Flipping the Script: Creating a Sales Page Before Launching Your Online Course

Let's take a moment to flip the script, shall we?

Ever considered creating your sales page before everything else when you're marketing your online course? I'm Jess, your guide on this unconventional yet effective route to strategically plan your course promotion.

As we walk through the episode, I'll shed light on the hidden power of a well-crafted sales page. One that serves as your comprehensive source document encompassing key details about your course like positioning, messaging, unique philosophies, and the life-altering transformation your course promises.

As we move forward, we'll explore how this master document can echo through every piece of content you create, be it emails, blogs, or more. Understand why it's crucial to articulate methodologies, elements included in the course, and how to strike a chord with your ideal client.

Dive into my unique perspectives on course marketing and the rationale behind my stand on live launching before evergreening. By the end of our chat, I promise you'll view your sales page in a different light, equipped with tools that help you harness its potential for your course marketing and launch.

So, ready to disrupt the status quo and skyrocket your course sales? Let's get started!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you've ever wondered which asset you should create first when selling your course, you definitely want to stay tuned, and this one might surprise you what change becomes possible when 100,000 people are impacted by your work? This question came to me one day, and I have been working to find the answer ever since. Hi, I'm Jess, and I help online course creators amplify their influence and create a movement with their message, and on this podcast, I am sharing the simple strategies and systems to help you impact more people with your programs so you can create quantum growth in your industry. You are listening to the Quantum Course Creator podcast. Hey there, quantum Course Creator. Welcome back to the podcast. Jess here, and I am so excited to talk about this topic.

Speaker 1: 0:47

Today, I am sharing one of the things that I really think will help you when it comes to creating your marketing and selling your online course, and when you have all of these various things that you want to create different assets, content pieces, emails, blogs, etc. It can be hard to know which one to start with first, and so, in today's episode, I'm going to break down what I think should be the first asset you should create of your course marketing, and exactly why, and so you may be thinking like, oh, you need to start creating content first, or you should write out your offer first, or any of these various things, but I think that the number one thing that you should create for your course in regards to marketing, the first thing should be your sales page. Now you may be thinking why would you start with your sales page? That kind of seems like the last thing you would create going into a launch, and a lot of people do teach it this way. However, I have found that your sales page, if you create it first, is actually one of the most valuable assets when it comes to creating all of the other content for your offer. And in today's episode, I'm going to really break down why you should create your sales page first, how to really leverage it in the rest of your content, and then how to maximize that asset as you go into whatever kind of sales promotion you are planning on going into. So, like I said, I believe that the first thing that you should create for your course, before the emails, before content, before anything else, is the sales page, and here's why your sales page is like the one sheet for your offer and messaging when you're putting together a sales page.

Speaker 1: 2:36

You have to put everything on there. You have to have all of the details. It needs to be clear who you're talking to. It needs to be clear the problem that you solve. It needs to be clear how you're positioning your offer, the transformation that people will receive. You have to describe your philosophies, your methodologies. You have to break down every single module and all of the things that are included. Right, there is so much information on a sales page that why not put that all together first, so that you don't have to recreate all of these things every time? You go to create a piece of content, right, and so by creating this like one sheet document in your sales page, then you can go and pull all of the other information from that sales page to create all of the other things, like your emails, your content, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 3:30

So the first thing that you really want to do when you're building out your sales page is you want to nail down the positioning and the messaging. So obviously, your sales page is speaking to your ideal client and positioning your offer as the best solution to their problem, or is the best way to learn how to get the transformation or the outcome that they desire, and so that really comes down to your positioning and your messaging. And so, on your sales page, when you are creating this conversation about what your offer is, who it helps, why they need it. That's really a good opportunity for you to nail down your philosophies, your unique angles and the transformation and ripple effect of your offer. So your philosophies are your unique ways of thinking about things. They're your unique, different than the industry norm beliefs that you are going to instill in your clients when they join your program. It's what makes you stand out when you really highlight how you think about things differently. And this is a really powerful part of messaging in a sales page because it helps people identify with you and how you think and they want to believe the things that you believe. That's why they're there. They don't currently or they aren't currently operating from those beliefs. So when you can really clarify your philosophies and why you do things the way you do it and why you believe the things that you believe, that not only makes your sales page stronger, but it really gives you a place to hone in on those philosophies so you can then turn that into other content.

Speaker 1: 5:06

The second thing in that is your unique angles, the different beliefs and polarizing beliefs that you have that you can call out specifically. So, for example, I don't believe that you should go straight to Evergreen. I think that you should live launch and then Evergreen is something that's already working. That's a unique angle. There's a lot of people who tell you you can go Evergreen without ever launching, and I disagree with that. So a unique angle in my business is that you should go live or do a live launch before you go Evergreen. Another unique angle is that you should create your sales page first. So these are the different things that you can start to gather and really these unique talking points, and then that all turns into content. So, for example, this unique angle of you should create your sales page first is a content angle that I'm now creating into content via a podcast, and then I can take this podcast and turn that into other content as well. But that's a really good place. Your sales page is a great place to really identify and pull out these unique angles that are going to really resonate with the person reading your sales page. Who is your ideal client?

Speaker 1: 6:14

And the third thing that you really want to have clarity on on your sales page. That then has this powerful effect in your content is the transformation and the ripple effect. So your course should have some kind of clear transformation, some kind of problem that is solved, some kind of point A to point B, something where people are receiving some kind of transformation, whether it's like a health transformation or learning a platform or developing a skill or whatever it is right, like creating a new hobby, anything like that. There is a before and an after in this mind and the transformation is what they want. They are buying the outcome that you are promising and so you want to or I guess so you really want to focus on how your offer creates that outcome and positioning that on your sales page and then positioning that in all the other content, because it's all in this like one source document.

Speaker 1: 7:12

And the other thing that you really want to focus on outside of, like the tangible transformation, is the ripple effect, right? Oftentimes people get stuck in marketing to the ripple effect and they forget the actual transformation, and the ripple effect is why people want that transformation, right? So, for example, maybe you have a course on learning how to play the guitar. The transformation is I will teach you how to like play five songs on the guitar in six weeks or whatever, and the ripple effect of that is that you can express yourself through music, you can develop your skills as a musician, you can learn how, like you can have all of these other ripple effects. You have passion for something, you have a new hobby, whatever the reason why they want to learn how to play the guitar right, so the transformation is that they will learn how to play the guitar. The ripple effect is why they want to learn how to play the guitar, and you'll want to tap into those whys as well in your messaging and positioning on your sales page and therefore in your content. Because people make decisions, why they want the thing, but they also need to know, like, what you are actually going to teach them. If you're only focusing your messaging on ripple effects and not the actual transformation, you're going to have a hard time really clarifying what it is that you're teaching and helping people do, and so that's why you want to have both, so that.

Speaker 1: 8:37

So really building out your sales page first helps you nail down your positioning in your messaging. The next reason why you should build your sales page first is it's one place to flesh out all of the details of your offer, especially on your sales page. You want to tell people what comes in the box, right? What is included? What will they learn? What are you covering? What resources are you giving them All of these things? So this is really an opportunity to get that all out in one place and again, this makes it so much easier to create content on all of these various things.

Speaker 1: 9:11

So the first thing you want to really flesh out on your sales page is your methodologies. So you have your philosophies, which is how you think about things, and then your methodology is how you do things. These are your own unique processes. These are your like acronyms or different steps that you've created your own frameworks and things like that. That is your methodology how you help them do it, and so you can get really clear on the different ways that you help people do things.

Speaker 1: 9:41

I recommend, for every different topic, or like core concepts that you teach inside of your program, that you have some kind of process or methodology to it. People's brains work in methodologies, right. We learn things better when there's a prescribed set of steps. That is the same process over and over and over again. So if you can create a systematized process and then turn that into a methodology for every major like core concept in your program. People will not only learn it better, but they will be able to repeat it in whatever they're trying to do, and so you really want to nail down and articulate well, what are your methodologies, what are the ways that you teach people how to do things?

Speaker 1: 10:26

So, for example, let's go back to the guitar idea, though I will full disclosure, I don't know how to play the guitar. I took a guitar class in high school, so I don't know why I'm using this as an example, but there's one on the wall and that's why I'm talking about it. So maybe the process that you have for learning the finger positioning is you look at it on a chart and then you place your fingers on the strings and then you hear the sound, and that's your process. So it's like look place, strum, or look place, hear, and that is how you learn the new finger positioning. You identify with what it looks like on the chart, you put your fingers in the position and then you hear it while your fingers are in that position, and that helps you learn the chord or whatever. So that would be a process or a methodology for that part of learning how to play the guitar, and so you can tell people that you'll help them learn the chords with this simple process that helps your brain identify the different finger positioning, and so when you create a piece of content, you can say like, are you not sure how you're going to remember all of the different chords? I have a process that will teach you this and this is why it works and this is how we do it Right, and so it just gives you an opportunity to create more content based on that methodology and have one clear place. So people who are going to your sales page know oh awesome, she's going to teach me her one, two, three process of how to remember chord progressions or whatever.

Speaker 1: 11:57

The next thing that you really want to highlight on your sales page is your processes. And so how? Like? Very similar to a methodology like how you're going to teach people how to do things. These are all really important things to have on your sales page so that people have all the information that they need to make an informed decision to purchase your program. But because all of this is on your sales page, you can then purpose it into content in various different ways and creating content around your processes is what's going to help people identify you as an expert in your subject, as well as see how you do things differently than other people, because if you've developed your own systems and processes to getting a certain result, you can then highlight those things and show show people how you stand out from the alternatives and how other people are teaching things.

Speaker 1: 12:49

And then the third thing that you really want to be clear on is the different topics that are discussed in every module. Now, you don't necessarily have to list out the name of every single lesson inside of every single module, but what I like to do on a sales page is give a summary and then give bullet points of the key skills or beliefs or knowledge that they will learn in that module. So let's say, module two of how to play the guitar is learning chord progressions. I don't know why I'm using this example I do not have enough knowledge in this subject, but we're going with it. And so I would say, in this module, you will learn the various chord progressions to take your music from single strings to beautiful chords, please forgive me. And then you would say in this lesson you will learn how to read chord progressions on sheet music, how to master finger positioning my simple three step process for remembering chords, etc. So you're like listing out the different things that they will learn inside that module, without necessarily listing out the video topics of every single video. Here's why this is important.

Speaker 1: 14:09

When somebody is looking to purchase a program, they likely have a very specific gap in mind. So you may think that, because I keep talking about it, when playing a guitar, a pain point for me might have been learning the different chords and remembering the different chords, and so if I'm somebody who's looking to purchase a course on this, I would be looking to make sure that that specific question is addressed and answered inside the program, and so if you don't have this on your sales page, they're not going to know that you answered that question specifically, and so they may turn to a different program that does highlight that they teach that Even if you do teach it, they won't know if it's not on the sales page, and so having that level of clarity on your sales page will help people make an informed decision about oh okay, this does answer my specific question or a specific gap that I have in relation to this transformation that I'm trying to achieve, and the other thing is that, again, all of those topics are topics for content. Like, you can create an email, for example, about like, do you teach me how to read sheet music? Yes, inside this program, we will teach you how to read sheet music, even if you have no idea how to read sheet music. Right, and I think that that's a really important thing because it answers an objection that somebody may have or a big question that they have about if it's going to be addressed inside the program, and gives you an opportunity to highlight how you will teach them and why your way of doing it is the most effective way to do that thing.

Speaker 1: 15:40

So the first thing you want to talk, the first thing we talked about, was nailing the positioning and the messaging for your offer and how to use that to create more content. The second was fleshing out all of the specific details of your offer, which should obviously be on the sales page, and then the third thing is using it as source material when creating other content. So now you've created this one sheet document of all of the things in your sales page, how do you use it to create more content, which I've been going over as I go through each of these examples. But the first thing or like what you really can do then is then pull directly from your sales page as the core document for your offer. So when you are listing out all of the different topics for content, for emails, for podcasts, for speaking on other people's podcasts, all of the messaging around your offer, you can pull all of that directly from your sales page and it gives you almost an infinite bank of content topics. So you never have to sit and think like, oh man, I have no idea what to write an email about today, or oh gosh, I want to create a real, but I have no idea what to talk about. So by going to your sales page and reading through the details of your offer and all of the things that you've outlined there, it gives you a place to pull from. So you have, like this ready made content document that you can just pull directly from when creating content. And what's really great about this is that it makes all of your messaging congruent.

Speaker 1: 17:09

One of the number one reasons why people don't buy things is because the messaging is incongruent. If you have a top like, if you have a post on social media about a specific topic and then it leads to the sales page that is not directly covered in the program. That causes an incongruency that makes somebody's brain stop thinking about something in that moment. Right, it creates this dissonance in their brain that makes them uncertain about that purchasing decision. And so when you are creating content from a source document, you know that that content all leads back to that source document, and that source document is your core conversion document for sales. And so when everything lines up, everything is congruent and it creates a much smoother sales process for your ideal client.

Speaker 1: 17:57

And here's the other really cool thing you should have content specifically about your offer that also has the call to action to check out your sales page. And when you create your sales page first, early on in your launch runway or in the process leading up to your launch, you can start driving traffic to that sales page. This has so many benefits that you may be overlooking. By creating your sales page last, or like right before a cart open, when your sales page is published pre launch, people can get all of the details that they need before they have to decide to buy the program. When you rush people's purchasing decisions, that's when people stay on the fence and don't make a decision, or they make a decision out of FOMO, because you have like a crazy countdown timer and they feel like they have to make a rush decision, and so they don't feel like they're making a fully informed decision.

Speaker 1: 18:53

By giving people an opportunity to look at the sales page weeks in advance and really get all of the details, learn more about your offer, listen to and read your philosophies and your angles and your like ripple effects and methodologies and processes, they become so enveloped in how you're going to help them. They're already invested in getting that solution before you ever make the offer, and so when they can see your sales page ahead of time, it's not a surprise when it comes time to purchase and they can be even closer to making that purchasing decision, because none of this information is new for them. And what's really important here is that you list the price. It's so important that you tell people ahead of time how much your offer will be when they can purchase it, so that they can prepare themselves. They can get like the space on their credit card, they can save up the money, they can make the money, they can do whatever they need to do with their own personal finances and be able to be in the position to make that purchase when the time comes. And so, by listing the price and listing the different offers, people can make a more informed purchasing decision and then ultimately purchase when it's time.

Speaker 1: 20:05

And what's really cool is that you can put all of this information on the sales page. But then, instead of having, like, the purchasing button or the checkout button, you can have a wait list, and so people who go through the whole thing and want to be the first to find out when the door is open, they can put their name on a wait list, and so they aren't able to purchase the program, but they can get early bonuses or access by putting themselves on a wait list. And on the sales page you can even list like make sure that, like, doors are opening again on October 21st, make sure to join the wait list to be the first to find out and to get an exclusive wait list bonus. Or like our next webinar is on this date, make sure to join the wait list to get access to an exclusive webinar bonus or whatever you're offering as an incentive. And so that gives people not only something to expect, like, okay, october 21st, I have to, like, that's when I'm going to buy this program.

Speaker 1: 20:57

They can start getting ready for that purchasing decision now and then, when it comes, then they're ready. They don't even need the webinar, right? They've already become sold on it because your content has been clear, has highlighted all of the important parts of the purchasing decision, and they've already read the sales page and they already know that this is what they wanna purchase, and so they are just marking their calendars for when they can make that purchase and they'll be able to do it in a much faster way because they're already thinking about it and then, like you'll capture them on a waitlist so that it's time, like when the time comes, you can open the doors to them and launch to those people specifically. Of course, if you have an ever-enrolling model, this is also an opportunity to just have a checkout button and then also give people an opportunity to watch a sales mechanism if they need to, or anything else that you wanna do in this process. But if you have an ever-enrolling program, just having the purchase button on the sales page is completely appropriate.

Speaker 1: 21:55

So, to recap, I think that you should create your sales page first when you're creating any content for a new offer, whether you're launching now or in the future, or if you have an ever-enrolling model, and the reason is is that you have this one source document with all the information there, so that you can pull from that to create content that is congruent.

Speaker 1: 22:16

You know that you have fleshed out all of the details into one place and you can send traffic to it ahead of the launch to start getting a waitlist and to start building anticipation and interest for the next time you launch or drive people directly into the program. So I hope that this was helpful. I hope that maybe you've shifted your thoughts or started to think a little bit more about how to leverage a sales page better in your offer and in your launches, and I hope that you're starting to think about how you can build your sales page earlier so you can leverage it earlier and more in future promotions. So I hope that this was helpful. If it was, definitely, let me know on Instagram at Quantum Course Creator and we can connect over there and I will see you in my next episode, music.