71: The Three Kinds of Course Creators Your Students Will Follow Next Year (Which One Will You Be?)

If you teach, coach, or mentor other people for a living, your students and clients are already using AI to figure out the things you teach them. And in the next 12 months, they're gonna start following the people who can help them use AI well. This is not meant to scare you. It's meant to give you a clear-eyed look at the moment we are living in, because the question facing every course creator, coach, and membership owner right now is not whether AI matters. It's what kind of creator and educator and expert you are going to be. Welcome back to Your Online Business Mentor. I'm Lydia Martin, and today I wanna talk about something I have been thinking about constantly for the last several months. Specifically, I wanna talk about the 3 kinds of course creators, coaches, and membership owners that your students will be following a year from now, and which one you are becoming. Whether you have decided yet or not. This is a conversation I do not see enough people in our industry having. So today we're having it. So let me set this up. In this AI moment we are all in, you really have three kinds of people you can choose to follow and learn from. The first kind is someone who is genuinely brilliant at AI. They understand the tools, they build agents, They stack workflows, they make impressive things happen on the screen, but they don't necessarily understand online marketing, or they don't understand launch strategy, or they don't understand conversion. They don't understand the business of teaching other people, or even how to run a coaching practice or how to build a membership. If you follow them, here's what happens. You learn how to make AI do impressive things. But they have no context, no perspective, and no real connection to your audience. You end up with outputs that look slick on social, but never quite land for the actual humans you serve. You build things that may not convert because the person teaching you has never had to convert anyone in a real business. Now, the second kind is someone who is genuinely brilliant at marketing, launches and offers. They've built real businesses. They know how to write copy that converts. They understand audience transformation and messaging at a deep level, but they don't really use AI, not deeply, not as a part of how they actually work. Now, if you follow them, you learn proven strategies, real ones, the kind that have built actual businesses. But you implement those strategies the slow way. You spend 1, 2, even 6 weeks writing a sales page that AI could have helped you draft in an hour. You hire more people to handle tasks that AI could handle alongside them. So you pay more in contractor fees and you burn out trying to execute on advice that was created in a pre-AI world. Now, both of these types of teachers are good at what they do. They have built audiences for a reason, but for the coach, course creator, or membership owner trying to build a real business right now, they each give you only half of what you need. That brings us to the third kind of creator and educator, and these people are rare right now, but they do exist and you can find them if you know what to look for. These are people who are genuinely skilled at both, who have built real businesses through proven launch strategies and conversion principles. They understand audience messaging and the actual work of running a coaching or course business, and who have integrated AI deeply into how they work so that they can teach you not just the strategy, but how to execute the strategy with the efficiency AI offers. These are the teachers who can show you how to write a sales page in a few minutes versus weeks because they know both what the sales page needs and how to use AI to help you write it in your voice. These are the teachers who can show you how to support your members without burning out because they know both what your members need and how to use AI to help them serve at scale. This is who you want to be following right now. Someone who teaches both. Someone whose strategy you trust, whose AI fluency is real, and whose business looks the way you want yours to look. So here's why I felt like this topic was so relevant for today. This third person that I'm speaking of is also who your students need you to become. Not just a coach in your niche, not just a course creator who knows their subject matter, but a creator who knows the work and knows how to help their students implement faster, more efficiently, using AI as a tool that serves the work instead of replacing it. Because truthfully, your students are already using AI. They're using it to write their bios, plan their meals, draft their emails, build their offers, and they're using this to figure out the things you teach, whether whether they tell you that or not. And the coaches, creators, and educators who become this third kind of teacher, the ones who can guide students in both their niche and how to use AI well, are the ones the students will keep following. The ones who do not will quietly watch their students drift towards someone who can. This is not a guess. This is what's happening in our industry right now in real time. I see it in my own community every week. The creators who have integrated AI into how they teach are pulling ahead, and the ones who have not are slowly losing ground. And you get to choose which one you are going to be. So let's make this practical because abstract conversations about AI are not helpful. Here's what it actually looks like to be the third kind of creator and educator in your business. And I'm gonna use real examples from my own week because I want I want you to see what's actually possible. When I host a live Q&A inside my programs or my membership, my members used to leave the call with pages of scribbled notes that they would never go back to. Now I have a Claude skill that I built that takes the transcript of that Q&A and generates a complete guide for my members. Step-by-step summaries of what was taught, the questions that were asked with the answers laid out clearly, and action steps so they know exactly what to do next. By the time my members log back in the next day, they don't only have access to the replay, but they have a guide waiting for them that helps them implement right away. Not someday, but right away. This is what this kind of creator does. AI is not replacing the teaching. It's helping your students actually use what you taught. Here's another example. When I sit down to create content that attracts my ideal audience, I use a set of prompts and Claude skills that I've refined over months. I'm not just writing posts, I'm writing posts that map a real strategy in my voice, and they go out faster than they used to. But here's the part that matters for those in my programs, because I teach content strategy and launch strategy as a part of what I do. I share these prompts and skills with my students, so they're not just learning what to post, which is what they did pre-AI. Now they're learning how to use AI to actually produce what I've always taught, so what they need to post in their voice and on their schedule. So that is the magic here. I use AI to serve my students, then I teach my students how to use AI to serve themselves and their students. Both sides of the relationship get faster, more efficient, and more grounded in real strategy that can be implemented. So when a student asks me a question about positioning their offer, I already have context loaded into Claude about how I teach offer strategy. So when I give them a response, it is not generic. It is thoughtful, voice-aligned, and goes deeper than I could have written in real time. I've also created Claude skills that give complete reviews of homework that students are submitting. These are reviews that I can run, or I can even give the skill to my students to run for themselves. Because of these tools, my students feel supported and I get to move on to the next thing without losing an entire afternoon. So when my students are asking questions about how to use AI in their own businesses, I'm walking them through the frameworks I've built for myself, and they tell me it's one of the most valuable resources for them as a member. This is what the third kind of creator and educator does. You're not creating robot armies. You're creating a calm, intentional integration of one tool used well that serves both you and your students. Now, I know some of you are thinking, but I am not tech savvy. I don't know a lot about AI, and I already feel behind. Becoming this kind of creator is actually not as hard as people make it sound. You do not need to learn all the things like how to build agents and how to have everything automated. You don't have to stack 17 tools. You just need a foundation. Now, for me, that one AI tool that's doing what I need is Claude, and it's exactly why I built the workshop I'm getting ready to tell you about. In the last few months, I have attended dozens and dozens of AI workshops, challenges, and courses. And there's one thing I figured out: so many of the things that are being sold are beyond what people need to start, and so overwhelm sets in and implementation doesn't happen. That is not what I want for you. So I put together a live workshop that I'm delivering on Monday, May 18th, called the AI Confident Creator. It's 2 hours It's $97 and there's lifetime replay access. So if you're listening to this episode after May 18th, good news. Buying it now means you get instant access. This workshop is designed for the exact person I've been describing in this episode, the coach, course creator, or membership owner who is ready to become the third kind of teacher, someone who knows the strategy of their niche. And the AI integration that helps their students implement faster. Someone whose students will keep following them because they can lead in both areas. So inside this workshop, I am going to teach you how I use Claude every single day in my own business. The voice training framework that makes every output sound like something I wrote. The content workflow that gives me back hours every week. And the skills feature that allows me to do so many tasks, including sales page copy, reviews for my students, and so much more. You'll see the exact way I create lesson guides, live session summaries, and student resources from my own programs. And the longest section of this workshop is on how to empower your students with AI, because that is the heart of it all. It's not just how AI helps you, it's how do you become the creator that helps your students use it well. You do not have to be an AI expert to guide your students in how to use AI tools to implement what you teach. And if you grab this workshop, I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. You'll find all the information at launchwithlydia.com/aiconfident. The link is in the show notes below. Now, before I let you go, I want to say it one more time. Your students are choosing right now who they are going to follow next year. They're evaluating in big and small ways whether you are the person who can lead them through the next chapter of the transformation they desire. And this is going to include AI, whether we are ready for it or not. So you get to decide what kind of creator and educator you are going to be. Are you going to be the kind that just keeps doing things the way you've always done them, while students quietly drift towards someone else who can guide them in both? Or are you going to be the kind they keep following? The kind that knows the strategy and the AI? The kind of creator and educator I want to help you become. If you want to learn how to be both, I encourage you to register for the workshop at launchwithlydia.com/aiconfident. Thanks so much for listening. If this episode really resonated with you, the most meaningful thing you can do is share it with one other coach, course creator, or membership owner who may be quietly wondering if they're totally behind on this. They're actually in the exact right moment to start, and so are you. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode and hope to see you in the workshop.