How to Make Money as a Creator: Part 1

Hey, hey, you're listening to the Level Up Creators Podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving, sustainable businesses they love. We're so glad you're here. Welcome. And I'm joined again today by our head of revenue strategy, Natalie Williams, to help me break down all the ways that creators can make money online. Welcome, Natalie.

Thanks, Amanda. It's good to be here and I'm excited for today's episode. This is the first of an at least 3-part series because fortunately there's a lot of ways to make money online as a digital creator with a loyal community of followers. We're going to break down each one in quite a bit of detail and help you decide the right next product offering for you.

Yeah. And going into this conversation, know that our POV at Level Up Creators is that you should start with just one product offering, but that you will need to build a suite of offerings over time to build a sustainable, profitable creator-led business. You can expect to leave this series with a clear understanding of what's available for you to sell. Which products or services are right for you, how to get started making those products, and we'll even touch on marketing and sales a little bit. But we have a full episode coming later this season dedicated to the topic of sales and marketing automation alone because that is a total beast and I don't wanna try and tackle it at the same time as a suite of product offerings for you. So we'll keep those conversations separate for the sake of clarity. But the work to be done is to first decide the right mix of offerings for your audience and then build a marketing machine to support ongoing sales of each product in your lineup without sales calls or any high-touch efforts on your part. So we're gonna teach you how to do that. Let's get into it.

Yeah, so we're going to cover a giant umbrella category today called one-off digital products or single payment digital products. And there are a lot of these, but we are going to cover the most accessible and popular dozen or so on today's show, starting with the digital course. And if you're a digital creator, I know you're seeing an overwhelming amount of content online that wants to teach you how to create and launch your first course. There are big carrots being dangled out there for 6 or 7-figure course launches and getting really rich off of a single course.

Yeah, no kidding. The content is truly incredible. The options that you have available to you, if you are interested in launching a course, it's even quite overwhelming at times. And we'll see how many of these we get through today, but we will definitely hit courses pretty hard here. So you'll definitely leave with a solid understanding of if launching a course is right for you, whether it's your first product offering or you're 6, it doesn't really matter. Courses are a great thing to inject for the right creator at almost any time. So let's start with talking about who courses are great for. And in my opinion, they're great for subject matter experts to create. They're a really legit way to start earning income as a creator or to add to your existing revenue and to ensure that what you have to say and teach is what your audience wants. If they'll pull out their credit card and pay you for your knowledge, you are really, really onto something here. Importantly though, there are far more course launch flops than successes. Unfortunately, some produce good results, but only about the top 2% of launches are going to make into those 6 and 7 figures that you see advertised all over the place. So first of all, please temper your expectations. Outcomes for course launches really truly span the gamut. There are significant variables to consider when you're launching a course. Things like audience size, if you sold something to your audience before or not, your community's implicit trust and affinity for you and your brand, the subject matter of your course, how effectively you market it, how you price it, public customer feedback, and just kind of like the whole range of things could potentially play into being a variable for how successful your course launch will be. Obviously, I can't predict sales numbers or conversion rates in your specific situation, but You're more likely to be successful launching a course if your audience is growing steadily, is highly engaged on social and through something like an email newsletter, for instance. They've bought something from you before and had a great experience and are able to provide testimonials that vouch for your work and expertise. And most importantly, you, creator, are in the position to solve a pervasive, widespread, and hopefully expensive problem that a critical mass of your followers have and just critical mass, meaning enough of them, right? To make it worth you creating marketing and dealing with all the technical logistics of creating a course. So make sure there are enough interested parties before you make the whole thing and launch it, right?

Yeah. And on the flip side of that coin, if your community is passive with your content and posts and/or your account is not built around a specific area of interest and/or you don't have a great reputation for reliability or quality, this is not a good idea for you. And for those of you who are well positioned to launch a course based on our description, we recommend starting relatively small here if it's your first one. And don't come out of the gate with a 50-video course and every last drop of your knowledge baked into those videos, you just, just to make your course look valuable.

Yeah, maybe start with 10 to 20-ish videos in your first course with a few supplemental materials like a worksheet or workbook. That course customers can fill in as they watch, but don't start by deciding how many videos the course should include or how long it should be. That is not your first step.

Yeah. So instead, when you begin outlining a plan for your course, start by asking yourself what problem your course will solve for your customers and don't just brain dump everything you know into it. That's overwhelming and might be very, very hard to sell.

Yes. Exactly. Specificity will help you sell, whereas ambiguity overwhelms and confuses prospective customers. You need to be strategic. Truly identify what are the biggest problems the actual humans inside your community of followers are facing that have to do with the topic you talk about with them. Your first task here is to literally make a list of those problems. And once you have a list of their biggest, most prevalent, painful problems, choose one and only one that you are best positioned to solve based on your knowledge, expertise, and experience. If you begin your course outline with a high degree of clarity about what the exact problem you're helping your customers solve, even a short 15-video or text or audio-based course will provide extraordinary value to your customers, which of course in turn will help you position yourself to build and sell the next right thing and the next right thing and the next right thing to your community Over the course of your creator journey.

Yeah. And everything you build for your community, you have to remember that it's all about them, not you. So plan your content with that at the forefront of your mind. How will your course methodically take your customers on a journey to solve their big annoying problems? If there are 13 steps they need to take, do one video for each step and boom, you have your outline.

Exactly. And if you can put together something like a PDF workbook that will help your customers see their progress in real time as they progress throughout your course, That can be really, really valuable. Seeing tangible progress will help motivate your customers to continue watching to the end. If they complete the course, they'll get the maximum amount of value from it and be more likely to do things like give you testimonials, tell their friends about you, hype you up online, and of course, buy the next thing that you sell.

Right. And an important and quick point to not just hear, but really internalize is that well over 90% of people who purchase courses do not complete them. No course creator is immune to the statistic. It's just the way that it is. And we'll go into buying our courses with the best— and we all go into buying our courses with the best intentions, but then life just takes over.

Yeah.

The best thing you can do based on that information is to provide some value early in your course. Think about the concept of quick wins. That way, no matter how far a customer progresses or doesn't progress, they'll still come away with positive association with their purchase from you.

Yeah, definitely. And if you're not familiar with the concept of quick wins, I mean, it's fairly self-explanatory, but don't hold back your value until, you know, videos 12, 13, 14, 15 in your 15-video course per se. You wanna make sure that people are recognizing value early and often, right? This is something that you are creating to sell for real dollars and asking people to pull their credit cards out for. You wanna make sure that They get hooked really, really quickly. So if you've got less interesting content, but that is still very necessary to provide the information to solve your customers' problems, maybe kind of pad those into the middle and mix them in with other videos that do provide really tangible, palpable outcomes, quick wins, you know, steps that your customers can take and things like that. So Put yourself in your customer's shoes, right? You don't want to be bored. I mean, if the first video is, you have to wait till video 10 to actually get value, you're probably not actually even going to make it to video 10 if you're the customer. So please be mindful of that as you're working on your course outline and just really putting yourself in the customer's shoes. I mean, to Natalie's point earlier, you have to think like your customer. You cannot think about yourself and what's in it for you as a creator, but Rather what's in it for your community and your customers. And I'm going to quickly switch gears to marketing here. I said at the, at the intro that we're not going to dive too deep into marketing, but I would be remiss to just skip it entirely. Right. And the main point I want to share here is don't wait until your course or any product for that matter is ready to launch to start talking about it with your audience. And again, we'll talk about this ongoing throughout every season of this podcast, but for the sake of our discussion today, start telling your community what you're up to. Tease what the course is and what problem it solves on your social media platforms of choice and your email newsletter if you have one, which if you don't, you should. Not only will sharing what you're working on create excitement and some marketing momentum for you, but it will give you the motivation to keep working and take your course over the finish line. It's that same principle about sharing. I talked about this in an earlier episode. But sharing about your New Year's resolution or goals. The science tells us that if you make them even just a little bit public, even just write them out and put them on your desk or your mirror or something like that, our brains push us to align what we've said with what we're going— what we've said we're going to do with our actual actions. So our brain is constantly trying to bridge this gap of cognitive dissonance to bring what we say together with our actions so that those— there's a lot of like congruency and consistency. between those. So, as soon as you have a problem identified and an outline, commit, go for it, and start sharing. And on that point about an email newsletter, we've touched before and we'll touch more on the importance of building an email list and owning your audience. What's happening with the platform formerly known as Twitter right now with the little soundbite that Elon dropped actually earlier this week, we're recording in late September of 2023, that he intends to potentially charge. every person, every user on Twitter, you know, some sort of nominal fee, I would guess $1 to $2. Who knows if he'll actually go through with it, but this is the most relevant current example of not putting everything into one social media platform and assuming that it will stay. I mean, many examples have happened with Facebook when Facebook was kind of like king of social media, where they— what was it, Natalie? They had Facebook Fan pages. Is that what it was like ten years ago or something like that? And then they completely flipped the script, changed the rules to where you really got to be doing paid advertising to drive people to your business page to become fans. I truly can't remember what they were called, but Facebook just changed the rules, and that screwed so many businesses. They lost so many of their followers. And if Elon does follow through with the situation on X slash Twitter and starts charging everybody on there, anticipate significant attrition on your account. Not everybody's going to be down for that. And so lots of people will, I'm sure. But if you are banking on Twitter and that is your primary platform right now, you need to listen to this bit really, really intently. Okay, go get a free account on convertkit.com and get going building your email list. You have to own email addresses to build a sustainable, profitable creator-led business. And sharing on social media that only folks who get your email newsletter will receive things like special launch pricing on your upcoming course, per se, a coupon, a bonus module, or something like that. You have to let your audience know that there is inherent value in inviting you to their inbox. ConvertKit makes it super easy to build an email list and create compelling offers for more and more of your followers to join. And it's not just a newsletter platform, you can actually create landing page, email automation flows, connect with other creators through their creator network and grow your email list that way. And we'll, we actually have a whole episode coming up about ConvertKit later in the season, but they have really changed the game in the creator economy. And I don't know of any email marketing platform that has as compelling as a reason to join as this creator network that they have built. So more on that later, but seriously, that's the first step. Go create a free account, find a reason to get people to join your email list.

Yeah.

And another quick— yeah, sorry, go ahead.

I'm just gonna say a cliché I always like to think about in terms of email lists is don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom. You have to own your audience. You have to make it— it's— you just have to protect your audience and make it kind of immune to some of these things that are constantly shifting with social media platforms. It's always going to change and you have to have at least some kind of control over your audience or you'll lose them. And then Poof, that's all gone. And another quick marketing tip is to get online friends talking about your upcoming course too. Supply them with the info they need to hype their audience up about it and use tools like Rewardful to provide them with an affiliate commission on each sale to help you make once your course is launched. So kind of being able to leverage your friends and your network's audiences. And a quick aside, this podcast isn't a commercial for software platforms, but we have— we know what a big hurdle choosing the right technology can be. So we hope our recommendations help cut through the noise and dozens of options. You can be sure that all the recommendations we make are extremely well vetted, and that we have personal experience with them. And we'll make a point to include links to everything like this that we referenced in the show notes.

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. And that's absolutely true. We're not including affiliate links in the show notes or anything like that. Just we have battle tested so many of these tools and want to Again, like Natalie just said, cut through the noise and help, help lessen the burden of that research project for you. Okay. Back to course courses. So throughout your marketing and promotional efforts, don't focus on what the course modules or videos are called or their contents or how long they are. That's just logistics. Remember what we said earlier, what you're actually selling is the outcome your customers will receive after taking the course, the solution to their big ugly problem. And there's a lot of emphasis around sales that happen during your course launch being the be-all end-all. Like you may as well consider your course dead after you launch, after your launch window ends. I don't like that. That's a lot of pressure for a launch, especially if you've never done this before. So instead, what I would encourage you to do is to do your best on the launch without burning yourself out and focus on the long game. You absolutely need what's called an evergreen marketing strategy that guides your community of followers on an intentional journey that helps them buy all the cool things that you make. We have an entire episode dedicated to that discussion again later this season. Definitely don't miss it. Effective evergreen marketing through what's called, again, marketing automation is the key to unlocking maximum success and impact as a creator. And let's talk audio video stuff for a minute for creators who are producing a video-centric course, or honestly anyone who produces video, which is probably the vast majority of people. who are listening to this, or at least you're thinking about it, right? So I've spent the vast majority of my career to this point working behind the scenes at companies. I have hosted audio-only podcasts in the past. I've done a ton of writing, but the prospect of putting my face up on YouTube was really, really intimidating. But here we are. Hi. Hi. Um, when we started Level Up Creators, I didn't even know where to start with my lighting and camera setup and felt Really, really intimidated about even like jumping into the research into this topic because I know it's not my forte. The options and opinions out there are really overwhelming when you don't live in that world, just like the options and opinions available on you know if you should build a course, how to build a course, how to have your first six-figure course launch, blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, but then regarding my audio video stuff, Aaron Francis of screencasting.com came into my life, and now look, I have like a pretty awesome setup, and there's you know light here and here. And behind me, I've got these cool LED lights on my bookshelf, all because of Aaron. So thank you. Aaron's course on screencasting.com is straight and to the point, easy to understand, undoubtedly saved me a ton of money by not having to guess which gear to purchase or how to set it up, or the opportunity cost of the time that it would've taken me to make a best guess on what I should have done, much less like the settings. Getting the settings right on your lights and camera and everything like that is an entirely different hurdle after you purchase and set up the equipment. So anyway, again, not posting an affiliate link or anything like that in the show notes, but I can't recommend his course enough. If you grab it and take his advice, I promise it will increase your confidence for any kind of screencast you're recording, whether you put your face on it or not.

Yeah. So to sum things up here, a course can be a truly great option to include in your product mix and is often a terrific first product offering for creators, but please just heed our advice about which creators are best positioned to successfully launch a course. Make sure that you are solving a pervasive problem that a critical mass of your audience has and start sharing exciting news of your upcoming launch as soon as you've got your outline nailed down.

Okay. Let's put a pin in course talk and move on to other types of one-off digital products. Next up, workshops, webinars, and summits. And I'll add that for the next handful of one-off digital products we discuss, Each of them could be offered as a lead magnet or a digital product or service for sale.

Yeah, in case you missed our first couple of episodes, a lead magnet is something of value offered in exchange for an email address. There are almost infinite lead magnet options, but consider examples like a mini course, a workshop, a webinar, a 1-week paleo meal plan with a grocery list, group challenge, a printable, top 10 list, an industry report or white paper. So lots and lots of options. And at Level Up, we love using lead magnets. Done right, they are very powerful marketing tools that help you build your email list, segment your audience according to what they're most interested in, test which products you were thinking about creating and selling, and ultimately lead to sales.

Mm-hmm. And the way today's conversation is related to lead magnets is that often a significantly scaled-down version of what you're actually going to sell for money can get packaged up for free in exchange for a prospective customer's email address, just like what Natalie was saying. So lots of ways to do that. Um, and definitely hits on our conversation earlier, especially if your primary platform is currently Twitter or X, um, build an email list like yesterday. Um, but just a further example, if with a course, for instance, you give away access to your first 2 videos in a 25-video course packaged as a lead magnet, you can gauge your audience's potential interest in the actual course, get some feedback from those who watched the first 2 videos and even create some simple sales projections. This is a little bit nerdy, but for sales projections, you, you might be able to accurately or somewhat accurately predict a range of how many course licenses you'll actually sell based on your existing audience size. Again, that's just like the ratio of how many total followers you have to how many total followers actually picked up your first couple videos, your lead magnet, and you could expand, expand on that to determine how many might actually purchase the course. Maybe we'll talk about metrics later. Maybe not. I don't know. We can totally get way into the weeds on this one. But again, actually not again. This I don't know if you've if you didn't take a statistics class in college or whatever, like this may be a new term. But it's important that you're getting both quantitative and qualitative feedback from your audience and from your sales numbers and from Google Analytics and your email automation platform and all that kind of stuff. So. How many people actually grab your lead magnet would be quantitative data, as would the ratio of people who grab your lead magnet to your total follower count. Whereas the feedback you get from those people, like testimonials, or if they DM you with a question or they're not clear on something, that's qualitative data. It's subjective. And so that's based on people's opinions. And often you want to take both of like all the data points you can get on the quantitative side with a like high degree of exactitude. You know, we're looking at numbers, percentages, ratios, and mix that with the qualitative data you're getting from your customers, like their actual voice, the things that they're saying, and put those 2 together to make strategic decisions. But just bear in mind, as we continue this combo, often a scaled-down free version of what you're actually going to sell will provide you with important data and info to help you make smart business decisions while maximizing the sales you make of everything you offer. Always relate your lead magnet to a product you're actually trying to sell. Like if you have a completely different topic for your lead magnet, than the product it's trying to help you sell, that won't give you any information and will confuse your customers completely if those 2 things are completely unrelated. So a really good framework actually I like to use for lead magnets is you give away the what and the why of the problem you're trying to solve, but then the actual— within the actual product that people pay real dollars for, you explain How, like how you go about solving that problem. So what, why, how, um, try and keep that in mind. And if you're trying to think about, well, what information should I give away for free? You give away the what and the why, like you're really setting the stage for the problem. It'll help you very clearly identify with your audience and the people who need your products, but then they actually have to purchase it to understand how to solve their problems, like what the actual steps are.

Yeah, that's a great lead magnet and something that's pretty easy to remember as you're starting to map out your lead magnet. Okay. Let's get back to workshops, masterclass, webinars, and summits. The commonality between these 4 is that they're usually one-time online events that can attract a sizable audience live and hold great potential for audience sharing, high conversion rates for whatever your call to action is at the end of them, whether that be to buy a course, join a membership, or something else entirely. All 4 are often offered live and then recorded for reuse and replays afterwards. And workshops and webinars are usually 40 to 90 minutes in length. Webinars are typically educational in nature. Workshops are always educational as well, but the term workshop should imply that at the end of it, your participants will have a tangible takeaway that can be applied immediately.

Yes, I'm glad you said masterclass. I forgot to mention that earlier. That's a great point. Masterclasses are really on the rise in popularity, and just the name masterclass carries quite a lot more gravitas than, say, a workshop or a webinar. If you're sharing really high-value knowledge, solving pervasive problems for your audience, then I'd recommend calling your event a masterclass and price it at a premium, whatever that means in your industry. And it's common for a masterclass to be delivered in a series as well, maybe like once per week at the same time for 3 to 5 weeks, or really whatever makes sense for what you're teaching. But masterclass is just kind of, again, carries a little bit more weight and a little bit more intrigue as well. So consider calling your webinar, if you weren't going to hold a webinar or workshop, consider calling it a masterclass. Now summits are a series of workshops and or webinars that happen in quick succession. Often like literally one session after another and commonly over the course of 2 to 3 days. They are a tremendous amount of effort to organize, especially if they're offered live, but the potential for growing your email list from audience sharing between each host usually makes it worth the effort. And as with most things, most things, you get out what you put in, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And a common summit model is to offer the live versions for free but charge one price for all of the recordings. And so summits should provide immediate and direct value to attendees. And if you do decide to organize one, do your best to pull in guests who are definitive experts in the subject matter you're covering and have large social media followings and/or email lists so you can leverage their audience who may not also be related to your audience. And for a webinar or workshop or summit, getting your marketing right is essential. You can put together the best workshops in the history of your industry, but if it's not well promoted, there will be crickets on the call. The good news is that if your live event isn't well attended, you can still repurpose that content by offering the recording of your website on your website for free as a lead magnet or for a fee.

If you're the only featured expert on your webinar or workshop, make sure you're leveraging every channel, channel available to you to promote the event. And those channels for creators are usually social media accounts and your email list if you have one. If you have people pay to attend, get their email addresses and make sure that you have automated reminders set up to ping your attendees at least 24 hours and 1 hour before the live event. A text message at the start of the event is even better. And then of course, on the backside, send out a link to the recording within 24 hours of the live event for those who weren't able to make it. And of course, if you have people sign up to attend a free one, you'll capture their email for your list as well.

Again, when you promote your event, make sure you're highlighting the key benefits and outcomes or results that attendees will receive, whether it's specific and valuable knowledge on a topic within your expertise or a workshop that will help people design their first Instagram carousel post, promote what they get for attending, not just the topics that you're covering.

Yes. Value and outcomes, value and outcomes. Remember, put yourselves in their shoes, get outta your shoes, stop thinking about yourself and the value instead about the value you're providing to those in attendance. And with a live event, you're competing for time in a very busy person's day. It's one thing to have someone sign up to attend. Often that's very aspirational, right? It's a compelling offer. I definitely wanna do that. I'll totally make time for it. But it's an entirely different thing to get someone to actually show up when you are live. Again, making that most compelling offer to get people to sign up and make a push to attend is really, really important piece of this. And then again, reminding them exactly when to join. And there's some significant technical hurdles to get your webinar up and running. I can't even tell you the number of technical issues Natalie and I had before we started recording. Recording this morning. Hopefully our audio is coming through and video is coming through very clearly. But this can be a major sticking point and tremendous frustration to anyone because so many things are outside of your control, or if your software is buggy or whatever. So getting your tech set up and testing every inch of it before the live thing happens matters A lot. With these kinds of offerings, you're frequently wrangling guests that are presenting or being interviewed, and you need to make sure their audio, video, and internet are working right for your event to go off without a hitch. Much easier said than done, but don't ever go into a live event without testing and making sure that your tech setup is foolproof.

Yeah, I mean, that's gonna be the easiest way to lose audience members too. People don't have the patience for that. It'll Your credibility will take a hit and it'll just be not a fun experience overall. So just doing a little bit of due diligence at the beginning to make sure everything is running smoothly. Of course, you can't prepare for all outcomes, but if you can prepare for the big ones, that's, that's gonna really, really help you out and have a smooth event. And there are a lot of tools available for hosting these events at this point. And I can't recommend just one because each platform available has compelling features depending on your needs. We will link to a great article from HubSpot in the show notes that breaks down in layman's terms which webinar hosting platforms are best for— best based on your needs. And whatever tech you choose to run your event, you've got to test it like we just mentioned. Do a dry run the day before at the latest and have any guests that you're interviewing join as well for a gut check on their audio, video, and internet connection. Don't just assume everything is going to be smoothly. Test it and make sure.

Yes. What's, what's the saying about making assumptions? And regardless of your event type, absolutely make sure that you're repurposing your content. I'm betting you can write 3 to 6 blog posts, a dozen newsletters, and maybe 3 dozen social media posts from the content you create on a single webinar. Don't reinvent the wheel every time you feel like you have to create content. I mean, that's back to episode 2. We talked about creator burnout and we know that content creation is such a major hurdle. It's so hard to produce excellent content consistently and get that out to your audience on a regular basis so that you stay relevant and stay top of mind and continue to grow your following and things like that. So we'll talk more about repurposing later, but if you're doing an hour or 75-minute-long workshop or webinar or masterclass, you're putting in a lot of work to write that Write the outline, reuse it, repurpose it, spin it off. You know, use your blog or your newsletter as a place to expand on specific topics that maybe you didn't have time to go into a deep dive in, but I'm sure you know about them. So definitely think about how you can maximize what you're doing with that content. And you can also reuse the recording as well. Of course, those recordings can be sold as one-off purchases, or again, used as lead magnets to help you build your email list. Of course, you want your marketing automation machine working behind the scenes to thoughtfully guide those members of your community toward each and every product or service you offer that they might find valuable. And in terms of the content you should include in any of these workshop, webinar, masterclass, summit, it varies greatly based on your area of expertise, what value you're offering to your audience inside of the event, and especially if you're using one of these events to help you sell something else, like offering it, the event for free, but it's, you know, a purpose is to help you sell maybe a course, join your membership, join your coaching program or anything like that. Or if people in attendance have already paid for it. If they've already, if they've already paid, you've got to overdeliver on the value you promised throughout your marketing efforts. There really is quite a lot to be said for the concept of underpromise and overdeliver. Just don't underpromise too much. There is like a sweet spot where you, you know, offering enough value, but then you really want to just go above and beyond in the actual delivery of your event or any product or service that you sell.

Yeah. And if you're using an event to help you sell something else, there's a lot of noise on the internet on how to outline your event to maximize conversions.

Yeah, definitely. And there's an article on LinkedIn, LinkedIn that I really like by Alex Cattoni. And I'm so, I hope that I'm saying your last name right, Alex. I'm sorry if I'm not, but this is a pretty great article. On specific outline points to use to put together your webinar or workshop. And so I'm just gonna quickly kind of run through these and chat about them. We'll of course also link to the article in the show notes so you can go through it again in detail. But if you're using your webinar, workshop, masterclass, or summit to actually sell something, Alex's advice here is that in the first 5 minutes, you really want to introduce the core message that you belong here. Whoever is in attendance belongs, right? Let 'em know that you know them, you understand their problem, you've put together this webinar and the product you're trying to sell just for them. So Alex's advice is take a couple minutes, say hello, provide encouragement, affirm people's decision to attend, and remind them of the value that they're here to receive, right? Because you don't want 'em to leave early on. And then the next bit, she says to make points, uh, or make this point in the like 5 to 15 minute range of your event. You are not alone. And so this is a really important thing in our brains as humans. We want to know that others are kind of in the trenches with us, that they're feeling the same struggles and problems. And so really emphasizing and demonstrating, obviously there should be other people on the webinar. You could say how many people signed up or whatever, if you wanna share that information. Um, but whatever you can say. To engender that feeling of, again, belonging and belonging to a specific group. You're not alone. And then the next section, she says minutes like 15 to 25, is clearly demonstrating that you are here to help solve the problem. The message is, I can help you. You're in the right place. Everybody here is in the right place. They're in the same boat, and I'm here to provide the solution to your problem. So, you know, the most, or the more real life evidence you have to back that claim up, uh, that will build authority, trust, brand affinity, and things like that. But if people have been following you for a long time and a webinar is unlikely to be someone's like first introduction or touchpoint with you, um, it shouldn't be too hard to reach that hurdle of ensuring that you're here to solve their problem and that you have what it takes to do that. Okay. Okay. Next large chunk of, of your event, she says minutes 25 to 40. You really wanna hammer in the point that here's how you get immediate results. So you go right into solutioning after you have ensured that everyone on the call understands that you're the right person to solve the problem. So take 'em through the solution, right? And again, if this is a selling webinar, which is what we're talking about, you can give away a lot of the what and the why. Save at least most of the how or specifics of how to achieve the desired result for, of course, the actual product that you're selling. But then you want to start to wind down your webinar around the 40 to 50 minute mark. And then, so say you've shared the what and the why and you've started the solutioning phase. The next section is I've made this even easier for you, right? So the product that you're providing is supposed to be inherently Well, like a shortcut almost, I think you could say, to get these people exactly what they want to solve their problem. And then you're going to wrap up with the official offer. So the core message of your official offer is here's what you get today. Here's what to do about it. Here's how to solve your problem. Right. And so she calls the last section the FOMO booster. FOMO is fear of missing out and, you know, don't miss out. Right. And so it's like you've got people on the call, you're wanting to use things like Peer pressure, honestly, I think is what she's promoting here. It's, it's don't miss out. You don't want to be the only one to miss out. You're here for a reason. You have, you said, hey, I've got this problem. I need help solving it. So I'm the right person. I built the right thing for you. Everybody else is going to get it. Don't you want it too? And then close it. You know, this is your, if you're going to add like a special offer, if someone buys within the next 24 hours, or maybe for only those who attended your event live, you know, you could say, well, this is your only chance or your last chance to get this, whatever it is. It may be, if it's a course you're trying to sell through this live event, it's a bonus module or an extra thing. It could be a coupon. We're not big fans of discounts at Level Up Creators because we want you to really, really, really internalize and express the value of your work and the value that you're bringing to your audience. But I think the point that she's making here is if you can add something extra to really push people over the edge, if they're on the fence, then That's a good way to do it is to add a bonus or a coupon or a discount or something. Don't forget to ask for the sale. I think that's another really key point here. And that makes some folks really, really uncomfortable, which makes sense. You know, if you have not sold before, putting yourself in an extremely vulnerable position where your audience members who you know and feel very close to can say no to you and turn you down and all the hard work that you've put in You might feel like it's gone to waste or something like that if your launch doesn't go as expected. I just want to encourage you to keep going. You know, I think it took 2,001 tries or something to invent the filament that led to the light bulb and electricity and totally changed the world forever. And so, don't quit no matter how it goes. Do your planning, put your best foot forward, follow our advice, please. It is— Tried and true. We've been using it for years and years and years in the business world. But don't take it too personally if your first shot out of the gate doesn't work.

Yeah, and there's always something to be learned from every single one of those, right? In all those 2001 tries, guarantee there was a lesson learned every single time.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Oh, and I do want to throw in a point here: Don't be the cheesy, sleazy. Salesperson. It's a huge turnoff. If you're not completely comfortable with this kind of like live event format, you're much better off just being you. If you don't, if what I just said from Alex's article doesn't resonate, forget it. Just be you. The people who are signing up to join your webinar, they know you, they like you, they have some level of trust in you. They believe in you at some level, right? Otherwise they would not be wasting their time at your event. The main thing is to say what the value is that you're going to deliver and then deliver on your promise, even if it doesn't go off super smoothly or without a hitch or anything like that. Um, people on the internet, I bet you have good communities. There are super mean people and trolls on the internet and things like that. And I'm hoping that within your specific community creator, that that is much more the exception than the rule, but it happens. Um, Just deliver the value you promise, ask your community to support you, and let them know that they're going to get amazing value and you're going to deliver on the promise you made for whatever you're selling. And final parting shot on live events: practice, practice, practice. Literally record yourself and watch the recording back over and over again until you feel extraordinarily prepared and comfortable enough on camera. This, like watching yourself back will help you notice unconscious verbal tics, maybe a facial expression you don't need to make, loads of ums, ums, ums, like I did after watching back our first couple of podcast episodes. Practice makes progress, not practice makes perfect, but practice makes progress. So every time you practice, you'll get better. Every time you go live or held a live event, make a product, you're going to get better and better and better over time. So remember to have grace for yourself. And like we talked about in episode 2, self-compassion is a big component of that as well. And I want you to know that you're brave to go get on camera and go in front of people and offer something and build products. It's incredibly vulnerable. So I'm proud of you. I think you should be proud of yourself for stepping into the arena on that front. Again, takes a lot of courage and we believe that you can do it. We would not be having this podcast and have pivoted into the creator economy from the business world if we didn't know that you creators were capable, first of all, and that we could come in and help you take it to the next level. So that's a wrap for today. Thank you again, Natalie, for joining, and please join us next time as we continue, um, what's probably gonna end up being quite a lengthy series on all the ways that creators can make money online. And we know that time is precious. Thank you for sharing yours with us. Level Up Creators exists to amplify the voice, reach, and impact of creators making a positive impact in the world. With your expertise as the focus, our team of strategists, marketers, sales pros, product developers, administrators, and tech gurus handle the heavy lifting of building and optimizing a profitable business. That will transform your life for good. Check out welevelupcreators.com for more info and resources for creators just like you. See you next time on the Level Up Creators Podcast.