Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive

147 Mission Possible: The Strategic Path to Course Profitability

• Dr. Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor • Season 3 • Episode 147

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Speaker 1:

Hey, I'm Dr Kate Walker. Welcome to your Tuesday coaching, and the title of this is kind of weird. I said Mission Impossible Make your Courses Profitable. And I probably should have put a question mark at the end of Mission Impossible, because it's not impossible. It's totally possible. So let me get everybody in. Who's in our waiting room? All right, we've got everybody in, welcome, welcome. All right, we've got everybody in, welcome, welcome. Let's see.

Speaker 1:

Yes, we're going to record the meeting and yes, we're going to take some notes. So if you're brand new, I will go over my topic and feel free to chime in. Just know that if you chime in, you will be on the recording. So if you're good with that, then I love it. When you ask questions, or you can also type things into the chat, and it would help if I open my chat. So let me do that. There it is. So type it into the chat, unmute or wait till the end and I will hit pause and then you can ask me anything you like. Remember you don't have to just stay on our topic. But our topic is oh wait, let me fix my microphone. Gosh, I got all kinds of things I'm messing with today. There we go.

Speaker 1:

So the topic is how to make your online course profitable, and that's been the theme this summer, because summer we generally have time, because our client loads slow down, and which gets our brains working. We're thinking, oh gosh, do I need another stream of income? Or maybe you're the person who has a course you've been sitting on for a long time and you're like I've got to get that out. I've got to push this out into the public, and we talked last week about what makes what are some good topics. And you know me, I say start with your customer right. Start with something that you know is gonna sell, and I compared that to what I consider more passion projects. And it's the same thing. If you're writing a book, right, you're going to write a book in a genre that you know sells, or you're going to write something that's closer to you, like your life story. Or maybe and I don't mean you don't have a fascinating life story because you might and it might be wonderful and everybody's going to buy it. Life story because you might and it might be wonderful and everybody's going to buy it. But if you don't start by doing some marketing research, you may end up spending a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy and going down a lot of rabbit holes, so today is continuing that theme.

Speaker 1:

Don't forget, though, members, you guys have a built-in intensive. I'm going to do this more with our membership, because you guys are doing a great job of letting me know what you're interested in. So our Teach Train Get Paid intensive is July 23rd. That's two hours, it's live, it's two CEs. If you can't make it, don't worry, you get the replay as well. Everybody else has to pay, so that's included in your membership.

Speaker 1:

And then everybody. You have a webinar with Jenny Melrose July 17th, where she's going to go in detail into detail about things I've been talking about in the June intensive, where I talked about getting booked solid, and I think I blew everybody's minds because we talked about opt-ins, we talked about newsletters, all of those things. Well, jenny Melrose is my business coach and she's going to talk about that more. And then we've got Kimberly Parker on July 24th, another free webinar, and she is going to help us get our NBCC provider designation, which is a great thing to have if you plan on selling courses across state lines. So those are free for members, but you still got to sign up, just remember with the free experts.

Speaker 1:

So let's move into our topic. So it's not a mission impossible. It is incredibly possible to make your online courses profitable. I am living proof. I see practically zero clients because of my course, the online 40 hour training to become an LPC, lmft or social work supervisor in Texas. In Texas, it's been wonderful. It's allowed me to slow my practice, my clinical practice, down no-transcript.

Speaker 1:

So three things, because you know I love odd numbers. For your online course to be profitable like if you've already done what I told you to do last week and you've done your marketing research now you need to make this easy to find, easy to search and part of a bigger marketing plan. So I've introduced the idea of a funnel to you guys and if you've gone to any sort of marketing coach or marketing anything, you know a funnel is absolutely vital, especially when you combine that concept with the pumpkin plan, which Mike Maklowicz talks about. That book, one of my favorite books, because it talks about this idea of using your things and I'd like to say the things that don't sell. That was our podcast episode last week. You make them breadcrumbs to the big thing that you're going to sell.

Speaker 1:

So making something easy to find on your site should be jarring many of you right now, because I get this question a lot. Should I have a second website? And I'm like, unequivocally yes, absolutely right, and I know you're like. But websites, I mean, tell me, tell me the reason you wouldn't do this right. Are they too expensive? No, can you get the domain name? Yes, right, so setting up something that's easy to find doesn't mean burying it on your clinical site. Now there will be an exception to that when I get to number three.

Speaker 1:

But if your course is not easy to find, you're going to have a problem, and I've faced this. I mean, I've had so many courses and I would have a navigation bar button, that's a drop down menu. Then you got to click another button, then you got to go to a thing and I still have that. But I had to make a decision about okay, what am I going to make easy to find on my site? Hands down, it had to be the 40-hour training. So when you go to my site you can find the 40-hour training not exactly above the fold, but it's pretty close. It's pretty much in the first scroll space. Now I have other courses that are free and again, I'll talk about that in a minute. Those are the free webinars and that is absolutely, in the first view, above the fold.

Speaker 1:

So making it easy to find may mean that you have to get another website, another domain name, so I'll look at me like spitting water everywhere. Okay, the next thing easy to search. So that goes back to our SEO. Right, if you have a clinical website that has been optimized for the people in your practice, the topics that you counsel, then you're trying to give Google hey. By the way, I do this thing over here. That's going to be very inefficient. Do this thing over here? That's going to be very inefficient.

Speaker 1:

So making it easy to search means not only SEO and the Google machine, but also consider YouTube. Right, I mean it's, and I may get a little pushback on this but when you sell a course, really what you're selling is a quiz and a certificate, and I'm talking about asynchronous courses here. So if you already have a training that you've produced and you want to put that video on YouTube, you may say, but Kate, I don't want people to access it for free, well, why not? I mean, if you let them access your course for free, but then you say hey, in order to get the CE for this, you have to come to my website, take the quiz and then I'll give you a certificate for that. Meanwhile, youtube who's like besties with Google is going to be directing traffic to your website Extremely searchable. Seo is a little bit different, but Jenny Melrose can talk more about that Now.

Speaker 1:

Also, and vice versa, you can put these YouTube videos on your website or, if you're like me and you use Podia, podia will host that YouTube video. Now you've got this nice cross-referencing thing going. You've got people finding you on YouTube, clicking over to your website. They're going to your YouTube page and they're like oh look, I just got referred to another video that she made. Oh look, there's another course. So it's a wonderful way to make sure that both search engines are working in your favor. Okay, so here's part of that plan I told you a minute ago, like, if you decide that you're going to not have a dedicated website, well, the way I have found counselors, therapists, doing this really, really well, if they want to incorporate courses into their clinical practice, make this something that you want your clients to take before they ever come see you, so it, or alongside, so it could be.

Speaker 1:

I always use play therapy as an example, because I just think it's amazing If you can have a parent who's on your waiting list, take a course on how to use play therapy, or title the course something like you know, if you don't think you can get in, or gosh, that would be terrible. Something like better than play therapy, right, make it very catchy. You do a course where they have to pay. Then they get to see how you do your work and if they do get in to see you, great. If they don't get in to see you, you have created a raving fan who's going to refer people back to you. And if this sounds familiar, that's because that's exactly the philosophy behind the 10-minute consultation. If you do the 10-minute consultation, right. If you do the 10-minute consultation script, you're okay if they don't book, because what you have done is you have created a raving fan who was so impressed by your ability to help them that they are going to tell friends and neighbors all about you and chances are they'll try to come back and see you themselves.

Speaker 1:

So when you make your course part of a bigger marketing plan, you may not charge sort of the big pumpkin price, right? You may say well, my couple therapy session is actually the big pumpkin here, but my schedule is so tight and I would really love it if my couples could at least have an idea of what Gottman says, or Imago communication styles or what Sue Johnson's you know demon dialogues are all about. So I'm going to make this quick course and it's super. It's much cheaper than my therapy session. But when they grab the course, they have opted in to your newsletter, so they purchased this maybe 20 to $100 course something cheaper than your sessions. But in order to get that course and remember, if you're using a platform like Podia, they just click that button and they're on your email list, especially if you have integrated Podia with something like Kit so it used to be called ConvertKit so they click, they purchase.

Speaker 1:

No, you haven't made a ton of money from the course. But now you have someone who it's better than attraction marketing because they are going to be looking for your newsletter. They're going to be looking for your email that says there's an opening. They're going to be. Oh my gosh, when does their next video come out? This last one was so helpful. You have raving fans and next thing you know, somebody at the school is going to be inviting you to speak, because your videos have become so popular and so helpful in your community. So it's a little bit of a shift, because we're not making the course the primary moneymaker. Your sessions are still the moneymaker, so this brings up another point. I didn't even write this down.

Speaker 1:

Once you decide to build courses, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing, right? Creating a course and you're like I'm going to make this my big pumpkin, I'm going to make this my absolute big moneymaker, and then it flops. You know, you can still do both. Right, you can take that course and chop it up into smaller things. You can take that course and do what I just said make it part of your you know, bigger marketing plan. So you can do a mix of both. It's not like, okay, I got to go out today and buy the domain name for my course site, right, you don't have to do that name for my course site, right, you don't have to do that.

Speaker 1:

The main thing to make courses profitable, though, is to understand it's possibly a moving target, right? You don't know. You're just going to have to know your KPIs. Make sure that you have a number in mind, and I've always used kind of this arbitrary $10,000, right, once you make $10,000 profit not net, not just income, I'm sorry, not just gross net profit then move on to the next project. Right. But if you're doing number three and you're like Kate, I'm not even making a profit on my clinical practice, courses can absolutely help your marketing and then if you see yourself making that $10,000 profit on that session, then you might want to spend more time, make bigger courses, bigger pumpkins out of that. So anybody want to unmute, ask me questions, anybody want to type anything into the chat or I can just hit pause If I can find it there.