How Nikki adds £140K in additional income from her course

Meet Nikki

She owns and operates a successful PR firm in the UK. She joined SFI to make an independent online course on how to run effective PR campaigns for your business. She wanted to create an alternative income source with her online course in addition to her client work with her agency. And she was curious about what the fuss about online courses were about and how it could help her grow her PR firm.

Six months after launching her course, Nikki is consistently driving new student purchases to her course and, to her very pleasant surprise, also turning a sizable portion of her student base into long term subscription customers to her firms $4500/year PR campaign management software. In fact, even before launching her course, she landed over £20K in new client revenue due to the early attention she generated for her upcoming course, expecting to add at least another £140K annually simply by turning some of her students into long term subscription clients.

With nearly two decades of experience having worked on public relation (PR) campaigns across a wide range of industries with clients both big and small, Nikki certainly felt qualified and ready to teach on the topic. And with a topic she has the most expertise and credibility in, making a course on PR made the most logical sense, especially since it could potentially benefit her primary business.

She knew her topic so well that she could dive right into the content creation, finishing her curriculum and her lecture scripts in only a few weeks time while working still running her PR firm full time. For most new instructors choosing a topic that they are familiar with, they will also be able to dive right in as well. The parts that do becoming challenging for new instructors often has nothing to do with the materials but with everything else involved in making an online course.

From the start, Nikki want to go through the entire process herself from researching your topic to building your curriculum, to filming, editing, and promoting her course.

Could she have released her first course faster? Of course. Learning anything new for the first time is always going to involve some mistakes and setbacks.

Making an entire course yourself, especially an independent course, meant learning and building proficiency in a long list of things:

• Market & topic research
• Curriculum building
• Lecture planning and scripting
• Filming
• Editing
• Promoting

So why did Nikki take the long, and arguably, tougher road for her first go at making an online course? Well, getting her hands dirty during the entire process helped her to clearly distinguish which aspects of the process she enjoyed and was eager to do more of versus the parts that she hated and were eager to outsource.

She discovered she didn’t much enjoy learning or doing the video editing. So after slogging through a few to fully understand it, she found and hired an editor to finish editing the rest of her lecture videos for her.

How much of teach you’d like to put into it is entirely up to you. The more time you have to put into your course, the less money you need to spend to make it. And the less time you have to put into your course, the more money you need to put into it. It’s always going to be a tradeoff. The more money can throw at it by outsourcing the work, the less time it takes. But the more time you have to do it yourself, the less money you have to put into it.

If you are working on your course full time and do not have another job or other major commitment competing for your time, then put in your time and get your hands dirty. That up close and personal experience of going through the struggles will help make you a better course creator and even if you decide to outsource some or most of the work later, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of what you’re looking for and what needs to be done.

In initially doing everything herself, Nikki discovered she didn’t much enjoy learning or doing any of the post production work herself. So after slogging through a few videos to fully understand it, she found and hired a video editor to finish editing the rest of her lecture videos for her.

Nikki’s first online course was a test—she wanted to see if she enjoyed the process and whether it was something that could help grow her income and business.

Initially, she had planned on selling her well designed but concise course on how to run your own PR campaigns for £400. But as she continued to market her course, she discovered that the people who actually care to learn about PR, often has the budget but not the time to run their PR campaign.

For Nikki’s audience, it meant that for her audience who are willing to spend up to £400 for a Do-It-Yourself approach, some of them are willing to spend £4600 for a Done-For-You solution instead. If you’re spending the time and energy to find students for a course anyway, why not consider converting them into customers for a product that generates many times the sales (in her case, over 11x!).

For independent course creators like Nikki, we recommend that they explore the potential to pre-sell their course to their audience BEFORE finishing their course.  Eager learners are often willing to buy a course that is soon to be completed, so long as they are confident in what they’re going to get from the instructor.

In Nikki’s case, utilizing the pre-selling techniques covered in the SFI program, she was able to do even better—instead of pre-selling her course, she pre-sold her initial audience with the high ticket Done-For-You package instead, booking over £20K in sales even before she was ready to release her course.

As she converted some potential students into big ticket clients, she realized she saw her course all wrong in the beginning—direct sales from the course isn’t and shouldn’t be the end goal. It could be utilized for so much more.

By modifying her sales funnel, she could continue to utilize her course to convert £400 students into £4600 clients instead, earning 11.5X the revenue.  And based on her very conservative estimates, she now expect to add an additional £140K per year in annual new sales simply by converting some students into PR clients for her firm.

She came into online courses thinking it would be an entirely separate initiative that would appeal to a separate audience and create a separate income stream, but instead having her online course will help her grow her agency by over six figures per year in additional new client revenue.  And though most first time instructors don’t have an established agency like Nikki does, they can utilize the same strategies to grow their income by converting some of their students into high ticket consulting clients instead.