#105 - New ”shortcuts” for creating a successful course

If there are shortcuts and these make more sense for you, why wouldn't you use them if they can still bring in some of those benefits that you want, but without having to take up so much of your precious time?

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit it too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to the Doing it online podcast, episode 105. Now today I want to go back to one of my favorite topics. If I'm not talking about online funnels and automating things and how to add regular and reliable revenue to your business in a way that is easy and not sleazy than the other thing I'm talking about is how amazing and how business and life changing having an online program is. However, there is a, almost like a dark side, I guess to online programs, to this thing of which I love so much. And that is, my gosh, do they take a lot of time and I think is always hugely underestimated the amount of time that it takes to, well, first of all come up with the idea. Some people just have that bolt of lightning like that flash to the brain and they know exactly what they're going to do. But a lot of people, they're like, look, I want to have an online program, right? I want to have all the benefits that that allows me to be able to have a resource that has my best content in it, that I can either give to clients or sell on its own or that allows me to reach more people, that allows me to increase my revenue. Like all of that good stuff. We know this stuff, right? There's the coming up the idea, then there's the actually creating the program. And if, now if you have been a listener of mine for a while, you know that we recommend that you, you don't create it first and sell it. You sell it and then create it. We actually did a whole series just a few episodes ago about how to actually create your online program right now, the steps that we recommend that you take. So if you didn't listen to that and you're thinking of creating online program, go do that. But today I actually wanted to talk about some other alternatives, some other ways of doing it, some other ways of Getting a lot of those benefits that you want from an online program, but without necessarily having to do quite as much heavy lifting. Like, these are some shortcuts, I guess, because I guess everybody is busy and everybody is. Well, let's just. Nobody's just busy. They're real, real busy. And it's not. No one's getting any less busy. And I know that I've just come off the back of like, end of last year, we created our online certification program. And that was amazing. But it took a lot of time. Like, it took all of the spare time of mine and my team. And then we straight off the back of that went and did a refresh of our ecourse Empire program, which was probably a terrible idea, but I felt like we'd been putting off for so long and I was just dying to get in there to just add in a bunch of new things and streamline some things and update some training. So I didn't feel like I could put it off any longer. But having those things back to back, it just reminded me how time consuming this all can be. And, and it's not just the first time that you create it. And that first time you create, it's probably going to be almost like that rough draft that you get out there and uses your, your mvp, your minimal viable product, which also can then become the mvp, as in the most valuable player in your business. But then, yeah, you do. You update it like every year or so, you're going to be in there updating things, changing things. It's not. It is always a lot more work. And I think people always underestimate how much more work it is. But of course it can be worth it. But if there are shortcuts and these make more sense for you, why wouldn't you use them? If they can still bring in some of those benefits that you want, but without having to take up so much of your precious time. What are the shortcuts? And these aren't like your. I always, whenever I hear like someone on the Internet say, oh, you're gonna be able to get there heaps faster or here's a shortcut or whatever, my spidey senses go off and I'm like, BS alert, BS alert. But there's no BS here, okay? This is just some cool new ways of that. I've seen people doing things that, like I said, it can still have some of those benefits, whether it's the just the extra revenue that you want or the. If you're like, oh, a lot of my clients, they have this particular hole in their knowledge. And I feel like I'm just saying the same thing over and over. And it'd be so great if they could just do a program or go watch the videos and learn the stuff they need to learn to be able to continue your higher level work together. All each of these shortcuts I'm going to suggest I've got a couple of them will take a couple of these boxes. They're not going to tick all the same boxes in the same way that if you went and created something, completely create your own program in the standard way of creating your own program. But maybe you don't need all those boxes ticked. Let's start with our first quote, unquote new way, new shortcut to creating an online course. And that is creating. Well, that is actually going out and buying and then reselling someone else's program. I've noticed that there is a bit of a trend of that at the moment and there's different ways that I've seen it happen. Now this has been traditionally called plr, which is Private Label Resale or it might be Private Label Resale License, depending on what it is. And again depending on whether this is that there's two different types here. There's some which literally let you white label the program. That means that someone has gone and they've created a program or some training or even some content. There's even ebooks out there that someone have created. And you are allowed to buy the license to that, to that information, to that content and then pretty much allowed to do whatever you want with it. Like every license will have its own sort of T's and C's, but you're allowed to change the design and encourage you to make it look like your own. You're allowed to put your own name on it and say you created it. You're allowed to jump in and update some things if you want it to make it sound more like you, like it's basically. Or you can just sell it exactly as is. Now, there are a lot of crappy versions of these out there, but they are also a lot of really, really great ones. There's a few different ways that I've seen these working. It's brilliant for if you have. If there's like, like I said, there's a, there's a gap in your knowledge. We recently purchased a program which is all around Facebook ads and creating and running Facebook ads and how they're working best right now. And this has always been a big pain point for me. Because for our trainings we need to teach people Facebook ads. We do a lot of our own Facebook ads and we, we also work with different to help us do our Facebook ads. But my big bug bear is this is something people need to know how to do, but they change it so often that the second you've recorded a video saying here's how Facebook is working right now, here's how you set up an ad, they've got to change their name to meta and they've moved some buttons and whatever and all of a sudden it's not. That video's out of date and you have to keep updating it and keep updating it. And that would be fine if it was like the core thing that we taught. But it's like this is nice to have on the side and it keeps changing all the time. I was, I like wanted to just remove it completely from our programs because it was just frustrating me. And then I saw that is really well known expert in the Facebook space has actually created a program that you could buy a license to, which meant that you're allowed to resell it under their branding still with their name. We now get to say, hey, inside our program. Not only do you get our program, but you also get this program which is an amazing Facebook ads program and it's going to be being updated. Like that's their promise is if we keep paying for this license that every time there's a big update, they're going to go in there and they're going to keep the content up to date. It's kind of like a win win for everybody. You can see here now kind of how different ways this can work. Like I said, this it for us, it filled a great gap. But for some people, they use these programs as like maybe you want an upsell or something like that. Like there's something you think it makes sense. It's a complimentary thing to your outcome, your service, whatever it is that you're teaching. You don't necessarily have a really strong upsell right now, but for not that all that much money, like the prices do vary a lot. You could go and you could purchase one of these and just either like I said, leave it as a co branded thing or branded up as your own, depending on what their agreement is. And then all of a sudden without you having to create anything new, you either have a whole new program that you can sell or you have an upsell or you just have something that can slot into your program and fill a hole. That's the it's called plr. You'll probably start seeing them everywhere now. It seems to be like a bit of a trend, like I'm noticing more and more. And the other thing is that you can. This is another option. And this is like the second option I want to talk about is you could actually, if you do happen to be in one of those, to have an area of expertise, something like this, that a lot of people need inside their programs but aren't necessarily experts themselves. You could create a program that is a whitelist that you sell as a white label program. Like, then you don't have to be necessarily out there selling, selling, selling to, trying to find cold leads and all of that stuff. Like, instead, what you're going to do is start building relationships with complimentary course creators. And usually when, particularly if it is something that does need to be updated, like the Facebook ads, training what these people, they're not buying it for a. It's not a single use license, it's a ongoing license. What you're actually gonna end up doing is building up a really profitable recurring revenue stream. And you're not the one having to deal with the client's questions. They do they provide support to the program. All you have to do is keep it up to date. Just another, another option, another way of looking at it. The third option that I've seen, and this isn't necessarily a new one, but I feel like it's something that people going back to, I'm seeing a bit of a trend of these, like popping back up again, is where actually you go and find someone else's program and you become an affiliate for that program and that is becomes a program that you promote and launch like it was your own. But what you do to make people sign up for under your link is you create an extra experience, an extra support experience that goes alongside this program. Again, you get all the benefits of. You don't actually have to create the program, but maybe it's. Maybe it's something that's complementary to what it is that you teach or what it is you help people with. Or maybe it's. It is what you, you teach and help people with. But it's like I said, you just haven't had the capacity to create your own. This program out there is amazing. Maybe you've done it yourself previously and that's how you became good at what it is that you do. Then it becomes a really genuine recommendation, which is always the best ones. Like, I do see there's some people out there who all they do is promote different affiliate programs and kind of go, I'm pretty sure you haven't done all of these programs, but maybe they have. And then there's others who, maybe they just have one and they use that or two and they, and they all state promote them throughout the year. The benefits of doing this is yes, you still have to be out there launching, right? But like I said, you don't have to actually create the program. The support from the program is generally then delivered by the original person, the person whose program you're promoting. But you're going to do an add on to it. You're going to do something that makes it extra special. You're going to, you know, if it's a live round, you're going to, people are going to go through it together, maybe you add some bonuses onto it, which is going to help to make their experience better. Again, that's the third sort of shortcut for creating your online program. Now the fourth is a bit more specific and it's one that's really just for the tech nerds out there. Everyone else could probably tune out now and go back to drinking a coffee or whatever it was you were doing. But again, this one is one that works really well. And it works, it's like a, it's kind of like a slow burn. I've seen people do this for programs like Kajabi and other things where what they do is they say, right, if you sign up for this online piece of software and you want it to be a piece of software that's a decently priced one because you're going to get a commission percentage, but that commission percentage is not generally huge if it's only like a $10 a month kind of software. You want a software that people are investing in, but one that's something that's really important to their business. Kajabi, Kartra, those biggest sort of all in one things. I've seen people do this really successfully. Literally it's like what they do is they click use my link to sign up. You may have to come up the system to get the proof to make sure that they have actually done that. But as long as they are a paying member of this software, which they were going to be anyway, they get access to your community, your support for that program. If you are a person who does Kajabi setups for people or builds out sales pages in Kajabi or Kartra or ClickFunnels or any of them. So many different programs out there now. Infusionsoft Ontraport, like all of this stuff. If you're someone who already, who knows this stuff inside out, who is kind of keeping up to date with new updates, any new bugs, who knows those nuances of the program, Maybe you've got some templates that people get access to. Maybe you do some like office hours like a couple of times a month, people can jump on and ask you questions and you can look at what they're doing and give them some feedback, all that kind of stuff. Like it's the same kind of thing you do if it was an online program, right? But instead all you're giving the support for is for them using this particular piece of tech. And maybe you have some upsells if they want you to help them with something else, something more detailed or like I said, or maybe have templates or whatever it is. But I've seen people build up thousands of dollars worth every month of this recurring revenue and all they're doing, having to do is provide a Facebook group where they answer some questions about something they already love talking about already. That's my fourth little shortcut guys. Fourth way of getting some of the benefits of an online course. Whether that is extra revenue, whether that is filling those gaps, helping you provide better service to your clients, being able to reach more people. And you can do all of those things without actually having an online course. Just something to think about if you are going to give it a try. Any of these options, hit us up over on Instagram at hellofunnels. Let us know. We always love to hear from you. Whatever your biggest aha or takeaway from this episode was. And until next week, guys, make sure you keep doing what you do and I'll see you all online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.