August 2021 Update: Capterra For Online Business Courses

Here's an update on our progress building the "Capterra for online business courses."

Previous updates:

By The Numbers

🎯 Target: 250 published student reviews through July, 2021

Progress through July 2021:

📝 109 submitted reviews
✅ 58 published reviews (53%)
❌ 51 rejected reviews (47%)
💰 $650 donated to CAMFED
👩🏾‍🏫 = an entire year of schooling for 4 girls

(We reject reviews that lack useful insight or that we consider untrustworthy, and donate $10 to CAMFED for each published review.)

In July we were mainly trying to collect reviews of popular Amazon FBA courses.

Our most "complete" review so far: Freedom Ticket Review

We failed to hit our target 😭

We were aiming to have 250 published student reviews by now, but we only have 58. So we fell well short of the mark.

From the start, I knew it was a tough target to aim for, but figured we might as well aim high.

Here's why we failed to hit the target:

As mentioned in previous updates, getting students to leave honest and insightful reviews of courses is really hard, even when we offer to pay them or make a charitable donation on their behalf.
It doesn't help that our standards are pretty high, so we end up rejecting about half of the reviews that are submitted to us.
We're a two-person team and we took some much-needed time off work in July. So we weren't able to deliver a big push at the end to get more reviews. (Though even with a big push we still would have fell well short of the target.)

Moving forward ➡️

Even though we missed that initial target by a wide margin, we'll continue to move forward. I won't set a new target; we'll just take it a day at a time and see how it goes.

This week we're wrapping up our editorial reviews of Amazon FBA courses. We've started to see those reviews rank better in Google and generate some affiliate commissions, so that's encouraging 🥳

Next we'll be turning our attention to affiliate marketing courses. We've previously reviewed quite a few of those in our old long-form style. Now it's time to update the old reviews (some from 2019) to our new format, and review other affiliate marketing courses for the first time.

In all we have ~40 affiliate marketing courses to review/update. I want to make a strong start on those in August and start collecting student reviews for them. I'm hoping we'll have an easier time gathering student reviews for these courses compared to the FBA courses. Time will tell.

Any feedback?

Unfortunately no big wins to share with you this month. We're still very much in the trenches at the moment 🤕

But thank you for reading regardless.

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?