Teach your Craft Workshop | Day #4 📆 Friday, September 11th
Bonnie Christine wraps the four-day workshop with Amy Small, founder of Knit Collage, who scaled to seven figures by teaching knitting online while selling hand-spun yarn. They answer live questions on balancing creation with teaching, platform choices, and filming setups.
Chapters
Hello, hello! Oh my goodness, hi! Welcome back, my friends. Welcome to day number 4. I forgot to turn my overhead lights on, so I look— I'm glowing. I'm glowing. I'll be right back. How are we today? As you join, tell me where you are joining from. Hello from Georgia. Hi, SG from Arkansas. Hello. Yes. Hi, Paula from Arizona. Hi, Bonnie. Welcome. Hi, Bia. So nice to see you, my friends. It is day 4. You made it. Some of you might just now be joining us. Some of you have been here all week. All of you have been making some incredible progress and also just absolutely delighting us with your work in the community, getting to know you all. Me and my entire team have like 2,000 courses that we want to take now, because we really need to see all of you bring yours to life, because we want to be your first students. Katherine is here from Germany. Hi, Rebecca from Idaho. Hello, Kate from Virginia. Welcome. Okay, we have quite a lot to get to today, so we are going to dive right in. But first and foremost, I want to say congratulations and welcome to all of our new Artisan Educator students. We're gonna shout some of you out here in just a second, but we are blown away at the response of Art as an Educator. This course has been on my heart for about 3 years, and it's been everything that we have eaten and breathed for the last several months, and to see that it is something that is needed in the world is just the best feeling in the world. So welcome! It's gonna be an amazing ride. Alright, let's dive into today. Ah, da da da da. Let me share my screen. Okay, my friends. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Today is the final day of our 4-day workshop, and I want to start first by just saying. Look at what you have done. Look at what you have made possible. So we're gonna take a little bit of time and just celebrate all of the action that you guys have been taking. This is from Pat, says joining from Australia. So Pat's been getting up at 5 AM to join us. Pat, if you're here, good morning. I want to explore turning my long-established beginner woodworking workshop into an online course for women who have never felt confident using power tools. Pat, so many of us. saw this and want you to bring this course to life. It is needed in the world. We're so excited about it. Hi from Texas. I am originally from Ecuador. I missed yesterday's live, but I've been catching up and it's been so informative and encouraging. So I really want to shout out those of you who have had maybe not the most ideal week. Maybe you've had stuff come up, things that you didn't expect. Our, our marketing director's sister-in-law had twins yesterday, so she's like, I'm going to see these babies. All kinds of things of life happens for us and for you as well. And I hope that you— I, I just say, I see you. You're still doing the work and still showing up. Paula says, I missed day number 1 because of a doctor's appointment, but I got the replay and I did the homework, and I'm so excited, loving this series. Patrice says, I'm watching day 2 now. There's a 6-hour time change difference. I'm so glad to be here. Ahas galore already. Brenda says, laptop battery charged, workbook printed. Just need a warm drink to get cozy for our upcoming live. Excited to be in the community and explore our creative gifts together. This is like the best community in the world. Heather says, I'm really curious to see what this call is all about. I've got my workbook printed, some caffeine for brain fuel, and I'm ready to go. Rachel says that was great. I couldn't join yesterday, but I watched the replay. So replays, my friends. So Rachel is lasering in on her goal to get people playing things on the piano. Another one that I just fell in love with. Replays are gonna be available until September 7th. Yeah, September 17th. September 17th, my friends. Alright. Says spinning. No, not bicycling. Hand spinning with wool, silk, or any other fiber. The possibilities are endless. We want to be a part of this course as well. Oh my goodness! It took some time to narrow down what I get to teach. I know what watercolor people need, but I had the aha moment in class yesterday. Already outlined her course, 9 videos from the dream with fears all the way to the end. The number of people looking for this information in Google searches is over 90,000 people a month in the US only. Okay, I love that. So excited for today. I really enjoyed day number 1, especially learning about picking a very specific topic. Listen to this, creating characters your children will love, illustrating picture books. Louise says, great day. Thanks, Bonnie. My idea for course is Drawing Made Wonderful. So these are highlighting people who have found their course idea. Kate says, right now my biggest skill is observation. I notice all the tiny things that make everything wonderful, that bring smiles to your face, or or make you wonder what it was about, you know, the interesting stuff. So I think I want to create a course on noticing your life and how it brings you randomness and joy. I just, I, I want the, the scope of concepts here are so incredibly exciting to me because, um, I have a saying. If you listen to my podcast or you've been around in my world, it is to create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And forever in my mind, I've used that to think about the way that I create artwork. But it is so applicable here, my friends. Like, we have to create more beauty in the world, and you can do so, and you can reach more people by teaching online. These are people who have outlined their courses. Already outlined my mini course for sewing patterns. I did my homework. A course is laid out, um, how to plaster repair in old homes. This course will have 9 videos. Biggest takeaway, I can outline a course, and I can do it again after this one. April also outlined her course with 12 lessons on Bible journaling. This has been so fun. There's a handful of you who are doing something similar, and I love that. And I think, how fun is it to come together and do it together? Nikki says, my class idea leans into my niche, which is sketchbooks for self-expression and creative joy. They'll move from, I don't know what to do in a sketchbook, to my sketchbook is my daily creative companion. What a great first day! Such a great teacher. I connect with your style. I just wanted to say how emotional I felt when you started, stated that there are students out there that want to learn from me. It's so empowering, and it's so true. Vanessa really appreciated the perspective of heartfelt marketing yesterday over icky marketing. So Eager to hear how you all felt after our marketing session yesterday, where I really want to kind of open up our minds and our hearts to what marketing does, because it is a service to the people who need what we have to offer, to let them know that it exists. Because if they don't know it exists, you can't change their life. So it is your responsibility to make sure that people know about your course and that they know that it exists and That is called marketing, but we do it with integrity, right? Nikki says, this week has been life-changing. Let's go, Nikki. It makes me so happy. For different reasons, I've retired from nursing. I've had many ideas. Marketing myself in a different way is exciting to think about, and I feel blessed to have stumbled across this workshop. Listening and watching to all the replays, I can tell I'm learning so much. I've taught before, but I've never broken it down into all the various skills and learned in the— in these classes. This builds value for the instructor and the student. And then Patrice says, listening and watching all of the replays, I can tell you I'm learning so much. I have taught before but never broken it down like this. Oh, sorry, I've read that one twice. And then many of you have joined us inside Artisan Educator. So Muriel says, I just enrolled. Jasmine Sadie, Kelly, and Sharon says, I'm terrified of being on camera, but I know this is what I need to do. I am in. Nikki says, there's no two ways about it. This course is a masterclass that can change our lives. I have been waiting for this kind of course. I'm so glad that Bonnie's teaching it. All signed up and ready to go. Abizola, thank you so much for this sweet message. She says, I truly can't say enough wonderful things about the team, Bonnie Christine, the thoughtfulness, encouragement, and value that you pour into everything that you create is incredible. She's also signed up and ready to go. So many of you have sent us just the sweetest messages, and we are so excited to get started. Okay, so you have officially begun. There's all different kinds of places that you might be. You might have it completely outlined. You might have decided what your opt-in is. You might still be trying to decide what it is you're going to teach, and that's okay because, my friends, we just started like 3 days ago. So today's day number 4. So I want you to take your progress for what it is, put it into perspective of how long we've been here together. It hasn't been that long, and you have already made so much progress. You have so much momentum already. So let's recap what we have been doing. Day number 1 is when we found what it is you're going to teach. So we, we kind of pulled in all the ideas of what you could teach into the one idea that you are going to teach. Based on where passion, skill, and market demand overlap. On Wednesday, I taught you how to outline it. We talked about deciding whether it was going to be a skill-based course or a project-based course, and then I taught you how I define— how I outline a course by defining the starting point and the end point. So once you know where your student begins and once you know where your promise ends, the lessons in the middle become much clearer. Then yesterday we talked about how to find these people. So we talked about marketing, we talked about how to gather people, how to reach them, how to grow your audience, even if you're starting at zero. And then, my friends, yesterday I did something that I have never done before. For the first time ever, we opened the doors to Artisan Educator. I think nearly 100 of you have joined us. So far, and I'm so thrilled to just begin this journey with you. We also announced an early bird bonus. So the early bird bonus is 2 launch debriefs. They are enormous. If you've dipped into the launch debriefs yet, tell us what you think in the chat. Um, they are my first launch debrief and my last launch debrief. So my first one, uh, was very unique. I was all by myself. I spent no money on advertising. I had no team. and I did it, um, as simply as one could, and it generated $352,000 in 2018. Now my most recent launch has been much more, um, complex, and it did $5.1 million. And so we're breaking down the entire thing, so you get every single email in my first launch word for word. There were 14 of them. There were like 96 emails, not, not to everyone, like different sections, segments of our list for different reasons, but a total of 96 in the last launch. So you can really just see, see kind of like how things move and groove. So this is your launch bonus if you join us in Artisan Educator by the end of the day on Monday. All right. I've never given these to anybody before. Talk about feeling a little vulnerable, but I know you're the right You're the, you're the right people for it. So then today we're going to talk about how to bring this to life. We're going to talk about becoming an Artisan Educator and what that means and what it looks like to bring your course to life. So an overview of today is that we're going to first start by going through our teaching format menu. So today we are talking about technology just a little bit. I'm going to make it really simple for you, and then I'm going to show you how to film Simply yet beautifully. And then I'm going to give you a really solid overview of the Artisan Educator. We've had a whole bunch of questions come in, so I want to make sure that you have all the questions that you need and also all of the information that you need in order to make the right decision. And then we're going to announce giveaways. So, my friends, these are our giveaways that were eligible, up for grabs this week. These grew as you came and watched the lessons. So go check in today. There's a check-in button right on the hub. And so this is what we have unlocked. So the Creator Starter Kits, we are going to be giving 10 of those away, and I'll show you what those are in just a second. And then we're also giving away 6 $500 Apple gift cards. All right, those, uh, you qualify for those by checking in. So you don't even have to be here right now live today to qualify, but we will announce them at the end. But I thought, because you are here, maybe we should just add one more level. So I've decided to just bump us up to one more level. But here's what we're gonna do. The next level is that 3 people are going to win a course curriculum review with me. Okay? So we're gonna unlock that, but you gotta be here live to win it. So we're gonna pull this one live, uh, today at the end of our call, but before the Q&A. And if you're here live, we will let you enter. We'll let you enter via the chat, and we'll pull 3 winners live, and then I get to talk to you about your course and review your curriculum, which I'm super excited about. Don't forget that you're also banking tuition towards Artisan Educator this week. So the first 2 days are closed. Yesterday is still open. So there's no new word today. There were only 3. So Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If you got all 3, then we automatically add the 4th. That would be called your completion bonus. So tons of you have already used your tuition credit. Just don't forget to go bank it. Yesterday's is still open and there is no new word today. Got it? That's what this looks like. It's at the bottom of the hub. You'll just insert your— the only thing you've got to remember is to push on the day that you're entering for, right? So push on the day that you're entering for. So if you're entering for day number 3, you got to click day number 3. Okay, so let's dive into the teaching formats menu. What I want you to see is that there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can teach, and I'm gonna give you several, and I'm not saying that you've got to use all of them, okay? So what I'm looking for is for you to pick one type of teaching format that you could see yourself getting comfortable with using. Okay, so I want you to choose one that you feel like you could become comfortable using to teach your craft. The first teaching format is called talking head. I also call this face to camera. So it's quite literally what I'm doing right here. It's also what I'm doing in this screenshot that I shared with you. So a talking head lesson is really great for things like principle teaching on principles or mindset shifts, encouragement, or any kind of like direct teaching. Um, especially if the student needs to hear the idea clearly. So this format works really, really well. This one also works really well with a teleprompter. So if you find that you're trying to record and it's difficult to remember what to say, or you're using a lot of filler words, or you're forgetting, or you're going down a rabbit trail, you know, a teleprompter is a really great way to stay on track. And the talking head lesson, or face to camera, is great for Now the second kind is what we call conversational or casual. So tons of different ways to do this, but my morning videos with Bonnie are a great example of very casual, very conversational. So inside Art as an Educator— actually could have gotten a screenshot of this, but I didn't— inside Art as an Educator, every lesson, well, the vast majority of them, at the end, they switch to something that's called Team Bonnie Field Notes. And the field notes are these conversational, casual conversations. So I'm not in my recording studio, and I'm certainly not using a teleprompter. I'm kind of just talking to you about how we think about these things, maybe how we personally implement them or how we've used them. So they're kind of conversational, casual. So they're really fun and kind of off the cuff. The third is interview style. So these are 2 images of me doing an interview style lesson. I love interview style lessons, and so you really are on camera but you have no script. You have someone kind of behind the camera asking you questions or prompting the idea that they want you to talk about. And so when you're knowledge is super intuitive. You know, you think about maybe talking to a friend or maybe hosting an in-person workshop or something, and somebody will ask you a question and you're like, oh, I could talk about that all day. But then when someone is like, can you develop a lesson around that? It can feel like a little more difficult to extract that knowledge and formulate it into a lesson. So an interview style is more off the cuff. Now there are totally ways to cheat this as well. So you can kind of interview yourself if you don't have someone to go behind the camera. You can kind of like read the question yourself and then answer it as if you're interviewing yourself, and then just fix that in post-editing, which is really fun to do as well. The next one is overhead. So an overhead video lesson is best for flat work. So anything like writing or sketching or planning or arranging or cutting, sorting, hand lettering, any kind of like workbook walkthroughs or showing off tools and supplies. So this requires an overhead camera. And there's no face-to-camera. So this is the one that typically just you can see your hands in, which is great. The next one is what we call a screen recording. So a screen recording is when you just use a software on your computer, you hit record, and then you do the lesson on your computer. So this one is especially helpful for anyone who teaches software, website design, any kind of digital tool. Anytime you're teaching like online research or tech setup or video editing or photo editing. Anytime you're teaching something like a platform walkthrough, a screen recording is great, and then all you can hear is your voice. So we see your mouse clicking around and you typing, but it's your voice over it. The next kind— oh, there's a— this is not supposed to be there, just that's for the next slide. So focus on this photograph right here. This is a narrated video, so you can always video yourself doing the thing and then come back later and do a narration over it. So sometimes it's really difficult to talk while you teach— I'm sorry, teach while you craft. This is especially true if your craft is very loud. So let's say you do a very loud craft that requires like saws or hand tools, or I'm not sure, all the different things, right? You can record the process and then come back and narrate it later. Now this one is what we call voiceover slides. So this one is great for when you're really just teaching, you're teaching points. And this is an example from our Surface Design Immersion course where I'm teaching about how to pitch. And so I'm just teaching, and so at some point it's like you don't even— you don't really need to see my face teaching it. So we'll cut to a slide and I'll just be talking through the slides, uh, as well. It's almost kind of what we're doing here, but when I do it for a course, you don't even see my face. So there's no face involved. Usually these are my favorite days because I just stay in my PJs and pop my hair on top of my head, and I just talk through the lesson because I don't have to be on camera that day. And then I think this might be the last one. This is something that we have kind of coined, I think, ourselves. And we call it come with me filming. So this is very much how we filmed our signature course Surface Design Immersion this year, kind of like an over-the-shoulder style come with me. So this requires someone with a camera on the move kind of following you around, but it's excellent for crafts that are not stationary. So if you've got a craft that doesn't happen at the table per se, if you need to walk a walk and do it or show it out in the field somewhere, this is called come with me filming and you You typically have someone with a camera there, or you have something like a tripod. Okay, my friends, I think it's time that we go film. Now, um, I have a couple of requests, mainly for you to be really, really nice to me because I've never done this live. Um, I'm gonna switch cameras, we're gonna go into another room, and I'm gonna just very kind of like very casually show you my setup. What I'm going to attempt to do is record a video. I'm gonna try to record the Artisan Educator trailer live. And again, I just need you to be really, really patient with me, because I'm hoping that all of the tech works. But I'm gonna show you the thing that I'm gonna show you is interesting for 2 reasons. Number one is that it is the exact setup that I have used every day this week for Mornings with Bonnie. So if you have felt like the production level of Mornings with Bonnie was anywhere close to acceptable, the setup for that was under $100. That is what we are also giving away to how many ever I told you. I think— what is it, team?
10.
5 or 6 or something. What we're giving away today are these bundles. So I get to show you exactly what that is. So here we go. We're gonna get scrappy. Don't let me— don't, don't get motion sick. I'm gonna switch cameras, so I'll be right back. Okay, are we here? Why, why doesn't it show up on this one? Oh, because that's my other camera.
Okay.
All right, you're on my laptop now. We're gonna walk out. So this is my, this is my, um, this is my big daddy, my big Mac, um, recording studio. It's got all of the, all of the lighting and sound control. Now let's see if I can see the chat. Okay, so I'm in my studio and now I'm going to set you up here and I'm going to show you how I would record this. But before I do that, I hope I'm not making you sick. I'm going to show you the setup. Okay, so it's extremely simple. This is actually— we'll talk about this in a second, but that's not even part of it. So this setup is a tripod and my phone camera. Now, the thing that makes it amazing— so here's what you got to know— is that people will Here, let me see if I can see the chat here. Okay, good. People will forgive a lesser quality video. They will not forgive lesser quality audio. Okay, so audio is the most important part. So this is the secret. This is my favorite little thing, and this is part of our giveaway bundle, and it's by Rode, and it's the simplest mic setup you've ever seen. So this guy plugs into anything, so either your computer or your phone, and it records really well. So I want you to hear the difference. I'm gonna make— I'm gonna see if this works. Okay, so I switched my audio. How do I sound? Like, hopefully, hopefully you think I sound much better now. Sometimes I try to cover it up with my hair, or I wear a shirt that I can, I can clip it to my undershirt and just wear one on top of it. Um, Um, but this is a Rode, and that was as simple as it was. So there's a little green light on the end of the receiver, and it shows green when this has connected because it automatically connects. So this is the Rode. Now, the thing that makes this a little tricky is that I'm doing it on Zoom. If Zoom— if you were not here and you were not a part of this, I would have connected the receiver into the back of my phone right here, and it would have worked beautifully. Um, and that's all there is to it. It. So let me make sure you can hear me. It's a little more quiet. That's probably a setting on my, um, that's probably a setting on my computer, not the mic. Okay, so now I'm gonna— now what I'm gonna try to do, the other thing that I want to show you because we're about to go live, is that I have another little laptop right here and I'm gonna— I have a teleprompter So this is just a teleprompter app right here, and we're going to give you the links to all of this so you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about, um, writing it down or anything right now. So, um, what I'm going to do is a little bit scrappy, but I just have my laptop set up behind my phone camera, and I'm going to run the teleprompter on that, and we're going to see if I can— we're going to see if I can record the Artisan Educator trailer on it. So the first thing I'm going to do is switch my camera view. Okay, so now you are seeing my phone camera view. Oh, you know what? I forgot. I forgot my flowers from this morning. Let me go get them. Yeah. Okay. So the other thing that I wanted to show you is a way that I like to find light. So I'm gonna— we're gonna go for a ride again. Don't let me make you motion sick, but this is what I do. When I'm looking for the light, I literally hold up my camera and I start to go in a circle. So you can see now this side of my face is dark, and now I'm like completely backlit. And over here, I am dark this way, but when I come into this direction, I become evenly lit. Okay, so that's what I'm looking for when I'm setting up something like my, my camera. Now it's a bit obvious in this room because— why am I out of breath? Because I ran, because I ran to get the flowers. It's pretty obvious in this room because there's a window right in front of me, but in the garden every morning I've done a circle because you just never quite can tell where the best light is or the most flattering light is. So that's what I suggest is just take your phone. Um, And go in a circle. Are we ready? I'm gonna try my very best to record, to record this and show you how I would do it. Nope. Hold on. I'm gonna go right there. Every time you make something, you create 2 things: the work itself and the knowledge that it took to make it. Now, most creatives build a business around the first. We sell the piece, we ship the product, We book the client and we deliver the work. And then, well, we begin again. When every new dollar depends on what our hands and our time can make, then the business has a natural built-in ceiling. But the second thing that you create, the knowledge, well, it can travel farther than your hands ever could. That knowledge was earned through years of practice and mistakes. And beginning again and again. It lives in your eye and in your timing, in your process, and in the 100 decisions that you make that you now know by instinct. And somewhere, someone is trying to learn what you already know. Now, the internet can give them information, but what they need is a guide who is discerning, who knows what matters What comes next and how to help them when the first attempt goes wrong. When we have earned knowledge that could shorten another person's road, when it could bring them joy, then we are called to pass it on. Because when you teach, well, your knowledge begins a second life. It becomes the confidence that someone gains, the work that they create, the opportunities that the work opens And perhaps one day the knowledge that they pass on to someone else. That is how craft becomes a legacy. And your craft, well, it can pay you twice. Once through what you create and again through what you know. Now, a course can serve many, many students without asking your hands or your hours to begin again and start over. So for every sale, it creates revenue that can extend beyond your physical output and your available hours. Now, not so education can replace the craft, no, but so that it can protect it so that you can have more freedom to choose the work that you take, the work that you make, and how you spend your days and what becomes possible for your family and your future. Hi, I'm Bonnie Christine. I am an artist and an educator, and for more than a decade, I have built my creative practice alongside my education business, side by side. Teaching did not take me away from my art. It actually deepened my work. It multiplied its impact, and it built a business that was no longer limited by what my hands could produce. Art as an Educator gives you the complete path in order so that you will find and validate the right idea, turn your intuitive knowledge into a student transformation And teach it in a way that creates incredible results. You'll build a beautiful course experience, and then you will grow an audience that trusts you. You will launch your course with integrity in a way that you can feel really proud of and good about, but that is also successful. You'll support your students well, and you'll build an education business that can last. It's going to take you from, I think I could teach this, to a student-centered course that you can confidently teach, sell, deliver, and repeat anytime that you want. Now, your body of knowledge, it deserves the same craftsmanship as your body of work. Your creative practice deserves a business that supports it without consuming it. And the person that's just a few steps behind you, they deserve the path that only you can give them. My friends, there is a course inside your craft. Come build it with us, and together let's pass it on. Okay, so it wasn't perfect, but there it was. I am going to, um, meet you back over in the other studio. Do you want to just walk with me I think I'll just let you walk with me.
Okay.
Can you hear me? So what did you think? It wasn't perfect, but we did it, and we did it live. So that is— I really want you to see just like how simple it can be. Okay, so that teleprompter was not an actual teleprompter. It's just a teleprompter app, and The interesting thing is that, and we're— we'll, we'll give you all the links to— we'll give you all the links to everything in the replay. Okay, so with the replay today, we'll give you links to the teleprompter, the mic that I used, and also the stand. I love the stand. Now, if you don't have an iPhone or a phone camera that you think is good enough, there's also plenty of webcams that are just as good. Good.
Um, I—
mine is in the next room over, but I can— we'll link that one as well. So we'll give you the link to the webcam that we suggest as well. It is pretty affordable too. And so this is like the first level. So this is what we would call the simple build. It gets you in a solid state of recording for around $100. This is the set that we're going to give away at the end of today. Um, oh, but here's the interesting thing. So if I hadn't been on Zoom, if I had just been recording, I could have actually put the teleprompter on my phone. So if anything, my eyes might have looked like they weren't directly into the camera, and it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I like to make sure that I'm looking directly into the camera. And so, um, had I not been on Zoom, I would have overlaid the teleprompter right on my phone camera, which is crazy cool. And so then you're looking directly into the camera, but you're reading and no one can tell. So that is the way that you kind of show up for filming day, and you just kind of get through your lessons very productively because you're not trying to memorize anything. Um, so that's my favorite way to do it. Okay, my friends, let's jump back into the core content. Yes, I have so much to share with you today. I'm glad that that— I mean, I'm glad that it like relatively worked. I was afraid that maybe my mic wouldn't connect or something like that. So I can take a deep breath now. Okay, let's see. We're going— okay, we solved. Thanks. Thank you. I'm so glad that you liked it. All right, this week I have shown you the path from blank page to an outlined course with a plan for finding your students. And my friends, you have walked it. You have actually done the work. So just a few days ago, many of you had never done as much as you've done this week. So many of you came in with thinking that you had an idea but were really struggling to bring it, to translate it into a course. And so many of you have found Today I want to talk to you about a little bit of a different path. I want to talk to you about a bigger path. So I want to show you where that path leads, and I'm going to start by sharing some things about me. And I want you to truly understand that this is not to impress you, but to just kind of expand your thinking, expand your mind. Over the past 10 years, our education business has profoundly impacted our ability to fulfill our biggest dreams as a company and leave a truly lasting impact on our industry. Um, the first way I think is through our magazine. So we founded Pattern Magazine. It is a quarterly production for our industry that you can now pick up at Barnes& Noble across the entire United States, which is insane. We just finished our 6th issue of Pattern Magazine. Last year we were able to exhibit at the world's largest licensing trade show with this incredible— some of my team in this incredible booth. We also were able to launch our very own e-commerce store. This is called Flowery, and it is our heirloom quality product line inspired by the belief that beauty, beautiful things should be made slowly and last for generations. The next is that I get to host a podcast called The Professional Creative. It has been downloaded nearly 2 million times in the last couple of years. I've also had the honor of speaking on stages around the country, being featured in incredible publications. But most of all, the thing that matters the most to me is that I've had the absolute honor of teaching more than 200,000 students. Now, 20,000 of those have gone through our signature program, Surface Design Immersion. They have spanned more than 100 countries, and this community, the one that you are in right now, spans the entire world. Every single thing on these slides started the same way that your week started, with a blank page and a pencil and a gut feeling saying, I don't know if I can really do this. Okay. This is the reason that I built Art as an Educator. The reason that I have poured 12 years of everything that I have learned into this program is because It should not take you as long as it took me. It should not be as lonely, and you shouldn't have to guess. You shouldn't have to guess how to build a marketing plan or how to price your course or what to do when a student complains. I have figured all of this out the hard way so that you don't have to. So when we get into questions today, I want you to ask them knowing who's on the other side. I am not just an artist. I am not just an educator. I'm someone who is deeply and profoundly both of them, and I am still doing this thing. I am still learning. I am still being a student in both of these worlds. The other thing I want you to know is that it is not just me. So I want to introduce you officially to several people. You've seen what teaching has made possible in my life, but I want you to see what it has made possible in other people's lives. So I want to first start by introducing you to a couple of the students who have been a part of our beta program. So because Artisan Educator is brand new, we have had a small beta test group go through the course ahead of time. Aubrey came into Artisan Educator wondering whether she would invest in another program and still be carrying this dream afterwards. Then look at the progress that she reported. Her course has been built out, her scripts are written, and she's prepared to record. And that is what I want you to see here, that she had moved from wanting to teach to having the actual work in front of her ready for the next Susan came into Art as an Educator with more than 20 years of teaching experience. Susan is also our guest educator who's teaching the first paid in-person workshop bonus for the course. She's taught for more than 20 years, both in person and online, and she told us every module surprised her and gave her insights that were already making an impact in her business. And that is the depth that I have wanted for this program for so long. Whether you are preparing to teach for the first time or you're strengthening some something that you have been doing for years. I want this to move your work forwards. Then I want you to meet Elizabeth. You met Elizabeth yesterday at the end of our call. Elizabeth had a custom stationery business, young children, and a limit to how many hours that she could give that she maxed out. So she began teaching alongside her client work, and over about 4 years, she has reported that she's brought in nearly $2 million from her education revenue. She says the freedom and the flexibility ability to be with her children is what has changed her life the most. You also got to meet Bale. So Bale was selling digital files for laser cutting, and people kept asking her how she made those designs work. So the process that she figured out was something that other people wanted to learn. She turned that knowledge into Project Academy and recalls roughly $20,000 to $30,000 in revenue from her first launch. Okay, so pay attention to the questions that people keep bringing you. There may be a class inside that if you keep explaining it over and over and over again. Now, to tell you the end of this story, Bale now makes roughly $300,000 a year from her education business. Uh, Diane is incredible. So Diane's specialty is chinoiserie painting. People started asking about her brushes and her paper, and eventually they wanted her to teach them how to use them. So by the time she launched her course, she had an email list of about 5,000 people and she made around £80,000 of revenue in her very first course launch. She didn't spend a dollar on marketing. And this is someone who said, I don't know what I could be as a teacher. She discovered that possibility by listening to her audience and what they wanted to learn from her. Amelia is a mother of 5 who began teaching garment sewing early in 2020. So over several years, she built the business that brought in $297,000 in just this past year. Now, you met Amelia a little bit yesterday because she is who taught me how to do what we call calling posts to grow organically on Instagram. This has meant so much to Amelia in her life. She's been able to be present with her children and allow her business to work for her when she's needed to take a step back. This is what having more choice in your life can really look like. Now, Amy, you're gonna meet thoroughly at the end of today's call. Amy was making beautiful handspun yarn, and her customers wanted to help— wanted her to help them turn them into a project that they could actually finish. So she created a knit-along that combined a yarn kit with a digital class. She makes 12— she made $12,000 on its first day. Nick Collage has reached their first million-dollar year in 2020, and the opportunity started with helping her customers succeed with the product that she was already creating. Then we get to meet Alex Kincaid. So Alex teaches thousands of people to paint at the same time, and I love the way that she describes the impact. She said an hour earlier those paintings didn't exist, and now they Think about all those people making something beautiful because you showed them how. That's your knowledge reaching beyond your work. You get to help other people experience the joy and the pride and the possibility and the skill that you brought you, you to your craft in the first place. Jennifer, you met on Tuesday. So Jennifer lives in a Canadian farming town of 800 people. So one of my biggest takeaways from talking with Jennifer is just the impact of being able to teach online in order to reach people all over the world. She said that this has been an opportunity for her while living in a tiny, tiny town that she could have never done without access to teaching online. She said someone in Australia was waking up at 2 AM to take her classes on making dolls, and how incredible to be able to just reach people and bring them together around the craft that you love so much. So there is a formula to success, and easier said than done, I know. But it is simple. The formula to success is when an action taker meets a proven path, and that is how people become successful. So that means that something is required of you, and something is required of me. Now I. I have the proven path that you can walk in order to become an online educator, but you, you are the one responsible for the action. And so many of you have taken so much action this week already. I am so incredibly proud of you. There are 2 paths to artisan education. There's 2 stages. So stage number 1 is really probably where you were when you arrived. So my craft enriches my life, and I want to make my more beautiful, right? So your craft enriches your life. You love it, you find joy in it, and you use it to make your world more beautiful. Stage number 2 is, I want my craft to enrich others' lives. So other people's lives. So rather than just make my life more beautiful, my world, I want to make the world more beautiful. So I want to know from you, which stage are you interested in? Stage number 1, I want to make my world more beautiful. Stage number 2, I want to make the world more beautiful. Tell me in the chat, Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 1, Stage 2. Stage 2. I think we're a room full of Stage 2ers. So this week we've worked on finding the class inside your craft. We've chosen your student and outlined your teaching and found the people who want to learn it. And today I'm going to teach you more about how to bring it to life. We brought it to life on camera already. That is like really significant progress. You have started making decisions about an idea that for some of you have been living in your heart for years. I also want to be direct with you about what comes next. Your outline needs to be fully brought to life. Your lessons need to be put into a course home, and your future students need to have a reason to enroll. There is a process and a plan and a path for doing all of that. And I have spent years doing it in my own business. And so I want to show you how to carry that work through, because teaching online is a craft too. Teaching online is a craft worthy of craftsmanship. I think it's something that we know to our core. And, and as artisans ourselves, we want to be an artisan of education. Teaching it means helping another person become capable of doing it. Inside Art as an Educator, I'm going to teach you how to take what has become instinctive to you and turn that into an experience that someone can learn from and find the transformation in. So this is kind of what we've done this week. So your course plan is the beginning. Now we need to turn it into the rest of kind of where we're going. So your course plan was the teach your craft portion of this entire experience. Art as an educator is where we really pull it into curriculum, filming, marketing, and launching, and supporting students, and then repeating it over and over again. So permission to be honest with you for a second. This is a silly Instagram post from a long time ago. There is a big difference between planning a course and actually launching one. So when a student pays for your course, everything needs to be student ready. Ready. Lessons need to be written, they need to be edited, they need to be in order. Videos that look good and sound professional, even when it started on your phone by a window like today. There's also the depth underneath it. So understanding why people make a decision to enroll in a course, what does someone need to experience before they're ready to move forward with you? How do you balance things like an opt-in and an email email list and what we call a launch. This is professional course creation, and I'm— I walk you through every step of it inside Art as an Educator. There are 18 lessons on filming and building your course. There's 16 lessons on marketing that you can be proud of. There are 19 lessons on launching with every tool in one place, and 16 more on the part that most programs skip: how to help students finish finish well, how to get them to increase your course completion rate, how to get your students the success that they've been looking for, and then how to teach it again. You got a beautiful taste, I hope, of all of that this week. Artisan Educator will give you the mastery. So Artisan Educator is brand new, and inside it comes with the full Artisan Educator Path, 12 weeks of world-class community and the Love Squad, one live Q&A call with me, the done-for-you library, the writing studios, the swipe files, the click-by-click toolkit, the guides and calculators, the bonus modules, and the Team Bonnie Field Notes. So as you choose what to teach, you might find yourself thinking, which of my ideas should I teach first? Who would actually want this class? What should students be able to do afterwards? How much should I include, or what do I take out? How do I test demand for this class before I produce it? What if someone already teaches this? And what should I name my course? Those are the things that we work through, all of these decisions in Module 1. You get research questions, you get our surveys and survey prompts, how to extract information from those, and ways to find find out that people want what you are planning on teaching. This is where we will choose the size of your course, the student that it serves, and the result that you will help them achieve. Then we're going to put that into words that someone can recognize and want, so you'll know what you're building and you'll have evidence behind every decision. Then, as you plan your lessons, you might find yourself thinking, what do I teach First, how do I explain something that I do without thinking about it? Right? It's intuitive. How long should each lesson be, and what do I actually say? When do I do a demonstration, and when do they practice? When do I? What worksheets or resources do they need, and how do I make those? And how do I know that they're learning? So that's what we cover in Module Two called Craft. It's how to turn your know-how into actual curriculum. This is where I teach you how to. Teach. So we take the things that you do instinctively, we make them into something that a student can really come in, follow, and practice. And then you get what we call the Lesson Writing Studio, where you will build your actual lessons. So your scripts, your tutorials, your demonstrations, the examples that you'll show, and what your students will do afterwards. So by the time that you move into filming, you've already worked through the entire course that you're going to teach, and you know how you're going to teach it. Then as you create your course, you might be thinking, should I teach this live or should I pre-record these lessons? Or what camera gear should I use? I'm ready to upgrade my camera or my light or my audio. What equipment do I actually need and how do I connect it all? How do I film my hands or how do I just film my screen? Or how do I get comfortable on camera? How do I edit out mistakes and how do I make beautiful worksheets? And what if I want to include a physical workbook? And where do I upload everything for my students, where do I give it a home? So that's what we cover in Module 3. It's called Create. This is where we actually create your course. So you'll get the production planner, all of our gear guides for 3 different budgets, and all of the tutorials for editing your videos, a hiring guide with a template if you want to hire your editing out, or tutorials if you want to do it yourself, and then a click-by-click tutorial on how to to set up your course home. Zalie Barclay's bonus is going to help you be comfortable and confident on camera. And then we also have the Canva bonus, which is going to help you create your materials. So you'll, you'll learn how to build your brand and your design in Canva if it's not something that you are comfortable doing already. We work through the practical details right down to how you get your students to log in and work through their lessons so you can begin with phone and build an experience that you're proud to put your name on. Now, as you find your students, you might be thinking, how do I find students when I have no audience? What should I give away to grow my email list? What do I email people before my course opens? And what should I post to attract future students? And how much should I charge for my course? How do I sell when people expect everything to be free? How do I ask someone to share my teaching on behalf of me? And when should I try paid ads or traffic? So Module 4 is called Grow. It's all about building an audience that trusts you. Now I teach you how to make the value of your course visible and sell it with conviction. You get an opt-in planner, a content planner, and our nurture sequence writing studio where we literally give you our nurture sequences that are ready to go. The toolkit helps you build your email list, and Amber, my marketing director, is teaching a bonus on how to do your own paid advertising if and when you're ready for it. We cover finding people, earning their attention, and helping them understand why they would want to learn from you. And you can begin this work while you're still creating your course. So we will allow— you'll be creating your course as begin developing a marketing plan for it as well. Then as you get ready to open your course, you might be thinking, what needs to be ready before enrollment opens? What exactly do I say on my sales page? What do I say in my emails leading up to it and during open enrollment? How do I move from free teaching into an offer? Should I include a bonus or a payment plan? What policies do I need before taking payments? How do I take payments? And what do I do if sales are slow? What about an order bump or an upsell? And what should happen right after someone buys? So this is Module 5 called Open Your Doors. Make an invitation that you believe in. This is building your launch plan and the words that you'll use to invite your students. The Launch Studio gives you a place to build the pieces— the, the launch schedule, your sales page, your invitation, and your emails. And when I say emails, I mean what to send before you open, during enrollment, and on the final day. You will get the sequence that we've used since 2018. You'll get the purpose of each email and the prompts that you need to write your own. We also prepare your policies, checkout, and your welcome experience. And if sales slow down, we have a launch SOS that is going to help you figure out what's going on, and you'll have a plan to follow during your launch. Now, as you welcome your students in, you might be thinking, how do I help students who fall behind? What if someone disrupts the community? How do I help without being available all day? How do I have boundaries and protect myself? What do I say when someone asks for a refund? What if a payment fails? How do I collect great testimonials? How do I know if my course is profitable? And how do I sell it again without starting all over? Yeah, that's a great question. Over, and how do I make it what we call an evergreen offer? So Module 6 is called Sustain. It is about building a business that lasts so that you can create a repeatable business that also protects your time for your craft. You get community guidelines, our support replies, our swipe files for refund requests and failed payments. These include language adapted from messages that our team use year in and year out. We cover helping students finish your course, protecting your time, gathering their stories, and improving the course year over year, or every time that you launch it before you teach it again. We also look at your profit and the hours that the business has asked of you. These questions have a place in the course because they have a place in running an education business, and when you reach them, you'll have guidance and resources to work from. So that is the complete path to Artisan Educator. It is an incredibly comprehensive of course. This is where you go from an artisan to an artisan educator. It is where you learn the language of online education along with the skills that you need to be able to bring your course to life even as a beginner. And it's one of the things that makes AE Artisan Educator the most comprehensive course on online education that exists. Now, if you are thinking, Bonnie, my subject is too specific, I want you to think about Diane, who has built her entire education business around chinoiserie painting. If you think, okay, great, Bonnie, I don't have a beautiful studio, don't forget that Elizabeth filmed Dream to Design at her living room desk. And also inside AE, we cover all kinds of different hacks and different ways to set up just a frame that your camera sees that looks great, so you don't have to have a dedicated area to film in. If you're feeling like, ah, I am such an introvert, I don't know if I can do this, I'm not confident on Remember that Alex tells us, especially in her video, if you'll watch it over on the hub, that this teaching online has been the easiest thing for her as an introvert. It is her preference to teaching in person because she's in the comfort of her own home and all by herself. And then if you're thinking, my audience is used to me teaching for free, that's also how Jennifer began. So Jennifer began teaching everything for free on Facebook Lives and then later began to create paid courses. paid courses and memberships, so you can make that transition easily. I want to walk you through every single thing that you get inside the program, including the course, the tools, and the support, so that you just have it really, really clear. Okay, so we're gonna unlock one at a time. These are for everyone who joins AE. You get the core course, so you get the complete Artisan Educator course, all 6 modules. They take you through your class, writing, filming, finding students, launching, and delivering well. This is the complete path to turning what you know into a world-class education offer that serves your student and supports your life, my friends. You also get live calls with me. So I go live once a week every Friday for probably 2 hours. So they're going to be a little bit longer because there's just one a week. This is where we will work through your questions, the decisions that have. You'll also learn from other students, and if you can't join the live, you'll be able to submit questions in advance and then watch the replay. You'll also get our writing studios. So inside the writing studios, you will write your lessons, the nurture emails, your launch emails, and your sales page will all take shape there. You get the structure, the prompts, and the examples that we have optimized for the last decade. Your knowledge and voice will fill all of the gaps, so it'll sound like you, but you'll have the strategy and the outline. Those pages become the course that you teach and the invitation that you share. The next one is our click-by-click toolkit. So this is where we show you every— how the technical side of everything comes together. So how to set up your course home, how to connect your checkout, how to build your email list, how to edit your videos. You can pause these tutorials, follow the steps, go back and forth and get the technical instruction that you really need. You also get our Team Bonnie Field Notes. So I spoke about these a little bit earlier, but you'll hear from me and some people on my team about how we make decisions about production and marketing and launches and student support. We share off the cuff what has worked, what we've changed, what we've learned along the way, and you get to bring that hard-earned experience into your business without having to learn it the hard way yourself. You also get the done-for-you library. This is probably my— these next 2 pieces are my favorite part of this course. So alongside the teaching, you get more than 50 of our templates, planners, guides, and kits. So all of our research questions that we use, our production plans, our community guidelines, our hiring resources, literally so much more. We've taken the systems that our team uses and made them adaptable for you and your course, so more of your time can go towards creating than figuring all of that out as you begin. The next one is our swipe file library. So swipe file means it's yours to copy and paste. You get messages that you can adapt. So our— again, our launch emails, our student welcomes, our support replies, our refund requests, how we handle failed payments— these draw from messages that we actually use and build We have such a library, it is incredible. So when an unfamiliar situation lands in your inbox, you are going to have language that we have built and learned from for more than a decade. Next, you get the Artisan Educator Path. So of course you get the course, but you're also getting our workbook. So the workbook is a physical workbook that's coming to your— coming to your front door wherever you live in the world. This workbook is going to be your best friend. You will write in it and make mark all of your decisions and log your progress as you develop your course in the physical piece. This was super important for me to have because I think as artisans, I want you to come online, learn what you need to learn, and then get offline and go pen to paper. The next thing you get is the Launch Studio so that when you open enrollment, you have a plan already in place. So the Launch Studio brings everything together— your launch forecast, your launch timeline, your free teaching experience, everything you need to know about your sales page, your emails, and the invitation for your students. You'll know what to prepare and when to use it. You'll also get the Launch SOS that we talked about so you can, you can diagnose what's happening in your launch if it's not going according to plan. Next, you'll get my guides and calculators. So you'll get all of our guides. You'll get our hiring guides. You'll get our printed student material guides and where we get all of our things printed like this workbook so that if you want to do something similar to this, you can. We're super excited about who we're working with for our workbooks, and they're a great option for you as a student as well. We've gathered the options and we've built all the calculators. You can work with your budget and your goals with the research and the math already organized for you. And finally, you get 12 weeks of community, so you get our private community for Artisan Educator students where you can share your ideas and ask for feedback and celebrate the work that you're completing. These are people who understand why this matters. So for 12 weeks, we're going to come together and do it in person together. Now you also get lifetime access to everything. You get 12 weeks of live support. At the end of 12 weeks, the community and the course go into read-only. So it's called read-only, which means everything is still there but nothing new gets added. So at the end of 12 weeks, it goes into read-only, but you've got lifetime access to the content and all of the live Q&A calls, and of course all of the resources, etc. Nothing goes away, we just don't add anymore. Okay, my friends, we got to talk about what one course launch could mean for you. What one course launch could mean for you. So you've heard from so many people who— there's nothing extraordinary about us, any of the people that I've shared with you here today who were shocked at the first time they recorded something and launched it and did $12,000, $8,000, $30,000, £80,000, and then of course my own experience. I really want you to, to bring that to life and And I'm going to tell you something that someone told me a long time ago when I was really struggling with a decision was be careful not to trip over pennies on your way to dollars. This course that I have built, I built to be a $10,000 course. I believe in my core very confidently that this course is worth $10,000 easily. What we have decided to do is to price it at $2,997. next year. So because it is the first time we're offering it, that is the price that's going to be next year. For this founding members class, this founding students offer, we've reduced it by $500 because you're first, you're here first. So this course is $2,497. We also have a 6-month payment plan, and this is everything that you get inside of it. Now, many of you have also been banking your tuition credit. So yesterday's is still open. Can bank up to $400 in tuition credit against this as well. So that is a really incredible way to get in this year. Now, oh, the other thing that I wanted to say is that the one-time payment is the best value, meaning the 6-month payment plan does have interest baked into it. But in the one-time payment plan, you can also choose to use Afterpay, or I think PayPal Credit, which allows you to pay over time. So those options will oftentimes let you get the best value, but also pay back over time. So it's a great option that tons of people are using. Jennifer, one of our beta students— this video is over on the landing page for Art as an Educator— after she came through Module 4, which is the one on marketing, she said this module alone is worth $2,500. I really am confident, I stand by, uh, the amount that we are giving in this course is truly life-changing. What this really means for you could be a course that pays you for years. It could be an annual vacation fund for your family. It could be your dream home. It could be working from home on your own terms. Or maybe it's just that you want to be able to, um, maybe it's that you just want to be able to go pick up your kids and be with them when you want to. Want to. Now, we said this on Tuesday, you are allowed to want your work to be both meaningful and profitable. In fact, I want you to believe that you're allowed to want it to be meaningful and wildly profitable. Teaching online gives you a way to pursue both. I believe that we were created to create. And because that— your craft is not meant to stop with you. You are called to pass it on, my friends. And I would love to do that with you, together alongside you, and, uh, see you bring your course to life. My friends, we are going to move into Q&A. So any question that you have about what we've covered this week, um, what content we've covered this week, if you're thinking through the marketing of your course or your course idea, or if you have questions about art as an educator, I want to invite you to put them into the Q&A form. It is at the top of the hub. My team is also going to put it in the chat. So at the top of the hub, you can click to add your question for today. We're going to take about a 10-minute break, and then we'll come back and we'll dive into Q&A.
First 7-figure year. And if you had told me in 2017, having been $200K in debt, to 3 years later having a million-dollar business and then seeing it grow beyond that, like, I never would have believed you, ever.
Hi everyone, I'm so excited to introduce you to Amy Small from Um, Knit Collage. Amy, I'm so glad that you're here. I cannot wait to dive into your world. Please tell everybody a little bit more about who you are and what you do.
I design very unique handspun yarns, so they have all sorts of things spun into them like trims and flowers, and I design knitting and crochet patterns from them. And then I teach online, so I teach classes on how to knit anything from a basic hat all the way a more complicated sweater.
I love it so much, and every time I see you, you are wearing something that you knit and you're knitting something else, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. So take me back to knitting. How did you get started? What did you do, if anything, before? And how long have you been teaching online?
Well, I went to school for fashion, and I studied cut and sew wovens and learned how to sew and all that good stuff. But then I got I got bit by the knitting bug when I learned to knit at a local yarn store near where I went to college and ended up getting a job as a sweater and knitwear designer at Free People and worked there for 5 years. I absolutely loved it. It was like a crash course in all things knitting, but I kind of burned out on fast fashion. Something calling me to the craftier side of things. I think that just aligns more with me than fashion. So I I decided to quit my job and try and start Knit Collage. At the peak, I was working 9 freelance jobs while I was also starting Knit Collage and trying to get it all going. But how it began is I started to design these handspun yarns. I was making them all myself on a spinning wheel, like a real spinning wheel, double treadle spinning wheel, and I put them online and tried to sell them. And that's sort of what happened, but it was crickets in the beginning. Like, I could not sell the yarn. And so I came to teaching in a roundabout way to sell the yarn. So I started designing patterns because people kept asking me, what do I do with the yarns? And I had to give them ideas. It was like, I'm kind of like, I could look at a yarn and be like, oh, I know what to do, I'm gonna knit this thing. But a lot of people actually They want the idea, they want to know how many to cast on, knit for this many inches, or whatever. So I started designing patterns, and then people started to ask me, like, how do you do that technique? You know, how do you knit that sweater? Things like that. And that's when I started to teach. And that was really cool because then I got to see people actually experience this transformation of going from not knowing how to do this thing, or being a very beginner, to actually coming out the other end completing something that they love, that filled them with a lot of joy.
Okay, so that's really interesting because you decided to teach online in order for them to understand how to use the physical products that you were trying to sell, and that worked.
Mm-hmm.
So tell me how it's been going. Also tell me how long it's been since you started teaching online.
So I started teaching online around 2017. I started the business in 2010, and those first 7 years were a real struggle. At the time that I started to teach, I was in debt. I just hadn't figured out how to make the business work. I was selling wholesale to a lot of different mom-and-pop yarn shops all over the country and the world, but the margins weren't there and it just wasn't working. And so kind of a last-ditch effort, I'm like, I'm going to try this thing called a knit-along, and it's a community knitting event where we knit the same designs at the same time, and the customers get a yarn kit from us, and then I teach them a course on how to knit this pattern. So the first knit-along I think was 2017, and I think on that first day that we launched the knit-along, I think I made like $12,000, and some months In the business before that, I had made like not even $12,000. Like, I'm positive I hadn't. So it just almost like within one day, my whole world was rocked and totally changed. And I think what was so cool, like what's so cool about the teaching piece is that people are quick to buy yarn, they're quick to cast on a knitting project, but if they don't know how to do it, they're also quick to give up. So By offering this digital class component, it really helped them achieve what they wanted, their goal of actually finishing this project. So when I started to offer this, it also led to more people finishing their projects and having great results. So that was just so satisfying and exciting to see.
I know that you move around a lot, or at least you have this summer. I know that. So you're able to kind of work on this business from wherever you are. But I also imagine that you're bringing together people who love to knit from every corner of the world. So tell me about what it has meant to you to be able to have a business that you can run from anywhere, and also what it's meant to bring people into the same room from wherever they live.
It's like hard to even put that into words, especially, you know, it's— it hit I think it's at different stages. It's important to me for different reasons at different times in my life. But right now my husband's working a very intense job, gone 12 hours a day. We have 3 kids in school and it's just so awesome to have the flexibility to be the one right now in this season of life.
When I was—
during COVID the roles were reversed. But right now to be able to drive them to school, pick them up, go to all their sports games If somebody's sick, be able to have the flexibility to say, I'm going to be with you. It's just been so awesome. And then the piece about bringing people together from all over the world, it is, it is so cool. We just had our first retreat this year in February and it was amazing. It was so cool because not only is it knitters, it's like knitters who like this kind of knitting, which is a unique kind of knitting. And it's like such Somehow we have all found each other. And to walk into that room where everybody was wearing a Knit Collage piece and hugging each other and just so excited, geeking out about all the little pattern modifications and yarn details. And I can't even tell you how amazing it was. And the feedback we got was, was really cool, really special.
I also know that your business has been just wildly successful. So tell me what has come true for you. What has made it possible, and did you ever think that it would do this?
In 2020, we had our first 7-figure year, and if you had told me in 2017, like, you know, having been $200K in debt to 3 years later having a million-dollar business and then seeing it grow beyond that, like, I never would have believed you, ever. It's been great, and it's opened up so many other opportunities. Like, now we have a membership That's a big part of our, the business and the team is amazing. We have 18 women in India that hand spin the yarn. It's, it's, it's a special thing.
Okay. Tell me about the fact that you have kind of this physical aspect to what it is you do. So everyone who's listening is deeply creative. Many of them have a craft, though, uh, many hundreds of categories, all different kinds of things. And so it's interesting to see someone who does handwork. Obviously, when you are filming, you have to be able to show what you're doing, but also it has a physical piece to it, which is definitely going to be true for some people listening. So talk to me about what that has looked like, what it's meant to kind of combine the online teaching with the physical product.
Yeah, so I think it's really our special sauce to be able to offer people this incredibly unique yarn, then the pattern, this is what you make with it, and then the class on exactly how to knit it. And if you're part of our membership, you get coaching too. So if you need help or you make a mistake, you can get help with it. So it really sets us apart. And I, I like to think of it like it's almost like we have our own little utopia where the yarns are designed by us, the patterns and the teaching, and it's like we're not dependent on I think it is a little bit harder and it takes more work because you've got to do the designing and of course the teaching, but it makes what we put out so much more special and stand out so much more from everybody else in the industry too. I started to teach because I wanted to sell the product, and I really didn't know how to teach. I still don't consider myself an expert knitter. And that's actually what makes me a great teacher, because I speak to beginners. I try to always stay in that beginner mind because those are most of the people that come and want to learn from us, and definitely it's most of the people who are engaging with my videos.
So you would say that not being like an industry expert on knitting has actually worked in your favor?
Yes, yes. And I've taken classes from lots of experts, and a lot of times they're talking a mile a minute and you're too scared to be like, oh my gosh, wait, can you show me that one more time really slowly? I think it can be your superpower, so don't let that stop you from just, just going. I was in a position where I was in debt. I had to figure out something that worked, and that really forced me to just do it. I was like, I gotta throw one more Hail Mary up to see if this works. And it was the thing that turned my business around.
Think about someone who, I don't know, maybe they're in a position where you were. Maybe they have a physical product and they're having a hard time selling it. Maybe they're in debt. Maybe they're just kind of frozen, but they're thinking about teaching online. Maybe they're afraid because they don't feel like the expert in their field. What advice would you give them?
Just do it. Just put it out there. And if you're not looking back at it in a month or in a year thinking that was really cringe, then you probably waited too long. Like, it should be a little bit like you look back in a few months and say, ooh, like, I could have done better. But you've just got to start somewhere. And the sooner you start flexing that muscle and putting in the reps, the better you get, the more your teaching style improves, maybe your setup. I still only film with my iPhone. I really do the most basic setup and no one's ever said anything to me about my— not ever once.
So just to be clear, you're running a 7-figure business off using your iPhone for camera?
Yeah. And no one said anything. You know what they will say something about? If I don't have a manicure. So that— what does that cost?
Like $15, $20?
So true.
Isn't Amy so fun? So Amy, um, you've heard me talk about her a few times, but her business is incredible. And you just heard her— her business does more than, more than a million dollars a year, and she does all of her filming with her iPhone. Okay, my friends, permission to not overcomplicate this, my friends. Also, I have some of you to shout out. So what I'm doing is creating a paint wall with students' names on it. I'm gonna be showing it just very soon, like probably tonight. But I at least got started with some of you who have just joined Art as an Educator. So, Cherise, Nike, Nikki, Brittany, Kim, Christine, Jane, Jackie, Kim, Kimberly, Patricia, Patricia, Deborah. You all just joined in the last few minutes, and so I wrote these as fast as I could. I am so excited for you, and this wall is gonna be beautiful. So I have about half an hour to do Q&A, so we're gonna dive right in. But let me tell you why I have a hard stop. Stop today. If you live in the Southeast, there is an incredible, um, Indie Craft— well, it's called Indie Craft Parade. It is an incredible, um, makers market, and Artisan Educator is the title sponsor for this event. So it's about 2 hours away from where I am right now. It's in Greenville, South Carolina. So If you— oh my goodness, Yolanda, I forgot about the giveaway. Okay, team, team, we've got to announce the giveaway. Okay, on it. So sorry, I meant to do that before the video. Anyways, I'm going to Greenville because half of my team is there already. We've got a big booth. If you are in the area, if you're in a lungeable distance to Greenville, South Come to Indie Craft Parade. Come meet us. Come talk to us. We're there on behalf of Artisan Educator, and we've got a super fun project for people. And also this market, this handmade market, is like the most incredible market. You will come and just meet some of the most amazing artisans ever. Yeah, Indie Craft Parade. Okay, so let's first of all This is how I want you to. Now I'm scattered. Team help! I need to announce the giveaway winners of the 16 winners, and then we've got to pull brand new ones. So I am looking at our support sheet. I'm on. I'm on the second tab. This is how I want you to enter the.
Giveaway.
I want you to just tell me your biggest takeaway from this week. So tell me your biggest takeaway from this week in the chat. That is how you are going to be entered to win. Um, we're going to choose 3 of you live right now to win a curriculum review with me. So I'm going to give you like a couple of minutes to enter because I think there's a little bit of a delay as well for me. Um, so tell me your biggest takeaway from this week. That is going to enter you into To this giveaway. 3 of you are going to win here right now live. I mean, we're not gonna do it right now. We'll follow up and, and handle it, but a review of your curriculum with me. Now, while you do that, I want to— I want to announce the winners that we are drawing for the check-in giveaways. Okay. Okay, let me get them pulled up. Okay, the first set— oh, hey Mia, you're here to help. Do you know that your video's on? Say hi to everybody. Say hi.
Hi.
Sorry, I don't know what happened. No, we're so glad you're here. Uh, I said, I said help, and Mia arrived. Thank you, Mia.
I'm here.
Thank you so much. Okay, I got it now. Um, Mia, you didn't even know Mia was behind the scenes helping all day. Uh, okay, so the first set of winter Winners is for the creator starter kits. So this is a Rode mic. So the mic that I showed you today, the Rode mic and the same tripod that I used today. So the Rode mic and a tripod. There are ten of you that are winning this. Now you may not be here live because all you had to do all week was check in, and so these are the winners. We have your email address, so we're going to. Email you. It's Mylene, Kat, Serena, Deanna, Kathy, EJ, Susan, Robert, Rebecca, and Allison. Now I can't share your email addresses live, so I'm sure there are many of you that are named Susan here. So we're going to email everyone who won that I just said. We're going to email you by in in just the next little bit, so you'll get an email. From us, and then we'll gather the information that we need from you in order to send you your creator kit. The next one is 6 winners who are getting a $500 gift card to Apple. We love Mac, so we use Mac for all kinds of stuff, from the phone to record to iPads and laptops. And one of the biggest gifts that we could give you is the ability to upgrade your So $500 Apple gift cards are going to 6 different winners. Team, I'm gonna let you go ahead and pull the 3 live winners, and I'll announce those next. So my winners for the Apple gift card are Mary, Linda G, Rosie, Teresa, Mary, and Stephen. Again, all I have is your first name and your email address. So If your name is Mary, hang in there and you'll get an email from us shortly with more information. Okay, congratulations. We are now going to draw the winners for the curriculum reviews. So the first winner— can I get a drum roll? The first winner is Linda Feldman. Linda Feldman is our first winner. Linda, congratulations.
Congratulations.
The next winner is Shelley Harrison. Shelley, congratulations.
Oh my goodness, I cannot wait to learn about your craft and your curriculum.
We're going to follow up and we'll, we'll get everything that we need from you. Okay, we've got one more. The third winner is Jill Bartlett. Jill Bartlett, congratulations. Linda, Shelley, and Jill. Jill, let me see if there's anything else that I need to say. Linda Feldman, Shelly Harrison, Jill Bartlett, congratulations! I cannot wait to review your curriculum and hear all about— so we will reach out to you via email. We'll get all your information and, uh, we'll go from there. Okay, my friends, so sorry about that. We're gonna dive into questions. So the first one is from Sonia. Sonia says, I want to teach, but I also need to make my art. Will I have time for both? So this is actually a question that I've seen come up a whole bunch. Is this gonna take over my craft? And I'm gonna give you some honest answers. Okay. First and foremost, I believe that if it takes over your craft, you have done it wrong. Okay, so the whole point is that this gives you more time to do what you want to do in your life. Um, however, you got to be careful. I will admit that I have let it take over my, my life. I have let it take over my life. So, uh, there were about 2 years in 2020 3, 2024, in that time period where I was really like all consumed by the business. Um, I— it was growing quickly and I needed more help than I had, and I got consumed by it and actually took a break from designing fabric for like a year because I couldn't keep up with it. And I have learned so much from that experience. And so today, truly, I am more creative than I ever have been inside my own business. So I have so much to say about this. But I have very much kind of like hacked or reverse engineered creativity into the business, meaning like in order to do like it, like it's baked in, equally as important as the teaching and the education and the business is demanding. So lots of things like pattern I created it because I, I wanted to do it. Like, I wanted to write, I wanted to be called into having photo shoots and designing flat lays and being the creative director of this magazine. And it is like some of the most prolifically creative work that I get to do in my life. Um, I made a membership called Pattern Play where all we do is play and make patterns and paint together. There's no business in it. I don't teach how to monetize. It's not about that. It is about the joy of being creative. And I kind of selfishly built it for me. I'm like, I want to make sure that I'm creating patterns and making art and playing month in and month out. And so I am— we do that with the membership. And so there are lots and lots of ways to make sure, but there's also an empowerment for you to decide how you do this. So don't look at what I'm I'm doing and, and think that that's the way that you have to do this. It makes me think of Laurianne. So Laurianne's story got shared on day number 2, and she is a fine artist. She identified one portion of her business that other artists struggled with, which was turning their art print— turning their fine art into art prints. So she made a course called Art to Print. Don't quote me on this. Laurie Ann, if you're here, don't quote me on this, but I think that course was around $600. Many of you took it actually. Um, and so she created this course once and then she spent, uh, a couple of weeks a year launching it. That course was highly successful, like life-changing successful for Laurie Ann. And it was not an education business that Like, the thing that I love about Laurianne is that she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't want to be held responsible for like going live all the time. She doesn't want to have to do live calls or live Q&As or support. So she built the business that she wanted to support her life, and she did so wildly successfully. So something that I teach inside Artisan Educator in depth is, hey, Wendy, congratulations and welcome. Let me write your name down since I saw it. One thing that I teach is that this concept of your house, your rules. There is nothing under the sun that you have to do because you build the business. So if you don't want a community, don't make a community. If you want nothing but a community, make a community. If you want to do live calls, great. If you don't, then don't build them into the business. Um, you can have rules and policies and all kinds of different things. Like, you get to step onto a playground and design the education business of your dreams. And so if that means that you build it and you put it on evergreen and it runs in the background kind of all the time, but you're not necessarily involved with it on the day-to-day basis, do that, right? If you want to launch like I do, do that. So there's so many different ways to build, uh, to build the business that supports the way— the very specific outcome that you want. Okay. Um, all right, the next question is from Cindy. Okay, will the discount that I banked stay on a Can I use it next year? I still have a full-time job, but I'm excited to sign up next year. Okay, Cindy, totally hear you. I get this. It is— it may not be the right time, but all banked tuition expires Monday at midnight. So if you weren't aware of that, make sure you are aware of it. We've tried to put it everywhere. It's on the bank itself as well. So all of your banked tuition So we wanted to do it this year because, again, Art as an Educator is brand new, and this is also the first time we've ever taught this workshop. So I wanted to make sure that we incentivized your doing the work because we believe in it. We believe in the work that you put on paper this week very much. But Monday at midnight is the last opportunity to use the credit that you banked. Okay, Angela says, hi, Bonnie, I'm ready to sign up, but in conversation with my husband, he wanted to know if I was willing to get my business license, an accountant, and do my own taxes. Taxes. Needless to say, it stopped me in my tracks. Can you explain the path of managing finances? Angela, A wise husband you have. Big shout out to all of the spouses as well that are listening to you dream this week and listening to you know the course that you're outlining and everything that you're learning. I'll tell you what I did with my husband. This is lighthearted, but but it but it is factual. So my husband told me in two thousand. 12. Uh, so back then he had a day job. He had like a 9 to 5. He was a cycling coach for endurance athletes, but he was also a professional cyclist. And so he was, he was at a 9 to 5 and then training a ton. So I was doing my own business online, which meant that I was home, which also meant that I did things like take care of the bills and do our taxes. And he told me that when I started making more money than he made, he would do the taxes. You wanna know how long that took me? 1 year. So I don't know, I think that might be a great response. Why don't you make that trade? Just let him know that I will do the taxes until I start making more money than you, and then you have to Do the taxes. How's that? But in all seriousness, taxes are not a reason to stop your dream. Having to figure out accounting is not a reason to stop the impact that you want to have and the people that you want to reach. And my goodness, that's all figureoutable. I always say, go make that problem and then we'll figure it out. You can figure that out and your business will more than fund you figuring that out. So if you have a tax and accounting problem, that means you're making a lot of money. And so it's okay, we'll figure it out. We'll get an accountant or a tax person. Like, the, the best investment I ever made, the, the first person that I hired was a bookkeeper as a contractor, I think in 2018. So when I did my first big course launch, I was like, it's time to do— to— it's time to figure some, you know, have some help in our bookkeeping. So we hired a bookkeeper, but that was Was easy, literally the easiest thing to solve in the world. So you got this. You also do not have to. Okay, I always have to say I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice, just my own experience. How I understand it. How I understand it is that you don't have to be an LLC or a business. You don't have to be a registered business. You can absolutely do it as a. Solopreneur. That's not the right word. A solo— oh my goodness, what is it? Solopreneur means one-person entrepreneur. A solo— you know what I'm trying to say. Now, we will cover this in Module 6, is some of the business side of it. We probably do recommend setting yourself up as an LLC, which also means that something like Art as an Educator is a business. business expense. Sole proprietor.
Thank you.
Sole proprietor. Solopreneurs are often sole proprietors. So what was I saying? You— oh, art, because art as an educator is an incredible write-off for your business as well. So anyways, we'll figure that out. Don't worry about it one bit. Okay, um, Katie says, I've been designing professionally for over 20 years and doing freelance for over 10. However, I have not been super great about putting my design life on social media. I have a good website and I have done a few podcasts, but again, not super great about updating my website. How do I convince my audience that I'm this expert in my field without a ton of evidence to back it up. Okay, well, first of all, we got to change that language. We're not convincing anybody that we're experts, right? Because that feels like hard work, right? So all you have to do is start to invite people in to experience what it is that you know. So if you listen to— what day is it? If you listen to yesterday, you'll really understand how I think about gathering people people and, and, and writing to them and just letting them experience your knowledge. So you don't have to tell someone that you know a lot, you just have to, um, help them experience your knowledge, help them experience your way of thinking, your way of believing. But immediately the thing that I thought of, Katie, is that if you've been designing professionally for over 20 years, um, and doing freelance for 10. What I would do is just reach out to literally every client that you have touched in the last 5 years at least and say, hey, I'm looking to do this in my business, and I'm wondering if you, um, enjoyed your experience with me, if you wouldn't mind to take a minute and write a testimonial for me. Um, one way that I love to gather testimonials is also offer to like do it for them if they want to answer some questions. So if someone doesn't feel like they can write copy or testimonial style thing, you can just ask them some questions. Like maybe you come up with 5 questions. I give you the ones that I use in AE. And it'll be like, uh, what were you struggling with before we worked together? What was it like working with me? What was the outcome? Would you recommend me? And then they'll answer, answer, answer. And then you could turn that into a testimonial and send it back to them. Of course, it's in their own words, but you kind of did the work for them. And that way you've got evidence, right, from other people, other students that have— sorry, other clients who have interacted with you. And that would be a really great way to just feel like you had— you were standing on a confident place. So that's what I would suggest. Okay, so Mary says, ideas for an inexpensive backdrop? Yes. Okay, so my favorite thing, again, we go into this in, in Deep Dive in AE, we have a whole couple of lessons on setting up your backdrop with tons and tons of examples from other educators. Mine's really busy, but sometimes like a really clean surface. But I recorded Surface Design Immersion in my like laundry room. Okay, in my laundry room. I wanted to do it at another location. I did not have this studio. And so what I did was I built a set and I recorded in it for 5 days. So the way that I build a set is that I build faux walls using insulation from Lowe's. You can paint them, you can wallpaper them, and it's really, really easy. If you— you can just use your own wall, but if you need to actually build like a faux setting, remember your camera only sees like a rectangle, so everything around Around it does not matter. So there's a really easy way. Doesn't cost much to build these foam walls. You can make it beautiful, set a table in front of it, and it works great. Yeah, but it is something that we go in, in detail. Jack just joined. I'm sure I've missed some of you, but I'm gonna write Jack's name down. Jack.
Welcome.
Okay, let's see. The next one is Sarah says, will you tell us more about how much you teach in filming, such as whether you teach your bigger filming setup with lights? So yes, we teach what— anytime it's something that there's a bunch of different options with, we teach in 3 levels. Every time there's a lesson that could do that, there's a simple build, a custom build, and a studio build. So the simple build is what I shared with you today. It costs around $100, and It uses mostly what you have already, so a window for light and a camera on your phone or a webcam if you don't have a phone with a camera on it. The next level up, the full suite of the custom build, is $1,500.
Did you see that?
I spit. The $1,500 build, now you can pick and choose just one part of it, but that build gives you a second camera. Both are using like a, like an actual camera this time and professional lighting. And then my studio build, I, I have it completely outlined. I think, um, I, I suggest the simple build. If you really want to invest, um, the custom build is solid. I mean, it's multiple camera angles, it's overhead, it's amazing. Um, but my studio build, which I think is a little like more than anybody needs, but more than I need, is the full build. It is a $15,000 studio, and I've got it all linked. And not only linked, but the gear guide tells you how to, how to set it all up. I will tell you how I came about this, though. I ended up hiring out a studio. I rented it for the 2023 version of Surface Design Immersion. And I paid right at $15,000 to rent this studio for a week. So I hauled everything in, I built a faux backdrop for this studio, and I spent a week— it was like 2 hours from here— and I spent a week in a hotel recording the course. And I just thought, I cannot do that again. First, it's so expensive. Second, I ended up losing my voice, and I felt like, what am I going to do now? Like I had— like I was paying by the minute for that studio. And that is what inspired me to build my own and just go like super high quality and just have it forever. So I can walk into my studio and be recording within 10 seconds. I leave it on all the time. I come, I hit record, and I'm recording. And so it has alleviated one of the biggest bottlenecks in my business, but it took me a decade to get to where I felt like I needed it. Okay, so that's my, that's my, that's my spiel. Okay. Nikki says, what if I wanted to teach live classes rather than prerecorded classes? I currently teach live art lessons to kids online through a platform, and I'd like to branch out and create my own website. I'd be open to some prerecorded, but my kids love the lessons and I enjoy the interaction. Love this, Nikki. So yeah, teach live. I mean, I'm teaching live right now. So we walk you through We suggest Zoom. Now, this workshop, if you've ever taken any of my other workshops, we always do it on Zoom. This one, because of the number of people that we were having, we decided to stream to YouTube. It's the first time we've ever done it, but it was really easy. But I would suggest using Zoom. So we teach live teaching right, right in Artisan Educator. You do not have to pre-record your lessons, any of them. So you could sell a course. In fact, I've paid, uh, what did I pay for that? Maybe $2,000 for a course that the entire course was delivered live, which means like, put that into perspective. Like you launch a course that you haven't had to do anything for. You don't have to prerecord, you don't have to edit videos. Um, and then people watch the replays. So it's totally, totally an option. And multiple camera views would be easy with that as well, so especially an overhead. So you, you likely already have that figured out, but it's very easy to go on Zoom Teach Live, have face-to-camera and an overhead, or even, um, I don't know if I can show you this. I don't think I have it hooked up today. I'm probably going to go out. Hold on. Yeah, I don't I'll have it hooked up. I have a— take that lighting. I have many cameras. So I've got an overhead camera and a side angle camera and a face-to-camera. So 3 different camera angles that I can toggle in between. I just didn't have— I didn't plug it up today. Okay, Deidre says, I'm gonna do the 6-month plan. Do I get access on September 17th with everyone else, or only if I pay after I pay in full? Deidre, you get access right away. Of course you do. Get on in here. So the hub is opening to everybody on September. You know, I I don't I don't say dates. I've gotten myself in trouble before. I'm not going to. Say a date. Next week, the hub is opening, and if you join us with the 6-month payment plan, you're in, you're in full experience. In the beginning, did you feel like you were just so close to success but still wasn't sure if you could ever be a success story like the women that you have been sharing and yourself? I'm telling you, when I say that I started with a blank page and a knot in my stomach for everything I've ever done, um, I never in a million years thought that this would be my life. I never thought in a million years. The first time that I launched the Surface Design Immersion Course, I had this very secret goal of 100 students. I wanted 100 students with everything in my body. And I knew that that would change our lives. So that course was $997 back then. And I thought if I made $100,000 with this course, it would forever change my life. But I was so embarrassed to even admit that. I think I told David that that was my goal. But never in a million years did I think that We would, we would do it. And we— and that was the one that brought in 352 students. So just like, let yourself be open to possibility. You don't know, you don't know unless you try. And my goodness, does it deserve to be tried, not only for you, but for the, for the craft itself, and for the student.
Yeah.
Joanna says, on top of this course, how much should I budget for using a platform or any other cost of teaching online? So this is a great question, Joanna. We talked actually a little bit about it last night. So on top of this course, there are going to be a couple of expenses, right? So it depends on the build that you choose, but I want to be really clear that the simple build. Well, let me be really clear about this from the get-go because we've had some questions about it. Everyone gets all 3 options. So you might do a simple build on your equipment, but you might do a custom build on your launch. So you can kind of pick and choose, or you might stick with the simple, the simple build for your gear, but then like get one light. So this is really helpful when you are recording with a window to the side. You can get one light to come over here to like counterbalance the window. So you can pick and choose. So that's the same for everyone throughout. We just don't want to overwhelm someone with the studio build when the simple build is really quality. So that was my second point, is that even the simple build does not sacrifice quality. So one thing that we believe and we teach in AE is that beauty helps someone learn. So things that are aesthetically pleasing Help someone learn. And also beauty comes in many different varieties, and clarity is one version of beauty. So anyways, what was your question? Oh, how much? Okay, how did I get to talking about that? So you've got Simple Build. So at the Simple Build, anything that you might need to get for recording is going to be around $100. And then the only other expense that you'll have is the tech, like literally the platform that you are going to be hosting your site on. We suggest, uh, Kajabi. So we use Kajabi for our everything. So we've been on Kajabi since 2018. Um, that business has scaled with me from $300,000 to more than $40 million with more than 300,000 people on our email list. Um, we're big fans of Kajabi because it allows you to have everything Under one roof and scale. So I've also migrated platforms, and it is not fun. It is like maybe the worst thing. Like, I would maybe rather do my son's 7th grade math homework than migrate platforms, and I really don't like doing his math homework. I mean, I don't do his math homework. I just help him with it. Actually, I couldn't do it if I wanted to. Gets much better out of me. Anyways, um, this platform is everything under one roof, and it will prevent you from ever having to migrate. So Kajabi is your course home, your landing pages. So if you need a website, you can do it on Kajabi. So my website, every, every page on my platform that you see has been built on Kajabi. I built them myself. It's really easy. It's like a super easy website builder. So all of your landing pages, your sales pages, your opt-ins, your email list, your community, your affiliate program if you ever have one, all of your offers. So you could do a course and a membership. You can even do a podcast on Kajabi. Like, it's truly everything under one roof. And that's why we suggest it, because the more, the different, the more pieces of technology that you try to connect, the more expensive it is. And also the more likely things are to break. Now, if you move up into custom and studio build, today we use Circle for our community. And we use Kit for our email service provider, even though we do still use Kajabi to email. I won't get into that. We'll cover it in AE, but we use Kajabi to email students and Kit to do our marketing on. But that's not the simple build that we did only when we really needed to. That was when we were hitting 2,000+ students in a course, and we very much needed to be able to track our support. And follow up. And so we ended up adding Circle as a community platform, but you— I don't suspect that you'll need that from the beginning. Um, Kajabi is also working with us, so they know about Artisan Educator. They're super excited about it, and they are giving our students 3 months for $99. Um, when you do that, you also get my templates. So I personally made a sales page template, a welcome template, a thank you page template, an opt-in page template, and a waitlist page template. These are the ones that we use in our business, and you can install them with one click, change the colors, change your information, and you're ready to go. So we love Kajabi. Our suggestion is that you wait to do that until, you know, it's time to build your course. But also, this is not like a Kajabi course. So if you come on another platform, if you're already on another platform, platform or you choose another platform, that's totally fine. It's just that my team really— we really know Kajabi like the back of our hand because we're in that program every day, all day. Good, good question. I'm 5 minutes over. Let me see if I can answer just a couple more of these. Teach and Tell. Amy is like, what is Teach and Tell on September 15th? Why have I not told you about Teach and Tell? So we're doing an event on Tuesday called Teach and Tell where you get to meet in person some of the women who you've already seen videos from, and also our beta team. So I've invited our beta students to come and just casually answer questions that people have about art as an educator. Um, it's going to be really fun. You're going to be able to hear just where these women have started and where they have ended up. Um, and none of them saw it coming. So it will be fun and informative. We're going to take questions during that again for the It'll probably last about an hour and a half on Tuesday afternoon. Okay, a couple of you are talking about overwhelm. Helen and Abby, how do we deal with overwhelm? I know I want to teach, but I'm overwhelmed by the prospect. I'm feeling overwhelmed about content creation. It's paralyzing. So I don't know if either of you watched Morning with Bonnie this morning. this morning. But if not, maybe go listen to it. It's about 7 minutes long, and I won't talk about it that long here. But when I first wanted to be a fabric designer, I was also paralyzed in overwhelm. So much so that like everything in my body wanted to be a fabric designer, and I did nothing. I couldn't do anything because I was so overwhelmed. I had no idea how to get started. So I let 6 months go by without doing anything because I was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the lack of knowledge that I had about how to get started. And so I finally woke up one day and I got a little mad because I realized how long it had been, and I started doing one thing a day. So I promised myself that I would start doing one thing a day to inch me forward. And what that did in hindsight was it took my gaze from way out in front of me to like right in front of me. So anytime I get overwhelmed today, it is because I'm looking too far in in the future, because that's like step 332, and I don't know what the step is or how to do it. But I do know what I could do today. And so today you could join Art as an Educator. Today you could start researching. Yeah, like, you know what you could do today to start moving you forward. And then tomorrow you'll know what you could do tomorrow. And then the next day you will know what you could do And that's how you start to chip away at big overwhelming things. You start making incremental progress. You don't worry about what's way far in ahead, in advance. You start making incremental progress. You keep your gaze right here. And it doesn't really matter how long it takes. Like, overwhelm may also be the result of you saying, like, giving yourself a deadline that feels overwhelming. When you start making incremental progress, I don't care how long it takes. takes you to achieve the goal. It could take you 5 weeks, could take you 5 months, it could take you 18 months. I'm not sure. It took me 18 months to become a fabric designer after I started doing one thing a day. But here's the thing, I did not miss a day. So 15 minutes is what counted, and I started tracking it, and I was like really obsessed with it. So I, I did not skip a single day inside of 18 months because once Once you start, once you commit to starting, once you get 10 days in, 15 days in, the sheer, like, tracking of it is momentum that you refuse to give up. So that's what I suggest. You just start, but you start on what you know how to do today, and then tomorrow you'll know what to do. And sometimes it's just figuring out what the next thing is to do, and that's okay. All right, my friends, I better go.
Bye.
I think I've covered— I think I've covered the ones that I hope were kind of hanging you up. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for joining me. We are here. We're on standby for those of you who have questions. We have live chat over on the website. So bonniechristine.com/artisaneducator is how you Join us. If you have questions, we've got live chat going, and I would love to see you on Tuesday. Replays are gonna be available until Thursday of next week, and the community is gonna be open until Thursday of next week as well. We close enrollment on Thursday for Artisan Educator. That's because we start the following week on Monday. I would love to have you come join us. It's gonna be incredible. Alright, everybody, see you soon. Bye.