AmyPorterfield 2020 Course Creation Starter Kit PDF
AmyPorterfield 2020 Course Creation Starter Kit PDF
Course Creation
Starter Kit
BY
AMY PORTERFIELD
Imagine how it will feel when you create a profitable digital course in your business.
One that you can promote over and over again. Not only will you get to share your
knowledge and expertise with hundreds or even thousands of students all over the
world, but you’ll be able to do so with less stress and fewer skipped family meals than
your current situation demands of you.
Instead, you’ll be able to sit with your family and proudly share the fact that someone
in Australia, or Singapore, or Brazil just took your course and improved their life for
the better.
Can you even imagine that? Now that’s “next level” cool.
With a profitable digital course you’ll also get to officially escape the time-for-money
trap, and have the freedom to say “no” to opportunities or clients that don’t feel 100%
aligned with who you are and the life you want to live. (Oftentimes what you say “no”
to is just as important as the things you say “yes” to in your business!)
To help you kickstart your digital course journey, there are three important decisions
you need to make. The good news? Once you have all the details (which I’m going to
give you in this Starter Kit) they are pretty easy decisions to make!
Decision #1:
What will your course be about? What topic will spark the most interest and
engagement from your community so that they will be eager (and excited!) to buy?
Decision #2:
Decision #3:
What are you going to stop doing in your business once you’re generating revenue
with your digital course? (This one is an extra fun to explore, so we’ll keep it for the
final decision!)
01
What’s the Topic of Your Course?
One of the most powerful steps you can take right now to kickstart your
course creation journey is to get clear on your course topic. This one step
will put everything . . . and I mean everything . . . into motion.
At this point you might have a few ideas—or too many ideas—for your
first course, or maybe you feel stuck because you don’t have any ideas
that feel like they could be “the one.”
No matter where you are right now, the following creative strategies will
help you choose the perfect topic for your course –– the topic your ideal
potential customer genuinely wants and needs to learn, and the topic
you are genuinely excited to teach (because you know it well and love to
teach it!).
Before we jump into these strategies, there’s one concept you need to
understand that will help you narrow down your topic quickly. Your goal
is to find the sweet spot: the intersection between your skills and know-
how, a struggle or challenge your audience is facing (and will gladly pay
for the solution), and a topic that truly lights you up.
01 02
Your Skills and Your Audience’s
Know-How Struggles and
Challenges
03 04
Your Profit What Lights
Potential You up
They’re looking to you for a simple step-by-step framework to get them from point A to
point B, as fast as possible. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to be the foremost expert
in your field, or have all the answers; you just need to be a few steps ahead of your audience.
You must have a clear idea of what your ideal customer considers a “nice to have” solution,
as opposed to a “must have” solution. The two best ways I’ve discovered to understand my
audience’s struggles and challenges are by directly asking them and being a good listener
(whether in-person or online).
When your topic hits all four of these quadrants, you can’t lose. You will be on fire because
you’ll know you are moving in the right direction.
Now speaking of moving in the right direction: that’s precisely what we’re going to do next.
The following six creative strategies will help you choose the topic that your audience has
been dying for you to create –– so let’s get to it!
How to put this into action: For the next three days, write down every idea you have
for an online course. Feel free to type these out or capture them in the Notes app on
your phone as they come to you throughout the day; but I’d love for you to actually sit
down and have some “brain dump” sessions using an actual pen and paper for this
exercise—I’ve left you some space below.
Don’t judge your ideas as they come; just write them all down, the good, the bad and
the ugly. I don’t want you blocking your creativity or flow of ideas with the propensity
to edit. From there, take your list and try out one of the following strategies to zero in
on the ideas your ideal customer would want the most.
“If you could wave a magic wand and make your biggest (insert your niche
here) challenge disappear, what would it be?”
So if your niche was weight loss coaching, the question could look like one of these:
“If you could wave a magic wand and have your biggest weight loss challenge
disappear, what would it be?”
“If you could wave a magic wand and be able to lose 10 pounds this month, what
would that change in your life immediately?”
“If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate your biggest struggle around your
attempts to lose weight, what would that be?”
How to put this into action: In the next 48 hours, I want you to post on Facebook,
Twitter and/or Instagram and ask your followers a variation (use my wording or your
own) of the “Magic Wand” question. This one question can help you learn so much
about where your audience is struggling the most . . . so pay close attention!
Another great way is to create a simple poll on social media with your top three ideas
to choose from. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have easy polls to set up.
When you include your audience right from the start, they will become a part of your
course creation journey. When they feel like they are a part of your journey, they’re
more likely to buy when you’re ready to launch!
Important Note: Make sure you identify who you want responding to your poll. You
don’t want people who aren’t your ideal customer piping in with their two cents. Make
sure to say something like, “If you are (enter a very short ideal customer identifier), I’d
love to have your vote on which of the three course ideas would be most helpful
to you.”
How to put this into action: After you’ve done your brain dump of ideas and you’ve
posed your “Magic Wand” question and have some feedback, come up with a few
course topics and create a poll on social media for feedback.
How to put this into action: Think about how you’ve overcome obstacles and
struggles in all areas of your life. Also, consider the desires you had just a few years
ago—we’ve all had goals, dreams and things we wanted to happen in our lives, and
so we got to work and made it happen. Ask yourself, HOW did I make it happen?
What did I do to get what I wanted? Your course topic just might be waiting in your
answers to these simple questions!
Make sure not to make the mistake of collecting intel in groups where your peers are
hanging out vs. where your ideal customer is hanging out. There’s a difference! You
need to go where your potential customers are spending time and get in the trenches
and pay close attention to what they are talking about, asking about and sharing
the most.
Of course you can ask around for suggestions on Facebook groups, but you can also
search Google for “Best Facebook Groups to Learn How to do XYZ ( insert your
niche)” to find curated lists and investigate groups that have already been vetted.
How to put this into action: When you’re granted access to the group of your choice,
use the search box to enter keywords related to your course topic ideas.
For example, if you’ve been thinking about creating a Growing a Kitchen Garden
course and you’ve joined a Facebook group for vegetable and herb gardening,
then you could enter the word “how” or “help” to see what types of questions are
being asked in the group. You could also enter “herb garden” and see what types of
questions or conversations are taking place around that topic.
In fact, let’s make this ULTRA-ACTIONABLE and commit to getting them done within
the next seven days or less. Action creates momentum, and momentum creates
results. Open up your calendar right now, block some time to work on your strategies,
and then nail down that topic! #excited
If fear starts to creep in and you find yourself asking, “Am I even qualified to create
a digital course?” don’t let that fear take over! Choose a course topic where you’ve
gotten results for yourself or other people, so that you can teach the steps or process
you used to get the results.
Coming up with your course topic is a BIG deal and will kickstart your momentum.
Once you have your course topic brewing (you don’t have to have it 100% locked
in—give yourself a little space and time to develop it fully!), the next step is to start
thinking about the type of course you want to create.
Now I am not going to get into all the details here, but I’ll give you a little snapshot
to pique your curiosity. There are many types of digital courses; but to cut through all
the noise, I believe there are three that are the most profitable: the Starter Course, the
Spotlight Course, and the Signature Course
Here’s a quick snapshot of each of these three types of digital courses to help you to
decide which one is best for you and your audience.
Spotlight Course Example: A student of mine, Jamie Sears, created a $97 Spotlight
course focusing on instructing teachers how to teach writing to their students. Very
niche-focused and specific in just one area.
Signature Course Example: My course, Digital Course Academy, teaches the entire
system, from start to finish, on how to create and launch a digital course. The promise
is a profitable digital course that you can promote again and again to see consistent
revenue in your business.
10
02
What Are You Going to Name Your Course?
Once you’ve chosen a name for your course, something starts to shift.
Your whole digital course journey becomes more real, and things begin
moving forward quickly. It’s magical.
Your perfect course name may come to you in ten minutes, or it may
take a couple of hours; but don’t let yourself get stuck here. Your goal is to
choose a name so that you can move on to the more important decisions
and actions that will create life-changing impact in your business and the
people you serve.
11
These course names spell out the outcome they’ll help you to achieve, yet they leave
enough open for a potential student to imagine and define what that result might
look like in their own life. The result is clear, concise, and there’s no confusion on what
this course is about.
The “Result in the Title Course” is where I recommend most course creators start.
*Hint: You can ramp up the specificity of the result in the subtitle as I did with my
former course, Webinars That Convert:
“The complete A-Z Blueprint for creating and delivering high-converting webinar
funnels that flood your list full of raving fans, build massive trust and value, and quickly
put your scaled-up profits on autopilot.”
A good subtitle can ramp up any title! More on that in just a bit. Keep going!
Examples:
[For you copy geeks, you’ll find this played out in Level 3 of Gene Schwartz’s levels of
awareness model where the prospect is already “solution aware” and marketers are
working to expand on the claim of why theirs is better, bigger or faster.]
Use it only if you feel super CONFIDENT that anyone who joins your course can
achieve that specific outcome. Otherwise, you run the risk of coming off as hypey.
12
This type of course name takes you from an undesirable point “A” to a desirable point
“B.” Because they document the entire “hero’s journey” in an efficient, effective, and
easy-to-digest fashion, they also tend to perform really well. They establish the gap
right off the bat, which is the key to selling just about anything.
A side benefit of this course name is that it reels-in the scope of your course.
Did you come up with a signature system, process, or “formula” for achieving results
for your clients? Try giving it a streamlined (yet easy-to-remember) name, and enjoy
a subtle boost in credibility that comes from OWNING a particular system, method or
blueprint.
Warning: The names could be hit or miss. Unless you have existing clout in your field
(which adds a layer of believability that you can, in fact, invent a method), I’d wait on
this option until you’ve been in your industry for a bit.
13
These course names are creative, fun, semi-cryptic, and when done right, can open up
a powerful curiosity loop that encourages people to dive into your marketing in order
for you to close the sale. You can even get creative with the font treatment in your
course name to make the name pop, like the course name “ADvantage,” which is all
about Facebook ads.
A word of caution: You want to be careful to not be overly clever here. Make sure to
follow up the title with a strong subtitle that CLEARLY points to the result or outcome
your audience can expect.
It is what it says it is ;-) While any of these examples can be accused of not being
“spicy” enough, they also carry a certain self-assuredness that reflects the confidence
of the super-accomplished authors who created them.
It’s a great fallback that anybody can use—and it puts trust in your marketing
messaging to drive home the bigger “so what” aspects of why people should enroll.
“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place
for the next moment.” — Oprah Winfrey
14
w Chakras 101 with Yogi Cameron: How to Harness Your Spiritual Energy for Better
Sex, Better Sleep, and Better Moods
w Roadmap to Success: Taking Your Etsy Shop From a Side Hustle To a Full-Time
Income
w The Elimination Diet with Dr. Will Cole: A 60-Day Protocol to Uncover Food
Intolerances, Heal The Gut, and Feel Amazing
w Career Boost: The 5 Step Job Search Accelerator for Those Over 40
w The 7-Day Paleo Plan with Pete Evans: How To Regain Your Energy and Beat
Fatigue in Just One Week
w Webinars That Convert: The complete A-Z Blueprint for creating and delivering
high-converting webinar funnels that flood your list full of raving fans, build
massive trust and value, and quickly put your scaled-up profits on autopilot.
15
16
03
What Are You Going to Stop Doing in
Your Business?
One thing that is just as important as dreaming up your big
opportunities is to look at your non-negotiables: What are you NOT
willing to do or experience to get to your wildly successful year?
What are the things you’ve done or experienced that you’re done with?
What are the things you no longer want to experience again?
Going forward, when you need to make a decision on how you spend
your time or what you’ll do, what are your non-negotiables?
Your Turn: Grab a notebook and write down what you will NOT do next
year. Letting go is one of the most important things you can do to create
the business and life of your dreams . . . so don’t skip this important step!
17
Unlike other types of online businesses that suffer from too much complexity,
escalating overhead, and shrinking profits, a thriving digital course business can be
very simple to operate while still producing life-changing revenue and impact.
It’s the type of business that allows you to truly live life on your own terms while deeply
knowing that you’re serving your market and creating the impact you were meant
to make.
w You’re also perfect for a digital course business if you would rather enjoy the
time and lifestyle freedom with your family that a digital course business
provides, rather than hiring and managing a big (and expensive) team to run
an over-complicated business you don’t even enjoy.
The biggest mistake that most online entrepreneurs make is trying to do too many
things all at once. They hear about high-ticket coaching, consulting, masterminds,
membership sites, affiliate products, live events, etc. and try to build a business that
offers all of them — all at once.
18
In fact, a digital course business is the single most powerful and strategic way to
make an impact in the world while growing your income and freedom to
life-changing levels.
If (and only if) you want to add those other types of products later, your digital course
will serve as the backbone of your business that allows you to command higher fees
while “funding” the creation of your other products and services.
Stick with me and I’ll show you what it takes to move from feeling overwhelmed
and frustrated with your online business, to moving into becoming a digital course
business owner...one who only says yes to the projects that truly light you up!
Amy
19