7 ways to make your Kajabi course more valuable to your students

Imagine two courses on creating a lifestyle based business.

The first course is called: How to Outsource your Business: A Step-by-step Guide. The course contains 3 straightforward powerpoint videos. The first video is called 'Finding a Product', the second video is called 'Hiring a Virtual Assistant', and the third video is called 'Lowering Your Expenses'. This course sells for $47, and once you buy it, you don’t hear from the course creator ever again.

The second course is called: How to Live the 4 Hr Work Week; Move to Paradise, Change the World and Make Money Online! This course has the same 3 videos as the first course with different “sexier” titles but also includes transcripts and audio recordings of the videos as well. Unlike in the first course, each video is structured and has an exercise for the student to do before going to the next video. Additionally, this course comes with an unadvertised bonus; a report on how to find cheap products in China and import them. But that’s not all—when you sign up, you got a welcome video from the course creator telling you that he has also added a Q&A call where you can ask him any questions you have about the course and a Facebook group where you can talk to other students and get advice. Two weeks after buying the course, you get an email from the course creator’s assistant asking how you’re enjoying the course and if you need any help completing the most recent module you didn’t finish. This course sells for $97.

Which course would you rather have?  

Even though the latter course is twice as expensive, you almost certainly picked the second course because it had a significantly higher value.

Even at twice the price!

There are lots of courses out there. Google almost any subject and you’ll find a course or online training on it within the first few results.

It’s no longer enough to have the best information or the best video production or coolest graphics.

You need to make your courses so valuable that students feel like they got 10x what they paid.

The more valuable you make your course, the more likely students are to try out what you teach and get the success they desire. You want to make sure that your students feel like the information and support you are presenting them with makes them sure to succeed.

After all, why should your students feel like your material is valuable if you don’t?

The more confident students feel about you and the material in your courses the more likely they will be to have the “grit” necessary to get success and become your success stories and testimonials.

Another reason to make your courses more valuable is that it justifies a higher price. Online courses are often treated as commodities by their creators because there is a minimal cost after you create the course. This leads to a race to the bottom on prices where people are selling full courses for $7 or using “pay what you want” offers. By adding value to your course materials, you avoid commoditizing your course and can justify your higher prices.

Think about the difference between Saks Fifth Avenue and Ross Dress for Less.

Everything about the Saks stores reinforces their higher prices, while everything Ross does tells their customers to look for a deal. Your course should be the Saks Fifth Avenue of your niche, expensive—but worth every penny.

Now let’s look at how to do that:

7 Ways to Make Your Kajabi Course More Valuable To Your Student

1. Make Your Courses Multimedia

Having a video course is great but did you know that only about 65% of people learn best through seeing? The other 35% of people learn either through listening or trying things out. So you want to make sure that your course has something for every different learning style. This is really cheap and easy so don’t worry you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars. The first thing you’re going to do is “rip” the audio from your videos so that you can create an MP3 version of your course that your students can listen to instead of having to watch the videos. You can do this yourself using various programs, or you can hire someone from Upwork to do it for you for around $10. The second thing you want to do is get transcripts of your videos created and turned into PDFs. Once again you can do this yourself, or you can hire services like Rev for around $1 per minute of video time. Now you’ve got your auditory and visual learners covered. It’s time to think about those doers who need to try things. You’ll also want to create checklists for each video with exercises, recommendations for further studying and short summaries of what they learned. Multimedia will make a big difference to the perceived value of your course. As you saw in the lifestyle business example, there is a big difference in perceived value between a course with 3 videos, and a course 3 videos, 3 MP3s, 3 transcripts, and 3 checklists! This is absolutely the first thing you should do to make your course more valuable.

2. Give Exercises, Missions, and Assignments Every Video

One of the easiest ways to add value to your course is to make sure that you have at least one of the following for each video; an exercise, an assignment, or a mission.

• Exercises allow students to practice things you are teaching in either the real world or through drills to build and nurture the skills necessary to succeed with your course. An example of an exercise for a confidence-building course might be to say specific confidence-boosting affirmations in the mirror three times a day.
• Missions are real-world quests that students are to complete before the next module of your course. An example of a mission for the confidence building course might be to go to a local mall and say hi to 10 people of the opposite sex in 1 hour.
• Assignments are longer-term goals that students can work on throughout the course. Using our confidence-building course as an example once more an assignment could be to keep a daily journal and mark down every time you felt extremely confident then go over it at the end of the week for the entire course.

Make sure that you create an accompanying piece of media like a checklist or a video to go with each assignment so that students don’t miss it in your videos. You’ll also want to remind your students to do the exercise at the end of your videos and ask them if they completed them at the beginning of the next module.

3. Create a Structure for Your Lessons

Have you ever joined a course only to find the instructor rambling on or not telling you when he was going to get around to teaching what? Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience, and it leaves students confused and unsure of what they are learning. Instead of just “winging it” you should create a structure for each video in your course. Your videos should have a beginning or introduction where you welcome the students back to the course, briefly re-cap what they learned in the last module, remind them to do their assignments and briefly overview what they are going to learn in this video. In the middle of your videos, you’re going to tackle the 5 Ws.  Questions like, “Who is this content for?”, “ Why is this important”, and, “When do you use this?”.  This is also where you are going to get into tactics, techniques, or formulas that you teach. At the end of your video, you will want to re-cap everything you taught in the middle, remind them of any exercises, assignments, or missions they need to complete before moving on to the next video and give them a little sneak preview of what you are going to be teaching in the next video. That is a very basic structure, and you can add in a lot more elements but is a good beginning template for any course you create.

4. Add These Two Unadvertised Bonuses

Tania Luna, the co-author of "Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected.” has spoken extensively about the power surprises have to “hijack” our attention and “shift” our emotions. Think about the emotions one of your students has as they buy your course. They are excited, but also a bit nervous. They are wondering if the course is going to be worth it. Wondering if they are going to get what they paid for this time? What you don’t want them to do is log in to your course and think to themselves, “Is that all there is?”. Not only does that lead to refunds but it keeps the students from learning. Instead of giving your students that “Is that all there is?” feeling, you’re going to surprise them with 2 great unadvertised bonuses! The first unadvertised bonus you should create is a welcome package. Your students should get a link to this welcome package as soon as they buy the course.

In the welcome package, they should get a welcome video. This is a short video you can shoot on your phone where you sincerely thank them for purchasing, explain to them exactly what they are going to learn and how their life is going to change!  In addition to the welcome video, you should give them a simple self-assessment form so they can evaluate where they are now. You should also give them a simple goals form where they can write down their short, medium and long-term goals for your course. If you want to add more to your welcome package, you can, but this is more than enough.

The second unadvertised bonus should be a piece of complementary content. This could be a report, quiz, video, MP3, Interview, or pdf with your best blog posts in it. The second unadvertised bonus should answer one of the most frequently asked questions you get about your course. In order to go back to the confidence-building course example, you could create a special report on what to do to restore your confidence when things don’t go your way or an audio interview with a psychologist who specializes in healing the trauma that causes low confidence.

5. Add Personal Coaching

When you create a Kajabi course, you automatically become the guru to your students. This means that access to you and your time has a very high perceived value with your students. An easy way to grant them access to you for free is to add 1 group Q&A call a month for anyone who buys your course. You can either advertise this as a part of your course and use it to justify a higher price, or you can make the monthly Q&A call the greatest unadvertised bonus of all time. And the best part is that it won’t cost you a thing as long as you have less than 1,000 attendees. All you have to do is use a service called FreeConferenceCall.com. It is that easy! The only thing it will cost you is 30 to 60 mins of your time a month to add a personal touch to your online course.

6. Find and Fix the Bottlenecks

One of many impressive Kajabi features is the video stats and heatmaps in your Kajabi dashboard. Having this information allows you to see things like what percentage of students complete video 1,  how many students completed the course, etc. What you want to do with these statistics is use them to find the bottlenecks in your course where students are getting stuck. For example, one course creator might see that only 45% of their students are viewing the final video of their course while 76% of them are viewing the video prior to the final video.  This would indicate a bottleneck somewhere between these videos. Maybe you have an exercise that students are having difficulty completing. Perhaps your students feel like they have learned everything and don’t need the last video. Whatever the reason, once you find a bottleneck, you’ll want to fix it and to do that you need to get student feedback.

7. Get and Implement Student Feedback

Once you have located a bottleneck in your course, you’re going to want to get some feedback from students on how to fix it. The easiest way to do that is to “ethically bribe” them with either a free coaching session, a discount on another product or even a gift card to Starbucks. You’re going to want to get positive feedback to turn into testimonials and use in your marketing, but you’ll also want to know what you can do better and where the students felt the course should be improved. You’ll need to specifically ask students about the bottlenecks you have discovered where students are either failing to finish watching or moving on to the next video. Try asking them questions like, “What would you have needed to know to move on?”, or, “Why do you think you never watched the last video?”. Make sure that you get a large enough sample size. Usually speaking to 10 or so students on the phone is enough to get a clear picture of what needs to be fixed. Once you know what the problems are, add solutions to your course through additional resources like videos, reports, and checklists specifically addressing the bottlenecks with the answers you come up with from the student feedback.    

Making your Kajabi course more valuable for your students is a win-win.

Your students win by getting more value, support, and community to help them succeed.

You win by being able to charge higher prices, getting fewer refunds and making a larger impact.

As you begin the process of implementing the tactics and techniques in this post, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Get started by deciding on 2-3 of the ideas in this post like adding a written or audio portion to your course or adding an unadvertised bonus. Once you get those working, add 2-3 more tactics and techniques until you have all 9.

Making your course more valuable will have an exponential effect on your students, and your business, so get out there and make it happen!

Start your free 14-day trial of Kajabi today! Still researching? Check out Kajabi’s free downloadable ebook guides on launching and growing a knowledge commerce online business!

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