Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Mark Wills, notary public business coach and founder of the Loan Signing System.
Mark Wills stands as a top-producing notary loan signing agent nationwide, helms a nationwide loan signing service, is a best-selling author, and serves as the lead instructor for the Loan Signing System, the foremost training program for notary signing agents, reaching thousands across the country. His instructional videos on YouTube have amassed over 5 million views!
Due to his significant contributions to the advancement of notary public entrepreneurs, the esteemed National Notary Association has recognized him with the Influencer of the Year award!
Mark's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UCPQw3qNuM8QIhwzSHRUvtoA
Mark's Website: https://www.loansigningsystem.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 Mark Wills, notary public business coach and founder of the Loan Signing System.
Mark Wills stands as a top-producing notary loan signing agent nationwide, helms a nationwide loan signing service, is a best-selling author, and serves as the lead instructor for the Loan Signing System, the foremost training program for notary signing agents, reaching thousands across the country. His instructional videos on YouTube have amassed over 5 million views!
Due to his significant contributions to the advancement of notary public entrepreneurs, the esteemed National Notary Association has recognized him with the Influencer of the Year award!
Mark's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UCPQw3qNuM8QIhwzSHRUvtoA
Mark's Website: https://www.loansigningsystem.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
I'm 25 broke and I'm like $150. That seemed like $10,000 an hour. You don't pay for information, you pay for execution. My course works. It's not even a question. I can help you make 500 bucks a month for $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month. What is in question is the effort behind the 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 Mark Wills. Mark is the course instructor of the top rated loan signing system agent training course. He's been an active professional loan signing agent for nearly 20 years. He owns a loan signing service that does thousands of signings a year and loan signing system is the nation's premier notary public loan signing agent training course. It's the only signing agent course that's an education partner of the American Escro Association.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be talking to Mark today about his course business, his membership, how he started it, who he helps, how he built his audience and how his whole funnel works. Before we dive into the interview with Mark today, yosip is our funnel strategy lead here at Data Driven Marketing and, while working on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects, he's developed and tested most of the systems that we use here at Data Driven Marketing to help our clients make millions of dollars. And what we did is we took all of the training that YoSIP's ever done for clients and we used it to train an AI version of YoSIP YoSIP AI. We've made this available completely for free. You can ask your questions about your course or your membership business. Get it's. Help with writing copy for your emails. Whatever you like, go to datadrivenmarketingai to get access to it for free. Mark, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you brother glad to be here, man. It's true I gave a bit of a summary there at the beginning, but for those of us who don't necessarily know what all of that stuff means, can you talk us through? Who do you help with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're in the money making niche, and so what I do is I help people a lot of people help make money in the Notary public niche here in America, and so what a lot of people don't know is a lot of people in America think, oh, I hear the word Notary, I hear they make $5 per stamp signature, they make $2 per stamp signature, but I don't realize there's a lot of really cool niches within the Notary industry, and so I specifically help Notaries who are part of the real estate mortgage industry in our country, and so a Notary for watching someone sign the borrower signed their name 100 times on their loan mortgage docs make $150 to $200 an hour, and so what I help is making sure that they understand who to approach, how to get the business, how to execute the jobs and really how to make money in this little niche that most people don't realize.
Speaker 1:In American mortgage that is, every single house in America has to have a Notary to close, so I teach them from scratch via an online course, just like you mentioned earlier, and I've helped over 70,000 Notaries accomplish that goal of learning how to turn the Notary commission into dollars. I have students who make seven figures a year students who make six figures a year and students who make $1,500 a month part time. So it's a cool business that you can kind of make as big as you want or keep as small as you want, and so just kind of like anything in life, the best thing to pay for someone's experience is shorten that learning curve, and that's all I do, man.
Speaker 2:And so how'd you get started with it? Were you a Notary yourself? Like what was the background here?
Speaker 1:Great question. So if you want the genesis of all this, it's actually a pretty cool story and so you know, especially for you know your audience specifically, I'll kind of break down the story. So I've always been a successful Notary. Right out of college I tripped in the Notary business. I had a buddy of mine who was a real estate agent and I'm 25, not knowing what to do with my wife right out of college and he's like dude, these Notaries are making $150 for watching people sign their names and I'm like tell me more. And so.
Speaker 1:I'm literally I'm 25 broke and I'm like $150 that seemed like $10,000 an hour and so he told me about it. I jumped in two feet first and I just went through school of hard knocks, figured out how to scale the business. But here's where it kind of gets cool, to where we are today. And so I was literally 26, 27 years old, making 100 grand a year. My friends are like I'm still bartending, making 100 bucks a night and so, just because I'm a good friend, I was teaching all my buddies. I'm like, dude, get out of the bar industry, get out of selling insurance. And I start teaching them just because as a friend.
Speaker 1:So it's fast forward like six or seven years. Then I have another buddy who is now my business partner through a signing system. He's actually up in Northern California. So he literally hits me up and says, hey, man, I see you helping all around the other buddies getting this notary business. Can you help me? And I was like done, bro. So we jump on FaceTime and I go through the entire thing with him. It's about two hours and at the end of it usually I get this huge thank you mark.
Speaker 1:like oh my God, you're the man, mark, super, thank you, but for him I got like dead silence and I'm like kind of waiting for the validation as a buddy and I'm like, thank you, at any time, it's cool. And so then, all of a sudden, what comes out of his mouth is like you just taught me how to do this over FaceTime. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm like I gotta go. He's like no, no, no, no, no, no, you just taught me over FaceTime. And that was our aha moment, his, and I go wait, what do you mean? He's like well, if you taught me, why can't you teach everybody? And so I was like, oh, you mean an online course? He goes, yes, and I'm like, well, I'm just a notary's taught five or 10 of our buddies. I mean, if you go, get me a couple notaries, I'll figure it out.
Speaker 1:And so he threw up a website called moneynotarycom and this is an online course community. So they understand that what paid traffic is. So we had no paid traffic. It was moneynoterycom and he threw up a couple of blogs behind that, and so through that, we ended up getting 25 signups in the first week. And then he calls me up and at this point I'm not really a good in digital marketing. Now I'm an expert, right. But then I was like he's like dude. I threw up a landing page no, tripwire, nothing. We had one blog on there and we got 25 signups and like, is that good or bad? He's like unbelievable.
Speaker 1:So then I teach 25 people how to do this over literally a go to webinar. Zoom wasn't even then this. We were about eight years old, so he was in go to webinar. And so we did a go to webinar and I taught people how to do it and he's like you know, let's try to get more people on. And so we went from literally 25 to 50 to 100, to a thousand, to 10,000. Now we're 70,000 deep. And so it was my buddies. Just all ha moment of if you can teach me over FaceTime, let's figure out how to teach everybody else. And so now we have a very sophisticated funnel on which I'm sure we're going to get into. But that is kind of the Genesis man. I was a notary making six figures. I want to teach my buddies, and it was my business partners brainchild to really take this to the next level. And so, like I said, we're 70,000 students deep, 300,000 person email list, and so opt in, which I'm pretty proud of. So, yeah, and that's, that's how it started.
Speaker 2:Beautiful man, that's really cool. So that's how I was eight years ago when you had that kind of our hard moment, cool Okay, and taught me through them. So you mentioned some numbers there. So you'd said 70,000 people, that's the number of people who've actually gone through your training course. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:That's correct. So in a year, 70,000 people pay for the course. We do have a free trial I'm sure we can talk about that and throughout the course of this conversation, we have 70,000 paying notaries and then of the 70,000, we have a subscription model, and so, of the 70,000, we have 11,000 notaries and a monthly subscription model. That, if you want to ask me what they get, we can as we go through this. But yeah, that's where we currently stand today. So it's all about top of the funnel, getting people in, helping them with the notary business and then helping them mature throughout the duration Cause this is a real business, it's not a get rich quick scheme.
Speaker 1:So they need kind of that ongoing support. That is what the subscription model basically is.
Speaker 2:And what's the kind of system that? Is it a high ticket thing that you're doing with a sales call, or is it like, lower ticket, you're doing selling through email or webinars, like what's the process you've got there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question, man. So it's kind of a sophisticated funnel at this point. Right, this point it is you know, retargeting ads. If you're on this page, you get this subset of retargeting ads. You land on this page. So now it's a pretty sophisticated funnel. So I don't want to make it super generic, but the answer is we usually do what we use. Russell Bruns is perfect webinar. That is by far our largest, believe it or not. We've had the same. We just updated our webinar from seven years last year. So my point is it it works, so we use.
Speaker 1:But the majority of our business comes through email drip. We really believe in the five plus one system. So the five plus one system is kind of a little bit of a Brendan Brouchard OVO option, value option, value opportunity. So we use a five plus one. So what does that mean? We want to educate people on the space, you know, and so we do five emails of this is how you become a notary, this is how you do a loan signing, this is what you need to do, and then on the sixth one, we say A, if you need some help, we do have a course to offer, and so we're really big on basically letting people know we're going to give you this away for free, because the value of an online course isn't information.
Speaker 1:Information is commoditized nowadays right, you can learn how to do anything on YouTube. So I think a lot of online or beginning online course instructors really try to gatekeep information, and the truth is you need to give it all away, but you need to give it away in a manner that makes them realize how overwhelming it is, by them doing it on their own. And then you say, hey, we're the option to really streamline this education we just gave you, and so we're really about giving people value. You don't need to take my course and you'll figure out how to be a notary signing agent, but if you want to expedite a 12 month learning curve into three weeks, we got a course for that.
Speaker 1:Now, to answer your question, our high. I don't believe in high ticket sales. I'm probably going to get some online course instructors and be like oh, our course goes from three, five and $800. We just increased our highest course from five to 800 a year ago, and so my belief is this is if you have a high ticket product, there is massive expectations that that is going to change their lives. If you have a smaller ticket item, you change their lives. Now you have a customer for life, and so I think a lot of them cause I get hit up all the time Mark you know how would you build what you've built and we built. We know we got to 10,000 students within 24 months, so we scaled this exponentially quick and I believe the key to our success was massively over delivering and then do a subscription model.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't massively over delivering, without kind of a secondary revenue option. But I think a lot of people you know I get hit up by people oh my gosh, Mark, I have this, I want to sell this course for $5,000. And I'm like dude, for $5,000, they're expecting a million dollar return. It's very difficult to live up to high ticket items in my opinion and I've met thousands.
Speaker 1:Now I'm not saying there's not a time and place or niche with online courses for high ticket. I'm just saying that the expectation when someone gives you a thousand bucks, I think there's a disproportionate amount of expectation, but when someone gives you 300 bucks, there's no longer that disproportionate expectation. In my opinion, Now you can really over deliver and then get them into a subscription model because that's all we want, right? We want a AR, right? We don't want MMR, we want annual reoccurring revenue and so if you can lock them into something that really gives them value. Now we keep going, and so I'm sure you're going to ask me what my subscription model is coming soon and I'll say it right now is we only charge 27 bucks a month because, again, we want to give massive order.
Speaker 1:I want someone to stay with me for five years, which I do have people in five years, and so I think again, online course instructors chase the money and not the value, and you can create a very lucrative online course at 300, 500, 500, 800, I'm living proof of it. I think the biggest misnomer in the online course communities are trying to figure out. You know, because they see a lot of these Instagram influencers right, we can name them top of our head and like get what you're worth. Only you know, don't worry, they're $5,000. You know, and yes, I think that's works for a very small population of the online course industry. I think what you need to do with online course industry is really focus on value and over delivering. They will automatically almost walk into your subscription model. So I don't know One of the things.
Speaker 2:I think it's really interesting with the kind of high ticket versus low ticket. So we mostly work with people doing or almost completely work with people doing low ticket, right so, and generally even cheaper than your highest price one. So stuff like under 500 bucks normally and the reason for that is my 500 a year ago, john.
Speaker 1:So it was massive data of like, okay, we're seven years in, we have massive social proof and it's appropriate, but we still have a 35, it's 800. But, yeah, continue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's. It's a very different business. Once you start doing the $5,000, even anything about kind of $2,000, you start to need phone calls. And once you've got phone calls, you know either you're doing it or you've got a sales team doing it. And if you've got a sales team that you're managing, it's a very different business than running like you got that webinar right, you made that seven years ago and you only just changed it. You can't just, you can't just train a salesperson and then seven years later come back and have another chat with them Like that's, that doesn't work like that. So you've got this whole extra headache that's going on.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the bigger headache, John, is the expectation someone's spending $2,000,. Your course, better changed their life right.
Speaker 1:And so I think at three. Here's my personal opinion. I think if you're charging three, 500 bucks, which was my price point for literally seven years, it's now three, five, eight, which is not dramatically bigger. Most of my sales are still the 500. Other course Is they feel like they got they.
Speaker 1:My return rate is less than 1% because my course not only works but I hope everybody hears this is my course empowers them. So even if they don't make a dollar in the notary business, they still feel like I am. If I apply what I just learned, I feel like I could go make the money. The fact that I haven't made the money actually isn't on Mark in his course, it's actually on me. And so my return rate's low because at three or 500 bucks there's not this expectation that they have to make $10,000. There's an expectation did Mark course deliver empowerment and that's what my course does. So my course works. It's not even a question. I can help you make 500 bucks a month or $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month. What is in question is the effort behind the course. So three or $500 though the Pearson buying it realizes that's on me At $2,000, they're almost expecting it to be on you Did that land, so, like if you're in 2000,. They expect you to do all the work to help them get successful. At three to $500, they're like, look, you've given me the tools. My expectation of you handholding isn't really there. I only paid you $300. But as long as you can make sure that they feel empowered to go make the money or whatever the transformation is it's losing weight, whatever it is as long as you can, your 3,500 bucks makes them truly feel empowered to get to transformation you've won. Because now the consumer goes look, it's on me from here on out. And so at the three to 500 price, I love that price.
Speaker 1:Anyone who ever asked me for advice, I go, go set 500. But when I tell them before that and I don't, then I think your audience is a lot of new online course and creators. Here's a number of piece of advice I get for any new online course creator is make sure your product freaking works. The lot of new online course creators do not validate. They make the assumption I'm super smart and what's in my brain, it can help somebody else, and they have no case studies. And so, and number two, or they're just chasing the money and they're trying to throw a garbage product out on the marketplace. The consumer is way too sophisticated for that today, in my opinion. There are so many online courses, so much information, that you actually have a product that needs to work. And so, before you figure out your email strategies, before you start working forward about your landing pages, before you start worrying about your retargeting ads is does my product transform somebody? My product works. I will help you make money in the notary niche. There is zero doubt. Not because I am arrogant, because I have enough case studies to prove that, and so I think online course instructors worry more about their pricing strategies, worry more about their email web funnels. They worry more about their retargeting ads, worry more about everything else.
Speaker 1:I literally got on the phone call last week with someone who's trying to sell a pitching product. He's like for baseball players. He's one of the best pitching coaches in America and he's like oh, this is a 5,000 product. I'm like well, have you proven that you're on Like in person? You can train somebody, that's not a question, but can you train someone via video instruction the way you did it in person? Well, no, well, why are you trying to charge someone $5,000 when you haven't proven that that actually works. He's more concerned about the value and how much he's gonna make than does my product actually work, and so my product works Like there's not even a question.
Speaker 1:I knew my product worked six months in because all I did was validate. Can I help somebody? And so you know if you're newer listening to this podcast in your online course industry like get rid of your sales funnels. That's not your concern right now. Your concern is can I create transformation? Does my course actually work? Not for one person, not for two, because remember what I told you in the beginning, I coached 25 people, then I coached 50. It was a gradual stepping stone of can I actually help humans via video instruction with my product, and I think of online course correctors more focused on that than these funnels and these landing pages and these websites. Of course, it almost built itself.
Speaker 2:I see. So it's interesting, right Cause you're talking about people who are coming along and they've got to think that they're teaching and they're thinking about how much money they're gonna make out of it. I think there's a couple of different groups within course creators. I see this quite often quite distinctively. You've got people who started out by building an audience so people who started a YouTube channel or started a blog or a podcast or what have you and then eventually their audience were like asking for courses from them, and so then they made the courses.
Speaker 2:And those guys, they don't have sales funnels, they underpriced almost everything, they don't do any more promotions, they don't have great sales pages or what have you. And then you've got another group of people who come along and go I'm great at something and I want to get paid a lot of money for it, and they don't tend to have a big audience yet and they haven't necessarily got a great course because their focus has gone from. I've been doing something in person and I'm really good at it too. I want to make a bunch of money from it, and I see those. It's not, of course, it's not black and white, it's not just one or the other, but I do tend to see people that kind of extremes reasonably often with that. Have you come across that at all?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, look I, this person, or your name name list. I'll just say that this person is one of the largest online magicians, right?
Speaker 1:there's a ton of them. Right, there's five million followers, et cetera, and so I'm pretty big. I'm pretty well known here in the Southern California online course. We're a pretty big online course meeting here in Southern California, from Los Angeles down. So this guy, this gentleman, got ahold of me today. Man, I see what you're building, everyone's telling me that you're doing really well and you're helping a lot of humans. Can you help me?
Speaker 1:And so his first inclination was to create a magician course, and he. But what he failed to realize is he needed to get the reps on how to show people to do what he did. But he just put out an online magician course saying, well, I'm the great magician and so I'm missing. But he failed to remember there's still a validation process, and so I have a handful. There's another person that came up to me. He has one of the largest. He's a hairstylist. It's millions and millions of followers and he's one of the best at dying hair. Same concept, and he's like you know well. I mean you have to test. Does your video translate to transformation? And part of being a good online course instructor is also being a good teacher, and so you know, my favorite analogy is like Magic Johnson was a terrible basketball coach.
Speaker 1:I'm the best point guard at the Institute of MBA, right, but he wasn't able to teach what he knew, and so part of being an online course creator is validating. You can teach somebody and, by the way, I do think anyone can be a good teacher but you need to just validate. Am I doing so? What happened with this magician? Is he put out a product that no one could actually learn the tricks Cause he wasn't able to communicate how his sleight of hand was working?
Speaker 1:He was like do this. I'm like, bro, no one can do that. And so I think the two buckets is I actually like the person who doesn't have the audience cause people have audience tend to be a little more arrogant. And then what I've seen in my experience and again this is not black and white is the person with the audience is a little bit not as willing to test and not as willing to get in the trenches, where the person who has, you know, just has an idea, is like, oh, I get it. I got to like do this video four or five times. I got to give it to my aunt, uncle, brother, sister so they can see if they're actually doing what I teach on video. And so, yeah, I do. I experienced both ends of it.
Speaker 1:I get hit up all the time for advice in the online course space, whether it is influencers and or brand new people. So my opinion is of anyone online course, I don't care if you have a million followers, you have zero. It's validate your product. Like you know, my course works. I can help you make money. There's zero doubt. There was zero doubt when I sold my course and so if people really online course, it's really getting to this mindset of like my product, am I capable of teaching? And I think teaching is a skill you can learn. You've got to be able to get on a mic and teach and communicate and put the passion through the video, and I think it's all learnable skills, but it's definitely part of the process.
Speaker 2:Now, one of the models that some people use when they're trying to figure that out they're like okay, I know how to do the thing, I don't know if I know how to teach the thing. I want to sell the course is they start out doing group coaching programs and that's somewhere where people are probably charging more money for it, right? So they often start out doing a group coaching program, which is maybe a course plus one to you know group sessions every week on Zoom or something, or the stuff's taught live over Zoom, and then there's questions and answers after, and so that's kind of a way of like, tweaking and validating it. How do you see that? Is that a model that you like? Or do you feel like you know you're charging 2000, it's too much, they're not gonna. What if they don't get the result? Like, what's your kind of feelings on that?
Speaker 1:one. Yeah, I mean, look what I would. So let me tell you about this my course was $15 when it first started, and so then it went from 15 to 47, 47 and 97, 97 to one. So, as I validated the transformation and here's something else that I think early online course graders, I actually doesn't matter if you're making multi-seven figures you should always be collecting social proof. So I think at the beginning of anybody's online course journey, it should be almost giving the course away for free excuse me in exchange for social proof.
Speaker 1:Mark's course worked and so again, I think people are so lost in money. Stop with the money, man. You gotta be focused on transformation. Can my product work and the moment it works, get social proof? Put that all of your website on. 50% of my ads are social proof. It is paying to get testimonials in front of my traffic. Social proof is the most powerful thing we can do as online course graders. But the problem is early on course graders focus about money. I would tell you to do a group coaching call for free like I did.
Speaker 1:I did that for free and then like oh, I go. Then like oh, this works, let me charge 15 bucks. Oh, it works, let me charge 47. Oh, it works, let me charge 147. People have this.
Speaker 1:I think they get very bad advice is like you know, only sell what you're worth, like you don't know what the market tells you. What you're worth, not your ego, and I think a lot of online course instructors go I'm worth 5,000 bucks, says who the market or you. And so I saw over the free product, went into 15 bucks, went into 47, because the only thing that matters to me is helping another human and I think if an online course creator, it leads with their heart, the revenue comes. But I see it every day. People like oh my gosh, I can make so much money with my knowledge.
Speaker 1:To me, you've already lost. It should be the first statement out of your mouth, in my opinion. I don't want to speak from a show box right here, because it's all things to all people, but I prefer someone like Mark I know what I know could help another human. Boom, now you got something, instead of like I know I can make a million bucks with this idea. And so when I came out, when I was teaching my friends, it wasn't about money, it was about trying to help another person like you're struggling. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stop struggling, dude. I know something's gonna help you stop struggling, and so I think if online course creators I meet them all the time and they're all money hungry they want to do an hour with me, they want to do lunch, give them a 15. I met this guy at Tony Robbins and I went to a Tony Robbins event six months ago and we know I don't feel like I've been at Tony Robbins event, but they break you out little groups If you haven't been to Robbins it's awesome. So, anyways, they shared. So some guy found out I was an online course creator, first pitch. I got a study. I can make a million bucks and I'm like, dude, the fact that that's what you're leading with, in my opinion, is why it's gonna be tougher to scale. I do think you can obviously make money when money's your leading magnet, but the truth is people gotta feel that you're in it for them, not the money.
Speaker 1:And when, the moment they feel like you're in it for them, you will make the money. And so that's what I've done for seven years. I've just like look, I can help you make money. The notary niche there's no doubt about it. People think it's crazy. I have 70,000 students, right, 11,000, seven years in. I still personally do the welcome webinars. People are like why do you still do the welcome? I can pawn that off to someone on my team Because I care. That's why You're not a number. You're still somebody I'm trying to help. My mission hasn't changed from day one, and I think a lot of people try to figure out how quick can I get out of the day to day? And, look, I do think there's a sense of you being in the business versus on the business that we need to talk about, which I've definitely done less of that, but I still do the welcome webinars.
Speaker 1:Because, it's about them, it's not about me. And then people gotta understand too is your customer is your best sales person. That's what people don't understand, and so I need I want my people to feel my community, to feel like I'm in it for them and they, in turn, are my best sales people. Like man March still does the welcome webinars. Boom, two new sales. And so because one thing I realized I care, they are it. You know and let me say this to the online course community Pay traffic is only getting more expensive. If I told you what I used to pay for Google ad versus what I pay today, like it's insane. So the only way to offset your pay traffic is free referral business. Let me say that one more time the only way to offset your ever increasing paid traffic costs is getting free referral business from your current customers. That's the only way to offset it. So my end of the day, my ROAS, is a little bit off. My top line revenue is still on because I'm getting massive referrals, because I care. That's what people understand.
Speaker 2:So let's talk through some of that. The practical funnel side of things. You mentioned the five and one. What's the kind of the process you're running ads? Where are you running ads to? Is that to your webinar, or what's the process?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question. So the number one thing is to an email. We have failed if we're not gathering an email. We are email marketers. People say you're an online course creator? No, I'm an email marketer, and so I get a lot of people who are running these Facebook ads that are trying to go directly to a sales page. I'm like you've missed the boat. In my opinion, you got to. In my. This is one man's opinion is you know? You got to have a conversation with them and so email. So we're trying to run everything to an email. Now we're running the email to get the webinar, by the way, but it's not click this ad, go directly to webinar. It is, oh, get a free webinar, drop your email in here right now, and so we're all about. So I think I shared early on this conversation. We have 300,000 plus opt-ins, all opt-ins.
Speaker 3:That's insane, and so you need a good tripwire, but again, I don't like the word tripwire, it's almost just need a good value.
Speaker 1:And so we give someone a nine-step checklist become a notary on their own. I want somebody to feel empowered that they can do this without me. I've won at that point, in my opinion. I've won their heart. A lot of people are about oh well, how can I give away a little information and they're going to pay for it in the back end, and my opinion, what we do is you don't pay for information, you pay for execution. We say that one more time.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of online course directors need to pivot. It's not because information is. I got this one buddy who wants to do a personal, wants to help people through personal therapy, you know, like physical therapy. Excuse me, frankly, you can go on the internet right now and you can find a lot of chiropractors and PT is giving information. It's like, well, it's not, you can't really sell that anymore, but what you can sell is execution, and so I want people to feel empowered by what I give them, and then they're paying for me to help them actually implement what I just gave away for free. So it's almost less information than I'm having them pay for and more paying for implementation of the information, and so my tripwire is or my value opt-in is what I prefer to say, I don't know, the industry calls it a tripwire my value opt-in is you can do this without me, and then in the emails, I get value, value, value.
Speaker 1:Hey, if you need help implementing everything you just learned, here's an offer for a product. So it is email marketing. Everything's running through an email, but the email is you know, get the nine step checklist on how to become a notary signing agent, plus watch a free webinar how to learn this. Do this step by step. So now they're like sweet, solid, I'm in. And so the webinar is not, you know, a fake live, it's a prerecord. It's prerecorded and as they go in and watch it.
Speaker 1:But then, yeah, I mean, our retargeting is pretty sophisticated. You know, if they land on a certain blog, we'll be. You know they turn page and it's you know. We know that they're a female. We have a quiz funnel which also helps us direct what blog or retrafficking they're going to get. And so, at this point, to get to our size, it is a pretty sophisticated funnel, but at the very crux of it, it is just a value opt-in free information on how they can execute without me, and so that's one of the things that I think is really important for us is if you need help executing, here's the course, and I don't think we've ever done an episode about webinars.
Speaker 2:If anybody's listening to this and they're like, okay, what is this? Russell Brunson's perfect webinar, then expert secrets is a great book. Go grab that, go through that.
Speaker 1:But could you give everybody like a summary of how that process works? Yes, yeah, so we actually paid for the perfect webinar eight years ago. It is now free on YouTube, so Russell Brunson has now given away free, so I think it's even more awesome. What is one hour webinar? The first 30 minutes is something of massive value, meaning like something that you can actually do, and so the first 30 minutes is massive transformation.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, for me, it is basically if you want to be a notary signing agent, step one is to get your notary commission. Step two is putting your name on all these databases, because in our business, you can get money without any sales. There's a text message system, and so you just get a text message. Boom, you get business. So I teach that in the webinar. So step one is your notary commission. Step two is it put your name in these five databases. These are the way notary replacement services call you. You don't need sales, you don't need any background. So put your name in these five databases, and then the last 10 minutes is when they give you a call. This is the expectation of what you need to do when you're at the appointment. So it's like, wow, you tell me, I get my notary commission, you tell me how to get business without any sales and you taught me what to expect at the closing.
Speaker 1:So, and then Russell is very you know, and what I love about Russell is all about value. You know, I feel, feel like it's a very heart driven entrepreneur and you know he's very faith based. So I think it's a beautiful thing. And so, after the end of your massive value, it's like, hey, if you'd like to continue massive value learning, what you just got was a tip of the iceberg of what you'll get in my course. And so the webinar is massive value. Then rolled into like, if you love this massive value I just gave you man, join me in my course because you expect way more. So you blow their mind away with amazing information. That is actually transformation. You're not gatekeeping and then you roll into your clothes or your pitch quote unquote is if you liked what you just watched, imagine what you're going to get when you pay for it. And so that's the Russell Runson and reviews, and it's been very, very successful for us.
Speaker 2:Nice. Yeah, I'm a massive fan of the perfect webinar process, like everybody I know who does really well with webinars is using that process and I think what?
Speaker 1:Russell tells you though, and I think now in 2024, at the time of this, you know, early on, you know you used to sell information. Now, information is, it's free, and so in the beginning, people would gatekeep on that massive nugget. The key to the webinar working is giving away something that hurts you. You're like, oh my God, they should be paying for that, that's what you should give away. So people would ask me Mark, what do I do? On the webinar, I said you give away something that like stings. You're like you should have paid for that. Boom, that's what you give away.
Speaker 1:Because people are sophisticated now they know they can go to chat GPT and they give me a business plan on being a notary, but what they can't get is the implementation. They can't get the support, they can't get the raw, raw, raw. They can't get the community, and so just give away something massive and then let them know this is just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to get community. Where you are, You're going to get all the part of. What makes my course special is we have a massive community 11,000 subscribers. That's the community, that's LSS nation, and so you know the community is also what you're buying into. So I by the way.
Speaker 1:I've done a lot of these conversations. I think this podcast is money, so I hope everyone really listens to it because I mean, you know what you're doing and I think there's been a lot of value in this podcast so far.
Speaker 2:So okay, so we've talked through a bit about how your funnel works and the fact you the way your front end funnel works when you've got the tripwire or you call it, I think, a value offer yeah value opt-in.
Speaker 2:Value opt-in. Great, we've got the webinar and kind of the process around that a little bit. We've got. How do you make sure you've got an absolutely fantastic course? Don't charge loads of money up front for it. Give it away for free or charge a very little amount and then gradually prove that it works. Get all that social proof. Talk to us a little bit about the traffic side of things. You mentioned paid traffic. Is that where most of your traffic comes from now, or is it SEO or where do you get your audience?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I want to be very transparent. We are as big as we are because SEO is very good to us, and so I don't want to say that we have this. We do have a pretty big ad spend, but SEO is our number one. People are typing in how to make money, how to make money as a notary, and we just guard that, so that's very powerful for us. Now, what I will say, though, is you know as you know, everybody who's listening to this webinar knows very rarely people will buy anything off of first blog.
Speaker 1:So, while we do get them in. Once they land on a website, we cook your pixel and then boom, you're part of the retargeting program, and so, depending what blog you land on, what landing pages will determine what retargeting campaign gets sent to you. We're going to send a different retargeting campaign if you are on our checkout page and you didn't go in. We're going to give you a different retargeting campaign. If you're just on our course pricing page, we're going to give you a different retargeting campaign if you are just on our homepage, and so we have different retargeting campaigns based on, you know, five or six massive areas you land within our website, so if you're in the checkout page, haven't bought, you're going to get basically social proof.
Speaker 1:But if you just land on our website, our homepage, you're going to get a lot of educational like did you know notaries are making $150? Did you know? So then we're trying to get them from the did you know? Retargeting campaign into more of a sales funnel which is then okay.
Speaker 1:So then they land on. Then we send them to our course pricing page. Once you're on our course pricing page, they get testimonials. But they get a different type of testimonial. The testimonial now is oh, the course was worth it. So now we're our belief. Their objection is okay, there, it might be too expensive. Well, nothing's never too expensive, it is do I see the value in the money I'm spending? And so then we send them a different type of testimony. But they're on now they're on the checkout page. They just need a little nudge. And so you know we're pretty sophisticated with you know what we're sending them at? Further retargeting. It's just not this. You know a lot of early online course graders just kind of send the same retargeting, regardless where they are on your page they land on my page.
Speaker 1:you're getting ABC, by the way, we used to do that. As we become more sophisticated and as our revenues grown, we are able to, you know, hire media buyers, et cetera, but at the end of the day, it is really about SEO. For us, that leads to our pay traffic. Our pay traffic really is more retargeting than top of the funnel, but we do pay traffic on Facebook, instagram, pinterest, believe it or not, for us, works well. Youtube is huge for us. But, yeah, any other questions that we know?
Speaker 2:And then the pricing you've mentioned a few times. You've got 300, 500 and 800 bucks for the course. What's the differences that people get? I'll ask a question.
Speaker 1:And also let me say that we have a payment plan and 7% of all of our business is through the payment plan. We love payment plans. We do incentivize a little bit to buy the package up front, like most people, but we kind of like the payment plan because growing in a subscription just becomes that much easier. It kind of used to be coming out of their account because where the payment plan is little for us is, our end goal is to get you into giving up value on the main product that you want to stay for the subscription. So let me just talk about this for a few minutes, as we will sometimes.
Speaker 1:So we'll do a payment upfront $497, or six payments of $137. Don't quote me on that. But if they do the $497 front, we give them three months of the community mentoring with the upfront payment. So then six months later we try to get in for a subscription. We've actually find the data and say it's a little bit harder, but if you're already in a payment plan it's easier to roll them in for our data. To me the psychology is well, I've already paid upfront. Now, six months later, you want more money from me and so it's just a little bit easier. So I think a lot of times online course creators are kind of against payment plans, where I actually find it's easier to roll them into a subscription from a payment plan than it is upfront. So I don't know if that helps anybody. So our payment plans are almost 7% used of the time, not our full payment so it's really not three, five and eight, it's more like 68, 137, 179.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. We have a full money back guarantee, no questions asked, 30 days. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And what's the difference between what they get at the $300, $500?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so basically it goes with marketing. So it's all a fundamental course. You just get the fundamentals. The next one's called the professional course, which is a little bit of fundamentals plus a little bit of marketing and the six figure courses. You're here to make big money. Let me just give you everything I got Social media, marketing, websites, landing pages, the whole 10 yards. So, depending what it is, we'll be fine to find people coming with the fundamental. Most people are the fundamental because they still aren't completely sold that I can transform them, so it's almost always an upgrade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, got it Nice. Yeah, very impressive, beautiful business. I love what you're doing, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now I appreciate what you're doing, helping the online course. I get it all the time. I don't have to band with the help as many people as I'd like to. On that side, my focus is notaries. It's the best kept secret in America for income opportunities. We're up against big boys in the money making space, right Shopify, home flippers, I mean, you name it and so we've carved out a nice little niche within the home money making niche, which is one of the hardest ones, the most expensive to run paid ad stores, as you can imagine.
Speaker 1:Got all the crypto guys and the home flipper guys dominating that. So we've done a really good job of carving a little niche in the money making space, but the key to my success is I'm solely focused on transformation, and I really hope course creators understand that, like there are certain online because look, here's the truth. You mean, john, what has working against the people who are really doing this for true, authentic reasons are the people trying to make a quick buck. We're going to be judged on those online course creators who aren't ethical, who are just trying to make a two bucks, who don't have a help center, who don't have customer service, and so that, to me, is why it's so much more important that we can get the online community really start focusing on transformation. I think it's the most beautiful entry in America. We can kind of start pushing out these quick get rich, quick guys and we can start really focusing on what I think the online course is beautiful. Everyone's experts, everyone can ask for transformation or can provide transformation, and so, if you're out there right now, my biggest advice which I get asked is make sure your product works. My product works, there's no doubt and I don't say that elementary, obviously, but like I don't mean works, it means transforms. Like really, if someone's giving you 300 bucks, they should get $1,000 with a transformation in return. Someone gives me 500 bucks, I want them to have $1,000 with a transformation.
Speaker 1:One of my mentors his name is Craig Clemens. He's one of the best copywriters in the world. He's at Craig, he's that big of a deal. I'm like how did you get the at Craig Instagram handle? Anyhow? So you know. He says you know everybody tries to get $1 from 100 people. You know all marketers are trying to get $1 for 100 people, so I'll make 100 bucks. And he's like I believe you should try to get $1, but give them $100 worth of value.
Speaker 1:And so that really stuck with me. He's like people want $1, 100 people, so why don't you try to get $1, $100 worth of value and see where your business goes? And now he has a billion dollars. That's what the be a billion dollar business. And so you know I just this online course business is amazing because we can transform our humans in a way it's not been possible ever. Right, you're in London and you're reaching people in America and people will receive, like this, an amazing thing we have. And so if we focus on truly helping the next human. You can make money but also change the world, and that's what I think online course is all about.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. If you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened. Thanks so much, mark, for coming on. Really really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 1:Well, come on. If you want more information on being a loan signing agent, go to LoanSigningSystemcom. That's the name of mine If you want to. I tell people on these on, John, if you want a really good idea of what my funnel looks like well often, so opt into Loan Signing System Go to my webpage, LoanSigningSystemcom. It's a 40 email drip. I don't think I shared that. So if you kind of want what's Mark's five plus one formula you know what's made him so successful, jump in, watch the webinar. You can see all the strategies you know. If you'd have never heard of the perfect webinar, watch the perfect webinar, go back, watch mine and then you can see the similarities between that. So we got, go to LoanSigningSystemcom. I'm all my social channels Loan Signing System, or Mark will. So thanks for having me, brother.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it, Thanks dude. Bye brother.