CONSISTENT Course (or Membership) Sales with YouTube | Ep. 55

Here's how to generate consistent sales for your course, membership, or digital product... Because as a business owner, the key is to leverage the power of YouTube to attract your ideal customers without constant selling or ad spend.

The goal is to create content that pre-sells your offers, so the selling happens naturally without high-pressure tactics. I'll also share details on a special bonus bundle I'm putting together that gives you the exact systems and templates I use to generate consistent course and membership sales from YouTube.

If you want to start making consistent revenue from your course, membership, or digital product without constant selling, this video is for you. Hit that like button and let's dive in!

▶︎  Meredith's BBD Bonuses: https://videobrand.link/rise

▶︎  Rise of the Digital CEO: https://videobrand.link/bbdbonuses

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🟣 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

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Transcript

As a business owner, you and I want the same things, right? We want to make consistent sales, generate consistent revenue in our business, but if you're confused about how to actually make that happen, how to actually make sales. With YouTube, if you have a course, a program, a membership, a book, or even a service of some kind, without giving all of that information away for free on YouTube, then you're in luck.

This episode is for you,

I,because I just wrapped up a bonus resource that I'll tell you a little bit more about towards the end. But I can give you the title, which is 101 Ways to Get Consistent Sales Without Constant Selling or Ad Spend for your course membership or digital Product. And I wanna pull some of those ideas from my list of 101 ways

for you here in this episode so that you can start applying them to your channel and to your business right away.

If you're new here, my name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can generate consistent revenue and do fun weird things like talk to a camera and create videos for strangers on the internet.

if there's one thing that I know to be true about creating videos on YouTube and growing a business from that.

It is that you don't necessarily have to know how it's all going to play out, how your business is going to grow from creating videos and from growing your list and doing some of the things that I'm gonna cover in this episode. All you need to know is that. It works if you show up consistently.

showing up consistently is the key to generating revenue consistently. And the beauty of YouTube, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about YouTube is that showing up consistently does not mean you showing up every day.

On camera, new outfit, new hair, lights, everything every day. It means you show up once a week, or maybe twice a month. You create content. That content shows up consistently so that for the person who is just searching for what you have to offer a month from now, or three years from now, they're just gonna be finding you.

you are showing up consistently for the people who are searching for what you talk about and what you help people with.

and if you're anything like me, you want to have like crystal clear clarity on the plan that you're working on, on the actions that you're taking, on the time and effort that you're investing into your business and creating your content. And what I keep hearing from my clients and students is.

I don't have my plan yet, so I can't start yet. I don't know how it's all gonna look, so I can't start yet. I don't know how these videos I'm working on here are going to actually attract an audience and how, you know, some of that audience is actually gonna be a paying customer. Like they can't see how all of those things are connected yet.

They're still trying to like figure it out from like. On a technical level, but also on a conceptual level, right? They're trying to put all the pieces in place so that they can see the puzzle. But like if you think about a puzzle, it starts to become clear as you build it, right? Yes. With a puzzle. You can like look at the picture on the box and all of that.

You can see it, but it the. The puzzle that you're building only becomes clear as you add more pieces to it. You start with nothing. You give yourself an outline, and then it becomes clear as you build it. And that's like the mentality that I want you to think about when it comes to. Selling your course program membership, offer digital product with YouTube, you don't have to have a crystal clear plan in order to get started on implementing the plan.

Let me explain why this is huge, because if you are listening to this or watching and you have ever listened to. Anybody who has reached a level, any level of success in business or life achievements, if you've listened to a book, a podcast, a video, maybe even a documentary, they all say this one thing at least one time in their life.

I wish I had started sooner. They all say that. Even I think I wish I had started sooner. I've been doing this for 10 years, but. Before I started publishing consistent videos in January of 2015, I spent a year and a half in planning mode. It was the middle of summer-ish. It was like July, 2013 that I first had this idea.

I think I should figure out how to create content about something, didn't know what, and then build a business around that. And it was January, 2015 that I actually hit publish on consistent content on YouTube. It was a year and a half, and once I started, you know, gaining a little bit of momentum and I was being consistent with my weekly uploads, I promised myself just do this for a year, stick with it for a year.

Because like many people, I. It was known to like have an interest and then the interest goes away after three months and then have another interest and then that goes away. You know, we're multi-passionate people, right. But I knew I wanted to make it successful and the only way that I would be able to gauge whether it was gonna be is if I stuck it out for a year and kind of like gave it a hundred percent for a year.

But once I started to see some. Momentum and some results from being consistent. Like seeing there were these things called subscribers on my YouTube channel. What is that? I don't know. Seeing that, oh, there's people that are commenting, there's people asking me questions.

What do I do? Like going from having no experience creating videos or doing anything on YouTube to getting that kind of like starting to build that community, getting subscribers, getting comments, um.

it became super clear that I should have started like six months or a year prior to when I actually started, but I spent so much time planning and trying to get this crystal clear image so that before I started to take my first step, I had it all mapped out. But things change. it didn't matter what I had thought that I had mapped out.

As you start to take action and move forward, things change. You see more details. There are opportunities that become available that you didn't know that they were there until you started moving forward. 

Okay, so let's actually dive into this because I went through this resource. I created my 101 ways to consistently sell your course or membership without constantly selling your course or membership.

And I pulled out 10 things that I think you could. Implement right now, or at least to kinda get the wheels turning into thinking about how you could easily implement these things on YouTube right now. If you have a YouTube channel, obviously, this is gonna be perfect for you if you already have some way of working with you right now.

I already talked about this a little bit, but I just want to reiterate consistency breeds. Consistency, right? Consistency in your actions in how you show up and what you show up with breeds.

Consistent growth. Consistent sales, consistent revenue, and one of my favorite little, um, brain tricks that I've taught myself. One of the little habits that I have taught myself is consistently seeding my. Offers my membership video brand academy or courses and programs in my content. What the heck do I mean by seeding?

It means I mention it every once in a while. I say things like, Hey, so and so had a question in, um, our recent meetup inside Video Brand Academy about how to get consistent course sales, um, without. Constantly selling. I'm just making this up. I'm totally riffing on this now, but I'm dropping the fact that we have live meetups.

I'm dropping the fact that there's this thing called Video Brand Academy. So if you've never. Watched a video from me before. If you've never heard that before, now you're hearing it. And if you watch my content consistently, you are also learning Video Brand Academy. 

That's Meredith's membership, I think. And there's no way to know this for sure, but. if people who are regularly engaged with your content couldn't name the name of your program, if you ran into Am at grocery store and quizzed them on the name of your program, would they be able to name it?

and I don't mean like accurately like word for word. People put the names of my courses and programs and things like together in creative ways all of the time, but I know what they're talking about.

and the thing is, they know what it's called. and I think if you. If you don't get the sense that your audience, your engaged audience would even know the name of your program, then you probably don't talk about it enough. And it might be because you don't want to be constantly selling.

You don't want to be salesy,

but saying the name of your program. Mentioning the name of your program every once in a while isn't salesy. It's just a fact. it, it's a thing that exists. 

And number two, sticking with the consistency theme is consistent list building. Now, one of the advantages I had when I first started my business and my channel was I already knew a little bit about email marketing. I already knew that it was important. I already knew like the technical side of. How to set up an email list, like I use Kit for mine. Um, how to create an opt-in form, how to send an email.

 I already knew like how to do it and I knew why it was important, so I started doing it from, literally from day one. I think my first freebie was three keys to. I don't know. Fun to watch home videos or something like that. I should look this up. the oldest thing in my Google Drive is a ebook.

I think this was my first offer, um, ebook draft, one Hour to Awesome Home movies. That was something that I sold, that was my first, actual digital product but I did have three keys. I think it was something like three keys to. Fun to watch home movies or something like that.

that was my first lead magnet. And like, as you can tell from the way I'm talking about it, it, it was kind of lame. People still downloaded it, like people still wanted it, because it wasn't actually lame. You know what I mean? Like I think it's lame now 10 years later, but it wasn't actually lame. It was actually really useful, really informative for a very specific audience. And I had curated some ideas that were like actually useful for people. It wasn't lame. People wanted it.

And that's what you wanna think about when you're thinking. What could I give away as a lead magnet to build my list? What is a first small win that you can help people get? What is something that you are always explaining or repeating to your clients? Can you create some kind of a tool, a tracker, a resource 

you can create an AI tool. I created an AI tool. It's inside of the free video brand Academy app that you can download on your phone Put a screenshot of your YouTube channel. It'll rate your YouTube channel. It'll tell you how binge-worthy your YouTube channel is, and some tweaks to make it even more. Binge worthy. 

So assuming that you do in fact decide you are going to build your list from the beginning, you're gonna start building your list. Now, if you're not doing that already, what the heck do you send to them? You send them your new content. And I've talked about this a little bit here and there, on the channel and on the podcast.

I don't recommend that you send, you know, as soon as you hit publish on a video, you just like swoosh, send it off to your email list. You have to give the YouTube algorithm some time to do. Its algorithmic things before you start sending people to the video. And if you wait like three-ish days, if you can stand it, then you have a much better chance of increasing the views on your video by letting the algorithm bring.

the viewers to the video, and then you send it to your list. And perhaps those people didn't see it yet or maybe they saw that it was there but hadn't watched it yet. And now you have another opportunity to get your video in front of your engaged audience. If you wanna be really. Smart about it. This is what I do. almost the entire email basically writes itself with the video. The opening line of the email is usually some variation of literally the first words of the video, the first things outta my mouth in the video.

If you write a good hook for your video, then you have written a really good hook for your emails.

in kit. If you put a link to a video in the email, it automatically populates with the thumbnail.

So I put a big title that's linked, and then the thumbnail is there, and then usually whatever I have in my video description is the next little section of the email, and then I sign off. Then there's a little ps. 

Here's where this gets juicy. And I wasn't, I don't even have this on my list. So I guess we're gonna have 11 things that I have pulled from my list. I've probably already told you 11 different things, but here's where it gets really juicy. You send out an email a couple of days after you publish your video, and then you copy the entire email and the subject line and you paste it into an evergreen email sequence.

So if you're using kit like I do. You paste it into a sequence that is gonna go out at some point in the future. Could be a month from now, could be six months from now, could be three years from now if your content is still relevant every time you send a new. Email to your list about a new video. You take that content and you drop it at the bottom of an evergreen sequence so that not only are the people on your list getting your new content, your new emails, but they're also getting once a week, twice a week.

It depends on how much content you have and how you have your sequence, um, timing set up. They're also hearing from you again. You know how many times I've been like on a call with a client or at a conference or something and someone will say, oh, I just got your email. And I'm like, and what email would that be?

Because. I might not have even just sent it. It might have just been in my evergreen email sequence. 

And so all you have to do is really think about curating. Evergreen sequence to make sure that the content is still relevant at some point in the future if it's, you know, an evergreen topic. And it's not like something like newsworthy that's happening right now today.

So I guess that doesn't necessarily fall under making consistent sales, but it does keep your email list engaged so that even if you are only publishing once a week, email list is actually experiencing you showing up even more consistently than that.

now here's where this does lead to consistent sales, If you create a video on a topic and then offer a lead magnet that helps somebody with that topic helps somebody reach the desired results that you are here to help people achieve with regard to that topic, you've given them a cheat sheet, a checklist, or some way to get the desired result faster, quicker, easier, 

Now they're on your list and now you have an opportunity to put an offer in front of them. And in the traditional sense, this would be. Possibly refer to as a funnel, like I feel like funnel, the word funnel, sales funnel YouTube funnel has a couple of different meanings, but a funnel is just where, like, it's the shape of a funnel.

You have lots of people up here, you get them down to like a mid funnel range where they're interested in your content, they're interested in, um, hearing from you. They're seeing you as the go-to person. And then. Further down. Now they're actually interested in what you have to offer.

That's all a marketing funnel, sales funnel, YouTube funnel really is. It could all happen on YouTube. It could happen on like through a series of landing pages in this case. What I think of as a YouTube funnel or turning your YouTube channel into a sales funnel is you have YouTube as the wide part of the funnel with two and a half billion users on it, and you wanna attract the people that you are here to help by creating the content on the topics they're searching for and watching and wanting to learn about, and wanting to binge and go down a rabbit hole about.

And then you're offering that lead magnet, freebie, some way of getting them on your list, and then you can offer them what you have to offer. 

If you are very clear and strategic and like. Laser focused on your messaging and your positioning when you create your free YouTube video and then offer your free lead magnet and then offer your paid program course, digital product, whatever it is.

Then your paid offer essentially sells itself because you've attracted the person who has the desired result and also is running into the problems that you're. Program solves, right? You've attracted that exact person and now you have an offer that you can offer them. So the way that I have done this is through email.

I did a metric check on my, uh, my YouTube funnel that I had in place for two years, the 30 days, to a thriving YouTube channel course that I sold. I made $47,000 off of this YouTube funnel. No ad spend. It was $147 product, and when I looked at the metrics of that, 92% of the people who had purchased had clicked a link in the sales emails, 92%.

So this is why I say like consistent list building is critical for consistent sales. 'cause you have to get people from YouTube into your world, into your space where you then. Can make an offer to them.

So how do you do this? I have three different, um, ways of thinking about YouTube funnels. I guess you could call them three separate distinct frameworks for YouTube funnels.

One is a backstage funnel. I previously have called this my secret video funnel, but that's just does not sound that interesting. But basically what it is, is you're using your. YouTube channel as a billboard, you're using it as a billboard where you're like, Hey, are you trying to solve this problem? Are you trying to get this desired result here?

This is for you. You are creating a video that attracts the exact right person for your offer.

And then instead of giving like a, a cheat sheet checklist or whatever, they're opting into a training, a bonus training that you provide inside of your program. Now, I know this might be, this may sound totally backwards. I'm getting them inside of the program in order to get them inside of the program.

How does that work? This is why I call it a backstage funnel or a backstage pass. You are effectively providing an experience that makes your leads experience your product, your program, your membership, giving a a little taste behind the scenes.

 and at the time of this recording, if you go to my YouTube channel right now, there's a video at the top that's something like, you know. Create a binge-worthy YouTube channel without spending forever creating videos. Something, something like that. That's the top of my backstage Pass YouTube funnel.

Now, just like this 101 ways to get consistent sales without constant selling, um, resource that I'm putting together. I'm also going to turn my backstage pass funnel framework into a, uh, kind of a plug and play framework that anyone can use. If As long as you have a YouTube channel and you have a course program, digital product, or something to sell, you can kind of plug and play your offer into it

by using this Backstage Pass funnel.

but these are resources that I'm putting together as a special bonus because I know you've heard me talk about here on the channel, and if you're on my list, you've heard you've.

You've heard it on my list as well. I'm an affiliate for James Wedmore's Business by Design program. I've been a student of James since 2017. And you know, you heard the, uh, kind of cringey first digital product that I created that was pre BBD. Okay. And so I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot. My business has grown a lot since then, obviously.

And as an affiliate for BBD, I get to put together a bonus. Bundle or a bonus pack of my best resources. And this year what I'm doing is creating resources that are not, um, they're not information, they're actual plug and play plans. Like, I don't wanna feed you more information and make you do more work. I want to hand you something that you can literally take your offer and plug it in to my funnel system and have it start working for you, um, immediately.

So the Backstage Pass funnel is going to go into that bundle along with a couple of other things that I haven't, um, that I haven't revealed yet.

and if that sounds like anything you might be interested in, there is a link down in the description to my BBD bonus page.

And if you just like put in your email into there, then um, then you'll be on my list and then you'll hear about how to get my BBD bonus bundle,

and some of my other YouTube course sales frameworks as well. But the backstage funnel is sort of like, I think of this as like my signature funnel. This was something I created myself. I didn't learn it from somebody. I created it myself by taking what I learned about sales and messaging in business by design and applying it to what I knew about YouTube and YouTube strategy, and kind of marrying those two things together.

And it's paid off really well for me. Like. It's literally paid off really well for me, and it's fun. It's different, it's interesting and it's perfect for YouTube. It's perfect for YouTube. It's not a webinar. It's not a sales video. It's not like a three part live series. It's not something that you have to show up live and deliver.

the binge to buy funnel. Um, I don't love the name of this, but I'm trying to give these things names so that I have a way to sort of like reference them. The binge to buy funnel is also perfect for YouTube. This would be a great way to, um, you can use this to build your list with a freebie.

But it would also be a great way to generate low ticket sales of something like a $37 offer or a $99 offer. Something in those ranges. So those might have a, um, like an order bump or an upsell attached to them if you really wanna, like, build out a robust funnel. It doesn't have to, you don't have to have those things.

But if you wanted to sell, you know, say like a $25 no brainer digital product, this is the way to do it with YouTube. This is the way I would do it with YouTube. So the binge to buy funnel is where you create.

A ton of content. You build out your spider web, right? This is what I teach inside Video Brand Academy. You build out your spider web. Use a couple of strategies that I teach, like the Save Me Series or the Ultimate User Guide. People are searching the internet for answers. You show up with the answers.

You show up with the digital product, the low. Price, low ticket easy, no brainer. Oh, this guide is only 37 bucks. Awesome. It's gonna save me five hours. Awesome. I'll get it.

your videos are essentially selling. That digital product for you, you are not making a sales video saying like, Hey, made this thing, buy it. Here's what you get. Here are the features, here are the benefits, here are the price. No, you're just answering questions. You're delivering information and value in the video, and then providing some kind of a digital product. For a low cost that's gonna save somebody a bunch of time or save somebody some pretty big headaches.

Right? But the point is people go to YouTube to look for answers to get user manual style instructions. You be the person that shows up with those answers, you be the person that shows up with a easy, no-brainer digital product that they can buy from you that's gonna help them and generate consistent sales for your business.

The third funnel is, I like to just think of this as a gateway funnel. It's a gateway funnel because it's an easy gateway to get people onto your list, but it's also an easy gateway. For you to start list building if you haven't been doing it. Okay, so it's basically you create a video. You say, I have a checklist all about the things that I'm covering in this video.

It's a free download. You can hit the link in my description or whatever, however you would word it,

now. Can you see how when you have these things in place, when you have funnels in place, when you have a lead magnet in place and all you are doing is making your content publishing consistently, consistently answering the questions, solving the problems.

Touching on ways that people can reach their desired result that you help people with.

You are just showing up as yourself on camera and letting people know where to get more resources from you in the form of freebies or in the form of an offer.

so your videos are doing the selling Your videos are essentially pre-selling your offers. Right? if you're crystal clear with your messaging and your positioning and who you're attracting into your funnel, then the offer is gonna be a no brainer for the people that you are attracting and you are not doing constant selling.

You are just making content, seeding your program, and either setting up an automated sales email, you know, three emails. Four emails, one email a day for four days or something, right? You're setting up your automated sales emails.

You're not sending them, you, you're not staying up until midnight getting your sales emails ready to go out the next day. Grammatical errors and all right, you've already written them. They're scheduled to go out and automated when somebody joins your list or joins for a specific freebie, right? You can set all of this up with kit and you set it up once it exists.

Once it's all automated, System is selling for you, not you showing up every day, constantly selling.

However, if you are generating consistent sales with your content and you have people trickling in, or you have people coming in consistently, either way I. Either way, every quarter or even every month or every six weeks, you can do something that I like to think of as an unlaunch.

It's not a launch, it's an unlaunch. It's not a live webinar. It's not a live three part series. It's not some big, high stress, high stakes selling event.

It is an unlaunch and I've been doing this to grow my membership for the last. Nine months. I four Xed my membership growth of Video Brand Academy in the last nine months by Unlaunch. So what do I mean by this? So here's the gist and the concept of an unlaunch. Because you create YouTube content, long form YouTube content. Your audience already knows you, likes you, trusts you, no, like, and trust, right? And now they're on your list. So if they're on your list, it's because they wanna hear from you.

and I want you to hear me out on this because I'm not anti webinar, I'm not anti live launch. I'm anti high stress. I'm anti high pressure and high anxiety, and oh my God, if this doesn't work right now, today, in this moment when I'm delivering this. Webinar then this whole thing is of failure, right? I'm anti that mentality,

 It's basically just a YouTube video. The only difference is instead of teaching something in that video, on your sales page, you are demonstrating what's in your offer. You're demonstrating why somebody would want to buy it or join it.

Your. Essentially making the case for the right person, for the right fit, for your offer to help them decide that, yeah, right now is the time for me to do this. It's basically the same stuff that you have on the sales page in a YouTube video. It's just not on YouTube, it's on a sales page,

 The reason why I think there's an elegance to this is like, think about the congruency factor of this. Your audience found you on YouTube. They found you through video. They know what you look like. They know what you sound like. They already like what you have to say. They already want to hear from you. Right? So

the reason why I think this is so elegant in my mind is because you're, it's not like you're going from short form content to 90 minute webinar. You are going from long form YouTube video to long form video at the top of a sales page in front of people who already know you, like you, trust you, and want to learn from you.

So when you're showing up consistently on YouTube and you're building your list consistently, and then every quarter or every six weeks or whenever the heck you want, you do an unlaunch to your offer, which is just a video at the top of the sales page.

With a timer so that your people are incentivized to actually join your thing Now, buy your thing now. 

You know, as long as you have an irresistible offer on that page, in that video that your content attracted the right people to, it just makes sense, right? It just makes sense. No stress, no pressure, no high stakes thing, just an unlaunch to your list. Every quarter, every month, every six weeks, whatever.

I absolutely love talking about all of this so much And nerding out over strategies and ideas and what makes an offer irresistible. And how do you get the messaging right so that you know that the videos you're creating are attracting your actual ideal buyers Like. Business is so fun. Online business is so fun, youTube makes it so much more fun because. You're, you're sort of pre-selling everything. It takes so much of the pressure off of the selling when you're creating long form content on YouTube and showing up consistently. So I mentioned that what I'm putting together is a bonus bundle for.

Business by Design, which is James Wedmore's signature program. and if you haven't heard of Business by Design, this is a program that my business mentor James Woodmore created and he is launching it right now.

He is doing an actual live what I would see as. High pressure launch. It is sort of like the yin and the yang over here. I'm like, let's just be cool and send a video to our list. And he's like, let's do a gigantic, um, three part live series in a studio, so James's launch is happening this week if you want to see what a, a really well produced live launch looks like. It's called the Rise of the digital CEO, and it's totally free. So I'll put a link to that down in the description. But if you want to generate consistent sales of your course membership or program with YouTube organically without ad spend and without having to do live high stress, high stakes launches.

Then you're definitely going to love the bonuses that I'm putting together that I'm gonna just give to anyone who joins Business by Design through my link, because I'm an affiliate. So basically, as a gift for you joining Business by Design, through my link, I'm gonna give you a bunch of my resources so that.

You can plug your offer into the systems that I've already built for myself that I already use for myself to generate consistent sales of my course and membership myself.

I'm so excited about the BBD bonuses that I'm putting together because it's not just more information or more lessons or more content.

It's my actual sales system. It's my actual like fill in the blank sales emails. Fill in the blank sales page, like the exact system structure process that I use to turn my YouTube channel into a sales funnel. It's gonna be great and I'll put a link down below if you want to get on the wait list so that you can hear about those bonuses when they are available because I think they will only be available for about four days.

So hop on my list, make sure I don't go to your spam folder and I'll see you soon.