Mary Schiller built credibility through her book How to Price Like a Girl and two Facebook communities before launching her course Let's Make Money, Honey. She sketched the four-week curriculum in an hour at Paris Plage: daily videos, a Facebook group, and monthly Q&As. Every lesson had to make participants feel lighter about money and earn while taking the course.
Hello there. This is Mary Schiller of MarySchiller.com and Pricelikeagirl.com. I wanna welcome you to the second video in this series that I've called a case study all about how I created and sold a program called Let's Make Money, Honey. And the purpose of these videos is to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how I developed and sold this course. And the reason I think this might be helpful is because some of these things may seem really elusive to you, and I want to make it all very concrete. So to recap the first video, what I was talking about there, in case you missed it or you're jumping around or whatever, uh, I talked about the fact that even though I hadn't officially gone into business development and money coaching success coaching. I knew that it was something I could do. It was something I was really interested in. I'd been interested in it for a long time, and I'd had a lot of conversations with people over the years related to it. But when it came time to actually making the move over to that subject, I didn't really have any credibility. So I decided to start building that by writing a book which I called How to Price Like a Girl and having a few more conversations, starting a Facebook group related to it and also Price Like a Girl, that one is, and then also having a Facebook group called Passive Income Magic, you know, trying to kind of build a reputation as someone who understands something about business development and making money and is someone who can be relied on and trusted. So it also helps to have those conversations with people because you can hear how they talk about the problems that they're facing and what things are really important to them. And I feel like it's really key because a lot of what I see in terms of people having a bit of a stumble here is that they're unsure of what people actually are looking for. They may know what they want to teach, and that's beautiful, but there has to be sort of a meeting between what we are inspired to do and what people are looking for. And it's at that critical point that something amazing can happen. So in this video, I'm going to talk a bit more about the genesis of the program itself, Let's Make Money, Honey. So after a little while of talking to people more specifically, and just kind of letting ideas come to me. I mean, I had a list of I don't know how many ideas for different ways that I could talk to people about making money in an easier and more fun way. And as it happens, and I know you know this, you've experienced it yourself, one day I was out for a walk here in the beautiful city of Paris, And I had this idea for Let's Make Money, Honey. And for some reason, that name just made me laugh out loud like it did now, because it seemed so lighthearted and really just very relaxed and fun, and it had the right feeling to it. And so I kind of let that sit for a day. I didn't really do anything with it. And the next day, which I remember distinctly because I posted about it on Instagram, was July 16th, 2017. I went— it was a beautiful day here, very warm, and I went down to the Seine. And during the summer, the city sets up this area along the Seine that they call Paris Plage, plage meaning beach. So they have lots of umbrellas and little chairs that you can sit on. So you sort of feel like you're at the beach. They even put in some sand, which is really cool in certain spots. And so I managed to grab one of the chairs under an umbrella. And in the course of about an hour, I wrote out the outline for this Let's Make Money, Honey course. I wanted to keep it simple. I knew that I didn't want it to be this humongous you know, 8-week, 12-week, 15-week program with a gazillion modules in it. That was not what I wanted for this particular program. I wanted it to be fairly straightforward, fun, easy to access. So I thought, okay, I'll make it 4 weeks, 1 video per day. You know, that was something that seemed like it would be easily consumable. And then I would offer support in a Facebook group. And have some Facebook Live Q&A sessions in there, at least one per month. I thought that way people can feel like they're part of a community and I have fun facilitating those kinds of groups. So that seemed like sort of the perfect package for it. What was interesting about this process too was that once I started to write out the ideas that I wanted to cover in the course, it was amazing how quickly it all coalesced into something. And I think the key that I'd like to bring to your attention here is that you don't have to give people everything, including the kitchen sink, when you create a program. You can take the ideas that you have and consider what might be good, for instance, for a first offering. If someone is fresh to a topic, what is the thing, the main idea that you want them to walk away with? What is the main result? Coming back to the consumer side of things, what is the major result that you would like them to have achieved after going through your online course? So for Let's Make Money, Honey, the results that I wanted them to get was pretty simple. It was actually sort of two parts. One was I wanted people to lighten up around money because it can look so scary and serious and horrible, as it did for me. So that was the first thing. So I wanted the tone to be very fresh and happy and fun. And the second thing was I wanted them to make money during the program. I have a couple of assignments in there that encourage them to do that in, in any way that they wish. But the assignments themselves are focused on making money. And so I thought, all right, well, how can I, you know, really create an environment so that that is easy and possible for them? So every piece of the course outline had to tie back in some way to those things, that it had to be light and fun, but it also needed to point them towards their ability, their innate ability to make money. So that is a big takeaway that I would love for you to see from this particular video is that when you are considering how to structure your online course, always, always, always tie everything back to a result. And I also really love the idea of tying everything together with a certain tone. You know, for me, like I said, it was light, airy, fun, not so serious. And so everything that I put into the program, I wanted to reflect that. And I also wanted everything to point them towards this easily achievable result of making some money while the program, or while they were going through the program. So that made it much easier to create the outline for the curriculum when I had those things in mind. So I would love to hear from you. Feel free to post comments wherever you happen to be watching, uh, this video. And if you have any questions that you'd like to ask me personally, of course you can email me mary@maryschiller.com or mary@pricelikeagirl.com. Thanks so much for watching. Talk to you soon.
