Things You Need to Know Before Creating a Course | 115
Have you ever wondered what it really takes to launch a course? Creating a course is a go-to idea for many coaches and big-wig marketing gurus when they talk about leveling up your business and generating more income. But is creating a course really as easy as they say?
On Episode 115 of the Market, Scale, Grow podcast, I chatted with Melanie from Duxbury Digital about the questions you should ask and what you should evaluate before launching a course. Melanie is a certified Online Business Manager and Launch Strategist who assisted in 20+ launches (AKA she knows her stuff!).
What Should You Do Before Launching Your Course?
When you get the idea for a course, membership, or program, you might be tempted to jump head-first into it! After all, you’re excited about this new idea (and if you’re like me, you might also be tempted by shiny objects).
However, Melanie recommends evaluating a few things before you jump into creating a course. First, you need to look at your current audience. What kinds of people are hanging out on your list? Where are they at in their business?
Understanding your current audience will be essential to success because it will determine the type of messaging you use when pitching your offer. It will also tell you if the people within your current audience are the right people for your offer.
How to Nail Down Your Messaging
When it comes to creating a course, messaging is key. Determining how your audience wants to be spoken to and what they relate to comes down to market research. I know, the dreaded market research.
Essentially market research is the process of gathering information about what your audience wants, needs, desires, struggles, ambitions, and so on.
Here are a couple of easy ways you can conduct this research:
Instagram Story Polls
Facebook Groups (for a competitor or niche)
Competitor Analysis (look at their sales page, social media, etc.)
Share a Survey with your Email List
Once you’ve done market research, you can determine what gaps your course can fill, how to stand out from the competition, and what problems your course will solve.
How to Generate Interest in Your Course
One of the questions Melanie and I discussed was, should you wait until people ask for the course before you create it? While you don’t need someone to reach out and say, “I’d love a course on XYZ”, Melanie did recommend waiting until people are showing interest in the topic.
For instance, if no one is asking for tips about canning pickles, there may be no interest. Or, you may just be in front of the wrong audience.
Either way, you need to generate interest when creating a course.
You can do this by…
→ starting to plant the seed in your audience's mind
→ asking them for feedback about the topic
→ publishing long-form content on the topic
→ discussing it in your Instagram stories
You don’t need to introduce your course yet but just start the conversations.
If you’re interested in creating a course, Melanie hosts a group coaching program to walk you through marketing research and testing your offer before you put your course into the world. You can check it out here.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Today I am chatting with Melanie Battistelli. She is a former teacher, a girl mom, a wife, a certified business manager, and soon to be certified course and launch strategist. After leaving the classroom in 2022, Melanie has become passionate about taking her love for learning and educating others by helping course and membership creators launch their programs. She also specializes in hiring freelancers for busy CEOs and streamlining systems in their business processes. She currently lives in northern Virginia with her husband, two girls, and their dog and cat.
I am super excited to chat with you today, Melanie!
Melanie: Thank you. I am super excited to be here.
Jenzaia: Can you just start by telling everyone a little bit more of your story? What you were teaching before you left the classroom, and then how you got into launch strategy and the OBMM piece of it?
Melanie: Of course. So I was a history teacher. I taught mainly AP courses; United States History and Human Geography. So I say that because I feel like that's where some of my skillset comes in, in terms of launch and strategy planning. Because if you ever have taught high school or really honestly anything that has a state test, you know what standards you need to hit and what the students need to know.
So it kind of played into like, backwards planning, which is mainly what I do for launches. I started as a general virtual assistant in late 2020 and dabbled in things. Customer support. I tried social media management. That definitely wasn't for me.
It's actually why I think I started listening to your podcast a while ago. Cause I was like, oh, marketing. Your girl needs help! Your podcast is great. Then one of my first clients had an online course and I sort of stepped into her role as her project manager. And got more and more comfortable with not only her course launches, but also her launches that had multiple affiliates. So that sort of led me to just wanting to solidify my skills a little bit more, which led me to becoming an online business manager through a certification program. It's not like I have my MBA or anything but iit definitely gave me some skills and more confidence.
Jenzaia: This is so perfect that that's your story because I'm outlining the other podcast episodes for March and so we'll have released an episode on Niching Down. And one of the pathways that I talked about was starting as a generalist. And kind of figuring out what you like, what you don't like. So it's so cool that that is your story.
You started totally as a generalist, found some things that you liked, found some things that you didn't like, and went through that whole process of feeling it out and have now gone into OBM, but then also are in the transition from there to something else that is like calling at your heart. So that's so cool.
Melanie: Yeah, and I do like the aspect of working on a team, like as a teacher for 12 years. I miss seeing people every day. And the department at my high school, it was great and it was big. There were 20 of us in the history department. So I do miss working on a team. So I still keep one or two retainer clients at any given time where I manage their remote teams and kind of oversee their entire business, which gives me that warm fuzziness of still actually working with people rather than one-off projects here and there.
So it took almost two and a half years, but I feel like I finally found where I wanna be with a balance of retainer clients and then launch projects. And if I don't feel like working that many hours in September, I'll just hang out with my retainer clients and not worry about picking up extra stuff. So it's been nice so far.
Jenzaia: I really like that. It sounds like you have a really good balance there.
Melanie: I try. It's not always easy. I probably made it sound a little bit better than it was, but I think too, there's just this process of figuring out what works for you and for your family and the season you're in.
Jenzaia: Right. And like you're saying, I just took time off in December for the holiday and knowing that I could take a few less clients and lean back on retainer clients is so great. And then same with launching a course, you can choose when you're launching the course to fit those ebbs and flows of schedule as well.
Melanie: I agree.
Jenzaia: One of the biggest questions I get asked is like, the before. How do I know what to do while I'm creating the course and getting it set up? Knowing if the course is gonna go anywhere, right? And I think that that's something you have tons of insight on. So what are your thoughts about before, like what we should do before setting up a course?
Melanie: That's like the hardest part, because I feel it's where people kind of, I don't wanna say like make mistakes - I mean, you don't know what you don't know - And I feel like a lot of course creators start in a similar way. Like they have this great idea for a course, people are gonna love it and buy it, and I know how to teach it, so I'm just gonna put it out there and people will buy it. Which I mean, that's what everybody wants, but it doesn't always happen that way.
And I've actually started to see a couple recent clients…actually one I just talked to this morning …She's launched twice and she's not happy at all with the results. It went okay, but it definitely didn't perform to the degree that she hoped it would. So we're looking at doing a couple things.
You could do this before you even start to create your course, which is when you should do it, but a lot of people don't. Or if you've had a launch that you consider kind of like a flop, you can go back to the drawing board, so to speak. So the first thing that you kind of want to do is segment your audience as best as you can.
So for example, for me, part of my audience are course creators who want to launch a course. But that's kind of a wide network. It'd be like saying your audience is kindergarten through second grade teachers, or even just kindergarten teachers. But then you have to think more about it.
So what do these kindergarten teachers want? Do they need help with literacy resources? Do they need help with math and number resources? So for me, like people who wanna launch a course. That's part of my audience, but I get different people, people who don't have a course idea or they have a very vague idea. I get people who have a full course created and it's converting and doing well, but they're sick of managing it cuz it's a lot and they don't wanna do it themselves anymore.
Or this sort of new group of people that I feel like are starting to find me are people who have launched a course previously by themselves and it didn't go well. So the way that I'm going to speak in my marketing emails, Instagram or whatever, is going to look very different. But they're all under the same umbrella of people who want to launch a course.
So I think sometimes, and I hate to use the term niching down because we use that term all the time, but I think sometimes course creators haven't actually looked at the specifics of their audience and what their audience needs.
So if you can kind of break it down into your broad audience and then make it more specific into different segments, then kind of think about, well, what is each segment's problem and what's their goal? So people who don't have a course idea, their problem is they don't have any idea what they're doing and they don't know where to start.
Their goal is probably to have a successful course launch and they might be overwhelmed by all the tech, overwhelmed by creating the curriculum. They have different problems than maybe somebody who has a course that they've launched and they consider it like a failed launch. They might have all their email copy, social media posts, and sales page set up, but their problem is they don't know where it went wrong.
So very different problems. Probably ultimately the same goal to have a successful course launch. But I say all that to say that I feel like that's where a lot of people kind of skip and they don't break down their audience into small enough segments and then really think about how they're going to speak to them about the problems that their particular segment of the audience has.
And for me, people who don't have a course idea or people who have a failed course launch, they might have the same goal. And it's okay if your audience has the same goal, but you gotta kind of think about problems that they're experiencing because those are probably different.
Jenzaia: That makes a lot of sense. And I know you support people with course launches one to one.
Melanie: I do. This is where I feel like I could use a little refinement myself. I support people one-to-one. Sometimes it's people that have absolutely no team, and it's just kind of me and them, and we're sort of splitting the work.
Like a lot of times I found that what intimidates people is technology and making sure that everything is hooked up correctly through their email provider and whatever launch element they're going to do; webinar, challenge or something like that. I have also stepped into the role of managing a couple launches where they have a team and this is an easier one for me. They have full teams that have launched with them before, but they're sick of managing. So they just get to be the face and show up and smile and do their live thing. And I'm the one making sure that everything gets done behind the scenes.
That one I enjoy the most. It's less pressure on me. You know? If they already have a copywriter on their team and they already have a social media manager on, that's just a little bit easier for me rather than trying to juggle all the pieces.
But yeah, so I have one-to-one. And then I also have aspects where I'm managing full teams. Cause I've done both and I enjoy both.
Jenzaia: If you had a course versus one-to-one…I'm just wondering about the messaging piece there, because it feels like if you're working one-to-one with people, that your one-to-one offer could vary a little bit more based on that person's specific needs. Like if they have the team or not, and if they've launched before or if they haven't launched.
Whereas if you have a course that's trying to help people solve that same problem, would you wanna be segmenting your audience like you talked about and potentially only solving the one person's problem, or would your messaging need to pull in different groups or segments?
Melanie: I think it kind of depends. There's some ways that you can bridge that gap by offering certain bonus aspects to your course. Like if you choose to offer, which a lot of people do, like group coaching calls where people can come and ask their questions or office hours or a Facebook group.
It kind of depends because if their ultimate goal is the same, you might be able to kind of use the different pieces of the messaging with different segments to appeal to more people. But if their goal is not the same, you might have to pick. And if you're in the beginning stages, like we talked about a bit ago, of trying to choose a course idea and kind of make sure it's going to do well, you might just need to pick one of the segments and create the course around that.
Because that's another kind of problem that I've seen off and on. Trying to be all the things to all the people. And yeah, when you talk to everybody, you end up accidentally talking to nobody or nobody's really sure like, is this for me or is it for somebody else? Is this gonna help me? I would say you can use language and the problems that different people are having and your audience could dictate your messaging and if the goal's the same, you might be able to create a course to kind of address all of those people at once. But you also might not be, it depends how similar their goals are.
Jenzaia: The other thought that crosses my mind is, it sounds like potentially the example you gave of people who have no idea what kind of course they wanna run, and people who have created their course and they haven't had success quite yet with it. And then people who have created their course and they've had success. They all have the exact same goal but there are different points in the journey.
And so you may potentially create different offers that serve these different people at different levels, like some sort of freebie to help people decide what their course wants to be about. And then your actual course would be supporting people to DIY their launch and then your one-to-one service to support people once they're ready to hand it off. If you wanted potentially to create a product suite that goes and supports people at all the different levels, but you'd still need to segment your audience to help slot them into what stage of the journey they're at.
Melanie: Yes. And that is where I personally hope to get at some point.
But talking about also just kind of the space that you and I are in a lot, teachers pay teachers, cuz I have had a couple clients outside of the T P T space and what you see is like a lot more DIY. In the T P T space, one client that I have, she's launched eight times and she has basically done it herself every single time.
So that's where it also comes into doing some market research to get a feel of what your actual client wants. And it's tricky, right? Because you know, people have different preferences. Some people are willing to just pay the money. What I've seen more often in the T P T space is that people want to DIY more than pay for one-to-one services. But not always. It just depends on the person.
Jenzaia: Definitely so many factors. How do you segment them and then once you've segmented them, how do you figure out exactly what the problem is?
Melanie: So with market research, and this is actually one of the reasons why I chose to take the certification that I'm in right now about being a course and launch strategist, because I feel like this is something that's really missed. It was really missed in my OBM program. And again people are afraid of the word market research cuz it's scary and it's hard. Of course, there's online surveys that you can send to your email list. I often feel though, people don't end up doing those enough. They'll do it once and then never again.
But especially if we're talking about staying in the teacher's space, teachers need different things in September than they do in April. The client call I was just on this morning, it didn't go like she wanted. We were talking and I said, when was the last time you sent any sort of market research survey to your list? She has an active Facebook group of over 4,000 people. She created her first course in 2020 and then just never did it again.
But 2020 was a different time! So utilizing your email list to send out any sort of online survey, there's some advantages to that, right? You can get a lot of people with not much effort on your part. I always recommend offering an incentive to get people to fill out the survey.
I would keep it to definitely less than 10 questions with a mix of like yes and no. And then also some fill in the blank or some open-ended questions. You don't wanna give them 10 open-ended questions because people are busy. You can also look in Facebook groups. If you are utilizing social media, you could do stories or just like the polls in your stories. Especially if we're talking about a failed course launch, I've noticed a couple of my clients have thought to ask current students like, Why did you buy this? What's your favorite part of the course? What is your biggest takeaway? What made you decide that you needed this course?
But if you can even get a Zoom call where you can record it and then actually take their language, that's going to be super powerful in terms of market research. And then I would also recommend competitor research if somebody else has a course idea. Very, very similar tiers and it seems to be successful.
That's like actually a really great thing because it means people need it or there's a desire for it, or a want for it. So not to copy somebody else's course, but if you can find any other people who have courses out that are similar, take a look at, you know, what do they offer?
What are they covering in their course? Do they have any live support? Do they have any bonuses? What's their price point? Because if you're creating a course on classroom management and you wanna charge $300, but there's seven other courses out there on classroom management that are all $97, you're gonna have a hard time selling.
Jenzaia: You'll have to work a lot harder on showcasing the benefits and I found this to be potentially more true in the teaching space. I find that there can be a lot of price comparison. If you are gonna price your course or your membership significantly more expensive than other people, then sometimes it just comes down to price comparison, which is in my opinion, not necessarily the best way to decide what you're gonna buy, but just to be aware of that, I guess.
Melanie: Yeah, it's definitely not the best thing. So yeah, it's just something, I've found over the last couple years in this space to definitely be conscientious of just not being an outlier. So competitor analysis, I guess you could say, or research is something that you should at least take a look at and kind of be aware of what other people are offering.
Jenzaia: I really like that. I like what you said too about it almost as a way to validate your idea. Because if somebody else has that course on classroom management, or if there's seven of them, we know that this is something people are looking for or they wouldn't have courses. Whereas if you were doing something like how to catch a frog, there's no courses on how to catch a frog.
So there is that really nice thing about doing the competitor analysis. It helps to validate your idea if you don't necessarily have the audience built already or whatever else may be stopping you from collecting other pieces of data beforehand.
Melanie: For sure. And I mean, I think it goes against our nature as people though, right?
Because you wanna come up with something new and innovative. But I mean, that's where you have to think about things like, well, you're different. Like you as a person are different. You have different strengths and experiences. And somebody who jives with you might not jive with somebody else or the way that somebody else teaches.
So, I feel like I have also really had to personally work on this, especially when I decided I wanted to shift into more of like launch management and strategy. Like a ton of other people do it, but there's nothing wrong with that, and I think that's a hard thing for course creators to get over because you want to be the first one to have a course on frog catching, right?
But yeah, it's not a bad thing if somebody else already has a course on what you hope to create a course on.
Jenzaia: On that innovation piece, I actually did some of this competitor research when I first created my course and found that there were other ones, and then more recently I was looking and some of those people have created these really cool offers that started as a course.
And then through them working with students and finding different pieces, they've turned their ads course into these cool group programs or mentorships. And so I just thought that was really cool as a Facebook ads course that has transformed into these other pieces. And so it's possible that innovation or that amazing idea could come from running your course, talking to your students and finding out what else they need or how you could better serve them.
Melanie: Definitely. I mean, and I think that's something really hard for people to get their heads around too.
Like, your course is not about you. It should be about what your audience needs and wants, or else it's not going to do great.
Jenzaia: The reason I started Facebook ads is because I was creating a course for math teachers. And if you could ever call something a flop, I would call it that!
There were a lot of reasons, and especially now that I support people with launches and I've gone through a couple of significantly more successful launches, I could get into all the reasons why it was a flop, but that's not important.
I was trying to force my course to my audience. I didn't wait until people were asking me to make this course. I was just like, here you go. Shove it in your face. So like, is there a happy medium spot? Do you have an opinion of like, yes, people should be asking for the course before you create it?
Melanie: It's like that meme where it's like, nobody…nobody…and you're like, here's my course!
It's so funny you brought that up because I feel like I’ve kind of struggled with that. Like personally, in my own business, people have started to ask me a lot of questions about hiring. I just had one of my launch clients - who I don't work with on retainer, but we've become friends - hired a VA and the VA ghosted her after six weeks and charged her eight hours pay and gave her like two Instagram posts that weren't good. So people have been asking me about making a course on hiring. And I don't wanna be known for that.
But more and more people keep asking me questions about it. So anyway, to answer your question, I have a spreadsheet of questions that I have been asked over the last year. Questions that I've been asked since July, and I wish I would've started it sooner. If you keep it long enough, you will start to see a trend about what people actually want from you.
Jenzaia: This is such a great tip. Oh my gosh. I love this.
Melanie: I can't say I'm gonna do anything with it, but this would be a tip that I would say for people who maybe are thinking of creating a course. And if one of my retainer clients left me tomorrow, I would probably start advertising what it's like to work with me on a retainer basis.
If you have multiple different funnels of your business and are thinking about a course but unsure of what to do, just start noticing what people are asking you about.
I have my own personal Slack, where I add launch clients and I have a channel where they can all generally type questions. And I'm looking right now and I have 7 questions. All of them are about hiring. It doesn't even pertain to launching!
And maybe that's cuz I'm providing such great support with launching. Maybe that's because there are not a lot of tips on how to hire a freelancer, especially in this space. Because a lot of TPT people want ex teachers or people who are in the education space. So listen to your audience and keep track. If nobody has asked you about a topic, probably don't make a course on it.
Jenzaia: So let's just say you were considering a pivot in your business. Or there was a topic that really, really interested you and you wanted to consider making a course.
I've had a T P T store since 2013. Most of my clients have T P T stores, so I'm very aware of it and I could probably help with some of it. Again, nobody's ever asked me, but let's just say I was super passionate about it. I really wanted to get in there. How could I start generating some of that interest without shoving it down people's throats.
For everybody out there, I am not at all considering this. This is a theoretical, hypothetical situation. But like, let's just say I wanted to get started helping people create T P T stores. How do you go about that?
Melanie: So I would probably start creating some engagement type stories on your Instagram, Facebook, just to kind of poke and test the waters. You could always use things like those, the question box. What questions do you have about starting a T P T store? Have you ever thought about starting your own T P T store?
So I would probably say to start to test the water. And then I feel like this is such a generic answer, but if nobody's responding in your audience to those questions, it takes a while.
It takes a while to kind of start to pivot your audience. So you might need to create some long form content about it and just start talking about it more. I wouldn't just talk about it for like three days and give up. If this is something you really wanna do, then I would start talking about it and I would give it a month or maybe even two months and see what kind of engagement you're getting with it.
So, if you were, again, hypothetically trying to do this, throw it in as one of your pillars or stuff that you continuously talk about and see if people are engaging with the content. Are they replying to your stories? Are they answering your emails? And if you get like zero replies and zero engagement after a month of talking about it on stories and sending a couple emails, it might not be what your audience wants.
I don't wanna say it's time to get a new audience, cuz that's not true.
Jenzaia: Well, I was just thinking you have to make a decision. Do you continue to pursue this and dive full-time in building up an audience? Or you let it go and hold onto the audience you currently have and the wishes and desires and needs?
Melanie: You would have a decision to make, and especially again, hypothetically, you would have a really big switch to make.
You would have to get in front of a new audience. Like, it's not an easy undertaking. And I feel like that's why a lot of people, especially TPT’ers, add a course or a membership as another layer of income. And they've had to also sort of pivot their audience a little bit.
But I can't think of anyone who's just been like, I'm not doing this anymore and now I only do this.
Jenzaia: I did that a little bit when I decided to go into Facebook ads. I jumped in, but I wasn't known for math. I hadn't really built up an audience. I hadn't done all of that work, and so it wasn't the same as what it would be now if I were to switch out of Facebook ads.
I now have an audience. To leave would be much more challenging. We're burning down a whole business. It's scary.
Melanie: Yeah. And like why would you? You would just add something else. It would just be much easier to add, more like a rather smooth transition. And like once you're established in something, you could hire someone to run that side of your business and do something else if you wanted to.
Jenzaia: So much theoretical happening at the end of this. But that was really great information about if your heart is pulling you in one direction, how you can go in that way even if you're not getting any feedback. You could start to guide your audience there with your content. And then knowing that there's gonna come a point potentially that either you've gotten the feedback and you have a green light to go ahead with it, or you have to make a decision, right?
Jumping in even more or letting it go and saying maybe right now is not the right time.
Melanie: While you're talking, I actually just thought of a friend of mine in my mastermind who actually started in August as a social media strategist. Side note - her and her husband paid off like $50,000 of debt in a year.
She did like one story or one post about it and people kept asking her, how did you do this? She now has I think maybe one or two social media clients on retainer, but she's kind of totally pivoted and does debt-free one-on-one calls.
She just started a free Facebook group. She's talking about maybe doing group coaching. She just listened to what people continued to ask her. Even when she was posting about social media, they'd be like, but I saw your story - you paid off the money. So yeah, she's totally pivoted in the last six months and doesn't really advertise social media anymore.
Jenzaia: I feel like the one big takeaway here is to listen to your audience and what they're asking for. What they're saying their problem is and how you can support them.
Melanie: Yeah, and it's hard, especially if you really want one thing and they're asking for another. I mean, you can totally ignore it. If you feel called to do the thing that they're asking you for, you should probably look into that because it's what's going to help the most people and probably be more successful for you in the long run.
Jenzaia: I feel like too, sometimes people can see things that we're passionate about and that we're really good at. And because we're good at them, it doesn't even cross our mind. Like your friend that you were just talking about the debt payment, she might not have even seen that as amazing or special or that she could help people. But from the outside, they're like, that's who we need to talk to.
You don't notice. It's just you're normal. So leaning into that outside perspective can be very powerful if you're not even seeing it yourself.
Melanie: Yeah, it’s somewhere in the perfect intersection of what you wanna do, what your audience says, and what you're good at. That’s what you should do with your business.
Jenzaia: I love that. Well, thank you so much for coming and chatting with me. It's been wonderful. I know that you have a freebie for the audience, so can you just tell us a little bit about what that is and who should be looking at downloading it?
Melanie: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess going back to my audience segments, I have a course checklist which takes you all the way from pre-planning stages with market research, the whole way through all of the assets, everything you would basically need to create in order to launch a course successfully. So it could be perfect for people who haven't even started creating a course yet.
Or for people who kind of just want that second checklist and somebody else's eyes on it to make sure that you have everything that you need.
Jenzaia: I love that. And then if somebody would like to find you, where's the best place?
Melanie: I mostly hang out on Instagram @DuxburyDigital. And my website is duxburydigital.co and you can find out a lot more about me there.
Jenzaia: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me!
Melanie: Thank you for having me!
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