Build a sales funnel using Skool.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to sell courses on the school platform using external landing pages without having to manually add or approve new members in your school community. I'll cover why having a dedicated landing page outside of school is important for converting paid and organic traffic, how to avoid the common mistakes that people make when using external landing pages and integrating that with school, the onboarding emails that you need in order to make this an easy and seamless process for your customers, and also the landing page software that I use and why I like it. So first, let's talk a bit about why you would want an external landing page like this to convert your paid traffic, organic traffic from social media into your school site. So to best understand this, it's best to understand how your customers really discover you and your products and how they go through the buying process. So if you're creating organic content on a platform like TikTok, or even if you're running ads on a platform like TikTok and you're driving them to a specific place here, if you're on my organic TikTok page, there's a link here that you can click where you can buy one of my automated systems, or you can schedule a call. If someone were to actually click on your link here, it's really nice to be able to control the environment, to format the headline, to format the sub headline, to create buttons to buy, to position your testimonials, to present the story and any graphics that you need to support the story, and to just build a good looking professional landing page where people can learn about the product and watch a video, read additional testimonials, and then finally buy the product. But even more importantly, you'll notice here that there isn't much that someone can do on this page other than just learn about your product. There's no logos or other links to click and get distracted or go do something else. So it really keeps people focused on your product. Now you could send them directly to your school platform where they could actually just pay right away. They could watch a video and then read more about your course or community, which is great, but you really don't have as much control over how this is presented to the user. You can't add a headline or subtitles, and you're really limited in terms of how you can control the experience here. And if someone is first discovering you through your content and then clicking a link, you've only got a couple seconds here to get their attention and get them to buy. And what you're also going to notice here is that there's lots of different ways for them to get distracted. They might come over here and say, powered by school, what is school? They might click on that and go somewhere else altogether. Now they're in the funnel for school itself instead of your community. There's other buttons up here that they could click, and that might come up here where they can actually discover and look at other communities. So when it comes to converting traffic from social media, it's much better to have a landing page that you can control. Now, of course, your community might be discovered by other members and other communities and they might find and join your community, but that's a completely different customer journey than if someone finds you on social media and they want to see more about you. All right, so now let's talk about if you were to set up an external landing page like I showed you here and you wanted to allow people to purchase and get instant access to your school community and the courses behind that community in a very seamless way. Let's talk about how you can do that, because there are some misconceptions about this process. So here I am on the Zapier page. This is a platform that allows you to run automations based off of different triggers. So you can see here I'm looking at all of the automations for the school platform. And if we just look at the triggers here, we are able to trigger off of a new member. And there are also some actions here. We can invite a new member and we can also unlock a course for a member. Now the big mistake that I see most people do is that when they integrate their landing page so that when someone buys, when they trigger a new automation, here I'm triggering off a new purchase, they end up trying to use both these automations, invite member and unlock course for a member. And it seems logical because in order for you to unlock a course, well, you must have that member in your group. So people will try to invite them with automation and then they try to unlock the course. But you really don't need to do that. All you need to do is use this one automation, unlock course for member. They will be able to create an account and then they will get access to the course that you invited them to. And if they're already a member of school, it will simply give them access to your community and that course. Now beyond setting up Zapier, another important part of getting people into your school community in a seamless way is your onboarding email. Now when you invite somebody to your school community, they are going to get an email like this, which asks them to join now in order to get access to the courses that you have invited them to through this automation that you triggered. Now it's really important that they click this join now button before they try to access the course material. So in order to make this seamless for them, you need to make your email instructions very clear that the first step that they must take is to click on that school email and to click this join now button. In the past, I've made the mistake of giving them a link to the course first. But the problem is if they click on this link first, they might find themselves sitting at your community in the classroom with a bunch of locked courses that they can't access. But if they try to access the community in any of these ways, they're going to bypass the automations that you set up and they're going to go down the normal way that you join a site, which is going to ask them membership questions, and then they're going to have to be approved by an admin. And then most likely you're going to get an email back from them saying that they bought your course and they followed your instructions, even though maybe they didn't. They click the link and join the community, but they don't have access to the courses. So you want to be very clear in your instructions to get them to click that email, join now before they ever try to access the system. So when you set up your purchase automation, as long as you use this unlock course for member in school and make it clear on how they get access to those courses, then you'll be able to create a very smooth process for purchasing your courses and enrolling them into your school site and get them going without any human interaction at all. And this is really important because when someone comes to your site and they purchase something, they're excited. You don't want the first thing that happens to be disappointment because they can't access the program right away. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is why I use Thrivecart as my landing page software. The main thing is that it's pretty easy. They have a pretty easy interface here to design the landing page. You can design it for a desktop and also mobile. I think you can make some attractive landing pages with Thrivecart. It also has a lot of different pricing options. So you can do one time fee, you can do subscription, split pay, you can even do pay your own price. You can add in free trials, you can do limited quantities. So there's a lot of different ways that you can price your different products or your community memberships. Whereas in school, you can only charge a single flat monthly fee. Now, the other thing that I like about Thrivecart that I didn't like when I first went to purchase it is that it's a one time payment. So when you're first evaluating a product and you see a $500 price tag, that's not the first thing you want to see. But actually I've saved a ton of money. It's a one time fee and then you get to use this service forever. So I was able to pay off that price in the first month of purchasing it. And now I've generated multiple six figures through this one Thrivecart platform. So by having Thrivecart for life and the affiliate fees that I've earned through school by having people sign up through my link, my funnel easily pays for itself.