The Art of Selling Online Courses

How Small Course Creators Double Their Revenue - with Josip Belina

• John Ainsworth

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Most course creators think they need to:

  • Create more content
  • Build a bigger audience
  • Launch new products
  • Run more ads
  • Work longer hours

But what if that's all backward?

In this episode, I talked with our Funnel Strategy Lead Josip Belina who revealed something surprising: 9 out of 10 course creators already have everything they need to double their revenue.

The problem isn't your content or your audience. It's your system.

We broke down hundreds of successful email campaigns and discovered why most course creators stay stuck at $3-5K monthly. The solution? A streamlined process that:

  • Converts at 2% (4x industry standard)
  • Gets emails done in 8 hours (not 2 weeks)
  • Works without a big team or copywriting skills

One client just went from 20-30 quarterly signups to 68 using this system.

Ready to transform your course business? Want to see if you qualify for our program that's helping creators double their revenue in 90 days? Email john@data-driven-marketing.co or josip@data-driven-marketing.co now and let's map out your path to consistent $10K+ months.

🖥 Visit our website for more information:
https://datadrivenmarketing.co/

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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 and today's guest is Josip Berlina. Josip's our funnel strategy lead and, while working on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects, he's developed and tested most of the systems that we use now at Data Driven Marketing, when working with our clients. At Data Driven Marketing, when working with our clients, and today we're going to be talking about the Instant Course Sales Program, what it is, who it's for and how it can help you to double your revenue in 90 days. Josip, welcome to the show, happy to be here. So can you kind of set the stage for us, like, what is ICS and who is it for?

Speaker 2:

So it's our group coaching program or the Instant Course Sales program, where we help online course creators, membership site owners and anyone who is selling digital products make more money or double to, quintuple to 10x their revenue, nice, so who's it for?

Speaker 1:

So we've got online course creators. Who else can? Who else is it kind of a good fit for?

Speaker 2:

creators, who else can, who else is it kind of a good fit for membership? Site owners, people selling group coaching, people selling anything digital, more or less it would work for it.

Speaker 1:

Nice, okay. So what I want to do today is just talk everybody through like, why are we relaunching the instant course sales program and then help people figure out whether this might be a good fit for them, because some people who've listened to the podcast for a long time want help from us but maybe don't think that they can afford to work with us or they won't be a good fit to work with us, and I think Instant Course Sales Program is going to mean that for a bunch of those people, all of a sudden they are a good fit and we can work with them and they can afford us and it's going to work really well. What are some of the stuff that we've kind of, um, why have? Why, would you say, we've relaunched this, uh, this program?

Speaker 2:

so for quite some time we worked with people that were making all a million or around a million or more, and those were the people that could afford working with us. But we noticed that 80 of our audience was actually making less than 10k a month, sometimes less than 5000. And all of them, or a lot of them, wanted help. We basically were saying no for a couple of years, while we can help them a lot and they need help. So basically it made sense to introduce something that can help those people reach 30, 40, 50,000 a month, while starting from 2, 3, 5, 10,000 a month. That's the main reason.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, one of the things for me with that is, I think the amount of difference that it makes to somebody's life, going from making 3,000 a month to making 7,000 a month, let's say, is so much bigger than when we help someone go from 25,000 a month to 100,000 a month, even though, like, objectively, 75,000 a month is a lot more money, it's like.

Speaker 1:

But the difference if you're already at 25,000 a month, your life's pretty dope, you know. Whereas if you're at 3,000 a month and you're kind of got a virtual assistant in there as well and some software costs and whatever, you might still have your day job and you can't quit it and you like really want to, or you're just like I can't quite seem to make this work and I can't have the lifestyle I want, I can't travel as much as I want all these kind of things. So it's actually like, even though I'm I'm totally happy to help the people who make 25 grand a month, make a hundred thousand, like you know, that is, I'm here for those guys but it's actually like it's, it's very rewarding, I think, helping people to kind of just get, get that, you know, double their revenue, get to that next stage and like actually change their.

Speaker 2:

It really changes their life yeah, it does change people's lives and, um, if you look at what they do, you know a common course creator with a decent following and a decent audience making three thousand a month. Going from three to nine thousand is a lot harder than for generally for people, going from like forty thousand000 to 80,000. It is harder because you know if you do marketing, you're not going to be doing that much in terms of sales. Maybe If you need to do more in-person sales, you're not going to do as much content. Or if you do content and if you do videos on social media and stuff, you're not going to have enough time to create courses. And then if you only have one or two courses, it's a never-ending cycle. I mean, we were in this when we first started back in 2018. If two of us did marketing, well, we then had work and then we had to deliver the work, but then if you have to deliver the work, you cannot do marketing. So it's a never-ending cycle.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so one of the ways that we'd figured out that this was the bulk of our audience was we had a lead magnet pimpyourfunnelcom.

Speaker 1:

People would go there and fill out a bunch of questions and being like, huh, there's a lot of people in our audience who we are not helping at the moment, like apart from through the free content like this. I'm like we could probably do better with that. If you're interested that's still there go to pimpyourfunnelcom, fill that out. We'll figure out for you how much more money you could make. And also we will kind of do a plan for you of like how you could be making more money through your business, like what the steps are. We've got something called the triangle model, the the course creators profit triangle model, and we'll use that yosip or I will go through and use it to kind of figure out for you how much more money you could be making, where you could be making that. So that's pimpyourfunnelcom. But why did we then like what's some of the stuff within the program now that we have managed to improve or simplify, since we were running this program before?

Speaker 2:

One of the things is that we've started to add more modules into the program, so one thing is always going to be the same, no matter what you do, and that's utilizing your email list and focusing on email promotions and just nurturing leads that are coming into your system.

Speaker 2:

We never had a good module on how to nurture them. We now have. So we have a perfect welcome email sequence module that basically helps people start with nurturing the leads when they come in, and I cannot believe how many people don't really have more than one or two emails after someone opts in for a lead magnet. So that helps a lot. We've also created a new email mastery module, so we have modules that talk about the importance of email promotions, what to do, how to do it, why to do it. But the biggest issue that almost every course creator had over the last three, four years was that it took them weeks, sometimes more than two weeks, to actually have an email promo prepped, and that's a struggle, you know, sitting in front of a blank canvas and then thinking, ah, what the hell do I do now?

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

We've created a process streamlined process where we can basically guarantee you're going to have a very good email promo done within 8 to 12 hours and it helps people a lot. So now you don't have to think, okay, what the hell do I write? Just sit in front of it, you pick topic, you go through the prep, it takes you 45 minutes and then you start writing.

Speaker 1:

We have really good templates that worked before, so people love it I think that's one of the biggest things from a practical point of view, what I'd found before. One of the reasons why we'd stopped previously with instant call sales program was I was super frustrated that we had a lot of people who just weren't writing their email promotions every month and then they weren't getting the results. We had some people who were right. We had some people who were absolutely crushing it. You know, we had lucy, who went from like three thousand a month to however many hundred thousand a month or something like that. Right, but a lot of people who just weren't always writing email promos.

Speaker 1:

And so one of the that's one of the things we've been able to do over the last year is we took all of the best email promotions that we'd ever done and we deconstructed them to see what were the actual elements that were involved at each step within each email. So instead of you know, on this, on this podcast, we've talked about kind of broken down like here's the overall framework for the emails, but broke it down to like here's what happens in this paragraph, here's what happens in this paragraph, here's what happens in this sentence, and then we found like the best examples of those and then we spent I don't know 100, 200 hours like kind of going through and reviewing it and figuring out how do you make that simpler and easier to do, and doing tests of it with a bunch of people. I think we did a test with like five people, maybe one-to-one with them.

Speaker 2:

Five people one-to-one and then two groups of about five.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and like, after each time we did it, iterate it, iterate it, iterate it, make it simpler, make it quicker, make it easier to understand, figure out how do you simplify the process, how do you streamline it. And at the end of that, what we've got is this process that, like you've just described, that makes it so much easier for someone to write that email promotion, and the email promotion is where a huge majority of the revenue comes from every month. So, therefore, the whole thing is like improved massively and it's like it's simple enough for somebody who doesn't have a team, who doesn't have a copywriter, who doesn't have a background in copywriting, to actually write these emails and get these results. Like we saw with um emma, she'd managed to, I think, double or more than double, something like that her revenue from over her best ever month by writing one of these email promotions without launching a new course.

Speaker 1:

We've seen mark taylor he came on the podcast recently. He had, I think, double his best ever month from right from doing one of these email promotions and it's like okay, we figured that it was so much work to figure out, how do you make that simple enough, but we've done that now and so it's like okay, we can really help a lot of people with this thing yeah, it took us from end of q1 of last year until early Q4.

Speaker 2:

I focused on that for like six, seven months.

Speaker 1:

It just did take that much work, didn't it? It was staggering how difficult it was, but once we've done it, it's like oh yeah, of course. Of course you do it like this. It's so simple and straightforward.

Speaker 2:

now, right, we now use it for our own emails and it works better than ever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's actually so. We we really really want to make this um process so good that we could use it ourselves to write our own email promotions to promote our own courses, and that's what we do now. And they convert at like really high conversion percentage right, something percent, I think. Like a normal email promotion converts at like about 0.5 of your email list will buy and these are like 2% of people buying these courses. So it's like it's staggering, okay. So we've talked about like why we wanted to relaunch it. How come we were able to? Because we'd built up all these different modules, some of the new modules that have been built, like the welcome email sequence, and there's a new email marketing mastery module coming as well, right, this next month, in March.

Speaker 2:

Yes, in March, march. It's already live and recorded, but it's going to be available in about three or four weeks nice.

Speaker 1:

So I mentioned a couple of the success stories so far. Take me through some of the other ones, like what some of the other kind of results that people have been getting yeah, so you mentioned emma.

Speaker 2:

I think that's a really, really, really good result. You mentioned Mark. That was really good. We work with humans under management. They do quarterly launches or one launch or three launches a year actually. So they expect 20 to 30 new signups whenever they do that. When they did it with our system they got 70, so 68 new signups and for them the monthly recurring and annual recurring revenue is a lot with that. That basically adds one quarter of the people in, so they're super happy with that. They are doing one. Now they're prepping for a new one where we are expecting the same results or they are virtually going to double their business in the span of six months. Nice.

Speaker 1:

So what's the? That's some of like the best results, but someone's listening and they're like, oh yeah, but you, you would tell me about the best ones, like what's the kind of what's a realistic result that most people can can get if they sign up, if we let them into ICS because we obviously do restrict who comes in to make sure it's only people who get results?

Speaker 2:

yeah, uh, almost everyone, and when I say almost everyone, that's like nine out of 10 or 11 people have their best month ever the second month in during the first four to six weeks they manage to go through from wherever they are to having their best month ever. It's normally by about 50% to about 2x. Generally, people 2x their revenue in like three months. I think our biggest marketing issue is actually convincing people that it's possible and that it is actually true. Yeah, who has results like this?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really good, isn't it Really good? Okay, so what's the so? Give a if anybody who maybe is new, hadn't heard previous episodes, like give a quick summary of, like, what is the ways that people are able to double their revenue, how come that's possible within that kind of timeframe.

Speaker 2:

We generally focus on three main things we want more people to see the main offer and other offers that people have. We want to increase AOV, or the average order value, with upsells and order bumps, and then we want to share andV, or the average order value, with upsells and order bumps, and then we want to share and show offers more frequently. So, basically, what we start with is utilizing the existing email list, assuming people have that. So we focus on email promotions and actually doing them in a structured way. A lot of people are emailing their lists but they're not doing it in a structured way. We have a structure that's proven to work, that's proven to convert anywhere from 0.1 to 0.7, with an average 0.45% of that list. That gives you a predictable revenue every month. So we focus on that.

Speaker 2:

Once that's done, we focus on lead gen, assuming you are going to be doing regular email promotions. We then focus on getting more people in front of those offers. So we focus on lead gen, possibly introducing a tripwire funnel. If you don't know what tripwire funnel is, there is a couple episodes that you can listen to on this podcast that are going to explain that and then, with that, we focus on course creation and value ladder and creating more offers and just being in front of people more frequently. Value ladder and creating more offers and just being in front of people more frequently. Upsells and order bumps are a must. So I always say, if there is one thing to take out of all of this assuming you are going to be selling products online, always have at least one upsell and at least one order bump.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the thing, the reason why these tactics it's possible for people to make such a big increase in revenue so quickly it's because they've already been building all of the foundations for, like normally, years. So they've built up an audience on youtube or pinterest or instagram or wherever happens to be. They've built up an email list. They've got courses these are great courses that people like. They've got good feedback on it. They've got multiple different ones that they've created and then they haven't implemented the tactics that we're talking about here. They haven't then converted a high enough percentage of people from the audience to the email list. They aren't sending those structured email promotions, they don't have order bumps, they don't have upsells and all this stuff. And one of the things I want to I want to talk through briefly is like what's the benefits of the coaching program over? So someone listens to this podcast, right, they can just hear what all the tactics are. What's some of the additional benefits from the coaching program that allow them to get results that are over just listening to the podcast?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, people generally need accountability. It's like with having a fitness coach. So if I ask you every week what you did, and we create a roadmap together, which is what we do you basically know what you need to do in the next three to six months. If you don't do it, you're not going to have results. But if you do do it, the results are going to come, and we basically check every week what's happening. We have weekly Q&A calls. We do one-on-one calls with people when needed and when we agreed to, and we make sure people do what they are supposed to do. And that's literally the most important thing in getting this to work you need to do the work.

Speaker 2:

We're never saying to people that, yeah, it's going to be easy, no, it's going to be a lot of work. I know you did a presentation where you used to say, yeah, this might seem like a lot of work, and the reason why it seems like a lot of work is because it is a lot of work, and that really is true. But it's not just random. You're not just doing something for the sake of it. You are doing it in a structured way. We build a roadmap and we make sure that you do it in an order that makes sense for your business. Sometimes it means focusing on an email promo. Sometimes it means building a new product. Sometimes it means focusing on lead gen. Sometimes it's a tripwire we don't know. There is no one thing fits everyone. We make it personal, personalized for the business. That's why they have success with us. Even though it's group coaching, it's a personal roadmap.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's. There's a few things people say to me when I, when I have calls with them that are stopping them. I always ask everybody, like, what's the issues that are stopping you from succeeding at the moment? There's always pretty much the same ones People don't know exactly what to do, especially what to do first, they don't really know how to do it, and then they'll end up just kind of going off track. And then time's another one, I suppose, as well. So those four.

Speaker 1:

And so we've tried to build the program to basically help with all of those things. So, first of all, we make you anybody who's a member of the Core Sales program. We will go through and make a one-to-one roadmap, like joseph's saying, and then, secondly, we're gonna provide you with feedback along the way. So if you you know that the first thing to do is email promotion, you write the email promotion. Okay, now send it to us and we'll give you feedback on it. So then we're also, if you don't write the email promotion, we're going to be checking. So we're going to give you that accountability and be like, are you on track? If not, why not? What can we do? How do we get you back on track and then time wise, it's that we've got like in the course.

Speaker 1:

We've basically simplified down everything like the email marketing mastery course that's coming out. We've simplified down right. Here's exactly how to write these email promotions more quickly and here's templates to make it quicker to write these so that it cuts down the amount of time that it takes to actually implement each of those things. So between all of those, we've got the right tactics and we're helping people to actually implement them and making sure they implement them and making it quicker to do it, and all of these things together is kind of what's got us to this point. So talk us through now. What's the next steps for anybody? If someone's thinking, yeah, this sounds really good, I want to get in touch. What should they do next?

Speaker 2:

Well, either go to our website and sign up on a form, or I think the best thing is just to reach out to either you or to me. So, john at datadrivenmarketingcoco or joseph at datadrivenmarketingco, and just email us your website and your email list size, or just your website. We're going to do a review and, john, you do the triangle model.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so what we'll basically do is we'll go through, have a look at your website, we'll have a look at what you've got in place at the moment and help you understand, like, basically, where's the places where you could be making more revenue?

Speaker 1:

And then after that, if you want to book a call and have a chat about it with either yosip or me, then then you can do that. And if you're wondering about, uh, pricing on this, it's starting from um 950 a month working with us, and so we've tried to make that as cheap as we possibly could so that it's really easy for everybody to be able to afford to do this, and our goal is to help you to be able to make that money back within like a month or two. Like to be making that much more revenue per month within the first couple of months, so effectively it's free, and then you start to make more revenue from there. What's, what's anything else? Anybody else that people should know if they're listening to this and they're trying to figure out if this is a good fit for them.

Speaker 2:

Well, think about what the biggest struggles are in your business. So, if it's email marketing, if you're not sure how to do proper email promotions or how to create a course that makes sense, if you're not sure how to create a sales page, a funnel, if you want a second set of eyes, just email us and we're going to be able to help. And ICS basically it's a community now. We have a lot of people in it. Everyone is helping each other. I think it's perfect for anyone making above $1,500 a month.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that's one way to tell if you're a good fit. If you're making above 1500 a month already, then it's probably going to be a good fit. But we won't let you in. If we don't, if we don't think you're going to make a good return on investment, we won't. Like we'll be super honest about that kind of stuff and, like you're super saying, we actually spend a good amount of our week just messaging with listeners of this show, helping them with their funnels and stuff for free, and just um. So if you've got questions about this kind of thing, then just drop us an email and, by the way, yosip is spelt j-o-s-i-p, if you want to. If you want to email him. I think that's everything. Thank you very much, yosip, for coming on and explaining all about the instant call sales program and thank you, as always, for listening. We appreciate your time and we look forward to seeing you again next time. Cheers.