First up, STORY TIME: About three months ago, I had my first ever online course launch for Elevate Your Details. It was my first time launching an online course, and it went better than I could have ever imagined! I launched it completely organically, which means I didn’t pay for any advertising (including Facebook ads) and didn’t have an affiliate promoting the course for me. All course sales came through my existing audience! 

During launch week of the course, I was able to host a free challenge with nearly 350 sign ups and made a total of OVER $5,000 during launch week, 95% of it in course sales alone. Crazy, right?! I honestly wasn’t expecting that kind of results for my first ever big online course launch! For someone with a smaller audience (I had about 2,600 people on my email list at the time) this was crazy awesome!

So… how did I do it?!

Here are 5 big things I did that led to the success of my first online course launch:

1. I listened to what my audience wanted. Just gonna be completely transparent here: I originally wanted to launch something related more to the business side of photography. However, when I polled my audience, SO many of you wanted a course on shooting details.

I knew this would be great for a few reasons: First, there was not a lot of education like it out there, so it was going to be super unique! Secondly, because this was my first big dive into education, starting with something simpler would be a great first step into establishing myself as an educator. 

Know Your Audience!

2. Once I decided on a details course, I polled my audience on what they needed in a details course. I asked my Instagram audience what was HARD about shooting details and what they really needed in a course. I wanted to be sure I was 100% hitting all of their pain points! It gave me SO many ideas I would have never thought of in the first place! 
3. The month before launching, I primed my audience really, really well. In the 4 weeks leading up to launching, I was providing free weekly YouTube videos on how to photograph wedding details. Each week, I was taking different perspectives and covering different topics related to details. After sharing it on YouTube, I was also pushing it to my newsletter, in a blog post, on my Facebook page, on my IGTV, on my Instagram, and anywhere else I could share it!

I wanted my followers to know that I was not only a great educator, but that I also was SUPER knowledgeable on the subject of details. By the time I launched a course, I wanted so many of them to think it was a no-brainer to invest in because the free education on details was so good!

Side note here: Even though I technically made over $5k in one week, it really was a whole month’s worth of work leading up to the launch and YEARS serving my audience to build it up to asking them to pay me. Really, now I’m making more money than I did during launch week compared to the amount of hours I work on the course, because it’s evergreen and is always available to purchase!

People love challenges!

4. I hosted a free challenge on photographing wedding details. I had a total of 345 people signed up for my free challenge. It was 5 days long, and at the beginning, they were all added to a Facebook group to interact and ask questions! Each day in the morning, they received a new email with a link to the content for that day. 

Half way through the challenge, I opened the doors to the course for early access + a bonus for being in the challenge (a personalized photo critique of their current details photos!) During this week and launch week, the course was on sale for $247 (a big difference from the original price of $429!) 

At the end of launch week, I made a total of 20 sales. At $247 each, that came out to a total of $4,940 from the course launch, plus I made $185 from other paid products that week!

Overall, I think what worked SO well for me was focusing on serving my audience WELL. I not only have been showing up and serving my audience for years with free content on my blog and YouTube channel, but leading up to the online course launch, I provided a lot of QUALITY, practical, and actually helpful content related to details photos.