Sell Your Knowledge
Knowledge is power and when you have that knowledge, why not profit off of it? Numerous intellectuals have online courses with amazing information. However, they struggle making profit from their online course. They must be doing something wrong.
Your online course could be the key to success, however if now one has the key, no one is going to unlock the door. In order to profit off of your online course, you must market it properly. In this blog, Hollywood Branded teaches how to properly market your online course like a master and optimize your knowledge.
A Little More About Jane
Jane Sagalovich is a chief strategist at Scale Your Genius and founded the company four years ago to help people whose work makes a difference in people's lives make a bigger impact, make more money, and have more freedom in how they do their work. She has helped hundreds of qualified experts create and sell their online courses and programs with clarity, confidence, and ease.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: What I'd love to do is start off the conversation of what got you going in your career today. What got you here where you're now helping other people with their courses and to be more successful?
Answer: I love this question because it's been a really windy road and it's a road that I find so many other people take that it's the thing you think you're going to be when you're a little kid is rarely the straight road that takes you there. Before this, I spent 15 years in Corporate America, really living the American Dream. I had the visions of my first I think job I aspired to be was marketing at Ralph Lauren. Just like super American Dream company and job really. I went to college. I went to business school. I've worked at some of kind of iconic American companies. What I started to realize was that something was really missing. On paper, everything looked so amazing. I had the title, the salary, the perks, all the things, yet I wasn't like... I was dreading Mondays. I was kind of like living that Monday sucking in. We're looking forward to Fridays and the weekend. I knew that that was not what I wanted to be for what I wanted my life to be. Unlike what I would ever recommend people do, I one day decided to just leave all of that behind...One day I just left without really having a plan of what's next. A friend of mine was starting a consulting company at the time and he's been a career consultant. I said, "Hey, let me just join you to do this. You know the entrepreneur life. You know the consulting life."
Question: When you're working with someone now, do they usually have a course already, or do they come to you and they're like, "I want to make a course and start off on this journey that I have the unknown and have no idea how to get there."
Answer: I'm sure if you ask any consultant out there, when clients come to them versus when we would love for clients to come to us, they're very different answers. I would love for every single person to come to me when they first have the idea, right? It's like you want to go from I'm in Denver, you're in LA, so I want to go from Denver to LA. We're going to have the best journey if I map that road out the best before I start the journey. Sure, I can get on my car and start driving towards LA and go see a bunch of stuff along the way and take a really long way to get there, but the journey's going to be the most enjoyable and efficient if I plant it from the front end. Ideally get help from the idea phase because there's just... We can't see our brilliance from inside of the haze of our own expertise. We can't fully see what's possible for us.
Question: What do you do when they [client] come to you? How do you approach it? What are the first steps that you do to dive in and try to figure out what the plan is?
Answer: Well, let's talk to them because I think that is the majority of the people that come to me and that's probably the majority of the people that are out there. You have a course. You've built it. You've created a sales page. It's not selling. The first thing I would do is kind of go back to the vision process. If this course didn't exist, what is the course you would be really excited about creating today? Because one of the things that I always say is the sunk cost fallacy, meaning that if you've already invested time in something, don't keep going just because you've invested time into it, right? This could be a bad business idea, a relationship, whatever it is, saying like you don't have to keep going down this route. The first thing we look into is if you're going to put more blood, sweat, and tears into marketing this thing, how close is this to the thing that you actually want to do, right? The idea, ideally wouldn't want to fully start over. Ideally we take what has been created and usually shape-shift it. It may be shapeshifting around messaging of how do you talk about the course, but it may be some shapeshifting inside of the course too, a little bit of... Usually people don't have to recreate the assets, right? If they've created digital modules, those don't have to be recreated. Maybe they're reordered. Maybe the way the structure is 80 to 90% of the work they've put in, we can use, but it's first really kind of shapeshifting into something that is desirable and going to be profitable.
Question: Are you really, really saying just pick one audience?
Answer: Yeah. I'll give an example. One of my clients has a business course targeted at wellness businesses who are early on in their business career. The two target audiences he came in to working with me talking about was, one, people who were about to graduate from that specific school where they're going to having these businesses, and the second demographic are people who had these businesses for three to five years and saw that the way they're running their business doesn't work, right? The reason he was looking at both audiences as the same and as a lot of people do is because their destination is the same, is because both of these audiences at the end of working with him will have a successful, profitable, private practice. The problem is their starting points are so different that in our marketing messaging, we tried to see what does it look like when we talk to both and it just really diluted the message so much. That even though there was some consistency in the destination, it's really important that we can talk to their today reality for them to resonate with us. And if we're talking to two different realities, it can get a little confusing.
Question: You have this audience. You have a plan. Then what?
Answer: You have an audience. You have a plan. The next thing that I have my clients doing, this is one of my favorite things, I call it the desire builder phrase book. This is a fillable book that we give to people. People can create their own. It's basically taking all the brilliant things they can say about their course and putting it into a one place document. So that anytime they need to write a post, an email, a sales page, a webinar, whatever it is, everything is right there. I also encourage people... I know a lot of people will have these as like, "Here's all the things I can say about my course. Here's all the things that people say about them." I recommend having two to three bullet points per category, so that you start creating this repeatable, punchy, resonant message that keeps that consistency. When people are consistent in this part of the process, then they can really see what is and isn't working, right?
Check Out The Podcast!
Jane has so much great information from her experience in optimizing your online course. Check out the podcast below to learn more about creating great visuals!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- How To Properly Pitch Your Contacts
- How To Secure Leads And Demands Through Social Platforms
- The Ever Changing Digital Content Landscape
- Let's Talk Streaming
- Tracking and Achieving Your Clients' Goals
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