081: [Soulpreneur 411] How to Sell An Online Course

Kate Kordsmeier 0:04

Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are back with the Success with Soul podcast. I'm your host, Kate Kordsmeier. And we are officially in season two of the show now. And I'm excited because we're doing something a little different. We've just released a brand new series called Solopreneur 411, where entrepreneurs just like you can send in questions if you want some personalized laser coaching. And I will answer each week. So if you want to leave me a message and be featured on the show and get some free coaching for yourself, which is usually only available inside the incubator, head on over to Kate kordsmeier.com/Ask, and you can be featured and get coached as well. So with that, let's dive into today's question.

Micaela 0:52

Hi, Kate, this is Micaela with Mindful Momma. And I have an established blog business. And I make six figures from that primarily from our seven about 75% of that income comes from affiliates. My question is, I already know how to make good money through the affiliate income route. But I'm very interested in making more money from my products. However, I have not been super successful with that thus far, I've spent the last couple of years working on creating an online course and a couple of other smaller products. And I've done okay, but haven't really sold that many. And I'm just struggling with whether to continue down that path. It takes a lot of my time, like the majority of my time goes into the into what I'm not spending what I'm not making very much money on. So that's the dilemma for me, or should I just stick with what I already know how to make money and stick with writing content, maximizing it for SEO and making money through affiliates. I would love your input on that. Thank you very much.

Kate Kordsmeier 1:54

Hi, Micaela. It's so great to hear from you. And congratulations on creating a six figure blog. I know you've been in the six figure blog Academy with us and did digital course Academy through us as well. So it's great to hear from you again and hear about all of your success. And I'm so glad that affiliates have proven to be a profitable revenue stream for you. I definitely agree that affiliate marketing is one of the best, most passive ways to create an income online. And so it's great that that's working for you. Now, with regards to your question of whether or not you should continue trying to make your online course work for you as well. I have kind of a couple of follow up questions for you. And just some things to think about because my answer is as usual, it depends. And mostly I know that's a very frustrating answer to receive. But I think it depends on several things. First of all, what are your goals? So if your goal is to make a certain amount of money, are you currently doing that with your affiliate marketing revenue? If so, then why add something else? That's a question. It's not to say that there is not a reason to add something else. I could think of many reasons like diversification of your revenue streams, and not putting all of your eggs in one basket and having some other pieces maybe it's another passion project, maybe it's a way you want to show up and serve people and the impact you want to make on the world. So there's lots of reasons to add an additional revenue stream. But I want to see first if if what you're doing is currently working for you and you're meeting your revenue goals. There's something to consider there about what you should do next. And if it's not working for you, or your rather, if you're not meeting your revenue goals, then okay, let's talk about that. Because there are other ways to do that. And I really believe that one of the very best ways to make money online is to sell something of your own. So with affiliates, as much as I love them, there are still like everything pros and cons to every different type of revenue stream, you don't own the affiliate product, you don't have control over the quality of the product, or if they make changes, you don't make 100% Commission. You know, there's lots of things to consider when it comes to affiliates, but selling something of your own. I have found and many of my clients have found to be a very quick, fast way to start making money online without having to build up a gigantic audience before you can do so. And there's lots of ways you can sell something of your own. One example is like you mentioned an online course. Another example might be doing coaching and whether that's one on one or group coaching. You could create an offer like that. Maybe it's a membership, maybe it's doing VIP days, maybe it's an agency model where you're doing some kind of done for you service. There's a million different ways you could do it but I think that selling something of your own is a much faster and much more profitable way to scale your income. Rather than just relying on affiliate marketing alone, I think the two complement each other really well, especially when you can partner with affiliates that either provide resources and tools for the types of things you're teaching, or that complement your teaching, because they teach something, you know, adjacent to whatever your your offer is on. So now, I would absolutely love to troubleshoot with you why your current digital course offer is not converting in the way that you would like it to. There's lots of different reasons this could be one of the main reasons could be just in your messaging, and how you're positioning it, if you are positioning it in a way that is really conveying to your audience, the value and the transformation and the result or the outcome that they will get after participating in your offer. I think a lot of times, the way we talk about our offers is one of the reasons that they're not selling as well, because either our messaging isn't clear, the transformation isn't clear, maybe we're even lacking some confidence and whether or not we truly believe we can get them that result or that we're worth the price. So there's a lot to unpack there. And this is exactly the kind of thing that we do inside the incubator every single week. So you can come we can troubleshoot what's happening inside of your business, you can get feedback on your work, you can you know, bounce ideas off of other members. Sometimes we have like market research conversations, because many times other clients are your target market. And this is one of the main things that I love about our live calls inside the incubator is this kind of support and community and feedback, you can also submit your work for critique. So you could submit your sales pages, your landing pages, your email sequence, you know, your curriculum for your offer, there's lots of different things that you can submit, and we can actually provide you direct feedback on how what you're doing could be potentially improved. So with all that being said, and without having all of that information from you. Now, I'll mention a couple other things that can often be the case for why something is not working for us. So one thing, like I mentioned, kind of along the same lines of how we're talking about our offer and our own beliefs around our offer, and our value is also our capacity, do you have the capacity to really deliver what you are promising. There's a great episode with Lisa Fabrega, about capacity. And I feel like it was a huge like brain break moment for me where things just exploded and everything started to make sense. So that might be something to re listen to, if you haven't already, and see what comes up for you around the capacity to deliver and to scale and grow your business. So that's some of the kind of like inner gunk stuff that comes up. And again, this is why I love having a community where we can really support each other with those sorts of mental and emotional blocks that often come up for us as entrepreneurs. I mean, it is a crash course in personal development. And there are so many limiting beliefs and mental challenges and impostor syndrome, ie things that can come up capacity issues. So getting the support, you need to work through those things, whether that's a coaching program, or a coach of your own therapist, there's all kinds of resources out there for you. And I of course would love to have you in the incubator to talk more about it. In the meantime. So other things that are coming up for me would also include whether or not your offer is aligned with your audience. So sometimes I see business owners have a blog that talks about one topic, and then their offer is about something totally unrelated. Or maybe it's somewhat related, but the connection isn't super clear. And I even experienced this myself when I was I had rootin rebel, my former blog, which I've now sold, but when I had written rebel, it was a holistic wellness blog. And then I started talking about blogging as a business and making money blogging. And when I launched the my first course the six figure blog Academy to the audience, of course, there were a handful of people in that audience that were like, Oh, I came for the holistic wellness content. But actually, this is really interesting. But most of the people were not there because they wanted to learn how to make money blogging, they were there for holistic wellness advice. So ultimately, I ended up separating the businesses out and sometimes that's a good answer. And sometimes it may actually just be that you might need to create some more content that is attracting your ideal customer. Maybe there is that disconnect that's happening there. I'd also be curious to know more about your conversion rate. So for example, what percentage of your email list has purchased your offer. And from there, we can kind of start troubleshooting I find it really helpful to make data based decisions rather than emotionally based decisions, especially when we're trying to decide like whether or not I should continue to do something or whether or not something is working or not. What does the data show us? So from there, we of course, could troubleshoot why the conversion rate may not be as high as you would like, just for reference industry, standard conversion rates from an email list are generally one to 3% of your email list would convert into a buyer. There's plenty of examples where it's much more much less, but if it's less than that, we could absolutely troubleshoot the conversion rate. The other thing is, sometimes it's a leads issue, or it's a traffic issue, like how many people have seen the offer. So maybe only 400 People have seen the offer. But if you've sold 40 of them into it, that's a pretty good conversion rate. Whereas if 400 People have seen the offer and only one person has has purchased, then that's telling you something the same way that if only 40 People have seen the offer, there may just be a traffic issue, how can we attract more people to our offer page, right, or to get them to the point where we're talking to them about our offer. So it could be an attraction issue, it could be a lead issue of maybe the kind of wrong audience for the offer that disconnect between your content and the offer. And finally, one of the things that comes up for me now I know I just said I like to make database decisions. But it also like to check those database decisions against like, my soul, my heart alignment, right? So is this offer really in alignment with what you want to do? Is this the impact that you want to make on the world? Is it aligned with your gifts? Are you in your zone of genius, when you are delivering on this offer? Is it what you dream of? Is it the thing? You know, is it your thing? And if it's not, the answer may not be that you should give up on Online offers altogether, it may just be that this offer in particular isn't the thing for you. So I hope that was helpful. Michael, would love to be able to have a longer conversation with you about this. So we can really dive deep into your business and figure out what's happening, what you really want, what's working, what's not. And again, this is all something that we do inside of the incubator. So I hope you will consider joining us there and you can learn more about it at Kate kordsmeier.com/apply. The same goes for anybody who's listening to this and this is resonating. We'd love to support you on your journey and help you achieve Success with Soul.

All right, thanks for tuning in y'all. If you liked this episode, and want to get coached by me and my amazing team, then come join us inside the Success with Soul incubator where we have live q&a coaching calls every single week. Plus, you can even submit your work for feedback every week to That's right, you literally can submit everything you're working on and get personalized laser coaching feedback on your actual work every single week. I don't know many programs offering this and it is one of my favorite features. And I think our students would have great. In addition to our self paced curriculum, we have frequent live trainings with leading industry experts on topics like leadership and Enneagram and metrics and finance and SEO and funnels. And because your business won't thrive if you aren't thriving. We also do monthly soul sessions with spiritual healers and wellness pros to ensure you get that self care in. So if you're ready to transform your business in life and holistic, sustainable and soulful way, head on over to Kate kordsmeier.com/apply To see if we're a good fit to work together. We're accepting businesses of all size, including those that are just dreams in your head and those who are making all the money but feeling totally empty and depleted by the process. Here's what one of our clients Molly Cahill from holistic marketing hub had to say about it.

Molly Cahill 14:11

I had my first $10,000 month and now I'm having consistent $18,000 months. Thanks to Kate in the strategies I learned inside the Success with Soul incubator. It is by far the best money I've ever invested into my business it has paid off for sure not to mention the time that it saved me being able to just copy paste import Kate's funnel. And I love that you get a lot of one on one time with Kate on the weekly group calls and that you get direct feedback and direct critiques on your specific questions that are unique to your business. And I also love that she doesn't give you this one size fits all business in a box approach she recognizes and appreciates that every business is unique and she helps you walk through those unique challenges for your specific business. And on top of With that, I love that she's just a real human who walks the talk. So highly recommend Success with Soul incubator. Thank you so much Kate.

Kate Kordsmeier 15:09

So if you want results in transformation like Molly, come join us inside this intimate mastermind style program at Kate kordsmeier.com/apply. And remember if you want to be featured on the podcast to get coached in the solopreneur 411 series, you can leave your voicemail over at Kate kordsmeier.com/ask and be featured on the show. We'll see you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai