If I Started an Online Course Business in 2023, I'd Do This

Go through the entire process together with them without new people coming in. And so what I did in 10 count replay, we opened it in in April. I think the cart closed, our doors closed towards the end of April. And then I started sharing weekly content, those weekly lessons. Now what was great for Those that joined 10 count replay as a founders member live. So I did all my slides and then we popped on Zoom. I presented the entire lesson that I wanted to share. I hit pause on Zoom and then I answered questions real time. And so that was giving me real time feedback on did my lessons make sense, Was it confusing, Did I need to clean it up somewhere? And so I think this is really great for anybody who wants to see what I would do into three different phases. And I want to be clear here that starting an online course business doesn't mean within 90 days you're making buttloads of money. This is a one to two to sometimes three year journey that you have to realize you've got to be in it to win it. Because starting an online course business can be lukewarm, lucrative. But it's not going to happen in those first couple of months. There's a lot that goes into it. So disclaimer there. And let's just jump into phase one. And the first step in phase one would be research. So one of the first things you need to do in this research phase is really validate if the online course you want to create has a market. Now, I understand everybody has a niche and there are so many niche things out there. But you do need to clarify what it is that your online course is going to do for people and are people actually wanting to buy it? So you need to go out there and start researching. Are there books on this topic? Are there blogs? Are there podcasts? Are there other courses? Just because they are out there doesn't mean you can't compete with them. But we need to know there is some type of market out there for whatever online course topic that you have. Because if you don't see anything out there around your course topic, it could be a huge red flag that there just isn't a market out there. And I know sometimes we want to find this like snowflake opportunity where nobody is doing what you're doing, but there may be a reason why nobody is doing what you are doing. So take some time before you even start your online course business to really figure out is there a market out there and what's currently being offered to those people in that market. I would also take some time Doing some research internally, meaning really determining what is going to be your unique factor. Like I said, there are going to be other people out there doing what you do and that's a good sign. But you need to figure out how you do it differently. What transformation are you personally going to be providing future students of your online course that other people can't do? Because again, there can be many other courses out there just like you. But people like to learn from different people and people like to have different transformations. And if you can get really clear on the transformation you're going to provide and your style of teaching, that's what's going to separate you from everybody else. Now this is something that I personally wish I would have spent more time on in the beginning, but I came from such like a button up government world that I felt very hesitant in being myself and leaning into me as a person me into my uniqueness. The uniqueness I came in with was being a female in the YouTube space. Because when I started years ago, there weren't a lot of people teaching YouTube that were females. And I also came from the perspective of being a mom. A lot of the people out there were young women that were amazing, but they could spend so much time on their business and so much time on their YouTube channel without the responsibility of a one year old at home. And I just really wish I would have leaned more into this because I know I could have talked to my audience in a much deeper level and mean that extra connection instead of just like, here are the facts, here's the value, here's the how to, but sharing how I do this all as a mom and a female. So I challenge you here in this first phase. The first step of this first phase is dive into research on you. How you can stand out and dive into the research of is there a market for the online course you want to create? Then the last piece of this research step is to start interviewing dream clients or clients that you would like to work with. And again, I wish I would have done this so much sooner in my business, but you can literally just start looking on Instagram for people who you would love to work with or you would love to take your course and just message them and be like, hey, I'm doing some market research for a course I'm thinking about. Can I just get on a 15 minute call with you? It's a no pitch call. I just need to ask some questions to get some clarity on what I want to provide in this online course. Do five to 10 of these and you are really going to get clear on how your audience is speaking, the problems your audience has, and how you're going to be able to solve it better than anybody else. But I'm telling you, this third piece in the research phase is a essential and will honestly take you leaps and bounds ahead of anybody else that is developing an online course. Now, the next step in this first phase is building. Now, you can be building as you are researching, but you need to start building an audience. You want to pick a social platform that you're going to decide to be on. And I'm going to tell you right now, if you're just starting your online course business, you need to focus on one platform. The more platforms you take under, the more stressed out you're going to be, the lower the quality of content is going to be. And again, from experience, I would recommend just really doubling down on one particular platform. Now that could be Instagram. When I say Instagram, that means when you're doubling down on it, you're creating feed posts, you're doing stories, you're doing reels, maybe you're even going live. That's what I mean by double downing on it. Because if you're going to pick one platform to grow on, you need to do everything that you can to grow on that platform. I'm not meaning massive numbers, but I mean grabbing the attention of your audience. Or it could be YouTube. And that's what I, I personally did until I got in my head that I needed to be everywhere. But if I doubled down on YouTube and just focused on my YouTube instead of playing on Snapchat and doing Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, I honestly believe that I would have been able to grow my audience a lot faster than what I actually did. But when it comes to committing to YouTube, I literally mean just posting one weekly video on YouTube because this will grow your audience. So pick a social platform and start creating content on one of those platforms. What to do talk about on these platforms? Well, you want to share case studies or real life examples. And if you haven't done any yet with clients or students, use yourself as a case study. So when I got started, I didn't have any clients yet. And I just started talking about how I was building a mom channel using YouTube things I was doing ways I was creating thumbnails, what I was noticing from the YouTube algorithm. And I used that as my information and my value that I was providing on my business YouTube channel. Start to tie in your story and stories with your content because that's going to make a connection with your audience. You just don't want to, like how to, how to, how to, how to. You need to start building a relationship and a connection with your audience and whatever platform that you're going to be in. So you can tell. Throughout this video, I'm sharing examples of how my journey as an online course business either did well or didn't do well. And I'm sharing those stories so that you feel more connected with me. And maybe you have a similar story that you can relate with and you're like, yes, so, so did I. I tried to do all the platforms and I burn out and I wish I would have stuck with one. Right? So as you're creating this valuable content and sharing how things are working and sharing examples, you're also sharing stories to make that connection with your audience. Now, in tandem during this time, you're building an email list. So during this time period, it would be great to have some type of freebie or opt in. Whether it's a checklist or a template or something that people will want to provide you their email. Because it's hard today in 2023 to just build an email list by telling people to get on your newsletter. And so you gotta think about something of value that people would want. Templates, checklists, workbooks, anything like that to help encourage them to sign up to get it and build your email list. Because you can continue nurturing them in your email list and starting to have dialogue and conversation with your audience in email, you're also going to want to be building your process. So process of how you do things, not necessarily for social media, building your audience, but what is going to be built out inside your course? What is step one that people need to do? Step two, step three, what are all the templates that you can create into this process as well? So once you've built your audience and you're getting ready for phase two, you have pieces of your online course all ready to go to make it a lot easier for you to create. And then another thing that's going to be incredibly important during this phase is tracking important metrics. Because this, my friend, is the one thing I would probably go back and redo the right way. I was so overwhelmed with all the content I needed to create and a newborn and a 2 year old and balancing all the things in my brain just doesn't conceptualize numbers. It's just I'm not a numbers brain, but I honestly wish that I would have spent the time to figure out my numbers and track some major KPIs that are critical as you're building your online course business to determine if things are working or if things are not working. And this is a complete deep dive that I believe is so important that I have an entire section inside of my coaching program, 10km replay, where we dive into setting up Google Analytics and looking at Google Analytics dashboards and really tracking not all the metrics so that you're overwhelmed with numbers, but key metrics that will really give you valuable information about what you're doing and if it's actually working or not. All right, now this last part in phase one is we're getting active. All right? We're going to start testing. What I mean by this is we're going to test out the process, test out the templates with clients. I encourage anybody that's starting an online course business to work with one on one clients first. And so in this testing period, you want to find three to five clients that you can test this process out with. It is going to give you so much information. It's going to help you see where people get stuck. It's going to help you see the questions that people are asking you so that you can then include that in sales page and cost. And it's going to allow you to build more case studies and testimonials for when you have your online course ready to sell. You're really going to give these clients as much time as you possibly can. You're going to be asking them questions, you're going to be asking them for feedback and testimonials. And I'm telling you, this is going to give you a huge jump on selling your online course by going through this testing period with three to five one on one clients going through your process. And then once you've had those clients, then you can start to tweak your process based on their feedback, any templates as well to again get you ready and prepared for phase two. Now, before I jump into phase two, I've got a really important question for you that I would like you to answer down in the comments. I'm wondering if you have an online course. If you do, tell me down in the comments what that online course is. And if you don't have an online course yet, let me know in the comments if you want to start one and you're not sure how to start or if you have no plans to start an online course again, I just want to get a sense of where you as my viewer are at along this journey. Okay? So the first step in phase two is you are going to pre sell this online course. Now I didn't mention that you spent hours and days recording your course because you're not, you're not going to take any time recording and publishing a course until you pre sell it. So because we've already mapped out your processes and your templates, you're going to pre sell that. Now you will probably out outline kind of what the modules or the lessons will look like and the outcome of each module that student will receive. But you aren't doing the actual course content yet. You're going to set a goal on how many courses that you want to sell to say yes, I'm moving forward with it. Again, another experience I had, I spent three months, three months building an online course without doing phase one and without pre selling. And when I launched my online course I sold it to a three people. One of those being a friend of mine who felt bad for me. So again, if I were starting an online course business from scratch today, I would have 100% do phase one and I would 100% pre sell that. In fact, I actually did this with my group coaching program last April. I didn't build out any of the content yet and I kind of mapped out the journey we would go through in the coaching program and when I pre sold it, I let my audience. Now look, this is an opportunity you can get in at a founder's member pricing. So it's a cheaper pricing point than what you want the course to ultimately be. You can do a beta pricing. Uh, I said, you know you're going to be able to help build this program with me. And so I didn't have to create all the content yet and I got a cash injection into my business so that I could then focus on building out this course in this program without needing to continually work with one on one clients. So the best way to start pre selling is because in phase one you talk to people, you started to build an audience, you're just going to let people in your email list. No, we don't need to do a full out launch for this. If you don't feel comfortable yet, you can just tell people you have this opportunity, you're testing out this new program that you're building and you're looking for founders members beta pricing. This is going to be the lowest price to get into this program what the benefits are and just let people go to the sales page to buy it. Now I do recommend in this pre sale phase of your online course I know you probably want an online course that is self paced or maybe passive, but definitely during this first round, as you pre sell it, you want to be as engaged as possible with the people that buy it. So it almost becomes like a coaching program. But you need to be engaged with them because you need to speak to them to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, where are they getting hung up, what is easy for them, what are their thoughts on the program, what are the results that they are getting, what do they wish was included in your course that isn't? The more you can engage with those people that said yes to the very first time that you've launched your online course, the more feedback you're going to get, the more testimonials, the more case studies and the better your program is going to be by spending that time with those people. Now also this pre launch phase is going to have a open and a close date because you want to get a cohort of people, maybe 10, maybe 15, maybe 5 and you want to go start an online course and make sure, sure it's really good is to do your lessons live and get real time feedback from those students that show up. Okay, we're still in phase two, but we're moving into the next step after pre sale. So you got all your people in, you've done, you know, maybe it's a 5 week, 10 week, 12 week program. Whatever the time limit is that you are going to say it takes to get through your course, you're going to analyze, you're going to take all the data that you received, all the feedback that you received. I also encourage you send out a survey to those that went through the program and you're going to start to figure out where are the improvements needing. Do you need improvements? Do you need updates? What are people saying or how are people saying things so that you can use this in your messaging, in your sales page and the content that you're creating. And I would highly encourage you to one on one interview every single person who bought in your founders round or your beta round because again you're going to get some really important data to help you sell this program in the future and help you create better content and better sales copy. And then the last piece of phase two is you are going to do a live launch. By a live launch, I mean you are going to publicly push this course. You're going to do a launch hype piece. Whether this is a webinar, a challenge, a workshop series, whatever it is, you are going to do a launch, launch hype piece, you're going to do the industry standard of a cart, open, cart close, meaning you're going to open the doors to your course on this particular day and they have until this day to buy it before it closes again. You're going to include price increases for urgency, you're going to include bonuses for FOMO and people getting off the fence, making them want to buy. Because you have all of these things, things going on, basically a full blown promotional period. You're going to be showing up a lot on social media because again, you need people to have a connection with you. You can have the best sales page in the world, but people still connect with humans and they need to know that you're the person that they're going to enjoy learning from. So you're going to be showing up on social media. You've got to do video content to do that as well. And then once your launch wraps, you're going to start tracking some dangerous data, like how much traffic did you get to your sales page? How many people were you able to get to the sales page? What was the conversion of that sales page? Right. How many people that landed on that sales page bought? If you did a webinar, you're going to track how many people signed up for your webinar, how many people showed up live to your webinar, how many people watched your webinar. These are all going to be very critical data points that we need to know as we move into phase three of your online course business. Oh, one more thing before we move to phase three. The other thing you want to be be tracking in your analytics phase of your launch is any questions that you got from people. Because again, you need to ensure you're answering these questions somewhere, whether it's on an FAQ portion of your sales page content that you create somewhere, these questions need to be answered. Now phase three is probably where you want to ultimately get to and I'm going to tell you, this could take you a year. I'm not going to candy coat it, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It honestly just depends on you, how quickly you work and how much have going on in your business. But phase three is about evergreening this online course. So you know how I talked about in phase two, you were going to open cart on a certain day and then close cart on a certain day so people couldn't buy it anymore. Well, once you've analyzed your launch numbers and you've made a few tweaks to Your webinar, to your email sequences, to your sales page, to your checkout page. Again, all the data that you want to track. And and again, this is something that I deep dive into inside of 10 count replay and show you how to set up all of these key performance indicators and metrics. If you're interested in learning more about 10 count replay, go to trina little.com forward/apply to see everything that we do and to submit an application. If you would like to work with me, help you build out these metrics to start and scale your online course business. But these numbers are going to tell you, tell you what to tweak. So we can put your funnel or your online course kind of promotion on Evergreen. So what this means is on the outside it looks like you're not launching, but if somebody signs up for your webinar, because you're going to make your webinar public for people to watch on demand at any point in time, it's not going to be live. They can watch on demand. You in that webinar are going to pitch your course. You're going to give them some incentives to buy during a period of time. You're going to follow up with specific emails that tell them they have this amount of time. This bonus is expiring, this price point is expiring, whatever your incentives are going to be. And then you are going to close the cart for that particular person that joined your email. It's not public, but it's specific to each person who joins your email. And this is how you're going to be able to get sales every single week. This is how you're going to start making that passive income. Now, there are other things you're going to need to do to get traffic to that webinar to get that passive income. And we're going to be talking more about that coming up. And if you were wondering what tools I use for my Evergreen strategy, watch last week's video, which I'll link right up here where I tell you exactly what I do to set this up on Evergreen. Now, if you're thinking, okay, the hardest part for me is going to be building an audience. I don't have an audience right now. Then watch the video that is on your screen right now because I'm going to share with you exactly what you can do today to start to grow your audience. Even if you're starting at zero. Seriously, go watch that video right now.