#129 - Best of 2022 - Are you making this crippling mistake with your course?

What I'm talking about here is finding that balance when you are designing your program between being able to do it in a way that is profitable for you, because that is important. You run a business, not a charity, but that is also designed in a way to actually help your client get the best possible results.

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, too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey, hey, everybody, it is Kate here from. Hello, funnels, and welcome to episode 110 of the Doing It Online podcast. Now, today we are talking about.

One of the really common, and I don't want to call it a mistake, because it's not a mistake, it's a decision. Okay. One of the really common decisions that I see people making that they don't realize when they make it is actually setting them up and sending them down a path of a lot more stress, a lot more work, a lot less profit, and a lot less impact, really, than what they actually are wanting to do. And we're going to talk about, like, I understand why people make this decision. I understand that, understand the rationale behind it. But the, the thing that I'm here to say today is that as someone who has worked with literally hundreds of people, helping them to create, design, automate, scale their online courses and programs, that those reasons, those beliefs that cause you to make this decision, and I will get to what the decision is in a second, I promise, are not true. And there's actually more true, more accurate reasons that people kind of don't necessarily know about yet when they're at this point. I'm going to get away from the being vague and elusive. Now let's dive right on in to the problem. Like, what is this mistake? What is this decision that that is potentially crippling your course business? And that decision is funnily enough, to create a course. It's probably not what you're expecting me to say, right? And what I mean is it's the decision to create just a course or just a membership and not something bigger, not something more valuable. Because when you are, when you make that decision to create something more leveraged, right? To take your knowledge. So I'm assuming that if you're listening to this, either you have an online course or program already or a membership site or you are some sort of expert, some sort of service provider, some sort of consultant, you work with clients, you help clients get an outcome. You're hitting that ceiling of not having like you want to be able to grow, you want to be able to have more revenue, more profit, make more impact. You can't do it with one to one because there's only so many of you. And also when you're spending all your time doing that one to one delivery, then all of a sudden there's no time for anything else. There's no time for the other things you need to do to grow your business and run your business. And there's often no time for the other things outside of your business either. Then everyone goes, okay, I know the solution to this. The people on Instagram told me it's create a course, right? And yes, that is one solution. But the problem is not that, okay, I'm going to create a course. The problem is the decisions that people make next around the type of course, how they're going to structure their course and how they're going to price their course. That can end up being causing huge, huge problems. The problems that I'm seeing happening, and it's happening more and more, is that when people decide how to set up their program, how to price their program, that the outcome that they're going to actually help people achieve inside their course, they.

What they actually end up doing is just creating a huge amount of work for themselves. Both in creating the program in the first place, creating the course in the first place, then having to continually market it. Continually, continually. Sorry, I don't know what's wrong with my mouth today. Actually deliver that, that course and be answering people's questions and helping people to move their way through it. And the actual ROI is terrible. Like all of a sudden, and this is so common, people go, I created this because I thought it was going to give me back more time and it was going to give me more money. And actually it's not actually, it's just taking up even more of my time. It's actually taking me away from my one to one clients which now I think about it was less stressful and probably more profit because I have now have all these extra expenses and I'm having to pay for marketing and I didn't have to do that before and blah blah, it actually ends up being, for some people ends up being a burden rather than a blessing rather than an asset. And I hate that because that's obviously that's not what you wanted. It's not why you built it. The other problem I see is that people can't scale it. And they, and it's usually can be a few things. But one of the biggest reasons people can't scale it and even more so currently with the, the way that the current market is with paid ads and things like that, is that when they designed it, when they priced it, they did not allow a margin for marketing. A big enough margin for marketing. That and all products have this guys, just in case before you go, oh well, that, that feels a bit weird or a bit icky to be making sure my price is high enough that I can afford to pay for the ads to sell it. People, all products, your McDonald's cheeseburgers have a margin for marketing. The socks on your feet have a margin for marketing. This is just part of when, when people are sitting down going okay, what should I price my physical goods? It's called cost of goods. They look at how much did it cost to make it, how much did it cost to market it, how much does it cost to pay for the warehousing for all of that stuff. The same applies when you are setting up an online business. We have cost of goods, we have how much it costs to get a customer to deliver the program. And that's your time, that's your, all your different programs. And by programs I mean like your email programs, your software, all that kind of stuff. People don't allow this margin for marketing. They don't allow this margin for generally for anything. They've, they've picked a price that they think is going to be easy or unscary for them when they go out to the market. And the other problem that I see when people are creating when they make this decision, when they go, okay, I'm going to create something more leveraged and I'll just make a little $300 course, $500 course, thousand dollar course, even is that no one does the program anyway.

And if you are truly one of those entrepreneurs or one of those people who like, I love helping people solve this problem. I love seeing when someone comes to me and says, oh my gosh, you changed my life because you helped solve this, this, this, and it's made my life so much better. And I'm one of these people, like that's what, that's one of the things that kind of lights me up, that gets me up in the morning, is being able to help people with a problem that I truly, truly am passionate about. But when you put it into a little low investment course Then and often it's in a completely DIY style delivery and all that stuff is most people and I would say like. And I say most because like more than 50% will not complete it. There's like 30% won't even open it. That's the stats on these things guys. When people their investment is low, they don't value it, they don't value. They don't. They kind of don't believe it, they don't do it, they don't get the outcome, they don't get the value from it. And nobody really wins here. And I just want to put in one of. It's a Kate caveat that I'm not saying just go and take your course and add a zero to the end of it. That's not what this is about. I'm not one of those people who believes in creating high ticket offers for high ticket offers. Sake of it makes my skin crawl when I hear marketers on the Internet spouting that you must have must be selling five figure offers and that when you sell five figure offers you only need a couple of people to buy them. Which maths it's true. And then they don't. They have way less work and all this stuff and screw everybody else. Like that's not, that's not really what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is finding that balance when you are designing your program between being able to do it in a way that is profitable for you because that is important. You run a business, not a charity but that is also designed in a way to actually help your client get the best possible results. And it's not every human in the world that that's the people who value this offer and enough to be able to give you a fair exchange. We talk about this a lot both here on the podcast inside my programs about when it comes to pricing. I believe that it should always be a fair exchan. It is an energy exchange that if you feel like your pricing is too high, it'll come through. People won't believe it. If you feel your pricing is too low, you'll be resentful. There will be blockages. If people on the other side, if they think it's too high, they're going to feel ripped off. If they think it's too low, they're not going to value it. They're not going to log in, they're not going to do it. It has to be fair. It has to be an even flow that takes a little bit of testing and tweaking. Sure. And often, as particularly if you're. The first time, you do it often. Yes. You will probably put a price on it that's a bit lower than it should be because you don't have the confidence yet. And that's fine. And you can build it up over time as you get more confidence, see the results. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is going, oh, it's just going to be easier to do it this way. We'll just make it look like it's that decision. Right. That you made or that you might. That you will make when you go, okay, I'm going to create an online course and you decide for it to just be, oh, it's going to be 12 weeks of this number of modules, blah, blah, blah. Like it's the planning it out, it's the decision you make of the type of pro. We'll talk about that in a sec. I'm jumping ahead, but I mean, I wish I could see you so I could go. Does this make sense? Everybody nod. Everybody send me a thumbs up or DM me on Instagram that you're nodding along. I underst. Like I said, I understand why people do this. Why people, when they comes to deciding how to structure, like what kind of model they're going to choose for their online course program membership, whatever it is that they go and model, what they see, they, what they see a lot of, and what they see a lot of is mass market market programs. Programs that are designed to have thousands of people go through them, that ones that need thousands of people to go through them to be profitable and that aren't necessarily designed to get the best outcomes for their clients. They're just designed to, as I said, just be quick. Quick, quick sales. Right. But only quick sales when you have a big audience and a big marketing budget. There's the cap. That's. That's the key. Why do we do this? Why do. Why is this something that's so common? Why is it something that when people go, oh, okay, I'm gonna design my, my leveraged offer, do they go, yep, I'm just gonna make it an online course. And it's going to be 200 or it's going to be 500, and they believe that that's going to be the best option for them, the most profitable option for them? Well, one is usually that people believe that it's going to be easier to sell cheaper in people. Usually people think, okay, if something's cheaper, it's easier to sell. And to a point, yes there is a small part of that that when something is cheaper it is fractionally easier to sell. But that doesn't. It's not easy to sell ongoing because once you have gone and launched it to your existing audience and your diehards have bought it though other and the other people are kind of like maybe, maybe later like once you sort of have got those that initial influx of people purchasing it. If you're wanting to then go out and scale and continue to sell this offer and have more and more people go through it, you're going to need as I said, you're going to need to be investing in growing your audience, growing your list. And usually the most time effective way of doing that is using paid ads or a combo of organic and paid ads. But if you don't have again that margin for marketing, you're going to be going out and spending $200 to get a $200 sale like and it's not going to be worth your time. The other thing I just want to say on that guys around that people believing that it's easy to sell is I've like over my lifetime I've sold programs from $27 to $7,000. And I and we track everything we track conversion rates, click through rates, all of that stuff. And I just wanted to let you know that the difference between and let's go apples for apples here like a $500 program or $200 program and a three or $5,000 program is it's maybe it's 10% less like it's not like double it's not then when you look at okay well the this program is actually just pure revenue wise is gives you 10 times more revenue but it's only fractionally more difficult to sell. Then what does actually make sense here and as long as like you've got doing this from integrity like I said I'm not about just make it more expensive. It's like this program has to have that fair exchange. The value has to be there. Like it has to be $3,000 worth of value or preferably 10x that $5,000 worth of value. Like it has to be there, right?

But if it's there and you know it and you know your market and you know how to speak to your market, then it is no easier or more difficult to sell a low price program versus a high price program. That's what I'm saying. The other thing I think is really common with this is I think people are scared That a more premium offer will be more work. Like they think, oh well, if I'm going to charge $3,000, $5,000 rather than 300 or $500, then I'm going to have to do so much more work. It's going to be so much more on me. And they're scared of that because they want the easy. Like that's why they're doing it. They're wanting the leverage, they're wanting the. I don't have to touch this, right? But practically again from, from running like I've had like nearly 14 different programs myself now over a couple of different businesses. Plus running, helping, as I said, hundreds of people create their own programs and launch them into the world and run them and tweak them and update them and scale them, then it's actually not more work to deliver a premium program. When you set it up right, like it's about have that moment, like I said, that decision when you're going, okay, what is this thing that I'm going to create? What is this offer? And yes, it can be hard to, if you've never done it before, to know how to be able to structure something in a way that is super valuable, that gives amazing results and is not a huge drain on your time, but it absolutely is possible. And again, it ends up being very apples for apples in that it's very similar amount of actually energy and input from you for a premium program versus a lower price program if you do it right. I just is third reason that I see people doing this, that creating these cheap courses rather than like premium programs is they just don't value what they do enough. And it's common and I get it. And particularly if you are newer in the world, you don't haven't worked with that many clients yet, then please price appropriately for your level of expertise. But I think there's another layer to that, which is that actually you probably are undervaluing yourself. Even then you probably are still not really knowing deep down in your soul just how impactful and just how important the work that you do is. And if you still aren't feeling that yet, then maybe it's not the right time for you to be creating a program. You need to spend the time honing your skills, finding like who is that person or people that you love to help, how can you in a real significant way help them? And this applies for all niches. It's all about helping people. Okay? That's what we do. We help people and then we want to create a way that we can help more people without having to clone ourselves. This is the problem we're trying to solve here. So if and if you have been working with lots of people and just a variety of people and you're still like, oh, I'm still not really sure, then maybe you just need to ask them to listen more. Like there's things that you can be done to really get inside their minds and really start to appreciate that impact, that value. Because you need to know that. You need to know that to be able to structure out a really effective program, to be able to deliver that program and to be able to price it appropriately. Three steps, guys, that you need to follow to be able to create a premium value, like a high value program. And I'm not gonna say high ticket, I'm gonna say high value because that's the more important. It's high value to you, it's high value to them. It's not just expensive for the sake of being expensive. As I said, first of all is you need to choose that right problem to solve. And we want just one, like one clear outcome. Like one thing they want or one thing they want to stop happening. Like that's what's it. There is a trying to move away from something or towards something, figure out what that thing is, hone in on what that is. And it needs to be a problem that you help you like helping people with that you like. And that people value enough, right? They value that. Either getting that or stopping that thing that's happening enough to invest in it. Like that's that's key. Next you need to choose the right market to solve it. For again, we are not running a charity, we are running a business. You cannot base your pricing based on guilt that you want to be able to help everybody in the world. There's other things you can do. I'm not saying you can't help a larger range of people, but you will be more useful when you have. You can make a bigger impact. You can donate more, you can have scholarships, you can do charity work, all that stuff. You can have special programs set up for marginalized communities or for. There's other things that you can do. But that doesn't mean that you need to price your program for the person on your list who has the least amount of money so they can afford it. Okay, you need to choose your market. You need to choose a market that can easily afford it, that really values the outcome, that is happy to pay for it, that is going to really freaking love this experience going to really love you for helping them with it. Choose that market and this will allow you to have a more profitable business to be able to show up and make a bigger impact in the world because you have more profit to be able to. Then if you want to give back, pay forward whatever you want to do. If you go and set base your pricing around the most broke person on your list and making sure that they can afford it, then like I said, you're doing everybody a disservice. Like that one person is going to be, probably be happy, but then they might not actually buy it or anyway, but as I said, other people, they're not going to value it because it was too cheap. That's not going to. You're not going to sell enough of them to be profitable and worth your time and worth your energy and worth your input. Because just because it's cheaper doesn't mean it's easier to sell. You got to choose that market, choose that outcome, price it appropriately. And the third step, and this is where again, a lot of people get it really wrong, you got to choose the right way to deliver it. You have to structure it. And the, the thing that I think is key here is that when you are thinking about creating a more premium program and the structuring the delivery, the support, all of that stuff, people get very overwhelmed because they go and look at other programs that have already got like 300 people, 500 people and all of the stuff that they do, yes, have that as your on your vision board for like a few years down the track. But you've just got to start with right now what is simplest, what is easiest, what for you to be able to live to deliver right now. And probably that does mean rolling up your sleeves, getting your hands a bit dirty to start with. And that's great because it's going to give you a lot of contact, a lot of feedback. All the stuff you need to make sure that people are moving through to make any tweaks that you need to make to make sure this program is freaking amazing. And then as you get more people in and because you've priced it in a profitable way, you will be able to afford to add in other components, whether that's guest coaches or mentors or other cool things like that. And there's so many cool things you can do, right to make a program amazing, to make the delivery and the experience amazing, to make sure people come in, they're like, I feel supported and so loved and so like I'm in the right place. And I'm so glad I made this decision and it helps to make their out their outcomes and their results better and it's a win win for everybody. But it all starts with making that decision, that decision of okay, I want to have more leverage. I want to have another revenue stream. What am I going to do? Just before you go, I'm going to create a cheap little course. Please stop yourself and think about what the other possibilities might be. And of course this, I mean this is actually something that I'm, I've been up on my high horse about for these last 12 months really that we're actually doing a special bonus training on this on helping people to either restructure their existing online course or to take their one on ones and turn it into a more premium program inside our Ecourse Empire program next month. If you're wanting some help with this, if you want, and we're gonna, it's very actionable. Everything we do is actionable. It's like gonna do a little training, get you to map it out, help you with the pricing, help you the setup, all of it. If you're wanting some help with that, then make sure you come and jump in. Apply for our next intake of Ecourse Empire. The link is down in the show notes or you can just go to ecoursempire.com our doors to that next intake are closing very soon. You don't want to miss out. And yeah, we really look forward to helping to support you through your premium program creation journey. Damn it. I was trying to think of a P word so I could have an alliteration. I do love those. Anyway guys, that is it for me this week. I hope I've given you some things to ponder. I hope I have given you a few aha moments. If I have, please let us know. Shoot us a DM over at HelloFunnels on Instagram or or hit us up on email or just tag us in a post at hellofunnels. We love to know that you're listening to us, that you're loving what we are putting out into the world. And then I will see you all back here, same time, same channel for next week's episode. It's a goodie. I hope you're excited and I will see you all then.

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 at stealmyfunnel.

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