I’m sure you’ve seen it: some charismatic person pops up in your Instagram feed telling you that they’ve just discovered the secret to immortality. They think you should make an online course and they’re very confident YOU can achieve success beyond your wildest dreams.

Symon and I are completely aware that when you’re looking for advice and direction when creating an online course, you have a lot of options. Like, a shocking number of options.

In fact, we’ve compiled a list of 34 different paid systems for learning how to be successful creating online courses. It’s remarkable.

What’s MORE remarkable though is just how many of them are blatantly exaggerating (or worse outright lying) to you when they pitch their “system” or “course”.

One of the biggest problems we see when you’re evaluating who to learn from is that you don’t know enough about the space to call BS. Luckily, we DO so what we’ve done is gone ahead and compiled the most common ways we see online course “gurus” try to deceive you into buying their shtick.

When you decide between who to work with, you need to consider WHO exactly you’re learning from. You after all, wouldn’t want to learn from someone who has no experience or demonstrated success in the space. This is the first problem we see: They’re just a “guru”.

What’s an “online guru“?

An online “guru” is someone who claims they can help you achieve some desirable outcome (in exchange for money), but HOW they get you there is very very fuzzy and they probably aren’t experts at all in their subject.

When you’re buying an online course creation system, the system itself is what you should be buying. Unfortunately, gurus turn this on its head and instead sell THEMSELVES as their product.

(Always laughing off camera for some reason)

Have you ever been listening to a webinar or a pitch, and you notice that an inordinate amount of time is spent on how awesome THEY are, and how DESIRABLE their lifestyle is?

(the subtext: I’m SO successful I practically live in screensaver island)

Yes, it’s true that it’s helpful to illustrate how their system has improved their lives, but gurus take this to the next level.

The ENTIRE pitch is focused around how happy THEY are and how you could be that happy and successful if only you paid them money and joined their system.

Gurus are everywhere, and it doesn’t matter what they claim to be selling: it’s all the same. They’re not selling you tactics and privileged information you need, they’re selling the idea that you could be like them.

(In case you thought gurus were only female)

This is why gurus can sell virtually anything they want. The details of what they’re going to teach you doesn’t matter. You’re buying because you think whatever they’re selling will get you to where they are.

(and this has to do with you teaching me how to make an online course how?)

The guru equation:

You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you ___________.

Then they just fill in the blank for whatever seasonal or hot business is available.

You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you start a YouTube channel
You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you buy this one crypto I’m shilling
You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you arbitrage currencies (FOREX)
You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you conquer bad mindsets & limiting beliefs

You can be rich, good looking, happy like me if you…. create an online course.

You can see how they can just swap out the dish of the day and re-sell the same thing by changing some of the wording.

So the actual “How do I do this” portion of their program is very thin. Once you BUY from them, the content typically looks like this:

When you fail, they almost all will tell you that its “your fault” and that you simply didn’t try hard enough. They imply that there are “winners” who kept trying until they succeeded, and there are “losers” like you or anyone who is considering quitting.

This shame based refund system is what keeps their refund rates lower – no one wants to admit that they aren’t a “winner”.

Dead giveaways you’re listening to a guru:

• They sell other programs and the pitch for each stays virtually the same
• They inundate you with photos of them laughing, at exotic locations, or smiling off in the distance
• They frame everything as “winners and losers”. If you buy their program, you’re a winner who wants to “take control of their life”
• The results they’re promising are huge and hard to believe
• They go heavy on the motivational material but are light (or even uncomfortable) on the details
• Everything they say is a folksy fortune cookie saying, an acronym, or a made-up framework

If you want to learn how to create an online course, you need to learn from someone who has actually done it and built up their success from online courses.

Not someone who has virtually no experience in the space, but just knows they can get people to buy because the product they’re pitching is THEMSELVES and not the actual course material.

How many sales pages or webinars have you sat on where you heard them repeat over and over how ridiculously successful their past students were?

This isn’t to say that they don’t have successful students.

Any program on online course creation will have successful students,. If someone is motivated enough to pay money and sit through videos on the subject, there’s a good chance they’ll actually get out there and launch a course. Regardless of the quality of the content they’re selling, if they have enough enrollments they will have success stories.

The problem comes with the testimonials themselves.

We see two varieties of “dishonest testimonials”.

1) Testimonials that have no timeframe attached to them, so you have no idea over what period of time the results were achieved.

For example:

(Was this before or after she created 270 podcast episodes, wrote a popular book, and was featured in 10+ articles online? Who knows.)

(Over what period of time? $250,000 in 1 year is great, but over 6 years is pretty mediocre)

Yes, anyone who puts in the time day in and day out can eventually find some success, but if that success took 5 years…. was it worth it? It’s genuinely hard to tell, because they purposely strip out the information you would need to make an actual judgement. How long would it have taken them if they didn’t drop $2,000 on an accelerator program?

2) Testimonials that do have a timeframe, and that timeframe is really short.

For example:

($115,000 in 2 months? To a cold audience? No wonder her name is blurred out)

($40k in “a couple hours” of joining. If you look at his stats you can see he got 1,000 to sign up for a webinar, so you can easily infer that his audience must have been at least 20,000 in size prior to enrollment)

(Was this before or after she had 80,000 Instagram followers AND a blog? It’s intentionally hard to tell.)

These testimonials claim that they made a large sum of money in a short amount of time.

The key here is the time it took them.

Now, these aren’t FAKE testimonials or actors typically (although we’ve seen them used). What they’re doing is simply twisting the truth.

Yes, this person DID makes $115,000 in their first 60 days, but what they DON’T TELL YOU is that person already had a large audience when they started the program.

If you have an email list of 100,000 people already, then it is very, very easy to make a large amount of money selling your course to that list.

I would venture to say that it takes 1/10 the effort to sell to a pre-existing audience than to create and and sell to an audience from scratch.

When you’re selling to a pre-existing audience, you can get away with a lot because your audience already trusts you. This means you don’t need to spend as much effort on your content quality, your course pages, or your promotional sequences. You don’t need a multi-month email sequence or to spend hours pitching and selling.

Selling to your existing audience is braindead simple and very hard to screw up. The question really should be “how much did they make per person in their audience?”.

• A lazily slapped together program that took a weekend to make can easily earn you $2,000 per 1,000 email subscribers (assuming they’re engaged). That’s a 1% conversion for a $200 course.
• A polished well thought out, and highly optimized course launch on the other hand could earn you $20,000 per 1,000 email subscribers. That’s a 4% conversion rate for a $500 course.

So when they say “This person made $40,000 in the first 14 days”, what they’re saying is that person had an audience, slapped something together, sent 3 emails about it, and made $40,000.

The key thing here is the audience size though. If that person had a list of 40,000 then what they’re saying is that they only made $1,250 per 1,000 email subscribers, which is actually a terrible outcome.

Without knowing how big their audience is, we can’t actually tell how much the program they were in helped them. To the naive observer, it looks like they had people join the course and immediately start seeing success.

What the testimonial really says is someone who was sitting on a pile of gold enrolled, and then maybe used some of our tips to create a lower than expected outcome.

How much could that person have made if they just ran the promotion to their list themselves? Probably a similar amount of money.

Another form of “exaggeration” we see is when programs list off testimonials that aren’t really testimonials.

Why?

They just want it to look like they have more testimonials than they really do and they’re betting you’re not going to watch all of them anyway.

(These were hidden in a testimonial wall. the “results” for 5/6 of these “testimonials” was that they… liked the videos and felt like they learned something. All for the low, low price of $2,000!)

In case, you really aren’t paying attention they’ll even slip in testimonials from people who haven’t done anything yet or just “anticipate” doing well:

Ever noticed that some of these online courses don’t pitch you directly on the program, but instead insist you book a call “with their team”?

They usually call these “discovery calls” (or many different euphemistic terms) and they’re meant to be a happy powow where they help you determine your next path forward and whether their program is a fit for you.

In reality, they’re just sales calls where you spent 20-30 minutes being barraged with a sales script. They don’t take any time to understand where you’re coming from, why you want to make an online course, or whether their system truly makes sense for you. They are designed for one simple purpose: to get you to buy their program.

You expect to join a call where an expert dispassionately walks you through your options and helps you get unstuck wherever you are in the process. What you get is simply a “high pressure sales call”.

Typically these calls involve a number of different techniques to get you to buy.

• They make up an arbitrary deadline for buying, for example “at the end of the call”. If you don’t buy by that time, you either lose an exclusive discount or lose access to the program entirely. They know it’s hard for people to make a good decision on the spot, so they try to overwhelm you right then and there.
• They aggressively try to refute any objections you have to buying, going as far as trying to make you feel bad for not believing in their system
• They try to re-configure their sale to get whatever amount of money they can out of you. Some go as far as to coach you on how to borrow money from others for the program or how to finance the purchase through a credit card.

Now obviously some of the programs out there aren’t as aggressive, but the fact still remains: your free 1:1 “discovery call” is really just a sales call where they try to badger you into buying.

This is why you see “discovery calls” more often being offered for higher ticket programs ($2,000+ typically). It costs money to hire someone to go through these calls, so you they need to make enough money for each sale to make up for that.

Another trick we see sadly too often is the “nearly impossible refund” trick. In order to assuage any doubts you have about the program, they promise a simple & generous refund policy. Like the saying goes, “the devil is in the details”.

This program for example offers a 365 day refund policy and they proudly state it all over their sales page:

Sounds great? Well, you need to read the fine print.

In this particular instance, they require that in order to qualify for the refund you prove to them that you watched all (6 hours worth) of content, and implemented all the strategies they suggested (including strategies that could cost you serious $ to implement).

They make it sound easy like “just show us that you did the work”, but the standard for proving you “did the work” would entail a hundred hours of effort and thousands of dollars spent.

Here’s what their T&C page says:

So you need to watch the entire course (and log your time to prove it), fill out each workbook (all 76 pages), then give them feedback on why you want a refund.

Think you’re done? Nope, they go even further.

On top of the other requirements, you need to make a complete landing page (with an $80 / mo tool they suggest), write your entire course outline (not defined as either an outline or the entire course material), and finally show them you integrated a live checkout system (another $40 /mo).

Think you’re done? You should know the answer by now. At the very end they quietly shove this little gem in:

Yep, you read that right. You have no guarantee to a refund. because it’s the “Company’s sole discretion” as to whether they’ll grant you one. Maybe they don’t like your landing page, or they don’t think you were sufficiently “pumped” in the 35 pages of notes they require you to fill in.

Is it any surprise they have such a low refund rate, given that its virtually impossible to get one?

Here’s another example of a “good luck qualifying for that refund” refund:

(Key phrase: “$50,000 worth of ideas”. You can value “ideas” at whatever you want. Also, despite the badge saying “100% money back” there’s nothing that says you get your money back)

When you look at their “Terms & Conditions”, you wouldn’t be surprised:

Another trick we see is requiring that you schedule a call with their team in order to cancel.

Once you schedule the call, they have someone dedicated to trying to change your mind for 30 minutes. If you want to get your refund you’ll have to jump through the flaming hoop of explaining to a “very disappointed team member” why you couldn’t find the time to implement their system.

The basic idea is that most people will be deterred from refunding because it requires a mandatory phone call where they get talked down to. That reluctance is often enough to get the customer to wait until their refund window has expired.

Speaking of refund windows, some course programs use short refund grace periods in combination with “cancellation calls” to do something really nasty.

One program we reviewed (not going to name names) had a 14 day refund window, but in order to to refund you had to schedule a call. The catch: they set up their system such that it was always impossible to find an available time within 14 days.

Even if they don’t use fine print shenanigans or require cancellation calls, a lot of programs barely give you any time to make up your mind.

The largest online course guru in our space right now currently offers a 7 day refund policy, but there are two major “gotchas” as part of it. In order to qualify for the refund, you have to show that you watched ALL the videos, ran a campaign, generated traffic for your site, and were not successful… all in 7 days.

Here’s the real catch though: the program is an 8 week program that time restricts the content. You only get Week 2’s content 1 week after enrolling. So, its fair to say it’s impossible to get a refund because you physically can’t watch ALL the videos in 7 days because they don’t let you watch them.

Another trick we commonly see is that the program instructor or guru makes it sound like you’ll have direct access to them for questions and support.

Being able to have your questions answered is crucial if you really want to launch an online course. Having pre-recorded lessons is helpful, but there are a million edge cases that can’t be addressed this way. Sometimes you do just need an expert to look at your situation and give you customized advice, so the offer of having access to your instructor is enticing.

Unfortunately, virtually all of the programs we looked at exaggerated the level of support and access students could expect.

When they say “you can email me”, they mean you can email them, and someone from their team will (eventually) respond to you. Whether that virtual assistant responding has any idea how to help you is a real gamble.

Some programs make it sound like immediately after purchasing, you get to hop on a strategy call with the instructor themselves. Don’t fall for this. Once you enroll, you’ll either be given access to a pre-recorded group session that had the instructor on it, or you’ll get access to a regular LIVE workshop with 200 other people.

This is the above guru’s exact script in one of her retargeting ads:

Spoiler: You don’t. It’s just a pre-recorded group call she did ages ago.

In case you need a reminder, this is on her sales page:

Some programs even go as far as to simply outsource support to their other students. If you hear them say things like “get access to help in an exclusive Facebook group”, then be mindful of the wording. They don’t say WHO is giving you the support. In some cases, the support comes from other students who are equally as clueless as you are.

Here’s a post inside one of those Facebook groups for a $2,000 course that summarizes this perfectly:

(Even though you paid $2,000 and were promised direct coaching calls with the guru, you actually only get to talk to her if you win a lottery. Talking to her is as likely as winning a lottery. Let that sink in)

Most online course programs assume that you aren’t going to read their Terms & Conditions, and this is a reasonable assumption. Most of what you see in a T&C for an online course program is standard boilerplate language around earnings expectations (they can’t guarantee your success), their lack of affiliation with any of the companies they advertise on (like Facebook for example), or other bland legaleses statements designed to protect themselves from lawsuits.

All of this is fine, however, we’ve started to notice more and more of these companies adding “non-disparagement clauses” in their T&C, like this:

(Try to wrap your head around this. You aren’t allowed to even verbally say something critical of the program, or even be seen to encourage or cause SOMEONE ELSE to say something bad about the program)

Basically what these say is that once you purchase their program, you’re not allowed (at threat of a lawsuit) to say anything publicly (or privately in some cases) thats bad about them.

This is one of the more pernicious tricks we see and it has a surprisingly large impact on… everyone.

Say you’re evaluating a program and wondering if you should enroll. What are you going to do? You’ll probably do some Googling and asking around to see if you can get an honest testimonial from someone who took the program.

What most likely will happen is that you only see positive, glowing reviews and most people will just assume this is because the program really is that awesome.

In reality, the people who took the program are legally not allowed to say the program is bad or not worth the money.

Another hilariously depressing legal snippet we see course gurus adding is the “termination clause”. Not only can you not bad mouth them, they can kick you out of the program for any reason (for “being difficult to work with” for example) without giving you a refund or canceling your upcoming payments.

(Asking questions that are hard to answer or questioning whether the program delivers on the value it promises would constitute “being difficult to work with”)

“Anyone can be successful teaching any topic”

You’ve probably seen this written or expressed prominently on your chosen program’s sales page or during a webinar. They after all don’t want to alienate or give any reason to a potential customer to not enroll, hence why they harp on how “ANYONE can be successful with ANY topic”.

They usually couch it in weird language by telling you that your “uniqueness” is what will allow you to sell your course.

(If you were selling to yourself, you’d have a 100% conversion rate. The problem is that you need to sell to OTHER people and so if that “unique experience” isn’t transferrable to others… it’s not a good course)

“ANYONE can be successful with ANY topic”

The problem with this statement is just that it isn’t true. Or at least, it’s only half true.

Symon and I do honestly believe ANYONE can be successful creating courses, with enough effort and dedication. I personally know instructors that don’t have remarkable experience or insight into anything, and yet with enough time and effort they’re created a full-time income out of their courses.

The problem is the second part of this statement. No, you cannot be successful teaching ANYTHING your heart desires.

(Translation: It’s not that there isn’t a market for your “underwater yoga for people afraid of water” course, it’s that you don’t “believe in your abilities” or “take yourself seriously”)

Online course consumers have certain basic expectations, and some topics simply do not deliver enough obvious value to justify costing… anything.

Yes, we have seen some very clearly obscure course topics find wild success, like goat herding, psychic healing, and growing your own vegetables.

What people fail to miss with these subjects is that they deliver serious tangible value to their students. Hundreds of thousands of people have goats and a good portion of them make their income off of them, so a course teaching how to do that better has obvious monetary value. Psychic healers can make a side business out of their practice. Growing your own vegetables means you don’t have to pay for certain groceries anymore.

How much tangible value is there in a course going over “how to make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich”?

If your course topic isn’t anchored to a tangible benefit to the student, then you’re going to struggle to sell seats. This is why we try to help people understand that there are always multiple topics someone could teach, and to focus on the ones that are a little more grounded in reality.

How often have you seen a program on creating online courses taught by someone who has only made 1 other course? Or even worse, the only course they’ve ever made… is the one they’re selling you right now.

(This was her only course for the first 6 years she was promoting it. Consulting for others creating their own courses prior to this does not count.)

(This course is based off the success of only 1 course before it, which was a very specific niche)

We call these one-trick ponies (or worse the “no-trick pony”), because they only have made 1 other course successful. Making an online course that’s successful is an accomplishment worth being proud of, but does it mean that you’re now ready to teach OTHERS how to make online courses?

A lot of people might not realize this, but there are few universal rules that apply to ALL online course industries and online course formats. What works for a hybrid, independently hosted, cohort style yoga course is not going to work for a platform based, pre-recorded, on-demand course on Facebook ads. The audiences for these courses are entirely different, they hang out in different areas, and they respond to different messaging and promotional formats.

So if your instructor has only made it work in one space with one format, why do they think what they’ve learned applies to all courses everywhere?

This is actually one of the most common reasons we see students fail in these other programs. The instructor only taught them one way to make an online course successful, and it’s the way that worked for them. That method then didn’t work for that students niche, and the instructor wasn’t knowledgeable enough to help them figure out how to adapt their methods for a new environment.

In the case of the “no-trick ponies” they have absolutely no idea what works because they’ve never done it before, so they primarily just re-package commonly available advice. As they start to sell their program, they then re-inject any sales figures they have into their pitch about how successful they’ve been “selling online courses”.

One thing you’ll notice if you look into enough of these “how to create online courses” programs is that often times the instructor tells you to do one thing, while they’re doing something entirely different.

For example, the program above teaches everyone that the way to get your first sales is to essentially spam your personal networks on Facebook and LinkedIn. The goal is to get your acquaintances and friends on a phone call, and then sell them on a course you haven’t made yet.

Not only is this a terrible strategy for starting your online course business, the instructor never did it themselves.

If you do a little digging (and using archive.org to see what she used to claim on their older pages), you can see that they actually made their primary success from podcasts, workshops, and joint venture promotions.

Why is she telling everyone to spam their friends and family? Because they knows it’s not possible for everyone to do what they did. Online courses are not as novel as they used to be, so PR tactics like th used require more effort and a savvier strategist to pull them off.

Another program for example tells people to immediately start running Facebook ads to promote their course. You can, of course, sell your course through Facebook Ads, but its rarely something that works right out of the gate. You need to first run students through your program, build up testimonials, re-configure your language based on feedback, etc before paid ads really start to pay off.

(Promotion of your course in this “course creation system” consists of 1. Facebook Ads and 2. YouTube Ads. That’s basically it)

We know the instructor didn’t run paid ads on day 1 because he just tells you: he made his first $100k from his YouTube channel that has over 1M subscribers.

(They claim that when they launched their YouTube channel was much smaller, but that begs the question: if you can pull $100k from a “smaller audience”, how much of your total success since then has been a result of the same, growing YouTube audience?)

Do you have a YouTube channel with over 1,000,000 subscribers? If not, you’re going to need to bridge the gap he left out of his instruction.

How often have you seen an online course guru promoting their system for an abnormally low price, like $27? In their copy, they promise all the things you would expect out of a $500 course, but they’re all included for just a small <$50 payment.

Is this too good to be true? Usually, yes.

(The course has been 80% off since the day it launched)

What you’re most likely looking at is what’s referred to as a “self-liquidating offer” or SLO, for short. The idea of an SLO is to sell an offer that has a very low price point, and then to use that purchase as a way to quickly upsell the student to higher ticket offerings.

(Sometimes the upsell starts even before you purchase. Also, why am I paying extra for an eBook summary of the program I’m about to pay money for? Why isn’t that included?)

What you’ll find often is that the things they originally claimed were included in the low price are actually only available if you pay a lot more. When do they tell you this? Right after your credit card processes.

The most common culprit here is “support”. They claim you’ll get access to exclusive support, but they rarely specify HOW you get that support. It’s only after you purchase that you realize that the “support” really is just an email address no one responds to, or access to a poorly written FAQ sheet you can read on your own.

Some are better about being upfront about whats included and others aren’t. Regardless, you’re given the impression that you’re just buying one thing, but in reality you’re taking the bait to a never-ending series of upsells that typically start immediately after payment.

When you’re considering enrolling in an online course creation program, be aware of the tricks that might be being used against you.