The good news for this week?

I’m all up to date, and actually a little ahead, on my podcast episodes and evergreen emails.

Which means I can get stuck into finishing my first paid online course!

But the bad news?

I had a LOT of trouble wrestling my course content into a format that works for it.

In fact, I didn’t even fix the problem this week. I put it aside so my brain can sort it out in the background, and I went and ate gelato instead. Any excuse, really.

So if you feel like you’re slower than everyone else, and we’ve all got it together all the time, churning products out effortlessly, listen to this – it’s a great dose of practical reality.

I also applied for some more summits and FINALLY, with the magic of Brandishing You, finalised my brand colours.

I think 😉

Listen to the episode right here

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Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in this episode.

Some of these links are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a commission if you purchase via that link (thanks!) – see my disclosure here.

Beyond Productivity – yep, I wrestled my productivity course into a structure that I’m very happy with – eventually!

Learn+ – part of Thrivecart, which is an excellent one-off cost product with stacks of useful features to manage your shopping cart, affiliates, courses.

Elizabeth Goddard’s summits – Low Ticket Live has happened, and you can get the recordings here. I have PAGES of excellent notes and ideas after only watching about half of the workshops.

Her Sponsorship summit is coming soon.

Brandishing You – the resources here have been fantastic in helping me really sort out my branding and messaging – in an area that tends to be a bit wishy-washy Dre is so practical, logical, and action-based!

Transcript

Hi, I’m Kelly Kotanidis and welcome to Online Business from Scratch, where I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do, so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

This is the update for day 120 of my new online business. It’s seven days on from my last update, and when I wrote my weekly list on Sunday, I saw I was up to date with the podcast and the evergreen emails. I’ve got them both under control and I’m actually a little bit ahead with podcast drafts and the emails. I’ve finished all of my current business idea reviews, so really the next logical step is to make a paid product, which is a little scary actually!

I had a look at my product ideas list and decided to go with the productivity course. It’s short, it’s quick, and I can then add it as a bonus to my Business Foundations course, which I think I will do next. That course will be much meatier and more detailed. It’s also really good to have smaller products to start off with because once I finish that, I can contribute it to bundles, set it up as a trip wire (which is a short-term discount offer when someone signs up), and there’s lots I can do with it. Plus, finishing something and having something to sell is a really huge confidence boost, so it’s good to start small to get that confidence boost sooner.

I got up one morning and went through my messy Google Doc with all of my productivity course notes and outline in it. I decided to start a second doc to start copy-pasting the info in a more logical order and start to edit it a bit. But when I started that, I then thought, oh no, this is adding an unnecessary step. So I decided to put it into Learn+, which is where I put my courses. If you’ve done the Business Idea Blitz, you know what that looks like. I got the first couple of parts of the productivity course in, but it was a struggle. I spent a couple of hours on it and, although I look at the content and think it’s good—short, snappy, and useful overall—I’m just really struggling with the format. The whole lesson-by-lesson thing just wasn’t really working for me. It just wasn’t seeming right.

I got a bit frustrated, tried a few things, then put it aside and went out for a walk. I ate a bougatsa (a Greek custard pie) and felt much better after that.

So, I don’t really know what I’m doing with that course now. Should I leave it as a course or turn it into something else? I don’t really know. It doesn’t feel right at the moment, but I’m not really sure what else to do with it.

Over the years, I’ve learned from experience many times that if I keep banging my head on it, I just get more and more frustrated and don’t make a lot of progress. I’m much better off putting it aside because now I know there’s a problem, I’ll automatically start looking for answers. My antenna will be out, it’ll be swishing around in my head and nagging at me, and then one day soon I’ll have a eureka moment where I’ll see something or my brain will make a connection, and I’ll come up with a new way to present that content. Maybe that will work, maybe not, but it usually does or at least gets me closer to the final solution.

This is a big reason why I’m a bit wary of anything that promises you’ll publish your first course in a week or similar. Sure, you can outline and draft the content in a week if you know your stuff, but putting it together in a way that works for that particular topic, content, and audience—and making sure that it’s a way that will get them results—is an entirely different step. It is hard to get right straight away.

I know I’m a slow worker. I like to think about stuff a lot. I like to draft, have a break, then edit and test everything thoroughly before I actually start selling it. That takes time, and that is completely okay. I feel the time is very much worth it because it means I release stuff that works. If you’ve seen the promos promising you nearly instant results and it makes you feel inadequate because you’re not churning out the products, please know that not everyone works like that. Although I will always tell you to keep plugging away and making progress, I also don’t think it’s particularly realistic to be popping out course after digital download after membership after course because there’s no point having lots of content unless it’s all solid, high-quality stuff. The days of being able to whack up any old thing and sell it are long gone, and thank goodness because it’s winnowed out a lot of the crap that used to be around.

Apart from that, promo-wise, I applied for a freebie bundle plus both of Elizabeth Goddard’s upcoming summits. I’m pretty sure I’ll get into the freebie bundle, but I don’t know about the summits because there will be a lot of competition for them. Right now, I am a nobody, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. It’s always worth a try.

I also finally sorted my brand colors (hopefully, touch wood) because I am always dithering about these and feel I can never come to a final decision. But I feel pretty good about the current setup. I actually sorted it because I joined Brandishing You, which is Dre Beltrami’s membership that has really awesome resources about branding and messaging. I’ve been working through some, and it’s really helping me think about what I need to communicate about my business and how I can do that. I love her resources and approach, and the way she organizes and explains stuff just really works with my brain. So I’m going to keep going through all of that and see what I come up with.

I then took all my new colors and used them to update all of my emails and most of my site. No doubt I will still be stumbling across other colors for months to come, but I did the obvious stuff, and hopefully, that’s it for me for branding for a while. These colors will work, and I won’t be tempted to change them all again in a month or two.

So, that’s about it for the week. I maintained what I’ve got, spent a couple of hours banging my head on this course and discovered a new problem, fixed up my colors, and applied for a few promo things. That’s a pretty good week overall, really, when you think about it considering that we’re traveling as well and doing lots of other things.

Now I’m going to jump forward to the future when I’m actually recording this podcast to say that I did sort out my issues with the course and I did create it. There will be a link to that in the show notes. At the moment, it’s called Beyond Productivity, but I think I’m going to change the name in a week or two, so keep an ear out for that. I’ve come up with a better name, but I’ve already committed it to be included in some bundles and some other stuff, so I’m kind of stuck with it until I fulfill those obligations, which is a bit funny when you think about it. But hey, I can actually change it in the future if I choose to. So, at the moment, it’s Beyond Productivity, but either way, the link will take you to my course.

All right, that’s it for me for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way to the end, and I will be back very soon with the next episode. I’ll see you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.

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