April 2022 Update: Capterra For Online Business Courses
Here's an update on our progress building the "Capterra for online business courses."
Previous updates:
- Intro post explaining what we're building and why
- 2021: Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec
- 2022: Jan
By The Numbers
Progress through March 2022:
📝 384 submitted reviews
✅ 253 published reviews (66%)
❌ 131 rejected reviews (34%)
💰 $2,505 donated to CAMFED
👩🏾🏫 = an entire year of schooling for 16 girls
(We reject reviews that lack useful insight or that we consider untrustworthy, and donate $5 to CAMFED for each published review.)
So far we've mostly been collecting reviews of popular affiliate marketing courses and Amazon FBA courses.
Our most "complete" review so far: The Affiliate Lab Review
$500 Giveaway Results
To incentivize people to leave reviews of online business courses, in January we entered published reviewers into a draw to win $500.
That helped bring in ~120 reviews for the month, which was way more than usual. Unfortunately, we were only able to publish about half of them, as many didn't pass our quality checks.
We randomly chose the $500 winner and announced on Twitter a few weeks back.
We will definitely be running this incentive again in the near future.
Reaching Out To Course Creators
Combined with the $500 giveaway in January, we reached out to course creators and asked them to send students to review their course on eBiz Facts.
Many of them ignored us, but several actually did help us out.
Best Courses Awards
We just announced our first batch of awards for the best Affiliate Marketing and Amazon FBA courses.
We plan to update these – along with the course ratings and rankings – every quarter going forward.
Hiring Help
Our progress on this whole project has been inconsistent for the past few months, and that's because my partner and I have been trying to do it all ourselves while also juggling lots of other responsibilities.
I'm now in the process of hiring an Executive Assistant to take over the day-to-day of recruiting, processing and publishing student reviews.
That should help ensure that our progress is more steady going forward.
Switching To $5 Donations
Until the end of January, we were donating $10 to CAMFED for each published review, but we've reduced it to $5 now.
We hoped the donation-on-your-behalf would be a strong incentive for people to leave reviews, but we've seen little indication that it has worked well. In contrast, the $500 Giveaway incentive clearly worked well, so we're going to try combining that with a $5 donation incentive going forward.
We could abandon the donations altogether but keeping it feels like the right thing to do.
Any feedback?
Thanks for taking the time to read this update.
I'd love to know:
- What do you think of our approach so far?
- What would you do to generate more reviews?
- Anything you think we're missing?
