Introducing the Keystone Course Accelerator

“Honestly, I feel like more people should know about you and your content.”

That’s how the email from a guy named Billy started.

It was April 2019, and I was at a crossroads.

I had been teaching my Building a Second Brain course for a couple years at that point. I’d had success, but the workload was totally unsustainable.

I was burnt out trying to do everything myself, from incessantly promoting the course to teaching all the lessons to answering customer service questions late into the night. The course I had created was consuming me, and I didn’t see any way out.

I knew that I either needed to turn my little program into a full-fledged online education business, and build the team and the support systems I needed, or risk burning out completely and losing all the progress I’d made.

I longed to get back to the original reason I’d started working for myself: to have more control over my time, my income, and my destiny. To have the freedom to pursue whatever interested me, and to work when and where and how I chose.

I’d lost sight of my ultimate purpose: to make a positive impact on people’s lives without sacrificing my happiness, quality of life, or integrity.

Billy explained that he was a marketing consultant for online course creators. He wanted to talk to me about potentially working together to grow my business.

I receive a lot of this kind of email, but as my finger hovered over the “delete” button, his name caught my attention: Billy Broas.

Hadn’t I seen this name before?

I searched my email and lo and behold, he’d been featured in Teachable’s newsletter just a couple days before right alongside me:

He was hosting a workshop on “How to Build a Sustainable Online Course Business,” which had piqued my attention. I saw that he was the only marketing consultant recommended by Teachable, the learning platform I use for my courses.

Needless to say, I replied to Billy’s email instead of deleting it:

“I’d love to have a call. I’ve been thinking for some time that it’s time to expand the marketing for BASB and my other courses. It’s becoming a full curriculum for how to work in the digital age and I think a lot more people could benefit from it than my own audience I’ve been focusing on.”

The phone call we got on a few days later would change my work, my business, and my life in more dramatic ways than I could have possibly imagined.

I decided to join Billy’s 10-week Course Accelerator program a couple months later. It was a group coaching program in which he taught course creators a scalable system for not only selling their product, but doing so in a repeatable, sustainable, and classy way.

Alongside Billy and a group of other impressive participants, I learned more about online marketing and persuasive psychology in 10 weeks than in the previous 6 years of solitary trial and error combined.

I realized that what I thought of as “marketing” was really a corrupted version of true marketing, based on the worst excesses I’d been exposed to. True marketing is about deep empathy and connection with others. So much so that when done well, we don’t call it marketing at all. We call it “sharing” or “storytelling” or “coaching.”

With that realization, the mindset of scarcity and anxiety around “selling” that was severely constraining me and my business completely dissolved, and was replaced by a philosophy based on generosity and abundance.

We focused on two main efforts: Building an engine to convert more of my audience into paying customers, and then pouring more fuel into that engine.

Over the next year, using the system that Billy and I architected together, I grew my email list from 6,000 to 38,000 subscribers.

 

And that drove my course launches from a previous high of $39k to a recent record of $985k.

 

Those aren’t results that happen by accident. They don’t just show up on your doorstep overnight.

It takes a system. But not the super complicated “sales funnels” or scammy ad campaigns you see influencers bragging about. Those “tactics” make everyone involved feel slimy afterwards. They aren’t consistent with creating a reputation you are proud of.

It takes an extremely high level of integrity combined with the fundamentals of storytelling: an email list you control, a deep understanding of the problems your customers are facing, a compelling story about what you can do for them, authentic testimonials and proof to back up your claims, all delivered in a consistent format with a clear invitation to join you.

It’s no secret that I’ve long wanted to create a program on how to successfully launch courses like mine. I’ve now launched three separate courses by three different instructors into the six-figure range, and have seen what a transformative impact they’ve had on the students and instructors alike. But my own course is growing so fast that it takes all my attention. Not to mention that I became a parent last month