View My Digital Course Toolkit

Apply For The Accelerator

work with me

Leave a Review On Apple Podcasts

tune into the show on apple podcasts!

I'm Katie — business coach for course creators. I'm here to help you build a freedom based online biz

Podcast

Ep 8: What Nobody Tells You About Live Launching Your Online Course

July 28, 2021

< back to blog home

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts and more.

Today we are talking about live launching and why it can be incredibly detrimental to your growth and sometimes even a little dangerous to the growth of your business. 

What is live launching? 

Live launching is basically what a lot of gurus like to tell you, you must do when you want to create an online course. You’re going to create this online course, the idea, all the things, name it, price, it, outline it, record it, blah, blah … and you’re going to need to launch it live, right?

By launching it live, you’re going to be creating weeks of launch runway content. Becoming a charity and giving away all this information for free on the internet about what it is you teach. You’re going to need to build up an audience and get them nice and primed and ready to buy when your doors open.

You’re going to open the doors and you’re going to talk about it nonstop from 1 – 3 weeks on every channel that you have. You’re just going to sell it and do live streams and do Q and A’s and everything.

Then you’re going to close the doors, right? You’re not going to let anyone else in. You are just going to be happy with the revenue that you made. And you’re not going to open up the doors again for about three months or so.

If you’re doing that right now and you’re like, “Please, someone save me.” This is the episode for you because I’m going to break down why that’s actually a horrible business model and what you need to be doing instead.

Live Launching Sucks: Why The Evergreen Model Is The Best Way To Launch Your Course

When I was looking into the strategy behind live launching, one thing stood out: I got to build an audience FIRST. Hmm. How do I do that? 

I guess I better do some Instagram hashtags, or maybe I should start blogging some free tips? Oh, I’ve got to become an SEO wizard and get on page one.  I need to blog my life away to get on page one so that I get enough traffic. Then I got to start an email list and blah, blah, blah. Right?

I thought we were building an online course for freedom, but that sounds anything but freedom. It sounds crazy. It’s just too much. 

To sell your face off for three weeks and just hope that the finances turn out right.  You hope that you make enough to live on for three months because you can’t open the doors again, you know?

From a financial perspective, It made absolutely no sense. Let’s say, I want to make $10,000 a month. I would need to make $30,000 per launch if I were going to launch every three months. So in order to make $30,000 and I have a $500 course, that’s a lot of courses that I’m going to have to sell.

Here’s the problem with live launching:

The Audience Problem

What if you have no audience at all? You need to figure out how you’re going to do that, right? Then you have to think about how you’re going to actually build up an audience big enough in between every three months. Right? 

Your first launch might go okay. But then what happens three months later?  You have to double your audience, triple your audience so that you can make enough on your next launch and your next launch. 

The more you sell the same thing to the same people, there’s only going to be a small percentage of your list who’s ready to buy three months later –  who didn’t buy it the first time around. The pool of people who are going to jump on this offer gets smaller and smaller unless you’re rapidly growing your list.

When you think of all these tasks that you have to do in the meantime to make sure that you’re ready for this big launch, it’s crazy. You probably could make more working at McDonald’s for the number of hours that you put in, right? You didn’t go into business for that. 

The Time Problem

If I was releasing something live into the world, something that was time-sensitive because live launches are time-sensitive, it would make me so anxious! What if my son has asthma, what if we have to take him to the hospital that day? How am I going to show up live?

Anytime I have something live, the universe just puts me back in my place because some kind of tech nightmare happens for me. Your Internet could stop working. If someone doesn’t know you and they join your live challenge and you have a bunch of tech glitches, they are not likely to give too many chances for you to get it together.

That’s one of the reasons why I truly do feel like it’s dangerous, anything could happen. Things we can’t control.

Live launches are not reliable. You need to be the leader in this space and show other people how they do not have to do live launches anymore, either. It just doesn’t have to be that way, you know?

Adapting The Profitable Evergreen Business Model

If you are doing live launches and you want real predictability in your life, something that you can count on, I would highly recommend going evergreen. 

There are so many people out here who tell you that going evergreen can only be done once you’ve launched your course  X amount of times, or once you have an X amount of audience. Or once you have a fully validated course.

I didn’t do it. I just went straight to evergreen. Because for me, it was 100% pointless to launch a course to a non-existent audience. Like, what am I going to do? Build an audience within a month or two? 

In the last 60 days, how many leads did you get onto your email list?

If you’re not running paid traffic, you are probably not going to fuel a big enough launch to last you long enough until your next launch, right? This is the rollercoaster that nobody tells you about when it comes to live launching a course. This is exhausting. 

Going evergreen just made so much sense because I could always have the course for sale.

Now my main priority was getting traffic, but the course is always for sale. The doors are always open, but the catch here is that there’s always a different incentive to buy. So if you come into my world and you see that the course is going to be for sale a month from now, the incentive that you have the sign-up, whether it be a coupon, an extra bonus, extended access to something, or a one-on-one call with me, those are all temporary and they’re always changing.

This is what I recommend for all course creators. Have your doors open all the time. Always have the doors open, but create a sales machine. A machine that brings people in at the perfect right time for them. 

How many people in your audience right now do you think are ready to solve their problems?

How many people do you think woke up and said, I am ready to solve that problem today. And I’m in the market to purchase a course today. Chances are, probably not hundreds and hundreds of people. Imagine though, being able to have an evergreen sales machine, a machine that runs all the time for you.

This allows you to do what you went into business to do. You’re not exhausted from finishing a live launch and you’re not anxious about planning your next live launch. You know that when you wake up at the beginning of every month that sales are going to come in that month because your machine is working all the time.

Aside from the gratification of making sales right away, making sales predictably every single month, it builds your audience on autopilot.

When the doors are open to other things where you sell mini-workshops or other things, you have a huge audience now, but the trade-off was that while you built your audience, you made cash money. Good cash money. You made money, you grew your audience and you grew your confidence because you’re getting people results and you have the freedom to live your life.

I have an automated sales machine that works for me, my life, my schedule, my kids, all the things. If you want to know how to do that, then I would highly recommend that you apply for the 10K Course Accelerator. It breaks down every little nook and cranny of this strategy. Exactly how to go from zero course, zero audience to a fully thriving online course business that generates $10,000 a month or more on autopilot.

I want to save you from this financially dangerous, downright exhausting strategy and get you into ease and flow and sales all the time.

I will see you next week.

Resources mentioned:

The 10k Accelerator Program: Apply Here

Follow me on Instagram for free live training, to watch my students’ success stories and of course, our life with 5 kids!

Support the show:

✔ Subscribe and follow the show on your favourite podcast player (You rock!)

✔ Leave a 5-star rating and review the show on Apple Podcasts (Thank you!)

✔ Share the podcast with your biz bestie (Sharing is caring!)✔ Comment below with your feedback or email me at hello@katieandfloyd.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

FREE MINI COURSE 

$37 WORKSHOP

APPLY NOW

Like the podcast? You'll love these resources!

search our show notes!

Hey! Do you have any advice on...