3 Things I Wish I Had Known Before Starting My Online Course 🍋🍎🍉

Hey everybody,

This Bill Soroka, (Multi-potentialite serial entrepreneur and founder of the sign and thrive notary training course and community, and the Notary Coach brand.)

I had been talking to Zion about some of the things I wish I would have known in the very beginning, and things I would've realized. And that let to me coming up with this list: the three things that I wish I would have realized earlier in this process. Because I think life would have been a lot easier, maybe a little less embarrassing with friends.... Plus I think the revenue and in the impact and the value that I brought my community would have been expedited had I known these three things.

Number One: When I first started out, I was delivering content via YouTube, but that's the medium that I chose. I was going to drive around in my car and just share my journey and share the experience of being loan signing agent and a mobile notary in Arizona. And that's exactly what I did. I just started the channel and started filming myself with absolutely no experience at all. And it's very evident when you see those early videos. But the thing that I wish I would have realized as I was driving around using my phone to film myself in my car as I was driving or pulled over or sitting in front of a house or a store waiting for an appointment, was that video, when it goes on youtube and most platforms is a lot better horizontal than it is vertical. So I started my first film vertical and they look terrible. It makes things blurry. It's really kinda hard to watch. You can see them all over the internet, but just switching that to the "horizontal" changed everything. It pans out, you get more in the frame. It's like watching a real video. So that one little change really made a huge impact on my videos.

The second thing that I wish I would've realized earlier was the value of an email list. That's one thing I completely underrated. I didn't have a whole lot of clarity about the product that I would ever sell. I didn't know how to send emails. I didn't know what I was supposed to talk about the whole time, so rather than gather emails until I did understand it, I just kind of let that go to the wayside and in retrospect, I wish that I would have created a landing page and had a lead-magnet that acted as opt-in. So I could have traded a free piece of information, a free report or something in exchange for somebody's email address. So I could have been gathering those emails for almost a year before I actually had a course to launch. And I think that would have exponentially increased my launch. Naturally it all worked out in the end, but I think it could have launched to greater success with a stronger email list on there.

Then finally, the third thing that I wish I would have realized, or what I wish I had was the confidence to charge what my course was actually worth as opposed to what I was comfortable charging people. I greatly undervalued my course upon its launch. I had lots of reasons to do that. I could justify it. It felt really good actually to, to offer a course that was affordable. (Still Is). But it eliminated a lot of the room to maneuver later on. It's very difficult to launch at a cheap price and then increase the price later. In retrospect I should have done that a little bit differently cause you can always start high and work your way down with promotions, coupon codes and things like that. But more than anything, and I think the biggest struggle, even after I talked to people who are doing this or building their own businesses in various industries, is that many people have a little bit of a hangup about charging for their services, especially when it comes to expertise. It takes a lot to realize that we might actually be an expert and then to actually charge someone for that expertise requires a whole other way of thinking. So we have to kind of grow into that. That's part of the becoming process.

So it's easy to look back and say, Oh, I wish I would've had the confidence to do that. But I've really grown into the type of businessmen that can appreciate that now.

So those are the three things I wish I would have realized earlier. I hope it helps you as you're making your decisions when you start your own online course.

Catch you next time guys.

xxx - Bill