What if you only had 1 minute?

When I was active in Toastmasters, I really looked forward to the speech contests.

I particularly enjoyed the humorous speech contest and I entered every year.

But squeezing as much “funny” as possible into a short speech is a real challenge, and the speeches that do well usually have a strong theme or story.

(You can’t just string a bunch of jokes together and call it a speech.)

My best-performing speech was a retelling of The Three Little Pigs, with the intrepid pigs venturing out not into the big, wide world, but the world wide web, and getting hacked and scammed by an unscrupulous wolf.

(You can watch it here if you’re keen…)

I remember practising that speech for hours and timing myself fanatically.

You see, the time limit was 7 minutes if you went over by more than 30 seconds, you were disqualified.

What a waste of all that preparation!

So when I was writing my speech, the fear of over-running forced me to be very disciplined about what I kept in and left out of my speech.

It was hard, but I learned that time constraints were my friend.

So if creating a course seems daunting, try adding some time constraints.

If you only had 1 minute of your audience’s attention, what would you tell them or teach them to have an impact?

That one-minute asset could be a social media conversation starter, or a teaser video for something bigger.

What if you had 10 minutes?

Now we’re talking about a more substantial training lesson or even a small mini-course (e.g., 3 x 3-ish-minute videos.)

And what about 100 minutes?

Now we talking about a decent-sized course. 10 x 10-minute lessons or 20 x 5 minutes. You could cover a lot of ground in that time.

Create them all and you practically have a complete course funnel:

• Your 1-minute video persuades visitors to enrol in…
• Your free mini-course, which gives people a quick win and invites them to buy…
• Your paid course, which helps them achieve a bigger goal.

The point is that you can start small, and you don’t have to build everything upfront.

(The mini-course is still a great way to build your audience, even before the paid course is ready.)

So let’s start small right now.

If you only had one minute of your perfect student’s attention, what would you do with it?

See you soon,

Glen