Imagine you spend many years creating something…

It might be a book, a play, a course, or a website.

The project consumes your every waking thought. You’re constantly doing tweaks and revisions, trying to get it absolutely perfect.

Until one day, finally, you launch it into the world.

And…

Nothing.

There’s a deafening silence.

*TUMBLEWEED ROLLS ACROSS THE INTERNET*.

It’s a nightmare come true, right?

And unfortunately, this is what happens to some people who decide to go ahead and make their own course (NOT, I must add, by following my system).

Without understanding that there’s an alternative, they spend years putting it together, devoting all their time and energy to it, only to get no sales when they hit “go”.

It really upsets me, because this should never happen.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

And I’ll tell you why…

There’s a guy named Dan Sullivan, a famous motivational speaker, business consultant and coach based in Toronto, Canada.

He often says the following:

“Sell the tickets before you write the play because if nobody buys the tickets, you don’t need the play.”

Makes sense doesn’t it?

If you can sell tickets before something happens, you’ll not only know that the idea works, but you’ll bank some income which removes the risk entirely.

Well, it’s the same for online courses.

If you do it right, you will KNOW that the course is highly likely to sell because you’ll have already tested the idea.

Not only that, you can even get some money rolling in before you finish.

This is why I’m a firm advocate of the prelaunch method.

This is where you sell a small number of discounted places to your course BEFORE you’ve created it.

So why is this good?

Well the obvious benefit is that you actually can get some money upfront to cover the cost of your time.

So you are effectively being paid to create your course, much like an author gets advance payment on a book.

However, I’ll be honest, that prelaunch income won’t make you rich…

It’s not the main reason for doing it.

The biggest benefits are these:

• You test the premise of your course. By putting it out there early, you’ll get a truthful picture of whether people are going to actually buy it. You can do all the market research in the world but until you ask people to put their hand in their pockets and pay for your course you’ll never 100% know if it will sell. So this is a great way of finding out fast – and for sure!
• Your final course will be much better for it. By launching a beta version to people on a discount, you’ll get interactive feedback, so that you spot any fundamental flaws in advance. Plus you can get testimonials and case studies that will help you promote it when the final version is ready.
• It will force you to get your course out there in good time. So many first-time course creators take too long to get their product complete because they feel they need to get it absolutely perfect. They worry over details that won’t actually make a difference to their bottom line.
  If you are a perfectionist, you may never feel that your product is quite ready. However, a prelaunch forces you to put something out in as little as 30-60 days! What’s more, it will make you realise that the odd mistake or weak spot here and there doesn’t make the difference that you worry it will.
• You’ll get a powerful motivation boost! There is nothing like seeing a few sales roll in, and getting some nice feedback, to motivate you to get your course completed. The prelaunch makes it all suddenly very real, and very possible!

OK, so those are all the benefits.

I won’t lie however… here is a downside…

It can be a bit scary.

It’s a bit like jumping out of an aeroplane for your first sky dive!

You have to get your offer out there, even though there is no actual complete course yet.

So this is not for the faint heated. You need to overcome your nagging doubts, be bold, and make the leap!

This can be stressful, but there are some tips to reduce that:

1. Make sure your full course is outlined BEFORE you prelaunch. In other words, know what it is going to include and that you can get that information. In my skydiving analogy, it’s like making sure you have your parachute (if you are a student in my CCA programme I’ll show you this step by step).
2. You must have some training ready to deliver, even in a raw form. (I’ll talk about formats in a moment)
3. Keep the numbers of buyers strictly limited. This way you are able to control it easily, and communicate with only a relatively few customers.

If you have all of the above in place, it won’t be a problem once you’ve overcome a few nerves.

Finally, you should consider how you’re going to deliver your prelaunch training…

Recommended prelaunch formats

There are so many formats you can choose from to deliver a prelaunch course.

However, my favourites are:

1. Deliver the course training through a live webinar each week. So this could be, say, over a period of 6 weeks depending on the course. Make sure you record the training webinars so it can be used in future for your course and also for those that are unable to attend the live broadcast.
2. Drip feed the information using pre-recorded content. That means the customer gets the first couple of weeks of training which has been made in advance. Then for the following weeks they get each training session when it’s due (which you will have spent the week working on!).
3. Via Facebook Group/Facebook Live. You can use private Facebook sessions to deliver the content to paying invitees only. So there’s no need to have your own platform polished and set up.

If you want to know more, I’ve recently added an in-depth bonus module to my Course Creation Academy showing you step by step how to run a prelaunch course.

It includes a deep dive into the various formats and reveals how to sell your course without a sales page.

You don’t even need a social media following or email list!

And if you are interested in creating your own course (pre-launching it first of course 😉 you can find out more information about CCA by emailing me at [email protected].