Ian Brodie

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My Sourdough Disaster!

Posted byuserIan Brodie on November 26th, 2021.

Like seemingly half the world, I got into baking sourdough bread during the pandemic.

I can't tell you how many terrible loaves I baked before I hit on a decent “formula” that worked for me and was easy to do. Now we get a fantastic batard every time.

Well, every time except today.

Last night I made the mistake of making pizza while I was supposed to be shaping the bread and popping it in the fridge overnight. And I plain forgot to do it.

I woke up this morning to a big lump of overproofed dough.

I'm going to bake it anyway, but it's a good reminder not to take on too many things at the same time. You'll inevitably mess one of them up.

But there's perhaps a more important lesson that applies just as well to building courses.

Because even though I messed up this loaf, all I've really “wasted” is maybe 10-20 minutes of my time and the cost of 400g of flour.

If today's loaf doesn't work I can quickly rustle up some more dough and get going again and have one ready tomorrow.

When it comes to courses it's important to start with that “rapid testing” philosophy.

In particular, you never know whether your course is going to sell until you offer it to people to buy.

Probably the biggest mistake you can make is to spend months and months creating tons of content and trying to make it as perfect as possible before market testing it.

It's much better to do your research, then create a course outline and offer it for sale in advance of building it – for example as a live online workshop.

If enough people sign up you create the content and run the workshop. Then turn it into a more official course afterwards, confident that it'll be a good investment because you know the demand is there.

If not enough people sign up you refund the small number who bought and go back to the drawing board. Rather like me with my sourdough.

Following this rapid testing approach means you're much more likely to hit on a course that will sell. And it gets you out of the trap of being so invested in your initial idea that you just keep trying to make it more and more perfect and never get it to market.

You'll see that rapid testing philosophy echoed in many of the interviews on the Course Builders Hub.

I'll say more about rapid testing approaches for courses in future posts – including what to do if you've got trapped in the perfectionism loop and haven't managed to launch your course yet.

But for now I just wanted to re-stress that if you haven't created or launched your course yet – it absolutely won't take you months and months. You can have a simple workshop designed, sold and delivered in weeks.

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What’s the Best Way to Market an Online Course?

Posted byuserIan Brodie on November 24th, 2021.

It's the biggest challenge most people have with their online courses: marketing their course – particularly after launch.

And the million dollar question: what's the best way to do it?

Unfortunately, there's no million dollar answer. It depends.

A lot of the “course gurus” push the idea that Facebook ads are a silver bullet.

And Facebook (or Linkedin) ads are indeed a great way to grow your sales in a scalable way that isn't tied to spending more and more of your time.

But my experience is that for most people, there's such a huge learning curve to getting good at Facebook or Linkedin ads that it ends up being a real barrier to progress. Not to mention the money you can end up spending before you master them (if you ever do).

My advice is to get your first wave or two of sales by other methods. Then armed with the knowledge that there's a real market for your course and a little war chest built up from those sales: hire someone who knows what they're doing to run ads for you.

That's the approach Michael Heppell took, and he explains more in his interview here.

But other approaches work well too. It all depends on your starting point and what you're good at.

Dr Tarique Sani fills his pipeline of course buyers and coaching clients through posting content on Linkedin.

When he first explained that he posts 4 times a day my jaw dropped. That just seemed like an incredible amount of content to me.

But in his interview he lays out his approach to creating content for Linkedin that allows him to be both prolific and productive without sacrificing quality.

Lynn Scott describes how she gets most of her course buyers from her Effortless Leaders Facebook group (and they were also the source of insight and ideas that helped shape her course).

In my wife Kathy's business, the vast majority of sales of courses and memberships come from people who sign up for one of her annual virtual summits.

(You can find out a little bit more about using virtual summits to feed course sales in Jan Koch's interview here. Jan's course is Virtual Summit mastery and he's a genuine go-to guy for summits).

In her interview, Denise Oyston explains how she uses her podcast as the primary source for sales of her marketing course for recruiters.

The overarching message though is that there are many different marketing approaches that work very well indeed for online courses. 

Some are better for high-value courses. Some are better at scale.

But all of them have to be ones that you can do and do consistently.

It's consistency that brings results.

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Online Courses

Speed > Perfection (but do we live it?)

Posted byuserIan Brodie on October 31st, 2021.

I've been doing more interviews this week for Course Builders TV and I'm now at the point where I'm beginning to look back at them to pick out common themes.

The first thing that absolutely jumps out is that everyone I've interviewed who's created a successful course has got something out of the door and into the hands of paying customers pretty quickly.

They've all – to a greater or lesser degree – gone down the path of creating something good but not perfect. Something customers can use to get the results they want, but that doesn't have all the bells and whistles that you might add to a final polished product.

In some cases that meant the technology was initially pretty basic. Or it was done as live calls before turning it into recorded videos.  Or it was a “minimum viable product” narrowly focused on the outcome of the course rather than on everything someone might want to learn.

My experience is that with an online course (and with a lot of marketing) you can get to good pretty quickly. It then takes you two or three times as long to make something 10% or 20% better.

And the reality is that you can never make it perfect on your own because you just don't have the feedback from paying clients you need to know exactly what to improve.

We all know this in theory of course.

I'm sure no one is reading this shaking their head saying “no, he's wrong, it's well worth spending twice as long to try to make something a tiny bit more perfect before letting customers near it”.

But the reality is that while most of us know this in theory, few of us live it in practice.

I'm forever tweaking my website and landing pages to make minor improvements only I will ever notice. I know people who've been working on books or online courses for months or even years without ever getting that first version into customers' hands. 

Yet all of us would nod in agreement with the concept that you need to get things shipped quickly.

Perhaps we need less agreement in theory, less nodding as we read emails like this, and more action to make it happen.

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Online Courses

Minor bravery

Posted byuserIan Brodie on October 24th, 2021.

One of my interviews this week for Course Builders TV was Sarah Robb who's created a course to teach freelancers and clients how to create world-class brand strategies.

One of the things we talked about in the interview was how Sarah made sure there was real demand for the course before creating it by interviewing potential buyers.

Not only did those interviews tell her that the course did indeed meet a real need, they also told her exactly what people were looking for from the course.

Not just the practical benefits, but the emotional side too. The fears and concerns they had when doing brand strategy. The uncertainties and hesitations when they were selling it.

In other words, the key “hot buttons” the course needed to address in order to motivate potential buyers to get off the fence and stump up their cash.

You'll hear Sarah's story and her lessons learned from building her course when Course Builders TV goes live in a few weeks.

But for now, I thought it was worth highlighting the importance of doing something a lot of us are actually a bit scared of: asking for help.

In Sarah's case, she asked potential clients to give a bit of their time to help her create a great product for them.

I know personally I'd have agonised over sending the invites. “Won't they think I should know this stuff already?”. “Will they think I'm being cheeky asking for their time?”. “What if I don't like their answers?” 

It takes a little bit of bravery to admit you don't have all the answers and reach out for help.

Not “rushing into a burning building to save someone” level of bravery of course.

But minor bravery. About as brave as marketing gets.

The kind of brave that saves you a ton of wasted time and effort and ensures you get much better results from your marketing.

But the kind of brave most people don't do.

You don't need to wait until you're launching a new product to do it. You should really be asking clients and prospects for their input, ideas and feedback on a regular basis.

And if you get into the habit of asking for feedback, it's a lot easier to do it when you really need it.

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Online Courses

Avoiding shark-infested waters

Posted byuserIan Brodie on October 20th, 2021.

I've spent a bunch of time this week searching for people to interview for my new Course Builders TV venture.

I'm looking for people who've successfully built and grown an online course. And while I've found a few through searches on Linkedin, it does appear that there are actually more “experts” in teaching people how to build an online course than there are actually people building them.

I'm sure that's partly to do with the way I've searched. But it does also highlight that once it becomes clear that there's a lucrative market for something it fills up with competitors pretty fast.

Some of the “experts” no doubt really are. Some seem to have become experts overnight.

So how do you stand out when there are so many people saying they do what you do?

One way is to focus on a sub-niche where you can deliver a more tailored service than more generic providers. To find a little oasis of blue in a desert of red.

When I first started my own business back in 2007 I was one of a handful of people focusing on marketing for consultants, coaches and trainers.

Over the years more and more competitors entered that market and I found I could stand out by focusing my offer on people like myself who weren't naturals at marketing and sales who found the whole thing a bit painful.

Of course, these mini-blue oceans don't last forever. If they're lucrative enough others will focus on them too.

Another successful approach is to differentiate based on your personality and the relationship you build with potential clients.

That might come from being a brilliant presenter, a best-selling author, or from nurturing relationships over the long term like I do with these emails.

There's no doubt that over the years a number of my clients have picked me not because there's no one else who could have helped, but because I'm the one they came to like and trust through my ongoing communications.

Perhaps the most effective way of differentiating is by using a unique approach to get the results your clients are looking for.

This is the way most of the big names in consulting have grown to prominence. Bruce Henderson and the Boston Consulting group through their experience curve, then the growth share matrix.

Tom Peters with McKinsey and the 7S approach that later morphed into his Excellence books.

Michael Hammer and CSC Index with Re-engineering. Jim Collins with his Good to Great principles. Peter Senge with the 5th Discipline and systems thinking applied to business. Eli Goldratt with the Theory of Constraints.

Of course, your unique approach doesn't have to be as “big” as those well known examples. It just has to be clearly different to what others are offering and to what your potential clients may have tried before.

My approach to teaching people how to build online courses, for example, isn't the normal “guru” approach of “I'm an expert in this, pay me to tell you how to do it”. It's “let me share with you the experiences and expertise of dozens and dozens of people who've been successful at this. You'll find the best way for you in there”.

Like all unique approaches, it won't be for everyone. Some people will still want to be spoon fed “one best way” (despite knowing there rarely is one).

But there'll be enough people who click with my approach that I'll stand out. Hopefully a lovely island refuge from the ocean of “online course experts”.

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Online Courses

My best online course tip

Posted byuserIan Brodie on March 10th, 2021.

If you're thinking of creating an online course then this is my best (and simplest) tip:

Create an “outcome-based” course.

An outcome-based course is one that's designed to enable course members to achieve a specific, tangible outcome – rather than one that's designed to teach as much as possible about a topic.

Because they're focused on tangible outcomes, it's easier for potential customers to figure out their return on investment from taking an outcome-based course.

Which makes it easier to buy.

And they're also easier to create because they need less content.

Most of us fall into the trap of thinking that more content in a course means more value for members. But the truth is that in most cases, people are looking to your course to help them achieve a goal with the minimum possible fuss.

There are exceptions of course, but the majority of people don't take a course to learn a topic because they're inherently interested in it. And they're unlikely to be as in love with the topic as people like us who've dedicated their lives to studying and mastering it.

Mostly they just want to learn the minimum possible to get the job done.

They want to learn Facebook Ads so they can get more customers. They want to improve their management skills so their team performs better and they get better results.

So in practice, adding more and more information can actually make a course less valuable to members – because it means they have more work to do without necessarily getting a better outcome.

With an outcome-based course you can strip back the content to focus only on the steps absolutely needed to achieve the outcome. Remove all the “nice to have” stuff you put in because you think it's interesting or you want people to feel they got a lot for their money.

What they get for their money should be the result, not the material that gets them there.

Focusing your course obsessively on a tangible outcome means a clear return for buyers with less time wasted getting there.

Which makes it much easier to sell.

You can find out more about how to design and build outcome-based courses in my-in-depth guide to online courses here:

>>> The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Online Course <<<

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Online Courses

How my first online course saved my life (not really)

Posted byuserIan Brodie on March 7th, 2021.

I always find it amusing the way online marketers over-dramatise everything :)

So in truth, my first online course didn't save my life. However, it did help me through a rather tricky period with a nasty cashflow gap a couple of years after starting my business. 

I was forced to act fast to bring in cash quickly and it taught me very clearly that a lot of the hoops we put ourselves through just aren't needed to actually create and sell an online course.

In my case I looked at the sort of questions I was getting asked and the sort of help clients were asking for – which was about how to build your own website.

I didn't have any material pre-prepared but I was confident I could deliver a course on the topic.

And I knew that although I might not have been the world's greatest expert on building your own course, I definitely could help people and that my particular experience building a site for a solo consulting business would be valuable.

So I gritted my teeth and sent an email to the small subscriber list I had at the time offering a live course delivered by webinar.

A couple more emails with some tips about building your own website along with a repeat of the offer and I had a couple of dozen signups for a $97 course.

Not life-changing money. But enough to pay the bills for a bit and take the pressure off while I brought on board more consulting clients.

But the main point is that I was able to test the market quickly by making an offer and once I knew enough demand was there I could deliver it week by week live. 

No weeks of preparing content, fancy websites and complex automation.

Just a few quick emails with the details and a Paypal link to buy.

It's something anyone can do if they're confident they can deliver a course on a topic that people are willing to pay for. 

I explain all the details of how to know whether you have something people will buy and how to quickly launch a course like this then scale it up in my in-depth guide to building online courses here:

>>> The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Online Course <<<

If you're at all interested in creating online courses it will be a big help.