The Art of Selling Online Courses
Best Selling Survival Expert Builds Survival Course - with Jason Knight
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today, we have a special guest, Jason Knight, who is the director, co-founder, and an instructor at Alderleaf Wilderness College.
With over 25 years of experience in teaching nature skills, Jason is an expert in wildlife tracking and wilderness survival. As a seasoned wildlife biologist and wilderness educator, he has collaborated with conservation organizations, government agencies, and the private sector. He is also the author of "The Essential Skills of Wilderness Survival."
Jason holds certifications as a Senior Tracker through CyberTracker Conservation International and has a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Ecology & Environmental Education from The Evergreen State College, along with a Permaculture Design Certificate. His impressive career includes managing cougar studies for the Washington State Department of Fish & Wildlife, assisting with gray wolf research in Idaho, and working on numerous wildlife projects with Wetland Resources, Inc. He also served as a wilderness expert on the Discovery Channel's "Dual Survival."
Visit Jason's Website - https://www.wildernesscollege.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, we have a special guest, Jason Knight, who is the director, co-founder, and an instructor at Alderleaf Wilderness College.
With over 25 years of experience in teaching nature skills, Jason is an expert in wildlife tracking and wilderness survival. As a seasoned wildlife biologist and wilderness educator, he has collaborated with conservation organizations, government agencies, and the private sector. He is also the author of "The Essential Skills of Wilderness Survival."
Jason holds certifications as a Senior Tracker through CyberTracker Conservation International and has a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Ecology & Environmental Education from The Evergreen State College, along with a Permaculture Design Certificate. His impressive career includes managing cougar studies for the Washington State Department of Fish & Wildlife, assisting with gray wolf research in Idaho, and working on numerous wildlife projects with Wetland Resources, Inc. He also served as a wilderness expert on the Discovery Channel's "Dual Survival."
Visit Jason's Website - https://www.wildernesscollege.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
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 Jason Knight. Now Jason is passionate about helping people learn wilderness survival skills. He authored the best-selling book, the Essential Skills of Wilderness Survival. He's co-founder of Alderleaf Wilderness College, a leading outdoor school in the US, offering courses to the public and private classes to a broad range of clients that have included the US Forest Service, the Seattle Mountaineers and the cast of the award winning film Captain Fantastic. Since 1997, he's taught thousands of people, including training hundreds of adults to become survival instructors themselves. He's consulted as a wilderness skills expert for the Discovery Channel, he's been featured on NPR and he's the lead instructor for the Essential Wilderness Survival Skills online course.
Speaker 1:Now today we're going to be talking about Jason's course business and how he built that up. What's working to get more email subscribers, more revenue from the email promotions. I'm going to dive into some of the numbers of his business Before we dive into our interview with today's guest. Yosip is our funnel strategy lead and he's worked on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that DDM is now using when working with our clients and we took all of the training that he's ever done for clients, all of the coaching calls, and we used it to train an AI version of Yosip Yosip AI. We made it available for free and you can ask it any questions about your course, your membership, business and get its help with writing copy for your emails. Even Go to datadrivenmarketingai and you can access it for free. Jason, welcome to the show man. Thank you very much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:So who do you help and what kind of problem are you solving for them? I've covered it in my description, but I would love to hear it in your words.
Speaker 2:Sure, we help people learn wilderness survival skills and other related outdoor skills. So, basically, how do you not die in the wilderness if you're going out on a hike or a camping trip or you get stranded somewhere? But also these skills that connect us to nature, so like knowing what wild plants you could eat or how to identify the tracks and sign you find along the trail.
Speaker 1:so a whole range of outdoor skills that enhance our experiences but also keep us safe when we're outdoors I got a friend, tom, and he runs I'm trying to think what he calls it exactly but basically you go live on a desert island for a week like desert, like desert island survival skills and for the first half of the week it's like they're with you and they're helping catch everything and what have you? And the last, the second half, like three days or something like that you guys are on your own, you've got your machete, you've got the skills that you've just learned, and then you better just either catch stuff or go hungry. What kind of what does it look like when you're doing courses with people? Is it like teaching them? Like in a in a set location? Are you going out on long trips? Like how, what's the kind of experience like?
Speaker 2:yeah, a lot of our courses are here on campus and where it's like that half of that experience where we're teaching the skills of how to do it. In some of our longer term courses we do do these survival trips at the end of the course where you're going out with the knowledge you've spent a lot of time learning and practicing and you go out with nothing except for the clothes on your back and make everything from nature, all the way from like stone knife to making friction, fire kits, to rock, boiling your water and foraging for your wild foods. So, yeah, that's kind of how a lot of survival trainings go, is that you? You get, you learn a bunch of skills, but then you go out and you put it to practice and make sure that you've got it and you can use it and that they work nice, and when did you turn that from in-person to online?
Speaker 2:So we always survey our customers and for many years, it was the most requested course from folks visiting our website and wanting to ask us if we would take any of our courses and make an online version, since they couldn't travel all the way out here to where we are in Washington State, way out here to uh, to where we are in washington state, and so, um, after being, after that, being requested for years, we finally created our online course and released it to the world in 2017 2017 nice okay yeah, so we took our weekend survival course, which is one of our popular courses for the public, and, um, you know, changed it, uh, modified it and and added to it and and recorded it.
Speaker 2:and we were lucky at the time we had one of our instructors in a previous life had been in film school and worked in that industry, and so we professionally recorded it and put it together. So it took our weekend survival training kind of our most important skills and put it into an online course that we call the Essential Skills Wilderness Survival.
Speaker 1:And about how long did that take you that process from saying we're going to do this till the course was ready?
Speaker 2:oh gosh, um, probably about a year, because it wasn't the only thing we were focusing on. Like we're our whole team, we're super busy teaching in-person classes. Like one of our our flagship courses at the time is a nine-month course where students at our college age and adults spend nine months with us, and so we were teaching them three days a week, plus an advanced course another three days a week, plus all of our public courses and custom classes so extraordinarily busy schedule. So it took us a year because we were reformatting all our handouts, we were scripting out all our lessons, we were recording, watching it, it and then re-recording it, testing things and then putting together a launch plan and all that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:So it did take a would have been much quicker if that was the only thing we were doing yeah, yeah, sure, I mean, I think it's one of the really interesting things right with running a course business is you've got all these plates. You've got to keep spinning at the same time, um, you know, I've got to run the promotion for what we're currently selling, but I want to make a new course as well, and I want to be building up our audience and I want to make some new lead magnets. It's like, okay, how do you balance all of these things together? So what made you decide to get in touch with my team about upgrading your funnel and your email promotions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's see, I try to make a long story short. Um, when we first launched the course, you know it was this new thing and, um, something that we were was very small thing compared to all the other things we did. So we were launching it the first three years just once a year in the fall. Um, and then what had happened is we had worked on simplifying our organization not doing the college course but focusing on our weekend classes and custom courses and the online courses and the pandemic happened, and so we couldn't run our in-person classes. All of our custom classes got canceled for like a year and things like that and so I was like, all right, we need to work on getting a word out about this online course, because the feedback we had gotten on it was fantastic, and so I started promoting it three times a year and that basically tripled the number of students doing the course. That was fantastic.
Speaker 2:And then, as time went on, we wanted to continue to shift more to the online course courses and we kind of hit this plateau. We weren't getting any further than that. So that's when we reached out to y'all, because I think I heard some of your podcasts and liked some of the strategies you're implementing and how you're helping other folks, and so, yeah, I think we reached out about a year ago and just trying to, you know, hoping to find some ways that we continue to expand our online course department.
Speaker 1:Nice, and what kind of stuff was it that you made a difference in?
Speaker 2:What did you change as a result of working with the data-driven marketing team? Well, so much, I think some of the big ones were serving our audience in a different way, asking some different questions and getting a great customer language document put together. And then one of the big ones was doing the monthly promotions. So, instead of promoting three times a year, monthly promotions have been a really important piece of that. And then improving kind of the email copy in our promotions, adding the bumps and upsells, which we hadn't done before. And then the really big one is is just recognizing that our audience really wanted some additional courses. They wanted us to turn more of our in-person trainings into online versions, and so we did that, and so these two new mini courses that we added really helped. So, instead of promoting the same course every month, now we can go through a rotation and promote different things each month, and so that's made a huge difference.
Speaker 1:And how many courses have you got now?
Speaker 2:So we have three courses now, so we have our kind of flagship essential wilderness survival skills and now we have an introduction to wildlife tracking and an introduction to foraging for wild edible plants, and so both of those launched earlier this year and it was fantastic, it was well-received and so, yeah, really happy with what we've been able to do working with you all.
Speaker 1:Nice, and what kind of difference has that made to sales in terms of percentage increase or whatever kind of way you're comfortable sharing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've basically doubled the amount of students taking courses, our online courses. We've doubled the revenue from online courses. So, um, you know, super happy with with how things have gone. Um, in that direction I was just. I was just looking at things before getting on here and it's just amazing to see, like I think, uh, in 2000, you know, a year ago now, we were looking at maybe 200 to 300 students in our courses for an entire year, and if I look at just the last six months, we were already about 300 students just for the last six months. So we're on track to have double the amount of students in our online courses.
Speaker 1:Nice Great. And what size email list have you managed to build up to now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, our email list is about 15,000 people. It was at like 10,000 for a lot of years and then we've been at 15,000 for the last couple of years, two or three years.
Speaker 1:And what's the main traffic sources for that? Is it mostly organic? Are you running any ads?
Speaker 2:It's mostly organic. We do some ads. We spent a lot of time when we first uh launched alder leaf, um 16 or 17 years ago now. We really worked on writing a lot of articles about the skills we teach, a lot of those blogs, so to speak, so like how-to articles on different skills, and so we've got several hundred articles on our website and so that still garners a lot of organic traffic from google, um, and over the years we've done google ads, facebook ads, um, and now amazon ads with my book, but more recently it's been testing out different facebook ads as well okay, cool, and so the bulk of it's from the organic traffic.
Speaker 1:But you've got these ads that you're running. Have you managed to get? What kind of where are you driving the ads to? Is that a tripwire funnel? Are you driving them straight to the sales page of your main course? Like what? Where do they go?
Speaker 2:yeah, we've tested a whole bunch of things and, um, the two of the things that that get traffic, um, I mean get traction, uh, would be sending folks to my book, um, or also sending them to our lead magnet, um, so, um, yeah, they said it kind of goes in waves where, you know, some of the ads will work well for a while and then we kind of have to brainstorm new ideas and so, um, it's one of those things that hasn't been super consistent for us on the ads, but when it does work, it's either driving book sales or growing our list okay, interesting, and so you're running the book sales ones through Amazon ads, is that right?
Speaker 2:the ability to sell the book direct. We've been running the ads straight to our own and so that puts them into a funnel as well, because when they're going to amazon we don't get their contact information, whereas if they buy our book, my book, directly from us, then we get their contact information, we can have them on our email list, we can deliver the bonuses that we have for the book that that they can only get if they get the book from us, and etc gotcha.
Speaker 1:And so with that do you break even on the. With the sales is it like a free plus shipping funnel, or you just point them to um sell the book at the same prices on amazon. Like how does that whole kind of process work?
Speaker 2:um and just in relation to the ads or not, including the ads yeah, with the with the yeah with the ads yeah.
Speaker 2:So at some points it breaks even and then some points it costs a little more, but we're earning it back over time as some of those folks become customers, the folks that end up on our list and then end up joining courses later on. So I think it's tricky to get it to do better than break even just on the book alone. But with the fact that there's bumps and upsells and then they're on our list and they get email promotions after that, then it really works out.
Speaker 1:Nice. So do you know about how much do you make like 70% of the money back in that front-end funnel, or do you know, like how much do you like? Do you make like 70% of the money back in that front-end funnel, or do you know, like, about what kind of percentage of your money you get back from the ads?
Speaker 1:um, let's see it's usually between 50, yeah, 50 to 75 percent, or so yeah and do you know what the url would be for that? Um, the ads funnel for that book, because I think people might be curious to go check it out. It might. I don't know if that's going to mess up your, your uh stats for the page or no, that's, that's fine um the essential skills of wilderness survival. Book dot html got it all right, sweet, okay. So I'm having a look through that page. So you're sending ads to this page, is that right?
Speaker 2:yeah, I have them turned off right now because, again, what happens is they work really well for a period of time it could be a couple weeks or a couple months, um and then they start to um wear out as ads, and so I've got everything on pause right now.
Speaker 1:I'm going to start working on them again this summer okay, so this is telling people basically go buy the book. You can buy the book directly through this link and that takes them.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're on the yeah, so you're not on the one that I'm selling the ads to. So if you go to that link, it's yeah. The correct link is the one that doesn't have the at the beginning of the the extension got it, yeah, yeah, I think I'm on the right page now.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So I've got like a video view at the top and then there's the option of paperback book to add to cart. Would you be open to some feedback about this?
Speaker 1:oh, yeah, sure sales page nice, okay, cool. So for anybody listening along at home, if you want to see this page, we're going to put this in the show notes but just as a reminder of what it was there, it's wildernesscollegecom slash essential dash skills, dash of dash, wilderness, wilderness dash survival, dash book dot html. And if you go check this out, so this is where there are ads going. So there's a video at the top. The headline is discover wilderness wisdom that could save your life. So I'm not going to watch the video at the moment, but we've got a couple of different options for um adding to cart, so the paperback book and the digital book, and then there's like a overall kind of description the essential skills wilderness survivor will empower you to survive emergencies and grow deeper connections to nature with expert instructor jason knight of alderleaf, wilderness college. Okay, so what we found overall is that a two column above the fold section tends to work better for on desktop. Now, it depends how many people are coming from mobile, how many are from desktop, but you see, at the moment you've got the headline discover wilderness wisdom that could save your life.
Speaker 1:I think there are stronger headlines that you could do here that would allow you to get more people's attention, to really grab their attention with this. I think this is good. You're not to put the name of the course or something like that. You've got a headline with a benefit, but I think it would be possible to improve on that. And the method that we use for coming up with ideas for headlines is to use templates and swipe files and look at, basically, what has anybody else ever done that will allow? That has worked. That's been a really good, compelling, strong headline.
Speaker 1:And then what's any of the kind of the formulas for making these and I've got a couple of examples at the end I can send through to you. So that goes at the top. And then you have the video on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side you have more of like a little description and then that kind of add to cart section. I think some of the formatting with this it could be improved a little bit. Like you've got that bit about paperback book on sale for $27 for limited time. I don't know something about it, just it looks a little kind of janky and maybe that's the click bank pages and that's how they are. But I think if you, if you've got this designed separately, you could get a better, more a page that looked more um, legit like, looks really good quality, and then I think you're more likely to actually get the kind of the benefits with it, um, to get people to to be converting. With the section that you've got next, uh, I what I really like is you've got here.
Speaker 1:As an outdoor enthusiast, you know the benefits of spending time in nature, but what happens if you get lost, stranded or find yourself in an emergency situation? So what you're doing there is giving people a reason why they should care about what it is you're doing, but you've you've cut that a little bit short, I think. I think that could be expanded a little bit. The model that we use and we always start all of the more text-heavy parts of a sales page with this is pain, agitation solution. So you've got here that pain section, but you haven't got the agitate part.
Speaker 1:You haven't got like okay, what does that mean for your life? Maybe you can't spend as much time in nature as you'd like to because you've always got this concern. Or maybe you're concerned about your family members or you can't take them out with you because you know what about? Maybe you feel OK for yourself, but you're not so sure for others. I don't know exactly. I'm kind of making some of this up, but there'll be reasons why this isn't just a problem, but it's a problem that leads to knock-on problems that affect that person's life. They can't do things they want to do and by bringing that to the fore you're not making any of this up. You bring it to the fore of things that they've already thought and felt and it makes them go. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is an issue, isn't it? And then they're more likely to be interested in what else you've got to say about how you're going to solve it. So you have to agitate that pain before you get into the solution, the solution section. You do really really well here. I think the parts you're going through and you're explaining about the skills they're going to be learning, about being able to connect more deeply with nature, avoiding mistakes, are going to prove deadly, like all of this kind of stuff I think is really strong. Um, you've got lots of testimonials on the page, which I love. That's absolutely fantastic. That really, really helps. You've got kind of glimpse of what you're going to find inside of it. That's great, kind of giving people an idea of what's going to be included, with some of the features, of what's going to be included, and you've turned some of those features into benefits, which is really really strong as well. You've got bonuses, which is excellent. I really love that. More testimonials going on here, stuff about yourself. You've got a guarantee, which is great. 60 day money back guarantee is fantastic. That's really compelling, really strong. You've got the call to action multiple times on the page, so that's really good as well.
Speaker 1:The things I think that could definitely be improved is headline, sub sub headline.
Speaker 1:The structure of the page at the top, having those two different columns, so the videos on the right and the text explaining a little bit more detail on the left. A better design for the page and I'm trying to see what else could definitely would definitely make a difference. We've got these 15 crucial elements to a high performing sales page and I think a few of them are missing and I'm trying to remember all of them off the top of my head and make sure I don't. So we've got bonuses, guarantee, pain, agitation, solution, testimonials, stuff about the author, details of the what's included. I'm trying to think what else there is, but I think I'm going to, so I'm going to send you through that, that like list of those 15 crucial elements, and we've done a we've done a podcast episode about it as well. I think if you made those changes and then ran the ads again, you'd be way more likely to get that uh to a higher return on ad spend and actually make those ads work kind of longer term.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Yeah, that's a great reminder because it's one of the things that's been on my back burner. To-do list is like the new courses, the introduction to wildlife tracking and introduction to foraging. I used those your structure to creating a sales page, the 15 things and they did really well and so they did so well. I'm like, okay, I need to go back to the book sales page the survival course sales page and implement that, that formatting.
Speaker 1:Nice, yeah, and I'll tell you why I think this is a big deal, why it's like cause there's lots of things that we could have talked about in terms of tweaks you can make, but I think this kind of funnel is good because it's because so this page why it's worth really working on this is you've got a lot of the other stuff in place. You've got the order bumps, you've got the upsells, you've redone the sales pages, you're doing a promotion every month. It sounds like you've got your three different courses that you can cycle through. So you've got all of those like low hanging fruit covered. But your email list is stuck at 15,000. Now if you can grow that email list to 30,000, then you're probably going to have about double the sales every month. Like it's not exact science, like that right, but somewhere in that kind of region. So if you're stuck at an email list isn't growing from your organic following, then we need to find a way to grow that email list some other way. And ads is something that most people. That's kind of a bit like oh, that's a bit terrifying. I'm not quite sure about that, but you've done ads, you've done ads and you've got them to work quite well. But if you just change this one sales page and and I would also change I know that it's nice that clickbank do the taxes, but if you used a system like thrive cart or something like that, samcart, whatever some other system for doing this that had a better optimized checkout page, then that conversion rate would improve as well.
Speaker 1:I'm looking at this checkout page. It's not great. I'll give you the five things that I would want to see on this checkout page Much, much stronger guarantee, a Visual explanation of the guarantee. And if anybody wants to kind of follow along, if you go to the page I said, just click on add to cart. It's going to take you to the checkout page. So you've got the guarantee, but it's nowhere near visually strong enough. Add testimonials to this checkout page and you probably can't with ClickBank but to age into a checkout page Probably three short testimonials with photos. Add a photo of you and a reminder of what they've got. Oh no, actually you've got that. You've got the photo of the product and what they're getting, but you don't have a photo of you to go with it. That would help as well.
Speaker 1:Make it more clear that that checking out is going to be secure. There is a thing at the bottom that says like trusted site, secure checkout and something else, but I think you could make that stronger. If you look at some of the checkout pages that we've um done with clients, then you should be able to see, like some of the uh, like if you go to b1 course stop, I don't know, is that a good one? Anyway, if, if you, if you message me, I'll send you through some checkout pages to check out um and some benefits, you don't have any reminder of the benefits on the checkout page.
Speaker 1:Checkout page conversion rates are generally much lower than people realize. Like most people don't look at the numbers for this. An average checkout page will have something like about a 10 to 15 percent conversion rate. In fact, if a lot of them are even I've seen to be lower than that, and if you can get up to like 20, 25 we've even got some that convert at like 50 or 60 percent, then it massively increases your sales overall.
Speaker 1:And it's it's funny because you've gone to all this effort.
Speaker 1:You've run the ads or the email promotion.
Speaker 1:You've got someone through to the sales page.
Speaker 1:You've got someone through from the sales page to the checkout page and then you lose them because you're missing, kind of like these basic, these fundamental things at the end, and the reason is it's because that's when someone's about to put their credit card details in and that's when their stomach goes.
Speaker 1:When their stomach goes, oh, I'm not sure I might be making the wrong decision here. So they need lots and lots of reassurance and they need it to be super simple and straightforward when they come to make that final decision. And I think if you change those I don't know if you can look at the data and see what the ClickBank checkout page conversion rate is, or if they give you that information or not, but I would suspect it's probably under 15 and, um, if you could get that up to like 25, something like that, that completely changes the sums for your facebook ads and all of a sudden you'd be able to run those consistently, be able to scale up the ads uh, ad spend up and then be able to massively grow your email list and therefore grow revenue overall.
Speaker 2:Right, right, do you think it would like? On Kajabi, I'd have a lot more control over the sales page, where I can implement all those things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kajabi sales pages and checkout pages aren't. They're not amazing, but they're decent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the only trouble with Kajabi is I don't think I can do the um the physical paperback, but I could do the ebook do you? Think would make sense to experiment with just selling the ebook version. Just take the paperback out of the equation.
Speaker 1:Um it's worth a try? Yeah, because I think the reason why it's worth a try is because, even if you find you know what that didn't work great people wanted the paperback version and that's that's what was successful you still would have redone the whole writing the sales page, designing the check, updating the checkout page, whatever. You'd have that nice and clear and then, if you need to take that over to a different system, you could relatively easily convert that over to it. Do you know what percentage of people buy the ebook versus buy the paperback?
Speaker 2:yeah, the fascinating thing is when we're selling direct it's almost half and half between the paperback and the ebook version. But on amazon it's way different. It's like 99 of the paperback and like only one percent of the ebook interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you'd have the risk of losing half the sales by not having the paperback. Some of those people if there wasn't a paperback mentioned, they might just go okay, well, there's an ebook, I'll just get the ebook, but you'll definitely lose some of those, so that would be tricky, so it might be worth looking into one of those other systems that would allow you to do and we don't often do book funnels, so I'm not sure what a good system is for that, but I think that would be worth checking out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because if it's half of the sales, you would definitely get a drop off, yep, and there's rumblings with Kajabi about adding sale, being able to do sales tax soon or um, and I would have to check with my shipping center see if we could connect the data from from kajabi over to the shipping center.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it might be possible, right to do like a manual behind the scenes kind of thing, or right, when we get an order, the for this, the order gets sent to this guy and he does it.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't know I connect a lot of things through zapier but clickbank to the shipping center to go zapier to cloudways and then over to the print by chip. It was a big project but still automated I don't have to do anything manual nice, okay, cool.
Speaker 1:So it might, that might be doable with kajabi. Okay, this starts to become a slightly bigger project as we kind of talk it through, doesn't it? But yeah all right, I think some of those things you could do in clickbank. You could make those changes in clickbank and some of them you couldn't, and it'd be worth then moving over to something else yeah, clickbank doesn't let you do anything with the ds the checkout page.
Speaker 2:As far as I know, I could reach out to them and find if there's a workaround or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, might be worth looking into, at least asking. They can only say no, it's not going to be. How dare you? I know it's like with Teachable. Teachable's checkout page is awful. I could improve Teachable's sales of like every course the entire business by, I would guess, something like 10 to 20% if I was given carte blanche to just redo their checkout page.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure there's all kinds of reasons why that's technically an absolute nightmare and they can't do it, but it's still true, it's like if I was allowed to just go in and say right, we're going to change the checkout page default design to include these extra three elements, and it encourages people to say oh right, fill in your testimonials here, add your benefits here, add your picture of this thing here, make this bit better designed. Then they would make massively more sales. Um, I have thought about reaching out to them and saying just just pay me only based on success, just like yeah, to the results.
Speaker 2:You know absolutely, yeah, I'm surprised they haven't, they haven't taking up on it yet so what's next for you?
Speaker 1:what's what's coming up? So we've kind of talked through like how you've managed to build your audience and your email lists and your courses and you've got these two new courses. That's all absolutely fantastic. What's, what's the next in the plan? Where do you want to go?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think I'm gonna um try to sort out more with, with, like the ads side of thing, um, because I feel like that area it's only marginally worked for it, kind of, yeah, it's not as efficient as it could be and so.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to do more, run more experiments and learn some new things on that front and the. I guess the other thing that I probably should do simultaneously is try to build up the organic. I've been really bad about pumping out new articles for our website and then, and then, uh, I I haven't, uh, you know, I haven't been creating video content, which I should probably, you know, revitalize our YouTube page. I haven't posted anything on that for years and and uh, um, you decide if there's other organic strategies. You know, martina was recommending maybe some additional lead magnets.
Speaker 2:Um, now that we've got the, the course on tracking and the course on foraging, maybe I could create lead magnets for those courses that would go on those pages on our site, because right now, we tie every article, regardless of topic, back to the importance of learning survival. But on all the articles we've written about plants, we can link to a lead magnet about plants that would then go straight to the foraging course and then, similarly, all the articles we've written about wildlife and animal tracking could go to a lead magnet on tracking that then leads to the course as well. So those are some ways to improve what's happening organically as well nice, that would be really good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you know what your option rate is on your on your website?
Speaker 2:um, try and remember what it is. It's not. It's not very good because, um, we have articles on so many different topics and, uh, only a portion of them relate directly to survival. So I think, um, I'd have to go look through my numbers. Um, but it's probably, it's probably well under one percent.
Speaker 1:Hmm, yeah, I'm just looking through at the moment at one of your blog posts to see like what could be changed, and I think it could be massively improved, because you've got promotion of the courses directly on there, which seems like a reasonable thing to do. Except what we found is if you promote lead magnets first, don't promote the course directly, get people on the email list and then do the email promotions, then overall you make way more sales than if you're promoting directly. Very few people as a percentage of audience will actually go and buy a course straight away, but you can get up to about five percent of people will opt into your email list and then out of those people you can get a percentage of them who buy through the tripwire funnel at the front end and then on the back end you can get obviously a good percentage of those people who buy long term. So overall it works out way better and some of the blog posts you've got, like your um free mini guide in place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're sort of trying to promote that, that lead magnet everywhere at the top of the page, in the middle, at the bottom um, as a, as a exit intent pop up and things like that yeah, so I think that's great.
Speaker 1:Um, some parts of the button don't actually work for letting you click, but overall I think that's excellent. Um, but if you did what you'd been, you mentioned about a minute ago if you said if you had different lead magnets that are appropriate to each article.
Speaker 1:So right, this article's got this lead magnet, this article's got this relevant lead magnet that would massively improve the opt-in rate is a. As a friend of mine, christopher sutton, and he has um, he's taken, he's done this a lot and put like really specific lead magnets on specific uh articles and he's got some of those pages to get up to as high as I think about six to seven percent um opt-in rate, which is really really high, like that's way higher than the kind of the normal like most people have about 0.5 to 1.
Speaker 1:That's the absolute, like 99 of people at that level. If you just promote a good lead magnet everywhere, like you said top, middle, bottom of the blog posts, exit intent, pop up the second on the page, pop up on the home page, everywhere on the site, then you can get up to about two or so percent, two to three percent. If you then refine it, optimize it, have different lead magnets on different pages, all of these kinds of things, then you can normally get up to about the five odd percent wow and on those pages he's got like six, six or seven percent, so that definitely works.
Speaker 1:What you're talking about. It's just figuring out, of course, isn't it like you've got a long list of stuff to do? Which one are you going to do first? So it would depend how much organic traffic you've already got. If you've already got a lot and you're just not getting these opt-ins, then I would say that would be a no-brainer. What kind of search volume do you get on your website?
Speaker 2:We get 1,000 to 1,500 visitors a day. Okay, yeah, it's decent. It was better a decade ago, but it's still pretty good.
Speaker 1:I'm just doing the maths on it now. So that would give you, if you could get up to 3%, that would give you about 1,300. Let's say it's 1,50 on average visitors a day. That would give you 1100 new email subscribers a month. So that's like, okay, that's significant, that's quite a lot if you said it's definitely under, probably under 1% at the moment, then you might be getting.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I think we only get 3 or 400 new subscribers a month okay.
Speaker 1:So doing this which would probably be if you don't, if the process of putting those lead magnets everywhere is like a day or two's work, the slightly harder work is okay. Well, you've got to make the lead magnets.
Speaker 1:If you've already got something you could repurpose as a lead magnet in those topics, great. But if you need to make them, you've obviously got to take that time into account for figuring out. Okay, how much do I put in, what do I get out of it? And what you would probably get out is somewhere in the region of 800 to maybe a thousand extra email subscribers every month by doing, running that whole project and setting all of that up which would be great, you know, like that's, that's, uh, really significant absolutely nice if you were going to give advice to somebody else who's stuck in their business growth process, someone who's maybe not started doing any of this yet.
Speaker 1:They haven't set up their email promotions, they haven't created the extra courses. If you were kind of giving advice, maybe to yourself from like a year or so ago, what, what was the best piece of advice you could give?
Speaker 2:Well, I think I think two things. One is is survey your audience and find out what what they're wanting and what their what language they're using to describe the topics that you teach, and then the other one is to do the monthly promotions Like. I think those two things have been super helpful and and again, that's that's how it determined what new, new courses we were putting together was just what our audience wanted, and so that's that's why I think they did well. When they launched is because it's written line with what folks were asking for. So those were the two things that I think have made moved the needle the most for us. That I would recommend to myself a year ago and or anyone else who's hit a plateau or looking to improve.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Thoroughly endorse that. I am 100% behind it. If you're not surveyed your audience, you're not doing email promotions. Then that is fantastic advice from Jason. I think that's absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 1:If you are listening to this and you want to start running email promotions but you're not sure how, we're going to launch a new service, probably in the next couple of months after this episode is recorded, which is June 2024. So it's probably going to be coming out at some point this month and the focus of the new service is to help you to run those monthly promotions. So basically, it's the absolute 80 20 of the stuff that we help people with. So it's going to be workshops where you come on and you write the email promotion live on the workshop. So once the workshop is done, the email promotion is written and you're good to go, and then also for helping the same way with your sales pages, if need be.
Speaker 1:And we're just developing the service at the moment. I'd love to get your input and find out exactly what you would love that to look like. We're testing this live with a few people, one-to-one, and we're going to launch it as a group service to make it really, really affordable. So if you're interested in hearing about that. Just drop me an email, john, at datadrivenmarketingco, and I'll add you to the wait list and keep you updated about, like, what we're actually going to do with that. Jason, if someone has heard all the stuff you've been talking about and is like man, I need to know more about wilderness survival where should they go in order to get your, your mini guide?
Speaker 2:sure, then go to wildernesscollegecom and uh, yeah, we can get the mini guide there. We have a a free short class on as uh, and a whole bunch of articles we've written over the years about the topics we teach, so I think it's fantastic knowledge for everyone to have, just like a basic first aid. I'm surprised it's not taught in public schools, um, because we're all human beings on earth and it's helpful to know these skills and to have known that in your back pocket so that you can feel more comfortable in the outdoors and be safe beautiful, nice.
Speaker 1:So that's wildernesscollegecom and you can go learn all about this and learn from jason and his wisdom. I said in previous episodes that if you write a review of the podcast, I'm going to read them out on um, read them out live on here. And we've got a podcast review from jazz piano 9 in the uk who said this podcast is a must listen for anyone in the info product space. John really knows his stuff and these conversations have helped me so much. Thanks, john and the team. So thank you very much, jazzpiano9 from the Jazz Piano Clan, and if you want to write a review of the podcast, then we would very much appreciate it, in whatever platform you're using, or if you just give a five-star review, and that would be absolutely fantastic. If you found the interview useful, give us a review wherever you listened and, uh, we will see you next time. Jason. Thanks so much for coming on. Man, really, really appreciate your time awesome.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me again. Have a great week.