Thinkific Approved Expert Linda Reed-Enever Teaches Organic Content Marketing

Jeremy Deighan
Hey, everyone. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Today, we have Linda Reed-Enever from the Enever Group and she's just an amazing person. I've had the chance to speak with her briefly and just has a world of knowledge in online business, content marketing, podcasting, online courses.

Very pleased to have you on the show. I know this is going to be a great episode. How are you doing today, Linda?

Linda Reed-Enever
I'm doing well, Jeremy. Thank you for having me on the show. It's very exciting to come and talk all things course creation and marketing.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. We have a lot in common so I know this is going to be a lot of fun to go back and forth. I know that you have a lot of experience in online courses, online course creation, and marketing and sales strategies. And I can't wait to dive right into that.

But I always like to start the podcast at the beginning and would just like to hear a little bit of your story. Where did you come from? What were you doing before you got into online business? And then how did you get into this world?

Linda Reed-Enever
That's an interesting story. I am now a Thinkific approved expert. I teach course creation as well as marketing. I started actually teaching when I was 14. I used to teach dance; I was a ballet teacher so I used to teach dance.

And then I went off to university to go and study teaching and teach children. I loved children, but I hated the education system. And along the way, I paid my way through uni by working in marketing and working in call centers and all of those sorts of things.

And I found that that was actually a career that I loved. And I then started to teach. So I've watched the marketing industry go from fax machines, photocopies, telephone calls, through to social media, through to being able to teach online courses, and run websites and do your own podcast like we're doing today and be able to share your message.

So that's what I did. Back in 2014, we founded a group called Business Business Business. I was running face-to-face workshops. And at that point in time, we had members all across Australia and also internationally that were wanting to learn from me.

And that was my journey into taking what I teach from a classroom into online because there's just no way. Australia is a big country. And even if I tried to travel all of the capital cities, if I did that, I wouldn't be here doing and servicing and working with our clients and running the other tools and resources that we have inside the businesses here.

So that's when I went online. And we did good stuff online. We tried other programs that failed. I was about to actually literally walk away from online teaching when the guys from Thinkific approached me and said, "No, I think we've got what you need."

So I've been with Thinkific since they were very early and since they first started and loved it. And that's what's brought me today to course creation. I spend most of my time now teaching business owners what I do. My team do the lead service stuff and I coach. So there you go; that's me in a nutshell.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. When you said you were teaching in classrooms and you went from classrooms to online business, were you teaching marketing and business at that point?

Linda Reed-Enever
Yeah, I was teaching marketing, social media business, press release stuff. I'm a publicist: most of my time has been in publicity, troubleshooting, so managing the organic message. And that's still my focus is always about managing the organic message that's going out.

If you want ads, yes, I can do it, but it's not something that I do regularly. But we focus on the organic message, and how can you move your message out there positively.

Jeremy Deighan
And that's still a big center of your business now?

Linda Reed-Enever
Yeah.

Jeremy Deighan
Let's talk about that because I know organic pops up a lot. I know everyone wants to fast-track to ads, but there's a lot of power in organic and there's a lot of sustainability there too. So let's just dive into organic marketing strategies.

What are some things that you see that are working, thinking about course creators and those that are out there trying to promote their courses? And we have all kinds of different niches and industries who listen to the podcast. So keeping that in mind, what are some of those strategies and some of those methods that you follow?

Linda Reed-Enever
I'd love to tap into first jumping into ads because lots of people want to jump into ads. But if you run ads, then you gotta think about it from your point of view. And if you're running Facebook ads or anything like that, and the page has nothing on it, there's no street cred to back up your ad, there's nothing for people to be able to see.

So this is where your organic stuff comes in. Your organic stuff is actually laying the foundations so that when you do an ad, it's got some street cred behind it. It shows that you know your stuff. And that's what organic marketing is all about.

It's actually about educating your market before they buy that course, book that consulting call, or taking your challenge, or whatever lead magnet that's going to lead people through to your course. So on your Facebook pages, on your YouTube profiles, on Instagram stuff, you want to share that you actually know your stuff.

And that means taking some of that knowledge that you have and putting it into bite-sized tips. And organic marketing is the foundation for your ads. And if you skip it, yes, you can get results. But it's not sustainable to keep putting money in time after time.

All of the algorithms, all the social media algorithms are looking for really good content. And if you produce that, you can actually get results out of organic content that you would get out of ads just as equally as well.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, I really like that. That's a great strategy because if you were going straight to ads, and you didn't have a converting offer, and your landing page had some major flaws in it, then you won't know what part of the ad isn't working.

But with the organic strategies, and like you're talking about the ability to convert and see what's working and not working, then putting ads behind that is only going to amplify it. Correct?

Linda Reed-Enever
Exactly. And you can look at, guys, if you're teaching on Thinkific, make sure you've got pixels installed in it. Make sure that you look at what your insights are and what's engaging. And Facebook released mid this year an app called Facebook Analytics and it starts to give you analytics about what's engaging, how engaged your actual page audience is and starting to see those statistics about what's happening.

YouTube, obviously, has it and the guys at TubeBuddy help you work really well optimizing your videos to make sure that they're getting the best reach. But when we're creating courses, and this is what I teach my course creation students all the time, when we're creating courses, we're the most passionate and most excited about our course.

So, as you're recording something and you're recording a tip, my top tip is to actually stop for a second and record just the basics bit that's going to help the people lead towards your course. So matching your marketing recording and why you're actually recording your course content so that you can use that.

You write down your tips and you take little snippets so that the people can engage with that content, and then lead your course. And it's fine to give them a tip. And then later, if you're looking for more information, then head to my course over here. This is where we'll deep dive into that topic.

Jeremy Deighan
Oh, I love that. That's a great idea. So basically, I'm going to record a course on a subject, I always say guitar playing because I like to fiddle around with the guitar. I'm no expert by any means. But I'm going to teach something on how to do something on the guitar.

And while I'm in the process of creating that course, I'm going to take these little pauses and record little bite-sized chunks of information that's going to become content, later on, to drive traffic to the course. Is that correct?

Linda Reed-Enever
Absolutely. Let's take the guitar course option, for example. So if you're going to record a guitar, what you might do is a how-to-tune your guitar video that happens to start on YouTube. And you might even take those first couple of lessons from your course, and they might actually be on YouTube or Facebook, leading through to your course because they're a little bit of education but inside your course.

Now, bearing in mind, people buy your course because the information is in one spot. They don't buy your course because that bit was out on YouTube. You're obviously going to add value, but they're buying it because the information is in one spot.

I have lots of course creators say to me, "But what I teach is out on YouTube." And I say, "Yes, but part of the reason people buy courses is the convenience of the information and the way that you teach it."

So, Jeremy might record a how-to-tune-your-guitar. If he's going to teach a specific song or three or four different songs, he might do the intro to the song in the lesson here and then go, "To learn how to play the song along with me, head over to the course over here buy the course."

Jeremy Deighan
That's great. That's a really good idea and that gives you a lot of content that you can create because all you have to do is always be thinking about the step that happened right before what you're teaching, and using that as a lead in to the next thing.

Linda Reed-Enever
Or just give them a snippet.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, just a piece of it. So thinking about what a lot of us do, and a lot of us do what I think incorrectly, we have something we want to teach. I love guitar; I want to teach guitar and I go out and I spend six months creating a guitar course. I have it and now I publish it on Thinkific. And tomorrow, I'm going to have millions of dollars.

But we know that's not right. We know that there's marketing, and there's traffic, and there's things that have to go into place into making sure that you get sales. So, imagine that I created a course and now I want to sell that course. I don't have any audience. I don't have any authority at all.

Where would you recommend someone begin? Where should we start so that we can begin building some sort of traffic or authority in our industry so that we can sell our course?

Linda Reed-Enever
Okay. I'm going to step everyone back to this point of why we're building our courses, but we actually need to start the marketing at that point, especially if you don't have an audience. You need to start selling to convert that audience either on Facebook or by lead opt-in sequences, or appearing on podcasts like we're doing here today. And having a conversation and sharing your expertise so that you can start to build your audience.

Now, the opportunities around this, obviously, the opportunity to guest post on most of your topics out there. Most people have a website, or there's something you can write on. You can maybe look at running a Facebook group; it's a good way of building authority within a space. You can look at appearing on podcasts.

But if you guest post and you appear on podcasts, what you're doing is you're getting a transfer of trust. You're getting a transfer of trust from the host audience to you. And if you can convert that well, you can convert that across to either leads for your database via a really good opt-in, or you can convert it into saying, "This where you follow me for more information," and delving in from there.

And then, obviously, the social platforms; if you optimize your content. If you're using YouTube and you optimize, and I'm a big fan of TubeBuddy, I love to buddy, you optimize it for the keywords. You optimize it for search, then you are going to start to appear on search.

But I think what most course creators forget is the marketing process, what we do now will affect our business in three to six months time. And that has been marketing for the 20-something years I've been in it. It's not changed. We are in the world of social media so we're expecting a more immediate reaction. But it normally is what we're doing now in three to six months' time.

And just because we've created the course, we need to understand that our students may not be ready to take the course. They might need to see that message as research says seven to eight times before they're ready to go, "Yes, I'm prepared to give you my credit card and buy your course."

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. I know because I've been in it for a while and doing blogs and doing podcasting; until you see the growth over a year, you can't really realize how long it takes. If you start a new blog, it could take six to nine months for you to even start ranking properly on Google.

And I like what you said also about the fact that it does take many touchpoints of getting to know someone. Typically, a lot of people won't go out and just buy the first thing they see. They will do research and they'll ask people and they'll get advice, and they'll take many touchpoints to buy that product, I feel like.

You're right; it's the same thing with courses. They might have to see you over and over again until they get to the point where they want to invest in you.

Linda Reed-Enever
And I talk about this from an opportunity. Course creation is part of a sustainable business and part of your business offering. I guess you could have an amazing course creation business and you can teach it. But you would have heard even in my introduction: I coach, I consult, I do classroom teaching, we do live-teaching.

So there are multiple ways that we do what we do and it's about sustainability. And also, we talk about learning styles when we're looking at course creation. It's the same in marketing.

Some people want to live or some people want to go through life challenges. Some people want to touch; kinesthetic learners, so they actually want to be in the classroom with you. Other people want the self-paced. They're a little bit more introverted learners.

We need to look at how we deliver our content in a way that people can engage with it. And the same with our marketing message. I keep saying to my guys that video is king at the moment, but if your audience is engaging with text in written format, then do that. Have a look at what your audience engages with.

And it does take time and please don't get overwhelmed by the, "Hey, I did a six-figure launch," or, "I've got a six-figure this," because the reality of it is I asked every time when someone says, "Someone's going to teach me how to do six figures." Where is the decimal point? Because the decimal point can be anywhere in those six figures. You gotta look at it from that point of view.

Jeremy Deighan
I really like what you said that, in the beginning, it's great to do guest posts and podcasts, Facebook groups where you can maybe leverage a different audience and build that transfer of trust. But let's say that you really wanted to start doing your own thing. Maybe it's blogging, podcasting, or a YouTube channel, what is some advice that you can give?

You talked earlier and you mentioned paying attention to what your audience is responding to. So if they are responding to the written, maybe you blog. Or if they respond to video better, maybe you do Facebook Lives or YouTube. Are there any tips or tricks you can give us on what would be the best way to figure out how we can find that out?

Linda Reed-Enever
Oh, that's a good old one called trial and error. I actually say to most of my clients and most of my course creation students when we come into this process, you need to be across the marketing channels.

If you've got professionals, for example, and you're wanting to teach with professionals who are traveling, and they're going to and from work every day, then we know podcasts are one of the ways that they consume their information because you're in their ears. And by being in their ears and being in a podcast situation, you're actually getting into people's heads; your voice will repeat, they take that information in.

But just the same as we talked about the learning styles for our course, we've got audible learners who will take information in by podcasts, and visual learners who will take information in via video, and your audio you cover in the video as well. So you've got your podcasts and YouTube channels and those sorts of things, and Facebook videos and LinkedIn videos that will help you rank.

You've then got the opportunity to look at your written content. And I actually say mix it up. If you're going to do video, then have the transcript. Have the written format so that people who don't want to so much listen or watch can read. So that you're tapping into both learning styles within that area as well.

The biggest thing about knowing what people are going to be is to look at your insights. So if you've got Google Analytics, have a look at what keywords were coming up on your blogs, and what people are searching for. Google sends you now, if you've got Google Analytics on your website, and is looking at starting this process, they send you a search console report every month which says what your most popular search terms were, what your most popular blog post is.

Go look at that blog post or go look at that piece of information. Can I go further on that? Can I make a podcast episode? Can I make a video, or even still can I make a course? Look at the insights and also just turn up and talk to your students. Your students will tell you what content they want from you. Your audience will tell you because they're saying I need that step first.

And the other thing is, don't forget to teach the basics. So your marketing message might be the basics that leads people on to more of an advanced course. And by doing that, and I said again, you are looking at podcasts, looking at all those things. Go search on YouTube what people are searching for. Go have a look at putting your topic and see what's happening.

Go and have a look at what other people are teaching and then the questions that are being asked on those videos, or on those pieces of content and create the content that's going to go out there. And one of the best platforms you can find the questions is Quora and Reddit. People are asking questions in there all the time.

It's a goldmine for (a) looking at what your course content can be, but (b) looking at, well, if I create the marketing message because that's the stage before my course, if I create marketing content around it, and I educate my market, and that's my big one, if I can educate my market, then I can lead them to my course.

And please, don't be afraid of giving away information. When you're in fear, that comes through in your marketing message. So teach and teach naturally, and make sure that people will lead to you. It will happen, but it happens all the time. It's not a quick process.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. And I know that that is something that comes up often is people ask, "How do I tell the difference between what I should give for free and what I should put in my course?" So how do you answer that question?

Linda Reed-Enever
I normally say you've got to provide more value in your course than you do within your free... Actually no. Your course has got to provide more of that added value to the content you put out there in your marketing. But your content and your marketing needs to be the same style that people are going to gain within your course or you're going to have a massive disconnect when you get there.

So you teach, but you might teach in short five-minute type videos or one-minute videos, or you might use Instagram reels to teach or share a top tip along the way. And then you might lead people through to the course, or you might put the series together.

The thing is, you can give a lot and I say this to all my students to be givers. Is that something we run for free or is that something we charge for? Would people put their money across for a challenge or something like that?

Educating and leading your market through the cycle is actually about having different price points, about having the free stuff, then having sort of low-cost, entry-level stuff, and then going through to your VIP offer, whether that's coaching or a guided course delivery throughout that process.

But if we, in putting together our content in a free situation, work with a level of fear, it will come across in our marketing if we're worried about giving too much. I say that to my students, "Don't worry about giving too much; worry about educating your market and trust that it will happen."

And it's really hard depending on each course creator, where that line is, and how the nurture sequences are going to sit and lead. And if you're asking someone to give you $7,000 or $8,000, or $2,000 for a course, then you have to give more in your pre-education marketing to build that trust, to get that transfer. But if it's a $97, or $197 course, then you've got the ability to maybe have just five or six videos that you continually use or five or six pieces that lead to that topic along the area.

But everything in course creation, all your marketing should be placing you as the expert. So you want to show your audience that is Googling and stalking you and researching you because that's what social media is allowing them to do, that you have knowledge on the topic.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. I agree with that, too. Yeah, that's very important to make sure that you're presenting yourself as an authority. And I like also what you said about making sure that there's not a disconnect between the type of content that you're providing and what's in your course because I've seen that before.

I've seen that you have one kind of video on YouTube, but then when you get into the course, it's something completely different. And you're like, "Why did I even purchase this? "

We're building our authority, we're building our trust, we are looking at Quora and different places where we can gather some information. And we start publishing on a different platform, whatever it'd be: a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast. What kind of schedule should someone keep whenever they're doing this type of thing?

There's different courses of thought. Take a bunch of content and throw it all out at one time and let it sit. Other people say to publish once a week or three times a week, five times a week. What do you feel about that?

Linda Reed-Enever
A consistent one. Now, I teach evergreen marketing. I talk about sharing your marketing; making sure that it does not have a date, and sharing good knowledge that can be shared over and over again when it comes to marketing your course content and putting those videos and that together.

And even to the point that I say to lots of my students make sure that you're not in T-shirts unless you wear T-shirts all year round. You're not in T-shirts or singlet tops when you're recording your promo videos. Make sure that you're in something that could work in winter or work in summer when you're putting your promo videos and that sort of stuff together for your courses.

So I'm a big believer in content batching and in Australia here, I have a group coming with me away for a weekend. We're actually going to focus on writing blog posts. And out of that, I'll most probably get ideas and frameworks for about seven or eight blog posts over that weekend.

Now, I'm not going to put them all out there at once because that would just be flooding the algorithms with information. When you build a website, you most probably need to have 10 or 15 blog posts up there to show your knowledge and your expertise. When you start your YouTube channel, if you can turn up weekly, then that is great. If you can start to add more videos...

And whatever you do, it's going to take the algorithm time to get to know you; whatever algorithm. Whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook; it's going to take time for it to get to know you and get to know that you're making quality stuff. But batch is my top tip.

So batch out and we started with this in the beginning. Batch as you're creating your course. You're never more excited about your course than when you actually start putting it together. So batch some content.

And if you record a video and you think, "That's a really awesome tip," write it down and see if you could write that into a blog post and part of your marketing. And then batch the content that's going with it.

To give you guys an idea, my 2021 online workshop live training session is all up and running on our website. All up and running on our website so that my students know that these are my live online trainings for 2021. And we will batch the marketing content for that very early in the next couple of weeks.

So that feeds everyone through to the information, and then we put it into our social programmer, and we can walk away because I know that when I'm sick of spreading the message about that course or workshop is that moment in time that I actually need to wrap it up.

Because not everyone in my audience has heard it and not everyone in your audience will hear that message the first time. Not everyone sees that Facebook post. And I have many course creators going, "I shared it on Facebook three times." I'm like, "That's just not enough."

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, engagement is low, and you gotta keep tackling it. And some of the platforms are even worse than Facebook.

Linda Reed-Enever
Oh, yeah. And it's noisy out there, guys. It's noisy. And at the moment, COVID made it even noisier because we were all in the world of social media. We're all trying to get online, and we're all trying to teach and sell our online courses.

Jeremy Deighan
That's right. I love batching. I've been batching the podcast episodes the past couple of days. And it's great because it gives you a chance to really get focused on the content and get focused on the task at hand. And then once you batch, I'll go ahead and schedule these podcast episodes out months in advance.

Then they will just go out without me having to be there babysitting them. And I enjoy that because I know that if I get sick or something happens, and I can't do something that week, it doesn't matter. That content is going to still come out on a consistent basis, which I think is super important.

Linda Reed-Enever
I do the same for my podcast. I record five episodes at a time. And don't do long podcasts. My episodes are max 10 minutes.

Jeremy Deighan
I like it. Let's hit on the evergreen marketing for a minute. I think most people listening probably know what that means, but I just would like to clarify a little more. When you talk about evergreen marketing, what would be some examples of that versus non-evergreen marketing?

Linda Reed-Enever
Okay, let's go to a guitar example again because we've got it. Okay. So Jeremy is promoting his guitar training course. The non-evergreen marketing might be his pre-launch special. So, if you take it now, you get a bonus one-on-one session with me, for example. That's not an evergreen marketing.

His evergreen marketing could be things like that guitar lesson; learning how to play a riff on the guitar, and then to learn the rest of it. That becomes part of the evergreen cycle because that's technically not going to change how you start the introduction to play the riff.

What I teach most of my course creators is about taking your top tips and your knowledge and creating a series of graphics around it. So evergreen content; you just gotta think like the tree. It is the tree that is green all year round. It can be shared again, and again, it doesn't matter when it's shared. There's no date, and there's no time that ties people to that message.

Jeremy Deighan
Sorry, I'm furiously taking notes. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's basically just the things that you're going to be able to share over and over again. Do you do this with content also? I guess you should because you want your content to be something that people can find later down the road.

I ran into this problem because I've taught courses on software before. And the problem with software is it updates and they change interfaces, and they add this and take things away.

Linda Reed-Enever
I teach Facebook.

Jeremy Deighan
That's a really hard one because it's not evergreen. So how do you battle that? Just do your best or do you have any tips for that?

Linda Reed-Enever
Well, software is obviously going to change and update and those sorts of things. Hopefully, what you can do is you can adjust. So, like our Facebook for business course, it's still the foundations of that are very much, "This is how you run your profile." Facebook haven't changed the terms of service too much inside that space.

But we talk about how do you run it? What's the difference between groups and profiles and pages and how do you do it? The Creating Communities with Facebook one has been the one that's most probably the hardest course for us to update at the moment because Facebook are still rolling out the changes, and they haven't been rolled out to all of the groups.

But the foundations about creating communities on social media because it technically doesn't have to be Facebook, it can be any group that you run is the same. It's about engagement. It's about going through the content and creating good content to engage with those audiences.

Yes, but when I teach; how do you delete messages from Facebook Messenger in 2016, and people still come back in 2020 telling me that that video is old and I should really update it, it's awesome. But the other part of me turns around and says, "Could you please look at what the publish date on YouTube was?"

Bearing that in mind, if you are teaching software or you're teaching stuff like that, you don't want to remove that content from your channel. If you remove that content from your YouTube channel or your Facebook video libraries, it's going to affect your view rate. You don't want that. But you do want to maybe if you do have an update, link through to an updated video.

And for blog posts and all of that sort of stuff, Google loves it when you come back and visit an old blog post, make sure that the keywords are still relevant, and update it with anything and then republish it. It just shows that you care about your content enough on that website to keep it up to date.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, and it's good for the person viewing that because how many times do you go to Google and you see that the article was from 2012. And it could be the best article in the world. But you're like, "I'm not reading that."

Linda Reed-Enever
And the other thing is if you can on your blog, if you're writing evergreen content, don't put date and time stamps on it. Just remove that bit of your blog posts.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, very good. So, someone is out there, they got their course and they are publishing on a consistent basis. They've got some evergreen marketing that they're doing, and they're starting to gain some traction. They're getting traffic, and they want to sell the course.

So now they put their links on their YouTube channel, and they're not making sales. Let's talk about the marketing that goes in between that section that me and you know, but let's explain it to the rest.

Linda Reed-Enever
Okay. The first thing is to have a good look at your landing page. I see so many course creators put so much work into the course creation. And then when I say to them, the first thing I say is, "Can you put a video on your landing page that actually introduces you and the course to the people because you don't know where the people are coming to find you and you're expecting your people to know you?"

So, make sure that your landing page explains who you are, why you're an expert, why people should trust you to buy from you, and what's going on from there. Because if you don't do that, you have no clue where people come to your landing page, what you do once you look at your analytics.

But when we're creating a landing page, I could come from a recommendation from a friend. It could come from someone who's never seen you. They've just Googled you and found you, or they've found you in a course directory, or they found you somewhere else. So introduce who you are.

Introduce to the students what they're going to learn and take away. What are you covering in it? And if they need to have some knowledge beforehand, before this course, you might need to know this. And then you can direct them either off to some of the YouTube videos or a basic course that is coming through before they get into that world.

And then ask them to buy. Now, I'm not a fan of that yellow highlight, scroll-for-20-miles landing pages. Give them the opportunity. Provide the benefits via the introduction; have a Buy button. Provide what you're going to lead them through; have a Buy button. Provide your curriculum outline; have a Buy button. Don't make them have to scroll to the top of the bottom or read 100 pages to buy from you.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, those long landing pages are something else. What do you feel about offering a free course? I know this is something I get asked a lot, too. What about doing a free course so that people can get to know you more before sending them into the main course?

Linda Reed-Enever
Absolutely. If you can run a freebie or a free challenge or a free opportunity. But I tend to do lots of my free content actually out in the world of social and YouTube and running people through that. But one of the working days I'm running online next year is actually about creating courses and challenges from the content you already have.

So bearing in mind, you might write a challenge or an online course, or a freebie. And you might use the blog post that you already have and the videos that you already have on YouTube for that free course to take them through a five-day email sequence course that delivers the content to them in a way that they can engage, and then ask them to buy. The same with your ebooks and your nurture sequences. You might provide an ebook.

And the biggest thing I see people do in the ebook world is they provide an ebook, and then they ask for the sale straight away. They haven't actually put the value in between. So our formula for when you do ebooks is to provide the value, put the ebook in, have a lovely button down at the bottom of the email that talks about your course, but it's subtle.

Day two, three, and four, you're providing just a couple extra tips that will help them on the ebook they've downloaded. And then day five is your primary one. And we've spoken for a couple of days now. Now, that email sequence might run over a fortnight.

In Australia, our market is very suspicious about emails coming in daily. So we tend to run over a fortnight period. And we look at just making sure that we've nurtured people through. We've actually given them enough information. We've given them enough to develop that trust because, once again, you run an ad on Facebook for an ebook, going in for the hard pitch straight afterwards is not great.

And we've all been on the receiving end of it. I was on the receiving end of it the other day. I just bought something for $7. By the time I got through it to actually get access to the content, there were three screens asking me to hand over my credit card for extra money.

Jeremy Deighan
How do you decide when you're sending people from your content to just your sales page for your course versus sending them to a freebie, a lead magnet, or something like that?

Linda Reed-Enever
I think you've got to have both. So, don't treat your freebies any different to a paid course in ways of leading your people through. Your freebies might be your ebook or all those sorts of things. It just depends on where the cycle is. If you were talking about the basics and they need the ebook next, do it that way.

Grab some post-it notes, I'm a big post-it note girl. If you guys could see my office here, you would see these post-it notes all over the spot. Grab some post-it notes and go, "Okay, where are their touchpoints?" So write down your marketing touchpoints first. Then right down where is the next step, and then start to connect the dots. And then obviously the end; where do we want the people to end?

And then lead people through that. But have different paths. Your ebook might lead through to a video. The video then might lead through to the course landing page. So look at the path and look at how you can repurpose that content you've created to lead to different paths as well.

Because you might have the video that then leads to the ebook that leads to another video. So it's about taking them on a little path through your opt-ins to build trust along the way.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay. And are you a fan of having multiple options, multiple touchpoints so that you can gauge where people are at?

Linda Reed-Enever
Yes. And the reason you want to have multiple touchpoints and multiple opt-ins is, once again, the learning styles. So, a reader will read, people who love video will love video. People who want to do will love a five-day challenge email-type situation where they're actually implementing in the meantime.

We cut first to our own learning style when we're creating courses, and that's what I see course creators do all the time. And they go, "I wouldn't do that." And I'm like, "You're not your market; you can't answer that question."

Jeremy Deighan
That's right. I've said that myself before. I've had people ask me and I say, "I'm not your audience. Don't ask me."

Linda Reed-Enever
They do it themselves, "I wouldn't do that, so, therefore, my students wouldn't do that." I'm like, "You're not your market." And that's the thing, course creators, if you can get that out of your head, you are not your market. You have to stop taking your own biases across to (a) course creation content, but (b) your marketing.

Jeremy Deighan
That's great. That's wonderful, Linda. It's been awesome having you on here. And you just got a wealth of information. I would love to maybe have you on the podcast again and dive into some other topics because I know you know a lot about this stuff.

I was looking at your page, and you just have a ton of courses and a ton of stuff going on. I know that you've got a very successful business. And things just look like they're doing really well for you. Well, where do you see yourself in the next couple of years? Where would you like to take your online business?

Linda Reed-Enever
Look, in all honesty, I'd most probably like to wait... Okay, there's a promise in this team that I will not launch another business. We've got two more to go. We'll launch the Course Creator Circle very early in 2021. We'll launch the Knowledge Search in mid-2021.

I started an online business running a parenting website when my daughter was born because I didn't like how mommies were being treated out there in the world because they happened to make decisions on how to raise their children. And it was just a lot of online bullying.

Business Business Business, the Facebook group I ran started because I'd had enough of online bullying in Facebook groups, and now it's 32,000 members strong. Ideas are my thing. And as long as I can keep seeing those ideas and implementing them for others, that's what I see myself doing.

I like now sharing the fact that I've got 20 plus years and I keep my hand in doing what I do and teaching you what I do in marketing and working with my team here to teach other business owners to do it. So I don't know where I see it. It'll change. The industry will change. In five years, it's going to be way different to what it is right now. That's the only thing I've learned in this game is it changes all the time, which is why I love it.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that is awesome. And technology, the ability to reach people; I was sitting there watching TV earlier. I'm watching a TV show and they're Skyping each other on the TV show. And I'm like, "What kind of world are we living in?" I grew up where the phone was still hanging on the wall and had a cord that would wrap around the house three times.

Linda Reed-Enever
Exactly. I have a typewriter here. Well, not the one that I learned to type on. But when I first started, there were no computers in the offices; it was still typewriters. I'm collecting retro pieces of my industry to keep to show. So I've got old TVs and I'm looking for an old telephone if anyone sees one around. Instead of throwing out when I moved out of my uni shared houses; I should have kept one of those because they're now worth a fortune.

Jeremy Deighan
I'm going to tell you a fun little fact; I still have my parents' old telephone. And if you remember on the phones, this was a push-button one, it had a little card where you could put like 10 people's names and phone numbers on it. And I still have it and says grandma and grandpa and I've got everyone's phone number. I'll take a picture and send it to you.

But yeah, it's been great having you on. Did you want to take a minute and just talk about the two programs that you have coming out next year?

Linda Reed-Enever
Yeah, let's talk about it. And by the way, you can join the Course Creator Circle at any stage on Facebook. It's a community where we talk about course creation, and I share lots of tips and knowledge about marketing. The Knowledge Search is on its way out next year.

And that will actually be a directory for those of you who have got courses, for those who've got ebooks, for those of you who've got podcasts, for people to be able to find the knowledge that they're actually searching for. That's a big one for 2021. It will actually take the first half of next year for us to put it together.

And thanks to COVID, it was meant to be a 2020 launch, but I ended up teaching course creators how to come online instead, which was fun. Everything that I aim to do, guys, it's really about teaching you how to share your story and how to educate your market.

And regardless of whatever you were doing, you need to understand the process before you can outsource it to someone else. Because that's when I find in marketing and online business that people get overwhelmed. And they don't understand the basics of the process.

So if you need to talk to someone, talk to a consultant. Have a conversation with Jeremy and myself about what the basics are to know your marketing so that if you do outsource it to a VA or you do outsource it to someone else, you know what should be happening.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay. Thank you so much, Linda, for coming on the podcast today. Where can people find you online and find these programs?

Linda Reed-Enever
Okay. You pretty much Google me and find me at Linda Reed-Enever anywhere. So lindareedenever.com.au is the main site that I run and I teach from. Enever Group is the other one, and that's our main impact. And all of them will update you with whatever projects we are working on and what's coming out and those sorts of things.

But on the homepage of my website, you'll see the businesses and the teams that I lead through the Enever Group area. And then, obviously, our Knowledge Search and Course Creator Circle are coming together. So the Course Creator Circle you'll see launched in early 2021. And the Knowledge Search will be in mid-2021. And we'll be looking for course creators to come and list and share their courses and knowledge as we start to build that one together.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Well, I'm excited. I'll definitely check it out. And yeah, we just appreciate having you on the podcast. I will definitely put all those links in the show notes and have that for everyone for easy access. I just wish you the most success in the future. And we appreciate you coming on the show today.

Linda Reed-Enever
Thanks for having me. It's been awesome to have a chat on course creation.