The Ultimate Lesson Plan for Creating Your Online Course
I just sat down with a teacher and helped her map out how to make $24k in six months using the skills she has right now. Want to know what I told her?
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First: How much would you like to make?
I asked her how much money she wanted to make–not just to cover bills but to live. Money for bills plus living, fun, and experiences. She and I are both clear: creating an online course isn’t about making just enough money. We’re no longer willing to accept just enough to get by.
She’d already watched my Minding Your Money video and used the worksheet to calculate her magic number: $4,000-$5,000/month.
Cool.
I asked her to say the number a couple of times so she could get comfortable saying it.
Making the money you want starts with saying it without doubt in your voice. Try it. Say, “I make $4k a month from my online course.” If you hear a question mark at the end, try it again and again until it sounds like a plain ol’ declarative sentence.
Want to figure out your magic number?
Click here, and the training with the link to the worksheet will open in a separate tab. That way, you can finish reading The Ultimate Lesson Plan and then head over to figure out your magic number.
Second: Here are the ways you could get there.
So she wanted to make $4k-5k per month, which means $16k-$20k within six months.
Let’s work with that.
To hit her number, she could create and sell:
$2,000 offer to 10 people
$1,000 offer to 20 people
$500 offer to 40 people
$10,000 offer to 2 organizations (This option is primarily for senior education leaders who could package their knowledge and expertise and offer it to an organization. That’s not what she’s doing just yet, but I wanted her to see that it’s an option. A someday option…for her–and for you.
Then I asked her, which of these feels most aligned for you?
“I don’t feel ready yet for the $10k offer.” So we took that one off of the table.
“$500 feels low, like it undervalues my experience. What I know feels more valuable than that to me.” So we crossed that one off.
“With the $2,000 option, I’d have to make sure I put enough in the offer. I might have to do some research to make sure I know enough.”
My response, “Sounds to me like that might pull you into hustle mode, like you have to do more, know more than you already do to make your offer worth the price tag. We are done with hustling, so let’s not do that your first time around. Anything that pulls you into hustle, overworking to prove your value is a no-go. Period.”
That left us with the goal of selling 20 people a $1,000 offer.
She said, “That feels right.”
Third: What problem do you know enough to solve right now?
This teacher has been teaching for 7 years or so. She’s had great results with her students. So much so, she exited the classroom and created a new role for herself at her school. Not only that, she used to tutor students. She has a wide range of knowledge and skills working with and supporting students with special needs.
I asked what problem she could solve right now, with no prep and no research needed, right now: helping parents of children with autism get the best education for their child from choosing the right school to having an effective, stress-free partnership with their child’s teachers.
Do you see how her experience uniquely positioned her to solve a problem?
Her solution was based on three factors:
What people ask her for: Her old tutoring parents routinely ask her to help with this.
What she knows inside and out: Her job believes in her skill enough to pay her, why wouldn’t others?
What excites her: Why would you do work that doesn’t?
Fourth: Pressure test the problem.
Let’s be real: not all problems are worth $1,000. And even if the problem is a $1,000 problem, not everyone is willing or able to pay that amount.
That’s one of the reasons why we calculate the magic number first. As educators, we have a heart to serve. And in many cases, we gravitate towards serving those with the greatest need, which is beautiful. But here’s the problem: in the process of serving everyone else, we’ve forgotten to serve ourselves. Your offer, your course, your business is about serving you, about creating abundance and overflow for you, so that you can serve others from your overflow with joy and love instead of resentment and depletion.
That’s why it’s important that we ask ourselves three questions to pressure test our problem:
Is this a painfully paralyzing problem to somebody? Could she think of someone who feels stuck and overwhelmed by not being able to advocate/support their child with autism, that paying $1,000 for relief would feel like a no-brainer? Because if she couldn’t, this offer goes nowhere. Return to start.
How well do you understand the problem and the solution? If she knows the problem well enough, she’ll be able to use words/phrases that her ideal client will identify with. She’ll need to be able to talk about how it feels to have this problem and what thoughts people with this problem think. She’ll also be able to make the solution plain, and she can’t do that if she’s trying to learn the solution. Either you are intimately familiar, or you’re not. And the success of the offer depends on it.
Can you map out a clear, step-by-step path to solve the problem? Relieve them of what feels like their greatest stressor? Here’s the thing about solutions, they are multi-dimensional. Just like when we create lessons for students, we ask ourselves, “What will students know (knowledge) and be able to do (skills)? What tools and what concepts do I need to teach to make that a reality? This is why educators have the advantage when creating online courses: We know how to teach, so people learn. We have the cheat code.
Because she passed the pressure test, we knew she had a no-brainer offer that she could get 20 people to buy.
Fifth: How do we get 20 people to buy a $1k offer?
There are four elements to launching an offer and getting people to buy it.
I jotted out the funnel (fancy online word for the process of moving people from I-don’t-know-you to enrolled-in-your-program) I used to launch my own programs:
Cast a wide net: Facebook ads will get her and her offer in front of the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time.
Give them a sample: Invite people to join her for a webinar or workshop that speaks directly to the painfully paralyzing problem of her people. She’ll get to show and tell them 1) that she truly does get them and that she can help them. Why a webinar? Because people connect with people. This way, they get to experience her and her teaching style, allowing them to move from stranger to student much faster. (Note: We all know that not everyone who registers for a webinar shows up. But if 75 people register and 6% enroll, that’s still 4 people. $4,000 from one webinar. And she’ll still have the email addresses of the others who were interested enough to register. They may not be students at first, but they can be later. That’s still a win.)
Extend a please-take-my-money offer: On the webinar, after demonstrating her expertise and her heart to serve, she’ll extend an offer that speaks so clearly to her target audience, that they weigh their current reality (stuck, frustrated, more of the same) against the potential reality with her (clarity, support, confidence that they are doing right by their child), and the investment of $1,000 for what they get is a no-brainer.
People enroll: Now, even if there are only 10 people on the webinar, if they are the right 10 people, she could enroll anywhere from 2 to 6 people. For every person she enrolls, that moves her closer to her $20,000 target.
🔑 My tip: Run this webinar once a week for four weeks. Why? Because the first time, she’ll be nervous. And because if she knows she’s going to do it four times, she’s more likely to give herself grace and space to get better and better with each webinar.
So if she runs this webinar once a week for the month of April, and she enrolls 2-6 people each week, she could have anywhere from $8k on the low end to $24k on the high end.
I don’t know about you, but that’s not a bad gig.
She was sold, so we mapped out her plan.
She’d spend January - March getting her course/offer set up. She’d get super clear on her people, their problem, and her path to the solution. She’d create her webinar using my highly effective webinar structure (and templates), and she’d set up the low-lift tech: landing page, email and course platform, and her business banking account (because I don’t play that).
She’d launch her ads the last week of March and kick off her webinars in April.
She’d start her program in May, meeting with her clients once a week for 90 minutes for 10 weeks.
She’d finish her first cohort in mid-July.
$8k-$24k in the bank
But here’s where her brain exploded…
She could launch with webinars again in August and make another $24,000.
Given parents are particularly panicked at the start of the school year, especially parents of children entering middle school, launching again in August felt a prime opportunity.
She might be able to make even more because this time around, in addition to the new people the Facebook ads were bringing in, she could also re-engage and invite all of the people who didn’t enroll the first time–doubling her pool of potential clients. And this time, she’d not only have testimonials to include in the promotion, but she’d also have all of the new insight she learned from her first cohort. She could easily make way more the second time around.
She could rinse and repeat this process over and over and over again. Same webinar. Same offer. Same or better results.
“How does this feel for you?” I asked.
“I’m excited. Before, I didn’t know how to transfer my skills into something I could get paid for. I can see it now.”
Then I opened up the Unleashed Educator® virtual classroom, and we calendared out when she would do each of the lessons to keep her on target. Everything she needs to launch her program, serve her clients, and make a bigger impact and a bigger payday using the knowledge and skills she has right now.
She’s doing it, and now you can too.
Do you want to make this the year you use your knowledge and skills to serve you?
Join her inside Unleashed Educator®, an online program helping educators make a bigger impact and a bigger payday by walking them step-by-step through the process of creating their first online course.
