The Course Mentors Podcast
Hey there, future course creator!
Ever feel like turning your know-how into an online course is like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded? Well, grab your headphones because "The Course Mentors Podcast" is here to be your secret weapon!
Meet Aimee and Odette (that's us!), your new best friends in the course creation world. We've been in the trenches for over a decade, and for the last five years, we've been rocking the online course space. Now we're here to spill all our secrets in bite-sized, 15-20 minute episodes that'll fit perfectly in your coffee breaks.
No fluff, no filler - just real, actionable advice that'll take you from "um, what's a landing page?" to "holy moly, I just hit six figures!". We're talking everything from crafting your course to marketing it like a pro and building a business that'll have you pinching yourself.
Whether you're dreaming of ditching the 9-to-5 grind, adding a sweet extra income stream, or just want to trade demanding clients for students who think you're the bee's knees - we've got your back.
Think of us as your personal cheerleading squad, but instead of pom-poms, we're armed with proven strategies and a healthy dose of "you've got this!" energy. We're here to give you the straight-up truth (with a side of fun) to help you crush your goals and create that freedom-filled life you've been daydreaming about.
So, ready to turn your expertise into course gold? Tune in to The Course Mentors Podcast. And hey, once you're done implementing our awesome advice, swing by Instagram @thecoursementors and show us what you've created. We can't wait to celebrate your wins!
Let's make some course magic together, shall we? 🎉
The Course Mentors Podcast
Welcome to the Pod - Get to Know Aimee & Odette and Why You Need to Go All-In on a Signature Online Course
Hey there future course creator!
Ever catch yourself daydreaming about turning your expertise into a thriving online business? Well, buckle up, because this week on the very first episode of The Course Mentors podcast, Aimee and Odette are spilling the tea on our wild ride from booked ’n busy business owners to course creators!
We're diving headfirst into the world of signature online courses - you know, that one course that screams "YOU" from the rooftops and keeps your bank account happy.
We're talking about crafting an experience so awesome, your students will be burning down the house with non-stop lightbulb moments.
Fair warning: we get real about the importance of going all-in from day one. Trust us, half-baked attempts are about as satisfying as cold pizza. We've been there, done that, and got the "lesson learned" t-shirt.
Our mission? To help you take those unique superpowers of yours and transform them into a course (and business) that's as remarkable as you are. Because let's face it, the world needs what you've got!
So grab your favourite beverage, find a comfy spot, and tune in. By the end of this episode, you'll be itching to unleash your inner course creator. And psst... stick around for next week's show. We're diving deeper into this crazy journey.
Ready to turn your expertise into empire? Let's do this! 🚀
Welcome to the Online Course School podcast where we talk everything. Online course success.
Speaker 2:I'm Amy Hill.
Speaker 1:And I am Odette Eade.
Speaker 2:And today we're talking about.
Speaker 1:We are going to take this opportunity to intro ourselves. It is episode one and we want to tell you who we are, what we do, why we do it. We're going to get into what a signature course is and why they're so great.
Speaker 2:Okay, hi, I'm Amy Hill. Hello, lovely to meet you. What do you do? I'm one half of the course mentors. I guess I've been in business for about 10 years. I've been in business for about 10 years. I've owned e-commerce businesses. I've owned an agency. I was an interpreter. I've done everything. I started my career as a tutor and a teacher. I've taught Japanese for a really, really long time and we all know what happened in 2020. And that's when I transitioned to teaching and doing my interpreting online, and then that fell into an online course, and now we have one of the world's biggest Japanese courses. It has thousands of students. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:It's the best thing I've ever done in my entire life Easily hands down. It's the coolest thing ever. That sort of led me into the online course world, obviously, and now I'm really. I'm here, I'm loving it and I'm helping other women do the same thing, and it's the best thing.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I can say that's the best thing a million times. It's the best thing. I am Odette, I am the other half of the course, mentors, and I started life my business life probably about 10 years ago as well. I was in event management. That's why I love logistics and processes so much, but most of my work has been in actually like design based industries so fashion and floristry, event floristry. So I ran a company. We did event floristry for big weddings, huge events, that kind of thing. What I actually really loved was not the using my hands making things, the design stuff. I really loved the backend. Whenever I could make a website or improve a sales process or all of the backend stuff is what I absolutely loved. So online courses for me have meant that I can have design as something I do, as a hobby, something I do on the side, but business is booming with online courses.
Speaker 2:I feel like for you it became a job because you were doing it as a job and selling your. What you're passionate about is a double-edged sword, and I feel like for you it became work and it wasn't enjoyable anymore and then you started to kind of hate it, and it's only been in the last couple of years, since we've had our online courses, that you've gone back into doing that stuff and loving it again it's because it's my like, that's my heart and soul, you know, but my brain is the business side of things, so I like using my brain every day, whereas heart and soul is like that's for the weekends, you know and I I'm the same, like I was, you know, doing Japanese for a long time, interpreting and tutoring and teaching it and running classes, and I was doing that every day.
Speaker 2:and I was doing that because it started off as my passion, which was learning Japanese originally, but it became less fun the more I had to schedule it into a calendar and now that I'm doing it as an online course, I get to enjoy it again 100% and both things.
Speaker 1:what we have in common is they have a ceiling. You cannot teach more Japanese. You cannot take on more clients than you have in the day. I have a cap to how many bags I can make, how many flowers I can arrange. My biggest day ever was a 20-hour day, when I was in floristry. I don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:And now we get all the best parts of it. I think online courses are the best parts of our passion because we get to do it enough and then we get to just see light bulb moments like the whole job is just seeing people's light bulbs go off. That's the job. But we don't actually have to do like when I was a teacher in the classroom right, I loved, I was addicted to going in, watching people understand stuff and then, like getting it for the first time, I'll be like, yeah, it's so good, so so good. And then I was really scared that with online courses I was going to miss that. But I don't. I don't because I have a signature course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's get into what a signature course actually is, because it's different to an online course. Let's talk about it. So tell me, amy, what is a signature online course?
Speaker 2:So a signature online course is an online course plus plus. An online course that is so good, that is so transformative, that is so complete that you can build an entire business and a brand around it and then actually do what you want to do from an online course, which is stop working with clients, get out of the day-to-day and actually enjoy living and working in your passion again. So what we don't?
Speaker 1:do? We don't do half a thing. We don't do an online course that isn't really committing. You know, it's not getting that person from the start of where they're at to what we call the Z. We take everybody from A to Z in a signature online course. We don't half commit and we don't make half a thing.
Speaker 1:Like Amy said, we focus on one big. What we don't do is mini courses, is masterminds, membership subscriptions, all of those sort of half committed things. There's a place for those, absolutely Not saying that you can't do them. And we can do them. Obviously, if you can do a huge signature online course that takes someone from A to Z, you can do a mini course in your sleep. But what we don't do is we don't half commit. We make an excellent product that encapsulates the one thing that you love about your work. You put that into an online course. You choose who you're going to sell to, who you're going to work with all day long, and that's what we want to do. We don't want to half commit. We want to make something awesome that we can then actually build something around.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, we've tested everything in the online course. I mean, we have our own courses, right. So before we came to mentorship, we have tested every single thing in the entire world. We've done launches. We've done evergreen campaigns.
Speaker 2:You started with an ebook. I did start with an ebook. Yeah, it's embarrassing in hindsight, but it was a great lesson to learn. I don't regret doing it at all, but I did. I started with like kind of like a half ebook textbook nonsense thing. We've done mini videos. We've done mini courses which were like intro courses to our main course. We've tried that too. We've tried big, large-scale launch campaigns. We've done challenge rounds of our courses. We've done every single thing that you can possibly imagine. We've had guest speakers, everything. We've done it all. If I could draw a line under every single thing that I've ever done and take one lesson away from everything, it's that all of that was just superfluous crap. The only thing I needed was to solve people's problem. That was it. I just needed to do one thing well and I get people fluent in Japanese. That's what I do and I just need to do that. I don't need to do that with workshops, mini classes, this, this and the other thing I need to do it with one sick course.
Speaker 1:What those things are are just lead magnets to your course. The main reason we do what we do and we teach signature courses and insist that you make a signature course is because they can change your life. They can demand a high ticket because they actually work, taking someone from where they are to where you want them to be.
Speaker 2:And when you can get someone all the way from A to Z, that's when you can actually change their life. That's when they tell people about it. That's when people purchase without having to think about it a lot. This is when we see the things that you actually want out of an online course to replace your income, to get out of client work, to close down your calendar. That's what you can achieve in online courses.
Speaker 1:If you fully commit, you can actually change your own life and other people's. So that's why we're so insistent on a signature course, not oh, maybe you could do this, maybe you could do that. We've seen people come to us and they are unsure. They're then, basically they're safe. You know they're not feeling like they want to put their all in because if I don't fully commit, then I can't fully fail. Most people come to us they have this like, have huge passion for what they do, and we can see, oh my God, this can be the most like valuable thing. It's so widely sellable all over the world. They don't understand how valuable what they do is if they actually just fully commit.
Speaker 2:That's exactly where I was when I did the ebook. Yeah, it was safe. I was in client work, right, and I just thought, if I sell two of these a week, that's 200 bucks a week. That means I can stop working Fridays. That was where my limit was, where I thought what I could achieve, and then it wasn't until I actually built Japanese in 12 and then I started selling them. I feel like I fluked it so bad, but I built that program. I just had a blind vision that it was going to work.
Speaker 1:You know, I just thought, if I you tried, though, like you had tried, you know, in-person tutoring. You tried an e-book, you know.
Speaker 2:And I was sold out. You know, and I thought you know, I just feel like this is going to work If I just record these videos. I just feel like people are going to purchase this. And the first day that I hit publish after months and months and months of working on the materials and the videos the first day that I hit, publish immediately I had five sales in the first hour and each sale was 500 bucks to me and I just sat on the bathroom floor crying Like I just cried and I called you and I called my husband and I just cried and that was such a life-changing moment. But it's because I committed right, it's because I went all the way, it's because I committed right, it's because I went all the way.
Speaker 1:It's because I 86ed that workbook yeah, essentially another Japanese textbook, because of course, that's what you think you need to do. How do you learn a language? No, you pick up a textbook.
Speaker 2:And as soon as I got rid of it and as soon as I just committed, I did the videos, I did the works. The past just going hard on a blind vision that I didn't even know it was going to work or not.
Speaker 1:Now people come to us and, oh man, just having to convince people that what they do is so valuable and if, just given the right direction, that you can turn it into the thousands and thousands of dollars, I feel like sometimes I'm putting my head up against a brick wall. Like babe commit, you don't understand how unique this is but it does.
Speaker 2:It feels like such a huge task to create, to commit to creating an online course, right, because it's all this videos, it's all this worksheets. It's blind faith, but if you know what you're talking about and you're passionate about it, blind faith is all you need and the thing is, I mean you don't have to change someone's life.
Speaker 1:You got to give them a great experience. You know we have people in our course. They do dog training. You know that's not changing someone's forever or changing people's behavior or their mindset. You know that's the first thing you think of. With an online course. You might think coaches and things the vast majority of people who come through they have just really niche things that are going to help people, not necessarily change their entire life. But you know, we have a amazing lady on our in our Q&A this morning. She's doing a year-long course on container gardening and it is going to be amazing for people. It's not life and death, you know, but you have to give them a great experience.
Speaker 2:Everything you know. She's putting every single thing that she knows about container gardening into her course. That's what we're saying. It's a full year course, season by season. It's about committing. It's about committing and then encapsulating everything you know into your signature.
Speaker 1:So that then you can build a business around it. Then you can say this is what I do. That's when you can direct people from your mini course or your mastermind or any of those little mini half commit products, you'd point them to your signature course, where the money is at. It just annoys me because I see so many ads or like people touting you have to make a mini course before you make your course. No, you don't touting, you have to make a mini course before you make your course. No, you don't. No, you need to have something to direct people to. Otherwise, you have a mini course worth $20. Even if you sell 100 of them, you haven't made money. So, in a nutshell, in a nutshell, why do we not do online courses? Why do we do signature online courses?
Speaker 2:We do signature courses because we believe that you have the knowledge to turn what you do best into something incredible, into something that is worth a business and a brand, not something little, not something that gets half a result. We believe that you have the knowledge, the intelligence to turn something to what you do into something incredible. Agree.
Speaker 1:That's right. It's about not half committing, it's about going all in from the start so you're not wasting time, you're not getting demotivated, and it's about understanding what it is you actually want to do, doing the thing, doing it really bloody well. So we hope that gave you a bit of an intro into Amy and Odette, the course mentors.
Speaker 2:What we do and why we bang on so much about signature courses and what we're here to do which ultimately is change people's lives.
Speaker 1:Get your life changed with an online course, by going all in.
Speaker 2:It was so nice to meet you guys. If you found this helpful or if you found this insightful in any way, give us a review, but otherwise we'll see you next week for episode two, where we're going to get into the meat and potatoes yeah, can't wait.