In this episode, host Julie Hood shares how to create a Revenue Model for your course creation business - and what you should consider along the way. She shares her hard-won experience from years of building online businesses AND gives you a tool to create your own Revenue Model.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares how to create a Revenue Model for your course creation business - and what you should consider along the way. She shares her hard-won experience from years of building online businesses AND gives you a tool to create your own Revenue Model.
LINKS MENTIONED
Get your copy of the Revenue Model Spreadsheet (use File > Make a Copy).
Get Russell Brunson's Dot Com Secrets book (page 46 talks about the Value Ladder).
Melanie Benson's Profit Explosion Toolkit also discusses revenue models at a deeper level.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As a business owner, you get to decide what your Revenue Model is... what products you will offer and at what price points. This episode walks through some of the decisions to make.
“When you focus on the outcome rather than the obstacle, your life will never be the same.” - Dean Graziosi
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Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood
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This week. I want to let you in on a little history, how my time in the corporate world can make you a much more successful course. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. So I don't mention it very often, but back in the day I used to,
to be a CPA and no, not the kind That does your taxes. I was a corporate auditor for fortune 500 companies for six years. And I was initially hired to join the computer audit division because of my computer science degree. But back then, because we work so closely with the financial auditors, they had us spend two years as a financial auditor first.
So I spent a couple of years looking at a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of financial statements. I learned a lot and also realized that was not where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. But today I want to share some of that hard won knowledge with you so that you can have a much better course business. We're going to talk today about your revenue model.
And in another show later, I'll talk about expenses and profit. But today I really want to focus on revenue and helping you plan a revenue model that works for you and your business. So let's start first. What exactly is a revenue model? So it's a spreadsheet that lists the different products and services that you sell, the estimated prices that you think you'll be able to charge.
And then you multiply that times, the quantity of items that you think you'll be able to sell. And then when you add these all up, you get a total revenue for the year. So I created an example for you, just go to coursecreatorshq.com/33 that's coursecreatorshq.com/33. And you can get the link to the spreadsheet that I created for you.
So if you don't like to do math, let the Google sheet do all the math for you, but there's some examples there that I want to walk us through. So one of your biggest decisions actually, as a business owner, is planning out what your revenue model is going to be. And actually my opinion is that owning a business is just one big series of choices and decisions.
And your revenue model is one of the most flexible. So you have a lot of leeway with how this is going to work, but it's also one of the most important as far as determining whether or not you're going to be successful. So way back in the day when I very first started online, I created an ebook that had everything I knew in it.
It talked about helping writers get organized. I spent a year pulling it together and guess what? I only charged $14.95 cents for this ebook. And people loved it sold really well, but you really have to sell a lot of books in order to make that a viable long-term business. And then when I tried to take that market to the next level and get them to pay for it for more things,
I learned that that market was not really open to paying for higher priced courses and workshops and, and different things with me. So that was a very good lesson. Number one, don't put everything, you know, into your first initial product. And number two, make sure your price points are high enough that it can support your long-term business. And so that's why I really wanted to talk about this revenue model concept today and want to have you headed down a better path from the beginning of knowing,
okay, this is where I want my business to go. This is the direction that I want my sales and my revenue to take. Okay. So start by asking yourself what it is that you want to offer in your business and what some potential price points are. So I'm going to give you some examples and I want to tell you, you don't have to have all of these offers,
pick the ones that resonate for you. Pick the ones that you think you'll most enjoy providing to your customers. Pick the ones that are the fastest for you to create, pick the ones that you feel most comfortable with, but let's run through these real quick. So first off, obviously at the top of the list is an online course and price ranges for these generally run anywhere from a hundred dollars to $5,000.
Usually when you get past the $5,000 mark, there's more involved than just an online course that someone takes by themselves. A mini course, I consider those anything between $17 and $97. Some people even give mini courses away for free to build their email list. So those are a great way to get people started with you. They get a chance to experience what you're like and how you teach.
And it's not a big revenue, commitment or payment commitment on their end. Then you might also have some kind of coaching that you do, maybe one-on-one coaching or group coaching. You might also have done for you services. So my team and I help people create and publish their mini courses and our prices will start at $1,500 for that. And then they go way up from there,
depending on how big the courses. And then you could also do done with you services, where someone gets help from you for different pieces of the project, but they work with you and not, you don't do it all for them, or you don't have like online courses. I consider more of a DIY. So they're taking your course in there, they're doing it all on their own and then freelancing services.
And this is one of the ways that I actually got started in between doing the e-book and doing course creators. HQ was actually doing some work for a regular income, regular services for my clients. You might also have a book. Generally, those are under $30. You might have a membership site or some kind of continuity recurring income program. You might want to do live events or even virtual events that people pay.
You might do workshops. So anywhere from half day to full day to two or three day workshops, or you might even have a mastermind program where you pull a group of people together and they pay you to be part of a mastermind. So the basic concept, as we're thinking about your revenue model is that you want to have at least one free offer.
One low cost offer one mid priced offer and one high priced offer. And you'll see in the spreadsheet, when you take a look at that, that these four items can get you to a six figure business or all the way up to a $2 million business, depending on how many you sell and at what price points. So you can use file, make a copy on that spreadsheet.
And Google sheets will let you create your own version of it and then play with the numbers, try out different price points, tire, different sales numbers, and you'll can see how much the revenue can fluctuate just as you're adjusting the numbers up and down. And maybe you want to have more offerings. So instead of one mid priced offer, you have three or four play with that.
See what kind of numbers you end up with. And the fun part about this is actually that getting to determine what you offer. That's you getting to be the business owner. You don't have a boss telling you, this is what we're going to do. You get to decide what am I going to offer and how am I then going to reach all my potential customers.
So Russell Brunson talks about this revenue model process very heavily in his books. And so he calls it the value ladder. And if you have his.com secrets book, you can read all about it. On page 46, he goes into a lot more depth on how this all fits together, how you could potentially work, work through it and pull out different options of your value ladder.
So I'll link to that in the show notes, at coursecreatorshq.com/33. His basic concept is that you introduce people to you and your business with low costs, introductory items. So a lot of times you can get his books for free, just pay shipping, and then he works you up. The different offers that he has. So when you like what you get for free,
then you listen and jump into the next thing and then you'll move up the ladder onto his next thing and his next thing. And eventually at the end, you're paying a very high priced fee to work with him. And then another person who teaches this is Melanie Benson, and I'm going through her profit explosion toolkit right now. And I really like how she's pulled all this information together.
So check out her profit explosion toolkit. That'll be in the show notes too. So if you want to get some more opinions and some more advice on how this could all work. So that's the general concept of your revenue model. We're going to figure out how many we're going to sell at what price point and add that all up and see what the total revenue could be.
And you notice I started you with that low price, mid price, high price offer. So I've listened to some other experts who say that you should start with the high price offers. And the reason is then you can get some revenue in the door, you get some money to get your business going, and you can use it to pay for some team members and some help.
So I really do like the idea behind that because it takes away a lot of the pressure. And instead of selling tons and tons of $37 low price items, that don't make you a lot of money, you can get some high price offers and get some things going. So this, I mentioned earlier that having some kind of either freelance services or high price offers,
if you feel comfortable getting those going, that can be a great way to get started, and you can use some of that money to fuel the rest of your business. So that's sort of how my business has evolved. Over the years, I was doing a lot of freelancing support for other people, and that helped expand. Then when I got to the point where I wanted to do course creators HQ,
I had some play money to be able to use, to help fund it. So be sure and let yourself brainstorm on how all these different pieces of the puzzle could fit together for you. You know, what is it that you really like to do? What do you enjoy helping people and how do you like to serve your clients? And I'm also going to give you permission.
You may not know the answers to these questions yet, especially if you're just getting started. You may not know which pieces of the puzzle you like to do, or don't like to do so years ago, when WordPress software first came out for doing websites, I actually offered a service where I set up WordPress websites for people. And I learned the hard way that I really didn't like doing that service it,
I didn't price it well. And I also took on a couple of nightmare clients at too low of a price and realized this was not the longterm path that I wanted. So I quit offering that service. It came off my revenue model, but we have shifted it. So that experience was useful. We're now helping people set up Kajabi. And so we're doing websites in a much,
much easier way for me, and in a much better way for my clients. And since we're focusing on courses, Kajabi is the perfect place for me to send them to and get them set up on. So that just took experience. There was no way I would have known that ahead of time. I just had to try it out and see how it went and,
and try to fix it along the way. So the great news about all of this is you get to decide, you get to pick as the business owner. There's no boss standing over you saying, you must do it this way. You get to decide so you can get input from different coaches and gurus, but ultimately it's your choice. So that's the fun part of being a business owner.
And then one last piece of advice I would give you as you're working through your revenue model is think about how you want to sell in general. Once you hit a $2,000 price point or higher, you'll need to have sales conversations with your prospects. And that honestly becomes a little bit more challenging if you're trying to scale, because you only have so much time in your day.
So you may need to add in a sales team to help you sell these higher price items, especially if you want to sell a lot of them. Now, I'm going to put a caveat on this and say that this is in general because there are some very well known experts who sell their $2,000 programs and courses from a webinar. And so it can be done.
I'm not saying you, you have to have sales conversations, but just in general, when people want to pay that much, they want to talk to somebody first. So this may impact sort of how you pick the pieces of your revenue model and how you decide, what am I going to offer, and am I going to offer those higher priced programs?
If I am, what kind of sales method will I be using to help promote it and get in front of my potential students? So please, please let me know how this goes for you. I really want to hear about your revenue model and what you've put together, how it's falling into place, what you like. And don't like, you know,
message me on Instagram, chat with me on clubhouse. Let's have a conversation about it so I can help you as you're playing through what your revenue model could look like. So I'll end today with a quote that came across my email from Dean Graziosi. And he said, when you focus on the outcome, rather than the obstacle, your life will never be the same.
So let's focus on the outcome today and just imagine what your revenue model could look like, play with that spreadsheet. And let's get you to some revenue models that you are so excited about and so thrilled to have. So thanks for joining me today. I truly appreciate getting the space in your podcast app. I thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing.
And if you enjoyed this podcast, if you learn something today, I'd really appreciate it. If you could give us a five-star review, they help us get our message out to more potential Courses, creators, because then the apps will share the podcast. So thanks so much. I can't wait to chat with you again next week. Have a fantastic week,
stay safe and stay well, take care.