How to Charge for a Course

0:00What we see in our data is that you can charge on average$1 ,000 or$2 ,000 for a high ticket course. Now, especially when you are helping someone with something that is very quantitative, very much like, oh, if I get a raise, I will make more money. Yes, I would like to buy this$1 ,000 or$2 ,000 high ticket course. if you are charging a fair price for something that is going to get people results, that has a really clear replacement opportunity, and that they're going to respect and you're going to respect because people pay attention to what they pay for. Woo!

0:47Hi, I'm Gina Bianchini, and this is People Magic, where we talk about the fastest and easiest way to create a$1 million community. So I'm taking your questions. We're tackling something big. And with that, let's get started. Hi, Gina. I'm so excited to talk to you. I launched a 48-month membership on Mighty in December, like you said, and saw a great launch in January. We've continued to grow and just passed 100 members. It's been awesome, and my people love the platform. Now I'm ready to add something new. What's the best way to do it? And how many people would you expect to buy it? Well, so first of all, congratulations.

1:28That's awesome. And I appreciate the kind words about Mighty. I want to stop and just celebrate the fact that we've now seen this multiple times in the last few months, which is somebody came to our events or otherwise heard about launching a million-dollar community. They launched it, grew in January, have continued to grow, and trusted the process. What we're seeing work on Mighty,$48 a month typically, that is for something that people want to get results and transformation from. So that's fantastic. And the fact that you have 100 people who have signed up, and if you're anything like most of our Mighty Networks, connecting and building relationships with each other, being able to see and experience your amazing framework for getting those results, making it through the transition that you've clearly done a great job of articulating and laying out for your members.

2:37Just a big congratulations on that. $48 per month times 100 people. That's$4 ,800 a month in new incremental revenue that you can set up for yourself. That's amazing. That's nearly$60 ,000 a year just with your basic membership. So first of all, that's fantastic. The first thing that I would go and do is really understand who those hundred people are. The numbers that we see is if you can get to 30 members, you have a community that runs itself and that you can generate revenue, again, from a membership like you're doing. So as you think about adding more, you've got sort of three other options.

3:25General options. There's things in between like merch or other kinds of trinkets and amazing things. But what you can really think about is courses. The distinction I make in courses versus memberships are with courses, you have a beginning and a middle and an end. But you still want to bring people together to go through that course together. Then with a membership, it's an ongoing basis. So that's the biggest difference. So when I talk about charging for a membership versus charging for a course, of course you're charging for sort of one concrete thing. Typically, when you're charging for a course, you can charge a lot of money and you do it on a one-time basis.

4:08Or you can bundle that course with your membership. So I'll talk about that in a moment. So you've got courses that you can charge for. You've got challenges, which are really fun. And basically, a challenge is a course come to life broken down into specific steps. Or if you want to think about it, it's like specific homework pieces, but organized as a challenge that somebody can basically just take what is right in front of them, do that step, trust you in a challenge that as you have laid out the steps for them, they are going to be able to get a result from that challenge. So you can charge for a challenge and you can charge for events.

4:51And those events might be live events, live coaching in real life, or like in a physical location events. All of these things are things that you can add on top of a membership. Now, here's what's really interesting. When you're thinking about charging, and I like to start with these three things because otherwise you can just pick a price out of thin air and you'll probably get it wrong. So the three things you want to pay attention to when you are choosing a price for, let's just call it a course, that you're going to add a course to your membership, to your community. So that course, you'll set it up as a separate space in your community or your membership, super easy to do on Mighty.

5:41Then what are you going to charge for it. So you've got three R's. The first R is results. What results do your members want to achieve? If you've done it right, which you clearly have, you would not be making$4 ,800 a month if you were not helping people navigate a transition. We talk about it as your ideal member And the easiest way to create a membership that you can charge for is by serving people who are going through a transition. So that might be learning a new skill, wanting to become a better manager so they can tie the results of being a better manager to better results for the group, a bonus, being able to get a promotion, being able to leave their company and go to a new company in a bigger role.

6:33Those all have really tangible results. One of my other favorite examples would be something where you're able to help somebody hike the Appalachian Trail. Yes, they could do all the research, do everything on the internet by themselves, can even use AI to help them. But if you created a community of people who have done it and people who want to do it, there is something incredibly valuable. So what is that result that people want to get? A raise. You could imagine that your members are able to make$10 ,000 or$15 ,000 more per year. Another would be sleep training your children. Another would be an organized challenge to help kickstart a new kind of diet or a new wellness practice.

7:26Those are all things that, number one, are transitions. And number two, help people get concrete results that you can start to quantify. So what does the value of that new job or that promotion or tackling something that makes somebody feel amazing because they've taken on this new challenge? That is pricing for results. The second R is pricing for replacement. What are people doing today? What courses are they buying? What books are they buying? What events are they going to? Where are they spending their time and money? And how do you think about what they're going to value those results based on what else they would be buying?

8:15Now, really clearly, you want results first and foremost. That is the most powerful way to craft an offer for your next high-ticket course that you're going to be adding on top of your membership. So replacement, that's a little bit more obvious. And finally, respect. What I mean by that is charge enough where your members are going to respect it because people pay attention to what they pay for, right? So you want people to be paying attention. And if they're paying a lot of money for it, they will pay more attention. The other side of that is if you are not charging enough because you're like, oh, I can't charge because I'm doing it for the first time or I'm not good at it yet.

9:02The reasons and rationalizations for people to not charge for the value that they are creating, the results that they are helping somebody get in their lives and that they can't get on their own without the community or the membership or the course or the challenge or the event that you are creating is kind of amazing. So we got results, we got replacement, and we've got respect. So when you look across those things, what we see in our data is that you can charge on average$1 ,000 or$2 ,000 for a high ticket course. Now, especially when you are helping someone with something that is very quantitative, very much like, oh, if I get a raise, I will make more money.

9:50Yes, I would like to buy this$1 ,000 or$2 ,000 high ticket course. If you are charging a fair price for something that is going to get people results, that has a really clear replacement opportunity, and that they're going to respect and you're going to respect because people pay attention to what they pay for. This is all a way of saying, think about how you take your hundred members. What are the questions that they're asking a lot? What are the things that they could imagine in what we talk about as your best year ever? Like, what is that transition that they have made it through that they can either go deeper in or after they graduate from that transition, what is that next thing that they can do in your high-ticket course?

10:38Now, we see this as a very successful model where you take your membership, you add a high-ticket course, and you bundle the two together, which is really fun. So you can charge for them separately. You could also do something where you say, hey, normally membership is$48 a month, and this high ticket course you can buy separately for a one-time$2 ,000 fee, or you can merge the two things together for, I don't know,$60 a month. So you raise that monthly price. And what you end up doing is actually making roughly about 30 % more money over the long term when you bundle those two things together.

11:27So key thing here is that you start with what is it that those hundred people want next? And then as you craft that course or challenge or event, expect roughly 20 of those hundred people to buy it. So that's the data we have is basically about 20 % of people in your community will upgrade for an offer that kind of hits those key points of results are really clear, replacement value is really clear, and it is a high ticket item so that people respect it. And the last thing I would say is as you look at what that next offer is, trust the process. Don't second guess your pricing. It's better to go out with a higher price and discount it later than go out with a lower price and discount it later, or go out with such a low price that you don't even have any room to discount it.

12:33The other thing that I would say is don't lose sight of adding the next hundred members to your base membership. You want to keep the community that you are building growing because with each new member who joins, there are new relationships to build. There's new value to be created between your members. And ultimately, there are relationships that are going to get people stories, experience, and ideas that you don't have as the host. Even if you're an expert in that transition, in that category, you don't have all the stories and all the amazing energy and experience that other members bring to the picnic.

13:17So you want to bring in more people. So one of the best things to do there is just go to your hundred folks and basically say, we are taking nominations. And here is where we are shining related to the transition that your community serves. And then you have this next level up as well. So that is the fastest, easiest, the most energizing way of creating that next phase of your business. And it's a pretty exciting time for where you are. You are building on a foundation of success and there is so much room to grow. So thank you for the question. I'm Gina Bianchini. Thanks for tuning in. This is People Magic.

14:11Thank you for being a part of People Magic. I could not do this show without you. If you want a deeper dive on any of these topics, how to build a community, run a membership, choose your pricing, I have a nine-part free People Magic Masterclass on our website. And the link is in the show notes. this is something that I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to share with you so hopefully you'll find it valuable and I can't do this show without some burning questions so everything that I tackle is something someone just like you has offered their idea or offered their question we take it and turn it into a show so in the show notes there is the link to leave me a voice memo and I hope you'll take advantage of it Thank you.