How an E-course Helped Me Pay off $65,000 in Student Loans
Whenever I ask therapists about their goals, they usually start off by telling me numbers.
“I want to see 20 clients a week.”
“I want to increase the number of self-pay clients on my caseload.”
“I want to make enough money to quit my soul-sucking agency job and do full-time private practice.”
If you’re in the process of starting or growing a private practice, numbers are important. You need to know how many clients to see and at what fee to support your lifestyle and build a life you love.
At some point though, the numbers change. You focus less on how many clients you need to see in order to move forward and instead focus more on how many hours of your life you want back.
You start to see that no matter how hard you hustle, you can only earn so much from increasing your fee and your caseload. As a therapist in private practice, there is always going to be an income ceiling when your only focus is how many clients come and sit on your couch. And that’s where adding an e-course can dramatically change your earning potential.
In 2016, I had a lot of numbers on my mind.
I was a new mom with a part-time private practice. In between sessions, I would pump and type case notes, keeping track of my income while simultaneously adding up how many ounces of milk I was going to take home (in those days, breastmilk was a currency that held just as much – if not more – value than the dollar).
One number that stayed at the forefront of my mind was a big one: 65,000.
That was the amount of student loan debt that I carried around like a big fat noose around my neck.
With my practice being forever part-time, I was limited to how much I could earn to make a dent in that $65,000 debt. I had no desire to go full-time, and I knew that increasing my fee – even significantly – was only going to move the needle so much.
So that summer, I made a decision that would change the trajectory of my family’s future. I started YourBadassTherapyPractice.com, an online business dedicated to helping anxious, Type-A therapists build and grow successful, profitable private practices. I was going to create the best online course for therapists, and the proceeds from that course were going to take my very big number of 65,000 down to 0.
On August 30, 2018, just two years later, I reached my goal and became debt-free.
And now I’m going to show you how I did it.
How I got started
When I decided to create an online business and sell e-courses, I didn’t even know who my target audience would be or what I would teach. So I compiled a list of all the things I was good at and even sent an email to my closest friends asking for input. A few of my therapist friends responded by telling me that I was instrumental in helping them start their private practices, and that I was able to break it down for them and even make it fun.
The more I thought about it, I realized that helping my friends build and grow their private practices was something I truly enjoyed, and something I could spend all day talking about.
That’s when the proverbial light went off in my head.
I decided to create an online business helping therapists who wanted to start and grow private practices.
If you’re a therapist with a specialty, your e-course can solve a very specific problem for people in your niche market.
For example, if you specialize in working with children on the Autism Spectrum, you could create an e-course for parents of children with Autism to help them understand how to advocate for their child in school.
If you love helping working moms who are constantly overwhelmed and stressed, you could create an e-course with actionable tools to help them find easy ways to add self-care to their day without taking away from their mile-long to-do lists.
The world is your oyster, so if you can come up with a long list of ideas for what you could create, that’s when the real fun begins.
Lesson #1: Do your research. Then, research some more.
I’ve spoken with so many therapists who had dreams of creating e-courses, but instead of doing the hard work up front to research the market, they simply got an idea and ran with it. After putting in hours and hours of work into their e-course, they launched to crickets and had no idea what went wrong.
You may not believe this, but it took me four months of research before I even created a single piece of content for my e-course. FOUR MONTHS. That included late nights, early mornings, working lunches, and weekends spent camped out in a Starbucks. This research was paramount to my (much later) success, and I would even go so far as to say that it was the key to it.
First, I asked lots of questions to anyone I knew who was in my target audience. I asked them things like, “What are your biggest challenges in growing your private practice? What do you wish you knew before you started? If I could help you solve one problem you have with your practice, what would it be?”
Then, I asked more questions: “What have you tried so far? Have you enrolled in any other programs to help you with this? What has been the most/least helpful? What do you think is keeping you stuck?”
I posted surveys in Facebook groups, I asked people out for coffee, and I even hopped on the phone with anyone who would be willing to share their stories with me. I wanted as many data points as I could possibly find about the problems my target audience had before I went about creating any meaningful solutions for them.
Once I felt like I had a deep understanding of what my target audience wanted and could talk about it backwards and forwards – and ONLY then – I began crafting the content of my e-course.
Lesson #2: Start small. Test and validate.
When I tell people that my course consists of 7 modules over 8 weeks and includes worksheets, Q&A interviews with industry experts, and access to a peer mentor (we call them “badass buddies”), they generally make the assumption that the course has always been this way.
Are you kidding me?
No.
Not even a little bit.
Before I refined the content of my e-course, I had to test it, tweak it, and test it again. It wasn’t enough that I had done my research up front; I also had to put it out in the world with a small group and then make changes based on the feedback they gave me.
The course began as a simple email course packaged as a 60-day challenge. Every Monday, beta testers would receive an email with all of the content for the week, and then we would all discuss insights, challenges, and next steps in a private group I created on Facebook.
Over time, as I enrolled new cohorts of 20, 30, and 50 new students, I would use feedback from the last group to make it even better. This not only helped to improve the course over time, but it also gave me an even better understanding of what my target audience wanted. Even more, it has allowed me to over-deliver for my students in such a way that they became even more dedicated, engaged, and loyal to my business.
If you want to create an e-course to help solve problems for your target audience, you have to accept the fact that new problems – and new solutions – will always come up. So testing and validating is a continuous process to help you keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience needs from you.
Lesson #3: Don’t be afraid to give shit away.
In order to successfully sell an e-course, you have to position yourself as an expert in your industry. You’ve probably heard of the Know-Like-Trust factor, which emphasizes the importance of someone getting to know you before they ever invest their hard-earned money in you or your business.
Well my friends, in the online world, this is the understatement of the century.
The anonymity of the Internet makes it easier to create a movement and also more difficult for people to trust it.
That’s why I give away almost 95% of my content.
Very few people trust an online course creator who promises massive results but only if you invest in their product first. Instead, you need to deliver results and solve problems before someone decides to buy.
When I first started Your Badass Therapy Practice, it was hard for me to figure out what to give away, or how much. I was worried that I’d give too much away and that people wouldn’t buy my course if I just handed out “the good stuff.” This fear was rooted in scarcity and would have really held me back if I had listened to it.
Ultimately, I made the decision to freely give away the knowledge I had so that I could help even more people. I realized that giving away amazing content that I could otherwise charge for would be the single most important way for my target audience to get to know me, experience some real wins, and then make the decision to invest in my e-course.
And it was.
Thousands of therapists enrolled in my free 4-part video e-course on crafting a badass Psychology Today profile (and it even won “Best Online Course for Therapists” from Brighter Vision in 2017). Even more watched my free webinar on implementing the Profit First system into their businesses.
Rather than stress out about giving away “too much,” I just gave away whatever I wanted. This positioned me as an expert and allowed people to get a sense for who I am, how I teach, and what they could expect to get if they invested in my e-course.
At the end of the day, when you give a lot of amazing content away for free, people will assume that your paid products are only that much better. And if their assumption is correct, you’ll have a student for life.
Lesson #4: Never underestimate the power of relationships.
This is a big one.
Relationships have single-handedly allowed me to sell out my course over time without spending any money on advertising.
First, you have the relationships between yourself and your students.
As more and more therapists went through my program and experienced success, they told other therapists about me. I even incentivized students by offering free coaching to any alumni who helped enroll a new student in the program.
This created a sense of community, because people were beginning to join who already knew at least someone else who had successfully completed the program. I didn’t know it at the time, but growing a small, engaged tribe would help me so much that I wouldn’t have to spend any money on advertising.
I also spent a lot of time nurturing meaningful relationships with other coaches, consultants, and industry experts.
These strangers-turned-friends served as sounding boards, mentors, and guideposts along the way. The road to a successful online business can be a lonely one, so making friends with others in your same space and collaborating with them makes this whole journey worthwhile. I’ve made friends that will outlive my business, and that’s pretty freaking cool.
Lesson #5: Whole-ass one thing.
I think creating an e-course is like birthing a baby: When you’re elbow deep in you-know-what at 3 AM and haven’t slept more than 2 hours in a month, the last thing you want to think about is ever having another kid…
Until they start doing cute shit, like blowing kisses and telling you that they love you. Then it’s like this tiny little fairy blows sparkly dust in your face and you’re all like, “Awww, I want another one…”
Dissociative amnesia hits, and you find yourself looking at cute nurseries on Pinterest.
The process of creating and launching an e-course is very similar. Once you do the research, test the market, validate your course, and begin helping others solve their biggest problems, it’s natural that you’ll feel the urge to make another course.
Instead, I want you to go back and see how you can make your existing course even better. What can you add or change to keep up with the new problems you’re learning about with your target audience? How can you make your e-course the best one in your industry? What can you do to make it even easier for your students to talk about you to anyone who will listen?
Before you let your impulses get the best of you, whole-ass the course you already worked so hard to create.
In the end
When I agreed to write this article, I knew that there would ultimately be therapists who would read it and decide that an e-course is not for them. After all, it’s taken me two years to get to this place, and I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder for anything in my career – not even my own private practice.
But here’s the thing: I had a goal – a very specific goal. I was going to break free from my student loans and live a full life. To me, that means having total control over my schedule and how I choose to spend my days. A rich life has little to do with how much I’m able to earn and a lot more with how many people I’m able to help.
Creating an e-course has given me freedom, and I don’t regret the amount of time and energy it took to get here.
If you’re interested in creating an e-course to help you reach your goals, start by simply brainstorming the things you’re already good at – whether it’s related to your private practice or not.
What is a skill that comes easily to you but seems difficult for your friends? What is something that you love talking about so much that you could spend an entire day on it and not get bored?
Start there, and just keep moving. It’s not easy, AND it’s totally worth it.
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