Best Day To Launch A Course

Subscribe: RSS

Thinking of launching your very first course, but struggle with having just way too much on your todo list leaving you with absolutely no time to actually create and launch your course? If you can relate, you’re in exactly the right place, because today i’m sharing 5 tips for making (and saving) time with your own course launch! That way, you can get your course out into the world sooner than you think, instead of leaving it hanging in your mind until time magically opens up in your calendar (spoiler alert: it won’t!).

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Grab the 8 emails I send to my waitlist every launch – a new free resource for you!
This week’s action step: Download my launch waitlist email guide where I outline the 8 emails I send to my waitlist for each course launch.
This week’s book recommendation: Simple and Free: 7 Experiments Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker. Faith-based warning. One of my few 5 star ratings – I’m a sucker for a good simplicity type book or activity. Jen identified seven areas of excess – food, clothes, spending, media, possessions, waste, and stress, and spends 7 months focusing on simplifier one area at a time. In the book she shares her struggles, her wins, and her lessons learned.
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

Did you love this episode?

Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.

Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!

Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.

Thinking of launching your very first course, but struggle with having just way too much on your to-do list, leaving you with absolutely no time to actually create and launch your course? If you can relate you’re in exactly the right place, because today I’m sharing five tips for making and saving time with your own course launch.

That way you can get your course out into the world sooner than you think, instead of leaving it hanging in your mind until time magically opens up in your calendar, because spoil alert, it will not. You’re listening to episode 122 of the chasing simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.

The first tip I have for you to make time in order to actually get your course launched is to batch your content. If you’ve been a long time listener, you may be sick of hearing me say that I will never stop saying it though, because it really does free up so much time and mental energy in order to truly move the needle in your business. When you’re not so focused on constantly creating content, you’re able to actually work on projects because you have the time to, and you have the mental capacity to work on projects, which is gonna lead itself into another tip that I have later, but not only does batching your content, save you a ton of time and actually allow you to move that needle. But it also is going to make you consistent, and consistency is going to be so important, both for your sales of your future course launch and also for your mental health.

If you can show up consistently, you’re going to build relationships with your followers. When you have relationships with your followers, they’re going to convert into sales. The easiest and simplest way to show up consistently is to batch your content. It just is the way it is. So if you can set aside one week out of every single month to batch your content, I really, really encourage you to do so.

And here’s the thing. consistency doesn’t mean constantly. You don’t have to show up all the time. You don’t have to show up to best practices in order to be consistent. So if you’re like Amanda, like in theory, that sounds great. I just don’t have a week that I can set aside. I have client work that has to get done all the time.

Well, can you set aside two to three hours? For one week out of every month, maybe for that one week, you start work a little earlier and you do a little bit less client work so that you can make time in your day to batch your content just for that one week, each month. Yes, batch, week’s gonna be a little bit more exhausting, yes, it’s you have to be intentional and make it a priority.

But if you can say, okay, I’m going to start work an hour early, or I’ll do it an hour later in the evening, if that works better, but I’m gonna do one extra hour of work and I’m going to do a little bit less client work this week, and I’m just intentional about making sure that’s possible, if you can start your day with two to three or again, if you work better in the evenings, whatever.

But you set aside either the first couple hours or the last few hours, whichever makes the most sense for you and the way that your productivity levels work and your energy levels work set aside intentionally two to three hours so it’s the main focus of your week without taking up all your time.

And then what you’ll do is you make sure that you are only creating as much content as you have time for. Again, consistency doesn’t mean constantly. You don’t have to show up to best practices. So if you’re like, well, that means I can only do one YouTube video a month.

That’s fine, do one YouTube video a month and show up consistently. And then once you get closer to a launch, maybe you’re able to bump it up a little bit specifically for the launch focus, but showing up consistly. Through batching, your content is going to help so much, not only with the launch itself, but also in making the time to be able to launch.

I have so many different podcast episodes on batching your content and making time for batching your content and getting consistent with your content. That I’m not gonna spend a ton of time on this one right here, but that is the number one thing that you can do as a business owner is to batch your content.

The second thing you can do is give yourself time. The number one mistake that clients that students, that friends, make when they’re putting out a course launch is they decide a month before or even two weeks before I’ve had a client do that before and said, hey, two weeks from now, I’m gonna put out this new offer.

Do not do that, please give yourself way more time than that. Please don’t plan a launch for a month from now. Not only is there a lot that goes into a launch, like a lot of projects and a lot to plan for, that’s also not enough time to actually move your audience from problem unaware all the way to student.

You need a launch runway. I highly suggest a launch runway of eight to 12 weeks specifically for your launch content outside of that, you might even wanna add on another month or two to give you time to plan and map out your launch. Especially if you’re someone that doesn’t have a lot of time and you can only implement a little bit of time and put only a little bit of time towards your launch project.

Maybe give yourself two months specifically for mapping and planning and then start your eight to 12 week launch runway, give yourself time.

Just like anything in business, good things take time and careful planning. And if we are trying to see zero to 60 growth all within one year, it’s just not realistic. Give yourself plenty of time to actually do the project. I am a terrible example of this because I tend to throw myself in way too quickly and expect way too much of myself. But if you can give yourself more time than you think you’ll need, you’re probably aiming for almost enough time.

The third tip I have for you is to implement a project day or a project time block each week. So I have themed work days, and this has been a really key factor to being able to run two different businesses.

So currently what my work week looks like is Monday is all about clients. I am dialed into clients, that’s my only focus, that’s the only thing I focus on.

I take all of my client calls on Mondays, I do the vast majority of my client work on Mondays, client students. All, all of that energy gets funneled into Mondays for both businesses. Although I have significantly more client work for, this business than I do for the Disney business for Magical Escape Vacations.

But all my client work happens on that day. Tuesdays is my project day for me, Warfield, LLC. So this is what I’m working on, whatever my current project is, and I’m making progress on it. Wednesdays are my project days for Magical Escape Vacations. I am working solely on that business and whatever my current project is for that business, I get that whole day devoted to it.

And then Thursdays are for basically business management, admin, finances, KPIs, all of the different various things that I have to do as a business owner happen on Thursdays. And then Fridays are a catch up day, if I really need some time to play catch up.

Although I try to only work four days a week because of Russell’s schedule. And it’s just easier that way, but you may be thinking again in theory, Amanda, that sounds great. You have a whole day for your projects. Awesome for you, but this works just as well. If you only have time for a, a block for a project.

So let’s say you only have two hours a week to set aside for your projects. That’s totally fine, I very much was in that place before where I only had okay, wednesdays from this time to this time, that’s my project time. As long as you’re really intentional about blocking out that time and not letting anything encroach on it, two hours a week is actually a ton of time and will allow you to make a ton of progress on whatever your projects are.

So if you can set aside just two hours a week at the very minimum, I mean, honestly, if you can only set aside 30 minutes, that’s still gonna be progress, but if you could work towards two hours a week, you would be amazed at how much progress you’re actually gonna be able to make to move the needle in your business.

The fourth tip I have for you is to get some help, whether that’s guidance or accountability or a VA. Get some help with the things that are on your plate. So whether you’re hiring a coach or working with someone who is an expert in some area, and they’re able to say, do X, Y, Z. And they’re taking that, that time of you having to play around and figure things out on your own.

They’re shortening the timeline for you, that’s a great way to free up some time. Whether you are being part of a mastermind or you just have a friend group where you meet up for accountability, making sure that someone else is pushing you towards your goals is going to hold you accountable.

And this really does save you time because if you know, okay, I’ve gotta go back to my mastermind group in two weeks. And I said, I was gonna get this thing done. You’re much more likely to prioritize it. If you know that someone else is gonna ask you. And then the next thing you can do is to hire help, whether that’s a virtual assistant or if you’re specifically outsourcing, I actually just hired my first virtual assistant and I’m, I have a team now, which is kind of crazy, but even before this, I was outsourcing specific tasks.

I’ve been outsourcing podcast editing for years now incredible, cannot recommend it more. Podcast Editing was something that took up a large chunk of my time and I really hated doing it, which made it take even longer. So do you have any tasks like that, that you could outsource or are there tasks that maybe you enjoyed them and, you know, you could do them, but it’s just simpler, if someone else does it for you.

I just started getting help and outsourcing some sales copy, not that I can’t do it, and not that I haven’t seen success doing it, but an expert’s gonna be able to do it a lot faster than I will. And it takes a big project off of my plate. Again, like I said, I just hired a VA and she’s able to help me with simple things to take those tasks off my plate.

Nothing that’s super, super, incredibly time consuming. Right now she’s only working for me five hours a month, but that’s five hours a month that I can then spend on speaking engagements on marketing on visibility on moving the needle on working on projects five hours a month, that adds up quickly.

That’s 60 hours a year that I’m getting back to move the needle in my business. I know that that’s not always an option, especially if you’re newer, starting out again, I’m in year five of business and I am just now outsourcing more and hiring VAs and team members and things like that. So I get it, but there are other ways that you can get help, that aren’t gonna cost as much.

And then the last tip I have for you in making time to launch your course is to skip the course creation process. This is a soapbox, I feel like I’ve talked about a lot lately, but you do not need to have the beautiful Kajabi course ready to go at launch. And in fact, I highly advise against it. Skip the payment that you need to make for a course host platform, skip the time that it takes to create it and skip the time that it’s gonna take you to redo all of it.

Because after you run your course for the very first time, you’re gonna have to update it. It just is the way it is as the expert in what you do there are going to be gaps in your lessons that you just didn’t even realize were gaps, because you are an expert at this thing that you’re teaching on and your students are gonna have some gaps and foundational pieces that they’re gonna ask about.

Hopefully they’ll ask you about it so that, you know, to fill it in for them. My suggestion is to teach it live I would say, teach it two to three times live and allow your students to show up there with you on zoom. Ask questions those questions can help inform where those gaps are get to know your students.

That’s gonna help, not only with the completion percentage, but also with just having people share about the course itself. With them giving you feedback with them anytime you have an ask of your audience, if they feel like they have a relationship with you, they’re going to feel so much more likely to do it.

They’re going to want to do it for you, we talked about this back in the consistency. It’s the same principle here. If you can build relationships with your students, they’re going to be much more likely to give you feedback on how to improve the course to let you know what they felt like they were missing to share about it, to tell their friends about it.

That’s gonna be the number one way to see better sales and future launches is by building those relationships with your students. So you might as well, not only build better relationships, but also save so much of the course creation time because building out slide decks and recording and editing and transcribing and making the whole back end side of the course in the course host pretty takes a ton of time.

I mean, we’re talking hours and hours and hours and hours. And if you launch and then you have to change it all up again, because you found out there were gaps. You wanted to improve it, which you will. It’s just the nature of it. That’s gonna be more hours and hours and hours and hours of redoing what you already did.

And the benefit to live launching into live teaching is so much higher, especially for the first couple times. So there’s my soapbox there, but you can save a lot of the launch process time. If you skip the 10, 15, 20 hours it’s gonna take you to actually create the course and just create your lesson plans in a word doc, and then teach ’em live on zoom.

So again, those five different tips for making time to launch your course, batch your content, give yourself time, create a very long drawn out timeline for yourself, implement a project day or project time block, get some help and skip the course creation.

Your action step for this week is to download my launch waitlist, email guide, where I outline the eight emails that I send in my wait list for each and every course launch you can grab that by going to Amanda warfield.com/waitlist-emails. And again, that link as always will be in the show notes,if you wanna just grab it there,

Your book recommendation for this week is simple and free seven experiments against excess by Jen Hatmaker, just a heads up, this is a faith based book for anyone who’s curious about it. I always like to give that warning, but this is one of my very few five star ratings. So when I’m reading a book, I’ll give it anywhere between one and five, right?

Just like on good reads. A three means that it was a decent read. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, but I probably wouldn’t actually recommended to somebody else. A four means that it was good and I would recommend it. And a five means that I would read it again. When I’m giving book recommendations at the end of podcast episodes, I only tell you about four and five star. I never talk about a three, unless it’s kind of in conjunction with another one. And I’m surely not gonna talk about a two or a one, but fives are really rare because there’s, it needs to be a book that I just, oh my gosh.

I would read this over and over again. Kind of thing. But this is one of them. This is one of my few five star ratings. And of course I am a sucker for a good like simplicity type book or activity. And within this book, Jen identified seven different areas of access that she and her family face. Food clothes, spending media, possessions, waste, and stress.

And then she spends seven months focusing on simplifying one of those areas at a time. And then inside of the book, she shares her struggles, her wins, and her lessons learned if you like those type of books, I think I heard someone recently call it like a stunt book or a stunt genre or something like that, where someone is doing something and then writing about it.

I highly recommend this one. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your life and biz.

Episode 122: Making Time to Launch Your Course

You'll also love

Meet Amanda