlier
See you in the next lesson!