3 mistakes I made in my first digital course

Today, I am talking about three of the big mistakes that I made in my very first digital course way back in 2017, when I first created my very first digital course, which was all about Facebook ads.

>> Click here to listen to the podcast on your app of choice <<

 

To give you a bit of context, I used to actually manage Facebook ads for clients and what I noticed was a lot of people were coming to me with no budget to spend on ads, or very little budget to spend on ads, and they couldn't afford to pay me to manage their ads for them, or their budget was so small and they could afford to pay me, but that would be the majority of their budget would be going to me rather than on their Facebook ads. So I saw a bit of an opportunity there to create a course that would show business owners on a tight budget how to manage their own Facebook ads. And I made every mistake in the book.

 

Luckily, in late 2017, I came across Amy Porterfield and what was then called Courses That Convert, it's now Digital Course Academy, and she basically rescued me from all of these massive mistakes that I was making, the mistakes I'm going to share with you.

 

Mistake #1. I wanted to include absolutely everything I knew into one course

 

So the very first mistake that I made with my first digital course was that I tried to cram absolutely everything I knew about Facebook ads into this one course.

And I had been working on this course for months and months and months, and the finish line was just nowhere. As soon as I added another module, I wanted to add more lessons. And each time I added another lesson, I was like, “Oh, I need to cover this one as well, and then I could also teach this and this and this. And I just exhausted myself, I overwhelmed myself with how much there was to teach because I didn't understand that the purpose of an online course isn't to make them the expert. It's not to transfer all of the knowledge that you have about the topic. It's to get them from point A to point B. And it really wasn't until I came across Amy Porterfield and Courses That Convert and subsequently Digital Course Academy, I've done both of them, it wasn't until I did that, that I realized, “Oh, isn't about trying to prove to my students how much I know. This isn't about trying to prove that I'm an expert. This is about getting them the transformation.”

 

Mistake #2. My ideal customer was not clearly defined

The second mistake that I made was that I didn't define my ideal customer very clearly. I was teaching Facebook ads for business owners, but I didn't specify, was I teaching Facebook ads for e-commerce business owners? For service-based business owners? For personal brand business owners? Totally different methods for each of them, and because I wanted to help all of them, I created lessons to help all of them. I created all of this extra work for myself by trying to teach multiple different ideal students with the one course, when I could've made it so much easier and probably sold more as well because the messaging would have been a lot clearer had I said, “Well, this course here is for e-commerce students. This one here is for service-based businesses,” and launched one at a time rather than trying to do all of them in the same one course.

The idea behind that though as well is, if I'd been able to say, “This is a Facebook ads course for service-based business owners,” rather than them looking at it and questioning, “Is this for me? I'm not sure,” it becomes, “Oh yeah, clearly, this is for me,” and it becomes an obvious choice for them.

 

Mistake #3. Creating the course before launching

The third mistake that I made, it's definitely not the last mistake that I made, because I made a whole bunch more, I probably haven't even realized half the mistakes that I made or I've just compartmentalize them, put them out of my brain, but the third mistake that I made is that I created it before I launched it. I created about 80% of the course content, recorded it, edited it, everything before I actually had a single paying customer. Now, these days, I wouldn't create a product before launching it because it's so risky. Even though I know how to launch something successfully, even though I've had a lot of successful launches, I wouldn't launch something new until I knew people were willing to pay money for it.

And it's all well and good asking people, “Would you buy this?” But, in reality, when you ask them to pay money for it, a lot of the time, it's like, “Oh, well, I just don't have the money right now. Yeah, I'd pay money for it, but just not right now.” So we want to make sure that we actually have paying customers first, and that was where I went wrong with that first course. I mean, luckily, it ended up being a $10,000 launch and the course then went on to sell a few more launches worth before I eventually retired it in 2019. But, wow, that was risky. And if I were to do that from scratch, I would have 100% launched it before I created it. Maybe I would have had week one and week two ready to go, if I really wanted that safety buffer. But I would have launched it before I created the entire thing.

 

Pin this?