E243: Course Mkt Challenge #10 - 9 Stories Course Creators Tell Themselves that Keep Them Stuck

Have you ever noticed what is it you're saying to yourself all day long? All those stories and thoughts and things we keep repeating over and over in our heads. And are they actually helping you or are they getting in the way? So today I want to talk about some of these stories and what you can do about it to make sure that you are not getting hung up in some of these crazy ideas.

Or not so crazy ideas. Let's get to it. Welcome to the Course Creators HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now, here is your host, Julie Hood.

Hey, hey, welcome, welcome to episode 243 of the Course Creators HQ podcast. And today's going to be a fun one. I'm excited and I think looking at some of these false ideas or stories or things we're telling ourselves can really help you get unstuck and figure out where's it I'm holding myself back. So I hope you like this episode and that it's helpful for you and let's just jump right in.

The first one, the first thing that you might be saying to yourself is I need to be an expert before I can teach. And this one, I really hope you aren't telling yourself this one because there's a couple things. First of all, you only need to be a few steps ahead of the person that you're trying to help. You need to have done it.

You need to have gotten results and even better if you've gotten results for someone else. So you do have to have the experience. However, you don't need a PhD and 20 years of experience to be able to teach a course that is super helpful and gets someone a result and I'll tell you I actually think sometimes the instructors that are closer to the actual activity that they remember what it was like to be a newbie to not know a topic I think they are some of the better instructors.

Just because they are more familiar, they understand what's coming up for you, they remember what it was like to not know. So I want you to erase this one if you're like, oh I'm not expert enough. Let's get rid of that myth and get to it. Let's get those courses created and get your content out there because we need you.

Okay the second story that we are telling ourselves often is that I need a big audience to make sales. And the truth is you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You actually need the right leads, the right people, and you'd be amazed if you have a hundred engaged subscribers, how well that can convert, especially the first time through when you're offering something. So it is, there is some nuance to making sure you're getting the right people.

So if you don't have help with that, make sure you're getting some coaching around it. But you, you don't have to have an email list of 50,000 people in order to sell a course. Number three, the number three story we might be telling ourselves. if my course is good it will sell itself and this reminds me of that whole thing about build it and they will come unfortunately that is not how it goes anymore great courses need just as much great marketing in order to make them work and visibility and messaging those are the things that will drive your sales unfortunately quality by itself is not enough.

And you also need to be out there so that you're constantly communicating with your audience. So they're hearing from you and they're staying connected to you and they're kind of deciding is this person could help me? Do I believe that the right person to help me? That isn't an instantaneous thing so you need that piece of it along with having a really good course so sorry to burst your bubble on this one but even if you have an incredible course you still have to do the marketing side of things okay the story number four is that I need everything absolutely perfect before I can launch and put it out there and I run into this one a lot we have a lot of perfectionist experts who have incredible knowledge things they want to share and they spend hours and hours and hours trying to change the color of a circle on the web page or they get down into these rabbit holes of things that they seeing and trying to figure out So you really really have to if this is you you need to recognize first that you doing this to yourself Then you can say, you know what?

Perfection is delaying my progress. It is holding me back. So I am going to start with a beta course, with a first round course. I'm going to tell the students that it is in beta that this is the first round that there may be some things that are not perfect yet and that part of the reason that they are getting to jump in at the beta is that they're going to get it at a bit of a discount and that takes you off the hook for problems and that they are going to help you improve it.

So set that expectation when you do a beta course that they will need to do an evaluation for you at the end. Set that expectation at the beginning so that they know. And I do want you to have people paying you for your beta courses. I don't like necessarily doing the whole free thing for a beta course that you're going to be selling at some point.

because the people getting it for free may not be invested enough to give you the real feedback that you need. So definitely, definitely recognize that perfection is a nasty monster, and it will drag you down if you're not careful. So I've got another episode about perfection, and I will link to that. So if this is you, I really, really want you to listen to that one and to think about where perfection is holding you back.

And if you need to, tell yourself that it's holding you back from sharing and helping somebody that needs what you have, that really, really needs your course. And so you don't want to be so busy worrying about every comma and every period that they don't get the help they need. so stay away from that perfection monster and it's a it's an ongoing thing too I will say if you notice that this is one of the traits that you have it's not like you can just today you're going to ignore all these ideas that you have about getting it just perfect it's going to be an ongoing thing there is recovery though I will say I used to be very very very much of everything had to be perfect.

And at one point, it was when I had had little ones, babies that didn't sleep, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to survive. Them being babies, having an online business, and getting any kind of sleep if I was going to try to be perfect. And so it was, for me, the breaking point was that I needed more sleep. But it doesn't have to get that hard for you.

You can stop yourself ahead of time. So anyway, there is a life after perfectionism. Okay, story number five is that people won't pay premium prices. And I hear this a lot from newer creators who don't feel like they can charge more for their courses.

And here's a little bit of how I would explain this. First of all, people pay for speed, clarity, and getting them results. So your pricing can be reflective of that outcome, that transformation. It's not based on the number videos you create or how long your course is.

It's really, really based on what kinds of results that you can get. And then the second piece of this, as far as premium prices, is I feel like in every audience, you're going to have a wide range of folks. And you'll have some folks that, you're right. They're not ever going to pay premium prices and that's okay.

Maybe you have some kind of free offering your blog or your podcast or something that you're giving away that they can get help from. But there are folks, always some in an audience, who are willing to pay. And so you do want to have those offers available because they want to pay for speed. They want to pay for your help.

They may even want like done for you side of things. So having that offer there, while it may not be everyone you come across, you do want to have it for the folks who are interested, who have more budget, who are ready to jump in and at least have the offer there for them. So that's story number five. Story number six is that I need to create more content before I can sell anything.

And you don't need more content. You just need a clear promise and really focused positioning on who you helping So having one really good course beats out having like 10 different different scattered ones or having lots of mediocre content that doesn grab the right person that doesn help the specific person that going to buy your course so you don't have to have more content to have an offer out there in fact I think it's better because have you ever noticed and think about this if you've come across this sometimes you'll stumble on someone you're you're out surfing or you're out whatever reading online and you come across this person and you're like wow that's really good I really like this and then you start digging into them and you start looking at what they've got and you go to their website or you go to their Instagram or you check out the different things that they have done and at that point you're most interested in them you're most excited about them so I think that's the point where you want them to know by the way I've got these great offers for you I've got these great courses I've got these great coaching for you.

They may not quite be ready to buy from you yet, but getting the seed planted at that point that like, oh yeah, that's right. She does have a course that helps me with this. Uh, he has put this together. Oh yeah.

I need to remember that. So that that's a great time for them to first hear about how you can help them. So I like to have offers around sooner rather than later. I think we have a whole page on the website that has different ways that we can help you.

If I come across it, I'll link to it so you can kind of see. And just having that available. Not so much because you think it's going to instantly turn into sales. It's just that you're planting those seeds for the future.

So don't have to create more content. and that when you can share your messaging in a timely manner so people find out about you and how you can help that's perfect okay the seventh story that we tell ourselves selling is sleazy and I don't want to feel pushy and I get this one because I'll tell you when I was in college, I avoided all the marketing classes. I kind of got to pick and choose which business courses I took because of the program I was in. I was like, oh no, I'm not doing marketing.

I'm never going to deal with marketing. And so I didn't take any of the marketing classes because it felt like that used car salesman to me. And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no. However, that opinion has shifted and the truth is if you can look at selling in a different angle in a different direction and here's what I want you to think about selling is helping when you 100 when you are 100% in belief that your offer is what will help someone so if your course solves a problem, not selling it is actually like you're holding it back from people who need your help.

So think of the selling side of things is actually helping them out and it is okay for you to get rewarded for helping them out. So that's kind of the second piece of it is you have to be okay with being paid for your knowledge and paid for your expertise. So depending on where you're at on that story. If it's the selling piece that feels a little too sleazy to you, that's part of it.

Or if you haven't gotten to a place yet where you recognize, hey, I deserve to be rewarded for how much time and effort I've put into becoming an expert and learning about this area and sharing and putting my course together. You have to feel like you deserve to get paid. So those both of those two things can be holding you back. So really selling is helping.

So okay, story number eight that comes up is the market is too saturated. There's no room for me. And the truth about this is when you see saturation, the good news is that means there's plenty of demand. So there's lots of interest if there's lots of people trying to help.

And I remember when I first focused in on course creators, there were a ton of people who were already doing some course creation and they were doing a great job. But the piece that was different for me is I knew I had a different angle. I had some different opinions and some unique ways of bringing out those that messaging that I wasn't hearing from anyone else. So I could then tell my stories in my style with my framework and make my course unique And at the time it was the 24 course creator which was not a concept that has that has been very popular it has gotten much more popular since I first came out with it and you'll see lots of things about you know your lots of different courses around that now but it was not at the time I started so that was my unique angle on a market that was already pretty saturated at the time.

So if you're thinking, oh, there's, you know, there's too many people already doing what I'm trying to do, what you want to find and think about and really look for is how can I be unique? How can I take a different angle? What's unusual about what I'm doing so that my messaging can stand out as different and it automatically will do that because of the stories that you tell other experts won't have the stories that you have and that's also sort of around the whole ai piece of it is this is how we keep ai from uh what do i want to say from giving out all the information the part yeah you can go to ai and you can get some great information and it's super helpful but what's going to carry forward into the future is the uniqueness of your stories the uniqueness of your experiences and that's not something you can pull from that you can have chat gbt right for you that's uh from what you've done and what you've pulled together and and and what you've been through and that kind of thing.

So don't worry about if you see other people also teaching something similar. You're just going to make yours unique. The last story that I want to mention for you is, and this is probably the biggest one, if this is the only one that you are able to pull from this episode. This is probably the best one, in my opinion, anyway.

It's the story that you tell yourself, I don't have enough time to create a course. And especially as things have gotten faster and easier than they have ever been, I think it's unbelievably easy now to get a course created, to get using AI can, can help you with different pieces of it, especially, uh, naming, thinking about what some of the different ideas could be, even creating, uh, some of your worksheets and that kind of stuff. It's incredible what's available now. So all of these things that used to be super manual and super time consuming have now gotten to where they can be much, much faster.

So it does go back to looking at your time, looking at your week, and saying, okay, where can I make changes to give myself more time? And we have tons of episodes in the past about time and making things faster. So I'll put links to a few of those if this is one of the things where you're like, no, I really am one of those people that just don't have time. Listen to a couple of those and see if they give you any ideas, any inspiration around what you can be doing and how you can stop telling yourself, I don't have time.

And I know I do this one too. So I totally get this. And it's a challenge. There's just a lot that we need to do, have to do, just having the right kind of energy to be doing what you need to do.

That's the part I've been struggling with the most. So is, is having the energy at the right time, like to create this podcast. So 100%, I want to thank you for listening and coming back and being okay with missed weeks and missed episodes. It's been a very, very challenging year.

I've took on a couple new corporate clients, which have been wonderful. And I love working with them. It just the whole time situation has become much more challenging. So I'm saying this one from my own experience of trying to stop telling myself, oh, I don't have time for that and getting past it.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for being here anyway. This was a nice long episode and I'm curious if any of these ideas resonate with you. Please work on them so that you can get past these stories that might be keeping you stuck.

So take care. Have a wonderful week and I appreciate you being a listener and a follower. Thanks for everything. Have a good one and I'll talk to you next week.