On this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses' we sat down with Tim Soulo, the Chief Marketing Officer and Product Advisor at Ahrefs, a cutting-edge SEO tool driven by big data.
Tim's ground breaking data research in the realm of SEO has been recognized by numerous online publications, including Inc, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Renowned for his expertise, Tim has graced the stages of major industry conferences worldwide, including PubCon in Las Vegas, BrightonSEO in the UK, and the Digital Marketers Australia Conference in Melbourne.
Tim's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaaSMarketingVlog
Tim's Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/
Ahrefs Website: https://ahrefs.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
On this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses' we sat down with Tim Soulo, the Chief Marketing Officer and Product Advisor at Ahrefs, a cutting-edge SEO tool driven by big data.
Tim's ground breaking data research in the realm of SEO has been recognized by numerous online publications, including Inc, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Renowned for his expertise, Tim has graced the stages of major industry conferences worldwide, including PubCon in Las Vegas, BrightonSEO in the UK, and the Digital Marketers Australia Conference in Melbourne.
Tim's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaaSMarketingVlog
Tim's Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/
Ahrefs Website: https://ahrefs.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
You don't need to have an amazing course to sell it. So essentially, a good lending page can sell a course.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Tim Solo. Tim is the Chief Marketing Officer and Product Advisor at HREFS, an industry leading SEO tool powered by Big Data. His data research studies in the field of SEO were cited by thousands of online publications, including Inc, TechCrunch and VentureBeat, and he's spoken at some of the largest industry conferences around the globe, such as Pubcon in Las Vegas, Brighton SEO in the UK and Digital Marketers Australia Conference in Melbourne. And today we're going to be talking about core principles of SEO and what's working right now, how HREFS uses educational content to grow their audience and sales, and the balance between product and marketing.
Speaker 2:Now, before we get into the meat and potatoes of today's episode, I've got an announcement for you. Yosip is our funnel strategy lead and he's worked on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that data-driven marketing uses when working with our multimillion-dollar clients, and what we did is we took all of YoSIP's training for our clients, all of the coaching calls, and we used that data to train an AI version of YoSIP. We're calling it YoSIP AI and we've made that available for free. You can ask it any questions you like about your course or membership business and about your funnels, about what you should be working on, even about copywriting as well. So if you want to access it for free, you go to datadrivenmarketingai and get talking to YoSIP Tim. Welcome man. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:Hey, john, thanks a lot for inviting.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's start back at the beginning of the real basics here. Can you explain what are the core principles of SEO that have remained consistent over the years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, not that much changes. To be honest, google's main goal is to help people find the information that they're looking for, leave them satisfied. So quality content has always been, and will always be, at the center of anyone's SEO strategy. If you can produce content that answers the questions that people are asking to Google, it is essentially Google's job to find this content. Then you have links. So content is the first thing. Links is the second thing, because there are thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people who create content on the same topic and Google has to know which of these people have more authority.
Speaker 1:And usually the way they figure it out is by looking at links from other websites. So if other websites are linking to this content, it means the content is link-worthy or noteworthy or basically deserves attention. So links are a huge factor if a lot of websites are linking to the stuff you produce, and the content shouldn't necessarily be even articles. That can be the services that you offer, that can be your brand, that can be your business. So anything that is worthy of talking about on other websites that get links gets kind of votes in the eyes of Google. And the last piece of SEO is the technical bit. This is where you ensure that your website is running smoothly, that everything loads fast, that it's optimized for mobile, that you're not blocking any pages from being crawled by Google, yada, yada, yada. So basically, those three things are what SEO is today Creating quality content that people are searching for, getting links from other websites as a validation that your content is worthy and, finally, making sure that your website is technically sound. That's about it.
Speaker 2:So then, what's the biggest challenges that you see people have in achieving a positive ROI with SEO? How do people make sure that they actually get their money's worth if they're putting lots of money into, like they put in their time, or they're putting money into writers to create this great content?
Speaker 1:So the biggest challenge is to actually say something unique, because lots of people, when they approach content and hire cheap writers, when they try to cut costs on this, what happens is that those cheap writers search for the keyword that the client wants to rank for. They read the top 10 ranking pages and they write kind of a medley of whatever they learned from those top 10 ranking pages and this kind of thing it doesn't deserve to rank in the top because it's already a rehashed content from what's already there. So in my opinion, the biggest challenge is actually, whatever topic you want to rank for, whatever keyword you want to rank for, you have to offer something unique. Or if you cannot offer something unique because the topic itself is not unique, like all has been said and done, at least you have to be an authority. So you have to have a body of work in this field.
Speaker 1:So whenever someone searches for a very boring topic that kind of everyone knows about, you would still be an authority. You will get links from all those other websites. For example, like, let's say, how to pick, I know a barbell for your home gym. So barbell is not a particularly sophisticated piece of equipment. So even like the new bean fitness can kind of understand what you would judge, but you do want to get advice from someone who's an expert, from someone who has built the body of work in the fitness industry, who has achieved something. So yeah, even if you want to rank for a boring topic, you have to be an authority. And this is the biggest challenge, in my opinion, because lots of people are looking for shortcuts. They want to create a blog about fitness today and rank for everything tomorrow, and that just doesn't happen because this would be unfair about all the people who are building their authority in the field creating content, educating people, building their audience for many, many years.
Speaker 2:And we've got a couple of different audiences we're talking to here. So some of the people listening are heavily into SEO and we're going to get a little bit further into like okay, what's working now and what's some of the latest stuff that you're seeing. For people who maybe they've got an audience somewhere else and they're thinking do I add SEO into something that I work on? Like, what's the? I feel like the biggest danger is almost someone starts working on it and put some effort in, but not enough to actually get really good results and it just kind of wasted their time a little bit. Is there some way for people to kind of figure out, like is this something that's worth me working on? Like, is it personality traits in terms of what they like and like what kind of content that I'm creating? Is it about doing keyword research and finding how competitive their market is? Like, how can people think through is this worth starting with?
Speaker 1:Whenever I'm asked this kind of question, I always have this concept of kind of minimum viable set of actions that you just have to do when you own a website, and they are things like creating a dedicated page for every little thing you do. So, for example, if you are, I know, some kind of coach and you have a bunch of different directions in which you are coaching people, a bunch of different angles, so what people usually do, they would create a page called services and they would just list everything they do on that one page. And this is wrong. What you need to do is you need to create a dedicated page for every service that you do and you need to have an exhaustive description of that service and how your offering is unique and what exactly you do in terms of this service and who your clients are and their testimonials. Basically, you have to create lots of information on a dedicated page about the service, because whenever people would be searching in Google for this kind of service, google would give preference to dedicated pages that have a lot of information, that have that help people make a decision, rather than an all in one kind of page where this service is mentioned in just one paragraph and that's about it. So that's the first thing. You need to create a dedicated page for kind of every little thing you do, every little project you worked on, every client you have, every service that you have, every location of your offices. So everything needs to have a dedicated page and the more kind of, the more exhaustive information you can put on that page, the better.
Speaker 1:The second thing is always think about acquiring links. So whenever, for example, you go on a podcast, people think that podcast is all about exposure. You get exposure to different audiences. You talk about your unique selling proposition. People get to know you. People might go to your website and buy from you. But what a lot of people don't realize is that whenever you're getting interviewed, there would probably be a page listing the podcast episode, and this is a great opportunity to ask the person interviewing you for a link back to your website Because, like I said, links help Google understand that you are an authority, that people are kind of voting for you.
Speaker 1:So whenever you work with different companies, whenever you do a training for some company and you're able to have an article written for their blog that you did a training, make sure they will link to you. Whenever you have a partner who you partner with I don't know for delivering food to your event, make sure they will list you as a client and link to you. So in every case where you work with different people or businesses or services that have their own website and you kind of collaborate with them in your real life, make sure that this collaboration can also secure you a link from their website, because those links are helping your website to gain more authority. So these are the two kind of minimum viable set of actions that every person needs to do, regardless of how invested they are in SEO. This is just something that just makes sense to do.
Speaker 2:So we talked about the fundamentals and the stuff that hasn't changed in SEO. What is different? What's different now to how it was five years ago, in what's working or even like two years ago?
Speaker 1:Well, what's different is, of course, the kind of content overload, because there's magnitudes more content on every imaginable topic than, let's say, five or ten years ago. So it's much, much harder to stand out. And it gets even worse because right now we have those large language models, we have those softwares that help you generate an article in basically a few seconds. So, yeah, there would be going forward. There would be too much content and too much competition.
Speaker 1:So I'm a big believer in building your online authority, your reputation, your online persona, your personal brand, and thus differentiating yourself from people who just pay cheap writers and buy tools that generate content and just create hundreds of pages with the click of a button. So I do believe that building your brand, your online persona, across different platforms like Twitter, facebook, podcasts, etc. Etc. Etc. It would help you win an SEO because later, when people search for something in Google and they would get links from different websites and they would see a familiar name. For example, that's an article I was searching for, productivity, and that's an article about Tim Ferriss. Or that's an article from some productivity 101 websitecom. So I would rather click on Tim Ferriss because I know the guy, he has credibility, he has been doing some work in the field, so this is what I think will change People would pay more attention to kind of experienced individuals who have track record in a given industry.
Speaker 2:So you think, if everyone understood right, you think as part of your overall work online, you shouldn't just be doing stuff in SEO. You should be like looking at okay, how am I going to build up a profile on YouTube, twitter, whatever else as well, and then that will actually help your SEO work as well. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah it's. I always look at SEO holistically, because SEO is not just a set of I don't know some technical or even secretive tactics that only a few select people know and therefore they rank no. Seo is basically building the business and building the audience that gets you notoriety and that notoriety translates into great unique content that you can create because you are an expert in your field, and it translates into backlinks from other websites because people are following your content and they're referencing your content on their own websites. So, yeah, if we're talking about building a long lasting legit business, then, yeah, you should look at SEO holistically. You should be present on different platforms. You should be building an audience, yada, yada, yada.
Speaker 1:But if we're talking about SEO in terms of some throw away affiliate website where you can invest X amount of money to generate a thousand pages quick, then you buy a thousand backlinks quick and the website starts ranking and for two months Google led its slide and you're generating traffic and profit, but then you get slashed by Google penalty, but you still generated the money you wanted, then yeah, that's a different story. But yeah, I'm talking about building long term legit businesses, because I work as chief marketing officer at HREFS and we're building a legit business that would hopefully last for years and years, and this is this is why we don't do any of those kind of sketchy tactics, so called growth hacks or loopholes. We don't like this kind of stuff because we don't want to put our business at risk.
Speaker 2:Let's say, someone's listening and they've got a good sized YouTube channel. Maybe they've got like a million subscribers on YouTube, but they've never done any work around SEO. They've not looked into that. Are there ways that they can start to think about this in terms of saying, right, I've already got this one channel that's working really well. Now I want to start moving over and leveraging that content or doing something with that, with SEO side of things? Is there some ways for them to kind of think about that, like how they can use what they've already got? Is there like I don't know, just gonna throw that open?
Speaker 1:It's actually very easy. We did this the other way around. We started from a blog and then we went to YouTube and basically what we did to kind of populate our YouTube channel, we were repurposing our blog content into videos. Of course, you can't just take an article, read it out loud, verbatim and hope that it would be an entertaining video. No, youtube, of course, it plays by completely different rules from the written content. You have to adapt the content to the platform where you're publishing it. But if you have a successful YouTube channel and you have a bunch of content on a given topic, what you can do is you can adapt that content in a form of engaging articles. But one thing you need to keep in mind if we're talking about SEO is the search demand, because YouTube YouTube works a lot on trends, so whatever is trending right now, you have a chance to get featured on people's YouTube homepage and get clicked. This way.
Speaker 1:With SEO, people have to be deliberately searching for something in order for you to rank and for people to find your website and land there.
Speaker 1:So once you'll be repurposing your video content to articles on your blog or some kind of pages on your website, you need to do the so-called keyword research, which is essentially putting the search query idea For example, what kind of kettlebell do I need for my home gym? You need to put it in a keyword research tool, and the keyword research tool would do two things. First of all, it would give you a number of how many times people search for that exact phrase per month. Plus, it would generate relevant ideas like kettlebell sizes, kettlebell weights, blah, blah, blah, that you can also use to kind of get inspiration of the kind of content you need to create. So, yeah, basically you need to ensure that whatever content you're going to spend your time on, people are actually searching for it, because if you will create content about the stuff that no one is searching for like what team solo had for breakfast today or has for breakfast in winter no one is searching for that. So there is no point of creating this kind of article.
Speaker 2:I want everyone to go search for that right now, see what we can find out. I was out last night at a gig with a friend and he is making a course at the moment and I kind of even nervous to say on the podcast about what exactly he's doing because I don't want to mess up stuff for him. But he's got this one particular instrument that he plays and he's making. He wanted to make a course about that and he couldn't find any good YouTube content about it. So he's gone on to. He's gone on and looked at different keyword research tools and found out all the terms around this instrument and he's like there's good search terms, there's good volume for it, there's people searching for it and the content in that topic is terrible, just awful. So he started writing articles about it and creating his YouTube and he's got like straight away, he's got like 500 views per video on his YouTube channel and he's getting loads of traffic coming in and people signing up to his list and it's like, oh, that's cool. He's found a little niche right when it kind of works for him and he's starting to build out from there.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going back to what you said. So you've got a YouTube channel. You've got your unique position, you've got your thoughts about. You know like, let's say, how to, how to do the specific kind of DIY thing or how to play this instrument in a different way. Maybe you've got like a specific style that you're using for playing the ukulele or the drums or whatever that's different and you're teaching that and you've already got that kind of developed. And then you take that content and you turn that into articles. But before you do that, what you do is you go and do the research and you find out how many people are searching for it and I think I interrupt a partway through you saying that's one of the numbers that you get, and then the other number I'm guessing would be the competitive side of things.
Speaker 1:Competitive side of things is also important, because if you wanted to repurpose these very podcasts that we're having right now into an article about SEO, there's very little chance that you would rank with this information.
Speaker 1:Maybe you can actually again if you niche down to SEO for course creators and you would list me as an expert who is giving some advice, because Google also tries to understand who is behind this content and if my name is mentioned, given that I have a body of work in the SEO space, google has some kind of connection in their kind of neural network between TeamSolo and SEO.
Speaker 1:So if I'm listed as kind of the so-called co-author of the page or like contributing a person to the page, then it can help actually the page to rank. But yeah, if you would repurpose this podcast episode into a guide about SEO, there's no chances of ranking. If we're talking about SEO tips, for course creators like, or SEO for course creators, that is much more manageable topic to rank for, because I would imagine there are not too many articles on this topic already. So it is much easier to kind of stand out. And if your website already has enough kind of authority, if your website already has enough links and some other content, for course, creators, then Google might as well rank this piece of content, rank this article and you would be getting a little bit of search traffic on the topic.
Speaker 2:Nice, okay, so we talked about keyword research tools. Obviously, hrefs, that's one of the options out there. Most of the people who I talk to about SEO, who are heavily into it, that's the tool that they're using. So what sets HREFS apart from other SEO tools?
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good question. Well, we've been in the industry for more than 10 years now and I like to think that we have developed a lot of core expertise in the niche of SEO. We went so far as to create our own search engine. It's called Yepyepcom, so we're actually running our own search engine and we have like pretty, like not pretty, but super smart data science people and super smart engineers who keep it running and who keep developing it.
Speaker 1:And while we are working on the search engine, we first we use all the cutting edge tech. Second, we get a lot of epiphanies about how search works, about how backlinks works, about how Google understands content, etc. Etc. Etc. And that tech and those epiphanies we try to apply to our product. So, basically, we think that we are very knowledgeable about SEO. We understand it very well, we understand what kind of pains the people who are doing SEO have and we try to solve it for them. This is why, whenever you pull kind of hardcore SEO professionals, which tool is their favorite one? It's overwhelmingly HREFS. If you would pull kind of more general marketing practitioners who dabble in this and that, then some of our competitors might come out, depending on the area of expertise of those digital marketers, but for hardcore SEO people, we're usually the tool of choice.
Speaker 2:Hardcore SEO people. I like that.
Speaker 1:I was chatting with Jack last night.
Speaker 2:He said he was recently at this convention for a tattoo convention, so he's heavily tattooed right head to toe. And in the same building at the same time there was an evangelical Christian conference going on as well, and each of them had their own like seminar areas, but in the middle was like a co-mingling place for everyone to go and just kind of hang out and get coffee and what have you. And so you've got the same time, people would, like, you know, dress very smartly with a tie on and like looking very kind of a you know, midwestern, very proper kind of thing, and on the other hand, you've got the people with tattoos all over their face and piercings and, like you know, only half dressed and this kind of thing. I just think, when you said hardcore SEO people, that's just kind of the picture that like, what is a hardcore SEO person?
Speaker 2:That, like, one of the things that I think is really difficult for course, creators to think about is, or to kind of balance is the amount of time they put into making great products and making great courses versus the amount of time they spend on marketing. And it might like the way that we work. What we found is there's like three legs to the store. One is building an audience, whether that's SEO or YouTube or what have you. Another one is having amazing courses that are like better than everybody else's. And the third part is the funnels, and that's the part that we kind of help with. You're in charge of the marketing over HREFS. How did how does HREFS kind of think about this in terms of balancing, like the importance of having a great product and having great marketing, and I suppose you guys kind of bigger, so maybe you've got like you know, with your different departments, it's maybe easier, but like, how can companies think about striking the right balance with that?
Speaker 1:This is a tremendously hard question to answer. I don't think there's there's a straightforward answer, even if we narrow it down to creating, promoting and selling courses. So the thing is you don't need to have an amazing course to sell it, because people buy your course before they know what's inside. So essentially, a good landing page can sell a shitty course. It's another thing that you might get tons of refund requests, but what I've seen too many times in our industry of digital marketing people kind of try to scam their audiences by doing the following they would have amazing kind of course launch sequences, those like Jeff Walker three part launch series or whatnot, and they're like yeah, I've listened to, I consumed quite a bit of content on like how to launch a course and how it is done and psychological triggers and blah, blah, blah Back when I was interested in this topic. But what I saw is that some people are extremely masterful in persuading people to buy their course, especially if they can tie this to money. If they can persuade people that by buying their course, they would actually make a lot of money. So this is kind of the investment and blah, blah, blah. But when you actually buy a course, you figure out that it's like I don't know 70 hours of content and the content is basically terrible. It's just like someone hitting the record button on the screencast of their computer screen and they were like OK, so the first step is that we're going to register a domain name. So I'm going to go to GoDaddy. They put in GoDaddy in the URL field, click Go and it loads, and all this time the video is going. So this is basically the content you're watching. So it almost seems that the strategy is that it's not possible for anyone to get through that 70 hours of that incredibly boring content. And I mean the advice there might even make sense, the advice there might even make sense. But then they say in their refund policy that we can refund you if you have like completed I don't know at least 90% of the course, which is not possible. So, yeah, what I've noticed is that selling your course is one thing, but creating your course and making sure it's amazing, it's a totally different thing. It's like two separate jobs. In our case, I likely have an actual experience creating my own course. It's called blogging for business. It's free right now. It's listed in the HF Academy, but I think if you search blogging for business, you would be able to find it.
Speaker 1:So when I was making that course within a SaaS tool company, we had lots of different ways of how to go about it. Because we could offer this course for free, because the course was basically featuring some of the functionality of our tool, so it was kind of converting people into users of our tool. So there's money there. We could sell this course separately. We could promote it like any other course and say it would teach you this and that, blah, blah, blah, and make money out of this. We could upsell it like one or the other. So if you buy the course, we upsell the software. If you buy the software, we upsell the course. Or we could offer the course on every paid plan. So if you subscribe to HF's plan, you get a course for free, which is additional value. Or we could offer this course on higher tier plans. So if you buy the cheapest plan, you don't get the course.
Speaker 1:So the course is kind of the motivation to upgrade.
Speaker 1:There are so many options to go about it and there's just no way to definitively answer the question which way is correct?
Speaker 1:So we ended up doing a little bit of everything. Initially, we launched the course for free. I think it was free for two weeks, so for two weeks you could watch it for free. Then we closed it and put a price tag of $800 on it and it stayed like that for a while and, even though we didn't promote it much, a bunch of people were buying it every single week because they were discovering it on our website and buying it. And then, when COVID hit and there was a trend of people opening their educational materials for free for those who stay at home, for those who lost their jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So we opened our course for free again and we got another influx of students. Tens of thousands of people watched it, which was also very cool. So, yeah, a course if we're talking about a company that has some other products, whether SaaS or anything else, a course is an incredible marketing tool which you can use in so many different ways.
Speaker 2:All right. So if people have heard your wisdom here and they want to learn more from you, where should they go? What's some of the different places people can go and learn more?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm most active on Twitter. I don't tweet that regularly, I have to do some actual work, but yeah, I'm most active on Twitter. So, tim Solo on Twitter, they'll be able to find me.
Speaker 2:Great. And then we're also going to put in the show notes links to hrefscom if you want to go and check out the tool, if you're not using that already. And hrefs on YouTube has got a lot of really great educational content as well. So that's youtubecomchrefscom. We're going to put the link in the show notes too. Tim, thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your wisdom with everybody and helping people kind of understand a bit more context around this.
Speaker 1:Thanks Tos for having me. I hope the listeners enjoyed some of the tips.
Speaker 2:If you found the interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened. Thanks so much and I'll catch you next time.