LISTENER:
I had a quick question if you don’t mind. Have you used a business coach or strategist before and do you have one you can recommend? I am getting a bit stuck with what to do when and need someone to help me clarify and plan. I think my biggest struggle currently is that I am not earning any money 😉
I’ll hit about 3.5k page views this month and have just over 100 subscribers. I don’t want to use ads or sponsored posts and I am using affiliates sparingly as I don’t really want to go that route either.
I really want to make money through courses but I am unsure whether I should just focus on building my list at the moment or whether I should just get on with creating the courses at the same time.
Any advice is much appreciated!
FROM ME:
Here's what I recommend if you're not into sponsored posts and affiliate marketing:
You have a list of 100 people – ask them what their biggest struggle is when it comes to whatever it is you know you can help them do.
From those responses, figure out what you can create to solve that problem. Maybe it's a course, maybe it's a group coaching program, maybe it's an e-book.
Awesome, but don't go out and make it just yet.
At this point, I would beta test it. You can do this a few different ways – invite your list to a webinar where you sell beta spots in this course, and then create and release modules on a schedule and get their feedback along the way and get testimonials at the end. Or just sell it via email without the webinar. Pre-sell the e-book with a release date.
The mistake I've made in the past is building the whole entire thing first and then launching it to no one.
The other thing you mentioned is that you're getting 3.5K page views – you may want to take another look at your email opt-in forms, make sure you're optimizing them throughout your site to get more subscribers and make sure you have a really strong call to action with a super actionable freebie so that you're better capturing that traffic!
LISTENER:
I have asked some of my list about what they needed help with but got crickets!
I have started to get some responses to other emails that are giving me an insight into what might be needed.
I’ve also added an email asking what people need at the end of the email sequence for my opt-ins.
I have got one response so far but will wait and see whether I get any more as I only added in quite recently.
One lady suggested a monthly subscription to a slack group as a support system to help people get their life back. I thought that was an interesting idea!
Pre-launching on a webinar is a good idea although the thought terrifies me. Where do you host your webinars?
I have already built the spreadsheets for the course (as I use them myself) and was going to start recording the ‘how to’ videos. Perhaps I'll record the first couple of videos like you said and try and pre-sell the course before I make any more.
I will definitely go back over my opt-ins, I have quite a few on the go at the moment and need to really dig into what is working. One thing I haven’t done is added them to the posts I am publishing on Medium so I will go back and do that.
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