HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
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Tips on how to get better results faster for your online program with Marisa Murgatroyd
- About 97% of people who sign up for online education don’t actually complete the online courses and online programs they sign up for, and definitely don’t get the results that they were hoping for when they joined.
- Most online courses are developed by experts who may know what they’re talking about in terms of their expertise but don’t necessarily know how to get someone a result and don’t understand the psychology of motivation and how people really learn.
- What we want is to learn from an online course is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
- I believe that every single human is meant to succeed and given the right conditions, and the right environment, they can succeed in huge ways. But unfortunately, most online education has not been creating the right conditions for people to succeed.
- The first principle that I teach in Experience Formula is what I call “mission.” Mission means that there’s a very, very specific outcome from your online course.
- People do not learn from information alone. If they did, we’d all be living in Googletopia. We’d have all the best lives imaginable, but the truth is that more information has actually led not to Googletopia, but more of a Googlepocalypse.
- For someone who has never created a course before, I really help them focus on creating a beta offer and also understanding what’s the right product to create at the right time in your business.
- Before you make money while you sleep, first you’ve got to be able to make money while you’re awake.
- They want to really see the results that you’re getting for people and that longer-term reputation and success depends on how successful your students, clients, and customers are.
- In our programs, we basically have a win attached to every single training. There’s never any training that’s just pure information.
- So many people think that the most important moment in your relationship with your clients is the moment that they buy, and I actually believe it’s the moment right after they buy.
- I definitely have to teach people how to go beyond the individual product and create an entire suite of products.
- I think that the more people are learning online and living off social media, the more there’s a need to have live events, and to get people into a room together and actually have real-world connections, rather than social or cyber connections.
- When you are confident that your product is going to get people the best possible chance to get the results they’re hoping for, you become a lot more competent to sell and market that online course.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a $325 billion industry and we’re going to have a guest that’s going to tell us how to help our clients get 10-30 times better results than they’re currently getting. Today’s guest is Marisa Murgatroyd. She is the founder of Live Your Message, and the creator of The Experience Product Masterclass, where she helps people who teach online programs to get better results for their students faster.
Doug: Marisa launched her career as an artist who built a mid-seven figure online business despite being told she had no marketable skills. Since then, she’s shown over 5000 students how to succeed online and now she’s here today on our show to share a few of her secrets with us, so welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today Marisa.
Doug: Hey listeners, welcome back. I’m super excited to have Marisa Murgatroyd in the studio joining us today and she’s going to share some amazing information for you to help your clients maximize the results. Welcome the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.
Marisa M.: Hi Doug. Good to be here.
Doug: So I looked at your background, your website, have to say I’m very impressed. It was very easy and clean to navigate, there was lots of information. I love the quiz and the interactivity of it, so you’ve done a really, really good job in getting established online.
Marisa M.: Thank you. Well, I like to say that I help everyday entrepreneurs become online superheroes, so I’ve got to be one myself.
Doug: There you go. That’s not always the case. Often people are busy working on their client’s stuff and don’t spend enough time building their own content out.
Marisa M.: Well, absolutely. It is an important time, though, when you get up to your gills in clients and you’re ready to make a bigger impact and leverage your time, and when you do, it becomes more important to build that out. But early stage, you don’t necessarily need all that.
Doug: I was really fascinated around what you do in terms of helping people with online courses, because you see this mover has obviously been not just overnight, but people moving towards online courses, looking for digital. But you have a different focus. Do you want to take a couple of minutes and just share what you do for your clients?
Marisa M.: Absolutely. So, first of all, the online education and eLearning industry is a gigantic industry. Forbes Magazine published an article recently saying that by the year 2025, they expect it to be a $325 billion industry, every single year. But there’s a dirty secret that not a lot of people know about, which is about 97% of people who sign up for online education don’t actually complete the courses and programs they sign up for, and definitely don’t get the results that they were hoping for when they joined.
Marisa M.: Because most products are developed by experts who may know what they’re talking about in terms of their expertise, but don’t necessarily know how to get someone a result and don’t understand the psychology of motivation and how people really learn. So, what happened is years ago when I first started creating courses, back in 2011, I was doing courses just like everybody else was doing courses, creating what was commonly called thud factor, where you provide so much value, it basically lands with a big thud on people’s doorsteps, right?
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Yeah.
Marisa M.: I came to realize that thud factor is really the sound of someone’s hopes and dreams collapsing to the floor and despair, essentially, that people don’t want the thud anymore. We’re all so busy and we’re all so overwhelmed, so just a thud of information and a thud of content is not what we want. What we want is to learn how to do something very, very specific and to get a very specific result or outcome.
Marisa M.: So, I’ve developed a methodology for helping people, course creators get anywhere from 10 to 30 times the industry standard results for their students. You’re basically getting people hooked on taking action and getting results through your programs, and when you do that, when you design products in the way that I teach, all of a sudden you have more sales, more repeat sales, more referrals, a whole lot less refunds, and business becomes way more fun because you’re actually watching people succeed on an everyday basis.
Marisa M.: You’ve got the choice to do that, or basically leave the vast majority of your customers behind, and that was my background, unintentional. Most people don’t intend to leave people behind but when I was getting started as a course creator, I just was creating courses like everybody else was creating courses. I remember asking a colleague if she was seeing the same thing, if it was common for people to buy programs and then not consume them and not get the results, and I remember what she told me was, “Marisa, some people just aren’t meant to succeed” and that just felt like a punch in the gut, because I don’t believe that one bit.
Marisa M.: I believe that every single human is meant to succeed and given the right conditions, and the right environment, they can succeed in huge ways. But unfortunately, most online education has not been creating the right conditions for people to succeed.
Doug: Yeah, and I think to your point, if you help people to succeed, if you’ve got one course then that’s obviously going to leave the door open for you to go back to that customer and to help them maybe in a different area or expand the knowledge, deeper dive maybe, a 101 consulting. So you’re really not only being a good, practical, ethical businessperson by serving your audience, but you’re also leaving the door for future sales like you said referrals.
Marisa M.: Absolutely. Well, Zig Ziglar, the late, great motivational speaker said you can have everything you want in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. I think so often with the focus on marketing and sales, people are very good at marketing and they’re very good at selling, but sometimes they are not as good at delivering on their promises. I don’t always think it’s intentional. I think people just think that their students, clients, and customers are going to take care of themselves and don’t realize the level of support people need to be truly successful, especially with something outside of their comfort zone. If it were not outside of their comfort zone, they wouldn’t need to buy a product from you.
Doug: And I wonder if it’s sometimes the speaker or the teacher in this case, isn’t just so excited about the topic that like you said, they want to provide so much value and what they forget is because you’re the expert, you fire hose somebody and then after a couple of hours, they’re just totally washed out because they just can’t take any more information in.
Marisa M.: Well, that’s one factor, but it’s definitely not the only one. I’ve actually identified 10 factors that when you stack them together create what I call the downward death spiral, which is a recipe for people getting really frustrated, really stuck, and ultimately just giving up. But the good news is, just like there are 10 things you want to avoid, there are 10 things you definitely want to do, to get better results for your students, clients, and customers.
Doug: I think I read recently, I saw a post come out by one of the online course companies that’s close to us, Thinkific, and they basically said you’re trying to help someone get the result they’re looking for as quickly as possible and then right after reading that, I got an ad in my email, it was, “We’ve got a 70 video series.” I’m thinking, “That’s the last thing I want.” Unless I’m trying to rewatch Friends or something on Netflix, is a 70 video course on how to do something, I just can’t even imagine where I’d have the time to go through the content.
Marisa M.: That’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make, is they just think that other people are as fascinated about their topic as they are, but the truth is that people want to learn how to do something very specific. The first principle that I teach in Experience Formula is what I call “Mission.” Mission means that there’s a very, very specific outcome from your online program. It’s not just a general survey course letting people know all the information about a particular topic, but you’re helping someone do, be, feel, have, overcome or achieve something very specific.
Marisa M.: It’s so specific it’s almost binary. You’ve either done it or you haven’t done it, and you can film someone crossing the finish line, mission accomplished. It’s got to be that tangible, that specific, that concrete. I actually teach a very specific template to help people get to the mission of the product, and I call it “the mission possible template.” I actually stole it from the Mission Impossible movies, and basically, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is. So for example, in our Experience Product Masterclass, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design, market, and make $2000 or a whole lot more from an experience product in 12 weeks or less.
Marisa M.: So people know exactly what they’re going to do, they know exactly how much time they have, and they’re going to know when they’ve done it or not done as it the case may be. When you focus your entire online program around a very specific mission, it’s not just a marketing message, but it becomes the container for the program itself. When students naturally want to ask me all kinds of other questions like, “How do I name my business?” That’s beyond the scope of our mission here together, and when we talk about things beyond the scope, we’re sending everyone down rabbit holes, right?
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Yep.
Marisa M.: It’s really powerful because it gives people an experience of clarity and of focus, of knowing exactly what to do, and it simplifies product creation because all you need to include in that online program is what’s going to get someone to mission accomplished. No more, no less, and you strip away all of the just general information. People do not learn from information alone. If they did, we’d all be living in Googletopia. We’d have all the best lives imaginable, we’d be rich, we’d be happy, we’d be hot, we’d be thin, we’d have our ideal mates, but the truth is that more information has actually led not to Googletopia, but more of a Googlepocalypse.
Doug: Yeah, I mean there are certain days when I’m just thinking, “Okay, enough, I’ve got to shut off everything electronic and get outside where there’s no electricity and nobody’s going to talk to me.”
Marisa M.: I do not blame you. I recently moved to Topanga Canyon here where I get to walk the hike versus driving the hike, and I’m hiking every day.
Doug: Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. I mean, we did the same thing and people say, “Why would you do that?” It’s like, well, it doesn’t make sense to drive 15 minutes to go for a hike. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to walk out your backdoor and have the mountain just a few minutes away?
Marisa M.: I think so.
Doug: In terms of people that are creating courses, can we just divide them maybe into two buckets for today’s conversation? One is people who have already created a course, so they’ve got something, and it’s maybe working, maybe not, and the people who haven’t. How do you address these two different markets when you’re working with clients, or you’re working in a group setting?
Marisa M.: Yeah, so for someone who has never created a course before, I really help them focus on creating a beta offer and also understanding what’s the right product to create at the right time in your business. A lot of times people jump right into trying to create that massive membership site. The number of times I’ve heard people come to me and say, “Marisa, I want to create a membership site.” I was like, “Okay.” “What membership site software should I use?” “Well, what are you going to put on the membership site?” “I don’t know, I just heard I need a membership site to make money while I sleep.”
Doug: Yeah, that’s funny.
Marisa M.: I’m like yeah, I’ve got an expression. Before you make money, you can’t make money … Basically, before you make money while you sleep, first you’ve got to be able to make money while you’re awake.
Doug: Yep, that’s a good point.
Marisa M.: And if you’ve never made a dime before, then I actually recommend creating some kind of one on one offer, or one to few offer for just a handful of people before jumping into a gigantic course. Just getting the experience of marketing and selling yourself and also defining what value you want to create in the world. Many of the people who work with me end up using my experience formula and applying it to some kind of one on one coaching, consulting, or service engagement, and still being able to learn everything that they need, and then ultimately, once they’ve dialed that in and they’re clear on their niche and they’re clear on who they serve, and they understand how to market and sell what they do, then turning that into some kind of leverage program.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, get some feedback and hopefully you’re going to find any gaps in what you’re doing because you get that immediate response back from your one on one, or one to a few audience.
Marisa M.: Absolutely. Once you have a few success stories, you have the experience delivering your offer, then packaging it up into a course or online program. Now, if you’ve already created something and you’re making money from it, then you can go back and what I call “experiensify” it. You can add in some of our core experiences and really skyrocket your results.
Marisa M.: I worked recently with Josh Turner and his team, and Josh Turner has a product called The Appointment Generator, and he did a, I think it was close to $2 million launch, where he had 1000 people coming into his online program in just a short enrollment cycle. Basically his team consulted with me, redesigned his membership site, we planned some of the contests and engagement mechanisms and restructured some of the programs, and basically he went from a double-digit refund rate to a single-digit refund rate, and he told me his customer support team hated me because I almost broke the support department because there was so much [crosstalk 00:12:59].
Doug: That’s a problem I wouldn’t mind dealing with. It’s like, “Hey, this is a good thing. We can reapply to you. We can move you to the sales and customer support side and no longer tech support or problems.”
Marisa M.: Absolutely. So I’ve worked with people who have got massive programs, and I’ve been working with many of the leaders in the industry who recognize that their survival, their ongoing success, depends on starting to really take their customer results seriously. I think that when the market was less crowded and online courses and online education were newer, anyone could create a product and people were buying it and buying it, and whether they finished or not, they never looked at the product creator as the person responsible.
Marisa M.: But now since so many people are taking a lot of online education, and many people have burned by online education, unfortunately, so it has gotten a bad rap, people are a little bit more skeptical now. They want to really see the results that you’re getting for people and that longer-term reputation and success depends on how successful your students, clients, and customers are. I’ve been teaching this at Mind Valley Momentum’s Mastermind, and one stage at Jeff Walker’s LaunchCon and a lot of different places, because the top leaders are starting to really take notice because they recognize that if they’re not getting people results, their business is going to decline.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Well, and I like your idea that you start with a small group and then expand it. I think of the courses that I’ve bought over the years and the masterminds that I’ve been part of, and some have been great, and some have been not so great, and some have been just horrible, but I look at all of them from my point of view, I’m looking for ROI. If I can get one good idea, one good contact, I’m happy just to accept that and move on.
Doug: But not everybody’s got the attitude that you have, that you want to make this experience so good that I get 10, 20, 30 times the results. So, it’s great to see that there’s an evangelist out there doing this in this industry, because like you said, we can impact a lot of people. I mean, somebody once said to me that right now somebody out there is praying for a solution to that problem, and you might have the solution. If you can help them to reach people and help them with whatever it is they’re dealing with, whether it’s business or personal, that’s an awesome mission.
Marisa M.: Absolutely. And honestly, I think it takes some of the doubt and inner critic that many entrepreneurs have around their work out of the game, because instead of focusing on how great you are, and proving your worth, and your value, and your credibility, if you turn your attention to can you get someone a specific result, all of a sudden it’s not really about you anymore. Even though your products are a reflection of you, they move through you, you’re there to serve and you’re there to help. That desire to serve is going to become a whole lot more important than all the fears and doubts you may have.
Doug: So is there a client or two that you would want to share with our audience that you helped maybe somebody that was just getting started? So, you made sure they got off on the right foot and didn’t have a false start?
Marisa M.: Yeah, sure. I’d be happy to. One of my favorite student success stories goes by the name of Kat Walters, or now she’s Kat Coroy Walters. She actually met her husband in my online program, too.
Doug: What a bonus, and that’s out of scope, though, right?
Marisa M.: It is out of scope. It’s beyond the mission-
Doug: Yeah, beyond the mission. That’s right.
Marisa M.: … of the online program. But she actually had a physical product business selling purses and she had a ton of inventory that she couldn’t quite get rid of. She’s a single mom of two kids and basically it wasn’t going so well. She was running out of money very, very quickly, and she’d been struggling in this business for a bit. She hemmed and hawed about joining our Experience Product Masterclass, because she’d already invested so much money in her business, but she just had the feeling that she needed to do it.
Marisa M.: And she ended up through the online program, deciding on a new niche that she could do because she had a very creative background with art direction and all kinds of stuff, and she decided to create an Instagram program. She went through our Niche Down, Profits Up module of really helping to select the right topic, the right niche for you, and chose that. In the program itself, I think she did something between 12 and $16,000, and was just thrilled.
Marisa M.: By the end of the year, that became over $50,000, and a couple of years later, it crossed the $500,000 mark, and she married a guy she met in the online program, and her program is so awesome. She took every one of the 10 principles that I teach and just embedded it in the program, so it’s so fun, it’s so innovative, that she has no joint venture partners, she hasn’t paid for advertisements, but she started to pay for Instagram ads eventually. But the vast majority of her clients are referrals because people are so excited about what she does, they’re telling their friends, “You’ve got to take this online program, you’ve got to take this program, you’ve got to take this program.”
Doug: So what does she teach?
Marisa M.: And she’s thrilled. Basically how to get successful on Instagram and create a stream that just looks awesome. Basically how to pimp your Instagram feed.
Doug: Oh, cool. Yeah, that’s a whole nother art form. I mean, I’ve seen some amazing people that do some great jobs on Instagram, [inaudible 00:18:07]. Okay. What about somebody that was already established that obviously had some success? Because I’m thinking somebody new, they’re really trusting you with their launch, but somebody who’s had some success, I find in my experience, sometimes it’s more difficult to deal with them because they have this, “Well, I’m an expert. I’ve already done this.” So you come along and say, “Hey, what if I could increase your clients’ results by 10, 15, or 20% or 30%?”
Doug: Now, you mentioned Josh, I bought Josh’s course and admittedly never completed his course. Did give it to-
Marisa M.: Maybe you bought it before I experiensified it.
Doug: It was a couple of years ago. I gave it to my VA team and I think that was the end of that, so maybe I’ll have to dig out my logins and log in and see what it looks like now.
Marisa M.: Absolutely. I’ve had many people who are fairly established go through the online program, too, and I’m trying to remember the guy’s name because he was such an awesome success story. He’s based in the UK, an older gentleman. He basically was a corporate consultant and he took what we were doing in the Experience Product Masterclass, and he applied it to some training that he was offering to a corporate audience.
Marisa M.: They got so excited by what he was doing, and they’d never seen anything like it before, that they ended up buying I think during the course of our 12 weeks together, he sold almost 300,000 pounds worth of his offers by having three large sales. With a sale, it’s like a $100,000 sale because he’s talking to a corporate audience. But because of the whole premise of this experiensify program and a different form of learning, they got so excited about it.
Marisa M.: He was already a six-figure consultant, but adding this new revenue stream really helped him go beyond the one on one consulting and create programs, and his audience just snapped it up. That’s an example of someone who is relatively established, but making the leap into the online program market and doing super duper well.
Doug: It makes sense. I mean, if you can teach people using tools and technology and you can help them to use those same skills in front of an audience, I mean, what better way to get an opportunity to pitch what you’re doing when someone’s had a result. I remember Frank Kern saying when you’re running advertising, why don’t you actually teach somebody and help them in the advertising so they can experience what they’re going to get if they buy from you? There’s a novel idea, instead of just buying my stuff, it’s like I’m actually going to help you while you’re here, and then if you like what I’m saying, then come follow me, join me, or participate.
Marisa M.: Well, it’s interesting you say that, because we actually apply these same 10 principles to our launch and to our marketing materials, and our results are off the charts. We had about a 2.74% conversion rate from opt-in to sale, but $11.47 earning per click. We were making about $50 per opt-in and our partners were making a lot of money. Their earnings per click were super duper high, so we have all of the top joint venture partners lined up to support this because it does so well, and we do a lot of the things that we do in the online program, we actually do in our marketing.
Marisa M.: For example, one of the principles is constant wins, and constant wins are combined with unstoppable momentum. Unstoppable momentum’s essentially structuring your program in a way that you’re ramping people up from small actions and small wins to bigger, more challenging actions, and bigger, more awesome wins. Even structuring a marketing campaign in a way, in terms of what the engagement and the requests are, to ramp people up to simple forms of engagement, and engaging with my marketing campaign in bigger and bigger ways.
Marisa M.: Constant wins is that every single time they’re interacting and engineering with me, they’re winning the game. There’s actually something specific for them to do, and some feeling of accomplishment that they’re going to have. In our online programs, we basically have a win attached to every single training. There’s never any training that’s just pure information. I don’t spend the whole module, like a lot of people just being like, “Why you got here and what to expect.”
Marisa M.: I get them into action, actually before they even log on to the membership site. So many people think that the most important moment in your relationship with your clients is the moment that they buy, and I actually believe it’s the moment right after they buy, and what you do to either fulfill on the expectations of what you’ve promised or not, or create disappointment, frustration, and a lack of trust.
Marisa M.: So, one of the things that I help my students do is to understand what happens in the hour after someone buys, and how do you get people taking action and winning the game already in that very first hour? So, one thing that I do is right on the confirmation page, after they buy, I have them engaging in their first training, and collecting their first win. That first training is called the Show Me The Money video. I basically show them how to put the money they just invested in my product back in their pocket as quickly as possible, if not a whole lot more, by setting a minimum target and stretch goals and having formulas based on say those two buckets we talked about a moment ago.
Marisa M.: Someone who’s never made a dime in their life, in their business, to someone who’s made some money, to someone who’s made more money, and what their minimum target and stretch goals should be. And it becomes so easy for anyone to figure out their goals using this formula but they already have a vision for how much money they’re going to make in the time of the online program, and you can’t go wrong. You can’t get this particular exercise wrong, because I’ve given them formulas for everything.
Marisa M.: They’re already winning right there before they’ve even checked their inbox before they’ve logged onto the membership site. Because if I wait for them to go and get an email in their inbox, what’s going to happen is their inbox is basically a very efficient organizing device for everybody else’s priorities. All of a sudden they’re in there, and my email’s mixed in with 10 other emails or 20 or 50 or whatever it happens to be, and they may lose track of what they came to do, and then who knows, days go by and they haven’t logged in.
Marisa M.: Or even if they do find the email and they do log in, then they’re trying to figure out where to go and what to do or whatever it is, or they’re not good at tech and they already have anxiety for trying to log in someplace, right? I just give them that first win right away.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: The other thing is that as soon as you’ve left it for them to go to their inbox, or if your confirmation is by text, now you’ve left it for technology, technology providers to possibly derail that great experience. If the text message gets delivered late, they’re waiting, “Where’s my text message? I just paid for this.” Or if the email goes to the promotion folder, or the spam folder, or the junk folder, or wherever it goes, again, they’re looking at you. They’re not thinking, “Oh, that’s my Gmail filter that’s doing that.”
Doug: They’re going, “Hey, this is the beginning of my experience. I can’t even get” … I think of that because I’m in the email space. I look at how much stuff people send me that they want to pitch me, and it’s like you guys want to do lead generation for me? You can’t even get in my inbox.
Marisa M.: Yep, not to mention my all-time favorite, which is someone types their email address wrong into the order form, and then gets upset at us.
Doug: I’ve done that. I’ve been on that site where it was my fault. It’s like, “How come you guys didn’t send this to me?” They’re going, “Well, what’s your email address?” They’re like, “You typed it in wrong.” It’s like, “Oh great.” “I was the bad guy, okay, I got it, thank you for fixing it.”
Marisa M.: But anything can go wrong for sure. So, you want to engage them right away.
Doug: So, in terms of direction, so do you focus primarily on the creation, delivery, and building the content, or do you have a piece in there around the technology and all the other stuff that it’s going to take to make it work as well? What are we looking at for a mix of what do we get to make this launch successful?
Marisa M.: Soup and nuts, baby. I’m not going to leave people stranded. I’m going to teach them everything from the technology aspect to the marketing aspect, too, and that’s a really big piece of the online program. It’s not just about coming up with your product idea and designing your offer and designing your program itself, but actually launching it and making the money in the online program.
Marisa M.: Because what I know is that it’s so easy to have an idea, but it starts to get real when you go out there and market it and you get clients. I want people to be getting customers in the program and some people start getting customers within weeks of joining the online program, simply by using some of my messaging formats and things like that. But I also teach six different marketing campaigns to help people launch their products as well.
Marisa M.: I want them to not just think about the product, not just design the product, but actually get customers and start to deliver it in that 12 week period.
Doug: How many of your clients either … I’ll ask you two questions. How many of your clients launch a second educational product after the first one?
Marisa M.: I don’t have that particular statistic.
Doug: Okay. How many use this as the frontend, and then maybe look at a bigger consulting? You might provide some training for somebody that might be in the 2 or $3000 range, and then they might have something larger like a 50 or $100,000 product in the backend, or do you know?
Marisa M.: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I teach, so when people join us in EPM, they also get a ticket to my Message To Money Live Program, and in Message To Money Live, I help them map out their entire Message To Money pathway, which is up to five different offers that follow an ascension model. Once they’ve gone through EMP, I like to ask them to look at, “Okay, great. You have a product, it might be a beta product, it might be a one-off that you never off again, but that’s still a success because you’ve learned how to design and launch a product which is a huge benefit, even if you never use the product that you created in the online program ever again.”
Marisa M.: But then we look at, “Okay, now you’ve got one product, but one product does not a business make.” So, how do we turn that one product into an entire business? Because of up to 80% of sales that people make in establish, mature, successful, sustainable businesses happen based on backend sales, you know? The second, third, fourth, fifth sales that you make. I definitely have to teach people how to go beyond the individual product and create an entire suite of products.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Yeah, that’s what I was asking, because lots of times, for the new entrepreneur, they’re thinking, “Hey, if I can create this one product, I can retire.” It’s like well, probably not. And then as you mature in business, you realize, “Hey, I need more than that.” Once people take the training and understanding how to do this, if you do it once, it’s kind of like a franchise. If I’ve done it once, then I can create another course and do it again and again and again, providing I’m adding value and helping people move the sales dialer, achieve their goal or their mission, whatever the finish line is that works for them.
Marisa M.: Yeah, I like to say that I’m really teaching people the essential skill of increasing their earning capacity. It’s not just about making $2000 once or a whole lot more, but being able to put that money in your pocket anytime you want, over and over and over again, for the rest of your career. And then it becomes a lot more exciting.
Doug: Yeah, I can understand how that would be a lot more exciting. So how do you engage with your clients and work with your clients?
Marisa M.: Well, it really depends on what online program they’re signing up for. So, in the one that I’ve been talking about on this podcast so far, the Experience Product Masterclass, it’s a really big, vibrant group of people who are simultaneously all committed to the same mission at the same time. I always do a combination of pre-recorded content that might be drip delivered on a very specific schedule, combined with group coaching calls and combined with private coaching. We actually give people within the larger group, we have subgroups based on coaches.
Marisa M.: We have coaching calls starting at like 5:00 in the morning going to 6:00 at night, because we have people from 40 countries in this program, and so we have coaches working around the clock where they have unlimited email access to the coach. We actually create personal milestone Google Docs for every single student in the online program, so they’re actually tracking their milestones and some of the key assignments, and getting them vetted by a coach.
Marisa M.: If someone’s offtrack, we like to diagnose that as soon as possible, help them get on track. Because a lot of times when you’re going through an online program like that, it’s one thing to know what to do, but then sometimes things break down in the implementation, where you could be interpreting that in a different way, and as someone who might not have decades of experience in business, interpret it in a way that may not ultimately be productive.
Marisa M.: We do private coaching, we do group coaching, we do live events, we do a combination of all different modalities to get people to a goal. I take that approach of whatever it takes to get my students to success, I’m going to do it. I think the challenge that a lot of people have is they want things, revenue streams to be purely 100% passive. I think it’s important to understand the difference between a leveraged income or a scalable income, and passive income.
Marisa M.: There’s very, very few truly passive income sources anymore. Unless you’re in something like … Even real estate, if you’re a landlord, there’s still a lot of work for you to do to make that income.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. Yep.
Marisa M.: Even if you’re selling software, or software as a service, unless it’s just something that’s downloaded on the Apple App Store, whatever, and there’s no other engagement, software as a service has a huge amount of support that’s required to sustain that business model. Even membership sites and continuity programs, you still have to market those programs and then support people to consume those online programs.
Marisa M.: There are very, very few truly passive marketing and delivery models out there, even when it comes to evergreen marketing using Facebook ad funnels. You’ve got to refresh that marketing every few months, at least. And so you’ve got to start thinking about if you want to make money, you’re going to have to do some work.
Doug: Oh no. What’s up with that?
Marisa M.: I know. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I feel like this whole idea of automation and passive income has kind of set some unrealistic expectations for a whole generation of entrepreneurs. It’s also created some of the problems and the failure rate in the online education industry, as people are just throwing some pre-recorded training up into a membership site and charging whatever, 100, 200, 500, 1000 bucks for it and thinking that they can wipe their hands they’re done for the day. Yeah, but the truth is that that isolation and anonymity are not the ways that people learn best.
Marisa M.: Even though it might take some extra effort, you can also charge higher price points and have many more people going into your backend products and services. I like to take a much more long term perspective for my offers, and even with something like my Experience Product Masterclass, I reinvest so much of what people pay back into them getting their results because, and I offer it at a really reasonable price point, the level of support that they get, because I know when someone has that kind of the first experience with me, they’re going to become my customer for life, so I play the long game.
Doug: And that makes sense. It’s easy to say play the long game and everybody hears that but I always use the analogy of you go to your stockbroker and he tells you, “Hey, I’ve got this great stock. It’s a long term investment. You understand?” You say, “Yes, I understand.” Then in the drive home, you get home, have dinner, go to bed, and you dream about being an instant millionaire.
Doug: He told you not four hours ago it was long term, and then I went to bed and wanted to get up tomorrow morning, retired. So you’re right, you’re going to have to work and put some work in, and at least in my case, make some mistakes, learn from the mistakes and keep moving.
Marisa M.: Absolutely.
Doug: Now, you said you do live events as well, and I think that these days live events seem to be getting a bit of a bad name. I really enjoy it, and I find that I created the deepest relationships with people at live events. I mean, I’m in several masterminds with people that I’ve met at other people’s training or other people’s events that they’ve hosted, because we had a chance to see each other, have a coffee, go for a run, go to the gym, have a beer, have a whatever, and start to build a relationship.
Doug: Do you find that the people that come to your master training, because they’re all pulling in the same direction, there’s this unique bond?
Marisa M.: Oh, my God. There’s nothing that can replace that, and honestly, I think the only reason live events might be getting a bad rap is it’s just like marketing. There’s plenty of marketing that’s bad marketing.
Doug: Absolutely, yep.
Marisa M.: It’s so transparent, it’s so transactional, so the notion of a pitch fest is you go there, and speaker after speaker selling to you. But there’s a lot of different models for events, and you’ve just got to find the people who are delivering value at the events. Yes, there might be something else to buy there, but that is delivering a full, complete experience, where you get to walk away with real, tangible results, whether or not you continue with that person or not.
Marisa M.: I find that in live events, the level of transformation you can have is just off the charts. I think that the more people are learning online and living off social media, the more there’s a need to have live events, and to get people into a room together and actually have real-world connections, rather than social or cyber connections.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Yeah, it doesn’t always have to be the big cities. I was just in an event in Reading, Pennsylvania, never been there, never thought I would be there. Didn’t know anything about it other than Billy Joel had a song, Allentown, which was where we landed but met some super cool people. Was blown away by the service in the hotel. They’re probably the best any place I’ve had, in terms of business service. This little small town in the Midwest. It was just crazy good.
Marisa M.: Totally.
Doug: Tell us about your class. Tell us about what you’ve got coming up. Obviously you’re not a person who sits still. You’ve got lots of energy and it sounds like you’ve got lots going on, so what are you working on right now?
Marisa M.: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are leading up to Experience Product Masterclass launch and we only open doors once a year to this online program. Last year we had 700 students going through it simultaneously, so it ends up being quite an amazing experience where there’s so much energy. When you have seven people who are all laser-focused on the same mission, because we have a mission-based online program, that’s kind of off the cuff in terms of the amount of energy and almost the force field that everybody gets into where they can do more in that period of time than they have often in the 12 years previous, right?
Doug: Sure.
Marisa M.: We’re leading into that and we’re creating an amazing experience for all of our students through that, and that’s kind of one of our like I said, it takes so much of our resources as a team that we only offer it once per year.
Doug: Is it online, offline, a combination of both? Tell us what the event’s about.
Marisa M.: Yeah, so it’s a 12-week online program where you actually design, market, and profit from your program. We have pre-recorded content, but again, it’s experiensified. I incorporate peak emotional experiences, feedback loops, a lot of the elements that I’ve been talking about that are essentially designed to create a game you can win and to get you hooked on the process of achieving your goals through the program.
Marisa M.: We have that combined with group coaching like I do laser coaching every Monday. We have smaller coaching pods every Wednesday, so you get more intimate support, and then we’ve got our trainer, Don Crowler, who recently released a product with Jeff walker. He does implementation Fridays, really supporting everyone in the tech implementation side of things.
Marisa M.: We have all of that additional level of support. It’s not that you have to do all of it, because we don’t want it to be overwhelming, but that there are opportunities for live support three times a week, and then unlimited email access with a coach, but really the whole thing is designed to get you to create a product that’s designed to get your students, customers, and clients massive results and learn how to market that product, how to sell that product, how to get people in it, and then what to do once they say yes.
Doug: Yeah, that’s really cool. I mean, I can’t imagine why everybody that I’ve ever talked to that’s a speaker or has created a course created to help people, but as you pointed out, and as I’ve seen and experienced, not all of them achieve that goal. So, this is an opportunity for them to have a better crack at making that thing work.
Marisa M.: Yeah. When you are confident that your product is going to get people the best possible chance to get the results they’re hoping for, you become a lot more competent to sell and market that online program. You feel more aligned, you feel integrity, and you feel congruent, and it really changes the game when you know that you’re not just going to sell more, but you’re going to have more people make it to the end, get the result, and love you for it.
Marisa M.: It’s really awesome when it happens, and these online programs are so much more fun to deliver, too, because of we kind of break the course creation box, so they’re not very typical programs. They’re really unique experiences that we create through the online programs than I teach my students to create as well. As I said, this is going to become a $325 billion a year industry in the next five years. It’s already a $200 billion a year industry. This is big business, but the real business is transformation. When you crack the code on how to provide consistent, reliable transformation on-demand, the internet is yours.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Doug: Absolutely. I mean, you’ve got the goose that lays the golden eggs. You just know that every day you’re going to get up and there’s going to be money there for you.
Marisa M.: Yeah, for sure.
Doug: So I’m borrowing a question from Tim Ferriss, and the question is what’s some of the bad advice that you hear in the industry? I’m not talking about picking on or naming a person, but in the industry, I mean you obviously are well versed in this, you’re an influencer in this space, so you’re out and you hear people talking at a cocktail party or at business events. What’s some of the bad advice that you hear around creating and marketing an online course?
Marisa M.: Okay. So, one of the worst pieces of advice, sorry, I’ve got to put this earbud back in my ear, and I won’t tell you who said it, but I was actually at an event and a guy was saying from the stage, gave people advice on the guarantee. Basically, the advice that he gave is that making people fill out a 16 page contract to claim a guarantee, where they have to sign it, and it’s like a back and front thing, they have to fill it out, and making them fax it back so they have to take each page out and fax it individually because there are not double-sided faxes.
Doug: Oh no.
Marisa M.: So basically have so much, I think it was either to claim the guarantee or to get the bonus session with him. He’s from the stage telling the whole audience to do this, and everyone was around in wrapped attention, taking notes, I was like, “What’s wrong with you people? Do you hear how amoral what he’s saying actually is?” Why not instead of making it hard for them to claim the bonus, hard for them to claim the guarantee, make it super easy?
Marisa M.: We actually offer with our EPM a $2000 no-risk guarantee, that means if you do the online program, and you can show that you’ve done the online program and you’ve marketed your product and everything else, and you don’t make $2000, we’ll make up the difference. If you only make 1000, we’ll give you $1000 back if you can document that. We have not turned anyone down for that guarantee if they’ve done the work, because we actually want to develop a reputation for honoring our word and honoring our commitments.
Doug: I mean, that shouldn’t be a strange thing. I mean, that should be common business practice, but here we are talking about it because we know, there’s the example, I’ve got to fax in both sides of this carbon copy thing that’s not going to work, and it’s going to be a nuisance, I’m just going to walk away and not claim my refund or get my bonus.
Marisa M.: Yeah. I know. So, things like that are just epically bad advice.
Doug: You’ve got me thinking because I was at a similar event and I heard somebody talking about that, but I’m not going to go there either. So, a couple of questions and then I’ll let you get back to serving your clients, and one question is who’s one guest you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast? It can be a client, it can be anybody that you want to suggest.
Marisa M.: Oh, well it depends on what you want. Like, what’s missing for you?
Doug: I love people that are in the SaaS space, marketing, technology, and helping people make a difference, and move the sales dial. I’m not looking for products, I’m looking for people that are either experienced entrepreneurs that are just crushing it and willing to share some of their stories and how they got there, or vendors, suppliers, and companies like yours that are helping people to get there.
Marisa M.: Yeah. Well, one of the … This is just somewhat obscure, came to mind actually. He’s someone we’ve partnered with and we offer his bonus in our Experience Product Masterclass class. His name is Ronnie Nijmeh, and he’s got a product called PLR.me, because you talked about SaaS. Basically he has pre-created content that you can white label and make your own, and resell, but just everyone’s so caught up in the content creation machine and for many people, just being able to take a starter piece of content and make it their own can shave some time off what it is that they do.
Marisa M.: But I think it’s a valuable service if you’re in the point where you’re not ready to create your own content marketing machine, but you still need to create a lot of content, and you need email sequences and blog posts and PDFs and everything else. Even though I highly recommend ultimately creating original content at the end of the day, sometimes it’s just what someone needs to get started.
Doug: Yep. I tell people, start where you are with what you’ve got, and then you can move from there.
Marisa M.: Absolutely.
Doug: And then the most important question is where can people connect with you?
Marisa M.: Yeah, so the 10 core experiences that I’ve been sharing, what I call my Viral Product Checklist, of how to create addictive products, online programs, and courses, I’ve actually put those together along with the 10 experiences you absolutely want to avoid if you don’t want to send people into what I call the downward death spiral. I’ve put that together on a link for your audience at LiveYourMessage.com/real.
Doug: Excellent.
Marisa M.: This is Real Marketing For Real Results, so LiveYourMessage.com/real.
Doug: I want to say thanks so much for taking time out of your day and just sharing with your audience. I’m so excited to see what you guys are doing, and what your team’s doing, and just the difference it’ll make as we move to this online world of being mobile. I mean, I was talking to a reporter last night and he’s saying, “So, what does mobile mean to you?” I said it means I can live on my cellphone and every once in a while I probably need to find a bank, but other than that, we’re mobile, so we can train mobile, teach mobile, service our clients mobile, and it’s a great time to be launching a business.
Marisa M.: Absolutely. We have all the tools, but the main thing to remember is it’s not about the tools, so you can’t put the cart before the horse.
Doug: No, fair enough. I tend to be a bit of a tech geek guy so I have to be careful to not go there often, but that’s what gives me pleasure in my spare time. I just want to say thanks so much, Marisa. I appreciate you, appreciate what you’re doing, and listeners, there’s another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast, and I hope this session wasn’t too fast for you. There was a lot of information that we covered. I’d really recommend that you go take a look at Marisa’s website, LiveYourMessage.com.
Doug: I spent some time on the site, I’ve been through her social media sites. I went online and I did her quiz to find out what type of entrepreneur I was and maybe you should give that a try, and then compare notes when the show notes come out. Thanks for listening, thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to serving you on our next episode.
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HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS FASTER FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSE
What we want to learn from an online program is how to do something specific and to get a specific result or outcome.
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Get in touch with Marisa:
- Website – Live Your Message
- Marisa on LinkedIn
Find out more about Marisa:
Links to other related podcasts:
HOW TO CREATE, MARKET AND SELL AN ONLINE COURSE
HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE COURSE FOR YOUR BUSINESS