What’s Better: 1:1 Services or Online Courses?
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked a lot about diversifying your income, specifically through digital products. This is super helpful if you want to stop devoting all the hours in your day to client work and want to give your biz more than the leftover crumbs. Because as you probably know, digital products can run pretty much on autopilot and help you make more with less time.
But so can digital courses.
Digital courses are basically an in-depth version of the products you offer, and with a much higher price tag. They’re broken down into modules, and take a lot longer to work through. But, you can create it once, launch it a couple of times per year, and that’s about it. (Okay, I know it sounds easy, but the concept of selling digital courses really is that simple!)
Wondering if digital courses are right for you…especially if you’re thinking of scaling down your one-on-one services? Find out here!
Let’s make a pros and cons list
To help you get a better idea of what’s needed for each of these offers, let’s take a look at some of their biggest pros and cons!
Pros of 1:1 services
With 1:1 services, you can typically charge higher rates because you are giving your clients personalized attention and custom solutions. This can be seen in your hourly rate, or in a packaged rate.
1:1 services can also help you establish a deeper relationship with your clients, which often leads to repeat business and referrals. You can provide more value by being able to identify and address their specific pain points and challenges!
Cons of 1:1 services
But having custom packages for everyone you work with can be draining. There’s a certain level of focus and attention that has to happen in ways that signature packages don’t have — from designing a proposal all the way to delivering what you’re working on.
And your income is directly tied to the number of hours you work, or the number of clients you have at a given time. This means that you can quickly hit a ceiling in terms of how much income you can generate. And, your schedule may become fully booked, which can lead to burnout and limit your growth potential!
Pros of digital courses
The main advantage of offering a digital course is that you can reach a wider audience and technically create more passive income. It’s easier to scale because it’s not linked to so much of your time.
Once you create the course, you can sell it multiple times without having to do any additional work. This means that you can scale your business without being limited by your time or availability!
Digital courses can also help establish you as an expert in your niche — opening more doors and more opportunities for speaking events or collaborations with other businesses, to name a few!
Cons of digital courses
Digital courses aren’t perfect though. Yes, they can be pretty easy to set up with technology these days, but you still have to build an audience for it! Because if you don’t have one, how will you sell it?
Seriously, I think this is one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my business. In the beginning, I thought I could create a course, people would flock to it with little to no effort on my end, and then, BOOM! Mai tais on the beach.
What actually happened was completely opposite of that. I spent SIGNIFICANT time building it, and it took me two months to even get through the planning stage.
At that time, I hardly had an audience either — probably somewhere like 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel and 100 on Instagram. I had virtually no experience with my ideal client, and as you can guess, this didn’t really set me up for success.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t sell much. Actually, one sale was a pity buy from a friend. Yeah…safe to say that offer got shut down fast.
Having an audience is KEY when it comes to selling anything. Actually, scratch that — having an audience you KNOW WELL, understanding their pain points, is the key to selling. I didn’t know them, and I think if I had, I would have opted for something like Video Strategy Academy instead.
You need to know your sales goals
It’s really easy to create a couple-hundred-dollar course and just assume you’ll make ends meet with it. You need to dig in and get specific with your sales goals so you know exactly how much traffic (and time and effort spent promoting it) you need to generate towards that offer.
Because here's course math for you…
Let’s say you have a $497 course, and you want to make $5,000 a month from it — that’s 11 courses sold per month. Since most sales pages have a conversion rate somewhere between 1.5-2%, you’d need at least 700 people to see your sales page every single month.
That’s a lot of people. And that’s exactly why it's so important to understand your audience — so your content that’s pushing that offer reaches the right people.
So, which one is better?
The answer? Probably a combination of both. Look, I don’t know your sales goals, but I do know that if you want to make more, while working less, so you can have more time to be the CEO and do the CEO things (ideating new offers, supporting your team, etc.) then it’s definitely both.
This is such a HUGE part of what I teach my clients inside $10K On Replay. They want to get to consistent $10K months, and get further with their biz, but the first step is always figuring out the math to do it. Because once you do, you can start prioritizing what to actually work on to get you to your goal faster (and with less headache because you have a clear path forward).
If you do want that clarity, then I invite you to join me inside of $10K on Replay where I’ll show you how to find it!
This is my coaching group where you’ll learn how to tell if your marketing strategy, and offer stack, are working for your business as a whole. You’ll get expert advice, coaching from me, and a whole lot more. Sound like your thing? Join me here!
