My Take on James Wedmore's "Course Chronicles" | Ep. 53

Ready for a peek behind the curtain? In this episode, I spill the beans on how I’m rolling out Video Editing Made Easy, and why owning your revenue beats crossing your fingers for ad revenue all day every day.

I break down the exact steps I’m taking (inspired by James Wedmore’s Course Chronicles): Why digital products beat ad and affiliate income when you want predictable cash flow, How I juggle a membership and a brand-new course without losing my mind, and the truth about those wild swings in YouTube ad and affiliate payouts (and how to smooth them out).

Thinking about launching your first course? Or leveling up your video marketing game? This is for YOU!

Links (when possible, I use affiliate links and may earn a commission. see disclosure.)
▶︎  James' Rise of the Digital CEO Free Series: https://videobrand.link/rise
▶︎  James Course Chronicles Mini Series: https://videobrand.link/coursechronicles
▶︎  Business By Design Waitlist: https://videobrand.link/bbd
▶︎  My New Course: Video Editing Made Easy: https://videobrand.link/veme

✨ Cringe or Binge: How does your channel rank? Download the VBA app to analyze your channel in 1 simple step. It’s free! https://videobrand.link/app

📹 Be Binge-worthy on YouTube: https://videobrand.link/become-bingeable

🟣 Video Brand Academy: https://videobrand.link/vba

🎥 CRUSH IT ON CAMERA GUIDE: https://vidpromom.com/crush

🎧 Video Brand Infusion Podcast: http://meredithmarsh.co/podcast

📲 Download my FREE Video Brand Academy app! 👉 https://videobrand.link/app

👉 Consistent Sales of Your Course with YouTube: https://youtu.be/GBhulsp0s-4

📹 Follow on YouTube for Video Podcast: https://youtu.be/zkscCExxg9Y?si=B2EAIPxJV0-jEP-7

Transcript

So what does it really take to create and sell a course for your online business that doesn't flop? Well, I'm in the middle of launching right now, or at least I'm about to as I record this video. So let's find out together. This is episode 53 of Video Brand Infusion. My name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can build your thriving video brand and generate consistent revenue in your business. And this is gonna be a little bit of a different episode because all of the sudden, I have a lot of things going on in my business right now. Like so many things that I had a hard time deciding on, like what exactly I wanted to talk about in this episode. Don't you just love how sometimes it's like pulling teeth to think of, what do I wanna create today? Like what is the video topic that I feel like talking about? And other times there's like so many ideas and there's just a flurry of activity in my brain and I wanna talk about everything and I don't wanna talk about it right now. And I wanna break all of the rules about having one consistent topic and one consistent call to action. So I'm gonna break some rules today. This episode is actually inspired by my business mentor, James Wedmore, who is the host of the Mind Your Business podcast he's been doing. A like, like sort of a mini series called Course Chronicles, riffing on launching a new course. Like what is the thought process? What is the validation process? How do you set it up? How do you launch it? How do you actually generate sales before you create the course? I've been launching and creating courses and offers for many years now. I don't have nearly as much experience as James Wedmore himself. However, I have been working on a brand new course called Video Editing Made Easy. Actually, it's done. It's like 99% of the way done. I have some bonus lessons that I need to record and upload. And I did not follow the same process that James walks through in the Course Chronicles miniseries. So I wanna share what I have done and what I'm doing to launch video editing Made Easy because it is a standalone course and I have my Membership Video Brand Academy. So I also wanna share a little bit about how it works to have a course and a membership and I wanna be fully 100% transparent with you, that I am an affiliate helping James promote his Business by Design program. And all that really means, as far as I'm concerned, is I'm a student of Business by Design, which is James' signature course. He's getting ready to launch that in a couple of weeks. And because it's been so effective for me over the, I think eight years since I joined it, I wanna share it with you. I mean, people ask me often about, you know, can you help me create a course? Can you help me create an offer? Can you help me launch my membership? And I honestly, I love nerding out about that stuff. But when it comes to teaching it, when it comes to like the foundational teaching of it. James has so much more knowledge and experience than I could ever have, so I always refer people to him. Now when it comes to building an Evergreen YouTube funnel, or turning your YouTube channel into a funnel that sells your courses and programs for you. That's me. I'm your girl for that. And those are some of the bonuses that I'm gonna put together for anyone who does join BBD through my link. You can take it or leave it. Sometimes people are a little like, oh, this person's an affiliate. That means like they're lying about everything coming out of their mouth. And if you know me, if you've followed me for a while, you know, I'm not. I'm not, that's not me. But if there's one thing that I want you to take away from this video, it's that the best revenue streams for online business are the ones that you have the most control over. That means digital products, courses, programs, even services rather than ad revenue, affiliate revenue, and brand deals. And I know that can be a controversial take on YouTube, but here's why this topic is so important to me. I have been on the receiving end of the revenue rug being pulled out from under you because of a glitch in YouTube's ad revenue system where my ad revenue went from up here to down here, like a literal. Vertical cliff down to zero for six weeks in a row, and then slowly had to work its way back up again. I've had affiliate programs that changed their affiliate terms, and I went from creating, generating, you know, $1,500 a month to $150 the very next month, then slowly had to work back up. And that particular one has never even come near what it was before they changed their terms. And I've had affiliate programs that just up and stopped. Just, hey, just letting you know, as of today, this affiliate program is no longer active. Working with brands is all fun and games, and until you realize that it's a lot like running and advertising agency. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of contracts, it's a lot more negotiating than it is like actually creating, and I was trying to do the math earlier, to kind of figure out how many years had I been in business full time before I hit six figures in my business. I think it was six years, but it didn't happen. It never happened until I said, forget ad revenue. Forget brands. I mean, I still work with brands. It's just not a main revenue stream. Forget affiliate marketing. I'm gonna focus on my own thing. I'm gonna focus on Video Brand Academy. I'm gonna focus on my courses. I'm gonna focus on my clients because that brings me the most joy. It brings me the most fulfillment and surprise. It also brings me the most revenue. So I feel very, very, very passionate about sharing this message with you because if there's one thing that I think we can all agree on is that we're in business for ourselves because we want time freedom, we wanna do our own thing, and creating your own courses, programs, digital products, memberships, et cetera, is the way you have the most control over how you spend your time when you are the one in control of the stuff that you are doing day in and day out. Okay, so I'm gonna get off my soapbox and we're gonna dive into my version of James Wedmore's Course Chronicles. I have, you know, created a bunch of different courses over the last couple of years. But some of my main offers have been my 30 days to a thriving YouTube channel. Standalone course standalone, meaning it's not part of the membership, it's just like it's a standalone thing. But I also have Video Brand Academy, which is my membership. So we have about a hundred members or so in there, give or take, depending on the day or the week or the month. And there's a bunch of YouTube growth strategies, the spiderweb strategy. There's a collection of revenue infusion guides. There's a bunch of video creation shortcuts. It's um, it's kinda like the place to be if you want to do the 90 days to one K YouTube subscriber bootcamp, or you want somebody like me to analyze your channel analytics and kind of diagnose what, what, what's going on? What is holding your channel back from growing faster? It's one of my favorite things. And I also share basically like what's working on YouTube right now? Like what are the trends that are working right now on YouTube, how to apply them to your channel so that you can become the go-to person in your niche. And it's, I like to say YouTube is your business, that's kind of like the promise or the transformation of Video Brand Academy. I also have another standalone course called YouTube Funnel Clinic, which needs to be completely reimagined, we'll call it. And I'll be focusing on that later on in the fall. But I've always, always, always had sort of like in my back pocket, an idea for, for Video Editing Made Easy for a video editing course for creating YouTube videos for people like me, for people like you, for business owners, solo business owners, small business owners. But it has taken me a really long time to actually create it and actually launch it. I've had a lot of resistance around it, probably because I have a ton of free video editing tutorials and things on my channel. And also because I'm not a professional video editor, so who am I to teach someone how to edit YouTube videos, but even though I have so many tutorials on my channel for how to create and edit videos, editing is still kind of like this big bottleneck that my clients experience, that members of Video Brand Academy experience, that everybody experiences, and so I've been teaching the same method of video editing. I've been using the same kind of workflow. I call it the B fff method. Basic, fine tuned, fancy, and it works really well for teaching video editing. It works really well for using Descript for editing. And, you know, I'm, I'm a Descript girl. And so I thought now's a really good time to create this course, Video Editing Made Easy. And in James Course Chronicles miniseries, he kind of walks through the, he starts with a decision to create a new offer. So for me, because I already had a couple of standalone courses and I had the membership, my focus. For 2025, I set out to focus on growing the membership and I have grown the membership. A year ago I had like 30 members and now I have a hundred. I have grown the membership quite significantly in the last year, and we can talk about that in another episode, um, at some point if you're interested. But I really didn't wanna just create a whole new course and launch that because you know it. It's a lot when you have multiple courses to launch and to manage and to keep updated. That, that's a whole separate thing. So my decision to create a new offer was, um, like this has to be cohesive with the membership and it has to be in alignment with. Like the content that's already on my channel. So it really did make sense, like it's a no-brainer. Video Editing Made Easy just made sense for me. Now this next step that James laid out in his Course Chronicles miniseries, which by the way, I will link to the Course Chronicles thing so that you can go listen to these on your own, because I veered off of James recommended plan and this next thing that he did was created interest. Now this is for somebody who maybe does not have a course yet, doesn't have a program, hasn't offered anything, but maybe you have an audience. I skipped this part because I mean, I know, I know from, just from looking at my YouTube analytics that people are very interested in knowing how to edit YouTube videos, in particular. With Descript, like I know that I get the questions, I see the comments, I have the analytics, like I have the data to back it up. And on top of that, I already knew that there was interest because people have asked me, do you have a video editing course? You know, like, that's enough for me. So I skipped the creating interest part because I already knew that I had generated interest in the Video Editing Made Easy concept. The next step in the Course Chronicles that James walked us through was revealing the name, setting a date for the launch, and a price. So mine. You know what? Naming a course is so flipping hard. I don't know why. I don't know why, but I called my Video Editing Made Easy, which is that's what it is. It's pretty clear what it is. It's basically like, it could be YouTube Video Editing Made Easy, could be Video Editing Made Easy with Descript. But I do kind of wanna add some bonus modules on like Final Cut, Premiere Pro, maybe CapCut or like whatever the flavor of the week is for YouTube editors. But a couple of, um, I don't know, maybe like a month or two ago I had posted this on threads and if you follow me on threads. Come say hi. Threads is becoming one of my favorite platforms, not above YouTube of course, but I really like threads. It reminds me of 2008 Twitter, like it's pretty quiet. It's pretty chill. But the people that are there, like it's a great community. It's very active and I just really like threads. One of the things that I posted that actually got quite a bit of attention, and this is a true story, I like woke up in the morning and thought. I should check if the domain name is available. Hello? And so I opened up Namecheap. That's where I buy my domain names and I searched for it and it was like, Nope, this is already taken. And I'm like, no, I. And so I contemplated, like, do I change the name of the course or does it even matter? I mean, it's not gonna be on its own domain, but you know, I do like to grab a domain name so it can redirect to like the sales page or whatever. And then a few hours later I actually went into Namecheap. I logged in to my account to see that I actually owned VideoEditingMadeEasy.com. The name of the course is Video Editing Made Easy, my date to launch. I mentioned at the top of this episode, I've just been really dragging my feet on this. The sales page is very, very, very close to being done, and I might finish it after I record this, but then of course, I'm gonna have to edit this video, and I'm gonna have to edit the video that's going on the sales page too. I might just say, Monday, May 19th is my launch date for this. The price for Video Editing Made Easy is another conundrum. Another thing to kind of drag my heels on, like deciding on the price. I go back and forth between, is this just like a bonus that's inside of Video Brand Academy? Is it a standalone course? If it is a standalone course, what is the price? I want it to be like a no-brainer price. I don't want it to be something that someone's like, well, we can either buy groceries this month or we can buy this course that Meredith created. Do you know what I mean? So I also have to think about what's gonna fit with the way that I sell my courses and programs because I'm using YouTube. I have a lot of video editing tutorials on my channel. I do a lot of list building with my channel, and I like to do what I think of as turning my YouTube channel into a funnel. And there are, there's a couple of different types of YouTube funnels that have worked really well for me that are very specific and, and you kind of have to have. Like the offer has to kinda work with that particular funnel. So I have one funnel that I, I, it's called a secret video funnel, which is like the most boring name ever. I think of it as a backstage funnel. I'm trying to rebrand it in my brain as a backstage funnel, so anyway, the point is. That type of funnel works really well for a particular type of offer. Um, like a particular price point. I don't wanna get into like all of the details here because I'm going to provide this whole process and stuff as a bonus for people who join BBD through my link. Um, spoiler alert, but, figuring out the pricing matters to how I'm ultimately going to promote it. So I have some ideas for that for down the road. But initially, for the initial launch of Video Editing Made Easy, I'm going to offer it as a free bonus. I'm putting bonus in air quotes. It's a free bonus when you join Video Brand Academy, but only during the launch window. Only during the like four or five days that, that, that it's available as a membership perk basically. And the reason why I wanted to go that route for the initial launch is because it really is a no-brainer offer. I mean, hello, it's a free membership perk when you join Video Brand Academy. There's four different bonuses, the whole template pack, all that stuff as a membership perk. For Video Brand Academy, like that's an insanely no-brainer offer, but also because it's new, I really do wanna get feedback on it, positive and negative so that I can kind of make some improvements, adjustments before I launch it for real. For real it is real, but before I launch it for real, like to the public as a standalone course, so that's the course launch that's gonna be happening but ultimately I'll turn it into a standalone course that I then convert into a YouTube funnel so it can generate evergreen sales and not just like do an open cart launch. Every quarter and that kind of thing. So as far as the content being created, which is the next step that James mentions, the content's already created, baby, it's already there. I just have a few bonus lessons that I need to edit, record some of them I need to record. Some of them. I need to just edit and upload and it's ready to go. It's very close to being ready to go. So that's where we are at. If you're on my email list, you're probably going to get emails about Video Editing Made Easy unless you're inside a Video Brand Academy already, in which case you actually already have Video Editing Made Easy. And I would love it if you went through the lessons and let me know. How you did, what you found and what you would love to see added to it. And if you wanna hear more about my trajectory in online business, creating and launching courses. Growing my membership from 30 members to over a hundred members within the last year. If you want to even hear about the results of my course launch, once it's done, then I invite you to do two things. And this is, this is where I'm breaking the rules by giving you two calls to action. One every year at this time of year, James does his Rise of the Digital CEO training if you have an idea for a business or a membership or a course program. Whatever, and you wanna figure out how do you actually turn that into a business That's really perfect for the Rise of the Digital CEO. It's a free training, and even though I have Business by Design, like I have the whole program, I am actually a paying member of James group coaching program. But even though I have access to all that stuff, I always go through the Rise of the Digital CEO training because it's always good. I always, always, always get new ideas, fresh ideas. It's never like just recycled, regurgitated content. It's always fresh ideas and I always walk away with new, kind of inspiration for my own business. So because I'm an affiliate, like I mentioned for James Program Business by Design, I will put a link to the Rise of the Digital CEO down below in the show notes. Like I said, it's totally free, but it is an affiliate link. So ultimately, at some point down the road, if you decide to join Business by Design using my link, then I will be able to give you my YouTube funnel, grow your audience, generate consistent revenue, grow your courses and programs with YouTube bonuses. I gotta think of a more elegant name for that. But if you want my bonus bundle and you use my link to join BBD, then I'll be able to send you that bonus bundle. So that's call to action number one, which was already a lot of information. But call to action number two, is, this is not meant to be like a sales pitch for Video Editing Made Easy, but because it is a brand new course and because I am offering it as a membership perk for joining Video Brand Academy for the short window of time that's gonna happen right after this episode goes live. I will put a link to that down in the show notes as well after the window, once it's no longer a membership perk, it's just gonna be for sale on my site and it'll be a standalone program. So use that link if you wanna get it and get it inside a Video Brand Academy. And so maybe I'll see your face inside of the Rise of the Digital CEO series with James. Or perhaps you'll come into Video Brand Academy and I'll see your face live on our very next meetup.