What if almost everything you've been told about launching an online course is backwards? People spend weeks recording videos, building beautiful course portals and polishing every tiny detail. Then launch day comes and they discover the horrible truth:

Nobody wants it.

But some of the most successful online business owners do things very differently. People like Dan Henry, Daniel Priestley, BossBabe founder Natalie Ellis and other top online entrepreneurs use a much simpler approach. Instead of building a course and then trying to convince people to buy it, they find out what people will pay for before they build it.

It's called the Minim Method.

And this simple nine-step system could save you from wasting weeks or even months building the wrong thing.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

I've sold many millions of dollars of online courses and coaching programs. And today I want to show you what me and the top 1% of people do to make us successful doing this when most people actually fail. My friends and paying clients are some of the most successful online business owners in the world.

But what are people like Dan Henry, Daniel Priestly, Boss Babe founder Natalie Ellis and myself all doing? Well, the good news is that it is way simpler and way less glamorous and sexy than most people think. Behind all of this high production content and prestige, there is a really simple nine-step system that works time and time again. If you're frustrated with slow growth or you just want to get it right from the start, this is going to speed everything up, but not how you think.

Let me show you what is called the Minim Method. The name actually has a really cool double meaning that I think you'll really like, but we'll get into that in a second. So the way that most people launch an offer is wrong.

And it actually sets them up to fail and do it the hardest way. And that's not their fault. It's just what we've all been taught to do from all these gurus.

And also just by watching what it looks like the gurus are doing. The problem is you don't know what's going on inside of most of these gurus businesses. I have that privilege of working with many of them.

So I can see it from the inside out because most people have their offer and they feel like they're pushing that offer up a really steep mountain in an effort to try and get the right messaging and the right way of selling that thing so it just sells. And the way that we've all been taught to do is the hardest way of doing it. And that is what most people do because that's what it looks like from the outside of any one of these launches.

That's what it looks like is happening. But it's not what the small minority of the top 1% do to make millions and spend a lot of time leading these glamorous lives. So let's get into it.

And by the way, every week I make a brand new video like this. And I share how we grow businesses and give our clients more choice and more freedom. Make sure you hit subscribe on my channel or else you probably won't see my videos again and you'll miss out and that'll be really really sad.

And if I do say something that you like in this video hit the like button and I'll keep making more videos and more content on this exact sort of thing. So let's get into the Minim Method. The first piece of the 9-step method is the idea.

The first thing you need to do is come up with an offer that you think your audience will pay for. You need to think it works before we even go. And a really successful offer needs to appeal to the three P's.

They need to appeal to a specific person. So it's a person. Maybe you help women.

Maybe you help men. Maybe you help kids with something. Maybe you help older people.

What is the makeup of the person? And the second P is the problem. So a specific person with a specific problem. So what is the problem? Hey, I'm helping kids get through their maths exam at school.

Hey, I'm helping older people manage their finances. Hey, I'm helping a specific person might be a dance school instructor and the problem they've got is they don't know what to teach in tap dance lessons. That's the person and the problem.

And the final piece and really good offer needs to have is a really specific process. The reason that is really important and more important right now than ever, and that's the bit everyone's getting wrong, is if you don't share your unique process, people will think they've either heard it all before or they can just go to ChatGPT and get the answer for that. They can get their own program.

They can get their own fitness program from ChatGPT. They can't get your specific process. So you need the person, the problem, and the process.

That is going to give you an idea, which is the first step of this minimum method. Then what you don't want to do is rush ahead and just go out and start selling the thing or making the thing. The next thing we need to do is schedule.

We're going to schedule. We're going to block out the time slots to actually deliver this program live or to produce the product or service. So let's say I had an idea to deliver a brand new course about how to use other people's audiences in order to grow your email list.

That was my idea. It's to help coaches. It's to build your email list, and my process is a specific process around other people's audiences.

Other people's audiences becomes the process. What I'm then going to do is think, okay, I need to now probably teach that over four sessions, which are about an hour each. So I'm going to put in a session next Tuesday, a session next Thursday, then the following Tuesday, then the following Thursday.

So I'm going to put those blocks in my calendar for when I'm going to show up and teach the class live to the people who buy it. If it's a case you need to pre-record stuff, you're going to put in your calendar the exact dates of the time blocks. You're going to plan the session, record the session.

You're going to carve out the time so you are ready and prepared to go and make the content, but you are not going to go and make the course. The big mistake people make here is they go and make the course and then they feel like they owe it to the course to actually get the thing to sell. There have been a number of times when I've had all these great ideas from my deep understanding of my audience and the problems they've got.

I had a unique process. It's been great. I've scheduled out the time and no one cared.

It's just loads. There's just loads of them. There's been a whole bunch of times when I've scheduled out the time to record this stuff.

So step three is messaging. You are going to write out the sales page or you're going to write out your video script and record the video script and you're going to put that up. Now, what's really beautiful is you have not yet built the program.

You haven't recorded a single piece of content video, nothing like that, because when you are writing the messaging before the program exists, that means you can write the best, most compelling sales content ever without the restrictions of what's already in the offer. If there's already an offer that you're trying to write sales before, you're restricted within what's already in the offer. But if the offer doesn't exist yet, you can dream, you can daydream and build up this really good offer.

And that means as you're writing the sales material, you think, oh, do you know what? At this point, they're going to have this objection, or actually they really need help with this. And you can add that into the offer because you haven't built the offer yet, right? You're almost allowing the offer to emerge and present itself to you in detail by writing the sales copy first. It's an old trick that the top direct response companies in the world use to sell lots of offers.

So now what we've got is we've got an idea, we've blocked out the time, we've written our sales page so we can actually communicate what this exciting offer is. We're then going to send traffic. So the fourth element of this is traffic.

We're going to get some eyes onto that page and see anyone will buy it. So on that page, we're going to tell them, it's going to be built live with you. We're going to create it live, or you're going to attend the live classes.

There's no expectation. No one's going to get let down. So you're going to put social posts out there.

You're going to maybe email your list or maybe a small testing ad budget would be ideal. So now we've got a whole bunch of people going to that page. And now it's time for the most important part, which is step number five, decide.

You have to decide based on the results of the test we've just done. You've sent a few hundred people to the page. Did enough people buy to give you the indication that this is something people actually want? And if they did not, which is going to be most of the time, just so you know, it's going to be most of the time, they're going to go to the page and go, I don't really care about that.

And they're not going to buy. And if they don't buy, you are going to go back around and start the loop again. You're going to go back and have a new idea.

Then you're going to schedule the time. Then you are going to write the messaging. And then you're going to send the traffic.

And then you're going to decide again. And you keep going round in that loop until the decision is, wow, people bought it. People cared enough about this angle, this idea, this piece of content that they actually put their money where their mouth is.

And then when that happens, that's when we escape the loop and we go up to deliver. So when you hit an idea that people do buy, now you actually deliver on those dates. So it comes to the next Tuesday, you show up and you deliver the first session.

The Thursday, you deliver the next session. You deliver the whole program. Then here's the really ninja bit.

The next piece is that you're going to get feedback. At the end of each session, let's say it's a four session course you're recording over a couple of weeks, and you're doing it live. At the end of each module, so you teach module one, everyone's there, they bought it, you're delivering it, it's really good.

And at the end of the session, you say, great, now it's time for questions. So they ask questions. And after that session, you get your AI that was tuned in to the class and you get it to give you a list of all the questions people asked.

That is a list of things that were not clear, that were not precisely delivered and people need more information on and more clarity on in the course. So you're actually getting those people who are there live to help you improve the course. So once you have that feedback from the Q&A, you answer everyone's questions, what you then do, show up to session number two and you start session number two off with a recap of session number one of that previous session.

And that recap is where you re-answer and re-address all of the questions that were asked at the end of module one of that previous module. Why do you do that? Even though you answered the questions on the previous session, it's because the Q&A part that you had at the end of each session, that's gonna be cut out of the recording when you sell it later. But the recap of like, hey, welcome to module two, back in module one, we talked about that recap bit is gonna be included in the recording, okay? So now what you've got is you've got all this additional recapped information, which has basically answering the questions that needed more clarification from the previous day and you're making a better program, which gets people better comprehension, better understanding, more confidence and of course, way better results.

It works really well. So the people in your program who are studying it live are actually helping you improve the program for you. And then the ninth step of this is scale.

At the end of this process, you now have a fully recorded program. You got paid to teach the program and we'll talk about pricing in a second. There's a big pricing mistake people make with this, which I'm gonna give you the solution to in a second because it will cost you a fortune if you don't do it.

But yeah, you got paid to teach it. Then in paying for attendance and paying you to teach it, your clients actually told you what they wanted to buy and they validated the offer and they helped you improve it. And they did all of that with both their money and their time, not just putting their name onto a wait list.

So now you know you've got a proven program that people wanna buy. You can now sell the recordings for people to access. You can do it through a launch.

You could do it by making it evergreen. Here's a big mistake that people make when they're doing this. When they launch this live, they make it a discounted price and say, oh, it's gonna be $2,000 when we put it on sale, but you're gonna be first.

You're gonna get in. It's gonna be live. So it's only $1,000.

Big mistake for a whole bunch of reasons. I really want you to pay really close attention. I see people making this mistake all the time.

The people who are getting in first, who are getting this information first, they want this information. That's a premium buyer. You should be charging more for the live version for that one reason.

Not to mention the second reason it should be more is because they're getting the live Q&A. People who buy the recordings of the program later, which are on Evergreen, like just a self-study course, they're not gonna get access to you and that Q&A. So again, that live access to you is a premium position for you because you're their expert.

You're gonna give them personal time and attention. And there's one other reason. So when you do it for that very first time, and that's other reasons, the biggest reason, by the way, when you first teach it and you teach it live, it's gonna be more expensive than when they get the recordings on sale.

So when you teach this live, make sure that you are charging more than you're gonna charge for the recorded version of the course later. Because there's one more reason, and it's a marketing reason that will help you sell more of the recordings. People always say to me, well, it sold really well when I did it live, but the recordings didn't sell super well.

Well, usually that's because they haven't pre-validated it. That's cool. So we've already solved that through this minimum process.

But the other thing you can do when you put it on sale as a course that they can buy and study self-paced, you can say, hey, people in the past paid $2,000 for this. You're getting access for just 1,000. You're positioning the future one as discounted.

You can't do that if you discounted the first one. Really, really, really important. We call this the minimum process for two reasons, by the way, because I know you're wondering.

One, because when you draw it out, it looks like a minimum, like a musical note. And secondly, it's the minimum viable funnel that you need to put together to validate an idea so you don't waste a lot of time. Now, the really important thing you've got to do now is make sure you land that messaging part.

Otherwise, it's not going to work. All of this falls apart. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to craft the perfect messaging that actually sells your offer.

Go check that one out.