Everything I Learned About Selling Online Courses In 31 minutes

Over the past few years, I've launched 13 online courses and coaching programs and generated $25 million in revenue. And the clients that I taught this model to have a cumulatively generated just shy of $100 million in reported and documented revenue. don't say this to brag.

I tell you this because I know darn well what I'm talking about, and I have the stories to back it up. And in today's video, I'm going to teach you everything that's important that you need to know when launching an online course or a coaching program. and I'm not going to share with you a bunch of theory and all the different ways you could do it.

But I'm going to share with you the most simple, proven, and profitable method that has resulted in stories like McKayla, who went from struggling in debt, to now helping women get free from alcohol addiction with her online program and generating over a quarter of $1 million in just three years. Doing so. Phil, a DJ coach who now makes upwards of $1 million a year selling his DJ courses, and fans who went from a personal trainer exhausted and his earning potential completely kept to living his dream life, helping women to get in shape with his online programs and has generated over $1 million doing so in the last few years.

am I going to share with you everything you need to know, but throughout I've got resources and other trainings that I'm going to point you to in order to go deeper in these certain areas and ensure that you finish this video with a comprehensive plan and system to create a profitable online course or coaching business. This has proven this is working. And this is simple.

If you just follow what I'm going to teach you today. as you start to think about launching an online program, there are three key areas that you need to focus on and get right. In order to have a successful and profitable business that is the offer what you're actually selling.

What is the program about the price of your program and what's included in the package? Then second, you've got the delivery. How are you actually going to deliver the program, the logistics of actually fulfilling on what you promised?

lastly, the marketing. How are you going to get people to see that offer here about how you can help them? Essentially, how do you start getting clients?

And so we're going to break each section down one by one throughout this video. But first, you need to understand which order to focus on these things. Number one, we must start with the offer.

I see too many people focusing on the marketing first, thinking, okay, let's get some eyeballs on my product or service, and then we can figure out the rest. Once we know we have some people to sell it But the problem that you will find with this approach is one of two things. Either you'll build a marketing funnel that does not work and is not effective because it's not built and designed to find the right type of people, because you haven't first thought about the offer that you're positioning, or the second is that the marketing funnel will work, but you're getting the wrong people on the phone out the other end, and they're not your dream clients, and you're back to square one So here's your first lesson in offer creation.

And it's really, really important when you are creating an offer you must understand that the most important thing is how you wrap it up. What's the description of the offer? How are you positioning the offer in the marketing?

Because if this first inner circle represents your actual deliverables, okay, the things that you're going to be giving to them when they buy, that's not what selling them what's selling them is the way you wrap it up, the messaging and the positioning. when we in the later steps talk about marketing and finding people to come in here about this thing, it's the messaging that's wrapped around the offer that actually sells them. And then once they've paid, once they're a client, they get the deliverables.

Now, of course, your deliverables need to match what you're promised. But you've got to understand that this is what's selling them. It's the same reason why, if you've ever purchased a product that sounded amazing, you thought it was going to solve all of your problems.

So you joined the program only to get on the inside, and you were disappointed. If you've had that experience and you realized it was a crappy product, I would ask you, why did you buy it then? Well, you bought it because you didn't see the actual product that was behind a paywall.

So it was the marketing, the positioning, the messaging that actually sold you. we're going to talk more about this as we go through this lesson. But you must first understand to create an irresistible offer.

We're not thinking about your deliverables. Just yet. That's the boring stuff.

What we're thinking about is the way in which we're going to position it. You also need to understand that when someone is joining an online course or a coaching program, they are paying for the result. So if they're over here unhappy because they've not got the result that thereafter and over here is them really happy because they do have the result, and let's imagine in the middle as a bridge is your offer, this is what's going to help them to get here when they're thinking about the buying decision, when they're thinking about exchanging their money for your product, they don't want this.

That's not what they want. What they want is this. And we've got to keep that in the forefront of our mind.

They're paying for the result or the expected future result. They're not paying for the stuff. So they don't want to hear about the deliverables.

They don't want to hear that they get X number of 1 to 1 calls with you, or they get 19 modules of 37 lessons, 30 minutes apiece. In fact, I would argue they want less stuff. Make this offer smaller.

You want less deliverables and still maximizing their opportunity to get to the end result. If you can do that, you will have a phenomenal product because you're able to give your clients the path of least resistance to get to the outcome. And that's actually what they want.

They don't want to buy a program and have to navigate through tens and tens and tens of hours of content in the hopes of getting the result. They just want to get here the quickest path possible, and they're happy to pay a premium price for you to get them there. So now that you know this, when you are positioning your product, when you're talking about your program, we're talking about the green here.

We're not talking about the deliverables. So when you're speaking to a prospect when later on we talk about marketing, we're not going to be saying, you know, headlines and our copywriting and in our videos, we're not gonna be talking about the amount of time they get with you. We're not going to be talking about the amount of training that they get.

We're going to be talking about the result that we're going to help them achieve. That's your first and primary lesson here. next thing we have to talk about is price.

So how much are you going to be charging for your offer. And this is so critically important because the price that you choose is actually going to play into the type of clientele that you attract. The cheaper you price yourself, the lower quality of client you're going to attract also, whereas the more premium the price tag, the more premium the client.

To help you understand where you should position your price, I want to introduce you to something called the Offer Triangle. This is a concept I've been teaching my private clients for a very long time, and there are three things in each corner of the triangle that your offer needs to satisfy to have a successful business. And at the top, we've got client results.

Okay. On the bottom left hand side we've got lifestyle. And on the bottom right we've got scale or scalability.

These are the three things that you need. And they must be working in balance with each other. Client results points to making sure that when you create your offer, that you are putting your clients first, that you're making sure they're going to win, they're going to succeed, they're going to get the result.

If you've got an offer for offers sake, if you're just trying to grow a business and make a bunch of money but not have a meaningful impact, it will eventually come crumbling down or it will implode from the inside because you'll be scaling too much and you lack this over here is critically important. Then over here you've got lifestyle. You need to make sure that you will structuring your offer in a way that's not going to interfere with your lifestyle.

What you don't want to do is be reactive to this, and as your business grows, it starts to swallow up your lifestyle. And now you're trying to you're trying to react to that and fix it as you go. We want to be proactive.

We want to first decide what do you want your lifestyle to look like. And now build your offer within that restriction. And then we've got scale.

We need to make sure that we are pricing ourselves and structuring our offer in such a way that we can scale without hitting a ceiling. If all that we're doing is 1 to 1 coaching for a small price tag, there's only so many hours in the day and you're going to hit a ceiling. Now, the issue is, if you overextend on any one of these, the other two will suffer.

Allow me to explain. If you overextend on client results, you're so desperate for your clients to win and succeed that you are going well above and beyond what you are supposed to do. Nothing wrong with going above and beyond.

But so far in that direction that you're getting sleepless nights because you're taking calls from clients at any time of the day. You're never getting a break because on holiday you sat on a sun lounger replying to clients and you just cannot possibly switch off that. They've paid for ten hours of your time and you're in our number 50 because you're just trying to give them more and more and more, and you can never draw a line in the sand for a client because they've finished in your program, then your lifestyle is going to suffer because you're working too much and your scale is going to suffer because you're working too much on one client that you are going to hit a ceiling.

Same thing with lifestyle. If you overextend on lifestyle and say, I want to grow 1 million pound business or $1 million business, but I want to do it one hour a day while I sit on the beach sipping pina coladas, then it's probably not going to be realistic. The clients are going to suffer because they're not getting any of your time, and you're not going to scale because you've not put adequate time into building a business that has a smooth operation.

And finally, scale. And this is the one that I see people falling into, I think most frequently is that they start this business. They get the wheels turning, they get excited because they found something that works and they focus on scale, scale, scale, only to find that they're burning out, right, their lifestyle, suffering, and also the client results, you know, is suffering as well.

They're so focused on making the next sale, landing the next client they're leaving a trail of dissatisfied clients behind them as they just continue plowing forward. All three of these must be imbalance. So what's the answer?

Because we're we're here talking about price. Well, when you're thinking about satisfying those three things the context of price, well, we can look at the opportunity to, to charge in different pricing tiers. You know, let's say over here, we've got lower ticket stuff that's, you know, maybe, $10 to $50.

And then over here, we've got the kind of $100 stuff, and then here we've got the $1,000 stuff, and then maybe here we've got, I don't know, $2,000 stuff, and then here we've got two K plus. Okay, this is the category that we want to play in. And you might say well John, if we do that, am I not excluding myself from the majority of the market.

And the answer to that would be, well actually yes you are. But this here is large enough. These are the types of clients that you want.

This is the price that's going to allow you to satisfy those three things that we spoke about. And there's a multitude of reasons why these are the clients that you want, which I'm going to share with you right now. The first thing is when you charge a premium price $2,000 or more, and that really is the base price that I recommend you charge every single one of you watching this.

If you have a hobby, some area of expertise, you've had a life experience that now you can pass back and help someone else. There is that top of the market, that smaller portion that would be willing to pay you top dollar 2000 minimum, maybe five, maybe ten K, maybe 15 K, but quite simply, you land better clients. You really do.

I can't explain it. The more someone pays just by making that decision, they're typically more committed. They're typically more desperate for a solution.

They've been trying for a very long time, and they've had failed attempts in the past. And the fact that they're still willing to purchase something else here with you shows that commitment level that they have. And the more someone pays, we just find their nicer people.

They do the work and they get the result. Which leads me to the second one I'll just put here success. We have a higher success rate with these clients.

When someone is willing to invest that much, they experience what I call feeling the pinch of the investment, right? If somebody drops $10, $20, $30 on an online training course or an e-book, they're not really feeling the weight of that decision. It was very impulsive.

It's very easy to spend $30 and forget about it. But when you spend $5,000, when you spend $10,000, you really feel it. And when you feel it, there's a built in accountability that comes with that, that I must get a positive ROI out of this investment.

And so they actually listen to you, they learn from you, they go through the program, they do the work. And as long as you've got a good product that backs up your positioning, right, that sells them. Now you back it up with a good product that actually helps them get the result they're going to succeed.

That higher success rate is going to give you a more fulfilling business that feels great. But furthermore, those stories are going to circle back around to help your marketing to find more people like them. And then the compounding effect is in place.

third reason why I prefer high ticket is that you need fewer clients. Right? If we're charging $5,000 and we want to make $50,000 a month, we're looking for ten new clients every single month.

That's manageable. That's obtainable. But that's actually giving us an ability to scale to some pretty sizable revenue figures before we even get close to hitting a ceiling.

And the fourth reason is really it's the difference between one client at $5,000, let's say, or ten clients at $500. And I would argue that to make the same amount of money, it is infinitely easier to find one person that will pay you $5,000 than to find ten individual human beings with different belief systems, different experiences, different fees, concerns, emotion overload. To make a decision like that, would be easier to find one person like that to give you 5000, then ten that have to go through that whole process of of purchasing a product, even though it's ten times cheaper.

now let's talk about the second thing, which is the delivery of your products. How do we get said client once they give you their money? How do we get them from point A to point B?

They're currently unhappy over here, and they do not have the result. They join your program and we need to get them over here at the end of the timeline with the result. Well, it's our deliverables.

What we're actually going to give to them and support them with that's going to help them on that journey. Now, what I want to give you right now is the end blueprint. I want to tell you where you should end up so that you can plan out for yourself and your business how you could get there.

Let's start with the mistake that I think people make when they're already established. They're moving in their business, the wheels are turning and they stay stuck in 1 to 1 coaching. This is not going to satisfy the offer triangle.

You are not going to get to scale a 1 to 1 coaching program. But people think that they've got to keep doing it because a that's the only reason that their clients are winning, and B, because that's what their clients are paying for. And if they stop giving their time, then they need to reduce their price.

But you would be making a mistake if you believe that. You would be falling victim to something that I already taught you is a part of crap earlier. If you think that your price is attached to your time, then you think that they're paying for the stuff and they're not paying for the stuff.

They're paying for the result. So if you can get your clients the same result with less of your physical time input, you can still charge the same amount because it's the result they wanted, not the stuff. So rather than staying stuck in the trap of to get this person from there to there, you're giving them 20 hours of your 1 to 1 time instead.

We want to break this up into three things. first block is a massive one, and it's going to represent about that much of the journey. And this is an online training program where you have a few modules of training, with a few lessons within those where you are teaching the stuff that your clients need to learn to get them, about 70 to 80% of the way their.

If I give you an example real quick here on the laptop, you can see this is one of the training areas that I have in one of my businesses. And when someone joins this particular program, first thing they get access to is this membership area where there's a welcome video, and then we've got a bunch of training that they are required to go through first before the coaching elements kick in. Nice and easy and simple for them to navigate to get to the different lessons, but they must watch these first before they get to ask for 1 to 1 support and coaching.

Why is this important? When you start doing coaching and starting to do it at scale, you will notice that if you take ten 1 to 1 sessions with different people, probably 70 to 80% of every conversation, you're saying the exact same stuff just to a new person, right? A client joins your program.

They need the immediate next steps. So you're going to diagnose where they're at. You're going to help them figure out the problem.

And then you're going to tell them the first things they need to do to get on the journey of recovery or getting on the journey to the solution. But 70 to 80% of your conversations are going to be a repeat every single time, because the person has changed. But your system's about the same.

It's just a little bit of tailoring. So what if we could get someone to 70 or 80% without our input? Well, those are the training videos.

Rather than delivering it live manually on a 1 to 1 call every single time we learn from all of these conversations, we take the stuff that's a repeat and we record that as a training video. Now you've recorded it one time, and every new client needs to go through that, and you have saved eventually as your business grows and you have tens of clients, if not hundreds of clients, you've saved tens if not hundreds of hours of your time. And the client does not mind.

They're very happy to come into a program, watch a few introductory videos before they get a bit of time with So let's say the training is 70% right. Then the next block is going to account for around about 20%. And this is the 1 to 1 coaching.

All right. Once they've gone through that training then to have a great program and to make sure that clients are succeeding, of course they're going to need that extra bit of tailoring on top. This is one to many.

Now this is where you come in and help them to understand how to implement this in their specific situation. Now you can have fun with this. You can get creative.

Maybe there's moments where you say, you know what? Watch module one first please. Then we're going to have a coaching call.

Then I'm going to help you navigate towards module two. Then we're going to have a coaching call. All right you may want to do it like that.

Or you may want to give them one big block of training then meet with them. Have some fun with it. But 70% 20%.

So then, what's the final 10%? Well, of course, these are rough numbers, but around about 10% of your program. Make sure you're putting in accountability processes.

This would be having personal check ins. Right. making sure that you're not just leaving them to their own devices.

You know, your clients will not always navigate through by themselves. They need the coaching. Yes, but they also need a guide to help them through the entire journey.

Maybe someone on your administrative team. As your business grows, it can be their role to just check in with them. Maybe while you're in your beginning steps and it's just you, you put it on your list once a week to just check in with a client, find out how they're doing.

Are they getting what they need from the training? Are they progressing? Is there anything you can do to help and support them?

Maybe create some checklists for your clients to help them to navigate the training. Maybe you can do what we call milestone call. So if you programs six months long, yes, they've got their coaching elements.

But perhaps every now and again you just have a friendly check in call. Takes ten 15 minutes just to find out how they're finding the program. Where do they feel they're getting stuck and where could you be of more help?

And all of this stuff needs to be housed somewhere. And that would be an online membership area. That's where you can have your training videos.

It's where you can have links to book coaching calls and give them their zoom links and things like that. And it's where you can have homework and checklists and all sorts of accountability pieces. So where would I suggest that you do this?

Well, there's quite a number of solutions, but the one that I would recommend is a company called funnel. It's an all in one marketing application and it's absolutely incredible. And if you go to the home page, you might recognize a familiar face on there.

This is a system that I developed with my business partner, Ryan, and we have plowed millions of dollars into developing the best, the most powerful marketing automation tool. It's not only going to help you to create your membership sites, but it's actually going to handle every other part of your business. And you might say, John, why don't I just use Udemy?

I heard that that's a great place to host my course. So there's this other solution is other solution. The issue is most of these other programs can do one isolated task.

And so you're going to pay over and over and over again for different subscriptions to the different marketing tools that you need. If you're just getting started with your business, you don't just need to better host your online courses. You need to have an email marketing system.

You need to better build your website. You need to better build your sales funnels. You need to have a helpdesk so your customers can reach out to you.

And so much more. And there's very few products online that proclaim to be an all in one, and there's no one else that does all the things that we do here at funnel. So go to funnel.

com is a link in the description box. You can check it out. It's a really awesome system.

And I'll show you very quickly how you can create an online program, because it really is as quick as this. This is inside of one of our funnel dashboards. And we go over here to programs, and you can see some of the programs that I've already got.

And I can simply go to add a program, give it a name, give it an image so my clients can see what they're buying and click save. And on the next page I can input my content. But to show you quickly, here's one that I created earlier.

And this is one that we use for one of our programs. And we can go and check out my site where when a client joins my program, I can give them access to this membership area here and within a few clicks with a template that we've already got, you can put a welcome video in the bit of text to to welcome them in and you can be adding in your different content pieces so that they can get access to it. As easy as that, you can build a membership site and we're talking ten minutes, 15 minutes.

It's super powerful, it's super quick. And of course funnel does everything else that you would need as well. So you've talked about your offer.

We've talked about the deliverable of the offer. Now let's talk about the marketing. The part that I get most excited about.

This is a topic that I absolutely love. And myself, my team have boiled this down to a science. If you want to find the right type of clients for this program that you're building, you've got to have a powerful system that does a lot of the legwork for you.

We don't want to be doing these manual approaches. We want to be building a Facebook group and having to manually create loads of content every time, and and try to get people to reach out to you, or you reach out to them and you come across as spammy and desperate. And we don't want to do constantly posting on social media as our only primary strategy in the hopes, fingers crossed that some of them become clients.

That's that stuff is fine in addition, but we need to have a powerful, predictable marketing system. And I'm going to share with you right now what it is. Now, firstly, just know that I've tried so many different marketing systems and nothing comes close to this.

It is, and many of you will already be expecting this. It's a webinar, not just any webinar. It's an automated webinar presentation where you can say and do all the right things.

It's going to take someone from a cold. Never heard of you before. Prospect to a ready to buy client.

And we can do it in about 30 to 40 minutes if you have the right structure. Now, I've got so much else I want to teach you around this, but I haven't got time to get into it today. But I do want to give you this and it's actually incredible.

And it's also really, really long. This is a blueprint that I created for my clients, where we literally walk you through from step A to step Z, everything that needs to be in a webinar presentation to turn someone from cold to sold. And it's my free gift to you for getting this far into the video.

There's a link in the description box. Go ahead and click on that. You can download it absolutely for free.

Just tell me where to send it. But that will be such a powerful presentation that you can just automate and it just works for you day in, day out. What we need is a funnel that's going to make that happen.

And what I like to do when it comes to a sales funnel that's wrapped around a presentation like this, is I want to keep it simple. In fact, I want to keep it stupid simple. So many people overcomplicate this funnel stuff, and they've got 20 different pages and loads of different email automations that trigger different things.

And there's so much that can go wrong, there's so much that can break, there's so much that you just simply don't understand and so never even get it launched. And particularly in the beginning, we don't want that complexity. We need simplicity.

So let's talk about some of the key things that we need. Number one, we need I'm going to put R for registration page. We need a way for people to land on our first page.

And they can't get to the webinar until they register. Why would we do that? Well, we're doing it for two reasons.

Number one, because when they register and then subsequently come to a confirmation page in that process, we're building an email list. And that email list is going to be an incredible asset of people that have displayed an interest in your topic and whether they buy something or not, whether they become a client or not. Immediately, you now have their contact information to follow up with them with another offer later on down the line when perhaps they're more ready to take action.

Or maybe you've built more relationships with them. At that point, I'm actually going to redraw that envelope because it looks terrible, and I don't think that one looks any better. That's worse.

But a funny little face, right? The second reason we have a registration process is, quite simply, it's a psychological trick. When someone registers for something, they are going to add more value in their mind to this thing.

Over here. If they click a link and go straight to the piece of video content, for example, they value it less if they had to make a decision, even a very short momentary decision to register for something and then get to it on the next page, they value it higher in their head. And then out the other end, once they watch the presentation.

And I do break all of this down in this blueprint. But there's a certain moment in the webinar where you're going to say, if you enjoyed this content, I'd love to book a conversation with you on the phone to see if becoming a client would be a good fit. But the key here is in this book, a cool process.

Before they actually get on the phone with you, you're going to have an application question list, and this is where you're going to ask them a series of questions after they book the call to qualify them. And we make a decision based on the answers to the form that they filled in when they booked a call as to whether we want to speak to this person or not. And the combination of having a webinar and having this process here means that you only ever speak to absolutely golden prospects, because firstly, they're only going to get a chance to book a call if they watched your entire webinar, right?

We know that some people are going to leave this webinar because they didn't enjoy it. So only your best clients or potential clients are going to get to the end. Furthermore, of those people that book a call, it's only those that you actually like, the sound of their application that you're going to speak to.

And this leads to a really high conversion rate on the phone, this is actually a really important part of the process, because you can get some amazing quality conversations on your calendar, people to speak to. But you can ruin your chances of them converting to a client if you don't have a process, a framework that you're using on the phone. I have devised what I think is the most powerful structure that people like me and you, people that don't want to be salespeople.

But sales is a part of the business. It's a way for us to close that feels authentic, that works incredibly well. But you don't come across like these sleazy, slimy salespeople that just entangle you in a web of words until you give them your credit card information.

And much like the webinar blueprint that we don't have enough time to go through today, I have another resource for you that I think will be incredibly helpful for you, and it's my two course sales framework. The first step is called the push script, and this is everything you need to say and do on the phone to prime someone to investigate whether they're a good client and get them ready to want what it is that you have, and then the second script is the post script. If you've determined they're a good client and you would like to work with them, the second script is designed to offer them your coaching program in a way where they just can't help but say yes, but they want to say yes.

They're so pleased you've given them the opportunity to join and they can't wait to throw their credit card information at you. If this is done right. It's so powerful.

And I want to give you both of these, my free gift to you. There's another link in the description box. Go ahead and click on that again.

Just tell me where to send it and we'll get those frameworks straight out to you. And on the topic of marketing, there's one final missing piece of the puzzle, and that is how and where do we find the right type of people? How do we drive traffic into our registration process so that we build a list so that people watch this webinar, so they book a call and so they buy your product and become a client.

Traffic is a massive topic. I love talking about it and have done many, many times right here on the channel. So if you're ready to get a shed load of the right type of people into your marketing funnel, then I've got a playlist prepared for you up here.

If you go ahead and click on that. I've got a few videos that I've done here on the channel that will really, really help So we've covered a lot in this video today. We've talked about the offer, the deliverable, the marketing.

There's so much more that we can explore. And if you're in a position where you want to do this, you've been gearing up for this. You have your idea for your offer, and you've tried some marketing and it hasn't worked.

And you want some professional help from a team of people that know what they're doing. Then check out this video right here where you can work with me and my team. We'll find out exactly what's going on in your business and help and support you.

Click on that link. Go ahead and check that video out. I hope you enjoyed this one.

I hope you got some massive value from it and I'll see you in a future video.