My first evergreen course was a huge flop. The course itself was great, but the problem was – nobody was buying it.
I was making the exact same mistake I see so many course creators make with their own evergreen courses today – a costly mistake they don’t even realize they’re making.
Today I’m sharing exactly why my first evergreen course failed and how I turned things around and blew my revenue expectations out of the water (in a good way).
My name is Caitlin Bacher, CEO of Scale With Success®, and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. I’m sharing revealing insights about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join me here to discover the tough decisions I’ve had to make, the biggest failures I’ve had to bounce back from, and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. I’m so grateful that I have the chance to tell you everything right here on Scale With Success®: The Podcast. Let’s get started.
Today I’m sharing why my first evergreen course was a major flop when it came to how many courses I actually sold and the unexpected change I had to make that skyrocketed my course revenue.
But, before I do, I want to explain exactly why I created my evergreen course in the first place in an environment where all I heard about every day was that launching was the ONLY way to grow a million dollar business.
If you’ve already seen my free masterclass, then you already know all about the pivotal moment in my personal life that made it crystal clear that launching was no longer an option for me.
But, today I want to share another reason.
You see, when I was launching, my revenue was STUCK. I was making some money selling my course, but I was nowhere near the big goals I set for myself. The year I made the switch from launching to selling my course on autopilot was the year I FINALLY crossed the million dollar mark – and I did it in less than 6 months.
I cannot convey HOW GOOD it felt to be generating revenue 24/7. Unlike launching where I only opened up enrollment for one week a couple times a year. With evergreen I was enrolling new students day after day – and the process was FULLY automated.
At the time I didn’t have a big team, so being able to take myself OUT of the sales process was a godsend. If you’re a course creator who is doing EVERYTHING yourself, marketing, sales, delivery, operations – I see you.
It is not sustainable to do this and I know people say HIRE A TEAM, but how in the world are you supposed to do that if you don’t have consistent revenue coming in week after week?
The decision I made to quit launching and start selling my course on autopilot saved my business, helping me generate the revenue it needed to thrive and grow.
But, making the switch from launching to selling on autopilot wasn’t easy – mostly because I had so many thoughts swimming around my head like, “will this actually work???”.
I made every mistake in the book, but there’s one in particular that I want to share with you today – because I see so many course creators falling into the same trap I did.
When I first began my transition from launching to evergreen, it took me a while to get out of the fight/flight mode that I was in all the time from launching. Launching requires everything to be perfect from the jump – because you’re only doing it a couple times a year. If something goes wrong (and it usually does) you have to wait 6 months or even a year before you try again.
But, selling your evergreen course isn’t like that. Evergreen is all about consistent improvement over time – so that the better things get, the better things get. The point of creating an evergreen funnel to sell your course is NOT to be perfect – it’s to get things up and running, look at the data, and determine what to fix first.
One thing that really surprised me about creating my evergreen funnel was that I couldn’t just repurpose the content that I’d used during a live launch. I honestly thought I could take a recording of my live webinar (and all the emails I sent out with it) and put all that content into an automated funnel.
I didn’t understand that the content inside an automated webinar needs to follow a completely different framework in order to really capture the attention of your audience and move them into action.
Before I figured that out, I was definitely struggling to make my automated funnel profitable.
Maybe you’re in the same boat, trying to repurpose your launch content into an automated funnel, and feeling frustrated because IT ISN’T CONVERTING. You may even be telling yourself that maybe evergreen won’t work for you – because all those years ago, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Once I figured out that I needed to quit repurposing all my old launch stuff and start following an evergreen framework, things started moving in the right direction. I now call this system a Profitable Sales Engine™.
One of the best things about a Profitable Sales Engine™ is that it’s gathering data all the time. So, there is ample time to make tiny content tweaks that can make a HUGE difference in your bottom line.
Learning which metrics to track (it’s different from launching), how to track them, and most importantly how to UNDERSTAND what they mean took some time for me to figure out as well.
Like anything, reading data is a skill you’ll learn over time – just like I did. So, if you don’t know how to do it, yet – that’s ok. Programs like ours walk you through all the steps of figuring out what data to track, what it means, and how you can use it to leverage your success month after month.
Reading the data helped me manage my emotions and avoid wasting time on solving problems that didn’t even exist. Data helps me stay out of the drama triangle and prevents me from making mountains out of mole hills.
So, what happened next?
After I made the switch from launching to selling my course on autopilot, I crossed the million dollar mark in six months and since then my business has generated well over $11m – and we’re still growing.
My Profitable Sales Engine™ does the hard work of attracting leads and converting leads into customers for me.
Now that my business is making millions per year I can experiment with riskier things like live events, building a team, paid advertising and so on – but the only reason I’m MAKING millions is because I prioritized learning how to generate consistent revenue FIRST.
I get so fired up about teaching people how to sell their evergreen courses because I’ve experienced first hand what it feels like to build a business that serves others in a way that’s sustainable for me and I’ve seen my clients do the same.
There is no reason why you can’t sell your course on autopilot.
I appreciate you being here and make sure to tune in next time for another episode of Scale With Success® The Podcast.
Are you sick and tired of launching and looking for a proven method to generate consistent revenue from your online course on autopilot?
Sign up for my free masterclass, “How To Generate Launch-Sized Revenue Without Launching” and I’ll show you how our clients are making MORE money in LESS time than they ever did while launching.
If making sales everyday in a way that is completely automated and doesn’t require paid advertising sounds good to you, then click the link around this episode and sign up for my free masterclass today.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale With Success® Accelerator — an online course designed to help you generate launch-sized revenue without lanching. If you want to learn MORE about our proven method for success, click here to watch my free masterclass. See you in there!
