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Content Planning Workshop Tips with Pete McPherson

Let’s talk about content. Is it really king? I always tell my high ticket clients to have great online content to attract people to their digital products and/or services. In this week’s episode, I chat all things content, including marketing, with founder of Do You Even Blog, Pete McPherson. Listen below or check out the show notes to see where you’d like to start.

Pete has been blogging for 10 years, interviews top bloggers, entrepreneurs and creators and has made several courses, digital products and a membership group. Plus, if you actually check out podcast episode number three on web design tips, you’ll see that I have interviewed him in the past but I’m so excited to talk to Pete today about learning how to create valuable content.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor

Why Content Marketing Matters

Pete was super excited to discuss content with me. So much so that it took us less than 3 minutes to jump right into his massive AirTable content planning list where he keeps all his content ideas. Check out the video.

The overall takeaway that he wants you to grasp, is to create a system or workflow to create content quickly by having one place where you store all your content, including ideas for future content. Airtable, Google Sheets, a notebook, use whatever works best for you.

Why Content Marketing Matters for Small Business

Trying to figure out which content should come next? Here are 3 important questions that Pete recommends you ask as you review your content ideas list.

What’s the search viability?
Is this on brand? Do I have a unique take on this subject?
Am I motivated to create this?

Content Marketing Strategy

Pete recommends spending 5 minutes answering these questions first:

What is the topic? 2 – 3 words
Who’s it for?
What’s the problem/challenge/pain point?
What’s the solution/answer/end result?

If you think these are gems, make sure you listen as we discuss the remaining content workflow process. Have a blog, podcast, YouTube channel? You should definitely tune in with your notebook. TAKE NOTES!!

Next time catch the podcast live by joining our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/inspiredcourses

Guest Resources:

Want more content workflow tips from Pete. Sign up for one of his courses.

Podcourse: https://bit.ly/2OndUvA

Free Training on How to Start a Podcast: https://bit.ly/2CDPbAw

*These are affiliate links.

The Course Consultant Resources:

We always have loads of great content over here for you at The Course Consultant!! Why should you miss out? Join us in our free Facebook group and you never have to again!!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/inspiredcourses

Thanks for listening!! Don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know what new content planning ideas you will be implementing. And if you missed, last week’s episode on transformational learning, be sure to catch it here.

Also, if you missed our previous chat with Pete on web design, listen here.

Social Media Strategy for Course Creators

This post may include affiliate links. For more information, please review our disclaimers and privacy policy.

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Create A Social Media Sales Funnel

There are so many ways to connect with your audience. By creating a social media strategy, you’ll have a higher likelihood of converting your followers into paying customers. Andrea Jones, the creator of the Savvy Social School and podcast host of the Savvy Social Podcast says there there are several things to consider when creating a social media strategy for your online course or digital product. The first stage is the attract phase where you try to court or attract your ideal client or customer. The second stage is the convert phase where a lead magnet such as a Facebook group, lead magnet, quiz, or other content lets your customer take the next step in their journey. The third stage is where a follower chooses to purchase your offer. And lastly, Andrea says that in the last stage is an advocate phase where customers become advocates and help you sell more by sharing how much they love what you offer!

Use a Social Content Pillars

Andrea says that the promotional content is one of the main piece of social media that discusses an offer’s features and focus of the transformation of the project. Sometimes it can be easy to overuse this type of content. The second content pillar is educational content. In this piece of content, you’ll learn how to create helpful tutorials and information that will assist your ideal client or customer achieve a goal or solve a problem in their lives. By using social media, you can share videos and images on your chosen social media platform. The third content pillar is entertaining content. You can use funny memes, behind the scenes videos, or interesting facts to help attract new customers. The fourth content pillar is engaging content. This is a piece of content such as an image that might be controversial, a positive quote, or a question that leads people to interact with your brand or business. Andrea says that by using these strategies you can implement a plan to help your business connect with more potential customers.

Tips for Creating a Membership Program

Andrea says that she noticed that she kept updating her original course curriculum and wanted to convert her courses into a membership program. She says that because her topic of social media is constantly changing, it was something that made sense for her business. Additionally she found that the coaching element was vital to help students understand a broad topic across multiple platforms by using webinars for her students as techniques and social media platforms change. It’s important to choose a great course platform. Andrea says that she started her courses by hosting them on WordPress and later transitioned her courses into her membership with Teachable. Other resources she’s used includes Demio for webinar automations and Zoom for video conference calls.

Conclusion

Creating an online course or membership can be great! But, it’s important to consider how you are going to implement your strategy for developing and launching your online course. Before you head away from this article, head on over to watch the free training abot 3 Secrets to Launching A Digital Product Without a Big Following!

What is A Salesfunnel And How to Make One

This post may include affiliate links. For more information, please review our disclaimers and privacy policy.

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You’re listening to Episode Two of the course consultant show. My name is Melody and I’m so stoked to have you back to listen in on what is the sales funnel and how to create one. Today I’m going to dig into the definition of a sales funnel. And I’m going to talk through some interesting software that you can use to kickstart your online course creation journey. So let’s start with what is a sales funnel.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is essentially a customer’s experience through the purchasing process. So take out your pens and paper and write down all this information because I’m also going to be sharing some helpful free And paid products that you can use on your own to start creating online revenue. The first thing about a sales funnel is that you need to think about the first stage, which is the awareness stage. Are people aware of your products? How are you bringing and generating more awareness to your online programs, your services or products. So what you want to do is you want to actually generate awareness by peaking people’s interest. This could be anything through your social media online strategy. By creating graphics through Canva through social media, videos, or podcasts, and by creating great copywriting on your captions on Instagram, or by really just taking out some ads.

Share a Free Resource

Piquing interest by creating free valuable resources or freebies. Now, a lot of people feel like freebies are really outdated, but the truth is that Everybody loves freebies, I like freebies, I honestly will go to a freebie, whenever I need some great inspiration to continue working and building my business. So peak that awareness and interest that you have with your customers by thinking through what you can share before you even start selling.

Offer a Tripwire

The second thing you want to do is once you have their interest, they’re already maybe opt in to that free resource. redirect your customer to a sales page. Now if you’re are an online blogger or a content creator, such as a YouTuber, a podcaster, or maybe even a coach or freelancer, you still want to utilize your website to its full capacity. So create a sales page, do it, I know you can do it. The biggest thing that you want to do is once you redirect people from your free resource page is to create that sales page that creates awareness around what that problem is, and your solution, whether that solution is a coaching session with you. Or perhaps it’s to hire you for a consultation. Or maybe it’s to actually purchase a product from your website, whatever that is, make sure that all of your copywriting makes it clear about what the solution is, and who the solution is for. So again, paint that clear picture of the solution that transformation the feelings of happiness that you can share with your customers and clients. Think about that while you’re writing out your sales page. Another thing you want to do in your sales page is to create that urgency by offering some sort of limited time offer discount. Now this is something that I talked specifically with my good friend Pete from Do you even blog and we call this a trip wire.

Build Urgency

So if you just started out with a new blog, perhaps you can offer a limited time offer to a discounted price on your product. And maybe it’s for 24 hours or three days or, you know, maybe for even half an hour or whatever it is create that urgency by offering a limited time offer on the sales page. Now, if you have a really big, big, big launch, that limited time offer might last a little bit longer, maybe you’re opening the card for five days, maybe it’s for 10 days. Or maybe it’s only for three days, think about the price of your product. And also the timing of your digital product launch include that urgency in your sales page because you want people to purchase and you want to give them a window, a limited time window when they can access this resource. Otherwise, it’s just going to feel kind of deceptive, like it’s truly not limited and there’s a lot of supply of it going around. So you want to limit that offering to specific times.

Embed a Checkout Timer

One of the biggest ways that you can do that is to create, check out timers. Now timers are really cool. I like timers because it gives that kind of sense of urgency, a visual way for people to actually see that timer. There’s a lot of different online timers available out there these days. One of the most easiest, in my opinion is the element or timer. That’s something that you can create through using the paid version of Elementor, which I highly recommend. It’s not very expensive at all. And you can use that you know as an evergreen timer or you can create a timer that’s specific to a deadline which you set for a launch. Either one is great. Another way that you can do it if you have a WordPress powered website is to use something called evergreen countdown. evergreen countdown timer is a free plugin that you can use on your website. That is WordPress powered.

Use Email Marketing

The other thing you want to do is, once you’ve created that interest, you want to push people towards that decision to buy right, maybe some people are on the fence, they’re evaluating, why should I buy this product? What’s the benefit of sending this money to this person that I don’t even know? And what am I going to get out of this money that I’m investing in this product or service? So how do you get people to buy right you know, One of the best ways that you can do that is through email marketing. And a lot of people talk about email marketing and don’t mean it to be cheesy. But email marketing is a great way to build up rapport with your audience. So before you even sell anything, have a relationship with people share some valuable tips and resources, I promise you, it’s gonna work out in the end because people want to buy per meal. So having an email marketing, launch sequence and automating It is a great way to push people towards the evaluation stage in the sales funnel to the decision phase where they’re ready to actually make that purchase.

Market On Social Media

Another great way to lead people into that decision making process is to share content on your social media. Tell people Hey, it’s a limited time offer. I’m only offering it until x and x date and time. You can take out Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, you can make sure that you share with any affiliate sending out course reviews To tell them that there’s a limited time offer. Remember, all of this is playing into a much larger marketing strategy. And then number four, you know, pushing people to that decision, and then finally purchasing it. So yeah, maybe you’ve already sold a couple of digital products, or maybe you haven’t.

Create a Cart Checkout

How can you make the buying process easier for the buyer? Number one, is it easy? How can you make it easier? Are you using some sort of card checkout that’s not optimized, consider using a software like thrive card or Sam card that provide you with the ability to create a seamless customer checkout experience. I’m telling you, it is so easy to use these software’s and you’ll be surprised about how quickly you’ll make sales. Just by optimizing your cart checkout. Forget about WooCommerce it’s all about Samcart and Thrivecart and they’re really easy to setup. And then what you want to make sure is our is your product free of glitches or errors, or their capitalization errors? Are people able to easily download your products or principles? Are you able to get the link directly to your website to have them enroll, do have common technical issues that keep occurring. Make sure you keep track of them so you can share with your customers about these issues before they get to working through your product program.

Remove Distractions

It’s important to have something so that people will have that interest piqued and they can make that decision easily and take that action and purchase. So one way to do that is to remove distractions on your website. One of the most distracting things that people don’t really consider as a distraction is something that’s right there at the top. It’s your navigation menu. Your navigation menu on your website is important when somebody is first looking at your website to pique their interest, but it’s not helpful when people are trying to make a decision. Why? Because you’re giving them too many decisions. So again, if you are in the middle of a restaurant and you have 20 things on the menu, you might want to look through the menu to see what you’d like to purchase or eat. But if you’re at a restaurant, and you know, there’s one thing that you want, and you’re only offered that one thing, it’s a question of, do you want that one thing or not? So make it easier for your customers to purchase your products by removing that distraction on your navigation menu. Well, how do you do that? How do you take out the navigation menu? And is that okay to take out.

Have a Salespage Strategy

So what you can do if you have a WordPress powered website is to use something called Elementor. I talked a lot about this and we’ve talked about this with my Interview with Pete McPherson from Do you Even Blog to remove that distraction you can use our mentor and design your page to remove that navigation through something called element or canvas. It’s a small area on Elementor page builder that removes the navigation menu. Now if you want to actually create a template of your sales pages through a mentor, it’s super easy I need to do is go on to other element or page builder and then save your sales page as a template. Instead of doing this over and over and over and over and over again from scratch. Just try to make it easier for yourself by creating a template. Trust me it’s going to save you hours and hours and hours of time. Or you can go and purchase a lot of these templates online. So make it easier on yourself and your customer by making it easy to have one decision and that’s whether or not They want to purchase your product by removing that navigation menu. If you are on a Squarespace website, removing that distraction can be done by again, using Leadpages as a way to generate that interest and lead and having that call to action button for the buy up for your customer. Or there’s a simple code that you can input into your Squarespace page to remove that navigation menu. That way, all that’s on the menu is the enroll button, the purchase button, the download button or the button that goes directly to your cart checkout. easy, simple Squeezie.

Use a Call To Action Button

Now, lots of different people have different call to action buttons. What you want to make sure is that when you’re selling online products and courses, you want to make sure that you’re clear on what you actually sell. So make it clear. If you’re selling a digital product, say this is a digital download. If you’re selling an online course say that this is going to provide People with not a physical product and it’s an online course, create that clear call to action button by using text to like, Enroll now, purchase now download now. And then some people can even include the price of it is Enroll now for only 497. Or Enroll now for 97 or download now for only $7. Whatever the case is, you want to make it clear to the user where they need to purchase that product. And if you’re using a sales page, make sure that you have that button available more than once. You don’t want people scrolling, scrolling, scrolling all the way down to only see one button to purchase. Now, again, I’m going to say that it’s up to the person designing the website page to have their own opinion of where they want to place that call to action button.

But in my personal opinion is great offer that button in several different spots. Similarly, when you’re creating email marketing campaigns have that clear call Action Enroll now or purchase button option that goes directly to that sales page in your email marketing campaigns. So if you have a Buy Now button or a sales page link that you want to include in your email marketing campaigns, reference that link several times throughout your email. Now, I’m not saying make a whole book out of this, but I am saying think strategically about where you place that call to action button to purchase your product. And then again, to drive in that interest and awareness, you can use different ways to remind people of how your product will benefit them.

Conclusion

You can remind people through email marketing, social media, and any sort of affiliate content or Facebook ads for promoted ads or Pinterest ads. And then finally, hopefully, the hope is that you get a sale. So make sure they’re for your students provide them with information. Frequently Asked Questions or content that would benefit them so that they can understand that you’re not only there to take money, you’re there to support them through their experience, get them a clear understanding of what you have to offer for them. Well, if that was really helpful and you want to get started on your course creators journey, make sure that you check out online,my free guide for the course crater starter outline, and that’s a great way to get started on the course creation journey. It’s got a lot of free resources which allow you to stop procrastinating and start building your dream course and build some passive income. Make sure you check out the course consultant. com for more resources and tipson how to build your first course and digital products.

30 Day Course Launch Checklist

Grab this easy Trello checklist to fast track your way to launch a profitable course in 30 days or less.

Marketing

Content Planning Workshop Tips with Pete McPherson

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor

Table of Contents

Why Content Marketing Matters

Why Content Marketing Matters for Small Business

Content Marketing Strategy

Guest Resources:

The Course Consultant Resources:

Social Media Strategy for Course Creators

Table of Contents

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Create A Social Media Sales Funnel

Use a Social Content Pillars

Tips for Creating a Membership Program

What is A Salesfunnel And How to Make One

Table of Contents

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor

What is a Sales Funnel?

Share a Free Resource

Offer a Tripwire

Build Urgency

Embed a Checkout Timer

Use Email Marketing

Market On Social Media

Create a Cart Checkout

Remove Distractions

Have a Salespage Strategy

Use a Call To Action Button

Conclusion

30 Day Course Launch Checklist

Welcome Course Creators!

thecourseconsultant