Influencer Series: Online Courses

Hey, my friends, it's Brendan.

And welcome to another special episode in this new series for influencers. It's a sort of behind the scenes look into my career as an author, speaker, coach, seminar leader, online trainer, social media, thought leader, what we just call now the influencer industry. It's how I run my influencer career and I like to share some tactical things with you here in this episode that I know you'll love. Now, this audio is actually pulled from our Influencer business program. If you haven't heard what that is, that's where I go live every single month and I teach you. How do you build a personal brand? How do you get a bigger audience following you? How do you make money from that? How do you build community and impact? How do you launch podcasts and coaches courses and do email marketing and everything you see us doing? If you love that kind of thing, then man, I would love for you to join us at the Influencer 2019 event in San Diego. It's October 10th through 12th again in San Diego, California. And that's where you're going to come to learn from some of the best influencers in the world about how do you start and how do you really grow? How did we start from scratch and grow our brand and monetize content and reach more people and build a community of followers around the world and scale an actual business doing it? Just go to influencertickets.com again, that's influencertickets.com to join us in San Diego October 10th through 12th, where I say join us because it's a real community of people teaching you exactly how we started from scratch. It's people like Rachel Hollis, who, you know, has had two back to back number one New York Times bestsellers. One of the most successful authors in the world today, Dean Graziosi, who he and Tony Robbins just did a $30 million online launch. Louis Howes podcast, extraordinary at the school of Greatness. Trent Shelton, one of the absolute best viral video makers in the world and inspiration to so much of our youth. Tom Bilyeu, who built a billion dollar brand and now runs the Impact Theory show, which I love so much and so many more real influencers teaching you.

How did we do it?

I mean, listen, there's no question, if you listen to me, you've been impacted, I hope, by what I do. And I'm just here to say, why can't you do that? You know, why can't you have a similar career? It's not like I'm some magician or have some Magical abilities. I had to learn to identify what topic and passions I wanted to follow. Just like we'll teach you. I had to learn how to build a personal brand and audience, just like will teach you. And I had to learn ultimately how do you actually earn an income and earn revenue from it, Building a business, doing it that you love to run. If you're in that game, my friend, go to influencertickets.com join us October 10th through 12th in San Diego. I'm sure by the time you're hearing this our tickets, there's probably only maybe a couple hundred left I'm guessing. So please make sure you go check it out. Influencertickets.com it will give you all the dates, details and limitations because you gotta get there. If you're totally new to the industry, it's okay. This is especially where you want to come so you can meet new people in the industry, but also see how the best of the best do it and just follow our plans. Uh, you guys know I'm always saying, you know, coming from Montana, we always say the time to have the map is before you enter the woods. So if you're really into building a personal brand and a major audience, even if you're just starting, this is when you need to learn. Don't go. Try to figure it out yourself. Follow the strategies that work. We're teaching them at Influencer 2019 October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Again go to influencertickets.com without further ado, please enjoy this training that I did live for our influencer community. Please realize that I might reference something visual that maybe you can't see, but we've edited it in such a way that you can definitely follow these strategies, understand and and learn a lot of the behind the scenes of how the influencer space works, what you can be doing in marketing and how to grow a real business doing it. With that, my friends, no further ado. Let's jump into this episode.

How do you create and sell lucrative online courses now? You know I'm in passionate about online courses having created over 15 online courses in my career. Complete full online courses, over 2 million graduates or people who've taken either our online courses or the online video series that led to or sold them. It's been a lot of work and focus in the last, you know, 10 years of my life on online courses. Lots of little distinctions, lots of things to teach you here. I mean outside of coaching online courses is the thing that I feel makes you the greatest expert in the marketplace when you have an online course. I think that gives you even more.

Credibility than a book.

I think it gives you more credibility than speaking. I think it gives you more credibility than almost anything else. Because to create a course seems so complex. It means you're the instructor, you're the teacher, you're the expert on it. And so I highly recommend that everybody watching this, if you're into thought leadership, you should have an online course one day. Now, if you don't yet have an online course, and I recommend that you don't overthink it, an online course can be very straightforward in creating. It's just five videos. That's all you got to think about. It's like I got to do five videos. I do five training videos and those five videos can be $100 course or $1,000 course. It just depends on how long the videos are and how deep you go, right? That's all you need. Now if it's a thousand dollar course and each of those five videos is two hours, obviously you'd break the video up when you put it in your members area. You know, you break it up in like 10 or 20 minute segments that they could take. If it's less than 30 minutes, then all you gotta do is just upload that one video and that's your new training. And I'm telling you, online courses are incredibly valuable in the marketplace. They position you well, they're easier to create than you think. You just need to prepare and really care about your students. So let's talk about where it's going to fit in your overall model and then we'll bust it down. Now make sure you go through Experts Academy. One day you'll learn. This is the grid. If you've never heard of the EA grid, then you're probably completely wasting your time creating too many products and programs. The idea of the grid, this is a short version of it, I'll do briefly. You take whatever your brand is, okay? And that brand you can create low tier price points, mid tier price points and high tier price points. If you're just starting in a thought leader or the influencer or the expert space, you know, you don't have to go and create five here, five here, and five here. Matter of fact, for most people, until they reached a million dollars or more, I usually say just create three things. A low tier price point, this price point, as you guys know, if you've been with me for a long time, this is anywhere. Let's call it from, you know, 10 bucks, all the way up to 97 bucks. This one would be from 97 all the way up to 497 and this one might be $497 and above. Now, I'm not saying create a new course for each of these. What I'm creating is have a product. This might be your book, right? So for me, this is like books as an example. This over here, the expensive stuff. What's that? That's like coaching. Or it could be like live events. So you got coaching events. Well, what's in the middle? What's the ideal mid tier, awesome, knock out of the park, build your business, automate it and love your life. That's your courses for every brand that I have, whether you've seen if it's Total Product Blueprint or Experts Academy, or in my personal development stuff, High Performance Academy, all of our achievement accelerators, all of our other online courses, whatever the brands are, I always have at the mid tier price point, an online course. Why? Because it sells like crazy. Your online course students are the ones who actually implement and do stuff, right? Your social media fans and followers are just like, yay. I mean, some of them implement, but for the most part they don't. Your implementers are your online course students. So I want you to get super passionate about your online courses and creating them. And every time, here's what I want you to do. Every time you get overwhelmed and you're freaked out about creating online course, just remember what Uncle Brendan taught you today. It's just five videos. That's it. It just depends. The more you charge, the longer the videos get. That's all you need to know. And the reason we say five, it's a magical number. We'd call it five module course.

Right?

Part one, two, three, four and five. Each part of the course is called a module. Or if you don't like the word part or module, you'd call it a section. Right? Section 1, section 2, 3, 4 and 5. We call them modules in the online course world. And each module people can access all at once or over a series of weeks. The less price the course, then they get access to all of it, the more expensive the course. You tend to roll out week one in module one, wait another week, roll out module two, another week module three, another week module four, a module five on week five. So you roll it out, it's called dripping a course. You drip a course out one module every week. Those are the ones that are. They tend to be, say, the $297 and above. So if it's $300 course or more, then roll it out every week for five weeks. Why? Because you want people to. It's longer content so they need more.

Time to go through it.

And also, you know, at week four, that's when your 30 day guarantee expires. You want something hanging out there for that next week that they're looking forward to so they stay in your program. That's why five or six or seven is the magical number. But what I've also measured over the last 10 years is, is the longer the course, the less the consumption. So you don't need a 10 week course, you don't need a 15 week course. A five week course will get just as much results and consumption and sales as a six, seven, eight or nine week course. So I'm like, hey, it just got easier. Five weeks. You're welcome. Okay with that. I love this price point. $97 to $497 courses, I love that price point. Start there until you've made a few of these. Don't try to go make a thousand dollar online course. So I tell people all the time, it's like, well I'm. Brendan has an online course that's $1,000. I'm like, well, I got a couple of them. But I've also been doing this a long time, you know, until you've Learned what a $500 course is, it's hard to conceptualize a $2,000 course, you know, and you need to have your training chops underneath you. You need to learn how to build great content in great training matter. But you also need to know how to create amazing worksheets and tools that they can download to get stuff done. Okay, I know this might feel a little random, but let's get back at it. Low tier, mid tier, high tier. The magic, magic, magic for you is right here. Okay? We want you to create a mid tier course, especially if you're just starting. It's unbelievably great. If you're like, I don't know which price and I can't decide. If it's going to take you more than 30 seconds to decide, then let me just give you the answer. Create $197 online course there. Because some people, they go, I don't know how much to charge. So they screw around for seven months, unsure of themselves, pick a price and build to making that a reality. Like when I say I never sort of said, I guess, you know, I'm worth a $2000 online course. I said I want to sell and $2000 online course. What the heck would I have to create and put in there? And how deep would I have to go to be able to charge $2,000? I didn't question myself or my authority or my background. I said, what would it take? And that's what I want you to do. If you're like, well, who would pay me $200 for an online course? I'm like, anyone you market well to, Duh. So that's what I'm thinking is something to think about, is you just need to do great marketing and you need to do a great job deciding to get in the game. Everybody here, I hope you'll give a double high five in the chat, roll down below that you're going to create an online course one day because it's insane not to have one. What most people do is they're doing one on one coaching or they're trying to do speaking gigs and they're doing social media and they're doing all those at the cost of the lifestyle that they could experience if they had an online course that was selling every night when they go to bed. You know, online courses changed my life. It's why I'm so bullish about them. So I hope you'll get in. Here's the four ways that you might go about marketing a online course. Here's my favorite ways to sell online courses. The first one is to do a live social launch. What does that mean, a live social launch? That means you take your phone, you go live every single day on Instagram, on Facebook, or if you want, on YouTube, if you have a following there. And what you do is you go live, you talk about something, you teach maybe two to three points every single day. And at the end of two to three teaching points, you just mention the URL or you tell them to click the link in the post that takes them over to a sales page for your online course. And that's the whole market. That's the funnel. The funnel is this Instagram or Facebook Live every day, teach and then mention the link to have them go sign up for the online course. So basically you're teaching and selling just every day. If I had to start all over again and I had nothing, I would just be teaching and selling every day on social media and then also posting three other valuable pieces of content throughout the day. So think about the. Let's talk about scheduling for that to help you figure it out. Like 7am I'd post a quote card as an example. 11am I'd post a good video. 3pm, I would go live, I'd teach, I'd sell the course, mention the link or link to the page where they can buy the course. Then at 7pm I'd post another quote card. Right? That's every four hours. Basically every four hours you're doing a post and one of those posts, I'm inspiring you to go live, teach and sell. I would just do that pretty much every day if I was starting over again. That's it. And if you're like, but people will get so tired of you selling, I'd sell pretty casually. But what they don't get tired of is the training, the value. So just think about it that way, that if I had to start all over again, if I didn't have emails, I didn't have anything else, I just use this as a weapon to reach people every single day on Instagram and Facebook. I just do that over and over and over and over again every single day. I would be crazy about it because I would need to make the money. I would need to start if I was just starting for me now for what I do. Like if I'm going to do a live social launch, I'll pick out, you know, like a seven day period and for seven days I'll do that. But what I'll do is maybe for the first three or four days, sending people to an opt in page to get their email. And then the last three days I'm just emailing everybody and telling everybody on social to go to the page to sign up. So kind of the same basically, teach for three or four days, get people their emails and then the last three or four days sell. That's kind of what I would do. I just pick a week where I just go at it.

Okay, it's Brendan. And yeah, I'm gonna serve you up a quick little promotion right here to make sure you learn a little bit more with us. If you're enjoying this, let's dive deep. And there's two ways that you can do that. One, obviously I told you about at the beginning of this episode where you can join us at Influencer 2019, October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Because if you love this kind of stuff, come learn how 10 other people do it just like I do it. But also, if for whatever reason you can't make San Diego, October 10th through 12th, then join our Influencer business program. That's where I go live, just like you've been hearing. And I teach every month how to build your personal brand, how to do better Marketing and make it really, really specific so that there's tactical things you can do. And I teach really the world's influencers. Every single month I go live. I do Q and A, I give a new strategy. I try to teach something that has earned at least six figures and I try to teach that every single month. So make sure you join that Influencer business program. If you can't join us live in San Diego, how do you do both? Well, just go to influencer magazine.com that's influencer magazine.com and choose your adventure. Do you want to come to the live event or would you like to join the Influencer business program? The online training component. You get to choose multiple levels. So just go to influencermagazine.com and choose your own adventure with us. Would you like to join us at the live event or would you like to join the online program? And hint, hint, hint, the online program does come with some tickets to the live event as well because it's an ongoing subscription and Influencer, the live event is an annual event. So are you confused? Are you ready? Are you excited to start? Would you like to share your passions, your wisdom with the world and achieve financial freedom, lifestyle freedom, and most importantly, real impact? Y' all go to Influencer magazine right now. All right, with that, let's jump right back into the episode.

Second would be to do a structured 14 day challenge. I'm going to talk about this later in another marketing monthly. But a 14 day challenge is pretty straightforward. You create a challenge based around your topic. Let's say like my topic is habits. I would say this is the, you know, 14 day habit overhaul. And so, you know, register. Enter your name and email here. And for 14 days we're going to build you new habits. And so every single day I would just email them a new training video for 14 days. But along the way I would also be selling the course. So I'd be emailing them, hey, check out the new training. And if you want the recordings of all these trainings, go ahead and buy this course. I'll give you the course and the trainings. But that's what I would do. I would just. 14 days, I'd say, okay, for the last 14 days of July, I'm just going to every single day either go live or email my list, deliver training to them, tell them they're part of a challenge and or get people to register, tell them part of a challenge, deliver exceptional training for 14 days and be selling the course at the same time at the end of the 14 days after you've delivered the whole challenge, which is just where you're teaching every single day for 14 days. At the very end of it, then I would say, okay, guys, you got 72 hours to sign up for the course and all the recordings from the challenge. Otherwise it's gone. That's the challenge campaign. And I like to do that pretty simply. If I was going to do a challenge thing with the course, I would just do it as part of a Facebook group. I'd get a ton of people to join into a Facebook group. I'd say, I'm going to lead you guys through a 14 day challenge. Every day I'd go on Facebook, I would teach and mention the course. I'd do that for 14 days. The only difference in this mod, this kind of style is at the end of the 14 days, all those videos that you taught, you take them down. So that's why you tell them at the end of 14 days, hey, you got to sign up if you want the course and all the things we did over the last 14 days. So that's the challenge sort of style of campaign to sell courses.

And then the other ones, you guys.

Are pretty familiar with doing a webinar that's been a topic of both Experts Academy and Total Product Blueprint. So tons of trainings you have about that. I would just automate a webinar using Everwebinar and that webinar would be about 60 minutes in length total, including the sale. So you basically teach for 45 minutes, you close for 15 minutes and I would set that sucker up to run 24, 7 online, where ads on Facebook are running to get people to a registration page, an opt in page for the webinar. Then the webinar is delivered through Ever Webinar the system. Then it also you can set it up to email them. For those who engaged in the webinar or didn't, at the end of your webinar, you sell your online course. When you sell your online course, well, guess what, you sell that online course. If they didn't buy it, you set up every webinar to keep emailing them until they die, until they buy the course. That's basically what you do. Okay, so that's the webinar model. Webinar model is super awesome. And here is saving you a couple million bucks to know if you're going to sell a course at the end of webinar. Your sweet spot is that 97 to 297 range. Okay? Don't think that you're going to come out of the, you know, unless you've sold, let's call it half a million dollars of online courses before. I don't recommend you create some big fancy webinar and try to sell thousand dollar or two thousand dollar online courses. That's better to do in a full OVO style launch with lots of affiliates. That might work. But if you're running ads and attracting cold traffic, then to sell an online course from a webinar, your real sweet spot is gonna be at $97 to $297 range. That's why I tell most people and same thing with the challenge and same here. Matter of fact, I would do this the best way. If you're gonna do a live social launch, that's going to be a course that's anywhere between $49 and say $97. If you're going to do a challenge, that's a pretty good sweet spot for $197 course. If you're going to do a webinar, anywhere between those two is a good price point. Now when we share that last one ovo, that's where they opt in. You deliver a bunch of great value, a bunch of great case studies and at the end of that ovo, then you do a full close down sequence on your offer. That sucker that can be anywhere between the 297 and the $697 range. This OVO sequence, that thing might be a 25 day email sequence. The webinar obviously is just before the webinar and after the webinar. So it's shorter. 14 days, just 14. Live social launch is just kind of daily. So these are different models obviously, but they really do serve. These are my four favorite ways to easily launch online courses. How do you create your course? To create a course, remember I told you you're gonna have a five part course. Think about this way. If you had to do five modules and we broke it down to each module. So you're like, what should I do in like week one? Here's what you do in week one because I want to give you an outline that you guys can all follow and that will help in week one. You're gonna do three videos in week one. As an example, the first thing you're going to cover in week one, you're going to have one video that just gives the context to what the module is about. Like here's what this module is about, here's how it fits in the overall big picture. Here's why you love it then you're going to give them why does this topic of this week one add holistic value to them? Why does knowing what you're going to teach them help them in their career, their finances, their relationship, their health or whatever way it benefits them? Then you're going to talk about the struggle that most people go through. And in mastering this topic, you'll share your story of struggle and how you overcame it briefly. And then you'll share, here's the goals for the module. That's the first video in week one. The second video in week one is the meat, right? This is like the introduction and the thing that frames it. This is the meat. This is the big stuff. This is we're going to teach up to 10 steps. No more than 10 steps ever, right? In which they can now implement or learn or apply or understand the major teaching points that you have. Just ten steps or less. Okay? Then you share, okay?

Now that you know the system or.

The tools or the steps, here's the do's and the don'ts. And so do this, but don't do that. And then resilience, okay? If you screw up, here's how you stay on path. If you lose motivation, here's how you get it back. If you don't find yourself productive, here's how you stay keeping crushing it. That's number two, the third video of week one. Now you do a case study explaining, like showing someone's story. And it can be your story or one of your students stories that they kind of see all this apply to. You give them a download like a worksheet or a tool that helps them actually do it for themselves. Then you cheer them on. You got to do a little cheerleading motivational session and you're done. That's an outline. That would be week one. And then you do the same thing week two, week three, week four, and week five. And all that's changing is you're helping them understand what the context is and where people struggle and what you want them to achieve that week. You teach new steps each every week, which of course brings new do's and don'ts and new ways to survive you. A new case study, a new tool, more cheerleading. That could be your whole online course.

Yes, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Sort of behind the scenes look into my influencer career. If you enjoy this and you would like to learn more, just get yourself over to influencer magazine.com, go ahead and select whether you'd like to come to the live event or to the Online training called Influencer Business Program. Both options are there on the page@influencer magazine.com for those wondering what's up. You know, we've been working behind the scenes all year on launching Influencer magazine. It'll be launching late winter with an unbelievable episode. It's gonna be a digital magazine and we're really excited about it because honestly, some of the biggest influencers in the world have just been freaking out once we announced this because our industry really hasn't had a voice and it really hasn't had best practices and honestly it hasn't had a lot of leadership. And for those of you who know my career over the last decade as I used to teach Experts Academy, you know, we had literally millions of people who learned online marketing from me. And as the world's transferred into this time of social media, but also a time in which so many people are on social media and so called influencers, they don't know best practices, they don't know the values of the industry, they don't know how to really build a business that scales. They're just after likes or following or narcissistic stuff instead of really making a difference. So I'm bringing that type of value ethic into the new Influencer career by leading the magazine, leading the annual conference and leading the major online training all into the Influencer brand. And I'd love for you to take part of that but also get to experience the growth of this industry. You know, it's a billion dollar industry where I mean every single day, listen, people have the opportunity to follow you, to buy from you, to share your message. And so my question is, why aren't you there more heavily? You know, why don't you share your wisdom, your life experience or even just your passions? Whether you're sharing your stuff or you're curating an experience or a community, there is a way for you to earn income at this build a real business and a real aud worldwide doing it. You just need the step by step instruction. So go to influencer magazine.com and either join us at the live annual conference again October 10th through 12th in San Diego, or join us in the online training program called Influencer Business Program. We call it that because if you're going to wade in this territory, you should have the ambition to build a real business that allows you to have your lifestyle freedom, that allows you to make your difference that you enjoy, that makes you the money that you need and really impacts people. That's the Influencer Business program which you can Again, access via going to influencer magazine.com all right, we'll continue this series. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, make sure you share it with four or five friends who are also trying to build their audience or make a difference in the world or who might be interested in these types of learnings that you just listened to. I appreciate you all. I'm so excited to bring you more, more and more insight into sort of behind the scenes of how my industry and my career has worked. I will continue here on these podcasts to share a lot of personal development. This series is just running while we're promoting Influencer 2019, so I hope you'll enjoy it and you'll share these episodes. Make sure you take a screenshot, share it with your friends, give them the link, but also share it and tag me so that I know that you're listening to these episodes and you're getting value from them. Share with me what you liked, what you really learned from so that we can not only recognize and reward you, but but that we can also invite you in. All right, go to influencer magazine.com until next time, my friends. Go out there every single day. Remember, you can live fully, you can love openly, and you can make a difference by sharing your voice with the world. Right now.