Beta rounds are a crucial part of creating “the perfect” online course. You can not build your online course only based on your own assumptions, what you think people need to learn about. 

There is a very easy formula to create a successful online course, and this is giving people what they want to learn and giving them what you know they need in order to succeed and achieve the promised transformation. 

 But how do you run a successful beta round?

 1. Ask your students in what timezone they live in and try to make it work for everyone. You really do want the majority of your students to attend the live coaching session (or Q&A session with you). You are going to learn so many things about the content you have put out and if your content is understandable. If you get the same questions over and over again, you know that probably need to go back and rerecord that piece of content an explain it in a different way and make it easier to understand (that is if you prerecord your content week by week). 

Definitely make sure you offer a replay of the coaching sessions to people who missed it and give them the option to ask questions afterwards.

2. Should you decide to present live each and every week, give your students the option to comment live, while you are speaking. Again, this will help you to understand which part of the presentation you need to work on and fix. You can use a private Facebook group to stream the class with Streamyard, or you can use the live stream option within Thinkific for example. 

3. Have a private forum where students can ask questions between session and mingle with fellow participants, and maybe even help each other out. You can show up every day, a few times per week or once a week to go through all the questions and answers those which have been left unanswered. Again, this gives you valuable feedback which content is and which content isn’t expressed clearly. 

I always recommend having your students in a private forum off Facebook as your account can easily be shut down by any social media platform and you will lose immediate access to your students and the valuable content they and yourself have been posting in the group. It happened to me once and ever since I host all my paying customers in a private forum on Thinkific. 

4. Provide workbooks and checklists at the end of each module. If you are promising a specific outcome in a specific timeframe, you definitely want a timetable in place which helps them to stay on track each and every day (or week), so they can see an overview of what needs to be done. 

5. Keep the number of attendees small for your first round (up to 10 people), because you don’t know what will happen. You really want to focus on them and maybe even bring them on live to let them ask questions live. You need to make sure you satisfy your beta students 100%, they are the most important students you will ever have. 

6. Hand out a feedback form during the course. You can do this after every module or after you have covered 50% of your time with your students. Really give them the opportunity to tell you everything they liked and disliked about your content and about your coaching. This will give you the opportunity to know what you can do better, and fix it for the upcoming modules, or the other 50% you are still running the beta round. 

7. Ask them for a video testimonial halfway through. This will do two things: 

1. 1. It will encourage them to catch up on your content if they haven’t done so yet, so they can achieve some results which they can talk about in the testimonial
   2. It will make them reflect on the course and provide even more feedback to you

8. Provide Voxxer access to you where they can ask you questions outside of the live sessions & forum. I would recommend you to charge extra for this, even if it’s your beta round because this can be very draining for you. 

Pro tip: Set the right restrictions and boundaries from the start, e.g. the questions which are being sent in must be below one minute

9. Offer a free 1:1 consultation with you if you see some of your students not getting to the desired results in the promised time. You do want to help them to catch up on things and you also want to rethink and potentially adjust the amount of time you have given them achieve the desired outcome. 

10. Offer a surprise price (e.g. a masterclass or a mini-course) to everyone who achieves the promised (and desired) results in time. Human beings are incentive oriented creatures and everyone loves a reward at the end of a coaching programme. This releases dopamine in their brain and they will never forget you. You will also increase your success and completion rate of your students, which is vital for your own success.  

Are you interested in creating your own online course? Check out my programme “From Idea to Course” here which will help you to get your course launched before you have even created it.