I can almost guarantee that you are going to want to update the content after
your first round of students go through it, and when you had it professionally
filmed, it becomes a lot harder to edit that content because you can't just
jump in and quickly edit the slides and quickly re record it. Welcome to
Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I read all the books,
downloaded all the freebies, and did all the courses, but it wasn't
until I started taking imperfect action that my business had its first million dollars.
Here, imperfect action is about doing things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action
over perfect action, and moving forward even when you're not sure you're doing it
right. On this show, you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips
and strategies to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom,
and even more joy. Are you on the list to get my daily businesses
Every day, I'll send you a bite sized prompt design to help you grow
your business in a more intentional way. Sign up at stephtaylor dot co,
forward slash DBB, or at the link in the show notes. Hey,
welcome back to imperfect Action. This is episode six hundred and fifty six.
Today I'm sharing six essential tools for creating and selling digital courses online. Now,
this is one of the one of the most common questions that I get
asked all the time is how do you create them? How do you sell
them? What tech has involved? What is the best tech for all of
this? So in today's episode, I'm sharing the one tool that I use
for hosting and selling digital courses, the tool that I used to design workbooks
and slides, how I record and edit my videos, the platform that I
use to deliver live webinars when I launch, what I used to deliver live
q and as and hot seat calls, and how I take submissions for Q
and A calls, so question submissions for QUS calls, and how I keep
track of the ones that I have answered in the past. Now, before
we jump into the full on tools and get into the techi stuff, I
just want to remind you of this concept of putting the cart before the horse.
Okay, the tools are the cart. They don't matter as much as
the horse. So your tools don't matter as much as what the offer is.
The tools that you are using to host the course don't matter as much
as what problem the offer solves, who it's for, how you communicate it
to the right people. You don't need to spend weeks researching which is the
best platform to host your course or the best tool to record it and edit
it. You're much better spent putting that time towards actually getting a really clear
idea of who is this for? How am I communicating it to them in
a way that makes them prioritize it. Okay. Those things are going to
have a much bigger impact on how well it sells than whether you posted on
Kajabi or teachable or think itfick. Okay, So now I've also turned this
episode into a cheat sheet. If you dm me tools just the one word
just tools on Instagram, I'm over there at Steph Taylor dot Co. I
will send you the cheat sheet of this episode with my complete list of tools
for creating and selling digital products. I will also include a link to some
Canva templates that you can buy work course slides and workbooks, because I've come
across quite a few really awesome templates and I know that this is something that
a lot of you ask, like, how can I find templates for workbooks
and slides and all of that, so I will link those in there as
well. Okay, so the very first tool I'm going to talk about,
the one that I use for hosting and selling my digital courses, is Kajabi.
And honestly, if I had to pick just one tool to run my
entire business, it would be this one. Yeah. It does checkouts,
sales pages, It can do your email marketing. You can build your email
list on here. It hosts your course videos. It makes them so that
nobody, that random people can't just download them and share them and sell them
to other people. It creates a course portal with a login, so your
students can log in and access all of the courses that they've purchased from you.
It's really nice, it's neat. It's not the cheapest option out there.
But I also believe that if you expect your audience to invest in you,
you need to invest in delivering a great experience for them. Okay,
you know, there's this whole concept that I A great thing I picked up
from James Wedmore when I was at his event in Phoenix recently, was are
you being the client that you wish to attract? So if you expect somebody
to invest in you. If you want to attract people who invest in your
offers, then you need to invest in your offers. Okay, So Kajabi
is really good at creating that nice, smooth experience for your clients. And
the layout of the course portal so the one that your students see when they
log in. I think it's much more user friendly. It's easier to navigate
than a lot of other platforms. I've been a student of many courses,
and I've been on the experiencing end of other hosting platforms, and I think
keajabi is just always miles ahead right and it makes that means it makes your
students experience so much better. The next tool on the list for designing slides
and workbooks, I don't think you can beat camber if you unless you're a
graphic designer and you're really well versed in using in design. I think Canber
is going to be the simplest option. There are so many great templates that
you can buy for Canber, and I've included some of those in the free
cheat sheet which you can grab if you DM meet tools on Instagram at Steph
Taylor dot Co. I will send you the cheat sheet with the list of
all of these tools, as well as some links to templates that you can
buy and you can edit really easily to suit your brand. The other great
thing about canber is that many virtual assistants are now also so familiar with Camber,
which means that if designing things isn't your cup of tea, if you
don't like editing templates, you don't like doing anything design focused, you can
get the workbook and slide creation task off your plate. Although I would pretty
much always suggest that you give somebody a template to work with unless they are
a professional designer who already knows how to design a really effective worksheet or slide
deck for a course. Then the next one on the list, the next
tool on the list for recording and editing videos, and that is descript.
We love this tool in my team, like, this is what we use
for everything that is recording audio and video. And you know, I don't
believe that you need to spend thousands of dollars getting your digital course professionally filmed,
especially if it's the very first time that you are teaching it, because
I can almost guarantee that you are going to want to update the content after
your first round of students go through it, and when you had it professionally
filmed, it becomes a lot harder to edit that content because you can't just
jump in and quickly edit the slides and quickly re record it. No,
you have to rebook the person who filmed it and get it professionally edited again,
and it becomes really expensive. So even though it might look nicer,
it's actually compromising the student's experience because the content might not be the most up
to date. So, like I said, we use the script to record
podcast episodes, but I also use it for recording course videos. Okay,
it's really good for basic basic video editing. My team can edit it easily.
I can record myself speaking over slides. I can record a video of
myself direct to camera and then edit it really easily because as I'm speaking,
it transcribes the recording and my team can just highlight the bits that they want
to delete like a text editor, and it deletes that out of the video.
And you can honestly just use your webcam, or if you want to
get a slightly better video quality, you can buy an external webcam. I
use the Lumina Pro. I love that one. The Elgado facecam is also
really good, and both of those will just give you a slightly better video
quality than you're built in webcam, although saying that the new Macs they have
really good built in webcams, so you might not even need an external one
if you're using a new Mac laptop. Okay, the next tool for launching
with a live webinar. Now, if you've been listening to the show for
a while, you know that I am a big fan of live webinars.
I believe they are a really quick way to build no liken trust with your
audience and a really quick way to nurture them to the point where they are
ready to buy your offer. So where I run my live webinars, I
use the tool Demio d Emio. It has been my favorite webinar platform so
far. I have tried a lot of them. I've tried pretty much all
of them, all of the major ones, and Demo has been the easiest
to use. It's been the most user friendly. It also delivers a great
experience for my attendees. It's a really neat experience with a nice chat.
It just all looks really nice for them. But I don't use Demo for
delivering Q and AS inside my actual courses. Demo is if I'm doing a
launch with a webinar and I know there's going to be a couple of hundred
people there, That's when I will use demo. But if I'm delivering the
live Q and as and the hot seat calls inside my courses and programs,
I will use Zoom. Now, we use Zoom a lot in this business,
as I'm sure many of you do as well, and that's because most
of our audience is really familiar with Zoom, so it removes any of the
friction that comes up when it comes to adding calls to calendar or finding the
link to show up, or downloading the latest update, figuring out how to
use the chat. Most people are familiar with it, so they already know
how to do these things. Now, that is where I will do the
Q and A calls, and if I'm teaching any live lessons as part of
a program, I will also teach those using Zoom. I will share my
screen, share my slides and that way they can see me, can see
my slides and they can ask me questions. And then the last tool is
for collecting Q and A questions, so submissions of questions to answer in the
Q and A and then keeping track of which questions I have answered and when,
and we use air table for that. At the moment, we could
probably also integrate it into clickup, which is where all of our task management
lives. Now, we have this beautiful Q and a form for Launch Magic
where students can submit their questions ahead of time for me to answer on the
calls, and for Freedom fast Track where they can submit their challenges that they're
experiencing in their business and they can workshop those in a hot seat with me.
So how that works is where on that zoom call and I will have
a list of who has challenges they want to workshop, and then we go
through that list and I unmute them. We spent a couple of minutes workshopping
their challenges like they're getting basically one on one coaching from me for you know,
sometimes it takes five minutes, sometimes a little bit longer, just depending
on how many we need to get through in that call and how in depth
each question or each challenge is. And then what we do is we go
through that list of questions or challenges and we tag them afterwards as answered so
that I can see which questions have been answered and which ones haven't. And
this really helps me to see where people are getting stuck with the actual curriculum
or with the content in the courses. Where do they need more support?
Where do I need to tweak the content? What do I need to change?
And that's how That is how you create a course that delivers what your
audience really needs by being flexible and by being open to tweaking things. So
there you have it. The six tools that I use to create and sell
my digital courses. I will put these together for you in a cheat sheet
dm me tools on Instagram. I'm over there at Stefhtaylor dot com and I
will send you this cheat sheet with my complete list of the tools for creating
and selling digital courses, as well as a link to some handy templates that
you can buy for course slides and workbooks. I've learned anything from this show
so far? Please take thirty seconds to leave a quick rating and a review.
I've been noticing a lot more coming through lately, which makes me really
happy when that email arrives in my inbox every Tuesday morning showing me which new
reviews I've got because I get to read them all, so take thirty seconds
means a lot to me. Thank you so much for listening. Catch you
next time.