Myth # 3 – You Need a Complicated Strategy To Launch An Online Course or Program
I’m sure you’ve seen ads or read blog posts, about needing to take months to build an email list.
About stacking different ad campaigns.
About setting up lots of funnels.
And this is great, if you’re at the point where you want to take what you’ve got and scale it up.
If, on the other hand, right now what you want to do is launch an new offer, validate it, and get those first people through your program, then you need to simplify to profit.
In fact, the organic strategies that I’m going to talk about can keep bearing fruit over and over into the future, even when you want to add paid advertising to the mix.
Let’s be clear about something here though.
When I say something’s not complicated – by that I mean it doesn’t require lots of technology, and you shoudn’t be spending loads of time on busy work to get lots of things set up.
So it’s straightforward, but it’s not necessarily easy.
Because the strategies that work, often require you to put yourself out of your comfort zone.
And the busy tasks tend to be the ones we like doing because they keep us safe, or they make us feel safe, they make us feel like we’re moving forward. But in fact, you’re just filling up your time with activities that aren’t really helping you to move forward.
Let’s talk some details.
The first thing you need to do before you decide to launch anything new, particularly if it’s a group program, is that you need to set yourself some goals.
You need to know what it is that you want to sell, how many people you want to sell it to, and how much money you want to make.
Don’t confuse being uncomplicated with needing to be a low-ticket offer.
And also don’t think that because maybe this is the first time you’re offering what you do as a group program, that somehow the value is less.
So you need to get that hurdle out of the way first.
You’re still going to be charging high-ticket for this, it’s just the way that you’re delivering it that’s going to be different.
The value and transformation is still the same as it’s always been for what you do with your clients.
So bearing that in mind, once you know your revenue goals, you know what you’re charging and you know how many people that you need to get on this program.
Let’s say you want to do the first round of it with 10 people and you want to charge them $1,000 each. That’s a $10,000 program out of the gate.
We’re not talking tiny amounts of money.
Yup, I’m not talking 6-figure launches, 7-figure juggernauts…but I just want you to see that adding an online component to your business can be very profitable, very quickly.
So, let’s say you want 10 people on your program.
That’s not a massive number to hit, and so you can use simple strategies such as:
- Reaching out to people that you know already
- Talking to old clients and asking if they know of somebody who might be interested in what it is that you’re offering
- Posting about it on social media, and you need to do that regularly.
- Posts on your Facebook page, or if you’ve got a Facebook group, let people in there know what you’re offering
- Going into Facebook groups and starting a conversation with people who you think might be a good fit. Obviously without being spammy.
- It’s about sharing what it is that you’re doing, being visible.
- If you’ve got an email list you’re going to need to start emailing them a bit more regularly if you don’t do that already.
Let’s talk about emailing for a second.
I know this is a big block for a lot of people, that they get worried about people unsubscribing, if they start selling too much.
If they start emailing too regularly.
But, so what?
If the people who are on your email list to consume your free content, get annoyed at you for trying to make money from your business and your expertise then you don’t want them on your email list.
Mini-rant here because this really annoys me – this whole idea that trying to run a profitable business is somehow a bad thing, and that we should all be out there just doing things from the goodness of our heart without needing to consider the financial compensation that we are all entitled to get.
Anyway, that’s a topic for another day.
If you’re launching something new, to keep it simple like this you need to give yourself a deadline as well.
Whether that’s 2 weeks, 3 weeks maybe a month, something like that. Give yourself a finite period of time where you’re going to be talking about this, trying to sell it, starting those conversations.
And obviously if you give yourself a window of 3-4 weeks – you’ve got time in there as well to still be adding value, so that you get that balance right.
Because obviously you don’t need to be scared of selling but you can’t be selling all the time either.
So, what you need to do it:
- Consistently show up
- Consistently start the conversations
- Consistently let people know what it is that you’re offering,
- Be transparent about it being a new way of delivering your current expertise
- Throw in some nice bonuses for people who join you on this first round.
What can the bonuses look like?
It doesn’t have to be a financial bonus, it could be some extra one-on-one time with you.
It could be that you structure this first round with a more VIP feel to it, than you’re planning on it being going forward.
There’s lots of ways to add value, to make people feel special and to bring them in to work with you in this new format, without cutting prices, without selling your soul, and without feeling like you’re doing something sleazy.
Doing something like this for the first time can be daunting and often works best with accountability and with some structure, so if you wanted to talk to me about that, book a strategy session and le’t’s have a chat about where you’re at and what it is that you want to achieve.
And I’ll help you to put a plan together to get from where you are to where you want to go.