Is Selling Courses in 2024 REALLY Worth the Effort?

Courses are dead in 2024. At least the way of selling courses that you remember. You know, back in 2012 to maybe 2018, literally any random person could just come up with an idea for a course, learn a ton about the topic, and then condense that knowledge into a few hours of video content. They'd open up a Facebook ads account, build a sales page, and you could reasonably sell that course for maybe 500 to 1000 bucks on autopilot with like 30 to 50% profit margins. So you know, if they're spending a thousand bucks, they'd spend maybe 5 to $700 on ads per purchase. And so really it was just a game of finding that formula that works and then just scaling it as far as you can. Today, courses are a commodity. Everyone's got one. And so no one's course is valuable. And so that same thousand dollar course that you would make 30 to maybe 50% profit back in 2018, it might lose 30, 50% today in 2024. But there is still a way to be wildly profitable with courses in today's market. You just can't launch it all by itself and expect that it's going to work. And so there's two methods that I'm going to share with you in this video. And if I was going to add a course to my service business, I would use one or both of these methods to do it. But real quick, why do we want a course in the first place? Well, there's two functions that a course can hold for anyone selling a high ticket service or consulting of some kind of. Number one is it's a downsell for people who aren't qualified for or can't afford your service. And number two, it's an ascension mechanism to get people in the door for your full service. So either way it's giving us an option other than just telling them to kick rocks for all those people who can't afford to pay us thousands of dollars for our services. So what do you build? The key here is that we need to be fishing with the right bait. So like if you're a fractional CFO, a course on QuickBooks, bookkeeping or running payroll, it's not probably going to attract the right person. Your ideal client isn't looking for how to do it themselves, right? They want somebody to do it for them. So what we need to do instead is identify the problem that we could solve for those higher level customers. And generally this isn't always the case, but generally they're not looking for the same information that A beginner would be looking for. So rather than tell you my parameters and just kind of list them off for you, I actually, I want to give you some examples of courses that you could create or training materials you could sell and rate them 1 through 5. So the first one here is a pro forma template and a training on how to use it. And the offer that goes with it is tax planning for real estate investors. So I would consider this to be a 3.5 out of 5. So generally beginner real estate investors don't even know they need a pro forma or they think they can do without it. And so in that way, we're not attracting people who are like too low on the totem pole, you might say. But what you might find is that super seasoned investors, they already have a pro forma they like. But if you can differentiate or if you can add a unique feature, then then you can kind of still catch those people because they might want to integrate that into the one they're already using or just completely replace it. So if I'm selling a $5,000 a year tax plan, I really want someone with maybe, let's say five to 20 doors, and there's a good chance that person doesn't have a pro forma yet that they really, really love. Now, the upsell pitch here goes something like this. If you found this pro forma template useful, you're probably looking to make sure your money is working for you as effectively as possible. And one of the best ways to increase the efficiency of your investing capital is actually not to buy more properties, but instead it's to pay less in taxes on the properties you already have. Right. Imagine an extra 10 or $20,000 a year minimum back in your pocket without any more tenants to manage. If you're interested, book a call at the link below. Okay, next one. Here is an options trading crash course. And this is an options trading coach selling this. So I would consider this to be a five out of five. And that's because a friend of mine actually created this. So they're using this to attract people who are interested in options trading, help them get a few quick or easy wins, and then upsell them into their high ticket coaching program. So if you follow the steps in the course, you'll make a few bucks, you could see the potential you could achieve with options trading and you'll be ready to invest more heavily. Right. And who do you want to coach you? Probably the person who gave you that quick win in the first place. Right. So to ensure people are ascending to the high ticket program. What I would do is I would create a final course module, call it what's Next? And make that my upsell pitch for the high ticket program. Now what I would also do is I would create a sequence of emails that automatically get sent to anyone who gets past 50% completion of the course and that will also upsell them. And honestly, I'd potentially even call or email one on one all the people who purchase, just depending on what kind of volume I'm getting and what kind of resources my sales team has. The pitch here is really, really simple because there's such good alignment between this course and the high ticket coaching consulting. It goes something like this. Hey, did you make any money from what you learned in this course? This is what happens when I'm able to spend one or two hours with a motivated trader like you. What do you think would happen if we were able to speak face to face every week? If you're interested in some one on one coaching with me, just click the link below. You can book a call with my team. We'll see if we're good fit. Okay, the last one here is an estate planning guide. And this is for an estate planning law practice. To be honest, I don't think it's that great of an offer. I'd give it a two out of five. And the reason for this is our goal with this course is to offer a full solution to a narrow problem. And if your course truly solves the estate planning problem, then why would they hire you for your services? Right now chances are the course is not gonna fully solve the estate planning problem. But that just means that you're not giving them what you promise in the course or what they're hoping to get out of the course. Meaning they get a bad experience with your brand. And so now if they've had a bad experience paying you just a little bit, what's gonna happen if they pay you a lot? Probably a similarly bad experience. Now a more aligned course that you could offer for this business might be retirement planning for business owners or something along those lines. I'm not the best, like expert in this niche of estate planning, but the idea here is something that solves a related problem your ideal client is facing. So I would think business owners who are getting ready for retirement probably also need help with their estate planning. And so, you know, right off the top of my head this seems right. But if I'm way off base, hopefully you at least get the idea of what I'm trying to say. Now how do you sell this course? So there's two ways and the second is a marketing strategy that I'm actually super bullish on right now. So way number one is what we call the downsell model. And pretty much any business can do this immediately without really changing a whole lot of what they're doing. So let's say you charge $5,000 for your main service right out of all of the leads you get coming through the door, probably 50% of them can't even afford to work with you or aren't qualified just right off the bat. And so what happens is most of you end up either A, trying to sell them anyway, which wastes a ton of your time, or B, you tell them to kick rocks even though, like they came to you asking for help. Now, neither situation is great. And so what we can do is we can create a suite of courses and maybe some other products that are suited to their specific needs and route them towards, that's all the people who can't afford to pay your high ticket price. Now the point here is to hold onto these leads, keep them in our ecosystem without embarrassing them by trying to sell them something they can't afford on a live call and without telling them to kick rocks because they're too poor to work with us. Instead, we're giving them a taste of what we have to offer and we're installing our business in their minds as the go to place for the service that you provide, so that when they're more qualified to work with us later, they, they know exactly where to go. Think of it like a crock pot. It's just a slow cooker. These people aren't ready now, but they may be later. And so we want to hold onto them. Now. The other way to sell this, and this is one I'm super bullish on right now, is what we call the upsell or the ascension model. So if the downsell model is to try to sell our high ticket service first, then sell the course. If that doesn't work, the upsell or ascension model is the exact opposite. So we're going to sell the course as our intro offer and letting it almost work like a gateway drug into working with us, then what we're going to do is we're going to upsell from the course into our high ticket service. So let's say, for example, you're a CFO for moving companies. This is a client of mine. You might create an Excel template for company owners to plug in their financial numbers and, you know, calculate some Key metrics that are really important to growing their company. You sell this plus a training on how to use it for $49. Now you might run ads to get people to buy this and it costs you $60 in ad spend to get somebody to buy it, meaning you're losing $11. So, but now you've got a lead who's obviously a moving company owner or else they wouldn't have bought it. It only costs you $11, which is a decent lead cost already. But this isn't any regular lead. They've already pulled out their credit card before you ever tried to sell them on your high ticket offer. And so the point here is to break even on the course or, you know, maybe spend a little bit of money on the course sale and use it as a way to get more or better clients for our main high ticket offer. All right, I just want to wrap this up by answering a few questions before. So here's one. How do I make sure people still buy my high ticket service? Okay, a lot of people worry about this, like somebody's gonna come in, they're Gonna buy your $99 course and they're gonna think, oh, this is the maximum amount of value I could get out of this. This person. Right? And this is usually ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy because if you believe that it's going to lead you to holding back and under delivering in the low ticket in the course of. So here's an example, right? You might make a course on basic financial reporting trying to upsell into your CFO service, but the course you make ends up being super basic because you're trying to hold back value and you're selling a ton. You're trying really hard to get people to ascend into your CFO offer. So now anyone who buys it, they're underwhelmed and they don't think that much of you. They got a bad experience. They didn't really get anything out of spending a little bit of money with you. And so why would they spend a lot of money on you? So now when they get calls or emails from you, they have a negative opinion of your brand and they don't think they'll get any value out of anything else you're selling. So the way to avoid this would be, let's say you're selling this course for $99. Think about what you'd include if you were selling it for 9.99, 10 times the price. This is the level of value you need to include to absolutely blow the customer away. Now, very few people will be able to over deliver so much that it cannibalizes their high ticket offer. Especially if your high ticket offer is an actual service instead of just being like a bigger course. Right, because the value in the course is the knowledge. The value in your service or your consulting is the implementation of that knowledge. Right. Big difference. All right, another question here says what are the best platforms to host my courses? So there's a bunch of them out there, but two of the most popular ones I know of are Go High Level and Kajabi. A lot of people use Skool as well. That's a newer one that's. Come on. I personally use a custom software we're building for our agency clients. It's this kind of all in one like CRM, funnel builder, website builder, email marketing software. It's got a bunch of other features, so let me know if you want a video on that sometime. But ultimately, to answer the question, I wouldn't get too hung up on the specific platform. It's helpful and it's good to find the best one. I guess that works for you. But most of them are like pretty good, honestly. All right, here's another one. Can the income from course sales replace my services completely? I mean, yeah, I guess. If that's what you want, it's certainly doable. The problem here is that we're in an environment today where it's really hard to profitably sell something for cheap deep. So if you're running Facebook ads, you'll be lucky to break even on any product that doesn't involve a sales call. I guess basically what I'm saying is you probably need a high ticket offer to sell now. If you offer services now, you could eventually pivot to more of a coaching consulting offer instead of a done for you service. But that's a whole different business model now.