Back in October of 2021, I launched my new course, the Reels Mini Course – and it ended up going really, really well. So, I thought it would be fun to do a recap of how I prepared for the launch and what I’m doing now. I’m asked a lot about this strategy and how to launch new products, so I hope you find this helpful! During the week of the course launch, which was an 8 day period, I generated about $40K in sales. With only about $2.2k in expenses directly related,  my profit margin was pretty good. Here’s a breakdown of what went on: 

As a side note: I share this information, these numbers, and this strategy to show you what launches really take. I don’t share this to brag. It’s shared so that you can hopefully understand what’s possible when you spend time crafting a community and an audience around a certain topic. 

MY LAUNCH STRATEGY

When it came to launching the Reels Mini Course, I knew there were three things I wanted to focus on. I went into it with an almost completely organic strategy. This meant I wasn’t paying for a lot of ads – in fact, the money I did spend on ads was related to re-targeting existing ads. Instead, it was important for me to lean into what I already had set up: my email list, YouTube, and blog. Since my audience had grown a lot leading up to the launch, I thought it was important to see what happened organically. 

Done is Better than Perfect

The second thing I wanted to remember was that “done is better than perfect”. It’s easy to think that we have to have it all figured out before we can launch something. But the reality is that we don’t need to have it all perfectly to be ready. While having all of those team members and help is amazing, it’s okay to not have them. Instead, I leaned on my existing team and took on more tasks than I might have before. It ended up working out well in the end and just reinforced the idea that you don’t have to have a huge team or everything perfect before you launch your new products. 

This ties into the last thing that was important to me: utilizing my team members. I hired a videographer to help film some of the videos, which made sense for the content I needed. Additionally, I have someone who writes my content copy, like blogs and emails. On top of that, I have my video editor who helped edit the content I film. During the launch, I leaned on the people around me to do their jobs – which made my tasks easier. Other than them, I did everything myself! 

MY PRE-LAUNCH PLAN 

The next thing to discuss is my pre-launch plan. This is a rough timeline of what I did leading up to my launch. Take this timeline and use it to guide how you might prepare for your own launch! Remember, there’s no right or wrong about how to do this, it’s just what worked for me! 

• 6 weeks prior: I sent my audience survey about reels and what they were struggling with so that I could create the course, sales page, and emails. 
• 5 weeks prior: Once I finalized the course content, I began to film content. I spread this out over a week to give myself time to record. 
• 4 weeks prior: Around 4 weeks, I began to release priming content around Reels. This is free, valuable content that will help my audience really think of me as the expert on this topic. My emails, posts, and content was about Reels so that people were really ready for me to launch the course in a few weeks! 
• 3 weeks prior: About 3 weeks prior, I began to poll my audience for beta testers. My beta tests complete the course for free, but they have to fill out an extensive questionnaire so that I have their feedback and testimonials. About a week later, I was able to finalize my course content based on their feedback and finished my final edits.
• 1 week prior: This is the week before course launch. The previous Friday, I hosted a free Reels class. I wanted to create more priming content but also offer a chance for my audience to begin signing up for the course because of the pitch at the end of my class (a chance to buy my course at a discounted price with bonuses). This free class also allowed me to turn my sales funnel into an evergreen funnel… which we can dive into later! 

LAUNCH WEEK

The free class occurred on the Friday before I launched my Reels Mini Course, with the option to purchase the course at half off with the bonus. On Saturday evening, the free class replay expired. This helped me make sure that we kept the bonuses really exclusive. On Monday, we launched the mini course to the email list with the 50% off sale. From there, I ran an early bird bonus from Monday to Tuesday, with a final reminder on Thursday and Friday. Friday at midnight was the last chance to purchase the course from me. Phew. That’s the timeline of the launch week sale! Now, onto some stats to show how it all worked out! 

LAUNCH STATS BREAKDOWN & EXPENSES

At the time of my launch, I had about 11,500 email subscribers. Roughly 8200 of them were added because of Reels content – so that’s really important to know. I wound up with 1,258 webinar registrations. Remember, I didn’t push ads so this was my organic audience and my email list! Email, by far, gave me the most registrations for that free class. From the live webinar and replays, I had 77 sales of the Reels Mini Course, which meant 6.1% of the people who signed up for the webinar bought the product. Over launch week, I sold a total of 254 courses which means the total sales generated came to $40,092. 

LAUNCH EXPENSES

I wanted to make sure that I shared my expense breakdown for this launch. Again, a big goal was to keep things focused on my organic efforts – my email list, existing audience, and almost no ads. For this launch, I paid: 

• $500 Videographer 
• $300 Video editor
• $300 Facebook ads
• $100 Virtual assistant
• $999 WebinarJam

= $2,199 total expenses

Sharing this was really important to me because I want to be transparent about what it’s really like to launch a course. We hear so many big numbers thrown around when it comes to launches in the industry, but I don’t always think they’re the honest representation of what profit truly looked liked. 

WHAT WORKED! 

One of the things I was so happy to see was that sometimes done truly is better than perfect. I actually spent fewer hours on this launch compared to my previous one (about 60 on this one, 100 or so on the last). The profit margin on this launch was much better – and I spent more time doing things myself instead of hiring out. I’m really proud of that – and it gives me a lot of confidence to know what I can do for the next time! It also reminded me that when I DO hire out, I’ll feel even better about that investment. 

Using my Organic Audience

Another thing that went well was leaning more into my organic audience and sending more emails than I might have usually done. For example, I spent a 3 hour and 1 hour reminder on the last day of the sale and saw a HUGE uptick in sales. The third thing that went well was offering the bonus with the live class. I think this made a difference in the number of sales I made. 

I also think that having my video editor made a huge difference in this launch. Because I had her, I could focus on writing the sales page, emails, and other content to share leading into the launch. Finally, I was surprised that turning my free class into a replay was a great decision. I wasn’t expecting the requests for the replays. But, by Monday, we had turned the class signup page  into a waitlist and that was such a smart thing for us to do. 

WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY! 

If I went back and redid this launch, there’s only a few things I would do differently. The first would definitely be to have that replay option setup before the day of the webinar since we now know it was such a success. Additionally, setting up all of the details for Webinar Jam (adding slides, etc.) would have been smarter to do a few days before the webinar. It would have given me more breathing room for support or getting it all figured out.

Additionally, I would have considered having someone else on my team to help with some of that launch prep and setup. Finally, the only other thing that I would change is to not have the bonuses during launch week NOT be current shop products. We had a lot of questions about discounts and refunds, which was a surprise. While I understand where the questions were coming from, it was a bit frustrating. We don’t see that kind of request in a lot of other types of businesses, but I do understand what they’re asking. It was too confusing and it didn’t feel good to see that many issues arise. 

SINCE THE LAUNCH… 

To wrap up this online course launch recap, I wanted to touch up on passive income since the launch. Honestly, I think the best thing I did was create sales funnels from my replay.  If you’re looking to make income from a course like this, I recommend setting up your sales funnels with a replay to help generate more sales. In the two months since my launch, I’ve generated another $10K solely from putting the webinar on replay and having those sales funnels to push sales. 

So there’s the course launch recap from my most recent launch of the Reels Mini Course! I hope that this video and walkthrough was helpful when it comes to how to launch products and courses in your own business. If there’s something else you want me to discuss when it comes to launches, make sure to leave a note below!