Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

SNM199: How to Create Your 1st Course from Scratch

September 15, 2020 Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger
Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools
SNM199: How to Create Your 1st Course from Scratch
Show Notes Transcript

Double your income by building your first course

I don’t have a problem promoting someone else’s course if it’s something that I don’t well. Although I would never promote something that I teach, I would much rather have my customers redirected towards someone who is better at something that averages at.  

If we are talking about is it better to fail while trying, it’s always better if you are not the first one in the line. Pioneers get shot in the back, so it’s the best if you see how others did before you if there’s actual value in the niche you chose and then go ahead and spread your content.  

When you know your audience you know that advanced people who are advanced in the market or people that are very wealthy, they often pay more money to get results faster.

How you deliver your content, it can be driven by what you're good at, what you feel comfortable doing, or what the audience expects, but you need to make that decision so it helps you determine what you're going to create, and decide how you are going to deliver it to them. 

 If I am an affiliate I get to keep 50% of the sales. If I sell my own course for $2,000, I keep all of it. That's doubling your income. There's nothing else you can do that will increase your revenue as much in any market. The moment you take your traffic and stop sending it to other people, start selling your own products, you will double your income and there's no other way you can do that at any job you have in the world.



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Double your income by building your first course. We're going to do it together on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by LearnDash, the backbone of my membership area. Launch your next course on the right foot at servenomaster.com/learndash.

 Are you tired of dealing with your boss?

[00:00:15] Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss, and start living your retirement dreams. Now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep presented. Live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green.

[00:00:39] Now here's your host. Thank you guys for joining me again in the garden. It's a lovely afternoon. We have a cool breeze, here goes the roaster. Nothing I can do, he's really excited when I'm recording. What we're going to talk about today is something that's really, really valuable. Now, I'm a big believer in the concept of try before you buy the power of the sample and the way that this can apply to us as product creators and business creators is we really want to do is find out if people want your idea before you make it.

[00:01:06] Every once in a while, you'll see someone who has an invention that's not very good and they don't see it and they believe in it so much they spend tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on patents all around the world. They jumped to the protection before they went through market confirmation.

[00:01:20] We need to prove that people want it. That's very,  very important that market validation and there's a lot of ways to do it, but I like to make money at every stage of the process. And the best way to do that is by running affiliate offers and you'll notice that I promote a lot of different ideas that are different from what I do.

[00:01:36] I never promote a course If it's something I teach, I don't have my own social media courses cause I'm not amazing at social media I'm just, okay, so if someone's really amazing at that I'd rather you learn from them, if that's what you want to learn. Part of my job is to introduce my followers to all of my different niches and markets to the products, the courses, the trainings, the tools, and services that are right for them

[00:01:55] and so I see my responsibilities as curating not of content, but of course is training value so that you only look at things that might be the right fit for you, It's the way of saving you time. And the beauty of this is that you can put a lot of different offers in front of people, and when you start to see what they respond to, that will tell you what you should create.

[00:02:15] So that's one of the great ways of getting data is by promoting something that probably being an affiliate is that you only get half the money, but you get all the information,  you find out what works and what doesn't. Some of my promotions have a wide variance. Sometimes I'll do approach, in fact, in Russia last summer

[00:02:29] I made $7. I then promoted an offer the next week to the exact same people and I did over $6,000. That told me what they wanted and what they didn't want. I didn't know which one they would respond to. I was shocked that the first one did so poorly and I was double shocked at the second one did so excellently, but that's why there's nothing more valuable than asking your audience.

[00:02:48] And we have talked about polling your audience before, and that's really useful, but the best way for someone to vote is with their money. There's a huge difference between me saying, oh, that movie looks interesting and me buying a movie ticket. Part of it is because there was no movie within several thousand miles of where I live.

[00:03:02] So I'm only near a movie theater when we travel to see the doctor. When my wife's pregnant we go once a month, so I might see nine movies in a year. Usually, not, I don't like to see a movie every single time, but that tells you real data. People will say they like something, but there's a huge difference between liking it and spending five, nine, or I guess if in you’re New York like $27 on a movie ticket, that's the proof that's in the pudding.

[00:03:25] That's the real validation. And the first way to do that is with promoting affiliate offers, another way you can do it as I talk about our previous episode, the episode, webinars that you can have a webinar sales webinar for a product you haven’t created yet. And you say, let's give me a live training course and as long as you hit your goal, whether it's selling 10 units or 20 units, or you have to make a certain dollar amount, then you know, okay, the idea is validated. 

[00:03:46] So that's a great way to validate before you create it. But I want to take you to the process of creation in a quick format right here to give you a real feel of how to sink your teeth into the idea. The first thing is to figure out what people want. We have to have, we have to develop an understanding of what they're looking for.

[00:04:03] Now, we can validate ideas with affiliates offers and webinars, but how do we even get there? Figure out what type of stuff to send to people. And the best way to do that is by looking at what they're talking about and looking at what they're already doing. If you want to see what people are interested in, you can go to the mall and see which store is crowded, which stores are empty. The mall that we visit has the movie theater

[00:04:21] there's this small stall that sells these Korean pastries that have like different flavors inside. And it's made on a little machine with the conveyor belt. It's really interesting. It's not a lot of art history into it, so they're more factory style, It's the same thing over, over, but they are really delicious and you'll go to the food court

[00:04:37] and everywhere has two or three people in line. And in this place will have 30. People wait in line like 30 minutes for these things. I've had them, they're so delicious. They're my arch enemy when it comes to trying to stay fit because they're so delicious. My wife loves them, my kids love them. They taste amazing.

[00:04:50] I can see exactly why the line is so long, but that tells you, Oh, this is what people like. Where we live, they're trying this idea of like an outdoor market and they have about 15 restaurants there. They’ve been open for a few months. Three of the restaurants didn't last 90 days, so the market answered the question - the beauty of seeing what's already happening is I don't have to

[00:05:09] try an idea. I can let someone else fail.  We've talked before about the idea of pioneers, get shot in the back and settlers get the reward. It's like people that come in the second generation, I'd rather let someone else test an idea. And so I can see them market validation from there. And so how can you do that in the digital world?

[00:05:24 A  great place to see it as are there other people selling similar products?  Are there a lot of products along with that idea? I like crowded markets because it also means there's a lot of affiliate offers I can try. That's part of how I choose my niches when I'm testing new niches and ideas. Additionally, I like to look at forums and groups and see what are people talking about, even better

[00:05:42] what are people complaining about? People who complain are the best because they're active. Even when I have a really bad experience, I don't take the time to become a member of Yelp or Travelocity or any of those sites so I can leave a bad review even when I'm enraged, even would have a really bad experience.

[00:05:56] Me and my family fled an Airbnb once cause he felt so unsafe and I didn't even leave them a bad review after calling and saying, Airbnb, I'm leaving. I don't care what you guys do, but I'm not going to meet these people in person ever again. So didn't take the time. I told her Airbnb to do delist them and I did my best.

[00:06:10] So people that leave negative reviews and leave comments online are really active, and they're the ones...if you can turn them into your fans, they will become fanatics. They'll become proselytizers, they'll go out and spread your message, tell everyone how great your product is. They were, everything was just terrible

[00:06:22] this was the first thing that was good. So we can find out what people want and start to get at least an idea of the area that we want to test by looking for other products that are selling well, we can look in digital marketing and direct response marketing, we can look on Amazon and other bookstores and see which books have high sales ranks, and lots of reviews,

[00:06:38] and we can read those reviews. We can go to forums and see what people are talking about, we can go to Facebook groups, we can go to any blog where people are talking about the topic and you should look for the blog which has the most comments or the most views. That information is usually public, you can see how many comments each post has,

[00:06:52] and on a forum, they usually show you how many comments or replies and how many views it has. You can figure out what people are interested in. There are more complicated ways of trending by searching keywords or searching Google trends or Twitter trends. And I don't feel the need to do that because what we're doing is more evergreen and those are more 

[00:07:07] short term trends. We're looking for things that people are interested in the longterm. Our next question is, what do people expect? For different solutions, we have a pre expectation in our mind of what it should cost. Depending upon your market, If you ask them what does a car cost? The answer would be very different for some people.

[00:07:21] If you say, what does a car cos,t they go a hundred thousand dollars? Other people will say $10,000. They're both right. The difference between their answer is their market, their demographic. Obviously the first person is much wealthier and they come from more money or they have a higher level of income and they have more wealth, but they're in a different market.

[00:07:36] So you're gonna approach those two people differently. So people's expectations can often come from their background of their community and we want to discover what does your potential market expects? And a great thing about doing affiliate offers, It gives us this answer. It tells us what they expect in a product.

[00:07:50] Do they expect an ebook? Do they expect DVDs to come in the mail? Do they expect live coaching calls? Do they expect to consume the product in an hour, a week, or a month? Each time I build a new course I do this exact process. I say, okay, if I were to build a course, that's $97 It's this big. If I'm gonna build a course that's $2,000,

[00:08:09] it has to be this much bigger. It has to be clear why it's so much more expensive because that's the first question people ask. What's the difference? Why is this more expensive? So you have to have a delineation in your mind, a clear understanding before you make any of those courses of what the differentiator will be

[00:08:22] and I covered this a lot in less on trip wires, how I separate free from $7, $27, $97, $2000. And so you can go back and kind of see that from the pricing cop rank perspective, but what we're looking at is what do people expect to get? If someone buys like, for example, if you were to buy and an exercise DVD program, P90X or insanity, or my favorite diamond Dallas pages yoga program, which is awesome

[00:08:46] DDP yoga, I'm a big fan, it’s so fun. He combined professional wrestling with yoga and it's just a blast. Well, I haven't done that one loads, but you have an idea in your mind of what you're going to get. You know, you're going to get between two and five DVDs. You're going to get probably eight weeks of workouts, but you know, you are going to do some repeats in there.

[00:09:02] And then you may or may not get a device. Like we have a TRX, which is this rope thing, you hang from the ceiling or from top of your door, or maybe you get like a tiny ladder, you lay on the ground and you jump between things like hopscotch. So sometimes there's a device. Or like a stretchy band.

[00:09:17] And sometimes it's just the training, but you have that idea. We have an idea of what we're going to get, and we expect those programs between like $79 and one 29. Right? Most of us have that expertise. If you buy a yoga DVD, see the difference, weight loss system, yoga DVD, you expect it to be an hour-long and he expected to cost 10 or $20 just depending upon if it's new or old.

[00:09:36] So we already have these things in our mind, we have our expectations. Sometimes it's hard for us as product creators to think about what the consumer will pay for things, and what they expect to get when they pay for things, which brings us to our next point: what people will pay?  People will pay in different bands.

[00:09:51]There are communities of people, and I've had different customers. There are people who will buy a 7 to $17 product every single day, 365 days a year. Every day they look to buy something new and they're chasing that dragon, they're chasing that emotional feel. The excitement of this is interesting

[00:10:07] I'm going to jump in and they're caught in that way, that psycho wave of singing object syndrome, which I try not to encourage, but I'm aware of it. And I used to be more in that market like 10 years ago of just keep giving people what they want. Just more, more, more ideas, more ideas, more ideas. And they're caught in that loop, but they have this idea.

[00:10:22] So you can sell them only cheap stuff but you could sell them a lot of it. And actually, over time, they can be worth more than people that occasionally buy expensive stuff, but you have to understand is what people expect to pay for different types of solutions. And this can be in every different type of marketing.

[00:10:37] It can be from cars to supplements, to juice, to diapers, to homeschool programs. We have a spectrum, and it's fine for you to say, I want to be at the top of the market as far as pricing, you just have to figure out what it is so that your pricing isn't crazy. You can say, okay, I'm going to make a product  

[00:10:55] that's free for your flagship product. The most expensive product I can find in my markets, 1999, it's $2,000. So I'm gonna make a $2000 flagship course. No problem. The crazy thing or the hard thing is if you go, you know what, I'm gonna make a $50,000 course right out the gate. That's where you start to run into a problem,

[00:11:08] and some people do that and you could also do the same thing. I'm going to have those exact same customers, I'll make a $7 course... I promise you, when those people see $7 they go too cheap, they don't trust it, they won’t buy it. You can lose deals because something's too cheap as much as you can because it's too expensive. If your product is too expensive, people will say I can't afford it,

[00:11:23] If your product is too cheap, people go I don't trust it, It sounds like a trick. You can even go, Hey, 30-day refund policy 60 days refund policy, 365-day refund policy.  Yeah, I don't care. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. And we all have that feeling. This is why none of us take free candy from strangers in parking lots.

[00:11:37] It sounds too good to be true, which means it's probably a trap. We have this sense in our minds when something's not right, even if we can't figure out what it is, and it causes us to pull back or to protect ourselves, go, I don't know what's wrong, but I know something is. This happened before in my life.

[00:11:50] I answered a job ad in the newspaper when I was in college, I was somewhere between 19 and 20, I'm not exactly sure. I think I was home for the summer and you had to go to this place and I was standing outside the room and even walk in the room and I looked around, I go, something's not right here.

[00:12:02] And I left, I never came back. I just drove away and I have no regrets, something wasn't right. I don't know what it was. I didn't stay around long enough to find out I go, this feels like a trick. This is a scam. I'm going to get kidnapped. This is a boiler room. I'm not sure which one it is. Something ain't right.

[00:12:14] I got a bad feeling. And we can trigger that in people If we price incorrectly. Once we have an idea of what people want, what they're expecting to actually get expected to pay then we have to figure out how long should it take them to consume. And this can be different. There are certain things that people want to consume in an afternoon.

[00:12:29] Totally fine. I know people and this, again, it depends on your market. If you're after advanced people that are advanced in the market or people that are very wealthy, they'll often pay more for faster. Like you can pay regular price for braces that take two years or pay three times as much for braces that

[00:12:41] take six months. Some people want the fastest solution and they'll pay more for it, even though technically it's less work for you, right? If you're the orthodontist, you only have to see them for three months, or for six months, whatever, instead of having to see them for years, it's actually less work for you.

[00:12:54] But again, it's about understanding your market. That's why I went through the process of understanding your customer avatar before we started talking about building a course, because the more data we have upfront, the easier this process is. For some things, people expect it to take time. If you buy yoga DVDs, you expect to take an hour.

[00:13:09] If you buy an exercise program you expected to take eight to 12 weeks, they have a cycle and it can be anywhere in between. If you get my products, you know, if you get a free gift, it's going to take you an afternoon, if  It's a book, it'll take you longer. But then if you go into a paid course, it's going to be an afternoon or four to six hours,

[00:13:23] next level above that is something that might take you one to two weeks. And my flagship course just takes a lot longer because there are massive amounts of coaching. We're building an entire replication of my business. When I teach you how to do that, It's gonna take longer than a week. And again, it can be measured by the amount of time they have to invest,

[00:13:37] so people either measure by how long will it take me to learn this, how long will take me to do this or how long will it take me to see a result that I'm looking for... important questions..The more we have an understanding of this and how can you figure it out? Well, again, go back and look at the products that are selling or the promises that other products are making

[00:13:52] If you don't have enough audience to do affiliate tests you can look at products that are doing well and say, okay, what promises do they make? I do that all the time when I'm writing my sales letters, I go, okay, what's the competition saying, okay, I'm going to say similar things. That's how I learn the language.

[00:14:04] I can look at what's already working so I don't have to start from scratch. The next step in our process is to define your win state. How will someone know they've succeeded? This is a really, really important, and a lot of people missed the boat on this. If you don't have a clearly defined win state, you can lose your audience.

[00:14:22] How do I know your exercise-weight loss program works? Some of the guys that are really switched on, if you hit a specific goal, you get a T-shirt. It's actually pretty standard. We're seeing this in more and more other markets that you get a free t-shirt when you cross the finish line, and then after that, you have to buy more t-shirts for them

[00:14:38] cause you're proud of it. This is why everyone who does CrossFit seems to own 50 CrossFit t-shirts. They're proud of their accomplishment, and you want to create a sense of pride, a sense of awardness, and also it gives you a list of all the people you should ask for testimonials. It's really valuable for you, but you need to know their win state, when they make their first dollar online, when they make their first a hundred dollars online, when they have a hundred dollars coming in every month, I have a free guide how to make a thousand dollars

[00:15:01] this month. It really breaks down a lot of the freelancing concepts and how to find clients quickly without having to feel uncomfortable, like you're chasing work. You know what the win state is, it's in the title. So having a clearly defined win state means people know if it's for them or not. The people who want that program are people who are in a situation where that makes the difference between saving money and increasing their debt every month.

[00:15:21] If you were making a million dollars a month, you're never going to grab my thousand dollar month guide cause you don't need it. It doesn't apply to you. You're at a different phase, more power to you, congratulations on being so successful, but you're not going to respond to it. So each different piece of messaging I have includes that,

[00:15:35] because you want to know, did I win or did I fail? This is a big conversation in the video game world right now, there is a type of video game called a walking simulator where you walk around and you read clues and things happen, but you can't die or you can't lose. And there's a big question of, is that a yes aim or an electronic toy because there's no fail state or a win state.

[00:15:50] It's kind of like playing a Rubik's cube. No one ever says, Oh, you failed. Just haven't won yet. It's fine. People don't think of it as a game, right? We think of it as a toy. But the idea is that if there's no win state and there is no fail state people can't tell, then you're missing something

[00:16:04] when you create it, so the more you put that in place to say, okay, when you finish going through the course, you get a certificate. That's a great way to establish your win state. People get really excited by certificate and they should. That's a great way of saying you've accomplished this. So that can be your win state and it really will motivate people.

[00:16:19] You might want to go further on and say, okay, your win state can be when you hit this specific goal, but whatever it is, you need to know what it is so that you can build your course around it. Next, we need to determine our learning modalities. You should have already picked up on this when you were looking at what are people expecting, what type of content...Are you going to be

[00:16:34] delivering videos or DVDs in the mail. It's something you directly download? Is something you have to watch in the membership area? If you get a course for me any of my flagship courses, every single lesson, you're going to get the video with slides, you're going to get a downloadable PDF, which either gonna be the slides or as a worksheet for the lesson,

[00:16:49] you're going to get a transcript and you're going to get an MP3 version you can download. So while you can't really download the videos, although some people I'm sure are figuring out how to, you can download the audio version and listen to it when you're out on the road. Cause some people to need to consume that way

[00:17:00] and so I wanted to meet them at their need. It may be that the right modality of the right way to deliver your information is via a book or an ebook. It might need lots of pictures of no pictures or might need lots of diagrams and no diagrams. All of those things start with what are people expecting, right?

[00:17:14] How are they expecting to learn, and then how do you like to deliver your content? I don't have a permanent answer, so even with the internal workings of my company, I rotate. So last night I was working on refining the process for creating our blueprint level products. I create a new blueprint, I started with a big dictation,

[00:17:31] we went through our dictation process and I realized that I have to create a series of steps, and sometimes when I'm creating these pieces of training, I recorded a video last night and I use this little program that takes a screenshot, numbers each screenshot, and then you could write a headline. So what I do is, as I'm going through, I just take a screenshot of each thing

[00:17:46] I'm doing, then I  save that document, and then I go through it, write the instructions later. And actually a lot of what I did, the reason I do it that way is that I'm worried that things aren't going to work out and things didn't. It actually took me a lot longer than it should. It took me almost three hours

[00:17:57] which I know if we get our process right It would have been 30 minutes of work. So I would probably go back through and change a lot of the steps. I actually had to talk with our developer. I said, you know what? If we can make a different type of template, we can lower the complexity level, and then someone can do this faster.

[00:18:10] But even with my team, right, sometimes I give them the training via video, sometimes it's a series of screenshots and sometimes I just give him a series of steps in texts. So it's not always a perfect answer. It's not always the dealer's choice. It can be a matter of this is the best way to learn this type of information,

[00:18:23] this is what the audience expects, or this is my preferred way to teach. I have told you in the past, I have friends who refuse to do video training, they don't let anyone ever hear their voice, their voice is a big old secret. And so they do all of their teaching and training via different types of texts.

[00:18:35] It's just what they do. So the way you're going to deliver your content, it can be driven by what you're good at, what you feel comfortable doing or what the audience expects, but you need to make that decision so it helps you determine, what you're going to create, you have to decide, am I going to deliver via members' area?

[00:18:47] Am I going to make it a download? Am I going to give them a link that expires in 24 hours, how am I going to give the content to them? All of that comes in our planning phase. And next, we have to think about almost near the end. Here is the consumption conundrum. This is the problem that plagues product creators around the world.

 [00:19:04] And everyone, I know that claims they've solved it...I don't think so. And this is a lot of people buy the course, watch the first video, read the first chapter, never do anything else after it. I'm just as guilty of this. I talked about courses and books I'm in the middle of all the time, and three months later, I'm still in the middle of them.

[00:19:18] I find consumption very hard. Now,  for videos, I have a really good excuse. Sometimes my eyes get on fire when I'm trying to go through training lessons. But when it comes to audio lessons, yeah, I can listen to whatever I want or a book, but boy, it's hard for me to read nonfiction. It's like, I'll read a chapter of nonfiction,

[00:19:33] then I'll read five fiction books, then another chapter after.  I'm a bad learner. Just done so much learning in my life. I used to go through so many courses and do so much deep training and watch every lesson, do all those things. But boy, as I've aged, my ability to learn and sit still has really diminished.

[00:19:50] Even as I do these podcasts, one of the big reasons that I'm not sitting in a chair in my house is that I like to walk around. That's why at the end of every podcast, I don't know if you can hear it in my voice but I am really sweaty. I have to take a shower after almost every one of these recordings cause I'm pacing and I'm walking thousands of steps because I like to move.

[00:20:05] I got to be moving around that’s why I don't watch that many movies. It's hard for me to sit still for certain things, but we want to think about how can you encourage consumption. And part of that means putting the big wins or the low hanging fruit at the front of your course and putting things that give them a fast win

[00:20:20] and putting the most exciting lessons at the front. So if someone watches one lesson, they feel really excited to go. Yeah, that's a really cool course. I'm going to go through it someday. Cause if the first lesson is boring or It sounds hard, they'll just go refund. You don't want that, right? You want them to consume it and you want them to at least think they'll consume it.

[00:20:34] That's really important. And our final step in this process, just do it. Stop thinking about it. Start trying it. When in affiliate you get paid anywhere from 6%. If it's like a physical product, up to 75% for some digital products, but average is 45 to 50%. So you get half buy, sell something for $2000, I keep a thousand dollars of it.

[00:20:51] If I sell my own course for $2000, I keep all of it. That's doubling your income. There's nothing else you can do that will increase your revenue as much in any market. The moment you take your traffic and stop sending it to other people, start selling your own products you will double your income and there's no other way you can do that at any job you have in the world.

[00:21:08] You can ask your boss for a raise. They'll go, all right, I'll give you extra nickel an hour or an extra 10% whatever say, you know what? I'm doubling your salary, do the same work, but I'm giving you double because I liked your confidence... that’s not how it works. That's why being your own boss is beautiful.

[00:21:20] And that's why it's so important to stop thinking and to start doing, get out there, take action, and create your first course.

 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve know master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race.

[00:21:40] Head over to serve no master.com/podcast now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five-star review of this podcast.

 See you Tuesday.