How to Create and Sell a Profitable Online Course in 2023

So if you ever have the idea of packaging what you know into an online course that doesn't just make money but also changes lives. What is the opportunity in the e-learning industry right now? It's over a billion dollars a day in sales. People don't buy your course. They buy the transformation you promise through your course. We're going to be learning from one of my friends and expert on online courses, Marisa Meritroyd. Marisa, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Super stoked for everything we're going to talk about today. I'm so grateful that you're on the podcast. We met up in person and Miami a while back have been watching what you do for a long time. You have a ton of respect and authority kind of in this industry. Just briefly tell people about your story of how you got to where you are today with your expertise and how you help people. Well believe it or not, I was a documentary filmmaker and I was making about a thousand bucks a week and I would only make money when I showed up to work and worked on films. After five, six, seven years of doing that, I just started to question not just what I was doing in terms of my lifestyle, in terms of how much money I was making but also the average documentary was only seen by a thousand people back then and it's really hard to get something seen. I felt like I was working really hard and I wasn't really making an impact and I wasn't seeing the kind of financial and lifestyle freedom that I wanted and I just started to ask myself, you know, what else could I do? And to be honest, I came up kind of blank. I was like, you know, I know how to make things look good. I know how to make things sound good. I know how to tell a good story but who in the world is going to pay me for that? And the really interesting thing is that I just didn't know what I didn't know because I didn't realize that those three things making things look good and sound good and telling good stories. While it kept me broke as an artist in a completely other dimension, it was the basis of all business and marketing. And I had actually been sitting on a million dollar skill set that I thought wasn't valuable. I've been told it wasn't valuable my entire life and then here I could help people solve really big problems with that skill set and make a lot more money and make a lot more impact. And so what happened is I gradually started asking myself, well, you know, where can I even start to use these skills? And I thought, you know, the intersection of the internet and entrepreneurship and I just remember starting to create service offerings and then ultimately courses and it just gradually snowballed. It wasn't easy. I made a lot of mistakes. I had some failed products and things like that. But eventually I was able to turn that million dollar skill set into millions of dollars. And I think everyone has the million dollar skill set. They don't have the other set of million dollar skills you need to turn it into that really kind of profitable and packed full set of skills. It's amazing. And what are some of the opportunities and what's called the e-learning industry or maybe what are some of the other terms for it? Because if someone clicked on this video, this episode of the audio podcast, there are probably already familiar with online courses. They've heard stories. They've heard the opportunity. Maybe they're halfway through a course. Maybe one is sitting on their hard drive or one is sitting on the internet already, but just is not selling. Let's zoom out just for a second before we get very tactical. What is the growth of this industry? What is the opportunity that is available for listeners? Yeah. Well, it's over a billion dollars a day in sales. People are investing more than a billion dollars a day around the world and going online to learn how to do things or solve problems or get results they can't on their own. And this e-learning or online education industry, it incorporates things like home study courses, digital products, online courses, some of which are cohort-based. You might have a group going together at the same time, group coaching programs, information-based subscriptions or memberships. There's quite a lot of different kinds of things that fall under this whole online education umbrella and some of which you can see universities getting in on the action, big corporations who need to onboard or upskill or re-skill their employees. And then, of course, all the people who just go online to learn for their own benefit. Yeah. That's a billion dollars a day is staggering. And you start thinking about just getting a small piece of that would be absolutely life-changing for someone that's going into this or a business owner that's maybe wanting to pivot and start not just doing the thing, but now teaching the thing and packaging what they know. But why do a lot of courses fail to sell? Yeah, I think one of the big challenges people have is coming up with the right topic, the right idea. And the reason being is people think that people buy courses to learn, right? Because they're curious about a topic. Because that's how we grew up in school. You study history and you study math and you study English. But when you're looking at this kind of online course industry outside of the main kind of educational institutions, people don't usually buy just because they're curious. They buy because they want to do something or become something or feel something that they can't do or become or feel on their own. So people actually buy courses because they want a specific result. They want to solve a problem. They want to realize something in their lives. It could be simple, like learning how to bake really good sour bread, unisowered bread, or it could be something like developing active listening skill set or it could be how do you get a razor or a promotion in the workforce or how do you have a better relationship with your life partner, even how do you find a life partner. So there's almost anything you can go online to learn. Of course, in your field, how do you create a YouTube video? How do you create a following? There's so many things that you can teach people how to do. But the main thing is people want an outcome. They want a result. They're not just learning because they're curious about a topic. Brilliant. And you also have a resource that I want to make sure people can get a hold of. And so at bestcoursetopics.com, if like you said, figuring out the right course itself, the right topic, and you actually put together the 20 most profitable online course, mega niches to help people find the right idea. And so I'll mention this a little bit later, but I want to let people know that that's in the show notes, that's in the description. And or you can just go to bestcoursetopics.com. And that's a free gift that you put together for people. What I love about what you're doing is you've kind of coined this phrase. I'm not just making an online course, but making it an actual experience. Why do a lot of courses fail to actually get results for students? 100 percent. Well, the shocking number is actually that 97 percent of people who buy a traditional online course, what most people are creating, don't actually complete the course and get the results that are promised. Because if you've ever tried to do something alone at home online with no accountability and no support, you know, you probably have just sort of flaked out or gotten distracted and stopped midstream, even in the middle of a YouTube video. How many of them do you actually complete? Right, because information is everywhere. It's on, you can kind of type anything into Google or into YouTube and just get a huge amount of free content. But content and information isn't actually what makes people change their lives, which is why I'm not at all worried about artificial intelligence, AI and chat GPT and all this AI generated content that's coming out. Because experience products are a new kind of online course or program that I've really innovated that stack these 10 core experiences. And I've got them right here that stack 10 core experiences into your course that create an almost addictive, you know, learning experience. And that's a good thing because we're addicted to our phones. We're addicted to social media. And we can use the same tactics that a lot of the Silicon Valley companies know. But in our course, and we can do it in a really simple way. So people get hooked on transforming their lives through your course. So what I believe is now the barrier to entry is so much lower with AI and AI makes an incredible, you know, brainstorming partner and support and creating content faster. But when you can combine that ease and accessibility with this experiential approach where people are leaning in to what it is that you're teaching or delivering and they actually start taking action and changing their lives and getting their results and enjoying the experience and feeling things along the way versus just getting bombarded with content, then you've kind of got the key to really succeed in this particular environment. One of the objections people might feel though, they can think, okay, if I have the right topic, and if I also, you know, follow you, learn your tips to even make the course great, what if I don't have a big following? Like where would I actually get customers? Now I've created this thing, and maybe I only have a few YouTube subscribers. Maybe I'm just getting started. Maybe I'm on Instagram. Is it possible to make money with courses with a small following? And do you have any examples of stories or students of how it is? 100%. So I actually teach what I call an earn while you learn approach. So if you're just getting started, I think trying to create this massive online course with thousands of people each paying you 50 bucks or 100 bucks, it's kind of counter productive because it takes, you know, a lot more to earn, say, a hundred thousand dollars with people paying you a hundred dollars, then it does turn a hundred thousand dollars with people paying you a thousand or even ten thousand dollars. So when you create courses in this experiential way designed to get people a specific result, you can actually create programs that you sell to one person at a time or you sell to just a small group. And when you test your idea that way, you just start getting paid as you develop your reputation, as you develop your result, your case studies, and as you develop your following. And when you start getting paid by, you know, creating more higher ticket programs, like more expensive programs to fewer people, then you can invest in, say, growing your audience. So when you do it that way, you're actually able to get started before you have any following at all because the truth is it all comes down to creating something that one person will give you money for. And once one person gives you money for it, then deliver an incredible experience and have more people give you money for that. And then once you've tested that viability of that model, then you can start to leverage and scale beyond that. So I've got this little diagram here that revenue, like how much you're making, equals volume times price, right? So many people I'm doing is backwards because I have to care about so many people think that the only way to create a course is to have a lot of people paying you a little bit of money. But you can actually start. This is really actually harder than you'd expect. I need to look at it. You're right for us, but I know. Just trying to point to the right direction. Yeah, you want to have, if you start with just a few people paying you a lot of money, and then you go like one on one, one person at a time, then you gradually increase to say a few people paying you a little bit less money, then you're testing the model along the way. You're gaining resources, you're gaining reputation, you're gaining credibility. And then pretty soon, you can start to create that course with a thousand people in it. The problem is when people try to start with a course with a thousand people in it. Does that make sense? You can ramp up there pretty quickly. You just got to kind of follow the right approach to test the viability of that model first. So smart. And I know that you also kind of help people launch kind of like beta groups or like this whole idea of testing the product. You know, when we launched video ranking Academy, our main online course, today it's been reshot four times. I want to say we're 13,000 or 15,000 students or something like that. That's just wild. But when it first started, it was one at a time via Facebook Messenger via Zoom calls and one-on-one coaching of the idea of the course and actually for free at first because I wanted to get some video testimonials and even see if it worked. I had some theories and to see, okay, can I coach somebody for ranking videos, getting some better results on their YouTube channel? And so I love and that was me fumbling my way through things. I wish I at that time had you know, your frameworks and all of that kind of stuff. But what it taught me was that you can work your way into this thing one step at a time and that there's different levels. And had I also started higher tickets, super smart and wise. And then eventually creating an at scale program. Again, I want to make sure separate to your gift. There's also a challenge that you have available. So you're probably wondering what the 10 core experiences are and some different things like that. And so I want to encourage you, this won't be available forever. But you do have a challenge if you're listening to this podcast within maybe a couple weeks of when it comes out. That is live and in depth. Talk a little bit about that and we'll make sure to just put a link in the show notes to that. But what are you going to be teaching on that? Yeah, it's the five day crack your course idea challenge. And it took me about 12 years to distill the process around finding the right topic, the right idea into just five simple steps that'll take you 15 to 30 minutes a day for five days. It's completely free one time a year, which means I think it's free into just a few days after this is coming out. So you can jump in and we've had 27,000 people go through this challenge to find their idea. And it really simplifies the process and gives you parameters to know. Am I just crazy thinking this is going to work to actually, oh, okay, I know this is going to work, right? And so that's what we're going to do. And we'd love for you to join us. And it's also designed as an experience product, meaning you're going to get to see all of these experiences that I'm talking about and how it inspires you to get super motivated and do things that you may have kind of started to do in the past, but then stopped or got bored or got distracted. You'll see how all of these experiences work on you to get you hyper excited and hyper motivated and doing things that you haven't been able to do before. Beautiful. So depending on when you're listening to this, definitely take advantage of all these resources and they'll be listed out in the show notes. But it makes me wonder, even if we lock in what our course is going to be about, answer this objection of what if somebody has already created a course on my topic? Yeah. Well, the reason why this whole experience formula is so important is that you can create a course and get a result that a perhaps other people don't in a way that's more enjoyable for somebody else. So it's not just about the information. It's really about the transformation. And how you deliver that transformation is going to be specific to your personality, to your life experience, to your particular strengths, to your delivery style and all of those things. And the truth is that not every person resonates with every potential teacher. I mean, their teacher's out there. I'm like, no way would I ever try to learn from that particular person. So it's actually a good thing if someone else is out there teaching it because it means that they're getting paid for that. And it means that there's a market for that particular thing. And if you can see the whole in what they're doing, either they're overlooking something important, or you can do it differently, or you can just do it in a way that appeals to a different demographic, or you can deliver the same thing, but to a different audience. You know, those are all ways to differentiate yourself and get in on the action. And I will say that there is something like 5 billion people on the internet. And they don't all know about the one person that you might be comparing yourself to. So when you start to build your own following and you have your own circle of influence that you develop. And even if you're just getting started, you have a circle of influence. You have people that you know, you have people you've met, you have people you've interacted with over the course of your life. You can start there and then gain momentum from that point. It's brilliant. And I want to shout out now some of our Think Media podcast listeners that took action and responded to a community tab question. And so I know we have so many people that listen on audio, but there is some special action that happens on the YouTube channel. And I asked people if they've ever thought about creating a paid online course, and what questions they have. Weasato Simples, I really slaughtered this name, but it's a most thumbs up question said, you know, the hardest part is actually selling the product. Like eventually, we got to sell it and communicate why people really need it. Just address a little bit. Of course, you go deeper in your content. I think a lot of people eventually that are like, I want to teach, I want to serve. I want to make a difference of people's lives. I want to package what I know, I want to educate, but I don't want to sell. Like what do you mean, you know, sales? And so what what is maybe some mindset tips about learning the skill or just embracing the idea that yeah, you're going to have to promote sell this thing. Yeah. Well, first of all, I describe sales and marketing as the process of helping people develop the attitudes, beliefs and conditions they need to say yes, not just to you, but to themselves. Does that make sense? So I think a lot of people think of marketing and sales as this kind of like sleazy manipulative thing. But everything that we are doing here right now in this interview, it's marketing and sales because it's answering questions, it's providing value, it's building connection and relationship. And so when you can see that a lot of times you have more reach in marketing sales than you will ever have in terms of people buying from you. So I've touched, you know, probably millions of people through my marketing and sales process. And even though a small fraction, like maybe one percent of those millions of people have bought from me, that's enough to have a significant business. And I think people forget that, you know, you're not about trying to get everybody to buy from you, you're trying to get your people to buy from you. And one of the tips that I've got for you right now that's going to be actionable is that one of the biggest reasons that people struggle to get people to buy is they're not super clear about the promise of their course or their program in terms of exactly what is that course or program going to allow someone to do or be or become or feel. And so I've got a template. I call my mission possible template. And it allows you to phrase the promise of your course in a way that gets people excited. So the template goes like this, your mission should you choose to accept it is blank. All right. So the mission of my experience product master class is your mission should you choose to accept it is to design, launch and profit from an experience product in 12 weeks or less. So you can get off the marketing treadmill, make more sales and serve more people, right? So it's so clear and specific, you know, exactly what you're going to do, you know, exactly how long it's going to take. And I've helped, you know, thousands of students come up with missions for their products, even ones where they felt like they couldn't come up with a mission, you know. And one of my students, they're going to try to find the exact language because it was so good was actually a shaman. And he was like, Marisa, I can't make a promise. I can't promise instant enlightenment, you know, because the actual transformation he thought took 17 years to complete, right? I think 17 years to, you know, become a knowledge keeper in the Shamanic tradition. I'm like, you know, that's really hard to get someone to, you know, want to commit to a 17 year journey because people need a little more instant gratification, right? And so he kind of told me what we do. And, you know, I asked him, well, how much is it possible for someone to just feel any of this stuff, even if it's just for a fraction of a second, like they're not gaining mastery, but could they feel some of these things you're talking about, like unconditional love for a fraction of a second? And he says, yeah, absolutely. So we came up with this. Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to receive through the six week Shamanic initiation, the four essential energies and gifts that every human needs to feel whole, loved and on path, the gift of knowing your truth, the gift of connecting to your life energy, the gift of a quiet mind and the gift of opening to the infinite. Now, once he had this, he emailed 18 people and he got something like 21 sales. So he got, he got people were so excited about it because he had made this big abstract topic. So specific. So he just emailed 18 people. And so they've got this six week Shamanic initiation coming up. Here's what it's going to allow you to do. They all said, yes, and three of them referred friends. So he had 120% conversion rate just like that. And I think he made $11,000. And it was his very first program, his very first attempt. And he had a topic that he didn't think he could translate into a specific promise. So a lot of times the reason why it's hard to sell a program is people don't really know what it is that you're actually selling because people don't buy your course. They buy the transformation you promise through your course. And simply having that clear specific transformation. And by the way, we have like AI generators to create your mission possible statement too if it's not your strength. So when we teach that inside of the challenge as well. So simply getting that right, I've had people just instantly start to make sales by simply sharing this one piece of messaging because it was so clear people knew exactly what winning looked like. So I always say you want this to be so clear and specific. You could photograph people reaching the finish line of the program. And when you've got that, it makes a really big difference. So a lot of times when something's hard to sell, it's actually just because you're not promising something specific enough or the transformation isn't clear enough. So simply doing that one thing will actually make people really want what you have to offer. Wow. Clarity is hard, but it's so powerful. And I love that you created frameworks to lead us to that clarity. Julian asks about platforms. I'm sure a lot of listeners go to the technical. I wonder if you have any favorites or when you point to people to things like circle is a trend cohorts or a trend. I think we actually recently did something in circle. We've done something in mighty networks. There's Kajabi click funnels. Any thoughts about the relevance of how important it is to pick the right platform and tips when it comes to that? I always advise people to be careful allowing kind of to put the cart before the horse first understanding and creating your program because there's so many options and they're all going to do the job. We actually did create our own platform about five years ago. They're not five, maybe three or four years ago called experience the five that has all of these gamification triggers. And it's the world's first fully gamified learning management system. And we have a lot of social media influencers coming on to that platform. People like Jay Shetty, like Dan Bell's area. And I mean, people who've got big followings because it brings almost this social media component into an online course where people can kind of click buttons. They can interact. They can engage. So experience the five is the platform I recommend. I mean, I did happen to build it. But we got to it's legit. A lot of people are using that platform because it gets people engaged in like 10 to 30 times more likely to complete. So when you add all of this gamification to the right idea and the right promise in the right program kind of design, it really supercharges everything. And what you'll find is that when people get that result, they're way more likely to buy from you and they're way more likely to refer people to you. And your business starts to grow actually almost organically because you're actually doing what other people don't do. You're creating an extraordinary experience that gets people results. You're adding so much value. And I'm excited to get to a few more of these questions that have come from our community. But I do want to remind everyone that bestcoursetopics.com is a must go to URL where you can get the 20 most profitable online course mega niches to find the right course idea for you. And so that is in the show notes or go to bestcoursetopics.com. You of course can also go to the show notes depending on if you caught this around the time it was released to be a part of the once a year, free challenge that Marisa is leading. And so hit that up and if there's still time to jump into that, you can get into that for free. And it's going to be so much more thorough than we can be in the remaining few minutes here. But Bequeen asks length of a course for beginners. What's kind of the spectrum of do I have to make a 50 hour course, a 500 hour course or could it be relatively short. And she did include in the question that is a beginner course. Well, this is the really beautiful thing about the way that I teach online courses that's really different from everybody else is first of all, it's not about the information. Like I said, information alone, people can get it for free all over the internet. They don't expect to pay for it. More content is not better. People want the shortcut. So when you've defined your mission statement, then all you need to do is to deliver the minimum amount of content necessary to get someone that particular result. So we think we have to just add everything we know or anything someone could possibly know. But a lot of times that gets in the result of just the fastest, you know, gets in the way of the fastest path to the actual promise or to the actual result. And one of the other things that I recommend doing the first time is actually delivering the program live. So so many people think they need to use all this tech and pre-record all the videos and everything else. But I actually recommend just start small with the small group of people, whether you deliver live to one person or six people or 20 people and just go live say whether it's on Zoom or whatever it happens to be because you'll get that feedback in the chat from the people. And that's going to allow you to fine tune your program before you go and do all that big production and record and edit. And all that takes a lot of time and a lot of expense. And the truth is you're probably going to have to redo it after the first time you go through it anyway because you'll learn all the questions people have, the things that weren't clear, what they want versus what you thought that they needed. Another question, worship TV 7 asked how do I price it and Tia asked how many hours at what cost is reasonable. So it sounds like you've already kind of said that's kind of the wrong question because it's not people don't just want more content they want to transformation. So what's kind of your thought for coming up with a the right pricing for an online course? Well a lot of it is based on the value of the transformation. And also it's based on how you get people there. So I have programs that are up to $50,000 and I have programs that are $7. So it's really looking at what is the depth and value of the transformation. You know of course part of it's the length of the program. It's the amount of support that you had too. So there's so many different forms of online courses and a lot of time and it's the offer that you make. So in an offer you might have some kind of review component, some kind of done for you component, some kind of done with you component, access to tools and it doesn't have to be your tools. It could be a partnership with somebody else. So there's so many ways to add value to an offer that's going to help people get that result more predictably and reliably or more quickly. So I think a lot of people look at a course from a limited frame of just a certain number of videos that you can charge like 100 bucks for. And when you understand that there's so many ways to develop an experience product and you can actually create experiences of so many different sizes and scales and shapes and forms, it actually opens the door wide open. So I know people who might just take 10 clients at $100,000 a year and I'm just giving you an example. I'm not saying this is going to be the way that you start and they got a million dollar business. And then they I know people and have clients who just have like a 197 offer and they also have a million dollar business. So there's actually so many different ways to kind of slice or dice that based on your strengths, your topic, the goal that you've got. And that's something it's one of the reasons why we actually I've earned who studies with us. We give them a coach so you can have these kinds of conversations versus one size fits all answers where all right, we're going to all create $197 course. And that's when your course becomes indistinguishable and unrecognizable from all the others. Brilliant. Well, one final topic as we land the plane in the second is marketing. Lots of people saying Harris inkwell was saying, I'm not sure how to market it. What are the best ways to market it? The cross legacy already has two courses, but need the next step of major marketing. And of course, we will only be able to touch that at a surface level because marketing gets me excited, especially because YouTube. Let me just add YouTube would be a good, you know, and that's of course why people are subscribed to this podcast, but whether that's social media, email marketing will circle back to that. But I want to remind everyone that I couldn't even get to all these questions. And I know you have many more. So if you want to be a part of the challenge, check out links in the show notes in the description. And then you can also get the 20 most profitable online course Megan niches for free. That's a PDF download at bestcoursetopics.com or everything's in the show notes. But let's just cover this idea of marketing from your standpoint. We're recording this towards the end of 2023. There's new things. There's tried and true things. What are maybe some of your big ideas on marketing and then one or two tactics that you personally like right now? 100%. So I think where people get challenged is that marketing can come in so many shapes and forms big and small. And so they think they've got to build this like gigantic marketing machine just to sell like one or two or ten copies of a program or whatever it happens to be. And so I've got this idea of a circle of influence, right? And so the one thing that's really amazing when you're just getting started is that you want to start closer to the center of your circle of influence, friends and associates and friends of friends. And marketing is easier when you're actually marketing to people who kind of are familiar with you in one case or another, marketing only gets a lot harder when you're going out to total strangers. So even if you have very little people in your following and it's just people that you know, there's still going to be people within that segment of people you know and the people they know that needs what you have to offer. And so simply getting consistent about posting on your profiles whether you're a Facebook person or an Instagram person or a YouTube person, you're going to start getting in front of some people. And then you can also leverage other people's audiences like here I am on your podcast. And while you might not be ready to have absolutely everybody on your podcast, there's a lot of more beginner podcasters who are just getting started too. So you can take advantage of their audiences. There's also blogs and sites where they're always looking for content. So there's ways to get in front of people, whether you just use your existing kind of circle of influence or whether you borrow other people's circle of influence. And you can kind of start small. And I think a lot of people like oh my gosh, I've got to be on every platform posting every single day and that quickly becomes overwhelming. I just taught my audience how to create an authentic voice post on social on Facebook LinkedIn or Instagram and just doing that once a week. All you're doing is sharing something real and authentic. And I even gave them an authentic voice post generated to create 14 different times of types of authentic voice posts. And simply doing that, those are the longer posts that kind of share a story or a moment or a brag that people tend to really respond to. So even if you start that way, posting once a week on a single platform, then you can add later on all these other layers of tips and quotes and content marketing. I think what the challenge people have is they want to build this like Lamborghini and they're trying to drive it to the grocery store. So if your minimum viable course is like going to the grocery store, you only need like a little kind of skateboard or something you don't understand. And so start small and just do something. And if you can start with doing something consistently, it's going to turn into something bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you're going to have that Lamborghini that you can kind of use to sell the housing copies of your course. But that's not where most people start. Most people see someone like Yushan with this huge following or someone with me, like me with a huge audience too. And they think that we just somehow started this way. But they don't realize that we started with these little tiny steps as well. And that's where everybody starts. And most people feel like they have to take the giant leaps. And by trying to take the giant leaps, they get overwhelmed versus just taking the small steps. So good. And I just want to clarify one point. And my understanding correctly, when you say you're helping people do authentic voice posts, meaning you're helping them right in their authentic voice. And I know when I log into Facebook, long form text posts, either text only or perhaps with a photo can just crush when it's a story. It's about pain. They've been through a victory they've had. And that's what is that what you meant by authentic voice? Yeah. Yeah. So I actually created this, you know, identified 14 types of authentic voice posts. And my students had an authentic voice post generator that I gave them. They just chose the type. They said, this is the tone of my voice. And they had eight options. And then here are some moments I want to include. Here's the close. And then it would just generate a post. And I say, just post one of these once a week over on your social, for example, in that alone, we'll start to get you moving forward. Now, even without all of those tools, even if you just write one long form post like that, and you can use chat GPT as an insist, and you post that once a week on one platform, and you tie it into something related to what you do, then all of a sudden, it can get going. You know, I was actually even demonstrating that if you want me to to show you one of these, I just demonstrated it live with my student and created this post in like, you know, less than five minutes flat. All right. And yeah. So it is, let me see. Chat GPT, were you using? I had built a tool. I built a lot of tools for my students. So they generate content for them that are leveraging AI. But this particular one, yeah, was leveraging that. You could still do something really similar inside of just chat GPT yourself. But I just wanted to show, you know, if you in case you're interested in seeing this, yeah, I mean, you, you can present your screen here in stream yard. Yeah. Yeah. Let me go ahead and do this. So I just did this in five minutes. And so people think it's like really hard, but you can actually try. I'm looking for present my screen. Okay. Share screen. Let's do it. Here we go. So yeah, this is one that I just did as a demo to my students. And you know, it got some good feedback and things here. Just, this was a concert that I went to in Italy. I'll never forget the day when my husband Murray and I immersed ourselves in the soul during rhythms of the Umbria Jazz Fest, 10 days of music, but two performances etched themselves into my memory for very different reasons. Mika the pop star and Mark Rabot the legendary guitarist. Mika with his vibrant wardrobe changes and grand piano turned interactive set piece had a swaying to his tunes, even though pop isn't my go to genre. He understood that it wasn't just about the music. It was about the connection, the shared experience. On the flip side, Mark Rabot lost in his virtuosity, seemed to forget about his audience. His fear of boring us ironically led to just that a disengaged crowd. That's when it hit me. It doesn't matter how intelligent or talented you are or how good your online courses. If you can't engage people, you've lost them. It's not about the content. It's about the experience. Just like the music industry has evolved from album sales to show tickets, the online course market is shifting towards cohorts and experiences. As an entrepreneur specializing in online course creation, this revelation was a game changer. To all my fellow coaches, consultants and course creators out there, let's not merely impart knowledge. Let's create experiences that captivate, engage, and resonate because in the end, it's not just about what we teach, it's about how we make people feel. It got great engagement there and it took about five minutes. Just wanted to show you, but you can do some things that are really simple just to start this process of engaging people around you and around your course topic. You can see it was all tied into my course topic too. That was a many master class on story telling, social sharing in such a way that it wasn't just a picture of your course for sale that looked from graphic design that said, go buy my course. It wasn't even at that level of the journey too. It was pure engagement, value adding, storytelling from your life, turning one of your life experiences into a bridge to a revelation and idea and a ha moment into what it is and how you serve people. So obviously, people have so much they can learn from you and that's really cool. And I'm sure there's a lot of interest in your tools as well because in today's world, the demands are ever increasing whether it's all these different platforms. But the cool thing about AI is it can bring some harmony back. Our philosophy too is not just so that we can become these endless workhorses, but ultimately that we can make great content, great products, serve people by our time back with these tools like AI and then ultimately have more time for what matters most to us like our family and our purpose and health and a sustainable pace. And so there's so much more we could cover and you're going to be covering that whether people can join you on the live challenge or they can download the PDF. We'll link all that in the show notes. But how can people also follow you and connect with you anywhere else? Where's your favorite place? All right. So we have an online course creators community on Facebook. So if you search online course creators community, it's been around since 2011. So it's the oldest one. A lot of people have actually created look alike groups based on mine, but it'll say since 2011, that's the original one. Also follow me, live your message on YouTube, live your message on Instagram. You can find me pretty much everywhere. Marisa, I appreciate you. So excited for your upcoming challenge and so excited for all the value that our team has gone from you as well. Think Media Podcast definitely check out a summary of all the show notes and go create your online course, serve people. Turn it into an experience. We'll see you in a future episode.