Practical Tips For Course Creators Who Can't Seem To Finish Building!

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie, and today I want to kind of come to you with some practical tips. If you are building a course or want to build a course, and I feel the need to address the sort of elephant in the room, which I find a lot of people come to me with and they're like, well, I feel like I'm too late to the course world. You know, there's too many courses out there already. And this is just hogwash. I think we are in a bubble and so we think everybody does courses, but really education is in a very disruptive moment of history right now. People are not going to college because they're realizing it's very expensive and, you know, you know, gets you in debt and doesn't always return the kind of job that you want. I think COVID and the rise of homeschooling have made alternate forms of education more normalized. So yeah, if you're in the internet marketing world or the online marketing world, everyone and their mother has a course. But the truth is that you are still pretty early when it comes to gen pop, right? So I just want to kind of put that out, out there. So now let's talk about the course creation process. And it's funny. Because I can build courses in my sleep. I can do it with my eyes closed. And yet, for whatever reason, writing a book seems like the most impossible task to me. And so whenever I talk about course creation, my tendency is to be like, come on guys, it's not that hard. But then I remind myself, no, I am talking to people who probably feel the way I feel about book writing, which is courses are hard. They're time-consuming. I don't know what to include. I don't know what not to include. I feel like, what if it's not good enough? What if it doesn't sell? How much should I spend? And man, the reasons that you can procrastinate on a course, there are a million, right? So if you are in that boat, I wanna provide hope that there is a way out of that sort of spinning washing machine cycle. So these are the, these are the 3 problems that I see most often with people trying to build courses. Number 1, they just procrastinate and they never actually build it. Number 2, they abandon it about a third to halfway through because it gets too hard to finish. And there is a, a, a very easy solvable problem here that will eliminate number 2. Number 1 is the procrastination is a little bit harder to, to fix, but hopefully if you listen to the beginning of what I just said, you'll realize like, I really need to take action on this. But number 2 is solvable. On this podcast today, I'm gonna give you the solution. Now, whether or not you execute it is a whole different thing, but I will give you the solution. And number 3, people actually do build the whole thing and then they never launch it because they thought it wasn't good, or they launch it once and it didn't go well, and therefore they think nobody cares and then they abandon it. All right, so what I wanna do for this episode is focus on Number 2, mostly, a little bit of number 3. So if you find yourself starting to build a course or thinking about it, getting maybe to the outline or maybe getting one slide deck in or, or what have you, and then you don't finish, here is why. Course momentum, which I'm gonna define as finishing a course in a timely manner. The only way you stay in momentum when you're building a course is if you are clear. I know it doesn't sound that exciting. It sounds kind of obvious, but let's talk about what it means to be clear. So inside of my course, it's called Course Chemist, and it's sort of this science-y way to build a course. The very beginning, I teach something called the mission and solution, and I walk people through two, two activities. The first is I help people write a one-sentence mission statement for their course. This doesn't have to be a hook. It doesn't have to be be something super catchy or polarizing. It just has to be a really clear statement. So my mission statement for my course, Course Chemist, was, my course teaches online entrepreneurs how to create an amazing course. Okay, pretty basic, pretty obvious. The second half is the definition of the solution, right? So we look at that sentence and we say, well, what's your solution? I'm teaching you how to make an amazing course. That's the solution. An amazing course. By the time you're done with Course Chemist, you're going to have an amazing course. That is my promise. So I have to define what an amazing course actually is. Okay, this doesn't sound hard, but if I said to you, okay, in 3 to 5 sentences, you have to define what an amazing course is, could you do it? And basically that becomes your anchor, that becomes your roadmap for the course. Now I teach this inside of Course Chemist. If you go to coursechemist.com, you can purchase it and you can bang out this experiment today and you can solve number 2, because once you have this done, this is going to unhook a lot of that sort of lack of clarity that happens when you build a course, you don't clearly define the solution, and then your course can go in a million directions. But I actually taught this live during our Course Chemist Live Accelerator. So this summer I blocked an entire week and I took 70 people through my Course Chemist model, but I added a whole bunch of things and I added a lot of activities to try to get people to take action. And wouldn't you know that the mission and solution, the definition of the solution was the single hardest task for everybody. And I had some hard tasks in there. I had some framework building, we had marketing arguments, sales page design. I mean, I had like some, some complicated things to do and the mission and solution, people were still talking about it on Thursday. It was a 5-day event and on Thursday they were still on module 1, if you will. So it sounds like, ah, that's easy, but it's actually not. However, if you do take the time to actually do this, and draw the boundaries around what you're going to teach, you're going to get really, really clear. And what was fascinating to watch in this accelerator was the minute someone had a good mission and a good solution, everything else happened fast, right? I'm talking sales page in an afternoon, outlines fully built in the membership with thumbnails in less than a day. All the ideas for bonuses versus core content easily sorted out. Confidence in their methodology and what they were teaching, and then unique ideas and frameworks to make it stand out, right? So all of this happened so fast. So if you are number 2, if you have a tendency to abandon projects a third to half the way through because it was too hard to finish, I encourage you to go get Course Chemist and also Stay, you know, stay aware because if we do an encore of the accelerator, it is 100% worth it. And we had an amazing completion rate of people getting not just that done, but many things done in the course of a week. So I wanna just circle back and go back to number 3, which was you built the whole thing and you launched it and it didn't work, or you never launched it. And what I have realized is that people expect success on day 1, even when you say you don't, you do. And you get disenchanted, right? So somebody sells a course, they get— sell 3 or 4 units, they think that means nobody wants it. They don't see the course launching process as slow building blocks. If you listened to my origin story, I have 2 episodes here on it. I think the first, uh, big launch I had was 30 students, and that was a big launch, right? Imagine what 30 students feels like if you're in, in a classroom and you're staring out of the class. I mean, that's pretty intense, right? So when people launch things and they get 5 students or 10 students, I like to say to them, I want you to imagine you're at some dinner party and you sit down at a table with 10 people and they all turn their head to pay attention to you and they ask you to teach them something. That's a, that's a pretty good moment there, right? That's how many people have raised their hand for your course. And half the time, the reason why you only sell 2 or 3 or 4 units at the beginning of a launch is not because your course sucks, it's because you have no audience, you have no platform, you haven't learned how to command attention. And so that just takes time. And so you use that asset, that course asset, and you sell again and again and again. You optimize again and again and again. You're going to eventually get to those 30, 50, 100 number. I had a client in my Voxer yesterday, really upset. You know, she's selling, she sold like 5 or 6 units of something so far. Her cart hasn't closed yet, so we're gonna see what she ends up with. My, my guess is she's gonna end up with around 10 or 12. Number one, it's clearly a traffic issue. She just hasn't had enough people paying attention. But number two, she said to me, well, if I can't sell this, what do I sell? And I said, what do you mean you can't sell this? I said, no, you gotta give this its shot. Another client of mine, it took her 5 months, 5 months to re-practice and re-practice her pitch before she finally saw momentum in her program. We give up too fast. We don't have mentors that encourage us on what the path looks like. We just expect, oh, we're gonna get that $100K launch or that $50,000 launch. So I hope this has been helpful to kind of restructure, um, some of the biggest hiccups that happen around course creation. And of course, if you don't have Course Chemist, go pick it up. It's $197. It'll be the best $200 you spent. Go to coursechemist.com. And I'll let you know if we decide to do the accelerator again. It was an amazing experience, but Hopefully this episode will have unstuck you and you'll get back on your course creation journey. Talk soon. Folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.