4: Six Types of Offers that You Can Create to Generate Revenue in Your Business

Highlights

00:00 - Introduction and welcome
02:10 - Digital courses can be offered in different ways
06:30 - Three types of digital courses
11:29 - The Pros and Cons of Memberships
17:03 - The value of coaching offers
23:55 - Tips for selling digital products
27:10 - Selling and marketing physical products
28:36 - Done-for-you and done-with-you services

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Transcript:

There are all different types of offers, so let's go ahead and go into those now. You may not have even thought of these and let me just share. I've talked about the struggle when we have too many ideas, but the other spectrum of struggle is when we don't have enough. How many of you all have said, you know, maybe you're on this spectrum? You're like, I want to create a digital course, or I want to create an offer, but I don't know what offer to create because you just don't know the options that are out there. Nobody's explained them to you. So, I have the two spectrums here. I want to cover both of you. I want to help those who need more ideas to get those thoughts going to really pinpoint what they want. And then I have the other spectrum where if this sounds like too many choices for you, I just want you to pick the one that most resonates with you and go for it. All right.

So, I'm going to mention six today, six different types of offers. The first one of course is a digital course. So, a digital course is typically something somebody purchases. They either pay in full or they pay in a monthly installment. So, for example, I have a digital course that's $597, or you can join for three payments of $217. So that's something that they purchase once. It's not an ongoing, recurring thing. And that digital course can be delivered in many different ways. All right. This can be a prerecorded course that as soon as someone buys, they get instant access and everything's prerecorded. It can be a course that's delivered live. And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit, but that is something that absolutely can be delivered live and in real time. We're going to talk about that as I talk about how I launched my first course.

Another thing to keep in mind is your course can be available all the time. Right. Something that people can do in their own time, their own schedule. It's something they can buy anytime, or it can be a course that you only have available during certain times of the year. I'm sure many of you have experienced someone who has a course open maybe once, twice or three times a year. And then once the cart closes that course is no longer available and a wait-list button shows up. Right. The benefit of this type of course is that it creates some urgency. Right. People know during a launch, hey, if I don't jump into this course now, I'm not getting another chance for three, six or twelve months typically. All right. So, I just want you to understand as you're thinking about a course, think about how you want it to be created and delivered to your students. Okay. There's a lot of different options.

Let's talk about types of courses. I originally learned this concept from Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield is actually who introduced me to the world of digital courses. Back in 2014, I was transitioning out of my direct sales career to work with an international speaker who wanted to bring her business more online. She sold a lot of physical products. She wanted to make digital products. She wanted to be able to teach online versus always traveling. And it was such a blessing to be a part of her business because she paid for me to take courses so I could help her do all of this technical stuff. Right. And one of the first courses she paid for me to take was a course by Amy Porterfield, it was called "Profit Lab". Okay. And it literally taught you about Facebook ads and all the things.

Now keep in mind, I am new to the digital marketing space and I'm listening to this course and I'm listening to her webinar. And I'm just telling you something went off in me, just hearing her talk about creating a digital course business. And I remember thinking what an opportunity I have right now to learn while helping support someone else because one day this is what I want to do. And it took five years, almost six years before I got to the place where I stepped out in faith and went for it, but that spark.

So, I just want to encourage anyone who's like, you know, I've been thinking about doing this for a long time. You know, timing is everything. And you'll know when the time is right. I knew I needed to spend a little bit of time learning. I then went into this corporate position, which again, every experience gave me additional skills that I am using in my business today. But I then got to that point where I was like it's time. Okay. Life is too short. If I'm ever going to do this, I've got to do this. I've got a son that I need to homeschool. I've got aging parents. I need more flexibility. And that is what sparked my decision to finally go for it in March of 2020. All right. But it all stems back to that initial webinar that I took from Amy Porterfield in 2014. So very grateful that she painted the picture for me. I truly feel like I'm living that dream now.

The three main types of courses that people create are starter courses, signature courses and spotlight courses. Now other entrepreneurs may call them different things, but this is really, I think, a great explanation and way to determine the type of digital course you would like to offer. Now, most people, if you're like me, I had originally thought I was going to launch my business with the signature course because I had a lot of content. I decided I was going to teach people how to use Evernote, how to get organized digitally, how to create an online system. And my brain was just going, going, going, and thinking of eight modules, ten modules. Like I couldn't reign it in.

Because a signature course, a quick description of that is basically something that gets your audience from A to Z. So, it is like a transformation course. Right. You're giving them each and every step to get to an ultimate result, which is Z, and it's usually a very, very robust thing. Signature courses can range anywhere from 500, a 1000, 2000, 10,000, 25,000. Okay. Lots of high-ticket signature programs out there. Right. But I knew the downside of starting with a signature course would mean a lot more work on my part before I had confirmation that people were even interested in buying what I thought I wanted to teach. Okay. So, I thought, Hmm. Before I create something that has twelve modules, maybe we should create something that has four to six and that's where a starter course comes in.

So, a starter course, I like to think of it as something that gets your audience from point A to B, okay, not A to Z. Okay. If you're Australian A to Zed. Okay. Not the whole kit and caboodle, but A to B. It's a starter course. It's something that not only is easier for you to create, but it's easier for your audience to watch, to absorb, to implement, to learn from, because time is precious. Right. Not everybody has time to commit to a twelve-week program. Right. But if they could learn something that's going to impact their life and business right now, something they can jump in right now and in four weeks or six weeks, boom, I have a result that I can then dig into further if I so choose. There's a lot of benefit to that. So that's what a starter course is. That is really where I recommend most people start because when you do a starter course, you're going to learn so much about your audience: what they're learning, what's resonating with them. And then it's going to help you develop a signature course, not just based on what you think they want and need, but what your audience has told you they want and need. Okay.

A spotlight course is when you do a deeper dive into one of the points. So, let me give you an example of this. Let's say I am teaching a Canva course, and I want to teach people, you know, I could do a signature course on Canva. It could be everything they need to know. Right. I'm talking everything from design, to editing the images, the videos inside of Canva, to organizing. Like it's the whole kit and caboodle.

A starter course might be getting started with Canva. Right. The key things you need to know to improve the way your images connect and convert. All right. That's a starter course. What's a spotlight course? It's diving deeper into one thing that they need in this whole process. I just did a spotlight course recently on Canva. It was a two-hour paid workshop, almost a hundred percent focused on organizing what's in Canva. Okay. Like creating a system for Canva so that: you don't have a gazillion images everywhere, you don't know where anything is, how to work with templates, how to save things, how to edit in Canva of course. All my little fancy advanced tips and tricks were in there too. But I niched down to a need that my audience was saying to me. They're like, we all love Canva, we all use Canva, but we cannot find anything in there and we don't know how to repurpose what we're creating. So, I created a spotlight course for that. Okay. So that's just some examples of courses. And this is just one type of offer.

The second type of offer I want to talk about is a membership. I actually thought I was going to start off with a membership. Why do people want to do memberships initially? As a business owner what's the first thing that goes through your head? Recurring revenue. Right. That's all you think about when you think of memberships, because unlike a digital course where they pay you once, or maybe installments over, you know, two to six months, a membership is recurring. Right. It could be a monthly recurring fee, quarterly, annually. And I remember when I first launched, I thought, well, why do a course? If I had a membership, then I would have people come in and they would pay me every month and as long as I had XYZ number of people I'll hit my revenue goals.

Then I realized something else. Not only is it recurring revenue, but it's recurring commitment. It is me saying I'm creating something I know I'm committed to for the long haul. Even if it's not forever, we're talking at least a year or two years, who knows. I have to be committed to this. It doesn't matter if five people sign up, if five hundred people sign up. And back in the beginning, I was a team of one. And I thought, how would I keep up with all of the admin, the content, the creation? I didn't even have a course done yet. So, I would have to literally be creating content for training, coaching in the group. I'm so glad that I put the complete brakes on it, just in the beginning.

Memberships are wonderful things. Okay. I have no doubt I will have one one day because there's so many benefits to them, but for me I realized that it was not the right time. Now that I have worked with thousands of business owners, I can already envision what a membership could look like for me, because I've learned through the journey of how I like to deliver content. I have a team of four now, including myself, so I would not be alone. I have a lot of prerecorded content that I could easily add to the membership. I'm in a totally different place now than I was in the very beginning. All right. So, I'm just sharing my journey. There are many people who have started off with memberships and had success, but I want you to think through, for you, what are you committed to delivering?

My signature course, The Digital Clutter Cure, I open the doors typically two to three times a year. I love being all in with my students who buy my course. Right. I don't just sell them a course. I go through it with them, with a Facebook community, a support group. And in those twelve weeks they get to ask me questions. You know, I do Q-and-A lives twice a month, but when that twelve weeks is up, it's done. And now I can take the next three months off if I want to. I can go on vacation. I cannot think so much about having to serve an audience and keep up with the things. And I like my life like that. Others, you want that recurring thing. You want to be able to do the same thing every month, but these are all things to think about. Okay. I really prefer right now in my lifestyle, a stop and go, versus on and on and on.

I know some very, very successful entrepreneurs today who originally started with memberships, that they ended up canceling within five to six months and refunding people all their money, because they learned very quickly that a membership was not the offer that was for them. So, kudos to them because sometimes you don't know unless you try. But then they made a switch, and they went to a different type of offer and now they are killing it. Okay. So don't feel bad if the first offer you have does not get the results you want. Okay. We're learning how you like to deliver and how your audience likes to receive content and the type of offer. Right.

But both courses and memberships, either one of these can include a lot of different things. Again, it can have video training that's prerecorded or delivered live. It can have a coaching element to it, whether that's one-on-one coaching or group coaching. It can have a community aspect to it, whether that's a Facebook group or you use a third-party tool like Circle. There's a lot of perks and inclusions that you can have in a course and a membership to get people to continue to stay and to become loyal raving referrals for you. Okay. Remember, the job is not just to get people into the programs it's to build relationships so that you have what I like to call your groupies. Okay.

I love my groupies. These are the people who you feel like they would follow you to the ends of the earth, because they're so grateful for how you've impacted them. It could be from one live, one training, something sparked or resonated from them, with them, and now they are connected to you. And any offer you have, they're like, I don't care what it is I'm in. That's the type of community that you can build in your digital business. Okay. It's amazing. It takes some time. Okay. It takes a lot of effort, but that is what's possible. And in each of these offers, I love having a live element because live is how I make a lot of these connections.

So, I've gone over two types of offers so far, let's go into the next one. The third type of offer is coaching. This is actually the offer I started with, even before I launched my first course, even before I had my platform Kajabi, even before I had my domain name. My very first offer that I had was a one-on-one coaching session. That is an offer, you guys.

So, think about this for a minute. I know some people launch a business and they're like, well I can't really make money until I get this course put together. That could not be farther from the truth. You can offer one-on-one coaching right now. You could literally reach out to people who you know have connected to you in some way on this thing you love to teach and say, by the way, I'm now offering one-on-one coaching on such and such. If you or anyone you know may be interested in this, please reach out to me. Please let me know.

That is literally what I did prior to launching my business in March of 2020. I had all these people that would message me, and they would say, "How do you use Evernote? How do you use Canva? How do you connect with your customers? How are you doing customer care and nurturing your leads?" And instead of just giving them the answer for free, which I had done my whole life, I would give them a snippet and say, oh, here's this little something I do. By the way, did you know that I offer one-on-one coaching sessions? I would love to set up a time where we get together on zoom for an hour, and we help you develop your system or your strategy.

Before I knew it, I had people booking coaching sessions. Now at that time I remember like, how are they going to pay me? This was, you know, 2000, I don't know, 2017, 2018. I didn't have Venmo then. Zelle wasn't out then. So, the only thing I knew to use was PayPal. So, I was like, great. And I charged $60 an hour you all. This was before I realized my value. And there was nothing wrong with charging $60 an hour. I felt comfortable with that amount. And it was what taught me the value that I bring to people, because I learned from what my audience was asking me. Right. As I was helping them, I was seeing them have wins. I was seeing what my system did, any tweaks that needed to happen to help them in their system. Those coaching sessions were invaluable for me to know what to put into my first course.

So coaching offers are an amazing opportunity for you, especially if you're just getting started. For some of you, it is the offer you want to offer. Those coaching sessions, I didn't do many. It was like one a month, one every other month, sometimes one a quarter. But before I knew it, I had coached like ten people, like twelve people. And every once in a while, I was like woo-hoo sixty bucks. Then I went to seventy-five. Then I went to ninety. And then it just kept going up from there.

But the cool thing was, is even when I chose my platform, when I launched my business, which is Kajabi, we'll talk about that in a future episode. But when I got Kajabi, I did something very important. Because so many business owners, when they're wondering where to start, this is where their brain goes. Oh my goodness, I need to build a website. Oh my goodness, I need to start posting all over social media. No, actually that is not what you need to do. You need to have an offer to sell. And that is the very, very first thing I built into Kajabi. I didn't have a homepage. I didn't have a website. All I did was go to offers. I set up a coaching session. I think it was seventy-five bucks at that point or ninety bucks at that point. And I created a checkout page from that offer so that whenever anyone wanted coaching, I could send them a link and they could buy a coaching session.

That was the very first thing I created. I created something that brought in revenue. Okay. I didn't spend time on all the things I thought I needed to have that weren't going to make me money. Right. I focused on the offer. So, coaching can a hundred percent be an offer, even if it's not the offer you always have. It can be a second offer, a third offer. All right. It could be an offer you use right now to gain knowledge about your audience for when launch your next offer. Okay. But offers and coaching can be one-on-one sessions, one-on-one packages. It can be group coaching. It can be a mastermind coaching type thing. There's lots of different types of coaching offers that you can create.

But now here's the thing to remember about coaching. If the goal, like it is for me, is to stop trading time for money, you will not want to keep your only offer as one-on-one coaching, because that is not scalable. Okay. One-on-one coaching has its place. I still offer one-on-one coaching, very limited. Okay. I have very few openings in my calendar because one-on-one time with me means I have to be there, okay, in order to get that revenue, I can't be sick. I can't be out of town, or I could be depending on where it is, but I can't be on vacation. Okay. I can't be sitting in my living room hanging out with the family. Right. It's time for money.

So, while one-on-one coaching is an amazing offer, I want you to start thinking about ways that you could stop, not just trading time for money, but how could you maximum that time. This is why group coaching is so beneficial. Instead of making, you know, let’s say you make $300 an hour as a coach or $500 an hour, whatever, in one session. What if you charged, you know, two thirds of that and had four people in your session? Now you are making so much more money an hour and you're able to serve more people in the same amount of time. Okay. So just, just be aware of that. There's lots of group coaching. There's also a lot of hybrid offers out there where they have a course with group coaching attached to it. Lots of things like that, but I just want you to keep some of these things in mind as you're thinking about the offer. Okay.

Number four is digital products. I did not start off offering digital products. It's a little bit different of a beast per se. Because a lot of people who sell digital products, you've probably seen on places more like a Shopify site, an Etsy site. People absolutely sell digital products through other platforms too. But these are the tools like templates and checklists and digital planners and eBooks, and some people their entire businesses is built on digital products. And there is a definite market for that if you are going to create digital plot products that many different people use. And another thing to keep in mind, a lot of times digital products are a lower price point.

So, for example, I now sell two digital products. I did not start off with these digital products, they were developed. The one I've now had for eleven months and the other one I just launched in December, so four or five months. I did not create digital products to be this amazing revenue stream for me. I used it as a way to create and give something that I knew my audience wanted and needed. So, one of them is called a business profitability tracker. Since I help people with digital organization, saving things like tax receipts and Evernote and how to organize your expenses so that tax time is a breeze.

I learned along the way that a lot of business owners do not use accounting software like QuickBooks, for example, and that's fine. They may not have a big enough business. They may not prefer to use QuickBooks, whatever. And I realized, well they need a way to track their revenue expenses. And so, I paid someone on Fiverr to create a Google sheet for me that I now sell on my website for $29. And it's this amazing Google sheet that I use personally, hundreds of others now use as well to track your revenue expenses. It has this really cool dashboard. So that's an example of a digital product.

Do I spend all of my marketing efforts on this $29 product? Not now. At some point I want to have a wonderful, you know, ads funnel, that's going to bring people to that. But where I've used this digital product is as bonuses when I do my launches or as a bump when they buy a different course. Bump meaning, you guys have probably seen them, right, somebody buys a course and then they say, by the way if you also want to add this it's available now for this discounted price. Or maybe it's not even discounted. So sometimes I might sell something, and I'll say, by the way, do you also want to add my business profitability tracker for 29 bucks? Click here. It adds it to the order. So digital products can be used in a lot of different ways. Bonuses and bumps and upsells and down sells and all the things that we'll talk about in future episodes, but they also can be an amazing stream of revenue if it's something that people really resonate with. Okay. So that's number four.

Number five, as far as offers go, are physical products. So, yes, even if you sell a physical product. Let's say you're in network marketing and you're wondering, well, what do I offer? I don't teach courses, I don't have memberships, I sell products that my company makes. Right. That product that you sell is an offer. Maybe you haven't thought of it that way, but every individual product is an offer. Every combination of products, like a bundle, that's an offer. Some of you guys have subscriptions to products, that's an offer. And so, if that's you, and that's the niche, you know, you’re in. Then your focus is how to launch and get leads that lead to your product offers. Okay. Even if it's a product that you don't physically create or manufacturer. Okay.

The other type of person who's selling a physical product are those who are making handmade things, things that would need to be shipped. Okay. So, these might be unique things, anything from jewelry to embroidery to all. I am not a crafty person, so I'm not even going to be able to think of all the ideas that go here. You know, people who create art. Right. All these things, these physical products, these are also offers. Okay. They could be one-of-a-kind things, bundles, or subscriptions. That's number five.

And then the last type of offers are done-for-you services or done-with-you services, sometimes they end up being. Okay. So done-for-you or done-with-you services are people like copywriters, virtual assistants, bookkeepers, ads managers, SEO strategists, community managers, website designers, social media manager. If you're any of these types of business owners, your offer is typically a service. Right. It might be project based where they pay you per project. If I'm a web designer, for example, my offer might be, offer one, you get all these website designs for me that you Implement and update yourself and then you have another service where I do it for you and that obviously is a much higher price point. Okay. So that's what I mean by an offer of a service.

If you are a copywriter, you might have a copywriting course "How to Get Started with Copywriting", but you might also offer a VIP Day where someone can pay you for half day, four hours or a full day, eight hours of your time to work on their copywriting needs. Okay. These are offers that are sold every day. And if this is your specialty, you want to get really good at crafting offers that sell again and again. Okay. If you are one of these people and you're like, I'm not making any money, I don't know where to find people, then you have to work on a number of things, either the offer you're offering or one of the next two: your launch and how you're getting leads. Right. But those are the six types of offers.

So hopefully you learned some new things today on offers. Maybe there is an offer you thought you wanted, and now I've shared these six things and you're like, ooh, I never even thought about offering a digital product or a done-for-you service. Okay. But every one of these are things that sell, okay, online. They all have some pros, some cons. I don't even want to call them cons, challenges, right, or things that you need to work through. But if you can hone in on an offer, okay, and that's what you're focused on. You don't need a ton, by the way. I started off with coaching and then I had a course. And that course that I launched, I have now launched again and again and again. Along the journey I have added additional offers, but you do not have to. Some people build multimillion dollar businesses with one offer. They are known for one thing. So, it is okay if that is you. All right.

The journey I've gone on is I focus on the one, but then I have other options. I like to call it like the value ladder. Right. So yes, I have a signature course, but now I have some starter courses. I have some spotlight courses. I have other things like digital products that people can join with me for as little as $7. That's my other digital product. It's a sprint planner for goal setting and that sort of thing. So, people can get that. Sorry, it's twelve. I don't know why I said seven. I think I launched it at seven for like one day or something, but it's $12 and they get this sprint planner, which helps them, you know, basically achieve one big goal over a 12-week time period. So that's my lowest offer, $12. And then I have currently a $600 course that's on a wait list. And now I'm getting ready to launch another course in June that's going to be $2,000. So, you see how you have different price points and different ways that people can join your world. I also have coaching packages that range from the hundreds to the thousands.

So, you create offers again based on how you want to deliver it and what your audience wants to receive. Okay. Just keep your ears open. As you do each thing, you're going to hear what their desires are, what their needs are and that is how I determine my offers.

Thanks so much guys for joining me today. And next I want to share with you a resource. This is a resource that is going to tie together all of the things that we've been talking about: your offers, your launches, your leads, and even the types of tools that you may want to check out as your building your business. So, the link you want to go to is banishbusinessclutter.com/guide. I am so excited about this guide. We put together this 15-page kind of getting started guide and it's everything that you need to know, do, it's all of the ideas that we've been talking about on the podcast. All of the options of offers and all of the types of launches and all of the different ways that you can generate leads are inside this guide.

So be sure to go to banishbusinessclutter.com/guide and go ahead and get that now. You're going to want to look at this again and again and it's definitely going to help you get some clarity on where to focus and the types of things for you. Remember indecisiveness is the enemy. Right. We're going to decide and do because it's that motion that leads to momentum.