Kyleigh Banks:                                         Hey there, birth nerd. You're listening to the Birthworker podcast. My name is Kyleigh Banks and I am totally obsessed with birth and equally obsessed with business. This is the show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable, and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it.

                                                       Welcome back to the Birthworker podcast. You're listening to episode 50 and holy shit, I cannot believe it is 50 episodes already. Pardon my French, if your kids are around and you don't like to swear in front of them, but 50 episodes, I seriously cannot believe we are here. I don't know if I ever thought I would get to 50 podcast episodes, but honestly, the way this podcast is rocking and rolling and we're growing every single week, week after week, lots of our students find us here on this podcast, I just have to say, we're not stopping anytime soon. That's going to be 500 episodes in the next few years, which just absolutely blows my mind.

                                                       Before we jump into the three questions today, which are going to be about online courses, free content, and paid content, how to know if you're giving away too much for free, and then also how to make financial decisions confidently in your business. Those are the topics we're going to dive into. I just wanted to remind you one last time that the Childbirth Educator Training program is officially launching on Monday, April 10th, 2023. That is this coming Monday, if you're listening to this when this episode is new. Now is your very last time to join at the early bird rate.

                                                       If you join before the 10th, you can save $500 and get access to not only a really comprehensive education on birth, so you can be a phenomenal childbirth educator, but you're getting access to my best business tips, my best tips for creating your own childbirth education course, and then also all of our curriculum. You're getting access to over 45 lessons that you can completely customize and curate and put into your perfect birth course, postpartum course, pregnancy course, breastfeeding course, whatever you want. You're getting essentially full access to our entire curriculum, because when I was creating it, I started from scratch and it took me a very long time, something like 800 hours if I calculated it correctly, and I don't want you to have to spend all of your time creating it because I already did.

                                                       This is proven content that thousands of students have gone through, and now I'm essentially giving it to you to use it as your own. Put your own brand on it, put your own colors on it, curate it, add to it, take away from it, literally full access to do as you wish with this curriculum. So, super excited. If you have thought about hosting workshops, creating an online childbirth education course, or even doing in-person workshops or an in-person birth course for your clients, this is absolutely a no-brainer. Join this weekend. You can join forever in the future, but join this weekend and save $500 before it goes to full price. For that, you can go to birthworker.com/cbe and check it out, learn more, and register today and the program, you're going to get access on Monday, April 10th.

                                                       Okay, let's jump into the questions. Very first question is, "What do you wish you knew before creating your first online course?" You know what? I actually did a podcast episode, I will link it in the show notes, just honestly a few weeks ago or maybe a few months ago, about all of my best tips for creating your first birth course. First, I have to say, if you're interested in creating an online course or even an in-person course, if you're ready to create a course in general, please go check out that episode. We'll link it in the show notes. But what I actually want to dive into as I'm answering this question is what I wish I knew before creating an online course, and the answer is that I wish that I knew that I was going to find massive success.

                                                       I wish that I had an inkling just how big this was going to get. It would have allowed me to appreciate the suck even more, to appreciate when it was hard even more, because it wasn't hard for long. It wasn't sucky for long. I wasn't busting my butt and making no money for that long. I did, I mean, a year, a year and a half, two years. But now that I look back, I'm like, "Dang, I wish I appreciated that more now that I've gotten to the other side of that." And so, what do I wish I did before I made my first course? I wish I knew in my heart that I was going to find massive success. Something that comes with that is actually really tangible.

                                                       I wish I invested in better platforms and better software from the beginning, because what happened with me, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen with 90% of people listening to this podcast, maybe it's already happening with you too, is that you don't have money when you're getting started. And so, you're trying to get all of the free versions of all the software. You're trying to do it for free when you're starting and you're saying to yourself, "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? It makes sense if you don't have the money to invest in the better software and the better course platform and the better website and all that.

                                                       I mean, if you don't have the money, you don't have the money. But what ended up happening is I started making money and enough money to essentially invest in whatever I wanted to invest in, but all of my creations were on the lower, cheaper, free platforms. They weren't as good platforms. And so, what ended up happening is after I made my first $50,000 from my online birth courses, then I actually had to go back and change the entire business. I had to invest in new software, I had to rerecord videos, I had to move them to new places. And so part of me is like, "Damn, I wish I just knew success was inevitable, and to be honest, I wish I just put all of that stuff on a credit card knowing that I was going to find success."

                                                       I'm not telling you to do that. I'm not telling you to go put everything on a credit card. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm just saying that I wish that's what I did. One of the big software that I'm talking about is the course hosting platform. When I started, there was a free platform called MemberVault, it's not free anymore, it's a hundred dollars per month minimum now, and I built my course there for free. And then, once I started making some money and could afford what I wanted to afford, I invested in something called ThriveCart. Now, ThriveCart is just a one-time payment. It's something between five and $700, depending on which level you choose, but it's just a one-time payment. You're not paying monthly. You're not paying ever again.

                                                       For MemberVault, which I started with, which was free at that time, now it's a hundred bucks per month, meaning 1200 bucks per year or year after year, by the way. 1200 bucks year after year after year, or just a one-time investment with something like ThriveCart. And so honestly, I look back and I'm like, "I wish I got ThriveCart from the beginning. I wish I hired coaches from the beginning, so I didn't have to learn things the hard way. I just wish I invested so much more in the beginning because I would've gotten to where I am now a lot faster and have not had to push the brakes and slow down 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, I have a special link for you. It's birthworker.com/thrivecart. Check it out. It is not only a course hosting platform, but it's also a checkout cart. So, if you've ever purchased anything from me, you've purchased that essentially through ThriveCart. It is just absolutely phenomenal. I tell all of my students inside the Birthworker membership and my business membership, I tell them all to get ThriveCart because it's just honestly that good. To prove it, I actually got ThriveCart when I was first just selling an ebook online, my third trimester checklist, and I went from making about 200 bucks per month selling that checklist, that ebook, to over $2,000 per month as soon as I got Thrive Cart, because it's just so beautiful and it looks so good that it skyrocketed my success.

                                                       That's just one example. There's several dozens of examples that I wish I invested earlier, but you live and you learn. This actually relates a lot to the next question, which is, "How do you confidently make a large financial decision in your business?" What I have to say is that it gets so much easier as time goes on. So much easier. If you've been to any of my free Masterclasses or workshops, I like to tell my story just to give a good idea of where I came from and what I'm doing and what my vision is. In that story, I tell the story of the first times I invested pretty big money into my business. The last time I did a free workshop like this, essentially since doing that workshop, I've actually added a whole nother layer.

                                                       Let me tell you real quick how this looked for me. I invested 2,000, $3,000 in the doula training program that I took when I became a doula. It was a three-day in-person training. That decision to invest didn't scare me because I was still working my other job. So, I had the money to invest. It didn't scare me. But my next investment was in a course from Amy Porterfield called Digital Course Academy. That's going to launch in September. I'll probably talk about that a lot more as we get towards September because it's an amazing course. It changed my life. But that course was $2,000 and it was scary for me because I hadn't made money online in my business.

                                                       I was a doula. I was attending births in-person, but I didn't have a large social media following or anything like that. And so, I was really spending $2,000 with nothing to back it up, nothing to prove it. But the thing is that a few months later, I want to say four months later, I made $14,000 selling my very first childbirth education course, which is called Autonomous Birth Academy. And so I turned that $2,000 investment into $14,000 within literally just a couple of months. That was the first wow moment of, "Holy crap, investing in myself financially and investing in my knowledge and investing in coaches and mentors actually pays off." And so, I did it again.

                                                       I invested in a woman named Kate McGibbon and I bought one of her courses called E-Course Empire, and it really helped me build my funnels, get more confident with ads and with email sequences, and do all of the online business stuff. That course was 3,500 bucks, scared me a little bit. 3,500 bucks is quite a lot of money, right? That's a lot of money. That's more than I was making per month back then. What happened was just a few months later, I had a $15,000 month where I did a promotion for Autonomous Birth Academy, my birth course. And so, I got to this place where I'm like, "Wow, any money I invest in myself, I'm actually going to get that back. I'm seriously going to get that back."

                                                       And so, the last investment that I made was in a woman named Rose. Rose Radford is her name, and she is a coach and a mentor. I paid her $15,000 to essentially be my mentor. It's a group coaching program. So, I don't really meet with her one-on-one. I just meet with her in a group setting. But investing in myself $15,000 actually very quickly turned around and led to my first six figure month. Made a hundred thousand dollars in one month. Now I've gotten to the point where I'm like, "Damn, maybe I should go turn around and invest in a $50,000 coach. Maybe, that's going to exponentially grow my business." And so, I wanted to tell this story because I just wanted to show that the more reps that you put in, the more times you make a financial decision that's scary and then it pays off, it's going to get easier and easier and easier and easier.

                                                       Just honestly, with everything else in my life, I follow my intuition. It's got to be an intuitive decision, an emotional decision, way more that way than a logical one. I tune into my whole body. I ask my head, "What do you think?" My heart, my soul, and then I just follow my gut. I honestly 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 pay for stuff and you just do it and you trust, the easier that money's actually going to flow back to you.

                                                       I very much believe that with all of my heart. I believe it more and more as I spend more and more with my business and make more and more with my business. And so, I hope that you can start doing that too, even when it's scary. I know that doing so definitely led to my wild success, to be able to do things like go on a five-week vacation to Israel and eat out two meals per day the entire time and literally not have to worry about it. All of that stems from making those first financial decisions that were a little bit scary before I even proved myself. But sometimes, that's what you got to do. If you want to play with the big girls, sometimes you got to make those financial decisions like the other people are making.

                                                       All right, let's jump into question number three. This question is, am I giving away too much free content? I love this question. It's a question that I get from my students actually 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 getting started this, it's a hard decision. You don't have enough experience creating the free resources or free content or paid content or paid resources to be able to really truly know what goes into each. And so, what I like teaching my students is that your paid content should be the all-encompassing everything.

                                                       The what to do, the how to do it, the why to do it, step-by-step, in order, everything together. That's what people are paying for, whereas your free content should be the what and also the why. Your free content should be what to do and why to do it. Your paid content is the how. So, how do you actually do it? It's a really easy question to just ask yourself to see, is this perfect for free content or should I actually turn this into something paid? I want to let you know that typically, people are not giving away too much free content. I would say 99% of the time, people are not giving away too much free content. And so, what I would like to actually see more of is more doulas giving away more better content, especially in their freebies.

                                                       Part of the Birthworker membership, and honestly the Birthworker Academy too, really, anytime I'm working with students in a community capacity, I'm looking at their freebies. I'm auditing their stuff. I'm giving them feedback and examples of how to tweak and make things better. Typically, what I say with the majority of people's free resources is that people aren't going deep enough. People are creating 10 questions to ask your midwife if you want a home birth... In the download, it's literally just the 10 questions. There's no meat. There's nothing else. Typically, I would say, I want your freebies to actually be way more in-depth than you're currently making them.

                                                       That just there right alone is going to definitely increase your sales conversion and the amount of people that are hiring you as a doula, hiring you as a coach, and then buying your online offers too because what I want is people to download your free resource and say, "Holy crap, that is so good. If this is what I'm getting for free from Kyleigh, just imagine what I'm getting when I actually pay her money." That's what I want your people to say. The last thing I want to say about content is that really what it comes down to is that the content on social media should not be boring, how to, step-by-step content.

                                                       This is going to be huge. I want your content on social media to be what lights people's fire, which gets them really emotionally invested, and then also content that changes the way that they think about something. I want you to get people to change the way they're thinking about something, because what can happen is if you're posting too much educational content on your free platforms like social media, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever, it can actually hurt your sales conversions. People could go to your Instagram and say, "Kyleigh posts everything on her Instagram. She's posting all of the how to content, all of the 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."

                                                       But here's the thing, for the most part, we can't actually really impact women's lives just by the free content we're posting on social media. It's 2000 characters or not posting that much on there. And so, 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 I actually want to help someone prepare for birth, she needs to either hire me as a coach or she needs to be in one of my courses. Just my Instagram alone is not going to do it for 99% of people.

                                                       Of course, there's always that one person or 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. My doula training was my birth course. But regardless, we just want to separate our free and paid content by the what content and the how content and the stuff on social media should be mindset reframing, emotional content, and then the step-by-step educational stuff, that's what's going on behind the scenes in our paid courses, in our doula offerings, packages, or even something as simple as an ebook.

                                                       All right, of course, I went over our 15-minute timeframe today. This should really be called 3-in-20 episodes or 3-in-25 episodes. But thank you so much for being here with me. I would love to see you inside the Childbirth Educator Training Program. It opens on Monday, April 10th, 2023, if that's something that you're interested in. If you want to get lifetime access to essentially all of the curriculum that I've ever created in my life, we're talking about learning your options, creating your birth plan, overcoming your fears, building your autonomy, breastfeeding, preparing for postpartum, pregnancy, birth and postpartum nutrition, all of that, if you want to get access to all of the curriculum that I've ever made for my clients and my students and pregnant moms all across the world, please check out the Childbirth Educator Training Program.

                                                       Not only are you getting access to our curriculum, but you're getting access to all of my best course launching and course creating tips. You're going to get a free sneak peek behind the scenes in the Birthworker membership. So, you'll be able to check out our community for a little bit for free. And then of course, you're also getting a really in-depth education in birth physiology because you could not be an amazing childbirth educator without understanding the physiology of birth. The program officially opens on April 10th, which is this coming Monday. It is not a program that is going to close. You can join next week, but if you join by before Monday, you're actually going to save $500.

                                                       I just want you to save $500 and jump in as an early bird. Again, the doors aren't closing. So, you're not missing anything. You can join whenever you want over the next several years. I know this program will always exist because honestly, nothing exists like this out there. This is what childbirth educators and doulas and birth workers really are lacking and really need, because this is going to help you curate your perfect birth course and get it up and running in four months or less, following my curriculum and my exact framework for naming, pricing, launching, recording, 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 which make you use their curriculum exactly as it is, you can actually take our curriculum, customize it perfectly for your clientele. Maybe, you only support free birth moms and you want to make a free birth course. Awesome. Take our curriculum, curate it perfectly for free birth moms. If you want to only support vaginal birth after cesarean moms, perfect. Take our curriculum, add your brand colors, rebrand it, put your name on it, create the perfect course for your niche and your community, whatever that looks like. I'm not going to be out here telling you how to do it and what to do it, and making sure that you only do it certain ways. No, I'm giving you all of the tips that you need to create whatever it is that you want to create and I'm just here to make it so much easier for you, so you don't have to spend 800 hours building anything from scratch.

                                                       You can actually join the Childbirth Educator Training Program and honestly, essentially host a workshop or create a course the next weekend if you already have the community who's ready to buy it. All right, if you have any questions about anything we covered today, go ahead and shoot me a DM over on Instagram, @birthworkerpodcast. Today was so much fun. I hope it was helpful for you, and I will see you right back here on Wednesday. We have an amazing interview with a woman named Joanna, and we are talking all about how to create packages that actually lead to amazing results for our clients. So, it is definitely a must listen. You don't want to miss it. Make sure you hit subscribe, so you don't miss it, and I will see you right back here next week.