#206: Plan Your Next Successful LIVE Course

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to get you excited about whatever you’re creating right now for your online business, your course, your workshop, your live cohort group coaching, whatever it is. I’m here to push you to get it done and build up the online based business of your dreams.

And let’s be honest, we could all use a little push here and there, right? And I’m here to do it with love. And today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things, which is going live with your course, which in my opinion, is one of the best ways to test out a course for so many reasons.

And I’ve done a couple of episodes about going live before. A link to those in the show notes. But it’s been a little while and it’s great timing because I just wrapped up a live course with Meghan O’Leary, copywriter Meghan O’Leary for the Conversion copywriting playbook, and I’m in the midst of planning another live course. And to me, they can feel really energizing and exhilarating when you’re doing something live.

I could see why stand up comedians get really hooked on it, because you get that feedback in the moment. When you’re presenting live, you get to test out the waters and some of you write to me, or you reach out and say, Gina, how do I know my course is going to work out? How do I know if this is going to be a bestseller?

And going live is a great way to test. So some of you are doing a lot of one to ones and you’ve got a lot of clients and you just can’t fit recording, of course, in advance and getting all those videos done in advance. Think about recording a course Life, but I want you to plan the proper way so it doesn’t feel as much like a heavy lift.

And if you do a little bit of planning, you’ll be surprised at how easy and convenient going live can be in terms of building your course. And I want to talk about that today in this podcast. I want to give you a framework that O’Leary and I use to plan out our recent CCP class. So you can plan so when times get hectic and trust me, it did get a little hectic when we went live.

In terms of the conversion copywriting playbook, I would be running two appointments or taking Tristan to school or O’Leary would have appointments, but it was a deadline driven course and we had to make time for it. So if this energizes you, if you’re excited about this, maybe you’re starting a live course or you just announced it or you’ve been thinking about it.

This is the episode for you, by the way. This episode is brought to you by our Done for You services. If you don’t want to plan out your live course or you want someone to guide you through the entire course creation and marketing process, think about signing on for our done for You services where we literally hold your hand through our custom done for you course creation and marketing go to course creation boutique dot com slash course to learn more.

We usually take to clients a quarter. Check it out. Book a call. We’ll talk more about your vision for your course and where you want to go. And this week I was a kind of a bad mom. Well, I had a moment where I felt like a bad mom, where I was yelling at Tristin and this was a day where I felt like Tristin was on too many screens for too long, and he looked tired.

He looked rundown and he didn’t get a great night of sleep. And I kind of took him to the mat about his screen time. And I said, Listen, you’re a great kid. You are really smart, you’re athletic, you’re doing great things at school. I just want you to have a new hobby or two when you’re home so you’re not on screens all the time.

So we kind of ran into a screaming match a little bit. I’m not proud. And it took about a day and a half. But then Tristin came home from school and said, Hey, I’d like to start Duolingo, which by the way I know is another screen. However, still it’s a different hobby. And he said, There’s this model of the Titanic that’s been sitting in my closet.

I love to have a go at it and start building that with Dad and guys. This model of the Titanic is the smallest pieces I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It is so intricate. I don’t know how they’re building it. However, they spent the next 2 hours that night building and it was awesome to see the bonding, the father son bonding that went on.

And then he had a great night’s sleep and it was a great moment. It was a great night. And it started out with fighting and it started out with tension and anger. But then we ended up with a different outcome. And and I think the point of me telling you the story is sometimes we do have to pivot, sometimes we do have to emote and change and ask for change.

And change is okay. And it’s okay to get angry and then adapt and then realize what is this really about? So if you need to change up your routine, great. I know I need to change up my routine all the time. Don’t be afraid to do it. Don’t be afraid to pivot and try different things. And I’ll let you guys know how this building of this Titanic model is going.

But okay, we’re here to talk about live courses and how to build them effectively. So let’s lay some ground rules. We are going to talk about live courses that are an hour each max 90 minutes. We’re also going to assume you’re going to go live over 4 to 8 weeks. We went live over four weeks. We had a 30 day program for commercial copywriting playbook.

I had a six week accelerator. You can go live for eight weeks. You can go longer. Let’s say you can’t go longer. But I’m saying I think the sweet spot really is 4 to 8 weeks. And if I’m honest, 30 days felt good for the copywriting playbook. I feel like we could have had that group for one or two weeks more because there is a special bond that happens when you are meeting people week to week and a connection and you really do build a community.

 

We even have a community built into it, but we kind of created our own through job and I love my job for building out courses, all linked to a job as well in the show notes. And we created our own community and you get used to seeing each other week to week. And by the fourth week it was kind of sad when we we didn’t have an additional week.

I almost wish I had scheduled a bonus call for us to come back together again, which I have done for the live accelerator before because people loved being together so much. They love that community, which is so important. Like I’ve talked about more than ever post-pandemic. People are craving that kind of connection. So that bond was real and it was awesome.

So that’s something that you can’t have in a static course. And another thing with a live course and I mentioned this with binge worthy courses, I think it was last week that I recorded that episode that it’s hard to get people to finish your course sometimes, especially self-paced. But with the live course, you’re asking them to show up live each and every week.

Does everyone show up live? No. Out of the 22 or 24 people we had registered for the calls for the program. We probably had 14 people show up week to week, which felt really great for us. And sometimes it was different people, but we never had a full house. You will probably never have a full house inside your life course, which is totally fine.

Okay, so for the purposes of this episode, we’re going to say your weekly calls will be an hour long. You could stay on longer. By the way, we stayed on for an hour for the copywriting playbook, and then we had extra bonus time where we reviewed copy before we plan each week. Overall, overarching for your class, I want you to think about how you want to open up your lives so this will be consistent element every time you teach.

We talk about this with Bose in Boston is a storytelling friend mentor, just amazing friend of the podcast. We always want to start with a story to connect, to build, trust, the set, the foundation of what we want to teach. So O’Leary and I started with stories for the copywriting playbook. I always start with stories of any of my trainings or my speaking.

I want to warm up students, I want to connect with them. You can start with a short story and anecdote stats questions you’re setting the stage for what’s to come. Think about how you want to set the tone, set expectations with your students, and this is something you’re going to be consistent with each and every class we tweak.

Now, setting those frames are really important, especially when you’re first starting out in addition to how you want to start week to week. Also think about how you want to wrap week to week Are you going to give them homework or you can give them implementation steps? Do you want to end with a funny story? Do you want to end with some kind of funny quip or a quote?

 

I’ve seen people do that as well. I’ve seen people read passages, and this is what O’Leary and I decided off the bat. We said, Hey, we’re going to start with the story and then this is how we’re going to wrap. So you’re going to think about the container for each of your live classes. Okay. Now, when you’re outlining each class, here are the steps that we took.

And this is what I love, and this is a format that I think really works. Step one. Okay, So say you’ve got a class coming up next Tuesday, for example. So O’Leary and I would get together on the previous Thursday or Friday and work through these steps. Now step one is figure out the content. What did we promise?

Go back to your sales page and look. What did you promise? What’s the transformation for that week? I’m hoping you broke down week to week or module to module. What you promising? What are the key words that you use for deliverables? Okay, we always start with the promise. We always start with. That’s the outcome. Hey, we said we were going to talk about air this week.

We’re going to talk about it. We said we’re going to talk about different types of emails or we said we’re going to give the formula for something we need to deliver on that. That’s how we build trust. That’s how we build connection. We deliver on our promises. So that was step one. We always went back to the sales page or the emails we wrote, whatever we sent to the student and we checked to see if what we had promised.

Step two What now does that look like? What’s the core content formula steps to fulfill on that promise? It could be a three step framework. It could be formula. Now, O’Leary came up with some really cool formulas. She came up with one checklist how to check your copy if it’s not quite working or if your launches are quite working.

She came up with this awesome formula to break down an email and that was the core teaching. So we would start with our stories. We would lay the groundwork for that session and then usually O’Leary would teach that formula or those core steps. Now, you don’t want to get crazy here. You don’t want to teach 17 steps here.

You want to keep it to about 3 to 5 steps. And even if you have a formula, I wouldn’t make it more than five steps or five part formulas because after that we just lose the rhythm of it. Okay, so you want to keep it contained and you can always grow this or do it a different way the next time.

If you plan to go live again and again. But for this iteration, let’s keep it more compact. So that’s step two. You’re going to figure out what’s the core of you going to teach. Then the third step that we did once we got the core down is what are the stories, examples that we were going to add in terms of richness.

o O’Leary and I would play with Pitch and Catch. Okay, I’ve got a great story for that. No, I’ve got a great example based on this stat. Once we came up with the formula, Oh, how do we illustrate that? How do we make it come alive? We had a lot of fun. O’Leary and I coming up with different stories.

I dug out some old Tony Robbins stories when I was just starting out. So so we added the richness to help illustrate and help teach what we wanted to come across. Then the fourth part was we would decide, okay, how are we going to involve our students or audience? So are we going to demo some of the steps?

Are we going to bring in examples and then critique them? Are we going to invite them to share? Okay. By the way, sidebar, this is where you want to decide if you are recording for live or for Evergreen. So if you were recording and planning to use this for the future, I highly recommend you wait until the end to let audience Audience member share to let your students share because you want a clean cut so you can have that training content in job or whatever your site is.

So for us, we would take shares at the end, but we also intermingled critiques. And like I mentioned early in this episode, we did critiques at the end. So decide how are you going to use your students, how are you going to include them? Maybe you put some questions in chat, maybe you have some exercises throughout, maybe there’s breakouts.

There’s a lot of fun ways to include your students, depending on what kind of course that you want to build. And then if there’s going to be a step five, I would say, what flare do you want to add, if any? So bringing on guests so you can bring on guests. We had a tight 30 day course and it was just it was already O’Leary and I, so I felt like that was enough.

Pattern interrupts. That was enough variety. But when I teach live, I usually bring in guests and one of them is O’Leary. So you might want to bring in guest, you might want to bring in props, you might want to bring in different aspects to keep it interesting. So think about that as well. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be PowerPoint.

It can be other props or other pattern interrupts that you bring in. I know somebody who shows videos while they go live. I don’t want you leaning on that as a crutch. I want you to really have confidence in your training skills. But however, you can still bring in different pieces to up the engagement. So those are the five steps that we followed every single week.

We would look forward to our calls together because we knew we were planning something fun and that we were going to go live. But we always walked in with that framework and then we usually leave about 15 to 20%. We do a Q&A at the end, but we leave 15% say, for flexibility to just open it up for the students because that’s part of the fun of going live and having that freedom and flexibility.

So hopefully this five part framework was helpful for you, maybe even encouraged you to think about going live. And if you’re thinking, Gina, this sounds amazing, but I don’t want to do it alone, we’ve got you think about our done for you course creation and marketing services as we can help you with the strategy, your course creation, your platform we build on Cadabby head over to the show Notes Course Creation Boutique, AECOM slash course, and we can chat about launching your next live course.

Thanks so much for tuning in today. Don’t forget to subscribe or leave me a review If this had a great impact on your business. Until next time, go out there and go live. Go create, be you and be brilliant and get it done. and be brilliant and get it done.