How To Launch A Mini Course Right NOW!

If you think you need to wait until you have a full blown course to start making money online, then you're missing out on a giant opportunity. There's something available to you that is way less overwhelming and can help you start making money right now or at least start gathering emails so that when you have a course done, you have an audience and a customer base to promote it to. So let me share with you one of the greatest successes that I stumbled upon in my online business and that is the mini course. Now the mini course is a great opportunity for business owners because it allows you to either give something away for free that you can build an email list, or it allows you to start selling something, albeit at a lower price point, while you work on building and editing and creating a larger product. Now I mentioned overwhelm and this is a huge benefit of doing a mini course versus a large course. So let's talk about some of the comparisons there. So a mini course allows you to start exchanging with an audience whether you're doing it for free or you're selling it for a very low price. And we'll talk about price a little bit later, but it allows you to provide the solution to a singular problem and help your clients have a win. All right? And this is great because it helps you build trust, okay? It allows you to start selling a small ticket item and start exchanging with customers. It allows you to collect the emails and it allows your audience to experience you as a service provider before they put any money down. Okay? So let me use my. Mine is a free crash course, okay? And I do have lots of other mini courses. And like I said later we'll talk about pricing. I use a free crash course. It's about eight or nine lessons, okay? And it's only probably about like 45, 60 minutes of content. But what it does is it focuses on a singular problem, okay? Versus my very large course, which is 70 videos, okay? So it's about 10 times as big. It also has a lot of practice tracks. I think there's like 90 practice videos. So it's a very, very large and extensive course. It takes a lot of time to record film and edit over 150 videos. So you can see how that can be like very overwhelming to someone just getting started. Whereas a mini course you can do something on a much smaller scale. And the benefits of this is, you know, you get to introduce yourself, like I said earlier, your audience to you and your personality. Because people buy from people they like and if they don't like your personality, they're not going to buy for you. It will show them you know, how you teach. So for me, it's very important that students understand how I break things down because my goal is I teach older adults, I teach them how to play guitar, I tell them I make it step by step. But I'm really good at breaking things down into bits and pieces for beginners. So I want to demonstrate that inside of this course and I want to give them the confidence that they can actually do this. Okay, so a lot of our customers have that doubt in the back of our minds, like, can we do this? Is this possible? So by showing them the whole goal of this crash course is to get them playing a song by the end of the course. So within eight or nine lessons, I will get you playing a song. And if I can get you playing a song in this course and it's absolutely free, imagine what we can do over here in this bigger course. So a big question I get asked is like, how many hours of content should I have in a mini course and my free one, Like I said, it's probably 45, 60, 60 minutes, but it's enough to get them that big win. I have some other mini courses that maybe are 20 lessons that are like five to 10 minutes. So maybe we're getting into like the one to two hour range. If you wanted to do something to, to sell it all right for a little bit of price and make some money off of it. So now I get into the pricing. Like I know I have the free crash course and you know, I give that away for free for people. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to email market to them afterwards to try and get them to go and buy my course. But what should you price a mini course at? And you know, I know there's so many teachers out there, especially in the music and arts industry, and I have a lot of competitors that are selling courses for $9, $17, you know, $19. And the thing is, with those pricing points is you don't get the best quality customers. You really don't. And you're going to, especially if you're just getting started, you're going to run into a lot of refunds, you're going to run into a lot of customer service and it's not going to be worth it. Trust me. I did start my course at like a $19 a month thing, which subscriptions are a little bit different. But for many courses I would recommend charging at least $47. My mini courses, I charge $97. Okay. Because if you want to get in, I want you to know, like, part of my goal is I want them to actually use the course. Because if they use the course and they're successful, they'll tell other people, they'll refer people to me. I can get great testimonials. So if you offer someone a $7 course, how committed are they to using the course? Probably not as committed as someone who pays 497. My best customers. I get the least number of refunds, the least number of complaints, and the best success with customers that spend more money with me, it's just true. They're more invested. They want to see the results. So I think 47 is a great price point to get someone, you know, involved with you without breaking the bank. And if they need something less than that, that's where you can offer. Hey, I have lots of people who say, can I get a free trial of your course? And I say, absolutely. Go take the free crash course. That. That's the free trial right there. If I can get you to play songs in nine to 10 days, you can go take my free trial. And if you like that, then come back on over here and buy the course. I'm not going to give you a free trial to this course. You can access free here or you can access free over on YouTube. I got tons of stuff on YouTube for free. So don't feel like, you know, you have to help everyone. We can't literally help everyone. And every once in a while, do I make an exception? Do I have someone who writes to me and they're like, you know, I'm on disability and I have a limited income, and sometimes I'll be like, you know what? I'm in a good mood today. I'm going to give you the course for free. Congratulations. Thanks for writing in. So sometimes I do that for people, but in terms of customers and, you know, I'm not trying to offend anyone here. Maybe you took a course for $19 or $27, and you were super successful with it. That's great. But in my own personal experience as a course creator and someone who's been doing this for a while, I find that, you know, once you get above that 47 price point, and if you can get closer to a hundred, you're gonna get better quality students. And that's why I don't sell my courses like my competitors for $7 or $17, because I really want people to feel an investment and feel like I need to do this so that I can get, you know, I want them to solve the problem. All right? My course solves a problem and if they take it and get that problem solved, they're going to be happy and they're going to trust me and they're going to spend more money with me. So once you've edited your mini course, you're going to have to host it somewhere and you can do it on the back end of a website. But I really highly recommend doing it through some sort of course hosting provider. I personally use Kajabi. That's my platform of choice. I've used T Teachable in the past. I switched over to Kajabi in 2020. I've been very, very happy with it because I like having everything in one spot. And I'll put a link in the description below. If you use my link, usually get a 14 day free trial. But if you use my link you get a 30 day free trial which is enough time to actually plan out, record, edit and build your first mini course. So you can go over there, take a free trial, poke around. I really like it because everything's kind of built in there. You could have a website. I will make a note that I do have a separate website on WordPress because I can do a few more things on WordPress. Also, my domain existed before Kajabi existed. I've had my website since 2009 and when I was a performer in doing that. So I've always had that separate from Kajabi. But you could build a website on something like Kajabi. But I use it a lot for the courses and I use it a lot for the email and the landing pages are really great. And now the. They have a community feature, so I use that community feature as well in Kajabi. So if you're interested in checking that out, go in the link in Description below. But picking some sort of platform software, there's so many out there now. But I just want to let you know that Kajabi is the one people ask me all the time. Kajabi is where I host all my courses. All right, so we've recorded the course, we've got it uploaded into some sort of course platform. Now we got to promote it, right? We got to sell it and okay, and how do we do that? And there's a number of ways to do that. So obviously if you have an email list, email is your best way to sell a course. So if you have an email list, I would shoot it out to them and say, hey, I've Got this course. You could even do a pre sale. You don't even have to wait for the course to be done and say, I have this course. It helps solve this problem. This is what it costs, okay? And you can get some sales there. Now email marketing is a numbers game, okay? Usually on emails you're probably only converting like 1 to 2%. When I do big offers, it's like we're converting, you know, 1 to 2%. So you need to have a big list to get a lot of sales. So if you don't have a big list, don't worry, still promote it to them. You might get a few sales, but just understand it might not be as big as you were hoping for. The other thing to do is social media, okay? And when I started, this is kind of what I did because I have my website, but it was kind of crickets over there. I mean, getting some people over because of my YouTube channel was starting to grow. But I didn't even have an Instagram account when I started my course. I think I created that much later. But I had YouTube. I have my website and I have my personal Facebook page. Okay? There's a lot of people who know me, they know what I do, they know I'm a music teacher. And I started promoting over there. Hey, I've got a course and it's going to help you learn how to have fun playing the guitar. You can go check it out over here on my website, alright? And that's where if you have kajabi, you send them over to this really nice landing page that helps promote and sell your product. And that's where my first sales came from. Just the personal people who knew me, people who wanted to support my business or people who were just interested in learning the guitar and being like, oh, I like Lauren and I know she's a good teacher. Let me go buy her course. And then the website, you know, I talked about the website already, but I use my website as a big advertisement. So don't, don't put Google Ads on your website, all right? I did that many, many moons ago. And I don't want my competitors advertising on my website. So I have my own ads on my website. And you'll see if you go to my website, laurenbatement.com There's a big red button on every single page that says get your free course. Get your free course. So that's, that's my crash course. I also have like a little store that sells all my courses, including my mini courses. So if someone doesn't want to spend $300 right out of the gate with me. They can try the free course or they could spend $97 and get one of my mini courses and see how that goes. And again, we want them to be winning with these mini courses because if they win, they will buy more. They will promote our stuff. We want our clients to be successful with our courses. So make sure they are valuable. And I want to give you a special bonus on this. This is a huge tip that I discovered. And I was like, kind of like a face palm moment for me. It was a huge mistake and I left a lot of money on the table. But it finally clicked me. I was on a call with a client and she was talking about her husband's book funnel. Okay? And these people are billionaires, so they know what they're doing. So I listen when we're. When we're talking about different things. And it's a free. It was one of those free book funnels. And they were saying, we make about a thousand dollars per person through this book funnel. And I was like, wait a minute. You make a thousand dollars off of a free book? Well, what I didn't realize later is this is called a trip magnet. And what you do, so when someone fills out an opt in form so you're giving away a free course, they go to like a thank you page. That is the most viewed page after actually, that is the most view page. And then the next most viewed one is like the first email you send them. But the most viewed, they go to that thank you page. So why not try and sell them something on the thank you page? 3% of people are ready to buy right now, okay? So give them something to buy. And I started doing this with my crash course, and I started making a few extra thousand dollars a month just by offering them a special offer. Now, this special offer, again, has to be highly related to the problem you're trying to solve. So one of the things I was testing on this that I first started was a workshop on how to set up the perfect practice routine. Okay? That's something that's very valuable, especially to beginner guitar students. And like, hey, if you learn how to set up the perfect practice routine, you can make progress faster. You can play with bands, you can, you know, start having more fun sooner. But you need to go buy this routine. And it came with a little PDF with some worksheets and stuff for them to play with. And then we kept moving it up because we're like, how much can we charge? How much can we charge? And now sometimes we'll get people. Most people spend, on average, you know, 77 to $125 off of a free crash course. Okay, A free crash course. So this is a huge bonus, okay? If you're going to offer something free, try and get some other mini course going or something related to that free offer so that you can start selling it right away. Now, if you enjoyed this video, I highly recommend you go check out this video right over there, right where I show you how I've sold over a million dollars in guitar courses by leveraging YouTube.