Course Lab – Episode 104
Evergreen Strategies, Micro Offers, Big Sales! (Kamila Gornia)
Abe Crystal: We want to avoid a situation where you spend a few minutes here and there, like posting some stuff on LinkedIn, and then you write one short blog post and then you mess around with some Facebook ads a little bit, but you’re not really sure how to measure them or if they’re working and you’re just kind of scattered all over the place.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku.
Abe: Hey there, Ari.
Ari: In each episode of Course Lab, we showcase a course and creator who’s doing something really interesting, either with the architecture of their course or the business model behind it, or both. Today we’re welcoming Kamila Gornia to the show.
Kamila is the founder of Heart Behind Hustle, an Evergreen Icon. She has been supporting online coaches and course creators with marketing and sales for the last decade. She helps her clients grow by creating an evergreen, scalable and recurring business foundation so they can get sales without the need for sales calls, social selling through DM’s or posting daily on social media. To date, her advice has helped over 25,000 entrepreneurs, which has resulted in over $2 million in revenue. I’m really excited for this conversation.
Welcome, Kamila.
Kamila Gornia: Yay. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Ari: Awesome. So the question that I always ask to kick things off is, could you give us a 30,000-foot view of yourself and how you came to the world of online courses?
Kamila: Yeah. As you read, I have been an online coach or course creator for almost ten years. I stumbled into this industry by taking courses myself. I’m one of those weird entrepreneurs that actually is pro education and I actually enjoyed being in school and learning. So it was a natural transition to start taking courses in areas that I was interested in. So initially I was diving into health and fitness. After working in marketing for a while, I decided to start blogging about it, and it was kind of a natural transition. When I do something, I’m like, maybe I can do that, too. Let’s try and take it from there.
Ari: Awesome. So can you tell us a little bit more about your current business, the courses that you have and how things evolved from you starting a blog on marketing to where you are today?
Kamila: Yeah. So what I initially started, particularly with the marketing coaching business. I just kind of wanted to teach social media because that was my background. I had a health blog before, I had a photography business before. And all of that, I was able to grow through social media and connections. A big thing that I thought was kind of obvious. It’s like, okay, this is what I’m doing with clients in the marketing agency I’m working in, and let’s just try it. So my first course ever back in 2014 was about Google+. You guys remember Google+?
Ari: That course did not age well, I take it.
Kamila: Oh, it did not. You know what was interesting is this is before I knew anything about courses. The first lesson I learned is, number one, don’t create a course that no one really cares about to begin with because Google+ was not a very popular platform. And secondly, the whole area around how to structure, how to sell it, I was so sure that everyone would want it because I had a few thousand people on my email list and I got like five sales maybe, and then no one went through the course. So after that, I continued trying. I’m like, let’s see what else I can do. I created a course on content marketing that was like, meh.
And that’s when I started learning course creation from other mentors and coaches and actually taking a course creation course. My favorite way of creating courses is specifically on group coaching. So creating that combination of course curriculum and integrating the coaching and Q and A’s, that actually allowed me to create my curriculum, my courses, my programs in general, in a way that served my clients in a better way. So instead of trying to guess like, oh, I think people care about content marketing because it’s a popular thing. It was, let me actually talk to you guys and see what are you struggling with, what are you wanting? And then taking that, creating like a general outline for a program.
And then once people were actually in, then delivering it based on what people are actually desiring to learn about and what gaps they had. So from that I started to identify, okay, people like this type of length of a program, people like these types of features in the program. And I’ve created a lot of programs since then. In the last four or five years, I’ve really been able to narrow in on the structure that has worked the best for my clients and what kind of support they’re looking for, but most importantly, how to communicate it so that I’m not the only one that’s excited about it, but the people that I’m promoting it to, it’s in response to what they’re actually asking for. So since then it’s been quite easy in terms of enrollment and stuff like that.
Ari: So something that jumps out to me and the name of the program, as I understand it, is Evergreen Icon. It feels like the process you’re outlining actually doesn’t feel like it would be, especially good in evergreen. Possibly I’m misunderstanding just because of the additional work that needs to go into tailoring and understanding what the audience wants and tweaking as you go. Often when people think evergreen, they’re thinking it’s the exact same course. It’s just being delivered automatically for the most part and I don’t need to think about it anymore. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Kamila: Yeah, I think that’s a misconception that people have because there’s a craze around passive income and people think that I make it once and I never have to work again. I work with people that actually want to help others. And eventually the course you’re going to create is going to be outdated. Even if you’re teaching things that will always be relevant, it’s how you teach it and how you present it that eventually people are not going to resonate with it as much. So the way that, and in particularly with Evergreen Icon, like the process that we go through is the initial setup and ideation, you have to put your energy and time into that. Otherwise you might risk creating a program that no one cares about, right? So that is not meant to be an evergreen process or a passive process.
Once you’ve identified and validated an idea for a program with a good program positioning messaging, like this is the structure, these are the features that are included, from there, once you validated with a few people saying yes and actually paying for it, that’s when we put an evergreen sales system in place. The sales system can be evergreen. And when I say evergreen again, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for the entirety of your life, but it will work without having to do launches or always posting. So it’s really about identifying, okay, how am I selling this offer and how can I communicate this offer? So it’s relevant to what’s going on today and I don’t have to update it too frequently.
There’s still going to be updates, but it’s about identifying the most lasting message and not necessarily perfecting it, but optimizing it so that it can last a lot longer and making sure your clients are happy. So with my programs, honestly, the structure that I have with sales and the delivery of the program, once some of the modules are created, my sales system is set up. Once it’s working, I usually don’t have to make edits or changes for another year. At that point, I want to make changes anyway because of the additional feedback I got through coaching, calls or questions that have been asked. I just want to do that. But to me that’s still way better than the alternative while still being in integrity. For me, that’s always been really important for me.
Ari: Got it. And that rhythm of once a year, and I’m assuming that this is dependent on what people are seeing in the market. If something’s working fine, three months later, it’s not working well at all, don’t wait for the full year before you try tweaking it.
Kamila: Right
Ari: But it sounds like what you’re talking about is mainly around the marketing and selling versus the course content, which also needs to be updated. But the evergreen, really, that you’re talking about here is around marketing.
Kamila: Yeah, absolutely. I’m in a very frequently changing industry of marketing and sales. So for me, I probably have to update things and add additional trainings into the curriculum more frequently than most of my clients because I teach them how to run ads. Right now, mid 2024, there’s a lot of changes that have been going on in the course selling industry, so there’s a lot more updates I have to make to keep my clients up to date. But if we look at the course structure most of my clients’ design, they don’t usually have to update it too frequently. It’s just about the overall message.
Or sometimes what happens is the market trends and the buyer psychology changes. So the messaging around the offer might need to change, or some of the initial lessons in the program might need to change. If something is happening in the world, for example, a big thing that happened for everyone is AI started to become commonplace. So even for clients in the health industry or relationship industries, like when dating apps became popular, if I have a dating coach that created a course and it’s just like, here’s how to talk to people and here’s how to meet people in the grocery store.
But now everyone’s like, well, I don’t have to do that. Or maybe it’s the pandemic and I’m not going into the grocery store and talking to strangers. So there will certainly be different situations that will require a change in messaging and the structure slightly, but doesn’t mean that everything has to be revised.
Ari: And I’m guessing that these big market shifts, I mean, they don’t happen often. It’s pretty rare that we have something that creates such a big impact, like AI, for instance. But in cases where there isn’t a major market shift, what are the patterns that people should be looking out for to indicate that, okay, it’s time for me to update my marketing update, maybe a part of the structure of my course, or what are the things that people should be looking out for that?
Kamila: My favorite thing to look at is what are my competitors saying and talking about. I run ads, so I tend to see pretty quickly if my messaging needs to be updated because my ads won’t perform as well. I’ll see cost per lead increase or cost per purchase increase. And usually that coincides with me seeing an increase in other people promoting the same exact message I’m promoting, or there’s just a little bit too much of the same going on, because inevitably, the ideal clients, the customers, are seeing the same exact ads as you would be in terms of your competitors.
If they keep seeing the same exact message, the same exact promise, the same exact bonuses, they start to become blind to it. So even though nothing drastic has changed in the industry as a whole, people’s perception has become, like, not another thing on online dating. Like, now people are like, I don’t want to be online dating. Right? So that’s a big thing. For example, in my industry, in the coaching space, a big shift that’s been happening is everyone’s talking about sales calls, and now people are like, please stop talking about sales calls. I don’t want to do that anymore. Right?
So then it’s like, okay, well, the message that was really performing well before, now it’s like, no, that’s not what we want anymore. So I would say that’s very important. Always be aware of what the big hitters are doing online.
Ari: Awesome. I’ve been asking a lot of questions, Abe.
Abe: This is helpful, and we can continue to go deeper on this theme. I mean, I think a lot of people listening to Course Lab, they’re probably sort of early to intermediate in their course marketing. What might be helpful is to hear your perspective on how has the overall marketing and selling process for courses evolved over and past few years from what you’ve seen working with your clients? And where does that take us to in terms of today and moving forward?
Like, what do you think course creators should be looking at as they think about what they’re doing over the next year or two to actually get people into their courses and to have a successful course business? So, yeah, it’s a big question, but basically, your perspective on what’s been happening and where does that take us to in the future?
Kamila: I think the biggest thing to look at is the niche of the person’s course. Because if someone is in a niche that isn’t very saturated and is targeting people who are in a mental state of like, I’m ready to change, but my problem hasn’t been solved by anyone else. There is that gap. The typical things that we’ve seen work really well, like doing a webinar launch or an Evergreen webinar going directly to the offer, it still works really well because that particular target audience isn’t used to seeing that quite yet. They’re not as integrated into that form of selling. So it can still work really well.
For anyone in a more competitive niche or when they’re talking to people who are more resistant, they’ve seen a lot of ads, they’ve signed up for a lot of webinars, and they’re like, not another freaking sales webinar. Give me a break. That’s when you have to work a little bit more to earn that person’s trust. So if you’re coming in very aggressively, like, this is my offer, buy the thing. They’re going to be like, well, who are you to tell me what to do? And so people will be like, oh, well, let me show you that I know what I’m talking about. Let me show you how much money I’ve made. Let me show you all these results I’ve gotten.
People are like, but you’re probably full of BS because I maybe have joined a course like this before, or joined a program like this before. And guess what? The course creator ghosted me, or I had a really bad experience, and now they’re even more resistant. So that’s that kind of antitrust situation that’s happening, particularly in the business space, health, a lot of dating spaces, any space that has a lot of competition, we’re seeing that a lot more. So my favorite thing for my clients is to be way less aggressive and earn that trust.
Now, the obvious thing that people often do, it’s like, okay, let’s grow a social media account. Let’s just start giving some value. If you have a great big YouTube Instagram channel, people can still go on a webinar, still buy the offer because they trust you and know you, obviously. I operate mostly with cold leads, so these people don’t know who I am. They’re resistant. My favorite way of moving people that’s still working really well is to get them to commit to a very small investment.
I love creating micro-offers, and that could be workbooks, template kits. My favorite has been like, small, short workshops that are helping people with a very, very specific problem. Let’s say the course is like, okay, how to attract your soulmate through dating apps. So your mini workshop wouldn’t be about that. It would be how to get started on dating apps and how to set up your profile. So it’s attracting the right type of person. Right? So a very specific symptom or problem that you know you can solve in a short amount of time. So people don’t have to be sitting there still confused, they’re moving forward, they got a result. So they have a good first impression with you.
From there, I like having people say yes to the next step. So I usually wouldn’t start hammering people with my offer, like, buy the course now, buy the thing. It’s open. I actually ask for permission. I say, hey, you’ve gone through this, get on the waitlist or apply for the program. Or hey, here’s a bonus training on X, Y and Z, which is basically a webinar. If you want to know how this all works to get you this outcome, here’s the next step. Once they’ve done that, they’ve taken enough actions to show they’re engaged, actively participating, and probably interested enough to buy the next thing.
So once they’ve gone through these micro commitments, we do tend to see a pretty high conversion from lead to buyer to interested in the program to actually buying the program. Even like 10 to 20%, even on a high-priced program on the back end, which is really amazing, but it just takes a little bit more time.
Abe: If I could reflect back or summarize, what I’m hearing is there were approaches to marketing that were relatively novel and engaging at one time. Example would be inviting people to a free webinar where you do some teaching and then present an offer, which still can be effective in the right context, but that approach is now much more common, much more saturated. People are more less likely to engage with that approach or to buy from that approach. And so we need to find ways of engaging and building trust with people that have less fatigue around them.
So one thing you’ve described is having micro-offers or low cost, low risk ways for people to make a small commitment and then build from there. Are there other approaches that you’re seeing as well that are helpful for building trust and making a connection with people to where they would feel comfortable investing now that we’re seeing these traditional marketing approaches that are more saturated?
Kamila: I think the biggest thing is what has to happen before that person decides to buy is they have to feel trust within themselves that they can do it, but they also have to trust the course creator. They have to build the fact that this person can take them there. This person’s approach is aligned with what they’re expecting and wanting to do and that they resonate with this person. So the question becomes, how do I do that? It looks different in different ways. Some people will do videos, like a video series. It doesn’t have to be like webinars, but it’s just like, hey, let me just share with you my way of thinking.
It’s not about educating people on how to achieve an outcome. It’s about, let me show you how I think. Let me show you the mistakes people are making. Let me show you what’s possible and allowing that person that’s potentially curious in this new philosophy of like, oh, I didn’t know that I could have a life filled with blah in this way. And because there’s no pitch, people feel more open to listening and hearing. The format is going to have to change depending on the person and what works for each niche. Some people have been doing private podcast feeds where it’s like, sign up, add this as a podcast, and every so often a new podcast episode is released.
But it’s not a typical podcast. It’s like a little mini course in a podcast form. We’ve seen the same with mini videos as well where it’s like, let me shift some of the beliefs that you might have and let me show you a different way of doing things. Something else that also has been helpful depending on the business and the niche, but at least for me, is being very transparent. So if I’m promoting, say, this mini course, I’m like, hey, come and join the mini course. Before you get started, you will hear about my offer.
So I release the pressure of like, when is she going to pitch me? It’s like, hey, I’m going to tell you about my offer. Don’t worry, you’re going to get a lot of value on x, y and z even without you joining. I’m honestly cool regardless of whether you buy it or not. But that’s not happening until video three or whatever. So sometimes that forward transparency is very refreshing for people, especially when they’re used to being hammered with pitches.
So they’re like, okay, cool, I got it. I understand the energy with which we’re coming into this new relationship. So, yeah, it’s just there’s so many different ways. It’s a matter of testing for each niche and each personality.
Ari: And how would you go about choosing what to test first, because you did outline a lot of different paths, and it could very well be that a course creator is listening to this and like, okay, great. There are all these ways. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to start. So how do you recommend that people think about that?
Kamila: Yeah, so I always start with what’s going to actually sell the course. What’s going to typically sell the course is some variation of a webinar. So I always start with, let’s just do a webinar. Because if you have an existing audience, that might be enough for you to enroll people into that program. Sometimes if the offer of the course is unique enough, even cold traffic will buy the offer directly without having to go through a lot of hoops and stuff like that, that will still happen. So that’s always priority with number one, creating a really solid training. The length can vary. It kind of depends on the niche and all that kind of stuff, but always starting with a webinar.
Secondly, let’s say that this person is now, okay, I built the webinar. I monetize my email list. What else do I do? People are not buying from ads. Let’s say that they’re trying ads. Okay, well, if that’s the case, we need to either create a bigger audience that you can then move into that pre framed audience, or let’s create a micro-offer that can get you buyer leads so they are more receptive to hearing the actual offer for the course. My recommendation, typically, if the person’s offer makes sense, which I would say 99% of people’s offer makes sense, take a little tiny piece, let’s create a micro-offer and start monetizing the rest of your audience, number one with turn them into buyers so that they’re actually paying attention to you and their psychology and relationship with you has changed from being a lurker to now I’m actually a buyer. Let me listen.
So that’s the second step. Or also running ads directly to that micro-offer, which is what I do. And a lot of times people can actually grow their email list of buyers profitably on the front end, which is amazing. So from there, it’s just a matter of looking at what am I paying per customer? What’s the average order value. Cool. How many of these people are actually signing up to see the next step training that is actually selling the course? And what do we need to tweak with that?
And a lot of times that’s enough to create a really solid system that creates multiple six figures a year. That would be my recommended action plan. We talked about the other things, like a mini course, private podcast that usually doesn’t happen until much later if they can’t find a micro-offer that works, but it usually should work.
Ari: Okay, awesome. So start with low hanging fruit. Develop the webinar directly into the course. Then once you’ve kind of saturated that market of that group of people you have start with things to test ways to get people into the funnel. A micro-offer is where you would generally recommend people start. Awesome.
Kamila: Yeah, that’s usually my recommendation.
Abe: Well, that might be a good place to stop.
Ari: Well, this has been super helpful, so thank you. This has been fascinating. If someone wants to learn more about you and your offers, where should people go?
Kamila: Yeah, so you can go to evergreenicon.com to see a little bit more about what I teach, but you can also find me on Instagram. And I’m at @heartbehindhustle.
Ari: Thank you so much for being on the show with us.
Kamila: Thank you so much.
Ari: Let me just do a quick readout. Kamila Gornia is the founder of Evergreen Icon and Heart Behind Hustle. Evergreen Icon is a high touch group coaching and mastermind program to help online coaches and entrepreneurs add $100k plus to their revenue by going on Evergreen. You can find out more about Kamila at evergreenicon.com. That’s evergreenicon.com.
Ari: Thank you so much.
Abe: Thanks so much. We really appreciate it.
Kamila: Thanks.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show, where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: All right, Ari, it is time for the debrief. And this is probably our deepest dive yet on strategy for course marketing. So a little bit of different territory.
Ari: Absolutely. And I do feel like there’s a ton to take away from this episode, but a lot of it is very much contained in the episode and in the recording. But I think the kind of the way that she approaches marketing and thinking about how to create the content and outline for her course and all that stuff we’ve covered in the past, but it’s so, so important to remember, you know, listen to the people who will actually take the course, have the conversations with them, and then even through the testing of the marketing, it’s more of the same.
Abe: Yeah, right. So in a way, there aren’t exactly simple takeaways here. Like, listen to the whole episode because there is nuance. It’s important to listen carefully to everything that she is saying because it is grounded in experience, you can tell. There’s a useful framework, you can pick up if you listen to it carefully. But it’s worth maybe pulling it out as a separate idea. And that’s this concept that you want to sort of saturate one marketing approach or channel at a time. And you also want to avoid spreading your efforts too thin.
So what we want to avoid doing is imagine you have 10 hours a week to spend working on marketing your courses. We want to avoid a situation where you spend a few minutes here and there, like posting some stuff on LinkedIn, and then you write one short blog post and then kind of mess around with some Facebook ads a little bit, but you’re not really sure how to measure them or if they’re working, and you’re just kind of scattered all over the place. And nothing is getting like, deep dive attention versus what you want to be focusing on is really working deeply on one strategy until you either get it working and then you keep pushing until it stops getting more results, or you figure out that, like, this is a dead end.
So, you know, I think that the takeaway here is to really focus on going deep with one marketing approach to the point where you saturate it in the sense of the results that you’re getting from that approach are plateauing and you’re no longer seeing more than tiny incremental growth. In other words, if you have built some type of audience and you have an email list with some degree of engagement, the first thing you can test and try would be what Kamila is suggested, which would be running webinars to your existing email list.
And so you would try that. And if you get some results from engaging people and selling your course via that webinar, you would then keep doing that, and you would work on running more webinars and making the promotion for those webinars more effective, making the webinars themselves more engaging, improving the offer you make on those webinars, and so on. And you keep working on all those aspects until you’re not getting any more sales from your webinar marketing.
And then you move on to, okay, what can I do next that will go beyond what I’m doing now? And that will help you make the most of the approaches that are going to work best and avoid spreading yourself too thin and basically getting nowhere with any of your strategies.
Ari: Yeah, I 100% agree. The one thing I’ll add is pay attention to the moment that sales start declining, of course, and you don’t need to wait till sales hit zero to start working on a new strategy. But as Abe said, focus on one thing at a time so that you’re able to get proper results from it.
Abe: That’s good.
Ari: Agreed.
Abe: Okay. You can find out more about Kamila’s program, Evergreen Icon at evergreenicon.com. That’s evergreenicon.com. Thanks for tuning into Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co-founder and CEO for Ruzuku, joined by my co-host, Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, featuring other great shows like Just Between Coaches and Neuroscience of Coaching. If you’re enjoying the show, follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please do leave us a comment or start a review. It really helps. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.
All right, Ari, who do we have coming on the show next week?
Ari: Next time we have Cheryl Ann Fulton. She’s a world-renowned harpist and master teacher and an Aces entrepreneur here at Mirasee.
Abe: That sounds really great.