Uncomfortable Truths About Online Courses

1. This Is NOT A Get Rich Quick Scheme

A lot of people think, okay, if I build this course, I'm going to put it out there, it's going to sell and I'm going to be rich overnight because that's what they see. That's the front that we see that a lot of people put on or we don't hear about someone until they become an “overnight success.”

All of a sudden you're like, oh, who is this person? I've never even heard of them. Here they are crazy successful. Right? 

Let's really take a look at this online course. Creation is not an Overnight success. Anyone who has had “overnight success”, if you were to go interview them and ask them about their journey of how they actually got there, you would find that it was not an overnight success. It was a lot of late nights, it was a lot of struggle. It was a lot of hard work to get to where they are. 

You see, what actually happens is once you're doing the work and you're building your course and you're creating content and you're doing all the things, what happens is as you are taking this action, you are starting to find your voice. You are starting to find your uniqueness, your methods, everything that makes you unique. Usually what happens is something that you say or do in this process of creating that will become your “overnight success” ticket. That's how overnight success happens. It's never overnight. 

It truly is this work that has been put in and the testing and tweaking and trying and then something sticks and then that's when the fire starts and that's when great things happen. It is not an overnight success, though. 

What I see and I know to be true is that the people who, when they launch their course have big launches, they have nurtured their audience for some time. They've been growing their list, nurturing their audience for quite a while before they had that big launch. So know that the work that you're doing, although it may feel like you're not getting eyes and you're not gaining traction one person at a time, that's how you build your audience. It's one person at a time, one step at a time. It's not going to be this massive boom and you've got it. 

2. If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Although in the Field of Dreams, he built it and they came. We are not in the Field of Dreams, friends. We are in real life. And if you build it, they are not going to come. People are not just going to randomly come. Yes, you might get a person here and there every once in a while, but you're not going to build this six figure business just launching your course. There's work that has to be done before people will come. People just don't come. There are so many different ways to bring people into your sphere, but it is a long game. For example, if you want to build it and just have people come and not have to do anything, well, what's going to have to happen is you're going to have to have an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, and you build that up. SEO takes at least a year to of building content that's SEO optimized, that brings in that organic traffic. That's how if you build it, they will come. You still have to put in all that work and you have to know how to do the SEO and how to do the marketing and all the strategies. 

So again, going back to that first uncomfortable truth is that it's not an overnight success. There is work that has to be done.

3. Courses Are Not Passive Income

You cannot just set it and forget it and be done with it. Yes, once it is created, it's created and it can bring money for years to come. That is true. That's where that passive income term comes. It's like, oh, I just made money and I didn't have to do anything. But the truth and the reality is, after it's created, you still have to do the marketing. You still have to make content. You still have to build the desire for your course. Everyone’s talking about “It's passive income. I just want to have a way to make passive income.” But it's never passive. There's always something that's happening to bring in that income, whether that's running paid ads, you're creating content and all those things. 

There is work to be done even after the course is created. However, you can still make money in your sleep. But it's all that work that now you're doing on the front end to bring in those sales that bring in those sales while you sleep.

4. Sometimes It Doesn’t Work Out

Here is the honest truth of any business, any successful business. If you were to go talk to the business owner, they would NOT tell you, “Oh, yeah, I created my product, put it out on the market overnight. Boom, sold like hotcakes millionaire. First idea, first everything. First time I've ever done this made me millions.” That's not reality. If you talk to any successful business owner, behind their success is a whole heck of a lot of failure, a lot of failed ideas, a lot of failed marketing attempts, a lot of failed emails sent out all of the things. 

But it's in the failure where you learn what your audience wants and you learn to master your messaging and you learn to master your marketing. So when you think like, “Oh, I put my course out there and it didn't sell or, oh, I put my course out there and only one or two people bought it.” That is not failure. That is a learning opportunity. 

That is the mindset that you need to go into when you are building a course or anything that you're doing, anything that you're doing in life. 

For example, if you have kids, when you had your first child and brought them home, were you like,

 “I got this. I totally know exactly what I'm doing.” 

Everything you did was successful. The first bath you gave them, the first diaper change, first feeding, everything was just successful. It was great. You didn't need any practice. It just all worked out. My guess is probably not right. 

But with every diaper change, every bath, every feeding, it got easier. You learned how to do those different things in a way that made it more successful, right? You learned from every experience to create a better experience the next time. 

Then when you had your second child, then you had a foundation and you knew what to expect.

Every child is different, but you have those foundational skills.

When you create any sort of new product, it's just like having a newborn baby. You have to learn. You have to put in the time and the effort and there's times of exhaustion, and there are times of questioning, 

“Oh, my goodness, what did I do?” 

It's the truth. With your products, it's so true. With every product you create and launch, it gets easier. But every product is just like kids, they all come with their own unique challenges and successes and failures and things that you're going to learn with every single launch. But with every single one, it gets easier because you learn something every single time. 

Although we've talked about those things that are hard, I want you to know- Creating an online course truly is such an amazing experience. When you have your course and those sales come in, it's so exciting to open your email or have that push notification on your phone that you made a sale. All of those things are so exciting. But it takes work and that's what I want you to know. There's work that has to be done at every stage of the game to make it successful. Know that going in. 

As I always say, go in with the mindset of a scientist that you are going to experiment, test, try things, and tweak things until it works. If it doesn't work out and the data shows that it didn't work out and it was a total flop, that doesn't mean that you as a person are a failure, and it doesn't mean that people don't like you. It's nothing personal. 

If a scientist puts two chemicals together and they totally flop and it doesn't work, they're not like, “Well, those chemicals hate me never going to work with chemicals again” and walk away. That's not what happens. They're like, well, let me test something else. That didn't work out the way that I thought it would. They test something else. But they learned from it, right? 

It's the same thing with if you launch a product and it totally flops, it's a learning experience. You go, “Well, I know what they don't want and I know what didn't work. So now what can I do to create what they do want and create something that does work?” It's a learning experience. 

Go in with the mentality of, I am going to do this and I'm going to create success and I am going to hang on no matter what. This is where knowing your why and knowing your reasoning behind what you're doing is so very important because that's what keeps you hanging on. It's on those hard days, you can dig into that and know your why. 

There's a quote by Conrad Hilton that says, 

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. 

So I'm giving you permission to make the mistakes. I'm giving you permission to keep going even if it doesn't work out the first time. I'm giving you permission to believe in yourself. Because as we've just covered, there's a lot of untruths out there. I wanted you to know what it truly looks like behind the scenes and the struggles and how you keep going even on those hard days and keep taking action. Success seems to be connected with action so take action like I stated in the very beginning; people who have overnight success, they never have overnight success. Overnight success is not a real thing. They've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes for a long time and no one knew about them until one action that they took, something that they said or something that they did or some framework they came up with stuck and it went crazy. That's how “overnight success” happens with action. 

Keep moving, take action, keep moving, make mistakes but don't quit. 

Know your why and don't quit. 

If you are ready to take action, move forward and get your course created and have something out there that you can actually test and tweak and gain some data from, so that you can become that “overnight success”, I invite you to join us inside of Construct Your Course.