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This is the fearless female collective a podcast for aspiring entrepreneurs to launch and build a business while fearlessly, mastering your mindset to create a life and business you love.
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Hello and welcome. My name is Nicole Davidson. The founder here at fearless female collective and a really big. Welcome. This is the very first episode of the fearless female collective podcast. In this episode, we are going to talk about pre-launch strategies that you can do that are going to help improve the success of your launch for your course or your membership program. So if you're out there thinking that you are going to launch a course, a digital product or a membership program, then you are obviously going to be wanting that to be successful. However, one of the things that I have seen with a lot of different people and myself included that I didn't allow enough time in terms of the pre-launch with my course, for the actual launch to be as successful as it could have been. What I would recommend is, and for you, it's so beneficial for your business to be able to have a pre-launch strategy in place that is going to really help drive interest.
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And so by the time you get to the point of launching your course or your market membership program, that you are going to have people ready and waiting to purchase. So if you're in that process of planning at the moment, and you know, that you do want to launch a course, what I would recommend is to allow a four to six week pre-launch timeline. So in terms of, you're not just going to be launching, you know, tomorrow, and then hoping for the best you are going to be quite strategic to, with what you're doing and really starting to sort of build your audience and warm that audience up so that when you launch in four to six week’s time, you could even be a little bit longer if particularly if you are just starting out, I could, you could even allow three months and then really just start talking about the topics that are going to be covered within your program.
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The best thing about having a pre-launch marketing strategy is that it doesn't have to be complicated. You can make this as simple as you like. You don't want to go down the road of really overthinking your pre-launch strategy and building it up in your head to the point where that you don't actually do anything at all. That's not the idea of this. The pre-launch is really just to help you create a little bit of a buzz around the course so that your customers or that your audience knows that there is something coming from you. It is also going to give you a little bit of an opportunity in the lead up to your launch to get to know more about your customer's needs. What happens when you are releasing content and you're creating sort of information that is based loosely around your course or your program, that people will start to interact with that content.
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You can really get to know exactly what their problems are and where they need help. This is really going to help you when you are then launching, because you're going to know a lot more about your customers themselves. You're going to know any reservations that they have. You will also know the things that they're wanting to learn more so you can really build that and customize your program as people go. And it's also going to help you validate your course idea by doing the pre-launch strategy. What we're going to do is quickly dive into how to create a pre-launch strategy from scratch. The very first thing that you would like to, the very first thing that you're going to want to do is to start building your audience. Now, this could be in a couple of different ways. The very first one that I would recommend that you start building on is your email list.
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Secondly, would be your social media. So the reason why I would recommend email first is because once people subscribe, you can market to them all the time. And email marketing has a much higher return on investment than what social media does. However, social media is a really, really great way to generate interest. You can then use your social media to generate interest in joining your email list as well, ways to generate interest, um, particularly on your social media would be to share some behind the scenes sneak peek. So you could, uh, start talking about what you are doing in the background, talking about your program, that's coming up, showing photos of you, creating content, showing photos of you, sort of creating any marketing, talking about, you know, doing lives on social media, where you are talking in detail around the topics that you are going to be teaching through your course, and the lives are really great in that.
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Uh, you can then connect with people directly. They can see you, they can really start to build trust. They can ask questions in real time as well, which is really gonna be helpful. Again, that's gonna really help you feed into that, knowing your audience and knowing their reservations and the questions that they have around your course. So I would recommend doing that as well in the lead up a third way that I would recommend to build your audience or, and also, which is going to really help build that email list is by creating blog articles that are loosely around the topics that you're going to cover again, in the course, this way, you can have this as content. That's going to be going out to your email list. And it's really going to be talking about the real basics of what is going to be happening within your course or program.
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And you can slowly start using that to mention that you have this program that is coming up and that they can keep an eye out for more information as they're going along. So step two follows through from the audience is to really create and grow your email list. Email marketing is going to play a really big role in your launch for your program. And so to do that, you really want to be warming your list up first. You don't want to start with a cold list where you haven't really developed much of a relationship, and then you just start selling to these people. That's really not going to help the take up of your course at all. And it's going to also increase people unsubscribing, and there's nothing wrong with people unsubscribing. It is part of email marketing. However, you really wanted warm everyone up prior to selling to them.
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You don't even need to have a huge list. However, it definitely helps. So having a really good lead magnet in place where people can subscribe for free and get a hold of your lead magnet is really going to help. And it's really recommended that your lead magnet will flow into the bigger program that you have. So for an example, we have our create our eCourse bundle, and that includes quite a few different templates to help people get started with creating their own eco. This flows into our larger product called create your eCourse, where we actually walk people through the steps to creating their online course. So the lead magnet is if they really want Dey and they want to just sort of know a really sort of decent blueprint on how to create the course. Whereas the program itself is going to go into details about marketing, about launching about your community.
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So it's a lot more of a bigger program, but it makes sense for the lead magnet to float into that co particular course, you can build your email list, uh, through a different couple of different ways. You can go into Facebook groups, you can post where they allow you to post links to your freebie. Or you can go down the road of doing something that is Facebook advertising, where you are paying to get those leads coming into your email list. Then as you're creating and growing this list, you wanna make sure that you are nurturing and emailing this list regularly. I would recommend at least once a week, if not two times per week in the lead up to a launch, but you wanna make sure that the content that you're sharing is really valuable. You don't want to start frustrating people in the lead up to the launch.
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So really helping them, you know, you can create like different freebies that like are really going to help them in the lead up. You know, if you are writing the blogs or if you have a podcast, you know, sharing those types of things, providing them with helpful resources that can help them in the area that your program is. Another thing that I would really make recommend doing prior to launching your course is to actively reach out to podcasts or YouTube channels and see if you could get onto their podcast or their YouTube channel, and they can interview you around the topics and you can then discuss the, either your freebie, or you can talk about the course that's coming up. So that's a really great, great way for some exposure for you to really get people, to learn who you are, especially if you have a small audience podcast work amazingly well to sort of use another
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Entrepreneurs podcasts to really build your profile. Uh, you'll find the lot of people do this. Like a lot of say Amy Porterfield, you'll see Stu McLaren, James Wedmore. They all seem to appear on other entrepreneur programs prior to their really big course launch. And this is a really, really great way. It's very successful because you're not only building your own audience by doing the other strategies, you're then creating new people to come into your audience by utilizing their audience as well. So you'd wanna pick, make sure that you're picking people that are where your ideal customers are going to be. So you're not just picking, you know, a podcast that's completely unrelated to what you do. You wanna make sure that these people are going to have an audience now that helps them. They're able to then provide great content to their audience. And it also then helps you build your own audience too. So it's a really, really great way to do that as well. A final way to really build up
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A final way to really build up to your launch could be to create a free challenge or hold a workshop or a webinar, depending on how you wanna do this. Uh, one of the things that I have found really useful, and one of the things that I see a lot of people doing quite successfully are doing really quick, short challenges. So a couple of day challenges, and again, very similar to your lead magnet. You want the challenge to be sort of a bit of a taster into your course. And then from there, that's going to sort of really launch into your overall course and program launch. It's such a really good way to warm that audience up again and get them to really get to know you prior to signing up to the launch. And again, it really flows into that getting to know your audience so that when you are launching, you have people ready and waiting to start your course.
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So we have just covered off a whole heap of different ideas that you can do in turn in your pre-launch prior to launching your program, these are really gonna help you warm that audience up. And in the meantime, while you are going, you're going to be using this time to really validate your idea and creating any of your marketing materials that you need to have in place. This could be your sales page, any emails that you need to send out through your launch, you wanna make sure that you're really, really organized prior to launching, because it's going to make you feel a lot more settled when you do launch the best thing about having these kind of things in place is as you're going through. Pre-launch like I said, you're going to really learn a lot about your audience, and that's gonna give you time that if you need to, that you can pivot and make changes to your overall launch as you're going rather than sort of needing to do things last minute.
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Now, obviously when, when you're launching things happen, you always need to be prepared to make changes at the very last minute that just happens. It's part of launching courses. It happens to all of, all of us. Um, it's happened to me. It's happened to all of the really big people, ha that have a lot of success within courses. So don't worry too much about that. The final thing that I would recommend doing in this lead up to the course is really trying to work on that initial first week. There, there can be arguments for whether you create the content first or whether you pre-sell your course. Now, I like to do a little bit of a combination of this. I find it quite stressful to pre-sale and not have anything in place. I just, it's the type of person that I am. I find that really hard to do.
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So what I like to do is actually have the first week ready to go. I also don't want create the entire course. And then I've done this before, where I've created the course, and then I've just sat on launching and I've, you know, taken my time to launching and things like that. And then, you know, I've had to rerecord videos because the timeline has just not worked out. So what I do recommend in that lead up time in that four to six to eight weeks that you are pre-launching is to just have that initial course outline, making sure you're really clear on that. And then if you are the type of person like me, just making sure that you have that very first week created and ready to go so that if people do subscribe, you are always one week ahead of the process. Thank you so much for listening today.
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I hope that you have found this really useful. If you are new to the podcast, I would love if you could hit subscribe on your preferred streaming platform, and then you'll be notified of any upcoming episodes that we launch that we release. And in the meantime, if you are looking to really learn more about course creation, you can find our course creation starter kit at https://fearlessfemalecollective.com/bundle. And within this, you are going to get our course creation, blueprint, our course creation checklist, a module planner, and a module creation tracker spreadsheet. This is really gonna kickstart your course creation journey. It's absolutely free, and you can get that from the website. You can also find me on Instagram, instagram.com/fearlessfemalecollective. Or you can find me on Facebook at the same name. I will see you. I hope that you have an amazing week and I will see you in the next episode B for now.