Profit Principle For Pre-Selling An Online Course Successfully
Discover the Profit Principle for Pre-Selling Online Courses Effectively. Boost your sales and engage your audience like never before.
Ready to revolutionize how you approach pre-selling an online course? Our engaging video on the Profit Principle is here to show you how. Dive deep into expert tips and tricks that will help you generate maximum revenue before even launching your course. Seize this opportunity to elevate your business success – watch our video now and kickstart your journey towards profitable pre-sales.
What is pre-selling, and why would you sell a product before it’s ready
#1 – Outline of Course
#2 – Write Your Sales Copy
#3 – Sell Outcomes, Not Courses
#4 – Design Your Landing Page
#5 – How Are People Going to Pay You?
#6 – Emails
#7 – Don’t Forget Any Promotional Material
#8 – Trust and Proof Are Key
#9 -Test, Test, And Test Then Finally, Launch
#10 – Final Thoughts
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:06.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 79. We have a returning special guest. Always great content with Kurt. Kurt, would you?I should really say what we’re going to be discussing during the show first. We’re going to be looking at a really important subject, folks. We’re going to be looking at pre-selling your online course. It is crucial. It’s something that a lot of people do not really think about, and it’s one of the bedrocks that will make your course a successful one or not. I think both of us have learned the hard way through our own experiences and through advising a lot of clients how important this is. So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:01:14.510] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called MananaNoMas, and I also work directly with the great folks at WP-Tonic and that team and the folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:01:24.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, Kurt has years of experience in eLearning, the area, and helping entrepreneurs. And he really helps at WP Tonic. So, like I said, it’s a really important subject. It’s a subject that a lot of people do not understand and don’t place enough emphasis on, I think you’re going to get enormous value from this discussion. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks, I want to take the opportunity to point out that we’ve got a fantastic course available at WP-Tonic. It’s really at a low price. It was developed by Kurt. It really helps you build a modern membership website on WordPress using the best Gutenberg cadence tools and combining it with Lifter LMS and a number of other essential WordPress tools. It’s at a great price, I said that. You also can get a discount if you decide to host with WP-Tonic. Where do you get this from? Well, you go over to Wp-tonic. Com/course, Wp-tonic. Com/course, you can read about it and sign up there.
[00:03:16.890] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a fantastic resource. I think this is going to be one of our more critical discussions. I think it’s a burn burner. I’m going to let you take over. What do you think… Before we go, got a list of 10 points, but before we go into it, why do you think, based on your own experience, why this discussion is so important, Kurt?
[00:03:46.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we’ve alluded to it before in previous episodes, Jonathan, but this is our chance to really focus in on the process because so many people, you call it war and peace, but so many people come to the eLearning learning arena. Like, I want my website to do this, to be that, to be designed this way, to have this automation, to have this widget, to have these extra tools. And they get lost in the weeds. And they spend so much time, so much money, so much effort trying to build or rethink the wheel and build this thing, and that’s just crazy. And then when they launch, they don’t have the energy. And by energy, I mean they don’t have the community, the members, the energy of an audience, the energy of a tribe that creates success within the platform. And you have a lot more success if you launch with an MVP, build a community, and then build the community.
[00:04:45.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you tell a new listener of yours what an MPV is?
[00:04:49.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s a minimally viable product. If you’ve got something that you really want to share with folks, you have to build a little community around it. You have to find your tribe. You have to find people that are interested in what it is that you’re going to sell. Then, you need to build a minimal viable product, an MVP that helps you deliver those ideas to those people, which is basically a proof of concept. I use proof of concept terms a lot. So, I’ll say it’s a proof of concept. Can I get ten paying people in here to see this content? If I can, I can leverage those ten people to help me grow this network more and then plug in features like community features or additional course material. There’s always more that we can do. But the important thing is to launch, get started, and then bring the people with you.
[00:05:44.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I call it MVC, Minimum Viable Course, but I totally copied it. The reason why you should be listening to this, folks, and why you should give us the opportunity to really advise you in this podcast and this video is that we’re not making this up. We’re taking it from loads of books that have been written by the startup community, and especially the boot Bootstrap startup community, people like Rob rolling. I feel an enormous amount of content from Rob, but I always give him the credos that I got the ideas from him, so I think he won’t mind. He’s a very generous individual, him and his wife. The only thing he likes people to say that they got the ideas from him, and I think I do that, don’t I? But I get all this from the startup community, and they’ve got over 20 years, and building a successful course from the ground up is very similar to bootstrapping a startup. It’s really not much different. So I take most of the ideas from that community, Kurt, and I wrap it up by advising people to start a course. The good news is you don’t actually need to have a tribe or a community to launch successfully.
[00:07:32.290] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s just you have to have other factors in play. But if you do have a community, the speed of getting into profitability and getting into a position where the income from the course can make a real difference to you and your family will be accelerated. But it’s still totally possible to do this from the ground up. But you You cannot, you mustn’t get yourself sucked into all the different things that you’ve got to deal with. And what I mean is they’re still there, but you’ve just got to concentrate your time on the minimum things. Initially, there will be multiple things unless you hire people like WP-Tonic and others to build the whole thing out for you and advise you. If you’re not in that position, you will have to deal with multiple things initially. You got to memorize the different elements to the maximum because otherwise, it will just go on and on and on. What’s your response to what I’ve just outlined?
[00:08:55.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Very similar. You and I pick our information from two different arenas. You focus on startups, which is completely understandable. I like in launching a course to writing a book. A lot of authors begin to talk about their subject, begin to share their topics with Facebook groups or podcasts or something. They begin to have the conversation to gage the market and prepare the market for when they launch that book. And then you’ll see a bunch of unheard of authors all of a sudden have a best seller that’s advertised on Amazon. That’s because they planned that launch and they set the stage for that launch, and they pre-sold those books before launch to have the best selling launch that they could have. I focus, of course, on being that same methodology.
[00:09:48.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think both. I think I choose the bootstrap because that’s my interest. That’s my tribes. It’s WordPress. It’s a bit of mysticism. I’m a bit of a mystic. It’s mysticism, it’s bootstrap startups. It’s WordPress. They’re the tribes that I mix with, and science fiction. That’s the tribe, that’s the stuff that I consume, basically. Let’s go into it. Outline of the course. I think this is important. I think… But before that, it’s… I had some feedback that people have been really loving the content on the membership Music Machine show lately, but people find it very hard to understand a word I’m saying, Kurt, because on my accent, they say they have to listen, they have to slow it down or they have to listen twice. They They say they can understand everything you say, but they can’t understand. I think that’s a blessing, isn’t it, Kurt?
[00:11:06.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
It could be a blessing for everybody.
[00:11:08.890] – Jonathan Denwood
I definitely think it’s a blessing. But there we go. But they still listen, Rob. So we must be doing I’m not going right. I think writing down an outline and doing some research, I was saying to somebody that I was having a quick chat with, that it’s linked to all the other conversations is that you got to join some Facebook groups or some other forums or something online and listen and write down the problems that people consistently are expressing on those groups or forums and write down a list. I am a believer in building your minimum viable course and then you can and then do a launch. Then that minimum viable can be utilized as a lead magnet when you build your next course, which is going to be… And when you get that initial feedback from your students and you learn more about their problems and you can see patterns and you write down what you’re seeing in these patterns, your next course is going to be much much more relevant to your target audience, and it’s going to be much more effective, and you’re going to be recommended a lot more. And each course, each step, if you follow the mythology, it’s going to be more impactful, more focused, and it’s going to become easier and easier.
[00:12:55.320] – Jonathan Denwood
You got all these steps, but after you’ve listened and you wrote down, and you’re going to have one or two victories in your initial minimum viable course. You got to write an outline because otherwise it’s just going to go like, I have verbal diarrhea sometimes. I just go over the place. Your course is going to go all over the place. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:13:21.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, that’s why the outline is important. You have to have a direction and you have to… I do a lot of course consulting with my clients because They’re not dumb people. They’re smart people. They have a concept. They have something of value to share. But when it comes time to breaking it down into milestones, tasks, and steps to create a story arc that matches somebody’s path of learning, it becomes very difficult. A lot of times people think in terms of wearing all these hats at the same time, but that’s not the way the learner can go through that material. So you have to break it into what do they learn first, what do they learn second, what do they learn third? And you have to break that out. And the outline process really gives you a direction, a path to follow and to isolate. Because when you’re developing a course, you don’t want to have a lesson inside your course that talks about 20 things. You want to be able to break those things down. If you don’t have an outline, you’ll rabbit trail and you’ll get lost in your own content.
[00:14:23.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I think, go back to Rob, I think we’ve had Rob on my other podcast interview, and he just launched a book. He’s written about six books, and it’s quite a good book, but he had an editor, and the editor was not only edit the verbiage and the grammar, it actually helps in the actual focus of the book, and that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s plenty of resources. You can contact WP Tonic, or there’s plenty of other resources online that give instruction about how you do a course outline. You need to study a little bit, folks. On to the next one, writing sales copy. Everybody thinks they’re a writer, folks. Writing effective sales copy, and there’s loads of people that think they could do that, and they’re not very good at it. I can tell you the copy on the main landing pages of the WP, and I think will confirm this, I obsess about it. I think I found the present copy on the major landing pages on the WP tonic that I feel, works, but I’m never happy with it. But writing the copy… One tip, people tend to overwrite. This is not about writing war and peace.
[00:16:03.170] – Jonathan Denwood
This is about effective catch line that synthesizes everything that you’re offering and getting over a message in less than 30 seconds. If they start scrolling down, you can have more and more content and links to other pages. And as they progress through the website, it should offer more and more detailed information. What’s What’s your views about this?
[00:16:32.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, if I could just be real transparent with the listeners, Jonathan, let’s be real. A lot of the advice that you and I had shared regarding sales copy in our website and promotional stuff lately, it’s been to simplify it. It’s been to take a compound sentence and take a comma out of it and get rid of some words. The art is… John Maxwell once famously said, he said, If you wanted to hire me for a talk and I could talk for three hours, I could go up and do it. Boom. If you were going to give me 20 minutes, it would take me weeks to write that presentation. Because you have to put so much thought into how to best simplify the message and bring it to the people.
[00:17:17.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, really, anybody can write war… Well, I was going to say something ridiculous. Everybody could write war, but no, I don’t mean the actual concept in war piece because We’re dealing with one of the greatest writers of the 19th, 20th, and ’20th in the history of man. But I mean, the actual volume. There’s loads of people that can write that volume. It’s hard to really condense it and keep the core message. That’s difficult. On to the next one. This is so crucial, and this is something. Sell outcomes, not courses.
[00:18:05.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
Totally counterintuitive, but it’s true.
[00:18:07.250] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you think about this?
[00:18:09.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Totally counterintuitive. When you create a product, you think you need to sell the product. You think you need to sell. When they’re selling cookware on TV, they’re not selling cookware. They’re selling a plate of food that looks like it just came out of a five-star restaurant. And then they’re telling you that that cookware created that food. They’re not selling you the pans. They’re selling you the result that the pans deliver. And it’s that way with everything. When they’re trying to sell a dude a Lamborghini, they’re not selling the Lamborghini. They’re selling the lifestyle and the perception that the Lamborghini provides. We need to do the same thing with our courses.
[00:18:53.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the only caliphate I would put to this is that I think the majority of courses, everything Kirk said you should follow, I would say I can’t put a percentage on it, but there are some circumstances, like if you’re talking to a technical audience, let’s say you’ve got a course about utilizing a particular WordPress page builder that appeals to the professional WordPress web designer developer. Well, you’re going to talk about the technical specification in that sales copy because of the particular audience. There is a proviso here, folks, but in general, people talk too much about what’s in the course. It’s linked to this understandable thinking that if they put the kitchen sink into the course, into the initial course, it will attract people. And so they go on about what’s in the course, and they don’t really discuss the outcome, what somebody is going to get from doing this. So it’s got… Actually, they’re persuading people not to sign up. It’s doing the counter thing, how would you respond to what I’ve just said?
[00:20:22.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
You’re on target. It’s so hard to explain to people the right way to sell. It’s almost like you have to do a full study on it. It’s almost like we’re talking about pre-selling the course on this show, so I don’t know if we should really get into how to write the content or how to deliver the content.
[00:20:42.000] – Jonathan Denwood
We do that for another show.
[00:20:43.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s like a whole new show. But I think the best thing I can think of in response to what you said is don’t be afraid to change it. Try something, go back, evaluate it. What is it done? Try something else, change a word, change a sentence. But you You got to be willing to move things around.
[00:21:03.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I think the last thing before we go for our break is design your landing page. First of all, if you’re doing pre-sales drive, you’re going to have our landing page because you’re going to try and pre-sell this course. Now, the traditional, and it’s been proven the most successful, is to have this one page long, very long, with you got what’s before the fold, which is basically whatever device you’re utilizing, what’s going to be the message that people see the first, and then they need to scroll to see the further. I take a middle road. There’s some people keep it as as fast as possible and really a little bit ugly and just have a lot of… And there’s a Pacific outline out there. If you do any searches, folks, you’ll come across It comes from television marketing, from half a dozen copywriters that have influenced the industry. I take a middle Still Road. I think that’s a little bit of a thing. Other words to say, I’m Ron. I’d be interested in to see what Kirk thinks with it. People say, Well, it still works, and you’re just Ron, Jonathan. I think you don’t have to follow that particular style, I think the look of it is important.
[00:22:51.620] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think keeping it simple and keeping the message really focused about what the problem you’re solving for your target audience. Rob Riving talks about, is it a painkiller or is it a vitamin? For your first call, you should be aiming at a painkiller solution in my opinion. It shouldn’t be aspirational. It should be a pain because that has more urgency in it. What’s your views about this? Because I think I’m starting to waffle.
[00:23:25.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
I personally hate long scrolling pages. Yeah, I do.
[00:23:28.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I do as well.
[00:23:29.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
But which ones convert the most? So now we have to get into a sometimes life is counterintuitive and you have to do what doesn’t seem to fit. Now, remember, if you’re pre-selling, you don’t have your content done yet. You have an outline, but you haven’t really written the course yet. And so you’re building this single web page to entice people to pre-sign up for something that you are going to create. And so I would say, don’t be overly specific, be sparse in the content that you share. Give yourself some wiggle room to go left or right in your development stages. But I think definitely having a way to collect an email address or to sign up and prepay are the two things that you really want to have. You either want people to sign up or at least join your mail list.
[00:24:20.430] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s the one thing on my own journey is I’ve got a small… For the amount of years that I’ve been producing content, I just haven’t built my email list up. For a number of those years, I listened to a lot of so-called online experts. For a period, let’s say from the early ’20s up to about pre-COVID, there was a lot of… Well, email is dead, email marketing is dead. You just need to concentrate on social media, blah, blah. I listened to these so-called… I allowed my list to just slowly die, basically. You must never… Your main objective is to sell courses, but your other main objective is to build an email list. I wish to never listen to these people. They’re still out there. They’ve done a 360, though. A lot a lot of these so-called gurus, folks. Now, they constantly preach the importance of an email list. You got to be very careful. You listen to people, but there’s a lot of people, they just do a 360 on a dime, won’t they, Kurt?
[00:25:47.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, yeah. The email list is so important because you never know when that social channel you’re using is going to shut down or be sold. Having your list is your list, and it’s important to have We’re going to go for our break.
[00:26:03.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Hopefully, I think we’ve had a good first half. We’ve given some great info, I think. We’re going for our break. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast about pre-launch, something that’s really important, having a successful pre-launch. But before we go into the second half, I just wanted to point it out we’ve got a fabulous Facebook group, the Membership Machine Show Facebook group. It’s totally free. You can join it and you’ve got any questions, me and Kurt, our moderate admins of it. We’ve got a small community of WordPress and people like you trying to build a membership website. Go over there, join it. Got any questions, you can just place them there. Me and Kirk or anybody else in the community will try and help you out. It’s a great resource. Let’s go on. Don’t forget any promotional-I think we’re on how people are People Going to pay you. Pardon?
[00:27:13.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think we’re on number 5, How are people going to pay you?
[00:27:16.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yes, you’re right. Thank you. How are people going to pay you? What’s your thoughts about that one?
[00:27:23.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, this is where I want to… I’m going to show off for WP tonic a little bit. With WP plus hosting, you have the option of, let’s say, and I’ll pick Lifter LMS as an example because I’m really familiar with that platform. Lifter LMS is specifically designed. It has a native payment gateway, so you can set it up to take your Stripe, your PayPal, your Woocommerce, whatever. But it’s also set up so that you can have pre-enrollments before the course is available. So it has what we call course restrictions. And so it’s set up specifically so that you can pre-sell your courses. Now, WP Tonic offers that as part of your setup. But if you were going to be on some other SaaS platform or something like that, you would want to connect your Stripe or your PayPal or your Spotify thing, to be able to take a charge. However, in most of those situations, when you’re in a SaaS platform or something and you’re pre-selling something that’s not ready to go yet, a lot of times you set yourself up with some type of to take the revenue and then later initiate the membership and get that going.
[00:28:37.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
With Lifter LMS, that’s automated. You could pre-sell with those restriction dates. You could say, Hey, I want to start selling this course June first, and the course isn’t going to launch until September first. You could put those dates right into the platform, and then it all works automatically for you.
[00:28:56.790] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a fantastic… It’s one of the great strengths of Lifter. Yeah, definitely. It’s fantastic. It’s something not really promoted enough by the lifter. Hopefully, they do a better job because it’s got some tremendous power there. And thanks, because I missed that, didn’t I? Emails. I think I slightly covered that in the first half, but like I say, well, I think email, having a… Writing out your sequence when Having effective marketing sequence, because you might be offering a pre-sale course, or you might be offering a lead magnet or something, a PDF, some form of digital that gives added value to people. I don’t know. I think working on the email, people tend to write very wordy emails, generally. I don’t because of my dyslexia, I’m pretty short. Would you agree with that? I like my list, don’t I? I’m pretty short, aren’t I?
[00:30:08.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, pretty succinct in email. I think it’s important to consider having an email sequence. Again, if you’re with WP Tonic Hosting Plus, you’re going to have Fluent CRM as your tool and people will sign up and they’ll get an email from the system, and then it’s up to you. You could send them, let’s say you have a three-month course launch going. Well, probably what you’re going to do for people that bought the pre-launch is you’re going to send them a sample first lesson, or you’re going to send them a sample evaluation, like a link to a survey that’s going to ask them, telling questions that will point them in the direction of what your course is going to deliver for them. And so you want to keep in touch with people because you want to keep that energy high and you’re looking for a referral. So hopefully, they’re energized by your contact. Don’t spam them, but educate them. And hopefully, they’re excited by that and they help you through referral increase your sales.
[00:31:06.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s great. You got some great points here about the affiliate. Do you think it can work when you got an initial launch and you get those people? Can you energize them to actually, if you got some form of an affiliate? But it’s a two-edged. But can it work? Have you seen it work?
[00:31:27.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Somebody that’s-I am not a big fan affiliates in a pre-launch situation? No. Post-launch, absolutely. Introduce an affiliate-I’m using the wrong word in here.
[00:31:38.570] – Jonathan Denwood
I mean, getting them to actually talk about it.
[00:31:43.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, share and referral and encourage the… Yeah, encourage the shares, the follows, the likes, the repost. You’re going to probably in an email sequence, you’re going to have a screenshot of one of your tweets or something, right? And then you would say, Oh, click here to repost, or or something like that. So yeah, the more you can get a community feel and a group push, because when you get them involved at that level, when you get your students involved at that level, you are creating ownership with them. You’re growing with your audience, and that creates more of a stickiness as your project launches.
[00:32:25.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Trust and proof are key. There’s a number of course gurus out there that are offering training courses around the 6-10,000-dollar mark who say that if you do their course, they will help you have a successful course launch, and they’re proposing that your first course be around the $2,000 mark. I can tell you, unless you’ve got a ton of social proof and credibility in the particular niche that you… And we’ve discussed this in 2024. I’ve had a couple of conversations this week with people, and they’ve been told, Well, your particular area is too niche. You can’t say ever, because some people might want to talk about something that’s only got 100 people worldwide They might want to talk about a language that only a thousand people speak. I don’t know. But in general, it can’t be niche enough. Normally, it just can’t. You’re dealing, obviously, price and that. But generally, it’s always the other side. They haven’t niched enough. That’s the problem. But they were I’ve lost where I was going with this paper.
[00:34:03.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
You can niche and grow, right? So if you’re one of these people that wants to share your wisdom with the world, pick a city first, right? Pick a city, a county, a township, a state, and grow. If you think in terms geographically like that, right? So start with a niche. And if that niche is successful, let it expand, let it grow a little bit, but try not to lose focus on what keeps people happy in your space.
[00:34:31.530] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a bit like WP tonic. We help people with building courses through learning management systems and community websites on WordPress. That’s a niche. That’s what we do. That’s what I want to do. I haven’t got the capacity, even if anyway. So that’s our niche. It’s a bit like the motorsport industry where Kurt’s got enormous following and experience. You can be just repair any motorcycle, and that’d probably work if you’re in a major city, but it’s probably better that we only repair Italian motorcycles. But if you’re not based in a major American city, you’re going to have to try and get people to come to you, and you’re going to have to market on the internet, because You just won’t have enough people to specialize in the Italian motor cycles unless it’s in a major New York, Los Angeles, one of the major cities in the US. There aren’t going to be enough people, is there?
[00:35:46.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, there’s not a lot of Ducatis in Hutchinson, Kansas.
[00:35:49.360] – Jonathan Denwood
No. That’s a shame, isn’t it? It is. Oh, dear. Trusting, the bigger the ticket was, before I waffled on listeners and views, is the main big thing is the bigger the ticket amount. I don’t think unless you’re well-established and you got a following, you got credibility, and you can show it, asking people to cough up two grand for your first course, I think it’s going to be a sell. I think aiming it at much lower initial ticket. And that’s the beauty of WordPress and something like WP tonic because you can start at a reasonable cost. Keep your cost down because we offer everything in our package, everything. There are no extras that you’re going to have to find. It’s all going to be covered, and it will cover you until you really got an established well-running course business, and there will There’s really no need to increase your costs or being tracked, and you’ve got as much ownership as possible. But because I just don’t think the idea that It’s always $199. To get that to… Give us 6,000, 10,000, and we guarantee that you have 500 at It’s totally possible. Don’t get me wrong, folks.
[00:37:35.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Totally possible. But if you haven’t got your own online tribe, getting the ball rolling at that level is going to be extremely difficult, in my opinion. What do you reckon?
[00:37:50.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the proof is the key, like you said, the social proof. Get you a testimonial, get you a video testimonial, get on somebody’s podcast, and have something that you can share with people that shows that you have recognition in the course material that you’re trying to share. And once you have that, you can have better luck with your pricing. The other side is that they don’t offer a course for $5.99. Nobody wants to spend $6 for what they assume will be junk. So you want to make sure that you price accordingly. Don’t be afraid to undercharge, but know that if you’re going for those big ticket sales, you’re going to have to have big-ticket support and proof to back it up.
[00:38:34.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Finally, test, test, test, and then finally launch. Well, that’s the whole purpose of the pre-launch: getting your first group of students in and learning from them because you’re not going to get this right straight away. It just ain’t going to happen. It will take work and feedback from your students. As you get that, the course will get more polished. In the next course, you will learn much from those initial students and get feedback. And you do need to… For those students who do the first course, It’s vital that you have a one-to-one Zoom with them after they’ve done the course, and you get them to fill in a survey, and you offer them something in return. But it’s so important to get that feedback. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:39:34.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, absolutely, Jonathan. I think about when my kids were born- Keep saying that, Kurt.
[00:39:38.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I like that.
[00:39:39.870] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, absolutely, Jonathan. I was thinking about when my kids were born as you were talking. I remember it was mayhem when my daughter was born. Someday, I’ll tell the story online. It was mayhem. It could be a comedy routine. I kept thinking, these people do this for a living. They should know how babies are born. It seemed like nobody knew what was happening. But as you and I work with candidates bringing their products to market in the training world, we can see that each community is different, and each message is different. So that’s why it’s essential that you have to test. Just because Tony Robbins did something doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. Just because Russell Brunson did something with ClickFunnel doesn’t mean it will work for you.
[00:40:20.800] – Jonathan Denwood
It has no relevance to your launch at all. That’s the hidden… Thanks so much for that. It’s so essential, the point. It has no relevance because their communities and the time they launch will not influence the success of your launch at all, will it?
[00:40:43.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
No. And that’s why you have to test. That’s why you have to ask: Did this message work? Did this email work? How many people clicked? How many people converted? And is my list growing? Am I getting people’s attention? You have to test, and you have to be willing to try, like we said earlier, just a different phrase, just a different word, a different picture, and a different heading. You have to sample different things to see what is relevant to your prospective audience. Once you find it, double and triple down on it and optimize it.
[00:41:18.590] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a bit like reading business books, folks. You can read a number of business books. But if you think you’re just going to read a business book and take If they’re providing some landscape about how you can have success, you can copy that individual’s plan of action and apply it. It ain’t going to work out for you because what worked for them at a certain stage in their career, at a particular time, things move on, and circumstances change. You can be influenced, you can teach, you can learn, you can take nuggets, you can then… It can help you avoid fundamental mistakes that will wipe you out completely. The other factor is that it’s very unlikely that you will do everything correctly during your first-course launch. It’s just what you should be aiming at: it was pretty successful. You’ve got it started, you’re getting this feedback, it will give you the oxygen to move to step two. For some reason, I don’t think people like that message, do they?
[00:42:37.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nobody wants to hear that there is real work and a real need for patience in the process. Everybody’s looking for the easy button. Unfortunately, a lot of the marketing you and I are up against profess this weird easy button that doesn’t exist.
[00:42:54.480] – Jonathan Denwood
We would love to get feedback from you, listeners, and viewers. Please join the Facebook group and also leave your comments if you’re watching this or send us feedback. Basically, do you want me to tell you that you can do A, B, and C, and you have multiple successful courses? In six figures. It will all be easy, and Bob’s the uncle, because I can provide that. No, it’ll be horrible. But we would really love your feedback about your reaction to what we’re saying in this particular podcast. That would be fantastic. I think it’s time to wrap it up. I’ve been rambling. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your fantastic knowledge of eLearning?
[00:43:48.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, thanks for the kind words. LinkedIn is probably the best bet because I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, and it’s a great way to get in touch and connect. Other than that, I’m MananaNoMas.com.
[00:43:59.600] – Jonathan Denwood
And I can’t stress that you should really do that outreach to Kurt and be part of his LinkedIn community because he’s consistently publishing great content on that platform, and his knowledge about eLearning is enormous. Hopefully, you’ll join us next week. I’ve got another regular special, Haroon. We’re going to be talking something about WordPress to help you build that membership website. We’ve got some fabulous guests in June as well. I’ve rustled up some really leading marketing experts. The podcast is expanding. I’m getting a lot of positive feedback about the Membership Machine show. It’s something different with a different message. We’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.
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