Right now the online learning industry is valued at over $200 billion dollars, which means there’s a lot of money to be made in the online course space.
Take Ashley Fox, for example, she created The Wealth Builders community and launched it with a white-labeled branded app built on Mighty Pro and made $100,000 in her first two weeks teaching people about personal finance and investing. And Fox’s cunning launch strategy is what set her up for success.
We’ve gleaned five lessons from the launch of The Wealth Builders community that will help your online course business succeed.
1. Focus on the long-haul subscribers
While any paying member is better than not, creating long-term connections with your members will provide you with a greater reward.
Ashley Fox told us a bit about why this idea is important, “We’re building a multi-million dollar membership business with Mighty Pro with $500,000+ generated from the course and membership sales so far. 80% of our memberships are annual and we’ve made over six figures from just one course.” But how did Fox accomplish these impressive numbers? She built The Wealth Builders community with value in mind.
Instead of proposing to prospects that this course will change their lives, instead, Fox’s approach suggested that this course is only the tip of the iceberg. When people joined her community, they were getting a community of peers who were in the same boat, online courses, events, and more.
2. Create an environment around your course
Another thing Fox emphasized to us about her launch was the importance of building an “environment” around your content. She told us, “I always had this vision of having a community, but I didn’t want to be everybody’s financial advisor. And I didn’t want to leave people to fend for themselves either. I wanted to create an environment for them to thrive.”
So, what does that really mean? Many online course programs are solitary experiences where you watch prerecorded lessons and once you’re down, you’re gone. Fox views her community as a house. Each aspect of the community has its own room, and within those rooms are different expectations and experiences.
Most importantly, in a house, you should feel comfortable and connected with those you’re around. The same is true in this community. Why is this so important? When you create an environment around your course, your members won’t want to leave when they’ve completed the material.
In fact, they’ll want to contribute more which means less content generation for you and more member engagement and retention.
3. Have a migration plan ready to go
Launching a highly successful online course launch doesn’t happen by accident, you need a detailed plan of attack for migrating your audience over to your platform of choice and making sure they’re comfortable with the software.
If you’re looking to reach $100,000 in sales out of the gate then you probably have a decent following already. For Fox, she’d tried numerous platforms before choosing Mighty Pro and what she learned is migrating your audience slowly works well.
Fox migrated her community over to her branded app in 3 phases:
Early adopters were grandfathered into the app at a lower price.
Through creating an accelerator online course within The Wealth Builders app they got people comfortable with the software and navigation.
Finally, after these initial two phases, they launched to the public and within two weeks made over $100,000.
An important lesson Fox learned during the migration was the importance of owning your member data. When she left her last platform she didn’t have access to all of her data which made the migration process more cumbersome. But she got creative, instead of relying on just emails she sent text messages, made posts on social media, and told people to tell their friends.
4. Build more than just an online course
With Wealth Builders, Ashley Fox wanted to make more than just online courses for her community. Coupling her courses with other content like guides, coaching, private groups, and even a book club allowed her to build deeper connections between her members and get people to return buy more content.
An important thing to note is if you’re launching a new online course to add to your repertoire, consider using a platform that allows you to combine your courses with community. When you do this, all of the old content that you may not use anymore becomes new valuable assets that add value to your business.
Fox wants her community to be “the Netflix of finance,” and she accomplishes that by putting retired content into an ever-growing resource center within her branded app. Fox told us“We like to call ourselves the Netflix of finance because you have access to financial education in the palm of your hand. We do weekly classes. Pretty soon we’ll be doing in-person events. We do a lot of accelerators and challenges.”
This is a scalable approach that means each time you produce new content and experience for your business, it adds value to your community.
5. People will pay for your expertise
Finally, it’s always good to remember that people will pay for expert knowledge on a topic. So many online course creators sell themselves short. If you’re looking to accomplish a launch like Fox’s then you need to believe in your worth and charge for it.
Fox told us she began to realize this when she charged $10 for an online course thinking no one would take it, and 400 people signed up. This gave her the confidence to not only charge, but charge more for the invaluable perspective she was giving people.
Launching an online course and making $100,000 is not an easy task, but it’s also not an insurmountable one if you plan and are creative with your strategy.
Ashley Fox attributes building a branded app on Mighty Pro as being a key piece of the pie for having such a successful launch because it allowed her to create that “environment” around her course we talked about earlier. Additionally, it is a platform that is growing with her aspirations of making the “Netflix of finance.”
