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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
$1,000,000+ Revenue & 418K Subscribers Teaching Davinci Resolve - with Casey Faris
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Casey Faris, from Ground Control who teaches filmmakers how to use editing software DaVinci Resolve, the premier colour grading software used by Hollywood professionals.
With an impressive following of over 418,000 subscribers, Casey has become a leading figure in the digital content creation sphere, sharing his unparalleled expertise and passion for video editing.
For nearly a decade, Casey has been at the forefront of content creation on YouTube, dedicating nine years to teaching, inspiring, and innovating within the editing community. His commitment and exceptional skills have not only garnered a massive audience but have also translated into remarkable success, generating over $1 million in revenue.
Casey's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@CaseyFaris
Casey's Website: https://www.groundcontrol.film/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
One of the big things that I've learned about business being an entrepreneur and stuff is focus YouTube channel is just over 418,000 subscribers. I kind of didn't expect anybody to pay for training, because it's like you can give that on YouTube.
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 Casey Faris. Casey is a YouTuber and online course creator that specializes in teaching video editing in an app called DaVinci Resolve. Over the last 10 years, he's built his YouTube channel from a fun side project to a full-time business. He runs GroundControl Film with his co-founder and best friend, dan. Together, they've created an online course business that's earned over a million dollars of revenue.
Speaker 2:Casey's mission in life is to inspire and empower creative people to express themselves and step out of the comfort zone. Casey lives in Oregon with his wife and three kids, and today we're going to be talking about Casey's course business, about how he got it started, about his YouTube channel, how he's going to adapt, and we're going to talk a lot about funnels as well. Now, before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you how much your support means to us. We're here to make sure your podcast experience gets even better, and you can help us with just a quick favor by taking a moment to rate and review the podcast. You can give us price feedback that helps us shape future episodes. Has the show helped you make money? Has it helped you grow your business, improve your courses? If it has, share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom slash online courses. That's ratethispodcastcom slash online courses. Casey, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 1:Hey, thank you so much, man. It's an honor to be here. It's very exciting so.
Speaker 2:I gave a quick summary of it, but tell everybody who you're helping me with the courses. What is DaVinci Resolve? What is your audience and how are you helping them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I do courses on DaVinci Resolve, which is a free video editing app, and it happens to be a very, very high-end video editing app. Chances are, if you've seen a movie in the theaters this year, you've probably seen a movie that was at least color corrected in DaVinci Resolve. It's kind of the king of color correction, and it kind of started like that and then grew into a fully fledged app that is very comparable with Final Cut Pro or Premiere, the Adobe suite and that kind of thing, but the big thing is that it's free and it's really really good, and so I jumped on that train in gosh almost about 10 years ago and just started putting up tutorials and that's kind of grown from there, and so now we sell courses on teaching how to use this program, primarily to content creators, and teaching people how to make cool stuff that didn't exist before without spending tons of money, and it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:How come you were able to start putting up these tutorials. What were you doing? What was your job at the time?
Speaker 1:My job is I was actually I put up color grading tutorials first because I ended up learning how to do color just by kind of running my head against the wall.
Speaker 1:I was using a different app at that point and working on a TV show that we were producing locally and I did. Nobody else knew about color correction, and so I started learning about it, and then I realized that not a lot of people online learned about it either, and they didn't know about it, and that was when there was a big boom in an interest in color correction, but nobody knew how to do it. So that's when I started posting tutorials.
Speaker 2:Got you Okay cool, so you were working in TV production or film editing at the time. Okay, cool, got it, and so why were you putting up on YouTube? Why were you putting videos up? Did you have an ambition? Were you like I want to grow this into something? Or you're just like oh, I learned how to do this, I'll stick a video up Like, why bother doing that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny because I started posting tutorials. It was way before that, actually. I was posting tutorials on some kind of software development stuff I was doing and I didn't even know why. I just enjoy teaching, okay, and I loved helping people. That's one of my main things is, I love being able to help people do things that they haven't been able to do before, and so I found out, you know, I learned a little bit and then I could put a little video on YouTube and some people will watch it and now they can do stuff that they couldn't do because of me and I'm like dang, that's really cool. I love that.
Speaker 2:Nice, nice, okay, cool. So this is one of the things I say really, really commonly with people, the kind of people who we're working with and who, like, resonate with us, who are course creators is that they didn't start as a course creator.
Speaker 2:They didn't start trying to make a business. They started as a teacher and so they were just like yeah, a lot of people were maybe like teaching in person. They've got a lot of language course creators we work with and a lot of them started off teaching languages in person in Japan or whatever right you know like oh, they're going to Japan, they're going to teach English, because that's the thing that you can do if you're English.
Speaker 2:And then they're like oh, this is really helpful, all the stuff I'm creating, let me go and put it up online.
Speaker 2:And then, after a while it kind of then leads to something and then like, oh, maybe I'll make some courses about this, as opposed to there's a whole nother group of people who were like, oh course, businesses are a good business to run, let me go and make courses and then figure out how am I going to sell it, how am I going to build an audience for it which is like a sure it's nothing wrong with that, but it's like it tends to be.
Speaker 2:Most of the people I talk to a kind of similar story to you. They like teaching, they wanted to teach, they wanted to get the stuff out there and then they kind of went from there.
Speaker 1:So I think it's easier to make something that's higher quality if you're used to teaching that's. The thing is like I've I got really good at teaching and now I'm learning the business side of it, and then you could be good at business and then have to learn the teaching side of it. But I think it's nice to know the teaching side of it because you know you can put out something that's quality, which is that I mean. It all comes down to that.
Speaker 2:I did my first reaction video for YouTube today, so my I got this guy who does my YouTube videos with me. So he comes around with a whole bunch of ideas of what videos we're going to do and then we kind of work out the scripts together and then I felt them and then he goes off and edits it all and puts up and he's like I want to do some, I want to do some reaction videos, and he shows me this one and I was just so angry, Like depending on when you're reacting to.
Speaker 2:So it was someone saying if you're super broke and you just want to make some money, you can make money through selling digital products online. All you do is you go to chat, you BT and you find out what problems of people got and then you go and make us. You make a digital product to solve that problem. And I'm like what are you talking about? What if you don't, what if you don't know how to solve that problem? You can't just start with oh, someone's got a problem, I'll make a product to solve it. It's like you first become an expert in something that people actually care about. That might take, I don't know, three years or whatever.
Speaker 2:Now, then, you go create the content and then eventually you make the course about it. You don't just go oh yeah, I'm just going to make something to solve this problem. It's like that's how you end up with trash there at least has to.
Speaker 1:you have to have some kind of crossover with things that you know. You know you can't just be like, oh yeah, of course, business analytics. I know, don't know anything about that, but I'll just make that real quick, good luck, good luck with that.
Speaker 2:Something like madness. Okay so take us back. So how long ago, just like 10 years ago, right, you're putting up these videos about color grading. Was that right? Color grading, did I get that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, cool yeah.
Speaker 2:At what point did you start to get a bit of traction in terms of like the channel growing? Was that straight away? Did that? Did you put videos up for a year with no reaction? Like what was it like?
Speaker 1:Oh, it was super easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, I started putting up videos and you know, my friends would watch it, you know, and my family would watch it and they'd be really sweet and be like, wow, that's really nice, honey, you know.
Speaker 1:But I ended up I was actually I've always wanted to make a living doing YouTube, and so I would watch sketch comedy and stuff on YouTube, and so I actually had three channels at the time and I was posting something.
Speaker 1:I was trying to post one a week to each channel, and so I had like a comedy channel, I had a tutorial channel and I had a gaming channel with my friend and I was just kind of like posting once every week or two on all of those channels and obviously the education one I know now is a lot easier to get some traction on because people have a reason to search for it and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I think it was just I tended to just post stuff that I was interested in and that I felt like people didn't really know. I came at it from an angle of hey, everybody says this one thing, but I'm telling you a different thing, which is always interesting, and it ended up getting picked up by an industry blog, a blog that shares things about video editing and production and stuff, and they shared it and then that got a bunch of views and subscribers and stuff. And that was like the first moment where I'm like, oh, maybe this could like actually be a thing and not just a pretend thing you know, and so it was.
Speaker 1:It was honestly a lot of just testing things out, throwing things out and and seeing what worked and then trying to try to just do more of that.
Speaker 2:And at what point did you make your first course?
Speaker 1:It took a long time. Actually, we started making with. Our first digital products were color grading LUTs, which, if people don't know what a LUT is, it's like a digital filter kind of like when you put on a filter on Instagram, it's sort of like that, but you can use it in a variety of different software. So it's it's pretty useful and so I would sell these LUTs that basically make your camera look better, and we did that. That was like our bread and butter for gosh.
Speaker 1:A long time, long time Ended up going like full time creator just off of selling those LUTs for 20 bucks, and it was probably. It wasn't until gosh, probably like five or six years ago, that we started really thinking about courses and I ended up making a course. It was like a 20 minute course. We sold it for I think it was like literally like seven or eight dollars, ok, and we're just like, hey, this is a mini training, it's like it's like a 20 minute video and you can download these, these assets and you can follow along. And you know we didn't make tons of money on it. It was OK. It was a lot of work and it was it was just OK.
Speaker 1:But we did that a couple of times and and then I ended up doing a course that was we called it an end to end course, which is basically here's all the stuff to make a short film and then. So it's all of the video and the audio and everything. It's unedited and then it was probably like two hours or so long and it's showing you how to edit this short film and do the color, grading and sound and all that stuff and effects and everything and to put that up. And that made a decent amount of money and we went, wow, hmm, maybe people will pay for courses. That's interesting. And this is before. I knew that courses were a really good thing to get into, that you could make a lot more money doing courses than selling previous, selling presets and things that everybody in the world sells, because there ended up being a lot of, a lot of other people that were selling kind of the same things that we were Right and it was getting really saturated. So talk to us.
Speaker 2:So when was this the bigger course, the end to run on?
Speaker 1:I think it was about 2015.
Speaker 2:2015. Ok, cool, yeah. So that's like nine years ago.
Speaker 1:Gosh. Maybe it was Dang. Is that right? No, it was Gosh. Yeah, I think so, wow.
Speaker 2:Time, so 2015,. You make that end to end course. What points just takes back a couple of steps before that. When did you become full-time creator then?
Speaker 1:That had to be. I guess it was about that time also. Okay, I ended up quitting my job and inviting my friend to come and start a company with me off of money that was just generated from Lutz.
Speaker 2:Got it, got it okay. So it was about that time when you launched that. Do you remember about how much you made with that first launch that course?
Speaker 1:I want to say gosh, it's. That was a long time ago. I want to say it was. I mean the whole course. I think was like 50 or $60 maybe.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And gosh, we probably made $3,000 or $4,000 on it or something, something like that.
Speaker 2:Okay, and that was enough for the time that you were like, oh, there's something here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I mean we could make that off of Lutz too and honestly we were making more on Lutz. But I kind of didn't expect anybody to pay for training, because it's like you can get that on YouTube. Right right right, why would you pay for that? But then I started realizing I can't really charge $100 for a pack of Lutz, because you can literally get hundreds of Lutz for $10 on some marketplace or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's just like starting to see the ceiling there and going like, wow, but I do see people selling courses for $250. Yeah, and it's like I know I can teach people like that's not that big of a deal, and so that's kind of where that mental switch happened for me.
Speaker 2:So take me through kind of where you're at now. What size is your YouTube channel now?
Speaker 1:YouTube channel is just over 418,000 subscribers.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool yeah. And is that your only channel, or do you also share content at other places as well?
Speaker 1:That's the only channel. Yeah, we share tutorials about the same stuff. Nice, just on that channel.
Speaker 2:And how big is your email list at the moment?
Speaker 1:At the moment I'm going to check her I think it's about 22,000 or something like that. Okay, we just pared it down Like we just got rid of a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nice, okay, cool. And how often are you sorry? The next one then. How many courses do you have at the moment?
Speaker 1:Right now we have kind of like one main course and then we have a bunch of kind of smaller courses. So our main course is sells for 850. And that is definitely our main bread and butter, our main seller. Okay, some courses that are like roughly related to it. There's four other courses that are around the $250, $300 mark something like that, nice, okay, and how do you sell those?
Speaker 2:Are you doing email promotions? Are you doing webinars, launches, like? What does it look like when you're actually making a fuss of one of those and selling it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so everything is marketed through lead magnets from. Youtube and then people get on our email list and we have a whole email funnel set up and everything sequences and everything and so, and we email every day.
Speaker 2:Okay, nice, yeah. And then do you do discounts on the courses when you we do from time to time.
Speaker 1:We're kind of rethinking that and not sure I don't know Kind of go back and forth on that. We've had obviously good response to discounting courses and everything. But we also have good responses packaging, bonuses, packaging upsells, that kind of thing. We have our courses available all the time. There's no launching or anything like that. It's all pretty evergreen. Buy it whenever you want. But we are running promotions, probably every two or three weeks or so to get people in, and it's usually some incentive of you get this other course for 50% off or you get it for free if you buy our main course and we're experimenting with different things like that.
Speaker 2:And how have you found that? Because that's super interesting. What we normally do, like a standard model we're using, is, main course, put it on a discount for one week period while we're doing the promotion round, a lot of value based emails around the topic and then some more sales emails over the course of the one week, and we will add bonuses. But we generally don't do it without the discount. So how have you found that in terms of the results that you get when you have a discount versus when you have bonuses for a limited time?
Speaker 1:Honestly like trying out this kind of new funnel model. I don't really have enough data. We've only done a few promotions so far. I know that anytime that we have a discount and a countdown timer, that obviously that works all the time, but I found that if I do a discount and then a few weeks later I do a discount, the second one doesn't do as well, obviously. So I don't know. I'm not opposed to discounting, but I'm still kind of trying to figure out what's going to work the best. And we're talking about maybe like splintering one of our big course and seeing if people want to buy the first part of it and then upgrade later or something like that. And that's kind of like at the point where we're sort of figuring stuff out right now, yeah. So yeah, I mean, any advice or help on that is definitely welcome. Nice, nice, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what we found is there's all these different people that talk about all these different tactics. There's webinars and Facebook lives and do discounts and add bonuses and have a countdown timer and have value-based emails and have urgency emails and all that, and the thing is they all work. They all work and if you do all of them in one big go, then it works the best. But the problem with that is that's a pain in the butt to do Like if you do a full launch right.
Speaker 2:You have a challenge and lives and webinars and emails and everything. You just end it exhausted and so that's like too far, because we've done that with clients before. We've had like $200,000 launches and it was just like they were just shattered. At the end of it we're like, well, that's no fun.
Speaker 2:And if the launch does badly for any reason and then goes wrong, they just so stressed because that's where all their money is coming from with that one thing, yeah. So our model, as you've probably heard me talk about in the podcast before, is like every month do any malpomotion of something.
Speaker 2:And then the model there is you're talking about, you've got discounts and you've got bonuses, but they both work. And the trick would probably be yeah, like look at, okay, well, we did this, we did an email promotion of this one and we did with the discount, and we did an email promotion of the same course with a bonus. Where did we make the most sales? Where do we make the most revenue? How did it do? Et cetera.
Speaker 2:I think, the slight advantage to doing the bonuses is you can cycle through different bonuses and then you don't have someone thinking, oh, I know, I could just wait, because in three months I'll get the same offer again.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:You've got kind of a different reason to go ahead and do something right now. But the advantage of a discount is it's like, oh, someone was thinking about getting it and now it's less money. It's like, oh, they're more likely to be able to afford it. So that's kind of the pros and cons with it.
Speaker 2:I would say probably, like the simple answer, without doing more testing, would be do the discounts because that's like what's the most proven. But if you get data and it shows different stuff around the bonuses, then I am super keen to see that and kind of see how it's worked and what's gone on there.
Speaker 1:Well, it's funny. I mean it's honestly way easier for us to do a discount. I mean I could put up an email campaign doing a discount pretty easily. We have people working on creative stuff and graphic design and all that stuff, so it's like pretty easy to just make that be a thing. It's a lot easier than packaging a bonus and making a promo video for the bonus and the combo pack and all that stuff. Plus, you need more content, more things to package with it.
Speaker 1:And that's time and energy too, and so I mean, ideally, I would love to just do a sale every month, but my fear and this is a fear because I've learned a lot of this is like man, what are you afraid of doing? That still works and works really well, but you're just hesitant to do it. And one of the things is like emailing your list more often, like afraid to do that, but it's been really great. Like I'm afraid to put a discount on something every month, let's say, because I don't want people to be like well, why don't I just wait three weeks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't do the same thing every three weeks, that's for sure, like I find about every three months, maybe ideal world six months in between doing a discount on the same course. But I like saying that we did have one course. This is an extreme example. We had one course we promoted 10 times, each time with the discount to the same list in a year for a client Because they only had one course and they needed to make money. And what we had to do? Our copywriter, monica, who's just phenomenal, came up with 10 different hooks, 10 different angles, 10 different reasons why you would be getting this thing, and every one of those promotions did better, because she kept learning more about the audience and kept improving. Eventually it started to die off and she was like I can't, I've got nothing left.
Speaker 1:You can't do this thing. I've squeezed it for all they've got yeah.
Speaker 2:But the having a different angle, having a different approach, a different reason why someone should get it now you know like it's the new year.
Speaker 2:New year is the time when you want to be learning a new skill. This is the new skill that you can be learning. Now's the time to take action on. It Gives you a whole different email promotion to. Yeah, it's Black Friday. We're gonna give our biggest discount on it right now, and then another one might be. There's a new version of the software that's just come out. This puts everybody back on a level playing field. If you go and learn this now, then that's a great time. Or, you know, lots of people are thinking about going off to college. If, instead of going off to college, you went and learned this instead, that would actually allow you to make more money than I don't know. I'm making stuff up here.
Speaker 1:I have no idea if it's true, but, like you know, Are you saying that it's less about the coupon and more about the reason why people would take that coupon? Oh yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:The discount is like it's not the main point of the promotion. The discount is like an extra reason why you should get it right now and the discount's gonna finish at a specific time end of that second week of the. You know, value emails for one week, promotional emails for one week. At the end of that second week that is finishing and you've got a countdown timer and something's going away and that gives someone a sense of urgency. But the sense of urgency isn't the reason why they get it. The reason why they get it is because something is going on in their life. There's a benefit, there's a thing that they get from it, and you can talk about different reasons why now is the time to deal with that problem or to get better at that skill or what have you. And the discount is like a minor, is a relatively minor detail in terms of in the emails. Now it does matter.
Speaker 2:You need something there to kind of hook it on, to like, why is it right now I mean hypothetically you could do that whole thing without discount, but then at the end of the second week there's no countdown. Because you're like there's good and that countdown timer helps someone to go like I've got to focus. I've got to decide on this and take action now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So it's more like the final nudge rather than the huge push.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we're not giving like 80% off.
Speaker 2:We're giving like 30% off, probably Maybe more of Black Friday or something, but it's like it's not a life changing amount of discount to it. They could buy it at full price in a few weeks time. You know that's no big deal. Like, for example, monica, when she was doing I think the course was about self love and one of the hooks that she did was based around the Olympics. So the Olympics was going on at the time I don't know which one. This would have been Tokyo, I guess, so 2021. And so there was something going on in the news about that. Everybody's thinking about what's happening with the Olympics. People are watching it, people are thinking about it. There's this particular story about, you know, some athlete who was an incredible athlete but had I don't know self harmed or some terrible you know, obviously not a happy person, and it was talking about you know even if you're super successful, you can still have all of these things going wrong.
Speaker 2:So, therefore, let's talk about self love and why that's so important and why you need to actually do something about that right now. And that had nothing to do with discount, but there was a discount on top of that as well.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, yeah, because I guess I've been thinking about the discount as like that's the main attraction you know.
Speaker 1:But I mean, and it's like I've kind of played around with like the warm up emails and everything. It's like let's present this problem and then in a couple of days I'm gonna have a solution to the problem and everything. And I think that like that's a really interesting, because it's not as intuitive to you know, send a promotion about that kind of thing. But it does make more sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is so. I was learning about this stuff.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons why a lot of people don't do promotions on a regular basis is because they don't want to feel salesy and spammy. And the reason why they think they will feel salesy and spammy is because all of the email promotions that they ever send are salesy and spammy, because they're the obvious ones to send. Because what can you do? There's a discount. I don't know what to say about it. There's a discount. There's a discount. There's a discount by now by now, by now, right.
Speaker 2:At which point you're like, well, if I was getting those emails, I'd probably be a bit irritated by the end of it. So the trick is, yeah, how can you do a mixture of providing value and moving somebody towards the sale at the same time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean. One thing that I've been picking up, especially like listening to Monica, is the idea of coaching. Right, like you're not selling your coaching people. And that's like I've really taken that part. I have it on my board of like, hey, this is all about coaching and from everywhere in the course there should be coaching. It's not just selling people, it's not just teaching people, but it's like being their friend and being along with them and helping them to have that result. I think that's like the coolest way to think about it.
Speaker 2:And I'm still like wrapping my mind around doing that, Because again it's unintuitive right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not just obvious, it's not just sat there waiting for you. But if you really take that approach, then the whole thing works so much more easily, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that. Get me fired up, man, go Go.
Speaker 2:This is one of the things, right. So I run this event called DCX London and it's in London in the summer. And tickets the first time that we ran it, tickets sold out in like four weeks and so the next time I was telling everybody you need to get the ticket because they're gonna sell out. You need to, like, make sure that you're aware of when it's going, because people were saying to me oh, I hadn't realized they were available, I didn't buy the ticket and then I didn't get to come and it's a real shame. And I was like that is a real shame that matters that's sad.
Speaker 2:I wish you would have been there. That would have been really cool. So then the next time I'm telling everybody about this, I'm like, as a service, let me see what I can do. So I set up a WhatsApp group where I was telling everybody look, the ticket's gonna be going on sale. They're gonna go, and it's gonna be frustrating for you If you don't get them. It's gonna be a great event. You're gonna really enjoy it If you come. If you don't buy them now, then they're not gonna be available and then they all sold out on a week. And everyone's saying to me you're like such a hype man and you're giving everybody so much FOMO and you're like, I'm like, it's a service, this is.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to tell you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen future, you I, because of my privileged position of being the person who runs the event. I've seen all the people who were frustrated because they didn't get a ticket and then they wished they got a ticket. And I'm trying to save you from that future version of yourself not being good.
Speaker 1:It's like you're about to be dumb. Yeah, please don't.
Speaker 2:Don't be dumb, yeah, I can help you here. And so then every year it like goes more and more people get excited about it. It's a great event as well, like it's not mostly due to me, nolan Shona, who run it with me like phenomenal at running it, but every year it goes fast, from fast, and I'd said it to everybody for like nine months. And then we had people this time who said you know? So we had the WhatsApp group, we're ready, we're all good to go. The last year it sold out in 24 hours, and so this time I was like you need to be in this WhatsApp group, you need to be ready on the date of buy it, you need to be prepared. And then it sold out in under an hour. And then people after, like who came along after like two or three hours, I'm like, oh, I thought that's still be tickets down. Like I've been telling you for nine months. Like can you please freaking listen, you cannot complain to me. I said to you. I said specifically this is going to happen.
Speaker 1:You need to be ready. So I think of like when you're coaching your audience.
Speaker 2:It's the same like it's if you understand that you are in service of them. That you are not trying to flog your junk. You are trying to help them make their life better. You've got something fantastic right. That's how people feel.
Speaker 1:What does flog your junk mean?
Speaker 2:Oh, you just hold on a minute. This is a English expression, is that okay? So flog means to sell, like on a market stall, like if you were like selling something that it and you're like just after a quick buck and you're like just trying to. But it basically means sell, but it's a slightly derogatory term for selling and junk is like rubbish. You know stuff that's like that Sure so you are.
Speaker 1:It does not sound like that.
Speaker 2:Ha, ha ha ha. You're trying to help people. It's like you've got to. You can make their future life better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you've got to think, okay, what needs to happen for them so I can see their future self?
Speaker 2:Because you've been making this course for like 10 years, right, you've seen how much betters people's life is after they take the course and they've learned how to do the thing and now they're good at it because they took the course, so you know you could see their future. They can't see that yet because they haven't seen all these other people. They haven't been through all of that. You can help them to understand what that future is going to be like and how much better their life will be, and it's your responsibility to support them through that. But it's not easy for them because you've seen it a hundred times or a thousand times or whatever, and they've never seen it. So you have to use stories and coaches, coaching and examples and data and all these things to allow them to be able to view that future and believe in it. And when you understand that kind of philosophy, then thinking of the way that you're running an email promotion is like completely different to oh, I need to make this many sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it's more humanity too. You know you feel better about it anyway and it's more helpful. It's a win-win, yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And if they don't buy it, like most people, like 99% of people in any email promotion you run, are not gonna buy. So you've then gotta think, well, okay, how do I also make sure these emails are useful for them? Yeah, because otherwise I'm just filling up someone's you know. If they're not gonna buy it, I'm just filling up their inbox and wasting their time, you know. And 90% of people will never buy from you and you could think, well, they should. You know it's fine if they go for any email list, which is also true, but it would be lovely if you could also help those people who never buy from you to still have a better life and to still, you know, like, get some value from your email promotions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's something I've been thinking like trying to do lately is, if I send an email, yes, there's a call to action, but if you just read the email, that you get value from it. Like you become a better artist, a better person just from reading the email. You know, I think that's and that's the way, like I think the way to you don't get people unsubscribing as much, you don't get people annoyed at you because it's just like what. You're gonna be mad because I'm nice to you, like yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. So what's any of your goals going forward? Because there's something you were saying to me before we got on air about how you're kind of shifting your role within the business. Could you tell everybody about that?
Speaker 1:Oh man, this will just. This is a whole soapbox.
Speaker 2:I don't think you're ready for it.
Speaker 1:So one of the big things that I've learned about business and being an entrepreneur and stuff is focus.
Speaker 1:I mean you have to be able to focus, you have to be able to say no to things, and that I think the people that are better at business and that I think are less stressed people, happier people, tend to say no to things. The people that are in my life that I've seen that are more stressed and crazy is like those are the people that say yes to everything or excited about everything, right. And so I've begun mercilessly cutting things out of my life in general, but especially my professional life and things that I spend time and energy on right. And so when I started, I mean it was just me running the YouTube, and then I had the website and so I was doing everything that's involved with business stuff doing taxes, doing emails, do everything and it was a major shift. This was about 2020, a major shift because when I started with my business partner, we basically, instead of him taking over and helping me, we kind of just started like another wing of the business and made two. The design was to make like two of me, right.
Speaker 1:And so we would both be doing everything and that was fine, but we were really stressed and it just took. It was just draining right and one day I realized like, wow, we're doing a bunch of stuff that is not joyful, not helpful. He was making tutorials and he hates making tutorials, like he is not, he doesn't want to do that. He's a good teacher, but he doesn't wanna do that. And I was like and I told him a couple times like dude, we have to make tutorials to market our stuff. We were selling sound effects, like we have to do that. And I had to come back to him and like, dude, I'm like repenting of that, because I shouldn't have have brought you into that, because that's not natural for you and it's not gonna be good and it's not great.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so we learned through all of these things that, like I said about, in 2020, I was still like managing the website, responding to all the emails and doing all of the YouTube videos, recording them and editing them and posting them, and like I was doing like everything, and I wasn't even like letting my business partner do very much. And our friend needed a job and he's like, hey, I know how to edit video, can I help you guys and I'm like, huh, I guess you could edit some videos that I have, you know. But that was really hard to give away the reins because I I realized I really want control over a lot of stuff and so I ended up giving him the job and letting him edit and he paid for himself just in YouTube revenue, like the first two weeks, like it was such a no brainer. Of course, this was lucky because it was 2020, when just everyone was watching everything right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But we're just like wow, I'm just like, I'm really dumb, like for not doing this earlier Like what, what a mistake, you know.
Speaker 1:And so that got me into this, into this mode of like all right, what else can I stop doing? And give away and hire people for, and get help with, and stop doing. And so I went from doing everything to basically doing two things I work on the funnel and I record videos, and then I hand the videos off to other people on the team that do the rest of it. And so I like to say, like I do two things a day because that's how I stay sane and that's how we can put out a lot of content without just being stressed all the time. Yeah, that's a big thing.
Speaker 2:So the funnels is kind of your thing now. That's like, are you competing in charge of it? Are you writing everything? Are you like designing the pages? Are you doing the text set up Like what parts? What do you actually work on?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's mostly like the strategy for it and writing the emails and so I'm the main face on the YouTube and so it makes sense that the emails come from me and are personal from me and everything and that's part of kind of the personal brand is just my attitude and stuff like that. And so we had somebody else writing emails for a while. She absolutely did not like it, didn't feel a bit about it, you know, and so.
Speaker 1:But I was always really excited about it. I'm like, hey, you know what, you should write an email about this. And she's like, okay, you know. And so once I kind of took over the reins and writing the emails and stuff, I'm like, wow, this feels great to me and it's helping the business and she can do things that she actually likes and it's just better. It's about finding the balance, like what people are excited to do and what they're good at. Where's that mixture?
Speaker 1:You know, and what does the company need. And that's been the hardest part of learning how to run a company and be a big boy and pay taxes and worry about revenue and junk like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Nice, nice, and do you think that's something you'll hold onto, like the actual writing, the emails?
Speaker 1:I really like it honestly. I probably will. I could definitely see like working with a copywriter or something, but I would probably like outline the emails or something like that. Yeah, because it's funny, because there's it's hard for me to tell, just again because of probably experience and not knowing, just I don't know what I don't know. But I wonder how many things I'm like all right, this is appropriate for me to do, this is the best thing for me to do, and which things I'm still being stupid about.
Speaker 1:And I'm like not giving the reins over just because I feel like I need it, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and copyrighting is really interesting one, because there are quite a good number of good video editors out there. There are not many good copywriters. There are lots of people who identify as copywriters.
Speaker 1:Sure yeah.
Speaker 2:They have that written on their LinkedIn profile and they put it at the bottom of their email signature and it's like technically they are writing copy.
Speaker 2:but they suck you know they really suck at it and people are charging quite a lot of money for it, so it's harder to find someone who can then write the emails for you. And then the second part is actually good at writing sales emails. And then the second part of it is that then they need to write in your style. It needs to sound like you. If they're coming from you, it has to sound like you. It has to be your tone of voice. It has to be the kind of words that you use, has to be the length of sentences that you do. You know all of these kind of things, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is?
Speaker 2:on top also really difficult and some of that takes time. So if you're testing somebody to do the copywriting for you, it could be that you've got someone great, but it still takes a month or two before it actually starts to work right. Sure, it's like whoa. That's frustrating, you know, to go through that process. But if you find someone who's actually good, then they can write emails that will make lots more sales. No, I don't know. I haven't gone through your numbers in detail. Right, you might be crushing it with your emails, but for most people that I see in the course creator space, they, even if they've gone through, listen to all of the episodes that we've had with Monika. When they go through and they use all of our templates and whatever. They still are like okay, that's cool, because that's great. You're like a five out of 10, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Good job, Great. That's got you way forward, way further forward than when you were two out of 10. But someone who's actually like a nine is just going to absolutely crush them, you know like the amount of sales that they're going to bring in from it.
Speaker 2:And then there's a whole load of strategy that goes kind of with that as well. But then that's getting outside of the realm of just the pure emails, so it is tricky to know when is that time? One kind of good rule of thumb is to look at what percentage of your engaged list are buying, and if it is about 0.3% of your engaged list who buy the course from you, then you've probably got pretty good emails and sales page and checkout page. Now that doesn't tell you if it's not 0.3%. It doesn't tell you well, which one of those is dropping off.
Speaker 2:Like the best conversion rate that we've ever had, I think it's about 1.52%. But a normally email promotion for most people most of the time is about that kind of 0.3%. And then that's like, okay, you're doing. Well, you have to make sure it's the engaged list, like some people who have actually been opening emails in the last kind of three to six months Rather than just. You know, if you've got a massive list and you haven't cleansed it I know you do cleanse yours, but so that gives you kind of an idea of how you're faring. If you're at like 0.05, then it's like, okay, no, there's something that you could make massive jumps forward.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. Yeah, I have to look into that. So I'm curious to see that. And is that like on a promotion itself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, during the promotion. Yeah, I'm just trying to do some math for you on like, and it does vary depending on like. Well, which price course are you selling Cause? Obviously that makes a massive difference on it.
Speaker 1:But if you're taking like I would assume it's easier for somebody to just hit check out on a $57 product you know than a $800 product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, it totally is. The numbers do go down. It's not linear. So if you've got, if you're selling a course for 79, and then you're selling another one for $200, then the $200 one will have a lower conversion rate but it'll make more revenue because the conversion rate hasn't gone down as much as the price has gone up. So in Ballpark, I'm just putting in, if you said to 20,000 person less, with a 0.3% conversion rate, a $300 course, then that's like an $18,000 promotion. So that kind of gives you an idea of like that's the kind of numbers that you'd be. Yeah, we're definitely not hitting that that's.
Speaker 1:yeah, we got some something to make up there, but yeah, but I'm learning too. So, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean we've probably done that during, like Black Friday. Okay, yeah, done that for sure. But again I mean that's dude, my first Black Friday promotion ever, not knowing anything, literally like changed the world for me. And literally all I did was I put out an email. It said hey, black Friday is a thing, here's the. Whatever it was. The let pack and made like 800 times more than I usually make.
Speaker 2:I was like oh, there must be something to this promotion thing, yeah yeah, black Friday is fascinating, as most people have got like one or two spikes a year in their sales. And if you look at the sales and say, oh, what was it that caused that spike, I know the answer is cause that's when they didn't email promotion with a discount and one of them was Black Friday and I was like do more, do more of those, figure out how to do that. Well, that's a thing that works. Do it more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, yeah, man. Thanks so much for coming on today, casey. I really appreciate your time and you're coming in and sharing your story with everybody. This has been really good fun. If people heard this and they wanna get some more of your wisdom, where should they go?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm on YouTube, it's just Casey Ferris. That's F-A-R-I-S like Paris with an F and yeah, if you Google my name on YouTube, or yeah, if YouTube my name, that should come up. And my courses are at groundcontrolfilm.
Speaker 2:Nice. If you found this interview useful and you wanna get future episodes, please subscribe. Wherever you listened, we really appreciate your time coming along and taking part and listening in and please, please, please, go and leave us a review. That would be awesome. Just need to go to raidthispodcastcom slash online courses and that would be fantastic. Thanks, as always. And then, casey, thanks so much, of course. Thanks for having me on.