7 min read

We're often asked for a high-level roadmap explaining each of our courses, how they relate to one another, and how to select the best course for each student's needs.

Please help me out and give me the 10,000ft view of your courses. How do they fit together and is there a sequence I should follow? — Ivo M.

To create that roadmap, we'll externalize how we think about a principles-based, systems theory-informed approach to modern digital marketing.

We think you'll find our framework valuable, on its own, regardless if you're interested in any of our courses.

(We've included links to many free resources as well, and we always encourage our audience to consume our free resources before considering a purchase.)

The roadmap begins with a simple question:

Do you already have an offer that is generating revenue, or are you still in the idea phase?

If you're still developing and validating ideas, the best place to start is The Durable Business.

This course focuses on the frameworks and actions required to identify and connect an offer with an audience, creating a business from $0 to $100,000+ in revenue along the way.

The Durable Business (TDB) includes ‘Project X' — that's where students see us follow the exact same framework we teach to build a business from $0 in a market where we don't have any advantages our audience doesn't have (no idea, no product, no affiliates, no list, no reputation, etc.).

If you're interested in developing or validating an idea and turning that into real independent income, The Durable Business is our recommendation.

Before you consider the course, however, we think you'll find these resources helpful:

• The Durable Business Series (Part I) (Composite of five emails, lightly edited.)
• The Durable Business Series (Part II) (10 individual emails from our Fall 2020 Enrollment.)

If you already have an offer that's working (meaning it's generating revenue in ways that are meaningful to you), then we don't have a prescriptive answer for which course is best.

Instead, we'll describe our three-part framework, how those parts interact to produce results, and where each of our courses (free and paid) are most effective.

Then, we encourage you to identify where you can create the most leverage in your business right now and focus your attention there.

What is ONE thing I can do next to increase the number of happy customers my business system? is producing is a powerful question to help guide your thinking.

For us, “happy” is a meaningful distinction. There's a world of difference between generating a customer (through any means possible to maximize sales), and a very specific customer who feels an emotional pull to want to interact with us more intimately (through our courses, emails, workshops, and free trainings).

Happy customers don't want refunds, often tell others how happy they are, remain loyal for long periods of time, and are also more inclined to purchase more (and more) over time.

Here's the framework…

In our experience, every successful business needs three non-negotiable ingredients: awareness, engagement, and conversion.

In more familiar terms:

• Awareness = traffic.
• Engagement = leads/prospects.
• Conversion = sales.

(We've described each of those ingredients in previous emails.)

Awareness is any activity that makes your offer visible to an audience.

Paid traffic, organic traffic, and affiliate relationships are the three most common ways to create awareness. Google, Facebook, and YouTube (paid and organic) are the largest platforms.

Email is most often used to channel awareness.

Engagement represents the micro-steps an individual takes that moves them closer to us, our world, our way of thinking, and the value we deliver.

Examples include:

• Consuming content (especially long-form content)…
• Visiting a website (or other web presence) multiple times…
• Commenting…
• Asking questions…
• And of course, opt-ing in to receive emails (which creates opportunities for even deeper levels of engagement).

Engagement is a spectrum of behaviors, over time, not a single, all-important event.

Conversion happens when someone buys (although, counterintuitively, a customer can be created long before a financial transaction takes place).

In our 40+ years of combined experience, the single most powerful insight we've discovered is that businesses are systems from which results emerge from the relationships among and interactions between the component parts.

Just like a car is a collection of parts / subsystems (engine, drivetrain, fuel) from which movement emerges — with no single subsystem capable of movement on its own — your business is a collection of subsystems that work together to produce something that no part can create without the others.

• Awareness without engagement or conversion is vanity.
• Engagement and conversion without awareness are engines without fuel.
• Conversion and awareness without engagement are offers no one ever sees.

Each of those three parts — awareness, engagement, and conversion — is necessary, but, individually, none are sufficient. All three must be present before the results we seek are possible.

Instead of looking for the ‘best' way to create awareness, engagement, and conversion individually, think about how each component can work with the others to produce the best overall results.

Our three courses — Art of Email, Sphere of Influence, and The Traffic Engine — all work together systemically.

They're based on shared principles in service to the same overall goal, which is to teach our students how to create happy-customer-generating-machines they, and their customers, feel good about.

We call that marketing with integrity.

None of our courses fits only into a single category. However, each focuses primarily on one or two critical ingredients (awareness, engagement, and conversion).

Awareness:

• The Traffic Engine (TTE): A Strategic Approach to Paid Traffic Acquisition (Google Ads, GDN, and Facebook) (paid course)
• How To Build A Happy Customer Creating Engine With Paid Traffic (free course)

Engagement:

• Sphere of Influence (SOI): A Strategic Approach to Making Better Prospects (paid course)
• An Unconventional Approach to Email List Building (free course)

Engagement / Conversion:

• Art of Email (AoE): A Strategic Approach to Story-Driven Email Marketing (paid course)
• Email Marketing Course — Earn Customers & Make Superfans (free course)

Included free with all of our courses is the Audience & Offer Masterclass (AOM).

AOM is a three-part framework and series of exercises to identify potential audiences and offers and create value propositions likely to resonate with those audiences.

Art of Email, Sphere of Influence, The Durable Business, and The Traffic Engine are all open for ongoing enrollment.

The Momentum Builder Workshop (Lean Edition) is an eight-lesson, learn-by-doing, content creation sprint where we teach a lean version of our customer journey framework.

Participants create a Facebook ad, landing page, relationship-building emails, and promotional emails based on a unifying theme and powerful narrative arc.

Unlike our core courses, the Momentum Builder Workshop (Lean Edition) is open for enrollment for limited times. (The next enrollment will be early 2022.)

Choosing the course that's right for you is all about identifying where you see the most significant leverage opportunities in your business right now.

We encourage you to start with our tens of thousands of words of free content. And, if you still have questions, reply to this email and one of us will think out loud with you to help identify what we think is the best fit (free or paid).