Episode 56: How to Create an Irresistible Online Course Offer!

Get ready, because everything is about to change. There's a new way of living life and doing business that will blow your mind. This is a podcast all about the timing of life and the timing of success. It's what we call the Right on Time life. And you are listening to the Right on Time podcast with Amber McHugh. Hey. Hey. Welcome to the Right on Time podcast. This episode today is going to be the episode you want to listen to. If you are making changes in your marketing strategy or your business model and you're looking to layer in courses and you want or you've got a course and you want to take that course. Evergreen, anybody? Anybody down for some reoccurring revenue? You are going to want to listen to how our guest today, Gemma, does life and how she runs and operates her business in a simple, streamlined way with some very specific priorities. In addition, we dive a little bit into the other revenue stream she has in her life. So if you are a modern CEO, growing your business and are looking for more reoccurring revenue or revenue streams to pour back into your life and the people you love, then you're going to want to listen to to this episode with the amazing Gemma Bonham Carter. Without further ado, let's do this. Gemma, you are here. Thank you so much for hopping on with us. How are you today?

I am so good. I am so glad to be here. Me too.

You are here even when you have got a lot going on, a lot shaking over there.

Oh, my goodness. It is been a day. Let's just say school has started. We are week one in. We are already needing to go get Covid tests.

So, you know, this is our new reality. I've been thinking a lot lately about the pivots that we made. We pivoted, of course. So many of us made adjustments when Covid became a thing, and then we've made adjustments throughout. And I'm starting to feel like, all right, I've got to settle into the new air quotes, new normal. Because people were saying that for a while, like, what's the new normal going to be? Like, what will it look like in the future? But I'm like, I don't know. This just not knowing, is it.

That's right. Exactly. Like, we're in it. This is it. Yeah, this is it.

And throughout it all, I mean, we've been connected for several years, but I've been watching what you've been doing throughout this season, and you are up to such cool stuff. So I'm pumped to dive in and Actually take it a little bit of a different direction first. And just the lifestyle that you live, like, you really set out to do things in a really special way. Could you just give us your philosophies on, like, how you want to live and show up in life?

Yeah, sure. I think it's that I'm just really stubborn and, like, you know, society tells us it needs to look like this, and I'm just not willing to accept that. And I just really want to have my cake and eat it too. I don't know. So, I mean, it's really, as you mentioned, I've got kids. It's really important to me that, like, that was always on my agenda. I always knew I wanted to be a mom, and so I always thought, and it's funny, like, my mom, scientist, incredibly, like, passionate in her career, didn't really have a maternity leave with me, was always a working mom. And I always knew that I wanted to have more. Not that and she and I are the closest, but, like, I just knew I wanted something a little different, and I wanted to have more time with my kids and be at home and do the mom things that I really wanted to do and the Pinterest crafts and all those things. So I really set out. Now, I will say my path in business was not a linear one, but I definitely set out to build a business that allowed me to live exactly the way I wanted to live, which meant being at home more with my kids, being able to pick them up from school, take them to their after school things, taking random Wednesdays off to go explore some new, new place, you know, and summers and holidays and travel. Like, you know, my husband and I are very dedicated, let's say travelers, or that's a big priority for us. And it was before we had kids, and we weren't willing to kind of give that up just because we had kids. So obviously, Covid's put a bit of a wrench into that. Our travel lately has looked like a lot of local road trips, but that's a big part of our life, too. And so really just having a vision for that that I'm not willing to compromise on has meant that I' built a business that, you know, it's not always been like roses, but it's brought me to this place, which I'm feeling pretty good about.

Oh, my goodness. I love that. I love how you started. I'm stubborn. This is the way that it's gonna be. And anything that doesn't align with that, I'm gonna sort what I say keep on driving. Like, drive right past that. Let's go to the destination that you're focused on. And you have a couple of different streams of revenue coming into your house because I know that you've got rentals and then you've got the online business and maybe I'm even missing something, but could you share a little bit about.

Your screens of revenue? Yeah, it's a bit of a joke in our household because my husband, my poor husband does all the accounting and bookkeeping and stuff. And it's so complicated in our QuickBooks. It's out of control and I just keep wanting to add more things. But, yeah, we've always been pretty interested in real estate. My very first business online was actually a home decor and DIY blog. I still run that actually, and totally passively on the side. So we from very early days knew that real estate was going to be a thing for us. So we bought a house and put a basement apartment in it right away. So we still have a tenant actually down in our basement. But we've now bought two additional rental properties that we fixed up and rented. So that's super fun for us. So we have that income coming in. I run my business, which in and of itself has like 18 revenue streams, like different offers, affiliate things. Like, I still have my blog that makes ad revenue and affiliate revenue and all these different things happening. And then my husband has a more standard job. But even still with my husband, so funny, he is in IT and works contract for the government and the government always tries to get him to have a permanent role. And I keep being like, no, I don't want to be tied into a box with that either. His contract means that he can take 10 weeks off a year and just like, give us more flexibility and freedom. And so, yeah, I like, put limits on him too, as to, like, what he's allowed to do, because I want to. I never want to give up that, like, that feeling of freedom.

That's amazing. Do you. So you had this vision, you said early on, like, real estate is going to be a part of what we do. How did you learn about that? Where did that come from?

Oh, God, I didn't really learn about it. It's trial by fire. I mean, this is embarrassing to say, but I watched a lot of HGTV and I watched. I don't know if you guys know Scott McGilvery. He's like a Canadian guy, has a show called Income Property. And that was why we bought a house with a basement that we could turn into a basement apartment was because we watched like 45 episodes of him doing it for other people and it paid for the mortgage. We were like, well, why wouldn't you do that? So we did that and then it just kind of evolved from there. And I'm a big believer in like listening to a lot of podcasts, reading a lot of books, talking to people, figuring it out as you go. And that's what we've done with real estate. That's what I've done with my own business. That's what I've done. Even with my health and wellbeing, that's a really big priority for me. And especially just this past year. Gone through some stuff. Same thing. Listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of books, talk to a lot of people, figure it out, test things.

So good, so good. Would you say your real estate properties bring you positive cash flow right now or they'll pay the mortgage? Thinking about a loan, long term investment.

It'S more the long term game. So one of them is fully break even. The other, we're in the green by like, I would say $100 a door, if that makes sense. So a door meaning like per unit. So it's a triplex. So per month we would make around 300 bucks from that building. But it just goes back into the building. Right. We just stick it into an account that's for that building. Should there ever be a dryer that breaks or a plumbing issue that needs to be repaired or whatever, we have a buffer. And really the big dream is to imagine we had 20, 30, 40 buildings like that that eventually have mortgages that are paid off, and that's a retirement. That's the plan.

That's awesome. And as you think about that, do you manage all those properties yourself or.

Do you have property managers? No, we manage them right now.

Okay.

We're gonna hit a tipping point soon where, like, it's not gonna make sense anymore. But for now, I mean, we're still, I feel like we're still in that phase where we wanna learn the ropes really well. It's kind of like in entrepreneurship and I think you talk about this too, is like knowing the system, figuring it out yourself, and then cloning yourself and like having someone come in and do what you do. So we're still in that early stage, I would say.

Oh, so good. I love that. You know, it's interesting. I definitely wanted to learn all the things for a long time, but as the businesses grow, I'm like, there's no way I'M going to know all the things anymore. And someone said like exactly that to me. A client said, you know, because you know everything. Like I don't anymore. And if I tried to know everything, we would not be able to move ahead. So it's an interesting shift that happens over time.

That's right.

You may be seeing this in your online business with 18 revenue streams. Estimated. Estimated 18 maybe.

Totally. You're right. Like there that. You're right. There's a point at which that shifts. Yeah, we're not there yet with the real estate business, but maybe one day we will be.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

What's been awesome now pivoting. You mentioned the online business, which is what we're really going to dive deep into here today. Your online business, tell us what that's made up of and what you gift to people.

Yeah, sure. So my kind of special sauce and what I love to do is to help people turn what they know into online courses. I mean predominantly courses, but it might be a membership or a group coaching program. Any kind of digital offer like that, not only create and launch it, but then moving forward, how do we scale this thing? How do we, how do we use this as really the business model for our business? A lot of people I work with maybe started off with one on one services and are shifting into this model. So you know, through that shift and evolution and how do we scale it up? So that's, that's really what I love to do. I, I'm a sucker for digital products and digital marketing. I could talk about it all day long.

Oh my goodness. Well, I'm thrilled because that's where we are going to spend the rest of this episode. Unless something amazing comes up because we roll with it right on time. We'll take any pivot we need to. But you help people create these profitable online course business to get more freedom. The dream, living the dream as you are. You exemplify this so well and so often.

Right?

There are people who want this, you know, heck, I want more of this always on my consulting side of the business. And as we're starting and building the course and building the framework, how if we want to do this and we want to do this right and we want to grow this to 100,000 in revenue, 200, 500. You know, how, where do we start?

Oh, such a good question. I mean the foundational piece of where you start is like looking inward at yourself and figuring out where you want to be and what you want to. You know, people always say to Me like Gemma, how do I pick the right idea? And we can get paralyzed in that. Sometimes you just need to pick a idea and move forward with it and then see what happens. So sometimes, like looking inward, looking at the market, figuring that stuff out is sort of step one. But then step two, once we've sort of got an idea there, there's sort of two paths that you sort of need to do at the same time. One is really making sure that you're starting to grow an audience around that topic and that area of expertise. And then the other thing is starting to think about how you can turn that into something like a course or program. And sometimes when I work with truly new people to this and they haven't done any one on one kind of work before, I'll actually encourage them. They have a course idea. I'll encourage them to do something like five one on one strategy sess with clients. They can actually help clients through at that level first to get a really good sense of what are the struggles, what's their system for, like helping those people achieve that thing and work out the kinks as they're growing their audience at the same time. And growing your audience can take a thousand different forms. We could talk about content marketing. One of my favorite things is getting in front of other people's audiences, whether that's on podcasts like this or, you know, being of service to other people. But by doing so, you get some exposure yourself and you can build, start building your email list and then I'm a big believer in selling before you've created it. So I do not want you to go and spend three months, you know, figuring out teachable, recording videos, making some pretty canva workbooks if you haven't actually sold the thing. So we are going to go. I have a golden number of like, I like people to have 200 people on their email list before they go and try a founding launch of something. So we make sure we hit that first and then we're going to go and put this thing out and we're going to do a founding launch and we're going to see if there are people who are like biting and taking it. And maybe that founding group is 10 people. That's amazing. Work with the 10 people and now create it in real time with them. This is like you're developing on the go and by the end of that six weeks or eight weeks or whatever that looks like with that group, you've now built out a program, you've built out a leverageable asset in Your business that this is now just cracking the door open to what's coming next and how you can grow that and scale it and build it into something even bigger. I gotta tell you this story. I was just talking with a former client and student yesterday. We had been working together late last year and early into this year, 2021. She's a bakery owner. She was getting started with teaching other food entrepreneurs about how to run their bakery successfully. She has an amazing bakery in Illinois, and her goal at the beginning of the year was $50,000 in revenue from this new arm of her business. She has one main course, and I talked with her yesterday, and she's on track to do a quarter of a million in this year alone from her course. And that was because it was like that door cracking open with that first little launch. But she stayed consistent with it. Has not had shiny object syndrome. Right. She's just, like, doing the things over and over and over again, and it has ramped it up in such a big way. I felt I choked up with tears. I was just so excited for her.

Ooh, I got. Yeah, I get goosebumps a lot.

Those stories.

Yes. This is what, you know, I saw someone post the other day, a friend posted on their Facebook page, like, this is the life I've created. And now my mission is to help as many other people as possible create the life they want and have this freedom and have this flexibility. So when you hear a story like.

Exactly. And she's about to have her second baby. When we first started to work together on her intake form, her thing said, like, one of the goals was, I just want to get to a place where my husband and I can have a conversation about having baby number two, because right now, we financially don't feel like we could. And then actually, she was, like, a coaching client of mine. On our very last call, she told me she was pregnant. And I was like, oh, my God, this is just incredible. Right?

Unreal. That feels so good. So it's interesting because the way that you described creating the course is the way that I created my first course as well.

Right.

And that beta, building the community, big focus. While I'm building the community, we're doing market research.

Okay.

Then we're launching the program. I have the outline for. It's not fully done yet. And to get real real about that, I would spend the weekend before the module for that in flight. We're creating this for the people as we go. I was loading it up, like, at the end of the day on Sunday. Finally I'm like, please, everything needs to go smoothly. Which is why for me, it was so important that the technology that I used going back to like, okay, we're doing a lot of this to start, that it was simple, that I could manage it all. If something broke, like, if something bro broke in WordPress, it wasn't going to.

Be good for me.

If something broke in these other platforms I decided to work on, I was good. I navigated it. So I've kept it simple for myself in that beta. And we don't have to put the pressure on to your point. Get the fancy program, like, focus on serving your clients and getting them what they need in whatever way, shape or form it is. And then we adapt.

Exactly. The most important thing is, can you get that result for that person? Because that result is going to turn into a testimonial. The testimonials are going to make it so much easier launch number two to like, have an even bigger bang and more success and make it easier to sell. And so if that means delivering videos by even like email or dropping it into your Facebook group, like, even if you don't have a teaching platform, it's just putting the video somewhere where they can find them and then from the, you know, showing up, answering questions. And this is the other thing. Like if there are supporting things like digital stuff or workbooks or whatever, create them in Google Docs. You can make them pretty in Canva later. Let's actually just stay focus on your people and as long as they're feeling like their hand is held to get through that for that round, that's your most important thing. And yeah, it's gonna probably be a Sunday night scramble and that's okay. That's what it's gonna look like this first time around. But have the vision of, of what you're building.

You also mentioned strategy sessions. Doing strategy sessions to get your process in place, do market research, et cetera. Do you recommend that those are paid working agreements?

Yeah, paid, yeah, yeah, always paid. Partly because you can't ever validate something if you don't get people to pay dollars for it. Like, I could offer free stuff and free strategy sessions and that could be great and I might learn a lot from them. But what if I go to the market then and actually try and put a dollar value on that and no one buys? Well, I've just wasted a lot of time. So validation is really only going to come, like if you have people paying a dollar for it. And it doesn't matter if it's These don't have to be $500 strategy sessions. These can be 97 bucks. But even just having that transfer of money tells you there are people out there who want to learn about this thing enough to pay $97 for it. And that's giving you a sign that this is something that you can explore. And the other thing is often for those people, they're fairly new. So you do. I mean, we can't just come out the gate at like a high ticket price point unless we have stuff to back it up. If you're coming in and you're like, you already have a breadth of experience, that means you can put a big price point on it, do that. But if you're new, let's just actually get some quantity rolling through the door and let's do five or ten or however many of those so that we can get that experience and make a book.

Yeah. Oh, good. Okay, now I want to go to your specific experience with taking your first course that you turned Evergreen Recurring Revenue Sells. I'm going to air quotes this for anyone who's listening and can't see the fingers who sells, you know, while you sleep. So tell us about what was the first course that you started selling? Reoccurring Revenue Evergreen Passive.

Yeah, so it was my second course, which was, and it was called Launch youh Shop. And so it was for bloggers who wanted to launch an online shop as part of their blog that to sell physical products, because I did this, I sold T shirts and mugs and art prints and all these little things as part of my blog business. And so I was helping bloggers do that too. And so that was the first course that I felt like I really had success with in my just regular organic launching and realized, okay, I've got something here. People like this, they want it, I'm selling it. How can I get sales more consistently and not have to rely only on the launches that might be two or three times a year? So. And I also didn't have a very big audience at the time either. So this idea of like, it's not like my launches were like six figure launches, you know, I couldn't. I was making maybe like $8,000 in a launch or $10,000 in a launch. It's not going to last me, you know, enough time. So I knew that I needed to explore this evergreen idea. And I went as per what I talked about earlier. Listened to all the podcasts, read all the books, listened to lots of people, watched what other people were doing, understood it, not Just from the digital space, but also looking at even other industries. And just how are people creating sales systems, essentially? And so I tried a lot of stuff and what ended up working the best, and I still try a lot of stuff. I will test new things all the time. And in my membership, the passive project, I'm always sharing with them, like, okay, guys, I do these quarterly reviews. I was like, here's what I tested this quarter, and here's sometimes here's the great success we've seen, and here's what really flopped. So don't do the thing. I did, but I got started and really just created that first email funnel and started to figure out the tech around that. And it was very plain and simple and not very successful. But there was. I started to make a few sales, right? And that was like, okay, hang on. That very first evergreen sale that comes in, you're like, wait, what? Wait, hang on. A total stranger bought that from me. So then I tried to figure out, okay, how can I make it, like, how can I get the conversion rate of this funnel working better? And so that meant things like, I added more emails to it. I used a webinar, which, like, I hadn't been doing at first. So it was really like a lead magnet that led into a webinar that had about seven or eight emails off the end of it. They did have some urgency there at the end, which was, I think it was like an extra bonus. If you buy during that time, you've got a bonus. And I started to see that there was. This is where I started to get really into data and numbers and all these things. And I think I was getting about a 4% conversion rate in that funnel, which, like, I started to feel really excited about. And so then. And that's when I decided, okay, let me layer in a paid ad strategy. Because at that time, I didn't have much of an audience to be organically getting enough people into that funnel to really make a go of it. And so I said to myself, okay, I'm going to launch it. Like, live, launch it, make some money. That money that I made, I put toward, like, mentally put it toward three months of working with an ads agency. And I just told myself, if I lose it, it is what it is. And that was the biggest investment I'd ever made at the time. In my business. I didn't even have a VA at the time. And I could see that if I can make that thing work with paid ads, that would then mean I could hire the va, I could get Some help I could go bigger. And so I really took a gamble, hired someone. And first month, I think we broke even. But second month we started to turn a profit. And by month three, we were definitely turning a profit. And then we just scaled from there. And I've actually never not run paid ads in my business since that point because I could just see the. It just allows you to speed up, right? So that was really the beginning for me. And then. And that was like in 2017 or something like that. And so ever since then, I've just like, I've launched new products. I've put different things on Evergreen. I've tested different things. Webinars, video series, you know, plain funnels, like all these different things. And I so enjoy it. I will say, like, the bottom line of going Evergreen is still just, you know, creating something that adds value for your audience in the moment and making a great offer like that. Those are the bottom line things. It's not about special tactics or sneaky tricks. It's so good.

I mean, you gotta have a great offer, right? Otherwise the rest of it, it's gonna be uphill battle, if it even works. So start with strong foundation.

Yeah. What.

So you said you've tried a lot of Evergreen things since then. You've got Evergreen going now. What's been your most successful Evergreen funnel?

Ooh, my most. My highest converting funnel. So I'm going to answer this actually with a two prong answer because one relates to conversion rate, one relates to dollars and cents sense. My highest funnel from a conversion rate point of view was one that started. It was for my Passive Project membership. I'll walk you through it at a high level. It started with some funnel blueprints. So I would say like, okay, basically here's the lead magnet. It's like a visual blueprint of some different email funnels that you can implement in your business. So it was a lead magnet. They'd sign up for that. I'd walk them through the funnels in some emails and then I would present them with a webinar that was about 45 minutes and high, high value. Really teaching them more about what funnels could do in their business and then open the doors to the Passive Project membership at the end of it. I think we had like an 8% conversion on that funnel from cold traffic. Like that wasn't even warmed up organic people that was cold. So that has been my highest conversion rate to date on something that's been Evergreen. I'll tell you what was tricky about it though, because it's a membership. The buy in price was low at the time I was selling PP for I think it was like 60 bucks a month. We're now at 97amonth. So it was really a low buy in. And so although we had that high conversion rate, to actually get it to work in terms of profitability with ads was tricky. So that was My best converting 1. My highest revenue generating one is the one that I actually have running right now, which is for course creator school. And it's basic. It starts with a masterclass or live training, whatever you want to or sorry, not live training in this case, just a prerecorded training. And by the way, we never pretend like it's a live training because that's just such a off putting thing for people, I find. So we start with the masterclass and then we've got about 10 emails that come afterwards and there are a few pieces of urgency in there like they get some extra bonuses and stuff if they decide to buy during the funnel. And that converts at right now it's about 3% but because it's a higher ticket product, we can run that all day long and have it work for us. So.

Oh, love it.

Yeah.

What you mentioned conversion on both of these, these are evergreen conversions. So 3%, 8%, phenomenal. But from a revenue those numbers didn't work. So to give people a baseline and comparison point, when you are launching outside of Evergreen and it's live, do you see similar conversion, higher conversion? What's your conversion look like in your live launch?

They're higher. And that's typically what we see with all of our students and clients is when you're doing a live launch particular particularly when you have nurtured that audience. So you have been working hard at growing your audience and putting out content, sending those email newsletters, being on Instagram, whatever that looks like for you. And those people are just kind of waiting with bated breath to take the next step with you. Right. In your business. So we tend to see higher conversion rates for live launches. I think the highest one we ever had was around 14 or 15% which was actually a five day challenge style of launch. And I think the reason was because they spent five days with me, like showing up me over, delivering the heck out of those five days and teaching them tons of stuff to get them ready to launch a course. So on day five they were like, all right Gemma, you've, you know, you've made me dial in my topic outline what this program is going to look like, you know, done all these things over the five days. Now I'm ready to, like, hop in and finish it off with you inside, of course, grader school. And so we had a really good success with that last spring, which I think now will just make it a recurring event. Yeah, that's awesome.

And you mentioned 14, 15% of live launch. That feels, as I think about data points and hearing launch conversion from people. Right. That we talk to colleagues, et cetera. That feels phenomenal.

It felt really good. Yeah, I will say, like. Yeah, I will say like, let me preface by like, remembering that for that launch, like, I. This is the other benefit of doing Evergreen was like, I didn't run ads for it because I truly just wanted to use my organic, warm audience that I had already built. So had we run ads and brought cold people into that challenge, I'm sure that the conversion rate would have gone down because they need more time to get in with me. Right. But the beautiful thing of running Evergreen all year long and particularly from with ads, so you're really getting volume there. Is that. Sure, people are going to sign up for that and what, like 97% aren't going to buy from you during the funnel, but they're going to hopefully stick around with you on your email list and keep hearing from you and keep learning from you. So that when you do do that live launch, it's why I like pairing them together. Because when you do do that live launch, that's now all they need. The, like, the hype of the live launch is all they need to make a quick yes kind of decision. So good.

So good. And I love that you have this, like, warm because it's true. There's a relationship that's built. Warm, engaged, connected relationship has been built. It tends to convert higher. And then your cold evergreen 3% love this. Now you bring them together. You alternate your calendar throughout the year. Love Evergreens. Constantly going.

Yep. Correct.

Okay.

Constantly going. I don't even turn the ads off when we're doing live launches. We just keep it rolling.

I love it. And so how do you break up your calendar so you're not feeling crazy busy all year? Know you've got good balance.

Yeah. So I mean, the thing with Evergreen is like, you do need to set aside some time to initially when you're creating it. And then every so often I set some time aside this summer when my kids were at camp and I could just hang with my laptop and like have quiet, some quiet days just to go back and tweak and make those emails really great. And come up with maybe some new angles for ads and things like that. So you do need to check in with your Evergreen pretty consistently. But once you've got it set up, it doesn't take a lot of, like, management or time, especially if you've offloaded the ads. So that just is able to run all year long. And so my live launches, I tend to do two a year, so I really like to do one in the spring and then one kind of late fall. And those tend to be good times for me for my Course Creator School program. And what I love about that model is that I can do, I can bring some creative energy to the launches because I've got the Evergreen rolling and I'm not feeling. I mean, I always want my launches to perform well, but I'm also not coming at it from, like, a desperate kind of place. I'm more coming at it from like, okay, what can I do that's going to light me up, be really fun, and really get a lot of people excited? And so that was where like, the challenge came from. Right. I just, it was a new idea. And I think you can have so much more fun with your live launches if you've kind of got the security of the Evergreen happening in the background.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so that's sort of my. That's how it shakes out with my calendar for Course Creator School. And then we do have the Passive Project membership, which I sort of casually do launches for that don't feel overwhelming. I just do little flash opens and have members kind of come in. I've built it out in such a way that often what happens is my course Creator school students, as they move into alumni, just flow into Passive Project. So it's not like I need to be constantly doing launches for Passive Project because it seems to sort of fill itself.

So awesome. How many members do you have in Passive Project right now?

Right now I have a 160, I want to say, which is like a nice number because it allows me to know them well. Like, I know their offers. We have great, like, monthly coaching calls. We've ebbed and flowed. Like, in the past, we have had up to 300 members at a time. And I don't know, there's just something nice about where we're sitting right now.

So beautiful. I am wondering, as you think about what's happening in marketing, business, online, the world, whatever comes to mind for you, because this is the Right On Time podcast. What is right On Time for you? Like, what is now? What is current? What is the Thing that people need.

To know right now about their. Like, you mean not for me, right? Like, for themselves. Like, what's right on time for right now.

Okay.

Okay. So I think that I. Okay, it's a good question. I feel like I could go in a lot of directions with that one. But I think that more than ever before last year, we saw so many people move online with their businesses, and I think more than ever before, there's a lot of noise in the online space. And so it brings me up two things. Number one is that you need to craft offers that are truly, like, irresistible and really highly sellable. And there's, like, some weight that we could talk about that later. But, like, there's some things that people need to be doing to make sure that they stand out in the marketplace. And number two is doing it your way. Not necessarily having to. Not talking about reinventing the wheel, but, like, learn from everybody, learn the strategies, but ultimately do what's in alignment and feels good for you and your business and listen to that intuition and also watch outside of your market. I think some of the best ideas that I see people having is when they're looking at other markets, other businesses, they're off Instagram, you're doing other things, and then you can inject those or bring those ideas into your business to allow you to stand out. How are you different from what everybody else in your space is doing? That's a really important question to ask yourself and to revisit, too. I don't know if I really answered the question. That's just where I wanted to go with it. You sure did.

I love it. It's perfect. That's how it goes. Right on time. And the piece that you said about how do you make the offer sellable, irresistible? It's funny because as you were saying that before you even said, oh, we can talk about that later, I'm like, oh, good. I'm glad she said that, because I think even about my offers, and I know clients. How can we just take this up a notch? How can we make this more unique? How can we make this stand out? So what do you recommend on that?

Yeah, so I think that, I mean, some of the foundational things that you and I both are. Both totally understand, but sometimes I think people miss is making sure that a. You're solving a real pain point for people with your program, not just something that you think is cool. Like, has to be something that people genuinely are struggling with and want to fix and that they will be willing to pay money to Fix too. Like that's an important second, second part of that question. And having a really clear like transformation for that student. Knowing where they are when they enter versus where they are when they come out of your program and making sure that you know that so clearly that you can speak to it in a sentence. And it's funny, I posted a reel about this the other day and just saying like if you are mumbling over your essentially your elevator pitch for your course, no one is going to understand what it is and no one is going to buy it because if you don't have total clarity around it, no one else will. And people started to comment saying like, okay, Gemma, here's my elevator pitch. What do you think? So I was trying to just give some coaching in the Instagram comments, but that's really foundational now. Next step is the actual irresistibility of your offer. I think if you can incorporate these five things for me, it allows you to create a well rounded offer that will appeal to the most types of people. And we know everybody learns differently and everyone is a different style of buyer. I buy for like the templates and stuff other people buy for like the community or the connection. Right. There's all these different things. So in a nutshell, let me just give them to you. Number one are like the teaching aspects. So you need to have obviously whether this is like, like video lessons, audio lessons, there's whatever those teaching aspects look like. You have those in there. Number two are digital assets, meaning the workbooks, the checklists, any kind of digital download, printables, calendars, whatever that looks like, spreadsheets, maybe for your business you have some digital assets. Third are shortcuts. This is what I buy for. So third are like the templates, the swipe files, the whatever you can provide for people that are allowing them to implement easier and faster. That's what shortcuts are. Interactive component is number four. So interactive looks like maybe that is sort of the traditional Facebook group. Maybe it's a Slack channel. Maybe it's the. Maybe it's monthly zoom calls with you. Maybe you have voxer access, maybe you're sending emails. You get to decide what that looks like. Just because other people do a Facebook group and zoom calls doesn't mean that you need to and like get be interesting around what that looks like for you. And then the fifth are. I don't have a good name for it, it's just other. But the fifth are like if you are able to. Now we're getting like a little techy but if you're able to create like an app or a tool or something different that people are able to use as part of their the program with you. Okay, this is a really big example, but I'm going to give it friends of mine, Jason and Caroline Zook, they have a membership called the Wandering Aimfully Membership and they created Teachery. Teachery is an online course platform. When you become a lifetime member in their membership, you get lifetime access to Teachery. What a no brainer. Like I bought into their thing the first time they ever launched it years ago because I already used Teachery and I was paying 50 bucks a month for it and now you're telling me I can pay what, two grand and get it for life? No brainer. So if you have anything like that that you can incorporate, incorporate it for me. Here's just another example. It wasn't software or anything like that. It was a coupon code. So when I was selling Launch youh Shop, I recommended people use a particular print on demand Drop Shipping company, Printed Mint was the name of them. And I connected with them and I said, listen, I'm going to be sending people your way. My students, is there anything that you can provide for my students that would be like an incentive for them to want to choose you over Printify? Printful, all these different ones out there. And they were so thrilled, wrote back and said, yeah, let's give a $50 coupon code to all of your students who open up a Printed Mint account and want to order some merch to like test us out. So every student got a $50 coupon code. I went to Shopify and got them a little deal with Shopify too so they could open their Shopify store. So get thinking about that, get creative on how you can bring some other elements into your course that really suddenly turn it into an experience that stands out from what else is out there.

Oh, that was good. Little wow factor, little no brainer, make it a no brainer, seal the deal. When you were other. I'm like, what is this doing for me? So I'll brainstorm some more options. So much fun. Well, Gemma, I love talking to you. I love learning from you. I'm so grateful for this time we've had together. I have a feeling people are going to want to know more after listening to this. Where can people find you?

Okay, so on Instagram, I'm Emma Bonham Carter and that's sort of where I hang out the most from a social platform perspective. If they are interested, if you're interested in really creating and launching that first like wildly successful course or group program. I do have a training that you might want to like go sign up for. So It's Gemma Bonham Carter.com class and otherwise. If you're just interested in learning more about my programs or hopping into the passive project, if you are an experienced course creator, just come visit me@gemmabottomcarter.com it's all there.

Love it. And we did not announce yet you are going to be in our upcoming Plan A Thon event and you're going to be going deep into what we need to think about forevergreen to be successful with Evergreen in the year ahead. I know I will be listening to that planning session.

So excited to be a part of the Plan A Thon.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Every year is phenomenal. I feel every year better and better. Every year I see say I'm like it's the best year ever.

And you're so good at like having those events or even the offers that we look forward to as Amber McHugh fans, we look forward to these things. And so yeah, the consistency and just like pulling that out every year. I just love it every year. This is our ninth year. Next year is 10.

So we're going to have to need to go big. Exactly. Going big. Every year gets a little bit bigger, a little bit better. So you definitely want to be there with us this year. But Gemma, thank you so much for hanging out. We will be chatting again soon and we'll keep everyone posted on all of the details. Be sure if you got a nugget out of this, let us know in the comments or find us and let us know because we want to hear.

From you, we want to connect with.

You, we want to, we want to support you and we want to cheer you on as you are moving ahead in your courses and in your Evergreen.

See you soon. Bye.

I mean, come on, wasn't that a phenomenal episode and breakdown of how to get started with your course if you haven't already and how to take that course. Evergreen, don't forget that Gemma's going to be joining us in the upcoming Plan A Thon where you can get all of your plans in place for the year ahead. Because modern CEOs who plan run better businesses and a better business means a better life. So I don't want you to miss out on this. You've got to get in there with us for the live event where more than 20,000 entrepreneurs are coming together to grow in the year ahead. So go to theplanathon.com to be signed up and make sure you RSVP for the plan a thon it is a 100% virtual, 100% free event that more than 20,000 entrepreneurs have gone to and attended and built growth plans from in the last nine years. This is year number nine. I can hardly even believe it. So you're going to want to be there. And if you want more from gemma, go to ambermcugh.com gemma and we'll send you to all the right places. Thank you for being here with us on this episode. Just remember everything you're doing, however it's going right now. Sometimes hard to believe I've been there, but things are right on time. Be open to the possibility that there is something brewing that we can't even understand right now and magic is coming your way. I love you. Thanks for hanging out with us on the episode today. You're right on time, Sam.