How to pre-sell your course & build your business with community

Alexis Teichmiller: Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to hand it over to you. I know that you have an action packed workshop for us, so I will let you take it away.

Mariah Coz: Oh my gosh. All right. Thanks, Alexis. Just give me the reins here. All right, let's do it. I'm so thrilled to be here with all of you.

Thank you to Andy and Alexis for inviting me and for having me here. And thank you all for showing up and being here live for my session. My name is Mariah cause if we haven't met before, hello we're about to have the most fun. And before I dive into today's session, I want to introduce you to Cami.

Who is my partner in crime here today. She has been a client of mine. She's worked with us in our company. She's just, honestly, same thing. We feel like we've been doing things together since 2015 in some way or another. So I'm going to introduce you to Cami and Cami is here. To basically be my, she's my wing woman.

She's my go to and she's going to help me stay on track today. She's going to help me answer all your questions. And Cami's also here to make sure that if you have any questions after this session, that you can just go straight to her, send her a DM she's here to help. So Cami introduce yourself and then we'll dive right into today's content.

Cami Farey: Awesome. Hi, everyone. I'm Cami. I am so excited to be here with you on this fantastic summit. Like Mariah said, I work with the team over at Fearless CEO with Mariah. I've worked with them in some capacity since 2015, starting out as a client, creating my very first digital course. And my background is in one on one web design services, later created a course.

Got into webinars, got into digital products, which evolved into coaching and masterminds and all of those things. So I've been on your side of things as well as the side of things. And so these days inside fearless CEO and with Mariah, I'm a coach in our programs. I'm a sales expert on the team. I'm the person who, if you DM us or send us a text message or anything like that, I will personally reply to you.

I'm not a robot. I'm a real human. And I'm super excited to get into all of the great content today.

Mariah Coz: Welcome to the future of online courses and how to pre sell your course in real time. We are going to get into it today. I hope you're ready. Before we start, turn off everything in the background. That could be a distraction, your email, your app, silence, your phone. Get ready to take notes. I hope you have a notebook.

I hope you have a pen. I hope you have a Google doc open because we are going to bring it today. Hello, my name is Mariah because if you haven't met before, I have been creating and selling online courses about all sorts of different topics since 2014. Like way back in the day. Okay. I'm the founder of fearless ceo.

com. You want to check out our website? We've got lots of free resources there. Lots of blog posts and videos and lots of free stuff for you to dive into. I have helped thousands of people like you presell create. I grow profitable online courses in every niche you can imagine from home decor to watercolor painting to engineering, fantasy football, witchcraft, everything.

Okay. And I've become renowned for our unique approach to evergreen funnels, innovating how we create and sell courses and creating these really human first enrollment experiences that we're going to talk about today. iF you want to connect with Cami and I, if you have any questions, during the presentation or after the presentation, don't hesitate to reach out to Cami and to our fearless CEO account as well.

Cami is a real life human being that you just met, and she is there ready to answer any questions that you have. So check us out. Ask questions. Don't be shy. We're here to connect and have conversations. You'll see as part of the presentation today, I'm going to talk about why we do this and how we do this and how so much of selling online courses has shifted to having conversations and dialogue with people.

So we'll talk about that today as well. And you'll see this as an example. So today you're going to learn the biggest shifts happening in the online course and community industry. You're gonna learn how to pre sell your course in a way that benefits your core students. And yourself, you're going to learn how to deliver tons of value to the founding members during your presale of your course and community.

Okay. So real quick, who here already has an online course or like a paid community program and who here has not launched yet? Okay. I'm looking at the chat. Evan does. Okay. Awesome. Test does let's see. Katarina does. Kathy says not yet. Not yet. Dr. J says not yet. All right. Awesome. Awesome. We've got a good mix here.

People who don't have an online course, people who already have one. So if you don't have an online course, it's perfect for you because we're going to be talking about how to pre sell your course. If you already have an online course, I'm actually going to be sharing quite a few actionable tips of how you might want to update your marketing and your messaging and the way that you promote your course.

You might want to update some of how you're doing that now. Based on what I share with you about what is shifting as we go into the future of online courses. So we'll have lots of actionable tips for you today. Now, things have changed dramatically since I started courses in 2014, right? Andy knows this, Alexis knows this.

I've been friends with them and working with them in different ways for years and years. Things have changed a lot since I started, platforms come and go, algorithms change, marketing strategies fall in and out of favor, but there are also timeless strategies that never go out of style right because even when things shift and evolve and algorithms go crazy.

Humans are humans and so we can still create strategies that. Are beyond the trends and beyond, what changes day to day, right? So today we're going to be talking about what is working right now, where are things going? What direction are online courses headed in? So my predictions for that, having been in this industry for a really long time, what you need to know and how to make this work for you, how to actually apply this in an actionable way to your business, to how you market your course, how you position your course, how you talk about your course, even how you deliver your design, your course from the.

From the get go. Okay. So it's going to be really actionable as well. So we're going to be talking about the old paradigm, the old way of doing things. Again, been doing this for a long time. So I've seen all these shifts happening and I can see the shifts that are coming as well. So we're going to be talking about the old paradigm versus the future of online courses and how you can get ahead of that and start implementing this in your own business. I'm really excited.

Now, I want you, as we're going through this, I want you to pay attention to your own habits and patterns. So I want you to pay attention to, as a buyer of courses, as a consumer, as someone who purchases community programs, right? I'm sure everyone here has purchased a course at some point. Have you noticed These shifts in yourself, have you noticed your own behaviors changing?

Have you noticed that what you value may have changed over the years, right? I don't think any of us are the same people we were a few years ago for many different reasons. So I want you to pay attention. And I'm going to ask you as we go through this, if you've noticed some of these things yourself, and maybe now we're just able to really put our finger on it and really put a name to it.

Okay. So number one. Is the difference in the change in what your customers and paying students are valuing right now. Now it used to be that when you were promoting and selling your course, you would just talk about content, and more content, right? The more the better. Okay. But now when you're selling your courses, you really want to focus on community and connection.

Okay. Back in the day, it used to be that positioning the value of our courses when we would go to create a sales page or write a sales email or write a social media post, tell everyone about how great our course was, we would be super focused on the content in the program, specifically the volume of how much content you get.

Does anyone feel like they've used to see this where imagine that there's a sales page that just across the top says like over 80 hours of videos included, right? If you saw that today, you'd be like, Oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to get through that. But that was how it used to be.

You used to really like. Talk about how many videos were included or how many hours of recorded content were in your course as an indicator of value, right? You used to say, Oh my gosh, my course has a hundred videos in it. It has a hundred hours of content. It has all this stuff, right? It was very much more is more attitude, more bonuses, more videos, more hours more, more, right?

That was how things used to be. Things have changed because in today's day and age, there's information. Overload. Okay. Tell me in the chat. If you understand, are you feeling the information overload? Are you all feeling like the content just oh my gosh, we're drowning in content. There's so much of it out there.

Literally. Yeah. Okay. Everyone hears their understanding. Things have changed. It's not how it was seven years ago. Now, the value of your course is less about how much content is included and how many dozens of videos you have and how many hours and hours of content you have. It's more about being in a community of like minded people.

It's about being on a journey with a group of peers and having support. Like right now, when you're going to sell your course, the most important thing that your paying customers are going to value. Are the live elements such as. Live streams, community, virtual mixers, group Q and a calls. Those are the most valuable parts that people are really like actually thinking when they buy a course, that's what they're looking for people.

When they're purchasing a course, they want to join an engaged community. They don't just want to watch a hundred videos alone by themselves and have no one to talk to about it. So in the past, you used to say. Oh My gosh get my course. It has a hundred videos and 80 hours of content.

Now, I really want you to focus on less is more and actually like. It would be better for you in your positioning, in your emails and in your sales pages and everything like that to actually talk about how quickly or how simply your course can help people get results, right? So instead you might say you can complete this entire course in less than six hours.

That is now a value add. It's. So my action item for you is instead of highlighting how much, people get from your course in your marketing, focus on the outcome, focus on the journey and focus on the people that they will connect with when they're in your community, when they're in your course and all the peers and friends that they're going to meet.

Okay. So I want you to think about including less content. But spending more time in your community, engaging with the real humans, and you can do that with features that Circle has live streams, Q and A's, special events, you can host community mixers, you can DM with people, we're going to talk about that a lot.

So I want you to think, how can I include less content, right? Because information overload is really real, but spend more time crafting that community aspect. That is actually what people are paying for now. And so keep the focus on what matters, the people that you are helping. Okay. Cami, is there anything else you would add to this one before we move on to the next big shift in the online course industry?

Cami Farey: Yeah, I think I would add to that sometimes we get into the feeling of like community needing to be like us personally connecting with every single member and it's it becomes all about you right and while it is incredible to have relationships with your community and with people who are in your courses and your programs.

You can also cultivate those relationships. Among your members, right? So encouraging your members to talk and network and discuss the videos. And, you can create collaboration and community in ways that don't necessarily depend on your personal time and output. So if you're thinking like, Oh, I want a community, but isn't that going to take so much of my time? I think if we structure it in the right way, it can be both.

Mariah Coz: I love that. It's so true. It's actually about connecting them to each other, not just you being the guru in the group. Its community is so different than having that one person up top, just giving information to everyone else. All right.

So let's dive into the next big shift in the online course industry is online course communities. Of course, we can't be at a Circle summit and not talk about online course communities. Now it used to be that we all hosted our online course communities on social media platforms. Okay. Now, It's incredibly critical that you run your course community on a group that you own.

And I will share with you why from personal experience. Okay. I've been saying this since the very beginning. Like I'm sure Andy and Alexis have literally heard me say this a hundred times since 2015. Back in the day, you cannot build your house on someone else's land. This is huge. You cannot build your house on someone else's land.

You cannot build something as important and crucial to your course business as your community on a platform that you do not own that can kick you off at any time for no reason with no recourse. Nothing you can do about it. People are leaving those social media platforms in droves. And I'll answer that question too of oh, but I don't own Circle.

I will answer that question. Save that to the end. We'll come back to that. People are leaving those platforms. Indros, right? People are leaving those social media platforms for lots of different reasons, political reasons, personal reasons, mental health reasons, lots of reasons, right? And we've heard the nightmare stories of people getting banned and blocked from their own groups, unable to comment with no recourse.

There's no one you can appeal to. There's no one you can ask for help. That's it. This actually happened to me in one of my own high ticket program groups where I'm supposed to be in there answering people's questions and for over a week, I was not even able to look at comment or see any of the stuff going on in my own group.

That's when I knew. This can't be like, we can't run our multimillion dollar company relying on having a group that is on someone else's platform that we have no control over. And if we lose access or we just get banned for no reason, there's nothing we can do about it. There's no one we can ask.

But more importantly, your core students don't want to be on those platforms either when they're trying to learn and actually get things done and grow in a focused environment, right? So it used to be that, everyone was just already on these social media networks. And so it seemed like having your group for your course on those social media networks was easier.

But at this point in time. Half of your students won't use those platforms for personal reasons, and the rest of them just find them horribly distracting and promoting negativity, which is not the ideal experience that you want your students to have when they're trying to participate in your course, right?

Not to mention you have no control, you get locked out, removed, shut down, there's no customer support that's going to help you, right? But Now it's really important to think about how can I create a group on a platform where I actually own this communication channel with my students, right? More and more people are favoring and actually prefer focused groups that are not mixed in with social media feeds, right?

You get to set the culture and the tone for your community when you have your own group, and you can have more advanced features designed for educators and teachers like you. Social media wasn't built for that, right? It wasn't designed for that. It was designed for the quick dopamine hit.

But it wasn't designed to actually be functional for educators and teachers like us. So you want to have your own group where you're in control. You're the administrator. And if you ever need anything, you can contact support because you're a paying customer, right? If you're a paying customer, and this is what I mean by, do you own the software platform?

No, of course not. But. You are a paying customer. And so there is an exchange there that there's going to be customer support if, and when you need any help, whereas. Facebook, Instagram, whatever other social media platform you're on, those are free. And so there is no, you are not entitled to support. You're not entitled to any sort of service.

They can do whatever they want, whenever they want. So it's totally different. So my action item for you, when you're going to sell your course, promote your course, I want you to really promote the fact that your private course community is off of social media as a benefit in your marketing.

So make sure that you highlight this in your emails, in your sales page, in your webinar, where people know that this is intentional, that your course community is its own focused place where they're not going to be distracted by social media. I want you to make it a point to highlight that it's a curated.

Positive and distraction free virtual space. That's meant for them to get the most out of your program and talk about the community aspect and how they can connect with everyone in your community through live chats, DMS videos, all those things on the course platform. And that is all in one place. So I actually want you to say this in your sales page, in your marketing, in your emails, that it's all in one place.

So there's no need for them to log into different. Platforms in order to participate. Okay. So this is really important. And even if you already have an online course. I think it's really helpful for you to go in and think about how can I add some of these things to my marketing assets to just highlight these things that maybe I haven't been really properly highlighting in your marketing.

Okay, so now we're getting into the third big shift in this industry and Cami feel free to jump on and tell me if there's something in the chat that we should jump in with before we move on.

Cami Farey: Oh yeah, I just wanted to say that from my end of things. So I on the sales side talking, like talking to nearly every single client who comes our way, like multi million dollars of core sales a year.

I've really seen this firsthand where more and more now in conversations leads are saying to me, Hey, where is your community hosted? Is it on Facebook? And when I tell them that it's not on Facebook, they're like, Oh my goodness, I'm so relieved. Thank you. That's the last thing I needed to know before I enrolled. Like it's really been a powerful movement lately.

Mariah Coz: Yeah, that's really true. More and more people are going to ask you this in the sales process. And so you want to be able to have an answer that you feel good about, honestly, either way, right? So wherever you decide to host your course community, you want to make sure you feel good about that because I do think more and more people are asking about this than they ever were in the past.

All right. So number three is that the way we launch our courses. Has changed now, the old way was that launching was basically a one way street. It was one person talking at everybody else. And I'll give you some examples. Now, everything is about dialogue, direct messages, conversation, personal connection.

It's so different. This, I think is one of the biggest changes. And this is like literally what Cami does all day. Every day is just chat in the DMS with people about our business, right? Like people come into the DMS and chat with Cami. And there's a real human there to answer their questions.

And if there's one thing that you take away from this presentation today, I want you to remember this. Launching is a dialogue and I've been saying this for years and years before DMs and direct message and sell by chat was a thing I was saying launching is a dialogue. It's a conversation.

It's a two way street. It cannot be just one person shouting into the void, talking at everyone, but that there's no back and forth conversation. Launching is a dialogue. This is like the biggest shift. So back in the day, launching was basically a lot of just one person talking out at their audience.

Think of it like a person with a megaphone, right? There's just a person with a megaphone, just shouting out at their audience. Look at my course, buy my thing. Here's what I'm doing. Read my email, watch my video, blah, blah, blah. It's just this. One person with a megaphone, but imagine they have earmuffs on.

So they're not listening to any feedback coming back the other way. They would pre record the videos, any marketing videos or anything like that. Everything would just be created in advance and then dripped out and released, as marketing for the course, there was essentially like a gate between you and the course creator that you were buying from, back in the day, you really didn't.

I'm going to personally connect with or ever speak to the person who was selling the course. When you enrolled, you really didn't have this expectation that you're going to chat with them or have some sort of conversation before you joined. But the tech and the platforms were so different. Then right.

No, nothing was live, like the whole idea of live streaming wasn't really a thing yet. Instant messaging or DMing, direct messaging wasn't really a thing at that time. So things were very different. But now, launching your course is a real time, two way conversation happening with your audience and students.

At like in the moment right now there are live streams where you can reply to comments in real time so I can see your comments here. I'm literally in the chat and we can be having a conversation right and say, Oh, hey. Hey, Scott. Oh, hey. Kimmy I know Kimmy. Hey Evan Hey Renee. I can be chatting with you all here in real time, right?

And there's direct message exchange when people have questions before they enroll. So people sending you direct messages sometimes on social media platforms, but they can also do that in a platform like Circle to make sure that they get their questions answered before they enroll. And people now expect that type of connection, right?

People can have more connection to you as a creator, as a thought leader, as an educator. Really the comments and the social media and the live streams and all this stuff has removed all the barriers between us. So for example, using something like Circle, you could do a live stream to your free community, to your audience there and host a webinar or promote your course launch, people can interact, they can engage and ask questions in real time, you can also have personal private DM conversations with the members of your audience in your.

Free group and answer their questions and help them make an empowered decision to enroll in your course. That's something that Kimmy does a lot too, is Kimmy is in the DMS, answering people's questions and helping them make an empowered decision if they're going to enroll in one of our programs or not.

And she's just really there to answer questions, ask questions, coach people through that decision. And so you can actually have this two way conversation. Launching right now is all about dialogue and direct messages and really having a personal one to one connection with people. So my action for you is that I want you to invite as much interaction and person to person communication as possible during your course launch.

So this looks like inviting people to comment on your videos, inviting people to comment on your posts, inviting people to ask you questions, actually telling people to DM you. Being open and available for that, telling people to DM you, telling people to come into your DMs or to message you, or to really personally connect with you and break down those barriers between you and your audience, because people are buying from people that they resonate with.

And so remember at the beginning where I said. Feel free to reach out to Cami and I, we are real people. We're here to chat with you. We want to connect. We want to have a two way conversation, right? This is what we do all the time is we actually make it a point to make ourselves available and to make it known.

Like we're extending an invitation to you, right? We're inviting you into the DMs so that you can have that conversation with us. Let's have a dialogue. Let's connect in that deeper way. So you could do something like that as well. Where you actually make a point, not just sitting back and passively saying I guess if someone DMD me or commented or messaged me, I guess I'd be okay with that, encourage it.

Like actually tell people to do that. Cami, you're the queen of this. Is there anything you would add in terms of this shift of, this is literally what you do all day. So this shift over the next, the last few years going into the future of having personal conversations with people before they enroll in a course.

Cami Farey: I think that this is Huge. It's really everything, I like so many people tell me they're like, I can't believe that you're a real person. I thought you were a robot because I do a lot of like you can do part of what's great about DMS. And when I say DMS, I mean like messages across any platform that you're using.

But part of the great thing about this is that you can communicate asynchronously across time zones. You don't have to get on a call with somebody. You can send text based messages. You can send screenshots. You can send voice memos. Or sometimes I'll even make a little video for somebody and send it to them.

You just have a lot of flexibility in how you communicate. And people are so blown away and so and so touched to receive that level of Support that a real person really cares about them and cares about helping them make the right decision. So when somebody is looking to join your program or your community, you know what you offer is genuinely not the right fit for everybody.

And, somebody is coming to you with questions, you want to help guide them towards. Yes, this is a good fit for you, or no, I don't think it is. And coming from that really genuine place means so much to people. And I've seen it where maybe somebody doesn't enroll with us the first time around, but that interaction sticks in their mind.

And then they refer friends to us and then their friends enroll. And it's just it's like in the last session, we were talking about word of mouth and Tiago mentioned how important that was to his business and how he would have really leaned into that. To me, I think of this as like word of mouth on

steroids.

Mariah Coz: Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And there's lots of great questions in the chat. Someone said, how does that scale? Like, how would that work now? First of all, not everyone who enrolls in your course is going to send you a message. A huge percentage of people will just enroll in your course and never ask a question.

That doesn't mean that you don't still want to just make it known that you are available to act, to answer questions. I'd rather someone come and ask me a question rather than just be like I don't know the answer to that. Isn't on the sales page. I'll just go somewhere else. A large percentage of people will enroll in your course, never asking you a question.

That's great. You just want to make, you just want to have and encourage these types of conversations. And in terms of scalability, we've had thousands of people at our virtual events. We've had over 1, 500 to 2, 000 people at our own virtual events that we host. And we've had, and that's just Cami.

That's all Cami. We've had no problem keeping up with that. For the, we have hundreds and hundreds of leads that come into our business every week. We have no problem keeping up with that. It's just Cami. We've scaled this to the multi millions. And Cami is the one real human behind it all.

So it does scale. If you're already at, if you're already beyond five to 10 million, then you might need two people or something, but that's like a, that's like a tomorrow question. If you're, if you're not already at the 10 million mark that's a tomorrow question, but yeah, it does scale.

Cami Farey: One of the, one of the ways it scales is you set your internal boundaries. So you don't want to be tethered to your email or your messaging platforms 24 hours a day. Of course you don't. So set boundaries, I'm going to check it for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. And have that be set like I do it.

I tend to do it in the pockets of my day. So sometimes I'll be standing in line at the grocery store, replying to messages or like waiting for my vet to come to the barn where I have my horses. And so it's really flexible, but then I also will tell people things like we're messaging on a Friday.

I'll say, Hey, our team is about to be out of office for the weekend. So what other questions can I help you with before we go out of office? Okay, great. So happy to answer that. Let's reconnect on Monday. So I'm really clear with people. And I set those communication boundaries, which Makes it scalable and prevents burnout.

Mariah Coz: Absolutely. Yeah. We have a four day work week year round. So we're not in the burnout camp for sure. We're not big, like hustle and grind type people. We're chill and relaxed type people. All right. So let's move on. We're going to come back to all your questions at the end.

We'll do a full Q&A. We'll stay as long until Alexis and Andy kick us out. We'll stay and answer all your questions. Number four, the. Big shift that's happening is how we promote our courses in our communities. So it used to be that we would really, the only options for promoting your online course would be paid ads or growing a big audience on social media and promoting your course that way.

But now there's another option, which is community based. Now, one of the things, one of the keys to this concept that I'm about to show you is that Circle does allow you to have a free community. And also have a paywall where you can have a separate paid course, a separate community for your paid students, a separate community where you host coaching and support for your paying students and clients, right?

So it's important to know that there's a functionality and a feature where you can have a. Free community that you can grow. And you can also have a separate walled off space where that's the private coaching and student and course community as well, only for paying members. So for a long time, the only option for promoting your courses and paid communities was on social media, which as we've talked about, you don't own, we know the pros and cons of that, right?

And you would spend years and years building up a community, which. I would say when we're talking about social media community is a loose term there because it's really more of an audience of, again, people watching you, but you're not really having that same connection. And so it used to be that you would spend years and years building up this social media platform, hoping that your account doesn't get shut down.

Hoping that the algorithm doesn't change and hide you from the feed and you never get seen again, right? The other option was to pay to play, right? This would be paying for ads on social media platforms so that your content does get seen by your audience, regardless of the algorithm, right? If you're not in the algorithm's favor that month, you can pay for ads so that people who follow you can actually see your stuff.

But now how we promote our courses is a lot more community based. Now people are creating free communities that are off of social media. So like free communities where people can gather that are focused around a topic or passion or movement, right? They can build an audience that they essentially own that communication channel more so than you would on social media, right?

Now this is a more long term strategy. It's a. Of building your community around your message, your movement, your business, your topic, your theme, right? Everything that you talk about in your business. But what's really cool about this is you can actually launch your paid course and community offering to the audience that you've built in your free group.

And you can get real time feedback. As you promote your course, you're going to see exactly. What questions people have, what are people commenting about? What are people asking in those live streams? If you have a free Circle community, you spend a couple months building that up, then you're ready to go sell your paid course, you're going to have this like real time direct market research, client feedback to really see what people are asking, what should I be including in my course?

It's really cool. So when we talk about pre-selling your course, this is going to come into play. It's going to be important. So my action for you is. To think about how you might utilize both the free group features and those paywall features to separate your free community from your paid courses and that private course community where you might have coaching or more support or more personal support in that way.

And you can be less reliant on social media or paid ads. If you put in the work to build a community on a platform that you have more control over that way, communication with your potential students is not at the mercy of the algorithm or anything like that. So I want you to think about how could you use those 2 features to actually create an ecosystem that supports each other?

How can you create a free community that becomes the sort of lead generation for your paid course and your paid community? And where you have your coaching and your higher level of support. Okay. So how can you use those features together? Okay. Who's ready to pre sell their course? Is everyone excited?

Yay. Safa says, yes. Me, Joshua says, yes. Awesome. All right, let's go ahead and dive in. Now, all the shifts that are happening in the industry, the biggest changes that Kimmy and I have seen through the years and how to actually action items to apply to your marketing. I hope that everyone here, if you already have a course, I hope that you are literally going into your sales page, your emails, your marketing materials and thinking, okay, I got to update that.

I want to make sure I really highlight this in my marketing. I want to make sure I talk about this. I want to make sure I really feature this as a benefit, right? Okay. So let's talk about pre-selling your course. Step one is what we just talked about. You need to build some kind of audience. Now, this can happen in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different platforms.

You can build an email list. You could build a social media following. We know the pros and cons there. You could build a free group. Something like Circle offers, you could build an SMS text list or text group. I don't know if you all have seen more of these. There's a couple of different apps, like Telegram is one.

There's a few others that allow you to start building a community of people who actually like subscribe to your text messages. So that's some way you can do it. You could build up an audience of podcast listeners or like YouTube subscribers that kind of falls into the social media category. Or blog readers, right?

If you're old fashioned, like me, I still have a blog, love having a blog. It's very long term good, sustainable strategy. So I'm curious who here already has an audience on some kind of platform like this, like email, a free group, a podcast, maybe people who follow your blog, maybe you have subscribers on YouTube.

Okay, cool. A lot of people say yes. Okay, good. So you're going to, you're ready to pre-sell goods. I would say. You don't have to have a huge audience on any of those platforms. Ooh, awesome. Ida has 40, 000 people on Clubhouse. Incredible. So you don't need to have a huge audience like Ida does, but you do need to have some kind of audience to launch to.

I recommend that you have an engaged audience of at least 250 to 500 people before you try to pre sell your course. Ultimately, though, it's not a hard and fast rule. It doesn't have to be exactly 250 people. It's more about the engagement than the number itself. And so we've had tons of clients have really successful pre sales and initial launches of their courses with 100, 150 people.

But they had a really engaged audience that they had really nurtured. Cami, can I ask you how many people were on your email list when you did your presale the first time?

Cami Farey: Yeah. So when I first started thinking about creating a course, I'd been doing web design services and working with clients.

Super word of mouth based referral business, didn't have a huge audience. And so I started thinking about creating a course when I had about 250 people on my email list. But then I decided to do a little bit of audience building specifically around my course topic, which was DIY websites. And so I had like just under 500 people on the list by the time I did my presale.

Mariah Coz: I love that, that's a great example.

Cami Farey: Yeah, it's so it's important because it's like you could have the most incredible idea in the world for a course, something that people really need and that would sell like gangbusters.

But without that kind of initial small pool of like 250 to 500 people to test your idea with and pre-sell it, it can be a little tough to get the traction. Having some kind of a small audience base really helps.

Mariah Coz: And sometimes it doesn't even matter how big the audience is, but if you put it into the context of where that audience is, the level of communication and engagement is so different. So for example, having 10, 000 Instagram followers, but only 5 percent of those people ever see your posts in the feed because of the algorithm is a lot different than having 200 people in.

A community that every single person sees every single thing that you post. And there's no situation there. So it's not just about the number, but think about the engagement. Think about the context of that platform and how much reach you have to your audience there.

And this is how a lot of the most successful course creators started out. Like all the amazing people that you've been hearing from today. First, they start with the community and building the audience around their passion, their movement, their mission, the thing it is that they're excited about.

And then once they have a little bit of a community and an audience. Then they are adding paid courses and that more exclusive kind of core student support, whether it's coaching or just Q&A, or just being available in the group, that sort of higher level of support. So whenever I talk about pre selling, a lot of people think pre selling sounds super weird.

Like, how am I going to sell? So why would people pay for something that doesn't exist yet? What am I going to give people when they buy so that they get value immediately? That is exactly what I'm going to show you today. People love being early adopters. They love being founding members and they will love the extra benefits and bonuses that they get when you do your pre-sale.

So here's the thing. The reason I'm so keen on pre-selling and I just talk about it all the time. Pre-selling is the only true form of product validation. I hate to say it, but. Surveys to your audience, doing a poll in your Facebook group or Instagram story, asking your friends and family if they would buy your course.

Those things are not true forms of validation, right? Someone filling out a survey and saying, yeah, that sounds great. I'd totally buy it. Or voting for some, scrolling through and voting for something. That is not the same as someone pulling out their credit card, purchasing your course and being like, heck yes, I'm in right.

The only true form of validation is an actual presale, not a bunch of people telling you that they would buy something maybe in the future. Okay. I tell you this so that you don't get your heart broken trying to validate your course idea with a survey. All right. So let me walk you through the presale plan.

I have a full calendar to show you. And I just want to show you how you can make your pre sale a win for you and your audience, and how to really get over that fear of how am I going to presale something that doesn't exist yet? How, what am I going to give people when they enroll? How am I going to keep people engaged before I release my course?

So you're going to pre-sell your course with a timeline to start dripping out your course content two to three weeks after your pre-sale happens. So there's going to be a gap there. You're going to do your pre-sale. You're going to get those initial founding members. And then there's going to be a couple of weeks between then and when your course is actually released.

Don't worry if you're a visual person like I am, I have a calendar to show you. So if these words on the screen don't mean much, like they don't to me, then just hold on give me one sec. Dripping out your course content just means releasing a new module week by week. The. First time that you run your course, so that very first time that you're creating your course that first round, you're going to drip it out week by week, creating it as you go, right?

That's just something you only have to do that once. Once you've done it, then you can do instant access and it's all created and you never have to do that again. But it's just something when we say drip out your content, it's basically publishing a new module week by week. That first time now in the interim.

Between when your course presale happens and your first module release, everyone gets access to two really valuable bonuses. Number one, everyone gets access to the private course student group, which is an opportunity to connect with others and yourself. So people who purchase during the presale, they're actually going to get early access to this private student community where you will be answering their questions.

And they're going to get access to two to three weeks of bonus live call Q and A's with you in the weeks leading up to the release date of the first module. This is super key. This is like a perfect win situation for two major reasons. Number one, your pre-sale students, the people who buy as founding members, they get Instant access to something really high value, right?

They get instant access to the group where you're in there, you're answering questions, and it's all focused on a topic that they're excited about. And most importantly, they get live calls with you and they get their most pressing questions answered. Personally tailored to them. Now, this is a very special benefit of being a founding member in your course, because future students who join way later, they may not get as much personal support as those initial founding members, right?

Like you might not end up being, I know this is hard to imagine if you're just starting out, but in the future, you might not be the person who's managing your community 24 seven, you might not be the only person who's hosting those coaching calls. You might not be the only person. Who is answering questions?

And so in order to get that personal tailored support from you, the creator, that is a very special benefit for those founding members. And people love that super, super high value. Now you're also going to now, the other reason that this is so key and such a win for everyone is that during those. You are going to get a sense of what to include in your course content.

As you start preparing your modules based on the questions that are being asked in the group and on those bonus Q&A calls, okay, this is going to make your course so much better for your students. It is going to feel like you literally built the course for them because you did. Now let's look at that.

On a calendar. Look at this beautiful work of art for you all. Okay, so try to imprint this into your brain. Just so y'all know too, I am going to be teaching more in depth sessions about the actual Launching and the strategy, like the actual, like content of the emails and the webinar and like the whole promotion and like a detailed look at launch week and everything.

I'm going to be teaching that at the chart your course bootcamp that's happening in October when you join the Circle bundle. Hopefully I'm saying that all right, Alexis, tell me if I'm off base there with the names of everything, but, that I am going to be teaching in great detail, the actual like launch strategy and everything like that.

And all the emails and the calendar and the live streams and everything. So I'll be teaching that more in depth in October at, in the charter course bootcamp. So today though, I just want to give you this really brief overview of everything. So you're going to start teasing and promoting your presale, right?

You're going to probably be posting a little bit whether it's on social media, or if you have a podcast or YouTube or something like that, you're going to be posting or to be sending a couple of emails and be sharing with your audience that a presale is coming for your course, you're going to do that for a couple of days, then you're going to open the cart for your presale.

That means that it's launch day. You're going live. The sales page goes up, the checkout page works. People can actually put in their credit cards and buy your course. During the presale. Okay. Now, during the presale cart open, we recommend you do about a week. This is six days here on this calendar.

You're going to be sending emails as part of an email sequence. You're going to be promoting us, posting social media posts, or again, wherever your audience lives, whether it's an SMS text list or a free group on Circle or social media, you're going to be posting there as well. During that whole week, right?

We've got a whole system there. Then you are going to close the presale. So you're going to have a last chance. There's a last day where that presale, usually people during their presale, we'll do like a special price or a special incentive. I think when Cami did her presale, you did both a special pricing.

So it was like special founders pricing and like a special bonus that people got access to. So it was. Super, super enticing and very incentivizing to be a founding member. Then the day after the presale closes, you're going to add your founding students, those initial founding members to your private course student group, they're all going to get to hang out in there and then you can see right here, you're going to start delivering those bonus live Q&A calls.

Again, this is a way for people to start receiving value. Instantly, even though your course content isn't released until about three weeks later. So this is just such a win for everybody. You can see here during the week leading up to these bonus live calls, you're going to have time to start preparing and creating your course content.

Now I recommend that you work ahead, maybe like a week or two ahead, always try to be a week or two ahead where you're working on module one during this week here. And it doesn't get released until about a week or two later. So you're always going to be a few weeks ahead in terms of creating the content and then publishing it and releasing it week to week as you go that first time.

Okay. So you can see here, you're able to start preparing, creating your course content. You're going to host those bonus live calls that are a huge win for the people in your course. But it's also a way for you to gather information and really get a sense of what questions do I need to be answering in my course content?

As you're creating it. Okay. Listen, you don't want to spend eight weeks creating course content and then have to redo it because you didn't actually answer the questions that people had who joined your course. Promise you don't want to have to do that. So then you're going to have plenty of time here to be creating and preparing your course content, you're just going to continue working ahead, then you're going to release module one.

You're going to be working on module two. You're going to release module two. You're going to be working on module three. You're going to release module three. You're going to have plenty of buffer there to get everything done and get everything prepared and organized to publish week by week. Okay. So that is our presale calendar.

That is how you are going to provide an immense amount of value during your presales, the people who buy as founding members, giving them instant access to something that is very valuable to them, but also a huge benefit for you too. Pre-selling isn't weird, right? And within a few weeks, your course content is complete and published.

From here on out, you can do instant access. You never have to do that part again. Okay, so I want to know what has been your biggest takeaway or aha moment from this session. We are going to do a quick Q& A. I don't know how much time we have. Before you go, everyone put your biggest aha moment or takeaway.

From this session into the chat, we're going to do a quick Q&A, and Cami, I would just love to know from your perspective, like that concept of pre-selling can sound a little weird or I'm nervous. Like people are buying something that doesn't even exist yet. How was that for you? How was that experience for you? In a sort of brief synopsis,

Cami Farey: it was. The only way I would ever do things. So when I've been working with web design clients, I used to work with lots of clients who'd come to me and say, Hey, I spent the last six months creating this online course. I hired a professional video team, all the modules are done, everything's ready to go.

Now we need to build a website and sell it and get it launched. And that always made me incredibly nervous because sometimes those courses would hit the mark and sell, and then sometimes they wouldn't. And meanwhile, that's six months in, of your time invested. It's the production of the videos and they're creating the content and the whatever.

So when it came time to do my own presale, I was like, huh, I've never seen this method laid out this way before, or talked about this. In this way, but from my lived experience with clients, this makes so much sense. So pre selling my course for me, it felt fantastic. My founding members were really excited.

And then I felt like in a way I got paid to learn. So I got a nice cash injection from pre-selling my course. I think I made 19 sales in the pre-sale. And then after that, I learned so much about what my real customers needed, what modules would help them get the best results how to create content.

And so in a sense, it was like me getting paid to learn how to create and deliver this fantastic course experience. And it was very co creative with my founding clients. And me and ultimately help them get the best results. Cause I got into it thinking we're going to have these eight modules to take you.

It was a DIY web design course. So I was like, we have these eight modules to take you from zero to launch. And in my mind, it all made sense. And then as I started working with my real clients in the first round of the course from the presale, I was like, Oh no, actually they need these modules to be rearranged.

They need this extra thing. I can get them from zero to launch. Even faster if I do it this way. And so it was really to everyone's benefit. And these days I like shout it from the rooftops. I'm like, pre sell everything.

Mariah Coz: I love that. It's so true. You're going to learn so much. You think, you know what your course structure and content is going to be like, and then it just ends up being evolving so much and being totally different when you work with real humans in real life. So again, I want to invite you. If you have any questions, if you want to talk strategy, if you just want to connect with us after this, don't hesitate, don't be shy. This is literally what we do all day, every day, reach out to Cami in the DMs, as they say. You can find Cami on Facebook and on Instagram, or if you go to fearlessceo.co, you can check out our website. We have tons of free resources, lots of free downloads, lots of video, free videos, you can watch lots of blog posts, step by step everything like. Literally everything. Go check it out. Okay. And I think my team will post the fearless CEO link in the chat. I'm going to stop sharing.

Alexis, do we have time for Q&A, you tell me where we're headed. We are happy to stay as long as you want. Thank you. Yeah, we have time for a few questions and then I'd love to highlight the champagne content client kit. That you're that you've put into the chart your course bundle.

And then I also, I'm going to reclaim host so that I can turn my video on. Oh, cool. Yeah. Let me tell everyone how excited I am. I know I mentioned this a little bit, but y'all, I am going to be teaching the launch week. Of the chart your course bootcamp. So like I'm talking where, what emails do we send?

When do I do my webinar? Like what I just showed you that calendar, that presale thing is like very basic overview. We're getting into the details of everything you need to know to launch your course. And if you like the idea of launching is a dialogue. This is going to take it to the next level.

And I really hope to see you there. And everyone who gets the bundle is also going to get this other resource that we've created. We literally sell it for 300 or like you could go to our website and buy it for 300 today, but we are giving it to you as a gift, as part of the bundle. And so that is our champagne client content kit.

I know you're probably like, what the heck is that? We've created a pack of content marketing templates that are totally platform agnostic. So you can use them for emails and use them for podcast outlines and use them for YouTube videos, use them for social media posts. You can use them for everything, but it's this pack of content templates specifically written to help you sell more courses.

So if you're like. What the heck should I be saying to my audience? If you have a free Circle group of people, you're like, what the heck should I be posting in my group to share my story and get engagement and sell my product, right? Sell my course. This is exactly what it's designed for.

We literally sell it for 300 every day and it's just totally included and it's our best. Strategy and templates for attracting high level premium buyers to your courses. It's really one of my favorite things I've ever created. I say that about all the things I've created.

Andrew Guttormsen: The audience is loving it. Like they are so excited. You can just tell the feedback. Everybody's mutual. So thank you so much.