Course Builder’s Content 101: Strategy, Authority, and Your First Steps to ROI

After attending and following along with Michael Greenberg in this webinar, participants will be ready to carry out, develop, and execute a research-backed content strategy designed to find them more of their ideal customers for their online courses and training programs.

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How To Build Course Authority And Turn Content Into Sales

This LifterLMS webinar with Call for Content founder Michael Greenberg breaks down how course creators build authority and turn free content into paying customers. Michael covers why leads matter more than raw audience size, how to research and segment your ideal buyer personas, and which promotion channels, community, PR, and content partnerships, actually convert. The conversation includes live audience questions on course length, pricing, and CRM tools.

What You’ll Learn

• Why leads, not raw audience size, determine whether your course actually makes money
• How to build authority through the right mix of perception and real expertise
• A practical system for researching your ideal buyer through direct interviews
• Five ways to promote your content without a big ad budget
• How segmentation and lead scoring turn a big list into a personalized sales machine

Key Takeaways

• Set aside about two hours a week (or per content cycle) and spend most of that time promoting, not creating
• Interview real prospects and customers directly before you guess at your ideal buyer persona
• Make your free content as good as your paid content, since weak free content erodes trust
• Pick one or two promotion channels you can sustain (community engagement and content partnerships are the cheapest to start)
• Tag and score leads in your CRM so your launch messaging matches what each segment already cares about

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Leads Matter More Than Audience Size For Course Creators

Chris Badgett: Welcome to this live training webinar. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS, and I’m joined by Michael Greenberg. Today we’re getting into course builder’s content 101: strategy, authority, and your first steps to ROI.

Michael Greenberg: Thanks for having me, Chris. This is designed as something you can follow along with, so grab a pad of paper and take a few notes. I’ll walk through examples specific to your situation as we go.

There’s really only one goal that matters, and that’s leads. Leads are the people who are actually going to pay you money for your course. If you’re putting out a course, that course is going to be used to make money somehow, so you don’t want 10,000 people who are never going to buy from you. You want 10 people who actually will.

What’s important to remember is that leads are really just relationships. As the price of the course you’re selling gets lower, you need more relationships. We’ll talk later about how you scale that relationship building with one-to-many communication, things like email and podcasts. But at the end of the day, you need to know who you’re selling to, and that’s what the bulk of this presentation is about: figuring out who the best group to sell to is, and what kind of content they actually want.

Audience building is the other side of it, because you have to look at your total audience versus the people who will actually buy the course. A lot of the time, people put out great free content, but that content isn’t designed to help somebody buy in the future, or it isn’t targeted to the group of people most likely to buy.

How A Real Estate Course Found Its Most Profitable Buyers

Michael Greenberg: Here’s an example I used during a podcast conversation with Chris. My dad has a real estate business focused in the St. Louis area, and he’s creating a course for commercial apartment investors in St. Louis on how to run a profitable multifamily investment strategy.

For him, there’s a small number of people who have the budget, the income, and the money to actually do that. But there are tons of people who want to make money in real estate in general. Knowing those terms, and understanding that his best buyers are going to be doctors who want passive income but don’t have time to do it themselves, means his strategy targets them specifically instead of just anyone who wants to invest in real estate.

Audience building is a good option. I’m not going to say it’s the worst move in the world, but if you don’t know who’s going to pay you and you just go build an audience, you’re going to run into a problem.

The Real Benefit Of Building A Big Audience

The real benefit of audience building is that a larger audience increases your perceived value, which means you can charge more, you’re more well known, and most importantly, you can partner with larger people who have larger audiences of their own that might include good potential leads for you.

That said, you have to make those connections and actually translate that perception into value for yourself. If you’re selling something high ticket, a more personalized course with interactive elements, that perception translates much more directly. But if you’re selling a one-off, self-serve, download-and-go course, the real value in audience building only comes into play if you make sure those audiences can turn into leads and sales for you.

Building An Email List Through Farming, Not Selling

What this really comes down to is that you’re building a list, likely a list of emails, with your content. You want it to be as big as possible, but you also want to build the relationship and build trust before people buy from you. Think of it more as farming. If you get an email on your list, it might take six months before that person decides to buy your course, and content is how you keep nurturing and watering that relationship until they’re ready to buy.

Why Slow And Steady Farming Beats An Aggressive Sales Funnel

Chris Badgett: Before we get into authority, which is key to building that trust, let’s pause for questions. If you have questions, use the chat or the Q&A box. Michael, what’s a mistake where somebody thinks they’re farming but they’re actually doing something else, something more like spinning their wheels?

Michael Greenberg: I’ll pick an example of somebody who’s actually been really successful with this strategy, even though it’s the opposite of how I’d go about it. He uses his podcast to reach out to potential webinar partners, which is a great strategy. But leading up to the webinar, you get about 20 emails, and every one of his webinars is “no replay,” even though there always is a replay if you look for it. If you subscribe, he follows up with a sequence of ten emails over the next five days, all extremely sales focused.

He does well with it, but that’s because he’s running a B2B course with a $1,500 ticket price and 16,000 emails on his list. He only partners with people who have over 5,000 emails on their own list, and he’s looking for something like a 0.5 percent conversion rate, so he’s hammering thousands of people. That level of aggression just isn’t something I’m about. I like slow and steady: build the relationship, prove your authority, and let the buyer decide when they’re ready.

Chris Badgett: I think that’ll resonate with the LifterLMS crew, not being too aggressive on the sales side.

Why Authority Is Always Relative To Your Specific Market

Michael Greenberg: I’ve talked about trust and about leads, but the way you get there is by improving your authority with high-value target audiences of potential buyers. The number one thing to understand about authority is that it’s relative. It doesn’t matter if every lawyer thinks you’re a marketing expert. It only matters if the one lawyer on your list who wants to buy your course on marketing to lawyers thinks you’re an expert in marketing to lawyers.

You have to think about everything relative to your authority and the person you’re contacting. Do they respect you? Do they know you? How did they get on your list? If somebody subscribes to my list after watching this webinar, I know they already have some sense of what I do and hopefully already see me as somewhat of an authority on content marketing and positioning. But if somebody comes in off a Google search, that’s a totally different situation.

Going back to that big list from earlier, nobody knows you have a big list if you don’t use it, and if they don’t see you connected with other people who have their own big followings. Keep that in the back of your head whenever you’re writing copy or designing your course: think about who you’re specifically trying to target, because that lets you get focused on how you communicate with them, and makes everything feel one-to-one even as it scales.

Authority Is Perception Plus Expertise Combined

Authority is relative, and it comes down to perception. Perception is what happens when people subscribe to your list, or buy a small course or extra thing you’ve got, or buy the whole course. You don’t have to know anything about what you’re selling in order to develop and sell a course. But for people to actually take the course, learn from it, and want to buy the next thing you put out, or even complete the course they’re in, you need the expertise too.

Authority is the combination of those two things. If you only have perception, you’ll get people in the door but you won’t be able to keep them. If you only have expertise, you’ll get a few people through the door and you’ll likely keep those few. Without the combination, and without authority that’s relative to the market you’re trying to reach, you’re going to have a lot of difficulty with content.

Why Marketing-Savvy Sellers Still Get High Refunds And Churn

Chris Badgett: We’ve got a couple of questions coming in from the audience. If somebody’s really good at marketing and gets a bunch of leads, sometimes I see retention or expertise isn’t really there, and the churn rate is higher, along with more disgruntlement. But I also see the opposite a lot, especially in the LifterLMS community: people with real expertise who don’t have lead flow. What’s the key to unlocking that, and why is it such a common problem?

Michael Greenberg: First off, buying courses online is still pretty new, and there’s still a lot of mistrust in it, because there are a lot of people out there with great perception and a pretty poor reality. I’ve personally spent a thousand dollars on courses that were worth maybe ten.

How To Start Generating Leads When You Have Expertise But No Audience

If you’re looking to build up lead flow, a couple of things I recommend right off the bat: I love ads, because if your content is good and you run the right ad campaign, and you actually know the people you’re trying to reach, the right campaign should perform. If you’re not great at marketing or writing copy that sells, start with one-on-one sales instead. Reach out to people in that exact market, your friends who are in that same audience, the people you created the course for, because there’s probably somebody who asked you a question until you got tired of answering it, and that’s how you ended up making the course in the first place.

Start with those people, reach out, let them know, talk about it at conferences, and build up enough sales over time that you can set aside a little money to hire somebody who actually knows how to do the marketing. I don’t recommend every expert become a marketer, and I don’t recommend every marketer become an expert in something else. If you’re good at one and you like it, stick with it, and grind out the little stuff until you can bring somebody in to fill the gaps.

The Two-Hour-A-Week Rule For Course Content

Michael Greenberg: Let’s talk about budgeting. It really comes down to two things: time and money. If you don’t have one, you need the other. The one you need to get started is time, because no matter what you do, there’s going to be some time involved. In my experience, you can get away with very little time if you have a lot of money, but my guess is if you’re watching this and working on your course, you don’t want to put $20,000 or $30,000 into marketing it. So what we’re talking about today is based on having about two hours, whatever period of time you’re putting out content on. If you want weekly content, set aside about two hours a week. If you want monthly content, set aside about two hours a month. That’s about two podcasts, or one good blog post.

Chris Badgett: Is that two hours to create it and promote it, or just to create it?

Michael Greenberg: Just to create it. Promotion is going to take a good bit more time.

Why Promotion Takes 80 Percent Of Your Time And Content Only 20

Promotion is really 90 percent of the game. Ten percent is creating great content, or we’ll call it 80/20 since that’s the popular phrase these days: 20 percent of your time on creating the course, 80 percent on promoting it, because if nobody knows about it, it’s going to do you no good. It’s the same with content generally. I love talking about courses here because courses are content, plain and simple. The best content marketing is giving away stuff people should have to pay for, and the best courses are that same stuff, but paid for. Promotion is hands down the most important part of creating any kind of content.

Community-Based Promotion Builds Trust Before You Sell

I mentioned paid ads already as one good way to promote. I also really love what I call community-based promotion: interacting in Facebook groups and Reddit channels where the people you’re trying to sell to already live. You give value first, show your expertise by responding to questions and posts, and then let them know you have something they can pay for too. That goes back to farming. You put in the time interacting with the community, watering and nurturing it, and maybe a month later you let them know you’re getting ready to launch your course, ask for feedback, and share a sample video or lesson that’s already out.

The Real Risk Of Paying For Ads Before You Have Proof It Works

With paid advertising, you want to make sure people are already buying before you put money into ads. I’m sure you’ve all heard the stories, I hear one about every week, of somebody who paid $30,000 to build a funnel, ran Facebook ads, and got $3,000 back, then swore off paid ads forever. That’s a bad experience, and it’s common. But if you’re already selling and you know you’ve got good stuff, paid ads are a great way to pour gasoline on the fire.

Getting Press Coverage With One Hour A Week

Public relations, just appearing in media outlets relevant to your audience to talk about your topic, and putting a small call to action wherever you appear, is a simple way to put an hour a week to use. If you take an hour a week and spend 15 minutes researching four different people who discuss your topic, then another 10 minutes each writing an email pitching yourself, following up on a previous article they wrote or offering a different angle on something they just published, you’re going to get press. If you don’t, maybe nobody writes about it, but I’ve yet to see that strategy fail, and it’s a great way to get some big wins early.

The combination I generally recommend for people who are time limited is community promotion, because you’re often already in those groups, and public relations, because it’s easy to get started and takes very little time commitment.

Why Content Partnerships Are The Most Effective Way To Grow Your List

My personal favorite is content partnerships, which is actually what we’re doing right now with this webinar. We’re creating a piece of content together: two personalities, two brands, Chris and me, LifterLMS and Call for Content, coming together to create something addressed at the overlap in our audiences. Those partnerships are pretty easy to set up. Pick out four people in fifteen minutes, write four emails, and set aside time to actually appear. Content partnerships are hands down one of the most effective ways to grow your list, grow your audience, and prove your authority to your audience at the same time.

Influencer outreach is my fifth recommendation, and it’s not my personal favorite because there’s so much buzz around it that it’s hard to find the truth in it. The real core of it is reaching out on social or by email, letting influencers know you’ve produced a course, and finding a way to work together, whether that turns into a content partnership or just tagging them on social when they put something out related to your course.

Building A Podcast Just To Network With Bigger Audiences

I brought this flow up earlier because it works extraordinarily well and is very low cost to produce. Build a list of 50 or 100 people you would love to do a content partnership with, and look at whether they publish ebooks, do webinars, or have a podcast. Those are the three best ways I’ve found to partner with them on content.

Develop a podcast specifically to network and reach those people, and have them on as guests. After a great episode together, follow up and invite them to do a webinar with you, or create an ebook or blog post together. If you go the podcast route, make it so one of you is guesting on the other’s show and you both put that episode in your own podcast feed, so you get shared to their entire audience. I’ve seen people build entire businesses on this. If you want to promote and don’t have much time, start a podcast and use it to funnel into partnerships. You get the content of the show every episode, plus the audience growth that comes from the partnership that follows.

Why Your Free Content Should Be As Good As Your Paid Content

Chris Badgett: You said something earlier about your content marketing being as good as your paid content, and that one really good piece of content is better than ten mediocre pieces. Are you saying your free content should literally be as good as one of your best lessons or trainings? A lot of course creators spend a lot of time creating content behind the paywall, but the free lead magnet doesn’t get the same effort. Can you talk about how valuable free content should be, and why it matters?

Michael Greenberg: Yes, your free content should be as good as, if not better than, your paid content, because if you’re not giving me anything good for free, why should I pay you? If your free content doesn’t prove your expertise and show your authority, I’m not going to trust you enough to buy. That’s the simple answer.

How Call For Content Builds Its Own Authority Playbooks

The expanded answer is the example I like to give of Call for Content itself. We put out three playbooks, and each one walks through the process we use for that service. So if somebody says they don’t have the money, here’s the playbook, go do it yourself. We built the playbooks we publish based on the internal standard operating procedures we use to actually do the work. Likewise, when we create a course or any content for a client, if we know it’s going to become a bigger piece and a smaller piece, we plan them both from the start and use the same knowledge to create both.

An example we’re working through right now: we’re helping a client put together an audio course with a companion workbook as a PDF ebook. For the title page of each chapter in the ebook, we’re creating an infographic, and the lead magnet download will be those infographics bundled together into an eight-page ebook that gives a broad overview, a couple of quick wins, and shows the quality of content inside the full course.

Why Three Focused Playbooks Beat Daily Blogging

Chris Badgett: Why do you have three playbooks instead of blogging daily? Head over to callforcontent.com to check them out, but why three playbooks instead of daily blogging?

Michael Greenberg: I’m honestly not great at thinking of something new to write about every day, and you don’t need all that daily blogging content. You need a few really good pieces so you can spend the rest of your time promoting them. We update two of our three playbooks once every six months to a year, and the rest of the time goes into ad campaigns, outreach, and doing things like this webinar, because we already know our content is good.

Chris Badgett: I really like the name Playbook, because people don’t want information, they want a process and a system to follow. An ebook is just electronic information, but a playbook, by design, is like X’s and O’s on a field. You do this, then this. It’s a system, and I think that’s a great name.

Busting The Myth That You Should Always Chase The Highest-Paying Buyer

Chris Badgett: I like what you said earlier about having something for people who aren’t ready to buy yet, because it busts a modern myth: that you always have to go up market, charge the most possible, optimize for hot leads, and automate everything toward that. If you slow down, and somebody doesn’t quite qualify on budget, you can still help them with your playbook. When your content helps them get results, they’ll come back once they have the budget, and they’ll already be following your instructions, which makes them a perfect client.

Michael Greenberg: I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes. I’m a big fan of that. If somebody asks me to help and I don’t have a way to help them, I’m not doing my job right. At the end of the day, as a content creator, an expert, an authority, your job is to help as many people as possible, because those people talking good about you, that good chatter, eventually turns into good sales.

Two Ways To Plan Your Course Content

Michael Greenberg: Let’s move into content planning. There are really only two ways to do it: you can go top down from what you already know, or you can go bottom up and do real research. I like to find a healthy balance, because most of the time people think they’ll be fine with only top down, and it doesn’t work out. Then they hire Call for Content, we do the research, and it turns out only about half of what they thought was correct from the top down.

This happens especially with experts, more than with any other group, because you forget how little the people you’re working with actually know. You end up talking over their heads, or not addressing the real problem they came to you with before getting to the root issue underneath. Make sure to do both. If you’ve created a course, you already have the top-down knowledge. Do the bottom-up research too, and if you haven’t created your course yet, use the bottom-up research to inform how you build it, so it solves the real needs of your audience as well as giving them the expertise and the advice that you think they need.

Why You Should Not Worry About SEO When You Start

Don’t sweat SEO. Google gets better at interpreting fuzziness every day, and when people search for things, Google’s updates are focused on figuring out not just what they searched for, but what they actually want to know. If you create really great content, do your research, and design what you create to reach your audience and answer their questions, it will naturally rank over time. It might not get to the top, but it will get you some traffic. That’s really where I’d stop worrying about SEO, because it’s a lot of work, and I’m not about the daily blogging grind.

The whole point of content planning here is that there’s nothing about consistency or planning an editorial calendar with a thousand topics, because if you do your research right, and you know your audience well, you’ll always have things to answer. It could be as simple as a question somebody emailed you halfway through your course about some small detail, and that question can turn into a whole piece of content.

The Right Way To Run A Customer Survey

Chris Badgett: I’ve got a quick question about content surveys, based on your experience as an expert. I’m constantly asking my audience what they’re struggling with, but I see a lot of beginners drop into a Facebook group as a brand new member and their very first post is asking what everyone’s struggling with. They’re trying to do market research, but they haven’t earned any trust, and there’s no context for the question. What’s the right way to do a customer survey?

Michael Greenberg: With a survey, you’re not speaking with someone directly, which means you don’t have the ability to dig into their answers. The right way to run one is to give a reason for it: “Hey, I’m creating a course for you, and this is what my first lesson looks like, this is my table of contents, am I on the right track?” That shouldn’t be the first post you ever make on that account. You should already be hanging around for a couple of weeks, watching the questions people ask and the whole community’s interactions. After two, three, four weeks, once people have seen your face a few times, you can drop in with your survey. The important part is building trust first.

Why Direct Interviews Beat Every Other Research Method

My hands-down favorite way to do research is direct interviews. I like to get on the phone with somebody who has either already bought or is a perfect fit to buy, and just talk with them. You can find the interview question template we use in the authority marketing playbook, under something like “interview your clients.”

Talk with them, get to know them, find out where they hang out online and who they ask questions to. Going back to my dad’s course for a minute: if you’re creating a course for multifamily commercial real estate investors in the St. Louis area, there are maybe a thousand or two thousand people you could ask, so get on the phone with them. That’s very targeted, but even if you’re creating a course for small business owners, or more specifically for the independent chiropractor, get on the phone with a dozen chiropractors and talk with them about their business. Take a couple out for a drink if you can, loosen them up, and one of them might put his head in his hands and say he gets people in the door all day but doesn’t know how to sell them a recurring package. That could end up being one of the primary parts of your course, on how to improve their business. I cannot stress direct interviews enough.

Using The Blending Stick Method To Build Buyer Personas

From those interviews, you use what I call your blending stick. If you don’t know what a blending stick is, think of a charcoal drawing where the shadows look like soft smudges instead of hard lines. That comes from putting down a line of charcoal, then using a tightly rolled piece of paper, a blending stick, to scratch back and forth, picking up some of the charcoal and blending it into the rest. That’s how you get the softness of the overall image, by blending the hard lines together.

The same idea applies here. Take your interviews, your surveys, and all the information you gather about customers, maybe you go on Amazon and read one-star reviews for books on the same topic to see where people complained, and use your blending stick to bring it all together into a few personas that represent your ideal market. I like to name each persona after the actual person I interviewed who’s closest to it, and include all the information from the original interviews as well. You look for the overlaps between them, and use that to develop the personas of your ideal customers.

Why You Cannot Skip Straight To Automation

Chris Badgett: Before we move on to how you turn all this research into sales, I see an issue with people who hear you mention direct one-on-one interviews and direct selling, and they try to automate things too early or limit human interaction, even when they’re just starting out. How would you explain the value of going direct with people, to somebody who thinks they’re supposed to automate everything from day one?

Michael Greenberg: The goal is to eventually automate everything, but there’s a whole pathway in between. If I can’t sell somebody something directly, they’re never going to buy it from me online. Similarly, if I only research the publicly available information, I’m never going to get the real, deep pains that make great content. You have to go direct. Maybe you have an email list and can sell without doing it, but if you want the best feedback as early as possible, you’ve got to pick up the phone or send that email, and it has to actually be personal, because the whole point of automation and scaling is to make personalization appear even when you’re not doing it directly. If you don’t take those initial steps, you’ll never know how to make it look personal once you get to automation.

Three Factors That Decide Which Customer Segments To Target

Chris Badgett: This is a personal issue I struggle with. If you have a horizontal market instead of something tightly vertical, where there’s learning happening across artists, musicians, business people, and coaches, where should you focus when developing personas? I feel like I could come up with twenty of them.

Michael Greenberg: Who gives you money? When we’re doing this for B2B services, we look at speed to close, lifetime value, and enjoyment to work with. Those are the three major factors. For a course, you’re not really working directly with them the same way, so I’d look at speed to buy, whether they see an instant fit and want to purchase, and ability to purchase, whether they have a clear understanding of how they’re going to make money from what you’re teaching. Not everyone is out there to make money, but they need enough to keep whatever they’re doing going. When you’re segmenting, look at the people who are going to get the most value the fastest, because those are the people who are easiest to show the value to in the first place.

For B2B work specifically, we also look at customer support cost. If a subsection of the market is fussy, say a health and beauty niche where nobody knows anything about WordPress, they’ll come to you ten times more often and end up costing you three times as much in support. That might be a market to shy away from. Another factor on the ability-to-purchase side is whether people are already making revenue from their expertise, rather than still working a day job and trying to strike out on their own. We won’t work with B2B clients at all unless they have at least five successful outcomes already, because it weeds out people where our systems won’t work as well. If you have no audience yet and you’re building your course, you might have to build your expertise and your audience at the same time, in which case look at how the content you’re creating for your course can also help build your wider expertise.

Why Personalization Depends On Segmentation

Michael Greenberg: Personalization is equal to segmentation, which I realize is missing a “t.” You can only personalize effectively, and automate effectively, if you segment effectively, and to segment you have to do your research so you can identify the differences between your various audience segments and find the ones that are most profitable, so you can build automations to scale contact with them.

It’s simple when you think about it, but this is where people mess up with automation almost every time. Lead scoring, which is featured in a lot of automation software these days, lets me segment my contacts. If somebody checks out my sales page, we can bump their lead score, and if they drop off during checkout, maybe they land somewhere else on the scale. That lets me create more personalized messages, because the chiropractor I’ve already tagged as somebody who doesn’t manage their own website and doesn’t know anything about digital marketing needs a different pathway than the chiropractor who manages his own site and is looking for advice on a completely different subject. Those different segments need different messaging, because they have different pain points and different personas.

The Fruit Tree Analogy For Scaling A Content Business

This is important to remember, especially for anyone who’s never spent time around a fruit tree. When a fruit tree starts producing fruit, it produces more than you can consume, so you make jam, cider, and whiskey, things that last a lot longer than raw fruit. If you’re taking the time to build an audience, taking the farming approach, choosing audience building over quick leads, it’s going to take longer, and a lot of people give up before they reach that point. With Call for Content, it took me three or four months before I made my first sale, and then I made so many sales in the next two months that we had to pause and rework everything, because I took the time and I knew I was right, since I’d done the research.

Why Some Courses Sell Better Through A Launch Than Open Enrollment

If you follow the process and the steps, time becomes the big factor, and I’d honestly expect six to twelve months before you get your first sale doing something with content and digital products, which is why picking up the phone for direct sales can be really important early on.

At Call for Content, we work with a lot of executive coaches and business coaches who build specialized lists and often run courses that look more like workshops over six or eight weeks, requiring real time to interact with the community during the course. For them, we see the best results with an annual or biannual launch, gating access and saying the course isn’t available yet but will be, opening the gates two or three times a year. The rest of the time, the content is small samples that build the relationship for when the course opens.

Going back to segmentation and lead scoring, maybe there’s a group of people who open every one of your emails between launches and see all your great content, but don’t buy when the launch comes. That might mean your launch messaging isn’t targeted to somebody who already knows all this stuff, so you might need a separate segment for people who are avid consumers of your free content. Or maybe there’s a group that doesn’t look at most of your content but always clicks your articles about lead generation specifically, in which case you’d want to tag them and focus your launch messaging on lead generation, since that’s what they’re most likely to buy based on. One of the reasons we really like the launch model is that it gives us time to do research, replan, and reposition, and it gives us a single point where we know whether the launch worked, and if not, what to do differently, and if it did work, how to do it even better.

A Real Persona Segmentation Example Using Chiropractors

Chris Badgett: Can you give an example, maybe using the chiropractor case, of having more than one persona instead of just “chiropractic business owner”?

Michael Greenberg: First off, there’s size of business and length of time in business. A chiropractor fresh out of school is in a very different position than one who’s struggled for the past ten years because digital has been eating into their business, or because their older clientele has moved on. Whether they already have a good digital presence versus not can make a huge difference, and whether they’re in a major metro area versus not is a large difference too. Chiropractic is a local business, so you can’t skip segmenting by geography. The US market is incredibly different from, say, the UK market, and you need to know the differences and speak to them.

There’s also female versus male chiropractors, which likely affects communication and even clientele. I don’t know the exact stigmas, but I’d assume some exist, the same way people often say they only want a man or a woman for certain services. Knowing all of these things gives you a better understanding of where somebody fits, and normally only a few of those characteristics really matter for the final personas, but you want to gather them all up front so you know which ones to blend away.

What Call For Content Actually Offers Course Creators

Chris Badgett: I wanted to call out your Authority Marketing Playbook. What is Call for Content, Michael, and what can people expect if they download it?

Michael Greenberg: Call for Content is a podcasting agency these days. We started out as a B2B content marketing agency, then found out we really loved working with podcasts, since they’re a lot easier to create than blog posts, so we went that direction. We specialize in research-first content creation and marketing, meaning we do all the direct customer research that a lot of people skip over in favor of jumping straight to keywords for SEO. We’re unlikely to even look up a keyword until right before we publish an article.

If you download the Authority Marketing Playbook, you get a PDF plus a set of Google worksheets that walk you through positioning yourself as an authority in a targeted niche market, based on your prior success or prior proof of authority. The whole thing is also posted as text online with a table of contents, but the PDF download is how you get the extra workbook resources.

We break our client work into two service lines: authority marketing and podcasting. Our introductory authority marketing engagement is priced at $2,500 for a six-week customer research and content strategy project, designed to take you from having some success in your business but no clear content plan, to knowing your personas, knowing who you’re trying to reach, and having a strategy for your first twelve pieces of content. For podcasting, we offer an audience research and valuation engagement, priced at $500 for four weeks, designed to help you understand your existing audience’s personas and give you a couple of strategies for growing or monetizing that audience.

Start Your Own Research With A Cup Of Coffee Or A Phone Call

Chris Badgett: You mentioned research as a part of what you do, and being intentional instead of getting on a content treadmill. I like that. You also said you work with people who need at least five successful outcomes for their learners. I think we forget that as course creators sometimes. If you’re an expert with a day job, you’ve developed expertise on the job, but that’s one outcome for your employer, not necessarily one you’ve delivered as a consultant on your own. Before automating everything, it makes sense to do a lot of that one-on-one work first, rather than scaling too early. What general advice do you have about doing this research, developing customer avatars, and being conscious about which types of customers are easiest to work with, most valuable, or easiest to sell to?

Michael Greenberg: Start with the research, and start really small. Start with a cup of coffee or a phone call. If you’ve already made sales, reach out to a couple of people and say you’re looking to create version 2.0 of the course, ask how you can make it better, or what questions it left them with. If you’re just getting started, have that same conversation, and halfway through, float the idea: “I’m thinking about creating a course for chiropractors like you, what would you want to see in it?” If you’re selling something that can be marketed B2B, get on LinkedIn and message half a dozen or a dozen people who fit, say you’re doing market research and ask if they’d hop on a ten or fifteen minute call. That’s really where I’d start.

The Authority Roadmap Exercise For Course Creators

If you’re trying to figure out how to even talk to people about being the right person to make this course, I’d recommend an exercise from the Authority Marketing Playbook called the authority roadmap. List out what you’ve already done that proves your authority, what you’re currently doing that proves your authority or expertise, and then look at where you’re going next and what you’re trying to do to prove that authority in the future. One of those things is likely creating a course, but maybe it’s also something like being a keynote speaker at a conference in six months. If that conference covers the same topics as your course, you’d want a sample of your course ready by then, so when people see your keynote, they can get in the door. Looking at what’s happened, what you’re doing now, and what you’ll be doing next can really help snap everything into alignment.

Where To Find Michael Greenberg’s Free Office Hours

Chris Badgett: Michael Greenberg is from Call for Content. I’d encourage you to go download his Authority Marketing Playbook at callforcontent.com. He’s got frameworks and steps to help you put all this into action for your business. Any final words before we sign off today?

Michael Greenberg: I host free office hours a couple of times a week. If you think of a question later, or you want to walk through some of this process for your specific case, work through it in the chat. It’s free, and it gives me great new content to put out later, since every question turns into something for me. I love chatting with people about content, courses, and marketing.

Chris Badgett: We share that, being easy to reach and connect with. Again, Michael’s over at callforcontent.com. Michael, thank you so much for doing this training with us today, we really appreciate it.

Michael Greenberg: Thanks, you too. This has been a lot of fun.