When you created your online course, you probably did it for one of three reasons.
- Because you needed more money in your business (and you were maxing out on how many 1:1 clients you could serve)
- Because you needed more time in your business (and you wanted to be able to serve many people in the same time it was taking you previously to serve one or two)
- Because you needed both 1+2… stat! (which for most solopreneur businesses or service-based businesses is 100% the case).
Sound familiar?
You dreamt of launching your online course and scaling it to that magical 6-figure course mark…
But, when you look at your bank account and your calendar right now, has your amazing online course delivered on its promise to you (well the promise all those gorgeous people on Instagram made to you on its behalf?)
Or, has it actually just added a bunch more time-consuming tasks, expenses and stresses to your plate instead?
Sure you’ve made some sales, which is always amazing.
But you’re nowhere near that 6-figure course vision…
And let’s be honest, with all the work involved in creating your program and making those sales, has it really been worth it (…yet?)
Now before you start to panic, and consider throwing your whole course, business model (and possibly laptop) out the window.
I want to let you know that actually, even though it’s super frustrating, it’s also totally NORMAL when you are in the STARTING phase of growing an online course.
And if you are not finding it easy to scale and make the number of sales you want each and every month, then that is where you are (and it’s totally OK!)
Look, all those benefits of creating your course are still possible, they just happen in the next phases of your online courses journey (those phases are called Mastering and Scaling, just FYI).
And the key to moving onto those next phases, where sales are easy, business is profitable, and you finally get that time freedom you’ve been dreaming of… is to NOT make these three super common mistakes that keep people stuck in the Starting phase… for good.
Yikes.
Ready to find out what’s keeping you stuck at the start and from scaling your online course to 6-Figures and beyond?
Let’s go!
6-Figure Course Mistake #1 : Trying to skip the most important step!
So if you’ve been reading this post hoping for a magic bullet solution, I am about to disappoint you (although let me save you some trouble, they don’t exist!). Because one of the most common reasons I see people staying stuck in the Starting phase is that they try to skip over the all-important “Mastering” phase, and go straight to the good bit, the Scaling (aka make lots of sales and money) phase.
But that 99.99% of the time never works.
You see in the starting phase, this is where you are trying out new things, whether it’s new offers, or new sales strategies or tactics.
When you find one or a combo of those things that work well enough (that hit the numbers you need), you then need to move to (and spend a bit of time in) the Mastering phase.
The Mastering phase is when you take a beat, whether that’s a few weeks, maybe even a few months, and you spend the time refining, practising and systemising that magical thing that worked so that it works as well, and as reliably (and that’s the important part) as it possibly can.
You do this normally by launching again, or retesting key parts of your funnel to your list, so don’t worry you’re still making sales in this phase (phew!)
It’s not a sexy phase, but it’s oh-so-important.
And it’s then (when you have mastered it) and only then are you ready to move to the Scaling phase for your online course (aka start growing your business by sending as many people as you possibly can to your “Mastered” offers and marketing strategies).
If you try to skip to Scale on an offer that hasn’t been mastered, or a marketing tactic that doesn’t convert well enough, guess what happens, they both keep sucking, and you end up wasting a bunch of time and/or money just reconfirming that fact.
Any of this sounding familiar?
The Mastering Stage is totally not sexy - but it's oh-so important! Click To Tweet
6-Figure Course Mistake #2 : Trying to scale the wrong offer
So this is another mistake I see so many people making, and one I have made myself many times.
And that is that you try to scale the wrong offer.
Now inside my programs, we spend a lot of time helping people to create what I call a “Funnel Friendly Offer”, which is actually super important even if you never plan on having a funnel. Because without a Funnel Friendly Offer, you are not going to be able to Scale it to 6-figures let alone without going bankrupt or having a mental breakdown anyway.
I’ve seen making some really simple tweaks take someone from 0 sales to 20+ a week, just by making their offer more Funnel Friendly.
And it’s not that hard. All a funnel friendly offer is is an offer that:
- You can deliver well, at scale (so you can still give your clients and customers a great experience and great results if you have 10 or 1000)
- It is an EASY yes, and therefore easy to sell (why make life hard on yourself trying to sell something that most people don’t want!?)
- It is priced to be profitable (and includes a margin for marketing, Scaling almost always requires some paid marketing, and you need to still make a profit when you do decide to invest in paid traffic and ads)
If you’re not sure if your offer is the right offer, check out my 6-Figure Breakthrough Assessment here now Free and I can help you figure it out!
If you try to scale a non-funnel friendly offer, you will either end up wasting a tonne of money and not making any sales. Or making lots of sales (but spending all your money-making those sales, so you are now essentially serving those people for free). Or making lots of sales and then totally resenting every single one of them (because delivering your offer still takes up so much of your time and brain space).
Neither of those is what you want, right?
6-Figure Course Mistake #3 : All launches or All funnels
Look, this may surprise you, as I am so all about the Funnels. But I actually don’t advise that people go 100% funnels, especially not at the start.
I also don’t advise them to be all about the launches.
I truly believe (and I can say this because I have seen the behind the scenes of so many multi 6-figure and even 7-figure courses now) that if you want to scale (and ultimately have a profitable and enjoyable business) you need both.
For lots of reasons, but these are the two main ones.
1 – They each take the stress off the other (and off you). It’s the whole “Don’t have all your eggs in the one basket” theory, and it’s an important one. Think of it this way, if you are 100% about the launches, and you have a “bad launch” what happens? Usually, you then spend the next few months scrambling and stressing to make up the difference. This takes you away from the work you had planned to do (the work that was going to grow your business), and it’s even more stressful because you need this launch to make up for the last one. And that is no way to run a business (or live!)
The same goes with funnels. Funnels can have bad days (or weeks), and if suddenly you main income stream shuts off, what do you do?? Probably the same thing as above. But if you have a funnel AND regular launches backing each other up, suddenly it’s not the end of the world when one of them has a bad day, week or month.
2 – They each help boost the other, if you set it up right your funnels will help to make your launches more profitable, AND your launches will add more people to your funnels. Often a simple funnel can add an extra 20-30% of sales in the week or two following a launch (sometimes even more!). So if you are only one of the other, you are actually leaving huge piles of money on the table (and when you are in the starting phase, and every dollar counts, that is NOT what you want to be doing!)
So more sales and less stress. Sounds pretty good right?
Bonus mistake: Shiny New Marketing Tactics keep bringing you back to the Starting phase.
Now there is one more mistake I see (and have made) over and over again.
And that is repeatedly falling prey to the allure of the Shiny New Marketing Tactic (and therefore keeping yourself stuck in the Starting phase forever).
Usually, this looks something like this…
You find something that works OK, maybe it’s a webinar or a challenge or even a funnel, but it’s not as OK as you had hoped (usually because your expectations were probably too high, and you don’t know the real numbers you need to be looking for) so rather than investing the time and energy to take that thing from OK to awesome, you decide to switch things up and try shiny new tactic after shiny new tactic (and because you are trying new things constantly, you never master anything, so you can never move on to the next phases!)
It’s an easy trap to fall into, so don’t beat yourself up.
But it’s also NOT the way to grow your business, plus it’s hella exhausting, so how about you give it a miss?
Any of these sound familiar?? DM me at @katemckibbin and let me know which mistake has been keeping you stuck.
And now that you know what NOT to do, I hope you can start to see what you NEED to do to move yourself out of the very suck starting phase, through the kinda boring (but crucial) Mastering phase, and into where you really deserve to be… Scaling!
And if you’d like some help with any of this, make sure you get on the waitlist for my eCourse Empire program ASAP, we are opening up a handful of new spots very soon!
