Q&A: Launching an offer before you’ve created it, strategy for a mid-ticket offer, and more…

This week, on my Instagram Stories, I asked my audience to send me their questions about everything launch-related. So many of you responded and so I decided to turn your answers into a podcast episode! So, in today's episode, I'm sharing how you can launch an offer before you've created it and so much more!

– The *many* benefits of launching your offer before you've even created it.
– Why live launching is a much more effective way to sell your offer, compared to parking it on your website.
– Why *warming up* your audience before launching is so important and what content you can share to do this.
– The key to creating urgency with your offers, especially if they're evergreen.

 

Q&A: Launching an offer before you've created it, strategy for a mid-ticket offer, and more…

Today I'm answering a bunch of your questions about launching. I put up a sticker on my Instagram Stories a little while ago and I had so many good questions come through from my audience. I couldn't get around to answering all of them in written format on my stories, so I decided I'm going to finish answering them on my blog as well as sharing a couple of the ones that came up multiple times because I know these are pretty common questions that come up whenever you are launching a new course or program or membership or whenever you're starting to think about it or whenever you're relaunching one that already exists.

Q1. Do you still encourage launching without creating the offer?

Now, I want to be clear, you do still create the offer, but you only create the offer if the launch is successful, if enough people buy it, for it to be worth your while to create it and deliver it.
Otherwise you refund them and you do your research and you go back to the drawing board and you pivot, you tweak, you do what needs to be done and then you launch again and you create it. The idea is that you are launching it to test the offer and the messaging and find out if it's something that your audience will actually pay money for because we can guess, we can do all the great research but until somebody actually pays money for it, we don't know whether they want it or not. And I love this method because I've seen so many people invest time, energy, even money into creating offers that nobody buys. I've seen people who have gone and invested thousands of dollars into hiring a videographer to film their entire course before they've even solved the first one.
And that's such a huge disappointment then because if you put it out there and nobody buys it. It's a lot harder to change and the biggest hesitation or biggest fear that I see stopping people from launching for the first time is “what if I spend time creating it and nobody buys it.”
So by launching it before you've created it or even launching while you create it or creating an outline and then launching and only actually creating the content that fills into that outline once people have bought it, that's an effective way around this fear. It's an effective way to stop this fear of nobody buying from holding you back.
Also, if you have been procrastinating launching for a while, if you've started outlining your course and – this isn't course specific, but I see this happening with course creators the most because it's very easy for it to take a long time to create a course – if you've been procrastinating creating it and getting it out there, launching it first creates a great deadline because once it's launched and you've told your students, Hey, it's going to be available on this date, or I'm going to start teaching it on this date, now you have a deadline. You have to get it done. It becomes a priority rather than something that just gets pshed down the to-do list onto next week's pile and then next week's pile and never ends up actually happening Okay, so if you've been procrastinating it, I would consider launching first and I know it's terrifying having that deadline but you have to trust that you can stick to it.
It doesn't have to be that you create the entire thing after people have bought, you can teach it week by week. I like the approach of co-creating with your students, where you're showing up and teaching the content live for the first round. And you can figure out where they're getting stuck, you can figure out maybe what challenges or what questions they had that you didn't preempt.
And then you can revise the content so that when you do go and pre-record it, you already know that what you are teaching is effective to get them that result.  Another time when you might want to launch it before you create it is if you are somebody who's running a service-based business and you can't afford to take some time away from working with clients.
You can't say no to the done-for-you client work or the one-on-one work because you need that income. But then because you're working with the clients, you don't have time to create your course or your program or your membership. So if you're launching it before you create it, that brings in a bit of a cash injection.
So that means that you then have a bit of cash flow which means you can say no to clients for a little while and spend that time building out the offer that you have sold.

 

Q2. Do I have to do a launch? Can I just sell my course from my website instead?

And I love this question because I have a very strong opinion on it. So to sell an offer, regardless of whether it's a course or a program or coaching or a done-for-you service, whatever it is that you are selling, you need a sales process of some kind and for higher ticket things like done-for-you services and maybe coaching, this is probably going to involve some kind of conversation like a discovery call proposal, bit of a back and forth via email.
But for a digital product, you're probably not going to jump on a call with everybody who's considering buying from you. That would just take way too much time. But is a sales page alone enough to sell your offer? Probably not. Not In most cases, okay? So in some cases, your sales page alone will be enough for someone to buy your offer, but that usually only happens if the buyer already trusts you.
So they're super warm. They've been on your email list or following you for a while, and they would buy anything you put out there. It also usually only happens if they already know that they want and need this particular offer and usually if the offer is relatively low commitment. So obviously when I talk about commitment, price is a commitment, one commitment point.
So if it's a lower price point, then it's going to be lower commitment than a higher price point offer, but so is time investment. ─ So a short course that's say two days long or a couple of hours long is going to be much lower commitment than an eight week course, even though on the surface, we think, Oh, an eight week course is more valuable.
It's a much bigger commitment for the person investing in it. Same with how much content is in it. So if they can get through the content in five minutes a day, that's much lower commitment than if it's going to take them five hours a week. So if the buyer already trusts you, if they already know that they want to need this offer, if it's relatively low commitment, then you can put it on your website and drive traffic to it and it might convert.
But more often than not, your buyers do need a bit more of a sales process. They need something that's going to educate them about the problem. They need reassurance that what you are selling is different to what they have already tried and failed with. They need a way to get their questions answered and they need a little bit of help making a decision.
And this is what a launch is all about. A launch is simply a journey where you are growing your audience with the right people. You're showing up for them. You're sharing the content they need to help them decide whether your offer is a good fit for them or not. You are giving them an avenue to ask questions, whether that be like on a live masterclass and they can ask you questions about whether this particular offer is going to work for them in their situation or not.

 

Q3. How long should I warm up my audience before a launch?

Somebody else also asked how long should pre-launch be? So this is basically the same question. Most people consider a launch to start on the day that your doors open and that your offer is available to buy. So when doors are open, that's when a lot of people consider the launch to start. I consider that launch to start weeks, if not months before that. And I consider the pre-launch or the warm up or whatever you want to call it, I consider that to be all part of the launch. So how long should it be? How long is a piece of string is my answer.
Because it depends on so many different things. It depends on things like how actively have you been showing up and sharing content and emailing your email list, in the lead up to the launch or the lead up to when you start pre launching. So for example, I can have a much shorter warmup time for my launches because I am constantly year round sharing three episodes a week on this podcast. I'm emailing my list three times a week. I'm showing up consistently on social media. So it's not like radio silence and then suddenly I'm selling. I'm constantly showing up with free content, even in between launches. Another thing that can affect this is, is the content that you usually share related to what you are launching, or is it completely different?
So if you are talking about one topic and then suddenly you start talking about a completely unrelated topic, you're going to need a little bit longer purely because you probably are going to have a different ideal client, right? You're going to be trying to attract a different person with that new topic or that new content.
So you need a little bit longer to grow your audience with that new or that new ideal client. And that's not to say that you need to grow your audience before you start the launching process. Remember the launching process includes the lead up, includes the warmup. You don't need to wait until you have the audience before you start that process.
Because when you start sharing that kind of content, you will start to attract that new ideal client. When you start sharing a launch lead magnet, that is if you've designed for that ideal client, you will attract more of those ideal clients. You'll grow your email list with the right people. Another consideration is how much education does your ideal client need before they'll be ready to buy?
So in other words, how big is the magician's gap for this offer? How big is the gap between where they are right now and where they need to be? Like what is that knowledge gap? What do they currently not know that they don't know, that they need to know to be ready to buy? I know that was a bit of a tongue twister, but think about that.
What do they currently not know that they need to know to be ready to buy? And they maybe don't know that they don't know this thing. How big of a commitment is the offer is another consideration. So like I mentioned earlier, you know, a lower price point is going to be a lower commitment than a high price point.
Uh, one day course. A one day course is going to be a lower commitment than an eight week course. A five minute a day course is going to be a lower commitment than a one hour a day course. ─ So how big of a commitment is the offer? A bigger commitment offer is going to maybe need a bit of a longer lead time because they need to trust you a little bit more.
Now, in Launch Magic, I encourage my students to start sharing this strategic free content. The content that's going to warm their audience up. From week one, from week one of the course. So that by the time that doors open on their launch in week 11, their audience is already warm and ready to buy. And that makes the selling part so much easier because now you can just sell the offer.
You can focus on what else do they need to know to make this decision. How can I make sure all of their questions are addressed rather than trying to also educate them on what they need to know rather than trying to build trust at the same time? All of that, the idea is that by the time you get to doors open, they already trust you.
They already are aware of the problem that they have that your offer solves for them. All of the knowledge gaps have been bridged and now it's just a matter of. Helping them to work out whether this is going to be a good fit for them or not in their particular situation.

 

Q4. How do I create urgency for an evergreen course?

If you're new here, evergreen is a course that is always available. You're not live launching it. There are no doors open, doors closed. It's just always available. Evergreen can be a little bit tricky because it's not just putting it on your website and hoping people buy it and it sells itself.
It's not completely passive. You still need to have a sales process for it. And the most effective sales processes for an evergreen course, it's going to be very similar to a live launch sales process, except it's all automated. So in that case, you're creating urgency in your evergreen launch, or you have an evergreen funnel, the same way you would create urgency for a live launch, except you can't close doors because it's always available.
So the deadline then has to be something like a bonus being removed. So if you sign up before then you get this bonus, otherwise you don't get the bonus. Because we do need a deadline, otherwise people will just keep putting it off. And this is the real challenge with evergreen offers. If something is always available, why would somebody buy it today rather than next week?
Unless it's a really, really painful pain point that they want to solve right now, they're going to want to put it off because it's a commitment of money, it's a commitment of time, and nobody thinks they have enough time or enough money right now. So everyone thinks they're going to have more time and more money next week.
So that's where having a deadline can actually be like, Oh, well, you need to make a decision now. You can't just keep procrastinating this. With evergreen though, it needs to be an authentic deadline. And that can be really hard, unlike with a live launch, it's easy because the deadline can be, for example, Thursday at 10 a.
m. But when it's evergreen, you don't have everybody coming into the funnel at the same time. They're not all coming through that journey at the same time, like they are in a live launch. So how do you create an authentic deadline in an evergreen? I use deadline funnels. It's a great tool. It creates an authentic deadline based on when somebody entered the funnel.
Not based on a fixed date and time, like in a live launch. So it's not like, Oh, bonus is expiring today. And then you go back tomorrow and it's still there. It's an authentic deadline where it will expire for that particular person. And setting all of this up can be quite techie. And honestly, I find it way harder than doing a live launch.
A lot of people think, Oh, if I just go straight to evergreen, that's going to be so much easier than live launching. Not true! It's all of the same elements of a live launch. You still have to create the sales page, the emails, the masterclass, all of those things. The only difference is you're not doing it live and you have to now set up all of the tech bits and pieces.
I recommend live launching it a few times before you put it on evergreen. That way you can test different bonuses, you can test your messaging, you can refine everything before you set it all up. Because changing it later is a bit of a nightmare, you don't want to go back and do it. And that's coming from me, and I'm pretty comfortable by now with setting up all my tech stuff.
I've set up multiple evergreen funnels, I've done many live launches. I find live launching so much easier than the tech setup in an evergreen funnel.

 

Q5. Do you have a favourite platform for launching a course? Are there any cheaper than Kajabi?

So Kajabi is hands down my favorite. I've been using it since 2017. It has come a long way.
And if you use all of the features in Kajabi, it's a lot cheaper than paying for all of those different tools separately. So if you used it for your website hosting, your email marketing, your checkout, your course hosting, all of those separate things, it's cheaper than paying for all of those separately.
But I always get this question, what are some cheaper options than Kajabi? And so this is going to be a little bit of tough love here, but if you're not willing to pay the 100 a month for a platform that is going to host and sell your courses and obviously all of the other features as well, and it's going to deliver a great experience for your students because it is a really beautiful platform, both on the user end and on the student's end. For example, the library, the way that everything's structured, it's nice, it's easy to follow, it's neat. But if you're not willing to invest that in delivering a great experience for your students, how can you expect them to invest in what you are selling?
If you don't believe in your own offers enough to invest in them, how can you expect someone else to? And also I believe client experience should be the biggest consideration here. Which platform is going to deliver the best experience for your students? Which platform is going to work best in the way that it's going to deliver your content best, not necessarily which one is the cheapest. Also a bit of a “woo woo” moment, but I believe that you attract what you put out there, right? So if you are going out there looking for the cheapest option in everything, don't be surprised then if you start to attract buyers who are also shopping around for the cheapest option. You get what you put out there.

 

Q6. If I don't share how-to content, will my audience feel like I'm holding out on them?

Now, most of the time, your audience are not even ready for the how-to content yet. They think they want it, but they're actually not ready for it.
So when you share that how to content, they're going to save it for later and then not come back to it. Or they will have a million reasons why they're not ready yet or why it won't work for them. So then they won't pay attention. They keep scrolling. So instead, focus your content on what your audience needs to know before they'll be ready for that how-to content.
What do they need to know to be ready to take action on the how-to content? And also as a side note, you can share content that feels like how to content, but that isn't actually giving away what's in your paid offers. So let me give you a bit of an example.
One of the things I teach in my paid programs is launching, obviously.
So if I gave away free content with step by step how to launch your online course, this is what would happen. Firstly, there's no way that I could fit everything someone needs to know about launching, even into a long form format like this podcast, let alone into a short form social media format. Okay? It takes me 12 weeks in Launch Magic just to teach everything that somebody needs to launch.
There's no way I could cover off all of those bases in a free format. Secondly, some people would see the how-to, and they'd be like, that's great, I have everything I need to know to launch now. And then they would go and they would implement it. And because they don't have everything, it would probably fail.
They don't know what they don't know, and they don't have the support and the accountability that they would get inside my paid program. And then thirdly, you might also have some people there who are thinking, well. I'm not ready. I can't launch yet because my audience is too small. My email list is too small.
So then I could create how to content that feels like how to content, but that isn't giving away what's in my paid offers. So something like, How to grow your email list for a launch. That could be quite a nice little high-level podcast episode where I'm sharing. And actually I did do this a few weeks ago where I was sharing a few ways that you can grow your email list in the lead up for a launch, which gets somebody more ready to invest in Launch Magic because now they feel a little bit more comfortable with growing their email list.
They can see, Oh, it's actually achievable for me to do that. And then when I talked to them about my paid offer that is all about launching, they would think, I have a bit of a formula that I can use to grow my email list and now I'm ready to learn how to launch. So it might feel like what you're giving away isn't valuable if it's not how to content, but your audience doesn't know what you know.
They're not the expert in what you do. So the things that you feel are not valuable to you. They're super valuable to your audience because they don't have all of the same expertise that you have. It's just that, you know, your stuff so well that to you, it feels really obvious, but to them it probably doesn't.

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