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#STARS
Minimum goal: $3,944
Target goal: $7,988
Stretch goal: $23,964
When the Student is Ready, the Teacher will Appear.
I have been running in-person writing classes for five years with little or no traction and not earning the income I wanted. In the five years, I have taught 400 students. However, very few of them went on to publish their books. What has kept me going has been my unwavering commitment to my work.
When COVID-19 hit in 2020 and the world went into lockdown, I froze. My business had been solely built on in-person meetings and now it was not possible to run the classes. That meant that an important part of my income stream was affected. So, I toyed around with taking my classes online. I reached out to friends of mine in the creative writing space in universities around the world to ask about how they were doing their virtual classes. Their needs did not meet mine. The students enrolled in their classes had writing knowledge and their sessions were mostly story workshopping. My ideal clientele is people without a writing history who want to document their authentic stories in book form, so I needed to teach them the writing basics. I wanted an online class that was as engaging as a live class. I did run a few online classes, but I was not sure I was getting the right of input and I believed I could do better. I was looking for a class that would teach me how to create and market online products.
Robert Allen, one of my writing coaches in the past, had said this to our class in 2013: when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the teacher is ready, the student will appear – it touched my core. So, during this time of wondering where to get the best coaching to help me pivot into the online space, I got an email from Brain Tracy on October 8, 2019, titled: The truth about info products. It was an introduction to Marisa’s EPM webinars. I signed up and invited a friend to also sign up for the free webinars and that is when I got hooked and paid for the EPM 2020.
I am glad I did. EPM helped take a closer look at my business model and helped me address the lingering question in my mind: what do I have to do to ensure more student success in writing books and publishing them? I discovered new concepts that I have used to design my classes. While at the start of EPM, I run an advert for my first virtual writing retreat which was priced at $512. I did not expect it to make any sales. Two weeks to the deadline, I started implementing some EPM lessons and got four students who signed up and that was my first Mission Accomplished. I earned $2,048.
My EPM Product is called the Savvy Writer Masterclass which I specifically designed after implementing lessons from the classes. The product launch date was 8 January 2021 and would run up to January 25, 2021, for the class to start 5 February to 6 August 2021. The class is a beta product and is priced at $1997. My main marketing campaigns were chatterbox and perfect email campaign.
Using the Perfect Email Campaign, I decided to make this an exclusive invitation-only product and from my mailing list of 1,000 people, I selected 150 people to whom I sent out the marketing letter. I used Marisa’s email template because the story resonated well with me and I was sure it would resonate well with the readers. I then went on Canva and created personalized fliers for each recipient and then pasted the marketing copy under the flier. Creating the fliers took me three-days but because of the price point I had put it at, I knew the investment was worth it. It meant looking up their pictures of Facebook or LinkedIn to download and prepare a flier like the one below.
I manually sent out these invitations which also asked the recipients to recommend someone else who would be a fit for the program.
It worked.
I started receiving responses from the prospective clients I had reached out to.
In addition to the Perfect Email Campaign, I also used the power of celebrity leverage. The CEO of our national paper reached out to me and I chatter boxed him about the upcoming Savvy Writer Masterclass. He signed up. He has a Twitter following of 195,000 strong. I asked him to tweet about our class, which he did, and that brought in several prospects but also the second sign-up student to the class. The CEO has committed to documenting his writing journey on Twitter for the duration of the class- that is 24 weeks of being endorsed.
Sometimes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Eight days after my product launch, we had an internet blockade. January was election season in my home country Uganda where the incumbent President who has led the country for 35 years whose strongest contender was a 38-year-old musician turned politician who appealed to the youthful generation. Campaigns had been held online because of COVID-19 restrictions. The internet in the country was shut down for 7 days and that is a lot of time in the world of marketing. Some clients on my list were from other countries in Africa.
I froze.
Again.
I had to quickly pivot to alternative ways of getting my message out and find new clients during the internet shutdown.
One Sunday while listening to a radio program called Desert Island Discs, where prominent Ugandans are interviewed, the guest on the show said he wanted to write a book. I reached out to the interviewer the next day to ask him to make an introduction to the guest and I chatter boxed about the Savvy Writer Masterclass. The interviewer promised to make the introduction, which he did and asked me as a guest on his show to which I agreed. It is a popular program among the elite in my country, who are the target market for this product. I also spoke to the guest who has signed up for the Savvy Writer Masterclass. My hour-long interview on my personal story was broadcast on radio, in print, and shared on Youtube.
Once the internet was turned back on, I sent the video to all the prospective clients on the targeted email list of 150 people when I sent the next email. I also realized that I would need to improve on my live version of the class, so I am able to make changes and fine-tune it in order to upload my materials on Xperiencify for the next time. This is the way forward for me as an African entrepreneur to have my online classes hosted outside my country because I see more incidents of rising internet shutdowns, yet I am trying to grow an online business.
I followed up on the old prospects who have started signing up and we used the old school payment method of EFT because of this amount of money and based on my market, many are more comfortable doing bank transfers. So as of writing this email, I have signed up 6 students which will make me $11,982 once their payments reflect on my account. I am still waiting for more sign-ups so the number will go higher. EPM helped me develop a product that would have fewer students but bring in more income. It was a EUREKA moment for me.
My students were ready, and I appeared for them."