 Well, hello and welcome to this video. Would you like to make a six-figure income from your art courses? If you would, then you're definitely in the right place. If you want to sell your online courses but you're just not sure what platform you should be using to do this, then you're definitely in the right place. Creating that online course, or maybe several online courses as an artist, is a brilliant income stream for your art business and once it's set up and all that upfront work is done, and what's better than sitting back painting or creating or sleeping overnight and waking up and seeing notifications on your phone as to how many people have bought your course. Now there's a massive reason why more artists are not getting their great art courses out online in front of waiting audiences and that's the very thought of the tech, right? It mostly sends you running to the hills. If that's you, if you're running away from the tech, then let me know in the comments. Also, we end up tending to procrastinate. You know, you've got that note, but compare and you're like, this is a great course. I could make this course. I could make this course. You understand how people are making lots of money making courses, but you end up being stuck in procrastination, right? I don't know what platforms to use. I don't know about the tech. I'm scared of that. I'm not very good at that because at the end of the day, as creatives, we're great at what we do, alright, but that other part, the bit that's going to support it and enable you to sell it, that's the bit that can be a challenge. So in this video, I'm going to solve this for you and share three simple steps that will help you get started with that online course today. And make sure to stay right to the end as well because the final part of step three will make the difference for you, your art business, and of course, your online art sales. Now, in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist's coach and entrepreneur, helping artists just like you to make more sales by building a profitable art business. And if that's something you want to learn more about, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and look out for more videos just like this with all different parts of building an art business. Okay, let's go ahead and get stuck in and look at those three simple steps. So step one, start out simple. The word simple comes up a lot because that's how we want to keep it, all right? We don't want to make things complicated when they don't need to be. So number one, start out simple. Now, sometimes it's just easiest to start out with a third party platform, something like Skillshare. It offers courses for creatives by creatives, right? And you can set up your content online for free. I'd suggest creating your starter course, something that's short and simple and will get your ideal audience hooked in to your style and what you're going to teach. Now, you'll need to do your research because there's a lot of courses on there and you want to make sure that you're coming up with something that's unique and not being covered before already. So make sure that you do that, have a good look, have a good search, look at what other people are doing and you'll see that typically on Skillshare a course can be 20, 30 minutes, sort of up to about an hour. So you're not looking at anything really large. So that makes it a lot simpler, all right? And they have an amazing kind of step-by-step guide as to how they like you to create that course as well. And I think if memory serves me right, they don't want you to have the same course for sale anywhere else. This is a unique course for Skillshare, which is why it's a great place for you to start. So if you're planning on building out more courses, why not create the kind of top of your sort of course kind of, I don't know, course pyramid. I hate using that word, but you know what I mean? The Mitesurkey is a really simple course and then underneath that I'm going to build out all these different, more comprehensive courses and they, for example, could be somewhere else that we're going to be looking at in a minute. This way you eliminate the tech, right? You haven't got to set up a site of your own. You haven't got to worry about all of that. You just simply follow their infrastructure. Obviously you don't have any way of making it look a certain way. It looks a Skillshare way. You create the content, you upload it per the guide and that's it. So what are the benefits of using a platform like Skillshare? Udemy is pretty much the same. The only downside is it's not just for creative courses. There are all sorts of different courses so now it's a much bigger pool of courses. So what are the benefits of using something like this, a third party course platform? Well, you can get started for nothing and you could do that quickly and easily and get going straight away. You've got a ready audience who are already looking. So something like Skillshare is a subscription model. So you pay as a customer, you pay a monthly fee and you dip in and around and you take all these different courses. So it's really good if you're just starting out and you don't have an audience yourself. You can also drive traffic then onto your website from the Skillshare site. So you can say I'm offering this course on Skillshare and then when they're there of course they'll look at you and your bio as you as a teacher, as an artist and then they'll be able to look and go across back over to your website for perhaps further deeper courses. What are the downsides on being somewhere like Skillshare? Well, you're not building your mailing list because you don't control that data. Okay, Skillshare is building their mailing list and so you're not directly in in sort of contact with your customers. It's only for short courses. So if you want to build out a sort of a much meatier course or you've got a what I call a key course that goes over a set number of weeks then that's not going to be the platform for you. But I also don't recommend that you launch that course from the get-go anyway. And of course there's tons of competition. So the audience is not just looking at your course but they're looking at all the other courses of a similar topic as well. So make sure that when you're going to do this you have something that's totally unique so that people come there and they're like oh wow we haven't actually seen this course on Skillshare before and that's how you're going to stand out. All right, step number two I'm going to call scale it up. So now you've got your initial course out on something like Skillshare. It's time to build out some other courses because at the end of the day if you do actually want to make that six-figure income or even a five or multiple five-figure income you want more than one course because what happens is somebody takes a starter course and then they're saying I want to learn more. What about the next step or what about applying what I've learned into something deeper or a different topic so you can't leave people hanging by just one short course because then they're going to go on and they're going to spend a lot of money with somebody else diving deeper into that topic, right? So you want to make sure that as soon as you've got that up you are planning what I call something like a spotlight course. So let's take my watercolours for beginners example. So you put your equivalent to your watercolour beginners course up on Skillshare. Now you might offer watercolour landscapes, watercolour florals, watercolour portraits, watercolour animal portraits, whatever it is that you do that would become a spotlight course so somebody would dive a lot deeper. Now you might say why can't we do these on Skillshare Sophie? You can do of course you can. Remember they're going to be very short courses and again you're not building a mailing list this is not you know at the end of the day this is not building your business you're kind of almost building Skillshare's business so I would you know you could have a few courses on there but I would really be looking to build out your own courses. You might then from there say okay actually what I want to build is what I call the key course. That's the sort of nicely priced one that's going to be a two thousand maybe three thousand dollar course. Maybe that's something that people can take over a period of time with you so there's maybe modules that go over 12 weeks so they sign up and on week one they get introduced to this and then week two you know the next sort of topic opens and they do that and you have lots of live support. That's the sort of course that you launch once a year you know the big names out there doing it they're doing it every year the same sort of time of the year roughly around the time I'm shooting this video actually sort of February March time a lot of those big courses you only launch it once once a year because it's going to take it's going to be a big launch and if you're going to deliver and support people over say 12 weeks that's a big chunk of your year. So that's not going to suit everybody so you might offer spotlight courses or the key course but you're going to offer something different this is the next step up now at this point I would recommend using what I think is the best online course platform out there to host these next courses on and that is called Kajabi. Now I mentioned this and I think in a previous video and somebody said oh I've never even heard of that and as an artist you're probably not going to because it's not typically a platform that you would look at as an artist unless you create online courses. I started on this platform many many years ago it is a beautiful platform I'll give you the reasons why I love it so much in a minute so again once you have your video content for your courses you can create a course on Kajabi probably an under an hour or you know probably half an hour if you're quick with uploading it is one of the simplest things that I've ever used thank goodness you don't need to be tech savvy you don't need to know about coding or there's no complications it's all templated it's all super super simple and courses are already laid out now you might chop and change it but it already says or here's a few modules and lessons you can just fill it out or add more modules or change it how you want and you can use a template to create your sales page just go to where the marketing is and then pages and then landing page and choose that infill some information it's all laid out you don't have to build anything from scratch you don't have to scratch your head scratch you don't have to build anything from scratch you don't have to get lost in language you don't understand there's always support there to help you if you do get stuck but honestly you can be ready to launch that online course really really quickly okay number three what I call go all in so now you've got some courses set up on kajabi we want to build out the entire website around that because kajabi isn't just a course platform it's actually a business in the box and it offers all these different features that i'm going to talk about in a minute one of which is a website the free website that comes with the package all templated and easy to use how do I know it's easy to use because finally after all these years of having my website over here I built my brand new website in a week last week and I'm a lot of you probably look at me and think oh yeah it's all right for you so for your very techie I'm not actually very techie at all I struggle with it all just as much as all of you perhaps I am a little bit more patient or I have a lot of persistence because I know where I want to get to and I had some frustrations I was like how do I move that and how do I get that over but at the end of the day it was quick and easy and there's multiple pages on my website so check it out I built the whole thing from scratch no website no pages in a week not full-time either by doing in amongst doing everything else as well so just a few hours here a few hours there an hour here finished it Friday lunchtime and so you know that is a real benefit right templates that make things easier nice looking graphics even there's AI to make suggestions for what to do all of that's good stuff now I must point out at this point that if you are the artist who's also selling original art alongside your art courses it's not set up with a shop like that with a cart where you can add art products so your online course products sit kind of in the background and you can list them on the website and they people can click through and buy them but they click through and buy an individual thing so if you wanted to buy my starter course my business planning course the marketing course that's being updated at the moment so you can't buy that but imagine it was live to buy that and you wanted to buy the membership at this point in time you'd have to click through and pay for them all individually maybe I should offer a package that's not a bad idea Sophie so unless you set up a package there's no cart so do you see what I mean you can't say oh I'll set up a gallery page and people can put things in their cart it's not meant to be like that it's not built like that it's not designed like that so your work around if you did want to do that is to create a kind of gallery page with some of your images and then have a big link and say I sell my original art here and assuming that you use a third party site that might work okay for you you might be happy with that you might say do you know what I've got all my courses one to one whatever I've got all my information about me here and I actually sell out over there so that works but if you want to sell out on your site then this platform will not work for you so of course there are endless other third party sites so I can hear you saying yes Sophie but what about Teachable, ThinkFix, Podia all the different sites and I'm going to say to you yes go check them out but at the end of the day you know they they all need some extra pieces to them and you end up having to pay for the software that links the extra pieces and I don't know about you but I like everything in one place and from a cost perspective because I can hear some people who are going to get clicked through and go oh my goodness me it's really expensive kajabi but I feel there's a reason why because the value they offer is huge the customer support is phenomenal the templates are beautiful the course layout is amazing the options are amazing and it has everything think from your courses to your sales page to your email marketing to your website you can put a podcast on there you can do one to one coaching live on there by a video you can build a community all of it just on one platform I think it's pretty good value so just hang in there because I have got a special offer if you want to just try it out so here's the thing about investing in good quality software so that your customer has the best possible experience I learn online creation from what I call the queen of online marketing and online courses and that's Emmy Porterfield and she uses kajabi along with all her colleagues who have multiple multiple seven figure businesses they all use kajabi and there's a reason why right if it's good enough for them I'm figuring it was good enough for me and if it's good enough for me I'm really happy to teach it to you guys but I'm also quite happy if you want to go and use a different platform that's absolutely fine today I just want to say I recommend kajabi and here is the reason some of the reasons again why I think it's great for non-techie people they've got amazing customer service it's a fabulous customer facing platform it all looks gorgeous you can have your course set up in minutes or hours depending on how long your videos take to put up you can have a course a membership your podcast your coaching your community your customer management all your people in there your email list your sales pages your marketing funnels it takes the money oh and it has the website all in one place so for me I'm like that's good I'm happy with that no extras to pay for said unlike some of the other platforms now it might seem a lot to invest with like we've already said but that's why I recommend starting out with the marketplace because imagine you've set up your course on Skillshare and you've got some money coming in from Skillshare regularly maybe you even made two or three courses and they're bringing in some money now you can say okay I'm ready to scale up I know that people want more I want to build more courses and that's how I want to make the majority of my money so now it's time to look at kajabi so I have got a special link for you so normally if you go there you can try it out for 14 days which is still good but it's not as good as the offer I've got for you so I have a 30 day free trial link for you below this video now in that 30 days you could set up your account you could build at least one course if not two you could launch one of them you could make sales on that and you could have enough to cover or put you into profit by the time the second months comes and the payment comes out if you decide to continue of course you can cancel it in that time no money will be taken but at least you'll have tried it out 30 days is a chunk of time and I really feel like if you really want to go at it you really want to do it you can make that money back in that 30 days now if you'd like help choosing how to take action on these three steps or you want help with setting up online courses or ideas of what you could teach or you're interested in finding out more about how kajabi works without committing to the link please consider booking yourself on one of my one-off one-to-one art biz boost calls I've decided to call them I've been called a few things over the years and now they're an art biz boost and you can thoroughly discuss all of it before you start to commit there's a link to that below this video and guess what that's going to take you to the kajabi website all right I think I've mentioned it enough times which is my favorite platform folks now if you want to know more about creating courses or maybe you've had a workshop you want to know how to turn that into a course check out this playlist on screen that's all about art workshops and courses I really believe that if you are wanting to build a successful business and you have online art having something like a course or workshops or something gives you a stable income perhaps whilst you're growing that part of your business the two work really really well together if of course you hate the idea of teaching you're probably not watching this video if you're still watching I reckon you have a course you're halfway through a course you've planned a few courses out you really want to make that course you just haven't taken action yet so let me know in the comments below if you're still watching and that's you you haven't taken action yet and like I said if you want help to take action then grab yourself a 60-minute art biz boost call with me and we'll help you create a bespoke action plan and get you going with your online course this year thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one bye bye