Making Your Online Course Stand Out From The Crowd!

Coach Yu – EP31

[00:00:00] 

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Coach Yu show. Dennis, you is going to talk us through how you can launch an online course. This is a topic that Dennis has a lot of experience with, and I’m sure he’s got a lot of great stories and tips to share about this topic. I think the underlying theme here is regardless of what the content is, the best practices for creating a course are going to be very similar. So the content is one piece, but really part of it is what’s the structure of the course, how are you going to distribute the course?

How are you going to track people to it? And these are all things that Dennis has quite a bit of experience with. 

 What is the topic that you were thinking of? What type of a course were you interested in Siva? I created a lot of content to help athletes transition to the next play, right?

There are 400,000 student [00:01:00] athletes in NCAA in college every year and only 1% of them go pro. I worked at LinkedIn for seven years specifically when the, in a division called LinkedIn learning where we offer coursework for any job or subject matter. My curiosity is really like transitioning from the next step of having content delivered and finding the right best practices to actually deliver this course in the right way to the right.

Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s a good question. I know Dennis has been working on some courses with some pretty high profile people who have big audiences, but they really weren’t sure on how to organize their course and convert, some of those audience members into students of their course, so to speak.

So I know he’s got a lot to add on that. I apologize that Dennis is running a little bit late tonight and that I’m not really the expert on this particular topic, full disclosure. So I can answer questions to the best of my ability, but I haven’t done an online [00:02:00] course. Per se myself I’ve written a book.

I can answer questions about that. And I can answer a lot of other questions about marketing and branding, but online courses is more of Dennis’s Bally wick, and he must be having trouble getting into clubhouse tonight. Interestingly enough, this happened to me last night in a room here in startup club where one of the co-hosts for some reason, couldn’t get into clubhouse and not to actually eventually join using a different account than their normal accounts.

If you were going to start a course what would it be in. It’s interesting. And actually, it’s a great question and it’s actually something I’ve thought about, cause I’ve thought about, I’ve heard Dennis speak on this topic many times and I’ve thought, for example, I’ve written a book on marketing a different twist.

It’s called everything I know about business and marketing. I learned from the toxic Avenger and it takes lessons. I learned making low budget action, hard horror films many years ago. And the business lessons I learned from that experience, and I’ve often thought I could I [00:03:00] take that content and turn it into a course.

I have turned it into a presentation that I’ve given a number of times for a number of different companies, but I’m not sure that there’s enough. There probably is enough meat on that bone to turn a course, to turn it into a course. But I’m just not sure if that’s something I really want to put put forward.

But it would probably be something along those lines. If I were to do a course to answer your question. Theresa. Thanks for joining us. If you have a question or a comment or something to add on this topic, maybe you’re more of an expert than I am. I actually have a quite a bit to share on this topic.

I’ve been studying it for the last couple of months. And I do want to say that was interesting about creating a digital course is that you don’t need to be an expert at everything. You just need to know a little bit more than the person who’s buying the course. And I heard a story about a woman who who created an entire digital course about how to create the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

And this the way the [00:04:00] story was shared with me was that She had this unique way of creating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I guess she was legendary for it. And so she built a course around it. And the whole idea, I believe around digital courses is to share your knowledge and experience with someone else.

Someone who is looking for that information and just like with anything else we do in business. Our goal is to find determined in advance, who our ideal customers are, who are the people who would be interested in the course that you’re trying to sell, because we don’t just create, you can create courses for a number of different reasons.

You can create a course for internal purposes, maybe to share with your team maybe with your clients and you can also create courses to share it, to offer for sale or as a lead magnet. So making a decision before you begin to create your course about who you’re creating it for is important, what topic you’re going to you’re going to create your course about, and there’s there’s no end to the list of.

And then creating a sh an [00:05:00] outline, maybe using a storyboard CAMBA has templates for storyboards that you can use to map out your content for your course. And then selecting a platform where your classroom is going to be housed and so on and so forth. So I could share a lot more about digital courses.

I’m just trying to buy time until Dennis gets here. Hi, welcome. Hey, good to see everybody here. What did I miss? Welcome Dennis. We’ve been shooting the shooting. This proverbial, you know what w waiting for you. And, unfortunately many of our topics are things that I have a lot to contribute.

And unfortunately, this isn’t one of them, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few people from the audience come up. And we’ve, I think we’ve started off with some good thoughts and comments about launching a digital online course with that, Dennis. Welcome. I’ll turn it back over to you. Ah, you guys are awesome.

I’ve launched 97 courses. Can you believe that? And the last 20 years, [00:06:00] and I want to say a few things about online courses, and then it’s like some of the problems that people have and why people screw up and the way to do it. And then I want to hear some of your ideas on if you want to launch a core. Or maybe you have a book you want to turn into a course, or maybe you’re using some kind of training as a way to grow your agency or your business, or to train up your employees.

And I hope today, and the time we spend together that you will have some clarity on what is the best format to do a course. How much should you charge for a course, what’s the best way to structure it and technically execute upon it. How do you market the course to be able to drive customers and sales and how does the course fit into the ecosystem of your business and your personal brand?

Sound good? Sounds great. Dennis, the wheat follow at principle, we have nine of them that we call the nine triangles and one’s called learn, do teach. And the idea is that you should teach [00:07:00] only when you yourself have done the thing many times. So if you. Are broke. You should not be having a course out there on how to become a millionaire.

And if you’re fat and there’s nothing wrong with being fat, I’m fat right now, you should not be talking. You don’t have a course on six pack abs. And if you can’t speak clearly, you shouldn’t have a course on how to be a great public speaker. So your core should always be based on your direct knowledge.

There’s a minor exception to that kind of where you are. Maybe not the very best in the category, but you can collect what other people know, and then turn that into a course or a podcast or a book or some other kind of program. Now, most people, they believe that they need to publish a course because that will give them authority because everyone else has a book.

And

there is someone who I won’t name, but he.[00:08:00] I came from $16,000, do SEO for one of our clients. And he had no idea what he was doing. It was a total disaster. It was a young adult who didn’t like the fact that he was failing. So instead of he took the money, I’d let him keep it. And then I fixed it.

But instead of learning how to do SEO, he decided that he would just go ahead and publish a five page pamphlet and put on Amazon on that was his course or book on how to do SNL SEO before. And his website at a domain rank of one out of 100. And he had no citations and he didn’t have any links built.

He didn’t even know how to build that. So don’t be building a course for your ego, build it because it’s part of your larger, why like the Simon Sinek start with why part of your mission based on something that you’ve done. So like I’ve done search engine optimization for a long time. I worked at Yahoo, so that gives me a little credibility.

So where do you have credibility perceived credibility? Where do you have [00:09:00] actual credibility? Because you can document what you’ve done and then how do you then turn that into a course? So as long as the starting point is right where you’re starting with expertise, you’re starting with your, why that course or lead magnet or whatever, long form educational content that leads towards the actual delivery of something that builds your business.

If you have that, then the rest of it is actually not very hard. So I was in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, and I was with Gavin Lira. And if you check my Facebook, you’ll see that I posted a lot of behind the scenes.

Sort of way we’ll build relationships and networking, which also helps you become more prominent and more authoritative. So what he did was yesterday, he wrote up a four page outline and it was points [00:10:00] chapters on the book. The book title was you’re just one connection away. I’m going to use my wifi here.

Hold on. Just be a little bit better here. The book title is you’re just one connection away. Like the whole, Russell Brunson, you’re one funnel away. And so we recorded for maybe two hours, two and a half hours, and we just went chapter by chapter through everything. Just not written out as a script that we recorded it as the video.

Now, it wasn’t the final products that meant to be a video, but we have video is another asset. And now that we have this on camera, it probably works out to 120 minutes worth of content. We’re running it through D script. You can run it through whatever your favorite tools, our frame.io with different like otter.ai to transcribe or rev.com, whatever you like.

And that then becomes the raw manuscript that we clean up, that we can turn into a book and [00:11:00] also turn into a course, because the course is how do you help? It’s like a cookbook where a checklist is, how do you help people to achieve a particular type of goal in this case? How do you build relationships or build a certain relationship that helps you build a build your business or helps you find the right employees or helps you get the right deals or, find the right partnerships and.

When you show people through your example of how you went from a to B that’s something that other people can credibly say, oh I want to be just like Jeffrey. And I want to be able to build an e-commerce company, direct to consumer selling pet rugs. He’s done it before. So he could probably teach a course to help people achieve that same result.

I see a lot of people failing because their courses are usually skill-based and there’s nothing wrong with teaching a course on like how to do Facebook ads. I have a course on HubSpot on how to do Facebook ads. I have courses on, building a personal brand or whatever. That’s great. But those kinds of the skill [00:12:00] based classes tend to not be.

And some people might want to argue with is, are going to be much for

$97. Maybe have a masterclass at 409. But generally skills, you can’t charge as much. Compared to the transformation of starting a seven figure agency, right? An agency that generates a million dollars in gross, maybe not a million of profit, more one 50, 150,000 in profit.

If you’re a seven figure agency and that might be worth 10 grand or 20 grand three days ago, I was with Joel Kaplan in Denver. And we filmed a course on how do you grow a seven figure agency, every step of growing that agency, starting from just you to getting the clients, to hiring up the team, to building the systems, the processes, to hiring up VA’s, to building your authority, to speaking and all that kind of stuff.

And it came directly from his experience because he built a chiropractor agency that went from nothing [00:13:00] to, I don’t remember some ridiculous number, one of the top chiropractor agencies, Atlas. He sold it for some amount of money just a couple months ago, but he’s demonstrated that he’s built. A seven figure agency.

So he started agency lab. Now he’s got 600 members that are paying over a thousand dollars a month. So you do the math. That’s a lot of money and he’s coaching these other agencies. So I asked him, I said, so how do you decide Joel, how much you should charge for your course? And he says it’s not that they’re buying a course.

It’s that they’re paying five figures because they want the result. And so it comes with the support. It comes with the guidance of the feedback from Joel and the other people on his team, because you go to YouTube and get all the same kind of stuff. Right? Why would you charge X dollars for a course if arguably there’s people that are better known and they filmed better and they’re more exciting or more charismatic than you are, how can you charge $200 for a course on something that you could get free?

Just literally go to YouTube and look up the stuff that you want to [00:14:00] be an expert in. Or you’d like to launch a course in it. Deflating, if you spend too much time there, cause then you can think, oh man, this one, there’s already these other people, but there’s a huge demand in any particular area, you just need to be able to tie it to some kind of value.

And then you can charge a thousand dollars for the course. And you’ll see when our episode comes out or the training that comes out with Joel group,

Josh Nelson, his group is also called seven figure agency. Joel had to change his name because Josh Nelson had the copyright, but each of these guys can launch a course about this because it’s something they’ve done because there’s a clear transformation of a, to B where there’s different steps in between and anyone can follow that particular recipe repeatedly and get that result.

So Josh Nelson, who has seven figure agency, and by the way, don’t think that this only applies to agencies or online marketing, it applies to any skill or have some [00:15:00] kind of transformation. So Josh Nelson has a book called seven figure agency, and it literally goes through step-by-step choose, figure out your dream.

100 start learning PPC or SEO started having regular weekly client calls, hire account manager. When you get to five clients like step-by-step and thousands of people have gone through his program. So I almost don’t like the word course, because course implies that you have to, you pay money to unlock access to some kind of content, as opposed to a course, like a program means that you have some accountability, someone might help you achieve that result.

Someone might give you feedback along the way, a little bit of coaching, right? It’s a difference between watching YouTube videos on how do you do the perfect bench press versus having a personal trainer. They’re looking at your form and saying, Hey, Jeff, you gotta straighten your elbows a little bit more or, whatever it is you gotta do.

So [00:16:00] look at how much value you’re generating and use that to determine how much you can charge for a course. And if you’re doing like my buddy, Mark Wagner has the course called Airbnb 10 K and he charges, I think, $500 for it. Because if you follow his program where you rent out houses and then sublet the houses, you’re not even your houses, you’re just renting from someone else and then subbing out the rooms and you get to $10,000 a month.

Cause you have three properties. Is that worth paying $500 to learn how to add an extra $10,000 of gross income to your bottom line? Yeah. Alex Berman has a course called Twitter 10 K, and it’s how to make 10,000. You don’t get to 10,000 followers on Twitter. So that’s worth something for some people it’s worth more than others and also how to make money on Twitter by promoting other people’s stuff.

And he was selling that for what $147. And we have a course, like all these courses are built around the achieving of a certain [00:17:00] result. You’ll see John Jonas has a course called one VA away, and I think it’s $47 in the first tier. And within seven days you should be able to hire your first VA to be in what’s that worth to you.

What’s getting back two hours a day of your time for a virtual assistant doing stuff. The 47 day challenge using the ones that are challenges are the easiest ones to be able to execute because there’s a clear path, 30 days to healing your relationship or the seven day challenge on, whatever, the ice bucket challenge, the same kind of thing.

So I see courses as

And the passive versus blending, some level of support, like a group, maybe a group coaching, or maybe a Facebook group. I have a program called office hours. So any entrepreneur that wants to be able to build their brand based on a heart-centered way, something based on their mission, [00:18:00] where they don’t want to just be a dentist or just a real estate agent, of course, they want to show more teeth and they want to sell more houses, but they want to do it in a way that is actually meaningful and fits in with their family and their values.

They might there’s a month, but it’s not

yeah. To your brand. So that’s the way that we look at online courses that the marketing of the course, like all this stuff you’ll see on courses is largely around selling courses and marketing courses, because those people ironically selling you courses on how to build courses.

Kind of don’t bully them. This is something Genuis about who their money comes from coaching and telling other people basically how to make money online. The people make the most money online or those who tell everyone else how you should make money online. So I’ll leave it at that and see, what do you guys [00:19:00] think, Dennis, I’ve got a question for you.

It’s funny cause before you arrived, the ice said that I had never done an online course. And then I just realized, as you were talking that I actually taught I was an instructor for a university of San Francisco online about 12 or 13 years ago and taught a course, an online course on mobile marketing.

So my question is. That course 12 years ago. It’s completely outdated. Now there’s probably just a handful of those lessons that still apply today. So how important is it when you’re picking a topic for your online course to do something that’s time sensitive or not or is it good to do something that’s really super current that you’re going to have to update versus something that’s somewhat timeless in terms of the content?

So your question Jeffrey is evergreen versus cohort based, and it’s not. It’s not that one is better than the other. So most people, if you are new to teaching a [00:20:00] course, whether it’s an online course or an in-person classroom thing, like a degree, it’s best to start with a cohort based. And there’s let me explain what some of those reasons are and then why you want to start with cohort and then moved to evergreen.

So with the cohort, it’s like a class and you could set the syllabus out and say, okay, we’re going to do this course. And it’s over five weeks and we’re going to meet twice a week on Monday and 10 sessions and have a new launch date, just like you have for any kind of event people register, the doors closed early.

There’s a sale price to get an early, and there’s a higher price. If people wait till the last, it allows you to step through by sec poem.

But then when people sign up for the course, you have a.

You called it to them for you, a little disingenuous. So be careful about this. I’m going to [00:21:00] say the way you want to gather the specific feedback of where people have pain points along the way in your training, because that allows you to adapt and tune your course that Hey, before okay. I’m going to switch to another one. Switch over here, literally right outside my place here in Las Vegas, like 30 feet away from the wifi, but it’s windy. Can you hear me? Yeah, it’s better now. Okay. So the, what I see a lot of gurus teach, which I believe is unethical, is sell the course, put up a landing page, talking about how awesome it is.

And then once you’ve collected the [00:22:00] money, build the course and understand why they’re saying that because why not have money now versus later. And you can ask people for their feedback and tweak it because if you ask people, Hey, if I had a course on personal branding, what would you like to see?

I’d like to see this and that. And you can make sure you’re giving people what they want. Okay. I can see something with that. But the better thing is that, like I taught a course with Mari Smith and it was called the Facebook ads, mastery, Facebook mastery success system, S M.

And I think it was yeah, 10 weeks and we did once a week. And I think we made maybe a quarter million dollars in the launch. She’s got a good list. I did zero marketing. I did zero promotion was all Mari Smith’s list. It was great. And I think she paid me 20%. So maybe I made 40 K or 50 K, which is great.

And all I had to do was teach this thing. And [00:23:00] Mari Smith said, Hey, we’re teaching this course on Facebook ads and I’ve partnered with Dennis you to do this because he’s the world’s expert at this. And I’ve talked to and and and decided that Dennis was the best.

And she was able to tap into my knowledge. I provided the instruction. So I taught all 10 or so episodes. She did all the marketing against it. And from my standpoint, I thought, wow, I’m just doing 10 episodes of an hour each. And I’m being paid, let’s say 50 grand for 10 hours. That’s five grand an hours.

And she’s looking at this thing. All I have to do is leverage my list, have a 90 minute pre webinar that gets people to sign up. You do a free webinar. If you’re going to sign up to get people to sign up for a program, that’s a cohort based program. Like here’s the date that we start the course, like enrolling in college kind of cohort.

And that’s great. Cause we’re adjusting along the way. And then because we’re doing it live, we’re collecting feedback and helping people with their questions, which creates more value for them. And we’re also collecting testimonials at the same time, because at the end of each session, [00:24:00] we would say, Hey, everybody let us know, hold up your hands on a scale of one to 10, one being terrible and 10 being amazing.

How did you feel? And you see a whole grid of people holding up 10 fingers, right? And then different people will volunteer saying, wow, I had no idea that’s how custom audience has been. Oh, I tried your, the thing with dollar a day and this is what happened to my business. And I’m so grateful for you.

So we’re collecting that, which allows us to launch a second. Which means we could launch the course again in six months, right? So there’s a huge advantage and cohort in learning and tuning and collecting feedback. But the thing is you want to go through cohort first, because once you have that, now you have the fodder to make it an evergreen course, meaning on demand, meaning anybody can enroll at any time, as opposed to you have to sign up by March 7th, because that’s when we start.

And then it’s, we’re going to run for 10 weeks or however many sessions you’re going to have evergreen for sure is the most profitable because people can buy it anytime. And it’s like a [00:25:00] Netflix kind of thing. But if you go from nothing to evergreen, you don’t know whether it’s going to really work or not.

You want to get real feedback. You want students to go through your program. So Perry Marshall line Marshall, I six months ago, Tik TOK ads for real business owners. So you guys probably know Perry. Marshall is the number one author. When it comes to Google ads like that, he’s got the Bible. Everyone knows like he’s the guy and he’s got the number one book on Facebook advertising too.

He’s an OJI like that. So he said the next thing is Tik TOK. And he doesn’t know tick talk that well because he’s not a singing and dancing kind of guy. So he thought, so then he approached me and he said, Dennis, why don’t we do a book on Tik TOK ads together? Do you think we could do it? Or I’m sorry, why don’t we do a course?

We’d launched a course on my birthday. I flew into Chicago where his house was and we recorded the first segment of the course. And then I taught the course with some other people that I brought on a special guests on how to do tick-tock ads. [00:26:00] And it was great for him because he was able to leverage his audience.

We made not a lot of money, like 50 or $60,000, just on a small launch. We didn’t heavily promote it. I think it was like $500 for 97. If people bought in early, if they came in later, I think it went up to 7 97 or something like that because you want to provide an incentive to sign up early, and from the material that we have gathered over the last six months since launching that course, of course, we’ve been running tick-tock ads for 18 months and working with TOK, which is a whole nother story for another time.

But we’ve gathered a lot more feedback from other people that are running Tik TOK ads and what’s working, what’s not working. And then we decided we’re turning that into an evergreen course, so people can buy it on demand. Now on demand is not as nice as being live for the end user because they don’t get the level of support.

And live is just more interesting, like a live basketball game versus watching a YouTube replace, like not the same thing, but it allows us to scale more and then we can lower the price. So maybe the [00:27:00] evergreen price is only $97. And you get access to the replays or maybe you get access to a group.

So you still get access to some coaching and some stuff. But then we’ve taken all this stuff that we’ve learned about Tik TOK ads, and now we’re turning it into a book. So the book is going to launch in two or three weeks from now. So we went from the course to the book and then the book ties into all the other things we have, like coaching programs and joining planet Perry and that kind of thing.

So hopefully that gives you some insight. There’s a long-winded answer on cohort versus evergreen. Yeah, Dennis I, thank you for that. And I think when I was saying evergreen or what I was really alluding to also was the timeliness of the content. For example if we had done an online course on how to use clubhouse a year ago, there would, it would be missing a lot of information because of all the new changes to the app and all the new features.

So my point was, I did a course 12 years ago on mobile marketing. The whole landscape has changed since then. So the [00:28:00] content of that course would need to be updated. So I. My question really was if you’re thinking about starting an online course, I guess the evergreen type, meaning it’s going to be recorded so people can watch it on demand.

How important is it to pick a topic that’s going to remain timely for a long period of time? Or how do you address updating the content in a course you may have released previously? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So it, there, it is true that if you pick a topic that spoils quickly like technology, then you know, a few months later, it’s not going to be valid.

It’s just like a lot of the social media marketing books out there. By the time they go through a publisher and whatnot, even if you self-publish, it’s already outdated, like our Tik TOK ads course, the screenshots that we took two weeks ago are now outdated because tech talks made a whole bunch of changes and that’s frustrating.

So I wouldn’t worry about whether it don’t pick a topic by whether it’s going to be evergreen. Like how do [00:29:00] you heal yourself and, get fit or. Probably always going to be the same thing. How do you have good relationship with your wife, that kind of thing. Don’t pick it based on how much money it can make or whether it’s going to last a long time, pick it based on how committed you are to it and how deep you are in terms of the knowledge and therefore how much value you can contribute.

Because even though there’s a downside of a topic that especially like technology that has high spoilage, that FOMO is actually what will cause people to buy now because they want to get on the thing now and understand this thing now, like tick-tock ads because that’s the hot thing everyone’s jumping on it.

So it works to your advantage. And the other way, too, it’s not necessarily a better or worse on evergreen versus something that goes away. Main thing is encapsulate your knowledge. I wouldn’t do a course because you’re just trying to make money. You’re just trying to. Famous or just because a few people and you think that it’s a hot topic, you could probably throw something together oh, crypto.

Imagine Jeffrey, you and I wrote a book on [00:30:00] the 10 things you need to know about crypto in 2022. Would that even be valid in six months from now? People weren’t even talking about NFTs a year ago? Where are they? Nope. Nope. Yeah. So on that line, Dennis, for best practices, and then we have a few people who may have some questions for you.

Let’s say you did do a course on something and let’s say you’re Tik TOK course. Now you’ve got a lot of new information. There’s new features. There’s some new ad formats they’ve introduced. Would you update the course then? And do you offer that to the people who already paid for it for free as a bonus, and then use the new updated course to bring it to people?

How it, how what’s the best practices. Here’s the way I think about it so that you don’t have to rerecord the thing just because, that sucks to rerecord the whole thing, just because a couple of things have changed, make your course modular. And here’s the three levels of modularity. We like to build an a course at the top level, you have the strategy.

So why would we do this thing? Who is it’s for,[00:31:00] what is the benefit and how do we do it? Who, where, what, when, why, how, where, like that kind of stuff, you know, goals, content and targeting, right? That’s never really going to change even if the tactics changed. So the strategy level, you film that’s usually your intro and your ending, then you have the concepts.

So concepts may slightly change. So concepts are we reapply dollar a day? And the Tik TOK is, guess what the same concepts apply, or if you can make one minute videos, but now you’ve got to make 15 second videos, same concepts apply. You have to start with a hook. You have to use your mobile phone and make it virtual.

You have to get their attention with movement, right? Or here’s how you target or you can’t target, or the concept of the algorithm, prioritizes what gets the most impressions and engagement, which then, so what drives organic is also the thing that you should boost to throw fuel on the fire, right? That’s a concept, boosting based on what the algorithm prefers organically paid being an extension of organic, right?

Those are all concepts. Concepts will rarely change much like [00:32:00] strategy stays the same. Then you film the conceptual pieces, which won’t change very much. And then the tactical pieces are okay. Now, log in here, click here, click there, do this. The tactical is, on Twitter ads, you should bid 5 cents per engagement, but maybe now you have to be at 10 cents per engagement because the prices have gone up.

So those sorts of little things will change. And so the way we record courses using this, these three layers of the strategy, the strategic conceptual, and tactical, when Twitter changes their ad platform and screens. We don’t have to update the whole course. We just update those tactical components within the course and everything else that’s strategic and conceptual stays the same, but it means that you do have to mark out those chapters.

So in the course that we filmed yesterday with Gavin Lira on how you’re just one connection away from growing your brand. We had the overall strategy, which is relationships are so [00:33:00] key instead of figuring out how to do something, figure out who can get it done for me. So I can delegate when you build your perceived authority, your conversion rate goes up, your networking gets better.

You have more fun. You have less cold calling, all sorts of good. You get to speak more, right? People know you better. And that’s why you want to build a personal brand. And often one network tied to their network creates lots of opportunities. So that’s the whole strategic view on why networking is the most powerful ROI thing you can do with your time.

Then the conceptual pieces are, how do I. Frame my why. And if I go to a conference, how do I behave at a conference? Or how do I tie in my mission with the operations of my business? How do I keep right there? There’s lots of these things that, how do I become a good friend? How do I say thank you to other people, the concept like Giftology right.

There’s a lot of these concepts there. And then the tactical pieces are go to video [00:34:00] stocks.com and order socks using the code, say thanks or something, or hire someone on Fiverr to do this one particular kind of thing. Those are all tactical checklist, task level pieces. But yesterday, because we filmed it based on this outline that went from strategy to concepts, to the tactical bullet points.

Think of it as three levels of indentation when you do an outline, right? So there’s the strategy, very top there’s 10 main bullet points, which are for the concepts. And then each of those concepts. Three or four tactical elements. I think that’s the best way to structure a course. I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks.

That’s just what we found works the best. And then it’s easy to swap out any of the tactical pieces or adding in new tactical pieces. I don’t have to change the overall framework of the course because some of the courses w we have lots of authors and I can’t get these people back on film. Again, some of these people are celebrities.

I just can’t get them on camera very often. Yeah. That makes sense, Dennis. Thank you, Theresa. You spoke earlier, [00:35:00] did you have a question or anything you wanted to add? I wanted to add that. I love what he, how he suggested focusing on those overarching topics that you want to cover in your digital course, that don’t change.

But I also want to add that I think it’s important to build community. And so if you build a community outside of the course and you direct people there where they can stay on top of. Related to that topic, whatever it is then you, it’s like you, you’re bringing them all together and of course it continues to be a strategic part of your strategy to build your business.

And I hope I’m being clear as what I’m saying, but as a virtual assistant, if I was building that course, like then when you mentioned earlier about how to hire a virtual assistant and I invited them to join my community on Facebook or on some other platform where I can keep the one top of technology trends or anything related to their business, then they always have access to me and to the latest and greatest [00:36:00] material I think.

And so that’s another way to go with making sure that the digital course by itself doesn’t become outdated and useless. Does that make any sense? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that Teresa. That makes good. Dr. Lauren, did you have a question or something you wanted to add? Absolutely.

First of all, thank you. Every nanosecond here is a value cause I’m sitting here. I learned dash tonight. I’m launching my evergreen. So thank you guys. Your targeting is perfect. My question is about pricing. I had a cohort based course. I’m in week seven. This week, it’s going to be a 10 week course. I sold 14 seats at 1500 each.

It’s a B2B. That feels pretty good. It was like a discount first time, because I’d never offered it before off of a $3,000 course. And I thought that went pretty good for first time, I made about 18, $19,000 on a first cohort. I’m currently in the process of launching the evergreen video course. And I’m trying to figure out pricing.

I’m trying [00:37:00] to skip over market research. Maybe that’s crazy, but I wonder if you guys have any general guidelines, if everything’s prerecorded and it’s lessons and quizzes and all this kind of self-serve material, a course that’s sold on a discounted rate first cohort at 1500 in any guidance as to what the evergreen self-paced course I should charge for Dr.

Lauren. And by the way you should thank Justin Fairman, who is the founder of LearnDash and we use learn dash as well. And we integrate, learn dash with Memberium, buddy boss and Infusionsoft, all this part of WordPress. So smart choice you have. They’re really smart. Yeah. So these B2B folks that have bought your first cohort, 1500 bucks, 14 of them, are they paying or is the company paying?

Large company is paying their companies pan. Okay. Then you have price elasticity, meaning[00:38:00] if these 14 foot, so you have a, like a demand curve, right? Yep. And it just slopes down when you have price elasticity. That means that the slope is high. So the there’s not much, I’ll just put this way.

So 1500 bucks. For a company to pays nothing. It’s really just the whole justifying it. So if you like going to a conference that’s the same kind of price, that three grand to go to a conference with the hotel and the fee and all that. So conference organizers in parallel to what you’re doing here, we’ll actually have form letters that attendees can print out justifying why it’s a good budget expense.

And that tends to go into their boss because it’s someone else’s money when it is a lower price thing. So for B2B, when it’s still be like, what is, what do you sell it? What’s the course about? It’s called decision intelligence. I’m positioning myself as a guru evangelist kind of influencer person.

It’s an AI related field that I invented and that gardeners now [00:39:00] recognizing. So I’m trying to monetize all my reputational stuff I’ve been doing. Okay. How about the partnerships that you have. Maybe on this course, I do have two JV partnerships. I don’t think they have big lists or anything, so I’m not quite sure how they would participate.

How are people buying these courses now? Through, so I’ve got maybe 40,000 followers between my news page, LinkedIn, et cetera. And I’m advertising to all my subscribers. Okay. I’ve got a Google campaign. I just don’t think it’s converting. It’s just an experiment for B2B. That’s pretty hard to do unless you have a reputation, like, all right.

But that also is just basically remarketing to your existing community that already knows about you, but maybe search that, especially if it’s really niche and B2B. It’s all relationship it’s niche right now. Yeah. Okay. So of the folks that are, who, who have bought already in this first cohort or before maybe you’ve done some consulting and speaking, I assume, [00:40:00] do you have any sort of special hooks.

Or offers that get people to come in or any like early signup bonuses that you’ve used, like some like a private consultation or access to something else. I gave him a 50% discount. And then I say, access to these innovative leaders to everybody else is doing this. So I started did the community cell.

Okay. And why did people these initial 14 people, why did they sign up? But what if we were to ask them? They would say, because decision intelligence fills an important need within their organization. And if they understand this new field, it will help them to get promoted and solve problems that are otherwise not solvable.

Do you think with the, with an evergreen course that it’ll still be company money or if it’s low enough to pay out of their own pocket as professional development? If I had to guess, I think they’d pay out of their own pocket. Are you doing any licensing deals or is it. To the [00:41:00] course, no, I have licensed software, but no, I don’t have any licensing deals to the course.

I don’t really know what that means. Exactly. So I’d love to hear more. So licensing deals could be like blue, Shield’s a client of yours and you charge them, instead of 1500, of course, AI and decision-making is not going to be for line level employees, probably more like managers or higher level specialists.

Maybe there’s a hundred people in their organization that would fit this niche and you just do a bundle deal and it’s $200 per seat. So then you charge them $20,000, for that their corporate license, grant Cardone does this for real estate. So you can buy his training for, $500 or a thousand dollars, but then he’ll license it to a Keller Williams or a century 21 where you have thousands of agents and then just charge like a hundred dollars an agent.

But then he makes way more money because it’s basically a bulk deal. So B2B, the folks who were making the most money are doing licensing deals. There’s this how new I am to this? I’d like this [00:42:00] PhD, try to figure this out. I never heard of that. Thank you so much. That’s dope. Seriously, learn dash supports this.

Oh yeah. Of course. Platforms promote that. Yeah. So not to promote LearnDash, but any major platform with the exception of I think ethic or Kajabi or some of these other ones that are more for like solo printers that are building courses, allow you to set up multiple instructors or be able to give a license.

Like for example, we have licenses for different universities. So we have university of the sunshine coast, university of San Diego. Let’s see Lu university of Louisville. We allow these universities a certain number of seats so their students can get. And learn social media marketing and Facebook ads and whatnot.

Like we don’t charge them. So it’s a special kind of license, but then individuals can come in and buy our digital plumbing course or buy our Facebook for a dollar a day course. So you may, depending on how well-known you are, if you get approached for consulting and what you typically do in a consulting deal, [00:43:00] maybe charge 50 grand and or some pre

you might consider bundling in it, license for all the other executives like this, add on like this value, add to your course, and you could say it’s worth $1,500 a seat, and you have 20 executives that want this AI decision-making thing, but I’m willing to give it to you at 75% off as part of our consulting engagement, because you’re a good client.

I literally have a proposal like that in flight right now. Thank you, sir. What percent of your income comes from consulting versus courses versus speaking or something else? I would say the consulting is 90% of the courses are 10% just because it’s brand new and they will use keynotes and stuff. So youth consulting the drive, more of the core sales, it’s an upsale basically, right?

It’s a, do you want fries with that? Dr. Lorian sure not doing sell the evergreen. I guess I could sell either, either the [00:44:00] evergreen or the cohort course, whichever they had an appetite for. Here’s the way to think about it. And this should be valuable for everyone else here. When Dr. Lauren is doing consulting, she’s basically doing one-on-one training.

So I, the cohort is one person, or it’s a group of people you’re going to a new, going to a meeting and they’re flying you in and you’re charging, whatever your cost of doing your thing is right. Some consulting engagement, think of a course as where you are. It’s like software. Okay. The fundamentals of software are, I can build software for my own company and it’ll cost me a hundred thousand dollars.

Let’s say for software to do a certain thing. But if I have a hundred other companies that need to solve the same problem, then we can basically crowdfund the software and I can say, Hey, all your other companies, if you pay a thousand dollars, you can get access to the software that I paid a hundred thousand dollars for.

And that way we share the cost of this one thing that everybody wants. [00:45:00] So that you understand how that works from a software standpoint, right? You have this thing you built that a lot of people need. The same thing applies for consulting versus courses. The exact same analogy. So Dr.

Lorian can do the consultant. But if she finds that she can package it up in a way that there’s other companies that want the exact same thing, she can sell it instead of a hundred thousand dollars for consulting, she can sell it at a thousand dollars and a hundred other companies will buy it. The beauty is that’s passive ish income.

It’s 95% passive because people can come through the stuff, but then you have support and, people want to ask questions and you have to build your community and grow the list. And also it’s not truly passive income, but it’s like mostly passive, if that makes sense. So think of whenever you do consulting, Dr.

Lauren, I can tell you’ve done a lot of it. You, cause you’re a pro think of any of these things that you repeat over and over again, that’s a clear sign. It needs to be in a course. Do you have certain things, certain topics that you know that executives or companies hire you [00:46:00] for? Maybe that’s what spurned this course, for example, does that ring true for you?

Yeah, definitely. And you can see which items need to be in a course because they have wider. And they have wider value. That’s why I launched it. I thought I can monetize all those one-offs into something more passive and scalable. Yes. Yeah. Great job. You made 20 grand and you’re seven out of 10 weeks there.

So call it a thousand bucks an hour. So for most speakers, that’s not bad, but more importantly, it’s building your brand and more people are talking about it. I’d say here, because it’s your first cohort, make sure you’re capturing feedback from all the attendees. And of course you have permission to be able to share that and ask them at the end of the zoom calls, the best way to, it’s not some form at the end saying, oh, you’ve completed the thing.

Now here’s your certificate of completion, rate this on a scale of one to 10 on these different posts, core survey, things like that. You can do your survey monkey and all that too, but, and LearnDash supports that as well. But the best thing is at the end of each of your sessions ask people, what did they think?

And was [00:47:00] it, what did they think was the highest value and that they find that this was time well spent and you’ll see a lot of people that will say that. And then when people say, oh yeah, I’m so good, Dr. Laura, And, I’ve really liked this such and such. I’m so glad that, I got this course and I had no idea that this and this was true, then you say, wow, thank you so much, Jeffrey and Theresa, can I quote you on that?

And they always say, oh yeah, of course you can. And now you’ve got legal, implied, endorsed legal endorsement from them to be able to use their stuff and put it on your landing page for the evergreen course. And the other pieces. You follow what I’m saying? Yeah. You said that earlier. I wrote it down. So I’m already there.

I got it, sir. Yeah. That’s a secret hack. It works real well. Like you would not believe. And I’m getting the idea that testimonials, the content on my landing page testimonials are one of the most important things because it shows the success that I’m driving. It’s not just me. So that’s why I really honed in on that.

When you said it earlier, sounds like a great, absolutely critical, right? Let’s say [00:48:00] Dr. Lauren, you’re traveling and there’s three restaurants and you’ve not been to any of them before. And one’s got a big line and the other two were. You’re probably going to want to go to the ones busy.

Even those got a big line, right? Yup. And so the same thing, you go to some landing page and it’s Dr. Lauren and here’s, what’s in the course and it’s $1,400, but I need to see that people that are like me in my similar position or companies in my space are also buying like everyone knows this, but for some reason they don’t put those trust marks.

So the trust marks are not just what these other attendees have to say, but the companies that they’re from the positions that they have, the reason why they took the course, like all that kind of stuff, because people, they just want to do what everyone else does, especially in B2B and for your pricing thing, if they’re going to pay for it, if you think that they are going to pay for it out of their own pocket, then you would probably charge something like $250 to $300 instead of 1500.

It’s like a fifth, the price. If you think that the company is going to pay for it and it has to come out of some kind of budget where [00:49:00] someone has to fill out some paperwork, or maybe they have some. Education budget, where they’re allowed to spend it on conferences and things like that. Then evergreen is probably half the price.

You can sell it at a higher price with higher perceived value by including support, by having a group by having some kind of like free coaching call. That’s bundled with that, which often will drive consulting. So you might even say people who buy it at $1,500 or whatever the thing is, you offer a free 20 minute consult.

I bet you’ll get a lot of clients out of that too. It’s like really hidden Legion. You know what I mean? That’s cool. It’s funny. I heard the second cohort a few weeks back. I tried to sell it and I doubled the price from 1500 to 3000. Exactly the same value proposition. I got zero signups. So my demand curve on that there’s something was though the decision-makers are the people that are buying the course.

What level are they in the company typically? Pretty senior [00:50:00] actually head of analytics or head of data, a business intelligence, something like that. Usually the price point there where people complain is above 5,000

odd that it’s a mystery to me. Why my second cohort with the same value proposition didn’t sell, I don’t know. I’m lost on that, but your marketing is the same on your marketing, the same audience. So it may be that the people that know you well, that are the quick buyers already bought in the first cohort, it didn’t reach enough of an audience, or you have 40,000 followers, but how many of them are really seeing what you have? Did you launch it with the webinar? I launched it with a clubhouse rooms, which I thought might be like the modern version of the webinar. And I got like anemic response. Tri how many people went to these rooms? One had 183 rotated through another 63.

I think what might’ve happened is I was asking, I didn’t give them enough lead time. Maybe B2B needs more than three weeks.[00:51:00] That’s my hypothesis B to B, you need registration. I know clubhouse is great. And we were saying a year ago, how it was going to change the world, all that, but I’m a big fan of old fashioned emails and webinars, the way to get people to webinars, they have to sign up and then you hit them with a bunch of emails reminding them.

I don’t think clubhouse does all that reminder stuff. I think they did at one point, but it was, people got annoyed, but I find if you’re selling. To the head of analytics and data minded sorts, or, managers, they might hang out on clubhouses, like a new version of zoom or WebEx, but I still find zooms where it’s at and we’ve got to go through the traditional we don’t want to like, maybe this AI and business intelligence thing is new and decision-making is new, but I wouldn’t change the way people buy.

Just people like to buy a certain way. Let’s just keep it the way they always like to buy. Thank you. Hadn’t thought of that. That’s super helpful. That’s a pivot that wasn’t on my list. Thank you for the free consultants or appreciate it. Imagine if you actually paid us for consulting, I know. And consultants.

So [00:52:00] why don’t you as your homework, paying it forward, implement some of these pieces and then come back in one of our rooms every Thursday at 5:00 PM Pacific and let us know how you’re doing. We’ll do it. I’ll do that for sure. Yeah. Thank you so much. And use LinkedIn for use LinkedIn and Facebook for your ads.

Don’t do I think Google ads won’t be very good unless you run YouTube ads because of the nature of what you’re doing. Yeah, no that, okay. There’s I’m going to stop my Google ads campaign and start LinkedIn. That’s a really good idea. Thank you. Yeah. Google would love to spend your money.

All right. Thank you, Dr. Lauren. So glad you’re here. Yeah, you should hang out with us a little bit. All right, Dennis. Great feedback. That was a nice case study. We got to witness of you going back and forth and giving that advice to Dr. Lauren, but a lot of good nuggets there for everyone.

We’re at the top of the hour, do you have any sort of final remarks on the topic you want to share? Dennis? [00:53:00] There’s a continuum, everybody that moved this way and I want you to see where you think you are on this spectrum. There’s been sales for a long time and there’s a lot of techniques to drive sales, but sales.

I believe have largely lost trust because people can see through selling and they can go to the internet and find the information. And why would they have to talk to some salesperson or talk to some guy for the used car lot at the dealership. Just, you can get all the stuff on the internet. So salespeople have devolved to become not as important and no offense to anyone.

Who’s a salesperson. And it’s moved into marketing where you’re adding value. You’re actually helping people understand their needs and you’re finding different angles and all kinds of modern marketing that you see as even coming up through social media and this influencer thing and whatnot, but even marketing is now starting to feel like everyone says that they’re a marketer and an [00:54:00] influencer and whatnot, and it’s moved into education.

So education has a higher level of trust. Because you wouldn’t imagine that your teachers or people that you’ve respected as your elders or whatnot, are there to try to shill. So it’s moved from sales to marketing, to education, to a real certification where you have authority. So as these previous levels start to lose their cache because it gets abused because everyone is in sales, because everyone now has a book because now you need to move to a higher and higher level of authority to be able to stand out.

And today’s topic on building a course, I believe is now, if you asked me this five years ago, I would’ve said no, but today I believe anyone who is a professional, who does services needs to have a course can be a real estate agent or a doctor or a consultant of some sort or an agency. I believe you need to have a course, because that is the way you’re going to stand out among [00:55:00] all the other people that do the same thing, because all the other people are going to say, I also do social media marketing to.

I also do this and that, and you might be better than them, but from the standpoint of a client, how the heck are they going to know? You need to have something that appears to be authoritative. So that perceived authority comes from things like having a blue check, mark, having a lot of followers, having a book, having a lot of recommendations on your LinkedIn, having a course.

And the funny thing is that as with books, what percent of people actually read books, get past the first page Jeffery or the 1% of percentage. But by the way, you’re saying it, I presume it’s a low number. It’s single digits of people read past the first page when they buy a book.

And I’m just as guilty of that too now. So in the same way, if you look at the e-learning stats, what percent of people who buy a course or start a course, actually make it to the end of the. It’s the same, very low I’m. I’m [00:56:00] guilty of purchasing several courses that I never even bothered to open up after spending the money.

Yeah. Cause you believe that one day you’re going to learn Spanish one day, you’re going to want to do this one thing. And that day never comes because then you get even busier and by then you bought another 10 courses. So you’re never going to get back to the one that you bought a year ago, and then you feel regrets and whatever.

So people we know don’t read the books and they don’t go through the courses. So not to say that your course should be garbage because people aren’t reading it. But if you are selling high ticket, anything, you need to have a course out there because the people who buy your high ticket, they don’t go to your webinar.

They don’t they’ll register, but they won’t attend your webinars. They’ll buy your book, but they won’t read it because then when you send the follow-up email saying, Hey everybody, here’s the replay of the webinar. And we covered these five things and blah, blah, blah. Oh. And if you want to reach out.

Here’s contact me, the people who are the who are the buyers that you want, who have a lot [00:57:00] of money and their time is super valuable. They will just rather hire you, even though they didn’t go to the webinar and they didn’t take your course and they didn’t read your book, they will just pay you. And they’re like, you know what?

Yeah, I know you have this course and all that, but I don’t want to sit through 10 weeks and show up every Tuesday at 2:00 PM or whatever it is. Can I just go ahead and pay you and have it done? And so by putting the course out there, by having the followups, even if it means you have to text them or personally email them saying, Hey, I noticed you registered for the thing, but you didn’t show up.

You’re going to drive a ton of sales to that. So anyone who does consulting or is a service business, you could be a chiropractor. You could be a personal injury attorney. You can be whatever kind of service business people know that they don’t know these things and they feel guilty about it. And the people that are your best clients are the ones who will say, you know what I’ve seen Jeffrey has this course and how to do digital marketing.

I just want to go ahead and pay him for. I just want to pay him for some sort of premium thing. Cause I don’t want to, I don’t want to go and take some, some people, they just always [00:58:00] fly first class. A buddy of mine. He just told me today at lunch that he’s never going to fly commercial again.

Oh, okay, I’m a, you’re a billionaire. So I guess you could do that. And there’s going to be some people that are just like that. It’s probably not rational, but if you put your course as your mid tier or low tier offer, it sets you up to have a high tier offer. It’s very difficult to sell a high tier offer unless you can compare it against a low and a mid tier offer.

So I want you guys to think about how a course fits into building your authority so that if you sell something high ticket, you can ladder up from a low ticket item. It’s very tough to go from nothing straight to high ticket. This is Dennis in the orange head. Just give me a follow if you like any of this.

Thank you, Dennis. Another great episode of the coach. You show really interesting topic. Thank you to Teresa and Dr. Laura. And especially thank you to everyone in the audience who’s listening. We hope you found some value in this discussion tonight. We’ve got lots of great [00:59:00] topics we tackle, and the Coach Yu show every Thursday evening at 5:00 PM.

Pacific 8:00 PM. Eastern time as mentioned at the beginning the recording of this show is available over@startup.club. We also have replaced turned on so you can listen to this replay in Dennis’s profile, my profile or on startup club here at clubhouse. So if you liked what you heard, feel free to share it.

Hopefully you’ll come and join us again for another edition of the Coach Yu show. Thanks, Dennis. Good luck. Thank you Jeffrey to seeing you next week. Yeah. Thank you Jeffrey for putting all this effort and thank you guys for coming. And I see some friends here like Danny Monson and Mr. Brightside here.

Oh, Christians here as well. You guys should speak up. I’d love to hear more from you guys. I’ll catch you guys next week. Love you all 5:00 PM. Pacific Thursdays. Bye everyone. We’re out. Thanks. Thank you again so much. Bye-bye thank you.