It's so easy to get stuck in the belief that perfecting your online program, if that's even possible, is going to be enough to make it sell. But in truth, that really has zero impact. You need to take your creator hat off and then put your marketing hat on if it's going to be a success. But before I launch into that discussion,
just a couple of fun facts about me, just in case you're brand new to my world. I'm Meg Burridge, host of the Kajabi Verse podcast. I'm also an Aussie mom of three young kids. Number three being a little bit of a surprise, but oh my goodness guys, she is so cute. I am married to a sometimes grumpy Dutchman that I met online in Australia before.
Online dating was really a thing. Prior to working in the online space, I drove trucks in a gold mine. I really wasn't great at it. Actually. I wasn't bad at driving the truck, but changing truck tires is completely beyond me. And before that, I used to call bingo on rural Caribbean cruisers. And to be honest, I wasn't great at that either.
I love to travel. I'm currently in the middle of a move from the Netherlands to Anguilla in the Caribbean. I'm secretly nervous though because our family are not really beach people and there's not much to do on Anguilla other than go to the beach. And my drink of choice is gin and to, and I sometimes have one with lunch at my desk and even by myself.
Now, for me, entrepreneurship is something that I guess was always in me, but it really took hold of me. After having children, I found the ability to blend work and family was like pretty much impossible. And I used to wonder how these super moms with multiple kids managed to run a household and work full-time. Now I love to work, but trying to juggle both had me completely exhausted.
So I became obsessed with this idea of creating a co-working space with childcare attached so that moms and dads could work productively without having to be far from their baby. Now this co-working space was called Bob Desk, and that was my business number one. Now, can hear what you're saying, guys, you're like, great idea Meg, and it was a great idea.
But this is pre Covid, back when working from home was pretty much frowned upon and employers really wanted their staff in the office. So the entrepreneurial mums out there that could use the space, they loved the idea, but not too many of them could actually afford it. Now, I've been so sure that this business was gonna be a raging success. And before I knew it,
I was a hundred thousand dollars in debt. I was closing my new business, business number one, and I was having to take nine to five back in the corporate sector in a job that I absolutely hated. Now, it was this turning point that really had me realize that a good idea made up about 10%, if even that of my business success.
And that the other 90% was the marketing and the messaging and really understanding my audience, which Was I think, you know, pretty much a major fail. So from that point, I turned my attention to learning everything I could about digital marketing, strategy, copywriting, anything I could use to make my next business a success. And luckily for me, I found business by design with James Wedmore and the world of online course creation,
and I absolutely loved it. Now, if only someone had taught me all this stuff right back at the beginning when I was planning out my first business, I loved it so much that it wasn't long before I was taking that knowledge and turning it into bite size trainings that others could learn from. And what I've managed to pick up over the last few years has not only paid off that a hundred thousand dollars debt and generated multiple six figures annually,
but it's also made it possible for our family to live this crazy life of adventure where this month at the Netherlands, next month it's the Caribbean. And who knows what's in store 12 months from now, my purpose really has become to help other creators achieve the same freedom and flexibility that I am so fortunate to have. The Kajabi Verse podcast has really come about after watching so many of my own Kajabi students struggling to monetize their efforts,
there were some who just shot out of the gate. They scaled quickly to six figure launches. But for the majority marketing, their amazing program once they built it is just not something that came naturally to them. And I can understand the overwhelm. I mean, it's hard enough when you're grappling with the technology and now I'm asking you to become a masterful marketer.
And for many, that was just too much. But it was really, you know about then that it hit me. Well, actually, people don't need to become masterful marketers. What they need to become is Sherlock Holmes, a skill that pretty much anyone can be taught. Even in my own business, whether it was selling coaching programs or website templates,
I knew that I had to reach more people to begin with. It was enough to run a webinar or host a live challenge, run a few ads, you know, keep your fingers crossed. But to really scale results was going to take more than that. I had to understand and read the market and be able to adapt my strategies to current trends,
to be able to model what I saw working for others inside of my own business. And I call it channeling my inner Sherlock. Now, many of you guys would know it as funnel hacking, the ability to be able to look at someone's funnel, reverse engineer it, and then find a way to apply it to your own business. And really that's what the Kajabi Verse podcast is all about.
Learning the art of funnels from some of Kajabi's biggest and brightest superheroes, inviting them to pull back the covers on their own funnels and what makes them work so well so that we can learn and implement the strategies that they've got as quickly as possible. Now, because the early days of online business are often filled with confusion and overwhelm around which strategies to follow,
who to listen to, now there's plenty of time wasted on piecing together free content for various books and YouTubes and blogs and anything else that looks useful. And guys, the thing is that there's never really only one way or a right way. So many of the strategies that you read about and learn about are incredibly successful if they're properly implemented. So the key is really landing on that strategy that works best for you,
okay? The strategy that fits with your lifestyle, your personality, your available time, what your appetite is for being in the social media spotlight or not. What strategy works best with your audience? And I refer to this alignment of strategy as lifestyle, launching, aligning the strategy to your lifestyle. And for me, it's helping my students to implement strategies in their business that feel good.
Now, to be successful in business, it really only takes one working funnel. But over time, you're likely to wanna implement three or maybe four funnels that could be working in parallel or seasonally. You might have funnels for your evergreen launches, funnels for your live launches, funnels, just for list growth. In the in between times, you might create a quiz funnel to grow your list.
You might create an evergreen webinar to sell your on-demand courses in the off season. You might create a live challenge funnel to sell your high ticket program once or twice a year. And every funnel that you master has elements that can be applied to other funnels in your business. There is so much overlap between strategies and before you know it, you'll be creating funnels that are unique to your business.
Now, funnels are great. They move the prospect along that buyer journey and direct them into your paid offers. But once your funnel is built, you still need to run traffic to it. People don't magically fall into your funnel. Marketing is very much multilayered. And when you look at that traffic layer, yes you can run paid ads or you can grow your audience organically over the years.
They're both great strategies and important to have. But my absolute favorite strategy when you're just starting with zero audience, is definitely collaborations or partnerships. And I like to think of this as the magic ingredient or the heart of my funnel, the thing that turns the dial on every single one of my offers. When I first got started in the online world, I had no offer,
no course to sell, no template, no anything I just had done for you services and a limited amount of hours in the day. And I desperately wanted to be involved in the industry, you know, just to figure it out. But what was I going to sell? I went and spoke to all my entrepreneurial friends. Thankfully I had a few of them about partnering up,
you know, because I knew that they had the knowledge to create an online course. So they would create it and I would figure out how to sell it. And just like that, I became this overnight producer of eight, six week courses that became the very first edition of Biz Mum School. And Biz Mum School was a raging success, thankfully, but it was also a whole lot of work,
unlike a lot, cuz I was chasing eight different people for their content, their Zoom links, their PowerPoints to interview them and all at the same time. Okay, you guys can imagine trying to get one course up and running. I was trying to get eight courses up and running in parallel. Needless to say, there was never a second edition of BIS Mum's School.
But what I realized immediately through that collaboration was that it brought this much higher perceived value to the offer. Now, it wasn't just Meg and Meg's course, which Meg didn't even have yet, but it was a collective of incredibly influential people who all thought enough of the concept to put their name and their time to it. And the magic was really in the collective.
Now, it requires some conscious reframing in your mind to imagine all your projects from here on in as a collaboration. Now it's no longer the Meg show, but instead driven every day by this underlying driver of who can I collaborate with to deliver the biggest possible transformation to my students? And honestly, the increased value you can offer to your students is immense when your program is no longer limited to only the expertise you have inside your own head.
And then of course, partnering up also opens up your whole world to new audiences that you can tap into. It increases your authority and your credibility in the eyes of people who have never heard of you. But obviously pitching for things like podcast appearances or you know, guest blogging, joint webinars, scrolling through your social channels to find potential collaboration partners. It's a very time consuming,
and B, not so much fun. And for a lot of people, reaching out to strangers in the hope that they'll wanna connect with you can feel a little bit icky and especially if you are an introvert like me. So I came up with a solution, guys. Now it is as simple as listing yourself and your preferred modes of collaboration on collaboration station,
which is brand new directory for online course creators who are looking to find or be found by like-minded people who want to partner. And I will pop a link to that directory below this episode. Now, there's one more piece that ties this all together and that is Funnel Club. It's a membership that I created for Kajabi based businesses who are looking to learn more about funnels and also collaboration strategies.
So those two elements really do work so well hand in hand together. Every month inside a funnel club, we do two things. We learn the ins and outs of a wildly successful funnel, the funnel that I discuss with our guest of the month on the podcast. And then we learn how to leverage those partnerships in your business to drive accelerated results. What kind of partnerships can you put in place?
What kind of collaborations can you come up with so that your funnel is even more successful? Those two elements combined are where the magic happens. And in my own business, it's been directly responsible for generating six figures within the first six months of my online business, which enabled me to quit that horrible nine to five corporate job while I was on maternity leave.
It also gave me the freedom and the flexibility to travel the world with my family. Working from anywhere I like, it's given me consecutive six figure launches that come without stress or anxiety, still come with a little bit of lack of sleep, but without stress or anxiety and the ability to reach and help over a thousand new students in my own online programs.
So if you're looking for community and the support structure as you get up and running with your new online program, consider joining us over inside a funnel club. I mean, it's step by step guidance. It's every resource you'll ever need. And best of all, it is so much fun. And on that note, let's jump into this month's funnel strategy.