The $100K Method #6: How to Create a Course That Sells
Did you know this blog is part of a series? The next blog is here.
You can also listen to the series as a podcast here!
Happy customers don’t tell their friends… successful customers do.
Here’s the hard truth, your audience doesn’t actually want your product.
That’s right, what they truly care about is the results your product can give them.
And, if you can get your customers real results that they are excited about they will tell their friends about those results.
This drives organic traffic and organic sales which will allow you to scale your course effortlessly.
Too many course creators waste their time creating the wrong course in the wrong way and they end up not making any money.
Trust me, I’ve been there.
The first three or four courses that I made were complete flops. But over the past few years, I have created courses that have earned me over two million dollars! Yes, it's wild, and I never thought I would be this successful at creating online courses.
At this point, with years of experience creating successful courses, we have it down to a science. We’ve found a simple formula that predictably WORKS — and that’s exactly what I want to share with you today.
In this article, I am going to break down:
how to know what your audience wants for a successful first launch
how to ensure they complete the course and get their desired results (HUGE for getting word-of-mouth referrals)
how to design your course to appeal to cold leads to ensure you can easily scale your profits year after year
Why you need to articulate a Primary Tangible Result for your customers
Your first job is to create a result that they want. The more tangible your result is, the more interested they will be in buying your product. This is because a tangible result is perceived as much more valuable.
This specific result is called the Primary Tangible Result — what we call the PTR in the 100K Mastermind program.
This PTR shows your customer that your whole course is geared toward getting them what they truly want.
In the 100K Mastermind program, we show our students how to find out what their audience truly wants so that they don’t waste time and effort guessing what they think is wanted, only to try to launch their course and find they missed the mark.
“$100K MM was exactly what I needed to fine tune my messaging and my products to connect with my audience. Between the 1-on-1 coaching and the community collaboration, I was able to create more effective marketing messages and set up my course to be a fully automated, evergreen system with 2 lead funnels! I learned lead generation strategies and was given the tools to put those into practice without any extra research needed on my end. Overall, I learned so much more about myself, my audience, and my business that I decided to re-brand and I feel so much more hopeful about the direction I am going now!”
Natalie Burns
Homeschool Teaching Simplified
The steps to creating a successful method for your course include…
meeting your customer where they’re at
walking them through the transformation needed to get to the result they desire
This is ultimately what people want! To be taken from where they are at now to what they desire. Your course is HOW they get there.
The most effective way to walk them over the other side of the river to their desired result is to take one step at a time.
Each of these steps that you walk your customer through makes up your Proprietary Method. Your unique approach of how your course gets the result they want is what will allow your potential customer to believe you can get them the result.
Happy customers are not the same as successful customers
Now that you’ve gotten people to take your course, how do you ensure they they actually complete it?
You may think that the most important piece is closing the sale, but if you want to scale your course to 6-figures and beyond, then you need to get them to complete the program so that you have a successful customer that wants to tell their friends about your course.
Let’s go back to those stepping stones across the river. We don’t just share the proprietary method to convince people to buy the course. These steps will be HOW you get your customer the result they desire.
Your customer needs to know these 3 components so they believe that they will actually get the result they want through your course:
Primary Tangible Result (PTR)
– The result they wantProprietary Method
– The steps in the processTransformation
– Journey from where they are now to where they will be
These 3 components will not only increase the amount of customers that BUY your course, but also the amount that actually COMPLETE your course and tell their friends about it.
Don’t forget to use propriety language as you talk about each of these components so that your customer sees how you are the only option to get them to their desire in this particular way. This way your course becomes one of a kind.
Product vs You: Why you shouldn’t rely on “know, like, and trust” to sell your course.
Too many business owners waste years waiting to make a profit because they think they need to spend time building an audience first that “knows, likes, and trusts” them.
But is this actually true?
The 100K Method proves otherwise. You do not even need to have your course ready to start selling it. There is no reason to wait for a big audience.
You can have a successful launch right now and those first customers will provide the revenue to reinvest, testimonials to share, and word of mouth recommendations.
If you want to work smarter, and not just harder, then create a course that sells itself.
How? You need cold traffic appeal.
You can convert a cold lead into a paying customer in as little 30min or less if you have a strategic sales process that is built on proven sales psychology principles.
Here’s the thing — when a course is created only for an audience that already knows, likes, and trusts you, it’s hard to know if they’re just interested in you or in the course itself… and you may find that your course is not actually appealing to anyone who isn’t well acquainted with you.
To create an online course that can easily scale to 6-figures and beyond, the product you create needs to appeal to those outside of your current audience. This is where having a strong message around your PTR, Proprietary Method, and the Transformation comes in. Create and market your product in a way that highlights the result rather than you. When potential customers trust your product, you will see more consistent, organic traffic.
Putting the Pieces Together: Six principles for creating a successful, scalable online course
1. Unique Edge
Show the transformation process that your customer can expect so they believe the result is possible for them and uniquely accessible through your course.
2. PTR —> Proprietary Method —> Transformation
Clear and effective marketing will create initial buy in and the motivation to actually complete the course so your customer will want to share the results they experienced with others.
3. Talk to Real People
Interview your target customers to learn the words they use for their Desires, Motivations, and Obstacles (DMO) around the result. This way you can communicate in the way your audience immediately connects to.
4. Checkout Page
A scaleable course has an online purchase platform that is professional looking so that people trust it to buy your course. You do not need complicated technology systems to sell your course.
5. Beta Launch Live
You can launch the beta version of your course as a live experience to validate your idea. In fact, this step is crucial to complete if you want to build the best possible course that actually gets your customers results.
6. Create Live
Adjust your course as you create it from the customer input you receive in real-time. This will save you the time and energy of going back to re-create your course after receiving feedback.
“Since joining the $100K Mastermind, I've gone from not having any clients to picking up 18 new clients, and in my first launch I managed to earn $4,400 in revenue. So this is gonna happen. This is gonna be a real thing.”
Sarah Mapes
The Bone Builder System
Conclusion
This was a transparent summary of HOW to create an online course that sells, but navigating the details of how that looks for your specific business can still be intimidating, especially if you’ve never successfully created a course and evergreen funnel before!
That’s why I created the 100K Mastermind program, so that entrepreneurs like you can work less and earn more. You can streamline your business with the valuable step-by-step 100K system that has been proven time and time again.
The 100K Method teaches all of the concepts discussed in this article: from validation, to messaging, to course creation, funnel design, and evergreen lead generation.
And we don’t just “teach” these concepts or tell you “what” to do — we show you how to validate your idea, market your course, and set up the passive revenue system (including walk through tutorials and swipe copy you can use to save massive amounts of time) to finally find financial freedom while working from a place of rest.
Are you ready to take your course to 6-figures and beyond with the 100K Method?
About this $100K Method series
Throughout the rest of this blog series, we’ll look at how YOU can take action and successfully implement a money-making system like this for yourself, including how you can easily generate leads — even without a big audience AND without social media, how you can strategically structure your funnel to passively convert 5-10% of your leads, and how you can scale this system to consistent ten thousand dollar months.
If you’re ready to build a $100K Funnel on your own, then now is the time to start taking action. Head to https://gillianperkins.com/100K to find out how you can build a $100K Funnel to start making you money in the next 3 months or less!
I know you are capable of this and I know it will change your life.
YOUR NEXT STEP
In the next $100K blog in the series, I’m sharing my top tips that can literally double your business’ revenue.
