What does it take to create a course that delivers on its promise and ensures that students get through all of the material? On the 421st episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, copywriter and course corrector, Maya Stojkovich, shares her COURSE framework for creating and fixing the programs experts sell in order to get results. There’s a ton of crossover with copywriting sales messages, so grab your headphones and let’s get to it. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

The Course Corrector

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Why are so many course creators failing when it comes to selling their courses? Or worse, they do sell their courses or memberships or workshops, but the people who buy them don’t finish them. I’ve certainly bought my share of courses with the full intention that I was going to complete the training and the assignments, and they’re still waiting there months… sometimes years later. What’s up with that?

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with copywriter and course corrector, Maya Stojkovich. Maya is one half of the partership behind the Course Corrector—a program designed to help course creators fix the things that keep course buyers from finishing the work and getting the result they want. The other half of this partnership is Linda Perry who has been on the podcast several times before. On this episode, Maya shared the formula for making sure a course will deliver the promised result and keep students engaged. And smart copywriters will notice some big similarities between what she shared and what we often put into a winning sales message. So stay tuned.

Just a quick plug… this episode is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground… the only membership for copywriters focused on helping you build your business skills—the skills that help you attract clients, create services they want to buy, price them effectively, and run a business that’s fully booked and profitable. Does it reallly make a difference? Yes it does. Members tell us its the best investment they’ve ever made in themselves. The training resources, templates, critiques and community are game changers. And you can find out more… even try it risk free for thirty days at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, let’s go to our interview with Maya Stojkovich.

Hey, Maya, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. Let’s start with how you got to where you are. How did you become a copywriter, a teacher, and now a course corrector?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me on. I’m so excited. That is a wonderful question. How I got here, I’d say, is a pretty non-traditional route. Everything about it seemed traditional at first. I went to college. I got an English degree. I actually started off working in politics and that’s what I really thought I wanted to do. And then I ultimately recognized that it wasn’t the life for me. And so I actually ended up coming home and I was trying to reassess and, you know, I got the chance to actually join the Accelerator, and that was the first course I ever took. And I sat there and was like, this is really something. But there was a piece that was missing. I wasn’t fully engaged, but I also like to blame that on being 20 and 21 and not really knowing who I am at that age. And I continued to learn. I took so many courses. That full year, I was just taking course after course. I actually ended up becoming a certified mindset coach. And that really helped shape the rest of my career path. I actually settled down into marketing for a while, and then I up and moved, and I ended up being a paralegal, a teacher, an education programs coordinator. And it seems all over the place, but now sitting where I am as one half of the course corrector, I recognized that my entire path was just setting me up to become this course strategist, to actually dive into the courses that I had taken prior and say, you know, what can I take from this and actually apply it to courses everywhere?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. And obviously, all of the things that you’ve done have, you know, created, gotten you where you are. That’s the way paths work, right?

Maya Stojkovich: Right.

Rob Marsh: All of us. But of all of those positions, did you have a favorite and some big takeaways from being a teacher, mindset coach, paralegal? I don’t know.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, I know, right? So many. I would say that the most impactful was actually the education programs coordinator. I got to learn what it took to craft this beautiful narrative. I taught environmental sciences to third and fifth graders. So it’s a tough audience, but I got to craft this beautiful narrative with these programs about salt marshes, about like forests, about, you know, fiddler crabs. And I had to make it exciting for these kids. I had to get them interested and be like, here’s why you should care. And here’s why this matters. It is applicable to you in your lives as small children. And it was just this beautiful process, and it gave me so much information about teaching in and of itself that I now have the ability to apply it to courses.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. That basically is what you’re doing now. So let’s talk about what you’re doing now. We’ll come back to maybe your experience with some of those courses that you were taking earlier. Tell us about the course corrector and what it is, what you guys do. You’re working with Linda, obviously. I have immense respect for Linda. I think she’s been on the podcast four times maybe over the last seven years, whatever. So absolutely love her to death. But what are you guys doing in the course corrector?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. So the course corrector is, as it sounds, I’m one half of it. I do work with Linda Perry. She is also, fun fact, my mother. Which a lot of people go, what’s it like working with your mom? And I absolutely love it. We have very similar brains, but we work completely differently. And I like to say we go on our separate caves when we work and come back together and always find the same conclusion. But what we really do is we dive into courses. And so what sets us apart is that we don’t actually always work on the course creation process. While we welcome a bunch of course creators and can help them create their courses, I like to say as preventative measure, so they don’t actually bump up into issues in the long run. We work with established course creators who have a course, and their course has gone awry somewhere, and they’re not quite sure why. Maybe they have an idea. They can say, maybe my engagement isn’t great, my completion rates are down, you know, I’ve looked at the numbers, or maybe something isn’t translating. And they have an idea, but it’s that big why that becomes the mystery. And what we do is we actually have a six-point framework. It’s called COURSE, unironically. And we dive into a course and we actually look at it holistically and we pull apart the pieces that aren’t working and actually help create this transformation for course creators that it’s just hard to do by themselves because they know their material, they know their course, they created it. And sometimes you just need that second or third pair of eyes and so we provide that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I love what you guys are doing, especially as an owner of several courses. And I realize how difficult it can be, especially what you have it set up to then take a step back and say, OK, wait, do we have the right promise here, you know, and and doing all of the things. So can we actually step through the course framework and talk about each of the steps that you guys go through?

Maya Stojkovich: Yes, I would absolutely love to. So We start with C, which is clear, identifiable goals. So we’re going to look at your course and we’re going to say, hey, do you have a clear goal? And usually it’s that one goal for the course taker. So you’re delivering something, you’re promising a transformation. What does that look like? I also always love to mention, hey, you are in your course yourself. Please have some goals for yourself for your course. That’s always so impor