This week I created a free quiz to attract and entertain visitors and got feedback from two friends.

I weighed several options for collecting leads for the course, namely:

I decided on the latter as the most promising because it employs people’s curiosity. So I devoted this week to this undertaken. It took me some time to choose the right platform, and I finally arrived to Thrive Quiz Builder. Their bundle option of Thrive Themes subscription looked like the most optimal solution, so I paid them $240 for a year.

Initially, I struggled with questions for the quiz. The solution to moving on was to ask questions from the course. It also let me check if the visitor already knows what I am to teach him or her, and to alter the offer correspondingly.

If the result of the test is excellent, I offer a 50% discount for them to explore the course at a low price. The user may still find some useful information as the quiz doesn’t cover everything, while I’ll get a review from a ready-like type of the student. The user who gets not-so-great results on the quiz will still get a discount of20%. I expect them to be hooked already by the results, and the discount would make the to-be-student hooked even more.

I only send the discount to email and don’t show it on the site if the user refuses to enter their address. My primary goal of the whole undertaking is to build my leads database, so limiting the offer to those providing their email seems like a viable solution. There’s also a section for sharing the quiz results on the final page. It was there in the template, and I decided to leave it there, even though I don’t quite believe in it.

Meanwhile, three of my friends I asked to check out the course responded after a soft nudge. They said that the content is okay and contains some unique things. The downsides were the background of the video (green curtains) and not-so-great audio. I had concerns about it too, but it’s rather hard to arrange a better one where I am now. I still think, or rather hope, that this won’t divert people from the course. The concern with the audio was unexpected because I used a special mic for the course. This issue should be investigated further.

After some discussion of the course with Alena, I got more inclined to work on the SEO of the course. According to most of the materials I learned, working on SEO is the last thing you’d do. The first step would be a high-converting landing page with ads traffic. If that doesn’t work, the offer is not strong enough. But I imagine myself as a prospective student, and I think I won’t dive into purchasing a course from an ad right away. I would read more about it to understand why it’s worth it, research for the mentions of the course by other people outside its site. So my strategy from tutorials won’t work with me. What would work is more recommendations, mentions on other resources, some valuable related posts by the course team. So the things that I would call SEO.

Another idea in support of concentrating on SEO is that summer is usually a dead season for recruiters and preparation for interviews. So I shouldn’t expect great results from the ads now.

The plan for the upcoming week: