Hello, and welcome to episode number 68 of The Shine Show. And in this show, we're going to talk about how to launch in the next 90 days. And if you've ever wanted to launch an online course, today's episode will take you through exactly what you need to have in place and when, if you want to launch your course in the next 90 days.

Also, my friend and mentor Amy Porterfield has just opened her signature program called Digital Course Academy, which is the best program available to anyone who wants to learn how to take what's in their head, package it up and sell it online so that you can help more people in that very special way that only you can help. So that you can create more income and have more freedom and more control of your own life. And this year I'm offering the best bonus yet.

You can get access to the entire A-Listers course. My course that teaches you how to build your online audience faster using Facebook and Instagram ads without wasting any money. I'm also offering group coaching calls and a much, much smaller and more intimate experience where you get to learn how to reach more people and sell your course sooner. To learn more about our bonus for Amy's DCA program, go to shineandsucceed.com/dcabonus. And now here's the episode.

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 tuning because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

As I'm recording this, I just returned from an amazing weekend away with my husband. I turned 40 over the weekend. And for the first time, since we had kids, nine years ago, my husband and I left our kids with friends and went away for the weekend by ourselves. That is all I wanted for my birthday. A weekend alone with my favorite man. And as you do, when you have a big milestone birthday, I became a little bit sentimental and started thinking about my 20th birthday and then about my 30th birthday. And it brought up a lot of mixed emotions. I don't know about you, but I haven't always had the happiest birthdays until now it seems.

I thought about my 20th birthday. And at that time I was actually quite depressed. I felt like my life didn't have much purpose and I wasn't sure exactly where I was heading or what I really wanted from life. My parents at the time were getting the divorce they should have gotten 20 years earlier and that just made me question everything. And I felt like I didn't really have a place in the world that I belonged. In the few years after I turned 20, I made some more than questionable decisions. And looking back on it, I wanted just to go back and hug that girl and just tell her to believe in herself and to chill out already and not take life so seriously.

Luckily, towards the end of my 20s, I started making some better life choices. Most important of which was to marry an amazing man for which I am incredibly grateful. So when I turned 30, I was very happily married to my best friend and we were making a life for ourselves here in Australia. I had a great job that I absolutely loved at the time and we were starting to try to have a family. Funny thing that I remember about my 30th birthday is that I invited a whole bunch of people who I, to be really honest, didn't even really like all that much out to a giant dinner party and spent the entire night talking to them.

Now you may think that there's nothing wrong with that, except now that I'm 40. I know for a fact that I hate giant dinner parties. In fact, my idea of hell is a party with a bunch of people I have to make small talk with. And that's why my perfect 40th was just a quiet weekend with my husband. A man whom I can talk to for days and who I can also just sit and not say a word and still have the best time ever.

See what I'm seeing now that I'm 40 is that there's a sequence to life. There's a certain way that things should unfold in our lives. And when we just sit back and relax and let them unfold in that way, the unfolding actually becomes beautiful. And it's the same when you're just getting started with selling online courses. There's a certain order in which things need to unfold. And when you know what that order is, then it takes the pressure off and you can just allow for it to happen. And what I want to share with you today is that order. And I'll ask you a few questions and as I go through these questions, I just want you to answer them as honestly as you can.

Be honest, like how I should have been honest about not wanting a giant dinner party at my 30th. When you do, you'll be able to perfectly identify what the next step is that you need to take in order to get closer to launching your online course. So I hope you have a cup of tea and a pen nearby, and you're able to relax and listen and go through this with me.

The first question I want you to ponder is do you know for sure what your niche is and what you can teach people that will make a difference in their lives and that they're willing to pay for. There's three parts to this question. Part number one is, you know exactly what your niche is. After my first business failed, my sales coaching business, all I knew was I wanted to inspire women to be braver. That's all I knew. And so I started Shine and Succeed, a video blog, that just was created to inspire women. Deep down I had no idea what my niche was. I just knew for sure sales coaching was not what I wanted to do. And so I can look back at it, and even though at the time I was frustrated because I wasn't making any money, I can look back at it and go very clearly. "Yeah, of course I wasn't making money. I wasn't clear on what my niche was."

The second part of that question is, you know what people want to learn from you. That was my second place where I got stuck here. I was making videos for women about feeling confident, overcoming overwhelm, beating procrastination, which are all really wonderful, but I had no idea what they wanted to learn from me until I started The Shine Show, which back then was a show that I did on Facebook Live. And then people started asking me, how are you going live all the time? How are you doing this? Can you please teach us. Now looking back at it again, I go, I was so frustrated about not making money, that I didn't see that I didn't actually have something sellable. A skill that I could transfer.

It was almost an insult for me to admit to myself that I didn't know what skill I had that I could sell. Maybe I was a little bit full of pride as well. I did have some ego issues back then that I needed to overcome, that I'm hoping I have overcome them. But the thing is I had to uncover a skill that I had that other people wanted. Now I'm sure now in hindsight, I can look back and go, "Well, I had at least 10 skills I could have sold something with at the time. But when you're in it, you just don't see the forest through the trees. But as soon as people started asking me, how am I going live all the time? It became clear to me that, that is a skill that people want to learn from me.

The third part of that question is, you know that they are willing to pay for it. Now I'm just going to make this easy and say whatever it is that you're going to sell, children are not going to buy. Animals are not going to buy and broke people are not going to buy from you. So if your target audience are kids, animals or broke people, find something else. You're not going to make money with those. If you answered no to this question, let me remind you the question. The question is, do you know for sure what your niche is? What you can teach people that will make a difference in their lives and that they are willing to pay for?

So if any part of this question, you had a no that you answered to this. Then I want you to keep talking about anything and everything that you are passionate about on social media, and just see if you start building up an audience. See if you start attracting people with similar interests as you. I used to go live on Periscope and just started talking. And just showing up every day and talking helped me clarify in my head what I really wanted to share and what I really didn't care about sharing.

At this point, you can sell affiliate courses to start making money online. So if you have a passion for a topic, but you feel like you're not sure exactly what you can sell in that area, you can start making money by being an affiliate for other people's courses or products. If you answered yes to the three part question, the question I'll remind you is, do you know for sure what your niche is, what you can teach people that will make a difference in their lives and that they're willing to pay for? If you know, for sure what your niche is, you know exactly what people want to learn from you and you know that they are willing to pay you for it, then I want you to move on to the second question.

The second question is, do you have an email list and are you adding value to that email list on a weekly basis? Now again, this question has two parts. Number one is, do you have an email list? Or are you actively working to build that list? A list that is just standing still and not getting any emails sent to them is growing stale by the day. And the second part of this question is, are you talking to them on a weekly basis? The number of people who have told me that once they went through one of our courses like A-Lister, it motivated them so much to start talking to their list regularly now that they're spending money on ads that helps them build that list.

Now, I don't want you to wait until you're spending money to start feeling like you have skin in the game. I want you to know that from the very first day, that first person opts in for your email list, you need to treat that list with the highest respect. And you need to also know that a smaller list tends to be a lot more responsive than a large list. So you don't need a gigantic list before you start talking to them. You'll actually get more out of them if your list is a bit smaller. So if you have an email list and you're not talking to them weekly, then start doing that immediately and I promise you when you get to 1,000 people on that list and your email open rate is higher than 20%, then I can show you exactly how to make money off of that list just by sending a few emails.

So if you have a list and you're already talking to them on a weekly basis, then you can move on to question number three. And question number three is, do you have 1,000 people on that list? Yes. I said 1,000 people. I want you to build your list to at least 1,000 people before you attempt to launch to them. Too many people try to launch too soon and end up having not enough people in their funnel to get a real result. I've seen this over and over. I've dried the tears of people crying, saying their launch failed. When in fact it didn't fail, they just didn't have enough people go through the entire funnel.

Remember, theoretically, and I say theoretically because it can be different for everyone. But theoretically about 1% of your email list is going to buy from you. So if you have 1,000 people on your email list, that's just 10 sales. You need 1,000 people on a list that is warm to make 10 sales. Let that sink in for a moment. But what that means is if you're selling a course that costs 4.97, from that 1,000 people, you can make almost $5,000. And if your course costs 9.97, you can make just under 10 grand. That'll be your five figure launch. Not bad for a first launch.

That was my dream. I dreamed of making a five figure launch back in 2016, when I sold the Facebook Live Superstore. What did happen was I ended up making 20 sales of $97 after spending just $400 on webinar ads. I had 138 people register for that webinar. And if that had been 1,000, then I would have made a lot more money. If I had 1,000 people on that webinar with a conversion rate of 14%, which is 20 sales out of 138, I would have made 140 sales at $97. That's a whopping $13,350. That would have been a totally different story. And perhaps I wouldn't have given up on ads and I wouldn't have given up on my course and gone back to my day job. Luckily that's a long time ago. That was decisions I made in my 30s.

So remember what I'm telling you. There's a right sequence. And there's a time when it is too early to launch. So get 2,000 people on your email list if you want to do it properly. So if the answer to do you have 1,000 people on your email list is no. If you don't yet have 1,000 people, you need to build your audience and your email list. And A-Lister, the bonus that I'm giving away for free inside Digital Course Academy, is valued at over $1,000 and is an amazing course that teaches you exactly that. So go and check out our DCA bonus at shineandsucceed.com/dcabonus.

If the answer to the question, do you have at least 1,000 people on your email list is yes, you have 1,000 people on your list. Then you are ready to start mapping out your launch, which is exactly what we do inside the Launch Lounge, which is our membership. Where we teach you how to build an audience who actually want to buy from you and launch profitably to them without wasting any money on ads that don't work. So if your list is over 1,000 people and you're adding value to them every single day, then I guess that just leaves one question for you. And that is what is stopping you from launching?

Now that I'm 40 I look at my life and I feel a bit like the cat that got the milk. I am so incredibly proud of this life that I've built. I am more and more at home with myself and I just unapologetically I'm myself and I know that it is good enough. Heck it is more than good enough. It is awesome because I see the mostly healthy humans that I'm raising. I see my mostly happy husband and I get to see my amazing team that I've built and the incredible students I get to work with every single day. And it fills me with so much gratitude and purpose and gives me so much confidence that I want to just look at that girl in her 20s and 30s. And I want to say, you did it girl. This is just the beginning. And when you relax into it, you are going to make magic happens.

And that is my absolute deepest desire for you too. That you listened to me talk about launching online courses and creating a lasting legacy and making an impact in people's lives and that it will stir something in you that makes you go, now is the time. Now is the time to share my skills. To start believing that what I have to offer matters and that I can sell it and make enough money to quit my crummy job, to help add money to my family's income, to take advantage of the opportunities that 2020 has brought and to make my dreams come true for me, through me and with what is inside me.

And if that's something you've always wanted to do, then go to shineandsucceed.com/dcabonus. And I will see you inside Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy my friend. See you next week. Bye for now.

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.