Alright, let’s talk about pre launch preparation. And first up is this understanding that you might not need to launch at all you might not want to launch at all. A launch in the context of an online course, is pretty much where you build up a lot of hype, and a lot of interest around what you’ve got to say. And then you have some kind of launch event, which you then pitch your course for sale. And it’s something that lots of people do and really enjoy doing and can do very, very successfully.

But it’s not something that you have to do. And it might not even be something that you need to do, particularly if you are intending your online course to be for a corporate audience. So you’re selling it into corporate organizations, as opposed to selling it to individuals. But even if you are selling to individuals, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have an online course launch, you can just simply publish your online course. And one day, it’s not available, and the next day it is.

Now obviously with a launch, you can build up a lot of publicity, a lot of interest, a lot of hype, and then you can have a good launch where you sell a lot of courses in one go. And that really gets the ball rolling for you in terms of your online course sales. But there is no doubt that there is a very specific process to follow, which I will go through in the next lesson on launching. And it’s something that not everybody will be suited to or will want to do, and certainly not for your first course necessarily. So lots to think about with that. But the good news, I guess is that if you are not feeling ready to launch, because of the aspect of putting yourself out there and having lots of people with eyes on your stuff, you don’t have to.

You also need to consider how ready your audience is for you to launch your course. So if you’ve got an inbuilt fan base of people ready and willing and wanting your online course to be delivered to them, then you may well want to take advantage of that and launch it to them. But if you don’t yet have an audience of eager fans awaiting the launch of your online course or the availability of your online course, then it might not be something that is necessarily right for you right now.

Beware unicorns, so you will have almost certainly seen people in that the launching space if you’ve done any research on this, talking about how amazingly they had an incredible launch of six figures, seven figures this that and the other. Usually the big numbers bandied around and oh, it’s amazing. I’m so stunned, I can’t believe I had such a massive launch, etcetera, etcetera. Oh, deary me lots of testosterone around that one. But what I would say is just be aware some of these stories.

Usually the people who have the six and seven figure launches also have access to audiences of literal millions, sometimes not quite as much as that, but through affiliate links and what have you, they may well be able to reach millions of people with their launch. And that’s why they’re able to get these six and seven figure launches. Not everybody has that luxury is in that space, if you are fantastic, but I’m going to bet that you probably aren’t. And so I would say you are best place to have slightly more modest ambitions for your first launch. But again, we will go through all of that in the launching lesson.

You might have come across a concept called pre selling. And pre selling is where you actually create a very sort of bare bones version of your course or even just have an idea for your course. And you pre sell it to people on the basis that you will test whether or not people want your course by selling them the idea as opposed to the course. So what happens here is that people will say, Hey, I’m going to launch this course on this subject if you want in buy now for this super discounted price. If enough people buy at the super discounted price, then they end up creating the course. Pre selling is a strategy that I don’t recommend for newbie online course creators, because it needs to follow quite a precise way of doing things. And you won’t necessarily have the skills to keep your topic really in close check just yet so be careful on that one.

Beta testing is different to pre selling so beta testing is where you have completed the creation of your online course but you release it to a few very specific people can be either for full price at discounted price or even for free but in return, what they are doing is very deliberately going through your course looking for things that are either broken or missing or areas where it’s just not making much sense to them, so that they can give you that as feedback. And you can adjust your course before you release it to the rest of the public. In some instances, you will use your beta testers to get social proof as well. So you will ask them to give you a testimonial in exchange for access to the course.

There’s something in online course creation called Evergreen versus limited access. And an evergreen course is one that is available year round without a launch, you can always get into it no matter the time of day or night, even on Christmas Day, if you wanted to. If that’s a holiday that you celebrate, you could still get in and pay for it and start that online course, if you wanted to. A limited access course is kind of what it says on the tin. There is access to the course but it is limited either to a specific time period throughout the year, or several specific time periods throughout the year. Or there is some kind of limited availability of additional information with the course. So there’s a way of doing sort of a hybrid evergreen limited access version. Again, I will go through that in the How To portion of this lesson.

Okay, so that’s kind of the overview of the pre launch preparation that you need. If you want to dive into any of that information in greater detail, then hang on for the How To videos, but if not, you want to go straight ahead into learning about launching, I will see you in the next lesson. If not hang on, I’ll see you in the next video.

Okay, in this video, we are going to talk about your pre launch preparation. And this really is also about understanding whether or not you actually want to or need to have a big launch. And there’s no doubt that if you look on the internet for online marketing advice, there will be lots of people telling you that you need to have a launch and how brilliant launches are and selling you courses and resources for learning how to launch and that’s great. And there are also lots of people saying, No, of course, you don’t need to launch.

The reality is it’s going to be entirely dependent on what you want to do. So here are some things to consider. First up in the question of do I need to launch no doubt, a launch will take you time, money and effort, okay, so it’s going to take some time to get all the resources in place that you need, it’s going to take some money, for you to certainly prepare the ground probably to learn a little bit about what’s going on. And I would imagine that you will spend a bit of money on having some launch materials put together, that kind of thing. It’s possible to do it without any money at all but you know, it’s not going to be that big of a launch, if you do it that way.

And it’s absolutely going to take you some effort to do your launch as well. And as I’ve already mentioned, you may well need to invest in some kind, of course, or get some expertise in, in order to help you with that launch. So if you don’t have time, money or effort or want to put the effort in, then maybe launching isn’t for you. Now, obviously, the flip side to that is that if you don’t have a big formal launch, and create the hype and the buzz around that, that you need, then you are not going to make a big amount of money from your online course immediately, it will be more of a slow burn. But for some people, that’s absolutely fine. There’s no problem with that whatsoever.  The other thing to consider, is your audience whoops.

And a whether or not you have one in first place. And if you do have one, are they educated in expecting you to be launching something? Or is it a relatively new audience, and so far all they know about you is your name and your expertise. This is going to be dependent on how educated your audience is with you your expertise, and also whether or not they are likely to expect you to be launching something. So again, only you can answer those questions. But you do need to think about are they ready for you to be launching some kind of online course in their direction.

The other thing that I think is worth knowing about and I’ve already mentioned this is to be be aware of the unicorns in the industry who will promise massive launches and huge six, seven figure launches and all the rest of it. But with that they have almost certainly got very large, very educated and very expectant lists of people waiting for them to launch. They’ll also have quite low profit margins on that I would suggest, especially if they are talking about how they’ve done it, you know, with a list of less than 50 people and three of those were their pet goats or something. So just be a little bit aware of these stories that you see of people having these enormous launches with very little outlay. It’s very unusual. And if it seems too good to be true, then it almost certainly is.

One thing that you might want to consider is pre selling. Now pre selling is not a strategy that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend for anybody that is new to online course creation. What it involves is effectively selling thin air it’s not quite as dodgy as it might sound. But it does involve people saying hey, I’m going to create a course on this subject. Do you want to buy it buy in now for a discount. And then once those people have bought in, then they will talk to that audience about what specifically the course needs to contain with their own varying ideas. Now, if you’re not used to designing online courses, then this can create a bit of a problem with scope creep, because you’re effectively designing a course by committee.

And that might lead to you having something that’s quite unwieldy, quite tangential, doesn’t quite focus in on what you want to do. So certainly for your first course first half dozen, I would suggest you probably want to follow the methodology that I’ve outlined in this course, rather than trying for a pre selling strategy. But if you’ve pre sold stuff before, then absolutely go for it. Just be aware that you will need to be really clear on what your minimum viable product is. Despite what information you might get from those you’ve pre sold to you are also likely to have something of a reputational risk for various reasons.

Reputational yes got it. For various reasons, not least people who perhaps then decide that the end result isn’t what they bought into in the first place or worst case scenario, you aren’t able to finish the course and you have to refund everybody that you’ve pre sold to. Now different to pre selling is something called beta testing. And beta testing is where you actually have an MVP version of your course.

And with that MVP version of your course, what you’re doing is going out and asking a selected group of people to test that course for you. And you’re asking them to refine it for you to find any errors, find any mistakes, find anything in there, that isn’t working the way it should, or perhaps could be explained differently to help people understand it better.

It’s still a transaction. So you can charge people nothing a discount heavy discount or full price to be a beta tester. If you charge them full price, what they’re getting is the course before anybody else and you limit the numbers, it will be quite a specific strategy for that, but it’s possible. The thing about beta testing is that it’s still a transaction. Alright, so you should still get some kind of return on that particular transaction. And what I would suggest is, in addition to feedback on how the course is structured, and, and how everything’s working, and linking together, you also want some kind of social proof from them.

So if you remember back to when we were talking about with the sales page, how much social proof is a good number to have, when people will feel comfortable that you’ve got enough, it’s 10. So you want at least 10 beta testers, I would suggest you want a few more than that. Because with the best will in the world, you will probably find that one or two beta testers don’t follow through with what they should be doing. But as long as you set expectations on what you’re expecting, and when you’re expecting it, and you don’t mind nudging people and nagging them a little bit to get that, then that can be a really good route to making sure your course is everything it can be certainly for its first edition to go out into the wide world and be launched.

The other thing that you need to be aware of with your pre launch prep is the difference between an evergreen launch and a limited access, launch or version of your course. So an evergreen course is one that is available for people to buy year round. And it is something that you could launch once you can launch it more than once, what tends to happen is that people will put an evergreen course out there, and then it’s available for anybody to buy at any time anywhere in the world. But there might be other things that are time bound with it, particularly support that kind of thing. But the basic course will be available year round.

Contrast that with something that is limited access, and this might have a specific launch cycle. And some of the very big names in the industry will only launch their courses once a year. And they have what’s called a cart, open cart closed period. And you can only sign up to their course for that period of time in between cart open and cart close. So this sort of creates that sense of urgency marker and scarcity marker, the sorts of things that people go, Oh, my goodness, I don’t buy now I’ve got to wait a whole year until I buy it again, these people have huge lists who are expectant for this kind of launch cycle. So I wouldn’t necessarily start with that as a strategy. But it’s certainly something that you can work towards if that appeals to you.

What some people do is have an evergreen course but they also employ a limited access launch cycle where they will launch their course once or twice a year, with bonuses thrown in. So they they gear up to have to all intents and purposes an actual launch. They’re throwing all these bonuses that are only available within a specific launch window. And then when that launch window has closed, the course goes back to only being the course available, and that’s the same price as their limited launch window.

Alright, so some things for you to think about there. With your pre launch prep, you don’t have to launch at all. But if you do want to launch then these are some things that you want to think about. And in the next lessons I will be talking actually about launching and going through all the various stages of that. See you there.