Q&A: How to find balance, disconnecting from social media, where to focus in the beginning + more

I regularly ask my audience to share any burning questions that they have about running their online business. In today's episode, I address many of these questions about payment plans, audience engagement, passive income and so much more…

1. 1. How many payment plans should I offer for my online course? (3:05)
   2. How can I disconnect from social media without losing engagement? (4:54)
   3. What are the key things to focus on in the very beginning when money is low & you don't have help? (7:45)
   4. How do you find “balance” when it feels like you always have to be doing? (10:48)
   5. How do I create a passive income without hiring extra staff/support? (14:01)
   6. Pre-selling stresses me out because I'm terrified of missing deadlines. Advice? (17:08)
   7. How to improve sound quality in your digital course/podcast/videos? (18:53)
   8. How to make sure there is content for followers of every stage? (Beginners to long-time followers) (20:23)
   9. Can you live launch a course that's only $247 (offer is $197 + calls)? (22:44)

 

So in today's episode, the questions I am answering are as follows.

Number one, how many payment plans should I offer for my online course? Number two, how can I disconnect from social media without losing engagement? Number three, what are the key things to focus on in the very beginning when money is low and you don't have help? Number four, how do you find balance when it feels like you always have to be doing. Number five, how do I create passive income without hiring extra staff or support? Number six, pre-selling stresses me out because I'm terrified of missing deadlines. Can you give me some advice on this? Number, seven how to improve sound quality in your digital course, podcasts, or videos. Number eight, how to make sure there is content for followers at every stage. And then lastly, can you live launch a course that is only $247? 

So let's jump in and start with number one. 

 

Question #1: How many payment plans should I offer for my online course? 

I'll give you a very general answer, which is as few payment plans as possible because the more that you have, the more options you are giving somebody, the more choice overwhelm you're creating, and the more admin that you are creating for yourself. 

For most of our offers, we only have two, maybe three payment plans. We'll have a full pay option, maybe a three-month option, maybe a six-month option. So start with one or two payment plans, if you can, and then see what happens from there.

And always remember that when somebody says, I can't afford it, it doesn't always mean they can't afford it. It often means that they don't prioritise it or they don't see why they should value it enough to pay for it. 

 

Question #2: How can I disconnect from social media without losing engagement? 

This one I love because I'm almost never on social media, but you would never know that based on how consistent my Instagram account is at posting content. And that is because my team and I have created this beautiful repurposing process where all I need to do is show up on this podcast and record some video content when I'm doing the podcast and then the rest gets repurposed. 

I don't really show up on stories very much. I used to be quite consistent with that. I can't be bothered anymore to be completely honest. I don't like sharing a huge amount of my life online. I don't think that people are following me to see a huge amount of my life. They're following me to learn about business and I would rather share really good business content in reels and carousels that have been repurposed from this podcast than sharing what I had for lunch.

Now, if you don't have a team, you don't have a podcast, then it's going to be a lot harder to create this kind of repurposed content. So then instead, I would really be thinking about what parts of social media drain you. And then how can you potentially remove that part? So if, like me, the part that trains you is feeling this need to always be taking videos of what's going on behind the scenes, can you maybe just delete that? Or if it's the part where it's actually just creating the content, then how can you remove that part from your plate? Can you delete it? Can you delegate it? Can you automate it? Or can you simplify it? 

Or maybe you could bring in a VA to help you with replying to DMs. If you don't know what to post and you're finding that to be the hardest part, could you start by sharing longer form content elsewhere, like a podcast or a blog, and then repurpose that content into something for Instagram or wherever you are on social media? The other option is to stop doing social media altogether. But by the way that you have worded this question, I'm guessing you probably already have an audience on there. 

So maybe you don't want to lose that audience completely, but you could stop doing it. And if you were to stop doing it, maybe you could focus on growing your email list and engaging with your audience over there instead.

 

Question #3: What are the key things to focus on in the very beginning when money is low and you don't have help?

I have narrowed it down to three things because I think over the years, there are three things that I've noticed make the biggest difference. And that is firstly, designing your offer suite.

So, it's really designing your business model. But designing what you are going to sell in your business and how you're going to sell them even if you don't create all of the different offers straight away, at least you know where you are going and you have a longer-term plan of what you are working towards rather than chasing all of the shiny things and you're starting to offer a mastermind because you see your competitors all doing masterminds.

Or you saw somebody tell you that VIP days are the best way to go. So you decide to add a VIP day to your offer suite without really thinking about how it aligns with your goals for your business, for your life, how you want to serve your audience, and the journey that you are taking them on. So I would start with that design your offers suite is number one. 

Then number two is starting to reach the right people for your offers suite, starting to grow your audience with those ideal clients, and then nurturing them. This can take a while and it's never just a matter of creating an offer and then putting it out there and hoping that you find the people you need to start growing that audience intentionally. 

And then number three is building out a sales process for each of your offers. So once you have your offers and once you have people in your audience, how are you now selling to them? Because it's not a matter of getting your offer in front of them and then they'll want it.

They won't just hear about your offer and then magically be like, Oh, I want that. Now I'm going to buy it. They're not going to see it on your website and buy it. They need you to guide them through the journey of that decision-making process to buy your offer. 

 

Question #4: How do you find balance when it feels like you always have to be doing?

This one is tricky. So a huge part of finding balance is mindset. What is underneath this need to always be doing? What is driving this I must do more. For me, I know that that was driven by feeling inadequate compared to others around me, compared to other people's businesses, compared even to my business friends who were working a lot harder than me.

And I would look at how hard they were working. And I was thinking, I need to be doing more. There is always going to be an unlimited number of things you can do as a business owner and you kind of have to get to this point where you make peace with the fact that you can't do everything and instead being really intentional with what am I going to say yes to? There's always going to be so many more things we can do. And we just need to be really intentional with what we put on our plate. And make peace with the things that we don't do. 

Now, you also need to be mindful of the boundaries that you are setting around your separation of work, play and life.

So what hours do you work? So saying, okay, I finish work at 4 p.m. every day, whatever that closed down of business hour is for you, then having that as a strong boundary where you don't check emails, you don't check DMs, you're not checking your Instagram outside of those work hours. 

And it's really hard to set those boundaries with ourselves. It might be easier to set that boundary with a client and say, Hey, sorry, I'm not going to reply outside of these hours. But then when it comes to you, you might personally be logging in and checking those emails, even though you've said you're not going to reply. 

I would also encourage you to think about what activities can you do that really help you to disconnect. So, what is something you can do that will help you to disconnect? Or, who can you spend time with that will help you to disconnect? Do you have family members, or friends, who when you're with them, you kind of forget about work? Can you maybe spend more time with these people? 

 

Question #5: How do I create a passive income without hiring extra staff or support?

So passive income is kind of a myth. It's never going to ever be fully passive because you're still going to need to deliver the offers and you're still potentially going to need customer support. So even if you are selling something like an ebook where there is no live component whatsoever, you still need customer support because people are going to lose their download link, or they're going to forget their login details, or they're going to the file anymore and they're going to want you to resend them the file. There's always going to be an element of customer support. 

It's never, ever going to be fully passive but the idea is that the extra income from that offer will start to cover things. Like customer support so that you can bring in somebody else to do it and then it becomes passive for you and you are just managing the person who is managing the customer support. 

So instead of thinking of it as passive income, I prefer to think of it as leveraged income, If you want it to be passive for you, you need to bring in somebody else to manage that or help you to manage it. The other thing with passive income or leveraged income rather, is quite a bit of work goes into it up front.

 

Question #6: Pre-selling stresses me out because I'm terrified of missing deadlines. 

Something about this question makes me think that you are somebody who has never ever missed a deadline just the way that it's worded. So why would this one be any different? Yes, there is a lot of pressure when you do have that deadline but that is also the point. It means you have to get it done.

That deadline means you have to get it done and done is always better than perfect because it's never going to be perfect. If you give yourself a month to do it, you will get it done in a month. Without a deadline, it's going to take you a lot longer. You don't have to pre-sell the entire thing though. So if you are creating a course, let's say it's a six-week course, you could create the first three weeks' content and then pre-sell it.

Once you've created half of the content and then you're just creating weeks four, five and six after that, or you could give staged deadlines. There are different ways of pre-selling without pre-selling the entire thing. Obviously, the more that you create upfront, the more risk there is going to be that you create something and nobody buys it. 

 

Question #7: How to improve sound quality in your digital course or podcast or videos, without going out and buying the best microphone that there is.

There are a couple of smaller things you can do to improve your general sound quality, the room that you are in will have a huge impact on your sound quality regardless of your microphone. If you have hard floors, high ceilings, empty walls, and background noise, these are going to have a massive impact even with a good microphone. Add some soft furnishings. A rug makes a huge difference. 

The room that I'm in has hard wooden floors, but I have a rug that covers nearly the entire floor and that makes a big difference. Cushions. If you can put cushions in your room and wall hangings, I have two massive chunks of foam. They're like a meter by half a meter large that I have sitting in the corners in two of the empty corners of my room just to stop the sound bouncing off the wall because sound bounces off flat surfaces and the more soft furnishings that you have, the more that it will absorb that echo.

And the more that you can break up those flat surfaces, the less it will bounce. So put some furniture in the room, put things on the wall. Like, you know when you walk into an empty room and it echoes? Your microphone is picking that up and the worse quality or the cheaper the microphone in general, the more it's going to pick that up.

And then when you can, upgrading to a better-quality microphone will make even more of a difference but start with those small changes in your room. 

 

Question #8: How do I make sure there is content for followers of every stage, from beginners to long-time followers?

This answer that I'm going to give you, I'm assuming that they are all the same ideal client. They are just at different levels of warmth. They're different levels of your funnel. The beginners are the people who are at the top of your funnel. They have just come into contact with your brand, they are brand new. They don't really know you very well and then the people who are longtime followers are warmer and they are closer to buying.

This is the assumption that I'm making. 

They are still the same person. They're still dealing with the same problem, but they are just at different stages of getting to know you. So then I would be thinking about where my social media content sits in the overall buyer journey, in the journey, somebody is taking between when they first come into contact with my brand and when they purchase from me, what does that journey look like?

And ultimately, we don't want your social media content to be your only touch point. It's like building a house on sand. It's building it on rented land that can wash away at any point in time because you don't own the social media platform. You have no control over the algorithms. You could potentially lose this audience at any point in time. 

Where else are you sending them? Are you sending them to download your lead magnet? Are you sending them to a webinar, which will then convert them into buyers? Are you getting them onto your email list and then sending them email content that's moving them closer to buying and thinking about what somebody needs to know at the stage that they are in, in their journey when they come to my social media account, right? 

And at every point in that journey, what do they need to know to take the next step in the journey? Once they are on your email list, it's also easier to segment them and you can also create a nurture sequence, for example, to move them through that journey. You can give them other calls to action to move them closer to buying. 

 

Question #9: Can you live launch a course that is only $247? 

Absolutely. I did this seven times with the podcast launch plan, which is also a 247 offer. I live launched it seven times with a webinar and in your case, I would be thinking about where it sits in your overall offer suite. I would be thinking about where does this live? Once they have completed this offer, what is the next step for these people? 

It's so much easier to increase your lifetime value, the amount that somebody spends with you over their lifetime with your brand, than it is to always try and get new leads in. So what is the next step for them? Live launch it, get them into this first offer, but always be thinking of that next step.

And also think about whether you can increase that average order value. So could you add an upsell? Upselling them as well can increase that order value. But yes, to answer your question, you absolutely can live launch something that's only 247.

 

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