In November, I wrote a newsletter about how I made my business more spacious by adding asynchronous offers to it. I love creating courses and programmes—it allows me to use my brain in a different way than in my 1:1 mentoring, and express my creativity differently.You might want to add more space (and financial sustainability) to your business too.
In this post, I share how to get started with self-led offers in your business, and how to use what you know and do already.
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Getting started with self-led offers
Self-led offers can take many shapes and forms, from downloadables like e-books, patterns and templates, to courses with video and audio. Simply put, creating them happens in four steps: deciding on a topic, picking a format, creating the content and then hosting and selling your offer.
Picking a topic can feel daunting—these four questions can help you decide.
Deciding on a topic
Question 1: What complements your business?
Some self-led options might be really obvious for your business (though no less valuable!).
If you’re a life coach, a self-led course on goal setting can complement your 1:1 work nicely. If you have a fabric or wool business, a pattern is a great addition. If you run a stationary business, an e-book on creating a journaling habit makes sense. As a yoga teacher, you could offer an email series with 10 days of short recorded yoga classes.
If you find it hard to think of something, try taking your vision and values of your business as a starting point.
What can’t you stop talking about?
If you have a candle business and your vision is for people to create comfortable, sustainable homes, what else could contribute to that? Can you create a mini-course around decluttering, thrifting or otherwise designing that comfortable, sustainable home?
Question 2: What do you find yourself talking about a lot?
This is how my course Substack for small business owners was born. After digging into Substack for 6+ months before making the move myself, I found myself explaining Substack to so many people that a course became like a natural thing to create.
Question 3: What are your clients and customers curious about?
Supporting many clients with their newsletters led to Small business newsletter magic. And redesigning my own marketing and sharing my experience with others, led to my gentle marketing programme Grow.
Are your clients and customers curious about creating their own daily art practice? Would they love to get into reflection and journaling more? Do they want to discover their own style and refresh their house decor?
Question 4: What is obvious to you—but not to others?
If you’ve been doing something for a while, it might be completely obvious to you.
You’ve designed so many cards for weddings and births, that it’s not even special to you anymore. You’ve figured out how to use a piece of software or a tool on your own, so you think everyone else will figure this out too.
Sharing your skills and experience is valuable.
But that’s not the case—and, taking a course by someone who is knowledgeable is often a much more pleasant process than having to figure everything out yourself.
Don’t worry that you’ll put yourself out of business.
Just because you’re offering a series of recorded yoga classes, doesn’t mean people won’t attend your live classes. Just because you’re helping people to design their own cards, doesn’t mean they’ll never book you.
In fact, they’re more likely to spend more money with you if they’ve bought a self-led product before.
You won’t put yourself out of business. Self-led offers create more business.
One of my former clients got to know me through my Substack-course. When she started watching it, she knew she wanted to book a 1:1 mentoring package. She loved how I explained things, how I organised the course, as well as the knowledge I was sharing. And we ended up working together for over two years, on her own Substack and much more.
I’ve created a 30-minute workshop to help you create your own self-led products, from coming up with a topic, through picking a format, deciding on the content and figuring out where to host/sell it.
At the end of this workshop, you’ll have designed a self-led offer that makes your business more sustainable (and allows you to express the full you).
Take a peek at the first part of this workshop below—love what you see? Upgrade your subscription to join the Female Owned community, and get my small business support through our quarterly recorded workshops, monthly accountability club, behind the scenes posts and quarterly office hours.
This workshop includes:
- a 30-minute video in which I walk you through creating your own self-led products;
- a workbook with worksheets to help you brainstorm, answer questions and go deeper;
- a checklist for all the elements of creating a self-led offer.
I’d love to know what resonates with you from this post.
Please feel free to share this post it with business friends, in your newsletter or elsewhere. 💛
I’d love to support you in all phases of your business. Providing clarity, focus and next steps is something that my clients tell me I’m really good at. If you’re curious about how we can work together through 1:1 mentoring, check out what I offer or send me an email–no strings attached. I have payment plans available, and flexible options for mentoring calls.
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