Online Courses

Should I give value – or push for the sale?

Posted byIan Brodie on February 16th, 2022.

Hopefully you made it through last week's post on course maths relatively unscathed :)

But hopefully, it also showed how important it is that your post-launch marketing is able to bring on board new customers profitably. Not just “build awareness” or “get the word out”.

To get customers profitably on an ongoing basis you need two systems to be up and running in your business.

The first brings new contacts into your world – usually onto your email list. The second nurtures your relationship with those contacts so they're ready to buy (and actually do buy).

I'm going to talk about the second system first. Because unless you can reliably convert your contacts into paying customers there's no point in trying to get more of them.

Often when people like me talk about nurturing relationships we bad mouth nasty old aggressive marketers who hit their email list with promotion after promotion and deadline after deadline. And we eulogise lovely fluffy marketers who give value to their subscribers through useful content instead.

Of course, the world is not that simple.

Pushy, aggressive marketing can and does work at times.

In fact, it seems particularly effective for selling marketing training and services – which is why you probably see it so much ;)

But it's not the kind of marketing I want to do and it's probably not the kind of marketing you want to do either. And it's much less effective for products and services that are a bigger, more complex, more thoughtful decision to buy.

That doesn't mean that all you have to do is share valuable content with your contacts and suddenly they'll be lining up to buy from you though.

The problem with a lot of the “give value” thinking on marketing is that it flies in the face of what we know are the real drivers of buying behaviour. It's necessary, but not sufficient.

Sharing valuable content with potential customers can build your credibility (if it's the right content). And it can create a sense of reciprocation and liking because you've done them a favour.

But there's a lot more goes into making a sale.

You can't just send out valuable content hoping it will do the trick. You need to be a bit more thoughtful about it and make sure your content is not just valuable but hits the right buttons to move people closer to being ready to buy,

We'll talk about what those buttons are dans mon prochain mél.

– Ian

PS writing in Franglais isn't one of those hot buttons, but I wish it was. The two things that had me in hysterics more than any other as a child were Miles Kington's Franglais books and Geoffrey Willans' tales of Molesworth's adventures at St Custards.

Online Courses

The mathematics of successful courses

Posted byIan Brodie on February 9th, 2022.

Here's a simple rule for success in life:

If something's working well, do more of it. If it's not, stop it. If it's marginal, tweak it until it works well. And if you can't tweak it to work well, stop it.

Obviously it's a simplification. But it works.

The big problem is if you can't actually tell if something is working well, if it's not, or if it's marginal.

And that's the case with most marketing for online courses.

The way most people market their course post-launch is to do “a bit of this, a bit of that”.

A Linkedin post. A YouTube video. Blogging. Maybe some ads for a while. Maybe another mini-launch to their email list or social media contacts.

Or maybe you try the latest technique your favourite guru says is “crushing it” (before they sell you another course on another technique that's crushing it next month). We've all been there.

We know consistency is important. But it's difficult to be consistent if you don't know whether something is working or not.

And the key to knowing whether something is working is to understand your numbers.

For online courses (and memberships and other online businesses) the key numbers are your customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC)

In other words, how much money you make in total from a customer from all the products and services you sell them, and how much it costs you to get them as a customer in the first place.

If you only sell one course, then the lifetime value is the price of that course. If you have upsells, other courses they can buy later or other services they can buy, then the lifetime value is the price of the initial course plus the price of the others times the percentage who “upgrade” and buy them.

How do you figure out those numbers?

If you've been selling your courses for a while you should have some historical data on conversion rates. If not, you'll have to make some estimates.

But the good news is your numbers don't have to be all that accurate.  Many people make the mistake of giving up on calculating LTV and CAC because they can't get it 100% accurate. But all you need to know is a rough estimate of what your LTV is at least and what your CAC is at most.

You're going to use those numbers to decide whether to do more of what you're doing, stop it, or tweak it. So as long as you're in the right ball park, you'll make the right decision.

In his book The Automatic Customer, John Warrillow suggests that the “magic formula” for successful subscription based businesses is where LTV > 3 x CAC.

I've found that formula works well for course business too. It gives a decent margin for error and for ongoing “cost of doing business” expenses.

So what you do in practice is calculate the average value of your customers. Then calculate your marketing costs per customer.

If you're using paid advertising, your tracking should tell you that. For more organic marketing, work out how much it costs you (in terms of your time and any out-of-pocket expenses) and divide by the number of customers it brings you.

Of course, there'll be time lags. You'll do marketing and some people won't buy straight away but may buy later. But if you use a long enough time period of, say, a few months, then for a product with a reasonably short sales cycle like an online course, the numbers will be good enough. Certainly, if your lifetime value is nowhere near your cost of acquisition after a few months it's unlikely to ever rise to more than 3x.

You really want to be able to do this for your different marketing channels, so you'll need to have some tracking that tells you which channel a customer came from.

Again, it won't be super accurate. Some people will click on a Linkedin post and then a Facebook ad for example.

But it's good enough.

When you know those numbers – even just roughly – you can make sensible decisions about whether your ads are working. Or whether all that posting on Twitter is worth your time. Or whether you're better off spending time doing YouTube videos.

It tells you what to do more of, what to stop, and what you might be able to tweak to get working.

Without those numbers you're stuck in “a bit of this, a bit of that” land, hoping that something is working but not really knowing what – and so not being able to stop anything and not being able to double-down on anything.

Now I'm going to be honest here: I don't have all these numbers on tap for my business.

I wish I did. But the truth is I have to dive into a few systems as a one-off exercise when I want to see them. And make a few approximations and informed guesses.

But even then, the results are hugely helpful.

You can do the same.

– Ian

PS Don't forget, there are tons of great case studies and tutorials for you to learn from for free on the Course Builders Hub – including lots of examples of tried and tested approaches to marketing your courses (which, of course, you'd want to measure the LTV and CAC for :) ) 

Online Courses

So you’ve launched your course…what next?

Posted byIan Brodie on February 4th, 2022.

It may not feel like it right now, but creating and launching your online course is the “easy” part.

It's easy in the sense that it's a known quantity that everyone can do.

It may be a bit of a slog at times. You might get stuck. You might need to get help.

But it's 100% doable.

You can even lower the risk like many of our Course Builders TV interviewees have done by doing interviews and surveys to check demand, pre-selling the course, and building it as they deliver it through live sessions.

But once you've launched the real work begins: getting new customers week in, week out.

This is where the vast majority of successful course builders make their money.

And where the vast majority of people struggle.

Many course builders have confessed to me privately that they got stuck after the razzamatazz of their launch. They didn't know what to do to bring in new buyers consistently without having to go through the huge pressure of a launch.

So our next emails are going to focus on just that: how to get a steady stream of customers for your online course post-launch.

To do that, you'll need to switch from event-based thinking to evergreen-based thinking. Away from “what activities and tasks can I do to drum up business” to “what systems and processes can I put in place to generate business for me with less of my intervention”.

Without evergreen thinking you'll never realise the promise of online courses to deliver scalable income and time freedom. You'll be stuck on the treadmill of one-off activity after one-off activity, event after event.

And there are two evergreen systems you need to put in place for an online course:

• A system for nurturing relationships so you convert your existing contacts into customers on a regular basis.
• A system for profitably attracting new contacts into your world so you can start nurturing them.

But we're going to start in the next post with some maths (why do Brits call it “maths” and Americans call it “math” by the way?).

That probably doesn't sound super exciting. But it is super important.

Online Courses

Making corporate outreach easy

Posted byIan Brodie on January 26th, 2022.

This is the last in our short series of posts about selling online courses to corporates.

Corporates are a great place to start if you already have good contacts.

You can chat to them informally to get an idea of what they're looking for. You already know who to speak to and who makes decisions. They already trust you so there's less risk.

But what if you don't have an existing contact base in corporates but you still want to focus on them?

That's much harder.

Cold outreach is really difficult for most of us.

There are some people who are perfectly happy to pick up the phone or shoot off an email or Linkedin message to someone they don't know to try initiate a connection to talk about their products and services.

For most of us though, it's really difficult psychologically.

We hate the idea of being seen as pushy or salesy or desperate so we're hesitant to reach out. If we do, it's only after agonising over it for ages. And the inevitable high percentage of rejection really gets us down and we quickly abandon the whole process.

Of course, someone who's naturally comfortable at cold outreach will be reading that and thinking “oh come on Ian, get over yourself. Just do it, what's the worst that can happen?”

But to those of us for whom cold outreach is difficult, that advice is about as much use as Bob Newhart's psychiatrist.

But what does work are a couple of approaches to cold outreach that bypass all those feelings of angst and fear of what people might think. And the people you reach out to actually appreciate them.

The first is to lead with value. In other words when you contact people cold, instead of trying to pitch at them or quiz them with questions to “get to know them”, you offer them something valuable for free with no strings attached. 

Usually that's a free report or video but it can be anything and I've written about this approach many times under the heading of Value Based Marketing.

But today I want to talk about the second way to make contact that is psychologically easier and is actually appreciated by the people you reach out to.

It's to ask for help.

Normally you'd ask for help and feedback from people you know. But if you're in the early stages of creating an online course there's absolutely no reason why you can't reach out to people you don't know to get their feedback on your course ideas.

I need to be really clear here: your primary goal is to get actual feedback. You're not pretending to get feedback in order to make contact and then at some point offer your course.  You're making contact to genuinely get feedback to help shape your course – and as a side effect you'll now have a contact who might be interested in buying it downstream.

Why would someone you don't know be willing to give up their time to help you and give you feedback?

I really don't know for sure – we're strange creatures we humans. But for some reason many people are. 

My guess is that many of us naturally like to help others (which is a good thing and probably one reason our species has survived so long). And being asked for advice is a bit flattering too.

So as long as you keep your request modest – a 15-minute call or 20 minutes over coffee for example – many people will say yes and help.

You can watch my Course Builders TV video on how to validate your course ideas to find out what to ask to get good feedback here. 

After you've got your feedback they'll have got to know you a little through the process. Some will voluntarily ask about the course you're planning.

With others you can ask them if they'd like you to send details when you've consolidated your feedback. Some will say yes, some will say no.

The point is that none of it is embarrassing. None of it feels like you're being pushy. Or that you're desperate.

All of it feels like a proper conversation between two grown ups.

Which means even the most reserved of us can feel comfortable doing it. We don't have to “get over ourselves” or “just do it” or even “stop it” (thank you Bob).  

Online Courses

De-risk your online courses to get more sales from corporates

Posted byIan Brodie on January 21st, 2022.

In my last post I talked about how perceived risk is a huge factor in corporate decision-making. And how adding an online course to other work you're doing like live training or consulting makes it an easier and less risky purchase.

You can apply that principle of decreasing risk in many different ways to make it easier to sell your online courses to corporates:

• It's almost certainly worth doing a lower-cost pilot of your course to quickly get testimonials and build a track record so that future buyers see the course as a proven quantity.
• It's usually a good idea to have a small, “easy to buy” product that lets potential clients dip a toe in the online course water without having to get budgetary approval or go through a bunch of procurement hoops. Then when your small course has delivered for them, buying a bigger more extensive one becomes much easier.
• If you're thinking about which potential corporate clients to offer online courses to, focus on the ones where you're already seen as a safe pair of hands and inherently less of a risk to work with.

That last point is all about trust and it's absolutely vital when it comes to selling to corporates.

Corporate decision-making is often slow and complex and involves multiple stakeholders jostling to get what they want from the process.

In fact, perhaps the most common outcome of corporate procurement processes is that no decision is made at all. They just can't reach agreement or they run into other internal stumbling blocks.

So at minimum, you need to be in the loop and understand the different perspectives of the most influential decision makers. Ideally you want to be in a position to facilitate the buying process and help them get over internal barriers and roadblocks.

But you simply won't be able to do that if those key decision-makers don't trust you enough to be open with you about what's really going on or worry that you'd be following your own agenda rather than genuinely trying to help them.

More trust = less risk = more sales.

Online Courses

The easiest way to sell online courses to corporates

Posted byIan Brodie on January 21st, 2022.

Selling to corporates can be hugely rewarding. But it can also be incredibly slow and painful. Especially when you're selling something they've never bought before – like online courses.

Covid-19 has changed things somewhat and brought online courses up the priority list. But by and large, people in corporates don't like to take risks on new things, because those risks tend to be one-sided.

If things go well, the company gets the benefit rather than them personally. But if things go badly, it's often career-ending for them.

So if a large organisation hasn't bought online courses before it can be a long and painful process for them to make that first purchase.

Unless…the online course comes bundled with something they're already used to buying.

That's why the easiest way to sell online courses to corporates is often to add them on to existing work you're already doing for them or proposing to them.

Doing live training? Add an online version of the course as an option to help reinforce the learning after the course is over. Or for new joiners or others who weren't able to attend the live sessions.

Doing a live workshop? Add an online training option before the workshop so that workshop itself can make real progress fast rather than having to spend half the time getting everyone up to speed.

Doing a consulting project? Add an online training option to ensure that new processes and methods introduced in the project are implemented effectively and that the improvements stick.

Proposing a training project to a client with a strict budget, or where travelling to each of their offices is going to be prohibitively expensive? Use a blend of live and online training to make the project more affordable while still getting the benefits of live sessions where they're really needed.

There are all sorts of ways you can integrate online courses into live work. And they're all much, much easier to sell to clients than a standalone online course because they don't seem anywhere near as new and risky.

But the reality is that most people just don't offer them.

They propose the same old type of live sessions they've always proposed, rather than spending just a little bit of time to figure out how they can add online courses into the mix.

And in doing so, they miss out on potentially a huge opportunity to start selling online courses.

Because even if an online course add-on is only a small amount of revenue initially, it opens the door for more online courses in future – including standalone options.

Once you've delivered and your online courses are a known and trusted quantity, it's much, much easier to sell more of them.

But only if you can get that initial foot in the door.

Of course, this only works in situations where you're already selling other services to them. In upcoming posts we'll see how you can break in to brand new corporate clients using the same principle of decreasing perceived risk.

Online Courses

Quality vs Speed: Do We Really Need a Trade-Off?

Posted byIan Brodie on January 5th, 2022.

Hope this New Year is treating you well. I have some big plans and tons of new content I want to share with you this year about building online courses.

But today I want to focus on something that's been bugging me for a while. A kind of paradox if you like.

In my interviews with successful course builders I always close by asking them for one big tip they would give to a friend thinking about creating an online course that would most help them succeed.

Two themes have come up time and time again.

One is speed.

You never really know if a course is going to click with your audience until you offer it for sale. And you never know exactly what they want until you show them something and get feedback on it.

So one of the biggest keys to success is to get a minimum viable version of your course out there quickly, offer it for sale and get feedback on it. Don't wait until you've perfected it or got all the bells and whistles or a super polished presentation.

But the second big theme is quality.

With an online course, you're not just competing with local competitors. Your course buyers could (and often do) buy from anyone in the world.

Your course needs to stand out and be brilliant quality to succeed in a harsh red ocean of other courses.

And, of course, it seems like there's a trade-off between these two themes.

On the one hand, you need to pull your course together quickly and get it out to your audience to get feedback.

On the other, you need to ensure it's super high quality to stand out against all the competition.

This really bugged me at first.

Did I have to sacrifice one for the other? Or find some kind of happy medium trade-off? Or was one of the themes simply wrong.

But eventually, I realised that there's no trade-off at all…if you think more deeply about what quality means.

As a course creator spending all your time building a course it's easy to assume that quality means the production values of the course…

…an impressive website. High-quality videos. Forums, certificates, gamification, the whole learning management kit and kaboodle.

But that's not what the vast majority of your actual clients care about.

They care about getting results from the course. Fast.

Of course, if the website is super slow and they can't understand what the videos are telling them then they're not going to learn effectively and they won't get results from your course.

But as long as the production values are OK, what's really important is the effectiveness and practicality of what you teach.

Powerful ideas. Simple plans that work. Shortcuts.

You can get these across without investing a small fortune or slaving away for months over a fancy website.

Quick, practical videos. Templates. Copy and paste examples. Live sessions where you answer questions. Nothing that takes an age or needs super high production values.

But super valuable.

So if you're getting bogged down creating your course and it's taking ages, think to yourself “what do my best customers actually want from this course? What's quality to them?”

– Ian

PS – I very often find that when faced with a painful trade-off or two goals seemingly in conflict, there's often a hidden assumption buried in there that just isn't true (in this case that “quality” means high production values).

Look for those assumptions. Challenge them. And you just might find.a way to have your cake and eat it.

Online Courses

How a “distinctive point of view” is rocketfuel for your online course

Posted byIan Brodie on December 10th, 2021.

Last week I talked about how important it was to differentiate your course given the huge number of options your potential buyers will have online.

And one of the best ways to do that is to base your course around a unique methodology or “distinctive point of view”.

If you think about it, we all do what we do in different ways.

No one approaches marketing or building courses in quite the same way that I do. And no one does what you do in the exact same way you do it.

Normally we don't make a big deal out of those differences. We get on with doing what we do and getting results for clients and hope those results will speak for themselves.

But in the world of online courses, everyone will claim to get the same big results you get. Your buyers need some way of differentiating between courses and choosing the one that will be best for them.

Differentiating based on a unique approach is particularly powerful because:

• Almost by definition it's very difficult for someone to copy your unique way of doing things (whereas they can all claim they have great service, get great results, etc).
• Doing things differently means it'll feel different to anything your potential customers have tried before. If (like most people) they've tried courses in the past and not had much success, the fact your course does things differently will give them hope they can succeed this time.
• It's much more marketable. For example, no one is going to invite you onto their podcast or webinar to talk about how you do sales training the exact same way everyone else does it. But they will invite you on if you have a new and interesting approach their audience hasn't heard before.

Now when I talk about a unique way of doing things, I don't mean the mechanics of how you run your courses. That's important, but the fact that you split your courses into micro learning or do things more interactively or whatever isn't going to bring floods of new customers to you.

Having a unique approach means teaching your customers how they can do things differently in your area of expertise.

For example, when Brian Dean teaches content marketing for SEO he doesn't teach you how to create content your audience will value. He teaches you how to identify the influencers in your market and how to create the type of content they will value. Content they'll link to and share so more of your audience gets to see it and it ranks higher in searches.

Of course, it has to be valuable to your audience too – but the primary focus is on figuring out the type of content your influencers will link to and share.

When I first heard him express that concept years ago my initial thoughts were “wait, that can't be right…oh hang on…oh…yeah…that makes sense now you think about it…I can see how that works…and actually, it might just work for me”.

That's the kind of reaction you want when potential customers hear about your approach…

…a little lightbulb going off where they're a little puzzled at first, then they get it, then they begin to think “this might work for me”.

That's what powers them to find out more about your course and eventually to invest in it.

And you need to be able to trigger that reaction in just a few sentences. Perhaps with a course name and subtitle or a few bullet points, or an explanatory model.

We'll discuss how to do that in our next post.

Online Courses

Why would someone buy your course?

Posted byIan Brodie on December 3rd, 2021.

I went to the barber's yesterday and got myself a half-decent haircut.

For some unknown reason, there are three barber's shops in close proximity in our tiny village. So plenty of choice.

But not anywhere near the amount of choice you have when it comes to buying an online course. You can almost literally choose from any supplier in the world as long as the course is in a language you understand.

Which brings up the important question for course builders: given all this choice, why should someone buy their course from you?

In my experience there are 5 ways you can set your course apart from the very many others on the market. But only 3 I'd recommend.

You could, of course, make your course cheaper than everyone else's. Not a smart strategy and not one that is likely to last long as someone else is bound to undercut you.

You could try to make your course bigger and more comprehensive. A decent strategy for a larger organisation with the resources to do so. But not a great strategy for the likes of you and me.

The first viable strategy is to focus on a narrow niche that plays to your strengths. There's less competition in narrow niches, but they're usually big enough to sustain a solid business for a small firm or individual course builder.

The second viable strategy is to differentiate based on your own credibility, personality or relationship with your audience.

If you're a well-known expert in your field, have a long track record of success, or have built a strong relationship with an audience (e.g. your own email list) then that can differentiate your course from others.

People buy from people they know and trust and that relationship can be your edge, even if the course itself is similar to others.

And finally you can base your course on a unique methodology or approach.

Rather than just teaching standard material, if the core of your course is a methodology or model or approach that's unique to you it becomes impossible for competitors to copy.

And because the approach is different to what anyone else is offering it'll be new and compelling to potential buyers. And it means you can focus on teaching the unique aspects of the approach rather than covering everything related to the topic.

For very many people this will be the most effective way of differentiating yourself while minimising the amount of work needed to develop an effective course. And the reality is that we all have our own unique approaches to how we deliver our work – it's a matter of codifying and communicating them in a compelling way.

Using a unique methodology or framework comes across in many of the interviews on the Course Builders Hub.

And next time I'm going to explore how to use a unique methodology or “distinctive point of view” to create a course that's different and rather easier to sell.

Online Courses

The Power of Podcasts

Posted byIan Brodie on November 28th, 2021.

So first off, the good news is my sourdough loaf from last week turned out fine after all, despite forgetting about the dough overnight.

I guess the freezing temperatures here in the UK stopped it going too mad. The rise was a little less than normal, but very acceptable and quite pretty really. And the slightly burnt ear was delish.

I'm sure there's some marketing lesson in there about having faith or things being more robust than you imagine…but that's not the point of today's post.

Instead, I want to talk about a question that's on the lips of a lot of people: “how can I market my course and get new customers without spending a bunch of money?”

The answer, in my experience, is… lots of stuff. You just have to figure out how to make it work.

And the “stuff” I want to talk about in this post is podcasts.

Podcasts aren't the kind of thing that make you rich overnight or bring a proverbial flood of new leads in an instant.

But they do bring a steady stream of new visitors. And they build a more permanent type of relationship. The type that comes from gently whispering in someone's ear week in, week out rather than making a big one-off noise.

In her Course Builders TV interview Denise Oyston talks about how her podcast has become the main source of new leads for her course.

Denise has my complete admiration as she does podcasts the “hard way” – solo.

I've always done interview-based podcasts – and that's continued with the Course Builders Hub interviews.

There are three wonderful things about interviews.

Firstly, you always learn something new. Often lots.

I've been staggered that despite over a dozen years developing my own courses and teaching it to others I've learnt so much from these interviews I've been doing. Different strategies. Different tactics. Different philosophies. All sorts of new stuff.

Secondly, you reach new people thanks to the folks you're interviewing.

I've deliberately told my interviewees there's no expectation they'll share or promote the interview – I'm so grateful just for them sharing their experiences with me.

But they've all shared the interviews with their contacts and on social media and new visitors have appeared at my site and signed up for my emails as a result.

And finally – and rather subtly – interviewing someone on a podcasts builds a relationship with them.

All the conversations you have with someone before you interview them, the interview itself and your interactions after all start a really good relationship.

It's up to you where you go from there.

Collaborations. Potential client work. Friendship.

All possible.

Podcasts or video interviews like I'm doing are a commitment, of course. But they're fun. They connect you with great people. They get you that steady stream of leads.

If you're looking for a no-cost way of marketing your course that actually works, I'd recommend them.