Why You Need A Cohort Course

Create a Community with Your Cohort Course

This is part of our Advanced Selling Techniques video series. Make sure to check out the rest to get all the tools you need to crush it with SamCart Courses.

So, you’ve done the research alongside legendary online entrepreneur Pat Flynn for your course, and now you have your P.L.A.N. You haven’t launched your course yet, or maybe your course is up and running, and you’re making sales. Some of your students are actually completing your course, not bad. But you want more. You’ve heard about our Success Stories, and you think you can be one of them...you can. One of the secrets of our seven-figure course creators is the cohort course. A cohort course is a moderated online course where you and a bunch of your students go through the course as a team.

Cohort Course (ko-hort) a moderated online course where you and a bunch of your students go through the course as a team.

Cohort Courses > Self-Guided Courses

Most online courses are self-guided. It's pretty much everyone's default method. It’s pretty straightforward. You create your lessons. You publish your course. Your students buy. You wake up in the morning, and more money is in your account today than there was yesterday. You didn’t have to do any additional work outside of creating and hosting your course on SamCart. If you’re happy with this, thanks for stopping by. Have a great day. If you want to maximize your course business, or if you want something that’s a little more hands-on, so you can interact more with your students, keep reading.

Make a Greater Impact with a Cohort Course

We’re educators at heart, and as much as we love passive income, we still love actively teaching. We love that interaction with our students. With so many people working virtually now, more than ever, it’s nice to know that you can still connect with your students if you want to. For many people, a cohort course can have a deeper impact on your students. While selling a self-guided course is great, the unfortunate truth is that 85% of students fail to finish a self-guided course, so they never get the benefit.

We’re great at marketing and all that good stuff, but we’re teachers at our core. Education is in our DNA. We want your students to complete your courses; have a firm grasp of the lessons, and get the benefit.

Use Social Proof to your Advantage

When students complete your course, it makes it easier for you to get social proof, like student reviews, that can help you make even more sales with organic marketing that costs $0.

Some people are really into reading product reviews when they shop on Amazon. Some folks won’t watch a movie until they’ve seen the trailer, or read the review on Rotten Tomatoes or asked their friends for their opinion. If that Amazon product has five stars, or if Rotten Tomatoes gives that movie a 98% score, and your friends are saying it’s a great movie, it’s more likely you’ll buy that product, and watch that movie. Social proof lets other people vouch for how great your course is, and upgrading to a cohort course is a surefire way to get that social proof. Your students will feel more connected to you as the course creator and to other students in their cohort, because your students go through the course together as a team. Not only are they not alone, but now they have a map, a lantern and a compass to guide them on their journey alongside you. Now you’re building community.

More of your students are going to see the results at the end of the process. You’ll have a bigger impact. Your students will be happier, and you’ll be able to create something greater.

How to Create a Cohort Course

One common way to start a cohort is at the beginning of every month. So, students who are signing up for your course during the month of November, can start their course in December. You make your own schedule. If you want to have a cohort course once per quarter or every six months, that’s totally up to you. One of our biggest sellers, Faster Way to Fat Loss, has scaled their business dramatically by doing exactly this. They currently have six-week cohorts where students get personalized attention as they go through the course. Adding tiers to your courses gives students more options, and SamCart makes it simple. Your regular, self-paced course could be $50, but your premium, higher-tiered, personally-guided cohort course could be $150. That personal touch and added guidance is a great way to grow, and earn more.

Cohorts Courses Aren’t Perfect

Cohort courses are not without their drawbacks. Depending on the commitment needed, they can be time-consuming for both you and your students. As the course creator you'll have to deliver on providing whatever level of service you promised. Thankfully, there are a lot of easy ways to provide that level of service.

1. - Private Facebook groups
2. - Live weekly group calls on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
3. - Private Slack groups
4. - Private Discord servers

Another thing to consider is that you’re working on limited time. You have to work in waves, so you'll want to make sure that you’re done with one cohort before the next one begins. Most importantly, stay on top of your planning and time management, so you don’t get overwhelmed. You might have a student who misses a class, because something came up. Maybe they got a flat tire on the way home, or they had to take care of a sick child. Life happens, so you’ll want to keep that in mind. A cohort course can be ridiculously profitable for you and insanely valuable for your students. Cohorts can multiply your bottom line, and generate that coveted growth via word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth growth earns you more money but also saves you even more money, because it’s free and organic.

Some businesses start off with organic growth. Some use tools like Facebook ads to scale their business. Our special partnership with Arrow takes the guesswork out of Facebook ads. You can also have a professional on Fiverr by your side to help with all nearly all aspects of your business if you want. You can also have your own affordable, scalable graphic design team with our partners at DotYeti. Make sure to check out the rest of our Advanced Selling Techniques video series, and see how you can take your current course, and take it to the next level by upgrading it to a cohort course. We’ve also got a simple but thorough Content Builder YouTube Playlist that will show you how to add all the necessary components to your course along with tips for video gear from our in-house videographer if video is going to be part of your course. Most of these videos are under two minutes long. If you want to see what’s possible when you have the right tools in place with your own digital courses, then check out this video with Abu Fofana, a brilliant marketer with a seven-figure course business.

Now’s a Great time for Growth

SamCart is the selling tool used by over 23,000 businesses that have sold over $2 billion of their own products, goods and services. If you want to learn more, head over to SamCart.com, and grab a free demo today.

Real team members are at your service seven days a week. Let us know how we can help you. Our Knowledge Base is a great place to get lots of questions questions answered. Our Facebook Group is also a useful resource for connecting and learning more about SamCart. We’ve created powerful features to multiply your sales. Our beautiful, pre-designed templates help launch your products faster than ever. SamCart makes running your online business simple.