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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
Brennan Dunn’s Tips for Launching a Course in 2024
Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Ever wondered how to successfully launch an online course?
Curious about how top creators grow their email lists and market their courses effectively?
In this interview with Brennan Dunn, an experienced online course creator and the founder of Right Message, we talk about the secrets to his successful launches.
Brennan talks about his journey from making his first course to building a powerful tool that helps personalize marketing. We also dive into practical strategies for growing your email list, including a simple guide that helped one client go from 60 to 2,700 leads per month!
Brennan shares his tips on how to market your courses effectively, the power of personalization, and why live workshops can make a big difference.
Whether you're new to online courses or looking to improve your strategy, this video is full of easy-to-follow advice that can help you grow your online course business.
Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My guest today is Brennan Dunn. Now, brennan has been creating courses for more than a decade, mostly on freelancing and working online, and he's also the creator of WriteMessage, which is a tool that creators can use to personalize their marketing in order to improve their conversions. And today we are going to be talking about how to create courses, how to market them, how to build your email list, and, before we get into that, I want to talk to you about how to grow your email list. So we have created a guide on how to double your email list.
Speaker 1:We had a client we've been working with in the last few days, just got an update from the team. They're 45 times the number of leads he gets per month. So he was getting like 60 in a month and now he's getting about 2700 leads per month just by making the changes that are laid out in exactly this guy is going to tell you exactly what to do, step by step screenshots showing you exactly what you need to have in place. Not everybody's going to get 45 times, but everybody's going to get double the number of leads, and that includes you. So if you want to get hold of that, go to datadrivenmarketingco. Slash double and download the guide. Brennan, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me, john. Yeah, all right, so take us back and talk us through. You've been doing this for a long time in terms of creating courses and I know you've got the the sass now as well and using courses to kind of market that. But take us back to the beginning. How did you create your first course?
Speaker 2:okay, so my very first course came about. At the time it was 2011 I had my first software business called plan scope, which is a project management tool, and to grow the business, I did a lot of blogging, because at the time, that's what you did. It wasn't really about newsletters, it was about blogs. So I wrote a lot about my experience having built an agency and freelancing and getting clients and how to price and everything else and how I went about really selling my first I'll call it info product, because that's kind of what we called it, you know in the day was through a bet.
Speaker 2:So I at the time I was living in America and my friend Amy Hoy I'm not sure if you know her, she's one of the she actually created the one of the first cohort based courses, starting, I think, in 2009. So I was a member of that. I was a customer of that course and I got to know Amy through you know the course and everything else. And there was a conference I wanted to go to in Ireland that my friend Paul ran and at the time PlanScope was doing okay but it wasn't doing great and I didn't really want to, you know, to justify flying across the Atlantic and going to this expensive conference and everything. It was tricky when it came to like cash flow. So she made a bet with me. She said well, you've built up this email list of people who you're trying to sell them on PlanScope. They've read your content. They like your blog posts.
Speaker 2:At the time I was doing weekly emails. I didn't call it a newsletter, I just emailed that list every week in MailChimp and the bet she made was why don't you write some definitive guide thing? Call it an ebook. Use a tool like eJunkie, which was state of the art at the time, which is a horrible tool, but that's okay. Sign up for a PayPal account. Get people to pay you money to pre-order this upcoming in-depth resource on how to price yourself as a freelancer. Raise some money and then use that to come to the conference.
Speaker 2:That's what I did. So in 2011, I launched a at the time, a book called Double your Freelancing Rate, and that's evolved in the last 13 years into a full-fledged course, but it started out as a e-book that was really just a PDF file that I sold in a zip file, and, yeah, I mean so that was kind of the beginning of it. It was that bet that led to me thinking, even though my background is in software engineering, what if, instead of selling an app to people, I sell what's in my head to people, and maybe they'll be receptive and it worked. Did you fly to ireland then? Yeah, I went to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a great event met derek sivers there um, yeah I got a great photo of me and him on the uh, what do you call it? Not the marsh, but the whatever of uh, the heath or whatever it is of uh, of inishmore. So the conference is off off a call way on an island called inishmore, um, and yeah, got to know derek, got to know, um, a lot of great people who to this day I still consider friends. I'm glad I took Amy up on that bet.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that was really the start of it, and from there I did a cohort-based course in 2012. That was a two-day workshop-y thing on building a consultancy and that led to my first real big video course called W Freelancing Clients. And yeah, I mean this all kind of was real big video course called W freelancing clients. And yeah, I mean this all kind of was, um, at the time again, there really wasn't a lot of precedent. There was, on the IM side of things, which I wasn't really, or internet marketing side of things, which I was never really, that you know deep into like the uh, you know, frank Kern kind of stuff, or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Um, but I just thought, well, well, I was building this email list and they wanted more help with, like, building an agency or learning how to get clients and generate leads or whatever. And, yeah, I just started thinking, okay, well, I have a history in doing this.
Speaker 2:I now have the advantage of an audience of people that I could talk to kind of at scale and get their input and then compile it all into a resource. And that's kind of how the brand that is today, w Freelancing came to be. And W Freelancing was an extraction out of the my first product, which is W Freelancing Rate. I thought, well, maybe I'll have W Freelancing X, w Freelancing Rate, w Freelancing Clients. I thought, well, maybe I'll have W Freelancing X, w Freelancing Rate, w Freelancing Clients, w Freelancing, whatever. And that's how that brand came to be.
Speaker 2:And I actually ended up selling the software company. That was the original thing that developed that first product, right. So I had PlanScope, which is my tool, yeah, and I was hoping I'd build an email list and sell them on the tool, but they kept buying the info, the training I was building, and eventually I got to this point where that was making a lot more money than the software company. So I actually found a broker and sold off the software company, except for the blog and except for the audience, nice.
Speaker 1:You had some great courses, though I took the one you did about roadmapping.
Speaker 2:Yes, Mastering Project Roadmaps.
Speaker 1:Absolutely fantastic. We took that and we're like great, we applied it straight away. Yep, set up a roadmap as the first thing. I've raved to so many people about that since as an approach to take, um, and we still sell uh road map as like our first right, first step and for the agency side of things, it's it's just like makes it so easy for people to buy. At the end of you know what it is you actually need to do for them, instead of just like writing a proposal based on one conversation and it's a mess and it never works out.
Speaker 2:And it's such a big leap to go from like no relationship to past. A ton of money and commit a lot of time. Yeah, nice little kind of taster. Yeah, first product yeah.
Speaker 1:So how does that compare with the way that you're making courses now, because you've got this great tool, rightmessage, and you're using courses as a way to market that. So, first of all, can you talk us through, like, how do you make courses differently to the way you used to be doing it?
Speaker 2:So yeah, let me talk about the technical differences Talk about that along with the business differences differences, if we want to call that so in terms of technicals I mean the really as I started making more money with the courses and also as I uh, as the landscape has improved. Um, remember my earlier products were largely text-based. I kind of. I don't know if you know Ryan Delk. He used to work at Gumroad in their early days and I remember the advice I got from him was basically, if you take your ebook and call it a course, you can add another figure to it in terms of the price right.
Speaker 1:So you can.
Speaker 2:Instead of selling it for 50, it's now 500, even though it's the same content. But obviously, if you just deconstruct a PDF file and then put it on a course or a platform, it's really just me, um, either reading off a script that's on a teleprompter or, uh, instead the way I prefer it now, which is, um, thinking through okay, I want to cover, you know, xyz or xyz and uh I'm trying to be British here.
Speaker 1:Trying to be British. I've lived here four years. I.
Speaker 2:British. I've lived here four years. I'm attempting it, yeah, so, where I try to just remember what I'm going to say and then do it. Yeah, and that's kind of how I prefer it, because I've always found with me I've never been able to make teleprompters work naturally for me. Okay, right, so if I'm reading off a script, it's going to sound like me reading off a script. Downside is I tend to ramble, so like I've had to really get good at the whole. I want to. In the next minute I'm going to cover this thing, this one thing, and I'm not going to deviate.
Speaker 2:What actually got me to do that well was this must have been. It was back in 2015. I was creating a course called W Freelancing Clients and one of my customers knew I was doing it right. So at the time he knew I was wanting to create a video course because I told my list I'm going to be creating a video course on getting clients and I was talking to local people who could offer, you know, filming and editing right, and they were all full-time employees saying, yeah, I can just do this on the side. It'll cost you, you know, twenty dollars an hour or whatever for it. And then this.
Speaker 2:This guy, david, who was on my list, emailed me saying I know you're talking, probably, to people who will talk about filming it and talk about editing it. I can do that stuff, but I can also direct it for you. I can come in, you know, I'll be behind the camera and if you're going on a tangent, I'll stop you If you're, you know, confusing, if what you're saying is confusing, I will stop you and I'll say this doesn't make sense. Let's, you know, redo it and rethink it. And he basically made the argument of you know, I could just get somebody just to do the raw recording and do the editing work, which is, frankly, commoditized, right, or he would come in and kind of direct the whole thing.
Speaker 2:So I ended up hiring him and that was really, I think, a big turning point for me because I, instead of me just thinking I'm just going to say stuff and hope people like it, instead he was very much like he's the proverbial student helping me, you know, do this right. So that was a big inflection point back in 2015 for me. But the way it's kind of evolved since then is a lot of what I do nowadays is I teach everything. Live a bunch of times first, so if I'm going to do a new?
Speaker 2:um, I just did a course on segmentation. Instead of just thinking I know what people need and I'm going to go into my cave and like record it right, um, because I do practically work in a cave, um, dark room with like dark blue walls and it's a bit of a quarter um. Instead, what I like to do now is just do the the it again and again a few times. So, like I've done the workshop version of what's now a video course a bunch of times. I've done it a lot individually with my consulting agency, like for clients, like explaining it again and again to our clients and telling them about, you know, the benefits of segmentation and kind of hearing their potential objections and so on and so forth. Segmentation and kind of hearing their potential objections and so on and so forth. I found for me that to be kind of the ultimate way to produce a good course is doing that right, right. So, like with the new course I did, it was really just I could have taught it in my sleep.
Speaker 2:I like to think because, I've said the same thing so many times. You know I hate saying it, but the people who got that first version of the workshop got a much worse product than the people who got the last live workshop, because eventually, you know you figure out examples that resonate well and you know you refine things Right. So that's the big thing for me is, I think early on I just thought I'm going to create what's. I'm going to take what's in my head, package it and hope people like it. Going to take what's in my head, package it and hope people like it, whereas now it's more. I'm going to do the thing as a dialogue a bunch of times and then turn it into a monologue. You know, a video course when, when and only when, I know what needs to be stated and what needs to be taught I love that approach.
Speaker 1:That's the approach that we've taken with the courses that we're selling as well, because I'm like, how do I know for definite what it is that's actually going to be the place where someone gets stuck or where they get confused, or what they're not going to understand properly? I know the stuff, but I know it from the point of view of unconscious competence, yes, and it's very hard to then translate that into something for somebody else who has unconscious incompetence, and so you've got to help them understand. Sometimes, oh, I didn't even realize that, you didn't know that. Oh, wow, okay, right, we've got to help you from that stage up to the next stage of like, no understanding what it is you don't know, and then trying to explain it clearly. And then you've got to learn right, how do I explain that? Sometimes visually, sometimes logically, sometimes, you know, auditory manner, like what am I doing to kind of reach different learners? And we've got a great lady that we work with, mariana Pena, who helps us to like, package up the like how do you actually take everything that you know and package it up into the right kind of structure? Okay, interesting, so that, so that you've then got a series of five minute right.
Speaker 1:Record this video. This video, this create this resource. Give this information.
Speaker 2:Kind of like an instructional designer. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:She's worked with a bunch of our clients. We work with her, but I do absolutely love starting out with teach it live, and the other thing you can do when you teach it live is you can charge way more for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you get paid a bunch of money, you get a better product too, because they can ask, they can ask, they can talk back to you and ask you questions, whereas with a video course you can't ask it questions. Yeah, maybe there's a community, but yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing. Like, I always charge, yeah, we charge a premium for, if you think of it on a spectrum, super expensive. But that's the ultimate form of you've got expertise, you've got a problem. You discuss how to apply expertise to your specific problem and then, as you get into more of a group setting, it becomes more of a shared curriculum kind of thing. Right, um, and yeah, but you still have the benefit of being able to say, raise the hand and say I'm confused about this, can you go deeper?
Speaker 2:and that's what I want, because I look at that as bug reports for my teaching, right, like if somebody's saying that that's what it is, it's a bug report, right? So then I, you know, try to make sure that the next time I do it that question doesn't come up. And then, and like we've been saying, that's a more premium thing for the student because they're there in person, it's live, it's synchronous. And then, finally, you have prefer, like I like, the idea of just saying you know, put me behind the curtain, like man behind the curtain, and let me just do my thing and build something and hope people love it and hope people pay for it, and I only want to hear from them if they can't log in or they need a refund or something like that. Right, like that's my natural state. But I've had to really fight that in order to make sure that the product being created is the right product, because I can technically create a course but it could be the wrong course, and I've done that a lot, especially early on.
Speaker 1:So once you've created that course and it's the right course and it teaches the right stuff how do you go about marketing it? You said you started out with an email list with the first group because you've been blogging. So what's the, what's the steps that you've been going through to market your courses?
Speaker 2:So my preferred way of doing this is I don't get too fancy too early. So, pretty much, starting with the first thing I did up until today, it all begins with kind of higher touch sales, if that makes sense. So, like, I'll mention in a newsletter or something like oh, I'm working on a new product, that's all about how to segment your email list. Right, it's still in the early days. I'm not quite sure what I want to make, you know, teach it and so on and so forth. And that's kind of how I would sell the workshops.
Speaker 2:So I get people to basically I close that call to action with, like, if you want to hear a bit more, I've got a rough Google Doc, I'm happy to share it with you. And then people would reply in that these are the warm leads or the hot I don't know the marketing term. But like people who have interest, right, like they've replied to that email, yeah, and then I'll um, I'll kind of um, go back and forth with them over email threads and, just, you know, talk about the thing. And that's how I I did a, a few workshops for the segmentation course that were live and I sold them all basically with like a Stripe purchase link that I'd give them after talking enough with them back and forth over email.
Speaker 1:What kind?
Speaker 2:of price point. Were you doing that at? I sold that for $600.
Speaker 1:$600. Okay, got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was just a one-day thing right at a co-working space type thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, in person, yeah, oh, okay. So there a working space type thing, um, oh, in person, yeah, oh, okay. So there were enough people that were close to you that were yeah, I did that twice.
Speaker 2:Interesting, okay, yeah and, but then I've done the online equivalent too, uh-huh. So um, I the in-person thing is going to sound weird, but we were going to america to visit my family and I wanted a way to justify the whole thing as a business trip.
Speaker 1:It's like coming to Ireland. Now you're going back again.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, yeah, so yeah, so I went there for work, even though I happen to see my family too.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So but yeah, generally speaking, a lot of the ones I've done before have always been virtual. So, whether it be with Google Hangouts back in the day or these days with Zoom, yeah yeah. Whether it be with Google Hangouts back in the day or these days with Zoom, yeah yeah, where it's basically just a small group type thing.
Speaker 1:Nice. So you're starting out with just, you're emailing to your list and you're saying if you're interested to find out about this thing that I'm developing. Let me know and I'll send you a Google Doc. And then you kind of go back and forth by email and then some people sign up for the 600 bucks, and forth by email, and then some people sign up for the 600 bucks, send them a stripe link.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean these tend to be like the uber customers, right? Yeah, people who are, I mean, generally speaking, they're existing customers and um, and yeah, so, so that's usually where it would start. But even with the launch itself like when I have the, the sales page ready and everything else um, I tend to always start with building up an interest list. So you build up that interest list, you promote it. I started promoting my segmentation the course is called Segment Surveys. I started promoting it four or five months in advance of it actually being ready and then, when people got on the list, I would keep the interest list warm. So I think a big mistake a lot of people make is they do some sort of like landing page to build up a list for a product and then it's radio silence until the product's ready and they're like, oh, that thing, you know it's ready.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of people are just like wait what?
Speaker 1:What was it again?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like they're scratching their heads trying to remember what it was. So I think like, um, and this is something I've done, this is something I recently worked with justin welsh on for his course launch and I really like the idea of like a behind the scenes kind of thing where you build up an interest list while the course is under active development you know, instead of waiting till the end and you are always kind of doing the whole building the open thing with that list like you're sharing.
Speaker 2:Oh, this week I recorded this stuff and then, um, even things like asking questions about pricing and packaging and just saying this is what I'm thinking like, I'm thinking three tiers, this is price, these are the price points, and just getting people to, uh, you know, either share that they think it sucks or, um, you know, get positive. It's just a great way, I think, to get people who are, first off, interested because they join the interest list, but also to get these kind of feedback loops where you can really find out in real time, like am I, is the offer that I'm developing, the thing these people want to hear?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, is the pricing in line with what they expect for the value that I'm positioning and stuff. So I'm a really big fan of kind of like getting people vested. You know, my goal when doing that is really, frankly, to sell without selling. I want, I want people to be make it so when it is ready to go, they don't even care about the sales page, they don't care about the sales emails. They at that point they're already bought into it. You know, that's the goal do you know?
Speaker 1:the book oversubscribed, donald bruce lee. So there's um, so he he does a lot of stuff in marketing and he wrote this book in order to try and explain to people the huge value of getting there to be more people interested in your thing than there is availability for the thing.
Speaker 1:Okay right and trying to get across and it's an interesting book because it's less practical than it seems like it is. So you read it and you're like, okay, but what exactly is do you say? What do I do? But the concept is totally right, like I'm totally convinced on the concept, which is, if you have tons and tons of people interested in your thing, like rolex have right then it's very easy for you when a watch becomes available, to sell the watch at a big premium right now and so. But there was one thing in the book that was like that is extremely practical and he said if you're running an event, don't wait till events about. So tickets are going to go on sale to sell the tickets. Right, tell everybody this is coming up, this is going to be a thing, and get everybody into a group where they can all see that everybody else is in there.
Speaker 1:So we did it with whatsapp, so I run a conference okay and so we invited people into this whatsapp group and said, in, we're going to tell you when the tickets are going to be available, and then did a lot of the stuff that you're talking about. So when we would go to try out different venues, we'd take photos of the venues so people could see. This is where we're looking. Maybe this, maybe this one. Oh, we're trying out the food. This has been really nice. We've chosen this because that's the tastiest food, for we found a spot for this evening. Evening drinks, what have you? Et cetera. You get them to be a part of it basically yeah, and they just feel like they get hyped up about it, right yeah.
Speaker 1:And then they say there's 100 tickets and there's 250 people in here and it's like by the time the tickets go on sale, people are like shaking the thing is you're making it their event.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean that's what I want people to think is that this is their course. It is a response to what they've shared with me. Right, and yeah, I think that's that's the way to do it, both practically to make as many sales as possible, but also to ensure that the people who do buy are, you know, huge fans of of of it and tell their friends and again, everything, everything just gets better when you do that. So, yeah, I don't. I am. I've been on the receiving end of so many brands that will announce an upcoming thing and then I will put in my email address. That takes all of two seconds to do and get on the list and maybe I get their newsletter or something, Right?
Speaker 1:But rarely do I get any sort of specific intentional build-up sequence for that thing. So yeah, I think that's one thing I do now and I think it works. I think it sounds great. I absolutely love that. I think that's so simple and straightforward because people know when they're making another course. It's like a private newsletter, right.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just basically like a one-off newsletter, If you're interested in this topic then sign up and we're going to tell you all about the fact that this thing is getting built and get their feedback and improve it. Yeah, exactly yeah, that's absolutely fantastic. I love that. Okay, so you do that. So, when we're on the topic of marketing, your course, so you do that. And then what in?
Speaker 2:terms of the actual launch itself. So one thing I didn't mention yet that I do is when people do join the interest list. So I tend to promote to the interest list, right, yeah, when they join it, I run a survey at them where I find out a bit about. What are you hoping this course will achieve for you? Give me a bit about, like, your context. So in my case it's what email platform you use. Have you done any segmentation before? What's your website built off of? If you do any segmentation currently, how are you doing it? Are you using Typeform or Tally or something like that? So I get this context, you know, and all that data is not aggregated. It's aggregated but, more more importantly, it's attached to their record in my convertkit account. Right, so I have, you know, john, as a subscriber. But I also know, use this, you, you want the course to achieve that, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:So what I do is when I go to launch, I don't just send the same launch emails to everyone. I I mean, I'm very big on personalization and so what I try to do is I try to think, okay, use ConvertKit, you have some experience with segmentation, and the experience you have is with Typeform, and your goal is you're not sure if the questions that you're currently asking are the right ones, right? So I have that profile about you. That's this persona I've developed about you. So what I'll do is, when I go to launch, I will leverage that to conditionally show different sentences or paragraphs of content so you know you might see a specific blurb. If your goal is better questions, it's going to talk about how the course will help ensure that you're asking the right questions, you get the right data, whereas if you're thinking more of a well, I've already got segmentation stuff in place, but I'm trying to figure out what to do with the data I have your goal is going to be different. Same product helps both of you, but how it's conveyed changes. So I do that both in the email sequence along with the sales page. So the emails you get, there will be dozens, frankly, of variations possible depending on what your goals are and who you are and everything else. And then, when you click through to the sales page because the email tends to lead people to a long-form sales page with a buy button, that context is carried over. So things like the headline will change and um, sub headlines will change and kind of the the benefits, uh, associated with the offer will change too, and that's something I spend a good amount of time on. It does add more time to the kind of launch process.
Speaker 2:But um like to go back to who I mentioned a second ago, justin welsh. Um, he did that with his recent launch and it and he did he a controlled A-B test because he's like this sounds OK, but is it actually going to be worthwhile? Right, like, what impact will it have For him? It added about $650,000 in new revenue to his launch, which was about a 38% increase in sales. So for him, being able to say you're a coach, you already have a business, here's how the creator MBA will help you. Here's my experience as a coach. Here's how you're going to love modules four, five and six, because they're all about how to scale an existing business.
Speaker 2:That person would get that communication, whereas somebody who is a course creator, who has not yet started, they're going to get stuff about how Justin empathizes with them as a course creator. The first time he created a course it was scary as hell. He didn't know what to teach. He didn't know all this stuff. That story was told and it recommended. You know you're going to love the sections on how to come up with a killer product idea that will definitely be bought and so on.
Speaker 2:So that's my big thing when it comes to launching or selling, really, whether it's a launch or just a normal kind of sales sequence. So I think the mistake people make is they take kind of this kind of shotgun approach of like I'm going to go and scream from the top of the mountain what I've got Right and hopefully enough people will take action, that it's a successful launch Right, and that's tends to be the way people do things. But my background before I got into the core stuff was I had an agency and I didn't sell agency services with a buy now button. It was me sitting at a table with a potential client and oh, they're in this industry. I'm going to name drop examples of clients we've had in that industry.
Speaker 2:Oh they, um, they're technical. I'm going to talk more technical with them than maybe a MBA who is non-technical or something like that. So we all do this. Naturally, I think, depending on who we're speaking with, we adjust what we say to make our offer more compelling. So I would rather spend a bit more time making it so I can have more signal, less noise when I do my launches, so that the communication being sent directly applies to the recipient. So you know somebody who's already pretty far further along down the road. They don't need if they see a bunch of social proof from like oh, brendan's course helped me, you know, quit my day job and start a new thing.
Speaker 2:It's like I'm already full time on my thing, like I'm, I'm now doubting that this thing can actually help me, if it can help someone like that and where I got this from. Initially it sounds crazy, but I mentioned that PlanScope app, that I had the project management tool from way back when I did like sales calls for that to try to get people to buy it. And I remember once speaking with an agency and all the language on the homepage at the time was, like you know, use this for your freelancing clients. And I had like a little testimonial from like a freelancer or something front and center. And there was actually two plans freelancer and agency. Those are the two plans.
Speaker 2:And the agency I spoke with said anything that freelancers could use there's no way it'll work for us, right, like we're an agency where we're big, where we're not, you know a little freelancer at a cafe who's doing client work. We've got an office. But me at the time I was just like it's the same, it's task management. Like you just have more users than this person. They have one user you have, however many are on your team. But it really struck home, I think at the time that like they needed, they didn't, they needed to see agency stuff to show that this is the right product for them. Cause in an ideal world we'd all buy bespoke stuff. We'd buy, like you know, the the thing made just for us. That's why people hire consultants, because it's like, yeah, I could buy a CRM off the shelf, but I'm going to pay this expensive agent web development.
Speaker 2:Just make it so the messaging around your offer is more specific to the individual needs and identities of the person you're speaking with. They're more likely to take action because it's a lower risk offering for them. It's like you get them. You, oh, I'm speaking agency to the agency whereas I'm speaking freelancer to the freelancer. Speaking agency to the agency whereas I'm speaking freelancer to the freelancer. So I just try to like, do all of that. I guess when? When doing any sort of promotion, or not even just promotion, just selling anything online and what?
Speaker 1:have you seen in terms of you mentioned with justin here the 38 increase? What kind of range have you seen in terms of the effectiveness of doing?
Speaker 2:so um it usually so funny enough just last week.
Speaker 2:Do you know tiago forte of um forte labs and yeah, second brain so he just rolled this out a lot of what I'm talking about with his um on his email list. So what he does now is you join, uh, his email list. He asks you about do you do note taking and, if so, do you use notion? Do you do note taking and, if so, do you use Notion? Do you use Apple Notes? Like you know which of these do you use? Are you on a team? Are you a creator? All this stuff.
Speaker 2:What he's doing now is you do that. You get on his email list, you get a personalized welcome series and you go down one of three different tracks, depending on how you fit Right, and these tracks culminate with a pitch for one of his courses. So he has three main things he's offering and the data we just got last week is showing that, against the control so the default you know the non, the A-B tested default series of welcome emails that he's always had it's getting 62 percent more sales and that's weekly. So every week now his business is generating 62% more revenue, so he's quite happy with that. So usually I mean, the biggest we've had in terms of success was Pat Flynn Smart Passive Income.
Speaker 2:They had something like 200, I don't exactly remember it was like 238 percent more revenue for their black friday sale yeah, because what they did is, instead of saying we have tons of products available, they'd said we think, based on what you shared, you need our podcasting course and here's why we also have this other stuff. But if you only buy one thing, buy this. So they kind of used it as a recommendation engine kind of like, where you get the inputs of what size is their business? Do they do podcasting? Do they have an email list? Do they do affiliate marketing? And then, given that we have a portfolio of products, which one should this person buy if they buy one thing from us?
Speaker 2:So that's an example I think of. It's not what I was just describing with, like personalizing an individual offer or an individual product, but using these inputs is a way to recommend, um, and I think that's a. That's a big thing that I think, especially as creators get more products. So it's fine if you have one course, but let's say you have six, like I think it a lot of people you know there's that whole choice paralysis, thing of like. Given six things, six different pathways you could go down, six different doors you could open. Sometimes it's easier just to freeze up and and turn around instead of making a choice yeah, I used to work in sales.
Speaker 1:how did you actually build the email list? Because the email list is obviously a crucial part of the marketing there. But how did you build that email list for marketing it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have two different brands, right, well, three. The old one is W Freelancing. With that, I want to say I stumbled into it with the growth side. So at the time I just wrote a lot of long form blog posts. Google rewarded me for this post with traffic and what I was doing was people would come to an article and so that Google, how do I get a client? They'd find an article that I wrote and then they called action on that would be an email course, a five day email crash course on freelancing.
Speaker 2:So people generally would go to articles. They would opt into the email course. They get on. They get the five days of emails on freelancing. So people generally would go to articles. They would opt into the email course. They'd get the five days of emails. They'd then be on the newsletter and that's how I got the leads, if you will, for all those products. With the courses I do nowadays, which are on marketing and sales. That's under an umbrella called Create and Sell, marketing and sales. That's under an umbrella called create and sell. I haven't figured out the seo side of things for that okay and I've heard from again.
Speaker 2:I'm not an seo or search expert, but I've heard from friends like oh, with ai it's gonna be harder for, like you know, people aren't gonna be googling for like articles as much as they will just asking chat gpt for an answer to their question right like how do I get a client um? So with that, it's largely been through social okay so, historically for me, it's always been twitter.
Speaker 2:Um, these days, though, it's becoming a lot more political. Uh, I find, as a user, um, so I'm actually shifting more towards LinkedIn, which is a bit of a struggle for me because I've always hated LinkedIn. As a user, I've never made it a habit to use and, yeah, so I'm now needing to get comfortable with it, but it is showing. It is pretty promising. So what I'm doing now is I'm trying to get a lot more consistent now on LinkedIn and I'm linking people to my email course, which gets them onto the list, and that's kind of the lead magnet that I primarily use. It's a seven-day email course, this time on personalized marketing, gotcha, get them in the door, and really I have a few different things.
Speaker 2:So I mentioned RightMessage, which is kind of my main focus. That's my software company these days, and the courses that I'm creating nowadays, like Segment with Surveys. The job of them are really to get people prepared for RightMessage. So we've done a lot of. I don't know if you know, do you know the concept of jobs to be done in interviews? Okay, so we hired my friend, claire Sullentrop, who runs a agency called Forget the Funnel, and what they do is they do outsourced jobs to be done right.
Speaker 2:So she went and talked to like a dozen or two a dozen and a, I want to say, of my customers and just dug into you know, why did you buy? What struggle led you to, you know, be interested in what he has to offer and so on and so forth. And she kind of reduce down my customer base into two sets. The first set are people who are tend to be self-identified creators, and they do. They use email marketing to sell stuff. They tend to do kind of simplistic email marketing, so it's like broadcasts only and maybe they'll have like an automation for like a email course or like a welcome series, but it tends to be pretty, you know, normal email marketing to sell courses or digital products or whatever else, and they classified these as type a people.
Speaker 2:Type a people they found um, they come in, they drink the kool-aid and six months down the road they're like I am completely bought into what this guy's talking about. With personalization, I can see this amplifying my sales. So now I'm gonna invest in a course or I'm gonna go straight to right message, or they're gonna buy a course and then with the courses I offer uh credits for right message. So people buy a course and it's like oh, part of the course is you get 300 off right message. So then they buy right, like that's my funnel, if you will, but that's a longer game right, whereas the other, the type B type of customer that they found, are people who have, who know this stuff. They tend to be like professional marketers and they're just looking for software that accomplishes it.
Speaker 2:So I kind of look at my courses as being the thing to intercept people who, where they are today, which is like they know the power of email marketing. I don't need to convince them of that, but they don't necessarily know that personalization is the thing that they should be on their radar. So I'd rather get them now, which is what I do deliver a ton of stuff about like, examples like I was giving a second ago of like justin tiago, pat flynn, people like that of like before and afters, along with tactics and ways that they can use the tools they already pay for to do this stuff and then, over time, convince them that, hey, if you really want to go deep into this and really you know, bring it up to 11. The next step is is right message so I use the tools or the, the software, not the software, the courses as the primary means to have the first sale, if you will, for that group okay and so a lot of the people who buy right message nowadays come from the courses.
Speaker 2:Um. So again I I mentioned, I think before we hit record, I was talking about, I think, like um at uh click funnels. That's kind of a way that russell's done things historically, which is you know, teach people about funnels and the importance of them and then say well, we have a tool called click funnels that can execute on what, what I, what I've taught you already now one of the things that russell brunson does with that is he uses that in order to be able to run front-end funnels.
Speaker 1:Because it's the problem with sas generally is that the amount of money you make from customer long-term customer lifetime value is high. Yes, the churn rate in software is much, much lower than it is in memberships, for example, but that doesn't necessarily translate into getting enough money up front to be able to afford to run ads into stuff. So he wants to sell courses up front, so he gets some money straight away and then have the and that's exactly how I look at it too.
Speaker 1:So do you do that? Are you spending money on ads into these funnels, or is this like just kind of justifies you spending the money on the time on LinkedIn or on Twitter or whatever else?
Speaker 2:So I would say that I try to. I don't spend any money on acquisition. Okay, but I'm not saying that because I'm like proud of that.
Speaker 1:I'm saying it because I suck at ads, not saying that because I'm like proud of that.
Speaker 2:I'm saying it because I suck at ads. Um, I've, I've always. I don't know how to do it and I haven't been smart enough to hire a team that knows what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you're listening maybe, maybe talk to me. Um, the so at the minute everything's pretty organic, right. They come from social, they come small number from search, but mostly social. Or you know, I've done stuff like with Sparkloop and other platforms to like, do these like lead, sharing things Right, where, like Creator Network or whatever else, where you can kind of like, yeah, other people, they get people on their list and they end up on my list. I can then talk to them about the stuff, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean to be honest when it comes to the, it's nice knowing that when somebody like I find it's easier to sell a course to somebody than it is a subscription to a software product, because software requires work, like with a course, you can kind of sell it aspirationally.
Speaker 2:I think like you just really need to have a really good message and a really good outcome that you're promising and because we all know I mean for better or worse, course completion rates aren't always that high, right. So it's like with books. I can go to Waterstones and see like a book that sounds really good and I'm like I want what that book promises and I buy it, but it sits on the bookshelf Like I don't necessarily read it Right and I'm like I want what that book promises and I buy it, but it sits on the bookshelf Like I don't necessarily read it Right and I hate saying that, but that's the reality of things. Right, like a lot of I know a lot of people who buy from me, they buy aspirationally. But actually executing on what I teach and doing the work, that's the hard part.
Speaker 1:The easy part is buying it. Yeah, that's why it costs so much more to have the group coaching program, yeah, where there's somebody holding you to account, making sure you do the thing like. Personally, I'll tend to, but not every course I buy I go through, do everything from it but a lot of it.
Speaker 1:I'm like I buy it, I go through, I do the thing and I'm like, oh my god, this is the most incredible value. Yeah, like this is insane. Like I've just paid 500 to learn about this thing and then I did the thing and they made all this money from it. Yeah, but the reason it could be so cheap is because there's nobody holding you to account.
Speaker 1:That's no, it's up to you to make sure you actually you have to do it yeah, and it's the kind of the pro and the con with courses like I'm a massive, massive fan of courses as a model, but that is the downside is it does it, doesn't give the, you leave it up to actually make sure you did it now there's things you can do like we haven't talked about this, but I I do think having some sort of like accountability automatic email sequence that goes out when they buy, yeah, is a good thing.
Speaker 2:I don't think a lot of people do that, or more people should do that, but even things like that, that kind of nudge people back into the courseware and back into like you, providing additional context and value and everything is good because it reminds them of the fact that, yeah, I invested in this thing. I should do it. But where I was going with that is that the. You know, I find it easier to sell a course, sell somebody on the idea of that. If they start segmenting their audience, everything will get better. Right, so I can do that pretty easily, I think, and especially with courses, it's easier to use urgency in a way that you really can't with software.
Speaker 1:Like.
Speaker 2:I can give a discount or a bundle or something like to get people to buy today because they might just sit on it and say I don't want to miss out on the promo and I'll go through it in a month or two or something Right.
Speaker 2:I've tried those same tactics with SaaS. It's very difficult, yeah, but I'd rather get people on that way, show them a better way and equip them and teach them with the know-how so that when they go to use the you know. So basically, when they go to use right message, they use it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think the example I think back to constantly of this is we take it for granted I think a lot of us that like email marketing is a good thing, right, so like ConvertKit doesn't need to do a lot, or ActiveCampaign or whoever they don't need to do a lot to say you should be emailing people, like it's pretty implicit. But I heard a talk at Business and Software years ago with Gail Goodman who was one of the founders of Constant Contact and she was talking about in the late 90s. She would go around to chambers of commerce in the US and give talks in front of business owners saying, yes, you bakery, you restaurant, you should be emailing people. And they were like why would we email people? It was such an unknown thing that for one of the first email service providers to tell people that you should be doing this, that was difficult. So I kind of feel like, unfortunately, the product that I've built, the software product I've built, we're kind of there.
Speaker 1:You're a bit ahead of your time kind of thing. So it's like I mean, it's a contact at the time, it's in the enterprise like enterprise companies do do what we sell but for SMBs and like creators and stuff, it's still very new.
Speaker 2:So I'm kind of feeling like I'm doing the chamber of commerce roadshow, kind of thing. Right now and that's why I'm trying to do it. Instead of doing what she did, I'm trying to think well, okay, if you look at it as like if, if, if, if, if. Right message is the pickaxe, it's the tool.
Speaker 2:People need to know what to do, what to do with it right like if I, if I go, buy a power drill, like I'm not going to build a deck right, I won't know how, I don't know what, like, what do you do with the tool to build the deck? So I'm thinking if I can use the courses to establish not only establish the problem, like I established the problem through the marketing of the courses, but then give the courses a way of saying here's how you can diy and do it yourself and solve the problem at hand. Oh and, by the way, I have software that can do it for you. And that's kind of my thinking with this is. And then actually I haven't even mentioned this, but I also have an agency for people who don't want to do the software. They just want the outcomes, right. Right.
Speaker 2:So if you want to learn the, if you want to either learn the foundation so you can do it yourself, or you want to learn the foundation so you can see if this is worthwhile for you, I have courses that are low barrier of entry, relatively inexpensive and so on.
Speaker 2:And then from there, if you want like a middle spectrum thing, like a done with you kind of thing, I have software that will do a lot of the legwork that I teach in the course, but obviously you still need to provide the inputs. Or if you're like somebody like justin who bought my course on email marketing, paid a thousand dollars for it and said, screw this, I'm just gonna like dm you on twitter and say, can you just do this all for me? Um, there's always going to be kind of a part of the market that is like they just want the outcomes. They don't want to figure out the tool or, you know, implement and go through a course and learn it and do it themselves. So I think, like what I'm trying to develop is this full spectrum thing of like do it yourself, do it with you in a way, with the software, or done for you.
Speaker 1:I think that's super smart because if you look at the economics of business with, most course creators are only doing the low ticket items yes, right, like the hundred, two hundred dollar, maybe five hundred dollar courses and a percentage of their audience are willing to spend a lot more money on group coaching and a percentage of those people are willing to spend money on one-to-one consulting and some of them want someone if it's in that, if it's in the right kind of space, to do it for them. So I've got a friend. He's been on the podcast before. I haven't checked with him if it's all right to tell this story, so I won't say who it is, but he has.
Speaker 1:Like um, he, he was on the, he was on the phone with another friend and he sells courses multi-million dollar range and he was chatting with a friend who had said he'd started doing high ticket consulting people, so like one-to-one coaching for ten thousand dollars a year. And this is in the hobby space where most courses are 100, 200, right, and so they're doing this thing for ten thousand dollars. And he says, well, how did it do? And the guy told him how much more money he was making from doing this. So he hangs up the phone immediately. He's like I gotta go. He runs through, he wakes his wife up. He's like I'm gonna do a one-to-one consulting coaching thing for ten thousand dollars a year, just like I don't care can I go back to sleep?
Speaker 1:and like four weeks later they'd launched it and they made more than a million dollars. Yeah, and it's just like because there's a percentage of the audience who will always spend more money, and so if you've got that big, audience Well the value is time or the money don't they Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:They can afford it, like people are learning whatever you know music or languages or what have you and some people in that audience have got a ton of money, they're successful in something else you know and they could just afford to pay you for it. Or if it's in your case, it's like they've got a big enough business they can afford to pay for. So we do the same thing. You know we sell courses, but we also have an agency for the people who just want it done for them can afford it, you know, and it's like you get the same amount of money again out of the business, out of the audience, at both levels, yep, which is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I, I have a. I have a friend who does um, like backdrops for when, like zoom backdrops right, and he has a course on it. He's recently started doing because he's realized like people, yeah, they can sit through a video course on, like, what equipment to buy and what are what are key lights? And like how do, how do we position them and stuff. And some people are like, just tell me what to buy, like, give me my Amazon order and tell me where to put the stuff.
Speaker 2:I don't care about the. You know the D and that's there's always going to be a part of that group. But on top of that, those are the people. I think that you do it right with them, right Like the thing I've enjoyed about the consulting side of what we're doing from that spectrum I mentioned is that you know the examples I've cited so far, like the Justins, tiagos and Pats and others. They're all examples of people who have said we know you have training, we know you have software, but I just want the outcome.
Speaker 2:When that's the case, the likelihood that it's done right is high because we're controlling it, we know how to use our software correctly, we know how to do this stuff correctly.
Speaker 2:There's little risk that we're going to screw up in that sense, right. So what that's done for me is I look at it as when we get somebody paying us on a consulting basis for this. It's like fundraising, because they pay a lot of money which outperforms the growth we get from like monthly recurring revenue or one-off course sales. Like this is a big chunk. We also get almost a guaranteed case study right Because you know it's going to be done correctly, like if you're that person who you teach a course on how to do backdrops for Zoom, you might get the odd student who really figures it out and does it great, and then you can use them as a case study, like a before and after, like look how horrible their zoom setup was before and now look at it. But if you do it for them, it's probably going to be great because you, the teacher, applied what you teach to their specific use case and it's a, it's a testimonial, it's a it's social proof right like it's.
Speaker 1:It's a.
Speaker 2:It's an example of what you teach being done correctly, even though you happen to be doing the work yourself with your team. So, yeah, I'm a, I'm a huge advocate of of that model. And again, like you've been saying, it's it's there's who will pay multiples more because they value time over money. And I think courses, naturally I think, bring out DIYers. Like a lot of people buy courses, do it because they want to learn the thing and then apply it so they can do it. They want to become better at their day job or learn a new skill or something like that. But you know the top of the market. They just want the outcomes. They don't care about that.
Speaker 1:So we've talked a lot about the stuff that you do and what's worked. I'd love to dig in to what is it that is more of a problem in your funnels? What is the stuff where you get stuck within your email marketing or in your funnels, or is there anything that's like a challenge for you?
Speaker 2:I think the big thing, frankly, is the discoverability growth side of things, because even though I mentioned the social stuff, I'm not that good at it. I struggle with. I kind of still use Twitter the way I did back in 2009. Like I haven't really done the whole like thread thing and like you know where it's, like you have the hook and then you bring it Like I just tweet, like oh, I was in Norway recently with my wife and daughter and it's like here's a picture of the three of us.
Speaker 1:It's not very strategic, you know like.
Speaker 2:I'm using it again the way I think it was originally intended to be used, but now obviously, it's being used as a way to generate leads. So, like from my perspective, my big shortcoming is on the growth side, and that's where, when I see, you know, these clients I mentioned, who I've had the honor of working with, I mean, they're getting hundreds of people a day into their funnels.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I'm like I get three or four.
Speaker 1:It's like you know it's not nearly as impressive. Have you gone through Lara Acosta's work around LinkedIn?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:She's really so. She came to a course creators dinner that I organized the other day, yeah, and she's doing absolutely fantastic work with helping people to grow their audience, specifically on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:Because that's something that you'd mentioned. Yeah, and my friend jody cook. She uh hung out with lara and and got consulting from her on like how to do it, and then has grown in the last seven months to 20 000 followers on linkedin and it's like just totally sold on this. Yeah, jody's got this cool tool called CoachVox where you can create an AI version of yourself.
Speaker 2:So we've created you can kind of upload your what you've taught or something. Yeah, exactly, Exactly.
Speaker 1:And so we've created an AI version of Yosip, who's like my head of delivery, okay. And so Yosip AI people can go and use. But within that, on the back end, it also has this feature where you can create linkedin posts, which is based on what lara teaches is the model. So it's the, it's the right hook, the right hook the right part of teaching different structures to it.
Speaker 1:There's one that success stories, one that is, uh, teaching. And there's a third one as well I forget what it was and then there's what jody calls I don't know if this is lara's term, but jody calls the zinger at the end. And then there's a third one as well. I forget what it was and then there's what Jody calls I don't know if this is Lara's term, but Jody calls the zinger at the end and then there's the engagement part to get people to respond in the comments. So there's a whole process to it. But yeah, lara's doing some really great work with that, so it might be worth kind of checking out.
Speaker 2:Oh that's cool. Yeah, I will, and we're supposed to. I actually just so with me moving into LinkedIn, I just recently got turned on to Claude. I think, Uh-huh yeah, and I realized, so I didn't mention this yet, but I had a book come out last year, traditionally published book on personalized marketing. So what I did is I uploaded the entire book to.
Speaker 1:Pod as the project knowledge, or whatever they call it.
Speaker 2:And I'm just I'm using that to ideate all of my posts where I'm like go through my book, find a really good quote and then from that develop a hook and so on and so forth and a little bullet list, kind of short punchy things, and that's been working pretty well. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's.
Speaker 2:It's been great because I'm like I have a 70 000 word thing, which is everything that I've ever said on this subject in one thing yeah, just upload the pdf of it and then there it is like I mean, I was trying to think like how do I get it to crawl my you know tweets and my articles and my newsletters and like just upload the book yeah, and it it's been working well yeah, it's been.
Speaker 1:I'm pleasantly surprised so, yeah, claude's next on my list for trying out. My friend rob has been using that. He does massive amounts of content. Um, he runs a. Um, what's it called? Is it the property geek or is that their old name? But it's like one of the top podcasts on. It's one of the top business podcasts in the uk is that rob dicks?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, we're uh forgot the name. There's an app called strong. Yeah, it's like a workout app. Yeah, we're like strong buddies oh okay, you'll need to get on a table. Rob and I.
Speaker 1:We we see each other's daily workouts oh nice, okay, yeah, rob's great, yeah, um yeah, so he was roving to me about claude okay, he does tons of content and he's saying how he started using that for his youtube scripts as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, yeah, no, I got it from uh, again from justin um, because I'd used gpt or chat gpt before, but, um, it does seem good. Yeah, so again, I'm not a. I don't know too much about it outside of what I know so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, beautiful, okay, well, that has been absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, thank you for having me. If people want to go check out RightMessage I'm assuming rightmessagecom yes, perfect, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:And if they're interested in your courses is that the same place that they should know? That's create and sell it at co. We haven't got into but I've grand plans on how to merge the two and figure it out, but at the minute it's create and sellco. Um is my twice weekly newsletter on all things personalized marketing perfect.
Speaker 1:And then is it anywhere else? Is there? We heard that there's. There's twitter photos of your family in norway. Yes, yeah, you can find me on twitter and linkedin. Uh, there's.
Speaker 2:Twitter photos of your family in Norway. Yes, yeah, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. There's a really. I have a YouTube channel, but it's kind of dormant at this point Okay, okay, but there is well thisispersonalbookcom. It just links to the Amazon listing and, if you're in the US, the Barnes Noble listing and everything else. So if you're interested in reading a book that kind of expands on like the full funnel method of personalized marketing that I teach, that's probably the best entry point for that perfect.
Speaker 1:All right, cool, we'll put all of those links down on the show notes as well, so you can go and grab those if you want to. And don't forget to grab the guide on how to double your email list datadrivenmarketingco slash double. And thanks, as always, for listening in. We really appreciate your time listening. Always send in any ideas that you've got for future episodes, any other guests that you think we should have on john at datadrivenmarketingco and Brennan. Thanks so much for coming on today, man. Yeah, thank you, john. Thanks for having me. No problem at all, man. Thank you very much.