Live Your Message

I hopped in the car to answer a question that's on A LOT of people's minds -- Is it too late to start an online business? When you think about the question -- Is it too late? -- there are actually two questions that come to mind: 1. Is it too late in the world? 2. Is it too late for me? In this video, I'll address both questions and show you how to finally build the online business of your dreams!

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We had created this BEAUTIFUL 94-page eBook but quickly realized something heartbreaking... People didn't want to plunk down $97 on a 94-page eBook. So, we decided to turn it into an online course -- complete with audio, slides, worksheets and group coaching sessions... I remember our first webinar like it was yesterday. Murray and I were at a hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand -- living the nomad entrepreneur dream -- and we woke up at 3am to deliver that webinar and sell the only course version of Hidden Story Power for $197. As soon as I got to the offer, the sales started pouring in. 1 sale. 3 sales. 10 sales!!??!! And it kept on going... We got up to 24 sales that day alone and 40 sales by the end of the weekend! And the really cool thing was that we were meeting up with my dad and step-mom at the hotel that morning. We ate breakfast in the courtyard as the sales continued to roll in... and we felt like we were not just living the dream; we were winning it! As we cruised around Chiang Mai in a tuk-tuk, that sales counter just kept ticking upwards! But -- eek -- we still had to create the course! That was a problem for another day... After the failure of our Hidden Story Power eBook, we decided to sell the course before we created it and then meet the demand by delivering it live! Murray was in Australia, and I was back in Los Angeles... I remember doing those GoToWebinar calls together... It felt so romantic -- we were falling more and more in love as each Module rolled out. Maybe we could do this whole online course thing after all! We sold Hidden Story Power for 7 years and a grand total of 819 sales and $172,749. My biggest innovation there -- other than realizing the power of online courses and choosing the right business model -- was introducing our Quarterly Story Celebrations. You see, after we delivered the course live, it became a purely evergreen program. Meaning that people paid their $197 and got the recorded replays in a membership site. That's great, but it felt like something was missing. People spent all this time creating their story and -- while we had 3 full models on how and where to share your story -- we didn't have a context for them to share their stories with each other. So, I introduced lifetime access to our Quarterly Story Celebrations as a BONUS. And it was a hit. Students came back quarter after quarter to share the next evolution of their story and get my feedback. I got to witness (and support) them as they went deeper and deeper into their life experiences and got more and more comfortable sharing authentically! So -- while I no longer sell Hidden Story Power -- stories are still a HUGE part of both my marketing and my courses. Because nothing creates connection more than story. Thoughts? #onlineentrepreneur #onlinebusiness #onlinebusinessowner #onlinebusinesssuccess #onlinebusinesscoach #entrepreneur

It's story time... cheers! I thought it was a great idea at the time... Famous last words, right? It wasn't the idea that was bad -- it was the execution. Classic mistake! My boyfriend at the time (now husband) Murray had a LOT more success with his first digital product than me. It was called Job Secrets Revealed, and he launched it with his best friend Acland in 2001... They sold it for a full 5 years, partnering with Monster dot com until they decided to create their own digital products. It was all about the Hidden Job Market and finding opportunities that aren't being listed, PLUS ways to bypass the usual application process. It was a hit and Monster dot com promoted it for years (until they decided to get in the game with their own products)... Adding up to about 50K sales! One year, Job Secrets Revealed crossed the million-dollar-a-year mark, and Murray and Acland traveled the world on the proceeds. So Murray and Acland were living the dream! One year they reached a million dollars in sales on this one program alone... and traveled the world on their earnings. Acland is one of those crazy idea guys with a non-stop flood of, well, crazy ideas... whether that's making giant buddhas for Asian restaurants (called Big Ass Buddhas no less) or creating custom laundry detergent with your favorite scent (Soap du Sauvage anyone?). Of course, MOST of those ideas never saw the light of day but this one DID -- with Murray's support. Yes, everyone needs a Murray! So, Murray suggested we take a similar approach with HSP. While JSR was about tapping the hidden job market, HSP was about sharing the hidden stories that people don't otherwise hear as a way to market and connect with your audience... Remember when I said the idea was good, but the execution was bad? Rather than create an online course, Murray and I decided the best format for a program on stories was a book. A PDF. And we decided to design the PDF like one of those beautiful Phaidon art books so people could learn about storytelling in both narrative and visual form. We wanted to match the message with the medium. It was absolutely gorgeous, but we discovered a HUGE problem -- only AFTER we created everything. First of all, sales were SLOW. People just didn't want to plunk down $97 on a 94-page eBook. And the people who bought just didn't see the value -- again, $97 for an eBook? So, something like 50% of the people who bought the eBook were refunded almost right away. I was devastated! We had poured months into creating it. This was our first creative collaboration and -- It. Was. Beautiful. But it just didn't add up for our customers... UNTIL we decided to turn it into an online course -- complete with audio, slides, worksheets and group coaching sessions... The rest of the story to come tomorrow :) #onlinebusinessowner #onlinebusiness #onlinebusinesscoach #onlineentrepreneur #entrepreneur

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Story continued from yesterday👇 Gradually, I started to see the cracks in the program until I made the hard choice to stop selling it. It all started with the refunds... 13.5% of our Message to Money students refunded, which dropped that revenue down by a full $33,488. I was concerned. I thought something was wrong with my course and started to second-guess myself. Out of desperation -- I approached a colleague and asked, “Do you have lots of people buying your program and giving up before they finish?” She looked at me, nodded quietly and said: “Marisa, maybe some people just aren’t meant to succeed…” That felt like a punch in the gut because I believe that every person is meant to succeed. That every person -- given the right education, the right support and the right guidance -- CAN succeed. But that WASN'T what I was seeing... And when I dug deeper, I realized it wasn't just me. I discovered that the industry-average refund rate for traditional online courses is between 10-20%... but nobody tells you that when you hear about all those million-dollar product launches! And this was just the beginning... I started to get this feeling in my gut that NOT a lot of students were making it through the course. And when we ran the numbers from our membership site, we saw the harsh reality -- something that most online course creators never get to see. We saw that only around 5% of our students were actually completing the course -- which lines right up with the industry average completion rates for traditional online courses. That's when I found out that online courses and home study programs have an average completion rate of just 3%. That means -- if you’re creating products, programs or courses in the traditional way like I was -- up to 97% of the people who buy from you will either: Not even open your course or program OR open it, but fall off… fail to complete it AND fail to get the results you promised. Which -- even if you figure out how to sell your course -- leads to declining sales and reputation. And that's exactly what I was seeing. My students weren't completing the course, so they weren't succeeding. Therefore, I wasn't succeeding... I had also made the huge mistake of offering lifetime access to weekly group coaching calls in that program, so my students felt like they had all the time in the world to complete the program... and they were disincentivized from continuing to work with me in other programs since this program never really ended So, while I was making money, my business wasn't growing... and I felt like I wasn't really serving my students in the way that I wanted to be. That led me to make the hard decision to retire the program in 2016. Uncoincidentally, that was also the year I launched my real Blockbuster Hit Program, the Experience Product Masterclass, which completely transformed everything I thought was possible for an online course -- both for me and my students!

I created my third course, Message to Money, in 2012 and sold it for 4 years before retiring it. Message to Money was my first course to feature a signature system -- My Live Your M.E.S.S.A.G.E. System -- and that made a BIG difference when it came to selling this program, because it gave my course structure. I called this an "inside-out model" because you had to work your way from the inside out, and each of the 7 parts of the system became a module inside my program. I didn't know it at the time, but it was WAY too much. At least 6 courses in one -- all crammed into a single 6-week program with a starting price of $497. At the time, everyone was making these mongo, "multi-point programs" that taught you "everything you need to know" about this or that... So I followed suit since that's what I thought an online course was... I slaved for months on the content, the sales page, the launch materials, the webinar, the emails, the membership site, and all that stuff. I even paid a well-known copywriter $10K to write the sales page for me, which felt like a FORTUNE. I worked my butt off, and I ended the year with 40 sales of that first course -- and just over $20K in revenue. It seemed like a small fortune at the time... and I was officially in business! I continued to sell that course for 4 full years and, along the way, we raised the price from $497 to $697 to $997, ultimately selling 501 copies and bringing in a grand total of $470,412! By the end I was making a pretty decent income... or so I thought... The rest of the story coming tomorrow :) #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurlife #entrepreneurmindset

A lesson in work, love, life partnership👇 Flashback to March 2011. Murray and I met at a Brendon Burchard event and chatted for 3 hours straight one night. I guess I made an impression! Because the night the event ended, Murray sent me an email — the most charming and blush-inducing email I’ve ever gotten. And in that email, he “future-paced” our entire relationship: i thought i’d google your name and in this half-asleep state i’m looking at your photos of bangkok and brazil and laos and greece, seeing what you’ve seen, and thinking one single thought: how cool it would be to go traveling together one day – you with your camera, me with mine – once we both get our content businesses up and running and no longer have any good reason to stay rooted to one spot. sound good? the only question that remains is …. where shall we go? He painted a picture of what our relationship could be just days after meeting me and guess what?!!??? That picture became our lives together. But, there have been times when we had different pictures for ourselves… You see, Murray and I have different motivations for being in business. For me, business is a deep expression of who I am. While he likes more variety — he likes to continually build cool things for people. So he eventually outgrew working with me in Live Your Message and needed to do something new. At first I was disappointed, even devastated. I didn’t know how I could “do” Live Your Message without him since he was there with me from that very first day. He even owned half the company. But I didn’t want him to sacrifice his dreams for mine, so we figured it out. It was his time, and I was going to support “him in doing him.” #entrepreneurlife #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurmindset

Every fail paves the way to your future success. Let me tell you about my second attempt at a program... It was back in 2011, and it was called the 30 Day Challenge. It lasted all of 3 months! At the time, membership sites and continuity programs were all the rave. Monthly recurring income was considered the holy grail of online business, so I thought I'd give it a try. I'd been invited down to Hawaii to speak at my friend Peri Coeurtney Enkin's event in Hawaii. It was my second-ever live speaking engagement and I was super nervous and super stoked. This felt like my global debut, so I wanted to create something brand new that would wow Peri and her audience... After watching 87% of my first batch of students finish my program (Build Your Site, Launch Your Business) without launching their sites, I realized there was a BIG gap between learning and doing. So I wanted my next program to get people into action -- that's why I called it the 30 Day Challenge. The idea was simple -- every month, I'd give students ONE AREA of their business to focus on. I didn't see the problem until it was too late... I was selling the online business equivalent of the "Emperor's New Clothes" -- something that couldn't be seen with the naked eye... A whole lot of work and process leading to... *** drumroll please *** An invisible transformation. (Messaging, Market Research, Personal Branding) Waa-waa. So even though the price was just $97/month, I only got 3 sales of my new offer. Granted, there were only 12 people in the room... But - I did all this work and flew all the way to Hawaii for just $291/month???!!!!!??? Murray had even spent an entire day (and lots of research) building me a homemade teleprompter out of cardboard, 2-way glass, and an old LCD monitor so I could record the videos! That's when I discovered that people don't buy your program or solution, they buy the transformation they get. And that was just the start of it! Because each month of the 30 Day Challenge was focused on a lot of work and process with an invisible transformation, guess what?!? Yup. Those 3 students didn't stick around... One by one they dropped out. By the third month, I had only one student. That's right, I was creating 7-9 videos a month for 1 student (and $97)!  Creating this program was costing me WAY MORE than I was making. And I discovered a sad fact that none of those internet marketing gurus mentioned: the average continuity program member churns in just 3 months... That means, after just 3 months, they cancel their membership as they fall farther and farther behind, lose interest or simply stop logging in. Ouch! The holy grail didn't seem so holy after all... So, I decided to abandon my membership and go back to creating online courses... And as they say, the rest is history (not really -- it was a long journey... lol!)... Drop me a comment if this story resonates with you 👇 #entrepreneurjourney #entrepreneurlife #entrepreneurmindset

In the latest LYM Weekly, I share how to use AI to scale your business to 7 figures... and beyond! #onlinebusiness #onlinebusinesssuccess #onlinebusinessgrowth #ai #artificialintelligence #chatgpt #onlineentrepreneur