#183 - 5 non-negotiables if you want to grow your course FAST

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Hey, hey, guys, it is Kate here from hellofunnels and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. And today we are going to be diving right on in and talking growth, how to grow your online course business. No fads here, guys, no shiny. Hey, this works for one month out of the year kind of tactics. I'm going to be talking about the five key things you need to have in your business that if you do not have them, you just will not grow or growth will always be really, really bloody hard. Now, none of these things are super hard, guys. They're all designed to be installed one by one. But when you nail these five things, this is where the magic happens. And I'm not just talking about theoretical ideas here, guys. This is the five things that have always been my focus and that once I've really learned how to tune them and dial them in, we had amazing growth in our business. These are the things we help our clients with. And these are also the things that I have seen firsthand behind the scenes, working away and fueling those big businesses that you all follow on Instagram. Those six, seven, eight figure experts who you all sort of hope one day to be. They all have these five things, but they're just not really that sexy. So people aren't there talking about it, but they are really, really important. They are really, really doable. And today I'm going to show you how to really, really figure out how to do them for yourself. So let's dive right on in.

Okay, guys, so if you've been feeling a little bit like your business is forward one step, maybe two step, three steps back, then this episode is definitely for you. And we're going to be talking, as I said, about those five things you need. So have you got a pen, some paper? You ready? Let's go. The number one thing, the very first thing that I want you to focus on, that you need to nail, is you need to have a Hell's yes offer. What is a Hells yes offer? Hells yes offer is an offer that is easy to sell. It is an offer that when your dream client hears about it, they go, Hells yes, take my money. If you do not have a Hell's yes offer, then everything just gets a little bit harder. If you have to be really, really good at marketing to sell an offer that's not that good, whereas it's so much easier. And usually I find it's kind of like the low hanging fruit. Whereas if you just make a few tweaks to your offer to take it from a eh to a hells yes. Then all of a sudden, everything becomes that much easier. You don't need to be a marketing expert to be able to sell your offers with ease. Your offers should sell and make sales every time you launch them both on the first day all the way through to the last day. It shouldn't be like trying to get blood out of a stone. If that is how you are feeling with your offers, then your offer is not a hell's yes. And that is the first thing I want you to fix. Okay, on to number two. Number two, and this is really important. And again, I think it's something people think they can come back to later. But number one and two go really hand in hand. But you need to get amazing client results. Your program, your offer, your course, whatever it is, whether it's your coaching, it's a process you take people through. It needs to actually do what it says it's going to do. You need to have people who go through this and who are like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. This made it so much easier, so much better. I'm so glad I did this. And you need it for two reasons. One, just morally, you need to make sure that you are helping people like you say you're going to help them. And number two is, you know, let's put our marketing hat on here is because those testimonials are going to make it, again, infinitely easier for you to sell. It's also going to give you a lot of great feedback about areas of the program that you need to be updated and whatnot. But less important, the number one thing you need to do is make sure that your offer is as good as it can be. Now, I want to put a little Kate caveat here, because I'm not talking about perfectionism, okay? Online courses, online programs, we can. It's very tempting to fiddle with them and tweak them to death, right? Even if you've just gone through and done a creative from scratch, or maybe you've done a big overhaul, like within a week, you'd be like, oh, I could update this thing. I could update this thing. I'm not talking about that, okay? I'm not talking about making it beautiful. I'm not talking about making sure everything. You have the most amazing workbooks in the world. I'm talking about, does it get the results it says it's going to do? You could have. Every single video is a copy of a live recording with you and a baby crawling around in the background. And it Gets people great results. Great. That's tick. You've got the second thing. But if not, if your people, they're buying it like the offer was good and now people are in there and you find that not many people are completing it, they're getting really stuck. They're not kind of getting the outcomes that you've promised. Then I would spend a bit of time right here in step number two in figuring how can you reconfigure this, what needs to be added, what needs to be taken away to make sure that when people go through your program, they don't just get what they thought they were going to get, they get more. That this actually exceeds their expectations. You want to have raving fans, amazing testimonials, and then you can move on to step number three. All right, step number three. So you've got a healthiest offer. Your offer is actually does what it says on the tin. Now it's time to start ramping things up. And now it's time to really flick the switch on your list building. So obviously usually to be able to sell an offer in the first place, you have to be doing something, some kind of list building. And that's going to be a combination of going out there. Maybe it's content marketing, maybe you're doing, you know, going on podcasts, maybe you're sharing things in Facebook groups. There's lots of things you can do to try and get free traffic, SEO, long form content, all that great stuff. Also, you can of course do paid traffic. So usually people have been doing some kind of combination of this to get to this point. But now we know the offer's good, we know that people love it. Now we want to sell more of them. We really need to start ramping up the number of eyeballs that you are getting on your offer. And the best way to do that is with paid marketing. But I don't want you going out there and spending thousands of dollars on marketing and then just kind of hoping you get it back in your next launch. To really be able to flick this switch, to have this be as powerful as it needs to be, your marketing actually needs to serve a slightly different purpose. And that is your marketing needs to pay for itself. So you need to have set up and built usually some kind of front end funnel. It doesn't need to be like a $7 or $27 offer. There's lots of different ways of doing this. But you need to have a little engine set up at the front of your business at the top of your funnel. Where new people come in, you're able to pay for ads to get those new people, and then some revenue is earned for you to reinvest back into those ads. So becomes its own little mini ecosystem that funds itself. And it means that you are never out of pocket, you were never in the negative. All right, so that's number three, your list building, your marketing, it pays for itself. So if you just have those three things in place, guys, you're going to start to notice there is some really good growth there and things just get a bit easier. Like obviously everything that you are doing in an online course business, like, if you've got a great list and that list is growing, if you've got a great product, if you've got a great offer, then everything is going to start to feel easier, it's going to start to flow better. But we want to wrap things up, we want to grow fast. So number four is you need to have consistent and reliable sales. And this can be done in a whole bunch of different ways. But the one way I don't want you to be doing it is by creating a new and untested launch every quarter and going out there and crossing your fingers and toes and hoping that you make some sales. To be able to really step up to that next level, guys, you need to be able to predict that if you do this action, if you do this launch, this should be roughly your outcome. Like, you need to be able to do that with a level of certainty. And on top of launches, I would always recommend, I mean, check the sign here, that you also have a funnel that is bringing in really reliable and consistent revenue in between your launches as well. Because when you have that reliability, that consistency, when you have that baseline all the time, again, it just allows you to do next level things in your business because you can now plan, you can now budget, you can say, all right, well, I know I want to have this extra team member, okay, that's going to cost me this. How can I earn that money and not just go, well, I hope I'm going to earn it in the next launch. Fingers crossed. It's like, okay, well, I can reverse engineer exactly how I'm going to do that, or I know that because I've got my list building paying for itself, I'm now going to add in a funnel that I know that I get roughly this number of leads. They go through my funnel that converts at this amount. Therefore, I've got this amount of revenue every month to play with. And we actually call that the financial Freedom Checkpoint. This is one of the things, it's one of our first milestones for our clients and it's a really, really important one as we help our clients basically to set up a funnel that doesn't just make you a random amount of sales. We set them up, we structure them, we reverse engineer them to make sure that they are covering all of your expenses every single month. So that's paying yourself, paying your team, all your tech, your hosting, all of that good stuff, paying that every single month you want your funnel to be covering that and then launches is revenue on the top. And when you have this level of reliability, consistency and predictability, it really does change the strategies you can implement, how I said how you can plan how you actually structure your business. And that is going to take you quite quickly to the next level. Now, lucky last thing, guys, that you must have, and at this point, you may already or you may not, but number five is you need to have a healthy profit. You need to have a healthy profit going in to this growth phase because guess what, growth is actually expensive. Now if you follow the other steps for you, it won't be as expensive for others because your marketing is paying for itself and that is one of the big costs of growth. And also your funnel is paying all your bills and you know, your team and all of that other stuff. Again, another big cost of growth. But still, as businesses grow, usually your profit margin will go down because you will bring on bigger team, you will be other opportunities that you'll want to be able to use revenue for. And that's okay because 20% of a million dollars is better than 50% of $100,000. Right? So this is what we're kind of looking at. But before you even grow, if you're not profitable, if you don't have a good profit margin, if you haven't structured your offers and how you sell and like I said, made sure your marketing is paying for itself and not eating into that profit before you start to grow, then you could very quickly end up with a business like, yes, making more sales, yes, looks good on paper, but you're not actually getting to keep any of that. And actually that's a really, really horrible and stressful place to be. I once heard about a coach, again, won't name names, but you know, they really want to have a million dollar launch just so they could say they were a million dollar launch coach. Right? So they spent a million dollars to have a million dollar launch. I think I actually spent more than a million dollars. We don't want this. This is not why we created our businesses. Like most people. Tell me if I'm right, like DM us over at HelloFunnels or leave a comment if you're watching the video. Most people created their online businesses because they want to, yes, have more revenue, more income, more money, freedom, of course, but also more life freedom. Be able to do more of the creative things you want to do, spend time with the people you want to spend time with. And if you're constantly stressing about money, if you're kind of going into the negative, if you're racking up credit cards, you're not going to be achieving any of those things. So those are the five things, guys, that everybody needs. Every online course business needs to grow. If you're missing any one of those things, growth is going to be hard, it's going to be expensive, it's going to suck. So let me know, As I said, DMS over at HelloFunnels or leave a comment below, which is the first thing that you need to go and fix. And if you want help with fixing any of these five things, that's what we do over at hello Funnels. Head over hellofunnels co. We've got loads of free resources, we've got amazing programs and we would absolutely love to help you out with that. Otherwise, guys, have an amazing week and I'll see you all next week for another episode. Bye, Sam.