Do you ever wonder why selling your online course has to be so complicated?
Do you have a hard time wrapping your brain around HOW you’ll ever make 7-figures when your existing sales and marketing system feels so disjointed and complex?
If you answered YES to either of those questions then today’s episode is going to be extremely helpful for you because you may be trapped in The Struggling Course Creator Cycle where everything feels confusing, overwhelming and you just feel stuck.
Today’s episode is going to show you the SIMPLE truth about scaling your online course to millions per year so you can finally let go of weird, complicated tactics and embrace a new way of scaling – that feels sustainable and even a little fun.
So, let’s get started.
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 we’re talking about the simple way to scale your course to 7-figures because the more you simplify, the easier it is to scale.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a very successful, multi-million dollar course creator and he was interested in how he could transition his business from 2 or 3 big lanches a year to an evergreen model where he could make MORE money by selling his course every day – not just a few times a year.
He was tired of all the risk that comes with launching and the revenue goals he set for himself would be MUCH easier to achieve if he made his programs evergreen. So, he came up with a plan to sell his course evergreen and wanted my feedback on it.
Now, let me first say that this guy is incredibly intelligent and successful – even helping me with a number of things in my business over the years. So, I was completely shocked when he unveiled what I believe to be one of the most ineffective evergreen plans I’ve ever seen in my life.
Here was a guy, who was a GENIUS at simplifying complex ideas in his own area of expertise, but was completely FAILING when it came to evergreen.
I don’t know what it is about evergreen, but so many course creators believe that in order for it to work – it needs to be super complex.
Here is what I know to be true, simple scales and complex fails.
When you increase complexity, you increase the risk of something going wrong – and some of the evergreen setups I’ve been seeing lately are DEFINITELY going wrong.
There are two things you need to scale your online course simply and profitably to 7-figures and beyond.
1. A simple, irresistible offer.
Let me tell you something, creating a simple, irresistible offer is no easy task. When most of our clients come to us they either have a course ready to sell or they have an outline of a course they’re gearing up to start creating. The problem is that they are “course” focused and not “offer” focused. Just because you have a course or an outline of a course doesn’t mean you’re ready to start selling.
In Phase 1 of our Scale With Success® Accelerator program, we give our clients specific frameworks to help them transform their course (or the outline of their course) into a simple, irresistible offer that will be easy to sell.
Your offer cannot be vague, confusing, or too similar to what your competitors are selling. I mean, if it is – you’ll probably enroll a couple new students, especially if they know your brand really well and have been following you a long time – but it definitely won’t scale.
No way.
Maybe you’ve had that experience before – I know I have. You create a new offer, and a few people buy – leading you to believe that you’ve got it all figured out and you just need a bigger audience to get even more customers. But, those first few students only bought because they’ve known you forever and they would likely buy anything you offered – but it won’t sell as easily (or at all) to new people.
And if you want to scale your business, your offer needs to be irresistible to NEW people, not just to your existing audience.
What a lot of people don’t understand about transforming your course into an irresistible offer is that doing so typically doesn’t require you to make any changes to your course itself – but it will require you to make changes to the way you TALK about your course.
Your course is a collection of content – videos, pdfs with instructions to follow.
But, your OFFER is a transformation. It’s the promise of a new reality where the problem they’re currently facing no longer exists. It’s clarifying precisely who will benefit from your course and positioning it in a way that is completely different from everything else in the marketplace.
Your course may be great, but nobody is going to buy it unless you can turn it into an irresistible, simple offer.
2. A simple sales and marketing system.
A system is a set of things working together as part of an interconnected network. The more complex the connections become, the less effective it will be at producing the desired result.
Most Struggling Course Creators don’t have a system, they have a collection of tactics they’ve cobbled together from various sources. Here’s the problem with tactics – most are not designed to work together.
I know this one course creator who absolutely kills it on Instagram – and when I say killing it – I don’t mean the number of followers she has, I mean how much money she makes from the platform.
She doesn’t have many followers and she also doesn’t get a ton of engagement, but the engagement she DOES get is profitable.
So, WHY is it profitable? Well, it’s profitable for a number of reasons but the MOST IMPORTANT reason she makes so much money from Instagram has absolutely nothing to do with Instagram and everything to do with her SYSTEM.
In the 12 months prior to working with us she had made around $20k from her course, but the 3 months prior were particularly rough. People weren’t buying and she was trying EVERY tactic under the sun – but, nothing was working.
Here’s what happened next.
She dove into Phase one and gave her offer a COMPLETE makeover – positioning, messaging, it was all updated – yet, she didn’t change ANYTHING about her course. It took her a while to watch the videos and complete the workbooks, but she didn’t care because things were CLICKING. She finally began to realize why nobody was buying and the more she worked through our materials, the more clear she was on the TRUE value of her offer.
The second she completed Phase 1 she dove into Phase 2 and immediately began assembling her webinar. It was wild to watch her go through the program so quickly because she was just SO EXCITED to be following a system where everything was designed to work together. All the work she did to clarify her offer in Phase 1 was used to make a webinar in Phase 2 that was COMPLETELY different from any webinar she’d ever done before.
The copy she wrote for the rest of her Profitable Sales Engine™ in Phase 3 was flowing like honey from a hive because it was ALL connected to the work she did in Phase 1 and 2. Phase 4 was a breeze and even though she’s not a “techy” person, our step by step videos and processes made the tech setup a breeze.
Her Profitable Sales Engine™ was killing it on Instagram because for the first time in her business, she was following a simple system and because she was following a simple system, she was able to flourish on every single social media channel she posted to. She setup her Profitable Sale Engine™ on TikTok, YouTube, and most recently she’s using it on LinkedIn.
Again, she does NOT have a big following on any of these platforms, but she gets new followers everyday and a portion of those new followers become customers in just a day or two – simply by running her Profitable Sales Engine™ on autopilot.
Simple scales, complex fails.
If you want to stop struggling and start scaling, then sign up for my free masterclass today. You’ll learn how to sell more courses without launching by keeping things SIMPLE.
I appreciate you being here and tune in next week 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 auto-pilot?
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!
