🗣️Transcript
Back for more already? Excellent! Well, this next lesson is called The Ecosystem for Courses that Sell.
Because when you’re creating a course, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and forget about the other pieces you’ll need to make your course successful.
So this lesson is all about seeing the bigger picture.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- The four parts of the course ecosystem
- How they all fit together
Some of the ideas coming up may already be familiar to you, but you may not have seen them put together quite like this.
And we’re going to talk about four concepts: Promise, Programme, Pipeline and Promotion.
Let’s start with what I call the “promise” of your course. It’s another way of looking at your course topic.
Your promise is just a description of what your course helps people to achieve.
It says: “If you’re this type of person, and you enrol in my course and you do all the work, then you can expect this type of outcome.”
To give a quick example, here’s the promise behind your local gym:
If you want to improve your fitness and physique, and you join our gym and work out regularly, then you’ll become leaner, stronger and have more energy.
To give a second example, the promise of a professional driving instructor would be something like this:
If you want to learn to drive, and you take regular lessons and follow my instructions, then you’ll gain the skills you need to pass your driving test.
We’re using the word “promise” but really you’re just telling people what they can reasonably expect if they do the work.
After all, your local gym can’t 100% promise to give you “beach abs” because it can’t force you to do all of the crunches you’ll need to do.
But don’t worry, we’ll go much deeper on your promise later in this course.
Next, you have the course or the programme itself. Its job is to deliver the promise.
We actually already talked about the programme in the previous lesson via the three pillars of highly completable courses: content, coaching and community.
Quick note on terminology: I’m using the word programme instead of course here for a couple of different reasons.
First because a course can just be a bunch of content, whereas a programme implies those other pillars like coaching and community.
Secondly, it’s because I get a kind of nerdy satisfaction when the key concepts in my lessons all start with the same letter. :-)
But mostly the two terms are mostly interchangeable.
Anyway, that’s your programme. It’s a way to deliver on a promise using a course plus maybe some other stuff like coaching.
Next up, the pipeline. A programme without any students can’t deliver any promises to anybody, so you need people to buy it.
But simply asking people to buy your course, even if they’re a good fit, isn’t usually very effective.
It’s like asking a stranger to marry you. Even if they like what they see, they’re not going to make such a big commitment so quickly!
That’s why you usually have this other piece, which I call the Pipeline.
(This is often called a funnel, although to me that implies a fully-automated pipeline, which isn’t always the case.)
Your pipeline takes people who are curious about you or your course and takes them on a journey that leads to an invitation to buy your course.
The pipeline could be a timed sequence of emails that establishes your credibility and warms people up to buy.
Or it could just be a set of manual steps you follow in order, like an old school salesperson chasing down a lead.
The point is that your pipeline moves people closer to a sale. And those who make it all the way to the end become the students for your course.
Quick question: Do you always need a pipeline?
Well, if people already know, like and trust you, it may be enough to say: “Hey. I created a course that helps you do X. If you’re interested, here’s the link to buy.”
But usually they need a little “wooing” first.
The final piece of the puzzle is your promotion, which is basically your marketing. It’s how you get the attention of the right people and get them into your pipeline.
Often that means offering something for free that’s designed to appeal to anyone who would be a good fit for your course.
So for example if your course helps people transition to full-time vegans, your “freebie” could be a mini-cookbook of super easy vegan recipes.
You’ll have seen this technique dozens of times – “give me your email address and I’ll send you this handy PDF”.
But it doesn’t have to be a download. It could be a free webinar on a relevant topic. Or a free 30-minute consultation with you on Zoom. Or a free mini-course like we mentioned earlier.
The point is that once someone’s taken you up on your free offer, and you have their permission to communicate with them, you can start moving them along your pipeline.
To see how this all links together we need to run it in reverse. Promotion, Pipeline, Program and Promise.
Your Promotion fills the Pipeline. Your Pipeline sells the Programme. And your Programme delivers the Promise.
Make sense? Excellent!
At this stage we’re not interested in the details of each part of the ecosystem. I’m just putting them on your radar so you can start thinking about how they might look for you and your course.
That’s everything for this lesson. See you in the next one!