AP 0671: Should I Drip My Course Content?

AskPat 671 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 671 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you, by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a sweet question today from Glen, but before we get to Glen's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, a company that I've been using for a while to help manage my books, keep track of my expenses, my income, and also invoicing too. So, this is really cool. If you do any invoicing whatsoever, you bill somebody, maybe you're a coach, or you have students or clients, or you do contractual work or whatever. You know, FreshBooks makes it really easy, like less than 30 seconds to create an invoice and bill that person. What's really cool, is it's very professional looking and it makes it really easy for them to pay you too. So, it's a win for everybody. So, just an all-around amazing piece of software that's serving over three million business owners. They can help serve you too. So, if you want to check it out, go to freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

All right, now here is today's question from Glen.

Glen: Hey, Pat. My name is Glen. I have a website over at strategicstartup.com, where I basically help people with their WordPress websites however I can, through either web design or by providing them with tutorials and resources and stuff like that. Here's my question: So, what I'm doing, is I'm creating a video tutorial series for my viewers. And the way I'm currently setting it up is kind of like a … I believe it's called a drip campaign or something similar to that where I host my videos on Wistia and then what I do is just embed them in emails, and have each email sent out individually with a matching email. So I'll send out video #1 and then a day later I'll send out video #2, video #3, on and on like that. I'm just wondering what your opinion is on providing access to video tutorials like that versus providing access to something like that all at once. Just wondering if you have any insights into how … What might be more effective? What is received better? If it's a good idea to just give them access to everything all at once? Cause I know sometimes, when you get access to a whole bunch of content like that all at once, it can be kind of overwhelming. Whereas if you feed it to them one at a time, it's a little easier to process. A little easier to go through. So yeah, I'm just curious to what your thoughts are on that, and if you might have any insights on what's a better practice? What's more effective, anything like that? I'd love to hear it. Love your podcast. I want to give you a big shoutout for featuring me on two episodes a while ago. I can't remember the episode numbers, but really appreciate. My girlfriend always bugs me for wearing my AskPat t-shirt too much, but I'm not taking it off. So, cheers, man. Love your stuff. Keep it up.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Glen. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. A couple of things I want to address. So, we will get to the drip versus not-drip situation. Drip meaning you send out tutorial, one at a time, and they don't get access to the next one until you send it, out versus giving it to them all things at once. We will talk about that in a sec. The other thing, I want to talk about is … I want clarification. Obviously, we're not talking to each other, right?, 'cause you sent in this voicemail a while back. But when you consider videos, and they are being embedded in emails, I want to make sure that the way you are embedding these videos in these emails—I'm just curious to know how that works, because Google and email clients are very sensitive to different kinds of media that are in emails. A lot of times, people won't see those emails, they'll get put in spam folders because of certain things that are in it. So, you could be sending emails out and just linking to those videos on Wistia, which is one way to do it. You could be linking out to a landing page on your own website that is sort of hidden on your website, and maybe people would have to log in to get access to it or whatnot. But that's another way to do it. And then the video is obviously on that landing page or in that page of the membership site. Or, you could be having the actual videos embedded in the emails, which could work against you, actually. I mean, it's very handy that they are getting these emails obviously but if the videos are embedded in these emails specifically, then they can literally watch the videos in those emails. Then it might actually work against you because it's a lot to…There's just stuff in there that email service…Clients don't like. Even images sometimes can get in the way. You know if you wanted to, and I'd think this would be it. You would have a video thumbnail where there is a play button on it, I don't know how these videos are done, maybe it's you or the piece of software you're talking about or the thumbnail of the actual title of the video. Whatever, it's just an image, and they click on that image then they go to a website where that video exists. So it could be Wistia, it could be on your own website, or inside a membership website for example. Okay, I just want you to be conscious of that. Sometimes when you put too many things in emails, they actually work against you. So that's the first thing I want to talk about.

Second thing, drip versus no drip. Now, there is no right or wrong answer here, but I think you are very wise to say when sometimes people get access to everything all at once, it's very overwhelming, and that's absolutely true. However, you can still give people access to everything at once because I know in the other end that some people hate getting drip. Some people want to move faster than you're guiding them, and so they're going to want everything. Here's the perfect solution if you wanted to test this out. You give them access to everything at once; however, in emails and beforehand maybe in a welcome video, you say hey, you have access to everything so you can go at your own pace. However, for those of you, and I know a lot of you want to make sure you follow the plan, I will be sending you an email every day or every couple days or whatever frequency you have that will give you links to the video that you should be watching on that day.

So, you can go ahead if you'd like, but if you want the hand-holding from me, if you want these tutorials in the way that I feel they should be consumed, look forward to those emails and just follow that plan. So you can have the best of both worlds there. So, that would give you sort of a hybrid drip versus no drip. You know, they're getting drip emails, drip guidance, but it's not drip in terms of the rest of the content. Now, if you really feel like that content needs to be dripped out—for example, yes, it's overwhelming when they get access to everything, but also whatever it is that you are teaching—it has to be given in that way to give people time, and you don't want people to get ahead, maybe there's a community with a number of students in there, for example, who need to all go through this together. So that they can all communicate together about it at the same time, so they can all comment at the same time. Be there together to go through this sort of course, if you will, and graduate at the same time. If you have it set up that way, where they'll have time in between those videos to actually do things—homework, for example, and then report about them. I mean, if that's the case, then you wouldn't want people to get ahead. You wouldn't want other people to either feel left behind if there's that community aspect on top of it.

So, Glen, it's up to you. Again, there's no wrong answer, but you have a lot of options here. I think you have to be smart and conscious about what kind of course is this, do you really need them to go through the drip sort of time-based sequence, or can they get access to it all at once? Is that going to work against them if they go ahead? If not, then you can give people the best of both worlds by giving them access to everything, but telling them you're still going to drip the content out toward them via email to guide them if they want it.

So, there you go. Glen, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to hearing about how this all works out for you. Glad you got your AskPat shirt, sorry to your girlfriend that you've been wearing them too much, but they are really comfortable, right? So we're going to send you … actually, no, we sent you one already, so we're going to send you an email to see if you want another one. Maybe she wants to wear one. We're happy to give her one, since you've been featured here on the show before and again today. But if not, let me know, then we'll do some sort of raffle or giveaway, or hand that shirt out to somebody on Twitter. We'll figure it out, but again, we'll reach out and we'll talk.

Thank you again for the question, and for everybody else out there who has a question, please leave a question at askpat.com. That's all you have to do. Go to askpat.com, hit the record button. You can ask your question there and potentially get featured here on the show just like Glen has multiple times. We've had a few people who've had multiple questions featured here on the show. And I also want to thank Freshbooks.com, for sponsoring the show. They are amazing. Freshbooks.com/askpat, you can try it out for 30 days for free, and make sure you enter “AskPat” in the how did you hear about us section.

And as always, I like to end with a quote, and today's quote comes from Albert Einstein. He says, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” So hopefully you guys are having fun, 'cause I know you guys are intelligent. So let's be creative out there, and let's make the Internet a better place. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.