Most of the time, your audience are not even ready for the how to
content yet they think they want it, but they're actually not ready for it.
So when you share that how to content, they're going to save it
for later and then not come back to it, or they will have a
million reasons why they're not ready yet or why it won't work for them,
so then they won't pay attention they keep scrolling. So instead, focus your
content on what your audience needs to know before they'll be ready for that hell
to content. What are the things that they need to know to be ready
to take action on the how to content? 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 dollar year. 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
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intentional way. Sign up at Stephtaylor dot co, forward slash DBB, or
at the link in the show notes. Hey, welcome back to on Perfect
Action. This is episode seven hundred and seventy one. Today, I'm answering
a bunch of your questions about launching. I put other sticker on my Instagram
stories a little while ago, and I had so many good questions and I
couldn't get around to answering all of them in written format on my stories,
So I decided I'm going to finish answering them on here, as well as
sharing a couple of the ones that came up multiple times, because I know
these are pretty cold questions that come up whenever you are launching a new course
or program or membership, or whenever you're starting to think about it, or
whenever you're relaunching one that already exists. So the very first question that came
in was do you still encourage launching without creating the offer? Now, I
want to be clear, you do still create the offer, but you only
create the offer if the launch is successful, if enough people buy it for
it to be worth your while to create it and deliver it. Otherwise,
you refund them and you do your research, and you go back to the
drawing board and you pivot, you tweak, you do what needs to be
done, and then you launch again and you create it. The idea is
that you are launching it to test the offer and the messaging and find out
if it's something that your audience will actually pay money for, because we can
guess, we can do all great research, but until somebody actually pays money
for it, we don't know whether they want it or not. And I
love this method because I've seen so many people invest time, energy, even
money into creating offers that nobody buys. Like I've seen people who have gone
and invested thousands of dollars into hiring a videographer to film their entire course before
they've even solved the first one. And that's such a huge disappointment then because
if somebody, if you put it out there and nobody buys it, well,
now you've actually invested something. It's a lot harder to change. And
the biggest hesitation or biggest fear that I see stopping people from launching for the
first time is what if I spend time creating it and nobody buys it.
So by launching it before you've created it, or even launching while you create
it, or creating an outline and then launching and only actually creating the content
that fills into that outline once people have bought it, that's an effective way
around this fear. It's an effective way to stop this fear of nobody buying
holding you back. Also, if you have been procrastinating launching for a while,
if you've started outlining your course, and I'm you know this isn't court
specific, but I see this happening with course creators the most because it's very
easy for it to take a long time to create a course. If you've
been procrastinating creating it and getting it out there, launching it first creates a
great deadline because once it's launched and you've told your students, hey, it's
going to be available on this date or I'm going to start teaching it on
this date, now you have a deadline. You have to get it done.
It becomes a priority rather than something that just gets pushed down the to
do list onto next week's pile and then next week's pile and never ends up
actually happening. Okay, So if you've been procrastinating it, I would consider
launching first. And I know it's terrifying having that deadline, but you have
to trust that you can stick to it. You can do it in time.
You can also, it doesn't have to be that you create it the
entire thing after people have bought. You can teach it week by week.
I like the approach of of co creating with your students, where you're showing
up and teaching the content live for the first round, and you can figure
out where they're getting stuck. You can figure out maybe what challenges or what
questions they had that you didn't preempt, and then you can revise the content
so that when you do go and pre record it, you already know that
what you are teaching is effective to get them that result. Another time when
you might want to launch it before you create it is if you are somebody
who's running a service based business and you can't afford to take some time away
from working with clients. You can't say no to the done for you client
work or the one on one work because you need that income. But then
because you're working with the clients, you don't have time to create your course
or your program or your membership. So if you're launching it before you create
it, that brings in a bit of a cash injection. So that means
that you then have a bit of cash flow. That means you can say
no to clients for a little while and spend that time building out the offer
that you have sold. Okay, question number two, do I have to
do a launch? Can I just sell my course from my website instead?
And I love this question because I have a very strong opinion on it.
Okay. So to sell an offer, regardless of whether it's a course or
a program, or coaching or a done for you service, whatever it is
that you are selling, you need a sales process of some kind. And
for highest ticket things like done for you services and maybe coaching, this is
probably going to involve some kind of conversation like a discovery call proposal, but
a back and forth via email. But for a digital product, you're probably
not going to jump on a call with everybody who's considering buying from you.
That would just take way too much time. But is a sales page alone
enough to sell your offer, probably not in most cases. Okay, so
in some cases your sales page alone will be enough for someone to buy your
offer, but that usually only happens if the buyer already trusts you, so
they're super warm, they've been on your email list or following you for a
while, and they would buy anything you put out there. It also usually
only happens if they already know that they want and need this particular offer,
and usually if the offer is relatively low commitment. So obviously, when I
talk about commitment, price is a commitment one commitment point, So if it's
a lower price point, then it's going to be lower commitment than a higher
price point offer. But so is time investment. So a short course that's
say two days long or a couple of hours long, is going to be
much lower commitment than an eight week course, even though on the surface we
think, oh, an eight week course is more valuable, it's a much
bigger commitment for the person investing in it. Same with how much content is
in it. So if they can get through the content in five minutes a
day, that's much lower commitment than if it's going to take them five hours
a week, Right, So if it's you know, if the buyer already
trusts you, if they already know that they want to need this offer,
if it's relatively low commitment, then you can put it on your website and
drive traffic to it and it might convert. But more often than not,
your buyers do need a bit more of a sales process. They need something
that's going to educate them about the problem. They need reassurance that what you
are selling is different to what they have already tried and failed with. They
need a way to get their questions answered, and they need a little bit
of help making a decision. And this is what a launch is all about.
A launch is simply a journey where you are growing your audience with the
right people. You're showing up for them, You're sharing the content they need
to help them decide whether your offer is a good fit for them or not.
You are giving them an avenue to ask questions, whether that be like
on a live master class, and they can ask you questions about whether this
particular offer is going to work for them in their situation or not. Okay,
Question number three, how long should I warm up my audience before a
long launch and somebody else also asks how long should pre launch be? So
this is basically the same question. Most people consider a launch to start on
the day that your doors open and that your offer is available to buy,
so it's like doors are open, buy now, that's when a lot of
people consider the launch to start. I consider that launch to start weeks if
not months before that, and I consider the pre launch or the warm up,
or whatever you want to call it. I consider that to be all
part of the launch. So how long should it be? How long is
a piece of string? Is my answer, because it depends on so many
different things. It depends on things like how actively have you been showing up
and sharing content and emailing your email list in the lead up to the launch
or the lead up to when you start pre launching right, So, for
example, I can have a much shorter warm up time for my launches because
I am constantly year round, sharing three episodes a week on this podcast,
I'm emailing my list three times a week. I'm showing up consistently on social
media, so it's not like radio silence and then suddenly I'm selling. I
am constantly showing up with free content even in between launchers. Another thing that
can affect this is is the content that you usually share related to what you
are launching or is it completely different. So if you are talking about one
topic and then suddenly you start talking about a completely unrelated topic, you're going
to need a little bit longer purely because you probably are going to have a
different ideal client. Right You're going to be trying to attract a different person
with that new topic or that new content. So you need a little bit
longer to grow your audience with that new that new ideal client. And that's
not to say that you need to grow your audience before you start the launching
process. Remember, the launching process includes the lead up, includes the warm
up. You don't need to wait till you have the audience before you start
that process because when you start sharing that kind of content, you will start
to attract that new ideal client. When you start sharing a launch lead magnet
that is is designed for that ideal client, you will attract more of those
ideal clients. You'll grow your email list with the right people. Another consideration
is how much educating does your ideal client need before they'll be ready to buy,
So, in other words, how big is the magician's gap for this
offer? How big is the gap between where they are right now and where
they need to be? Like? What is that knowledge gap? What do
they currently not know that they don't know that they need to know to be
ready to buy? I know that was a bit of a tongue twister,
but think about that. What do they currently not know that they need to
know to be ready to buy? Okay, and they maybe don't know that
they don't know this thing. How big of a commitment is the offer is
another consideration. So, like I mentioned earlier, you know, a lower
price point is going to be a lower commitment than a high price point.
One day course, a one day course is going to be a lower commitment
than an eight week course. A five minute a day course is going to
be a lower commitment than a one hour a day course. So how big
of a commitment is the offer? A bigger commitment offer is going to maybe
need a bit of a longer lead time because they need to trust you a
little bit more. Now, in Launch Magic, I encourage my students to
start sharing this strategic free content, the content that's going to warm their audience
up from week one. From week one of the course, so that by
the time that doors open on their launch in week eleven, their audience is
already warm and ready to buy. And that makes the selling part so much
easier because now you can just sell the offer. You can focus on what
else do they need to know to make this decision? How can I make
sure all of their questions are addressed, rather than trying to also educate them
on what they need to know, rather than trying to build trust at the
same time all of that. The idea is that by the time you get
to doors open, they already trust you. They already are aware of the
problem that they have that your offer solves for them. All of the knowledge
gaps have been bridged, and now it's just a matter of helping them to
work out whether this is going to be a good fit for them or not
in their particular situation. Okay, question number four, how do I create
urgency for an Evergreen course? Okay, so Evergreen if you're new here,
Evergreen is a course that is always available. You're not live launching it.
There's no doors open, doors closed, It's just always available. And yeah,
that's kind of it. Now, Evergreen can be a little bit tricky
because it's not just putting it on your website and hoping people buy it and
it sells itself like it's completely passive. You still need to have a sales
process for it, and the most effective sales process is for an Evergreen course,
it's going to be very similar to a live launch sales process, except
it's all automated. So in that case, you're creating urgency in your evergreen
launch or Evergreen funnel the same way you would create urgency for a live launch,
except you can't close doors because it's always available. So the deadline then
has to be something like a bonus being removed. So if you sign up
before then you get this bonus. Otherwise you don't get the bonus, because
we do need a deadline otherwise people will just keep putting it off. And
this is the real challenge with evergreen off is if something is always available,
why would somebody buy it today rather than next week. Unless it's a really
really painful pain point that they want to solve right now, it's still they're
going to want to put it off because it's a commitment of money, it's
a commitment of time, and nobody thinks they have enough time or enough money
right now, so and everyone thinks they're going to have more time and more
money next week. So that's where having a deadline can actually be like,
oh, well, you need to make a decision now. You can't just
keep procrastinating this. So with Evergreen, though, it needs to be an
authentic deadline, and that can be really hard. Like with a live launch,
it's easy because the deadline can be well, Thursday at ten am,
But when it's Evergreen, you don't have everybody coming into the funnel at the
same time. They're not all coming through that journey at the same time like
they are in a live launch. So how do you create an authentic deadline
in an Evergreen I use deadline funnels. It's a great tool, and it
creates an authentic deadline based on when somebody entered the funnel, not based on
a fixed date and time like in a live launch. So it's not like,
oh, bonus is expiring today and then you go back tomorrow and it's
still there. It's an authentic deadline where it will expire for that particular person.
And setting all of this up can be quite techy, and honestly,
I find it way harder than doing a live launch. A lot of people
think, oh, if I just go straight to Evergreen, that's gonna be
so much easier than live launching. Uh No, it's all of the same
elements of a live launch, Like you still have to create the sales page,
the emails, the masterclass, all of those things. The only difference
is you're not doing it live and you have to now set up all of
the tech bits and pieces. So I recommend live launching it a few times
before you put it on Evergreen. That way you can test different bonuses,
you can test your messaging, you can refine everything before you set it all
up, because changing it later is a bit of a nightmare. You don't
want to go back and do it. And like that's from me, and
I'm pretty techy, Like I'm really comfortable. I've set up multiple Evergreen funnels,
I've done many live launchers. I find live launching so much easier than
the tech set up in an Evergreen funnel. Okay, number five, do
you have a favorite platform for launching a course? Are there any cheaper than
Kujabi? So, Kijabi is hands down my favorite. I've been using it
since twenty seventeen. It has come a long way. And if you use
all of the features in Kijabi, it's a lot cheaper than paying for all
of those different tools separately. So if you use it for your website,
hosting, your email, marketing, your check out, your course, hosting
all of those separate things, it's cheaper than paying for all of those separately.
But I'm always always getting asked, what are some cheaper options than Kajabi,
And so this is going to be a little bit of tough love here.
But if you're not willing to pay the one hundred dollars a month for
a platform that is going to host and sell your courses and obviously all of
the other features as well, and it's going to deliver a great experience for
your students because it is a really beautiful platform, both on the user end
and on the student's end, like the library, the way that everything's structured,
it's nice, it's easy to follow, it's neat. But if you
can't, if you're not willing to invest that in delivering a great experience for
your students, how can you expect them to invest in what you are selling?
If you don't believe in your own offers enough to invest in them,
how can you expect someone else to? And also, I believe client experience
should be the biggest consideration here. Which platform is going to deliver the best
experience for your students, Which platform is going to work best in the way
that it's going to deliver your content best, not necessarily which one is the
cheapest. I also a little bit of a that wio Wu. But I
believe that you attract what you put out there, right, So if you
are going out there looking for the cheapest option in everything, don't be surprised.
Then if you start to attract buyers who are also shopping around for the
cheapest option, you get what you put out there. Okay, question number
six, I've left the best one till last. This is such a common
question as well. If I don't share how to content, will my audience
feel like I'm holding out on them? Now, most of the time,
your audience are not even ready for the how to content yet they think they
want it, but they're actually not ready for it. So when you share
that how to content, they're going to save it for later and then not
come back to it, or they will have a million reasons why they're not
ready yet, or why it won't work for them, so then they won't
pay attention they keep scrolling. So instead, focus your content on what your
audience needs to know before they'll be ready for that how to content? What
are the things that they need to know to be ready to take action on
the how to content? And also, as a side note, you can
share content that feels like how to content, but that isn't actually giving away
what's in your paid offers. So let me give you a bit of an
example. One of the things I teach in my paid programs is launching,
obviously, so if I gave away free content would step by step how to
launch your online course, this is what would happen. Firstly, there's no
way that I could fit everything someone needs to know about launching, even into
a long form format like this podcast, let alone into a short form social
media format. Okay, it takes me twelve weeks in launch Magic just to
teach everything that somebody needs to launch. There's no way I could cover off
all of those bases in a free format. Secondly, some people would see
the how to and they'd be like, yeay, great, I have everything
I need to know to launch now, and then they would go and they
would implement it, and because they don't have everything, it would probably fail.
They don't know what they don't know, and they don't have the support
and the accountability that they would get inside my paid program. And then thirdly,
you might also have some people there who are thinking, well, I'm
not ready. I can't launch yet because my audience is too small, my
email list is too small. So then I could create how to content that
feels like how to content, but that isn't giving away what's in my paid
offers, So something like how to grow your email list for a launch that
could be quite a nice little high level podcast episode where I'm sharing and actually
I did do this a few weeks ago, where I was sharing a few
ways that you can grow your email list in the lead up for a launch,
which gets somebody more ready to invest in launch Magic because now they feel
a little bit more comfortable with growing their email list. They can see,
oh, it's actually achievable for me to do that, and then when I
talk to them about my paid offer on actually launching, they're like, Okay,
great, I have a bit of a formula that I can use to
grow my email list, and now I'm ready to learn how to launch.
So your audience it might feel like what you're giving away isn't valuable if it's
not how to content. But your audience doesn't know what you know. They're
not the expert in what you do. So the things that you feel that
feel not valuable to you, they're super valuable to your audience because they don't
have all of the same expertise that you have. It's just that you know
your stuff so well that to you it feels really obvious, but to them
it probably doesn't. All right, So there we have it, a bunch
of your launching questions answered. Doors Open to Launch Magic. If you're listening
to this episode when it goes live, Doors open tomorrow, so Thursday,
the twenty second of feb and I'm pretty excited for this round. We've got
a few new things happening, so I out for that. Head on over
to Steph Taylor dot com slash Magic for all of the details. You can
jump on the wait list, or if doors are already open when you're listening
to this, you can go and check it all out and sign up for
the next round. I only run it twice a year, and the next
time that I'm running it's going to be August, so if you want to
launch in the first half of this year, then jump into Launch Magic.
We go through it all together over twelve weeks and I love teaching it.
So gone over to Steph Taylor dot co slash Magic for all of those details.
And if you're not already subscribed to this show, make sure you hit
the little plus button in Apple Podcasts or follow in Spotify and it just means
you'll get each new episode straight to your podcast app every Monday, Wednesday and
Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Catch you next time.