Yesterday I explained why sales pages can be dramatically shorter and simpler when you’re focused on true Buyers and you’ve leveraged the other pillars correctly.
My experience shows me that killing all focus on people who are really just browsing, and instead focusing ALL your energy on Buyers, makes these small six figure solopreneur-type businesses take off.
Today we’re diving into the fourth and final pillar of my framework – the actual products that generate your income…
Simple But Highly Effective Courses. (I Prefer Email Delivered Courses)
If you’ve been following along all week, you know I’m kinda obsessed with simplicity.
I don’t want a complex business with dozens of moving parts, big teams that require me to be on Slack all day, and systems that break when I try to take a vacation.
I don’t mind working hard – I just don’t want to always feel beholden to my business, spend hours working on stuff I don’t care about, or feel confused about what to focus on next.
I want a minimalist business that generates mid six-figures reliably with as little overhead and hassle as possible.
And when it comes to creating courses, most entrepreneurs make the same mistake they make with everything else we’ve talked about:
They massively overcomplicate the process.
They spend months (sometimes years) building elaborate courses inside complicated and clunky platforms…
Only to discover that:
- Nobody wants what they’ve built
- Nobody finishes the course even if they buy it
- The course doesn’t actually get people results
- Writing the sales copy for the course is REALLY HARD because everything is complicated and results of the program are unclear
I used to fall into these same traps.
But about 12 years ago, I accidentally stumbled into an approach that changed everything for me – something I call “Email Delivered Courses” (EDCs).
What exactly is an Email Delivered Course?
It’s exactly what it sounds like: a course delivered daily through email, one lesson at a time.
Instead of dumping all your content into a member’s area where it will likely be ignored, you deliver bite-sized lessons directly to your customers’ inboxes every day for 30-90 days.
This approach has become a calling card in my business model, and it solves virtually every problem I encountered with traditional course creation.
The "genius" of building courses in real-time
The biggest benefit of Email Delivered Courses is that you can build them in real-time.
Here’s how it works:
- Create a simple sales page describing your course concept (or even just a simple email series that send people directly to a checkout page if you have an audience)
- Pre-sell it to your audience (or through affiliates)
- Only start creating the content after people have purchased
- Deliver each lesson one day at a time while getting live feedback
This completely eliminates the risk of spending months creating something nobody wants.
If people don’t buy it, you don’t build it.
Simple as that.
And if they do buy it, you have a paying audience eagerly awaiting your content and providing feedback every step of the way.
This approach removed ALL the pressure that used to keep me procrastinating on course creation.
Why most course creators fail
I talk with course creators basically daily and all of them seem to accept that no one really puts their courses to use – the typical reaction is just to shrug and say, "Nothing I can do!"
Within my framework though – that’s not acceptable because then I don’t get word-of-mouth traffic or repeat business in that scenario.
It’s true that most people never make it past the first few modules of traditional courses.
From what I’ve seen and heard, typical completion rates seem hover around 5-15% for most online courses.
With Email Delivered Courses, my completion rates consistently hit 60-80%.
Why such a big difference?
In part, it’s because people treat their inbox like a to-do list.
When a course lesson lands in their inbox, it becomes a task to complete. If you’ve done your job right, people set aside everything else and read your email immediately.
Additionally, the bite-sized nature of daily emails is far less overwhelming than facing a massive course all at once.
And finally, other course platforms and apps are deliberately designed to keep people scrolling and distracted – email isn’t quite on that level.
When you’re in your email inbox, you tend bounce around and out of it and then come back to it… versus the endless scrolling in apps or forums and then if you leave, you don’t return.
How EDCs create hyper-responsive lists
Here’s where I think the magic really happens:
When you deliver a course via email, you’re training your customers to open and engage with EVERY email you send.
Why? Because they literally paid for this content.
After 30-90 days of opening your daily emails, they’ve developed a powerful habit. They associate your name in their inbox with high-value content worth consuming immediately.
And when the course is over? That habit continues.
This creates a hyper-responsive list that eagerly opens whatever else you send them.
I’ve found that subscribers who go through an Email Delivered Course are 3-4x more likely to purchase additional products compared to those who consumed the same content in a traditional format.
Does every course you create have to be an Email Delivered Course?
No, definitely not.
If you don’t struggle to pump out content sans resistance and procrastination then creating regular video, audio or pdf courses is more than okay.
But I think you should at least have one EDC (for all the benefits mentioned above) and you can even add an EDC to a regular course – kinda like a consumption sequence.
(I teach all of this inside my course Email Delivered Courses btw. Super meta, I know.)
How this creates the perfect “minimalist” business
When you combine all four pillars of my framework, you create a beautifully simple business machine:
- Pillar 1 (Traffic via Affiliates) brings pre-qualified visitors to your world
- Pillar 2 (Email List) builds trust and positions you as an expert
- Pillar 3 (Simple Sales Pages) converts true Buyers efficiently
- Pillar 4 (Email Delivered Courses) creates products that get results and generate word-of-mouth
Each pillar feeds into the next and then loops back around, creating a self-sustaining cycle.
For example, your EDCs generate results, which creates word-of-mouth, which brings more traffic, which builds your list, which sells more courses…
All without the complexity that kills most solo operators.
The entire system is deliberately stupidly simple.
And it’s repeatable just about anywhere.
I’ve helped people implement the pillars in niches way, way outside of "how to market to marketers".
And while I talk about bits and pieces of this system all the time on this mailing list, I figured it was time to try to summarize it all in one place.
Tomorrow I’ll wrap up this series with a simple breakdown of the exact tools I use in my businesses for each pillar. You’ll see how few tools you actually need to run a mid six-figure digital business.
Talk tomorrow!
— Derek
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