5 must-knows to sell your online course, program or membership

It's easy to think that if you just get your offer in front of more people then you'll sell more. Sometimes this will work IF you have all of the ingredients in place. But if you're struggling to get your current audience to convert, then getting more people won't help until you tweak things. In today's episode, I'm share my top essential must-knows to sell your online course, program or membership.

– What launching your offer live actually means (and what it doesn't).
– Why understanding where your audience is at will help you know what they need to know to buy from you.
– Why trying to hype up your offer and selling it as this new exciting thing just doesn't work—people *won't* buy because they're excited and don't want to miss out.
– How answering their questions and hesitations IS what will guide them to buy.
– How dumping all of your knowledge into a course can cause overwhelm rather than value.

 

 

5 things to know to sell more of your online course, group program, or membership.

The usual approach that I have noticed, or the usual belief that I have noticed with online business owners is this idea that, if I can just get my offer in front of more people, then I will sell more. And sometimes that is the missing piece. But that is only if you have the other essential ingredients in place and it's already converting your current audience. If you are currently struggling to get your existing audience to convert, a bigger audience isn't going to help you to sell more until you make a few small shifts first.

I'm sharing a few things that you need to know if you want to make more sales of your courses, programs, and memberships. If you want to convert better, these apply regardless of how you are selling and you can use them regardless of your sales process, but they apply especially well when you are selling in a live launching format.
If you are new here, a live launch is not something you do just the first time you put an offer out into the world and you announce it and there's fireworks and champagne and confetti and yay, you can buy my offer now. Instead, a live launch is a limited-time campaign, where you are focusing all of your energy on selling one particular offer with a lead-up of free content that is designed to grow your audience with the right people for that offer.
You nurture them across the Magician's Gap, give them everything they need to decide whether it's a good fit for them or not, and address any hesitations that they have. And then it gives them a clear deadline to decide.

So let's talk a little bit about the Magician's Gap. This leads me beautifully into the first must know point.

 

Your audience won't be ready until you make them ready.

Something that came up quite a bit in my most recent survey that I did of my email list was this worry of my audience isn't ready. They keep telling me they can't afford it yet. They're going to join later. I think I have the wrong audience because they're not ready to buy from me. But the thing is, the reason they are not ready is that you haven't gotten them to the point where they are ready, so you'd need to do this either through your free content or through your paid offers, for example, with Launch Magic.
I often have people say, well, I'm not ready to learn how to launch yet. I need to grow my audience first. So in that case, using my free content, I can show them how launching is a repeatable process. You don't need to wait until you have a really big audience because it's something you can do over and over and over again.
And each time you launch, you grow your audience a little bit more. But on the other hand, another hesitation that I have with people coming in to Launch Magic is I'm not sure what to launch yet I need to figure out what to launch first. So I bridge this gap with one of my other paid offers called Offer Less, Sell More, where I'm helping them to brainstorm and refine ideas For what else they can create and sell to serve their audience.
And this is all part of the magician's gap. This is all part of that gap between where my audience is right now, where my ideal client is right now and where they need to be to be ready to buy Launch Magix when I opened doors.

People won't buy simply because they are excited about your offer and don't want to miss out.

FOMO might sell sneakers and Taylor Swift tickets, but it's not going to sell courses, programs, memberships, or any other offer where someone has to change their behaviour in some way to solve a particular problem or get a desired outcome.
Yes, you might sign up, for example, to Launch Magic, because you are excited to launch and make more sales of your offers in a really intentional way. But chances are that despite that excitement, you will still have natural hesitations that unless I can address those hesitations for you. You're not going to buy no matter how excited you are.
Hesitations like, what if my audience is too small? What if I don't have enough time right now? What if I can't make it to the live calls? And my job in my launch and your job in your launches is to make sure that the ideal client knows. Hey, it's okay to launch if you've got a small audience and yeah, you've got lifetime access to the content, so even if you're really busy right now, you can still work through it all at your own pace. And that's cool if you can't make it to the live calls because you can submit your questions ahead of time and I'll answer them for you to watch in the recording. So notice how I'm addressing those hesitations and questions that you might have rather than just going on about how much value there is in the live calls and how great it is to learn live.
I'm also telling you that, if one of your hesitations is that you can't make it live, that's okay. There's a solution to that. You're still going to get value out of it.

 

If your ideal client has unanswered questions, they are still not going to buy.

For example, I was recently doing a bit of research. I was looking to buy some new thermal base layers for when I go skiing. And I was considering buying a base layer top, but on the website, it didn't have the care instructions. It didn't tell me, do I need to hand wash this? Can it go through the washing machine? Like, how hard is it going to be to wash these things?
I'm going traveling. I don't really want to be hand-washing all of my thermals. The website didn't answer my question, so I didn't buy them. If someone isn't sure about any part of your offer, they are unlikely to take the risk and buy it. So we need to give them an avenue to ask their questions. And we also need to preempt some questions, but we want to give them an avenue to ask specific questions to their situation.
For example, in the live webinar, if you're teaching a live webinar or a masterclass, having a Q& A section at the end is the greatest avenue for this, because they are in a situation where they are seeing other people asking questions. It's a safe space. They might be getting their questions answered when somebody else asks the same question.
Another thing you can do is in your cart open emails. So the emails that you send when doors are open during a launch, you can ask them to hit reply and ask you their questions. You can put a chat box on your sales page that might help. You can ask them to DM you with questions. You can look at the people who clicked on your emails and viewed the sales page and didn't buy and email them directly and ask them, Hey, I noticed you had a look and didn't buy.
Do you have any questions that I can answer for you?

 

Your ideal client won't buy because they are impressed by how much knowledge you have.

Instead, they want to know that you get them, they want to know that you have the solution to their problem. And if they don't feel like you understand what they are struggling with, no matter how experienced you are, how much knowledge you have, they're not going to be impressed by that, they're probably not going to buy because of that.
I also want to digress a little bit here. Dumping all of your knowledge into a course and putting in all of the lessons and modules, making it just so jam-packed full of value, that's not what makes it valuable. Value to your ideal client is a clear path where you have identified exactly what they need and you have removed everything that doesn't get them there faster. They don't have a lot of time to spend. We are all super busy these days. So they want the shortcuts. They are paying you for the shortcut. They're not paying you for the information. And if you can't narrow it down, that is a sign that you don't know your ideal client well enough.

Now, instead of using your free content in the lead up to doors open as a way to demonstrate how much you know about your topic, how can you maybe start to use it as a way to show your ideal client how much you understand? What they are experiencing, how well, you know, the problem they are experiencing, how much, you know, about their personal experience of that specific problem, and then show them that you have a solution that is going to work for them. Despite all of the other things that they have already tried not working.

 

Your ideal client needs a deadline to buy.

Deadlines get such a bad rap for being unethical and being a high pressure sales tactic. But in my opinion, they are only unethical when they are a fake deadline, or when they are used to pressure somebody into buying something that is not a good fit for them and you don't have a cooling off or a refund policy available for them.
An ethical deadline is when doors are legitimately closing or the bonus is legitimately disappearing or the price is going up or they have to join by this date because the first live call is happening that day.

And the reason that we need a deadline is because humans naturally, we are going to put off something that is uncomfortable. Our brains are wired to just maintain the status quo to do what we have always done and changing our behaviour, like you are going to be requiring your ideal client to do inside your offer – and spending money – both of those things are really uncomfortable. For example, paying bills. Our bills have a due date on them.
Because otherwise we would probably just never pay them. Because paying money is not really something we want to do. It's not a pleasant thing for most of us. So people put them off for as long as possible. Going to the dentist. I delayed getting an annual dental checkup for three years because I didn't want to go.
Even though I knew it was important, I knew that, you know, I value my teeth, I value my smile, but I still put it off. Because there was no deadline. But suddenly when we have a deadline to act, we do the thing. When we have toothache, then we go to the dentist. When we have the due date, we pay our bills on time because we want to avoid the late fee or the interest.
And the only time when you really don't need a deadline in your offer is when it's an inherently painful problem. For Riz from Found Legal, she has some templates called the Copycat Kit, which are legal templates. You can use like cease and desist templates and that kind of thing for when you have discovered that somebody has copied your intellectual property and that when you've discovered that somebody has ripped off your content or your program or whatever they've copied from you. That's a pretty painful problem that you want to go away urgently. So you don't need an external deadline because that deadline is within you. It's inherently painful, but in most other cases, you need a deadline to take action, right? Your ideal client needs a deadline to take action.

 

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