Description: Interview with Jeanine Blackwell, who teaches Create 6 Figure Courses. Jeanine discusses how experts, entrepreneurs, and teachers can create online courses that solve a real problem, and are easy to sell.

Key Points & Takeaways

1. Jeanine starts her work by asking, How do you move a result? How do you create an experience that helps make the result happen?
2. She then thinks more broadly about, “How do I stay in relationship with people who sign up for my course?” Her business is a relationship model, where she goes deeper and deeper with her participants, helping them achieve results over time.
3. To make a difference in the world, we have to generate profit. Profit is what gives us resources to reach and help more people.
4. Never make the mistake of spending all your energy thinking about how to create content, rather than how to create REVENUE. That’s a really dangerous place to be as a solopreneur. Instead, think about creating revenue step-by-step as you grow your courses and your business.
5. How do you design a structure for your business that makes sustainable revenue happen automatically? A course is a great foundation for that, because it attract people who want to go deeper with you. You’ll develop a stream of clients.
6. Everyone has the ability to create a course that attracts a big, passionate audience. But you have to focus on creating the right type of course — a course that sells. It’s not about “what” you’re teaching, but “how” you’re equipping people to create a result. To do that, you have to get really clear about this question: “What do my participants want to know how to do? What is their big question? What is their big problem they’re trying to solve?”
7. Example: Suppose you help people use LinkedIn to grow their businesses. They aren’t really interested in a general overview of LinkedIn. They don’t actually care about LinkedIn itself — they care about how to find new clients, today, right now! Think about, what could people do, in a short period of time, to start finding new clients on LinkedIn — and how can you teach that in a practical, doable way.
8. Your course isn’t going to appeal to everybody – in fact, it shouldn’t! The mark of a good course is that it only appeals to a very specific group of people.
9. Don’t just copy what looks like other people are doing successfully. This is actually a dangerous form of inauthenticity.
10. Dig into the “sellability” of your course. See: 4 Research Tips That Will Make Your Idea Really Profitable.
11. When people finish your first course, and get that initial result, you’ll have a group — say 20% or so — who are ready to go deeper. And they’ll be ready to invest much more: often 3x the course price or more. For example, if your course is priced at $500, about 20% of the people in that course will be interested in a follow-up group coaching program at $1,500.
12. What’s important is a well-designed next-level offer that has a clear thread for people to follow, from one program to the next, to the next. Keeping talking to your participants and asking them, “What do you need next?” And pay close attention to what they are doing, and what kinds of results they’re getting, during and after your course.
13. Start with the right mindset: “You are not your results, and you are not your idea.” You’ll be so much more successful if you can distance yourself from your idea. You can be passionate without being attached. Open yourself to learning, critique, and creative options.
14. Launching a course is an iterative process. Every time you launch a course, you can get better and better.
15. Meet people where they are: thinking about their own question or problem. Your course offer must speak to their “self talk,” then you can gradually introduce teaching and techniques to help them solve the problem through the course. One helpful exercise is to reflect on what your own experience was when you first discovered the problem or topic you specialize in now. The people you’re trying to help are probably in a very similar place right now.

Jeanine’s top coaching for creating successful online courses

It all flows from that first question…

What is the question that I’m answering for people in my course?

This is the problem that your course is positioned to solve.

Start by simply writing a first pass at your current idea for this key question.

Then begin sharing this question with people in your community, to see how it resonates with them.

Learn more in this free training presentation from Jeanine:

7 Steps to Creating and Launching a Profitable Online Course

Resources & Links

Get our 3-step roadmap to developing and selling your online course:

Roadmap to $5K in Course Revenue

Free 40-minute video training + PDF downloads.