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
The 'I Need More Followers' Lie That's Keeping You Stuck
Stuck in the "I need more followers" trap? Waiting to hit that magical 10K follower list before launching your course? Time for a reality check! In this myth-busting episode, we're calling out one of the biggest lies in the course creation industry: that you need a massive following to succeed.
Think about it - do restaurants wait for 10,000 Instagram followers before opening their doors? Neither should you! We're exposing why this toxic myth persists (spoiler: it's making certain people a lot of money off your insecurities) and showing you a better way forward.
In This Episode:
- Why the "10K followers first" rule is complete nonsense
- How to launch successfully with a small, engaged audience
- Why your course should drive your content (not the other way around)
- Real examples of profitable courses launched to tiny audiences
- How to stop letting follower count hold you hostage
If you're tired of feeling like you need to win a popularity contest before launching your course, this episode is your permission slip to start now. Because at the end of the day, it's the transformation you deliver - not your follower count - that matters.
🎧 Ready to break free from the follower trap? Hit play and let's bust this myth 🚀
Want to create your own 6-figure+ course? Apply to join Online Course School https://thecoursementors.com/application
Got questions or want more free content? Follow us at https://www.instagram.com/thecoursementors/
Catch us every Wednesday for your weekly dose of course creation wisdom. Got questions or loving the show? Let us know on IG @thecoursementors. For more on our courses and mentorship, check out Online Course School's website https://thecoursementors.com/application.
Welcome to the Course Mentors podcast. I'm Odette, I'm Amy. Today we have a myth busting episode where we bust a big old myth from the online course industry that may be holding you back from starting your online course. This is a big one and you know before you even get into it. I'm so excited. I can't wait to talk about this. I am excited about this one. It is probably the biggest.
Speaker 2:We'll do a whole episode about this. Probably, we'll probably do 17,000 episodes about it and never stop talking about it, because it's the biggest one. I think it's the one that just like holds everybody back, everybody back, and I wish that it didn't, because I'm so passionate about it. Okay, okay, let's get into it, you ready? I'm gonna ask you is it a myth that? Do I need 10,000 followers first? Myth myth, myth, myth myth, myth.
Speaker 1:You don't need 10,000 followers, you don't need a big audience before you get started with online course creation.
Speaker 2:You don't and it's crazy that people think that you do because I'm like is every amazing psychologist out there doing incredible psychology work and then just like casually, 50 000 followers on instagram in their back pocket ready to whip out. No, does that mean they shouldn't teach online? No, god, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:Think about it in other 50,000 followers on Instagram in their back pocket ready to whip out? No, Of course not.
Speaker 2:Does that mean, they shouldn't teach online?
Speaker 1:No, god, no, absolutely not. Think about it for other businesses. A restaurant doesn't open or a physio studio doesn't open with 10K followers, totally, it shouldn't stop you starting a business, regardless of what business you're in, if you're online. Social media, just like any other business, is one way to get leads, to get people looking at you to market your course. It doesn't mean you have to have the audience first, just like if you open a yoga studio, you probably haven't been.
Speaker 2:Just like carefully curating a 20,000 followers on TikTok before you open.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to then monetize it? Of course not. If you've got an audience, yeah, sure, monetize it. Yeah, with an online course or a product or something. But most people that are really successful in the online course creation game.
Speaker 2:Started with a big fat zero followers, 100%. And they should, and they should, and I think that it's really, really important to talk about this. Why does this myth exist? It's probably because it's really sexy and hot to get on social media and sell a audience growth strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's probably why that's right, like there's a lot of emphasis put on grow your audience and it sort of translates to because that's the only way that you're going to make any sales, when it's just not the case. It's one way to market your online course.
Speaker 2:I think it's really sexy to say you're not making any money and it's because you don't have any followers. So come and buy my strategy about how to make followers.
Speaker 1:It's quite predatory because it's like what they're kind of saying is nobody likes you. That's why you're not selling exactly 100 000.
Speaker 2:So look, it's an absolute, it's not just a myth.
Speaker 1:It's shit. Yeah, you can make with good quality content about your amazing product. You can make sales with the first hundred people that happen to find you on social media.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and we're going to say something very controversial If you don't have a product and you don't have a course, what are you creating content about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:What are people following you for? What's the point of following you? Is it just that you're just creating a bunch of informational content? Because I'm going to bust another myth for you People are not following other people on social media anymore just to be lectured to.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, and if you're struggling to make content, it's because what are you trying to make content about? Your course is the source of a lot of your content.
Speaker 2:And if you're finding it really hard to create content on social media and you're like, what am I supposed to be creating content around? What am I supposed to be doing, it's probably because you don't have your course mapped out yet, because once you have that course mapped out, you are going to unlock a literal world of content to then create from, because you can't put every single thing into a course right Like every single intricate detail of every single thing you've ever known. Do you know you can share a lot of those helpful tips and hacks and resources and things you've learned along the way on social media Exactly If you're struggling to create content out of nothing.
Speaker 1:You can go to your course, go to one of your favorite lessons and think, oh, I'm going to talk about that today. Or you can get an email from a student who just had a really great success story, shared something with you, and you can share that story with your followers. It is a world of content inspiration.
Speaker 2:It's a world of difference. You'll feel it immediately. Okay, but we're not just here to say that we believe that this is different or that we feel like it might be different. We know factually from all the people that we've worked with that big audience sizes really are not critical at all, and I want to share some case studies because I think it's really important to know that 99% of people who come through our doors very successful didn't start with an audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so we had, but 99% of people who come through our doors very successful didn't start with an audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. So we had Laura who taught marketing. She had 300 followers. She told us 50 of those probably her friends and family.
Speaker 1:I think most of them were friends and family. Like 300 is like the golden number of oh, that's people I know, yeah.
Speaker 2:So she did her first round after her beta round and did $27,000 to 300 people.
Speaker 2:No email list, no Facebook audience, no TikTok account literally just 300 followers on an Instagram Amazing, on a $1,000 course. Next we had Sally, who did macrame. She had an amazing, beautiful course but she had taught in person for a while and done workshops at her local community hall, so she had 500 on an email list because she'd been collecting emails. She had gone to an expo and she had collected a bunch of emails from doing macrame wall hanging art. She launched her first round after her pilot and she did 45 000 in her first round with a small email list of just 500 people yeah, from just like a few people that had expressed medium interest a while ago that she hadn't even contacted since pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:And then we had julie, who's a psychologist who worked with teenagers on the neurodivergent spectrum. She had both a really good community kind of outreach because she did a lot of community work, and she had just a very small 150 followers on tiktok because she just started doing tiktok and was still finding her feet. For her first four rounds each month, so four months in total she did 20k a month, month on, month on, month on, and then she grew from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she sold out every single month. And she came to us thinking oh, I don't know where I'm going to make sales.
Speaker 2:Exactly. She actually said to us I have a really small audience. I've got a hundred people on TikTok-ish, about 150.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I haven't been posting particularly about what my course is about, so it was just sort of 150 random people that had followed her from maybe a few videos and she sold out, and 150 followers were just made up of people who just followed along to listen to her advice about helping their children, and I think that that's really, really important, because it goes to show that we work with people all the time who have, let's say, 5,000 followers or 10,000 followers, but 10,000 followers because they had been building really random content over the past six months and have a really disengaged audience. Just because you have 10,000 people that are following you, it doesn't mean that all 10,000 of them are going to be truly obsessed and engaged with what you're doing. It's probably likely that you probably only have like 500 to 1,000 people that are really, really keen on purchasing from you, and so when you have a really small audience, the same thing can be true too. A small audience of really engaged people who are really, really passionate about what it is that you're talking about, who are really in love with you and following you along and listening to your content is much better than 10,000 passive viewers who don't really care what you post. I think that the numbers game is a really kind of shitty thing to get caught up in, because it's really easy to get caught up in numbers. It's just how human beings brains work.
Speaker 2:We can really easily quantify 1,000 followers bad, 10,000 followers good. And that is a trap and it's a myth and it's a problem that we see all the time, because we've seen time and time and time and time and time again that a hundred really devoted followers is way, way better than a big audience of people who don't care about you. Or even again, starting with zero followers but bringing a really quality product and then therefore having the confidence to really create exceptional content around it, have content with a focus, have content that actually leads back to something and is like very communicatable, very rounded out, and it all ties in together. Having that product can oftentimes help to guide that content creation and keep it from feeling really sporadic and crazy and weird. And we find that it's so much easier sometimes to start with zero followers. Really good product, really good content that accompanies it and therefore build really really quickly, highly engaged people that really care about what it is that you're actually talking about.
Speaker 1:They're really actually vibing what you're putting out and you've started really strong, really good content. You can get to those few followers to convert them into your first few students really quickly.
Speaker 2:So what we don't want again is random, shitty audience building tactics that are I just need to post three reels a day about what, who knows, I'll figure it out when I post it. And then you get stuck on this really crazy, hectic content hamster wheel of push, push, push, push, push, content, content, content, and it becomes about quantity rather than quality. It's random, it's unguided, it's messy, it's hard, it's random, it's unguided, it's messy, it's hard, it's hard. It feels crap for you, it feels crap for people watching it. You have followers, maybe that come from that, but they're unengaged and they don't really know what it is the point of, what your content is or what you're trying to talk about. That is a literal nightmare, that's nightmare fuel.
Speaker 1:You can make those reels the hard way or you can wait until you have a really good product. You know what you're talking about, you know the purpose of your audience, and then you can make the reels and you'll take the stress out of it yeah, your content will be so intentional, your content will be so purpose-driven and it'll sound really, really communicable, and that is obviously what we want ultimately.
Speaker 2:So if you are trying to get started in the course creation world and you are just sort of purposelessly creating content because you think you need to be having an audience, or running around like a headless chicken, being like I need content and I need an audience before I ever even think about making an online course, I always say it's a big procrastination activity.
Speaker 1:You're wanting to make an online course? Make an online course the audience that comes when it should come. Make your online course. Don't use kind of the excuse of oh no, I'm just getting an audience first. No, make your product. Direct those people to your product.
Speaker 2:It is a way better use of your time exactly so if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh my god, I need an audience, I promise you, you absolutely do not. You can get started with a very small or zero sized audience.
Speaker 1:So I'd say myth busted, myth busted check john.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for listening, guys. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you next week. See you next week. Bye.