What kinds of value do you offer? An outline for creating ****transformative content.
Getting somebody to trust in your course and content isn't easy, there's a lot of noise on the internet, so how can you breakthrough? The goal is to build reputation over time.
Reputation and social trust is gold dust in the business world, companies literally spend billions every year trying to improve their brand reputation. Reputation is a simple formula: capability x consistency.
In this case, your capability is determined by your ability to provide valuable, educational content and expriences to an audience over the internet. And your consistency is your ability to do it over a range of not just time, but people as well.
With this in mind it's important to really externalise, and make concrete your value proposition. Writing something down can really help add clarity to your thinking and your business.
Here are four key ways that we've identified you can potentially provide value; feel free to write your own comments next to each piece for your own business as an educational creator.
"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve." — Elon Musk
(make someone feel better)
Psychological value is more often than not around providing a new perspective to the learners. As the teacher, we cannot force new perspectives to our students, but we can present them in a way such that they are able to leave behind an existing belief structure (a form of ego death), and adopt a new, more empowering belief structure. The way we perceive the world around us directly determines our behaviours in it. If someone holds a limiting psychological frame, such as a fear of public speaking, then that person will self-sabotage their own success if it means they can reduce the likelihood they will have to give important presentations in the future. Allowing some the space to 'jump ship' to a new way of thinking is what this type of value is all about.
(make someone money)
This is the most obvious of all the value adds, so I won't talk on it directly. If you can help people make more money through buying your product or service then surely everyone on the planet would invest in it, right? The problem is that people don't believe you will deliver on your promise. The two common objections are 1. I bet it doesn't work, and 2. If it does work it won't work for me. These two core questions are really worth printing in your brain because if you can overcome those two objections, success is inevitable.
(make someone or something more competent)
The skill acquisition economy is one of the biggest industries in the world, every school, college, university and Bootcamp come under this category. So how do you stand out? The key is to play off your unique skill-set, expertise and perspective. As an individual edu-creator, you have the benefit of being a human-being first, your teachings are charged by your personal quirks, ad-libs, and stories; don't shy away from it, embrace them. We are all natural teachers, find your own voice for it to be heard.
(make someone feel a sense of belonging or make new connections)
The value add here is by being a teacher, you will naturally attract likeminded individuals that will all benefit from a co-learner environment and collaboration. Using tools like Circle, Discord, Slack and Facebook all can help you facilitate the organic growth of a self-sustaining community. Many courses, actually find that the group behind the course itself actually becomes more valuable over the long term than the course itself!