In today’s episode of GSDdaily, we’re going to talk about course stuff. This week we’re going to talk about course ascension. We’re going to talk about selling and creating bigger box digital offers, things like accelerators, things like boot camps, not necessarily your introductory kind of digital course, but your upper-end stuff, your upper-end material. So today, I kind of retooled this week a little bit real quick, it was going to be kind of self-help, kind of personal development. We’ll probably do a personal development one next week, but today I wanted to dig into this material.
For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of Done For You. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and then also setting up marketing automation and traffic for your offers or offers in general. It doesn’t have to be yours, just in general. Today what we’re going to talk about is this idea of course ascension or digital product Ascension to have a better money mindset. Right now digital products are fucking crazy. Everybody is trying to package their knowledge in a way to sell something to somebody. It’s just one of those things like I’ve had more conversations that deal with, how do I package my course? How do I sell my training? How do I sell it for $1,000, and $2,000, and $5,000?
Digital Product Ascension
Your knowledge, information and experience are very valuable to the right person. Product Ascension can be answered in twofold.
1. How do you transfer your knowledge into somebody else’s brain in a way that makes the biggest impact in their life, the biggest transformation?
2. How do you segment your prospects down into your ideal kind of customer avatar so that they pay top dollar so that they can experience the transformation?
How we do this, how you end up doing a high ticket product, a high ticket offer that is backed by some sort of a digital thing, is this. We set it up like a triangle or a pyramid if you will.
Here you see that we have our course ascension process. The course ascension process is pretty simple.
Course Ascension Process
1. traffic and sales material
So much of what we’ve done in these dailies is the traffic and the sales material. We’ve talked about Facebook traffic, content marketing and about SEO traffic. We have also talked about many, many, many different types of sales funnels. The automated webinar sales funnels, and the high ticket sales funnels, and the VSL upsell sequences, and all that stuff.
2. Offers
The thing that is in the middle of the triangle, are your offers. Those are your digital product. Those are the ways that you communicate your knowledge to somebody, you transfer your knowledge into somebody else’s head.
Digital Product
At the very, very, very base level, we have a digital product. The digital product is a collection of videos. It is a collection of PDFs. It is a collection of written material, audio, basically all of the things that are needed to package your information, to package your expertise in your material. Most of the time that digital product is created at least in its very, very early stages, like a table of contents. We’ve been through mind mapping quite a few times in this series. We’ve been through mind mapping your ideas, turning your products into something saleable online.
Oftentimes, it’s like module one is a discovery module. It’s kind of foundational. You bring everybody together with module one.
Module Two, you’re digging into the basics of the thing you’re teaching. Module three, module four, module five, all build on each other. And you might have five modules, you might have six modules. You might have five or six videos per module. How you build it, we’re going to talk a little bit about that later in the week. But the digital product itself is the container, the thing that you are selling. Oftentimes, a simple digital product, you’re looking at selling it for $97 or $497, or $397, or $997. It just depends on what kind of transformation somebody is going to get from it. It’s going to be, what is the value that they receive? If you’re teaching somebody how to build a business that is going to make half a million dollars a year, that is a pretty high value.
So that course is probably not going to be $67. That course is probably going to be a couple of thousand dollars. Do you know what I mean? Because it has such high value associated with it. Now, if you’re teaching somebody how to build a nightstand with two by fours, that course might only be $7 because it doesn’t necessarily have that big of a transformative value in it. So that’s the idea behind a digital product. The pricing, depending on the pricing, you’re looking at selling it with a webinar or selling it with a VSL upsell sequence or something like that. Now the next evolution above a digital product is what we call assisted group. Your assisted group offers assistance in the course. What you’re doing is you’re using the course to be the baseline educational piece of the offer.
What happens is every week somebody goes through the course. They get a week unlocked or a module unlocked, or a couple of lessons unlocked or whatever. They’ll learn, so maybe Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, they go through the course material. They take all of that in, maybe they do a homework assignment or whatever. Then on Thursday or Friday, they have some sort of group coaching or group training that brings everybody together and answers all of their questions. Now, the assisted group is a higher-priced experience than just a digital product that you consume and go through on your own. The assisted group also, if you think about it is college or high school, especially now.
Your assisted group kind of courses you, now with so many schools in the country just being digital-only, it’s really kind of an assisted group process. COVID is teaching your people, your customers how to do these assisted group digital courses. And so it’s just something to think about. Whereas before this kind of stuff was very like, it wasn’t weird or it wasn’t an alternative, but it kind of was. So we’ve been selling digital courses and eBooks and everything online forever, but now everybody’s being thrust into the mainstream here for the digital course, digital product kind of thing. So the assisted group is what everybody’s going to be learning from.
You have a baseline course that you go through, whether it’s videos, whether it’s textbook, whether it’s material or whatever. And then you have some sort of teaching experience or a group coaching experience, or a group learning experience that bolts everything together. And that might be done in a Facebook group. It might be done in a Zoom call. It just depends on your preference. Then the next level up above the assisted group is assisted one-on-one. Assisted one-on-one is pretty infrequent. Assisted one-on-one is you go through the lesson material, the digital product yourself first, and then you get on a one-on-one call with your mentor, your teacher, you’re whatever, your coach, you get on a one-on-one call to review the material.
Now this assisted one-on-one, this is going to be like a $2,500 a month kind of experience, or 2,000 or 5,000. Again, it depends on the transformative impact of it, but you’re looking at a much more expensive offer, which means that when you were selling this assisted one-on-one when you create the base digital product and then you’re doing like biweekly one-on-one calls, you can charge a lot of money for it because there’s only one of you and you have your experience and everything. And then you’re answering questions of your student and making the course material applicable in life for them. So you’re able to help them use it in their life. Now, above that, so assisted one-on-one infrequent would be like twice a week or maybe once a month, or once every two weeks or once a month.
Above that, you have your assisted frequent one-on-one. So this is like weekly one-on-one coaching. It’s also like, there’s, one of the things we’ve been doing a lot of for clients is like virtual CMO, virtual CFO, virtual COO kind of offers. So that would be like your assisted one-on-one. So a lot of times the virtual CXO offers have a course that the team or companies go through. And then they get access whenever they want to the person, whether it’s through Slack or text message, or whatever. So that would be like an assisted one-on-one frequent. And that of course, is a pretty high dollar price point.
Above assisted one-on-one is done for you. So any kind of a done for you offer that is hands-off for the client, hands-off for the customer, and then you do it for them because they’re not required to learn. They’re not required to jump on a coaching call. They don’t need to jump on a one-on-one call. All that they’re paying for is a done for you offer. And then above that, you have a mastermind. So a mastermind is where you have a bunch of people who are in a networking relationship with each other. They’re able to bounce ideas off of each other and able to pick each other’s brains. There are so many different benefits from a mastermind just in terms of being exposed to other people’s viewpoints, being exposed to what’s working in other industries, or even in your industry.
But the mastermind is the upper, upper, upper level of how you’re going to ascend through digital courses. Almost every highly respected course creator has a mastermind. Sometimes the mastermind is $10,000 and sometimes the mastermind is 25 or 50 or 75, or even $100,000. But there’s usually a mastermind at the top end of that pyramid. So when you’re looking at your business model when you’re looking at what you’re trying to create, consider a mastermind, consider a done for you offer, consider the assisted course offers down below. Now, if we go up the side on the left-hand side, you see that we broke it down here. So the digital product itself is very DIY. It’s a very self-starter. So somebody is going through the offer, going through the product on their own time. It’s a self-study, home study kind of an offer.
Then we have assisted group, assisted one-on-one. Those are done with you. So those are done with your offers. It is up to them to go through the material, up to them to go through the course. However, you’re able to interact with them and help them, and anchor them in the course material and help them implement that stuff in their life. Then we have the done for you, which is DFY, of course. And then we have a mastermind. So everyone has an upper-end mastermind offer. Like I said, most digital products, most creators, most vendors, have a mastermind or they’re part of a mastermind that they sell. So that’s the essential model of courses, of digital products. As I said, it all starts down here with the traffic, kicks up through the sales material.
Oftentimes, there’s a low-end digital product, then that goes through an ascension ladder. And the ascension ladder usually has assisted group, assisted one-on-one, done for you offers, and then masterminds. So that is how most of it looks. Sometimes people end up just hanging out down here in the digital product space. They don’t want to get on the phone with clients, don’t want to get on the phone with customers and don’t want to do coaching or mentorship. If they do explore those upper-end models, then they’ll hire somebody for it. They will teach coaches their methodology, and then the coaches will run people through this. But it’s a way of generating quite a bit more revenue once you have a body of work that you can use to anchor the rest of your process.
Does anybody have any questions about that? It’s all kind of a shotgun scenario. But let’s see comments here. Okay, cool. So we’ve got one. When can you introduce a mastermind? Great question. You can introduce a mastermind really whenever you want. I would say that you have to be anchored in the space a little bit. You need some customers that you’re going to sell it to. You can’t necessarily go zero to mastermind without being either, A, pretty entrenched in the market, or B, very well networked. So it’s one or the other. You can start at a low-level mastermind. Masterminds have this weird… There are mastermind groups that are $197 a month, free mastermind groups and mastermind groups that are $50,000 a year.
It just depends on what you’re trying to put together. If you’re trying to put together an elite level mastermind, then the charge is $25,000 a year for CEOs who are at the helm of businesses doing 10 million or more per year, then it’s a different scenario than somebody who is looking to put together a mastermind of digital product creators who are just starting. Yu always have to consider your target market when putting together the mastermind. You read Think and Grow Rich. I don’t know that that’s where the idea was introduced, but I think that’s where the idea was popularized. But a mastermind is just a collection of people who can feed off of each other and uplevel themselves and their businesses and their lives, I guess collectively.
That’s the idea of a mastermind. It doesn’t necessarily have to be business-related, but it can be. So in starting your mastermind, it doesn’t need to be something that you have, it’s $50,000 a year. It can be a free mastermind just among friends and then it can grow. So it just depends on what it is you’re trying to put together. In the course ascension model, masterminds typically end up at the top of the pyramid in terms of price scenarios. And they also help you greatly increase the revenue that you’re getting. There are a couple of masterminds that start at masterminds and they don’t have anything below them. They don’t have like assisted one-on-one, don’t have a digital product or books. It’s a little bit more difficult to pull off that way, but it’s doable.
Let’s see. You said you can charge up to $1,000 per digital product. Typically, for digital products, you can charge up to 997, 995, $1,000 for a digital product alone. In some spaces, the financial space, the real estate space, you can usually charge up to $2,000 for a digital product, business development too. Every once in a while, you see an outlier that’s like 3,500 or $4,000 for a digital product. But usually, that outlier has some of these assisted models. They have assisted one-on-one or the assisted group or whatever. Just be mindful when you’re going to introduce a product into the market. Like, do you want to take on some clients? Do you want to do some group coaching with it?
Because oftentimes if you do, you’re able to generate quite a bit more revenue that way because some people just want the course, but then other people also want the coaching and mentorship in it too. So just something to think about. I think that’s about it for today. For the rest of this week, we’re going to talk about courses. So I’m not real sure the blow by blow, but we will get it all squared away. I will talk to you tomorrow, have a fantastic Monday.
For Questions and Guide
If you need anything at all, just go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, and we’ll jump on a call and talk about it. I’ll talk to you soon.
