Let’s talk about why so many people build courses and programs that don’t sell. It’s because people have their priorities completely backwards when they are building their offers. I’ll teach you the way I do it!

Subscribe On:

Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Today, I want to talk about the importance of funnels in your online business. A lot of you probably already know that I work with Russell Brunson over at Click Funnels, so I am constantly and forever inundated with funnels. Building funnels, launching funnels, teaching funnels, you name it. I do it. Prior to working with him, I also built and launched funnels for lots of different types of businesses. I use them in my own business and as well for clients. So funnels are absolutely the number one thing you need to focus on when you are trying to sell your products and services online. And no matter what kind of business you’re in, whether you’re a course creator, coach, even a service provider, you need some kind of funnel.

---

I get a lot of people asking me, how do you know when it’s time to build a funnel? How do you know what funnel to build? How do you know if it’s gonna work? How do you know when it’s not working? What isn’t working? Right? And there’s lots of people who get super, super bogged down in all the details.

One of the things that I can say, I want to just kind of walk through a little bit of my process when I’m getting ready to launch something new and how the funnel actually dictates the entire thing.

So what typically happens in an online business, if someone has an idea for a product or service, right? I’m going to do a coaching program, I’m going to create this course, I’m going to offer this service, right? We think in terms of what the actual offer first, and then from there we then usually build the offer and then after we build it, then we think, okay, now what sort of funnel should I use to sell it? And the reality is that when you become as in obsessed with funnels and the working of funnels, as I have become, everything actually goes backwards.

You definitely do have the idea first. I mean most people are going to. Very few people are going to have the idea for a funnel before they have the idea for a product or a service. So you’re going to have the idea for something. Right? And just the other day I had an idea for a new course. So you have that idea what it takes extraordinary amounts of self-control, but it’s absolutely necessary to do. If you want to make sure that that core offer whatever sells is as soon as you have that idea and you write that down of kind of what you wanna do, you stick it in its rightful place as the assistant to the funnel, not the boss of the funnel, because once you have it immediately, your next question should be what should be the vehicle with which I sell this? So I can give you a bunch of examples.

So when I had the idea for the Digital Gangsta, which is my big course, the next thing is how am I actually going to create demand for this product? Right? And so I built a webinar funnel. That was the funnel I knew it was going to sell that offer. I have another course that I’m getting ready to launch with Cathy Olsen and it’s called Funnel Gorgeous. And as soon as we had the idea for the course, the next question is what kind of funnel are we going to use for this? Before we think of price, before we think of fulfillment, before we build the course, we think about what kind of funnel will work for this. Same thing with Create Your Laptop Life. What is the offer and then what funnel will work for this? One of the things that’s so amazing is that when you do it this way, building the marketing funnel and the messaging for the offer is so much easier.

So Funnel Gorgeous is this course that Cathy and I are launching on August 6th and we had the idea for the offer, but then we took. We did exactly this process where we take the idea, kind of outlined out what would be inside the course and then we put it on the back burner and we began building the funnel.

And the first step of building a funnel is to really write your message, right? So your message is usually either in words or in video. I typically go to words first because that’s what I do, but some people like to do video first, but either way, you come up with a sales message. As I wrote the sales message, the sales page for Funnel Gorgeous, the offer changed. Why? Because without actually having to write a sales page for something that’s in existence, I was writing a sales page for something that doesn’t yet exist.

So there were no boundaries. There were no problems. There were no like, oh, I can’t say this because it doesn’t do that. I can’t say this because it doesn’t do that. Okay. So I wrote the sales message, the copy for it, and then I gave it over to Cathy and Cathy started designing it. She’s a designer, so she wanted to, you know, we had her do the actual sales page.

Once we had the sales page, now we knew what we were building now it was like, oh, that’s what the course is going to be. Because we didn’t have the constraints of the offer driving the machine. We were using the funnel to be the boss. So if you think about this in the product world, it would be like, let’s say you were designing a new lipstick or something, right? And instead of focusing on the lipstick itself, you went and designed the actual bottle, right?

Was it going to be the twist lipstick? Was it going to be the one where you pull out the little brush and it’s kinda like that tacky wet lipstick, right? What kind of container are you going to build for it? And then once you have the container, what’s the messaging on it? What’s the name of it? What’s the brand of it? I’m sitting here looking at my Revlon Ultra matte color lipstick, right. As soon as you have the container and you can see the messaging of it now you can kind of understand, oh, this looks like it should be right. This looks like it should be a $10 lipstick or oh, there should be a $25 lipstick, or oh, this should be a $3 lipstick. You can start to see the value. You can start to see how it appears in the market when you focus on building the funnel, the message, the vehicle, right?

And so with Funnel Gorgeous, once we had built, we, we’d written the copy, which again, no, no boundaries, no problems. And we did the design. Now we’re like, oh, okay, now we can see kind of what the price point will be and now we know what we’re making.

And so for your online business…this is where I’m gonna give two different opinions, right? For people who are course creators or coaches or consultants, when you have an idea for a program or an offer or a course, go ahead, write it down, get it out of your system, and then immediately your next job is to write out the sales message for that offer because once you’ve written that out and I would argue written it out and designed it, you will see, you will have materialized what you’re selling and now you can go build the offer to actually fulfill that because to be quite honest, there’s a lot of offers that people create and they’re not gonna sell in the market.

They’re not sexy enough, they’re not irresistible enough, and then you’re banging your head against the wall trying to create a sales message that makes this course or program look good and it doesn’t. And that’s because you did it backwards. Okay? So for course creators and coaches, that would be my recommendation is, and I know some of you are like, well I’m going to do a Webinar, I don’t need a sales page. I would say the very act of writing out a sales page, doing the copy, doing the design of a sales page will immediately clarify what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and it is an amazing asset to have no matter what you’re selling. So that’s just my two cents.

If you’re a service provider, the good news is that service providers don’t actually create the services, right? They fulfill the services so that you are kind of at an advantage because you don’t have to actually get bogged down and distracted with, well, should I do worksheets that do audio? Should I use zoom? You know, people get all distracted that like how to actually build something. So as a service provider this is awesome because you just can have the idea and then again you can write the sales page, the services page to get people excited about that idea. One of the things that I really often recommend with service providers is that you sell an intensive first before you actually sell super, you know, lots of packages. For those of you don’t know what that is. If you go to my course proposalsecrets.co, you will learn all about that. It would take way too long. But the idea is that for a service provider, you’re kind of at an advantage because you’re not having to build the course or the product first so you can really focus on that sales message. Which is super important.

All right, so what do you do if you already have a course or a program and it’s not selling and believe it or not, this happens all the time. It’s really hard. It’s like the difference between renovating a house or building one from scratch, right? If you already have a course or a program and for whatever reason, it’s not selling. And I have a few people in my group who do this, they, you know, they tried, they, the name doesn’t quite fit or you know, there’s just like something that’s kind of off about it. What I recommend you do is this very exercise where you go back to the drawing board and you ask yourself, okay, with this current program course, whatever, who is it serving in? What is the result? Right? And once you have the WHO and the result, right?

I help moms be more organized. I help real estate agents flip houses, I help online business owners make a million dollars, whatever the WHO. And the result is, I want you to put that course aside and I want you to write a sales message, write a sales page, design it, get it so that you are like, if I had to get that person, the WHO that result, whatever the result is, how, how would I sell that to them and write it out. And then what you do is once that’s written out, you look at that sales page and if you think to yourself, okay, what I’m saying in that sales page isn’t fulfilled in this product, then you need to go back to the drawing board and build a new product or take pieces that are working in add pieces that in that weren’t there before, But honestly writing a sales page and a sales message and building your funnel before building a course will save you so much time and headache.

So as you’re building your online business, if funnels, sales, messages, copy, and those things are not at the front and center of what you’re learning, they need to become front and center. There are so many ways. One of the ways you can start to learn about funnels is to enroll in my program, The Digital Gangsta. You can go to thedigitalgangsta.com to see more about that. You will learn everything there is to know about building that vehicle, that sales message before you launch something. And the beautiful part about it is that when you do it this way, you never build something that doesn’t sell because you’re always focused so much on the sales message. Alright guys, have a great day.

If you’re ready to create growth scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.