I’m creating and launching a paid course, this week.

I'll be documenting the entire process right here on Twitter, including real revenue stats + actual time invested.

So far, I've generated $2,054 in presales.

The course: starterstory.com/lean-seo

BACKSTORY

We just hit 500k/month visitors at starterstory.com, mainly through SEO. I figured my approach to SEO might be valuable to others, and I wanted to see if there was any interest:

https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/1327235898036117506

After that tweet, I got hundreds of emails. Not sure what to do, I turned to Twitter...

https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/1328151846649729025

This feedback got me even more excited. Plus, I heard from @dvassallo & @stephsmithio, both launched successful info products)

OPTIONS

Some ideas for the info product:

- Series of blog posts?
- @Loom videos?
- Zoom consulting sessions?
- Live stream it?

So many options. In the end, I decided to do a paid video course.

VALIDATION

I wanted to make sure people would pay for this.

Before starting the actual work of creating the course, I did three things:

(1) Created a landing page
(2) Coded a checkout feature with @Stripe to take preorders
(3) Set a firm launch date (Dec 8th)

LANDING PAGE

I tried to keep it simple, but with the following:

- Short intro
- What you'll get out of the course
- Link to purchase

Here's the landing page: starterstory.com/lean-seo

THE COURSE

A bit about the course:

- It’s everything I know about SEO
- It's a framework for how you can win SEO
- I called it “Lean SEO” because it pulls many concepts from the famous startup book “Lean Startup”

PRICING

I priced the course at $129.

To incentivize preorders, I added a $50 discount if you buy early.

You can also get the course if you're a Starter Story Premium Plus member.

SS ACADEMY

In 2021, I'm planning to launch dozens of "mini-courses" like this at Starter Story.

So this came at the perfect time.

This will be the first course of many, converting all sorts of topics.

(interested in creating a course / getting in front of our audience? lmk)

FIRST SALES

Going back to all those emails...

I just started emailing everyone back personally to (1) hear more about their SEO situation and (2) let them know I was doing a course.

I want to make sure I don't miss anything for the course!

Honestly, this took quite a long time, and I still have many more emails to get through.

But just from replying to emails, I've generated over $2k in preorders.

This is really motivating to deliver something great!

EMAIL LIST

But not everyone will preorder.

For everyone else, I’ll use an email list to:

- Send teaser emails, free content & to build hype
- To notify when the course is live

Email list: https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/subscribe?a=Jchkiv&g=XC6h4p

BUILD

Now for the hard part.

Over the next 10 days, I'll be going full time on this thing, including:

- Planning
- Outlining
- Writing
- Recording
- Marketing
- Social media
- Launching
- Mistakes
- Failures
- All revenue stats
- Total time invested

Follow this thread!