The Fastest Way to Turn Your Expertise Into a $1M/Year Business

        My name is Matt and in this video I'm going to show you the fastest way to turn your expertise into a $1 million plus per year income stream without coaching, consulting, done for you services, or becoming any type of guru. I built this for the people who are experts, educators, maybe you've done a course before, digital products, coaching agency, but you want to find a better way to turn what you know into a business. And I'm going to show you something that works and is very little known right now. I'm also not talking about courses, digital products, private communities. That's not the best way. What I'm going to show you does not require you to use any type of AI or have technical expertise. You don't need a big audience of hundreds or tens of thousands of people. You don't need fancy or complicated marketing. And you can do this and make money without any testimonials or social proof right now. You don't need to be a known expert or authority. And if you do this, you're not going to be perceived as salesy or some type of scammer. It is the best beginnerfriendly offer that you can launch and make your first $100,000 quickly. It's also an offer that can scale to seven or eight figures per year in sales. I think this offer or format that I'm going to show you in just a second is the next big thing. I think it's going to be the hot educational product of 2026, but it's still little known underutilized right now. Now is the best time to start before it gets popular. It's also a proven format. This has been the most proven way to turn your expertise into income for the past 100 years. I'm not exaggerating when I say that. Hundreds of millions of people have gone through the types of programs I'm about to talk about. So, now is the time to take advantage of this before everybody else does. And what I'm talking about today is cohort-based courses. You may have heard of them before, you may have not. Today, I'll explain that to you and why they are incredible. Cohorts are the best way to turn your expertise into income, and almost no one is doing them right now. Here is why. Cohorts provide the best student outcomes. Outside of one-on-one coaching or consulting, which you can't scale, nothing comes close to cohorts when it comes to getting students in your customers results. And yes, cohorts are not courses. Live cohorts and traditional courses are entirely different. I'll explain why in a second. Here are my results from doing live cohort-based courses. So far over the past two years I've done $2.1 million of highly profitable revenue over six live cohorts. I've served over,200 paying students. I launched my first live cohort back in January of 2024 to just 4,000 people on my email list. And because I used just a fraction of the system that I'm going to show you today, I made over $100,000 in 30 days from that very first cohort. And most importantly, because of the power of live cohorts, I've been able to help hundreds of people. I literally have hundreds of testimonials and success stories that you can see from my cohort. Over 400 five-star reviews and a 91 net promoter score. So, our net promoter score for my co, which is called Ricell, is higher than Chick-fil-A, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon. In this video, I'm going to break down why traditional courses and information products are dead. How to craft your cohort in 10 steps, even if you have no teaching experience right now. The number one reason why most cohorts fail. And here's a hint. It's because cohorts are entirely different than normal courses. And most people have no clue how cohorts really work and more. Before we get into that, if you're new here, my name is Matt. I'm the founder of Growletter. I've helped clients add over 10 million email subscribers and over 100 million in sales collectively. I've worked with some of the biggest names and faces in the media creator and education industry. If you like this video, the slides and more resources to help you will be linked in the description below or you can go to craftyoucohort.com to get them for free. Also, give me a like, subscribe if you're new here, and any question you have, just put in the comments below and I will get it answered. Okay, let's get into this. First, the reason why cohorts are so important is because the alternatives are not working anymore. Traditional information products and courses are dead. Everything has changed. the education market and training market is entirely different than it was before COVID and before AI. And we're just really starting to see the full force of those effects this year in 2025 going into 2026. What happened? Well, the way people learn, implement, and grow their businesses, careers, and improve themselves has changed entirely. People are drowning under the weight of just one more course or one more information product that they're never going to finish. People just don't need more content anymore. LLMs. Chat GPT can teach you more than most courses. It gives you customized advice to your situation and it can answer your questions instantly. It's hard to compete against that. Things are just moving faster across everything. And when you do a course or an info product, that static content becomes outdated very quickly. Pre-recorded courses age while AI provides up-to-date information. In YouTube, where you're watching this, it's just better than ever. There's tutorials, creators, and great videos on literally every single subject. And they're free. People also have way less disposable income in free time than they did back in 2020 to 2022. Interest rates aren't zero, no stimulus checks, people aren't stuck at home. And another reason you probably wouldn't expect that the education market is changing is because most people impulse buy courses and info products. And 12% of US adults and growing have used GLP-1s like Ompic, which drastically reduces impulse buys. What I'm trying to say here is that the problem isn't access to knowledge anymore. It's actually getting things done. Customers need clarity, execution, systems that actually do the work and not just explain how to do the work. In traditional courses and info products, digital products just don't do that for customers. So instead of selling content, training, information, you should sell an experience that helps people execute the work that they need to do to reach their goals. That is what live cohort-based courses do. Cohorts deliver clarity on what matters, a plan to execute from a trusted mentor, and a community to hold students accountable and for them to bond with. Cohorts can also be gamified to make it more fun and increase the odds that your students get results. Cohorts can provide systems, templates, feedback, and examples that make it easy to implement what your students learn. And cohorts are 20 times more engaging than recorded course content. According to maven.com, which is probably the largest platform for cohort-based courses, you're going to see much higher student engagement and success rates when you do a cohort versus a traditional course. And by much, I mean 10, 20, 100 times more. Most traditional courses have a completion rate of 1 to 5%. Most people are never logging in to the courses they buy. It's crazy, but it's true. My cohorts personally get 26 to 46% completion rates and way better student outcomes. This enables higher price points in word of mouth marketing. So you can price cohorts much higher than traditional information and digital products and people will actually tell their friends how awesome it is because it's a superior product. Live cohorts are a new and proven model for getting real student outcomes without customer overwhelm without burnout and without buyers remorse that most traditional courses and digital products usually create. So cohorts are different. They build your brand in reputation instead of destroying it like most traditional courses in information products do. What I'm going to show you now is at this point it's actually 10 steps to craft your cohort-based course from scratch. So if you have no idea what a cohort is or how to create it, how to build one, this will help you do that. Step number one is that a cohort based course is all about transformation. It has very little to do with education. So your cohort needs a goal outcome. It needs to help people achieve a real tangible result in a short period of time. That should be one simple and achievable outcome that can be done over a 4 to six week period or less. The shorter the better. So, for example, the goal outcome of a cohort could be run your first 5K race, kickstart your weight loss journey by dropping 20 lbs over 30 days. Get your newborn baby to sleep through the night. It should be simple, achievable stuff that a lot of people want to do. Let me illustrate this with some examples. These are some of the most popular cohort-based courses. And frankly, because cohorts are so uncommon, there's not a ton of great examples, but um these are very good to look at. So, Ship 30 for30 is one of the the classic cohort based courses, although it's only been around since about 2020. It helps you. The goal outcome is to create and publish 30 pieces of online writing in 30 days. So, that could be 30 LinkedIn posts, 30 tweets, whatever. It's really that simple. And this cohort has done over $10 million in lifetime revenue. Cut 30 for30 kind of similar. It helps you learn how to create short form videos for Tik Tok, YouTube shorts, etc. And the goal outcome is to publish 15 to 30 pieces of short form video in 30 days. Over a million dollars in lifetime revenue. Rightell.com. That's my cohort-based course. I help you launch your newsletter, get your first 500 to a,000 subscribers, and make your first dollar online in just 30 days. We've done over 2 million in lifetime revenue. And yes, I help people do more over time, but over the life cohort, we're just focused on that foundational thing and getting as many people that outcome as possible over a 4-week period. YouTuber Academy, your part-time YouTuber Academy from Ali Abdal. It helps you start a YouTube channel and publish your first video. It's done over 5 million in lifetime revenue. Building a second brain is just a cohort about how to create a organized digital system to store your ideas, do take notes, do research, have projects and to-do list. It helps you implement and build that system in Notion, which is a popular popular note-taking and project management tool. It's the tool that I use that's done five to 10 million lifetime revenue. Pretty simple outcome. Amy Porterfield has done a bunch of different products, but her most popular cohort is the digital course academy. It helps you create one course with a clear plan, live coaching, and real support. That's done north of 50 million in lifetime revenue. And maven.com, like I mentioned before, is just a platform for coderbased courses. So, if you want to see a bunch of examples, you can go there. Not all of them are great examples. It really depends on what you're looking at. But on that platform, over 12 instructors have made over $1 million and over 100 instructors have made over $100,000 just on the Maven platform. Now, cohorts are not comprehensive education. A cohort helps your customers, your students kickstart their success. You're not going to give people all the information they need for the rest of their lives. It's not 20, 40 hours of content. That's not what a cohort is for. or cohort is much more like a challenge or a live event than it is a course or a book. So knowledge transfer is not the value proposition of a cohort. Helping your students implement and execute what they learn from your program is the value proposition. So you only need to have one goal outcome, a 2 to four week plan to get that goal outcome, a curriculum for those two to four weeks, and a system to help your students get there. That's it. Cohorts should be straightforward and simple because it's about taking action. It's not about just telling people everything about the process or plan for example. Step number two is your cohort structure. So like what exactly these programs look like. I use the short narrow small framework. So short means that a cohort should have four to 10 hours of live content. Of course people will also get the recordings of that too, but usually no less than four hours, no more than 10 hours of live content. Your cohort should be narrow. So it should only solve one problem or deliver one goal outcome. You can't have a cohort on how to drop 10 pounds and how to build muscle. It's just too many different goals are going to confuse people. So, just one simple outcome. And then your cohort needs to be small. It should only have two to four features. The reason for this is because it's better to leave customers wanting more than to make them feel overwhelmed. The biggest reason people don't use courses and information products is because of information overload. People feel good when they complete something. So your cohort's job to be done is to be completed and help customers implement that work. Okay? So that's why it needs to be short, narrow, small, not overwhelming. So here's an example of a 30-day cohort. This is very similar to what I do in Ricrosel. So feature number one or part number one of this is you're going to have eight live sessions and then after those are completed, you'll share the recordings of those sessions. So that's two sessions a week for four weeks. You're going to have eight resources. So, one resource per session that's going to help people implement what you taught them. Then you'll have four to eight homework assignments. So, that could be one homework assignment per week or one homework assignment per session. And you'll have one community with a few channels for support, feedback, discussions with your students. Here's what that live session structure should look like. This is what I do. Option number one, I have a 90-minute time block and I do that on Tuesdays and Fridays. I teach the concept for about 60 minutes, sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more. And then after that 60 minutes, I do about 30 minutes of Q&A and group coaching with my students. I always schedule these for 12 p.m. Eastern time. I found that to be the best time because that is the most inclusive. People on the West Coast in the US can attend at at 9:00 a.m. A lot of people in Europe can attend at 5:00 p.m. So, I find that time works best. But if you don't need that much time to to teach and answer questions, you don't need 90 minutes. You could just do a 60-minute time block where you do 45 minutes of instruction and you do a 15-minute Q&A at the end. Again, you want to have a couple days between sessions. So, I like the Monday and Thursday schedule or the Tuesday and Friday schedule. Option number three is maybe you don't need to teach stuff on two days per week. Maybe you can just teach on one day per week and then do more feedback and coaching on the next day. So, let's imagine your program has more of a group coaching implementation focus. On Tuesday, you could do 60 minutes of instruction and 30 minutes of Q&A. And then every Friday, you can do 60 minutes of feedback and coaching. and you can give people feedback on their homework, answer questions, stuff like that. What you need to avoid is making these mistakes. Okay? I've done a bunch of cohorts. I've helped other people do this. These are the most common mistakes when it comes to structuring your program. There's other mistakes, but when it comes to structuring, you need to avoid these. Your cohort should not be longer than 5 weeks. 5 weeks is like the max. 5 weeks is a long cohort. Okay? 2 to four weeks is the sweet spot. I've been doing uh four-week cohorts and I've taken my cohorts all the way down from six weeks down to four weeks and it's a hundred times better. So, try and keep it in that range. You should do no more than two sessions per week. That just becomes too much for people to attend and to absorb. You shouldn't put the live sessions too early. 11:00 a.m. Eastern is too early. 2 p.m. Eastern is too late. I mean, you really should do 12 or 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. If you feel the need to have a cohort that's longer than four to five weeks or more than two sessions per week, you're just teaching way too much and you're overloading people with information. You need to make your cohort much smaller. Step number three is homework. Homework is really important for cohorts. And I like this terminology or idea that if students do the homework, they should be able to get the result. That means if students complete all homework assignments, they should be able to achieve the main promise or outcome that you talk about in your marketing. realistically they can actually do that. Homework is all about execution in the cohort model. So all of your homework assignments that you give to students should be about having them take action to get closer to the outcome that you promised. So homework's all the stuff that they need to do to actually get results. No busy work. If they can't get the result by doing the homework, you either need to make the program better or promise less. And in most cases, you should be promising less. Step four is that you need to create a system for your students to go through and understand. People don't want to learn or work. They don't care about cohorts, courses, or programs. All they care about is results. So, you need to make your cohort feel like a done for you system even though it's not going to be a done for you service. And the way that you do that is to give them shortcuts. You need to create and share tools, templates, scripts, examples, AI prompts, checklist that do the hard part for them. What do I mean by that? It's easy to explain through an example. So, let's say you have a cohort about how to do email marketing to sell more stuff and grow your business. You're going to teach your email marketing system over two weeks, four weeks, whatever it might be. And then you're also going to give examples of emails that sold a lot of stuff, emails that worked very well. Then, you're going to go further and you're going to give your students fill-in- thelank templates that help write the emails faster. This so they can just fill in 20% of the email and now they have a draft that they can edit and then send to their list. And then you're going to go further by giving them AI prompts or workflows that write those emails for them. That is shortcuts and that's what you need to include in your cohort. Step number five is gamification. This is why cohorts work so well because you can gify the program to incentivize your students to do the work, get results, and also make it fun. So, for example, we've done this in every single one of my cohorts. We have a community prize. We have a super active community and after people go through my cohort, they have act access to our community for life and people are still active in our community years later after the cohorts. So, the person voted most helpful in our community at the end of the cohort gets a $1,000 Amazon gift card and that encourages participation. You can do completion bonuses. Everyone who completes the program by attending or watching all sessions and doing all homework assignments could get one bonus group coaching call with you. Or maybe if you have a smaller program that's higher price, they could get a a 30 minute one-on-one session with you. Or maybe they get access to the next cohort for free. There's lots of ways you can have gamification and different types of completion bonuses. Every cohort should have a wins channel, just a dedicated channel in your community for sharing progress, sharing wins, metrics, small victories. I really encourage people to share everything. No win is too small, whether they just hit their first 100 subscribers, 1,000 subscribers, whatever it might be. And if you're looking for a place to like host these cohorts, the tool I use is called Circle. I believe it's circle.com. You can also have a leaderboard. And tools like Circle have a built-in leaderboard feature, which is really fun. But you could use a spreadsheet or a dashboard where students are completing and checking off the different modules and homework assignments that they've done. So, everyone sees everybody else's progress in real time, and it becomes a bit of a fun competition. You can also give some prizes to the people who are in the top three of the leaderboard. Maybe at the end of each week, you can have a badge system for key milestones. Maybe if they complete the first homework assignment, they get a badge. If they complete all of it, they get another badge. These can be displayed on someone's profile in Discord or Circle or School or whatever tool that you use to host your cohorts and communities in. You can do accountability pods where you assign students to small groups in week one and then you have those pods meet for 30 minutes each week to share their progress, troubleshoot any problems, celebrate wins. It feels much better when you're just going through a cohort with someone else, especially a small group. And cohorts naturally build communities. You don't have to have these pods, but it's a great idea, especially for larger cohorts with hundreds of students. You could have a hall of fame, just a dedicated space that showcases all of your students wins from all the cohorts, screenshots, testimonials, results with their names and faces. SAS Academy, this is Dan Martell's program, they do a million-dollar wall for their students who hit a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. and they have a photo and story about how they did it. And that becomes a proof of concept for new students. So when they join and they see that Hall of Fame, they know that other people have actually gone through this and seen results and they're more likely to take action and do it, too. You can do milestone celebrations and rewards. So you could do anyone who gets their first $1,000 in revenue gets a free call with you. Anyone who completes all assignments gets lifetime access to the community. Everybody who hits the primary goal gets a $100 gift card. Any way you can celebrate milestones, it's a great idea. If you want to go further, you could do a win your money back contest where maybe the first 10 people or maybe more who hit the primary goal get a free refund as long as they complete the program, watch all the sessions, do all the homework assignments. We took 10 people in our cohort who added 1,000 newsletter subscribers in 30 days, and we sent them a 100% refund and more. Okay, I gave you maybe too many examples of gamification. Your first cohort that you do does not need to be gamified in this many ways, but you should use one of three of the ways that I just showed you. Step number six is to track results. You need to measure your students progress before and after the cohort, just like real universities do. You can do this with an onboarding survey. So, in your orientation video or in your welcome email after someone joins the cohort, require them to complete a precourse survey. I do this below my orientation video. And I tell people if they don't complete the precourse survey, they will lose access to our course community. And I ask questions like who they are, the current situation, their goals, annual revenue run rate, audience size. I also ask demographic questions, business type, industry, stuff like that. Usually 10 to 15 questions. Most are short answers. Most are multiple choice. And then after the cohort's over, I do an offboarding survey with the same types of questions so I can measure the results before the cohort and after the cohort. So the way that I do that is I just compare where students were at before the cohort and after. I share the results in our marketing and I also compare my cohorts. So like how did my November cohort do compared to my January cohort and that I use that to improve the program for every single cohort that we do. Step number seven is real scarcity and urgency. That's going to make it much easier for you to sell cohorts. Urgency just means a deadline. Enrollment ends on Monday, for example, and after that, you can't get access until two to three months later when the next cohort happens. So that encourages people to take action before they lose access. Scarcity means a limited number of something. So in the case of a cohort, a limited number of students. Let's say it's 50 students. And you have that scarcity in place so you have time to support each student individually. So you can say, "Hey, we have 50 spots in this cohort. We've sold out 40 so far. After these 10 are gone, enrollment's going to end." if that happens before the enrollment deadline. Step number eight is social proof and authority. You need proof that you can deliver results before someone joins your cohort. And the more proof you have, the more sales you are going to make. Testimonials, case studies, student data, endorsements, and more. All of that is super important, but what if you don't have any social proof yet? Well, you don't have to have product testimonials before your first cohort launch. You can get character testimonials instead. You can go and reach out to 10, 20, 50 friends in your industry, clients, past employers, loyal readers that read your newsletter or social content and more. And you can send them an email like this. And this is the character testimonial request email. I'm not going to read this out now, but it basically tells you to ask people for a testimonial about why you are the right person to teach this, to deliver this product, to deliver this cohort. And if they think you're a good fit for that, they'll give you a testimonial even if they haven't reviewed or used the product yet. And that's really all you need to get started. You can get two, three, five of these character testimonials, and that's more than enough to launch your first cohort. Now, after you do that, here are all the different ways you can showcase proof in your marketing. The first is testimonials. And video testimonials are much more useful than just textbased testimonials because you can use that video as text. If you want to, you can pull up the transcript. And then video testimonials are always believable because you actually see a real person talking. So, when someone gives me a video testimonial, I use a tool called Senda, which I think we'll show in a second. And I always ask these three prompts to help them more easily record that testimonial. How is the program helped you grow your business? A part of the program helped you the most? Would you re would you recommend this program to a friend? If so, why? I get way better testimonials when I ask those questions versus when I don't. Testimonials also need full names and photos. Testimonial that just says something like John D or Matt M and no photo, that feels fake. real names, faces, and ideally company and the title to add credibility. That's why videos are so powerful because you can see a video. You could fake an image, but it's hard to fake a video. I use Sanja.io to collect, store, and use these testimonials. It makes it way easier, and it's worth paying for a tool to do this because they're so important. The next way to get proof is through case studies and success stories. You should go and look at all the testimonials you got and then pick out the best ones and interview those students on how they applied your material and got results. You can do just a 15-minute interview. You'll probably edit that video to make it more concise down to five or 10 minutes. You should ask the same three to five questions for every single case study that you do. So, all of them have the same patterns and format. You can also include your student count and completion rates in your marketing. You could say you have a thousand or 10,000 students. Of course, only say that if you do, you have a 81% completion rate. That signals that others trust you and actually finish the program. Here's an example from Digital Course Academy from Amy Porterfield. She showcases that 25,000 courses started with her program and then she has like a animation or a video of all the different courses and a screenshot of their landing page to make it look really professional and legit. You can show proof if possible by sharing the total revenue or any key metrics that your students have generated by using your cohort or your methods. You could showcase your media appearances, the logos of publications you've featured in, podcast appearances, speaking engagements. If you have credibility like years in your field, former qualifications, companies you've worked with or brands you've consulted with, industry awards, rankings, stuff like that, showcase that on your landing page for proof. And of course, your own result. Share what you've accomplished in the domain that you're teaching. Any metrics, sales, clients served, personal transformation, put that in your cohort marketing to show that you're legit. Endorsements are also super powerful. If you can get a brief endorsement from other respected figures in your space, that's amazing. And the way you get that is just by asking for it. They're not going to give you that automatically. You need to go ahead and ask for it. And also maybe trade. Maybe you say, "Hey, I'll endorse you if you endorse me." You both put that on your landing pages and you're both way better off for that. You also need to incentivize testimonials. Okay, going back to the to the really foundational part of social proof, which is just basic testimonials. To get those, you need to incentivize them. And here is how I incentivize testimonials. So on the final two to three live sessions of my cohorts and especially on the graduation session, I ask for testimonials and I always ask for video testimonials. I give them a reason why I need that testimonial and I incentivize students to do it. So, if I give them a reason why and I incentivize them to do it, I'm much more likely to get those testimonials. So, here's basically what I say on these live sessions and I also email this to people afterwards. If you found this helpful, it helps me tremendously if you share a video testimonial. Takes a ton of work to do these live cohorts. Your testimonials allow me to improve the program and continue investing time and resources into this. So, if the program's helped you, the best thing you can do to support me is to take 3 minutes of your time and record a quick video testimonial. Click here to do so right after this live session while it's fresh on your mind. As an additional bonus, I'll be giving away five $100 Amazon gift cards. Everyone who shares a video testimonial will be entered to win, and the gift cards will be given away randomly, no matter what you say in your video testimonial. The deadline to get in to win is on this date. So, that's it. Here's some incentives that I've used before. I don't do this every time, but these have worked for me in the past. You could do Amazon gift cards. That could be three, five, 10 $100 cards given away randomly. You could do a bonus group coaching session for everybody who shares a video testimonial. Access to the next cohort for free. Custom feedback through a Loom video on their homework. That's always a really good one that takes more work, but definitely gets you more testimonials. You could do a lot more, too. Be creative. Now, step number nine is your outline. What do you actually need to do to put this cohort together? So, I don't know everything about you or your topic, but here is how I make my cohorts. Before I begin any type of marketing promotion, I create an outline of what my cohort's going to include. Now, you don't need to go and create all the content, all the slides, record videos before marketing. You just need an outline. You need a program structure. How many sessions is it going to have? How many weeks will it be long? Is it a two to four week cohort? Two sessions per week. What does that look like? I gave you some examples before what you should be doing with the core sessions. So my cohort, for example, has eight course sessions. I also have an orientation video that people watch before they attend those eight course sessions. And then I have a live graduation session at the end. So it's actually nine live sessions total. So that orientation video and graduation part are probably just as important as the core sessions in between. So, what I do is I do a pre-recorded orientation video that's just 5 to 10 minutes on what to expect and what you need to have in place and what you need to know to get the most out of the cohort. And then I like to do live graduation sessions that are about 60 minutes long where we have like discussions, people share how the cohorts helped them. I ask for testimonials. Doesn't have to be that long, but that's how I do it. I encourage um a live version of that graduation session instead of just like teaching in the final session then just saying goodbye. It kind of feels like a wrong way to end things. I like to have a dedicated place to to celebrate everybody's wins. In the outline, you're going to need your session content. Basically, what's what you're going to cover in those sessions. So, you're going to have a bullet for your orientation video. Then, you'll write out what's going to be in that. Session number one, what's in there? Session number two, etc., etc. What's in the graduation session? Here's what that looks like for me. It's really not that complicated. It's certainly not easy, but you shouldn't overthink these cohorts because they're best created live during that 30-day period, two week period when you're doing them. So, I have a little toggle for each session. Session number one, session number two, and session number three. And then I just put bullet points of what I'm going to include in that session. And then after I sell out the cohort, I will go and create the slides for that. And I will teach it live. This is how I did my very first cohort back in January of 2024. And of course, since then, I've built upon the content that I've already created. I haven't just done this from scratch every time, but for your first cohort, starting with the outline is totally fine. You also need to outline your homework. Is your program going to have one homework assignment per session or one homework assignment per week? What are those assignments going to be? Put that in your outline because these homework assignments are just as important as the course content because the homework is the execution that they need to do to actually get the outcome of your program. Then we have the goal outcome. Talked about this before, but what is the main thing that they're going to get or achieve at the end of the program? It needs to be one realistic goal or result and it needs to be doable over a 2 to six week period. Then you need a completion criteria. What does it take to actually graduate from your cohort? What work do they need to do to complete the program? Is it homework? Is it washing stuff? Is it more? By completing the program and doing all the stuff in your completion or graduation criteria, they should be able to get that one key outcome or result realistically. So for example, my completion criteria or graduation criteria is very simple. People need to complete the pre and postcohort survey. They need to introduce themselves in the community. They need to attend or watch all sessions and they need to complete all homework assignments. And step number 10 is that before you sell your cohort, you need to build anticipation and build a weight list. You must tease the cohort before it's available for purchase, before it's live. You need to have a weight list where people can enter their email address to get notified and give some type of exclusive discount or bonus to people who join the weight list before everyone else. Weight list size is a predictor of launch success. So, if you can get 3 to 10% of people on your email list to actually join a weight list, you're going to have a great launch. If no one joins the weight list, the concept of your cohort or the value proposition probably isn't very good. So, here's how to build that weight list. Go at least 2 weeks before launching and start building a weight list. Do a teaser on social media. Have a call to action to join the weight list in every newsletter. Send one to two dedicated marketing emails anticipation and grow your weight list. Then you should sell your cohort to the weight list first before you open up enrollment to the general public. Give them type some type of exclusive discount or bonus. Step number 11. When you do a live cohort, you always need to sell before you actually build and deliver the product. Cohorts have a built-in pre-sale, which is the amazing thing about them. people have to like buy the cohort before the live sessions begin. So, it just has that built in. That's why I love cohorts so much. People need to buy before getting access to the program. So, your enrollment should always end the night before your cohort starts or maybe in some cases 2 to 5 days before the actual live cohort starts and people get access to the sessions, the recordings, and so on and so forth. You should not be creating the program or building anything outside of an outline before the program starts. So, outside of an outline and an orientation video, that's all you need to start selling. Step number 12 is my marketing process. And I could probably make a whole video about this. If you think I should, comment down below. But at a high level, here's what I do. I do a quarterly schedule for my cohorts. So, I do three to four cohorts per year. Ideally, one per quarter, but sometimes that forefront doesn't happen. I like to do these in January, April, July, and October. If you're only going to do three cohorts per year, the best times to do them are going to be January, April, and October. July, and the summer, it gets very busy. And I build out a marketing timeline schedule for my cohort. Kind of like you might market a conference or a live event where you're starting to promote it six, eight months in advance. I do that with my cohorts, too, but not quite that far in advance. What I start by doing is identifying the cohort start date. So, when the first live class starts, then I identify a deadline when enrollment ends. Usually, that's midnight before the classes start. And then I market my cohorts over a 30-day marketing period. Over this 30-day period, the first 1 to 14 days is about building the weight list. Day 15 through 19 is where I sell exclusively to that weight list. Day 20 through 25 is where I do live webinars to sell to our broader audience. Day 21 through 30 is where I open enrollment to the public where anyone can join. So, here's how that works. To build the weight list, I'm doing at least one to two posts on social media teasing that the cohort's coming. and teasing what they're going to get out of it. I usually will try to mention it in a podcast or YouTube video. I'll tease it in my newsletter and I'll send at least one to two marketing emails to get people onto that weight list. Day 15 through 19, I'm going to send three to five dedicated marketing emails to the weight list and I'm going to give them some type of exclusive early bird offer because they join the weight list first. But there's going to be a deadline for that offer. So after 5 days, for example, they cannot get the special offer that I give them. It could be $1,000 off. It could be free bonuses. I like to reward people who take action early. So that's what I do. But there's a hard deadline where after that date, after day 19 for example, they can't get access to that early bird discount. And then I go and market the cohort to the general public. I like to do live webinars, usually one to three over a 30-day marketing period through day 20 through 25 approximately. I teach my system for building newsletters and then I sell the live cohort on these live webinars. to my list. I'm generally doing three to five marketing emails to get registrations and signups. I'll do a couple social post. We'll often run ads, but not always. And then what I love to do on webinars as an exclusive offer for live attendees. So, if someone purchases the goart on the live webinar, they will get an exclusive bonus or discount or special offer. After I click end and that live session goes away, that exclusive bonus goes away, too. So, it really drives purchases as soon as possible. And what I found with webinars, I've done dozens of these now, is that the people who are going to buy just buying the live webinar, I've done things where like there's a bonus and expires at midnight the same day the webinar or it expires 24 hours later or 3 days later and still I'm getting 80 90% of my purchases on the live webinar when I ask people to sign up and buy. So why not just have that bonus expire when the live webinar is over because people are already buying there anyways and that just encourages more people to do it. So that's what I do. So, I would encourage you to do that live exclusive offer as well. I do share the recording or an edited version of the recording, but when I do share it, I always make that expire usually 48 to 72 hours later because if I just leave it up forever, no one will watch it. But if there's a deadline to actually watch it, more people will watch the recording. And then throughout day 21 through 30, enrollment is open. The sales page has a buy link. It's open to the public. anyone can buy, but they have to buy before that deadline that happens on approximately day 30 because enrollment closes completely then. So over day 21 to 30, I'm sending oftentimes five to seven marketing emails to my list, usually one per day. We're getting most of the purchases right before the deadline, like the the final 5 days before the deadline. And our biggest day of sales is always the day of the deadline. So on the day of the deadline, I'll often send usually two, maybe even three emails to my list. But often those emails are only sent to people who have already clicked and showed interest. So I might send one email in the morning to my entire list. But in the afternoon I'm sending two emails to people who already clicked and showed interest in the cohort. I don't just send that to everybody in a blind way. I'll do usually one social post when enrollment opens. I'll do one the day that it's ending just to give a reminder to people who follow me on social maybe miss some of the emails. But that's pretty much it. You'd be surprised how many people buy right before a deadline. And usually our deadlines are at um midnight Eastern time. And we're getting dozens and dozens of sales at 9:00, 10:00, 11:30, 11:45. So, you need those follow-up emails in the afternoon. They're super powerful. And that's it. That's kind of the one-on- ones about why live cohorts are worth considering, why they're important, why they're different than traditional courses, and why you should consider that. If you found it helpful, I'm going to create a much more in-depth guide that's going to be free initially. You can find that in the first link in the description or you can go to craftyoucohort.com. When you sign up to get that guide, I'll also send you the slides from this presentation for free. If you like this, just comment below if I should make more videos about cohorts. I'm not sure if this is a topic people care about, but if they do, let me know so I can create more content around