How to start a course and community?
A step-by-step guide from: Idea to the announcement post & the waitlist landing page
I am currently working on a new offer.
Today I will share with you, how it all started from an idea to the announcement of it this week.
Roughly, it includes these points, but I will break them down for you into action steps below:
Implementing what knowledgee I have collected over the last years.
Thinking about what to include from the courses & communities I am a part of.
How to announce all this to the world.
And discussing and brainstorming all that with my co-host of this whole offer-building endeavour.
This week we announced our plan, to build this offer:
“The Science Freelance Starter Kit – From Bench to Business”
It will be an offer for Scientists who want to dare to start their freelancing career but don’t know how.
We are both scientific illustrators, scientists & artists, I am also a writer and we both have given workshops and taught others.
None of us has a business background, we live in two different countries, yet we made it work to be successful science freelancers.
Over the years, many people have asked us for advice on how to make it work.
Now we decided it was time to build a proper offer & we want to do it in the open! That is why we made our first announcement of this offer this week.
And guess what?! By today we have 100+ sign-ups on our waitlist!
This did not just happen out of nothing!
In case you want to know what we did for that, I will break it down, including action steps for you:
We are regularly posting on our main social media platform LinkedIN & therefore built a following there
FOR YOU: choose a social media platform & post content regularly
We came up with an offer idea & structure and worked out the details in two weeks
FOR YOU: if you have an idea, come up with a rough plan & brainstorm it
We also included our own experience & the years of questions we got asked to shape our idea
FOR YOU: include your past experiences, knowledge and needs & problems that others have communicated to you
We decided we want to build all this in the open, for people to be able to warm up to the idea for a while, so that it doesn’t come as a surprise & overwhelm them.
FOR YOU: decide how you want to build your offer: share the process or do it silently
We decided on a name that is clear and short, relatable and immdiately speaks to our audience.
FOR YOU: that one took us a while, but its important to make pople imemediateely realize if its sfor them or not. It was also important for me as a stable “anchor”.
We then came up with survey questions to get details from our audience about what they need and want & are missing, so we know how to help them best.
FOR YOU: use your own experience and/or the help of AI tools to come up with a set of questions & multiple choice answers to ask your audience what they want and need & where they are, so you can help them the best
We then planned and wrote these survey posts.
FOR YOU: sit down to plan and write your posts
We also wrote our announcement post, including a picture from both of us, so the people in our networks will see who is creating this great offer!
FOR YOU: how do you want to announce your idea? Choose a great visual, ideally where you are seen, so people know who creates this great ressource (for this to be comfortable & not awkward for you, you would have posted pictrues of yourself already before, see the first point I shared)
We knew we need an email list, so we made a shared email account and created a landing page for people to sign up for a waitlist about our offer
FOR YOU: make a new email account, create a landing page for a waitlist sign-up (we used carrd.co)
That landing page needed to be connected to our own domain, so we bought a domain (thefreelancescientist.com), connected the landing page to that domain as well as our email adress (as that email address was a funny one, we will make a serious email address connected to our domain soon).
FOR YOU: buy a domain, this is why you need a name for your offer, to have everything consistent.
We then posted our announcement post and waited.
FOR YOU: post your offer announcement and the link to the waitlist sign-up!
Hour by hour emails dropped in with people signing up, commenting on our posts & sharing it. We replied to all comments, sent messages and kept being engaged with our audiences.
FOR YOU: stay present in these first hours of the announcement and interact with your audience!
We then manually added all sign-ups in a “Waitlist Starter Kit” email label, because we do not decide yet to get Kit or any other email provider to help us with email automation: but that will come.
FOR YOU: organize your email sign-ups! In gmail its just to create a label and save the new contacts under that label.
So now what is left is: keep on posting about it, sharing our process, sending welcome emails, updates and keep our audience and email list subscribers in the loop.
FOR YOU: keep on doing that :), this is what we will do & I will keep you updated on how it goes!
Soo, that’s it, just a couple of points to consider ;)! I hope this was helpful for you.
As I have never done such a thing, it is a lot that I am learning! There are many things to consider and decide upon and then it is just about doing each of those steps.
And honestly, I had no idea how much is behind just such an announcement post. It is not just the announcement; it is the whole offer, planning, and idea behind that builds this announcement and collects emails.
If you have any other question, feel free to drop me a message!
Love,
Daria