Why I Closed the Doors on an Evergreen Course
Four months ago, I opened registration on a course with the intention of keeping the doors open long-term. Our strategy has changed, and this new approach will actually be better for everyone involved.
The Backstory
In June of 2015, I launched my first video course, The Get Noticed!™ Theme Unlocked.
Registration was open for just ten days, and I generated roughly $10,000 in sales from a list of about 250 people (full story here).
Then I closed registration for three full months.
When I re-opened registration in September, I added a new twist to try something out.
We removed the lowest membership level, and replaced that with a free email series that acted as an evergreen funnel (because freemium).
From a bird’s eye perspective, the free email series looked like this:
- Email 1: “For starters, how can I help?“
- Emails 2-5: Tutorials
- Email 6: “Any questions so far?”
- Emails 7-9: Tutorials
- Email 10: Brief overview of the paid course
- Emails 11-12: Tutorials
- Emails 13-17: Series of pitches for the paid course
- Email 18: “Was it something I said?” (If they didn't buy)
It was nice! 99% of the work was automated within ConvertKit, and I had just over 200 subscribers go through the GNT Essentials series.
As planned, sales trickled in over the next few months. Eerily, my evergreen sales of $10,431 were almost exactly what the launch in June had brought in ($10,541.85).
The Inner Conflict
As I started gearing up to launch my next video course this year, I had two questions in particular that I couldn’t seem to shake (or answer):
- How do I position my platform marketing, when I'm offering more than one course?
- How do I serve both course audiences well, without stretching myself or my team too far?
About that time, Bryan Harris wrote a phenomenal blog post recapping his latest launch, and towards the end he went on a little rant that really hit home.
What if in 2016 we completely changed the way we did things?
What if in 2016 my #1 goal wasn’t to double launch revenue (which would be $1 mil and completely insane) but what if instead my #1 goal was the success of every reader of this blog and student of 10ksubs?
What if your #1 goal was similar?
What if it wasn’t about you and how much you wanted to make? What if instead it was 100% centered around the success of your customers?
And what if we all held each other publicly accountable for that goal
What if instead of selling courses or apps or coaching services and bragging about how much money we made…what if instead we bragged about how many people took our course and ACTUALLY GOT THE RESULTS THEY WERE AFTER!!??
I emphasized that last paragraph (though the caps were all Bryan) because it's exactly what I needed to hear.
Ever since I had created an evergreen course, my focus had been marketing. I had done nothing to update course videos or add new ones, even though I'd labeled an entire section “Coming Soon”.
(Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t abandon the course. I put my best man on the project, and he created some killer instructions to go along with each video―but I had not done my part.)
My New Mantra: Always Be Teaching
If a single week goes by where I haven’t created something educational to really help people, I’m wasting my time on all the wrong things.
For me, that means the new focus is more free tutorials, improved course content, and extra work poured into each blog post.
Want to truly serve your audience? Live out the mantra “Always be teaching”.
That also means registration closes for The Get Noticed!™ Theme Unlocked on February 16th, 2016.
Closing registration will allow us to transition the focus from marketing to education, and pull off three specific projects in the next several months:
- Update course content that no longer applies,
- Add missing course content that was promised long ago, and
- Move to a new system, that will make course creation easier from here on out.
We’ll re-open registration sometime in the Fall, and the plan is to have an open & close cart launch for every course we create, at least once a year.
This will make it easier to market one course at a time, and give us plenty of room to focus on serving our members we already have.
I hope you can learn something from this story, because that's now my #1 goal with every post.
Question: Have you ever been caught in well-intentioned motivations that led you astray?
