Learn about sales funnels, product launches, and paid ads for course creators with Jennifer Tamborski in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.
Jennifer is the CEO of Virtual Marketing Experts, a company dedicated to making sure digital marketing campaigns are a success for companies they work with. She and Chris discuss the essential aspects of an online course business, and what it takes to become viable in the marketplace.
Jennifer shares her story of entering the digital marketing specialty, and how she got into being a marketing expert. Having always worked in tech specializing in marketing technology, Jennifer realized she had a natural affinity for digital marketing when she was reevaluating her niche and found she knew everything necessary to be a digital marketing consultant.
Marketing is often viewed in a way that makes it feel out of reach or elusive. Jennifer approaches marketing with the comparison of dating. Often times signing up for an in-depth coaching program or intensive course is analogous to marriage. Before committing to a full program, you need to be introduced to your audience and get your audience to communicate with you usually through a lead magnet.
The process of introducing yourself and your program to your audience is your sales funnel and depending on the price point of your course and your industry, you may need different levels of communication and relationship building before asking for the sale.
There are many tools you can implement as part of your sales funnel for your online course offering. You can offer a smaller mini-course that may have three days of material on your product, and the fourth day is spent wrapping up and upselling to your full course. Or you can instead go with a one-on-one call approach where you meet with clients live and figure out if your product is a good fit for them.
Depending on your students’ comfort level, you may end up deciding to do a webinar where you deliver that introductory content about yourself and your product offering. And even webinars can vary in length based on your industry and who you’re trying to sell to. It is a very different sales process selling to someone who doesn’t know you versus selling to a warm list of clients who have followed you or purchased products from you in the past.
You can find Jennifer Tamborski at VirtualMarketingExpert.com. If you’re on Facebook, be sure to connect with her there at Facebook.com/VirtualMarketingExperts. She is also on LinkedIn and Instagram.
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. I’m joined by a special guest, Jennifer Tamborski. How are you doing, Jennifer?
Jennifer T.: I’m doing great.
Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to have you on the show. Jennifer is from VirtualMarketingExpert.com, and we’re going to be talking about some of the stuff that course creators and people building training-based membership websites need to be able to pull off to actually turn it into a viable business. Before we get into sales funnels, and product launches, and paid ads, and implementing the tech, and kind of wrangling the beast that is technology, how did you get into this specialty? You mentioned it in our pre-chat, you kind of woke up into being a marketing expert.
Chris Badgett: I think it’s funny that you say that because that happened to me at one point where I realized, “Wait a second, I have all these skills.” It happened to me. I was just writing an article about affiliate marketing for course creators. I was actually working off the laptop in Costa Rica with my family, and next thing I know I was contacted by someone in New York City. They flew me on a plane to go help them develop affiliate program for their course. I’m like, “I guess there’s something here. Maybe I’ve been studying marketing and stuff for a while,” but how did it happen to you? How did you wake up into it and have that “aha”?
Jennifer T.: It’s a kind of a similar story, in that I’ve been doing it for years with marketing experts. So I got a lot of on the job training-
Chris Badgett: As a virtual assistant?
Jennifer T.: As a virtual assistant, yeah.
Chris Badgett: Okay, so you were behind the scenes implementing the marketing stuff?
Jennifer T.: Yes, so I’ve always worked in tech, always. I love tech. And so I was specializing in a lot of technologies that marketers were using and wanting to use, and so I connected with a lot of them. And if they were selling their marketing plan, a lot of times they brought me in for consultations, when it came to technologies or, you know, those kind of things, and we’d talk it through. And at some point when I realized that I wanted to grow my business, I actually went to my business coach. We were talking about, “Okay, so what should I specialize in?” And I tell people this all the time in the VA world that are coming up, “You can change your niche.”
Jennifer T.: I changed my niche five times in one year until my business coach finally looked at me a she goes, “Why aren’t you doing marketing?” And I was like, you know, you hear all those thoughts, “Well, because blah, blah, blah,” whatever that itty bitty committee in your head says at the time. And so my default is to research. So I started researching all of the things I needed to know and realized, “Oh, I actually know all of this. Really, I know it.” And so I had a couple of people hire me to start building their sales funnel and then I started doing consulting work with their marketing, like making actual marketing plans, and you know, so how their business should flow in their customer journey and all that kind of stuff, and realized, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this.”
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, that’s awesome. One of the things when you develop a lot of marketing knowledge, and I see this happen to people with marketing, and sales, and technology where it all kind of comes together and I think there’s a category of software called MarTech, marketing technology. I think it has like 80,000 companies in there, like if you really get into it.
Jennifer T.: Probably.
Chris Badgett: But there’s this huge rabbit hole opportunity where you know, people get super focused and miss the big picture, or get overly complicated when it’s not necessary. How do you wrangle that beast of simplicity and effectiveness?
Jennifer T.: I tend to look at it is, you know, marketing isn’t necessarily a hard process and you don’t have to make it complicated. So when I look at marketing, I look at it kind of like dating, right? So when you’re dating someone, you get introduced to them, you start chatting with them, you maybe go for coffee, you know, all of those steps that lead to commitment at the end. It’s kind of what a sales funnel and marketing is: You need to be introduced to your audience. You need to get them to communicate with you, usually through a lead magnet, and then your email sequence, and you know, so we try and keep it simple in that same terminology of if you think about dating versus marketing, you just keep it simple and you know, work through the same process.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Yeah. I love simplicity. When I help people, like experts, come up with courses, and outlines, and stuff, I often ask them to think back to a time in the life before technology if they’re old enough, and what kind of elements were present for some of the best learning experiences they had. And it’s usually not that complicated, you know, what’s required to make a good learning experience happen. But it’s easy to get sidetracked.
Jennifer T.: Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: Sales funnels or marketing funnels are having a moment right now in the consciousness, you know, whether that’s like click funnels or in WordPress there’s a cool tool called CartFlows. A lot of the page building softwares have all these landing page templates you can use for opt-ins, and sales pages, and all this stuff. For a course creator, let’s assume we only have like one transformational course, like a high-end course, it’s you know, a couple grand, it’s a course plus coaching package. If you could design a sales funnel, a simple sales funnel to put in front of that, what would it look like? What would the pieces be?
Jennifer T.: So I find, depending on the price point of the actual funnel, or of the course itself … So if it’s $1,000, $2,000 that’s a little bit of a higher price point than that at 199, where people are more likely to pay without as much introduction. And it also depends on if you’re going after your cold audience or your warmed-up audience that’s on your email list. There’s a little bit of difference, but realistically, launches are a great avenue to go by when it comes to your courses. Especially like, if you follow Jeff Walker’s product launch formula, doing those small free mini courses at the front end of your big course at the end is a really good way to warm up that audience, teach them something, give them value, but also teach them that you are the expert in whatever it is your course is going to teach them.
Chris Badgett: So like a free mini course leading up to the paid course. And you mentioned something interesting, the price point’s important, which I 100% agree with you. If it’s a $200 course, you can probably automate it, but anything over $1,000, maybe instead of a buy now button, it’s a schedule, a call thing and there’s just a more in depth, trust-building and value adding process.
Jennifer T.: There is that option. That’s kind of where the product launch formula, which you know, that formula where it’s a short mini course, so you have three days of courses, of material and then your fourth day is kind of wrapping up that three days in a bow and selling them your course. So it kind of eliminates that one-on-one call. But that is also an option. It really depends on the comfort level of the client on being on video. You know, is their course more audio and PDFs, or are they on video all the time, or … You know, it’s all depending on what that client’s comfort level is.
Chris Badgett: Could you speak to webinars a little bit?
Jennifer T.: Sure.
Chris Badgett: I know that those are pretty popular, and some people are intimidated, some people aren’t, but they’re not getting them working well. Like what’s a webinar do and how do we use it effectively?
Jennifer T.: So a webinar is also, it’s an introduction, introducing your target audience to you, to how you are the expert in your field. And it’s similar, you know, with a webinar, you want to sell from the stage, right? Like if you’re giving a live event, at some point you’re going to sell them a product or you’re not making any money. That’s just kind of the point. So the webinars, really depends again on the length of time that you need the webinar to be. It depends on A, what you’re teaching them. Do you need an hour long webinar in order to teach them something effectively and sell them your program, or is 30 minutes enough to teach them and sell them?
Jennifer T.: And it also, again, depends on the price point. The higher the price point, the more material you’re going to want to give them, the more oomph you’re going to want to put behind that push to buy your product, or sign up for a one-on-one call or … Because you don’t … I mean courses are fantastic at the end of webinars, but sometimes you do need that gap, right? So sometimes you do need to divert them into a call because maybe your course comes along with coaching, and so they’re going to want to talk to you a little more about coaching kind of things.
Chris Badgett: What are some other lead magnets? I mean, we can do like a free email mini course, or even do a video series mini course, or even do a free course on our website. But what are some other, like let’s say super cold traffic, low commitment lead magnets that we can do at the top of the funnel?
Jennifer T.: So easy things: PDF that just gives them maybe top 10 things that will help move them on or top five ways to build your confidence or something, you know, whatever your course is about. You also have things like infographics that can kind of lead them on a path, eBooks. There’s you know, challenges like five-day challenges, those are good.
Chris Badgett: What are some example challenges that maybe you’ve seen, or just hypothetical ones? Because I think these are cool and often under … I mean, we see them sometimes in, I don’t know, like the health and fitness niche. Maybe there’s like a certain type of diet or exercise, like, “Walk every day,” or something. But like, besides health and fitness, what other challenges are out, could you do?
Jennifer T.: So if there’s a ton of options when it comes to challenge: I have a client who’s a confidence coach, and so her five-day challenges usually pick a topic within the competence area. So how to build your self-confidence. And then she goes into … Each day is a different area of that. And here’s the secret about five day challenges, right: You can turn them later into courses. If they go off well and are received well, you can pull that and then turn it into a course that you sell, and maybe it’s not a high ticket course. Maybe it’s like a $50 introductory course, but it’s still something that you can sell later.
Chris Badgett: I love that idea about validating your course idea by starting it as a challenge. Like I’m thinking of one now that I … I’ve thought about doing challenges, like one of them would be how to outline your course in five days, because that gets a lot of people hung up. There’s all kinds of like little small challenges that moves people along that they need before the product or whatever.
Jennifer T.: Yeah, they’re great. I think challenges are a great way to validate your course or your idea, because it’s free. It’s the same as beta testing your course, right? But you’re getting that real, live interaction with people, and getting the feedback in the moment, usually. Because a lot of challenges are done on Facebook Lives, or in a group on a Facebook Live, however you want to do that. But it does usually give you real data really fast about, “Okay, so this part of the course worked, people were responsive to that, and this day not so much.” And so it’s easier to tweak, but if you have one that goes really well, next week you can sell it for 47.97 or something.
Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, and the social component of it is pretty cool too. Like if you do it in social media and you see people start encouraging each other and really getting into it, that’s awesome. I’ve also noticed that the mistake I see people make is that they’ll go too big. They’ll do like a 180-day challenge or something like … I mean, you can start like five days. I really liked that idea because you can do … You’re basically saying, “Let’s pretend it’s a Monday. Before the weekend, we’re going to get some incredible results. Perhaps mindset changes, and just give me a little bit of your side time, five days a week.” I think if we approach it like that, it’s one, not overwhelming to create, but it’s also not overwhelming to participate.
Jennifer T.: It’s often the biggest challenge that I found course creators have, often when they’re doing webinars, or challenges, or … It’s people committing their time in order to receive that free item. So if you’re doing 180-day challenge, nobody has time to give you 180 days. They just don’t. People are so busy that it’s not an effective way to do it. So you want to keep that time commitment three to five days. Just keep it short. So people, they can do anything for three to five days. You know, that’s a short window. You want to keep your trainings kind of short in those as well. I would go no more than an hour, because again, time commitment on those.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In our pre-chat, you were talking about being somewhat minimalist in the tech. Like if we’re going to build a sales funnel and we have a WordPress website, we don’t necessarily need a bunch of extra tools, right?
Jennifer T.: I think tools are fantastic, don’t get me wrong. I really do think there are some really great tools out there, but if you already have a WordPress website, you don’t necessarily need extra plugins. You need a good theme, I’m not going to lie about that. You do need a good quality theme, so expect to pay for one if you haven’t already, but you don’t necessarily need the extra plugins to create a sales funnel. Of course, yes, because you have to lock down that material, but a sales funnel you do not, and there’s no …
Jennifer T.: Really, the landing page of a sales funnel, you simply want to make sure that it’s not connected to your menu, and it will look the same as if you clicked on a click funnel page, or a lead pages page, or Kartra, or any of those other tools. You can make your website look identical to those and have just as good a result, especially if you have an expert that knows what they’re doing.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s talk about product launches: First of all, how’s a product launch different from a sales funnel?
Jennifer T.: I love this question. So realistically, the only difference between a product launch and a sales funnel is timing. A product launch is usually on a specific timeframe, where you are launching your product on May 1st and so you’re doing the steps so that the doors open and close on May 1st through the 5th. Whereas a sales funnel is often more evergreen: You set it up, you set it, you don’t forget it, because realistically you should never forget your marketing. There’s always going to be tweaks that need to go along, but you set it up, and other than small tweaks that go along with it, you don’t necessarily need to bother with it in a time ….
Jennifer T.: You know, it just keeps going on and on. So that’s really the only difference between the two. The actual steps depend on your marketing vision, whether you’re doing like a Jeff Walker-style product launch, or whether you’re doing a webinar launch, or a five-day challenge launch. All of those are different options that you know, it’s just about opening and closing carts.
Chris Badgett: For the non-advanced marketer out there, if they’re getting ready to release their first course, and they’re prepared, they’ve got like a month ahead of them or two weeks ahead of them, and they want to do some kind of product launch, what’s the minimum effective product launch sequence?
Jennifer T.: It depends on if they’re launching to a cold audience or a warm audience, because-
Chris Badgett: Can you speak to why that’s so different?
Jennifer T.: Sure, because a cold audience are people who don’t know you-
Chris Badgett: Like a Facebook ad?
Jennifer T.: Right.
Chris Badgett: If your launch [crosstalk 00:18:04] is Facebook advertising?
Jennifer T.: Yes, so if you’re using Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads as part of your launch strategy, you’re targeting people who have never heard of you. They may not even know they have a problem that you can solve. So you’re locked to a completely cold audience. A warm audience, and you can still use Facebook ads for a warm audience, just in a different way. Your warm audience are people who may already be on your email list, or they liked your Facebook page, or their part of your free group, or anything.
Jennifer T.: They know who you are. And so when you’re launching to them, the amount of time you need to warm them up is going to be a whole lot shorter. Whereas, if you’re launching to a cold audience, there’s more time because you need to teach them who you , that they have a problem, and that you can solve it.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you have any advice, like we hear this sometimes about product launches of opening and closing the cart? Do you have any advice around whether it’s better or not, or what situations would determine which way we go to have an evergreen course or a course the opens and closes in terms of new people being able to buy and get in?
Jennifer T.: So in my experience, and I primarily work with coaches and consultants, and so it depends on if that course has like a coaching component to it. Because if you are opening a course and there’s a six-week coaching component to it, you do not necessarily want someone to come into that course on week three. Right, so that definitely determines whether or not you want it to be time bound, where there’s, you know, six to eight weeks, whatever the length of your course and then you can open cart again.
Jennifer T.: Also, if it is a brand-spanking new course and you have a good idea that you’re going to need tweaks, opening and closing the cart can give you the opportunity to test it with a beta group and then launch it again. Once you know that your course is running well, you don’t necessarily need a mastermind group or one-on-one coaching or anything part of it. You can just allow it to go and grow, you know, and drive traffic to it.
Chris Badgett: That’s great. What about ads? You mentioned Facebook, and I think LinkedIn ads.
Jennifer T.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: When does it make sense to use ads? Because I see people use an ads over the place, from just trying to validate to trying to scale. Let’s talk about ads for course creators: When to use them, when not to use them, which ones to use, and why?
Jennifer T.: So okay, let’s start with which ones to use: We primarily use Facebook and LinkedIn. There are a dozen other kinds, but those are the ones that we focus on. So if your business is business to consumer, and most of your people hang out on Facebook, and you know that your contacts are on Facebook, then you want to use Facebook ads. And it’s the same for LinkedIn ads, often if it’s a business to business. So if your ideal client is a business owner, LinkedIn ads can be a good place to go. LinkedIn ads are still relatively new, and people are still getting used to them, and getting used to the way they run. But they do tend, because the demographics monetarily are different between Facebook and LinkedIn, they tend to have a really good ROI.
Jennifer T.: Facebook has been around longer, and so the cost of Facebook ads tends to be higher than LinkedIn ads currently. Give it six months to a year, that’s all going to change. But right this second, that’s the way they lay out. When you want to use ads: So that is all dependent on whether the client has been able to build an audience without reaching out beyond their demographic, beyond their social area. If they have been able to build an audience, they may not need ads right away, but at some point that audience gets tapped out and you want to bring in new audiences. If you don’t have an audience at all, Facebook or LinkedIn ads can be a great way to start designing, and developing, and building your audience.
Jennifer T.: So it’s really just dependent on where they are in their marketing process. I would also say you want to validate … If you have a warm audience already, validate your business with the warm audience. There’s no point in paying for ads if your model or your course has not been validated by people that you know have given you that feedback, otherwise you can waste a lot of money.
Chris Badgett: So you’re saying if you do have a some kind of audience, even if it’s small and you’re just getting started, like slow down, because if your warm audience doesn’t buy the course, or get much success with it, or whatever, you don’t want to scale that problem with cold [crosstalk 00:23:36]?
Jennifer T.: Exactly. That’s exactly the point. Now, you can use Facebook ads to target your warm audience. So it’s a really great process, if you have a warm audience and you’ve sent out a newsletter, and they haven’t responded to that newsletter, or email, or whatever it is to introduce your course, you can start showing them the course in their Facebook feed. I have a client that it’s worked fantastic for her warm audience. Takes a little longer to warm up, so though they’re getting her emails, they’re not responding to her emails. They’re responding to the ads on Facebook that they see.
Chris Badgett: Very cool. What are some best practices if we’re doing a Facebook ad, like should we do image, should we do video, headline, body text? Can you give people some best practices? Because I know there’s some people listening who are, you know, they’re like, “I’m just going to do it myself. I am ready for Facebook ads.” What are some best practices when you approach the interface to build the ad?
Jennifer T.: So I would test video to … So the whole point of Facebook and LinkedIn ads, the first thing you’re doing is testing. And sometimes that can feel like wasting money, but it’s not. It’s validating what you’re doing. So the first thing you do is test to see what your audience likes. Do they prefer an image to a video? Use the same copy in both. Just use that image or a video. Then also the headlines are … Is it going to grab their attention? You want to make sure that any of your copy grabs their attention. I will tell you something, for the copy in the body that a lot of people don’t … That I’ve seen a lot of rejections of ads for. Use the word “you”, Y-O-U, as little as possible.
Chris Badgett: I’ve heard that before. Why is that?
Jennifer T.: Facebook does not like you speaking to people, they want you to speak to a general population. Actually, they’d prefer if you talked all about yourself. So if you’re speaking, if entrepreneurs are your target market, instead of saying something like, you know, “You’re struggling with …” say something like, “Entrepreneurs often struggle with …” And so you’re still calling out your target audience without the word “you”. “You” can get that bumped a lot. And the more often you get your ads rejected by Facebook, the harder it is to run your Facebook ads.
Chris Badgett: Interesting. So if we’re bringing in cold traffic through a Facebook ad, and let’s say we need to warm it up, like what do we actually send the ad to? Can you take us from ad to sale?
Jennifer T.: Sure.
Chris Badgett: Like what the path would look like.
Jennifer T.: Sure, the sales process. We’ll just do a general funnel, just a lead magnet funnel: So in general, your ad will lead to a landing page that has some great copy on it, that basically offers them a free item. Whether that free item is a mini course, or a PDF, or an ebook, or … That’s completely up to you, or even a five-day challenge. That’s completely up to you, but it offers them a free item. They give you their email address, and their name, and such and go into your email automation funnel, and then they’re taken to a thank you page.
Jennifer T.: If you set your email funnel up or your sales funnel up really well, the thank you page will either be a trip wire where you’re selling them something small, maybe something for $50 or under $100 that just gets them to start buying from you. Once someone buys from you, they’re more likely to buy from you, so you’d send them to that. Often those pages are like video sales pages where someone’s on video talking about who they are, what they do. Or if you don’t necessarily have a direct thing that you want to sell, maybe you send them to a, “Hey, let’s hop on a call and let me walk you through …” You know, whatever that piece is.
Jennifer T.: If it’s a three-day challenge, or a five-day challenge, or something where you’re going to give them information on an ongoing basis, that thank you page can just be a, “Hey, thanks for connecting. Follow me on Facebook. Your information will be in your inbox in the next five minutes,” or whatever. So that’s pretty much the most simple form of a funnel. You’re just looking at like two pages and then your email sequence, which depends on what you’re doing, whether it’s three to five emails that follow.
Chris Badgett: I think that’s a big mistake I see people doing with paid ads, is they go right for the sale. They’re like … I mean you got-
Jennifer T.: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: With cold traffic, it takes time, and it’s not the same as your-
Jennifer T.: If we go back to that whole dating idea, it’s like going on a first date and asking someone to marry you, right? Not only is that kind of creepy, but in the marketing world, it’s going to give you really, really low rate of returns. So the ROI is just pitiful when you do something like that.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we were talking before we hit record about, you’re a fan of WordPress, and owning the platform, and stuff like that. Can you elaborate on that point?
Jennifer T.: Yeah, so this is my thought process when it comes to owning your own email list or owning your own website, and the course, and that kind of thing: Facebook is a fantastic tool. You know, click funnels, and lead pages, and Kartra and Kajabi, they’re all amazing tools. But all of those platforms are owned by somebody else. So if we’re just looking at Facebook, for example, if Zuckerberg decided tomorrow that he wanted to shut down Facebook and you don’t have your own email list, what’s going to happen to all of those contacts that you had on Facebook? How are you going to communicate with them?
Jennifer T.: I look at courses and sales funnels in the same kind of venue, what happens if one of those tools shut down? You have to start all over again. Also, generally speaking, once you’ve built it on a WordPress site, every sale after that, yes, there’s going to be some upfront costs, but every sale after that is your money. You don’t have those ongoing fees.
Chris Badgett: Excellent point. Yeah, and the other thing with Facebook is I’ve see some people sell the Facebook group, and I’m a big advocate of that. I love Facebook groups, but I’m just waiting for the day, Facebook to mess that up and like-
Jennifer T.: Oh, they’re starting already
Chris Badgett: Display ads, my competitor ads in there, whatever. Their groups are nice, but I’m not counting on it forever.
Jennifer T.: Exactly. Facebook is a fantastic tool, but like a month ago I was down in Florida on family vacation, and I was doing some Facebook Lives, and I went to get on on a Wednesday and you couldn’t do any Lives, add any video, or … People were just freaking out. And I’m like, “And that’s why you have an email list.”
Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. Well, I know you help people and you work with people who need help on the marketing, and the launching, and the advertising. What’s an ideal type of person that you work with? What stage of business are they in or what’s going on in their life that you make a great fit with?
Jennifer T.: Yeah, so I generally work with coaches, and consultants, and course creators. That’s my target market. Those people that really, they’ve got a desire to change the world, and they know their product, their service, or their course can make the difference in somebody’s life. Usually, when they come to me, they’ve been in business anywhere between two to five years, and they’ve kind of hit that tipping point in, “I’m making decent money.” It may be six figures-ish, a little above, a little below, but they don’t really understand how to get to that next level, whether it’s multiple six figures or seven figures.
Jennifer T.: And so they’re just in that struggling point of, “I know I need to invest in my marketing and I know I need to bring in more cold leads, and cold traffic, and you know, I’ve tapped out my current market, and I need to find people that are not currently on my email list.” That’s usually when they come to me, or they may be making six figures and beyond, and they have a great course in mind, and have absolutely no idea how to use the tech. They’re like, “I’ve got all of this information and all of this great course material, and I have no clue how to set it up or how to get it out there into the world.”
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, we talk about the five hats problem a lot on this show that course creators face, which is you have to be an expert, you have to be a teacher, you have to be a community builder, you have to be a technologist, and you have to be an entrepreneur. And it’s hard to wear all those hats at one time. It’s very rare. It’s a unicorn person that has all those skillsets or has already built the team that has all those skill sets. But the big thing we noticed is that people that really make it, and not just kind of make it and they’re scraping by, but make it big, they don’t do it alone. And if you need help in the marketing and the growth, or getting the tech implemented, it sounds like you can really step in and help people level up, which is awesome.
Jennifer T.: Yeah. I will say, you know, I can’t do it alone. I’ve built a team, so it’s not just me in my company. I’ve built a team of other experts that specialize in specific areas so that we can all work together to build a great company. And I truly believe the only way to scale a business, especially if you’re a solopreneur, is to build teams of other experts, people that specialize in marketing, or that specialize in operations, or you know, those other things that are required. If you look at a CEO, the CEO of Walmart, he does not know every aspect of Walmart. Like, he just doesn’t. He knows how to lead and he knows how to, you know, grow the business. But he is not an expert in finance, he’s not an expert in marketing. And thinking as an entrepreneur that you can be an expert in all of those areas is where I’ve seen the most entrepreneurs fail.
Chris Badgett: Well said. Jennifer Tamborski, you can find her at virtualmarketingexpert.com. Is there anywhere else or any other thing you want people to look at, or ability to connect with you through?
Jennifer T.: You are welcome to connect with me on Facebook. It’s facebook.com/virtualmarketingexperts, and as well as on LinkedIn, I have the same business page on both platforms, and Instagram. So yeah, you can connect to me on all of the platforms, just “Virtual Marketing Expert”, and it’ll take you right to our page.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well Jennifer, I want to thank you for coming on the show today, and thanks for sharing all your wisdom, and just taking us to school on all of these areas around the marketing, and the advertising, and the tech. We really appreciate it.
Jennifer T.: Not a problem. It was my pleasure.
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 getting courses on the internet.
