So You Want To Create An Online Program [Ep #163]

So I bet you’re like most practitioners and your way of merging online is to create an online program. Well, I’m going to burst that bubble. And there’s a few reasons why it may not work for you. But you have to stay tuned. 

Hey guys! Welcome to another episode of the profitable practice podcast. I am of course your host, Andrea Maxim. And this was a promised episode from last week. So if you didn’t listen to last weeks’ episode, I was talking all about how you need to be making sure that your business has your hands in offline and online. And why that was and how even fifteen years out, it can be a bit of a shock that the way you created your business is not what is going to help your business continue to grow. So go ahead and listen to that, but what I promised I would talk about is my suggestions around creating an online program. This is the number one thing that I hear from most practitioners saying ‘I want to create an online program.’ This is their way of merging their practice online. And while I fully adopt that idea and I think it is fantastic. There are a few things that you need to be very mindful of before you start putting in a ton of effort into creating an online program that isn’t actually going to make you any money. 

So, let’s talk about the benefits first and foremost. With regards to the online program, how you should be putting it together is almost like an online curriculum. So it should be something that will completely encompass what you would have written a book about. What your entire methodology or pillars of your treatment plan or your treatment protocol looks like. So that people are getting a full experience with that program. And the reason why I say that is because then you can totally leverage it parallel to working with people in office. But it’s also a beautiful way for people to understand what it is like to work with you. And maybe the timing just isn’t right, their financials aren’t there, or something along those lines that allow them to be able to work with you right now. Maybe they’re out of province, maybe they are just not ready to commit to naturopathic medicine; getting into osteopathy, getting into massage therapy, etc. So, if you’re going to create a program that is what I encourage you to consider doing. Now it does not mean that you have to do it that way. But I think that is the best totality approach for you to be conducting an online program. 

Now the other thing you absolutely can do is create those little micro tiers where you have like a low offer and then you work up to a bigger offer. The only reason why I’m not the biggest fan of that is because then we’re starting to lose the whole purpose of why we are creating this online program to begin with. And that is to funnel these people into working with you. And if you have too many layers, too many levels that people have to work through before they can start working with you in your office you’re probably going to end up losing them. This is why I am so adamant about having an offline business as well as merging online. But all of our online strategies that we have is bringing people right back to our office as much as humanly possible. Whether that’s through telemedicine or whether that’s directly into our Brick and Mortar. Every strategy I have is just grabbing them from a different place and bringing them back into our Brick and Mortar. And that is the best strategy for you to be considering when you’re putting together this online program. Please don’t look at the online program as something that is completely on its own, that you are going to make all of the dollars in the world, because other people do it. To be honest with you guys, getting all-in in an online program in the online space the way that it is right now. I think it is way harder than growing your Brick and Mortar practice. And I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘Man! But growing the Brick and Mortar practice is already so difficult and there are so many people that are doing amazing things online.’ The problem is that I don’t think that you should be abandoning one to go into the other. It’s not like the grass is greener on the other side, because there are a ton of practitioners who have also attempted to go all-in online and they weren’t successful. So there is no sort of an equation of ‘If I go online and if I created an online course I will therefore be successful. I will be making all of this residual income, I will be doing X, Y, or Z.’. We are right now trying to set-up our Evergreen funnel for webinars that we have created. And it is way harder than I ever thought it ever would be. It seems like such a dream to create something, record it, put it out there and people just buy it while you’re sleeping. It doesn’t work that way. And until you start to experience the online space you won’t fully understand that until you’re like ‘Oh crap! Now I have to spend more money, and more time, and more mentorship, and get more coaching etc.’ So that’s why I implore you that if you’re going to create an online program, that you use it as a marketing strategy only and not leveraging it now you’re going to go all-in on it. Especially if you’re still running your Brick and Mortar and/or still trying to attract virtual patients perhaps. It is just a way to get them in and the finality of that course is obviously to show that you are an authority and you want these people to start working with you one-on-one. 

I personally wouldn’t create more than one online program and I would just try to make that one my star and it’s all we talk about now. On our live videos, and with our emails, and with our patients, we’re constantly saying we have this tool as well but ultimately we want them to work with us. So here is the thing that I caution you on. Number one, we pre-sell every program including the maximized practitioner program before I ever finish the program. So we pre-sold the maximized health method program before we even created the first module. And we did that intentionally because I wanted to make sure that people actually wanted it. And I wanted to get some real-life feedback before we put in what took us three months’ worth of effort to actually finish this program. So that is a ton of time, a ton of effort and that was with me and my team doing it. That if it is not the right decision for your audience, it’s just an absolute waste. You just lost so much time, and you just don’t have that time to lose. So pre-sell it. And we pre-sold ours by doing a free challenge that led into a webinar, and on the webinar we unveiled the program and asked for beta members to join. It was a huge hit, but I also had a great audience to tap into to make it successful. 

So if you don’t have a lot of people, this is where it’s going to get harder because now you’re going to have more cold audiences to buy your online program. And cold audiences are the hardest to convert. Unless you’re really having them messaging down and then your marketing down and everything else. So with that being said, just rely on the fact that when you create this online program, your warm audience; the people that have already been working for you are most likely going to be the early adopters. And that’s why when you originally roll it out, you’re going to have a huge successful launch. If it’s the right product for them, and then you’re going to think ‘Oh sweet! I’ve hit it.’ And then the next time you roll it out you get maybe a fraction of that. And that’s because there’s only so many people that are going to be willing to buy without getting the testimonial proof. Without you talking about it more, without you continuously putting it in front of their faces. So it is like a whole entity on its own. So pre-selling it is huge, and that is what really cemented to us that this was going to be worthwhile. 

The other thing is how you structure the program. Now, what most practitioners do and most of my students do when they talk to them about it, is they want to create a program that solves all of the problems. And that is not what your people want to buy. In fact, the simpler you make the program the more successful it will become.  So what I mean about that is, if you don’t have a particular protocol, we have the gap protocol, then the maximized health methods so it all kind of went under that umbrella. If you don’t have something like that, and you just wanted to treat it like healthy living across the board. Well, you’re going to have a way harder time selling that to a cold audience which is kind of that again, residual piece that you are aiming for. As supposed to creating a program that is incredibly nailed in really simple, the transformation is there. And that could be something like ‘going gluten free’. And then of course you sprinkle in all the digestive healing pieces in the lab tests and stuff like that on your program for under ten dollars a day that could be your program. 

Another program which we had one of our elite members do is all about thyroid management. So the entire program was specifically about breaking down thyroid function, talking about lab testing, and then talking about how to treat the thyroid naturally. And that is something that I can do in an entire hour of training, and she just mapped it out into a module and she crushed it. She was hoping for ten people to opt in and she ended up getting forty of her patients buying that program at $97 for the beta. So it can be really simple. You could do an entire program on SIBO for instance. So pick one health condition and walk people through it like you’re holding their hands the whole time. 

Where the issue starts to happen is it’s too diluted when you’re just selling health in general, when you’re selling weight lost in general, when you’re selling ‘get-better-sleep’ in general. People are not going to want to buy that because again, you’re selling it in the online space. When you sell it in the online space, you are now automatically competing with everybody else who is talking about all of those things and they’re doing it for free. So this is why in our maximized practitioner program, we have a bonus module on maximizing your messaging. And your messaging really is key. And this is where we’re talking about how you can create this unique methodology that only you and your business offer. So it sounds new, and novel, and it makes people intrigued about it. It’s the reason why Keto, when Keto was a huge fad and then we brought out Paleo, and then Paleo became a huge fad. And then we brought out the whole food diet, and the whole food diet became a huge fad. They’re teaching the exact same things but they’re putting a new label on it. And there is no reason why with your practice you can’t do the same thing. And that is something we are trying to teach all of our maximized practitioners students about how to maximize your messaging. 

And then of course using modernized marketing which is the third pillar of the maximized health practitioner method. Which is now you’re using your Facebook and webinars, and online marketing strategy to then continuously get eyeballs unto whatever it is you’re trying to sell. And so look at this online program not as a residual income, as a completely different company, a completely different program. We want to look at it as a marketing piece. But again, please don’t be making the mistakes that a lot of the practitioners make, which is having these huge generic touch points all over the place, of all the health things that you could be doing. And there’s no obvious transformation at the end. Don’t be selling something that everybody else is selling online. Again, use your own methodology or your own messaging in your own marketing. And 100% pre-sell it before you put in three months plus worth of investment to get this done. Now, when it is done though just like what we experienced, it is a phenomenal breath of relief. Because now that final piece that you’ve been wanting to create is now done. And that final marketing cog that you can now constantly be referring to when you do your social media pieces so we go live every Friday. And every single live I’m talking about that maximized health method, I’m dropping the link I’m always showing people what it is that we created. It was the final piece that I wanted to create for our business strategy.

 And now I feel like our business is whole. We have our hands in the online bucket really cemented down. Our Brick and Mortar, all the systems and processes, and strategy and growth there is consistent. And the two together are now completely married and are helping the Brick and Mortar business grow consistently. Which I know is what you’re looking for. 

But again, just because you create it does not mean you’ll be successful, otherwise every single person who has created an online program would be able to then retire their family and go on big trips and not worry about their finances. It’s a whole other journey, but if you do it well and you do it strategically it can pay off massively. And if this is something you want to learn more about just merging your business online, I want you to go watch our one hour free training on ‘Merging the Three-Step Framework to Merging your Practice Online’. But if you want to nail down the nitty gritties with regards to your program, what you want to create and you just want to get a secondary eye on it. Please book a game-plan call with me, it’s a dollar and that’s just to get rid of the tire kickers. And that link is in the description below. 

So I applaud you for wanting to merge your practice online and by creating a program. I am going to kick your ass in gear to say ‘get it done!’. And in our maximized practitioner program, we have an entire module on how to create your program. Including the exact framework that we used to create the maximized practitioner program, the maximized health program, basically all the big programs I’ve ever created. So that you can see exactly how easy it is to just brainstorm, brain dump and just get it done. Because I know you’ve probably been sitting on this idea for a while and this is your wakeup call to say ‘look, there is no better time than now, and it’s amazing how quickly six months full fly by.’ A year will fly by, and we don’t know when the next shutdown is going to happen. So please if you need the support, if you need the guidance you need to be raising your hand and say ‘I need help’ and let me help you book that game-plan call. 

But if you also want to become a member of our community, the maximized practitioner community and also cement the foundational experience. Get those business systems and strategies built out, so that your modernized marketing helps to consistently feed everything with regards to your practice. Then I want you to go watch that one hour training that will explain everything you need to know about the maximized practitioner program. And of course, any questions you have? Just drop them in my DM’s @andreamaximnd. So I wish you all the best, stop waiting, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Get shit done, take imperfect action, I will see you in the next episode. I’m Andrea Maxim and I’m out.