Writers: How to Develop a Course Your Readers Will Buy Like Hotcakes

The formula for creators who want to build multiple income streams

Course-building is a great business model. You build the class once and sell it forever. As long as your work is evergreen, you can sell the same information for years, with little need for updates.

But how do we make a course our readers are willing to buy?

Most creators attack the course-building process in reverse — starting with building the course, while later looking for customers to buy it. In this story I’ll show you a better method. A more-predictable method. You’ll spend less time creating content no one wants and more time serving your customers.

As people live more-mobile lives, formal education becomes both more-expensive and less-useful, simultaneously — there’s an educational revolution in progress.

With on-demand courses we can learn what we want, when we want, how we want.

The course offers a promise and everyone who buys the course assumes they’ll get the same transformation the course promises. Successful courses deliver a transformation they promise.

• We don’t have to build the longest course.
• We don’t have to have professional-grade lighting and sound (although it helps).
• We don’t have to include a bunch of bells and glitter, just to fill a semester.

Our buyers consume our course, not because they want to spend a long time learning off their phones, but because they want the promised transformation at the end.

Your course only has to be as long as it takes to teach every aspect of the promised transformation with perfect clarity. No fluff required.

In fact, a long course can be a turnoff. If your course delivers on the promises you make, and the total value is higher than the investment required to enroll — course length isn’t as critical as you may think.

You can still develop a high-dollar course with tight, actionable, quick steps.

How do writer and creators find a course that works?

We start with email. If we want to create and sell a new, evergreen, successful course, we’ve got to start with a list. We’ll use a unique way to help our customers tell us what they want without telling us what they want.

1. We start with our first 100 subscribers

We ask everyone we know. We ask our social followers. We ask all people on our personal email list to join our list if they’re interested in your next project. Give everyone a general category of your upcoming work, say — tennis lessons. Those who have an interest in tennis will join your list.

2. We grow our list to 1,000 subscribers

Here, we cast a bigger net than our personal contacts. We’ve got to develop a landing page, a valuable, free offer (your Easy Invite), and an automated welcome series to give each subscriber the same experience.

We create valuable, targeted content to gather only the people we wish to serve, onto our list. It won’t help just to have a big list. You want a list of people only interested in your work.

3. We survey this list of 1,000 subscribers

Once we’ve got our list of 1,000 subs, we’ll survey these folks to uncover the hot topic for our next course. We can’t ask them what they want, however. Our customers can’t tell you how to create an innovative idea they’ll want to buy. This is the creator’s job. Instead, we’ll give our subscribers multiple, targeted questions throughout our automated welcome sequence — asking them what they don’t want from their current situation.

4. We divide the answers into three buckets

Find the one bucket that will serve eighty-percent of your audience. This is the bucket we’ll target. Pay most-attention to the longest responses. If someone took thirty minutes to reply to your automated email, you better pay attention. You’ll find your course solution, not at the surface-level, but in the meaning behind these long responses. We’ll look at what the subscribers don’t want, and we’ll provide them a transformative solution.

The best way to create this transformative solution is through (what Frank Kern calls) the Escape-Arrival framework.

Start with the life/situation your reader wants to escape from. End/arrive with the life you want to help them achieve.

Divide the transformation into 5–15 actionable steps. These steps become your course modules. Boom. You’ve got your outline. All you have to do is make the thing.

5. We build the prototype and offer it to these 1,000 subscribers

Here, you’ll test your course, offer, and price. Look at each variable and see how your subscribers react. Price will impact sales. Too inexpensive and subscribers won’t feel your work has value. Price too high and you’ll lose sales. I recommend you start higher rather than lower. You can always drop your prices, but if you raise them while someone is in the middle of a buying decision, you’ll lose a lot of people. If you can sell your course to at least 5% of your subscribers (for higher-prices, maybe 10% for intro-level pricing), you’ve got a hit.

6. We tweak the course and sales process based on what we learned

Maybe your promise needs some adjusting. Maybe one of the lessons wasn’t clear. Maybe your PDF cheat sheet doesn’t work. We fix all these little housekeeping items before we launch big-time. We don’t want to make really expensive mistakes later. We also promise the subscribers updates for life, so they’ll know if they help you with your beta course, they’ll get the updated version later.

7. We unleash the course on the world

Here’s where you’ll pay for social media advertising. Once you’ve got your message, your course, and your prices figured out with your initial laboratory, it’s time to grow your business fast. We move from our creating hat to our marketing helmet. We find ads that work and we pump as much money into them as possible. Looking to earn more than a dollar for every dollar in ad spend.

It all starts with our email list

As creators we’ve got to own our list. And we need to build a list before we need one. If you build your course first, then look for customers later — you’ve designed your business backwards.

When we start with our list first our customers will help tell us what they want and all we have to do is make it and sell it back to them.

Once your email list grows as people buy your first course, you can use the same process to develop subsequent courses. Once you build a big-enough list, you won’t have to advertise at all.

As an indie author, I’ve developed a introductory course on list-building. It’s called the Tribe 1K. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000) so you can launch your next book, product, or course using the strategy I described above.

Tap the link below and you’ll get the first lesson today — enrollment is free.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.