3 Critical Elements That’ll Transform Any Online Course into a Viral Phenomenon – In Just 7 Minutes with Marisa Murgatroyd

Resources/Links:

• The 10-Step “Viral Product Checklist”: How to Make More Sales, Eliminate Refunds, Boost Completion Rates & Get Pages of Success Stories*: https://www.liveyourmessage.com/tom

Summary

Marisa Murgatroyd is the Founder of Live Your Message and the creator of the Experience Product Masterclass where she helps entrepreneurs sell more online programs and get better, faster results for their students. Marisa started her career as an artist who was told by her father that she had no marketable skills. She figured out how to build a mid-seven figure online business anyway and she’s shown over 5,000 students how to succeed online — many of whom also felt like they had no marketable skills or were told they couldn’t do it.

In this episode, Marisa shares how she helps online entrepreneurs get off the technology treadmill, find their true voice, and build an enduring online platform that will long outlive the “trend-of-the-moment”.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:52 – Marisa’s ideal client: People, entrepreneurs, who want to grow their business using some kind of online program, digital course or info product.
• 02:34 – Problem she helps solve: The problem I solve is people have trouble either selling enough programs or getting the people who do buy all the way to the end. So, they get results and want to buy from them again and refer them.
• 02:24 – Typical symptoms people experience with that problem? Some of the symptoms might be having a program that’s either not selling, or a program that is selling but you know could be performing better.
• 04:17 – Common mistakes they’re going to make? one big mistake is actually designing the wrong product for your stage of business growth.
• 06:49 – Marisa’s Valuable Free Action(VFA): I recommend a single point program, especially if you’ve got something under like 5000 bucks. And the way you decide on the single outcome as you want something so clear, and so specific that you could almost film someone crossing the finish line to Mission accomplished. It’s binary, either someone’s done it, or they haven’t done it. There’s no ambiguity and no uncertainty.
• 08:58 – Marisa’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): The 10-Step “Viral Product Checklist”: How to Make More Sales, Eliminate Refunds, Boost Completion Rates & Get Pages of Success Stories*: https://www.liveyourmessage.com/tom
• 08:58 – Q:’One piece of advice?’ A: So many people approach product creation based on what they want to sell, what they want to offer, what they want to provide. So, I recommend taking the opposite approach. It’s based on a quote by Zig Zigler, you can have everything you want in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. So, figure out what you can do for people, what result you can get them, how you can transform their lives in a very specific way. And everything will change in your business. If you just focus on getting people results and delivering on your promise.
  .

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“You can have everything you want in life if you'll just help enough other people get what they want.” Marisa Murgatroyd, quoting Zig Ziglar Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland: 0:09 Hello everyone, a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. I’m Tom Poland, beaming out to you from Little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia. Joined today by Marisa Murgatroyd. Marisa, good day and welcome, and where you’re hanging out?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 0:24 I’m hanging out in the Los Angeles, California area,

Tom Poland: 0:27 L.A. Thank you. And for those of you don’t know Marisa, she is a genuine superstar in her field, known globally, internationally, subscriber list of some 50,000 followers. That’s just emails, not including social media. So, she knows what she’s doing and she’s going to spill the beans to you on a very, very specific subject, which is going to help you help a lot more people and make a lot more money and have a lot more fun. And Marisa is the Founder of Live Your Message, and the creator of the Experience Product Masterclass, where she helps entrepreneurs sell more online programs and get better, faster results for the students. She started her career as an artist who was told by her father that she had no marketable skills whatsoever. Revenge is a dish best served cold. She figured out, however, how to build a mid-seven figure online business, that’s a lot of dough, add that up, us your calculator if you need to. And she’s shown over 5000 students how to succeed online, many of whom also felt that they had no marketable skills, or were told that they couldn’t do it. So, it’s a joy to have you on the program. Thanks, Marisa, very warm welcome. Our title today is “Three Critical Elements That Will Transform Any Online Course into a Viral Phenomenon”. So, Marisa, our time starts now, seven minutes, question number one, who is your ideal client?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 1:52 People, entrepreneurs, who want to grow their business using some kind of online program, digital course or info product.

Tom Poland: 1:59 Perfect, thank you. Six minutes, 45 seconds left. Question number two, what’s the problem you solve?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 2:04 Yeah, the problem I solve is people have trouble either selling enough programs or getting the people who do buy all the way to the end. So, they get results and want to buy from them again and refer them.

Tom Poland: 2:14 Perfect. Question number three, what are some of the typical symptoms that prior to finding you, your clients are experiencing?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 2:24 Absolutely. So, some of the symptoms might be having a program that’s either not selling or a program that is selling but you know could be performing better. So, you know a program, obviously, it’s obvious if a program isn’t selling, it’s not compelling enough to sell, or perhaps your testimonials, your case studies, your track record isn’t high enough. In these days, there’s a lot of skepticism in the market. So, people go and they ask your customers the experience they had with you. So, you might see bad reviews online or something along the lines of that, or you’re just not even getting the customers to begin with and to get the bad reviews to begin with. And for people who are already successful or have a program that might be selling well, you start to see that the engagement and the results are dropping significantly. They’re just not what you want them to be. It’s a dirty secret in the online education industry that up to 97% of people who buy online training, do not complete them and get the results. So, when that happens, you see a high refund rate, a lot of times refund rates are in the double digits. And I’ve been able to drop people’s refund rates to single digits, ours is 3%. And the other thing you start to see is little to no repeat sales. You also see people just stopping at engagements, and you don’t see referrals. So, the next time you go about trying to market your product, and the next time in the next time, it’s like it’s harder to get the sales and the results, your launches don’t grow with every you know, every launch, you don’t see more people joining. You see the same or less.

Tom Poland: 3:52 Thank you very, very descriptive, very true too. So, question number four, four minutes, 45 seconds left. People to become clients of yours are going to be aware of these symptoms that they can play the online course game at a higher level, they’re not getting the referrals, they’re not getting repeat business, and they going to try stuff before they find you. So, what are some of the common mistakes that your ideal clients make before they find you?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 4:17 Yeah, well, one big mistake is actually designing the wrong product for your stage of business growth. So, a lot of people, for example, might try to go for a continuity program where people are spending 50 bucks a month with you every single month. But what most people don’t know about a continuity program is that the average person stays for three months or less and then cancels. And it’s a harder model because you have to have huge volume to say make $10,000. But if you wanted to make $10,000 with, say a $2,000 product, you only need five sales. And if you’re close rates, 20%, you only need 25 prospects, right? But to make that same money with $50 a month, you know, I mean, I’m not very good at math, but you would need basically 200 people signing up, and then you have all the churn. So, a lot of people don’t understand the business models, and how to create the right product for their business at the right time. And a lot of people are also mirroring the kinds of products that they’ve taken in the past that are based on information transfer, or skill transfer, but they’re not really designed to engage people, it’s very different to know how to get a result for yourself than it is to be able to get somebody else a result. And most of the entire industry of online education and info products are not designed to work with our natural motivation and get us kind of hooked on taking action and moving towards our greatest goals and overcoming our biggest challenges in life. So, following outdated models, for course creation itself, as well.

Tom Poland: 5:42 Yeah. And we’ve all been to those seminars where someone stands up and says, Well, look, it’s easy to make a million bucks, you just need, you know, 1000 people and $100 a month in the continuity program, job done. Yey!

Marisa Murgatroyd: 5:54 And they don’t forget to tell you that the average online conversion rate might be between one and 5% and 5% is extraordinary high. To get to a thousand people, you need like 100,000 leads, right?

Tom Poland: 6:05 And you’ve got to have that every month because they’re dropping off every third month. Yeah. And yeah, so let’s not do that. Folks, I hope that you’re going to play the last two minutes back again, and again, and again, because there was so much gold in there, and Marisa articulates things very succinctly. But in each five seconds soundbite, there was gold. So, play it back, take notes, for God’s sakes, because this stuff is genuinely, extraordinarily, valuable.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 6:33 Well, I’m succinct because you’ve given me seven minutes to…so I’m speeding talking but go ahead.

Tom Poland: 6:39 Right. Marisa, we’ve got two minutes left. Question number five, what’s one valuable free action that an audience member could take that’s not going to solve the whole problem, but might take them a step in the right direction?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 6:49 Okay, well, I developed a framework called the Experience Formula, which is 10 Core Experiences that when you apply them to your products, programs, and courses, you get from 10 to 30 times the standard completion rates, the industry-standard completion rates. So, I can’t tell you all 10, but I’m going to tell you one of them. I’m going to tell you the very first Core Experience, and it’s basically called Mission. And Mission is not like your personal mission, this is your product mission. So, the problem with so many programs that lead people astray, or that don’t sell, is that they’re trying to serve too many masters. It’s a program where you’re getting like five results, or 10 results or whatever it happens to be. It’s what I call a multi-point program. So, I recommend a single point program, especially if you’ve got something under like 5000 bucks. And the way you decide on the single outcome as you want something so clear, and so specific that you could almost film someone crossing the finish line to Mission accomplished. It’s binary, either someone’s done it, or they haven’t done it. There’s no ambiguity and no uncertainty.

Tom Poland: 7:51 Beautiful.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 7:51 So, you have to think about what is your program going to allow someone to do, be, feel, have, overcome, or achieve. And the template that I teach is called the Mission Possible Template, you may recognize this, both from where it came from. And you may see other people using this because I’ve taught it to thousands of people. So, your mission should you choose to accept it is blank. So, for our signature experience, product master class, your mission should you choose to accept it is to design, market, and make $2,000 or a whole lot more from the experience product in 10 weeks or less. Now some people make, I’ve had people make over $300,000 in the program in that time, but our goal is that everyone makes at least their investment back in the program during the program itself. So, when you have a clear mission, you can do cool things like rapid guarantee around it. So, we have a $2,000 cashback guarantee, where if you don’t make $2,000, we’ll give you the difference.

Tom Poland: 8:47 Okay, thank you. Our time’s up but there’s so much gold here, I want to do the courtesy of extending it for another 30 seconds. A valuable free resource we can give people?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 8:58 Absolutely. So, if you want to know all 10 Core Experiences, my viral product checklist to create unstoppable momentum and get your students’ clients and customers hooked on taking action, getting results, and buying from you over and over again, and getting 10 to 30 times the industry standard, go to liveyourmessage.com/tom. Liveyourmessage.com/tom and grab our viral product checklist. So, you know what to do to create a super sticky product and what not to do if you don’t want to lead people down the downward death spiral and have 97% of them fail.

Tom Poland: 9:30 Right. 10 counterintuitive ways to create addictive info products training programs and courses that sell themselves. So, go get that at liveyourmessage.com/tom. Marisa, question number seven, the last question, 20 seconds, please. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 9:46 Ooh, okay. Well, one piece of advice. I’m just going to say the piece of advice versus the question, is that so many people approach product creation based on what they want to sell, what they want to offer, what they want to provide. So, I recommend taking the opposite approach. It’s based on a quote by Zig Zigler, you can have everything you want in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. So, figure out what you can do for people, what result you can get them, how you can transform their lives in a very specific way. And everything will change in your business. If you just focus on getting people results and delivering on your promise.

Tom Poland: 10:22 Perfect. Marisa, thank you so much for your time.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 10:24 Sure thing.

Tom Poland: 10:24 Cheers.

Tom Poland: 10:26 Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.