How To Prepare For Creating And Selling Your First Online Course Or Group Program

If this is your first time creating and selling a course or group program, chances are that you don’t really know where to start. And I want to help you with that.

The very first step is to get clear on who you are marketing your course/ program to.

Marketing and delivering 1:many offers is different from marketing and delivering 1:1 offers. In order to help you to effectively identify the potential buyers for your course or program, we need to talk about target market (or audience) vs niche vs ideal client avatar.

The target market is your broad audience. For example, in my business Brudarac Ltd, my target market is online business owners.

The niche is the subset of your target market. It’s your narrowed down target market because it’s hard to effectively market your products and services to such a broad group of people. For example, my niche is female business owners who want to sell out their courses and group programs.

The Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) is a fictional person that exists within your niche. It means breaking down your niche further and defining the characteristics of your dream client you’d love to work with. When you know their personality traits, their dreams and struggles, then you’ll know how to tell them to take action and buy your stuff. To give you my own example again, my client avatar is an intuitive female entrepreneur, who has delivered 1:1 work successfully for at least a year, and she’s now ready to grow her business through launching a course or group program. She may be a complete novice to launching or has done 1-2 launches max. She has tried to figure things out on her own, and now she’s feeling overwhelmed and stressed out by all the moving pieces. When she did launch, the results were far from her expectations.

So, now that we have clarified these terms, let’s focus on

…. how to prepare for creating and selling your first online course or group program

It all starts with identifying and understanding your niche and client avatar.

 

1.Decide Your Niche and Client Avatar.

Identifying your niche and client avatar is going to help you with your messaging, with creating your “no-brainer” offer, and with selling successfully. That is why this step is so crucial, and yet so many people skip it!

I can hear you saying ” but, Roxana, niching sounds so narrow. I don’t want to exclude anyone. I can help everyone!”.

Marketing is not about who you can help, but who you are speaking to about your course or program. Imagine yourself being in a room full of people and speaking about how to lose weight sustainably. Unless all the people in the room were interested in losing weight, they’re not going to want to listen to what you have to say, correct?

It’s the same in the online world, only noisier. The more specific you can be, meaning the narrower your niche, the faster you can grow your business.

If we go back to my example of losing weight, let’s narrow that down even further. Let’s imagine that you are targeting women over the age of 50 who would like to lose weight for good. Being as specific as you can means that you can speak directly to the pain points and dreams of your niche audience. The way you speak to women aged 50+ is going to be different from the way you speak to younger women. Their bodies will work differently, their interests will be different, their family situations will be different. A younger woman, with kids, is going to need something easy that takes little time, that she can do while also working and taking care of her family. See what I mean? The more you can zero in to the specific situation of your chosen group, the easier it will be for them to connect with you. They will see that you actually get what they are going through.

For your business it means that you’re weeding out those who are not interested in the subject, and who will most likely never buy from you.

Can you see how easier it is to promote and attract the right people when you are clear on who you are serving and how?

Having a niche also helps you to position yourself as the specialist and charge higher prices. Can the Jack or Jill-of-all trades do that? NO! People pay more for expert advice, not general knowledge.

 

2. Prepare The Questions To Ask About Your Niche And Client Avatar

Who would you like to attract? What are their personality traits? What are their values?
What’s their employment status?
What is their gender, location, age (if relevant)?
What are their goals, struggles, worries, beliefs?
What stops them from achieving their goals and dreams?
What is their day-to-day reality that gives them something specific they need to change and for which your course/program can be the solution?
What do they see and hear from family, friends, society, media, etc? How do they feel?

 

3. Do The Actual Research, Ask The Questions

You have decided who you would like to market your course or group program to, you have the questions that you need to ask them, now go and actually speak to this specific group. Learn from them what they need right NOW.

 

4. Create Your “No-Brainer” Offer

Use the results of your research to create the solution to the immediate need of your niche. You want your solution to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

My recommendation is to find out where these people hang out and go there. Ask a few of them to help you with your market research. Be honest and tell them that you want to make sure that you develop something that they really need and want. I find that the best way to do your research is by doing interviews, or at least having conversations in the DM. You want to have a conversation with at least 5 people who fit your client avatar so that you gather relevant information. This information is going to be your golden ticket to creating and selling your “no-brainer” offer.

I hope that you have found these steps helpful. If you’d like guidance for your specific situation, you can hop on a Clarity Call with me anytime.