The Art of Selling Online Courses

Dog Trainer to $10k/ month Course Creator - Here’s How

• John Ainsworth

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From £1,000 to consistent five-figure months - that's what happened when this dog trainer optimized his online course funnel. In this episode, Mark reveals how he doubled his revenue during Black Friday by implementing a proven funnel system, optimizing his sales page, and crafting high-converting email sequences.

You'll discover how Mark built a 5,000+ email list using Instagram and Facebook, his exact tripwire funnel converting at 6%, and his strategy for growing to 500 customers in his flagship program. 

Learn how he's transitioning from doing everything himself to building a content team, and the specific changes he made to his sales page that drastically improved conversions.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale your existing course business, Mark's practical insights and proven strategies will show you exactly what's possible with the right system in place.

Want results like Mark? Book a call at datadrivenmarketing.co/call

Speaker 1:

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. Today's guest is Mark Taylor. Now Mark is a head trainer and director at Acer Gun Dog Training and they specialise in teaching dog owners how to train their gun dogs using ethical, science-based techniques science-based techniques. Now Mark's been working with my team to grow his business. He's been in the Instant Course Sales Program and in today's episode we're going to explore the key changes that Mark's made to his funnel and his marketing strategy, the challenges he overcame and the impressive results that he has achieved since we started working together. Mark, welcome to the show. Good to be here, john. Thank you very much, really appreciate it. What kind of results have you gotten since you've been in the instant course sales program?

Speaker 2:

so I joined the program maybe three months ago and put together a promotion. The best month was my last month, which ended in the black friday sale, and the headline is is I basically more than doubled my running revenue my best month? So it's been going up and I'm fairly new to the business an online course business I've been escalating my income each month and the last month, as a result of the program, the funnel that I put together, it's pretty much doubled what I earned in the last best month.

Speaker 1:

Wow, Double Okay. So talk us through. What did you do? How did you manage to get that incredible result?

Speaker 2:

so lots of, lots of different aspects to the approach. I've always had an online course program, so I've always had an offer and basically what I've done is refine the offer and create additional products to go with it. So I've got a tripwire when people opt into my funnel, order bumps and upsells through the funnel, and then I wrote a specific email promotion with the instant course sales to go with it. So there was a sequence of emails that went out prior to Black Friday as like a specific promotion, a warm-up promotion, and then the actual sales promotion, and the results were as I spoke about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Nice, okay, cool. So we had their order bumps, tripwire, funnel and the email promotion. Is there any other changes or was that everything?

Speaker 2:

well, there was the refinement of the sales page, um, in terms of how that looked, literally the whole funnel was was worked upon in the run-up to this Black Friday promo.

Speaker 1:

Nice, nice. Well, that's beautiful. I like hearing numbers like that, so talk us through. What was the kind of the process like for that, what was some of the struggles you had along the way, and what was any of the support that you got from the team to allow you to do that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure. So it kind of started with email writing that that's not my specialty. I'm a dog trainer and never did I think that when I became a dog trainer I'd have to learn how to write emails. So, um so, with with the, with the program, there's like a structure to how to write each email. There's a specific email that lands at a specific time and there's a structure to how to write it, kind of like a framework that you can apply to really any business and with your target customer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so what was the, what was the stuff that you found difficult with that? What was, uh, what was hard about? Obviously, you mentioned you're a dog trainer. You're not, you weren't an email writer. So what was specifics of what was difficult about it?

Speaker 2:

for you just Just the amount of time it takes me to write copy. I'm not a natural copywriter, so the program kind of focused my mind into creating emails that covered very specific things to hit different customers or to appeal to different customers. So you've got analytical types, you've got people that have got problems that you address, you know, using the customer language that real customers would use.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so what was it that allowed you since it was difficult for you and that wasn't something that you were kind of used to, you had the framework, great. What else allowed you to be able to actually put all of that together? Was it the because I know you did the workshops with the team and you mentioned to me before that that was quite an intense experience.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the workshops were two days, several hours of literally sitting writing emails with the team, with a load of other students as well. So we'd cover specific things, like in a Zoom call, and then we'd be given time on the call to sit and write the email. Within this framework that I'm talking about and what would normally take me, you know, with procrastination maybe a month to write these emails, we did, we got them out in two days and then Monica on the team literally went through each email, re-edited it all, rewrote the bits that were doubling, you know, saying the same thing twice and rereading the email. It just read so much better than when I'd created it.

Speaker 1:

Nice, okay. So you had workshops where you went through the frameworks that you got from the team. Then you got feedback on it and kind of rewriting of some of the parts of the emails from Monaco as well. Nice, well, nice, okay, cool. How about with the with the sales page? What was the process like for rewriting that?

Speaker 2:

so I had a sales page, video, video, sales letter, sales page. So I had all that already and with dominic's help he went through and said if you put the video there so it's above the fold. You put a each one header there next to it so people read that, and then the subtext underneath it and then a buy now header there next to it so people read that and then the subtext underneath it and then a buy now button right next to it. It's all above the fold and then below the fold. This is what you should put.

Speaker 2:

Where there was copy that was just too too wordy, as I had before. We edited. That made it easier to read. You know people on a black friday offer don't necessarily want to sit and read paragraphs and paragraphs of text. So you kind of made it a lot leaner, put value stacks in it. Where it needed, value stacks, buttons at the bottom of the bottom of the page for people to buy. So basically redesign, not redesign the pro, but but reordered the sales page and it seemed to work. So the conversion the conversion went up massively for black friday.

Speaker 1:

So nice, yeah, and if anybody listening is thinking, I want to know how to change my sales page, we've got other episodes where we've specifically gone through the 15 elements of a high converting sales page and exactly what it is you need to do. But some of the stuff that Mark talked you through there is you want to have your video above the fold. You want to have the call to action button above the fold, and ideally that would be above the fold. You want to have the call to action button above the fold and ideally that would be above the fold on desktop and on mobile, because a lot of people are buying on mobile too. As people start to spend a bit more money, they tend to move more over to a computer than phone, but a lot of people will look at it on the phone.

Speaker 1:

We want to have the main headline, the sub headlines throughout to kind of get people's attention back if they're skimming through and just trying to find out where they are. We want to have all these different sections, the value stack that Mark mentioned as well. So these are all the different parts that we need to have within a good sales page. So let's talk briefly about the order bump. For anybody who doesn't know what an order bump is, can you explain to them how that looks and then what you put into place for it?

Speaker 2:

sure so. So an order bump sits on the checkout page. It's kind of like it's designed to attract the customers when they're in buying mode, so they've. They've decided that they're going to buy, um, and with mine it's it's an opt-in, so they have to tick the box to select the order bump. With some software you can have it pre-selected, but with mine I feel more comfortable on not having to deal with refunds that people bought it accidentally, that you have to deliberately opt in by ticking a box. The order bump itself, um, it's like a mini course. So it's like it complements my main offer. My, my order bump is to start a course for new gundog handlers. Okay, so it's the kind of thing that people would find useful if they're new to the sport, but wouldn't detract from the main course itself.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha Okay. So you had an additional offer, which was this extra course that you added as your order bump. Did you have an upsell as well?

Speaker 2:

I do on my. So my program, my flagship program, is all my courses combined, a bundle of all my courses with coaching. Option two is that you can just buy my entry-level course. So if someone buys my entry-level course, they can buy course number two as well as a as an order bump, but with my flagship course it is the solution that solves all their problems. So I haven't got an upsell on that because it is the ultimate, as it's called the ultimate gundog programs, gotcha okay, and then what was the process like?

Speaker 1:

because you had to? Uh, you worked obviously with the team and you're going through. You got the q a every week as well. Now could you talk and be anybody's listening who's like maybe this might be right for me, I'm not quite sure. Could you talk them through, like, what is the process like when you go on those calls? What's useful about it? How is that helping you to continue to grow your business week after week?

Speaker 2:

sure. So the calls are. There's two different types of calls. There's a weekly group call. It's like an office hours type call, so with other course creators, various members of the team, on different weeks. It's an hours call and we just go around the table and basically ask everyone how they're getting on, if they've got specific questions. So, depending on whether there's a particular time of year like a promo running, we'll focus on if they've got specific questions. So, depending on whether there's a particular time of year like a promo running, we'll focus on that. But everyone's got the opportunity to ask specific questions within the office hours call.

Speaker 2:

There's also like a monthly one-to-one call with Yosip hosting, where that's very much about my business, what we're going to work on, what we're going to try kind of split testing, different options for the month coming forward. It's more strategy, it's more specific to my business. So that's once a month, whereas the group calls are once a week. Behind all of that is the online course with all the videos. So that's really helpful. That's kind of like a framework, self-paced. We can pick out bits that we want to work on in any order that we want to work on it.

Speaker 1:

Nice, and can you give people some idea of the size of your business, like revenue, number of students, team size, whatever you're kind of comfortable with?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So my business, just to explain, is twofold. It's a bricks and mortar business. The online part of that has grown out of the bricks and mortar business. So I filmed videos of my program and decided to scale my dog training business by having an online course program to go with it. So people around the world can just buy the online course videos but people locally can also come to physical classes and train their dogs with us. So it's twofold. So just segmenting out to answer your question about the size of the business, just segmenting out the online course side of it. So I only started 12 months ago. I've got currently 500 customers on my flagship program working with their dogs Revenue. It started a year ago with maybe a thousand pound a month. It was small turnover. I wasn't really taking it seriously. But since summertime last year we've started bringing in five figure incomes each month quite regularly now. So it's really starting to take off.

Speaker 1:

That's great man. That's great progress within a year. And what made you made you decide to ask for help with upgrading your funnel? Why was that something you thought was the right thing to do?

Speaker 2:

it's a really good question. So the reality is I was building stuff myself which took blooming ages, quite honestly, and I didn't really know what I was doing. So I designed a sales page. You know, I looked at other people's sales page. I designed a sales page, but everything I was doing myself was taking like three times as long as now I realized. I just wished I'd joined sooner to get the help and support and just get straight to the straight to the point where you know it works, so that that I was building it myself and just faffing around and not getting anywhere very quickly.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, that makes total sense.

Speaker 1:

I found that everywhere that I've improved the fastest has been because I got feedback and help from somebody who had done it 20 times before, knew how to do it, knows exactly how it works, has done all the kind of the painful learning for me and, um, that's basically that's why we set up.

Speaker 1:

The instant course sales program is like, okay, there's a lot of people who are doing reasonably well, but they're doing, but they've got the potential to do incredibly well. Like you, double your revenue and I expect the potential is probably more. You know more than that as well, and there just isn't a ton of information specifically for course creators out there about how to do this kind of thing. And so it's like, okay, well, you need to know. Okay, how are you going to set up your sales page? How do you write your email promotions, what goes into each email promotion, how do you set up your upsells, your order bumps, your, your whole funnel, the whole you know process, and uh, yeah, so I'm really, I'm really proud of the team and everything that we've got in place there. It seems like it's, you know, it's really worked a lot.

Speaker 2:

I was always a big fan of your podcast and so it's like I describe it as like I've got jigsaw pieces of the puzzle from pod, from the podcast. You know, I listened to so many of them but they didn't quite fit together. Yeah, so by doing the course with the people that that you know behind the podcast, it allowed me to put all the jigsaw pieces together and and optimize everything so that it really worked, just basically get from a to b much quicker, absolutely now, one other thing that you mentioned in there that you've got in place was a tripwire funnel.

Speaker 1:

Can you explain for anybody who doesn't know what that is? Could you explain what a tripwire funnel is and then what you've actually set up as your tripwire?

Speaker 2:

For sure, so a tripwire offer is designed to attract people when they first opt in. So I attract people through social media and ask them to leave their email address in order to get my lead magnet, which is a free course. At the point that they've given me their email address, I have a many chat bot which talks to them, gathers their email address and then, as the final step, says, here's another course that you might find really useful in helping you, and it's my entire, one of the entire modules out of my entry-level course, for just under $10, 10 pounds, and it's designed to get people, attract, the people that are ready to buy. With that comes an order bump and with that comes an upsell as well, but it's converting at 6%. So even if they don't buy the full offer yet, I've got their email address and I'm able to segment the people that have kind of put their hand up and said I'm really interested in this.

Speaker 1:

Nice, nice. So 6% of people who opt in for your lead magnet then buy your tripwire offer behind that Cool, and would you be happy to share about how much money that makes?

Speaker 2:

uh, yeah, so with my black friday promo, so it's only a 10 pound product, but with my black friday promo you may. So 43 sales, that's 430 pounds. But that's 430 pounds in one month is money I would have just left on the table previously, so I'd have got their email address and then maybe put them in. I would have put them into a funnel and they maybe would have bought my course at the end of it, but maybe not. So it's money that's, and this is every month. So this is money that's otherwise left on the table.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, beautiful, okay. So what's your main traffic source for the business? You mentioned social media. What is the main one that you're using?

Speaker 2:

So if you'd asked me six weeks ago, I'd have said Instagram. That's been my main traffic source, but Facebook seems to have found me, so it's short-form content on Facebook and Instagram and I just cross-post the same content to both channels at the same time.

Speaker 1:

And you've been doing that for a year as well, or has that been longer building that?

Speaker 2:

No, no, seriously for a year. So in terms of like adding value, I'd always post before, but not seriously, so it would just be when I felt like it, but seriously, really, since the summer.

Speaker 1:

I've been creating content with a deliberate purpose of attracting emails?

Speaker 2:

Nice. And what size audience have you got on either of those platforms? 40,000 on Instagram and 25,000 on Facebook?

Speaker 1:

Nice, okay, and what kind of size email list have you been able to build off of that? So?

Speaker 2:

I'm growing the email list between 800 and 1,000 new emails a month and it's currently sitting at about 5,000. I'm quite aggressive with how I what's the word? Filter my emails for people that are engaged and people that are not. And I think the thing is when, when you offer a lead magnet a free lead magnet in exchange for an email address, you're going to get some dodgy email addresses in there. So I am.

Speaker 2:

If people haven't opened an email in 90 days, they sent a series of emails that basically said you know? It says are you still alive? You must click here in order to stay on the list. I think one of them does literally say that kind of thing and then they're automatically. It's an automation. They're automatically unsubscribed if they don't. If they don't, you know, it's kind of like a last resuscitation attempt to keep them. So my list is pretty clean and it's people that are pretty engaged. But, yeah, 5 000 is is what it's sitting at just over 5 000 at the moment nice, okay, cool, and what kind of content's working for you on Instagram or Facebook?

Speaker 2:

You mentioned shorts, so it's all shorts. Yeah, so it's mostly reels, so video content, and most of my audience are dog owners who want help training their dog. So a lot of my reels are either educational it's like little snippets of how I train dogs. A lot of them are kind of like funny or engaging or they're kind of nurture content, where it'll be the things that happen. As a dog owner, you know the annoying side of like other dog owners, things like that trying to tap into that, um, you know so. So, if so they they associate me as somebody that understands the real life problems.

Speaker 2:

Um, but yeah, I try and post once a day. That's my goal at the moment. I've gone from trying to do everything and this is the trouble with an online business is is not only you're trying to get the leads to go in the funnel and you're trying to nurture them when they're in the funnel that's that's that's what we're doing here but you're also trying to look after them on the other side of the funnel when they're in the program, and it's a balancing act of kind of like all three things. Yeah, so recently I've hired a video editor. It's a freelancer who edits my videos and as of last week I've also hired a content manager who will now kind of help me with the creation of ideas. So all I need to do is turn up with my script and start filming it and then pass the video you know, put it on a cloud and pass the video across to her to then handle the production side of it and what do you think with that?

Speaker 1:

do you think that you're going to get better scripts and and videos from that, or is it just about taking that amount of work off your plate and maybe it'll only be 80 as good? What's your kind of instinct on that? Because I I find that one fascinating, like I've spent a while with somebody else writing scripts for me and I never felt like we really hit the nail on the head, and so I'm going back to writing them for myself, but I don't see myself doing that forever, so I'm curious what's your kind of? Uh, I know you haven't done it yet, right, but what's your take on expectation?

Speaker 2:

Well, she's flying with it already. We've Well, she's flying with it already. We've already got 50 ideas in the pipeline, okay. So the goal is to get to the point where I've got maybe a month of content ready to go, ready to go live, and then she's just scheduling it when it goes live. So that's the ultimate goal.

Speaker 2:

I recruited very carefully. I held back on this role for a long while, but I know her really well. She's worked for me. She's delivered the program herself as a trainer in my physical business for hundreds of. She's delivered hundreds and hundreds of courses. So she's worked for me before she took a career break in order to have a child. And now this role is ideal because she doesn't have to physically do it at a particular time. It's kind of freelance. She can do it as and when it suits her. You know her timings are her own kind of thing. As long as she brings the content uploaded every week, it doesn't matter when she does it. So she knows my business inside out. She knows my customers. She's delivered my program to real customers hundreds of times. So it's working out pretty well so far nice, okay, cool.

Speaker 1:

So is the content from her going live already or is it kind of in the pipeline?

Speaker 2:

It's in the pipeline I'm literally filming. As you know, today is one of the videos. It's in production, so early days.

Speaker 1:

Beautiful, okay, well, I look forward to hearing how that goes. I've got a lot of YouTuber friends, as you might imagine, in the kind of the core space, and it's been really interesting seeing the slightly different ways that people are kind of approaching the content creation space. What made you decide to go with Instagram and Facebook as the places for you Like? Why not YouTube Shorts or TikToks or anything else like that?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So TikTok, I am on TikTok. I've stopped posting on TikTok. I've just found it a very different audience there. They're kind of there. I've stopped posting on TikTok, I've just found it a very different audience. They're kind of there, I think, for entertainment purposes, so they're scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. They're not there for educational purposes as much. I've also found it really difficult to convert a TikTok to acquiring an email address. You can't use ManyChat, so you have to use a link in bio and I've just found the conversion has been really poor. The other thing with tiktok is because of what I do. It's got the word gun. I'm a gun dog trainer, so just randomly block my videos or put covers over the front saying this is sensitive content and it's just a cute puppy. So I I just got fed up with appealing and waiting weeks for some kind of outcome, so I came off tiktok altogether oh my goodness, that's hilarious okay, but my goal, my goal, is to get into long form.

Speaker 2:

So now, now I've got my video editor, is my goal. So the tail, in terms of like the, the leads that you'll get from long form, I hear, is the tail is much longer, whereas on short form it's like peddling a bike. I can post a reel today and maybe get a hundred new email addresses literally today, and then that'll taper off, but by next week that reel has just stopped. Sometimes Instagram's algorithm will find it again and suddenly they come back to life, which is quite weird, because you start getting notifications from people that are commenting on reels that you posted three months ago. But it's completely random, you know it's. It's a lot more fickle on short form content, I find so gotcha.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, tiktok's a really interesting one.

Speaker 1:

So most people I know who have tried tiktok have found, even if they've got a massive audience there, that they get basically no sales from it, and so I was very much of the opinion for quite a long time that tiktok is just not useful for selling courses.

Speaker 1:

And then my friend, jack, who is teaching banjo, said he started putting his content on TikTok as well as YouTube Shorts and he gets more sales from there within a month than he does from on YouTube Shorts, and YouTube Shorts does better for him than long form generally, or at least as well as it, and it takes him less time to make it. So he's like great, I'm going to double down on TikTok and do a lot more stuff on here, and so that's really made me think, okay, that it's not maybe as simple as it works or it doesn't work. It might be niche specific. Why it would work for Banjo in particular, I don't know. So we'll kind of wait and see if this like bears out. Is this like being a temporary blip where it's worked well and then it won't do so much in two months, or what?

Speaker 2:

you know. But the other thing I tiktok is that the, the audience, are less warm. It's less of a community. You can't have a conversation with people or people aren't inclined to have a conversation. So, whereas on the other channels facebook and instagram people will ask questions, you can engage with people, people will send you dms, whereas I just don't find that so much on tiktok no, and on youtube, you just don't have it at all right, there is no option for it.

Speaker 1:

I find that so much on tiktok. No, and on youtube, you just don't have it at all right, there is no option for it. I find that a fascinating difference. So I've started doing a lot more content on linkedin recently and it's just such a difference because you can message with people and I'm just like from youtube, I'm used to like okay, I have to get someone to give their email address, get on our email list, and then we can have a conversation after that, you know. So, yeah, very of vibe, nice. Anything else that you'd like to share in terms of lessons that you've learned from the process of going through the Instant Call Sales program, what you've started doing that you think might be useful to the listener?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure. So when I started the ICS, the first module is about understanding your avatar, understanding the customer at the other end, which is not a process Anecdotally I've done it, but not really kind of specifically done it. I've not really got so much information as I did through this. So the first module is about understanding your customer and then using their language in the copy. So when I get somebody opt-in, once they've gone through my process, they're asked two specific questions. They're asked what their number one wish is in terms of their dream outcome and they're asked why they haven't achieved it already.

Speaker 2:

What's been the biggest barrier? So I've been doing this for a year and I've got two and a half thousand pieces of data where people have customers have left their wishlist and their barriers in their words. So what I did was I fed that into ChatGPT to analyze it and ChatGPT has helped me come up with my avatars. So I've got different avatars, different types of customers using their specific words. So I use ChatGPT quite extensively to help me come up with ideas for things like short form content for things to put in emails, that kind of stuff, but based on that data. So so the exercise attracting your avatar and understanding your avatar was was a massive learn for me.

Speaker 1:

I was just looking up to see what podcast episode I should be pointing people to to learn about their customer avatar, and I found out that we don't have one and I'm like, oh my goodness, this is terrible. We need to record a episode about customer avatar. I don't think we've got anything on the resources page either, so I will record that one. So, dear listener, I promise you there will be an episode about customer avatar at some point and you'll be able to learn more about that. Obviously, if you sign up to the instant course sales program, that is the first thing that we'll do with you, but if not, then I want to make sure you know kind of what that is and how that works. One thing that did come up when I was going through the podcast trying to find that episode was the episode with Lucy. Who could you tell everybody what the strange coincidence is about us kind of connecting?

Speaker 2:

So randomly shout out to Lucy and Will and of course, their dog Diego Random. So randomly shout out to Lucy and Will and of course, their dog Diego, Randomly. But you know, small world, isn't it? I understand Lucy has also gone through your program in the past, but I trained Lucy and her dog Diego in my business as a dog trainer several years ago while she lived locally, so literally from the next village at the time. So yeah, small world online course business, which is global, and then the small world, of course, creators actually coming from two villages apart.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's incredible. I couldn't really get my head around it. When you first told me that you knew Lucy, I was like, oh, that's why you got in touch. And you were like no. And it's like, oh, you know her through the online course world. No, I trained her dogs. Like how'd that happen? So, if anybody wants to listen, so Lucy and Will. Lucy runs English with Lucy YouTube channel and the two of them run their course business together been incredibly successful in their course business. If you want to hear that episode, it's from July 26th 2023, it's episode 98 and Lucy kind of goes through how she got started with her YouTube channel and then has built this up to a multiple seven figure business over time. If people want to go and learn about, want to go and see your business and want to go and like watch, how are you doing it? What have you got in place? Try and make sense of it that way where can they go? Or if they're interested in getting their dog trained?

Speaker 2:

yeah, and where can they go? That's the interesting one. So you can find me on instagram and facebook. Same handle at asa, gundogs. All one word a-t-e-r. Gundogs. G-u-n-d-o-g-s website is wwwasadogscom.

Speaker 1:

Perfect and if you want more help with this and you want help with using email promotions and funnels to get results, like mark, then book a call with me or someone from my team by going to datadrivenmarketingco slash call C-A-L-L or clicking the link in the show notes, the description or the pinned comment below. We've helped dozens of people more than double our revenue and seven people to reach six sorry, seven figures a year now through this process, so book a call using the link in the show notes. Thank you, as always, so much for listening and Mark.