September 2021 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
• June 2021 update
• July 2021 update
• August 2021 update

By The Numbers

Progress through August 2021:

📝 138 submitted reviews
✅ 88 published reviews (64%)
❌ 50 rejected reviews (36%)
💰 $950 donated to CAMFED
👩🏾‍🏫 = an entire year of schooling for 6 girls

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

Before August we were mainly trying to collect reviews of popular Amazon FBA courses. During the month we also started actively collecting reviews of popular affiliate marketing courses.

Our most "complete" review so far: The Affiliate Lab Review

Collecting reviews of affiliate marketing courses

So far we have 18 affiliate marketing courses we're collecting reviews on, and we're adding more all the time (full list here).

We already have quite a bit of SEO traffic related to affiliate marketing, so we're starting to get some reviews organically. But we're also going out and finding real students and asking them to leave reviews.

We've found a couple of ways that work well, but nothing that really scales.

Publishing more editorial reviews

In August we published several new editorial reviews of affiliate marketing courses.

An editorial review takes 5-6 hours and involves me researching a course, feeding data into our 31-factor algorithm, and then writing everything up to be published.

My goal for September is to write and publish at least 6 more editorial reviews. They will all likely be reviews of affiliate marketing courses.

Ramping up our "recruiting" efforts

As mentioned, we're still looking for a reliable way to collect user reviews. We've found a few ways that work well but they tend to be hard to scale.

There are two parts to recruiting:

1. Find contact info of real students
2. Reach out and ask them to leave a review

The first part is easy enough. With the help of some VAs, we now have contact info for 100's of students.

The second part is tough to scale, especially when the only contact info we have for many students is their Facebook profile.

We have a few ideas for automating and scaling up the outreach, but haven't yet landed on a solid solution for this.

We'll keep testing and experimenting until we find the best approach.

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?