Spirit Junkie Masterclass - Level 1 - Module 5

Transcription

1 Derek: The point of this presentation today is I want to show you that regular people can turn their skills into digital products and they can turn these digital products into a living. I want to walk you through how to do it from start to finish. If you re wondering, How do I come up with an idea for a product? we re going to show you how to do that. If you re also wondering how you can start attracting the prospects that you want to attract, we ll show you how to do that, too. Then finally, I want to show you how to actually deliver an online course that wows your students. I m really excited for this, so let s jump in. This is Kim. Kim had a skill that she was actually a photographer, and she turned her photography skills into online courses and started selling them. The types of courses she sold were like a Lightroom course or How to take pictures of your baby type courses. Her skills as a photographer are now in online courses that she sells to consumers and she s making a few hundred thousand dollars a year doing it. Everyone here has a skill that they can teach someone else. It doesn t have to be photography; it could be anything. You have a skill that you can teach someone else, and if you have a skill, you can turn it into a course and start selling it. This is Jenna. Jenna was in the business of selling one-on-one services, and like many people here, she quickly found that she couldn t scale these one-on-one services like she had hoped. So she packaged it into a do-it-yourself course, started selling it, and she s doing a great job doing that, as well. Here s one last person I want to share with you because he s a very interesting story. This is Joseph Michael Nicoletti. Joseph didn t have any skills, but he knew he wanted to create a course, anyway, so what did he do? He found this cool program called Scrivener, which was getting very popular. He didn t know how to use Scrivener, he never wrote a book before, and he really had no idea what he was doing, so what did he do? He decided to go through this software step-by-step and record short little three- to five-minute videos about how to use Scrivener for people who want to write a novel. This guy didn t write a book. He didn t have any skills. He found some popular piece of software, showed people how to use it as he learned how to use it, and now he makes about $25,000 a month selling tutorials about how to use some silly app that was popular in the app store. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 1

2 I m not sharing this for any other reason other than the fact to show you that you can really create a course about anything. You can start today, and I want to show you how to start today. This is James, John, and Brian. James teaches people how to break into the basketball industry, John helps people get fit, and Brian sells a course about audio editing. You could sell a course about anything, and they re all doing very well. Why is this working right now? Well, there s a trend going on in the whole online community, and I m calling it the rise of accidental teacher. There are people who don t necessarily have degrees in instructional design. They re not teachers, and some of these people aren t even tech wizards. They don t even know how to use the app they re teaching. They never imagined that they were going to wake up one day and say, You know, I m going to create a course. They never thought this. This wasn t a dream. It was something they stumbled upon just recently. What s going on here? Well, look at this graph. Graphs are boring and so are numbers, but the long story short here is that over the last few years, the online course industry grew from about $36 billion to being projected to $107 billion this year. The market is expanding. Now, what does this tell you? One, there s money out there to be made creating digital products and selling them. But also, the market is expanding, so you re not fighting for the same customers. There are more and more people who are trusting digital products every single day, and now is the time to jump in before everyone starts to do it. There are already some big companies Like LinkedIn just bought Lynda for $1.5 billion, and all that was was teaching people how to use apps like Microsoft Excel and stuff like that. But this is what s happening, and now is the time to jump into this. I want to show you how to do it, because there is this huge opportunity, it s standing before you, and I m hoping before the end of this presentation, you re going to have an idea, you re going to know what you want to teach, and maybe you re going to go home and outline that course tonight and get it up this week. That would be great. Let s keep going. I m Derek, as she said. I m the founder of Social Triggers and Zippy Courses, and I m also an accidental teacher. I want to share this story to show you that you can really get started today. My first course was a complete disaster. I filmed this in my house with my own horrible camera. The videos are grainy, I have the worst handwriting in the world, and I apparently never had a haircut. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 2

3 But this was my first course. It was three videos. That s it. I filmed it in my living room. I actually got this whiteboard It wasn t even a real whiteboard because whiteboards were expensive, so I bought this thing called melamine from Home Depot. I don t know how to hang anything on the wall, so I Velcroed it to the wall. This was my first course, and what s funny is that course is what kicked off my current business, that dumb course. Now, this is my current website, and here are some stats. I m not saying this to brag; I want to show you what can happen when you start with a horrible course. I have customers all over the world, 69 countries. We have multiple seven-figures in revenue, and we ve reached more than 5.5 million people around the world. But it started with that course. Again, I m not sharing these stats to brag or just to talk about myself. I know there are a lot of people out there who want to do this. They know they can do it. You might have had an idea. Say yes if you ve thought about making a course before. Audience: Yes. Derek: You ve all thought about it. Now say yes if you ve actually created one. Audience: Yes. Derek: Not nearly as many people. But you all need to, and you re going to want to because I believe you can be the next accidental teacher, and this can be the start of your business where you share your message with the world, or as Gabby told me, spread your light to the masses. You can do all of this. If you re a speaker, you can turn your speech into a course. If you re someone who doesn t like to shower every day, you can work from home and not shower every day. If you are a consultant, you could turn your consulting into a course. You could turn your book into a course. You can be like Gabby and do meditations. Even though they re a meditation or they re a download, it s still kind of a course. You could be a photographer and turn that into a course. You could do it about anything. Here s the five-step process. You need to find an idea. Then you want to create a mini-course to attract prospects. You want to promote that mini-course to everyone all over the place. After you know people like this mini-course, you re going to turn that mini-course into a full course and sell it, and then you re going to reinvest back in your business. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 3

4 Now, we re going to go through each of these steps on how to do that. Let s start with how do you find an idea in 15 minutes or less? Well, I have taught people about creating digital products for a few years now, and in my experience people always have one of three problems. The first problem is I need an idea to start with. Anyone here need an idea? Yes, there are some people who still need an idea. The other problem is other people say, I have too many ideas. I don t know which one I should create first. All right, raise your hand if you have too many ideas. Look at the people with their hands down. You should connect afterwards. Give some of your ideas to those people. The third problem is you don t know how to sell it or get started promoting it, and that s why we have this whole five-step process. Now let s start with how do you find an idea? I know this sounds a little negative, but when you want to create a digital product, step one is you want to find the pain. Then step two is you want to offer relief to that pain. Let s break this down: find the pain, offer relief. How do you find the pain? Well, the secret is eavesdropping. You actually want to listen to and talk to your customers. Who here is a fan of Lululemon? Everyone, yes? Do you know that they have their folding tables next to the dressing room so they can hear exasperation from people trying on clothes? This is actually true. Christine Day wrote about this in The Wall Street Journal. They actually listened to some of the pains people were having. Every time someone took this one sweater in, they noticed people would say, Oh my god, the sleeves are too tight. They wrote this down, got it back to corporate, and then they fixed their clothes based on eavesdropping on their customers. You all need to eavesdrop on your customers. This is where the insight comes. Find the pain that people are having in their life right now, and then offer relief through a digital product. Now how do you find the pain? You could go everywhere. You could go to popular Facebook groups. Everyone here is a member of a Facebook group, right? Yes. You can go to the comments sections in blog posts, and you can go to places like Quora.com. Maybe you re a health coach, maybe you re helping people meditate. Whatever it is you re doing, you can type it into the search bar, and you can see all these questions that people are asking about whatever it is they re looking for. You can see people here saying, What are efficient ways to get in shape? These are pains people are having right now. You can create digital products to solve those pains. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 4

5 My favorite way to do this, though, is to find super popular books that have thousands of reviews about the topic that I want to cover, and I like to read those reviews. I like to read the five-star reviews and the one-star reviews. What am I looking for? Well, I went to this particular book, The 5 Love Languages, and here are some quotes from people in their reviews. I just went through a pretty rough patch with the man I thought cared about me where I was easily set aside when anything else interesting came up. This was a quote that someone said, and then they went on to describe how the book helped them. But you re not worried about how the book helped them right now; you re worried about the pain that they had. The next pain: I wish I would have read this for an ex before the last. I did everything wrong. He must think I m a total wimp, and he s now got an even bigger ego. My relationship unexpectedly fell apart and I found myself very distraught and alone. These are three pains that I pulled right out of the reviews. Have you ever seen some marketing from people and thought, It s like they re reading my mind? Yes? It s because they probably are. When you pull quotes like this out of random book reviews, you know where to focus. Now how do you turn this pain into a course? Well, you just flip it. For an example, I went through a pretty rough patch with a man I thought cared about me that was. Well, Never Be Second Choice: How To Make a Man Put You First. Course idea. Take the second one, I wish I would have read this for the ex before last. Stand Up for Yourself: How to Win Respect in Your Relationship. Course. My relationship unexpectedly fell apart. Why I m Happily Single for Now: How to Get Past a Broken Relationship. Course. Do you see how easy it is? This took me 8 minutes. I know nothing about dating or relationship advice. My fiancée would say I m actually probably bad at it, but I just at this in about 10 minutes. Go through the reviews, find pain, flip it. You now have a course. You might even have a name for your course just by starting with the pain and trying to offer relief for that pain. This is something that anyone here can do. Can you see yourself doing this right now? Say yes. Does anyone have an example of a pain that they want to cure right now? Raise your hands. What s your example? Participant: [13:20 inaudible] Derek: This is a great example of a course that you can sell. When you re selling health-related things, you have to talk to a lawyer and stuff like that before you make promises. But that is an example where if someone is having an issue with their health Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 5

6 or wellness in their world, whether it s in fertility, whether it s dieting, or whatever they re focusing on, you can see how that can be flipped into a course. Now all you need to know is what do you put into that course? We re going to get to that. All right, let s keep going. When you re coming up with your idea, you find the pain, you want to offer relief, you have an idea on a piece of paper. At this point, people for some reason think to themselves, Let me create this eight-week long course, and that s a lot of work. Eight weeks might take you two years to finish that, and that s actually the case for people who try to build these huge courses for the first time they ever did it. Do not do that. You have to test the waters first. If you have an idea for a course, yes, it s as easy as finding a pain and flipping it, but you want to make sure people actually care about this before you invest a year building it. Does that make sense, yes? This is why you have to test the waters, and that s why instead of building a full course, I always tell people to build a mini-course first that you give away for free. Build a mini-course that you give away for free, see how people react to this minicourse, and then you can decide to pursue a full course or not before you waste all that time building that eight-week or 12-week or six-month course or however long your course might be. Now, you might be wondering, how do you test the waters with this mini-course if you don t have an audience yet? Well, here s how I do it. I come up with an idea for a course and I ll just go buy some Facebook ads. I know some of these budgets are pretty large, but what you need to do is you don t need to spend more than $50. If you have an idea for a mini-course, you spend $50 promoting it on Facebook ads, and you look for whether or not people are signing up for your free course or not. In general, a metric I use is if I can get someone to download my free course for less than $5 with a Facebook ad, I am probably going to pursue that course a little bit further. Now, I have a question for you. Would you rather spent six months building an eightweek course, or $50 on a Facebook ad to see if it s going to work first? $50, right? Yet everyone I know who built courses for some reason, they build their course first and then they sell it, and they don t know it s going to work yet. Raise your hand if you have a friend who launched a course that didn t do as well as they had hoped. Come on, everybody has a friend who didn t do as well Not everyone s winning all the time. I just failed just recently, but that s another story. You want to test it first before you build it. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 6

7 Another benefit of testing it first is you can start building your list. If you have no one who is currently subscribed to your site, this is a way for you to start building that list. Even if the course test ends up not working, you still have those subscribers. This is Guillermo, and he gave away free courses. He gave away free courses about helping people immigrate to Canada. I don t know who would want to do that, but that s what gave away courses about. I m sorry, we have a Canadian here? No? But that s what he did people opted in for this, and then he sold his course and made $2500 in a week helping people go to Canada. His courses were in Spanish. Now, apparently there are Spanish people who want to go to Canada, and he s focused on a super specific niche, and it s helping him build his business. He built the list with free courses, then sold the paid course, and now he has a business. It s really that simple. Now, you want to know what s in the mini-course, right? You have an idea, you have a pain, an overarching pain, you have a potential course you want to do. Now you know you want to create a mini-course first, but what do you put in it? Well, here s an example. You want to keep it small. This is a video I did about networking. I wanted to see if people would be interested in a full-fledged course about networking, so I gave away a bonus e-book, Download this free e-book that will give you the exact scripts you can use to contact important people and get responses. I just wanted to see if people were interested in learning more about this topic. Create a piece of content, offer this course. That script is like four pages. I put that together in about two hours. It s a little mini-course that walks people through how to send an to someone they don t know, and it took me about maybe two or three hours to do. It doesn t have to be a big mini-course. The goal is to have an idea for a course, create a mini-course that you can create in about two to three hours. That way you can get it up and running today. A lot of people have ideas and they think, Is this going to work? I don t know if it s going to work, and they sit there and they hem and haw about whether or not they should create a digital product, when all they really need to do is create a minicourse in two hours, get it up, and see if it s working or not. You can t think about whether or not something is going to work, because you re not talking to anyone. You re just kind of getting in your head and psyching yourself out. You don t want to do that. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 7

8 Here s another example. I did a blog post. Raise your hand if you re blogging. Yes? Is everyone blogging? A lot of people are blogging? You don t even have to create a minicourse. If you have a blog post, here s what I did. This was a long blog post I wrote. I said, Hey, do you want the PDF version of this blog post? I m giving that away, and that s helping me build my mini-course for people who are interested in selling more. You can do it with anything. Then your goal is to promote the mini-course. You could do it with Facebook ads. You can do it with conferences, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, media, podcasts, videos, LinkedIn. It doesn t matter how you promote it. You can promote it in any way you want. I like Facebook because you can create a mini-course today, get it on your website, spend $50 by tomorrow, and you ll know if it s an idea in 24 hours. I like that because it s fast. You don t have to. You might want to start going to more meet ups and promoting your mini-course that way, and that s something you can do, as well. That s how you can start building your list, which is very important, especially if you want to be in the business of selling digital products. If you want people to buy your digital product, I don t want to say the sad truth, but the truth is that for every hundred people on your mailing list, you might only get one or two of those people to buy. You just need more people on your mailing list. The more people on your mailing list, the more you sell. You can start building your list today with mini-courses, and then sell them stuff later. This guy had 120 people on his list. This is James, and he made $1500 from his first course launch just by doing the strategy of giving away something for free first, then selling something later. It s a very simple process. Once you test it and know people want your mini-course, now you can create your first course, at which point you should still not create a four- or eight-week course, because if you re just getting into digital products, or maybe you already have a digital product and it might not be selling that well, it s a little disheartening to be working on something for six months not knowing if it s going to work, and that s when you start to become a perfectionist. Oh, I want to just redo this one module, and before you know it, you redid the first video of the course 700 times. I know because those three videos I showed you, I didn t know how to edit videos. I tried to one-take those videos. I don t think you understand what it s like to one-take a video that s more than 30 seconds. It took me 18 hours to do one video. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 8

9 You don t want to do that if you re creating a six-week or eight-week course you re going to drive yourself nuts which is why you want to create a horrible course and realize that it doesn t matter what it looks like as long as your message is sound. As long as you re helping people solve their pain, you don t even need good handwriting. It could be anything. This course right here went on to generate more than $100,000, and all it was was three videos and a worksheet download. I actually got one complaint from someone who said, Hey man, your videos are crap, and I was like, You re crap. You can have a refund. Don t do that, I guess, but that was my first response, and I gave him a refund. The other people were happy, though, and this is what kicked off my whole course business. You can do all of this. This is possible for everyone here to do. Now, let me walk you through why I believe you should start with a small course. You probably noticed that a lot of people know they want to create digital products and they talk about it and they talk about it and they keep talking about it, but they don t necessarily launch it. This might be you. It might be a friend. Shit, it was me, too. I just did this last year. I thought I was creating a product. It took me six months because I was being a perfectionist, and I had to take my own advice. But there s a reason why this works where you break it down into find the idea first. Once you to have the idea, create the mini-course, once you get the mini-course, get it up and see if it s working, or create another mini-course, or create that short course, the three videos. It s because this is how the psychology of motivation works. When you re creating something small and getting it out into the world, you feel really good about yourself. You get happy when you finish something, and if you re working on something for six months When I m working on something for more than 6 minutes, I start to think to myself, I m never going to finish this, and it starts stressing me out. But when you break it down into small, little bite-sized pieces, you re taking advantage of what s known as psychology of small wins. Has anyone heard of this? Say yes if you know what that is. Yes? Everyone knows that when you do a little something, get it out in the world, see five people download it, you feel good. Holy shit, people actually want this. As opposed to sitting there thinking if it s going to work or not, you already know it s working. You re giving yourself the opportunity to succeed by breaking it down into small pieces first and then releasing it, and then you can promote it. You can start building your list. If the first mini-course isn t working, it only took you two or three Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 9

10 hours. You can create another one, and then you can create ten of them, and then keep promoting them to see what sticks. Actually what I did I had one course that I released. I had a four-week course that I had out there. After I did the bad course with no haircut, I finally did a better course, and I didn t know what to create next, so what I did was I created five mini-courses. One was about networking, one was about selling, one was about productivity, and I gave away all five of them and I just watched to see which one grew faster. When I saw that there were more people on the list of people who wanted to learn about selling, my next course was about selling. Not at any point was I trying to figure out my next product. Even if you have one course right now and you want a second one or a third digital product, you can create mini-courses to test the waters for things you might create in the future, and then you can see which ones get the most traction. Then you can focus on creating that short course first, and then see if people will buy it. If people will buy a short course, chances are they will probably buy a bigger one. You can start making revenue now while you re building your short courses and minicourses before you start to worry about something that s going to take you six months to do. Does this sound like something you can do? Yes? Derek: Who is going to create a mini-course by the end of this week? Why is everyone not raising their hands? There are a whole lot more people in here who said they wanted to create digital products, and I didn t see every hand go up. Let me say this again: are you going to create a mini-course by the end of this week? Hands are up. Good. Let s keep going. Now, what do you want to include? We talked about this a little bit. You want to keep it small. In your short course, you want to include one or two things that help people with their desired pain. In that first short course that I created, it was about blogging. There s a lot of stuff to talk about with blogging. There is social media, there s search engine optimization, there s LinkedIn, there s paid advertising, there s how to write content. There are so many different things in the world of blogging that I could cover, but in that one, all I did with teach three things: one, how to convert people to your list; two, how to write three types of content that get you traffic; and three, how to promote that content. That s it. I didn t teach them everything. I taught them three things, just three things, and that s it. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 10

11 If you re trying to help people get healthy or get happy, these are big topics and you might be thinking to yourself, There s no way I can put this into a three video course. There s just so much to do, and you re right; there is a lot to do. But even if you look at Gabby, these are her meditations, and even though they might help you with different aspects of your life, chances are each meditation can be expanded upon to cover more. But when you re creating these short courses especially, it s not only about what you put in it; it s about what you leave out of it on purpose, because what you leave out of it, you also have to realize, is stuff that you can put into that four-week or sixweek course later. The goal right now is just to test if people want what you want to sell. For example, let s say you help people find better careers. You could say How to find your dream job is one of the examples, but that s going to take eight weeks. You have to show them all this different stuff. An example of a short course might be how to make a resume. One little aspect of the big picture is what goes into your short course that you want to sell. Just one thing, maybe two things or three things, but not ten things. You don t want three weeks for $99. It s too much work to do that. Focus on something specific. Maybe you re helping people with camping. You can do Camping Trips 101,: how to not get eaten by a bear, or something. You could sell that. There s a lot that goes into fitness about dieting, workout routines. You could focus on one thing, Abs Without Crunches, and that s the whole thing. You re not going to talk about anything else, just abs without crunches. You can do that, focus on just one thing in the short course and sell it. Let s keep going. You want to start small. I want to reiterate this because a lot of people who want to create their first digital product are always concerned about, What if people feel like I didn t give them enough? Let me tell you what happens when you don t give them enough. They get a refund. You can sit there and think about it, or you can just start selling it and see how many people refund. Don t stress yourself out. If you think that there s enough in there to justify the price, sell it. If more than 15% of the people refund, maybe you have to give a little bit more. I say more than 15% because I know there are people out there who think 1% or 2% or 5% refunds are bad, but actually 15% is the number that I shoot for on all of my Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 11

12 products because I know that I m getting more people to buy them who think it might be not necessarily a good fit but they want to try it out anyway. That says more to me about how I m selling as opposed to people who don t refund. If you don t have any refunds, that means you lost out on a lot of sales. You want to start small. We re coming to the end, and I have three free things that you can download that don t have any opt-ins. You can get them at SocialTriggers.com/Gabby. You have three worksheets, Free online course ideas, Find your customers pain by asking the right questions, and Recommended tools and software for creating courses. There are no opt-ins to get this, so you just go there and download it off the website. This is an opt-in because it s an series, but this is a five-day thing about e- mailing people and how to build your course and it walks you through step-by-step, and that s the same URL. Then in addition to that, I also have my slides on that page where you can download these slides. Thank you. Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved Gabrielle Bernstein, Inc. page 12