TCC Podcast #255: Become a Better Course Creator with Jennifer Duann Fultz

Jennifer Duann Fultz disrupts the status quo on the 255th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast. Jennifer is the founder and CEO of Chief Executive Auntie, a business aimed to teach WOC business owners how to make more money online through course creation. Interested in creating a better course experience for your students? Tune into the episode to find out how.

It breaks down like this:

• The importance of promoting alternative and diverse voices.
• Money mindset and how it can affect your life (and business).
• The stories that are deeply rooted in us from the way we grow up.
• Why you don’t need to attract every single person into your course. (It’s okay to repel people.)
• How using your background can propel your business forward.
• The better way to create a course and guide students to an outcome.
• How to be the guide your students need and understand where they are coming from.
• Why you need to prime your students before they reach the next level.
• Customer research and the effect it has on your course creation.
• Increasing course completion rates and being selective on who joins your program.
• Building a lead magnet that will actually help your ideal prospects.
• Figuring out your strengths and not being tempted to try and do everything.
• The reality of passive income. (Is it even a thing?)
• Shifting from employee mindset to CEO mindset and knowing when it’s okay to step away.
• Being multi-passionate and creating structure to get things done.
• When it’s time to hire help in your business in order to avoid burnout.

Become a better course creator by listening to the episode or checking out the transcript below.

 

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Christy’s website
Jennifer’s website

 

Full Transcript:

Rob:  A lot of copywriters buy courses, or write for course creators, or have created their own courses as part of their work. And lately, there seems to be a sense that courses may not be as easy to create and sell as they once were. Some course creators have been criticized for low completion rates. We’ve heard numbers as low as 4% of people buying courses that actually finish the course. Or they’re criticized for signing up students who shouldn’t be in a course in the first place.

Our guest for the 255th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Jennifer Duann Fultz. And she knows a thing or two about creating and selling courses because that’s what she does in her business. So I asked her about these challenges and a lot more. But first, let me introduce my co-host for today, Christy Cegelski. Christy is a copywriter who specializes in copy that connects, captivates, and converts. She is a Think Tank member and host of her own podcast, The Captivate and Convert Podcast. I was lucky enough to be featured with Kira as a guest on that podcast. I think if I’m remembering right, it was Episode 29 right in there somewhere.

Christy:  Somewhere around there, yeah.

Rob:  Yeah, I think I’m like, one of two male guests that you’ve had in the runs of our site. I feel kind of lucky to be included amongst so many brilliant women.

Christy:  Yeah.

Rob:  But, yeah. Welcome, Christy. Thanks for joining.

Christy:  Well, thanks for having me. This is exciting. I’ve never been a co-host.

Rob:  Well, and now you are. So yeah, I mean, we can maybe make this permanent if it turns out well.

Christy:  Check.

Rob:  This is your audition.

Christy:  Check.

Rob:  I like it. If you want to know more about Christy, you can see her at christycegelski.com. Of course, subscribe to her podcast, The Captivate and Convert Podcast. She was actually a guest on our own podcast, Episode number 226. About what? That was probably five, six months ago now.

Christy:  Yeah.

Rob:  A really good interview about what you’ve done in your business and how your businesses has grown and developed from product marketing to what you do today, helping people actually connect with their clients. It’s a great interview.

Christy:  Thank you. I got a lot of messages about it. It’s funny because I totally felt like I bombed it, but hey, if somebody got something out of it, it’s all good.

Rob:  It definitely did not bomb. I’m excited to talk about Jennifer’s interview here in just a second. But before we get to that, let’s mention that this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank. That’s our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to do more in their business. Maybe you’ve dreamed of stepping on stage or creating a new product or a podcast or a video channel or maybe you want to build an agency or a product company, or maybe you just want to become the best known copywriter in your niche, the person that high paying clients call because your name is the one that everyone in your industry knows. That’s the kind of thing that we focus on in the Think Tank. If you’d like to learn more, visit copywriterthinktank.com.

Okay. Now that we’ve got all of that out of the way, let’s start our interview with Jennifer’s story and how she became an online course creator and Chief Executive Auntie.

Jennifer:  I taught high school science for a total of three years. During those years, and in between those years, I sort of dabbled in freelance digital marketing and photography. But after I became a parent, I started my current business, largely because I didn’t think I could be both the type of parent and the type of teacher I wanted to be at the same time. And now that my child is in kindergarten and I have met their teacher, I was like, “I was right. I don’t think I could do this”. And so, I started my business and I originally tried to be a chirpy white mommy blogger, which didn’t work for a lot of reasons, and about to the end. I did a lot of freelance; web design, content writing, dabbled in some other document design type of things, and didn’t really have a clear vision of what I wanted to do besides make a bit of money in a small amount of time.

But in 2019, I did something called the Year of Asian Reading Challenge, which is hosted on a couple of book blogs. It was a really good experience for me just as a person because I thought it would be really hard to find books by Asian and Asian American writers, and it wasn’t. The only time I had to sort of break that streak of reading only books by Asian and Asian-American writers was when I wanted to read about business. After looking and looking and looking, and I did start to find more Asian American business owners, but there still weren’t a lot of resources out there so I do what I typically do, which is decided to make my own resources about business from one Asian American perspective. And I say from one Asian American perspective because there’s very many different Asian American experiences, and mine is just one of them.

That’s how the Chief Executive Auntie persona was kind of born. I took the… And I feel like it’s not limited to just Asians. I feel like every person on earth understands what the well-meaning kind of nosy, kind of loud truth-telling telling auntie in their life is like. And so, that’s kind of where she came from.

Rob:  Nice.

Jennifer:  It was from that experience.

Rob:  Okay, cool. I want to ask more about that. But first, tell us a little bit more about the Asian reading experience, like some of your favorite books that came out of that in case some of our listeners would like to be pointed in that direction. Because you’re right, and we’ve actually talked about this before in the podcast especially when it comes to marketing. It’s overwhelmingly male, it’s overwhelmingly white. There’s not a lot we can necessarily do about the history, but there’s definitely a lot of things we can do moving forward doing the right voices. So for those who might be saying, “Yeah, I actually haven’t read a lot of Asian writers,” give us a couple of your favorites just so we have a place to start.

Jennifer:  Yeah. I think I probably have a list on my personal blog somewhere. If I find it, I’ll send it to you.

Rob:  Okay.

Jennifer:  But some of my favorite authors that I found in that time, Ken Liu. If you like science fiction fantasy, he writes both. In 2019, I think I read one of his fantasy books, but then I later got a book of science fiction short stories that I really liked called The Paper Menagerie. Rebecca Kuang; she writes fantasy that is based on and informed by the history of 20th century China. And kind of a side note. I didn’t learn Asian history, any of it really in school. If anything, it was just… Even World War II, where Asia’s kind of a big deal, you know? Just minor detail. There wasn’t a lot discussed about the Pacific front besides really the atomic bomb at least in my schooling experience.

And so, I learned a lot… What history and culture that I did learn about China and Taiwan has come a lot of times from fiction and from memoir because it’s not covered in the textbook. So just kind of a side note there.

Speaking of memoir, Two Trees Make a Forest, which is an eco memoir, kind of about the nature and heritage of Taiwan, which is where my parents are from. I’m kind of blanking a little bit. I’ll see if I can find that list to share with you.

Rob:  Okay. If you share that, we can link to that so that people can clue in there, but I appreciate that. As somebody, I mean, similar school experience, a little bit of discussion in World War II. I did take an Asian History class in college, but that’s not taught to everybody, right? So I appreciate you sharing that.

Okay. Let’s go back to then starting Chief Executive Auntie. How did you get started? What services did you start offering? How’d you find your first clients? Let’s talk about that.

Jennifer:  Yeah. Auntie doesn’t have a… I don’t do a lot of services under the Auntie brand. It’s really more of a knowledge source. I teach workshops and courses kind of underneath that umbrella. I don’t really provide any direct services, but the topics… I just started talking about business, and again, just using that Auntie persona and perspective.

Pricing is always a topic that got a lot of interest. And this is not by any means unique to, or exclusive to Asian-Americans, but I think it shows up in greater frequency. But just the idea of like, for those of us who are second generation or even first-generation immigrants, we typically come from a background of scarcity. I’m one generation removed from pit toilets and no indoor plumbing. One side of my family were refugees from the Chinese Civil War. We come from a place of scarcity, and I think that shows up in how we think about money, even though for me I have never been poor in my life. But because of how my parents grew up and then how they raised us, I grew up thinking like, “Oh my gosh, money is this magical thing that I have to save and make as much of as possible.”

And then eventually, it kind of, in the course of running my business, I realized, “You know, I could spend a little money to outsource this task or purchase this tool. That would save me a lot of time, which I could then turn around and use to go make more money.” But if you’re stuck in the, just save, save, save, save, save mentality, which again is not limited to Asian Americans, but if you’re stuck in that, you limit your own growth with that belief.

And again, none of these things are exclusive to Asian Americans, but these are the things, these are the questions that showed up a lot, like, “My parents would never pay this much for whatever luxury service you’re providing.” And when you are trying to survive, everything is a luxury besides food and water and shelter. And so, seeing your photography, “Why are you going to pay $500 for someone to take pictures of you? Are you out of your mind?” And you just can’t get that out of your head.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who are like, “I don’t have an English presenting name. And so what if clients think I can’t write English because they can’t pronounce my name?” And I’m like, “I don’t have a great answer for that.” But these are the things that don’t often get talked about, at least in my experience in sort of the online business community. So these are the sorts of things that I wanted to touch on. But also on a more simpler level, just representation really, really matters. I didn’t meet an Asian American who made their living by writing until probably three or four years ago. So I didn’t know it was possible. So I was always trying to be something that I wasn’t. And so, just running my business as an Asian American, that’s kind of my main motivation for trying to be visible. At least have certain parts of my business be very visible just to show people, “Hey, this is possible, and this is what it looks like.”

I think typically it’s not lack of desire or lack of wanting to do to start a business. It’s just you’re not able to imagine that because I mean, I think for a lot of us just with even just the generational gap like, “You make money by making things on the internet?” It’s something that our parents could never have imagined. And so it’s just a matter of showing them, “Hey, this is possible.”

Rob:  I like it. Yeah. I’m curious. As you started doing this and representing your community in this space, how much did it resonate with your community versus people of all colors, right? Because what you’re talking about actually impacts all of us. And so I’m just curious how that all came together.

Jennifer:  Yeah. I think when I sort of first started embracing the Auntie brand, I was a little bit more active in some online spaces that were geared specifically towards Asian Americans. There’s a group called Asian Creative Network on Facebook. And then, I don’t know. Probably sometime last year I just sort of left that platform completely and focused just on Instagram, which was a slightly more enjoyable experience for me. There aren’t really groups on Instagram so it was just kind of like whoever was discovering my account interacting at least with me. So it kind of diversified a little bit.

I’ve been rather selective in the clients that I work with, the other business owners that I partner with, just people that share the same values that I feel safe in my identity with. And so, I guess there’s a little bit of self-selection in there. And I never claimed to say I am speaking on behalf of all Asian Americans.

Rob:  Sure.

Jennifer:  But I also don’t try to tone down that part anymore. In my welcome email sequence, I say like, “If you’re not Asian-American, you are absolutely welcome here, but just be aware that this is the perspective that I’m going to be speaking from. If eventually you decide that it’s not for you, then that’s okay, but this is where I’m going to be starting from.”

Rob:  I like that. Have you had negative pushback? Have you had people offended by that or respond poorly?

Jennifer:  I do have a headline on my Chief Executive Auntie website that says, Bust through imposter syndrome with the confidence of a mediocre white man.

Rob:  Some of us mediocre white men maybe don’t agree with that so much. Is that what you’re saying?

Jennifer:  Yeah. I’ve had a couple people tell on themselves really.

Rob:  Nice.

Jennifer:  And I don’t apologize because I’m like, “This isn’t for you. It never was for you. And so why are you here?”

Rob:  No, that totally makes sense for sure. I mean, of course anybody who’s in on the joke isn’t really going to be offended by it, right?

Jennifer:  Well, that’s the thing. If I’ve made any enemies, I’ve made way more friends. People see that. I still get messages about that headline. And I also have a little gift from the movie Mulan where the male love interest says, like, “Let’s get down to business.” And I get so many comments about that gift and about that headline from people who are like, “Okay, yes, she is my person,” which is what I want to happen on my website. For as many people as I scare away, there’s even more that are attracted to that.

Rob:  Right. And I think that’s the beauty of leaning into a niche, is you repel the wrong clients and attract the right ones.

Okay. Let’s talk about the other side of your business too, because not only do you do this, but you are an online course creator and you help course creators facilitate all this stuff. So tell us about that. What is it that you do with these clients and how do you help them?

Jennifer:  Yeah. So I create online courses based on a client’s area of expertise. Typically, my work process is that I will… These are typically people who have already taught this content live in some capacity, so it’s a workshop or it’s a group program or something like that. And so I will take any recordings, slides, handouts, student feedback from those live experiences and convert them into video courses or an interactive PDF workbook. Those are kind of the two main formats that I work with. And I’m leaning more towards the PDFs a lot lately, mostly because production is easier. But I also help people design group programs. Like, if they really want to run something live like, “Okay, let’s take all your knowledge and organize it into a learning experience rather than just a content dump.” So that’s what I do for my course clients.

Rob:  Cool. Are there, and I’m sure that there are, but best practices when it comes to course design and curriculum design? Can you share some of those with us? I’m especially interested because, obviously, we do some courses and group programs, that kind of thing. And so I want to see, first of all, how we’ve messed up and what we should be doing better. But I know a lot of our listeners too have their own courses, or work with clients who are creating courses, and so it can be immensely helpful for them.

Jennifer:  Yeah. I think the most important thing to have and the thing I often see missing is a learning objective, which is different than a topic. I think I see courses and books that are just kind of dumping all the knowledge that a person has on a certain topic. That’s not unhelpful, but I like to see concrete learning objectives, which often take the form of, “Okay. After reading this book or taking this course, you will be able to what?” Write a sales page, write an email sequence, perform customer research, whatever it is. Having an actual end goal versus just, “Here are 17 things you want to know about sales pages” And I’m like, “Okay. But what does it actually look like to write one?”

Objectives can also be effective. Like, if it’s a coaching focused course, you will feel confident about X, Y, Z. You will feel empowered to do this or that. So just having that concrete objective in there I think is really important. And once you have that, it’s a lot easier to pick what to include. I think that’s the most common question I get is, what should I put in my course. And I feel like I’m over teaching. I feel like this is overload. But when you have that overarching specific objective, it becomes a lot easier to just pick what’s in there.

Another piece that I often see, that I actually almost never see, is some form of assessment. Coming from a teacher background, I love me some quizzes, I love me some projects. But it’s important because you need your… especially for self-paced things, like self-paced video courses or books where you’re not there to guide the student, your students need to know if they’ve actually mastered the skill or the knowledge. Because you can read a book and you can watch a video, but that doesn’t mean you’ve actually learned anything, which I discovered when I was in the classroom many, many times, because I was like, “Do this great, fun activity.” And all the kids were having fun. And then I do a little thing at the end called an exit ticket. And I ask them a question related to the concept they were supposed to be learning, and I get them back and I’m like, “Okay, I guess we need to look at this again tomorrow.” Doing an activity is not the same as learning what you’re supposed to be learning there.

And so, having some sort of self-assessment quiz or a rubric. If you’re teaching a skill, how to build a website, you want to have standards and a checklist for like, “Okay. Do all your links work? Do you have this? Do you have that?” The components of what success looks like. I think those are the two of the big things that are most important that I don’t always see in the online course and ebook and other information product world.

Rob:  I like that. Going to the first point talking about the objective, you’ve got the overall objective for a course or a program. Would you also break it down to each module? Should it have its own objectives?

Jennifer:  Yes. Yes.

Rob:  I mean, you could almost break that down in two or three levels to get to the points where you’re actually teaching something, right?

Jennifer:  Yes, exactly. When people get overwhelmed by course planning, I tell them, “Start at that big overall objective.” And then just work backwards step by step, like, “Okay, I want to have a functional website. Before I have a functional website, what do I need to have? And then before that, what do I need to have? And before that, what do I need to have?” You can really just move backwards that way and figure out how to get there. You also need to pick where to start, and that can come from understanding kind of where your students are before they come in. The reality is, you can start anywhere. So you kind of just have to pick where’s your starting point at. What do students need to know before they come in? Because if you’re teaching math, there’s a big difference between addition, subtraction, versus calculus. If you’re teaching calculus… I don’t remember all my math courses. If you’re teaching calculus and somebody has had pre-calc, that’s a very different experience than teaching calculus to someone who’s still in algebra, for example. So knowing kind of where your students are starting.

And I think being clear about that in the sales and marketing piece is more important than most people realize, because I think everyone’s like, “I want to sell this to as many people as possible,” but then you’re teaching calculus and somebody comes in only knowing addition, they’re going to have a really frustrating experience. They’re probably not going to buy from you again. So you want to know where your students are starting. And if you do open it up to a wider audience, like, “Okay. Student who only knows addition, let me give you this little primer on what you need to know to be able to succeed in the calculus level course.”

Rob:  I’d love to see that little primer. You go from addition to calc.

Jennifer:  Right. How do you go from addition to calculus?

Rob:  Yeah.

Jennifer:  I don’t know. I don’t remember any of it. Any math teachers out there, help us out.

Rob:  Do you have a secret or a process for doing that front end research? Or is it just a matter of, you’ve got to know your audience? You need spending time with them.

Jennifer:  I mean, it really is very similar to basic customer research, but with the focus on kind of asking not what their knowledge or their skill level is rather than their feelings and experience, which is what you would do for a sales page or a sales sequence. Sometimes I just ask questions on social media, especially Instagram because they’ve got the little sticker poll, doodley things. I’ll ask something about course design or pricing, and it’s an A or B answer and I see what people think is accurate. And then, that gives me information on, “Okay. Here’s a popular misconception. How can I make sure to address that in the course?” And that’s also a really important piece because if people are coming in with misconceptions or limiting beliefs, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to learn the new thing because they’ve already got this idea of how this works.

And so sometimes you actually have to spend time kind of disassembling the misconception, like, “Okay. Here’s why this doesn’t work” before you get to try this instead. Because if they’re like, “I already have a way to do this,” with online courses that somebody has bought, they’re probably already halfway there. They want to learn how to do better, but it’s still not a bad idea to kind of address that and fully show like, “Okay. This is why this does not work. And then here’s a different way to go instead.”

Rob:  Okay. And then I want to come back to the assessments in a course. You would assess before somebody starts and at the end, is that so you can measure the success of you’re doing?

Jennifer:  Exactly. Exactly.

Rob:  Okay.

Jennifer:  In the classroom, we call that pre-assessment and post-assessment, and what’s the change throughout the learning experience. You can assess after every module, especially if you follow the sort of backwards design process. If they don’t get the concepts from Module 1, they’re going to struggle in Module 2. And that struggle is just going to keep building and building and building, unless put check points in there or homework or something where it was like, “Okay. Before you move on…” Because everybody’s in a hurry and everyone just wants the result right away, but it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. You really need to make sure you’ve got this piece done or mastered before you go to the next one.” And again, it’s up to you as the instructor to give them idea of what does mastery look like.

If you’re building a website and you have set up some backend thing, like, “This is what it should look like or what it should be able to do. And if it doesn’t, here’s how you might go about fixing that.” And again, especially important for self-paced courses because you’re not going to be there in person if they get stuck in a jam. So you want to have kind of, I don’t know, I call them like exit ramps, like the emergency exit ramps for trucks in pub, have something to catch them if they fall off the tracks.

Rob:  Yeah, great idea. Okay. As I’m thinking that through then as someone who might want to create a course, we all know that online courses have a terrible track record for completion, something like 4 to 6% depending on who you listen to. What are some things that we can be doing in courses to encourage people to actually do the work? Because in some ways, adding assessments or adding homework makes it even harder to complete the course, as opposed to helping somebody get to the end. What are some things we can do to overcome those objections?

Jennifer:  I think always reminding them of what the big picture goal is and how does this little piece here, how is that going to get us to the end result? I like to do at the beginning of each section or module, like, “Okay. Last time we talked about this. And this time we’re going to do this.” Just kind of previewing what each step is going to be gives people… It kind of helps cut the, “Oh my gosh, what am I in for? How long is this going to take?” Cutting it into bite sized pieces helps, but also putting it into context of like, “Okay. Last time we did this. This time, we’re going to do this. And next time, we’re going to do this. And this is what we’re all aiming for at the very end.” So just kind of contextualizing that for people.

And there’s all sorts of gamification, widgets, and things like that you can get, you can add to your course platforms. And also I would say on the front end, maybe being a little bit more targeted in your marketing for the course. Again, I think most people are like, “Yeah. Scope in as many people as possible,” which, I mean if sales is your main goal, which is there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you really want to have that transformative learning experience for as many people as possible, it might make more sense to kind of vet that group of students a little bit better and provide them a way to be like, “Are you ready for this course? Are you prepared for this?” Again, it’s like I’m not going to let a second grader into a calculus class because they can’t multiply yet. That’s setting them up for failure, even if they want to pay me money for that class. Don’t pay me to teach math.

I really think being a little more selective at the front end can, I think, ultimately yield better results at the end because they will have that learning experience. They will get the transformation that they were promised. They’ll be willing to do testimonials and case studies and referrals and affiliate programs versus, “Okay. 2% of people finish this. I can’t get any feedback from people. I don’t know if anybody likes my course or not.” So those are a couple of things I think that can help. And yeah, I think I said already, putting it into small chunks. I did a group program once and it was like a 90-minute meeting every week and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” One, it’s hard enough to find a 90-minutes at a time. But for me, by 40 minutes my audio processing part of my brain has just kind of stopped and gone home for the day.

Rob:  Yeah. Chunking is great. I love your advice on being really selective though, because I feel like that’s something that is not talked about, and it’s not done very often for the reasons you said. We want as many people as possible. It’s how we make our money. Doing that and adding that selectivity can, I think, make our courses stronger and our results a lot better too.

Jennifer:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely.

Rob:  So let’s break in here now and just talk a little bit about some of these things that Jennifer’s mentioned so far. Christy, you’re the guest host. I’m going to let you go first. What jumped out at you from this first half of the interview?

Christy:  Well, the first thing that I thought was, I love that she came up with this Chief Executive Auntie persona to brand some of her workshops and educational resources. I’ve seen people do this. I don’t know. I’m kind of fascinated by it. It seems like on the one hand it might be a lot of work in terms of creating the content and carrying that voice through. But on the other hand, I can imagine it would give you maybe the freedom to be a little bit more bold and honest. I don’t know. What do you think?

Rob:  Yeah. I really liked the idea of having that alternate character that you can lean into and share in different ways. I think in some ways, all of us are a little bit different in our work environment. You know, this alter ego that we put on for work, or maybe for family. Obviously, I think I’m a little different in the people that I talk to at work than in family. So at some level there’s a little bit of that going on. But to actually put on that whole role and say, “Okay. I’m this sassy auntie who’s giving you advice in your business,” and of course, she brings the Asian perspective to it so it’s kind of got a little bit of that flavor to it as well, I think is really interesting.

I’ve certainly seen other people do it where they’re acting aggressive or they’re putting on a show for their audience as copywriters or whatever the role is. But I think, yeah, it’s a way to maybe be able to say things in a slightly different way, or to talk about things that are uncomfortable in our normal roles that we have, right?

Christy:  Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I could see what you’re saying. It could maybe seem a little bit contrived if you’re trying too hard. But yeah, I think maybe it gives you a little bit of courage too. I love it. I love the idea of that.

Rob:  Yeah, I do too. I think it’s really cool. I also think, and I know I don’t necessarily have a lot of really smart things to add here, but I love that Jennifer is using her stage, her platform to promote alternative voices and to lean into the community that she’s so connected with. Being an Asian mom and having that as part of her background of wanting to help others in that environment, she just, I think, deserves a ton of credit for doing that. Like I said, I don’t necessarily have a big learning here other than we all have these kinds of communities that we can help support, help grow and develop. And if we don’t, we can certainly help promote others in what they’re trying to do and reaching out to the people that they can help the most.

Christy:  Yeah, agreed. I love that. I also could relate to so much of what Jennifer said about the struggle of what’s an acceptable amount of money to invest in your business, especially for things that aren’t absolutely required. Or is it okay to spend that money at all, right? I mean, I’m not a child of immigrants, but I grew up pretty poor. We were on welfare a lot of the time. I know for me that whole thing is coming to play definitely in terms of my mindset around pricing my services, especially in the early days when I was kind of charging more for time versus my expertise or what writing copy provides in terms of results. I always felt like I had to keep giving more and more. It was kind of like because is it acceptable to expect people to pay money to work with me, right? Like, thousands of dollars for the product that I produced. But I guess maybe it was more specifically, is it acceptable for them to spend the money on me, right?

Rob:  Totally. Yeah. I mean, we all have these weird stories that happen that impact how we feel about money or especially how we feel about the money that we’re able to spend on ourselves versus other people. I think getting really clear on not just like, yes, you have permission to spend, but then being clear on, “Okay, how much should I be spending?” Because once you do, once you make that shift and say, “Okay, I’m going to invest in myself.” Obviously you don’t want to invest everything.

Christy:  Right.

Rob:  That would be foolish too. So just being really clear on, “Okay. You know what? I can take this $200 this month and put it into my account that I’m going to use to pay a coach or buy a course or buy a tool that’s going to help me do the thing that I do that much faster.”

So, yeah, I really liked that too. And I love how honest she was about it wasn’t necessarily her environment, but even her parents and their beliefs about money and how that impacted her. And I can look back and see the same thing. I can look back and I remember my parents arguing over money. That makes me a little bit more risk averse, I think, in my approach to money.A As opposed to if everybody had been open about, “Oh yeah, money comes as we need it, and we’re all going to be okay,” that kind of thing. Maybe that would have changed how I approach money and my own life. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. We all have these stories in our head about it and just knowing how to deal with it or figuring out how to deal with it over time helps.

Christy:  Yeah, definitely. I loved that she shared the headline on her home page, Smashed through imposter syndrome with the confidence of a mediocre white man. I thought, “Wow. That is bold.” And I admire it. I’m here for it. It’s interesting because I’ve definitely found myself repelled by some of the content that’s clearly not geared towards me or people like me. And it triggers me for a second, but as a copywriter, I’m able to look at it from a different lens and kind of recognize the brilliance in it. So I don’t know. I’m just curious what you thought about that.

Rob:  Well, you’re curious because I am that mediocre white man. I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s brilliant. I think anybody that would get hung up over that is sort of missing the point.

Christy:  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob:  Because everybody shouldn’t work with everybody. It’s not any different from saying that I work only with, let’s say, a programmer who’s developed a SAS company, right? Talking directly to that person that I want to work with or talking to somebody who they only want sales pages, and I want to write sales pages. Having that kind of a conversation is perfectly okay. She’s simply saying, “Look, I’m here to help my community.” There’s at least a huge segment of people who aren’t part of that and, “Okay, fine. You want to be on the email list? Why don’t you be on the email list. See what I share. But the messaging here is really for the people in the community.”

We talk about attraction marketing in trying to attract those who match, but the other side of that is repelling those people who don’t match. I think it’s perfectly fine to want to work with people who you jive with, right?

Christy:  Yeah.

Rob:  And if you can help them in some way, then push away the ones that you can’t help and focus on the people that you can.

Christy:  Absolutely. I love that she doesn’t tiptoe around it. It really gave me pause to think, “Well, how could I be a little more bold like that? It was really, really good, I thought.

Now, one of the things that Jennifer didn’t talk too much about here, but she touched on it, and I love that she said that most of her clients have run group programs before or some kind of live iteration of the course that she’s helping them create. It was kind of a timely topic for me because I have a podcast episode coming out next month on online courses versus programs, and why maybe you shouldn’t rush to go the online course route to scale your business, at least at first. Like I said, she can really talk too much about it, but I did like that she kind of interjected a little bit of that information in there.

I also loved that her perspective on having an objective for your course, like a tangible end result. It’s so important because I feel like learning for the sake of learning isn’t really going to move you or your business forward. You have to sort of be able to take some kind of action. But I think sometimes that’s missing in a lot of the online course stuff out there.

Rob:  Yeah. I agree 100% with that. I think a lot of times we think, “Okay…” We approach it from whatever our background or expertise is, right? So as the copywriter, I’d be thinking, “Okay, I’m a copywriter. I should create a course on copywriting.” And so, then I do it. It’s like, “Okay, here’s what you have to do to write a headline, or this is what call to action looks like, or this is what a sales page is, or here’s how you want to think through an email sequence or how you do research,” and all of that stuff. But what’s the objective I think is the starting point, and not just the learning objective.

I know in the second half of the interview, we talk a little bit more about like the role that this course will play in our business. And so, we can talk about that in a minute, but knowing that there’s this big promise for the person who goes through your course, it’s not just, “Hey, here’s everything I know about a particular topic, but here’s what you can do with this information in order to become something or to have this transformation in your life or in your business or whatever.” Being really clear with that learning objective, I think makes it really easy then to build the course around that and to support it. And it makes it really easy to avoid what happens to a lot of courses where you just start dumping all of this stuff in it, because more is better. All of that extra stuff doesn’t always help you reach that final learning objective.

Christy:  Yeah. I think just having the ability to do something that you couldn’t do before is really the key to success with that.

Rob:  For sure. And the last thing that I want to mention from this half of the interview is what Jennifer was talking about in being selective in who joins the course. I know you and I were chatting about this a little bit right before we started recording. But the thing that I struggle with is, “Okay. Yes, when I am selling a program or a course, of course, I want as many people as possible in there because that’s how you make money.” right?

Christy:  Yeah.

Rob:  If every additional person brings another $500 into your business, then of course you want 100 more people or 1,000 more people or whatever that is. But the result of that is that we get people who aren’t a perfect fit. They don’t have a great experience. Maybe they don’t finish the course or they refund, that kind of thing. So I think if you’re really selective upfront, what happens is, yes, you get an initial group that’s smaller, but every single person who is in that course, or program, coaching, whatever is a really tight fit. And then they go through. They