Uncomfortable Truths About Online Courses

Although having an online course is amazing, it's not always sunshine and rainbows. Today we're diving into the truths that no one else is talking about.

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Welcome to the Little Miss Course Creator Podcast. I am your host, April Bradford. There is a big problem with the course creation world. Course creators build a course, put it out there, and either it doesn't sell or they're waiting for between launches, wondering where the money is going to come from. Well, if you are ready to turn from a course creator to a course boss, we are going to flip that model on its head. In this podcast, you are going to learn how to build a course business based on strategy from solo episodes with me, where I will teach you everything I know about Corporation and digital marketing to fix your funnel episodes where you'll learn how to optimize your selling. This podcast will teach you the strategies to do that. Becoming a coursebox isn't always easy and it isn't always pretty, but I promise you it is worth it. So dive in and start implementing the strategies that you hear today and start building the life that you dream of the business that you love and get those things on your vision board checked off their list. Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I'm April Bradford. I am your host and I'm so excited that you're here. Okay, today we're diving into a tougher subject and it's going to be a little bit deeper and not as lighthearted as most other episodes, but it's information that you need to hear if you're going to be creating an online course or if you're in the middle of creating an online course. This is information that you need to hear. Today we are talking about the uncomfortable truth about online courses. So let's dive in. I want to talk about a few uncomfortable truths in this episode. And the first one that I'm going to talk about is one that a lot of people think that online courses are. They think that it's a get rich, quick scheme. So a lot of people think, okay, if I build this course, I'm going to put it out there, it's going to sell and I'm going to be rich overnight because that's what they see. That's the front that we see that a lot of people put on or we don't hear about someone until they become overnight success. That's in quotation marks when they become that overnight success. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, who is this person? And oh my gosh, they're so successful, I've never even heard of them. And here they are like just going crazy successful. Right? But let's really take a look at this online course. Creation is not an Overnight success. Anyone who has had overnight success again, quote, overnight success. If you were to go interview them and ask them their journey of how they actually got there, you would find that it was not an overnight success. It was a lot of late nights, it was a lot of struggle. It was a lot of hard work to get to where they are. And what actually happened is that once you're doing this work and you're building your course and you're creating content and you're doing all the things, what happens is as you are taking this action, you are starting to find your voice. You are starting to find your uniqueness, your methods, everything that makes you unique. And usually what happens is something that you say or do in this process of creating that will become your overnight success ticket. That's how overnight success happens. It's never overnight. It truly is this work that has been put in and the testing and tweaking and trying and then something sticks and then that's when the fire starts and that's when great things happen. It is not an overnight success, though. So as you know, if you've been around the little Missouri community for any time, you know that it drives me crazy when I see posts in Facebook groups of people who launched their course and they are like, oh, it failed or I didn't have that six figure launch. So it was a failure. That's how they predict failure is that they didn't hit that income that they were thinking they were going to hit. And I do a lot of market research, as I teach you to do and teach my course to do. But I do the market research. I'm constantly looking and reading people's comments online. And what I see and I know to be true is that the people who, when they launch their course have big launches. They have nurtured their audience for some time. They've been growing their list, nurturing their audience for quite a while before they had that big launch. So know that the work that you're doing, although it may feel like you're not getting eyes and you're not gaining traction one person at a time, that's how you build your audience. It's one person at a time, one step at a time. It's not going to be this like massive boom and you've got it. So the next thing that I want you to know this leads nicely into this, is that if you build it, they will not come. Although in the field of dreams, he built it and they came. We are not in the field of dreams, friends. We are in real life. And if you build it, they are not going to come. People are not just going to randomly come. Yes, you might get a person here there every once in a while, but you're not going to build this six figure business just launching your course. There's work that has to be done before people will come. People just don't come. So there's so many different ways to bring people into your sphere. But it is a long game. So, for example, if you want to build it and just have people come and not have to do anything, well, what's going to have to happen is you're going to have to have an SEO strategy, that's search engine optimization, SEO, and you build that up. Seo takes at least a year to be building content. That's SEO optimized, that brings in that organic traffic. That's how if you build it, they will come. You still have to put in all that work and you have to know how to do the SEO and how to do the marketing and all the strategies. So again, going back to that first uncomfortable truth is that it's not an overnight success. There is work that has to be done. And that leads me to the next one. Online courses. Although they can make you money in your sleep, they are not passive income. You cannot just set it and forget it and be done with it. You have to. Yes, once it is created, it's created and it can bring money for years to come. That is true. That's where that passive income term comes. It's like, oh, I just made money and I didn't have to do anything. But the truth. And the reality is, after it's created, you still have to do the marketing. You still have to make content. You still have to build the desire for your course. So that's one thing that so many people here. Oh, it's passive income. It's passive income. I just want to have a way to make passive income. But it's never passive. There's always something that's happening to bring in that income, whether that's if you're running paid ads, you are building ads and marketing that way. Like I said, the SEO, you're creating content and all those things. There is work to be done. Even after the course is created, however, you can still make money in your sleep. But it's all that work that now you're doing on the front end to bring in those sales that bring in that sales while you sleep. Bring in those sales while you sleep. And finally, I want to talk about the hard truth of sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it doesn't work out. And here is the honest truth of any business, any successful business. If you were to go talk to the business owner, they would not tell you, oh, yeah, I created this product and it's sold and I'm a millionaire now. That's just how it happened. I created my product, put it out on the market overnight. Boom, sold like hotcakes millionaire. First idea, first everything. First time I've ever done this made me millions. That's not reality. If you talk to any successful business owner behind their success is a whole heck of a lot of failure, a lot of failed ideas, a lot of failed marketing attempts, a lot of failed emails sent out all of the things. But it's that failure. It's in the failure where you learn what your audience wants and you learn to master your messaging and you learn to master your marketing. So when you think like, oh, I put my course out there and it didn't sell or, oh, I put my course out there and only one or two people bought it. That is not failure. That is a learning opportunity. And that is the mindset that you need to go into when you are building a course or anything that you're doing, anything that you're doing in life. So for an example, if you have kids, when you had your first child and that first newborn baby at home, were you like, I got this totally know exactly what I'm doing. Everything you did was successful. The first bath, you gave them, the first diaper change, first feeding, everything was just successful. It was great. You didn't need any practice. It just all worked out. My guess is probably not right. Probably not. But with every diaper change, every bath, every feeding, it got easier. And you learned how to do those different things in a way that made it more successful, right? You learned from every experience to create a better experience the next time. And then when you had your second child, if you have a second child or same thing with pets, same thing happens with pets. But if you have your second child, then you have the ground like the foundation of, okay, I know what to expect. Every child is different, but you have those foundational skills. I know that for the first two months, this is going to be freaking exhausting. I'm not going to get a lot of sleep, but it will pass. And I know that these are coping strategies to deal with that exhaustion and to have a newborn baby in the house. Seriously, when you create any sort of new product, it's just like having a newborn baby. You have to learn. You have to put in the time and the effort and there's times of exhaustion, and there are times of questioning, oh, my goodness, what did I do? It's the truth. With your products, it's so true. And with every product you create and launch, it gets easier. But every product is just like kids. They all come with their own unique challenges and successes and failures and things that you're going to learn with every single launch. But with every single one, it gets easier because you learn something every single time. And so although we've talked about those things that are hard, I want you to know what to expect, because when you know what to expect, then you know how to prepare. Because if I were to just say, hey, build this course, you are going to launch it, and you're going to make six figures. No matter what, you're going to be standing in front of your private jet like all the gurus out there. That's what's going to happen. And then you launched your course and you're like, wait a second, I have to be marketing this. Wait a second. I built it. And they didn't come like, I want to be honest with you so you know what to expect and know what to prepare for. And this podcast episode, I don't want you walking away from it feeling like, oh, there's no reason to do this because there is. Creating an online course truly is such an amazing experience. And when you have your course and those sales come in, it's so exciting to open your email or have that push notification on your phone that you made a sale. All of those things are so exciting. But there is work that's what I want you to know is that there's work that has to be done at every stage of the game to make it successful. So know that, know that going in. And like I always say, go in with the mindset of a scientist that you are going to experiment, test, try things, and tweak things until it works. And if it doesn't work out and the data shows that it didn't work out and it was a total flop, that doesn't mean that you as a person are a failure, and it doesn't mean that people don't like you. It's nothing personal. It truly is. Just like a scientist. Like, if a scientist puts two chemicals together and they totally flop and it doesn't work, they're not like, well, those chemicals hate me never going to work with chemicals again and walk away. That's not what happens. They're like, well, let me test something else that didn't work out the way that I thought it would and they test something else. It's the same. But they learned from it, right? It's the same thing with if you launch a product and it totally flops, it's a learning experience. You go, Well, I know what they don't want and I know what didn't work. So now what can I do to create what they do want and create something that does work? It's a learning experience. So go in with the mentality of, I am going to do this and I'm going to create success and I am going to hang on no matter what. This is where knowing your why and knowing your reasoning behind what you're doing is so very important because that's what keeps you hanging on. And when you know that this is the path that you want to take, that's why it's so important. It's on those hard days, you can dig into that and know your why. There's a quote by Conrad Hilton that says, success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. So I'm giving you permission to make the mistakes. I'm giving you permission to keep going even if it doesn't work out the first time. I'm giving you permission to believe in yourself. Because as we've just covered, there's a lot of untruths out there. I would say being marketed that people aren't talking about the truth about what it really looks like to build a successful online business and I wanted you to know what it truly looks like behind the scenes and the struggles and how you keep going even on those hard days and keep just like that quote said take action. Success seems to be connected with action so take action like we're talking about at the very beginning people who have overnight success, they never have overnight success. Overnight success is not a real thing. They've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes for a long time and no one knew about them until one action that they took something that they said or something that they did or some framework they came up with stuck and it went crazy. That's how quote unquote overnight success happens with action. Keep moving, take action, keep moving, make mistakes but don't quit. Know your why and don't quit. If you are ready to take action move forward and get your course created and have something out there that you can actually test and tweak and gain some data from So that you can become that overnight quote unquote overnight success. I invite you to join us inside of construct your course. Construct your course is the course that I created for busy people just like you. So if you've been stuck wondering how to get your course created how are you going to do it with a limited amount of time? This is your step by step simple guide to getting your course created in 90 days and in less than 2 hours per day. I know that you're busy. That's why I created it in this way so that you get a quick and to the point training and then you have the exact action steps to take to get to the next step. So again that's construct your course you can go grab that littlemisscoursecreator comcyc for construct your coursecyc and for a limited time you will get three free months inside the little miss course creator club Where you can get help from me to get your course marketed, launched, reviewed. I will look at your course I will give you personalized feedback on the things that you submit. So go grab that a littlemiscoursecreator comcyc. See you inside the course. Alright. I will see you next week. Same time, same place.