How do you create an online course that sells right now?

The truth is that times have changed, and what worked even just a few years ago no longer does. 

The online course market is maturing, and with the growth many are starting to wonder:

"Are people still buying online courses?"

Here's my two cents: 

Yes they absolutely are, but it’s uneven at the moment.

Some people are killing it and some are finding it tough. 

If you're wondering how you can create an online course that sells right now, here are seven things to keep in mind. 1. Cultivate Trust and Authority

2. Contracts Create Friction

3. Creating an Online Course That Sells Requires Transparency

4. New Offers Require Time in the Market

5. Positioning is Everything

6. Risk Reversal is Extra Helpful

7. Trust and an Irresistible Offer Are King and Queen Right Now

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

In 2007, I spent six weeks in a hostel in the middle of Guatemala just “because”.Truly, I’d never felt so free.The two years prior had been spent working like a donkey, with good people but in a field I hated.The endgame? Admission to the Supreme Course of Queensland as a lawyer.It was an accolade I spent 7 years working towards..Only to quit, 6-weeks to the day later. And so, there I found myself in a computer shop in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, on a steaming April afternoon checking my emails when my brothers friend messaged us on Facebook.“Wanna come visit?” – he wrote, “I’m just down the road in Guatemala!”We looked at each other.Of course we would. It wasn’t even a QUESTION.We were free. The world was our oyster. And we could do anything, be anyone, go anywhere!And so it came to be that I ended up spending the best, most carefree, most FUN 6-weeks of my life living out of a backpack in a dingy hostel dorm room in Antigua.Acutely aware that I had opted out of life for a little minute, and feeling grateful as heck for it.Five years later, I started my online business chasing that kind of freedom again.And on the surface, the promise of it all felt..  intoxicating.Time freedom – to work when I wanted!Location freedom – to go back to Central America, or London, or ANYWHERE BUT HERE!Financial freedom – to make more than a doctors wages working on the goddamn INTERNET!I wanted it.The sense of adventure.The possibility.The wonder that came from not knowing what would come next.The Tuesday afternoons spent outside (and not in an air-conditioned cubicle)ALL OF IT.🍊 Rinse and Repeat has just been added to Lifestyle Business School!  This is the ultimate collection of every live launch and promotion under the sun. Join now for $149/m. 

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

🍑 Rinse and Repeat has just been added to Lifestyle Business School!  This is the ultimate collection of every live launch and promotion under the sun. Join now for $149/m. I’ve had 17,400 Instagram followers for YEARS now.

Sure, it tracks up a bit.

Down a bit.

But overall, it HOVERS around that number 🛸

Same with my trusty email list.

A few subscribers up.. then a few down.. and repeat.

But, what can I REALLY expect?

I HAVEN’T TAKEN AUDIENCE GROWTH SERIOUSLY SINCE 2017.

In 2023 though, I changed my business model.

I gained clarity on my founder type and ditched the big, stressful business to to intentionally go back to my creator roots.

Here’s why:

In November 2022, I turned 40.

And let me tell YOU:

There’s something about turning 40 that puts everything into perspective.

It makes you realise that you are not, in fact, immortal.

That “later in life” has actually come WAY FASTER THAN YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD.

It helped me – in the best possible way –  to define my dreams and what I REALLY wanted to do with the increasingly limited time I have left.

Here’s what I realised in the process:

That I was really, really proud of what I’d achieved in the 7 years prior since I’d started my business.

.. Even though I was a late bloomer.

.. Even though I’d spent FAR TOO MUCH of my life *ahem my twenties into my early thirties* waiting for the weekend and losing myself in happy hour.

.. And even though I’d veered a little off course in building the wrong model for me.

With every misstep, I’d had the tenacity, courage and clarity to course correct and keep chasing after my dreams.

And ALSO?

I realised that I was in NO WAY DONE YET.

That in many ways, I was just getting started.

 And if YOUR dream is to build a lifestyle business, Lifestyle Business School is the thing I have personally built to help you get there.

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

I don’t care about leaving money on the table. 

I don’t care about “maximising” my revenue” or getting the “most” out of every day. 

Here’s what I do care about: 

Spend Tuesday mornings at a 10am Pilates class. Stuffing around making labels for my new spice racks just because. Googling cool new hair-dos for my little girl. Sitting on the floor with her at 2pm on a Friday, playing hairdressers.

I care about travel. I care so much about travel. I care about renting a month-long Airbnb in Norway just because. And getting a van, and traveling around the English countryside stopping at every cute pub along the way. I care about driving down the California coast. Showing my kids Hearst Castle. Visiting Old Town Ibiza, and sipping Sangria at 10pm on a hot August evening. 

I care about feeling free – really, truly free. Waking up on a Monday and relishing the week ahead. Spending the morning sitting in a cafe, writing for three hours over two half-strength cappuccinos. And never again sitting in  an air-conditioned cubicle with no natural sunlight, taking orders from a girl called Samantha and waiting for Friday. 

I care about life. 

And living it, unconventionally and messily.

And having fun. 

And being the poster girl for living free. 

And above all? 

After building a $2.5m business to the ground in the name of wild alignment, NOT sacrificing all of that at the altar of some arbitrary revenue goal that won’t even give me more of what I want. 

That’s why I have the business I (now) do. 

And the values I (now) have. 

And it’s why I’m now so passionate about sharing with others my ethos for building a simple, highly profitable one-person + a tiny team style business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot ®In this week's podcast, I'll be sharing with you the Seven Commandments of Building a Business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot.

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

In the past two years, I have gone from three full time team members.. To me, one part time contractor. The result of scaling DOWN my team? My business went from 40% profit margins on a good month.. To 80%, always. I halved my revenue.. But took home WAY more profit. And I felt lighter, happier and more fulfilled than I had in years, with my days spent working on the things that truly light me up. Two years on, things looked so very different.. It feels like a dream. The no-team dream. Systems Over TeamSo, what changed? And specifically, what ENABLED me to re-build my business A One-Woman Show Working 5-Hour Days With 80% Profit Margins?Here’s the cliff notes: From a business model perspective, I moved to a model that felt far more aligned. It required fewer moving parts, fewer offers and fewer resources. And I started prioritising systems over team. It looks like this: ✔️ A Simple Model: One of the most overlooked “secrets” to an elegant business is simplicity. More offers, more work. I worked on refining my business model and offer suite to be simple.✔️ Increased Leverage: I built offers that leverage my time by packaging my Intellectual Property into scalable offers that were divorced from my time (and didn’t require big team to run).✔️ And Systems BEFORE Team: Rather than hiring FIRST, I worked to systemise as much of my business as possible, so that my time is now leveraged by processes, automations and tools instead of another set of hands. Together, those three things, once achieved, are a little thing called Operational Elegance –  and it has changed my (business) life. Operations doesn’t sound sexy. But truly, it is the thing that has set me free. I want other people to experience it, and it’s why I have dedicated my entire business mission since 2022 to help others achieve the same. If you resonate with this mission?  Lifestyle Business School is for you. 

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

📫 BRAND NEW! Subscribe to the NEW Lifestyle Business School newsletter here.  In December last year I phased out my primary (only) offer in my business in the name of business model re-alignment. And, in many ways, I'm starting again. I'm in a messy creation phase right now.  So, a few days ago, I started documenting the journey of re-building my business.This podcast shares more of that process, including behind the scenes insights.  BRAND NEW! The Lifestyle Business School newsletter where I'll also be sharing how I do the work, test and experiment and inch forward step by step in my business. If you want to follow me in this journey,  subscribe to my newsletter and share it with others too!

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

Here's 7 things I see holding business owners back from their goal to build a leveraged business model.This is based off seven years of experience and working with hundreds of online founders, and noticing patterns.I hope recognising these will help you to shortcut the process.[PS Our newsletter is live! Subscribe here]. 1️⃣ Time & the Hockey Stick EffectBuilding a leveraged business model takes MORE time upfront, and less time later on.2️⃣ Misaligned PositioningGet clear on who your offer serves, and match what you do to their problem.3️⃣ Too Many OffersAt max, you need three offers - an audience offer, a core offer and an anchor offer. They should all complement and feed into each other.4️⃣ Not Applying Scalable Traffic Strategies to a Scalable Business ModelThe traffic strategies that work for a 1:1 or service business model won't be enough when trying to sell a leveraged offer. More units to sell means that you need more eyeballs to see your offers.5️⃣ Not Making ROI based investment decisionsOnce you have the offer sorted, learn the math involved to make ROI based decisions to invest wisely to grow.6️⃣ Solving the Wrong ProblemKnowing the problem, and solving the right one, will cut your journey in half (or more) 7️⃣ Product-Model-Founder MisalignmentThere is no right way of doing online business, only what is right for you.You need clarity on your endgame, and the model that fits you as the founder.In Lifestyle Business School, we focus on a structured approach to building a leveraged, expertise-based business model - actively working to avoid these pitfalls to build an aligned model with structured strategy that is right for YOU.Join Lifestyle Business School at lifestylebusiness.school/join.

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

Ever wondered EXACTLY how I create digital courses? The nitty gritty "I do this, then this, then THIS"? I have been creating online courses now since 2018, and have learnt a LOT about what works and what doesn't when it comes to the "creative process". When developing my very first digital course in 2018, I went to Bali for six weeks, wrote a 50,000 word manuscript in the final week because I had no idea what else to do and then came back to spend the next six months figuring out how to make it into a course that people would buy (more on that in this episode)!I don't recommend that approach 😉With more than $2 million in digital course sales now under my belt, my creative process has developed over time and in today's podcast episode I break down exactly how I do it now. 

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

“My launch failed”, she wrote to me one Sunday evening.Weird, I thought.I’d seen the funnel — it was good. So, I asked to dig into the stats.“What was your conversion rate?”, I asked.She stared at me blankly.“You know.. the percentage of people in the launch that bought?”Oh. There was six days of silence, and she emailed me back.“5.4%”.Well, I thought.. the launch didn’t fail. Actually, it converted GREAT. There just wasn’t enough traffic.It was EASY for me to see the issue. And, to objectively see where the opportunity was to improve.But, she couldn’t see it, and subjectively, in her mind it was a big fat flop.It’s kind of the industry’s fault that this sort of thing is a HUGE issue.We EXPECT fast success. Knock it out of the park wins in two seconds. And when it doesn’t work out like that? We scrap the WHOLE thing, and go and build something else from scratch. But, that is a story for a different day. For today? Let’s talk about HER, and how this scenario can be avoided with ONE thing.This scenario is common:GREAT launch.HIGH conversion rate.But, low traffic, so it's perceived as a flop.It is a very common and vicious cycle that occurs when someone decides to start trying to build a more leveraged business model, and it looks like this:

1. Person builds offer; 
2. They promote it on social media to a small audience; 
3. They launch it and due to very small registrations, perceive the WHOLE thing as a flop (it's not, the LAUNCH worked great) despite a high buy rate; 
4. Even if they DO realise that it was just more traffic that was needed, they have NO idea how to get it;
5. So, they try to haphazardly invest in Meta ads, or pitch podcasts with crappy angle and poor pitch game so nothing works; 
6. They launch again with the SAME amount of traffic as the first launch; 
7. They get even smaller results because everyone bought the first time, and eventually they give up altogether.

I've seen the cycle too many times, and here's what I've realised.

There is ONE thing missing, and it's letting down their WHOLE game.That one thing?A simple, effective marketing plan in place to drive the amount of traffic they need to sell their scalable offers with (relative) EASE.And that's what we'll be talking about in today's podcast episode.

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_

Wondering how I am thinking about business "growth" in 2024? The things I am focused on to build my version of the lifestyle business sweet spot? The actions I am taking that go against the grain of "traditional" business advice? That's what I'm breaking down in today's podcast episode where I'll be sharing with you 7 counterintuitive things that I am doing to build my business in 2024.Links and Resources Mentioned in Episode:

• Episode 158: Our Podcast Makes Us $8,300 an Hour — Here’s How
• Free Failed Payment SOP: Get the exact Standard Operating Procedure template we used to recoup failed payments in our online business. 
• BRAND New Deliver and Delight Course just added to Lifestyle Business School: Deliver and Delight is the FULL playbook for implementing stand out, streamlined delivery processes for any high or low touch course, program, coaching offer or mastermind. We hand you our done for you workflows, standard operating procedures and automations for the three phases of managing any online offer. 

Want more?📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter: For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast: With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic: Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free. 🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.

📲 Instagram:Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_