Forget E-Commerce in 2026. This model is better.

0:00There is a better future-proofing way of taking your course and turning it into something absolutely valuable. There is so much that you can do.

0:19Hi, Gina. My course sales are down and I know things are changing in the world. I'm worried about the future of content. Do courses still matter in a world of AI? And how should I be thinking about my business from here? Oh, I'm so glad you asked this question. I am spending more and more time with more and more creators who are asking this exact question. And here's what's going on. So today, instead of going and buying a course, which, you know, the way courses evolved was I make a video or you write up a bunch of PDFs. You might have like a Zoom or two or some kind of live stream. and you would put it on a website or a course platform and leave it alone.

1:12People could come in, consume your content, watch your videos, take notes. And then what happened? Well, for most courses, people didn't finish them. They'd pay for it, watch one thing, and then stop watching. So a lot of courses then added a Facebook group or added a Slack team as a way to basically keep people engaged in the course content. That simple, read my text or watch my video and get my PDFs. So that is really how the course industry online has grown up. It's basically content with a separate group somewhere else. And then the third piece is all of these marketing funnels and tricks and things to get people to buy the content.

2:09So plenty of platforms out there that are all about how do you create things like lead magnets and funnels and squeeze pages and all this stuff. And so if you take a step back, the course industry really became about the promise of creating a business that you could set and forget. It would be, quote unquote, passive income. And the whole idea of it was sell somebody on access to content and hope to get a separate group going that would bring people back into that course and also charge one time for that course. So that's been the baseline of this industry. Now, what has happened is that we now have ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or any of these other ones where instead of sitting there and consuming content, consuming videos, I can go and get a quick answer from an app that gives me sort of instant context.

3:19So I don't have to buy a bunch of content. I don't have to buy even really beautiful and high quality and well-organized content. I instead can access something that is interactive, something that is AI. On one hand, I'm not surprised that your course sales are down. On the other hand, there is so much that you can do, and it just requires a bit of reframing. And I would say moving to a different model for what you can create and then forget about. There is a movement afoot for a lot of course creators to basically take their course material and turn it into an interactive AI experience. So there's great platforms like Delphi for this.

4:17There's even platforms that exist out there like 11 Labs where you can basically create the AI version of yourself. Those are totally legitimate things for people to do when you got a lot of content and you're like, how do I make it more interesting to get people to interact with and take advantage of all the amazing things that I've created? So it's a great way if your world is content to think, oh my gosh, I'm going to make an easier way for somebody to interact with my content. But there is a better, much more resilient, I'd go as far as to say future-proofing way of taking your course and turning it into something that is absolutely defensible, absolutely valuable, that preserves your price and even lets you charge a premium.

5:15And that is to take your course and reimagine it as a set of things that a group of people are going to do together. What do I mean by that? It means that for every video that you create, think about creating a challenge. So less homework assignment or quiz, those aren't working that well. Instead, take your same context. Make sure that, you know, it's really valuable and is about a transition in people's lives because that is what people pay attention to. The people who are going through transitions are by far the most motivated people to buy things, to contribute to things, to invite new people to things.

6:00That is why tapping into a transition is so powerful for creating these kinds of digital commerce and digital community businesses. Then the value of what you are building can still be a course, but instead of it being about passively consuming content or your passive income, it is about setting up the framework for people to be able to tackle these transitions, getting these kinds of results and transformation that come from what you've designed for them. together in small groups. This is People Magic. I'm Sheena Bianchini. Until next time. Woo!