#81 - How to create a 6-figure course in 2022

If you don't have these six things in place, it's going to be mighty hard for you to scale to where you want to go and then keep on scaling. Like, these are really the foundations or the pillars that any online course creator needs to have in place.

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.

Hello. Hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 81 of the Doing It Online podcast. I'm your host, Kate from HelloFunnels Co and today is our first real force proper episode back for 2022. I hope you loved last week's little planning sequence, which was an encore sequence, but everyone loved it so much last year we knew we had to do it again. And you know me, I'm all about working smarter, not harder. So we already had it in the bag, we just rerolled it. So hopefully you guys loved it just as much this year. But now it's time for some shiny new content. It's a shiny new year, hopefully a little shinier than some of the previous ones. So let's dive in. Let's talk about how you can make this year be your year for finally cracking the six figure code for your online course. And this applies to if you have an existing course and it's maybe been selling not as well as you'd like, or if you're thinking about creating a course or program to get all the goodness of that leveraged offering. Or even if your goal is actually a little higher than six figures, maybe you're wanting to get over, you know, 250k or over 500k. You know, the principles of this apply, regardless. If you don't have these six things in place, it's going to be mighty hard for you to scale to where you want to go and then keep on scaling. Like, these are really the foundations or the pillars that any online course creator needs to have in place. And a lot of them are just not even really considered or they are considered too late. Which means that, you know, you kind of have to take a few steps backwards to be able to step forward. You know, I want to dive in. I want to walk you through the six things that I know you need to have in place because I want you guys to, to succeed. I want you guys to if you're out there, if you're, you know, an expert in your field, you've got something you're passionate about, you love helping people. And you know, the best way to do it is by bundling up all that great knowledge and putting it out there into the world and allowing, you know, people to access it and helping them to, you know, overcome something or fix something or be better at something. Like, we need more of that. If you have a great product or a great idea for a product, it needs to be out there that those ripples kind of are ever expanding. Let's just go through the things that might be getting in your way and help you fix them. This episode, I'm going to go through six steps that I recommend that you go through pretty much in order for how to, how to sort this out. Now, one other thing is these six steps. Obviously this is an episode of a podcast and we try and keep everything super brief, but we actually dive into every single one of these, like all each six of these pieces into a lot more depth. Like 30, 40 minutes plus plus live and all kinds of all of these inside our six figure school program, which is the doors are opening again. Well, they're open right now and we're going to be running. It's live. It's a six day online workshop. It's really fun, it's really valuable. You walk away at the end of it with a customized to your business. Easy to execute like step by step plan about how to get all of this done and get crazy amazing results over the next 12 months. So it kicks off January 1st. If you want to come along, like I said, we're going to go through this sort of overview style in this episode. But if here one or two of these points and you're like, oh my gosh, I haven't nailed this. I know I need help with this. Then come on over. It's only $27 for a ticket, which is just insane value. You will not find a better way to spend $27 on your business. Just head on over to hellofunnels co school, grab your ticket, then map it out in the calendar. Make sure that there's. Cancel your plans, make sure you come along because it's going to be amazing. All right, so let's all start with step one. Now this is one. You know, if you have been hanging around my part of the Internet for a little while, you know, I've said this before and I'll say it again because not everybody is listening, but the first thing you need to do, and I'll say it again, because not everyone is clearly listening, but the first thing that you need to do when you are, you know, if you're wanting to grow your business, if you're wanting for your business to end up being that thing that you're dreaming about and have that life that you're hoping for, is you actually need to get intentional about it and you need to plan it out that way. This has a couple of pieces to it, and we dive into each piece. Like they get kind of broken up inside the program. So we go through both sides of the. Both the dreaming and the visioning and figuring out what you actually want, as well as breaking it down into actionable steps inside Six figure school. Like, that's. You get spreadsheets, you get the whole shebang. It's super fun. But yes, I did just say spreadsheets are super fun for anybody who picked that up, because I'm a nerd and for me they are. You need to, you know, there's a few pieces to this, but it's about being intentional. It's about taking a moment, stepping back, and saying, all right, like, besides the dollars and cents, what do I want my business to look like? So start there first. Forget the big numbers. Like most of us pick a goal and it's just, it's either an ego based number or it's pulling it out of the air. Or you've seen someone on Instagram hit that goal and you're like, oh, I want to do that too. No, no, no, you, you need to plan it based on real impactful things. And that therefore makes it far more likely to actually happen. So you need to stop and go, okay, well, what does this success? What does success look like for me and for my business? Like, who am I working with? How am I working? How many days? What does it feel like to show up to work? How many, you know? And what way am I working with clients? Do I have a team? Am I in an office? Am I working from a laptop on the beach? Which I don't recommend, by the way. It's highly impractical if you're. You need to figure all that. You need to start with that picture first. And it's okay if that picture is vague. It is okay if that picture changes. It will. It will get clearer over time. It will change over time. That's totally fine. But you can't steer a ship towards an outcome, you know, towards an ending or a destination if you don't know. At least Vaguely where that destination is. The reason I say it is so, so important that you need to know those less, like I said, dolls and cents spreadsheet stuff about your goals and about you, where you'll want your business to be like, you can't just say I want a six figure business, I want a seven figure business. That means nothing because you can have a six figure business, seven figure business, eight figure business, and that you can still be broke, you can still be miserable, you can still, you can now be working harder than ever before. You can now be doing, you know, all these tasks that you don't enjoy. Like there's, you can have businesses that are quote, unquote, on paper successful and that have hit financial goals and targets, but that actually is like becomes this Frankenstein business that you hate and you want to burn down and destroy. And there's no point working this hard. There's no point sacrificing what we sacrifice to get to the destination and realize it's not where we freaking wanted to go. So number one is you need to design your business to be a business that when you get there, when you hit those goals, it's actually where you want to be. The second thing that you need now that you've kind of got your plan and like I said, we break it all down inside the six figure school. We help you re like reverse engineer everything. So it's not just this, oh, this is a nice, pretty vision board kind of thing. It's also. But okay, let's get, let's get freaking practical. Let's see what this really looks like. Let's break it down into doable steps. That's, that's my jam. So the second piece, the second pillar that you need is you need what I call a Hells yes offer. So the Hells yes offer, it has a couple of components, first of all, and they're all kind of equally important. So I'd say most importantly, but very, very high up there on the scales of importance is offer needs to be easy to sell. It needs to be an offer that when you send out an email saying my car is open, when you have, whether you have an evergreen system set up to sell it, whatever it is that people go, oh, yes, I want that they understand what it is. It seems, you know, they, they have the same idea of its value as what the pricing is, they are excited about it. It's an issue that they're looking to solve. You've got the right people in your target maker. You've nailed the messaging like all this stuff comes together to create a hells yes offer. The second side of this is priced correctly. It's priced to attract the right people and repel the right people. It's priced so that you can sell enough of them easily. It's priced to match the way that you want to deliver it and the way that you want to sell it. There's so many other pieces to pricing that's not just looking out there and saying, oh, this is how much Amy Porterfield charges, that's how much I'm going to charge. There is a whole lot of other questions that need to come before that and icing on the cake, but very like this is a non negotiable. It needs to be priced to be profitable. So to for something to be priced to be profitable, it's not about going, oh, I'm just going to make it $5,000 for the sake of it or $10,000 or $500 or whatever makes sense. It's not just about going, I'm going to pick a big number but it's about looking at okay, how am I going to deliver it, how much does that cost, how much of my time goes into it, how am I going to market it? And then at the end of the day, therefore how much does it sort of need to be and playing with some levers and we've got a really cool calculator inside the six figure school that you guys will get if you come and join us where you can sort of play with these levers and go, okay, well if I made it a little bit less, you know, if I brought the price down a little bit, which therefore will probably make it slightly easier to sell. Again, depends on the market. Sometimes making it more expensive, increasing the price makes it easier to sell. You know, how many do I need to sell? What does that look like? How will I then need to deliver it? How will I then need to market it? Is that something I want to do? Will I be happy with this? Like this is all of the kinds of questions we want you to be going in a lot deeper and that's what we do inside six figure school. Number three is you need to have a marketing engine in your business. You need to build it, you need to make sure it works and then you need to let it just run in the background and it is going to take off so much of the pressure and the stress from you. And it's very, very hard to grow your business at any kind of velocity without this engine. So just to put it into like a really easy to understand visual currently if you do not have a marketing engine. And by marketing engine I mean a system that is repeatable and reliable and preferably does not involve much of your time or input is something that runs in the background. Usually it is some kind of evergreen system. And again I'll walk you through my favorite ones for the different types of offers and how they would look for you and your business inside six figure school. But it's something that just keeps on rolling, just keeps on burning. So this is if you don't have this just picture and again I might be showing my age here and for any of the youngins listening you'd be like what is she even talking about? But hopefully you've all heard of Fred Flintstone. So if you do not have a marketing engine, then you have a Flintstone car. You've built a Flintstone car. And the way that that car goes forward is you propel it forward by running. Please Google Flintstones if you don't know what I'm talking about. And the and if you get tired or if you stub your toe or something happens, the car will stop. And it doesn't really go as fast like you can only go as fast as you can go and you're eventually going to run out of steam, you're going to get tired. Building an engine that will then replace the little feet sticking out the bottom of the car and running along is what you need to do. That's your marketing engine, your marketing machine. That is your automated funnel or something similar. It is a system that is not reliant on you, but that is reliable and that your business can rely on to bring in revenue. It consistently and scalably so it will grow and grow and help you to grow your business and grow as your business grows. Really important. You need to have something there because like I said, without it, it's all on you. All the heavy lifting is on you. And that is just going to limit how fast and how far you can go. So the fourth thing that you need is you need a plan to scale. It's just working harder or just spending more are not plans to scale. You need to actually know what does it look like? Like what are the, you know, what do I need to be doing in my business? How often do I need to be launching? Should I even be launching? Which products should I be launching? What's the best way to do that? You need and, and how does that change at different stages of my business? Like if you're in startup stage, what does that look like if you're in scaling stage, what does that look like? So you need to have this plan and this plan that something that you can easily implement and put into your business and you know, for the next 12 months and then probably recheck reassess to another 12 months. So this is basically again, so I'm going to go through with you inside six figure school and help you to Mac out, sorry, map out the next 12 months of your marketing, sales, promotions and how exactly they going to grow and scale. And again, like I said, we're going to take that original goal that you started in pillar one and we're going to help you reverse engineer and show you exactly how achievable that can be and all the pieces that you need to make that happen. So that's pillar number four. Pillar number five is. And again this is one that gets left off because the first four is what everyone thinks they need to do is like, okay, I need, I need a vision, right? And I need to focus on my offer, make sure I get that all packaged up right and I got pricing right and whatever. I know I need to market it, I know I need to sell it and promote it. Okay. You know, people think tick, tick, tick, that's all you need to do, do that. And again, if you just focus on those things, you're going to get to a certain point, but you're going to hit a ceiling and you're going to hit it hard and it's going to be a lesson that most people have to learn the hard way. But hopefully I can jump in here and prevent that for you guys. But you need to be throughout this whole process, as seemingly unrealistic as this might feel is, you need to be focusing on profit. You need to have a plan for how your business will continue to be profitable even as you are scaling. Because this thing happens, guys. And I don't think everyone realizes this, particularly at the start because I. Let me just paint a little picture for you. You know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there who they're getting started, maybe they've got an offer and it's working and they're like, okay, great, here's how I grow. I just spend more money on Facebook ads and they might look at what they've done so far. I was like, well great. So you know, maybe they have a thousand dollar product now. So far it's costing me $200. Every time I do a launch, it costs me $200 per sale. That's awesome. I would do that Every day of the week. Even $300 per sale, I'd spend $300. And Facebook gives me back a buyer who's gonna spend a thousand. Like, you just would keep doing that. And then people go and do the maths and they're like, great, well, so if I wanna double how many sales, all I need to do is double how much I'm spending and I'll get more sales. Is not how it works. If you like the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of it. If you look at just even how Facebook ads works, is that people on Facebook.

It'S not an infinite resource. These are human beings out there in the world. And what Facebook likes to do is because Facebook likes to try and please if it can. It's like a puppy dog, is they bring you the best ones first. So usually your first budget, the first stuff you're spending, like provided that you know what you're doing and you've got good ad copy and whatever, and you're targeting the right people. They're those people who are served up for you first. They are the people most likely to buy. And as you spend more and over time, Facebook has to keep going or any other platform that using, they have to keep going, finding more and more people. And those people become less and less of a good fit or less and less perfect less. And they. So they take a bit more warming up. You might need more of them to get a sale. It starts becoming more and more expensive. So it's really, you know, it's very common. Like as people scale, as you start spending more on ads, it's not just like, doesn't stay that 200, $300, start screen 400, 500, 600. And all of a sudden it becomes a whole lot less profitable, a whole lot more scary and risky. And particularly if you throw payment plans into the mix, it can actually put you into a negative cashflow situation where because something might be split over six months or whatever, you're paying 500 bucks upfront for somebody to purchase your program, and they're only giving you $200 right now. And then people can get really, really stuck here. And I've seen it happen a lot. What you need to know and need to understand is you need to have a plan in place that is going to counteract that, that's going to allow you to keep scaling and to keep growing. And there's a few different things there that we talk about. We talk about, you know, making sure your marketing always pays for itself like that. That's A really big one. We talk about having, you know, how to optimize your offers and your funnels to increase the average cart value and.

VIP or ascension offers where possible and when it's the right fit for your business. And there's lots of different, like puzzle pieces here that can be put together in different combinations and the exact combination they should be put together and in what order is actually really unique to everybody. And you know, someone at one stage of, you know, at a different stage of business to another will have different set of puzzle pieces and they'll be in a different order. And that's why I think it's really important that people aren't just out there going, copying and pasting what someone else is doing or just hearing like a one size fits all strategy and going, okay, well obviously I'm just going to do that because there's many, many factors at play of how you would actually put that together in a way that's actually going to work for you and be the best use of your time. Because if you get it in the wrong order, you'll be focusing on something that's maybe adding three, four dollars a month to your business and taking up way too much time. And then again, you're going to get stuck. So number five, you need to focus on profit. You need to have a plan for profit, but a plan that is designed for you and where you are in your business right now and what the kind of offers that you have and the kind of market that you have and where you want to go, because all of those things are unique and individual to you. And yes, of course, we are 100% covering up inside Six Figure School. I told you it was crazy valuable. I was not lying. It is like my favorite thing to do is this six days that we do together. I kind of wish I could just do it all the time. Although as an introvert, I would actually collapse in a heap if that was the thing. I have to have a bit of a break in between. But every time we do it like it blows people's minds. The aha moments from day one are just like, boom, boom, boom. And it's like I love seeing that light come on and people realizing, oh, that's the thing I need to do. That's all it is. This is doable. I can make this freaking happen. And then hearing back from them, the amazing impact and things that they've achieved in their business since then. All right, onto step number six. Step number six is you need a step by step plan to put this all into place. Like I said, it's all well and good to go. All right, I need this. I need this, I need this. But which order do you need them? Which is the most pressing thing, which is the big rock that you should be focusing on, and which unique combo of these steps and the nuances in these steps is the right one for you. So that is what we do inside Six figure School. That is what you walk away with at the end that step by step process. So if you want to come and join us, like I said, it's live, it's all online. So it doesn't matter where you are in the world. And if you can't make our live calls, don't worry, it's prerecorded. You can submit questions, you can, you can come and listen in later. You will not miss out. We have people from all over the globe saying that it freaking changed their business. Six Days Live Hands On Super Fun starts January 31st in Aussie time, which is January 30th for most other people. And the tickets are just $27, so just head to hellofunnels co school. The link will be below, of course, in the show notes. Grab your ticket, get it in the diary, get excited. I can't wait. And I'll see you all inside. 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 exact exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.