We dive into monetization, production, growth, and advertising for course creators, coaches, and consultants with Michael Greenberg in this episode of LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.
Michael is the founder of Call For Content. He started out in software development and majored in economics in school. After being a part of a startup where he managed technical teams, he used the knowledge he had gained to become a technical marketer. At Call For Content Michael works with coaches, consultants, and podcasters to help them take effective action for their businesses.
Positioning your business helps to inform your marketing. Michael emphasizes getting your positioning right before you focus on marketing. Michael has put together several playbooks for business owners that act as a guide to teach you how to take specific marketing steps for your online business.
One playbook Michael put together, called the Authority Marketing Playbook, goes in-depth on how you can conduct customer research and position your product or service. Authority really boils down to the relationship between you and the small market of customers that perfectly fit who you are trying to serve. Chris and Michael talk about a good mentality to take towards how niche your business should be, and how you can optimize the lifetime value of your customers.
Michael’s father works in the multi-family commercial investment real estate business in St. Louis, Missouri and the surrounding area. Michael uses how his father has positioned his practice as an example of creating a profitable niche. Not only is his father positioned in a specific area of a specific state, but he is also dedicated to a specific type of real estate property that a small group of people are interested in purchasing.
By having an audience of around 10,000 people or less who are perfect for your product or service, you open up a great opportunity to perfectly serve those individuals.
To learn more about Michael Greenberg, the playbooks he has put together for online marketing, and how he may be able to help you with podcasting, head to CallForContent.com. You can schedule a 30 minute office hours call with Michael and learn more about his services.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and we’re joined by a special guest, Michael Greenberg. He’s from Call For Content. Michael reached out to me, and I had a wonderful conversation with him. I can’t wait to introduce you to the course building community because there’s a lot of people in this audience here building courses, building membership sites, who are looking to monetize, looking to grow, looking to scale, and just in talking about what you’ve been up to with podcasting, eBooks, authority marketing, all these things, is very helpful for a course creator or a membership site owner to kind of grow and package things up.
Chris Badgett: But the thing that really fascinated me about you was you’re not just kind of talking about these ideas of like, “Oh, you need a podcast. Oh you should have an eBook.” You have play books and specific strategies and services and people can talk to you on the phone. Go to CallForContent.com, you can schedule office hours and have a conversation to see if you might be a good fit for Michael and how he can help you. But first, Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael G.: Thanks, Chris. It’s great to be here.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, let’s just get into it. One of the biggest course creator problems that we talk about is you have to be a lot of people at once. You have to be an expert, a teacher, a community builder, a technologist, and an entrepreneur. And if we put on the entrepreneur hat, like somebody who’s an expert at something, maybe they’re a good coach or teacher, but they don’t necessarily have training in marketing, prospecting, building an email list, a strategy for getting people familiar with them before they offer. They’re usually, if it includes coaching, an expensive training program, but that’s where you come in. Let’s talk about your playbooks.
Chris Badgett: If we start with authority marketing, there’s a lot of talk these days about authority marketing and influencer marketing. What does all this mean and what’s your angle? What would you advise course creators to do?
Michael G.: Yeah, so I guess my angle is, don’t worry about doing a lot of the marketing stuff until you actually get your positioning right. The authority marketing playbook is mostly about customer research and positioning. It’s the first thing we do when we take it, when we bring on a client.
Chris Badgett: So it’s who are we serving and how are we perceived in that to them?
Michael G.: Exactly. Because authority really is only about the relationship between you and that small market of customers that fit perfectly who you’re trying to sell to.
Chris Badgett: I love it. So let’s say, if we look at the three mega niches in course creation, that’s health, wealth and relationships, most programs fall under one of the … there’s all these sub-niches and sub-niches of sub-niches under all that. But can you give us an example of, if someone were to come at you and they’re were like, “Can you pick one niche and I’ll give you an example?” What do you want to talk about? Wealth, health or relationships?
Michael G.: I think wealth is probably the one that I have the best understanding of.
Chris Badgett: Okay. I’ve seen people using our software, LifterLMS, delivering real estate investing programs. They develop a unique style of selling or in a particular segment of real estate and they help other people become real estate investors. How would you help that person if somebody comes at you and they want to focus on real estate investing, how would you help them clarify their target market or do market research?
Michael G.: Yeah, so the first thing I do is have them introduce me to the people they’ve already helped do this.
Chris Badgett: So no BS. We’re making sure that you can back up what you’re saying you want to do.
Michael G.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: I love that.
Michael G.: And real estate comes close to home for me.
Chris Badgett: [crosstalk 00:04:56].
Michael G.: My dad is a real estate guy.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: And actually I’m getting ready to help him put out a course. But he has a brokerage and he’s been helping people sell real estate and is an investor himself and has been for 40 years. And so his course is about distilling that knowledge, and you can … When it comes to authority, there’s two parts. There’s perception outwardly and you can effect that very easily.
Chris Badgett: What do you mean by that?
Michael G.: I mean, you can put lipstick on a pig.
Chris Badgett: Okay. I can put a suit on and get a nice video production.
Michael G.: Yeah, hire somebody to script it and do the whole thing and that works. That’ll get you lead flow. But that won’t get you any sort of retention because you won’t really know what you’re talking about.
Chris Badgett: It’s all about lifetime value. I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble to create a high value program or even a recurring revenue membership month over month, I mean, retention is more important. I mean, it’s the name of the game.
Michael G.: Yeah. And that’s why the guys in wealth that I’ve seen be the most successful a lot of times are ones who were started blogging about it while they were doing it. And then afterwards maybe they converted to something else.
Chris Badgett: So their journey, I mean, there’s like a track record, is that what-
Michael G.: Exactly.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. I wonder why that happens in this world. It’s pretty common, I think, in internet business or internet marketing where someone wants to … they learn those skills and then they want to go teach them. But they haven’t actually done that much of it themselves. But like your dad, you mentioned, he’s got 40 years in the industry. So in my five hats paradigm that I talk about, we talk about the expert hat, your dad’s been wearing that hat for 40 years. He’s got that one covered.
Michael G.: Yeah, his family did it before him.
Chris Badgett: So it’s generational. Yeah.
Michael G.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Well, that’s even better. A lot of people can’t necessarily have the generational backups, knowing how much people change careers these days. But that’s awesome, buddy.
Michael G.: I mean, in digital, like generational doesn’t happen, right?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. I mean, just being around for five years. That’s almost like the new generational, but using your dad as an example, he’s got the street credit, the 40 years. What else is important for positioning besides the actual experience with those real customers for decades?
Michael G.: Yeah, so his experience is also geographic. And in real estate, this is a big one that I think a lot of people skip over. He deals with the St. Louis, Missouri and the surrounding area. [crosstalk 00:08:03]. Both sides of the river, but that’s it. In real estate, the licensing is separate on a state by state basis. The laws are separate on a state by state basis. He can’t do business in California. So he can help with this one market, and getting even more specific, multifamily commercial investment properties.
Chris Badgett: Now, that’s specific.
Michael G.: Right, and so that’s it. Now we know, okay, they’re looking in a single area. They’re looking to invest in a single type of property and that means you now need a certain amount of money to invest. You now need to therefore be at a certain stage in your life or career, and you need to know that multifamily is the right option for you because that’s part of a diversified real estate portfolio. But the way you rent apartment units is very different than a commercial lease for office space, or a strip mall, something like that. Or just a single house.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love that because that’s such a good example of looking at a mega niche, like wealth, and then you go down into the real estate category and then you go down into a location and then you go down into a type of property and then you go down into a customer at a certain stage of life that can play in this arena. That’s so specific. I love it.
Michael G.: Yeah. That’s 10,000 people specific.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, so how do we know … I don’t know if you’ve heard of Ryan Laveck, I’m talking to him later today. He has a new book out called Shoes and it’s about how to choose a market or whatever. And I’d be curious, he talks about a market, their markets need to have certain characteristics to be worth it. Is it not scary that there’s only 10,000 people or is it because the transaction amount is so high that that’s fine? But 10,000 people where the transaction amount is low, that’s not a lot of people, right?
Michael G.: But 10,000 people. If a transaction, if a minimum transaction is in the mid five figures and the lifetime value of a customer is in the sixes, that’s not an issue any longer. That’s okay. We get a dozen new customers and this could be a life changing event. And that’s a lot of the people that I work with. I try to get them to move up stream because if we can sell that $10 and $50,000 engagement, then we might only need to sell five or 10 of those.
Chris Badgett: Cool. So if we’ve done our market research and … what’s next? And we’ve got our positioning figured out. What’s next in the authority marketing playbook or the … yeah, what’s next? Where do we go from here?
Michael G.: Partnerships.
Chris Badgett: And what do you mean by that?
Michael G.: Getting your name out there, partnering to create webinars or creating a podcast and having people on. The real goal is just creating content with other people in the space and spaces adjacent to the market you’d like to serve.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Anything else before we go to another playbook that you’d like to mention about authority marketing?
Michael G.: We do a bunch of other stuff with ads, but that’s a lot more complicated-
Chris Badgett: Do you do ads from day one or do you kind of … Where does that come in?
Michael G.: So it depends on the market. If we’re on Linkedin, then our ad campaigns are pretty short, but they’re concentrated. And so the spend looks different there. If we’re working with Facebook or Instagram, something like that, then we’re going to do ads based on the content we’re putting out, and it’s likely not day one. It’s probably like day 91.
Chris Badgett: Got you. Very cool. You talk about eBooks, which is really interesting to me. And I think one of the problems or just challenges for course creators, especially if they have a high ticket course or training program or consulting package coaching program, is that they need to do some a lead generation. They need some lead magnets and stuff like that. And, I mean, eBooks were all the rage 10 years ago. But I’m one of these people who I think they still work. And I mean, some people say email’s dead. I use email all the time; works great. Or chat doesn’t work, but it works for me. I don’t know. Even though it’s an old strategy, what’s your take on eBooks?
Michael G.: I like them. I like to make sure my eBooks are useful and I like to make sure that most people aren’t going to read them. I expect-
Chris Badgett: You want to make sure they don’t?
Michael G.: Yeah. Because if an ebook is useful, in my opinion, it goes pretty in depth and in depth might get a little boring at times.
Chris Badgett: For the wrong market.
Michael G.: Right.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: And so I expect most people to skim the ebook that they download one time. And by skim, I mean just read the headings, and maybe 10% of those people are actually going to go in and read it. But if those 10% of people are the people I want, then that ebook has done its job well.
Chris Badgett: So the 10% of the 10,000 people in that target market, that’s still a thousand people that are highly targeted.
Michael G.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: And a thousand is just barely enough to do custom audience retargeting.
Chris Badgett: Can you explain what that means to the uninitiated?
Michael G.: Yeah, so what you can set up what’s called a custom audience based on a list of emails you collect in pretty much all of your major ad retargeting, ad targeting platforms. I know Facebook can do it, I know Linkedin can do it. Those are my two big ones. And then you can just run ads to that market.
Michael G.: So I can just run ads to the people who have downloaded the ebook. And if I have some call to action at the end of the ebook like, “Hey, click this link and do anything.” Literally just click this link. Then we can pass on a pixel saying, “Hey, they also clicked this link at the end. They have some interest in whatever the next step is because they at least skimmed the headings.” And then-
Chris Badgett: So those become your hot leads, right?
Michael G.: Exactly. And those are people that I might reach out to.
Chris Badgett: Very cool.
Michael G.: I might send them an email or call them. I like phones. I know, that’s weird.
Chris Badgett: We have a phone number on our website. I don’t like this question as a course creator. People ask me how many hours should a lesson be or a course be or whatever, but in your opinion, is there an answer to how long should the ebook be or what you should go for?
Michael G.: It really depends on how long you’re going to use it. Some eBooks are planned for us with what we call a tent pole strategy, which is when we plan to build an ebook from multiple blogs or podcasts or other posts that are put out over a period of time, and repurpose that content and the feedback we get from the audience into the ebook that then gets released on that topic.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. And do you plan that out even before you record all those podcasts and other-
Michael G.: Oh, yeah. [crosstalk 00:16:19]. So you start that …
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: Yeah. Strategy is a big part of what we do. That’s what you’re buying from an agency like ours. It’s strategy and expertise in any professional service. It’s why we publish these playbooks. Most of this is literally what we do.
Chris Badgett: Eat your own dog food, as we like to say.
Michael G.: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Badgett: Cool. I wanted to ask you a question while we were talking about positioning and perception and relate to this. Do names matter? Some people call a ebook a guide or ultimate guide or whatever.
Michael G.: Yes.
Chris Badgett: Some people call a webinar a webinar, a workshop a master class. Some people call a course one thing or they call it free training or a three-part series of whatever. How important is naming?
Michael G.: Pretty important. [crosstalk 00:17:17]. If you’ve done your customer research, if you’ve spoken with your customers, they’re using a specific term. And different segments of your customer, of your audience, may be using different terms, and you really would like to use the term they’re using because that will increase your conversion rate. If they want masterclasses, if that’s what they’re looking for, give them a masterclass. Don’t give them a webinar.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Michael G.: Yeah, I cannot stress that enough. Internally, we call them all pretty much the same thing. But we don’t do that externally. That’s not in the copy.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Cool. Well, I haven’t stumped you yet, so I’m going to go to the podcast playbook and what really intrigued me talking to you before we hit record here was you started talking about audio courses. I mean, podcasts are not audio courses. Podcasts are like a show or episodic content, free content, usually.
Chris Badgett: And here this audience here makes courses and everybody’s talking about how video is eating the internet and 80% of Internet traffic in 2025 is going to be online video. But audio is still just killer. I mean, it’s one of those things … There’s this concept of portable content. There’s so much competition for video, but when you are washing the dishes or going for a run or driving, not looking at a screen, there’s music, radio shows, audio books, and there’s just … it’s not that crowded the way video and your screens are. Let’s open up a conversation around why podcasting and why audio courses, why are you interested in those?
Michael G.: So I think they’re really powerful. I think that a video course is good, but an audio course is going to more deeply ingrain you into the listener than a video course will.
Chris Badgett: And I have to ask you a question here. Are we talking about audio courses as the product or part of the paid product? Or are we talking about for lead generation or both?
Michael G.: Both.
Chris Badgett: Okay.
Michael G.: I’ve seen them used both ways. Successfully. I can’t say one’s better than the other at this point. But when somebody’s doing that physical task, everything’s now concentrated on you there and you get-
Chris Badgett: Because I don’t want to pay attention to washing the dishes. I’m fully immersed in what is going into my earbuds, right?
Michael G.: Exactly.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: Because that’s really how kind of our body processes, right? Most of those tasks that people are listening to audio content on are the physical ones that have been deeply ingrained in us because we can split the concentration like that. And with video, I know video takes a lot more bandwidth, so it’s always going to take an outsized chunk of the market. And I get it.
Michael G.: A lot of people are watching things on phones, but video content really most of the time is short form, and a lot of the video content that is long form gets put in the background and played as audio. YouTube is the … What is it? The first or second biggest audio streaming platform.
Chris Badgett: Right, for songs.
Michael G.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Or like a Joe Rogan podcast, which he does long form two and a half hour shows and stuff like that. It is on YouTube, but I don’t know who actually sits there and watches a video of two people talking in a studio for two and a half hours. I mean, they’re just … You’re right, it’s background.
Michael G.: Yeah. And so I think some of the video numbers are inflated, I guess, is what I’m getting at because a lot of video gets used as audio. And we do a lot of things where somebody is speaker and they’re recording video and working in repurpose that as audio.
Chris Badgett: I’m a course creator and I’m going to start a podcast or I’m going to go be guests on podcasts or whatever, what is the podcast playbook that you recommend to generate more leads and sales?
Michael G.: Yeah, so the podcast playbook that I really enjoy is called the Authority Builder Show. It’s in the B2B podcast playbook. But the concept-
Chris Badgett: So the Authority Builder Show is a concept or is it an actual show?
Michael G.: It’s a show concept for positioning a show in the market. And it’s based around positioning the show as interviews with our target audience that makes up potential partners for your organization as well as potential prospects, high value prospects. So ideally, if you have a prospect where their lifetime values in that 15-20,000 or more range, that’s who you want to target.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Michael G.: And if you don’t really have those people, if you’re mainly focused on selling the course, not selling services after the course for a higher ticket, and that course is in the three-figure range, then you’re probably going to want to focus on partnerships with a show like this and focus on getting the best interviews you can.
Michael G.: Because the goal of the show is to prove your authority to the audience by interviewing people who line up with what they respect in the market you’re trying to position yourself into. So you really need to do the authority marketing playbook before you do the B2B podcast playbook, or build out that authority builder show.
Michael G.: But in the B2B podcast playbook, we put an abbreviated version of the same stuff from the authority marketing playbook.
Chris Badgett: I got you. And these are on your website CallForContent.com. I want to talk a little bit about partnerships. Some people get hung up on, “Well, what am I supposed to do? Just go interview my competitors? Why would they do that?”
Michael G.: For sure.
Chris Badgett: How do we think about either potentially even working with our direct competitors or with tangential, just in our industry people, how do we get organized around partnerships and create like a list of people to go after?
Michael G.: If you do your homework, if you do the research, then you know who your customers respect. And you know who they look at in the market already. So those are the first people you’d want to go to.
Chris Badgett: So get in front of your customers, don’t try to … Don’t go to Google first, go to your existing audience.
Michael G.: Yeah. Right, those are the best people to sell to. The people who are already listening to you, getting new audience is a lot harder. So if you’ve got audience already, use that audience and try to find more of that audience and focus on the people who already make good clients and good customers.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. And while we’re on this audio note, I know it’s a question that I personally don’t like, but I’m going to ask you too is, how long should the audio course be or what … How long should the lessons be or should it be kind of dripped out over time? Or how do we make a good audio-only course?
Michael G.: Yeah. So the first thing to look at is how much time your customers have.
Chris Badgett: How do we tell … I love this, I love where you’re going with that because some people ask me like, “Well, how long should my video be?” I mean, I’m thinking about me personally. I’ll follow a six-hour web tutorial that’s all one video to learn how to do like build a website from scratch as an example. I’ll listen to it two and a half hour podcast episode about entrepreneurship, but I’ll listen to a 20-minute episode about something else. How do we figure this out?
Michael G.: Yeah, so looking at the content first off and figuring out what it all looks like together. So we do audio course. We’re trying out audio course plus ebook right now.
Chris Badgett: When you say audio course plus ebook, what does the plus mean? They’re in a combined lead magnet kind of thing? Or what do you mean by that?
Michael G.: Yeah, so they’re going to be a product, but they’re going to be combined as … So here is the written part and here’s some work that goes along with it. But then here’s also companion audio.
Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that because I have this concept I teach a lot called Course Plus, and that’s course plus coaching plus mastermind plus group coaching plus productized service. It’s not just about the course. Like you said, you can do a three-figure course, but it’s when you start adding to the stack that you start creating something that’s more integrated and more valuable and kind of surrounds the prospect or the customer with more resources. I love that idea. The audio course plus ebook.
Chris Badgett: That sounds cool, and also not overwhelming to create because sometimes people get into, “Well, I got to do a course and then I got to do a video course and then I got to do private one-on-one coaching. I need to open up my calendar and then I need to do a upsell, a $20,000 mastermind retreat in Tahiti or whatever.” If we just like say, “Slow down, audio only and ebook,” that sounds pretty doable.
Michael G.: Yeah. I would start with the one-on-one high ticket item.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, so private coaching or service?
Michael G.: Yeah, that is 100% where I’d start and then I would build the course out of that experience.
Chris Badgett: I love that idea because I think a lot of people tried to start with the course, but when you do the high touch service or coaching, I don’t want to say this in a wrong way, but you kind of earned the right to figure out what works and then you can start automating that through course content. But you really have to go through the hard yards of one-on-one transformation and result delivery with individual people in your target market to really … if you’re going to make a great course, you have to have done that other thing first, right?
Michael G.: Yeah. You need that expertise because otherwise you can make a course before then, and people might use it. Some people might even get results. But you’ll have no idea why.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Michael G.: And that’s a more difficult process in my mind to go through.
Chris Badgett: Very cool. Can you tell us some of your story? How did you develop this expertise and skillset and focus in your business of around what we’ve talked about here today?
Michael G.: Yeah, so I actually … I started out in software development. I was an economics major in school and then I joined a startup and managed some technical teams. And through that I learned a bunch about startup marketing and I was like, “Man, I like marketing. I like operations. I don’t really like the software stuff that as much. So I’m going to take that technical knowledge and become a technical marketer.”
Chris Badgett: I love it.
Michael G.: And at the same time I started doing some B2B growth strategy consulting, and that’s when I saw a lot of overlap between some of these areas, and I started working with a podcasting network as one of my clients. That’s when I learned about audio and podcasting. And then from there I decided to start call for content as sort of a playground for myself. And over time, it’s morphed into these very specific lines of sort of combination, “Okay, here’s a strategy that we do. We customize that strategy for you, but it’s still very similar as a strategy.” And that means that we can offer our services in these sort of productized ways. And then I built that out of looking at the consulting work I was doing into this, and over the time that turned out to be good for coaches and consultants. So we got into that market among others.
Chris Badgett: So that’s what I was going to ask. Who is your ideal person you work with now? Like coaches and consultants? Is that what you’re saying?
Michael G.: Yeah, so we work with coaches and consultants. We work with podcasters now through our podcast or relations program. We’ll help you find and place guests for free. And then we also offer some commission-only sponsorship deals and audience audits for people who want a sort of get evaluation set before they go out and try that sort of stuff.
Chris Badgett: What’s that mean? What was that? An evaluation set? What is that?
Michael G.: We call it an audience audit. Let me take a look at your audience and the demographics. And if you’ve done any sort of prior affiliate or sponsorship deals, we look at the revenue that’s come in through those, or the prior experiences, and we use that information to develop an actual valuation on the person’s audience or on the company’s current audience so that they can either go out and get sponsorship or negotiate more revenue share partnership deals, that sort of thing themselves. Or for us to then work with them as a person who goes out and find sponsorship on their behalf.
Chris Badgett: Very cool. And at the bottom of your website you have, “Schedule office hours.” What goes down in one of those?
Michael G.: It’s about 30 minutes of one-on-one, me and whoever I’m talking to, it’s recorded. And so that way I can use it to create content later. I like to review the session, see what people have been asking me, and then use that to inform what we do going forward. And if it’s somebody who’s trying to figure out where to go through the playbooks or where to get started with their business or with their content, then that’s what we talk about. If it’s somebody who’s looked at our services or heard about them and wants to see if we’re a good fit, then we’ll talk about that. And if it’s somebody who wants to talk about bread making or cooking or just kind of chew the fat with me for 30 minutes, then we’ll do that, too.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Cool. Well, Michael Greenberg, thank you so much for coming on the show. I want to ask you one final question before we sign off here. If you take your body of knowledge and you go down into beginner’s mind of a coach or consultant who has earned their stripes in whatever skillset or industry they had their experience in and they’re wanting to kind of scale up and go online, where’s the first step on the growth side? What should they do?
Michael G.: Create a course and then build a website. Actually, create the course, sell the course to some people who know you and then-
Chris Badgett: Validate it.
Michael G.: Yeah, validate it, and then create a website to sell that course online.
Chris Badgett: Nice. I like that. And then they can get into the the partnerships and the authority marketing and scaling, right?
Michael G.: Yeah. Though I’d probably start by reading the Authority Marketing Playbook and do that research and figure out what kind of course people want you to make.
Chris Badgett: I want to do a bonus question because you just picked my brain on it, which is, what are the classic mistakes that people make when they don’t do that market research or figure out the who and the positioning? What are some common just missteps you see people make with that?
Michael G.: Yeah, so the biggest one is making assumptions because what ends up happening is you don’t know how little they actually know, and you skip over a lot of stuff, and you don’t realize like, “Oh wow, my initial course is so simple. It’s the stuff that I learned 30 years ago.” Or, that if you’re in digital, you learned four years ago.
Michael G.: And it’s that stuff that you need to teach somebody before you can do anything else, and so that might be your first mini ebook or course that you put out. And that the high ticket stuff for the people who actually know enough to understand the value of your high ticket, that you’ve met one or two of them, and there’s a small market there. A lot of people assume they have a big market, but they don’t because there’s personality issues that come into play, especially with courses.
Michael G.: I can hire somebody to rip off your course and just take all the content and speak it again. And if that person delivers it differently and looks differently than you do or sounds differently than you do, they could get a totally different audience as a result. And so you really have to know exactly who you’re going after and what they’re looking for. And if you spend the time doing that, then you’ll do really well.
Chris Badgett: And last question, what’s your definition of high ticket?
Michael G.: High ticket depends on the market and depends … Yeah, it depends on the market. In B2B, high ticket starts at maybe that 10,000-15,000. If you’re selling to consumers, high ticket, depending on your audience, I know life coaches where their high ticket starts in the 4,000 or 5,000 range and they’re selling to your successful millennial or successful Gen Xer, and goes up from there. But on the mid ticket and their initial offering is right in the $300 range. And so I guess that’s the higher end of the market overall. I don’t like selling $10 things. It’s really hard.
Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Michael Greenberg, CallForContent.com. What should people do when they come to your website?
Michael G.: Schedule office hours, check out the eBooks, and then check out the playbooks and then schedule office hours. Or just schedule office hours and we’ll talk, and I’ll direct you to some and then we can go from there. It’s up to you.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. We’ll have to do this again some time. That was a lot of fun, and a ton of value. I really appreciate it.
Michael G.: Yeah, definitely.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to LifterLMS.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results-giving courses on the internet.
