Help with Video, Marketing, Publishing, and Story Productions

Category: Publishing Sales Machine

Is Your Great Course Not Selling? Try This Approach

This article is for you if you have an existing online course that is not selling or you are considering launching an online course or membership program.

It has become tougher to sell more complex courses without offering some form of live engagement such as workshops and Question and Answer sessions (Office Hours).

I am a member of Dave Dee’s Inner Sanctum Masterclass. He recently said that he no longer sells courses, so I asked him about that in the live Q&A meeting.

Here is what Dave Dee advised doing instead:

  1. Drip out one module a week by email on Mondays.
  2. Have a live Q&A session on Thursday or Friday for people to engage with you.
  3. Sell the ongoing modules and Q & A sessions as a membership. ($20 – $99 per month).
  4. You can present the full course modules available as a gift for those who want to work ahead. (Sold separately for $XX)
  5. You can continue to sell the course separately for $XX.

Many of the courses he sold before are in the Inner Sanctum membership portal.

This is consistent with my Golden Publishing Sales Machine.

Let’s talk about breathing new life into the sales of your existing courses or launching something new.

See Greg’s Presentation on LinkedIn

Think Different about Publishing, Marketing, and Story Productions

Consider how book publishing, course creation, stories, and marketing can all fit together holistically for you to share your stories and help people.

As humans, we tend to approach things in silos: write a book ~ create a course ~ sell a service ~ tell my story ~ do a broadcast ~ try marketing here ~ and write some stuff.

Me too.

Over the years I have tried a lot of boxes: writer ~ artist ~ musician ~ course creator ~ publisher ~ video creator ~ marketer ~ software engineer ~ driver ~ logger ~ fisher ~ minor ~ literature ~ philosophy ~ traveller …

Sometimes I think my most accurate job description is Chief Enabler to Do Stuff.

The list a variety of projects is vast and diverse!

Shared Visions Unlimited aims to integrate all of that to provide encouragement and services for Publishing, Course Creation, Story Production, and Marketing.

The essential idea is that we are all creative beings constantly exploring life and sharing things like stories, insights, products, and services to grow lives and businesses.

As Marie Forlio says, “The world needs that special gift that only you have.”

The main principle here is that there are many ways to get your message out into the world.

I will explore expanding and integrating media and strategies in the next sections.

Publish Your Book In Multiple Formats

I have helped people publish their books over the decades because they asked for my help. I recently recast Shared Visions Unlimited to include writing, publishing, and marketing services.

Betty Withrow and I have helped many authors complete their books and formatted and submitted the books to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and IngramSpark to get the printed and eBook versions out through the usual channels.

Here is an expanded list of where the content from your book could go:

We offer all of these versions.

  • Printed Book.
  • eBook (Kindle, Amazon Books, …)
  • Audio Books
  • Podcasts and Broadcasts (serial readings like Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others used to publish their books).
  • Print Publications
  • Video
  • Flipbooks
  • Print Magazines
  • Digital Magazines
  • Digital Experience Editions

Courses and Membership Programs

If you come to me with a book you want published, I will likely suggest that you consider creating a related course or membership program to leverage your content and benefit more people.

If you talk to me with a course in mind, I will suggest you consider creating and publishing companion books as well.

And a comprehensive plan to develop and market the books, courses, and related stuff all at the same time using my Publishing Sales Machine.

Digital Experience Editions

I use the Kartra Membership platform to create a multimedia repository for books, audio, video, downloadable resources, exercises, and more to create a rich digital version of your book and any related course creation elements.

I marry a course creation platform with multimedia publishing.

Here are some examples:

Marketing Differently 

We often say the time to start marketing your book course or product is when you have the main idea and a working title.

Further than that, you can develop the content as part of your marketing campaign.

Let’s say you have an outline for a course and book. You can present each topic on your outline in live sessions and posts, all leading back to a landing page with an opt-in for a mailing list and a membership that grows over time.

You can start selling access right away, build engagement, and get feedback on your content.

Here are some related articles:

What Is Your Dream Project?

I can help implement the many components to take your books, courses, and story productions from concept to launch.

I can also help you repurpose the golden nuggets in your existing books, courses, and content. You likely have more resources than you think.

Or simply help you market existing products and services.

Let’s chat!

My Golden Offer

Let’s take a look at your publishing and marketing project and find a way to create a win for everyone.

One possibility is a modest retainer plus profit sharing for your offer.

I create the framework and marketing campaigns for success.

Build Your Golden Publishing Sales Machine For Quick Cash Flow

My Golden Publishing Sales Machine is for you or someone you know who has or has considered a book, online course, or membership program.

The approach is designed to leverage your Golden Content by publishing marketing everywhere as well as generating sales early in the process to validate the market and create cash flow.

Here is what I cover:

  • My Multimedia Publishing and Marketing Background
  • Common Problems With Sales for Courses and Books
  • Leveraging Your Golden Content
  • Publishing Everywhere In Multiple Formats
  • Creating Your Golden Offer
  • Using Golden Marketing to Make Sales.

My Golden Offer

Let’s review what you have in the way of Golden Content and implement a Golden Publishing Sales Machine for you.

I have a moderate cost retainer to cover planning, development, launch, and marketing.

I will also entertain revenue-sharing options to be a partner in your success.

Broadcast Transcript

Hello, my name is Greg Dixon, your Chief Enabler for Shared Visions Unlimited Publishing and Marketing.

Today, I’m going to talk about my best offer here, which is Your Golden Publishing Sales Machine.

Multimedia Publishing and Marketing

I’m going to give you some background about Multimedia Publishing and Marketing.

I started doing this in the mid-1990s, publishing things in various formats and also marketing and selling things in different ways ~ courses, concert tickets, all sorts of things.

So in a way, the Publishing Sales Machine has evolved out of that work.

So one of the things, recently, we’ve been dealing with people who are course creators or authors of books.

Betty Withrow and I helped many authors launch their books last year. We also work with course creators.

Challenges with Sales

There are some challenges that people have with selling books and courses.

Quite a few people have maybe spent months, sometimes years, getting their books ready to publish. And then they finally get them up on Amazon and IngramSpark or wherever it is.

If they’ve gone through some kind of publishing company, they may not even have control over the publishing and they don’t know if there are any sales and they don’t see any money.

And course creators too, people can spend months and sometimes years putting together an online course, get it all ready, get it, make, and launch it.

And then crickets.

Nobody wants it.

They can check it off their list. They’ve completed the course, they’ve launched it, made it available for sale, but nobody buys it.

In both cases, somebody writing the book and somebody writing the online course could have spent thousands of dollars for other people to help them. And they also could have spent thousands of dollars of their own time developing it for it to go nowhere.

That’s one of the things I’m trying to avoid.

It’s not easy.

And I just have to say, some people put up a book and then it goes viral. They get tons of sales, they get invitations to speak, it works out.

A lot of it is to do to their own marketing and publicity that they do before, same with online courses.

There are lots of success stories with online courses. It’s just not guaranteed. Just because you create a book or you create a course, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get sales.

So those are some of the sales challenges.

Your Golden Content

You may be in the category, maybe you haven’t tried writing a book yet and you haven’t tried creating an online course. So this is all kind of new to you.

But you’re thinking you might want to and you may have your Golden Content in the form of little articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, or things that you’ve created over the years.

You have it out on your media channels and all of that can be Your Golden Content.

You’ve advised people on your topic.

I tend to get up and I do a broadcast on StreamYard and I’ll share about how to use a phone for doing interviews or something like that, any of those kinds of things.

All of that stuff adds up over the years.

You’ve got lots of golden content.

And so one of the things I’m inviting you to do is think about it and contact me and talk about how we can organize all of that and create one or more books or one or more online courses and membership sites and that kind of thing.

That is what I mean by Your Golden Content.

Publish Everywhere

And then publish everywhere. So I’ve been doing websites. I have published stuff on websites for a long time, blog posts.

I’ve also pushed out tons and tons of video. I’ve done my 10,000 hours of video over the years. All sorts of projects, community projects, church projects, live broadcasts, interviews, all that kind of stuff.

Anything related to videos, I’ve done.

I’ve done some questionable-style music videos with some friends. One of them is called My Baby’s Going to Jail for Christmas. The other one is If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy.

And I’ve also put things out into audio format through CD Baby.

And I’ve recently started doing a live podcast. I’m broadcasting out to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and all those other podcast platforms.

And we have a couple of book clients who are looking at doing audible versions for people to purchase an audible version of their whole book.

Once you have your content, it’s relatively easy.

If you can take your content and create a plan for it, like a table of contents or outline, and then create it, and then from there, once you have that, then that’s a lot of material to go out in all of these platforms.

Generally, I like recording things as video and putting it out in video format. And then once you’ve got the video, you can also do the audio for it. And text versions, of course, all of that stuff.

If I’m creating a membership site or an online course, I like to cater to most learning styles. Some people like watching videos, some people like listening to them, some people like reading the text, and some appreciate doing exercises.

So we can combine all of those things into what I call a Digital Experience Edition, which could be considered an online digital book, digital magazine, online course, online membership, all those kinds of things in one.

Your content gets published everywhere.

Your Golden Offer

And the next thing I want to talk about is your golden offer.

The reality is that it’s pretty easy to sell something that somebody wants.

If you have a solution to a problem, you can sell it.

I’m just going to make something up:

If you can get your spouse not to snore at night, so you can have a good night’s sleep, or you can help with behaviour problems, or even something simple like get your loved ones to not overeat and lead towards diabetes or whatever it is, whatever it is, and it could be simple, or it could be complex.

What I’m offering today is to work with you to figure out a way of packaging it, and pricing it, so that anybody who finds out about the offer just can’t really can’t resist buying it.

That is Your Golden Offer.

If you’ve got the right thing and put it in front of the right people for the right price, you can get sales.

Golden Marketing

So the next one here is the golden marketing.

I’ve been at this game for a long time, and I’ve developed some pretty interesting strategies. I follow the Dan Kennedy model of magnetic marketing:

Your offer | your message | media

The message, more or less, is the same for all media, but you just get it out everywhere.

So that could include social media posts, blog posts, YouTube channels, YouTube reels and shorts out to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever it is that you like to use. I’m set up to put things out to 10 different platforms, multiple Facebook groups, and LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

I’ll help you expand so that you have multiple channels. You may have a few favourite ones that really work. I’m just going to suggest that you continue with those, but add a few more.

That’s one of the reasons I added podcasting to what I do is that reaches out through syndicates out through places, a ton of different places.

So your message gets exposed in different places. And podcasting has the ability for people to subscribe. And so they get notices when you put new things out.

So you can, if you find something that people want, you can go viral with that.

That’s Your Golden Marketing.

We’ll try pretty comprehensive strategies.

And I must mention email as that’s a major marketing tool.

If you don’t already have a mailing list, we’ll do things to build a mailing list and get the word out. And that’s one of the best, most effective ways for sales. If I’ve put out an email with something that people want, I can see the traffic that people go to the page, I can measure it.

The other thing is some paid advertising. If you can find something that people want, you have to have that Golden Offer, and then you send them to a convincing page. Paid marketing can work well and fast.

I’ve had a lot of success with boosts for concert tickets and theatre productions.

And, again, it’s just easy if there’s a big market of people who want that. They just have to learn about it and you have to send them to a page where it’s easy for them to sign up for it.

That’s pretty easy, easy peasy.

Sales!

The next steps are about sales.

If you have an offer, you have the right place, you get the right people on there, you can make sales.

An important part of this Publishing Sales Machine is we get you to start making sales very early in the process.

So rather than wait six months or a year until everything’s all done, I’ll encourage you to do things in an incremental way, which, for example, if you’re doing a course, consider doing it as a membership where people pay a monthly fee for it and you’re cranking out new content regularly.

Maybe you have a live class you’re doing once a week, you do the presentation and the video and the show notes and everything else goes into a membership site and it keeps on going.

You just have to keep ahead of your students.

I think one of the problems that people have with teaching things is they overwhelm, they create too much.

There was a notion that if you give them a hundred things, that might be good. But sometimes four or five real nuggets, real golden gems for people to grab onto, people will grab that and they’ll pay for it.

if you have an offer, something you can offer that solves a problem and they can get that problem solved in an hour or two hours, they’ll pay money for it, whereas they might not pay for something that’s got two years worth of your work put into it.

It’s one of those things.

The other thing with this is by offering it right away you you’ve got a pretty good idea of the sales potential.

For one, if you don’t get anybody to buy it, if you offer something for some outrageous opening special to sign up for $10 and you can’t get people to buy it at $10, then you have to go back and consider that you may not be making a golden offer, you may not be offering the right thing.

So maybe either you have to adjust what it is you’re offering or how the offer is presented.

Membership Program

The other thing is in a membership program, you get people in and they’re giving you feedback. They’re telling you what they need to know and what they’re looking for. Because sometimes we think we know what people need and we have an idea about what we want to teach.

But when people come in, they’ll say, ‘oh, geez, OK, yeah, that’s really good. That’s really good. But what I really want to know about is about X. ‘

And sometimes that X is something you’ve just done routinely for years and years and years. You’ve never even thought about it. You never even appreciated how special that was.

When you get somebody who’s missing that and you can provide it, that can make a big deal. I was recently in a Dave Dee mastermind with a person who had been in the mastermind for quite a few years. Dave Dee had casually said, give a good name for your offer and your conversions will increase.

She said, ‘yeah, I’d heard you say that, but I never really understood it. ‘

‘But we tried it. We changed the name of our offer. The only thing we did was give it a more catchy name. And we went from a few people being interested in their calendars filled with people wanting to know more. ‘

Little things like that. You may have that magic sauce that people can learn and it doesn’t take that much to teach it to them.

If you have something special to offer, you have something of an obligation to offer it.

The Golden Publishing Sales Machine can be the Golden Ticket for doing that because I’ll help you organize your material and get something that helps people ready to go and ready to sell quickly.

So you’re not spending months or years figuring out if this is ever going to be popular or not. And it’s better to know better to know soon that you’re not going to find a market for something.

Yeah. Yeah. Some things take time.

You have to persist in it and keep going.

But other things, if you’re you already think you’re connected to the people who would want it and you’re and you put it out there and they don’t commit to even looking at it, then then then you might have to reconsider what you’re doing.

My Golden Offer

My Golden Offer is really to talk to you about what you have, like where we’ll review all of your golden content, what you know, what you have, who you want to serve, and how you see this going out.

I’ll make some suggestions and we’ll and we’ll try working on that right away.

And my invitation is to have a conversation with me.

I have a low-cost retainer that I can use to work out all the stuff, work out the deal details, outline the program, do the marketing, and do all of that stuff over time.

If you got everything ready, ready to go, you know, more or less, we’re just trying to change the format and launch it can probably be done within a month.

Sometimes, if you need more help writing the book, developing the book, and developing the course, then that could be over many months.

I have a reasonably priced retainer for that.

And if you have something really special that it’s pretty obvious that if we get it put into place and we can get sales for it, I could implement the Golden Publishing Sales Machine with you on a pure commission basis.

We would arrange to I would do the implementation of the book and the course and all of that and do the marketing in return for a percentage of the sales.

We’ll have to look at that and figure out the best win-win way of moving forward.

All those things are possible.

And it all starts with a conversation about where you’re at, where you want to go.

Add a Digital Experience Edition to Your Journey ~ Make Sales!

A Digital Experience Edition is for you if ANY of these apply to you:

  • You plan to publish a print book.
  • Your current books could use a boost in attention and sales.
  • You have multimedia content that could be made into books.
  • A course or membership program would fit your content.
  • You have stories to share!

What is a Digital Experience Edition?

A Digital Experience Edition is a structured collection of multimedia elements made available in a content portal.

Access to different parts of the content can be restricted by access levels.

What are the Benefits of a Digital Experience Edition?

Here are some of the advantages over printed books alone:

  • You can test your content early in the process by giving trusted reviewers access.
  • Videos, audio readings, downloads, exercises, and other elements can create a great experience for the reader.
  • You can start selling and marketing the Digital Experience Edition early in the Book Journey process.

Examples of Digital Experience Editions

Here are video tours of different uses for the Digital Experience Edition.

Tales from the Turkey Table by Bill Allman

This is a full-on Publishing Journey including a Digital Experience Edition, Paperback, and Kindle version.

The Rocket Norton Vault

This is a collection of most of musician and writer Rocket Norton‘s lifetime creative output, including books, recordings, videos, photos, and courses,

The Digital Experience Edition with Marketing Success Playbook

This package is for you if you have books, courses or other content that would go well in a Digital Experience Edition.

Includes:

  • Organizing your content into a Digitial Experience Edition.
  • Sales Landing Page.
  • Marketing Success Roadmap.
  • Launch Marketing.
  • Ongoing Content Expansion and Marketing Support.

$488 for the first month, plus $188 per month for ongoing hosting and marketing support.

We meet weekly to prioritize actions.

If you want the Complete Book Journey with the Digital Experience Edition, published books, and comprehensive marketing, the Publishing Sales Machine may be for you.

What is the Publishing Sales Machine?

We combine the content collected during the book development process to create a Digital Experience Edition, Marketing Assets, and Sales on the journey to publishing the print editions.

This makes the Book Journey fun and profitable early in the process.

Is the Publishing Sales Machine Right for You?

Let’s chat.

The Best Choice For You ~ Book Journey? Publishing Sales Machine?

Woman on blackboard. What is the best choice for you?

Betty Withrow and Greg Dixon offer two programs for book authors and course creators: Your Book Journey and Publishing Sales Machine.

The primary focus of Your Book Journey is to take you through all of the steps of writing and publishing a book from idea through launch.

The Publishing Sales Machine combines the book journey with course development and marketing done from the start of the project to attract interest, clients, and sales.

What is best for you?

Betty Withrow has a question she always asks new and potential book clients:

What Do You Want To Get Out Of This?

Today Betty and Greg discuss a fun activity to help you explore the question for yourself.