Get off the course/webinar/challenge hamster wheel, and build that profitable online course business.
Yea I figure everyone has a 12-step program so it was only logical to create one for building a profitable online business, and look I even got a funny acronym out of it (I know you smiled when you saw it). BTW I’m not making light of any of the 12 step programs out there, because they really do work. And as Tony Robbins says, “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.” Plus 12 step programs have great records and results, which is what we all want from our online business: great results. Modeling is good.
So, let’s dive right in, shall we.
- Calm The Mind: OMG I CAN’T STOP! Just one more free mastermind webinar! Just one more challenge and the heavens will open up, a light will shine down on me, and BAM! I will understand everything I need to know to bring my online product to life and I will be able implement every skill perfectly that I have learned in the last 6 months in the 150 courses and challenges I joined, and the $10,000 I spent to buy them all.
Do you know someone like that? Come on be honest, maybe you?
EVERYONE of my current and prospective clients/students have that same common story. Every one of them are frizzle fried and at their wits end by the time they get to me by feeding at the firehose of webinar hell. They come to me hoping I’m that light from the heaven that will end their blood thirsty quest for the all-seeing all-mighty knowledge of everything in the digital world. I’m not a God by any means, but I do have a SUPERPOWER of being able to calm people down and get them to be UBER FOCUSED on what is important to move forward.
I find just taking time for self and exercising, even if just a brisk walk on an awesome trail, yoga, or meditation, do a world of good at calming the mind. Do your favorite activity. Allow yourself to jump off the hamster wheel quest and just be you, fuel your passions, be grateful for your blessings, and in this state you will find a path.
So, step one is to get off the MUST KNOW EVERYTHING hamster wheel, and give yourself permission to relax and be OK with the knowledge that you don’t have to know everything right now. Learn things as you need them. Think of it like this: you just spent a month learning your LMS system and you still don’t really understand your LMS system or why you need it. You only know you need it. Then you spent another month in a challenge learning ClickFunnel and wasted your 14 day trial because you don’t even have a product. Then you waste another few months going from webinar to webinar and challenge to challenge just to get to the end of six months and you have zero product produced, and frankly creating that framework scares the hell out of you.
“Silence your brain and focus become clear” (me quoting me).
- Work your Body: I find getting moving and keeping your body in shape brings great clarity. Calming the mind and working the body go hand-in-hand. The key point of these first two steps is to just relax, lighten up on yourself, and enjoy life #lifeisgood
- Make A Plan: This sounds so easy, and most people go yea yea I have a plan – next. Then I ask them to see their plan, and they say no it is in my head. Ok well tell me the first 10 things your plan says you should do. CRICKETS. You MUST and I mean MUST write you plan down, it can’t be in your head. One, you don’t get the dopamine rush from taking your red pen and drawing a line through a finished item when it is in your head, and two you will never remember what is on the list and never get it in the right order. It can be electronic or on paper. But electronic is way better because then you can just spew the whole plan down, and then you can rearrange things into a great order by priority and sequence. I use Microsoft OneNote to organize everything in my life, if I was to lose my OneNote my life would be over. But a tool I see many using today and I have tried and really like it is Trello, so check out Trello or OneNote (EverNote on MAC), and get yourself organized.
- Work The Plan: Another quote of mine is “do something even if it is wrong“, and that is truly an inspirational quote. I bet you are saying hey Paul, how can that be good if you do something wrong. Well, doing anything is better than doing nothing. Remember most of my clients have done nothing but webinars and challenges for 6+ months by the time they get to me. They truly want to build that online course but are just immobilized by the vast amount of knowledge they have learned in all those courses and don’t know what to do first or how to implement what they have learned.
I would rather take any action even if it is wrong, then none. Best part is if you do something wrong, you will learn from it and not do it again (well you hope anyway). You made a plan in step 3, so now you need to just take action, learn from your mistake and your success, and move on to the next step. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time.
Another quote from me “perfection never gets done“. Your work does not have to be perfect; it needs to be correct but not perfect. I have one student that would not start recording his videos for his course because his hair was not perfect, and he could not get into “his guy” for two weeks from when he was ready to start videoing (SMH). He was going to wait two weeks to continue his project to wait for a haircut, and then I bet he would have had a pimple and would have to wait another week LOL. I have another student that just kept recording the same video over and over again because she did not say this word right or that word right, or one strand of hair fell down in her face, and then there was the base makeup on her left cheek did not match the color on her right cheek (as my Nana use to say oy-vey).
Funny most of the imperfections are about looks, actions, or speech, I’m telling you, the videos do not have to be perfect as long as the content is strong and factual and of course not stolen from someone else.
My guy with the hair, he was local so I grabbed him and drove him to Supercuts walked right in sat down and got the same cut “his guy” gives him for $40 cheaper and BAM an hour later we were making videos. Guess what? In two weeks he finished his whole course and launched it on the day he was supposed to have “the guy” cut his hair.
“MAKE A PLAN & WORK THE PLAN”
- Find Your Niche & Audience: The next six steps I’m not going to go into full detail, you will have to take my course to get the full step-by-step details. With that said you most likely have an idea of what your niche is, because you have a special talent or superpower you want to share with the world all ready. But you want to make sure you do research on your niche and find out what is already out there, and even buy some of those courses and see what the competition is doing. And like most of the gurus say you should narrow your niche down. Sometimes that is true and sometimes that is not true just depends on the subject. Only research will tell you. You might find there is a need in your niche but narrowed down to four different niches within your main niche and that gives you four courses to write and sell. Prioritize the niches and get to work.
While researching your niche you will also be looking at who wants, needs, and desires your product and narrowing that down really helps. Sometimes you cannot narrow that down till you get into A/B testing in your marketing. You can’t just say every person from 18 to 65 on the planet. You need to get your product built and geared to focus on your target audience, and you need to get your product in front of that audience.
- Build A Framework: The framework of your course is really just the outline or a table of contents for your course. For some reason this seems to be where most of my clients have the most trouble. Writer’s block sets in and BAM all progress comes to a screeching halt.
For some reason, and maybe that reason is that I have done so many outlines, but I’m really good at building frameworks for any subject. One of my frantic and overwhelmed students got in a Zoom call with me and she was just freaking out about how everything is so hard and overwhelmed. So, I got her talking about her niche. All of a sudden her whole demeanor changed. She got excited and just started focusing on her niche, which is a subject that she knows very well. I quickly opened a Google Doc page and started typing while she talked (remember we are in Zoom so she does not know I’m typing). I started asking her pointed questions and she was talking faster and faster and got really in-depth into to the answers. I kept asking questions and guiding her and she kept answer and forgot all her worries in the world.
About 40 minutes later I stopped her and asked her how she feels. She said I feel GREAT!!!!! And I asked her why do you feel great? She said because that was a great conversation and it just felt good to not think about all the tech of building a course.
I shared my screen, and up on her screen before her very eyes was a 7 module outline with a few lessons in each module out outlined for her. Once she realized what it was, she screamed I have been trying to build an outline for 7 months and you just did it in 40 min. And then she started crying, I had to work hard to hold back my own tears. Best moment of my career. But the point is if you take the time for yourself and calm your mind and don’t worry about all the tech, and uber focus on a subject you can accomplish your goals.
- Build Your Content: This is what it is, you just have to build your content and it can be a grind at times. Content consist of videos, written text, pictures, graphics, infographics, power point slides, PDF and a ton of other items. This just obviously has to get done and in my course we walk through this step-by-step. Recording, editing, building PDF, Building Powerpoints, using Canva and so on.
- Build Your Online Store Front: Building your store front is done on what we call a learning Management System (LMS). You can do a DIY LMS system on your own WordPress server, or you can use a cloud based subscription service for this. We go into great detail into this in my course.
- Build A Marketing Plan: People spend a life time to get good at marketing, and there are so many different types of marketing that you could spend a life time learning it but it would all be outdated by the time you learn it (LOL). I will leave you with one piece of advice here and the rest again we go into great detail in my course. No matter what form of marketing you do, just make sure you are real, honest, and give GREAT value to your clients. Do what you say you are going to do. If your clients perceive they are getting more value than they are paying for you are golden.
- Work The Marketing Plan: Once you have a marketing plan in place then you have to work the marketing plan. You have to show up and be very consistent with your marketing. You can’t show up and market for a few weeks, then stop for a month and come back and do a month. You have to be consistent and work the plan. Over time your fanbase will grow and your fans will market for you. It is like a snowball it just grows and grows and gets bigger and bigger.
- Add Value: As I have alluded to in this post many times already, I felt it was so important that I decided to give value its own step. As long as your clients and perspective clients perceive that they are getting way more value then what they are paying for, and they will love you and keep buying your products over and over again.
- Let Your Soul Soar: And the last step is to let your soul soar, because you have built an amazing product, you have built confidence, and you have given your clients and perspective clients great value for their money. This should make you feel proud, which in turn lets your soul soar high with the clouds (OK enough of that enjoyment get back to work on step one and build that next class – LOL).
So, there you have it 12 steps to building a profitable online business, simple right?
Just stop looking at the overall picture and all the steps in sum, but brake everything down into little steps, and only learn the skills you need for the current step. Don’t worry about marketing or funnels when you are just at step 6 building your framework, why worry about marketing when you don’t even have a product. Yes I know that goes against most all of the gurus out there and saying sell it before you build it, do market A/B testing, and model the best funnel out there. And that is all good if you have built 10 or 100 courses and you know how to use the tools and you know how to build a course. But a beginner just trying to build their first class becomes overwhelmed almost immediately, and most quit after spending 1000s on courses.
If you are a beginner you need a time-tested plan to follow, and like Little Red Riding Hood’s mom said “don’t stray from the path”. You need someone to hold your hand and walk with you on the journey, not take your money and scream at you that you should be doing all these things at once and if you don’t’ have time just hire someone.
You have a passion and that is the niche that you wanted to write a course on or build a online business about. You know that subject like the back of your hand, and when asked about it you light up and it is hard to get you to shut up about that subject. That is what we need to harness, we need to get that passion into a product, without overwhelming you. And the process should be fun alone the way not a stressed out race for the finish line.
I’m always open to help calm your mind and help you gain clarity and that UBER FOCUS needed to see your online course come to life. Comment here below this post and let’s have a conversation, or feel free to DM me in Facebook our public Facebook group. Also, I have 10 open slots on my calendar every week so click this link to my personal calendar, find a spot that fits in your schedule, and let me help you clam your mind and start your journey to creating your profitable online course.
