My loves,
Today on the first episode of “Leonie Goes For a Walk because Their Brain is FRAZZLED”, I delve in the behind-the-scenes of a Leonie launch.
The episode is down below (go for a scroll to find it), but I also thought I would write up a companion blog piece, because I’m bigly generous like that, ho ho ho.
I’m also just adoring writing and blogging again. It’s nourishing my soul, watering my crops and curing my ailments, as the youngsters say these days.
I’m so fucking hip and with it, babes. HA!
Okay, onwards, before I get distracted by the joys of today’s youth.
(BTW: I am completely unable to say the word youths without thinking of Schmidt from New Girl. New Girl = LIFE.)
Sales Star Masterclass
By now, hopefully you will have seen I have launched a new program, YAAAAY! It’s so new and shiny omfg.
This is something that people have been asking for for years. It’s always been in the back of my mind to create. I’ve been wanting to create an intensive where I can put all my information, tools, resources, checklists and worksheets on how to create sales pages that really sell. Not to mention copywriting; i.e. how to use those delightfully tricky little things called words to make yourself even more dollar dollar bills, y’all.
Even if you already have a sales page, doing this course will mean your sales page will start selling more and earn more $$$!
Here’s the thing, learning about this stuff (about sales pages, marketing and copywriting) is really what changed the trajectory of my business. It went from just being a hobby of mine to something that now has brought in millions and millions of dollars.
I really feel like learning the skills of sales and copywriting is kinda teaching yourself how to have money for the rest of your life. If I lost everything or decided not to do this business anymore, I would still be earning a really good fucking wage, purely because of my sales and copywriting skills that I’ve developed over time.
I’m not someone who was born naturally good at this stuff. I wasn’t birthed holding a pen, a thesaurus and a knowledge of words that sell. Instead I’ve learnt along the way. I’ve invested in my education and it has given me the biggest return of investment E V E R!
Sales Star Masterclass is education that you and your business deserve to invest in.
So let me give you a behind the scenes glimpse as to what it looks like for me to prepare for launching a new program.
Step One: Mindmap analogue. I get out my trusty journal & start scrawling shit & mind mapping topics I want to cover. This can totally be edited, added to and streamlined later. It’s not set in stone – just a bunch of ideas off the top of my head.
Step Two: Digital listify. At a certain point my mindmap gets fucking messy, so I swap to a Google document to clear it up. I pour everything out into dot points, which then branch out further and further. It’s here I edit and move content chunks into modules.
So doing those two steps creates the framework for what I want to teach in the course and what questions I want to try and answer. I have been doing this process for 13+ years now and have created over 160 programs, so it comes second nature to me now.
If you want to know more about building out an e-course framework, I go through in great detail in 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-Course.
Step Three: I try and think of questions you’ll want answered in the course, what you are struggling with, what would be most helpful to you. And then BAM! I’ll add those into the course as well.
Step Three: Once that framework is in place, I can then start building out the sales page because I know what I’m going to be teaching and what the course will contain.
Step Four: I design & illustrate the sales page myself using Procreate on my iPad. I’ve noticed my brain just seems to work a lot better when I illustrate shit. Plus it looks really fucking purtyyyyy.
Now let’s talk stats.
The average amount of time it takes me to write a sales page is probably 8 or so hours. And that includes doing all the graphics + design work myself too. It’s a few solid days (because why the fuck would I work full days? No thank you very much) of just chipping away at the page until I feel it’s long enough and covers everything important.
I use a bunch of checklists that I’ve been using for years, to make sure I don’t forget anything. I remember I started sharing one of my checklists at a coaching retreat I ran eons ago and the awesome Denise Duffield-Thomas was there and I remember she said to me:
This checklist is what I’ve used to generate over $11 million dollars in my business, so naturally I’m going to share it with you in Sales Star Masterclass.
Now that the sales page is all done, the next step is to build out the course in Kajabi. That’s where I really simplified my business a couple of years ago. Kajabi has made the whole thing sooooo much easier to manage.
What my Kajabi looks like behind the scenes…
Kajabi has my eCourses, mailing list and shopping cart. It can also host your website but I have over 2500 blog posts here and lorrrrrrd knows I cannot be arsed transferring all of that over.
I love it, it’s very, very useful and it’s saved me a shit tonne of money. I used to have to hire a whole bunch of staff to manage my business (this did NOT bring me joy of any kind and is just ssssssssso not the business model for me). With Kajabi, it’s just me and my assistant plonking about, pushing buttons and figuring shit out.
How the back-end is set up
So peeps will click a link on the sales page, it’ll take them to the Kajabi shopping cart where you can enrol and pay and then exit. That’s literally it. Kajabi will automatically send you login details and course details. I fucking love it.
Once Kajabi is done, I’ll make sure customer service is manageable for my team. With a brand new course launch I usually do a three day early bird price (to reward all you loyal humans) and that can result in a few extra emails.
Side note: there’s nothing better than having people in your team who are excellent communicators and boundary setters. Seriously. My business runs 10000% smoother. Plus having a large team takes all the fun out of it for me.
So, my launch to do list was looking like this:
Sales page: ✔️
Kajabi: ✔️
Customer service: ✔️
It is now time to send out to the mailing list. WAHOO!
What I like to do when I open up for sales is make sure the checkout process is smooth so no one runs into any problems and keep an eye on any questions we’re getting in the inbox, so we can pre-answer them on the sales page and in follow up emails. Good customer service is when no one has to email in at all.
If one person has asked me the question, at least 10 other people have the same question somewhere. But instead of emailing in, they’re just confused, bless their souls. So the better a job I can do at communicating, the better it works for everyone all round.
For me, month-long launches work best.
I do a three day early bird discount at the start of the month, then over the following weeks I continue to educate and answer questions through a series blog posts (like this one, helloooooo!) or articles or podcasts or emails about the topic.
By the time of the end of the month comes around, I have the final week of sales emails scheduled in Kajabi aimed at reminding peeps that, yooohoooooo it’s time to sign up plz and thank you!
A lot of people like to do shorter launches and that’s totally cool. I just tend to a bit longer. I like to make the course start on the first of a new month, so the launch starts on the first of the month before. That way the last day of the month is the deadline to sign up, and I’ve found that inbuilt deadline of “oh fuck it’s the last day of February, Sales Star Masterclass starts tomorrow!” works really well as a natural reminder for people.
But also maybe I’m just making causation out of correlation. But hey! Whatever works for you and your biz, lolzzz.
I will probably try out a shorter launch, just because I like trialling new things. But for now, we’ll stick to month long launches.
So that’s kind of the behind-the-scenes of one my launches!
I really don’t plan out my launches in advance. I have an income goal for the year, but for my personality if I have it all booked in place at the start of the year I lose interest. I need new, sparkly things and so going with my natural instinct and creating on the fly really works. And it’s what I’ve done for years.
The no-plan plan works for me, ho ho ho.
Okay! So! Any questions, let me know. Just pop us an email at support@leoniedawson.com.
And of course:
Make sure you sign up to Sales Star Masterclass, but only if you’re interested in learning about sales page, copywriting, marketing and making more money.
Because who isn’t interested in making more moolah, truly?
I do feel ridiculously, enormously blessed and grateful to be able to live this life. I feel so lucky that I was able to leave my public service job, work from home, be with my kids, retire my husband (from his job, not me LOLZ… I’m a liiiiife long career for him HO HOHO) and live in some of the most beautiful places in the world.
We get to live a life of freedom, and one that’s in alignment with out values.
And that really comes back to the decision I made nearly 15 years ago to really learn how do marketing + copywriting + sales pages that really sell because it has meant I have been able to create all of this and not work ridiculous hours.
10 hours a week. $11 million.
I want to pay it forward. I want to teach other people about all this stuff.
If that’s you, jump on in before we begin!
I love you all! Let’s go make miracles!
FREE GOODIES:
✏️ Daily-ish writings
???? Weekly love letters
???? Podcast: Leonie Dawson Refuses To Be Categorised
???? A library of free treasures
COURSES:
???? Sales Star (begins March 1)
???? Money, Manifesting & Multiple Streams of Income
