Adding New Programs and Classes is Fun, but Could Limit Your Income

Oopsy, here’s something heart-centered coaches do that severely limits their income and why focusing on creating content to share your work in the world solves this problem.

Often, heart-centered coaches (me included) are really creative and love hanging out in the creative process, coming up with new ideas for their business and new ways to serve their clients.

This is the fun part, so naturally, we want to do it all the time. It also feels safer than marketing.

We love thinking up a new little small class we can offer, a fun retreat, or whatever exciting idea pops into our heads.

The only problem is, this creative generation can lead to a place of serious overwhelm, lower income than you want, and confusing marketing that doesn’t attract the right clients.

You don’t really want your program ecosystem in your business to look like a tree with lots of branches and leaves to represent all the ways people can work with you. Instead, you want it to look more like a flowchart where people can move through your ecosystem in any way they want to get the support they need.

What I mean by that is, if you hop on a call or work in the DM’s with someone (not cold DM’s - only if they reach out), you want to be able to meet them where they are without confusing them.

If you have a higher-ticket 1-1 offer, a mid-ticket group program, and a lower-ticket offer, then you can flow them into any of those offers depending on what they need. If they buy the low ticket offer, they can upgrade. If they buy the mid–ticket offer, they can upgrade. If they buy the high ticket offer, you can include the other offers to give them lots of support.

Your offers should all work together as an ecosystem to help your clients and to retain and upgrade current clients.

Why?

Because who is most likely to spend money on your high-ticket offer? Your current clients who already love you and know how helpful your work is.

What doesn’t work is to have a lot of similar-sized offers that don’t really work together and/or don’t clearly solve a problem and provide a solution.

While it sounds easy to toss out a new class that’s $99 and doesn’t involve too much work, you will likely find that it’s very very very hard to sell.

Your time will be better spent perfecting your main program offer and selling just that one program until it really does sell. Once it’s rocking and rolling, then you can play with adding a lower-ticket lead in class to capture newer audience members, if you want.

I don’t think it works very well to start out by creating your low-ticket lead in offer. This is because until you KNOW your main program makes money, you’re wasting your time. If you create a solid signature program, then you can create a smaller offer or a free offer that ties directly into it and helps people want to upgrade.

All that to say - save all those fabulous creative ideas in an idea box. Use them when your main signature program is for sure working, people are buying it, and you want to scale up. Those ideas can become opt-ins, masterclasses, workshops, and more to lead people into that program.

Every time you create a paid program, you have now doubled your marketing work, at least.

Now you have to tell people about it, and get them excited to do it.

Don’t do this to yourself! Keep it straightforward. Only sell one thing until your selling is working.

It’s tempting to think that selling something else will help you make money while the thing that you’re trying to sell finally gets off the ground.

Instead, you’re just diluting your time and energy and confusing your audience.

Take all that creative energy and focus it into writing, video, or audio that inspires your audience to buy your program.

Marketing is a GREAT place to put all your creative energy. You can coach people and teach people through words, video, and audio. You can start a Facebook Group and enjoy teaching and presenting in there to sell your program.

You can still do all that stuff you love to do with your creative spirit - just focus it on selling, not building programs or classes.

Once your program is truly making you money, only then does it work to begin to create programs that connect to it. For example, for the first ten years of my business, I only had one main program, my Mind-Body Magic Life Coach Training Program. I also did 1-1’s.

Because that program was totally set and proven, five years ago I was able to introduce a new type of program into my business - a business building program for coaches. I kept it mid-sized and lower high-ticket so as not to have two similar programs in my business.

Then, six months ago, I added a low-ticket program as well.

Have I done one-off classes? Sporadically, yes. They always take up time and energy, so I only plan them when they feel totally exciting.

Take your creative energy and give it direction, even if you’re tempted to create all sorts of things. That will save you so much work and you’ll see results so much faster in your income growth.

Setting up your business ecosystem in a smart way and helping you see exactly how to refine or build your signature program that will make money for your business is what I do in my group program. This program takes you through clarifying exactly what your niche is, how to articulate it, building your program, testing it, and finally getting it out into the world.

You’ll also learn ALL my techniques for saving yourself time and energy so that you’re not working in ways that burn you out and make you feel overwhelmed. (I call this my Slacker Magic System.)

Though this is a group program, you also get 1-1 feedback from me throughout the program. I write your niche clarifying copy for you so that you have base copy for everything you create. Then I show you my formula for making content for marketing feel fun, easy, and creative - and effective.

You can learn more about this program and others here.