How to Launch online course in 2021?

My name is ABHI Rya Padra. Two girls, six dog, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer, founder of Internet Moguls and I'm going to be teaching you something very interesting.

Hello, how are you?

I'm very well, how are you?

Good. Difference in time zones. Hey.

Nice and bright morning in Australia.

It's three o' clock in the afternoon here.

Okay, lovely. Thank you for taking the time out.

That's okay. Tell me a little bit about what this is about. First I had the emails come through and then not much else.

Okay, absolutely. So basically we run a school called Micro Video Mastery where it's a school for entrepreneurs where we have about 800 students right now and we teach them around digital marketing through videos.

Okay.

So what we do as an exercise is to feature new guests from different parts of the world and get their perspectives on how our students can do better and use more of different business strategies with one objective. Sure, no problem.

The 3 o' clock alarm was hitting him.

No problem at all. So with one objective so that they can become more efficient using videos and other business strategies to be able to. When you become efficient, you save one thing which is the most important commodity that you have, which is time. And then you spend that time with your family. And so that's our objective, to help more people spend more time with their family using efficient business best practices.

Okay, beautiful. So you found me through thinkific. Sorry, you found me via the thinkific group.

That's right, that's right.

Okay. Was there anything I was teaching or sharing in there that you want to talk about today in particular?

Yeah, you can talk. We'd love to. I've got some questions. We'd love to talk about your courses and how you help people grow their businesses and all of that. How we always start an interview is always by saying something that we call the hero introduction. I always say the shortest distance between two human hearts is a story and a story short in the most efficient and short concise format possible is called the hero introduction. So I'll give you my hero introduction and I'll request you to give yours. Okay.

Okay, beautiful.

Great. So my name is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls and creator of the Micro Video Mastery system, a system that makes everyday entrepreneurs into video entrepreneurs so that they can get known, get leads and get sales and spend all that time saved with their families. So that is my hero introduction over to you.

Okay. I'm Linda Reed Anaba. I'm a publicist and marketing consultant. I'm an idea strategist and a mum to one. And I help business owners do what I do, which is market their business and take their ideas to market.

Wow. Did I already send you the question?

No. We have a challenge to do it in 18 words or less than this office.

Oh, that is fantastic. That was fantastic. Okay, so tell us. You know, like, I want to get straight into the meat of the matter because all the entrepreneurs watching and like I said, 800 people every Saturday watch a new interview from. So all the people who are watching now and later, entrepreneurs are scared, they're anxious, and they are uncertain about next, the next move to make. And I see on the thinkific group where I, you know, we discovered you, and even now you seem to be so positive and happy, which means that you seem to either have a very strong mindset and you're able to break through whatever storm your business is facing right now, or you already had a plan in motion and therefore you didn't let Covid completely throw you off guard.

Which of them Covid didn't throw me completely off guard, but we run a community of 31,000 business owners. So what it did do is it meant that we had to come to the forefront and lead by example. And that meant similar to where you found me via thinkific, where I was running expert sessions and helping course creators come online, our role as leaders, when you are teaching in the online space and you're teaching business owners how to grow their business and put strategies and systems in place, our job and our role is to lead. And if you've had a community where we have for the last six years, where we've been leading and sharing our expertise, we then our job was during COVID when I say to people, March 15th, my world changed. I went from all these amazing plans I had of running face to face workshops and traveling the country this year through to how do we support our members through this? How do we help our members get online? And here, where I am in Victoria, Australia, we're still in lockdown. So lots of our members have gone through lockdown once, so they thought they were coming out of it and they're in lockdown the second time. So our job is to lead throughout that process. But mindset comes down to it. Knowing where you want to go is huge, and knowing how to adapt when things change is the other thing.

Right. Awesome. So tell us, how did you and how much time and how can you run us through a step by step process of what it takes to build a community of 31,000 people?

Craziness to begin with. Absolute insanity. To think that you would write to run a Facebook group, look, to run the community that we do. We created it because, like with everything else, there's enough bullying, there's enough picking, there's enough angst with each other in the world that I created a space where business owners could come and feel safe to ask questions and ask any question and not be, you know, taken for being, you know, silly or stupid for asking a question. So we created that space. Originally, I created that space for me and my colleagues and my friends to hang out with that were all business owners together. And then I woke up the next morning to all of a sudden, 500 people in that space, not just the 50 people I invited. And we did things a little bit differently. We maybe don't do things as much a little bit differently nowadays. I think our ethos of how to run a Facebook community has spread across Facebook a little bit. But we lead by example. We support, we ask questions. And in our space, we say, we're a group for business owners, by business owners. The stuff we put together for our community and for our members is the stuff that we do that we see that we work with every day. And both Clive and I, I'm a marketing and idea strategist, Clive's a business strategist. We take strategy to the table and we've been there. And any business coach or whatever says that you do it. They haven't done a failed course or a failed video or a failed website within their business journey. Slightly fudging. They're fudging the truth. Just ever so slightly because we've all made a mistake somewhere along the line.

Awesome. So is this a paid community?

It is a free community. So it's a free community where business owners get to come in there and then they work with us. It's part of our give back. And part of being an entrepreneur and leading and doing things within your groups and your communities is educating your market. And by educating our market, we created a space for business owners. That space now is 31,000 members strong. It's a website, it's a directory, it's. It's moved us into online courses because I physically. Australia is a rather large country. I could not travel the country to be where everyone wanted me to be, to do workshops. So it brought me into the online world, of course. Creation. It's done all sorts of things. So as much as we give time running it and my team and I run that space, it also gives back.

So nice.

You've always got to give something 100%.

So in today's day and age when more and more people are wanting connection community and on the other side, business owners are wanting to take their business online, would you recommend starting a Facebook group of like minded people or people that you want to serve and making that into a business?

Depending. Depending on the time that you have. Running a Facebook group isn't as simple as setting up a Facebook group and then walking away from it. It's about staying ahead of the trends. It's about setting some really clear foundations and guidelines about how that community is going to run. It's about checking into it three or four times a day to see what comments have been going on and what's the post. Is the community still fading within the guidelines? So just like building a community in a face to face networking environment or anything else, it is what you put into it. So if you put in a great amount of energy and work and positivity, then you'll get a positive space. But if you feel like it's a drag and it's really hard to do and you don't have time, you'll get that back as well. So I say for most business owners, if you are already time poor, a Facebook group is not the solution.

Got it.

There's different ways to educate your market but you know, and looking at putting things in automation. So if you're time poor, no, but if you've got knowledge to share and you can share it and you can engage and you like spending time on Facebook and that's the other thing, you've got to like spending time on Facebook to run a Facebook group. If you don't like Facebook and you don't like spending time on Facebook, then it's not the space for you.

But I've seen there are different models that exist. There are some people who charge a couple of dollars every month to be part of the Facebook community and there are many people who are happy doing that and there are many of us who. I have a Facebook community as well. We're about 26,300 people and I love checking in couple of times a day and every time I announce a meetup or an event or an online course, like you said, the value that we put in into the group allows us to draw from the same. Well, if I can say that. So which is a better option?

There's a couple of things. If Facebook has allowed you to have a paid community, then you can have a paid Facebook group which is just purely access for that Facebook group. If you're only selling the Facebook group and it's not supported by a course or by a membership program or anything like that, then technically you're a breach of Facebook's terms of service. You can't charge for a Facebook group. So Facebook will allow you the monetization option to have something like that. So be really careful. If you think you just want to run a Facebook group and charge people to enter it and it's going to be a component, because it has to. If you're going to run a mastermind group and you happen to add a Facebook group as value to that group and it's got courses and all that information to go with it, you are fine to do those sorts of things. But the reality of it is, somewhere along the line, you have to give your people a chance to get to know you. And especially as we start to move in online communities, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn, wherever it is, you've got to allow these people a chance to get to know you. I wouldn't change running a pay group or a free group. Either way, where we see it, we have groups that are part of my course membership and my inner marketing membership because my audience is on Facebook and they will engage with me there. But the free group is not something I'm going to walk away from because once again, it's about providing value. And yes, there are days that it's stressful and there's days that you know you're pulling your hair out and you want to walk away, and you have to walk away and say, look, I'm not the right person to admin that post. There's some stuff happening in there that, you know, that's not the right situation for me. But the reality of it is, like, everything out there, there is people out there at the moment that go, I want everything for free. Yeah, okay. If you want to get something and I say to people, if you want something for free, if you want a tool or a service or, you know, free pr, as quite often comes in my industry, how do I get free pr? Linda? Then you need to be giving something in return because you need to be doing something good to have got something free back. Otherwise you will take everything for free, and then all the universe is going to give you back is a whole heap of clients that are going to come tired kicking take and want your services for free or want them at $0 because that's all you've put out there. All you've put out there is I am prepared to take and then you're all you're going to have is people who will come and take back from you. So it's about making sure that you engage. That is so true.

So don't be a go getter, be a go giver like they say.

Exactly. You can pay go getter and a go giver at the same time. You know your boundaries and you know where something is a paid and a fee for service area and by all means charge for your knowledge and your expertise but lead people through so that they actually know who they're paying for. I think lots of people come to this online industry in this online course area and they're not actually prepared to show enough of who they are first but they want people to pay the big dollars.

That is so powerful. Thank you for, thank you for sharing that. Now I'll just shift gears from a Facebook community to online courses where you are a visit that and I've seen you reading courses and I've seen you teaching other people how to do that. So again, for this entrepreneur or these 800 plus members of ours, is an online course, Is it for everyone or who is it for?

No, absolutely not. It's not for everyone. I just got off a call before I could jump on the phone to you. For someone wanting to look as an online course as a solution, I'm like no, that's not your solution. You need to go and look at another system or another software to be able to do it. Now online courses aren't for everyone. And yes, I'm a thinkific approved expert. I've been working with the thinkific team for over. I've been teaching on thinkific for four and a half, close to five years now and I have been working with them for about four years as an ambassador here in Australia and then join their expert team earlier on this year. Which just basically means I've jumped some hoops to say I know my stuff, which is, which is a pretty good thing. And that's another giftback that I do is sharing in the thinkific group and educating and helping other course creators get their courses up and online because it's part of what we do. But an online course, you've got to have knowledge to share, you've got to have expertise to share and build it. They will come isn't how online course Creation works. You know, you don't build a course, but up there on the web and go, what's up there on the web now? It's great. Yes. Everyone, everyone's going to come by my course. They're not unless you market it. So the course creation component of your course creation journey is 20%. It's 20%. Making the course is 20% of the work. 80% of it is leading and bringing people through. Like having running a Facebook community or doing blogs or videos and giving people multiple layers of opportunity so that they can come and work with you. Because if you don't give them multiple layers of opportunity, they don't know you and they're going to go, well, why would I buy this person's course versus the person who actually tells me who they are?

Nice. So what is the best the webinar.

The YouTube videos, the strategy that leads people through you? Joint ventures work incredibly well if you've got the right joint ventures and it matches up inside the right community and the right platforms and it's your audience. Because there's no point in doing a joint venture with someone just because the audience isn't the right fit. So you want to make sure that you know the people you're going to be talking to are the right fit for you, that you're able to talk to the right, right people out there. But webinar wise, if you're running a webinar and you're giving people a taste of that information and then you might put that webinar out on the replay out on YouTube or you might run a series of tip videos that lead through to your course. I always, my tips are marketing your courses through evergreen pieces of content. So using webinars, using YouTube videos, using blog posts, using email campaigns and using opt ins to lead people to you.

Got it. So in terms of the price of a course, some courses they say are easy to sell on a webinar or 90 minutes. And for some courses, like you said, you have to show more of you, which could mean a two day workshop leading to the selling of a course. So how, when you're talking to entrepreneurs in our community who've not done much courses, is there any benchmark to say if it's $500 you can set it on the webinar. If it's not, then set it on a absolutely not.

It comes down to the value and it comes down to your market and who people are wanting to go through. And look here in Australia, if it's a two day free workshop, or something for you to attend to sell you into a bigger course or a bigger program. Our people tend to get a little bit suspicious about those types of workshops here, but having a look at your content and your information and it actually doesn't take a two day workshop to sell someone into your program. What it takes is you being accessible, you being knowledgeable within your field, people knowing who you are. And if you think that it's a bigger sell, if you think it's not a, you know, grab the credit card out because it's under $200 type or sale, then use it. Use things like webinars where you can jump in and give them a taste about what they're going to be leading through or run a community or something where you're known as that area of your expertise and you're known as the go to person for that field and do those sorts of things. But your landing pages, your messages, the value proposition you put in the course, the fact and when it comes to course creation, I was talking inside the thinkific group about this one this morning. It's about one pain point, bringing up the pain points, presenting the solution and presenting your course as the solution and then giving them the learning outcomes they're going to learn by the end of that course that will allow them to take the journey. And it is definitely not jamming all your knowledge into one course and overwhelming people. Online education is about short, sharp pieces of information and giving people quick wins. You are better to have four courses on. If we're talking social media, for example, you better have a course on each social platform. And even if you went to Facebook, you're better to have a course on Facebook profiles, sorry, Facebook networking, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, Facebook ads. Because the more you try and pack information into one course, the more you overwhelm your students.

You overwhelm the students and then when you confuse your rules, there's no single clarity point. Understood. That's powerful. My next question is when it comes to an online course, credit and selling online, like you said in the beginning, it could be a standalone online course or it could be something that supplements another product or service that you. Or it could be coaching or consulting, just your personal time, and you sort of bundle an online course with it. So can you tell us some of the various options that you've used and how they worked?

So I run a group called the Marketing Circle where it is a small group of people who come in on a VIP membership basis and they get to work with me in a group level. So they get to work with me on group coaching. Our course creator Circle is very much a community based area. It's a Facebook group and it leads through to the education points and the key checklists for course creation. My husband's a business strategist. He works his coaching clients literally go through the homework and everything program that he's got for each of them is run through the Thinkific portal. So it's actually run in the back end of the portal. There are many ways you can use your course creation platform. I've delivered face to face workshops and then had the resources and the materials inside the Thinkific school so that it's easy for people to be able to get their information to. But you can also do things like free ebooks and free webinars using platforms like thinkific and putting those information into the platform where you want the person. If you want people to learn your online course, lead them to the software, lead them to the platform. You're going to deliver that learning. So if you've got an ebook, pop it up as a mini course. Use the ability of having a video software there to be able to do a video. And a welcome and thank you for downloading this ebook. By the time you get to the end of it, you're going to learn. And if you're looking for more information, you know, feel free to check out this course here which is a perfect lead on from the book.

Lovely. Tell us, should course creators or people who are looking at making monetizing their knowledge by putting it into bite sized short lessons Is video creation some is course creation something which means that I will continue to create courses all year long because things might get redundant. Or can you have one or two signature courses and offer it as part of your consulting and just do all of. Just do that and keep updating these two courses?

It depends what you teach. Okay, so it really depends what you teach. Facebook are just rolling out changes today. So which means my Facebook for business course has to be updated with the new how to's and all of those videos that are coming out. So you know, thinkific themselves have updated some of the training platforms and some of the how to do stuff that, that we've got in there. So we're having to update those ones from a, you know, goal. If we're running a course on goal setting, the goal setting stuff's unlikely to change. I'm running a course on blogging for business. The foundations about why you would blog for business are unlikely to change. But when you teach stuff about other people's platforms or you teach stuff about, you know, how to use something, then those courses are going to need adding to. But your people will, as you start to go through your course creation journey, they start to let you know what else they want to learn. They start to give you the tips about what they want to learn throughout the consulting journey. So we run podcasts and we create podcasts as an agency here for our team. I was with my marketing circle members, they wanted to learn podcasting. So I'm like, well, okay, I can teach you how we do it. So we put together the course and the process on kickstarting their podcast. We've now got about seven or eight people launching podcasts because they wanted to do something. Now I could have said, no, I can't teach you how to do that, but they, they showed me what they wanted to learn next. And as a leader within my field, I'm happy to go, yes, I'll teach you that, or no, I won't teach you that. But most of the stuff I'm prepared to teach my people because I know those who really can want to work with me and want me to do it will still come to me in the end.

Lovely. So I, you know, like, I have an agency.

Yep.

Online courses. I do workshops now online and I do webinars. 4, 500 people each. I do two day webinar workshops. Do you think it's necessary for entrepreneurs today to be able to do a little bit of all of this to have a successful business? Or can I just do one service with one product and just make that. Like if you see founder.com they're continuously creating courses, curating course courses, other people's courses. Then there are people who have multiple of their own courses. And then I see consultants who have 1, 5, 10, $20,000 program every year and they only focus on that. And. But because it's a high ticket program, they offer consulting with it. Is there something called too much of an overwhelm and don't have everything just. Or do you think to each his own, whatever works. Sorry, I think we got disconnected. Yeah, we are back. Yes, we're back now.

There we go. We're back now. Do you want to ask me that question again? Because it broke up actually quite a bit.

I said, you know, like there are some people who have an agency, a done for you service, a done with you service and multiple courses coming in every month. And then there are people who run with one or two signature courses and then they use those courses all year round. And you know, because the signature courses are high ticket courses, they supplement it with a lot of their own time given to the customer in consulting. Do you think is there a pro or con to either of these strategies or whatever works for you?

I think it comes down to what works for the business owner. So for me in particular, I would much rather that we have lots of people getting out there learning how to market their business. And that's what I would say for my marketing circle members is they are actually proactively marketing their way through COVID 19 at the moment because they have been there and we've been able to turn up in a group and support each other as a group throughout that process. But it doesn't stop having the high $15,000 type ticket courses and programs if that's what you want to deliver. For me, I would much rather deliver on mass. For me. I like teaching people as things come up. So we deliver a base level, you buy your own courses and then we've got. You buy your courses and help and then we've got, you know, coach, be coached by me level courses and then we've got the. We'll do it for you and take your right arm approach through the course creation, through the, through the journey. But my favorite place to work is with those business owners who are starting out, the ones that are wanting to maybe starting out, but they're wanting to market and they're wanting to get their own wins because I love seeing the excitement of their wins. So you have to work out as a coach or a consultant or an agency which bit you want to work in. So my controlling factor is when we even take on a client, I want to work with people who want to do something. So if they're not prepared to get in and work with us as part of this process, we don't work with them. Even if we do the whole done for you stuff, they have to continue to give us the information because we're not the magic bullet, not their business. We can help them take things to market, we can help them develop the strategy, but in the end it comes down to the business owner delivering that.

Nice. So you do have a level one, level two, level three kind of programs?

Yeah, absolutely. I talk about things, you see the tree behind me, I talk about marketing and giving your clients an opportunity to climb up the trunk of the tree, branch off to the course or the opt in or the ebook or the blog post or whatever they want to. Then come back to the trunk of the tree and keep climbing until they Decide they're either going to reach the top or they've gone high enough for where they want to go in their journey right now.

So that. Okay, so you, I understand. So you're saying it's not about you having a level one, level two, level three in your business, it's about your clients wanting to level up and when they do, you should be available with a solution for it.

We deliver to the level we want to. Yes. To our top level service. Yes.

Okay.

But you've got to work out whether you want to be doing a $15,000 program or multiple workshop or two day webinar type situations and summits that I do. You've got to look at what the return is, is for you as a business owner, if the returns. And I say this to business owners all the time. So I really want people to understand this. 500 people, 4 or 500 people turning up for a webinar and none of them taking action is worse than 10 people turning up and all of them taking action or 10 people turning up and taking two action. So don't look at, and don't look at Facebook likes or YouTube likes or anything like that under vanity metrics. Look at, I launched something, my people did something, they took it, they bought it. Great. Or I launched something, they got engaged, they liked, they commented, I had engagement. Because big numbers without engagement mean absolutely nothing.

That's brilliant. So do you have a, do you have a webinar metric? Like you have to convert 10% or 15% for you to feel happy or, or does it matter?

I trust that my people will buy when they need to. Okay, so yes, maybe, maybe we had metrics. But look, we, we're pretty known and my brand is pretty well built inside this space now that we launch something and we, unless we've completely screwed it up, and sometimes we have, unless we completely screw it up, the market's jumping on it. We launch a webinar now on Eventbrite. We normally have the first ticket sale before we've got the webinar up on Facebook.

That is so fantastic. I was speaking to Chris Ducker the other day and he said the same thing. He said, I asked my audience what they want, I create for them, I ask them, what's the price point they're okay to pay. And I offer that price point and we sell. That is fantastic. So does that mean that you spend a lot of time to get to know the ever evolving needs of your clients? Because for you to get it right almost every time must mean that you Spend a lot of time with your ear on the ground?

Yeah, I do. I spend a lot of time reading. I spend a lot of time seeing what our group and our community does. I monitor situations coming through through social media, even through course creation, even in the thinkific group. What are the questions being asked? Okay, can I record a video? Can I record an answer that's going to help someone get the answer to that? Or do I need to run a challenge? Do I need to run a workshop? And in COVID 19, I've been running, we ran a content creation bootcamp over eight weeks. So the first eight weeks of COVID 19 was spent on, you know, every week, people getting together and creating pieces of content. We'll run in October a be the expert challenge about building their profile and being the expert. But I know my business owners and my community are trying to fit this in around the rest of their day. So I need to give them information that they can take away in action and then come back to the next session and do something throughout the process. I cannot overwhelm them with every marketing strategy under the world.

That's fantastic. You told, you know, business owners who are listening to this and thank you so much for giving such precise, to the point answers for everything because just I can just imagine people listening to this are taking notes and saying, I've got my answer, I've got my answer. I've got my answer with every question. So thank you very much. Tell us when it comes to, you know, what are the top three, because there's also a lot of overwhelm on the one side and there's also a lot of will this work? And it worked very well last month, but this month nothing worked. So tell us about the unpredictable nature of this business or does it not matter at your predict it?

This is an unpredictable nature. But when things don't work, you have to look at what actually chances are it's not your product. If it worked last month and it worked this month, you need to actually look at what the extenuating factors are. So what did COVID 19 hit at that particular point in time? Has there been something that's affected your market? You know, in my case, you know, people were saying the other week, oh, we should market to Victoria because everyone's in lockdown. And I'm going, actually, no, you should market to Victoria because everyone wants to do something. So, you know, when it's talking about delivering your information, business is always unpredictable. The key thing about being ahead in business, no matter what business you are is about reading what your clients want and what your market wants and listening to it. So even as Chris said, ask them what they want and give it to them. We asked our members in our community what they wanted through COVID 19 and we delivered it. Did it mean we had to scurry like Helen, take 15, you know, face to face events online? Yeah, it did. Did it mean that I turned up every day for the month of April on a live, you know, call session at 9:30 every morning just to help my guys, my community through? Yeah, I did.

Right.

But you know what it meant that they were supported.

Of course, you know, we did.

You're going to have to adapt always, always, regardless of COVID 19.

So I run an agency. I started an agency with a four member team 10 years ago. We grew to a team size of 225 and because most of our clients are with hospitality, so it almost tanked. So during that time we already had my courses. I used to do a webinar every week, but once Covid happened in 75 days, I did 75 webinars, built an email list of 113,500 people and spend hours and hours even after the webinar to answer people's questions. So in the 75 days of my corona, we were able to build such a tight knit community which I had not been able to build for the last two years. So that's it. That's it. That's what you said, right?

Yeah, it's about, it's almost. And some people, when I speak to my members, I first say focus on what you can do now, what you can control and what you, what you could control was how do I communicate with my people now they're in lockdown. How do I give them a solution now that Covid has hit? You can't control the other factors.

What is your take on building a strong email list?

Okay, there is two things you own in the Internet. One is your email list, one is your website. You don't own everything else. You rent the space on social media, you rent the space on those Facebook groups. So it's about bringing those people who are genuinely engaged with you onto an email list and delivering high quality information. If you want to give them a one page little tip sheet that says nothing, then be prepared for them to do nothing. If you want to give them a five or six page ebook which actually gives them a win by the time they get to the end of it, that's great. If you want to give them a free mini course which Gives them a win by the end of it, then you can expect them to do something. So your email list is once again only as strong as how you attracted the person to get there and what wins they got from the information trade that you had. Because building an email list is a trade of information.

Do you think storytelling in your emails is a good idea?

My market likes straight. You can pretty much tell I'm a straight to the point. You know, I can tell you a story, but I can really go, hey, this is the stuff you need to know this month. And that's what I tend to do with my email people. I tend to give them, this is the stuff you need to know. This is where you got these other things might help you. Okay. I don't even fluff around for the first 20 minutes on a webinar going through introductions and hi, wasn't it great? You know, are we straight in? I know here In Australia, the YouTube guy will talk to you and they'll say, she's really brutal. She will give you three minutes and then we're going straight into the topic, so you better be ready. But the reason that I do that is because I respect the time that my people are giving me to either open that email or open those sorts of things. Now, yes, you can tell a story and you can take people on a journey, but there's a place for that. And the place for that might be a video or it might be something else. When you're putting together your newsletters, don't send one for a newsletter sake. Send one because it's actually got something the person inside it wants to read and act on. Now, you can tell the story to give them that action or that learning, but don't just, you know, say, hey, my dog, you know, went. Walked around two blocks yesterday around Covid. Gee, that was great. You know, give them, give them a reason why you and your dog were walking around and what did you learn from the experience?

What's in it for them?

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Always got it.

Got it. When it comes to. When it comes to paid ads.

Yep.

An entrepreneur starts his journey as an online digital entrepreneur and start building online courses, gets into the webinar world, gets in touch with this interview, learns a hell of a lot from you, goes and follows you on thinkific because we're going to put all your credentials and all of that over here. And he starts learning and starts implementing whatever you teach and he starts seeing some predictability and some revenue in his business. How long before somebody who can leave whatever they're doing in their brick and mortar field, transforms into a new avatar, starts learning online courses, digital, whatever you teach. How long have you, in your experience, have you seen people make this into a full time business?

Most people I see are either in a full time position or they're transitioning. Now I've had members of mine fortunately go from six months being, you know, working for someone else to I'm going to get out to, oh man, I'm out, you know, and they've had, one of them has had a two year plan and she's out inside her first eight months. So it depends how much your work you're prepared to put into that journey, how much time you have to. Because obviously if you're working for someone else, you've got, you know, commitments and that to meet along those journey that way it's not burning yourself out, it's not pushing yourself to the point that you're going to kill yourself throughout that journey and it's definitely not comparing yourself to someone else. So it's definitely about, well, am I comfortable to move to the next stage? And you have to be a little bit uncomfortable to move to the next stage. You've got to be comfy, but you've got to be a little uncomfy because a little bit of fear is all good. But it's about making sure that it's the right time, it's the right moment to move to that next division and take that jump and leave that employment. But there is nothing to say that you cannot run a business alongside being an employed person. So you cannot monetize it and be an employed person at that time. And then when, when everything aligns, you know, take that jump out of here. We run five businesses out of here. It's crazy, it's insane to think that we do it, but we do it because we know our systems are right and we know that we can take one system from another to another to run it and do what we need to do. And I also trust my people and that's. If you've got other people working for you, you have to trust them.

Sure. Tell us, you know, do you also invest time and money into trainings and buying other people's courses and all of that?

Absolutely. Coaches have coaches. If your coach does not have a coach, you have a big problem. The best coaches have other coaches they learn from. Okay, how do you choose a coach? Lovely piece of string. Question. Okay, you choose a coach based on fit. Okay, you choose a coach based on where you want to go. What are they going to take you through and are they going to make you uncomfortable? Because the coach that makes you feel nice and comfy in the corner isn't actually growing you, isn't stretching you, isn't taking you throughout that direction. And I will say to 90% of my people when we work with you, I am not nice throughout this process. I will kick your butt until it is done. And we will get it. We will get it and we'll get it done. And there's going to be uncomfortable stuff and you're going to have homework to do in between. And if you don't do it, then I'm going to go, well, hey, what are you paying me for? Why do you want to work with me if you're not prepared to put in the work in between? But the same happens on my end. I work with coaches. I'm training and learning my stuff and putting money into my knowledge so that I can teach it to other people. And the reason I'm doing that is because I need to have my accountability to somewhere else. So I need to learn stuff throughout the journey. Like, I'm still learning Facebook at the moment. So you choose a coach based on who can teach you what you want to go. No. And are they going to move you along in the direction? Because if you feel like they're going to give you a big warm cuddle and keep you comfy and you really like the person, that's great. But they're a friend, they're not a coach.

Got it.

Your coach is going to help you grow your business and they will be a friend quite easily. Quite often they will become a friend. But the thing you want your coach to do is see your vision, know where you want to go and give you the shortcuts and the help and the hands to get there so that you don't have to keep running around and circus yourself to do it.

Got it. Got it. Perfect. That was really to the point. Rapid fire. So we finished slightly earlier than expected. I have one, two last questions. Actually, it's just one. I'll just put both of it together. So we started everything in India. Now we're in Vancouver, Canada. And, you know, I've got two girls, like I said, six dogs, husband, two superwoman. I used to be a streetcar racer. Got into digital and all of that. And, you know, like I said, the last few years, every year has been a challenge, but every challenge is an opportunity. Covid made us grow our email list and tighter with our community than ever before. And so Therefore, I'm able to talk to you now more as a digital marketing strategist who has a coach and a, and a community of 800 people. Before this, I was doing only a done for you service. So in your, you know, so if I, you know, my community is called, they call the mvmers, so the micro Video Masters because we say that we make everyday entrepreneurs into video entrepreneurs. So one customized message for the MVMers.

From your side, Tell your story through video. Go live. Live video is king now as much as Evergreen stuff is great. Go live, turn up, do a series and educate your market.

That sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. This was, you know, you know, most of the time we all, we never give out our questions in any interview. We just like to have it. But in this, it seemed that you were reading my mind before. You've been through so many interviews. It just seems so fluid and so thank you very much for making it so interesting, so exciting for me and I'm sure the audience that's watching. Before I leave, I wanted to say, like I said, we've got a company here in Vancouver, Canada and New Delhi, India. We've got a community of almost about 200,000 people. So if at any stage you have anything that we can support you with, please feel free to reach out. I would love to help because just to say thank you to you for taking the time out today, you're launching a course, you have a podcast coming out. Anything that you want and you want our audience to support you, all you have to do is send us an email and we'll be happy to help.

Jump into our BBB community. You'll see what we're doing there. So jump into the business, business, business community.

I will. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take from your team all the credentials so I can put it in the beginning and the end of this interview so that people can follow you. And just before we leave, if you can tell your favorite, which is the best place to reach out to you at.

So the lindareadanava.com au website, so my name.com au will take you to my website and everything that I do.

Lovely. Is it very cold over there right now?

I would not want to know.

All right.

I would say I'm currently sitting in here with a lovely little heater connected to my office. I'd say it's about 10 degrees.

Alrighty. Okay. So that's.

It's not snow. We're not in snow territory.

Alrighty. Thank you. So much for your time. I really appreciate this. I'll send you a link once this goes live.

Beautiful. And we'll share it.

That'll be awesome. And once again, anything we can do for you now, tomorrow, in the future. I'm actually going to the thinkific office in a couple of days to meet Greg, Emily and the team and I will. And maybe we do a nice video from the office and send it to you.

Go and hunt that Aaron for me.

I will do that.

Actually, I don't think he's in the office yet, but yeah. Thank you very much. It was great to have a chat and look, I just know my stuff and that's why I can answer questions.

I learned something new.

Good, I'm glad. That's awesome. And when this is live, my team will share it for you as well.

I so appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Beautiful. Okay, see ya. And have fun with Mikna, guys. Bye.

Bye. Bye. And a community of 800 people. Before this, I was doing only a done for you service. So in your, you know, so if I, you know, my community is called, they call the mvmers, so the micro video Masters. Because we say that we make everyday entrepreneurs into video entrepreneurs. And so one customized message for the MVMers from your side.