What I Wish I Knew Before Creating My First Online Birth Course
Are you preparing to create an online birth course, make a huge business investment, or revamp your approach to free content as a doula?
If you’ve been wondering how to take a (calculated) leap of faith in your doula business, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you!
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
What do you wish you knew before creating your first online birth course?
How do you confidently make a large financial decision in your doula business?
Am I giving away too much free content in my doula business?
Every Friday, I answer your biggest questions right here on the Birthworker Blog AND the Birthworker Podcast.
To submit a question for next week’s podcast, click here.
Question 1: "What do you wish you knew before creating your first online birth course?"
I wish I knew that I was going to find massive success. I wish I had even an inkling of just how big this was going to get. It would have allowed me to appreciate the grind even more because it wasn't really difficult for very long. Looking back, I wish I would have appreciated the grind in the moment, and I wish I confidently knew in my heart that I would find massive success.
I wish I invested in better platforms and software from the beginning. In my situation, (and 90% of all other online business owners) I didn't have money when I was first getting started. I tried to get the free versions of all the software while telling myself, "When I actually make money, that's when I'm going to invest in the better, more expensive software," which makes a lot of sense, right? If you don't have the money, you don't have the money.
I eventually started making enough money to invest in whatever I needed, but all of my creations were on the lower, cheaper, free platforms. So after I made my first $50,000 from my online birth courses, I actually had to go back and change the entire business. I had to invest in new software, rerecord videos, and move them to new places. Part of me wishes I had more faith in myself and just put all of those expenses on a credit card to be paid off when I started making money. (I'm not telling you to go put everything on a credit card, I'm just saying that I wish that's what I did.)
The most notable software I wish I would have invested in earlier is the course hosting platform. When I started, there was a free platform called MemberVault, (it's not free anymore) and I built my course there. Once I started making some money and could afford what I wanted to afford, I invested in something called ThriveCart, which I wish I got from the beginning. I wish I hired coaches from the beginning, so I didn't have to learn things the hard way. I wish I invested so much more in the beginning because I would've gotten to where I am now a lot faster and without needing to push the brakes to fix stuff that I did wrong because I was trying to do it cheaply or free at the beginning.
If you're interested in getting ThriveCart, click this link. It’s not only a course hosting platform, but it's also a checkout cart. If you've ever purchased anything from me, you've purchased it through ThriveCart. It is absolutely phenomenal. I tell all of my students inside the Birthworker Membership to get ThriveCart because it's honestly that good. I got ThriveCart when I was first just selling an ebook online, my Third Trimester Checklist, and I went from making about $200 per month selling that ebook, to over $2,000 per month as soon as I switched to ThriveCart. It looks so beautiful that it skyrocketed my success.
That's just one example. There are dozens of examples that I wish I invested in earlier, but you live and you learn!
To learn more about launching your first (or next) online birth course, click here to listen to Episode 15: Impact More Lives With An Online Birth Course!
Question 2: "How do you confidently make a large financial decision in your doula business?"
It gets so much easier as time goes on. If you've been to any of my free workshops, I like to tell my story of where I came from, what I'm doing, and what my vision is. In that story, I share the first times I invested heavily in my business. I invested $3,000 in the doula training program that I took when I became a doula, which didn't scare me because I was still working my other job and I had the money to invest. My next investment was in an amazing course from Amy Porterfield called Digital Course Academy. It changed my life, but the $2,000 price was scary for me because I hadn't made money online in my business.
At this point, I was a doula attending births in-person, but I didn't have a large social media following or email list, so I had nothing to back up that $2,000 with. A few months later, I made $14,000 selling my very first childbirth education course, Autonomous Birth Academy. I turned that $2,000 investment into $14,000 within just a couple of months. That was my first wow moment when I realized that investing in myself actually pays off.
So I did it again. I invested in a course called E-Course Empire by Kate McGibbon. It helped me build my funnels, get more confident with ads and email sequences, and do all of the online business stuff. That course was $3,500, and that price scared me a little bit. That's more money than I was making per month back then. Just a few months later, I did a promotion for Autonomous Birth Academy and had a $15,000 month. I got to this place where I'm like, "Wow, any money I invest in myself, I'm going to get that back."
The last investment I made was in a woman named Rose Radford. She is a coach and a mentor. I paid her $15,000 to be a part of her group coaching program. I don't meet with her one-on-one, I just meet with her in a group setting. Investing $15,000 in myself very quickly turned around and led to my first six-figure month. Now I've gotten to the point where I'm like, "Damn, maybe I should go invest in a $50,000 coach. Maybe, that's going to exponentially grow my business."
I wanted to tell this story here on the blog to show that the more reps you put in and make scary financial decisions that pay off, it's going to get easier and easier. With everything else in my life, I make intuitive decisions way more that way than logical decisions. I tune into my whole body, I ask my head, my heart, my soul, and then I just follow my gut. I know that even if it ends up being a bad decision in the end, I'm still going to learn so much from it.
The last thing I'll say about making large financial investments in your business is I truly believe that the easier money flows from you (AKA, the easier that you invest in your business), the easier that money's going to flow back to you. I know that doing this has definitely led to my wild success, to be able to do things like go on a five-week vacation to Israel where we can eat out for two meals per day the entire time and literally not have to worry about anything. All of that stems from making those first scary financial decisions before I even proved myself. If you want to play with the big girls, sometimes you have to make big financial decisions.
Question 3: “Am I giving away too much free content in my doula business?”
My students ask me this question all the time. How do I know what to give away for free? What should I charge for? What should be in a freebie? What should be in a paid offer? What should I save for my course?
I think when you're just getting started as a birth worker, it's a hard decision. You don't have enough experience creating free or paid content to be able to discern what goes into each. I teach my students that your paid content should be “all-encompassing” content. The what to do, how to do it, why to do it, step-by-step, in order. That's what people are paying for. Your free content should just be about what to do and why to do it, but not how to do it. “How do you actually do it?” is a simple question to ask yourself to see if the content should be free or paid.
Disclaimer: 99% of the time, people are not giving away too much free content. I would like to actually see more doulas giving away more content, especially in their freebies. A large part of my work in the Birthworker Membership and Birthworker Academy is auditing my student’s freebies. I'm giving them feedback and telling them what to tweak to make things better. Typically with free resources, doulas aren't going deep enough.
For example, a “10 questions to ask your midwife if you want a home birth” freebie will include literally just the 10 questions. There's no meat! There's nothing else. Make your freebies way more in-depth than you're currently making them.
That one shift alone is going to increase your sales conversion for people hiring you as a doula, hiring you as a coach, and then buying your online offers too. I want people to download your free resource and say, "Holy crap, that is so good. If this is what I'm getting for free, just imagine what I'm getting when I actually pay her money."
As for social media content, try not to post boring, how-to, step-by-step content. I want your content on social media to be what lights people's fire, gets them really emotionally invested, and changes the way that they think about something. If you're posting too much educational content on your social media, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or whatever, it can actually hurt your sales conversions. People could go to your Instagram and say, "She posts everything on her Instagram. She's posting all of the how-to, educational content. Why would I need to buy her course? Why would I need to buy her ebook? She's posting it all here on social media!”
For the most part, we can't impact women's lives just by the free content we're posting on social media. It's 2,200 characters per caption (for Instagram), so we are not posting that much information even at the maximum length. Our clients might think they're learning a lot from our social media and they might feel really prepared for birth, but I know deep down that if you truly want to help someone prepare for birth, they need to either hire you as a coach or enroll in one of your courses. Instagram alone is not going to do it for 99% of people.
Of course, there's always that handful of people who can do it on their own. Absolutely, I was one of those people. I never took a birth course. I just did it on my own, or rather, I became a doula. I considered my doula training as my birth course. Regardless, we just want to separate our free and paid content by the “what” content and the “how” content. Social media content should be mindset reframing, emotional content, and step-by-step educational content
Thank you for reading!
xx — Kyleigh
PSA: The Childbirth Educator Training Program officially opens on April 10th, and you can join anytime, but if you join before the 10th, you will save $500 as an early bird. If you want to get lifetime access to all of the childbirth education curricula that I've ever created, click here to check out the program.
Some of the topics include learning your options, creating a birth plan, overcoming fears, autonomy, breastfeeding, preparing for postpartum, perinatal nutrition, and more. Not only will you get access to our curriculum, but also my best course launching and course creating tips, as well as some behind-the-scenes of the Birthworker Membership.
This program is a vital resource that childbirth educators, doulas, and birth workers are missing. This is going to help you curate your perfect birth course and get it up and running in four months or less. You will be able to follow my exact framework for naming, pricing, launching, recording, and selling whatever it is that you decide to create with our curriculum. It's completely customizable and you do not have to use it word for word.
Unlike most programs that make you use their curriculum exactly as it is, you can actually take our curriculum, and customize it perfectly for your clientele. If only support free birth moms and you want to make a free birth course, awesome. Take our curriculum and curate it perfectly for free birth moms. Take our curriculum, add your brand colors, rebrand it, put your name on it, and create the perfect course for your niche. This will make the entire process so much easier for you, and you won't have to spend 800 hours building anything from scratch.
If you have any questions about the blog post or the Childbirth Educator Program, shoot me a DM @birthworkerpodcast. See you next week!
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.