The Art of Selling Online Courses

5,000,000 YouTube Views Teaching Mandarin - with Phil Crimmins

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 137

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Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with Phil Crimmins from  @MandarinBlueprint  

Phil has called China home for over six years. During his time there, Phil has developed a deep fascination with the language, culture, society, and way of life in China. His passion for the Chinese language led him, along with his business partner, to co-found Mandarin Blueprint. This innovative platform leverages modern visualization techniques to revolutionize the way people learn Chinese characters, making the process faster and more effective.

Under Phill's leadership, Mandarin Blueprint has flourished. The business is on track to generate an impressive $2,000,000 annually, a testament to its success and the value it provides to learners. Furthermore, their engaging and educational content has garnered over 8 million views on YouTube, expanding their reach and impact on a global scale.

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@MandarinBlueprint

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mandarinblueprint/

TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@mandarinblueprint

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/mandarin-blueprint

If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/

Speaker 1:

Our average monthly revenue. We set a goal this year of 2 million and we're on track. The average monthly revenue would be 166k.

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 Phil Crimmins. Now Phil's a co-founder of Mandarin Blueprint. They've got over 80,000 subscribers on YouTube. They help people to learn to speak and learn fluent Chinese, and today we're going to be talking about Mandarin Blueprint and how he and Luke started it, who they help, how they've worked with us to improve their funnels. In the email marketing, we're going to talk through what's working to get more email subscribers and more revenue from their email promotions.

Speaker 2:

But before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We're here to make sure that your podcast experience is as good as it can possibly be, and you can help us out to do that with just a quick favour by taking a moment to rate and review our podcast. You're going to give us priceless feedback that's going to help to shape future episodes. So has the show helped you to make more money, like we've heard from previous listeners? Has it helped you to grow your business and improve your courses? And if it has, share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom. Slash online courses. Phil, welcome to the show. Glad to be here, nice, so talk us through. I've covered it very briefly, but talk us through. Who do you help and what kind of problem do you solve for them?

Speaker 1:

Well, you know this question, you see it, and it's like the kind of question that you would say, oh, that's a simple question. But I actually think there's quite a bit of hidden profundity in this question, because it kind of helps illustrate how not to lose the big picture of what business is all about when you deep dive into the KPIs and data-driven decisions right, because that's obviously you guys are great at that and that's excellent. But if you can remember the point of business in general and then the point of your specific business as solving problems and what even is a problem, that helps you kind of like I don't know, stay level emotionally during the process, because you can find yourself being so, uh, knocked out of whack because some KPI is changed, it's gone down and like what does that mean? But if you remember the big picture, you can kind of keep your, keep your emotional level, so to speak.

Speaker 1:

And so what I mean is that, on a basic level, if somebody has a problem, it could be categorized as, in the realm of they're experiencing suffering. Now, it's not like great suffering, like torture or something, but they have a problem that's unsolved and if they don't know how to solve it, it causes them irritation, or just it is a hit against their well-being in some way, or just it is a hit against their well-being in some way. So I tend to think of business as the art of trading suffering for livelihood. People often think of it as trading time for money, but it's basically like hey, you've got this problem.

Speaker 1:

For example, you have a lack of knowledge about how to learn Chinese, and that's a problem for you because you really want to learn Chinese, right? So that is a suffering that's happening for you. We've all experienced it, and there's a million different ways. My car is not working. It's like, do I suffer through learning how my engine works, or do I just transfer some of my livelihood in the form of cash to the guy who already went through that process, right? So that's basically what the business world is meant to do. And so in my explanation it's, it's kind of like it's sort of the universe balancing itself out because nobody can solve all problems. So you trade a little bit of your livelihood for somebody else's uh, previously done suffering. So the it's probably somewhat equal in the end.

Speaker 1:

But in our niche, a Chinese learner they have the option to endure the hours of research and mental effort, the various ways to figure out how exactly should I learn the character components and characters and words, and how should I put them into a sentence and should I learn grammar, and there's the million questions that come up. It gets overwhelming. And so what we did was we put a ton of effort and suffering, so to speak, into plotting a map, a blueprint, explaining exactly what to do step by step, and in return, you know, we just basically say hey, our staff and our people, you know, you pet, that's what you pay the fee for is we're reducing that suffering for you. So it just keeps continuing on into the rest of the economy. And so the problem we are solving Mandarin learners who don't know how to traverse and navigate the landscape. We give them a map. So that's the way I would think of it.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha. So what does that look like as in? Is it a do it yourself course? Is this a membership? Is this are they getting feedback from people on your team, Like what does the actual product that people can get from you look like?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think of it, as we have video courses, so the actual medium is a video platform. It includes access to flashcards via an app. So there's basically two platforms a course platform where you get all the learning done, and a flashcard app to do your reviewing. And so the way that the courses work is we have a sort of core course that integrates with everything called the blueprint and that is a linear, bottom-up foundation building course. And we also have the sort of ad hoc follow your bliss top-down learning course that are like I want to know what to say in the doctor's office.

Speaker 1:

It's like, okay, here, this is exactly what you say and here's the materials to review it, and you know that type of thing. And that way you get a holistic learning. So you get the foundational learning that is going to give you fluency for life, right and literacy, for that matter. And then you've also got the quick satisfaction. You know, I just want to learn the three quick guitar chords so that I can play stairway to heaven. You know that's what the sort of ad hoc top down learning is, and so, yeah, that's what we've been working on. You know it's an ongoing project because there's always more ways that you can uh, you know, iterate on those ideas, so yeah, nice, cool, um.

Speaker 2:

What was it that made you decide you've been working away on this for?

Speaker 1:

for how long, how long you run this business for uh well, we started it in 2016 and, in some ways, the seeds of it were happening already in 2014.

Speaker 2:

And then what made you decide to get in touch with us for help with upgrading your funnel?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, ultimately it was my business partner, luke's decision, because he's the one who focuses a little bit more on the digital sales side of things. However, you can kind of think of it, as we never think of learning as a bad investment, because it's usually the best investment you can have, and so we know how to fix Chinese curriculums and make them better. That's our area of expertise Selling stuff online. While we've learned a lot over the past five years I mean, come on, learned a lot over the past. You know five years. I mean, come on like that's, if you've gotten really good at something, you know that five years actually isn't really enough to be an expert, right?

Speaker 1:

So, recognizing that there are courses that DDM has made and we saw some of that, I mean, luke saw it first. I don't know what his actual first touch point with DDM was, but you know, checking out your courses and seeing the expertise and being able to realize that, okay, yeah, this really is the type of thing that you could test, the type of thing that you could, um, clearly just do a few small things and increase your average order value, it was like all right, obviously these people know what they're talking about, so let's get into it and it basically comes down to we're not experts yet, so we've traded some of our livelihood to reduce the suffering born of our funnel analysis ignorance. So yeah, that's kind of how I think of it.

Speaker 2:

Nice, okay, cool, and you guys would. You were doing a lot of stuff really well before we were working together, like I know that I don't know if it's maybe more Luke than you, but I've gone through a lot of stuff from Russell Brunson and then built out like three or four different front-end funnels. I can't remember exactly which ones. I think it was Tripwire Challenge and maybe a webinar, as well, something like that.

Speaker 2:

So that was all kind of going quite well. It sounds like the reasoning was then well, this might help us to go faster, and there's more things that we can kind of spot that maybe you weren't able to spot for yourself, right, but was there a particular challenge, was there an issue, or was it more like we see an opportunity here?

Speaker 1:

I mean, yeah, it's always a bit of both. I would say that one thing that kind of plagued us for a long time was we'd be getting all of these great five-star reviews the vast majority of our reviews are five stars and they're often beautifully written or there are these great video recordings of people and we're like so okay, so we're having all these people love the course, but we just don't have enough people in it, like it's just it's kind of it's tough for us to get it off the ground and there's something feels off here. There must be some missing material in our minds about what it is. That like what. The bottleneck must be somewhere in our mindset, right, because clearly people like the course, but we're not getting enough new people. And so one thing was just how do we get more eyeballs? How do do we get more people recognizing that you know this thing we're doing is really great? And then increasing average order value.

Speaker 1:

That definitely struck us as a great opportunity, because sure, the idea of you know, an order bump or an upsell or a downsell they all we'd heard of them, of course.

Speaker 1:

Sell or a down sell uh, they all we'd have heard of them, of course, but actually implementing it, and, you know, there was just a lot of known unknowns and even some unknown unknowns when it came to that.

Speaker 1:

So, uh, we just looked at it as like, well, if we want to increase our order value, having a team that is like really knows about this, on our by our side as we're implementing it will be great.

Speaker 1:

And, to your point, though, we felt that we were in a good position to do it, like we had gotten to the point where our basic sales page into checkout page was working quite well and had good conversion rates and all of that. But it's like, okay, but could we make it even better by simply recognizing that we have multiple products? We have ways to reframe in such a way that we could maybe get more people just by offering the same thing but in a different way. So, you know, a lot of that stuff was just wanting to get the expertise of people who've done it before. And then I would say that the other thing that we saw as a good opportunity was just some level of accountability and consistency with, you know, a promotional email plan, because we were good, we're good at email, but we just weren't consistent enough. So you know, leveraging that was, we saw that as a good opportunity, so makes sense, cool.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and then take me through a few of your numbers. So I mentioned before you, you've got 80,000 YouTube subscribers, was that correct?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, around 82,000 as of today. I just checked.

Speaker 2:

Okay, cool, and is YouTube your main channel or you've got anything else that you're running?

Speaker 1:

Well, I think it's become our main channel. We had over 5 million views year to date so far on YouTube. So, yeah, it's probably our main channel, so that's good, but we also are on YouTube. So, yeah, it's probably our main channel, um, so that's good, uh, but we also are on Instagram. We have about 75,000 on Instagram. We definitely have a strategy there, uh, and that for a long time, instagram was our biggest um source of social media audience, but recently YouTube has passed that.

Speaker 1:

And then we also were on other things. You know, I think we're on Facebook and TikTok and Pinterest and LinkedIn, and they have varying levels of focus. You know, it's the kind of thing where it's very easy to think about all of it and do none of it. Well, and that was how we were for most of the time that we were doing it, and eventually we decided, okay, let's focus more on Instagram, because that's the one that has the highest followers, did that for a while, and then we focused on YouTube and that had the most outsized effect. So we've since then been, like, you know, probably most of our investment into content. Like I just put it another way, investment into content creation is the biggest single company-wide expense that we have because it has the biggest return. So, um, yeah, that's, uh, that's. What we focus on mostly these days is video content and you said there five million views on youtube year.

Speaker 2:

to date, as in from january 1st till today, you've had 5 million views. Okay, so how come the number of views on your channel is so much higher than the number of subscribers?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, to be honest, that's not an area that I know a lot about, like what. There should be subscribers to views. But I can say that we've had a few shorts go particularly viral, um, and we've had, uh, several. I mean, it's like we, you put out a few videos that do quite well, and sometimes they're videos to a wider audience, to kind of like. You know, they're not necessarily all about mandarin, maybe they're about language learning in general. So maybe somebody who goes okay, this obviously is a mandarin learning channel, I liked video, but I'm not going to subscribe because I'm not, I'm learning French or whatever. Uh, that might be the case. But in those cases that we do occasionally make a video like that, because if you get a video that makes, you know, I don't know, 2 million views or something, then even though maybe only a percentage of that was actual Mandarin learners, it's still a lot of people. So we will still do that occasionally, so maybe that, but that's just a pure hypothesis on my part.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha, and what's the size of your email list at the moment?

Speaker 1:

It's right around 18K. Because we cull it aggressively. We try to make sure that it's only people who have shown interest in our emails within, I think, 90 days is the absolute limit, but if I recall correctly, there's also even like a 30-day check of some kind. So the number of people who've signed up is significantly more than that. I think I could find that number somewhere, but active 18,000 at the moment.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha and give people some kind of idea of the scale of the business, whether that's a number of students, revenue, team size, whatever you're kind of comfortable sharing.

Speaker 1:

Sure, sure. Well, I can say that we have around 10,000 clients, people who've given us some kind of cash, even if that's just to buy our cheapest product. But when it comes to our core offering, it's probably more like around somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000. And that's for the blueprint, but many people in between. And then, yeah, I mean I'll just say this, our average monthly revenue, like, we set a goal this year of $2 million in revenue and we're on track. So a $2 million average monthly revenue would be $166K. So that's what I'll say about that.

Speaker 2:

Nice, all right, cool. So what's some of the stuff that, since you've started working with data-driven marketing, you've changed what's been effective for you?

Speaker 1:

Certainly the email promotions is no doubt effective, because just insisting on making sure that we keep thinking about our possible promotions that we could do twice a month, and thinking about it in the context of a single email know, a single email, a flash sale, a full promotion, you know all of these type of things, a product launch, whatever that might be and recognizing that, okay, we can actually. You know, obviously, every six months or so, we've gotten all of these new emails over that period of time. So we can then recycle these past promotions and just, you know, just don't send it to somebody who's gotten it before, or you send it if it's somebody who is gotten it before but didn't go for it, then maybe they go for it this time. So it's the kind of thing where recognizing you're building a system and that system can be iterated upon and recycled is, uh, has been really nice, and then, uh, furthermore, it made me get even more motivation.

Speaker 1:

So this dopaminergic motivation of building a new course, because you see how it fits not only into just obviously you sell a new course, it's great and whatever, but also once you have a new course, then that can become an order bump for this or it can become an upsell or a downsell for something else. Uh, you can do another email promotion, so you don't have to stretch yourself as much like like oh we did, we just did a promotion for this two months ago. Do we really want to do another one? Well, when you have enough products, that's never an issue. Um, and so that that has been great. I've really enjoyed that process, because I love building courses and knowing that it's actually going to lead to pretty quick results is, you know, fantastic.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that I see very, very often and I might be talking to you here, dear listener is that people only run an email promotion for anything two times. One is when they launch it, when they first build it, and then the second time is on black friday, I'm like, and apart from that that's it.

Speaker 2:

They're never sending any more email promotions. And one of the things that people worry about is oh, but what if I send out these emails about this course? And people have already seen the emails about it before, and so it's. It does work to do a different email promotion with a different angle. But one thing that you can do and you reference this in what you said is you can send out basically the same email promotion, again about the same email promotion about the same course, to your email list, and the reason for this is there's a whole bunch of people who weren't on the email list last time, so they didn't see it. They have no idea this exists. They know that's. They're completely new to it.

Speaker 2:

Then there's all the people who received the emails but didn't open them. And then there's the people who open the emails but didn't open them. And then there's the people who open the emails but they didn't really read them. And there's the ones who read them but they weren't paying that much attention and they don't remember them. Or there's the ones who opened them, read them, paid attention, clicked through to the sales page and had a good think about and decided not to buy, and most of them have forgotten. So you can just send out the number of people who are going to be like oh, I saw this email six months ago or a year ago or whatever, and I clicked through it and I'm just getting the same email again and they're just disgusted by it. It's a very small number of people. It's like if they get too upset, I wouldn't worry about those guys anyway. Exactly.

Speaker 1:

I've had that thought so many times. Who's the person who really gets that upset that we dared tell people who are new about our product and they were also included in that for a second time. It's like they're just wrong, they don't know that so many of the people receiving this email didn't receive it the first time, and all the other points that you made, and so I don't really I'm not affected by that person, because it's like if you're really this offended by that, then like what an easy life you have, like that you can get to this level of upset. You know what I mean that a company sent you two emails. It's like, all right, that's cool, I'm happy for you. Your life is not that stressful.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, I remember having somebody come up to me once. I can't remember exactly what it's about, but they said, oh, aren't you stressed about this thing? And I was just like whatever it was, it was very small, was like man. If I got stressed about that kind of thing I'd be stressed all the time. It's like this is nothing. This is like a I can't even believe we're having this conversation kind of a thing. But people who are sending, who are selling courses, worry about this. They really do that. They're going to send out an email and somebody won't like receiving it and it's like.

Speaker 2:

You know, there's an unsubscribe button right you know they're allowed to you know, if they really don't like it, they can just hit that button, and they never hear from you again yeah, yeah, totally, and that is that is true.

Speaker 1:

I will say that it is possible to cross a barrier where it starts to become you start to become known for it, because we kind of followed a little bit more of a frank kern russell brunson framework before, where it was like email, email, email all the time, and I do think that it can start to become a bit desperate and people can smell it. And because the fact is, we were desperate at that time when we were doing that, which was a few years ago, you know, we we were like somebody buy the course because we need we was every month was like did we, are we in black, are we in the red? It was just that kind of thing that I think all of us who have gotten to any kind of success in entrepreneurship went through a period like this where there's just too much that you don't know and so you're just throwing stuff at the wall trying to make your business not fail. And I think that it did actually hurt our reputation for a little bit during that time. And I think that it did actually hurt our reputation for a little bit during that time.

Speaker 1:

I mean, obviously it's a little bit hard to know, because you're reading a Reddit post or something and you're like, who's this guy? Is this actually a legitimate complaint? But you could find it if you looked for it. You could find complaints about Mandarin Blueprints marketing and I was like, okay, and it made us think about it. And then we kind of went the other direction. We took the route of checking out tiny little businesses, which is Andre Chaperone's.

Speaker 2:

That's. Yeah, that's a bit too far the other way, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, right, but the thing is we learned a lot from that, though Like cause that was it was great learning experience, cause the Frank Kern, russell Brunson approach is much more like just volume right, like hit them with loads of offers all the time, constantly and lots of timers and lots of scarcity and all that. And tiny little businesses is much more like. Would you mind, please, if I could just possibly tell you about a thing I made, only if you want. You know, it's like, it's very like. You're like asking somebody every step of the date, like you know, may I hold your hand, may I dance with you, may I like it's like, it's everything, it's too. It's just too much. And so you come across a little bit. I don't know I loved it, I would. I prefer tiny little businesses to the Russell Brunson approach because, honestly, I think ClickFunnels 2.0 is a bad product and I think that they have. He's lost the plot a little bit because, um, you, know it's like you still have to have a good product, bro, like anyway.

Speaker 1:

But uh, that's so you know, my point just being that it we that balance of learning, the two kinds, the one where you're asking for every little bit of consent along the way. Well, that has an advantage, because it means that you can send the same email promos over and over, because you only sent it to the people who opted in before. So anybody who didn't opt in before definitely didn't see it. But going back to what you said earlier, most people didn't see it anyway, so you can still send it to your list. If you have a good active list culling process, then you know that anybody who's on your list is at least somewhat interested in Mandarin right now. So the tiny little business approach was too much to ask for consent just to send any kind of email promotion. It's like if you're on our list, we're assuming that you have. If you're on our list, we're assuming consent because it means that you have been active and opening our emails recently. So us telling you about a product we have it's not too crazy. And look, yeah, of course you can unsubscribe anytime, right? So yeah, I think that that's the happy medium between the two.

Speaker 1:

But just another comment on that sort of Russell Brunson, frank Kern thing. I really think that people need to make good products. I feel like it's so easy to forget that when you get so into the marketing of things. Like, you know, we were lucky in a sense because, you know, I mean it's kind of all luck in some sense, but we really cared about the product at the beginning. So we never felt bad about marketing techniques, so to speak, because it's like, well, if the ultimate, if ultimately the technique that we use gets you to buy, and then you're satisfied and you reach your dream aspiration of being fluent and literate in Mandarin, then great, it wasn't like it was snake oil salesmanship, right. But then if you don't focus as much on the product and you're just like trying you put out a mediocre product, but you have great sales. Like I don't know, I kind of have a problem with that or product, but you have great sales.

Speaker 1:

Like I don't know, I kind of have a problem with that. It's like you know, you're not, you're pointing people, you're using these psychological techniques to, you know, manipulate people into an average thing. And it's like, no, no, make sure your product is excellent, right. It's like if your product's excellent, which means it solves people's problem, it reduces their suffering. Right, then you deserve the compensation for it because you've done a good thing, and so then you'll be fine with like whatever you know, like, for example, I have a perfect thing that illustrates this, which is that we used to have a much too complicated sales page copy because we felt like, hey, we've got a new concept of a product. Like our whole product is. It's like it's patent pending the order we have. It's kind of it's a lot, there's a lot of moving parts, and if you're experiencing it, you figure it out slowly over time and it makes sense. But we felt like we had to explain everything to justify the fact that we were asking for premium product pricing.

Speaker 1:

And then we read the book Story Brand by Donald Miller and he made the point. He's like people do not make a decision at a six of knowledge. Like you're the owner of the business, you have 10 knowledge, 10 out of 10 knowledge of what the product is, but you recognize that nobody is as good as you so or understands as much about it as you do. So you lower it to a six on your sales page. He's like but nobody makes a decision at that level, they're making the decision at a one or a two.

Speaker 1:

You have to make your sales page copy much more story-based, like, okay, you're on a hero's journey, I'm your Gandalf, you're my Frodo, and I'm going to show you how I'm going to walk you down the path that ends in you having your aspirational identity. And I don't feel bad about having broad strokes that just show you how I'm going to help you achieve your hero's journey, because I know that the product at the end is legit and it is actually going to work. So, even though I'm not explaining everything and I'm not showing you like look, I did showing my work, teacher, you know, like I did all of it, it's like you'll find out and you will not be disappointed. So let me make this more of a tale of the thing you're going to come, you're going to go through. So I hope that that makes sense. But I think that it's been very easy for people to, because of sales training and digital marketing training, forget that it's still make an excellent product, please. You know, like everybody.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, yeah, and I think what's really nice about both about the course space for one, but about the particular kind of people that we work with is that they nearly all are content and course creators first, and marketers a very distant second, and they tend to be people who are really obsessed with how do we make something really good like yourself, right. How do we make something really good, how do we make great content? How do we really help a lot of people for free with the great content? And then, oh, maybe I should start to think about how do I actually make sales of it? So we get to help people to go right now, let's actually implement some of these marketing tactics that will help you to make some more sales, and there's no danger of going into the snake oil side of things, because they've got something really solid that sits behind it.

Speaker 2:

I wanted to go back, though, to something you'd said there about, um, what you? How much you'd learned with andre chaperon stuff. So the, for anybody who doesn't know it, the email marketing program that andre chaperon sells is called auto responder madness, and it's excellent, and it has a lot of really good things in there, some of which russell bronson has then taken and put into his system which he's teaching, so, for example, soap opera sequences. I think it's a lot of what andre chaperon's doing is slightly overly complicated. It's kind of his own interesting system that he, like, has built in his way, but a lot of the principles in there I think are fantastic, and so we've stopped.

Speaker 2:

We've taken a lot of stuff from there as well in terms of, like, soap opera sequences, for example, you know, and some of the stuff in our customer avatar process is based around, uh, what we learned from from ondwesh f1. So we'd gone through, when I'd started doing this, we'd gone through every single course that we could lay our hands on and just been like, right, what? And then we tested everything. This was I don't know if you know this actually what we've done for the first two years of running this business is we'd taken every single course and we tested it on a different, on different clients, and we'd seen which bits worked, which bits didn't work. And most of them work to an extent right but, secondly, what percentage of people did they work for?

Speaker 2:

and then, thirdly, how long did it take to do? And then we cut out everything. We did a really, really brutal 80 20 analysis of it and just cut out all the stuff that did either sometimes didn't work or didn't work for um, it wasn't quick enough, wasn't quick enough to implement, and that's what. That's how we've got down to all the stuff that we now. We now teach and we take people through and what's covered on this podcast. So, for example, webinars work fantastically well, but they don't work for everybody, because not everybody is comfortable with doing that live, the live presentations that you kind of need to do in order to get to the point of getting the hang of doing it so that you can automate it.

Speaker 2:

There are people in our audience of video creators, so that does work well for doing a webinar, but they're not willing to then do it live. That makes them uncomfortable. They don't like it. Whatever, they don't want to pitch at the end of it as well. So that's another really bad sticking point, because that's really essential as part of the webinar. Whereas writing an email promotion or us writing an email promotion for them and do it send to a sales page. That kind of works for everybody and everyone's kind of emotionally okay with it. So that's like a part of it. So we're now starting to add back in. Well, let's get the people who are willing to to do webinars, because you can sell a more expensive program and you can, and they convert brilliantly. I think webinars are absolutely fantastic, but just not everyone's really comfortable with it, you know absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I was just thinking about that recently because so much of, for example, we like to get people to give testimonials and even when they're giving testimonials in english, the occasional person who does tries to do a video when they're not really used to it. It's like that whole like what do I do with my hands?

Speaker 1:

thing, like it's like they're just not used to being on video and um, it's, and that's perfectly fine, um, but then you go well, hey, let's get some testimonials in chinese. And it's like boy, do you really stick into people's all of their fears when you do that? Because you're like, you're like, oh, um, let's practice in your second language, which you know you're still learning even if you're two years in, and you're fluent and you are comfortable with your Chinese friends. Then to go on camera and like talk about, like, what you think about an online course that you watched, it's just, it's a big ask. It's like it's people are already not very comfortable in front of the camera.

Speaker 1:

So, you know, similarly, with a webinar thing, luke and I were just lucky in a sense, because, while Luke and I are very different in our skill sets otherwise it would make no sense for us to be business partners it's like, why would you be business partners with somebody who's exactly the same as you? But you know, it's like then just go into business for yourself, right? But one thing we do share is that both of us are just fine with telling people what we've learned and sharing it right. So that's made a big difference and so, yeah, we do webinars, but I do get that. If you weren't into that, that could be a real sticking point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure it is. It really is. So just going back a couple of steps in the loops that we've opened here, one of the things we talked about was that the email promotions is something that had worked really well for you, and you'd said earlier in the conversation that one of the things was you were quite good at doing them but you weren't doing them consistently. So what is it that's kind of helped there in working with the team to actually make that work better? Is it that you've got email promotions that are converting better, or is it that you're doing them more consistently, or both or anything else in there?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, as for whether or not they're converting better, I'm sure that they are, although I would have to check the numbers on that.

Speaker 1:

But mostly it had to do with the fact that it was like you know, we would occasionally realize like, oh boy, we've kind of been had a few couple of weeks of pretty slow sales. Let's run an email promo, right, and we were adept at it, we could do it very quickly, we could put it together quite, quite fast, but it wasn't a habit, right. It's like now it's just a part of the SOP of the company. It's like at the beginning of the quarter we plan it all out and then we set up due dates and everybody knows when their stuff is supposed to be handed in, and it's just a natural part of the process. And obviously it sets up a framework then to expand, like OK, do we then add in some paid ads related to it? Do we add in a social media post here or there, like what you know, should we change the strategy on that? And so it's the structure, and then also just the breakdown of the um, the value ladder.

Speaker 1:

I hate that term, but like yeah, just sort of understanding, like uh but just understanding what are our different offers and, uh, what have we used before? How could we come up with an interesting experimental offer where we bundle things together or whatever? Just having that type of thinking was very helpful, because then you suddenly realize, oh, there's so many options here, there's a million things we could do. And then it's less intimidating because and more exciting, because you're like, ooh, we'll put together the speaking bundle for the first time, because we just released this course last quarter and we've never put that together with these two courses. That could be great.

Speaker 1:

So that type of thing happens. And then it gets you more excited and you're more interested in the metrics and, of course, then afterwards looking through it and going, okay, how did it go? And knowing that the good metrics are there has definitely been a big, because we were like many companies, our kpis were a bit of a mess for a long time and you know it's still an ongoing process. It's never you're never like, okay, they're sorted forever, but it's, um, it's, we're much more on top of what's happening now, uh, so, yeah, that was a big part of it too nice.

Speaker 2:

That's really fun. It's like something that we're going through at the moment. We have decided we're going to start actually selling our own courses, which is we've got a course as part of our what we had as the group coaching program and you've got access to that. But we haven't actually really sold that separately and we certainly haven't broken it up into different pieces. So we went through the process of the day of actually doing.

Speaker 2:

I got Martina to do an audit of our business, so I got to kind of go through and be in the in the customer seat while she was doing the um, asking us all the audit questions. And we've got the second audit workshop in a couple of weeks to kind of go through here her recommendations, and one of the steps was write out what's all of the offers that you've possibly got, what's all the things that you can sell. And when you really start going through and brainstorming it, it's a lot of things and you're like, oh, how is that? How is there so many different bits and there's different ways of packaging them. Even you could bundle bits together on top of that, you know.

Speaker 1:

So it's fascinating yeah, yeah, and sometimes you just need somebody to break your frame right, like so we had forever. We sold pronunciation mastery, an eight hour course all about Mandarin pronunciation, as a part of the blueprint. And the blueprint is more. It's like character components into characters, into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, into stories. It's like it just builds from the bottom up and you get from knowing nothing about Chinese to knowing 3000 plus characters and 11,000 plus words. You can use them all in context. But uh, we went, but you got to know how to pronounce things first. So you must have pronunciation mastery.

Speaker 1:

But we had also built a YouTube video. I think it might be our YouTube long form video with the most views. That's a one hour encapsulation of pronunciation mastery. And so, like one day it just occurred to me, it was like, wait a second, we could just tell people that if you don't want pronunciation mastery, you can watch this one hour video and that'll give you at least an overview. And so then we can sell pronunciation mastery separately for people who want to take it further. And it's like just we'd never even thought of that, because it was like, of course pronunciation mastery has to be included, but in some sense it's a completely different course. It's focused on one thing individually and so it can totally be sold separately. And so it was funny how we needed an outside view to like make us analyze. Then we went oh yeah, duh, you can totally sell this, you know yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, you can totally sell this, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm totally finding that because it's like, even though I teach this stuff, it's still hard to do it for yourself. It's hard to see what's it, what's that expression? You can't read the label from inside the bottle oh right, yeah, yeah, you can't see your eyes.

Speaker 1:

You can't, yeah, you can't see your eyes.

Speaker 2:

You can't bite your teeth. Yeah, you can't see it yourself, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Now, if someone's listening to this and they are at a stage where you were maybe a few years ago, you know they've got a few thousand people on their email list and they've got a couple of courses that they are proud of, they're pleased with, but they're not making that much money from it. What's any advice that you would have for them about mindset or what they need to be? You know how they need to be sticking with it, like what is what's the thing that you would say to your previous self?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, this is a tough question because everybody's business is slightly different and I, you know, I don't want to give any uh frameworks that you know lead people down a wrong path. However, I will say, and I also want to point out, that I do appreciate when people do this, like Ollie Richards is two or three years ahead of us, right, he's in a language, he did a language learning thing, uh, and he's taken it to eight figures. You know we're at like seven figures. When he talks about what he was doing two or three years ago, I'm like, yeah, that's what we're doing right now, right. So it's like I do appreciate when people do that.

Speaker 1:

Here's what I would say the main thing is to again first remember why you're in this. Uh, start doing profit first accounting. That's one thing that is like that's a, that's a practical thing. I'm not going to go into it too much, but let me just tell you, when we started doing profit first accounting, the motivation to have a good month went way up. So that's just a practical thing. But more mindset based Uh, if you're not at seven figures yet, then make sure that your one sales funnel with your one product is rock solid, like, just keep iterating on it, don't try to make a million other things because you're going to overstretch yourself and not have the resources to be able to fund all of it Right? So it's like that would be my primary suggestion, and that's a general suggestion. It may not apply to everyone in some certain circumstances, but I do think that if you focus on making the one uh funnel to product process smooth until you can get and that should get you to seven figures If you get the pricing right and you get the number like, it's like that should be enough to get you to that point and then start thinking about iterations, more products, uh, more ways to do uh, upsells, downsells, order bumps, all the stuff that we've learned from you guys.

Speaker 1:

You know like sure, but I think it's very easy to fall victim to shiny object object syndrome. It's like, oh, there's this new idea that could, because it'll this will make me so much money immediately. And it's like most of the time it's not true, most the time it's like a huge investment of time and energy and attention. And you know, if you've got something that is partially working right but it needs to be optimized, optimize the hell out of it, right, and then get it to the point where you're like okay, I'm really sure that this is the best way that this can work. I mean, and again, okay, I'm really sure that this is the best way that this can work. I mean, and again, I say that with all humility, recognizing that it's not always the case for every situation, but I think that in many cases it applies Nice, Great Well.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much for coming on today. Phil, Really appreciate your time and I think the audience definitely do as well. If people want to go either to learn Mandarin or just to kind of check out what you're doing and maybe have a look at how your funnels are working, where can they go?

Speaker 1:

Well, we're Mandarin Blueprint on YouTube and mandarinblueprintcom is our website.

Speaker 2:

So check it out Very simple nice mandarinblueprintcom and mandarinblueprint on YouTube and we'll link those up in the description as well. So I said at the beginning um, if you uh rate the podcast, then we're gonna be super appreciative. One of the things that we're starting to do is to actually read out those reviews to show that we are paying attention and that we're listening, and so that you can kind of hear what others are thinking as well. And here's a bit from one review we got recently says what sets this podcast apart is its focus on practical wisdom delivered by experts who've actually walked the walk. So thank you very much for that review.

Speaker 2:

If you found this interview useful, please give us a review wherever it is that you listened, and come join the Advanced Course Creators Group on Facebook. This has not been massively active for a little while, but we are starting it back up again. So come join the Advanced Course Creators group on Facebook. You're going to get early access for future interviews and you're going to get support with growing your online course sales. So thanks again so much, and thanks again, phil, for coming on.

Speaker 1:

It's a pleasure.