It's feels like it's been a year since we opened the course to the public, but did you know we just launched in April 2021?
Sure, it took me a year to create the course, but we actually have been around for just 4 months!
That said, I think now is a good time to keep stock of what happened these past few months, and keep you updated on what's coming in August!
Hint: it's going to be AWESOME.
The course to date: Some Statistics
As of this writing we are at 28 students, 6 of whom have finished the course, passed the Final Assessment, and received their certificates.
We have a few success stories as well. You can read Jaypee's success story here.
Finally, 57.14% of students took the Advanced course, which was a little surprising for me, because I though the majority of students will opt for the Beginner's Course.
This just goes to show that freelancers are willing to invest in their education, provided the investment is a good one.
What's Coming? Updates
Now for the updates! We have 7 updates in total, and we're calling it Horizon Focus.
Why? Because most of these course updates and changes are meant to improve our student's productivity.
These are course updates for premium students, but our free course also gets a MAJOR MAJOR addition.
#1 Better homepage.
We slightly remade our homepage with better, clearer copy, and a more seamless design.
Once it's published, we can confidently redirect our inquiries to it and they can get all information they need on the homepage.
So if you're a follower of our Facebook page and still on the fence about enrolling in our course, just go to our homepage, SEOTraining.ph and learn how our course can help you!
We also made BIG changes to our courses.
#2 Updated Courses
Our initial course tiers are called BEGINNERS and ADVANCED, which caused some slight confusion.
We get questions like "is the Beginners course a pre-requisite to the Advanced course?" or "I'm a total newbie, can I still take the advanced course?"
The truth is, BOTH of our courses are great for beginners - we made the course with total newbies in mind; the only difference between the two tiers is the number of lessons or topics covered. Specifically, the Advanced course has 14 additional lessons than the Beginners course.
So, we changed our naming from from Beginners to BASIC and Advanced to COMPLETE, to better represent our course.
We also renamed our third course, the SEO Agency Masterclass to Client Magnet Masterclass, and a it added it as Module 7 of the Course SEO course.
Here's how our course will look like now:
#3 SEO Writing, e-commerce SEO, and YOUTUBE SEO courses.
We're also brewing an SEO writing course courtesy Roann, our resident content expert. If you don't know her, she write and edits whatever copy goes into the website as well as the majority of the Facebook posts you see on our page.
She's mostly invisible on the site (she prefers it that way), but her existence is proven through all the content on our Facebook page. Seriously, I have a partner.
The SEO Writing course is in our conversation, but there's no definite date yet. She's quite an in-demand writer.
E-commerce SEO and YouTube SEO are also being concocted and could be released next year.
#4 A Better, More Intuitive Course Layout & Design
This is one of the things that I'm most excited about.
We're releasing a major update to our course pages to make them more in-line with our brand, as well as make them more intuitive and easier to navigate.
Here's a sneak peek on how it will look like:
Old Lesson vs New Lesson Layout
Old version
New version
#5 Updated Lessons
Some lessons are outdated, particularly the instructions on how to set up your web hosting. We'll update those to make them more in-line with our current procedures.
We also noticed that most of our students get stuck on Module 1 (How To Create A Portfolio Website).
We want to provide students with a decent challenge, but taking to long fumbling around with WordPress - at no fault of their own - instead of learning SEO, defeats the very purpose of this course.
Since the web hosting and domain name registration is a major update, we decided to publish a separate blog post here.
#6 New Lessons for Square One: The Free SEO Starter Course
There are over 60 enrollees on Square One: The Free SEO Starter Course.
We thought that we could help them understand SEO better by adding a few intro lessons from our BASIC and COMPLETE courses. That's a ton of value!
Check out the free course here:
#7 Better Chat Bot
I'm proud to say that my response time to inquiries is quick at an average of 17 mins. Between running this and managing my own clients, I feel like that's an achievement in itself.
I also try my best to reply even during off-hours and weekends. My students can attest to this fact.
However, I'm only human and I'm starting to feel the effects of working beyond the hours I am supposed to work (I'm typing this at 12:22AM). Specifically, my lower back.
That said, one of the ways I can continue supporting inquiries is through a more responsive and robust chatbot.
We added a few keyword triggers for enrollment inquiries. They are a little oversensitive and might get triggered unintentionally, so please be patient while we fix this for you.
Keyword triggers for our students are a little more complicated. We've set up some intuitive replies, but they might be a little more general than you want.
The chat bot is still a little rough around the edges and we'll smooth it over in the next few weeks.
Are you excited as we are?
I hope you're just as excited as we are!
The entire Horizon Focus update will roll out in the next few weeks.
