Transcription
If you clicked on this video, then you're ready to monetize your skill set and your expertise and do it the right way. And in this video, I'm going to break down the 12 vital steps that need to happen in the right order in order for you to do just that. So this is going to take you A to Z in creating a highly scalable, highly profitable, highly impactful online program for the people who need you most.
Now, how do I know how to do this? Well, not only have I helped thousands of people do just that and take their expertise, package it into a highly scalable online course, and some of our clients are scaling all the way up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month with their program without using any paid advertising at all—and are all organic marketing strategies—but I've also been able to do it for myself. To date, in my business, not only have I been in this industry for a long, long time—I don't want to date myself—but a long, long time, but I have also generated over 30 million dollars with my own online education business.
In fact, if you want to see some of our success stories, we have a whole other channel dedicated to just that. So if you're here and you're serious about this, give this a like if you're excited to get some clarity on what the right steps are, in the right order, to be able to do this, and be sure to subscribe for new videos every single week. This is the place to be to create a peaceful, purposeful, and profitable online education business, all while making a massive impact and not having to trade your time for money.
In just a second, I'm going to break this down in so much detail as I like to do, so you get a thorough understanding. So make sure you have a notepad, a pen, open a document on your computer so you can really pay attention and take notes. And if you're actually super serious about this and you're like, "I am ready to turn this into an actual business and to stop trading time for money and make a way bigger impact," there's an application link in the description below. Head there, fill it out in as much detail as possible, and we can set you up with someone on my team to support you in the best next steps. And if you're a perfect fit for us to support you in creating this highly impactful online course business, without further ado, let's get into these 12 steps.
Step number one is identify your profitable course topic. Now, what I mean by this is that oftentimes people will tackle finding a course topic in a very basic way, and it's not going to help you build an actual business. It will help you build a course that probably will not sell, or maybe sell for a little bit and then plateaus. So what you need to identify first and foremost when you're looking at a profitable course topic is the very fundamentals and foundations of any business: who plus what plus how. So what most people do is they go, "Here's what I'm going to teach," and then they start building a course. That is the worst way to do this, and I've seen people do this, and they ultimately have to go right back to the drawing board after putting all this time, energy, and effort into it to make it something that's actually going to sell. So first and foremost, understanding profitable versus Google-level, and what that means is there are a ton of topics you could cover; there are a ton of course ideas you could have, but it has to be aligned with something that's actually going to be transformative.
So I'm going to talk about this in a second and how the topic of your program relates to how much you're actually able to charge for your program, but to really understand this, I often say it's either Google versus profitable. Googleable topics mean that it's kind of surface level, and it's something that you just look up on Google and find the answer to. So, i.e., how to dance—easy enough, you can go look that up online; there's a bajillion different results for it—but people probably aren't going to pay for that. We actually have a real client who has an example of this: tried to sell a course for a long time; nobody was buying it; it was just about how to dance. And then she uncovered what was actually transformational and who she was actually serving with her program and how she was going to get them the result they were looking for, and it turned into, "I help adults dance in social settings to build their confidence and nourish their relationships." And she's now generating close to fifty thousand dollars a month with her program consistently, and her course has done over a million dollars in sales. That's the big difference; you go from tactical to transformational. Profitable course topics are transformational.
Now, understanding high versus low ticket. So high ticket—what I mean by that is our clients charge no less than 500 for their programs—and you might be thinking that sounds like a lot. We have clients that are charging all the way up to twenty thousand dollars for their programs, depending on the value of the outcome they are serving. We're going to talk about pricing a little bit later, but that's really important to understand. Now, low-ticket offers mean you're charging under 500, and it's more so around like the 97, sometimes even less than that, 49 range, and this puts you in a position where you're kind of selling a very tactic-driven course and something that people can probably find online, and you're trying to go after a mass volume of clients. But here's the tricky thing: people think that that's easier; it's actually incredibly difficult to sell at this price point because you're trying to generate as much traffic as possible to get people to buy, hopefully, but you need a large quantity of buyers in order for this to be actually a viable business, if that makes sense.
So what I have noticed working in this industry for so long is there are fewer and fewer and fewer courses actually surviving because we are moving towards transformational programs and creating something that actually creates an entire transformation and a super high-value outcome where people are excited to invest into it. We are moving away from this low-ticket space, and ultimately it's an incredible thing because if you're in this for impact, you can have less clients with this and serve at a deeper level and create even more transformation for your clients without being spread thin with this mass volume of people that you don't even really know how you could possibly fulfill or serve.
Now, the foundation that we work with our clients on to create a transformative program and a profitable program is what we call your unique selling proposition or your transformation statement. So I want you to really think about this, and I want you to pause the video after we go through this, and I want you to comment below with your first initial thoughts on your transformation statement, because it's going to identify all of these key fundamental pieces: So I help blank go from blank to blank so that they can blank. For example, "I help adults go from insecure, shy, self-conscious, and isolated to being confident on the dance floor at any social settings; they can improve their relationships and feel good about themselves." That's a great transformation statement. So I want you to comment right now, pause the video, come back to it once you're done, and let me know what your transformation statement is.
Step number two is conduct market research the right way and build a targeted list of ideal clients from zero. So I recently did a video on this and how one of my clients was able to build a list of 61 people, and she ended up enrolling 33 of those people into the first version of her program before even building it. So she pre-sold it, which is part of the strategy, and she was able to generate over two hundred thousand dollars in just two weeks in a very unique niche. So I'm going to drop that as part of the resource below and a pre-sell playlist so you can understand more about this strategy. But when I say market research and build the list from zero, you have to understand the market you're heading into and the category you're trying to break through in order to actually do it, be seen, respected, valued, and for people to want to invest in what you have versus what maybe somebody else has.
Now we've already covered how to make your offer unique in the first step because it really is going to be aligned with a transformative experience as opposed to just tactics somebody could find online for free. Now, in order to find these clients and to build this list from zero, you have to think about where are these people currently hanging out. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when trying to build a program or start a business of any kind is to just create it and hope that people come. That will not happen. So you want to do your research, and you want to use that research to both a list. So first and foremost, it starts with understanding the marketplace. This is important because you want to do your due diligence and see what else is out there and what else would people be investing in to find the solution and the outcome that you're offering with your program. You want to get a lay of the land so you know where you fit into it and also how you're differentiating yourself. Just because there's competition, it doesn't matter; that's actually a great thing because it proves there's a proof of concept that people are actually interested in investing in this. So look at competition as a great thing, and look at yourself as a unique angle so you really remove any competition. So you're going to understand the marketplace better by looking at everything that people could be investing into: conferences, workshops, online programs, coaching, consulting; there might be actual brick-and-mortar businesses in your space. What are people paying for, and how much are they investing into those things, and what is currently on the market? That's step number one. Step number two: magnetize your people. So oftentimes people think, "Well, yeah, clients will just come to me." That's not how it works, especially in the beginning, because you're trying to prove yourself, and you, you don't have the authority yet. So this is a really big step to proving authority. So we have the signature process that I've explained in other videos, which will be part of the resources below, called the 50 ICA process. What we do is we have our clients do market research, ask very specific questions, things like, "What's your biggest challenge when it comes to X? What makes you feel the most frustrated? And what keeps you up at night when it comes to X? If you could wave a magic wand and solve this problem tomorrow, what would you need to do?" You want to dig into what your ideal client is actually thinking, what's in their brain, and how you can create something that's going to blow their minds and they're going to go, "Oh my gosh, you made this just for me." And so we have our clients actually sit down on Zoom with 50 people by doing the research of where these people are hanging out online, putting themselves in the conversation, activating conversations, whether that's through offline facilities or resources or online like groups, forums, Instagram accounts, YouTube channels, blogs, media—wherever it might be where your ideal client is hanging out—we show our clients how to find those places and then interact in the conversation and engage in the conversation, not sit back and wait, and start to build that list of ideal clients from absolute zero. Get them onto a Zoom conversation, ask very specific questions, very specific questions that lead to absolutely golden answers, but it hand-delivers you essentially what you need to put in your curriculum for your program. And that brings me to step number three.
Create the curriculum outline. Now notice I'm not saying build the whole thing. I've had people come to me, and they've spent years trying to build their online program, and they have no idea if it'll actually sell. We don't want you to do that. You're going to approach this like a prototype, and you're going to create the outline of the curriculum but not actually build the curriculum, and I'll explain why in a later step. So how you create curriculum for an online program—and I'm going to dig really deep into this in next week's video, so stay tuned for that—but the general rule is, because you know you're going to create a transformative program, you want to think that your client is going from here to here, so zero state to hero state, and your curriculum bridges the gap between that. So in order for somebody to go from zero to hero, what do they need? What are the lessons they need to learn? What are the tactics they need to implement? What do they need to create the transformation? So how we do this is we always start with the hero outcome; that is how you build a really transformative curriculum. So you start: hero outcome—this is where they're going—and then zero state—this is where they are now—and then I'm going to put this down here—this is looking confusing—formula, steps, and just brain dump all the things that they could need to take them from zero to hero. And then this is the most important part: subtract. Because a huge mistake that course creators make, experts make, when they put together programs, they go, "If I stuff this with more information, people want to buy it." Why is that so wrong? Because if somebody's investing into your program and they actually want to buy it, they are buying the outcome; they are not buying information. They can get information for free on the internet, so you better make it as efficient as possible. So just jamming it with a bunch of unnecessary information and making your program 25 hours long is not helpful to anybody, and it hurts your business because it's going to delay results; people are going to give up; they're not going to finish the program, and it often leads to a massive plateau or just your course not working in general. And this is just such an efficient way to solve that problem.
Step number four is name your program. Now don't get too hung up on this. I always say use a five-minute rule when it comes to naming your program because it does not matter. And the most important factor of naming your program is we bring it back to basics: who plus what plus how. So you want to make sure that the name of your program tackles all three pieces. And my biggest piece of advice when it comes to naming your program—and inside of our program, The Authority Accelerator, we talk about how to name a program in the right way—because oftentimes people get really creative with it, but if your ideal client reads the title of your program and it has no idea that it's for them, you failed. So you need to make sure that when they read the title of the program, it is so clear that it is for them. So always go clarity over creativity when it comes to naming a program.
Now the next step is we're going to price. So we've tackled the research; we know what we're going to deliver; we know the outcome; now we can tackle the price. Now why do we need to know the outcome before we tackle the price? Because the price of your program—the number one factor of pricing your program—is making sure that it is related and based on the outcome and the value of the outcome. Now what I mean by that is, on a financial, mental, emotional, spiritual level, what is the value to the person who's enrolling into this program? Why is it urgent? Why is it painful for them? Why will solving this problem save them time, money, energy, resources? Okay, so you have to consider that the cost to your ideal client of not having this outcome delivered to them and them actually achieving it through your program, what is that cost? And you want to actually do the exercise to go, "Okay, on a financial level, this is what it's costing them; on an emotional level, this is what it's costing them; spiritually, mentally, all of the things." And I have a whole other video on how to price your program, which I will include in that playlist below, but just consider that the cost of not having this outcome is the biggest key indicating factor of pricing your program adequately, and it builds your confidence to price at a high-ticket option as opposed to undercharging, undervaluing, and creating a program that one doesn't sell or you can't get enough clients to make it sustainable.
Before we get into the next step, which is all about creating consistent income, I just wanted to say if this is starting to click for you, this is a process that we have fine-tuned over so many years now and thousands of clients that we've worked with. So if you're at a place where you're like, "I want this to click; I want to bring it all together; I'm ready to create efficient results for myself," there's a link below, as I mentioned, to apply for the Authority Accelerator program. Fill it out as thoroughly and honestly as possible so that we can really support you in the best next steps. You'll be able to speak to a real human on my team, and they'll be able to guide you on that process.
Now the next step is the fun. It might not sound fun if you don't like math or numbers, but if you don't like math or numbers, it's real hard to make a business survive. And I used to hate them, but I learned to love them. It really is the key to consistency. If you don't know this piece here, it's very hard to create a business that can actually stand the test of time, as we like to call it a legacy business. If God forbid something happened to you, this business could survive and keep going and keep making an impact without you. So doing the math to create predictable income means you need to know how many leads you need to generate in order to hit your target for clients and income with your online program. Simple way to do this is you want to understand the kind of an industry average when it comes to converting people into clients. On the lower end is actually 20. So you can do this math quite simply. Let's say your goal to enroll people into your program is you want to have five clients. Okay, so we're going to start with five clients, and we're going to be charging one thousand dollars, let's just say for example. So that would be a total of five thousand dollars for the initial sort of sale of your program. How do we guarantee that you got five clients? You need to know that if we times this by five, that gives us 25. We now know we need 25 leads, conversations, and that will convert. We take 20 of that; that will convert into five clients. So here's the beauty of how this works: you now know, "Okay, if I want five clients and they're going to be charged a thousand dollars, that makes that five thousand dollars. From this, I need 25 leads, 25 sales conversations in order to generate five clients." You now know the math. So whatever number of clients you want to enroll, you need to times that number by five, and that's the number of leads that you need to have in order to generate the income that you're looking to create, which brings us right to the next step.
Now I know what we need to do; now it's all about pre-selling and enrolling. So at this point, you don't have your curriculum built, and you're not supposed to. This is what we call a POP—a profitable offer prototype. Now this is a methodology that I created for my clients because I understood that so many of them are wasting time on things that didn't matter, and they were building out their entire programs without having tested them. You don't know how to teach something thoroughly and in the best and most effective way possible until you actually teach it. So we've created your curriculum outline, so that's what you're going to deliver, but in order to pre-sell and enroll, guess what you're going to do? Remember that interview process I told you about and how to do the market research and build your audience from zero? You're going to go right back to those folks, and you're going to pre-sell to those people first because you built a relationship; you built trust; you didn't try to sell them at all in the first call because you're really just trying to listen to create the best program for them. You understand their pain points, and you've created a curriculum that's going to solve their problem and deliver the outcome they're looking for. So that oftentimes will sell out your program without having to do any more marketing or any more outreach or efforts. So that's how you pre-sell your program, and you start enrolling real clients into the program.
Now why is this so important? We talk often about three C's, and the three C's being vital to the stability and scalability of your online course business. What those three C's are—they're all achieved by this process right here: you get cash flow in the doors; you're not scrambling and stressed about money and trying to find your next client; you get confidence in your offer—this is a biggie; oftentimes people are scared to sell; you can't have a business without knowing how to sell—so confidence in your offer that people actually want it and they are going to invest in it and they're going to get results; and the final piece is client results, which is vitally important. If you don't have results for your program, you don't have proof for your program, and it's very hard to continue to sell it because people like to see proof. So by getting clients in the door as efficiently as quickly as possible using a prototype model, not building everything first, you accomplish those three C's, which sets you up for long-term success, if that makes sense. I want you to put "yes" in the comments right now.
So now we actually deliver and structure your program. And so, like I said, this is for your POP—profitable offer prototype—which is the first version, the beta version of your program. Okay, so it's very simple; don't overcomplicate this because the more fancy you make it, the more you're going to have to correct things later on and double back and do more work. So all it takes is you have to have curriculum. So we have the curriculum outline, so you're kind of going to build this as you deliver; you're going to build it as you go. And we do this using Zoom to deliver it to our clients live and Google Docs for the first iteration of the program. You also can use PowerPoint, Keynote, whatever you want to put your information onto and your lessons onto. That's how you deliver your curriculum the first time around. The next piece is private community. So this can be done in a multitude of ways; there are so many private community options online, but it can be as simple as just having a private Facebook group for your clients, and this allows them to collaborate with one another, be involved in community with one another, and also have access to you outside of just the curriculum and these live calls. And the final piece is support. Yes, they have that through the private community, but you can also set up a separate call each week outside delivering curriculum where you can further support, answer questions, and fast-track the results. Why? Because of the results, you're not really able to scale the program. So this is the entire structure of creating that POP curriculum, and this brings us to step number nine, which is, which is very important, and I don't want you to undermine this part, please, for the love of all things good in the world: collect feedback. So the beauty, the absolute gold, I'm delivering your program this way the first time around because you get so much feedback in real time, and this just fast-tracks everything. Because imagine—or maybe you've done this, and commit it in the comments if you have—a lot of people have—if you've built your program already, but not a single person has seen it, used it, or implemented it, you don't know how it's going to go; you don't know if things are in the right order; you don't know if you've taught something and it kind of whatever, over everyone's head, so it stalls their progress. So you want to, through this entire process of delivering the program the first time around, ask for feedback. You can ask things like, "What's keeping you stuck this week? Is this making sense? Should I have switched the order of some lessons? Any feedback you have for me at all?" You want that feedback because that feedback is only going to make your final version of your program that much stronger. You also want to ask
People on a weekly basis inside your community when you're delivering your program. What are your biggest wins this week? What are your light bulb moments? Then you're starting to collect social proof as you go, and this allows you, like I said, to build the strongest evergreen course possible.
So why does this all add up to creating a really scalable, super profitable, super impactful course business? Because once you've done this groundwork, which I know sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, you can do this in a matter of—the timeline generally is about six weeks—you can get all of that off the ground in six weeks and start building out your evergreen course so that it's pre-packaged. People can study at their own pace; there's no more live delivery in this setting, and it can just sell and scale for the rest of time. So we call this your scalable offer prototype.
So you're no longer working on the pop; you're not building it into an evergreen, pre-recorded program. So it's not much different; you're going to have curriculum, but your curriculum now is no longer delivered live because you've actually done that, and you've tweaked it, and you've used the feedback to make it better, and then you're going to put it just into a pre-recorded version of that. So again, you can use PowerPoints, you can use Keynote, you can use Google Docs and just screen record that information and turn it into your pre-recorded curriculum. From there, that's going to be uploaded into your portal. So your program portal can be anything from, you know, Thinkific to Kajabi to everything in between—whatever you want that to be—but you do want to have a place where you host the program at this point. These now—it's proven—and in order to truly scale it, you need to have one place to host it. But that's honestly the easiest part about this; you just pick which one you want to use, upload the curriculum once it's done, it's set to go.
Then you have your community. So you still want to have that community aspect; it fast-tracks and accelerates people's results so much better because they're learning in this group environment, and and an accelerated environment; they're seeing other people's progress and lessons, learning from them. So you're not completely reliant on just you as the teacher and founder.
And then the next step is support. So at this point, you can do one to two weekly calls where they're just support calls. People can ask questions; they can work along with you; they can dig into anything that's holding them up to, again, make the process super efficient and what's the most important part—help them get the result that they're after.
And now we get into the most exciting part of this process, which is your Evergreen Sales Machine. Now here's the issue though: most people make this step number one, and it is Step 11, friend. It's step 11. If you do this before you do all of the rest of the things—probably my biggest frustration out there—is that people think if they just build a funnel, funnel traffic, leads, not your ideal client inside and out, some social proof, a validated offer—friends, this ain't gonna work. It's just not logical; it doesn't make any sense.
So how your Evergreen traffic actually works is you need to have a source first and foremost. So we use YouTube as a range source of Evergreen traffic. Now why do I say that, and why is that important? Because there's a big difference between paid and organic or free traffic. So paid traffic means that you are spending money to attract leads. This used to be awesome; used to be a lot easier than it is today and a lot more inexpensive than it is today. But regardless of that, if you don't know exactly who you're targeting with paid advertising—like, I mean, down to the detail—you're just making it rain for no reason. Okay, you are throwing money in a fire. You do not need paid advertising. We have clients that are scaling to several six figures a month without spending a dime on advertising because their organic strategy is that strong, and it's all about being hyper-intentional with who you're marketing to and what you want to be known for.
So we leverage YouTube. I have a whole playlist below on how to use YouTube to grow your online course business, so make sure you check that out. But when it comes down to it, you need to build authority in the algorithm through really the three main sources: search, suggested, and browse. And I go into detail on this in other videos, so I won't do that here. Be sure to check out the YouTube playlist. But understanding this helps you dominate and bring in consistent traffic at all times without you putting any more effort or work. So what YouTube does and why it's so beautiful is that it's a search engine owned by the largest search engine in the world. So if you use it the right way, it's consistently helping you be discovered by new ideal clients because you're showing up in their search results or their suggested results or their browse results. So that's where you start to get traffic from.
In order for a funnel to work, what does it need? Pop quiz—just talked about this; you should put it in the comments. Gold star! Traffic. You are correct. Traffic. It needs traffic. It doesn't have traffic, but it's not gonna work because there's no one actually going through the funnel. So that's why we don't build this until now because if you waste time on tech, landing pages, funnels, spending money on this stuff, you're just being frustrated. Now the funnel is getting filled with traffic and ideal clients, and that takes them to their conversion site, which is where you're ultimately going to enroll clients in an evergreen fashion, meaning consistently. You know how to predict your income; you have stability throughout the entire year, which brings us to step number 12.
Now once you have all of these elements in place—I don't know why I keep doing this—your only job is to market and sell, and you don't have to market so hard when you have all this established and set up because you know exactly how many people you need to attract, and it's probably way less than you think. You don't need millions of views, or you don't need to go viral, or you don't need to follow up on the latest trend or be on the latest platform. You know it works, and you just stick to that. That's the fundamental business; you double down on what actually works, and at this point you know, and so you can be a really mature and efficient and free CEO of your business.
Most importantly, when you get to this step, what do you think you need to know? Your numbers, which we kind of already know based on our first evaluation—we're first enrolling people into the pop version of this—but this gets more sophisticated and even more dialed in as you actually have sales under your belt and you actually have clients who've enrolled because you know what your actual conversion rate is. So you can use that—out of x amount of leads, how many people do you convert into clients on a monthly basis, for example—you actually know, and so you use that as your baseline. You go, okay, I'm converting clients at 50%, which some of our clients are, and so if that's the case, if you want two clients in the door every month that's five thousand dollars to make 10K a month, you just need to do four calls. And so knowing these numbers empowers you, and you can stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and chasing every client under the sun. Okay, knowing your numbers means that your efforts for marketing are gonna happen through on-demand and evergreen, and I think one of the mistakes that people make is when they start to see success with their online program is they stop actually talking about it. And so your Evergreen traffic is going to work in the background for you for the rest of time, but it doesn't mean that you don't need to do things like on-demand to create stability. If you're seeing a sales slump, if you're seeing things kind of fall off, you can do things like posts—we call them profitable content posts—they're hyper-intentional on on-demand platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever may work, but you need to do a lot less when you have this working for you. You can do things like live webinars, you know, quarterly to add a boost of leads, etc.
So when you know your numbers, you know exactly what needs to be done in terms of your marketing efforts, and you're not spreading yourself thin or doing too much, and you're making it really seamless and predictable and repeatable for yourself to hit the exact income goals that you have at this point in the business. And at this step, you're the most empowered version of yourself because you know all of your key metrics that are required for you to scale to wherever you want to take this, and this is how our clients are able to scale to multi-million dollar online programs. And at this point, you have cash flow consistently coming in the door, so you have stability in the business; you can save runway, meaning that if the business were to stop, you have money in the bank to keep things afloat. You have the financial stability, the mental clarity to continue to grow from a place of abundance instead of panic and being in a reactive state. That is the beauty of building the business in this way.
And most importantly, you're at a place where everything is proven and moving along really smoothly, so you can actually reinvest into the business—things like team, other resources that might help automate or delegate parts of the business to free up even more of your time. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Like I said, we've been supporting clients and creating their highly scalable and impactful online programs for years now in every niche imaginable—from account installers to bakers to dentists to doctors to dancers to DJs to everything in between. So if you're at a place where you're like, I have the skills, I have the expertise, I can do this, I highly encourage you to fill out that application as thoroughly as possible below to get the process started so we can actually support you with those next steps. So if this is helpful for you, give it a like, be sure to comment with your light bulb moment below—it is my love language, words of affirmation; I love hearing what you take away from these videos—so be sure to comment and subscribe for new videos every single week. Thank you so much for watching. I have so many resources below for you in terms of playlists that'll complement this video, so be sure to watch those next. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.