Once you’ve been in a business for a little bit, it’s a natural next step to take what you know and put it in a format where clients can work on it themselves.
We’ve done it, too. Our Learning Community is full of dozens of learning modules. Over the years, our business has seen a good deal of revenue from these products. There are so many advantages to having these.
An income stream that doesn’t require your physical presence.
Support for clients, so they can stay engaged and keep working between sessions.
Bonuses to be given in promoting a larger program.
However, when I see folks go to create their first home study programs, they often freeze up, unable to figure out how to do it.
For business owners that have been used to working deeply one-on-one or in other very interactive formats with their clients, the biggest puzzle to answer is: How do I get the same results for people who are using the home study version?
The answer? You don’t.
It’s a big surrender to let go of the depth and transformational nature of working closely, personally with a client. That’s not what home study programs are for.
Am I saying that you can’t have transformational content? Of course not. I’ve created lots of content that is intended to support people in transforming/working deeply in themselves.
I’m just not holding expectations that it will be as powerful as working with someone, in real time, using my intuition and skill and experience to read what’s happening and to guide it moment by moment as needed.
So what does go into a home study program, that will still be effective?
There’s two broad swaths, being grossly general, that fall into home study material.
One is the transformational material that you end up repeating a lot. You may notice, after working with a bunch of clients, that there is some fundamental process you walk most of them through. And it begins to feel at least a little bit formulaic.
I don’t mean it feels dead, uninteresting, or rote. I just mean that there’s a sequence to the process that appears to be repeated in most cases. That can be documented, and you can walk folks through that in audio, video, or in a written workbook, or all three.
The second one, similarly, is if you begin to notice that there’s certain information that you end up teaching your clients over and over again, client after client. If you ever catch yourself saying, “(Here we go again.) Okay, let me explain to you this model.”
That happened for more with the 3 Journeys of Marketing. I explained what the 3 Journeys were so often, that it was easier to finally make a video. This happens to be a free one, but there are lots of examples of products we sell that came from a similar vein.
A time and a place for everything.
This dynamic and struggle is why I generally don’t advise people to create home study programs too early in their businesses. If you haven’t had many clients, it can be hard to spot those patterns and repetitions, so hard to know what to create.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to create home study programs early, necessarily. I did. Some people do. But, don’t expect your first guess at what people want and need to be clear until you’ve had enough experience. You may find you’ve put in a lot of effort to create something that no one wants very much (even if they should! 😉 ).
It’s also helpful if you have enough of an audience that it makes sense to sell them home study programs. If you have 50 people on an email list, you may not sell anything. And that’s fine! You want to be focused on getting clients early on anyway.
But, as your audience naturally (or with focus) expands, it can be easier to sell home study programs, if that’s what you want to do, simply because it is, to some extent, but not entirely, a numbers thing.
The lesson: give yourself some compassion and don’t try to recreate the magic of your personal work with clients, Instead, capture some of your special sauce not from the interactions, but from what you are giving repeatedly. It can be incredibly helpful in your work, and you might be able to have an additional income stream!
What’s your experience, or what are your questions, about home study programs?
With love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
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2 Responses
Very valid points on the limitations of home study programs.
There are some things you just can’t teach people to do themselves as a home study course. After years of teaching classes in person, I realized that I can’t help people be great designers without mentoring or feedback, and I don’t want to teach them how to be mediocre. So I’ll never make a home study logo design course. I just won’t. No matter how many people ask.
I once took a self-guided advanced illustration class, and I felt… abandoned in a way. I knew that another group before me participated live, and it felt so demotivating to see others get feedback that transformed their work, and not being able to get feedback myself.
Those live classes you record once and then turn into a home study may sound lucrative and “easy money”, but people looking at those recorded interactions will *wish* they could be there alongside of you.
Home study stuff is great for the basics, but the more involved the learning, the more interaction with a teacher it requires in order to really get it.
Another thing is that so much of this (my work, and perhaps most people’s?) is about follow-through. Setting up the appointments and showing up keeps people moving forward. I made a home-study course for exactly the reasons you describe, Mark, and I’ve sold a few of them. But I think in all the sales there’s only one, maybe two people who actually watched them and got something out of them… 🙁 What they are useful for is sending a specific module to my current clients to save us time in sessions, but even then, I must say that people are not great about taking the time to watch them… It’s disappointing in a way, honestly.