In this blogpost, I’m going to talk about the most common mistake new online course sellers make.
The most common mistake that people make when it comes to launching their online course is perfectionism.
Perfectionism: a subtle form of self-sabotaging your business
I speak to so many online course sellers and the most common problem that I see is that people try to do everything perfectly when they launch their first course. They go out there and hire a professional video team to shoot the videos for their course or they might get a designer to create an awesome website. And then they spend months trying to put their perfect online course structure on paper and they spend another month putting everything together on their online course platform. And this is a very subtle form of self-sabotaging your business.
The hard work is marketing and sales
Why? Because making sure that everything looks awesome and professional and trying to create the best online course in the world, is more a way of not having to do the launch. A way of not having to do the hard work which is marketing and sales. Getting people enrolled into your course, bringing home the money, that’s the uncomfortable part. That’s the thing that most people are avoiding. And if you’re spending months putting together your course, working on the structure, creating super high quality videos, then you’re focusing on the wrong thing. When you’re launching, all you should be focusing on is getting the job done. Delivering your course in a way that you’re getting clients some results. But it doesn’t have to be sexy, it doesn’t have to be an artwork, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
You shouldn’t spend months working on your course
Some of the most profitable courses, they look pretty ugly and they aren’t perfect. So, you don’t need to get everything right in the preparation phase of your course. You shouldn’t spend months preparing your course, working on your course. I always cringe when people say, I’ve been working on my course for 6 months, I’m going to launch in another 2 months… You should’ve launched 6 months ago pretty much.
You can’t deliver a perfect product when you’re just starting out
What you should do is just getting your course out there. Do a product launch, don’t focus on getting things perfect. Try to focus on marketing and sales and enroll as many people as possible into your course. And then once you scale, that’s when you tweak, that’s when you make things look nicer and focus on perfecting things. Not in the beginning. You can’t deliver a perfect product when you’re starting out. So, you should just get it out, because that’s the hard part. Launching it, that’s the uncomfortable and hard part. Once that’s done, you will have feedback from the market. You will know how many people you’ve enrolled. You can then scale the online course with paid advertising or whatever marketing method you want to use. And at that moment you can always improve the course, make it look better and tweak things.
Stick to your deadlines
This is the sequence in which A-players solve their problems. I’ve had several clients come through my program. They launched an online course that didn’t go perfectly, they made mistakes, they learned things, but they basically stuck to their deadlines. And after the course launched, they took the course and they worked for several months on scaling it and that’s when they perfected things.
Perfect, tweak and adjust as you move forward and as you go along
So, one of my clients for example, James, he did a launch. He did about $16.000 or so, a pretty decent launch. The course wasn’t perfect. The marketing, the sales, none of it was done perfectly but it was good enough to have a successful 5 figure launch. And then he took all of that, got laser focused and scaled it up with paid traffic. Last month he did about $80.000 and he’s expecting to make a 100K this month. And it all started with an imperfect course. If he had let himself be held back by perfectionism before launching, he would probably, right now, still be working on his online course structure, trying to get everything right. And he wouldn’t have a 7-figure business right now. So, go out there, understand that not delivering your course, working on the wrong things, can be a subtle form of self-sabotaging your progress. Put it out there, deliver it, that’s the scary part, do that first launch and then scale up, perfect, tweak and adjust as you move forward and as you go along.
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