As I reflect today I am feeling super blessed that I listened to my intuition and leapt with faith 3.5 years ago. What happened you ask? I had huge epiphany in Peru late 2011 after leading a retreat. I was up in the mountains on a three week solo vision quest when the inspiration hit me hard and I decided to go from leading small meditation circles to putting all of my work online in the form of eCourses. Since that moment SO MUCH has changed. I have since launched FIVE of my own eCourses which have spread to people in more than 25 countries. That’s almost more countries than people in the little tiny town I grew up in!
Plus I have been helping about 50 other creators launch their first eCourses over the course of this last year.
When I got started I had NO IDEA how to do this work. It was like a foreign language and I didn’t have a translator to guide me. My first course was a 40 Day Meditation Vision Quest and because I didn’t know how to do auto-responders I just sent the emails out manually everyday. The technology I had for the audios and videos was extremely low quality and looking back I am amazed that people even loved the program (but they did).
My eCourses have been a labour of love. I couldn’t even tell you how many hundreds of hours (or thousands) I have put into building my courses, rebuilding them and rebuilding them again. I am so meticulous, always wondering how I can make them better, more beautiful and more easy for participants to use and enjoy. I honestly love it so much when I get to hear about their transformations or the gratitude they feel after going through one of my programs. It’s the coolest!
So my second eCourse, was a 21 day meditation program and I actually created and launched it over the course of 8-days (from the conception of the idea to launching and making money). It was hardcore! I literally did my whole product launch while sitting in the Eden Hot Springs in Arizona at a Retreat with all of my Soul Family. I didn’t even have internet access to see if it was working, but sure enough, I checked my email a few days after launching and I’d made enough money to pay for my trip! This was when I realized the possibilities for what I could do with my lifestyle were literally endless!
Turning my work, life experience and workshop content into online programs has been life changing. In my first year of launching I replaced my income from the previous year JUST in online sales (probably about $25,000) – I was really struggling financially so to match my income from the year before in just passive income was a huge win! Three years later, Celeste and I are now living on Salt Spring Island and up until recently I had never even made a penny living on this island – it was all through online coaching and eCourse sales.
It has also allowed me the freedom to pursue a lifelong dream of playing professional golf (the whole reason I dropped out of college and got into business). After over a decade of hard work and focus as I’ve built my business I am finally entering my first professional golf tournaments. I feel like a new-born. It’s the greatest feeling ever and at the same time it’s a little wild to go from “Dreaming” for so many freaking years to “Living the Dream” now!
As I continued to refine my own courses and launch new ones, I started having other coaches and friends doing great work ask me how to create courses of their own. That was when I started looking at my process from a bird’s eye view and mapping out every step I take, every time I create a course.
I have now got it down to a science; or a Blueprint for that matter.
When launching an eCourse (whether for myself or someone else) I take the nine steps below. These nine steps are actually the three modules and nine lessons from which I’ve built my entire eCourse Creation Blueprint, an online training platform that supports coaches, creators and transformational facilitators to create epic eCourses with way more ease and support than I had when I got started.
STEP ONE: “Getting Clear on Why, What & Who”
Lesson One: Life Alignment & Visioning Exercise (identifying clarity of purpose)
Lesson Two: Exploring your Personal Story & Gifts in relationship to your eCourse
Lesson Three: Understanding Who your Customer is & What they Need
STEP TWO: “Pulling it All Together”
Lesson One: “Exercises for Creating all your eCourse Content and Processes”
Lesson Two: “Storyboarding + Recording your Audios & Videos”
Lesson Three: “Uploading Content to your Membership Site”
STEP THREE: “Systemizing, Strategizing and Launching”
Lesson One: “Setting up your Auto-responder Emails”
Lesson Two: “Creating a Sales Page that Sells + Setting up Shopping Cart & Affiliate System”
Lesson Three: “Marketing Strategies and Getting Launched Successfully”
The whole process of creating and launching eCourses is a creative vision quest. Most of the big marketing gurus won’t say this, but it is totally a journey of self discovery where you must dig deep to pull out what you really want to share, what’s relevant to share and what your customer avatar needs you to share based on where they’re at. It’s honestly been one of the most rewarding, powerful, transformational things I’ve ever done AND it’s helped me grow my business, expand my ripple globally and create the life of my dreams.
