Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Jon Dykstra, expert in niche site building and creator of Fat Stacks Blog.
With a publishing career dating back to 2012, Jon Dykstra is a seasoned niche site creator who has cultivated a six-figure portfolio of high-traffic websites, many of them earning substantial passive income from display ads.
As the creator of Fat Stacks Blog, Jon generously imparts his wisdom to aspiring bloggers and niche site creators. His transparent "Tell it like it is" style of sharing successes and failures establishes him as a reliable source of information and inspiration for individuals seeking online success.
Jon's Website: https://fatstacksblog.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Jon Dykstra, expert in niche site building and creator of Fat Stacks Blog.
With a publishing career dating back to 2012, Jon Dykstra is a seasoned niche site creator who has cultivated a six-figure portfolio of high-traffic websites, many of them earning substantial passive income from display ads.
As the creator of Fat Stacks Blog, Jon generously imparts his wisdom to aspiring bloggers and niche site creators. His transparent "Tell it like it is" style of sharing successes and failures establishes him as a reliable source of information and inspiration for individuals seeking online success.
Jon's Website: https://fatstacksblog.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Everyone said display ads are like the worst way to monetize this site. It's like the lowest amount you could possibly make and there's better ways to do it. I've learned in some niches it's really the best way. It's the only way.
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 John Dykstra. John is an experienced niche site creator. He's been publishing since 2012 and over the years, he's built a six-figure portfolio of high traffic websites, many of which generate significant passive income through display ads. And as the founder of Fatstax blog, john shares his knowledge and experience with aspiring bloggers and niche site creators, and he's got this transparent tell it like it is kind of approach to sharing his successes and failures, and it makes him a trusted source of information and inspiration for those looking to make a living online. And he's also been selling a course over the years for others about how to do that, and we're going to be digging today into how come you made that course, how we've built up the audience, the community around that, and how he's been promoting it and what's been some of the kind of ups and downs with that.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dive into our interview with John today, yosip is our funnel strategy lead and he has worked with all of our done for you clients. He has helped them make millions and millions of dollars I calculate the other day it's over 10 million dollars so far and what we've done is we have created, instead of chat GPT, we've created YOSIP GPT, yosip AI we call them internally and we took all of the coaching that YOSIP's ever done and used that to train a version of chat GPT and you can access this for free at datadrivenmarketingai. It's going to answer any of your questions about your course business, your membership businesses, what kind of promotions you should be running upsells, order bumps, all the stuff that we cover here on the podcast, specifically for you for free at datadrivenmarketingai. John, welcome to the show man. Thanks for joining us. Hey, john, thanks for having me. Could you talk us through with your course? Who does it help? What kind of problem is it solving for them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very simple. So the course is geared toward people who are writing and publishing content sites and are monetizing with display ads and, in some cases, affiliate stuff. But I've focused on display ads for years and years and that's been sort of the main driver for revenue. It's fairly passive, but I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing and I started a new site and the traffic grew quickly, but it wasn't working with affiliate stuff. So I just put some ads on and they work really, really well.
Speaker 1:And I thought, I don't know, I just there was so much talk about affiliate, affiliate, which is great in a lot of different niches and websites, but it wasn't working for me. So I just started writing about hey, you know what Ads can work. Because when I kind of explored this whole concept of content sites and learned about it, everyone said display ads are like the worst way to monetize a site. It's like the lowest amount you could possibly make and there's better ways to do it. But I've learned in some niches it's really the best way, it's the only way, and so I wanted to get that message out. Fatstacks was born.
Speaker 2:Why do you think that is? Why do you think sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't? Is it that it kind of works for your mindset and approach that you're taking? Is it that it works for certain topics, like what changes between the times when it works and when it doesn't?
Speaker 1:Well, it's topic and it's audience. So you know, affiliate works when there's some sort of buyer intent behind the search. I mean, most of my traffic over the years has been Google search, plus some Facebook and Pinterest. So I mean, facebook traffic is very low buyer intent usually especially organic. If they're, you know, followers of your page. They're just regular readers. The same with Pinterest. That depends on the pin they came through and how they search.
Speaker 1:But the lion's share in a lot of niches is there's no buyer intent for a lot of topics and if there's no buyer intent behind it, you could throw in all the affiliate links you want and they may even click some, but the conversion is very, very low and so really what you're left with is display ads. And yeah, they do earn much, much less per thousand visitors than a well performing affiliate page or e-commerce page or something that's selling an info product. There's no question about that. But what I love about the ads using ads is it gives me a lot of freedom to write on topics that aren't buyer intent and it opens it wide open, and which makes the writing a lot more fun.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we do. We work with course creators, info product creators who've already proven they've got product market fit, so they've got an audience and their audience is already buying courses from them. They're already buying info products for them. The reason we do that is because we found it's really difficult to figure out in advance which audiences are going to actually buy the courses. We've had people before we've looked at and thought, oh, this is an obvious fit. Obviously people in this niche buy courses, so this is going to work really well. But it's not quite as simple as that and I think what you're saying about the buyer intent might be a big part of that, in terms of certain audiences are attracted to certain niche. It's not just the niche, it's like the type of content you're covering about that niche, as to whether those are the same people who are actually looking to them, buy an information product or buy an affiliate link or what have you? You know, buy something from an affiliate link around that. So that makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think I mean I distill it very simply across between two different audiences You've got your B2B, which you're speaking to a business oriented audience, and courses are absolutely ideal for that. Fatstacks, as a separate entity, is serving a B2B audience. B2c yeah, there's a lot of opportunities for courses there. Generally they're going to be priced a lot lower and in some B2C niches it would be very hard to come up with a course concept. It's a lot more obvious in the whole business realm in my experience. But coming up with something that's going to work really well in a lot of like, like take the automotive niche, let's say you, you have a site about mini-vans and you provide reviews and writing info articles all about mini-vans. What's the core saying go there. I'm not saying there isn't one, but I think it's a lot harder than say if you are serving an audience of restaurant owners.
Speaker 2:The Fatstacks blog is then the place where you've built up an audience who then has been buying your course. You mentioned to me before that building up the community was the thing that really led to that working. So could you talk us through the kind of the timeline there? How long have you been building the community for and how's that kind of worked?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it started with a very simple PDF and an email and there's been a few things I've done that work that were really smart, and one is to really put out a better email newsletter. Rather than three sentences and a link to the blog, put the entire message in the email and that work. The opening engagement rates went up a lot. Then eventually, with the materials I was selling and I did it just as a way to provide support for customers is, I set up a private forum and you get access to it, and that has continued for years. It must be five, six years old now and it just keeps growing and the engagement's very, very strong there.
Speaker 1:A lot of daily activity, I think, being private because I really didn't know whether I should make it open and free to anyone or make a private, and I think private was really smart. It's kept spam down to almost nothing, which is really great. I don't want to spend my days moderating and kicking people out. That's no fun and I haven't had to do that. But the community there is a lot of people. There's people just getting started, there's people who have huge, huge content, businesses and everyone in between, and it's worked out really, really well and I should say the other reason I started it was I was part of a forum very similar to what I set up before that and he shut it down and I actually really enjoyed the forum and I was getting to know people and I think we all really liked it.
Speaker 1:We were all paying just for the forum. We didn't buy a course or anything, we just paid for the forum. We're happy to be there. And he just came up one day and said I'm shutting it down and I thought, okay, I want to fire this up again. So I just started it, nice, nice.
Speaker 2:So how many people do you go in there now?
Speaker 1:4,000. I haven't checked super recently, but around 4,000. Okay, so you're acting. I mean a lot of people aren't active, but yeah, you know how forms are. A lot of people read the both posts and that's cool too, right. I mean, I get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've heard someone tell me it was the 991 rule. It was about 90% of people will never, almost never, post. 9% will do it like from time to time, and then there's like 1% who are, just like you know, the absolute dedicated posting all the time, kind of thing I'm going to agree with where I'm one of them. I saw that the model that you've got for selling your course you've got like it's only open to buy a few times a year. Is that the way that you've always done that?
Speaker 1:No, I've experimented with a number of ways that you said just always be open and sales were okay. I mean I would do a promotion where I drop the price for a week. You know, at long story short, there has to be some element of scarcity involved in trying to have these bigger sales periods. And so for a long time I just ran discounts, but they never sat well with me because the people who paid full price struck me as just not really a fair thing. Right, I had they wait. I mean I know they got it right when they wanted it and that was the additional value to them. But you know, and then all of a sudden, like a month later, I run a 100 or $200 discount. It just never sat well with me. So I switched to open, close, and so it's never discounted and it's just open for a week every few months. And that's what I do and that seems to work really, really well.
Speaker 2:How did you find? Did you find that actually converted better, or was it just kind of similar, but you felt happier with that?
Speaker 1:Well, I like the fact that everybody's paying the same price, so some people aren't getting discounts on other people paying full price, because I've been the full price payer. And then I, you know, I find out a month later. Oh, like you know, had I waited now, it could have saved 200 bucks. It feel like, you know, this is not a great feeling. So I like that aspect of it and, you know, as a seller and for conversion purposes, the scarcity works so much better than just keeping it open all the time. When it's open all the time and I think it's in everyone's mind it's like oh, I can get it next week, I can get it next week, I can get it next month. Well, no, now you can't. And so when it is open and I do a fairly aggressive week long set of email pushes for it it works, the conversions are great and the aggregate revenue over a course of the year is much better.
Speaker 2:And how often do you do run those promotions? How often do you open the car?
Speaker 1:It's worked out about every two months.
Speaker 2:So it's not like I've got to wait six months for it, but they also know that, like, when it is open, that's their, their only chance for for a while. Okay, yeah, yeah. What can you share with people? I don't want to ask you for anything you're uncomfortable with, but like in terms of, like you know, number of students or revenue or anything that you're comfortable to kind of share, to give people an idea of the size of it.
Speaker 1:Well it's. It's hard to say. The whole thing has evolved from a small PDF into several independent or individual mini courses that I called them. And then, as what would happen, so you know those, those sold pretty well on an evergreen basis because they were priced at like 47 bucks or 97 bucks. So it wasn't one of those things that people really had to like think about. It's like oh, I want to buy it, it's pretty cheap, right? So then, as it would happen, you know everyone's like well, you know, you're selling five of these mini courses now can I get a bundle, right? So then I bonded them and increase the price and that's hold really well.
Speaker 1:And but you know, things get messy with these things. So this has been the hardest part of being a course seller. Like, this is okay, I bonded them. Then you get the people emailing me and saying, well, I bought them all individually and I paid way more than the bundle. And you know, can you give me a refund? And I'm like yeah, I know, it's again, it's one of those, you know, fair issues, right?
Speaker 1:So then eventually the bundle was selling really well. So I stopped selling them individually and now it's just the bundle, but because the bundle is a lot more expensive. It doesn't probably sell in the same volume as the, as the small courses did right, but the overall revenue is higher. So I'm I mean total sales across all that. When it back, when it was like literally a $27 PDF to now about 4,000, at least based on who's in the form there were some sales before the form. But you know, and I switched it's hard to say because I switched to teachable along the way, and you know so and then I also have a free, free course and teachable that people can can grab, you know, as sort of email lead gen concept, and they're kind of counted in numbers as well. So it's hard to say precisely because it's just been a kind of this evolution over a number of years.
Speaker 2:What have you found in terms of actually building out the courses and the different elements themselves, like what's some of the stuff that you've learned along the way with that?
Speaker 1:I like doing courses. I think I have a pretty good knack at it, like in terms of sequential, sequentially stepping people through how to do something. It was a big job when I combined them and try to keep it organized, in a sense that that was actually a lot of work and difficult. What's hard is A lot of people want video, but not everybody wants video. When I buy a course, I prefer in text and not video. I don't care to watch videos. Most people tend to prefer the video, but mine is a mix and I will not change that.
Speaker 1:I use video in the course where I think video best serves the concept. If I'm showing how to do something that may require screen sharing type videos, I don't just do the talking head video where I'm explaining the concept. If that's the lesson, it'll be in text instead. So that's how I do it, and perhaps it's not ideal. The ideal, I suppose, would be every lesson is a video with a full transcript of that video. But and potentially I could see myself getting to that because I think that would be a better customer experience but I haven't gotten to that yet. It's a huge course. There's a lot in there, so, and it's been updated twice a year for a number of years.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, okay. Yeah, I took a course like that the other day. That was video and text. It was Ali Abdaal's YouTube I forget which one of them, but one of his YouTube courses and it was fascinating to be like, oh, with this one I can kind of skim through the text and see if this module, if this particular video, is useful for me right now, rather than watching the whole thing. But I, yeah, I don't think that that many people are willing to do that, to put in both of those and most of our clients, it's just video the whole way through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I try to create the course that I would like, so that's that's how I go about it. It's a lot quicker to do the video usually and the right at all out. But, like I said, if I'm showing how to set something up technical or use a piece of software or something, I mean it's definitely I'm going to use video because I mean you know, typing that out that's, that's deadly.
Speaker 2:When you're doing those email promotions that we talked about. What's the kind of structure to that? How many emails are there over the course of that week? What are you covering in any of those emails? What kind of? Are you offering a discount? I'm guessing not, because there's no other time to buy it, so there'd be no point to a discount.
Speaker 1:That's right. No discount but a deadline. I send a lot of emails and what I start doing about part, you know I do exclude all buyers who bought in the past and then kind of throughout the week. You know I'll filter them out. But unless I do try to tie most of the emails in with something useful, they're not just you know, every day course deadline end of week by I, usually tied in with a fair amount of information in the style that my newsletters typically go out.
Speaker 1:I'm a odd email newsletter publisher, at least in this realm, because I'm not consistent. I may send for a week, I may send zero week over the course of the year. It just really depends if I have something to send out. I don't have like get it every Wednesday or sort of thing, and but promo week it'll be almost every day, not quite every day. You know you get the first day spike and then and then you get the wall for a few days with sort of a trickle sales and then the last few days are the big day. So all the emails leading up to, let's say I do Tuesday through Sunday, which is my typical days that I have it available, the emails Tuesday, wednesday and Friday will typically include quite, quite a bit of helpful information, trying to tie it into how the courses you know and make it useful for people and I won't exclude previous buyers from those because there's something of value there. But come the weekend in your last two days, the pretty much fairly short, aggressive, you know deadline by now sort of emails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we tend to follow a pretty similar kind of format. We'll start out with we do ours over like two weeks, and the first week there's no actual way to buy the course. It's like warm up emails, getting people set up, so about by having useful emails about that topic. So the people who are interested in the particular topic let's say we're doing a marketing audience and the particular topic is about how to run a webinar Then we're going to have useful emails about how to run a webinar so that those people who are interested in that topic are particularly paying attention when the promotion starts. But even when the promotion starts, the beginning of the week will tend to do more value in those emails and the end of the week is more really focused on if you're now interested and you want to buy this, let's answer all of your questions and make sure that you can make a really good decision. So frequently asked questions, testimonials, case studies, that kind of thing towards the end of the week and a real focus on the discount. One of the things that you mentioned in there was that you normally tend to get the spike at the very beginning of the promotion and a spike again at the very end. So we found the email recently that we started using really regularly that we send out in the middle. That seems to lead to a middle spike as well, so it makes the whole week kind of a little more even, and it's something called future pacing.
Speaker 2:We learned about this from a I forget it was a copywriter who was doing something for deadline funnels doing I could training for them, and it's the concept of it is it's all of the. So there's a lot of people who are unsure about buying because they're like I know what I'm, like I'm not gonna actually do all of the work in this, so it's breaking down for them. If you did the minimum amount needed and you tell them what that minimum amount is the amount of hours per week, or however you might break that down, here's how your life is going to be different in a day, a week, a month, six months, a year. And show them if you just do this much, this is what kind of result you can get. And it's an interesting one because it doesn't.
Speaker 2:It's it depends on the course, right? Because some courses you have to go through absolutely everything in there and you have to do every single thing for it to work at all. And there's other ones where it's like well, you know what, if you just do some of the stuff from the first module, you're gonna be way further forward than most people anyway. And so we can kind of focus in on right, that's our minimum amount. Just go through this first module, do that stuff and that's gonna move you further forward. And that works really well in terms of having a spike right in the middle of the promotion.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I haven't done that. That's a good tip.
Speaker 2:No, I'd never heard before we heard this copyright talk about it. I'd never heard anybody else talk about that kind of approach to take, so that was super interesting for us. We run a lot of tests on this kind of stuff. Yeah, as always. Okay, let's try this angle, let's try this hook, let's try this focus.
Speaker 1:Well, it's neat because you get instant results right. Yeah, you can see whether it works, whereas other types of marketing it takes a while to find out whether something works.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I really like about running promotions that are for a set period, rather than some people have this system of setting up an autoresponder and everybody goes through this two year. Autoresponder is you get to see it right. Then you write the emails, you send the emails, you see the result, you get to review it, whereas if you're doing it over, you've got this two year period that these emails go out over. One, you end up not doing the review because when exactly is the time to go and do it. And two, it takes so long for enough people to go through it that it's really hard to decide if that's statistically valid. Is it enough information? Whereas you do these kind of things, you run a promotion, you send a type of email and you go oh, that was cool, let me try that in this other niche, because we work with a bunch of clients. We can kind of do that multiple times take something and run it with a bunch of different places.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so going back to I've kind of jumped around a little bit, but going back to those promotions. So you've got a bunch of emails going out over the course of a week. Just to summarize about what you said you start out with the opening. You have a big spike at the beginning. You tend to have value emails. Towards the beginning. Towards the end of the week. You've got more of the like heavy promotion. This thing is finishing. It's going to be all closing. Do you have anything else in there for urgency and scarcity in terms of like? Is there certain bonuses that you do one time a year and you don't do them others? Or is it about you know what? This is just your chance to buy it now.
Speaker 1:No bonus Again. It just complicates it. It's not really necessary. I've found you know the bonus is another way. Instead of discounting, don't do that Just open and close it.
Speaker 1:I try to keep it really simple and I'm sure there are a lot of little things I could do to help sales, but you know, at the end of the day, the best thing I ever do is just foster the community and write good emails all year long and at least I think they're okay. People stick around, try to listen to people and what they want to do and be transparent and just be myself. You know I'm not a super big YouTube personality. I've done some YouTube videos and they're not great but they're okay. You know, I think it helps people just get to know me or see what I'm like. I'm a real person. I think that's probably the most value out of having a few YouTube videos out there and it kind of just ties it all together and I think that overall has helped. And I will say one more thing that's helped a lot and this is good for people.
Speaker 1:Just getting started in selling courses is for a long time. I wrote the copy and did the design of the sales pages and it was atrocious. I'm not a designer and I'm not a copywriter and but I did it. Just I don't know I got a course. Here's my with the Teachable landing page. It was not really the best landing page design thing and anyways. Ultimately I hired a copywriter who works with me and a designer and sales just exploded. The difference is unbelievable Same audience essentially attracting the same people to the newsletter throughout the year, but when I reopened for a week with the whole new sales page, it was unbelievable. So it pays to get a really, really good copywriter and nice-licking sales page done.
Speaker 2:The thing you've kind of mentioned this a few times now this community and the fostering of the community is like the thing that you do that you think kind of has the really big impact besides having the promotions, the great copywriter, the design. So what is anything that you do to help foster that community? What does that look like on a daily or weekly basis?
Speaker 1:Mostly emails and the form, the private form that you get with the course and so you're essentially paying for it and it's really that About, I think, getting on. A year ago I started getting active in the space on Twitter. I'm not super active, it's kind of again, hot and cold. That's good too. Twitter can be really good if your audience is on Twitter. I found that to be quite good. It's kind of fun. It's almost, you know, it's like the public version of the forum really and people get to know you and that I don't really sell on Twitter. I'm really just there to provide info, ask questions, learn myself and that sort of thing. That's how I treat it and that's been both fun and I think it's been a good business decision. But that's really it.
Speaker 1:The forum is huge and I'm active on the forum. I'm not one who OK, well, now I've got thousands of members and it's the self-running entity. It's not like that. I'm in there, I answer questions, even if I'm not tagged, because I like it and I started it because I like the forum concept and I don't really like Facebook groups and I know there's tons of Facebook groups in this whole arena and it seems to be the default option. When people are trying to start something up with a course, you know a place they can get support and talk to other people. But I'm a member of a lot of Facebook groups. I never go to them. I just like the forum. It's searchable, it becomes this big database of information you know over the years and it's just, it just works.
Speaker 2:If someone wants to go check out your course sales page or your blog or the forum, where can they go?
Speaker 1:That's thexblogcom. Everything's there. You can join the newsletter there. You can find the link to Twitter. That'd be my most active social platform.
Speaker 2:Well, John, thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your time sharing your kind of experience with everybody in terms of what's worked and what hasn't for you over the years. Thanks so much, of course, to everyone listening. I really appreciate you listening in and being part of the Out of Sending Online Courses audience and if you want to get future episodes, please subscribe wherever you listen. Thanks, everybody.