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The Art of Preselling

The art of preselling

Want to know what sets experienced course creators apart from the new ones? 

It’s preselling. 

But what is preselling, how do you do it and why is it such a game-changer? 

That’s what I’m going to take a dive into in this blog post…


The premise of pre-selling your online course (or any program) is creating an outline and offer of it that you take out to market before you go ahead and create it completely. 

You are presenting a complete prototype of your course to your audience so you want to make sure you’re addressing a lot of things in that prototype:

  • What is included

  • What does it look like

  • What is the transformational journey you’re taking students on

  • What are they going to learn

  • What are the results


Then you take this strong offer out to market and get students in before you start creating the nitty-gritty of the course content.

But why should you do this?

Imagine that you have this fabulous idea for a course.

You spend weeks or months creating all the aspects of your course, recording the videos, creating the worksheets, building your course portal and doing all the things that need to be done for a successful course.

With great anticipation, you take it out to the world.

And then…

Crickets.

You’ve skipped that all-important step of validating your offer, making sure there is a market out there for it and that you have people itching to buy the transformation you’re offering. 

If this sounds familiar, don’t worry.

This is the story that most successful course creators have at the beginning of their course creation journey.

So many first courses bomb and mine was no different.


I created everything, spending so much time and effort to build what I expected to be a super successful course and I got ONE sale!

So my approach now is always to presell.

I just create the first module so that my students have something to get stuck into, and then I create the rest of the content week by week.


This approach allows you to really refine your course offer when you take it to market. 

You may initially take your course offer out to the audience and not get the response you’re hoping for.

This means tweaking the offer in one way or another, and not recreating your course.

Pre-selling really allows you to test the waters before you dive right in.

When you pre-sell and have students pay you upfront before you create the content, then you’re able to justify the time and effort it takes to create that course. You’re essentially being paid upfront to deliver it. 

Another huge advantage of pre-selling vs pre-creating?

Because your students are moving through your content in real time (as you create content week by week) they are able to give you real time feedback.

As they move through your process and start implementing what you’re teaching they may come up against struggles and roadblocks with the content.

When they let you know this you’re able to update it and fill the gap in knowledge very quickly.


How do you presell?

There are a few things you’re going to need to presell your course:

  1. Your no-brainer course offer. Often for a beta round, you will offer the course at quite a discounted price to get real time feedback and have your students help shape the final iteration of your course.

  2. A simple sales page - and I really encourage simple to start with. You can focus in on the design and detail on future launches, but to start off with, simple is key.

  3. A launch funnel - I really recommend using a masterclass or webinar funnel for preselling your course. This is a great way to share a huge amount of value and information with your audience, show them how you can help them by helping them and entice them to want to work with you in your course. For high ticket courses, you may want to use a consultation funnel instead where you get your prospects onto a call and then sell them into the program from there. 


Once you’ve launched your beta round and have run it with students, be sure to put a fantastic testimonial generator process in place.

This is so important in having an elevated offer for the second and subsequent rounds of your program. 

Social proof/testimonials can make the difference between a sale and no sale for a program.

If you’re not sure how to offboard students, I have a great Automation Success Kit on this very subject and you can get your hands on it for just $37.

Check out the details here.


So that's the detail on pre-selling your course! 

I would love to know in the comments below if you've pre-sold a course or program before. How did it feel, what worked, what didn’t work?

See you next time

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