June 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 May 2021:
📝 83 submitted reviews
✅ 38 published reviews (46%)
❌ 45 rejected reviews (54%)
(We reject reviews that lack useful insight or that we consider untrustworthy.)
In May we were mainly trying to collect reviews of popular Amazon FBA courses.
Our most "complete" review so far: The Last Amazon Course Review
What have we tried?
At this early stage we're trying to figure out the best way to a) find students who have taken the selected courses, and b) incentivize them to leave honest and insightful reviews.
So far, the second is proving much harder than the first.
A few approaches we've been testing out...
$10 Reward For Leaving A Review
Capterra offers a $5 reward for leaving a review, and that seems to have worked well for them so we started off trying similar.
But it hasn't worked great for us 😕
If anything, the $10 incentive mainly seems to attract reviews from people who are broke and still struggling to build an online business. Some such reviews were still useful and we published them, but overall the quality was disappointing.
For June we're switching to a different incentive, which will hopefully prove more effective and also aligns nicely with our core values as a company. More details here, and I'll let you know next month how that's going.
Asking Course Creators
Many people have suggested we simply ask course creators to send students to our platform to review their course.
We're still testing this out and it's too early to tell how effective it will be. So far, we've had one course creator send us lots of reviewers, another say that they're open to the idea, and a third reject it.
I suspect this will get easier as we become more established and course creators see that we're going to collect reviews from students with or without their help.
Individual Outreach
Mainly doing this via social media, when we find someone mentioning that they are a student of a course we're collecting reviews for.
We were contacting and asking them straight up if they'd leave a review, and offering the $10 incentive. We didn't get many responses to those messages.
Now we've switched the incentive and our initial ask is much smaller. We'll see in June if that works better.
HARO
We've posted two "queries" to helpareporter.com, asking people if they'd used specific courses to learn Amazon FBA.
That has yielded 2 good reviews so far. Not bad considering it doesn't take much work to post a query to HARO.
We'll probably keep doing this every couple of weeks.
Upwork
This was our best source of reviews in May, but it took quite a bit of work.
We basically posted two jobs on Upwork asking people for reviews of Amazon FBA courses. We ended up paying more than $10 for each review, and some of them were so bad that we couldn't use them. So in terms of time and cost I'd say the ROI was only okay.
Not sure how much more we can use this approach for FBA courses, but might be worth trying every couple of weeks going forward, similar to HARO.
Reddit Ads
We ran an ad targeting two of the most popular Amazon FBA subreddits. The ad ran for less than a week, reached 112,000 people, and cost only $17.
Unfortunately, we only had 222 people click through to our site and didn't get any publishable reviews out of it.
Probably still too small a sample size to consider this a waste of time, as it's pretty passive and cheap.
Might work better with the new incentive we've set up.
Build In Public
I'm sharing all this with you as part of our "build in public" efforts.
Hopefully you and others will like what we're doing, maybe tell others about it, offer some useful ideas or critique, or leave us a review of a course you've taken.
In May our Build In Public efforts looked like this:
-
Indie Hackers post
9 votes, 309 views, some useful feedback -
Dynamite Circle post (private community)
Great feedback on this, led us to change our "funnel" for getting reviews -
Trends post (private community)
Great feedback from this one, too. -
Kernal post
Found this via a member of Trends and shared a comment about what we're doing.
It's hard to measure the ROI of Build In Public stuff, but I feel the time we spent on it last month was worthwhile. If nothing else, it led us to some good ideas and deeper considerations.
So we'll keep doing it 😊
Any feedback?
Thanks for reading!
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?
