In this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses,' we sit down with Josh Hall, a former freelance web designer who transitioned into building a successful six-figure, work-from-home web design business.
After selling his thriving business in 2017, Josh became a dedicated mentor, impacting thousands of web designers globally. Join us to hear about his journey and how he guides others to establish their own six-figure, freedom-focused lifestyle web design businesses.
Now, Josh is prepared to share his expertise and support with a wider audience.
Josh's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JoshHallco
Josh's Website: https://joshhall.co/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
In this episode of 'The Art of Selling Online Courses,' we sit down with Josh Hall, a former freelance web designer who transitioned into building a successful six-figure, work-from-home web design business.
After selling his thriving business in 2017, Josh became a dedicated mentor, impacting thousands of web designers globally. Join us to hear about his journey and how he guides others to establish their own six-figure, freedom-focused lifestyle web design businesses.
Now, Josh is prepared to share his expertise and support with a wider audience.
Josh's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JoshHallco
Josh's Website: https://joshhall.co/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
The other big aspect, what I've done to get to the seven figure mark, is a community. That's been the bulk of my million dollar earnings in the past six years.
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 Josh Hall. Josh is a web design business coach, podcast host and web agency founder based out of Columbus, ohio. Through his online courses, his web design community podcast and YouTube channel, he teaches web designers how to build a web design business that gives them freedom and the life that they love. He's made over a million dollars in sales of his courses so far. We're going to talk today about Josh's course business, how he built an audience on his podcast and YouTube channel, what kind of marketing funnels we're working for him, his thoughts on launches versus evergreen funnels, community building, personal welcome videos and his thoughts on pricing as well.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dive into our interview with Josh today, yosip is our funnel strategy lead and we're working on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that we use at data driven marketing with all of our clients. What we did is we took every coaching call that YOSIP has ever done with clients. We transcribed all of them. We uploaded them to a system built on top of chat, gpt and we built a super YOSIP AI. You can access YOSIP AI for free by going to datadrivenmarketingai. You can ask any questions you like about your course, your membership, businesses. You can get it to help you draft emails, plan out your strategy all totally for free. So go to datadrivenmarketingai. Now back to the show, josh. Welcome man. Thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 1:John, it is a pleasure man. I love talking courses, memberships. I love talking with my next of kin. So great to be here with you, man.
Speaker 2:Lovely, okay, cool. So I've covered it briefly already, but tell everybody again who do you help with your courses and what kind of problems are you helping them to solve?
Speaker 1:It has evolved since I started as a course creator Six years ago. When I started as a course creator, I was teaching web design, like how to build websites. So I'm a WordPress guy and I've been a Divi user the theme on WordPress for years now and that's where I started. I started doing Divi tutorials and WordPress tutorials and it was all about pixels. It was about teaching web design.
Speaker 1:But I had been an agency owner for over a decade and people kept on asking me questions about how to build a business, how to do pricing, how to do the business stuff. So I got in kind of accidentally to the business side of things and teaching that, and now my business has evolved to now I primarily 90% of what I do is teach the business side of things. So I still talk design and in some WordPress and Divi related stuff, but it's mostly the business side of web design and that's what I teach on and that's also what's presented. A lot of challenges over the years is because I'm known as a Divi tutorial guy, but I don't really do that as much now, so I'm sure that will lead into plenty of challenges in this next phase, but that's what I do now.
Speaker 2:And so do you still run the agency.
Speaker 1:No, I sold my agency in 2020 to actually one of my students, so it was very fitting and it was kind of cool because all of my courses were essentially my SOPs. I just created courses off of everything I was doing in my web design agency, which was a very small team. I didn't have any official W2 employees or anything, it was just subcontractors. It was a nice little lean solo printer style business and when I got the bug for teaching and I started doing online courses, my income started far exceeding what I was taking into my agency. And one of my students, who was a rock star, was wanting to do more and more and I just felt like he was a good fit and he was able to take over my agency and I sold it to him and all my SOPs were my courses that he had already been through, so it was a pretty seamless transition.
Speaker 2:Nice, alright, cool, so let's take into some numbers, if that's alright. What's your kind of podcast downloads? Youtube subscribers how big is your audience?
Speaker 1:Currently my YouTube is the biggest discovery platform, so I view all marketing basically as two categories discovery and relationship building. So discovery is my YouTube channel. That's where people find me. I'm at 31,500,000 subscribers and 3.5 million YouTube views. Most of my views on YouTube come from DVD tutorials, wordpress tutorials and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:My podcast is my relationship builder and I still have a lot of people that find me on the podcast. A surprising amount of my students and members of my community say they found me through the podcast, which means some people are searching web design in their podcast apps. The beauty about my podcast is there's not many web design podcasts or they're like five years old and they're not current. So I'm actually one of maybe half a dozen active web design podcasts maybe a dozen at the most. So it's a really, really niche, cool spot to be in. So some new people are finding me there, but it's usually people where I'm deepening that relationship with. I get about 20,000 downloads and plays per month on my podcast, so nothing huge, but also, being that they are so committed and they're serious business owner web designers, it's extremely powerful. So my podcast converts better, but my YouTube is bigger in the way of bringing people into my world.
Speaker 2:Got you. And then what size is your email list at the moment?
Speaker 1:Just over 10,000. Right now, an email is something I'm taking very seriously. Actually, very timely this interview because I'm about a week away from launching my newsletter for my email because I email everyone every week my podcast episodes, new videos but I've never had an official weekly newsletter. But that's about the change. I feel it's time to do that. I know it's a very cool trend right now because email is back and I think, with the noise of social media and everyone just being dispersed everywhere, email is such a powerful tool to be able to connect with somebody weekly, so I'm really, really excited to get that going. Maybe we can do a round two from a year from now and see how much the email newsletter helps me grow.
Speaker 2:Nice, exciting. And then you mentioned numbers in terms of you at a million revenue. Is that lifetime with your course or is that like Lifetime so far.
Speaker 1:So I have a suite of web design courses. Yeah, basically what fills my bank account is my suite of web design courses which take web designers from learning web design, seo design, my process and then the business side of web design. So those encapsulate all of the courses in there. That's been the bulk of my million dollar earnings in the past six years. I don't have the exact numbers. I'm sorry, john, I wish I did.
Speaker 1:The other big aspect of what I've done to get to the seven figure mark is a community, a membership. Now, what's interesting about this is I started my membership in 2020 and I'll talk about the numbers here because it's important to lay the foundation for this, because previously I just sold courses but I didn't have any recurring income. So, 2020, after I sold my agency, just a couple months after that, I started a coaching community which was on the back of my courses. So when people joined my courses, I offered to get coaching with me and have a deeper sense of community. It was $99 a month that started growing at, I think.
Speaker 1:I had almost 40 members joined initially and the first year I think that brought in $50,000. The next year was close to six figures and now my membership is nearly a quarter million dollar venture. But what's funny is the courses have flip flopped. I went from selling courses up front to having a membership on the back, but now my membership is the primary thing and my courses are actually inside my membership. But lifetime value wise, I'd say my core sales are probably at least 60, 65% of the million dollars and then the membership is probably about I'd say we're about 350,000, if I could give a rough estimate. But in the next few years I foresee that drastically changing because most people are interested in my membership and coaching along with the courses now.
Speaker 2:There's often an argument about online courses versus membership. Maybe that's a little too strong, but people are debating which one should I go with, and I hear people often talk about it looking at it from their personal point of view. I want to have recurring revenue or I just want to put everything in one place, which, personally, I think it's flawed. I think it's much better to look at it from the point of view of the audience and go well, what actually makes more sense for them? But I want to hear your point of view on it. What's the benefits of having courses, having membership, mixing them together, keeping them separate? What have you seen for yourself?
Speaker 1:I was on the same page with you, john. That was my mindset. I was like I can't imagine having a membership community with all the courses in there. It just doesn't seem the value would be construed to me. I feel it'd be very confusing, even with success pathways and stuff. I felt like that would be confusing. But I changed my mind when I was running my coaching community and I was having people join that first in a lot of cases, and then they were asking me questions on coaching but they had not been through my courses and I just kept on. I was like, man, I wish I could just send you to this one lesson in my business course because that would answer the question without me having to coach you on that. That's the answer, and then we can go from there. So that was the problem that I had with having one-off courses that were separate from a coaching membership community.
Speaker 1:And then earlier this year, in 2023, what I decided to do? Because I really got to the point where I was like I just can't keep these things separate. There's so much synergy in between going through a course and then getting the community and coaching you need on the back of that, and what I found was my students who were getting the best results and really building a nice six-figure web design agency. They were doing it all. They had went through the course, then they were getting coaching from me and they were having community support to rally around them. And that's what led me, over the period of about two years, with having courses and a commuting separate to finally say you know what? I'm going to put these together and it's going to be a shift in my business model. It'll take a little bit of figuring out how we're going to do this and how to sell it, and I'm still figuring that out. But I'm telling you right now I think, even though it's been costly from a standpoint of I don't have as big as launches as I had previous to this I have seen my students get better results and, more importantly, my monthly, my MRR, my monthly recurring income is just going up and up and up and up month to month. So I'm very excited about that and that's my model now, as I have the courses inside my membership and I basically use the membership to guide them through every step of the way and the goal is to have them stay in there for as long as they're a web design business owner and just to offer them more value and different tiers inside the membership.
Speaker 1:I do currently still offer my courses one off if somebody just wants the course. So it's kind of the hybrid approach. They can either just get the course and I still go live once a month for all my students as a Q and A. But if you want the course backed up with community and coaching with me in there, which is just DM, they can DM me questions. That's the coaching aspect. They have that available. So it's been a shift in a business model for me over the past year and there's been challenges to that. But that's why I did that. I just I was coaching people and I was like you got to have the courses, it's got to be together for me.
Speaker 2:Firstly, what's your price point? How much do you charge people a month for the membership?
Speaker 1:My membership is called Web Designer Pro and it is $199 a month or $199 annually, so you can get a couple months free. Anyone who goes annual also gets a one on one coaching call with me that they can use at any point in their membership. So it is more premium, but it's because the courses are involved in there and it's fairly time intensive. For me. Not in all cases it's not group coaching, so it's not like we're not doing calls like with everyone per week, but I am. I try to.
Speaker 1:I do a lot of personal reach out in the beginning when a member gets going to give them some personal direction. There's success pathways in there and then they're kind of off on the races and I try to do some touch points for the group as a whole. Right now we're closing in on 150 members in there, but I have a lot of people in that program who are grandfathered in from the previous version of the community which was at $99 a month. So I still have a lot of people paying that rate. But right now it's $199 a month Includes coaching courses and the community.
Speaker 2:It's a really interesting one, isn't it you mentioned in there, just kind of almost in passing. You don't get the spikes that you're used to. If you're setting courses, you do a promotion, you can get a lot of revenue coming in that month. When you're running a membership, you've got an ongoing, you're building up your MRR gradually. It doesn't happen. You don't tend to get those big spikes in the same way. How's that been for you? Are you like it's fine, it's all right, it's kind of all works out long term? Do you see that you made less money at the moment but you're hoping to make more money later? Like, how has that actually been for you as?
Speaker 1:a business. It's the latter Making less money right now, but it is more consistent and, like I said, I love seeing the stability of where it's at right now. And what's interesting about this is, leading up to adding my courses inside my membership, I had some launches that did not go as well as I had hoped and I thought and I'm terribly curious to see what you are seeing with the course industry right now, because I've seen a lot of changes and, quite honestly, a lot of people I know who are in similar position with me with courses have had a really tough year in 2020-23. I think information by nature, with AI and everything else going on is often commoditized, so I think there's a. I think it's a lot harder to sell a high ticket $1,000 to $3,000 course Not to say it's impossible, but it's a lot harder now than it was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1:I mean, 2020-2021 for me were the boom years because when lockdowns were happening, I had so many students flooding in to learn web design because they couldn't work, so they were interested in getting into web design and building an online business. So it was. I mean, all I had to do was put a course up for sale and it would sell, and now I feel like online courses are definitely, at least from my perspective, is much harder to sell and I saw that over the past but definitely 2022, I saw that it was harder, seemingly, to sell those big launches and I had some launches that did not go as well as I thought they would, which led me to feel like you know what the students who are like most active and who are paying me over and over and who are getting good results, they're the ones who are doing the big three the courses and coaching and community and that's why I decided, at least for this part of my business, this is, this is the biggie, this is this is what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so and again people can still get the courses on on their own. We're coming up to Black Friday soon. I'm not sure when this will go live, but we're recording this few weeks before Black Friday. That's always the biggest influx for me, so I'm still going to do a sale on my individual courses. But the membership, yeah, that's where. That's where it's been a painful year in the way of slight change in business model. But I think I'll look back in a few years and say this is probably the best decision I've made from a stability standpoint, cause I've I don't have to live and breathe or live and die off of a launch which we all know, as course creators, is how it goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. It's interesting because I got a friend who's in a similar kind of boat. She swapped over to membership. She wanted to have something that's more stable but it's taken her like a year to build up to the point where she's actually back to the revenue that she was previously making every month from doing her promotions of her courses. And I said to her you know you are allowed to do both. You know you want to get a bunch of money coming in this month You're allowed to still run the promotion for a course and then if somebody wants to get the membership that's available, they can get it, monthly fee, whatever. She's kind of really stuck, stuck at her guns on that one. She really wanted to just get the membership up and running.
Speaker 2:We're probably so much space for having both of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's definitely space for both. I think what's tricky about doing both is you now you're adding an extra option for a customer. You're making them think like, well, do I want to have lifetime access on itself or do I want to get it as a part of you know, a membership, and then, of course, my. The reason I held off doing it is, as I would like. I said I was on the same mindset of you, which is I didn't want to devalue the course if it's just inside of a membership. But I almost kind of feel like we're just about past that point when it comes to information inside of a course. It's again just from what I've seen in my experience. High ticket courses at least, are becoming more and more difficult to sell. So I think the membership model and honestly you, just you have a better chance of serving your customers well if they are in your world and having and they're fully supported. And that's one reason I started my membership is because I had, I've had, over 1600 students join my courses to this point and I'd say over a thousand of them I've never heard from, I have no idea, maybe not a thousand, but I say at least half of them. They've just gone through my courses and they're off. That's fine for some people. If you have a business model that's at scale and you just want to have thousands of people join a course, get the information and go, that's fine.
Speaker 1:I am a people person and, even though I'm not deep into the coaching world, I have enjoyed getting to know my students and serving them on a deeper level and seeing the ones who want to stay with me providing something that they can pay me, basically over and over again, and I can actually help them every step of the journey. That's the only problem with the peer course model. The DIY approach is it's like you're never going to know, unless they send you a testimonial, how it's going, almost really what results you're getting. The membership for me changed the ball game for me with being able to serve them well and then serve them over and over. I will say too, it might depend on the type of course that you're talking about, my courses, especially now that I'm in the business realm.
Speaker 1:I almost need to help them ongoing in order for them to succeed Because, as you know, john, the world of web design and just online marketing in general is changing so fast that you really need to in the business sense. You need to be able to serve them and help them ongoing, to help them get the results. If it's a topical course, it could be a one-off thing, but yeah, I don't know if I drifted away from the question, but that's why I, and maybe why your friend was going to the same thing too. I imagine she probably felt the same way, that maybe she saw that as well with her students.
Speaker 2:Yes, her ones are. There's no community, there's no coaching as part of it, it's just you get access to all of the courses all in one.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's more of a all, are you?
Speaker 2:familiar. It's very cheap, you know, like 20 bucks a month from membership. So it's a different ball game.
Speaker 1:Are you familiar with Smart, Passive Income Pat Flynn's brand?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm fortunate to live local to Matt Garland, the CEO of Smart Passive Income, and we connect every once in a while and I really value seeing what they're doing in their business because it's so similar to mine. Smart Passive Income essentially has what you just mentioned there, which is like an all access pass. It's a bit cheaper I think they're doing quarterly right now and I think it's like 150 bucks per quarter, so pretty cheap but you get access to all their courses. But then they have a separate pro community that you can join. For those who want to go deeper and that's a model that's working to is to to have.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the tricky thing about this man. It's like it all can work. It really is, like you know, like there's no right or wrong way to do a course or a membership. Now it can all work. I think what I've learned is you just got to look at if you're going to make a change. Whatever is working like double down on that, which is why me personally, I'm doubling down on my membership, which has it all, and then next phase will probably be breaking down to a couple of different tiers. I might open up a lower tier for those who can't swing to on our bucks a month. And then I'm actually about to offer a higher tier for those who want a little more intensive coaching.
Speaker 2:So it all works. Talk to me about your audience building, because you've done a good job there. So what? How much time do you spend on your podcast a week? How much time do you spend on the YouTube videos? What have you seen work for you there?
Speaker 1:It's about 50 50. I would say I spent about 50 percent of my time managing my community, doing the coaching in there and doing the calls for them, and then another 50 percent doing my podcast, doing guest interviews like this, creating YouTube videos, and I'm going to be starting my newsletter, which will be kind of serving everybody. The the biggest pain point in my business set up right now, though, are my funnels, so I know that's what you guys help out with, and that's the thing that's been tricky for me is because, as I mentioned, I started teaching building websites, so the funnels were like my design course and things like that. But with the business side of things, the funnels are very different and that type of customer is a little bit different, so I've been continually reworking my funnels to take them from YouTube videos, from podcasts, and I do have a social media presence. It's not huge. I'm active on Facebook and LinkedIn. That's a little more like relational for me. I don't use it, as those aren't like audience builders really. It's more. Somebody comes into my world. They can connect on Facebook and Insta, so I do market there as well, but, again, youtube is the big one for people finding me, and I'm actually on the process of creating better funnels and updating descriptions and really bringing people into the right kind of pathway for them, to where I can serve them where they're at. That's kind of what I'm working on and I do that currently.
Speaker 1:With going live on YouTube, that's been a biggie. That's always a huge converter for me. I need to freaking do that like once a week. I really need to do that more going live. I always get sales going live, so I just, in fact, I had like three members join my membership the last time I went live and I'm like I need to do that again. So I'm going to go live more. And then for me, I'm a webinar guy. I love doing the live webinars and then have an offer for a course and then the membership on the back of those. So that's my current kind of strategy and I do have some evergreen stuff to where, like, once a webinar is done, it'll keep it on my site, but those tend not to convert great for me. I never had a great evergreen strategy, not at this point.
Speaker 2:No, ok, cool, yeah, I. We focus way, way more on live promotions and sometimes webinars mostly the promotions versus evergreen, I just find that that has, overall, having way more success. Well, a lot of people get sold on the concept of evergreen in terms of you know, you set it up and it just runs and everything's perfect and it's all wonderful, instead of like actually looking at the reality in terms of what works better and in my experience just generally, the process of running the promotion to your whole audience in one go means that you figure out really, really quickly Is it all that information comes back to you in one go?
Speaker 2:about that one promotion you can go oh, that worked, that didn't. Let me tweak that for next time.
Speaker 2:Whereas when it's running, evergreen, that's just doesn't happen, and I think that leads to less iteration, less improvements in terms of what actually is working. You do your webinar, you get the feedback straight away from all the people who've gone on there, who've seen the webinar. In one go, you go. Oh, everyone was really responding to this bit of it, right? I'm going to focus more on that next time. I'm going to do this Facebook live and that works really well, whereas if you set something up and it's running for two years, the data from the emails that go out on day 73, there's no way that you're going to keep track of that over the course of a year and see all the people who've gone through day 73 and go oh, what was the response on that?
Speaker 2:It's not where it works. That's a great point. Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 1:And what I'm doing now is the webinars I do, whether it's a live training or a workshop or I've only done one challenge before. I prefer the webinar approach personally, but I do like having the window of the replay as well. It's like for everyone who joins live super powerful Q and a sessions. Actually, what sells me, honestly, most genres are my live, q and a sessions, because people like I see the comments, are like, oh my God, mind blown, this is amazing. And then like, yeah, I'm very, very interested in the membership or one of the courses. So the queue like the live Q and a thing is also huge. I think there's a huge benefit and a change in the market over the past few years with live, just because people now more than ever are just starved for authenticity and we can smell bullshit from a mile away now, and not that evergreen is a problem, but it's not live. It's like well, josh recorded this six months ago. Is this even relevant today? Whereas a Q and a session that's live is huge. And then when you do a webinar, you have a Q and a session. You have like a seven day funnel or a seven day offer on that or however long you'd want to do it. That's been the real benefit for me and that's what I'm continuing to refine. And actually I just got done doing one.
Speaker 1:For another strategy that's helped me with not only getting in front of new people but converting them into my world is partner webinars and partner workshops.
Speaker 1:So another web design business coach who has some similar offers to me but she goes a little deeper into group coaching. She has a lot of students who are like perfect for me because I can kind of help them get to the point where they could go to her at the next stage. So I did a recent webinar for her audience and it was the same thing. It was a seven day offer. We watched the webinar replays available, did some bonuses and then we had a handful of people join my business course off the back of that webinar. So best believe I'm going to be doing a lot of more of those too, just because it's with a built-in audience. But you know, I really try to work hard at serving them well and not feel like I'm taking advantage of partners. But that's a real common thing right now too, and I see a lot of the top course creators who are promoting each other's stuff, but there's usually only you know a select few people they feel comfortable doing that with, and I feel that way too.
Speaker 2:There's one thing I know that you do, that I want to dig into with you, which is personal welcome videos to students.
Speaker 1:So how do? These videos make a difference in a course-creators engagement with their audience.
Speaker 2:How does this work?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I can't believe that more course creators aren't doing this. So here's a question for everyone listening when is the last time you joined a course or a coaching program and you got a personal video Like, not a can? Hey, it's Josh, welcome to the group. Blah, blah, blah. Here's the next steps. That's just automated, but an actual, like personal video maybe never. Maybe one, probably never, though.
Speaker 1:That has been the biggest differentiator between me and everyone else who is competing with me in the web design business space, and I know that because of all the students who tell me that. And the real benefit to the personal video is and look I get, it's hard to do at scale. However, I have made a habit of doing this at least once a week. I generally do it on Fridays. Every Friday, new students who come through my courses and new members of my community web designer pro I send a personal loom video that's like a minute to two minutes long and I'll just say, like you know, if you were to join, john, I obviously don't know you yet, but I'd say hey, john, welcome in, so excited to be a part of your web design journey. I'd love to hear, kind of, where you're at and I'll give you some insight and recommendations on how to get the most out of the course and then I'll give you some recommendations on, like, the next best steps for you. And I'd love to hear from you again to kind of hear where you're at and get to know you better. You can email me back or send a video reply on this loom video. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 1:I bulk those if I have a lot of them and I'm telling you right now it's been, it's been the biggest retention strategy, because that leaves such an impression. I mean, I've had people who have responded and they're like holy crap, I can't believe you actually did that. And sometimes I'll do it in my office. Sometimes I'll do it when I'm on a walk with my kids and I got the dogs and I'll just you know we're walking on a pond and I'll send a quick video and it just oh, I wish every course creator would do it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know it can be time consuming, but if you want to make more money and get better retention, it's something I would do immediately. Or even go back to your last like month of signups and send them all personal video. Just wait to see what happens, because it really it's been a game changer for me in the way of making a lifetime student with one little one minute video. I mean they're just like they're so bought in, they're like he really cares. He actually cares, he actually took the time out of his day to do it. So sorry I could go on for an hour about it, but that's just a highlight of the power of doing those personal videos.
Speaker 2:So I've never seen this with courses. It's super interesting. What I have seen it with is a friend of mine, noel, who runs Jobrack. It's a site for hiring from Eastern Europe and he does this with new clients. So he's obviously saying something much more expensive as like a $2,000, $2,500 service. But when someone signs up, as he's walking through London on his commute into, he goes into the WeWork in central London and on his way there from the station he's got his phone out and he's walking down the river. So what he's got there is like London in the background. You know, you see the London.
Speaker 1:Eye the.
Speaker 2:Parliament or Big Ben or something like this, which is great, Obviously makes an amazing backdrop for his video and it feels very kind of engaging. And I do. I do it a lot in terms of personal videos. Whenever I'd make an introduction for two people, I'll do like a one minute video, be like, you know, Josh meets Sam, Sam meets Josh, Josh, Sam does X, Y and Z. I think you guys can get on really well. This is really interesting, you know, and kind of in the reverse, it's like 45, 50 seconds, something like that to do it. But everybody always comments back oh what a great. You do the best introduction videos. It's so good and it's like it wasn't very time consuming, right, but nobody's doing it, so you stand out with it, right.
Speaker 1:You stand out and I remember, john, you sent me a video. I forget if I asked you a question and you responded with a personal video, or when James connected us.
Speaker 2:I think it's when James did the introduction. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yep, you sent a video. You know how many people have done that since I've been in this industry Five, maybe you know. Like no one does it. It's crazy. And yeah, you're right, and I did this as a web designer serving my clients. I started doing personal videos after proposals and it was a huge converter for me. So it was one of the first things I did when I started doing courses.
Speaker 1:And here's the real benefit of doing these when you're as a course creator, even if you're selling a $50 course or $100 course, if you have more courses or a membership, when you send a personal video, it just engages them. It also helps them invest in the course, like get into it. But then it's an upsell opportunity and of course, you can upsell. You can automate your upsell email funnels and everything else. But I have a template. I mean it's like super old school. I have a template that I have in my notes that has a student discount for them once they join a course and I just in the video often say, like really excited to hear from you, john, below is your student discount code for any additional courses. Any questions? Let me know. But that's going to be below for you and I can't tell you how many repeat buyers I've had, because I have this little template and I do a little personal video on Loom that I embed and it's because a lot of people will see an automated email and it's deleted before they even open it.
Speaker 1:But if they see personal video from Josh to Jim, jim's like oh is this really? Is this really a personal video? Holy crap, he said my name, it is really him. Oh, my gosh, he's looking at my website. It is really Josh.
Speaker 1:So it leads to upsells, it leads to repeat work, it leads to recurring income if you're selling a membership. So for all those reasons and more, I can't recommend enough the personal videos. And there's not that many course creators who couldn't do this on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, like, if you're getting a dozen people in your course, you could do 12 videos pretty quickly in half an hour and send them all out. And yeah, it's time consuming and it's a bit manual, but what we've covered so far is the telltale sign it's authentic, no one else is doing it and if you really want to stand out now from all other coaches, course creators, memberships this is the kind of thing that will separate you from everybody else, because, again, I can't tell you how many students who said like I've never had a coach or a mentor do this, this is amazing. And then they're bought in man.
Speaker 2:Now I want to talk to you about pricing a little bit as well. What's your approach to pricing and how do you strike the right balance between value and affordability for your students? Because you talked about, like you know, some people can't afford 200 bucks a month, but 200 bucks a month for somebody running a business is actually quite a cheap thing to do. Like, how do you kind of overall think about where you're going to put your pricing out?
Speaker 1:So hardest thing I have found pricing for courses and memberships to be way harder than pricing websites when I was a web designer. It's so hard particularly because, like in my world, I'm helping people who might be early on in their journey, so they might only be making like 10 or 20,000. Well, a couple hundred bucks a month, that's like that might be 10% of their revenue. That's going to be probably a little too much to swing practically for them. So but at the same time you're right, I don't want a price point that's like too low to where it devalues what's involved with that, which is why I'm. The $200 a month plan for me is kind of my mid tier. And then, like I said, I'm going to open up some higher end coaching which are basically just going to be almost like boot camps, coaching sprints. That will be like 90 day, like three month plans for higher tier people who want it and that's going to be the thousand dollars a month for a little while. But then there's that lower tier which you mentioned, your friend earlier, who might have access to all the courses for 20 bucks a month or something, and I actually think that's fine depending on what's in there for those. So that's kind of what I'm working on right now. But it's tough because you got to kind of have a price point that is going to be doable for somebody with where they are. But you also want them to invest in it. And one interesting mindset about pricing is I've found you want it to make them like, you want it to be just enough to where they're like okay, I'm investing like 200 bucks a month. It's a car payment I'm in. I'm going to do this because if you have it too low then it's like well, how good can Josh's business course be if it's 19 bucks a month? I don't know Is this really going to help me build a six-figure business? So it's extremely hard.
Speaker 1:But I will tell you this with pricing, lifetime access or even like a 12-month program, access is way different than continuity with a membership. The goal of my membership is paying per month forever, for as long as they want, which is why I have not made my program a 12-month kind of thing, that is, forever, as long as you want to be a member. I've really debated on whether or not to cap it at 12 months and just pay annually. All the models I've thought through and experimented and lost sleep over. But if I can get somebody who feels like 200 bucks a month is worth it for the long haul and I have a lot of people still pay me 99 bucks a month for over three years now and they've never canceled that I found that's the true value. That's continuity with a membership. At least that's what you're really looking for, even off courses.
Speaker 1:Lifetime access is a little bit different. You can charge more for lifetime access, but Lifetime access is lifetime access. They pay you once and that's it which is where the big launches come from. So my one-off courses range from $97 to $1,000 and everywhere in between, depending on the course. All my courses together are total up to be over $3,000. So it's kind of like a $3,000 bundle. Uh, and I do have it available as a bundle bundle that people can buy for for a $500 discount.
Speaker 1:Um, so it's different, though that's different than than paying the lower monthly fee to get everything. But my membership includes community and coaching too. It's extremely hard. It really is hard. I found pricing to be the hardest thing.
Speaker 1:Uh, I don't know that helps answer in any way, cause I mean you could, you could. You could charge by module, by lesson, you could charge by a value-based pricing with it. I mean, technically, my business course should probably be $100,000, but I don't think I'm going to sell many a hundred thousand dollar business courses, being a DIY kind of thing, so, uh, but I also didn't want to make it like $100, which a lot of people are doing. So, uh, yeah, it's kind of all in between there. But, uh, I personally, if I could sum it up, I would say courses are going to be in between a hundred and a thousand dollars, or maybe 2000 or three for lifetime access, depending on that program. Uh, and then memberships are what I've seen are likely going to vary in between the 20 to $30 range for for the very you know the basic stuff to to one to two to 300 for the mid tier, and then you get into the thousand to $3,000 a month for the for the high, high ticket group coaching intensive programs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the way we work with our clients is mostly we're looking for them to have stuff for sale by email to new class new customers for somewhere in the kind of a hundred to $300 range, cause that way you can set it by email, you don't have to be doing a phone call, you don't have to be doing webinars, which I know you like webinars but not everybody does. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then what's the value ladder? Like, what are you going to have like 500 or 1000 or 2000 that somebody can upsell to? Like, someone's got your first thing They've got. If they're fitting the door, they love it, they loved it. Now what? How do they go up to the next level? Not everybody has that we that's something we're working with different clients on like, how can you start to put that in place, cause that's a little bit different for most of the graders.
Speaker 2:They don't have a coaching program or the full bundle of ever that you know. They haven't got that kind of higher level offering.
Speaker 1:And you know I do.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:That's what that's. When. When the quote unquote needle move from my business, john, was when I finished my entire suite of courses, because that did take time. It took two years for me to create nine courses, launch them all, build my brand, build my business and then eventually, a couple of years in, I had nine courses.
Speaker 1:It was like a complete set of, of, like a web designer academy style set of courses, and what I found was I would get a lot of people into one course with a personal video and a student discount for additional courses. They would either buy more courses or, when I had my bundle version of all of them, I would say you can also get all the courses for 2,500 bucks. Well, back then it was like 1,500. I've raised my prices since then, um, but you know, they went from going from $97. If they got the course, they loved it, they got some quick results. A lot of them would be like, oh my gosh, I want the bundle. Yep, let me upgrade. And then if there was ever a sale or promotion, a lot of students would would take advantage of that.
Speaker 1:And that's how I went from making just over six figures to two to $300,000 as a course creator with that model, with that up sale and with a membership, it is different, um, but what I'm working on now is having the tiered approach with the membership to have that top tier for those who want to go further and can go further with a higher budget. But and then I I'm kind of working through and figuring out what I could do on the lower end, um, without messing up the current community. That's probably a whole different conversation but, um, I'm kind of using my one-off courses as the legions for my membership. As of right now, I have a lot of people joining one course and they're like oh, okay, yeah, I want all the courses and the community and coaching. So it's, it is working for me now.
Speaker 2:Nice, Nice. That's fantastic, man. If people want to get some of your wisdom, where should they go? How, if someone's not a web designer but they're really interested to learn more about everything that you've been working on, everything you've been doing, where can they follow you?
Speaker 1:My website is joshallco. That's got everything there, all my courses, even if you're, if you're curious about what like my landing pages look like, and my membership is called web designer pro, so you'll see that there as well. Uh, yeah, feel free to take a peek over there. I have my podcast there, my YouTube channel and I am just about to start on my newsletter, which I'm really, really excited about. Uh, to be able to.
Speaker 1:You know just, I'm not salesy on email, but I feel like the missing component to me, and a lot of my students have told me this is just like a weekly check-in, like a weekly bit of advice and tip, and then I'm going to use the newsletter as a, as a what. What was published this week in the way of content, in case anyone missed it, and then what's ahead to get people excited, uh and uh. So, yeah, so that will be available on my site as well to sign up for the newsletter If you'd like to see what I'm up to and I love hearing from other course creators, so I will, I will, uh, I will not do my books a favor and give you free course creator advice If you email me, joshallco, I love doing that. Eventually, I'd love to help course creators, but for right now I'm all in on helping web designers Beautiful.
Speaker 2:If you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, please subscribe. Wherever you listened and, uh, I want to thank you so much for listening, as always. Love you guys, josh, thanks so much for coming on today. Man, really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:Thank you, john. I hope it. Uh hope it helps everyone out, especially if you're struggling with courses versus membership. I don't know if we helped or made it worse. We'll have to see. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, guys. Talk to you later.