Picture this:
An influencer in your niche invites you to present a live online workshop to their audience.
They’ll hype you up and invite all their followers to attend.
You’ll have a full hour to teach them something from your area of expertise.
At the end, you can pitch your product (and you won’t even have to pay out affiliate commissions).
There’s only one problem…
You don’t have a product to sell yet.
This is the exact situation our client Rob Fortier found himself in recently.
But by the time the workshop was over, he had sold the first 5 copies of an online course he hadn’t even created yet.
How?
Because he came up with a brilliantly simple but powerful offer that appealed directly to the audience’s needs.
In this post, I’m going to show you how he did it so you can quickly create high-converting offers even if you don’t have a finished product yet.
Step 1: Diagnose the Problem
To quickly come up with a killer offer, you need to understand your audience’s biggest pain points.
In Rob’s case, he was presenting a workshop to an audience of authors who were struggling to get results from their email lists.
They had two main problems:
- They didn’t know how to keep their email subscribers engaged.
- They didn’t know how to get the email subscribers to buy more stuff from them.
He was already addressing Pain Point #1 with the workshop itself:
The workshop taught Donna’s audience of authors how to nurture their email subscribers with a welcome sequence.
This would help them develop more engaged email subscribers from the start.
While this is super useful, it doesn’t do a ton to help with Pain Point #2 — getting more subscribers to buy from you.
It was the perfect opportunity to create a product.
Step 2: Create a Simple Product Description
This is where most people overcomplicate things.
They think they need a massive long-form sales page.
They think they need 40 video modules.
They think they need an epic 20-email sales sequence.
Nope.
To pre-sell a product, you only need a brief description.
Here is what Rob came up with:
This description follows the classic P-A-S Framework (Problem-Agitate-Solve).
The first three paragraphs identify and agitate the problem:
You’ve worked hard to build your list and create a relationship with your subscribers. Don’t ruin your chance to convert them into paying customers with an email that says “Buy my stuff!”
In order to make a sale, you need to show your potential customers the impact your product or service will have on their life or business.
You know why they should buy from you… but do they?
Notice how that second sentence taps into a common fear that so many online business owners have: sounding overly salesy in their emails. Nicely done, Rob.
He then presents the solution (his course) and lists its top benefits with 4 quick bullet points.
I love how bullets 3 and 4 describe the actual asset you’ll have by the end of the course: an actual sequence of sales emails that will convince your subscribers to buy from you.
Keep that in mind when writing your product description. What’s the tangible thing customers will have at the end that they can point to?
This entire section is only 145 words long, and it makes up about 50% of the entire page’s content.
Other than that, there’s a general testimonial about Rob’s expertise, a short FAQ, a 2-sentence bio, and a checkout form.
I repeat: you do not need anything elaborate to pre-sell your course!
And keep in mind…Rob was selling to someone else’s audience.
In other words, these were people who barely knew who he was before attending his free workshop.
Yet they were still willing to purchase a product that did not exist.
So, remind me…why are you still hesitating to pre-sell your product idea to your own audience that already knows and trusts you?
Step 3: Structure Your Course
Rob shows how his course is structure in question 3 of the FAQ section:
6 video lessons. 1 workbook. That’s it.
And he’s still able to charge $297!
That’s the power of building a course to solve one super specific pain point — it doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to solve the problem in a clear way.
You could accomplish that with a 2-hour live workshop, a handful of recorded videos, or even a bundle of templates and tutorials.
It’s not about length. It’s about value.
See How Rob Got His Pre-Launch Course in Front of a Warm Audience — And How You Can, Too
So…how did Rob book that “no commissions” live workshop for someone else’s audience in the first place?
Check out his full case study to find out.
You’ll learn how Rob not only “borrowed” a warm audience for his pre-sale, but also how he added 400 email subscribers to his list in the process!