Introduction
You want to have a digital course in your business, but right now you are feeling uncertain whether this is even doable. Maybe you’ve taken courses in the past on how to create a course and felt even more confused and overwhelmed.
Or perhaps you’re frustrated with slow or no progress and are feeling nothing but tired and frazzled.
The reality is that building a course has a lot of moving parts, including parts that aren’t taught in the big programs on creating courses. All of this leads to that uncertain feeling about the place a course has in your business or if it will even be profitable.
Becoming a six figure course creator relies on four key components so that you can finish your course, get sales, have a steady income that leads to six figures and even have time off without business crowding your time and thoughts.
Today I’m going to walk you through those four key components and we will wrap up the episode with the best way to implement key component three effectively.
What does it take to become a Six Figure Course Creator?
When you are adding a digital course to your business, it is easy to slip into course creation paralysis where you are pivoting ideas and approaches almost as soon as you get started. You might even find yourself focusing on busy work rather than the hard work. After a while it feels like all you are doing is questioning decisions, trying to find approval for the decisions that you’ve made and are drowning in a sea of meaningless to-do’s while missing the critical to-do’s.
Although you’ve heard of making six figures with a digital course, at this exact moment in time, you’re just wondering if it will ever get easier.
When you are working toward creating a digital course that will turn you into a Six Figure Digital Course Creator, there are four key components that you need in your business, but too often you only hear about one of them.
Four Key Components
Component 1: Magnetic Messaging
The key component that always comes up when you do a Google or YouTube search for a six figure business is marketing. At the root of a solid marketing plan is messaging that attracts the right people and repels those who aren’t ready or aren’t suited to your course offer. The messaging, how we talk about our course takes time to create and is key to growth not just in our visibility but our sales, customer retention, and referrals.
Component 2: Mindset Mastery
The second key component to building a Six Figure Course Creator business is to make sure that we are constantly and consistently working on mastering our mindset. Mindset work is never ending and feels like something to do “tomorrow”, but it can mean the difference between staying stuck where you are in your business and moving toward profitability and Six Figure status.
Component 3: Progress-Driven Learning
The third key component to becoming a Six Figure Course Creator is progress-driven learning. Progress-Driven learning is learning that is focused on helping you make progress in your business. As an entrepreneur, many of us love to learn. We scoop up course after course, we invest in workshops, templates, listening to podcasts, and more. These are good things as long as they map back to our key goals in our business and help us to get there. Before we wrap up today’s episode, I’m going to come back to this idea in our Sixty-Second Solution because finding the right learning opportunities can be tricky and I want you to be effective in doing this.
Component 4: Course Design
Finally, the fourth key component to becoming a Six Figure Course Creator is your course design. Although I left this one to last, it is exceptionally important as a course creator that you are building a course that follows research-backed instructional design principles. TOo often I see courses on creating courses that cover course creation in just a single module and then focus the remainder of the modules on tech, marketing, launching, and other pieces of the course. Too little time is focused on creating an exceptional student experience.
Six Figure Course Creator Effect
When you have magnetic messaging with an amazing course that follows good instructional design principles, you will have a revenue stream that not only attracts the right students, but then creates a situation where they can be successful and turn into raving fans.
But if you only have magnetic messaging and solid course design then you are going to hit a wall with how far you can go and even how much you can accomplish with your current resources and knowledge. This is where progress-driven learning comes into play. You have to take time to learn the missing pieces as well as stay up-to-date on new research, trends, and opportunities. But it has to be done in a way that drives progress. After all, we are all busy right? And if we are missing mindset work, things are likely to come to a grinding halt at some point. We absolutely have to master our mindset to get through the creation, launch, and delivery of our course. There will always be things that pop up to derail our progress, make us doubt our course, and even wonder if we can get to six figures, which makes mindset work critical to becoming a six figure course creator.
Clearly progress-driven learning is important and will lead toward a stronger, more cohesive, complete, and accurate course design. When learning is focused in the right places, it can have a positive impact on our course materials and content that helps lead to student success.
But if all we have is a learning-backed course without magnetic messaging and mindset work, the course will stay hidden away. Few people will ever get to experience the amazing work you’ve put into the course and over time that will lead to a mindset that has you going back toward an uncertain course creator instead of moving forward to becoming a six figure course creator. You might find that you are pivoting more often and looking for the magic bullet that will fix your business, which we all know doesn’t really exist…but it doesn’t keep us from looking.
You are probably starting to get the idea here, but let’s keep digging to see how this really comes together. When you combine progress-driven learning with magnetic messaging, you are going to know exactly what to say, how to say it, and where to say it as you learn the ins and outs of marketing.
But if we skip out on the solid course design, you will have students asking for refunds and telling others that your course is just fluff. They won’t be getting results from your course, which means that you won’t be delivering on the course promise, and they won’t become raving fans. This is going to limit your success, your reach, and most definitely whether you make it to that six figure level with your digital course.
Now this is where things get even more delicate. As course creators working to become Six Figure Course Creators, we need to make sure that a mastery of our mindset is paired with good course design. Why? When you master your mindset and commit to good instructional design for your course, you are going to be resilient when tackling revisions, extra work that comes from connecting the key objectives to each piece of the course and each slide, and developing materials that students will be able to use. This is not for the faint of heart. That mindset piece is what keeps you going when you are in the weeds of course design!
But none of that hard work will matter if you don’t have the progress-driven learning to back up what you are putting in your course or get stuck learning things that won’t matter for your course in the long run. It won’t matter if you don’t have messaging that will reach the right people at the right time so that they say yes to your course.
So mindset is clearly important and when you pair it with magnetic messaging, you will again develop a resilience that is key to creating a revenue stream that is profitable in your business. Messaging is a trial and correction process. Even the biggest and best marketers in the world will tell you that they test every piece of every campaign. Each word. Can you imagine doing that without working on your mindset. They are critical to one another and to the success of your digital course business.
But messaging and mindset alone aren’t going to make your course a success. You still need to be able to learn and implement the right things in your business through progress-driven learning and you need to be able to successfully implement the ideas into a solid, research-backed course.
Now, if you only have progress-driven learning and mindset, you are going to be equally stuck in that uncertain course creator phase of business. While progress-driven learning combined with mindset work will help you to stay on track, be creative in looking for the right learning opportunities, especially when the ones you want are out of your price range or not available, they won’t be enough to get you to six figure course creator status.
You’ll be missing an audience and course to sell that will wow your students.
When you have them all combined together you get a beautiful effect. You create the Six Figure Course Creator Effect. Where your course creation efforts are rewarded with loyal students, an audience that is growing not just in number but in commitment to your offer, and you gain a sense of peace that as you continue to implement your magnetic messaging, a solid course design, and progress-driven learning you will become a Six Figure Course Creator. It isn’t an overnight occurrence and it is that added mindset mastery work that helps you to stay the course and work through the challenging pieces of being an entrepreneur adding a digital course to your business.
Action Item: Self-Evaluate
All of this means that we have to take action. We have to self evaluate. We have to identify which of our key components is going swimmingly well, and which of these key components could use a little bit of love and time in our business.
This week, as you start to take action, I would love for you to sit down. And examine your own business. How are you doing in creating magnetic messaging? What’s it like to find those learning opportunities? Are you making sure they’re progress driven? What about your course design? Are you really implementing all of the best principles and practices in your course design and Are you working on your mindset actively, consistently, constantly, every single week, day, month, year, we want to be doing that all the time.
This week’s action item is to do a little bit of self reflection and examine which of these four components. You need to spend a little bit more time with, for a little while, maybe one has been lagging behind the others. That’s okay. It’s pretty normal as we’re building a business to focus on one thing and do a lot with that and then move on to something else.
See what you need to be focusing more on right now.
Becoming a Six Figure Course Creator
Growth in your business is all about strategy. But finding the right strategy, especially when you take into account the need to focus not just on magnetic messaging and course design, but on mindset and progress-driven learning can feel big.
This is something that I’ve been managing in my own business, with my students, and in my own college courses for over 15 years as a psychology professor, mentor, and entrepreneur.
One of the key things that I’ve learned is that we can’t just rely on learning to get up to that si figure mark as a course creator. The books, podcasts, courses, and workshops get us partially there, probably about 10% of the way there, but the other 90% often comes down to mindset work through 1:1 support.
If you are listening today and realizing that you are ready to take the next steps in your business and get 1:1 customized, tailored help with building your digital course creation business, let’s have a talk. Send me a DM at DigitalCourseCreatorGuide on Instagram or Facebook and we will sit down to figure out the next right steps for you and your digital course business.
Now I know that not everyone is ready for a 1:1 Coach or mentor, but you might still have questions, need help getting unstuck, or just plotting out your next step. I’m here for that as well, because we all deserve to have support in our business. If you need a little extra support, I hold at least two slots each week for strategy calls that are designed to help you get unstuck and take action in your business. These are free, no obligation calls and you can schedule your call at coursecalls.com.
If you are ready to make the next 12 months THE year that you go from being an uncertain Course Creator to a Six Figure Course Creator, schedule a strategy call today. Again, the link to schedule is coursecalls.com.
Sixty-Second Solution
Progress-driven learning is something that isn’t talked about enough. Sure, we talk about learning as a necessary part to being a successful entrepreneur, but there are so many options out there today that learning can quickly become a stumbling block to success.
We get sucked into all of the different opportunities out there, the FOMO that every launch brings, and scarcity of pricing that could go up at any time.
The trick to making the most of your learning and truly engaging in progress-driven learning is to look at your annual, quarterly, and monthly goals. Find the gaps in your knowledge that will keep you from achieving those goals and then identify the learning that will fill those gaps.
Other opportunities get flagged as nice to have for the future, but you can by-pass them in favor of progress-driven learning opportunities.
