In this show we discuss how to develop an audience for your propose new or just launched course or membership website. What are the key mistakes that owners make when it comes to building a pre-launch audience?

Neil Napier is a charismatic leader of people. He focuses on empowering people to spread their wings and develop their individual super-powers. Neil cares about his customers like nobody else and is available for them more than his wife would prefer. He loves to teach and uses this skill to go the extra mile for his customers’ success.

This Episode is Sponsored By WP Fusion

You can get 25% WP Fusion by using this coupon code WPTONIC

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic Show. I’ve got a great guest this week. We’ve got Neil Napier joining us and Neil is going to be talking about his product and a number of other things. It is going to be fascinating. And I’ve got my great co-host here Cindy Nicholson. Would you like to quickly introduce yourself, Cindy?

Cindy: Hi, everyone. It’s Cindy from the TheCourseWhisperer.co where I help entrepreneurs create their online course.

Jonathan: And Neil, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Neil: Absolutely. So, this is Neil Napier and we do help people turn what they know, their knowledge into something they can sell.

Jonathan: That sounds fascinating. And before I hand it over to Cindy, I just want to quickly talk about one of our great sponsors we really appreciate and that’s WP Fusion. And what is WP Fusion? Well, if you’ve got a WordPress powered membership website or Learning Management System and you want to put it on steroids, this is the product for you. Basically, it enables your WordPress website to really totally integrate with your CRM, example, ActiveCampaign.

Obviously, there is a number of them like Drip and a number of others. And WP Fusion communicates with almost 40 of these CRM systems and like what I said, it enables them to really communicate with these systems. So, you can really plan custom Drip Marketing campaigns and other optimization processes on your website to a level which would be unachievable without WP Fusion. The other factor is if you go to the WP Fusion website, and there’ll be links in the show notes, they have offered us an exclusive deal to WP-Tonic and our listeners and viewers. And that’s if you go to the website, and you decide one of their packages and you put in the coupon code WPTONIC all upper case, one word, you will get 25% off any of their packages. And that is an exclusive deal for WP-Tonic listeners and viewers. So I suggest you should get over there quick and take advantage of this fantastic offer. So, I’m now going to send this interview over to Cindy. And off you go, Cindy.

Cindy: Thank you, Jonathan. Hello Neil. Thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate you coming online.

Neil: Of course. I am happy to be here, Cindy.
Cindy: Coming all the way from Finland, so it’s a little bit later where you are. So, I’ve been watching you for a while Neil and the work that you’re doing with Kyvio and your more recent work and I’ve been really impressed with the community that you’re building and the support that you give to them. So, can you just tell us a little bit more about what Kyvio is and how you help your customers?

Neil: Sure. So, me and my business partner discussed this some time ago. We thought about what is our why and what is our mission there and we are leaning more towards this mentality shift in the people and helping to get them from just knowing things or just doing things into actually creating and selling those things. So, not just being consumers but also being creators and actually monetizing what they know. And that’s been our core focus for quite some time now and guide you as a platform in My First 1000 as a community gives us exactly that.

So Kyvio is a platform that helps business owners build their followers, membership sites, send out marketing emails all from one place and even if they want to have affiliates and manage those affiliates, they can do that as well from within the platform. And My First 1000 is a community that compliments what we do with Kyvio, where our goal, our actual goal is to help 1,000 people get to their first $1,000.00 with the power of membership sites. So, we do a lot of free training within this group. We recently had a 5-day live training series and on one of those days, Ryan Deiss came in and shared how he runs a half a million dollar per month membership site. So, that’s our goal to inspire people, to give them tips and techniques that they can use to build courses, to sell courses and lead a comfortable life by doing so.

Cindy: Awesome. I love how you’ve kind of pivoted slightly in terms of the work that you’re doing. Now, what was it that made you want to do this slight pivot to kind of really focus on helping your clients get their first 1,000? Was it from the customers or was it just a difference that you were finding from a business strategy?

Neil: It was more of a business strategy thing because truth be told, we got a lot of sales with Kyvio and some of them turned out as it happens because it’s a monthly platform and we ask them, “Why aren’t you utilizing it to the full? Why didn’t you stop paying?”. And most of them said, “I don’t quite know how to sell my course,” or, “I have all these ideas. I don’t know what to do with it.” So we realized that if you truly want to help people, just giving them a platform is not enough. We should go beyond that and also give them training that they can use and create things with. And since then, we’ve noticed as well, honestly speaking, that our rate has gown down too and people are now more willing to learn and implement as they go along.

Cindy: And so, why did you decide to focus on the My First 1000 in terms of the first $1,000 you earn from the membership site?

Neil: So, we were thinking about branding quite a bit because I think branding, as long as you have something catchy, something good, it sticks. And first, I came up with the idea that, hey, I want to help 1,000 people make money online. But my business partner Steven, he said, “It’s a little bit too self-centered. Let’s try and make it more about them.” So, I said, “Okay. Well, I want to help them make money.” And he said, “How much?” I said, “I want to help people who are like me 5 years ago, who just wanted to validate the idea that they can do it too. I want to help them because I see myself in them.” So we decided that 1,000 is a good starting point and we also talked to a few people, we did a discovery call with them and we asked them what would $1,000 mean to you?

And you know it’s interesting because some people in the US or in Europe, they would say $1,000 is okay. You know, “It will pay for my holiday,” or, “I can do this couple of other things.” But, then we talked to people in Asia or Latin America and we asked them, “What would $1,000 be for you?” And they said, “It would be really, really big because that’s what people make here in 3 months.” And then, we realized that money means different to everyone. But if you create a group centered around results, focused on what we want people to get, for them it’ll mean making first $1,000 but eventually, they’ll say, “Okay. My First 1000 is now about getting my first 1,000 subscribers or members.” So, it’s always a goal that you keep on kind of moving forward and that way you always keep on looking at the next thing you want to do.

Cindy: Yeah, I know. That’s great. I also imagine that the first 1,000 is kind of getting that momentum going as well because if you can get to 1,000, then getting to the next barrier is so much easier. But it’s that initial support that they need to get up and running and the help in terms of what kind of things they need to know at that particular level. So that being said, what do you find, you know clients who are working towards getting their first 1,000, what kinds of thing did you help them with or what kind of support do they need?

Neil: Sure. I will be honest. The biggest challenge and I’ve done a few calls about this with them as well, the biggest problem or challenge that they have is the confidence issue. So, they feel that their idea is not worthy enough or they don’t know enough to teach someone else or no one is going to pay them $100 to learn from them. And I find that’s a mental obstacle that’s holding a lot of people back. So a lot of things we do inside the group is about breaking that barrier. A lot of posts that we make inside the group is about sharing success stories of people who come from difficult places and these people are Kyvio customers or I work with or some really successful people and we share these inspiring stories to show people that it can be done.

That regardless of what their current state is or state of mind is, they can break through these barriers and do it. And once they overcome this, then, of course, you have more technical challenges like if I don’t have a market in mind, what market should I go after? Or how should I decide my customer avatar? Or how should I think about positioning my product? Or should it be just one course or should it be a complete offer? So all those things are things that we answer within the group. We have some pre-recorded training already available there. For example, the live interview with Ryan Deiss is also in that group already. But people can go in they can kind of learn the bare necessities that they need to build a membership site and then drive traffic to it. So we provide all the information.

Cindy: That’s great. And it’s so funny how mindset just keeps coming out up again and again and again. You know when I first started in this entrepreneurial world, I never even thought about that. I was more worried about the website and everything that again, same thing for me, in terms of working with clients, it’s often the mindset that holds them back and the ones that are successful, are the ones that just do it anyway and they just move forward and figure it out as they go. So, do you have any example, a story that you can share of somebody who did overcome that with the work that you’re doing?

Neil: Yeah. Absolutely. So, I recently did an interview with a customer from Venezuela and I mean, you know Venezuela is in kind of a difficult state at the moment with their finances and what not. When he told me that he’s from there, it peaked my interest because I was interested in how he’s fearing as well at the moment. And he said that it was quite big for him in construction back in the day when everything was booming, everything was good, he was making a lot of money with that. But as the economy started to shrink, like he had to apply his trade elsewhere. But doing so in a shrinking economy is not an easy thing to do. So he turned online and he started learning a lot of new things about marketing and he realized that what he knew about construction or working, you know doing DIY stuff, he could turn that into a course and he could teach other people. So, he turned around and I think within the last 12 months or so, he’s made $30,000.

$30,000 might be a small number for, again, people in the US or Europe. It might be a little bit under a years’ worth of salary, but for him, it’s a lot of money. And I think he’s using that now in a way to inspire other people as well to show them that they can also make it online just by transferring their skills what they know into something they can teach other people.

Cindy: Yeah. It’s amazing how that can be done with membership sites for sure. So, can you just tell us a little bit about some of the mistakes people make when they first are starting out with their membership sites or the courses that they’re creating?

Neil: Yeah. I am going to give you two examples here because I think they stand out.
One of them is from someone I was talking with who has made $1,000 as well, even before he got into the group. And I ask him, you know, he told me, “Neil, this really good training, and I enjoyed it and I just want to let you know that I made my first $1 000.00 already. But I’m looking forward to make the next one.” And I’m like, “Great. What did you think about the training?” He said, “I’ve been doing this since March and I have to say that learn everything with hit and trial and I made a lot of mistakes along the way as well. So, I didn’t choose the right platform or I didn’t have the right sequence for when I was launching the product.

I didn’t build a list. I didn’t build a community.” So, he said, “But now I know all of this, I can focus on my efforts into doing this and make it work. So that’s the first example. Second example is of another student who used to be in healthcare and then she quit that and for the last 10 years, she’s been teaching other people healthcare locally and recently about 6 months or so ago, she decided to build a course. And you know, she was kind of hesitant coming in, into to the group. She said, “Am I really going to get value out of this? I already have my course. I know what I’m doing.” And we said, “Yeah. That’s perfectly fine.

Hopefully get some value out of it. Just watch the trainings.” And she did and she realized that she had a lot of gaps in that because even though she was already selling a few copies of her course every month, she still didn’t know what her market was because she was selling to anyone who would buy. She didn’t know her customer avatar so that way, she couldn’t really scale this up because she didn’t know what kind of traffic she wanted. So, I think that a lot of people I find that it’s good to go in head first and I mean always say that imperfect action is better than a perfect in-action. So it’s good to go in head first but once you’ve done that, you’ve got to come back out again and you have to re-evaluate and see what are the missing gaps and slowly start filling them in. Just because you make money or you’ve done a course, it’s not enough to say that you’re going to continually sell it. But if you do get your fundamentals right, I think you can do a good job at that as well.

Cindy: Right, yeah. People talk about it being passive income but in order for it to be a consistent, ongoing, sustainable thing, you always need to be doing tweaks and taking a look at it to see what else you can do to improve it.

Neil: And that also reminds me very quickly about that expression that overnight, you know, I’m a millionaire but being an overnight million took 10 years to make.

Cindy: Yeah, exactly. So, what are some of the main questions you’re getting from your clients that are in your My First 1000? What kinds of things are they looking to you for advice on?

Neil: So, a lot of them are looking to validate the idea before they finish creating their product. So they already started creating the product and when they watch the live training, they realize they hadn’t quite validated the idea. So that’s something they keep coming back with. And what I recommend to them in such a case is to build out a sales page, even if it’s a small sales page and target your audience with that. But, instead of selling the product, what you can do is on the buy button, you can clearly write down that.

“We are opening up beta group for five people only because we need immediate feedback so the copies might run out and if it does, we will let you know in the future.” So people have to click and when they click, if you can register that click already, you know that they’re interested to buy. And when they do click, you say “Hey, we’ve just ran out but you can leave your email address and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as we decide to re-open it.” And when they leave the email address, they’re definitely interested. So, if you do that, you can validate the idea even before you’ve started building out the product, which is something we do. I mean it really helps because we have so many ideas, you have hundreds of ideas, but a quick way to test out which one will work the best is just set up a quick sales page, between writing and designing takes about 12 to 16 hours and once you push that out to your audience, they’ll give you the feedback. So, if you get 100 clicks from the page, if five of them click, then you know how much money you can potentially make from that idea.

Cindy: Yeah. That’s awesome. Validating is a so important initial step and I think in your group, the My First 1000, you recently did a Facebook Live on how to actually put that sales page together. Am I correct?

Neil: That was actually tonight. So I’m doing the validation idea tonight.

Cindy: Oh, you’re doing it tonight.

Neil: Yeah.

Cindy: Okay. So stay tuned for that one.

Neil: Yeah.

Cindy: Oh yeah, Jonathan. Thank you, Neil. Jonathan, I’m going to pass it back to you?

Jonathan: We’re going to go for our break folks. We’ll be back with this fascinating interview with Neil. We’ll be back in a few moments.

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Jonathan: We’re coming back. I’m actually going to throw it back to Cindy so she could continue because she seems to be in full flow there Cindy. Well, continue for a little while and I might just jump in.

Cindy: So, another thing that I saw in your My First 1000 that you were giving advice on, was about pricing and I think you have a strategy that you recommend people go through in terms of pricing their courses and membership sites. Maybe you can share some of your thoughts there Neil? Because that’s always a burning issue. How much do I charge?

Neil: It is. Absolutely. One thing I will say to begin with, is charge less than what you think your course is worth because that way you’re always giving people value and you can justify it like, if I was to buy this myself, I’d be happy to pay $9.97 but you’re getting it $4.97. So, first of all, always pricing it below what you think it’s worth is a good thing but more importantly, what I’m try and tell people is that simply having a product is not enough because a product is actually a starting point, a course is a starting point. What people need beyond that is more help, implementation help or they could need checklists or templates or some done for you things if you can afford to give them that or group calls or one on one calls, whatever you can afford to give. So, if you really want to build a good, you know offer, you build the product and then you build other elements around it that will help people overcome any objections or obstacles they have. And as you do that, your valuation goes up as well. So, we actually build a calculator.

So, if people go to myfirst1000.com/calculator, you can find the calculator there where you can answer a few questions about your course, about your offer and it will give you a suggested price. And as I say, price below that just because that way you can give immense value. But there are a few things I would recommend doing. First of all, look at your competitors. If your competitors are already creating and selling such a course, that will give you some idea. If you feel you don’t have competitors, look again. But, in case you don’t have competitors, I would recommend thinking about how much time you’re saving someone by giving them that course. We had one My First 1000 graduate who came on, who did an interview with us and what he said was that with this course and what I’m teaching people, when they implement it they already save like a $1,000 every week. So I’m confident of pricing it at $1 000, which I did, which people were happy to pay because he just showed them the value of it. If you just implement this, you will save $1,000 in your business just by doing this every single week. So, that way people will say, “Okay. $1000 just makes sense.” He based in on the value and that’s how he priced it. So there are different ways of doing it. I recommend using a calculator because that takes about the subjectivity that you might have in your mind and try that out.

Cindy: So that’s interesting because often you’ll hear people say, “Charge more than what you think it is worth.” So, can you give me a little bit more, you know, thought or rational around, why you think you should go less?

Neil: Sure. Here’s the thing other than just making money, I’m out there to help as many people as I can. Now, I do think that if I price low, number one, I’ll get more customers. If all numbers stay intact, I will get more customers because, of course, I’m going lower. And I’ll be able to impact on more lives, I’ll be able to affect more lives. But if you always think about pricing higher, just pricing it higher for the sake of it makes it sound to me like you don’t really know the value of what you’re doing enough. Pricing higher is okay if it’s a service, like if you are a done for you service for other people and you’re charging $1,000 a month and you oversubscribed, it’s okay telling them that “Hey, we’re going to raise it to $2, 000 just so that I have more time to help everyone.

” But if it’s an additional course, if it’s something that you don’t have to be constantly involved in, it doesn’t make a difference if you price it a 100 bucks lower because as I said, you’ll get more customers, you’ll impact more lives and you might even get more people buying in just because they can afford it and they feel like now it’s more of a steal than it was before. So I think pricing lower is not so that you lower the value of your course in your own mind, but that way you’re able to justify to others that it’s truly worth that much but you can get it for less.

Cindy: Right. Absolutely. Okay. That sounds good. So, in terms of, now, do you advocate for these people when they’re starting out with the first 1,000 that they start out with a course or do you recommend that they start with the membership site or a combination? What are your thought around getting started with creating some sort of information product for your clients?

Neil: So, of course, the very first step, like I keep saying, is the sales page because you need that just to validate the idea but once you have that, then it’s okay to have a bare-bones membership site. You don’t need to put too much effort in the beginning. I mean I remember the very first course I recorded was just me creating mind maps and I still create mind maps because they are so fast to do and I just put them out there.

So, another strategy that I’ve been using recently, it’s called the Invisible Funnel and the idea with the Invisible Funnel is that you actually sell a course, not just you validate the idea but you sell a course even before you’ve created it and you create a Live. So, what happens, in that case, is say, if I’m going to do a course about How to Play a Flute, for example, if that’s what the course is going to be about, I’ll sell the idea for a $1 and I’ll people that it’s only $1. 3 days later, we’re doing a live webinar and it’s going to be a value-packed 2, 3-hour session and if you feel that you get enough value out of that, I’m going to automatically charge you $49. But if you feel you didn’t, if you feel that’s not good enough for you, you let me know and I’ll pay you that money back or I’ll refund you, I’ll cancel, whatever you tell me, within the next 24 hours. So, we tried that out recently and we had 150 people sign up for a $1 and 100 of them actually showed up live for the webinar which is a good show up rate and about 75 of them stayed to the end and most of them paid either the full payment or part payment because we had a part payment set up then and we made about $3,480 or so just from doing that and I created the product live on call. I mean, again, I said the mind map before and I did the how product live on a webinar and then I, later on, took it, broke it up in smaller chunks and put it in the members area, gave people extra templates and checklists so they would stay and that way, I didn’t have to work before to sell the idea. If only two people had signed up, I could have said, “Hey. It’s not happening anymore. Something came up. I’m just going to cancel this. Here’s your money back.” But because I had the validation and the money, now I had more of an to actually do it.

Cindy: Wow. That’s great. That’s a good story. Thank you for sharing that. That’s an interesting perspective. So, again, as I’ve mentioned, I have been following you on Facebook and everything and in your group, My First 1000 and you kind of have been sharing your strategies around your Facebook group in terms of as a way to build your audience in terms of kind of almost using it as an example of what you’re doing as something that people can do. So, can you share some of your strategies that you’ve been doing in your Facebook group to help build that audience?

Neil: Sure. I think we can all agree that it is easier to retain old customers than get new ones. That just costs more. But if you already have a customer, it’s easier to continue talking to them and when you have something to offer, they are more likely to buy. So, we create communities because we feel that it gives me an environment to put what I have in my head out to people for free. I mean that gives them a lot of value and again, hopefully, one day they purchase something from us. But for people, not only does it give them free content but also a place where there are like-minded people where they won’t be judged for stupid questions, where they can ask anything they want and they can help each other as well. So, if you have a community, you have a place that is your own. I mean, everyone talks about being an expert or they feel like they’re not an expert. But trust me, if you have a community of 100 people, for them, you are the expert. When you do a Live video, when you post something, they’re not going to look at you as a peer, rather, they’re going to look at you as someone who knows more than they do and that gives you an automatic authority. So, I’m always open to showing people in a meta way what I’m doing is something they can do as well. Like they were asking, you’re right, they were asking, “If I want to build a community, how should I go about it?” I said, “Look what I did with My First 1000 and do the same thing.

It just works.” We built a community of 1,000 people, I think, in a couple of weeks. So, if people were to just duplicate what they see being done online, I’m sure they will have a lot of success with it.

Cindy: Yeah, I know. It’s a good point. Just follow what other successful people are doing and use similar strategies and they’ll work. Okay. So here’s just another question because again, we’re very philosophically aligned in terms of what content and how it should be structured and everything like that. So, my last question for you is around, one of the things when people spend all this time creating a course and then they sell it and then either people don’t complete it or they never come back to it. For me, which says, well, how are you going get that ongoing revenue if you can’t get the people to stay sort of thing? So what kind of, because I saw your blog post recently, what are some of your thoughts around, how to get people, once they are in, to continue with on the course and complete it?

Neil: I’ll kind of paraphrase what Ryan Deiss said when he was on that session with us. He actually said that building a community, a paid community, really gets people get together in one place and he said a lot of people actually stayed in the recurring membership group, not because of the content but because of the Facebook group. Because there are 12,000 other people in that group and they get a lot of value. So, one thing you can do once you get big enough is you can add a community element to your course as well. The other thing that I notice someone else doing and I was really impressed to the point that we’re going to start bringing some of those techniques into Kyvio’s members’ area as well, that when you finish a course, you get a certificate and there’s even a leader-board, for example. So, when you are doing a course, as long as you don’t mind being public, your name will be published on a leader-board if you have finished the course, for example. Then there is also, he said that, “When you finish this course,” and it was like $1,000 course, he said, “I’ll send you a handwritten letter with my personal email address that you can contact me anytime you want.” So that also made me feel like he actually cares a lot and he does. So, all of these personal touches really gives me more incentive to finish a course myself.

So I paid for that and I finished the course in 3 days because I was like, I really want to get that letter with his email because I had more questions for him in terms of business. So I think, I say this and a lot of people say that my job is selling a course for a membership site access. I don’t care if people go to it or not. I do think, to an extent as render, it is our responsibility because if people do go through the course, they will keep coming back. So, it is your job to, you know, if they haven’t logged in a month later, you can email them and say, “Is everything okay? Is there something I can help you with? Is there any more content you would like?” And then, that way give, they give you more ideas for the products that they want as well. So it’s a win-win.

Cindy: That is so true and I just feel really strongly about creating the quality of the course itself because, you know, any client that I’ve have worked with, their plan hasn’t been to just create the one course and be done with it. It is kind of almost been the foundation of this broader offer that they have. Whether it’s a membership site, whether it’s masterminds, it really kind of starts with the course itself from the clients that I’ve worked with. And if you don’t impress them in that first stage, then you’re not going to get them into the next level. So, for me, I think it’s worthwhile or time well spent to focus on the quality of that initial course that you put out there so that they keep coming back for more.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think that’s great Cindy. We need to wrap it up for the podcast part of the show, folks. Hopefully, Neil will stay with us for another 10, 15 minutes which will be bonus content which you’ll be able to see on the WP-Tonic website and YouTube channel. Neil, thank you for joining us on the podcast part of the show. It’s been a great discussion. How can people find out about more about you and what you are up to, Neil?

Neil: Sure, just go to Facebook and search for My First 1000, join that group and we answer questions every day and it’s an absolutely free course and you can also check out kyvio.com and see if it’s a fit for you.

Jonathan: And Cindy, how can people find out more about you and what you are up to Cindy?

Cindy: Well, they can always go to TheCourseWhisperer.co. and visit me there. So, if anyone’s needing some help to get that course created in a way that will create those raving fans, they can reach out to me there.

Jonathan: And if you want to find out more about WP-Tonic, go to our website, give us a review and iTunes. We love feedback, either on the website, the Facebook page or on iTunes. It really helps the show the more feedback we get from our listeners and viewers. Tell us who you would like on the show and interview. Whatever you want to say. We love feedback. So, we’re going to end the podcast part of the show. Like I say, hopefully, Neil’s got enough time to have an extension of the discussion and we will be back next week with somebody that can give you information, advice on how to build a successful membership, Learning Management System course, WordPress or Online Marketing in general. We’ll be back next week folks. Bye.