This LMScast with Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett introduces Joshua’s new Ultimate Course Creation Framework. We begin with Step 1 – Rapid Enrollment and tell how you can get started with this free mini-course today.
The Ultimate Course Creation Framework is a step-by-step process for building and presenting your online courses. First Step: You need a foundation, and that’s what Rapid Enrollment is about. You’ll make a list of 100 potential students for your pre-launch marketing campaign. It’s a necessary action that will determine the success of your online courses.
In the past if a student wanted to learn a subject, they enrolled in a classroom-based curriculum that dictated what they had to study to receive a certificate or degree. Now students have choices for the courses they will take and how they’ll access them. You want them to choose yours. Rapid enrollment prepares you to make that happen.
Your beta list of potential students is more than a marketing tool. You also need feedback to make sure the courses you are creating are courses people want to take and will enjoy. After your initial offering, you will know what works, what needs to be improved, and how to talk to the next level of prospects in a language they will be receptive to.
This is not a quick, easy process, and we’re not going to sugarcoat it. You’ll need to work hard, hustle, and allow plenty of time for the process to work. We’ll tell you how to put that first list of 100 prospects together to reach your intended audience. We’ll also help you calculate how many enrollments you need to achieve the income you desire, and help you maintain the proper mindset to follow through.
Each step of the Framework depends on completion of the step before it. The idea of essentially cold-calling 100 people may be frightening, but we will help you accomplish the task with a minimum of frustration.
Following the proven Framework guidelines will remove the guesswork and move you forward much faster than trying to figure things out from scratch. That’s a lot of value from a free mini-course. If you’re willing to invest quality time and effort in creating your online courses, make an equal investment in the success of those courses.
The Ultimate Course Creation Framework mini-course will run in sync with upcoming LMScast episodes. Get started now: Sign up at CourseClinic.com, or text the word “courseclinic” to 33444, and we’ll send you Step 1 – Rapid Enrollment. You can also try a demo of LifterLMS to see how our course development platform helps you build exceptional online courses.
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Episode Transcript
Joshua: Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode LMScast, my name is Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we are talking about a framework that I’ve created over the last three months called the the Ultimate Course Creation Framework. We’re going to jump into part one in this series – it’s a five part series – and give you some narrative around the things that are taught in the Ultimate Course Creation Framework. If you want to opt in for this email mini-course, all you have to do is go over to lifterlms.com/courseclinic or if you’re listening to this on a podcast player, you can simply text the word “courseclinic” one word to 33444, and we’ll get you enrolled that way.
I really encourage you to enroll in the Ultimate Course Creation Framework mini-course, because it’s going to run in parallel with these LMScast episodes where Chris and I get a little bit more theoretical. Who knows where we’re going to go with it, but we’re going to have fun, and we’re going to be talking about the content in the mini-course. If you’re like, “what the heck are they talking about?” Go sign up for the mini-course, opt in, join us, and all of this will make a lot more sense.
Christopher: I just want to say one of the things I’m really proud of is this CourseClinic course creation framework that’s Joshua’s created here. I’ve seen the ins and outs of it, and it’s really, really good. If you’re into becoming a LMS superstar online course education entrepreneur and level up to the next level, you’re going to love what you get out of the ultimate course creators framework. I’m really happy to do this arial view with you today, Josh. It’s some good stuff.
Joshua: Let’s just start with he big why. Why did I create this in the first place? Thank you for those kind words Chris because you’re an expert and it means a lot that you would say that. I just got tired over the last year working with so many people who’d come and buy our plug-in lifter LMS and then go and build a course and they’d come back they didn’t have any technical issues, like they loved lifter it was fine, but they were really struggling to get their course business going or even if they weren’t selling it, they were just struggling to get traction. It doesn’t have to be that way.
At the end of the day there’s a simple step by step process that you can follow to make sure that you have success with your course. This works at any level, if you’re just starting out, all the way to the advanced levels if you have a massive list of launching courses in the past, all of it fits in this framework. Today we’re just talking about step one which is what I call rapid enrollment. Rapid enrollment is basically the idea that you want to have a list together of people who are your potential students that you can launch and pre-launch to before you create your course. The reason is that I think that educators struggle with some pride and some arrogance when it comes it thinking that they know what their students want to learn.
The interesting thing about the online landscape opposed to the in classroom traditional education model can be boiled down into one word for me which is choice. A student can choose now. Back in the day I sign up for a business program, I’m told what I have to take, I got to take it, if I want that degree I got to take it. I don’t have an option, maybe I have an option between for me Professor Anderson or Professor Deal for accounting, but that’s about the variation I have. Now with the internet you have a ton of options for learning accounting for instance.
I could you udemy I could go to YouTube and string it together myself. Or I could go to someone else and learn it.
Christopher: That’s part of the democratization of education. The walls are coming down, the strong will survive. By strong I mean the courses or the combination of learning situations that actually work and deliver the result your going and what’s likely a very fast changing industry or economy.
Joshua: Right. Exactly, so the idea with the rapid enrollment step is curating a group of people that are interested int he subject matter that you can teach towards. In my case that might be online marketing or in this case course creating. Even though I’m giving away this course for free. When you launch, when you have this group this kind of beta group or potential student list together, the feedback that you gather from them will help you really solidify a rock solid course and you’ll pick up on words that they use that you can use in your course lessons as well as your sales messages. You’ll really learn how to speak to the end student well and the customer well.
What is rapid enrollment really entail? For me, it’s a micro task that unfortunately takes a lot of work. I’m not going to beat around the bush, it’s takes hustle. What I suggest people do is they work really hard on getting a list of 100 potential student together. A lot of people trip out about this. They’ll like, “you know, I don’t know a lot of people, I don’t have a big social following” they come up with all our excuses. The fact of the matter is if you want to you can get 100 people on a student interest list. It’s as simple as using twitter, you got to think about twitter as like text messaging the world. You can go to a tool called rite tag, R-A-T-E tag.com and I could type in, e-learning and I could find hashtags around e-learning and I could plug those into Twitter and I could find people who are tweeting using the hashtag e-learning and then I could just manually reach out.
In the early stages of any business or whatever, you’re always going to be doing these cold calling or direct outreach. You can’t get away from it, so don’t try to, just do it. Do the work, you know?
Christopher: If I may jump in with a little motivation, if you need to get psyched up to go cold-calling or cold-approaching somebody by e-mail or twitter or whatever, just think about your education platform, if you happen to be sole entrepreneur and you’re trying to quit your day job, if you can get 100 people and you build a program or course or learning environment where in a year you get 100 people to give you $1,000, that’s $100,000, I’m talking in U.S. Dollars personally, but that’s a very nice income, fully capable of replacing the traditional middle class job. Pick up the phone, or open that e-mail.
Joshua: Yeah, the idea too, I think Kevin Kelly said it best, he’s like, “If you can get 1,000 true fans” and this is a great article, you can just Google 1,000 true fans, but 1,000 true fans is an essay by Kevin Kelley and he talks about how if you have $1,000 true fans, how you can make a very livable wage using the internet and technology and all these different things. He’s talking about it more of a philosophical level, but it’s true. If you have 1,000 true fans that are willing to buy things from you, basic conversion rates, say that it doesn’t matter if you’re selling a physical product or if your selling an information product, you could have a sustainable income. We’re not even talking about that, we’re just talking about 100 people who are interesting. It just takes some griddy hustle.
I share a lot of different ways of accomplishing this goal in the ultimate course creation framework, I really encourage people to go opt in and take that full lesson. It is the first step for a number of reasons. The main reason is that it is the first thing that you need in place for all the other steps in the ultimate course create framework to work. You accomplish this step and then when we talk tomorrow, or I mean in the next episode about the magical education intersection, it’s a pre-req, you have to have this list together, you have to have these people together before that will really take hold.
Then, if you don’t have those two things in place, then the collaborative course process where we actually co-create the beta course with your students, that is contingent on the following two steps and so forth. Each and every lesson in the ultimate course creation framework builds. That is in a nutshell the high level of the rapid enrollment, really high level of the rapid enrollment step in the ultimate course creation framework. I guess for me Chris, what are some questions that you think the audience might have? I’m so deep in this rabbit hole, I’m struggling to think about what do people want to know about this? I go into great detail in the course, let me just be an open playbook for you.
Christopher: One thing i think people need help with is tying into that idea of the framework and how important this step one is. Maybe a little bit of motivation like what if I don’t start building my early 100 interest list and I go ahead and move on to creating my course and doing other things, what big mistakes am I making?
Joshua: The biggest mistake you’re making is your addressing the fear, the conscious and subconscious fear that you’re dealing with. The only reason for you to move past this initial step is because you’re afraid of it. It’s plain and simple. It’s so much easier to lock yourself in a room and create a course than it is to actually reach out to 100 people. Odds are, you’ll probably be reaching out to 300 people and you’ll have probably about a 30% yes rate. That’s means you’ve got 200 people that are going to tell you no and no one ones to deal with that. Even it’s digital no via a tweet, people psychologically beat themselves up about this. My response is just hunker down and do it. If you’re willing invest all the time and energy into a course, don’t you want that time to be fruitful and to really do something? This mitigates so much risk is building that course. That’s the number one thing is people don’t want to talk about that, they don’t want to address that, they don’t want to break it down. The reason that they don’t want to do this is because of fear and resistance and rejection.
Frankly again it’s not the most fun thing that you can do in an afternoon. For me when I launched my personal podcast, 60 day delay it took me 3 weeks. This was maybe spending about maybe 20 minutes a day.
Christopher: Yeah, you don’t have to do it all in one day.
Joshua: No. If you want to move into building your course faster, complete this step faster. Don’t drag this out and then start to work on the course because in reality, I forget who said it, Steve Blank who wrote five steps to epiphany and the start up user manual. He’s kind of Eric Reases mentor, the guy who started the lean start up movement. He said, and it’s so beautiful because it really applies to course building, it says “no product survives first interaction with customers, ever.” Every single one of them fails. Every single time that you release something for the first time, especially if it’s been build in a laboratory somewhere is that it’s going to fail and people are going to tell you what they don’t like, this sucks and that sucks, and I don’t get this and I don’t like that style, and this isn’t speaking to me. Most people just get fed up and they leave, they stop because they can’t handle that feedback, but that’s the feedback that you’re avoiding by starting with this interest list that you can work with.
It’s like, I don’t want to dwell on pain and what not, but I’m just being real, it’s like do you want the pain of building that student interest list, or do you want the pain of spending a ton of time and having it just fall short of expectations and revenue goals and all that. The other things, is people already have 100 people on an e-mail list, you’re good. You just need to go through the next few steps really well, which again are not fun necessarily, they can be, but they’re work, they’re hard work. You need to follow the next few steps so that you mitigate the risk too.
Just because you have the list doesn’t mean you’re done, you have to follow the steps, and the next two steps that we go through are really important. Yeah, that is my answer to that question.
Christopher: That’s awesome. I would encourage everybody to let Joshua guide you with the course creation framework and be your guide. You can search around and try to figure it our on your own, but there’s a brick road here for you to follow. It’s not always going to be easy, you have a guide waiting, for free, to show you want to do.
Joshua: Absolutely. Again, people can check that out at lifterlms.com/courseclinic or you can just text the word courseclinic, it’s just one word, to 33444 and we’ll send you lesson one, which is kind of an in depth step by step progression of how to do this rapid enrollment process. I’m excited. Chris, next time we’re going to be talking about the magical education intersection and excited to talk to him about that. Do you have any closing thoughts for the crew?
Christopher: I just can’t wait to see what’s coming in step two.
Joshua: Right on. Until then, we’ll talk to you soon.
