When's the last time you purchased an online program?

Sometime in the past year, you’ve been faced with the decision to buy, enroll or download a training course online. Or maybe you really wanted to go to a big event hosted by someone who really inspires you… and it bummed you out a little.

Ok, maybe it bummed you out a lot.

The pressure to buy comes at you from all angles…

Rejection: Not wanting to feel left out.
Belonging: Wanting to be part of the cool kids group or something bigger.
Reputation: Hearing so much about a program and why it’s the ONE thing you haven’t done that would turn your business around.
Cost: A high cost program has been broken down into so many payments that you can’t resist.
Information: You love to learn and are a bit of an addict for more and more info.

And the truth that you need to know is this… no 1 program is going to do it for you. In fact, I’ll go so far as to tell you that no program is going to be the reason you succeed.

There is no on switch to turn your business from struggling to successful.

But stick with me as I share how to choose those programs you invest in and then how to make sure you get the most out of them.

How To Choose & Get The Most Out of  the Best Online Program In The World

There is a secret to getting the most out of all the programs and conferences and coaching you buy.

Brace yourself – this may seem obvious, but it's the only way to achieve the “success” that lured you to them in the first place.

Your Business BFF

Implementation.

I know. It’s that simple.

Someone said this to me when I was stressing over where to apply for college in high school–

“You can get a good education anywhere.”

What that meant (to me) was simply it doesn’t matter whether you attend an Ivy League, private, or public institution… only your action, your implementation, your initiative matters.

YOU are the reason you’ll learn or not learn something.

Promises Promises

You see the promises made by creators of business programs, coaching, and events.

If you come this event, this weekend will change your life. If you enroll, your business will stop sucking the life out of you. If you buy this – your life will forever be altered and you’ll be on the path to riches.

And it’s true. Kind of.

Let me explain…

When you see all the promises programs make about you changing your business overnight, creating the life you want and building a sustainable business, all that is true IF you show up and make it happen.

Promising to change someone’s business or life for the better is possibly the easiest promise you can make when you’re selling a product.

Change happens when you take action. If you take action (or your customers do), businesses can change.

This all boils down to one thing – that I've made a rule for myself – plan to implement or save your money – I’m not joking.

Think before you enroll or hit buy now. Make the commitment to take action or wait.

What To Work and What To Ignore

So what do you do once you’ve taken that step, and you've shelled out your hard-earned cash?

Make a plan on what you’ll work through and what will wait until later. It’s that simple.

This one’s going to be a touchy subject for us product creators out there. We all want to believe that our entire program must be gone through from start to finish.

But I'm here to say that's just not true.

The only way to know if something should go on your to do list or not is to go through the content for an entire program and THEN decide what to work and what to just ignore.

Sometimes, you’ll find a huge takeaway in a bonus video or bonus piece of content that you might have skipped over because it’s not part of the core training.

You get to make the call here – so do it.

The Basic Steps:

• Go through all the content in the program.
• Create an action list
• Take action quickly on anything you can – right away.
• Schedule everything else for the MONTH you purchase the product.

It’s going to be tempting to stop, listen, do worksheets, re-listen and listen again to the audios, because there are some amazing programs available – programs that look amazing, have content up the wazoo, and that can help you grow your business.

Your job is to choose the steps you can do right now. Schedule time to go back through the material you didn’t implement at a later time. Understand that you can’t do it all at once and you don’t have to.

Examples of Implementation

Don’t make the process of “taking action” complex.

Pick 5 things from each course that you’ll implement while you’re going through it.

If you know there’s more you want to do, use the basic steps above and schedule time to go back and pick another 5 things.

Courses that drip out content can be handled EXACTLY the same way.

Each module – watch through the content – list out to-dos as they are mentioned. Then, for each module pick 5 actions you’ll take as a result. When I say actions, I don’t mean complete the worksheets. I mean do the worksheets and then tie them into how you run your business or do something specific as a result of those worksheets.

Just because you DO the customer avatar worksheet, doesn’t mean you’ve implemented. Now that you know what you know about your ideal customer, take it to the streets.

• write a blog post specifically for that ideal customer and advise them how to solve ONE of their big challenges
• revise a sales page where you talk about “who” your offering is for using your worksheet to guide you
• add a section on your about page about who you like to work with or who your business serves and use language from the worksheet

Here are the top 5 implemented tips from my own business mentors and what part of my business they impacted the most — meaning they led to me make sales, add new subscribers to my list or change some very visible part of my business.

Can you guess who these mentors are?

• Get clear on where the cash is coming in.

I got clear on where my profits were really coming from by listing everything out and determining actual dollars and cents revenue. Now, I focus on growing those areas. No more wasting time with activities that don’t thrill me, bring in the moolah, and help me build the “dream biz”.

• Create epic + insanely useful content.

Put together a launch essentials toolkit that actually helps you plan your first online launch. The visible results were watching my list jump several hundred percent over a 3 month period.

• Create an autoresponder email to find out what challenges your readers.

I did – and respond to each and every one of the emails. 50% of my sales for the last launch of Fearless Launching were people I had responded to over the last 6 months.

• Write guest posts for blogs that cater to your audience.

First successful post had more than 250 comments on it and led directly to e-book sales. Now I get asked to guest post.

• Know how you want to feel in your business.

This is one of those sneaky ones. Knowing how you want to feel helps you make decisions. This one helps me decide if marketing strategies are right for me, gives me intuitive feedback on what I’m offering and if there’s ever anything off, and also dictates whether I post or not.

Share your story

Please share specific tips from programs, coaches, conferences that you’ve implemented and also ‘fess up where you’re guilty of buying something but then never opening it, going to a class, watching the training.

If you're looking for a little more help with a launch check out the Free Launch Workshop or become part of the next Fearless Launching.

This post look familiar? It should! I first published it in 2012 but have made some much needed updates and now you can listen to the podcast version with even more tips on getting the most out of your online programs!