Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 110 of the Shine Show. Today's episode, we're going to talk about how to get clarity so you can launch your online course sooner. And I want to remind you that the Launch Lounge membership is opening up on the 29th of July. What is the Launch Lounge? You ask. It is a membership where you're going to learn how to find your most profitable audiences online and then predictably scale your online course launches so that you can hire a team faster, get your time back without wasting any money on strategies that don't work anymore.

If you want to get on that wait list, there will be a bonus for people on the wait list, and you can go to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist to get on it. Let's jump into the episode now. Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world.

If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is the Shine Show. Let's talk about clarity. It's a C word, that's for sure. I don't know about you, but I remember back in 2015, 2016 when I was brand, brand new to the whole entrepreneurial experience and hadn't even yet totally discovered the power of online courses and of launching online courses.

All I knew at that stage is that I don't want to work for a boss, I don't want to be bound in terms of the potential, my earning income, and I don't want to work full-time hours. I also knew that I did not want to be a stay at home mum. So I was very clear on what I didn't want, problem was I lacked a lot of clarity about what I did actually want.

I remember feeling like I'm swimming in an ocean in the middle of the night, like it is pitch dark and I don't know where I'm going, but I feel like I'm in an ocean of information and I just don't know how to filter this information and find what I need next in order to move me towards what I did want, which at that stage, I just knew I wanted money and I wanted to be able to work from home and be available for my kids.

And I was trying to explain it to someone the other day and I thought about this analogy. And if you've spent enough time with me, you know that I can come up with some really creative comparisons and metaphors and analogies. But I don't know if you've played... have you ever played Minesweeper? The guy in Minesweeper? Minesweeper is one of those games that were way back when computers had just come out and yes, I am aging myself.

I was about 10 years old when we got our first computer and it still had those big screens and all you got was the text was orange on black. So back then, I think, or maybe it was one of the very first Microsoft games, I don't know, it doesn't matter, but we're going back years to here. And you can actually still blame Minesweeper. Minesweeper used to be one of my favorite games as a kid on the computer.

The way that Minesweeper works is you get a grid. It's a grid with blocks on it. And let's say you choose, you can choose how big or small you want the grid to be, so but let's say we choose a hundred squares, we want a hundred squares. In that a hundred squares, there are 10 bombs hidden. And if you click on a square with a bomb on it, you blow the whole thing up. So you need to be strategic in knowing which squares to click on.

But how this works is when you click on a square that does not have a bomb next to it or within two blocks of it, it clears that space, it clears that square for you. And then what it shows you, it gives you a number and often that number, it might be 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. The number that you've cleared that you can see then represents how many bombs is right next to this cleared space.

And so if a space clears that says there's one bomb touching the square next to yours, then you kind of have a choice because typically because the squares are on a grid now you know, "Oh, there's one bomb, but there's maybe three or four squares that's around that one. So which one of that four might be the bomb?" And you kind of have to figure it out. And there's part luck to this guy and then part strategy.

And the strategy part is you only ever get to work with what's in front of you. You only get to work with the information you have right there next to the square that you cleared. You have no idea what the big picture is, you have no idea where the other bombs are hidden and you have no idea whether your next move is going to be a bomb or not unless you carefully look at all the numbers that opens up around the square you just clicked on and you're able to work out, "Well if this one touches one bomb and that one touches two bombs, then it's more likely that the bomb is sitting on this square than on that square."

So you kind of make informed decisions based on what opens up around you. And I just kind of went... I went, "You know what? It's kind of like that." When we're starting a business and when we're launching our online courses, we often get so lost. It can feel like we're in a giant, big ocean and the lights have been turned off and we're swimming in this ocean where we're hearing people say, "Webinars are the right thing to do signature courses are what you need to do. No, you need to do tiny offers. No, you need to run ads. No, you don't need to run ads, you just need to go live every day. You need a group coaching program, you need a small group."

There's so many options that gets thrown our way and sometimes you're just floating in the ocean of options getting thrown you're way, but then it becomes like Minesweeper and you kind of have to go, "Okay, well, working with the information I have right now, what's going to be my next best decision." And I was thinking about this this week and I thought I want to offer you three things that if you can get clear on these three things, only these three things, then you'll be able to make strategic decisions with the information that you have.

And if you spend a little bit of time thinking about these three things and thinking about creating clarity around these three things, then that'll really enable you to make better decisions, to make informed decisions and to be able to weigh up options so that you spend less time feeling like you're getting pulled in a million different directions or feeling like you're throwing spaghetti on the wall and nothing ever sticks, or feeling frustrated because you're working your tail off building an audience, but you create podcasts every week or you blog every week or you send out emails every week but as soon as you ask them to buy something, they don't want to buy.

Or maybe you create a lavish webinar launch, a giant big webinar launch and it doesn't quite go your way. At the end of this episode, I want you to be super clear on three things. And those three things are, we're going to look at how to get clear on what you really want, how to get clear on your desires because that's going to be your north star for your online course's business and then we're going to look at how to get clear on who you serve, your ideal customer.

Now, I know if you're like me, you're probably rolling your eyes at this one. In the first three years of my business, I rolled my eyes every time someone says, "Get clear on your ideal customer." Because I was like, "But I'm not clear on my ideal customers, so how do you keep telling me to get clear on my ideal customer?" So I'm going to help you. I'm going to give you some exercises you can do to get clear on your ideal customer.

And then the last thing we're going to look at is how to get clear on your offer because that is so important. You can know what you want and you can know who you serve, but unless you're clear on the transformation you provide for them, you're going to be talking and talking and talking and they're never going to buy from you. So at the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear strategy for creating clarity around these three things so that you can get to an online course launch faster so that you can scale that online course launch to six figures faster and get to building your team so that you can build a sustainable business.

So let's talk about getting clear on what you want, getting clear on your desires. I am listening to an audio book. I love audio books. I consume audio books like it's nobody's business. Takes me six months to read one book, like a normal book, but I work through about six audio books in a week because I'm always listening to things. So the book that I'm listening to that really stopped me kind of in my tracks is called Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power by Kasia Urbaniak, I think that's how you pronounce her surname.

And she is a Taoist nun and a sought after professional dominatrix, a nun and a dominatrix in one person. So she has some really interesting perspectives on power and on how to use power to get what you want and how women can learn to use our power in a more productive way, in a way that helps us show up for ourselves better in life.

And there's a chapter in her book where she talks about desires. And it's not a new concept, the idea that we need to know our desires in order to make our dreams come true, but she just takes it to another level. You can imagine a professional dominatrix telling you to get clear on your desires. She's pushing the boundary a little bit. And she talks about how as women, we are conditioned to good girl behavior, to conform, to not want to stand out.

And here in Australia, there's even a saying for it, it's called tall poppy syndrome. And what they mean is that the tall poppy has to be cut down. So we condition ourselves or society has conditioned us to not want anything too extreme or anything that's going to make us feel judged or anything that is going to make us stand out for all the wrong reasons, and she calls it good girl behavior.

And then she has an exercise in the book where she guides you through going through all the areas of your life. She starts from... she goes from the bedroom, of course, that's one place where she takes it as the dominatrix. But she also goes through just to how you want people to talk to you, how you want to show up in the world, how you want to dress because maybe you're dressing the way your environment has told you to dress.

How do you want to spend your time? And if we go very specific, how do you want to spend your Friday evening? How do you want to spend your Sunday afternoon? How do you want to spend your Monday morning? If we can get clear on these things, then we start to see all the places where we are either just living on default, reverting to other people's desires, or living by default to serve other people on a level that is no longer healthy for us, which then builds resentment.

So it's worth the exercise, it's really worth doing this exercise to go through it. And I want to take you through a little bit of kind of my own take on this exercise where we're going to apply this to launching online courses and to launching an online course's business, or to scaling an online course's business, to getting to six figures in our online course business.

So I want you to start by taking a pen and a piece of paper and imagining for a minute that there are no limits to what you can write down on this piece of paper. Nobody ever has to see this piece of paper. You do not have to justify this piece of paper to anyone. And if you read this piece of paper and you think, "Well, who do you think you are to want these things?" Then you're probably on the right track.

So I want you to just quiet that who do you think you are voice for these few minutes and take a piece of paper either in your journal or just on a loose piece of paper that you can throw away afterwards and just let go of any judgments that you have around your desires as they relate to your business, as they relate to serving your students, as they relate to making money and as they relate to building your business. And I want you to come from a place of indulgence.

Really, it's so easy for us to come from a place of survival. And this is not that. We are not surviving, we are thriving. We are going to come from a place of abundance. So the first question I want you to answer is what kind of online course do you want, a big one or a small one? Do you want a more intimate experience with your students or do you want to serve everyone, as many people as you can inside a giant ass course? Think about that. How big do you want it to be?

The next thing I want you to think about is who do you want as a student? Who do you want as your student? How should they behave? How should they show up for you? How should they show up for each other? How should they show up for your customer support team? How should they show up with their credit cards in hand? And this is where you get to dream about the student who pays in full and never complains.

The next thing I want you to think about is what type of launch do you want? Do you want a live launch where you feel energized and the adrenaline is pumping and you get to make decisions on the fly and you get to answer questions live, or do you want something that is fully designed, mapped out and gets delivered in email, on autopilot without you ever having to show up live?

You do get to choose, you do get to choose. What type of launch do you want? A live one or a more automated one. Do you want a webinar? Do you want videos? Do you want emails? Do you want it to be mostly delivered in written word or do you want to mostly show up and speak? Would you want to deliver it in audio? You do get to choose. Now think about money. How much money do you desire? How much money do you desire to make in your business?

Think about what do you want to do with that money? And if your head is going to things like I want to pay my mortgage, I want to send my kids to a good school, then my friend, I'm going to challenge you because then you're still coming from survival. Remember were indulging now. Imagine you're making so much money that paying your mortgage doesn't even come to mind, paying for your kids' education doesn't even come to mind.

If you love traveling, are you traveling in first class or maybe your thing is not traveling in first class, maybe it's backpacking in style or maybe it is going to the most rural, unexplored places. It doesn't have to be a five-star hotel, you get to choose. But it's going to require money. So think about your desires, your deepest desires. What kind of house would you buy if you had all the money you desire to buy a house?

What kind of holidays would you take? What kind of not-for-profits would you support? I am so inspired by Stu and Amy McLaren and the schools that they're building in Africa. I was amazed when I just recently read that they've already built 15 schools in Africa, 15. That is incredible. And if you think about it, when Stu and Amy looked at those 15 schools and they are going into their tribe launch, I don't think they hold back on asking for what their course is worth because they know the money they make is making such a big impact in the world. And I just love that.

So think about what would you do? What is your deepest desire for money? And then finally, I want you to think about what is your deepest desire as it pertains to building a team? Do you want a couple of people that sit in the same office with you and work from 9:00 to 5:00? Nothing wrong with that. Do you want a giant big team that's all virtual? My team is 100% virtual.

We're on at least four different time zones. Not a single person is based in Brisbane where I am and I'm having an absolute blast with these girls that works for me that are everywhere around the globe. Yes, we have time zone challenges, but you have other challenges with other teams. So how do you want to build your team? Do you want a lot of freelance contractors or do you want a few full-time employees? You get to choose that.

So that is my Unbound exercise for you. I want you to go and sit and dream. And when you've dreamed, I want you to say, "Well, if I've dreamed of this and there was still any part of me holding back on my desires, what would that dream look like?" And go even wilder than that, just to go all out. There is no judgment here. You do not need to be a good girl here. This is the non good girl dream exercise.

So the first thing that I want you to get clarity on is what is your desire as it pertains to your online course's business, in building your online course's business. The second thing that I want you to get clarity on or that you need to get clarity on in order to get clarity in your entire business and be able to move forward and start creating profitable online courses is you need to get clear on who you serve, who is your ideal customer?

We often call her your ideal customer avatar, sometimes abbreviated as ICA. When I just started learning how to build a business, I had a mentor who said, "There's the customer you want to have and then there's the customer you think you have and then there's the customer you really have. And the faster you can figure out who the person is that you really have, the better you'll get at creating offers for that person and building a success path, an ascension model for that person."

Because the longer you hold on to wishful thinking around who you really want or the longer you hold on to an idea that you have one customer when you actually have another one, you're going to struggle to make offers to that client or to that student. So what I want you to do is I want you to create three different surveys. I want you to create one survey that you send out to your audience.

So that's your email list, excluding anybody who has purchased any of your online courses. So anyone who listens to your podcast, reads your blog, watches your YouTube videos, joins you on your Facebook lives, interacts with you on Instagram, I want you to create a survey for this audience. And what you ask them is what is your biggest challenge as it relates to, insert whatever niche you're in, whatever problem you solve?

And then also ask them, how would you want this to be instead? How would you want this to be instead? And what they're going to tell you is their biggest pain and then their deepest desire. They're going to share with you what their pain points are and what their desires are. And then send the same form, but, okay, so you might need to duplicate this form and separate it because I want you to keep the answer separate.

Send the same content of the form, but a different one, send this to your students. Ask your students, what is the biggest challenge you have as it pertains to, insert your solution, and how would you want it to be instead? And then they're going to tell you. And then I want you to do the exact same thing with a few people that you've identified as people you would love to have in your audience as your students.

So this is the people I would really like to work with group, right? People that I think is my absolute dream students, send them that survey. And then I want you to compare the results. I want you to look at the difference between the pain points and the desires of the people who are consuming your free content, the people who have paid for your services and the people who you believe would be your absolute dream student. And pick one of the three.

Look at the differences between their desires and their pain points, and then choose one of those three. Maybe you look at the survey results and you realize, "Wow, the student that I have wanted to work with is more advanced than I thought they are. Maybe this is not the right student for me." Or maybe you go, "Ooh, the student that I've been dreaming of working with has actually has a problem that I don't really want to solve." So you might learn something from that.

But I want you to pick one of these three students and take their language, take their deepest desires and their greatest frustrations and align your free content for six whole months just with those pain points and those desires. So write down the other people's and make sure you don't reference that because there's a reason you attracted that in the first place. You attracted it because you kept putting it out there.

But you need to choose the one that works the best for you and then commit to only speaking to her for six months and see the effect that has on your launches. I am hoping that what you'll see is that you start getting clarity around who you talk to and who you sell to so that you get to create profitable launches faster that's going to get you to six figures and beyond sooner.

One thing you need to get clear on is your desires. Number two thing you need to get clear on is who you serve or your ideal customer and what their deepest pain points and their deepest desires are. The third thing that I want you to get clarity on so that you can move forward faster is you need to get clarity on your offer. I love seeing that moment in my students inside the Launch Lounge and inside A-Lister when the penny drops and they go, "Oh, that is the answer to so what, when I put an offer on a landing page and my ideal customer reads it and they can answer so what."

And it actually deeply connects because they've been able to answer the so what question after they made their offer. What I want to say to you is you need to write this down. What you sell is not an offer, what you sell is not an offer. I teach people to organize their email is not an offer. I have an ebook with vegan recipes is not an offer. I help you lose weight is not an offer. What those things are are services. They are things you do.

The difference between a service, a thing you do or a thing you give away and an offer is that an offer gives people what they want. People buy things they want. And it is our job as marketers to learn the difference between what I do, what I sell, what I give away and what my ideal customer's desire is that I fulfill. And once you learn how to take what you sell and use language that helps your ideal customer go, "Oh yes, that is what I want," then you are making offers to that person that they really, really want.

So there's this little story that I remember so vividly because this is where I really learned how to make an offer and how to communicate this and the difference between my services and my offers. Ryan Deiss tells this story, he's the founder of Digital Marketer. And he tells the story about a lawn mowing service that they were working on recreating the offers for the lawn mowing service. And when started working with this lawnmower service, they asked, "What do you do? What do you sell?"

And they said, "Well, we sell lawn mowing for anyone in XYZ suburb." Lawn mowing, that is the service, lawn mowing. And then they started digging into who's the ideal customer and discovered the ideal customer here is typically a, let's say, mid forties to fifties man who owns a home in this suburb and he is looking for lawn mowing services because he doesn't want to do it anymore. And they spent the time really uncovering the deepest desires and the pain of this customer. And they realized that this customer does not want a lawn mowing service, this customer wants to save time.

Now that's kind of first layer to this. They want to save time, but everybody really wants to save time. So using the language of, "We mow your lawn so that you save time," yes, but make it... It's not quite emotional enough. We all know saving time is such a marketing noise phrase that it kind of just falls on deaf ears.

But then they asked, "So why do you want to save time? When do you want to save time? What would you do instead if you had the time?" And they came up with an offer, a marketing campaign where they said, "Get your Saturday mornings back, get your Saturday mornings back." And that is an offer. It is when you fully understand your ideal customer's deepest needs and desires and their deepest pain points and you can be so specific in terms of how these pain points show up, when these pain points show up and what the deepest desire that is the opposite of that is, then you can start using copy on your pages, on your landing pages and on your sales pages that makes people go, "Yes, I want that."

So a good example of this is, another good example is a weight loss example. Like if you are a personal trainer or a health coach and you use language like, "I help you lose weight," that's kind of the same level language as, "I help you save time," right? It is a benefit, it is what people want. People do want to lose weight. But one person's ideal customer who is a 32-year-old new mum wants to shed the pregnancy fat. That's a very specific thing.

Someone else's ideal customer is a 25 year old male who wants a beach worthy six pack and someone else who's target audience is 50 year old women, they want to grow old gracefully, or they want to become the strongest you've ever been. This might show up differently depending on who your ideal customer is. And so it's always important to differentiate between your service, what you offer and what your ideal customer wants and then really going deep with your ideal customer and you'll really discover how this sets you up for faster list-building, for creating a more profitable online course, and for getting to those six figure launches so that you can start scaling your business faster.

So now you know three things that you can spend some time on to get clarity. The first one is getting clear on your desires, getting clear on what you want, the second one, getting clear on who you serve and exactly what they want and what they want to avoid and then the third one is getting really clear on what you offer them that is going to get them to that desired end state that they want.

Now, you remember at the beginning, I told you about Minesweeper and my hope is that once you start doing this just like with the mind sweeper game, you'll start being better at identifying which steps to take next. So even though you may still only see a few blocks around you, at least you feel more confident because you'll know which steps to take next and you know that clarity comes from taking action.

So once we know these things, we take action and then at least, you know you'll be able to see two, three steps ahead of you because you'll be clear on what your desire, you'll be clear on who you're talking to, and you'll be clear on how to create offers for them. And when you do that, you get to six figure launches faster and you get to scale a more profitable business, hire a team and build something that makes an enormous impact in the world.

And if that sounds like something that you want, then I want to invite you to sign up for the wait list for the Launch Lounge. The Launch Lounge is the membership that shows you the fastest way to get to a six figure online course launch so that you can hire team, get your time back and scale with confidence to seven figures and beyond. We're opening the doors on the 29th of July and there will be special bonuses for anyone who is on the waitlist.

So go to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist. it stands for the Launch Lounge, TLL wait list and get on the wait list and let's all get some six figure online course launches going, let's build our teams and let's get our time back and scale with confidence. All right, my friends, it's been lovely hanging out with you today. Don't forget to come and hang out with me on Instagram. I'm @salome.schillack on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you there.

I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week and I'll see you again next week, bye. Thank you so much for joining me on the episode today. And remember that if you want to learn how to find your most profitable audiences online and start predictably scaling your online course launches so that you can hire a team and get your time back without wasting any money, then the Launch Lounge is the community for you. I want to see you in there.

And you can find out more about the enrollment that opens on the 29th of July by signing up for the wait list, which you can do by going to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist, I'll see you there. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.