Launching soon? 5 lessons you need to know
A few months ago, I closed enrolments for my first online course, Marketing for Your Small Business. To be honest, I didn't really know what to expect so I treated this first "launch" as a bit of test, in terms of the marketing and the whole process of building something new. I've been genuinely overwhelmed by the response (thank you!) and I'm super excited to be helping more small biz owners understand and execute great marketing.
Like any new venture though, this launch came with a plethora of lessons (some more full on than others). I thought I'd share five of them with you today.
Whether you are thinking of launching an online course, a membership group or just planning out a new product collection launch, these lessons can be applied.
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1. Theory is good but DOING is better
I have been in the online education game a while, . One of my earlier employed roles was at Pearson Education (one of the largest education publishers in the world) and I also worked heading up the media development of the MBA online program at Open University UK. I've bought multiple online courses myself and have even helped clients plan out their's. But there is NOTHING like doing it yourself to realise that you may theoretically know what to do, but putting this into practice for your own biz can surface so many new lessons, you never imagined learning! You can buy every course out there, or listen to every podcast but until you start DOING it yourself, you actually won't know what it entails.
2. Organisation is your friend
I love an excel or Google sheet and these were my saviours during the building and launching of this course. If you have ever worked with me, you'll know dates and deadlines are my "thing" and this was no different. I began using the standard Customer Journey map exercise to create the ideal journey from someone hearing about the course to becoming an advocate for it (an example of which you can see here ). This helped me plan out the marketing I needed to do to support this. While I didn't end up doing all of the marketing I'd originally planned, I did follow the journey most of the way. In terms of building the course, I also mapped this out using post-it notes using one colour for module introductions, another for all the lessons within each module and a third for the PDFs / worksheets I'd need to create per module. Doing this on post-it notes allowed me to move things around well before building things. I used consistent filenames that made sense and mapped everything out in Dropbox so I could share files easily with my VA and videographer.
3. Things will go wrong
Of this , you can be 100% certain. For me, it was realising the wrong URL had gone out to people meaning credit cards were unable to be processed (just a little bit of an issue!) and I had no way of knowing who had tried to pay and given up. Thankfully, a lovely woman all the way from Sweden alerted me to this one evenings, so I was able to correct it early on. I still don't know how this happened, but I'm actually glad it did. I have made a Google doc of all the issues we experienced and this will become a checklist for future course builds and launches.
4. Get help
I am forever indebted to the brilliant videographer, Bianca Fusca, who not only helped me film 13 direct-to-camera videos in one day (with no autocue, so there were MANY takes per video) but who also said "sure, ok" when I asked if she could help me edit another 56 slides & audio video lessons in minimal time. Surrounding yourself with great people - and paying them for their expertise rather than trying to learn everything yourself!- is the way to go. In addition to B, I also sought help in online groups (such as the Kajabi FB group (the online course platform we use to host the program) where no question goes without someone (who's been there before) answering it). Whenever I came across an issue I asked someone for help, rather than sitting there letting frustration build with no real solution.
5. Embrace being a student
We are inundated these days with "success stories"— people who tried something once and had phenomenal success. Whether it's someone who "just tried my hand" at making a product only to have it sell out instantly, or someone else who launched a course to "a really small email list" and made 7-figures overnight. I often hear my clients and students berate themselves for launching a new collection, product line or digital product and not getting the instant result they thought they would. In this launch I embraced being a student, learning everything I could and not getting overly stressed or anxious about things. I didn't check my stats every day and I didn't stress out about not posting daily on the 'gram. Instead, I took the opportunity to learn — about the platform, about the FAQS people most resonated with, about the peaks and troughs that happen during a launch, about the best times of day to send marketing messages and about what can go wrong in a launch. All of these experiences have led to me increasing my knowledge for next time. Regardless of what is it your launching, there will always be lessons - you can fight them or embrace them.
All in all, I've had a fantastic launch (again, thank you!). The course has done really well in terms of student enrolments, we surpassed our revenue goal and I have finished the course launch period feeling absolutely fine, relaxed even. Shock! Launches don't have to be this insanely stressful experience. Remember, you may not get a choice over what happens, but you definitely get to control how you react to it.