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🌱 Course Creators Weekly #50 🗓 June 7th, 2021 - Build your first course

Lauren Valdez shares her top tips for first-time creators, Janelle Allen talks about pre-selling, and Julia Saxena explains her process to build an email course! 📧

Lauren's top 4 tips for starting an online course Lauren's top 4 tips for starting an online course
✏️ Article 🌱 First Course

Lauren's top 4 tips for starting an online course

Lauren Valdez shares her top tips for building your first course without overwhelm:

  • 👣
    Start where you are—don't compare yourself to top creators further on their journey
  • 🧗🏾
    If you don't have an audience, hustle for early customers—be helpful on the Internet
  • 🎯
    Go as niche as possible—make your messaging super specific to a targeted group
  • 🛳️
    Just ship it—do the absolute minimum to test your idea, e.g. a Minimum Viable Course

Check out Lauren's article for more details and examples from her own experience! 👇🏻

🔗 Lauren Valdez via laurenvaldez.substack.com

P.S. I found this through Josh Spector's newsletter, For The Interested.

How to Pre-Sell Your Online Course How to Pre-Sell Your Online Course
📹 Video 💰 Sales & Marketing

How to Pre-Sell Your Online Course

Pre-selling means to sell your course before it's ready. You always should.

Why pre-sell:

  • 👍
    Validate your course idea—the only true validation is people paying for it
  • 🤝
    Keep yourself accountable to stop procrastinating and build your course
  • 💰
    Make some extra cash, upfront, that you can invest into building your course
  • 📧
    Build your email list—a list of people who actually want your course

The process:

  • 👀
    Build awareness—put regular, helpful content out on the Internet for free
  • 📣
    Announce your course—prime your audience to expect your course + gather feedback
  • 📖
    Educate & Nurture—share more targeted educational content on all channels
  • 💳
    Launch—open the gates, allowing people to purchase your course

Some more tips:

  • 🚧
    Your course doesn't need to be (shouldn't be) complete when you pre-sell
  • 👨🏻‍💻
    Pre-sell a live pilot, not a self-paced course—much easier + only need 30% of content
  • 📢
    Putting up a sales page alone isn't enough—like any sale, it needs active promotion
  • 📧
    Don't skip email marketing—it's always your number 1 way to reach your audience

What you need, at a minimum:

  • 💈
    Sales page
  • 📝
    Email copy—at a minimum, have your launch sequence written
  • 💳
    Shopping cart, i.e. checkout—basically, some way for people to pay you online
🔗 Janelle Allen via janelleallen.com
How to generate leads with a free email course How to generate leads with a free email course
✏️ Article 💰 Sales & Marketing

How to generate leads with a free email course

An email course is a great lead magnet to help you grow your email list. In this article, Julia Saxena shares a step-by-step process to develop and promote your email course.

My biggest takeaways:

  • 😌
    Make it effortless to benefit from—e.g. mindset shifts require minimal thinking exercise
  • 🧠
    Brainstorm myths, misconceptions, limiting beliefs, and common pitfalls to avoid
  • 📧
    Write the emails, debunking the top 4–6 items on your list, one at a time in story form
  • 🕐
    Schedule the emails in your email service provider, one day apart from each other
  • ⤴️
    Include a recap as the final email to tie everything together
  • 🔗
    Create a landing page to promote your course + let people opt in with their emails
  • 📣
    Get promoting—e.g. opt-in forms on your website, social media posts, direct outreach

Check out Julia's article for in-depth explanations, examples, recommended elements for a landing page, and reasons why an email course is the perfect lead magnet! 👇🏻

🔗 Julia Saxena via juliasaxena.com

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CCW is no longer published, but you can check out the past editions—see what you can dig up!

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Hey, I'm Merott 👋🏻

I'm an indie maker and freelance web developer from London.

I'm building my own business, because I'm terrible at following other people, and because I want my work to matter. I hope it will, to you and to your students.

Making progress, slowly and steadily, I'm also documenting and tweeting my journey every Monday @merott .

Thanks for visiting!

Merott