Breaking Vlad

An online academy sells something the buyer cannot inspect before paying. You cannot flick through a course the way you flick through a book, and everyone browsing has already been burned once — by a course that turned out to be slides read aloud, or by a subscription that renewed for a year they did not use.

So the entire job of the site is removing that risk, and the things that remove it are specific:

• A real lesson, free, with no sign-up. Not a trailer. One actual lesson, taught the way the rest are taught. It is the single highest-converting page such a site can have, and the one most often replaced by a promotional video.
• The full syllabus, visible before purchase. Every topic, in order, with the length of each. Hiding it to protect the content protects nothing — competitors already know the syllabus; only buyers are kept in the dark.
• Who teaches, and what they have actually done. In a technical subject this is checked closely.
• What happens when you fall behind. Most people who buy a course do not finish it and they know it. Whether access expires, whether the material can be rewatched, and whether a missed month can be caught up decides the purchase more often than price.

Then there is the part that is easy to build and hard to sustain: the community. A forum where students ask questions is the strongest retention mechanism an academy has, and it is also a liability if nobody answers. An empty forum with three posts from last year says more about the course than any sales page — and it says the wrong thing.

If it is going to exist, someone has to be paid to be in it. If nobody can be, it is better to run a smaller channel that is genuinely attended than an abandoned space that is publicly visible to every prospective student.

Related: why create a business blog, creating valuable content and ecommerce web design.