The Art of Selling Online Courses

How Elite Course Creators Price Differently

• John Ainsworth

Share episode

Send us a text

In this eye-opening episode, I reveal the pricing strategy that allowed me to generate $1 million annually from an email list of just 1,000 people. Discover why approximately 10% of your audience will gladly pay 10× more for your offerings, and how implementing this approach has helped course creators across diverse niches add hundreds of thousands—even millions—to their revenue.

I break down:

  • The "power curve" principle that explains why this strategy works so reliably
  • Real examples from hobby niches (like bass guitar lessons) that added $1M+ annually
  • The exact coaching structure that allows you to charge 5-10× higher prices
  • How to implement this strategy without sacrificing your lifestyle or free time
  • Common objections and how to overcome them

Want to know exactly how much more money you could be making with your current audience? Visit pimpyourfunnel.com for a personalized report showing the revenue potential hiding in your business right now. It only takes 3 minutes to fill out, and you'll get a detailed breakdown of what steps you need to take to double your revenue.

If you've been focused on growing your audience when you could be dramatically increasing your revenue from your existing followers, this episode provides the roadmap to doubling your income with far less effort than conventional growth strategies.

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 we're going to be talking about how elite course creators price differently, how this allows you to increase your revenue by X without growing your audience, what price to sell at, what kind of products you need to sell at those prices and why this works so well. You've already done the hard work of building the audience, building the courses. This is like an additional thing you can add on top with much less effort. I have used this approach to double revenue for numerous people and you can use it too. So let's get into it Now.

Speaker 1:

Whenever someone comes to us and they're making more money than seems reasonable given their or their email list size, it's always because they've got a high ticket program. So what keeps happening? We know that kind of reasonable amount of money someone can make from selling courses. So if you've got course and you've got an audience in the of the let's say you're an email list like 30 000 then you're probably going to be making about 15,000 a month from your email list. If you've got something in the hobby space and you're selling relatively low ticket courses about the kind of 150 mark and you're at the top of like how much revenue that you can make. You're doing all the things well with like funnels and email. So we know, if this and this and this, then that when someone comes to us and they're like making 30 grand a month and they've got an email list size of like 2000, we're like, okay, there's no way, it's impossible that they're making enough sales to their email list site, their email list, in order to sell that sorry, in order to sell low ticket courses. It must be that they have high ticket program in order to be making that $30,000 a month. It's got to be. Another example is we at my business, data Driven Marketing, we make a million dollars a year from an email this size of a thousand, a thousand people, right, and we're making a million dollars a year because we are using this approach. We had a client, dan. He doubled his revenue by adding in a group coaching program. I had a friend. He doubled his revenue by adding in a group coaching program. I had a friend, christopher. I tried for ages to convince christopher to do this high ticket offer. He did it and then it added hundreds of thousands of dollars to his revenue hundreds of thousands of dollars to his revenue every year. Now then he told another friend about it scott from scott space lessons and scott added a million dollars per year to his revenue in.

Speaker 1:

In fact, you can go listen to the episode with Scott. Just go back through the podcast, go find that Scott from Scott's Bass Lessons and he explains that whole process he went through. And this is in the hobby space, like Scott is selling stuff to people who are learning bass and that's like it's something that people don't think of as like okay. Well, it's not b2b, it's not how to make money online. You can't sell coaching for that much money. He's charging people ten thousand dollars a year for coaching about learning base.

Speaker 1:

So what I want you to do is I want you to go to pimpyourfunnelcom and, if you do, you fill in a bunch of answers right, you say it's my website, it's my audience, audience size, my email, this size, etc. And we're going to come back with a report for you telling you how much more money you could be making and what steps you need to have in place in order to do that, and in there we're going to include stuff about how do you sell this high ticket offer that's going to allow you to double your revenue, like we're talking about today. So go to pimpyourfunnelcom, fill that and we're going to go through and create that report for you. We're going to explain to you this is exactly how much more money you could be making. All the steps you need to have in place where you could be making more money from each of those things. It takes about three minutes to fill this out and we're going to create that personalized report for you.

Speaker 1:

Next, I want to talk to you about why this works. So there's something called the power curve and what this shows is how much money people are going to spend. So if you know that a thousand people are spending a hundred dollars with you, you can figure out how many people will spend $10,000. You can actually go to I think it's like 8020curvecom, something like that. It's a website that Perry Marshall put together and it allows you to feed stuff in. He's an engineer, he writes this stuff and he creates these things for people who are slightly more technically minded. So it's a bit of a fiddly interface when you're filling this stuff in, but if you figure it out, it's going to tell you okay, given that I've had this, many people spend this much money.

Speaker 1:

How many people would spend this amount of money? If you put in a thousand or 10,000 or whatever as the offer, how many people approximately are likely to buy? As a ballpark, though, if you don't want to go through that, about 10% of people will spend 10 times as much money, so that's why, normally, you can double your revenue by having this high ticket offer, having something that's 10 times as much money. If you do everything else right, you're going to double the amount of money that you make. So this is something that a lot of people who are course creators kind of don't believe. Almost like nobody would pay that much more money.

Speaker 1:

I'm selling this thing. I'm teaching people, whatever it is bass or english or spanish, or music or magic or whatever right. I'm teaching people how to set up a home recording studio, whatever the thing is. Those people don't have this much money. They're not going to spend that much. There is a percentage of people. There are a percentage of people who have that extra money, and what I want you to do is understand that. This is maybe a limiting belief that you have got, but it does not reflect reality. This is really, really important. There are a percentage of people who have that much money and they are willing to spend it and they want to spend it to get that extra level of support.

Speaker 1:

Now, the kind of way that this tends to be priced. Let's talk through that. We have free content, right? This is the largest group by far. 90% of people who consume your free content will never buy They'll never buy anything from you. So 10% of people will buy, 90% just will consume the free content. That's it, the thing from you. So 10% of people will buy. 90% just will consume the free content. That's it. Then we've got our low ticket buyers and that's people who are going to spend between whatever 27 bucks and maybe 300 bucks, 500 bucks, something in that kind of ballpark. And then we've got our high ticket, and the high ticket is generally coaching. That's the offer that we're looking at here Some kind of coaching and support on top of the course that you've got Teaching the same thing thing, helping them with the same thing, but giving feedback, giving them accountability, supporting them now.

Speaker 1:

So why would people pay so much more money for this coaching? That goes along with the course as well. Accountability is worth a lot to people. What they want is results and they aren't getting the results because they're not doing the work. Like, I pay a bass teacher to come to my house and sit down with me and actually go through and help me to practice every week, and part of that is accountability. I know that because he's coming, I need to be practicing before he gets there, otherwise I feel like an idiot. When he's there, I'm practicing with him, so that really helps.

Speaker 1:

Direct access to an expert you can ask all your questions. You can get feedback you can get you can get little tweaks that you couldn't get from somebody. You can't just get from an online course. Maybe you can get community. A lot of times there's a community that goes with this as well, of other people who are trying to do the same thing. Overall, this leads to faster implementation and better results. Now, objections that I hear my audience can't afford high ticket. Well, just not all of them a percentage of them can afford that. Maybe you don't want to be available. So this is one that I feel is actually potentially valid, and you have to make the decision about whether this is right for you.

Speaker 1:

If you offer coaching. It is a slightly more complicated business model. You have to either be giving the feedback yourself now. Now, if you do this with a group coaching program, you can give very specific boundaries to that. So if you want to see about boundaries, there's an episode I did recently with Oscar Owens. He talks about his group coaching program. There's one with Andy Morgan where he explains how he does feedback through email for fitness coaching. He does it one-to-one but he does it through email and people can't expect to get that feedback and the response immediately. So it reduces the burden on him. But you put some kind of boundaries around it right Now.

Speaker 1:

It might be that at some point you don't want to give the feedback at all and you actually hire a coach. Well, now you've got another team member, you've got another person, you've got to pay. So it does introduce another level of complexity. You've either got to be doing the coaching or hire a coach, but it allows you to double your revenue. That's the lot. That's massive, right.

Speaker 1:

So I was helping my friend Jack with this recently, right, he was making, he's getting started teaching banjo and he wanted to make more money and he's making a certain amount of money. It's going to come on the podcast at some point, so hopefully he'll be able to talk about how much. But he needed to make more money, and so what we looked at was what if you offer a higher ticket program and instantly, instantly, like within a week or two, he was making significantly more money by having this higher priced offer? This stuff flat out works and very few people in the course space are doing it. And if you can make enough money from just selling courses and you don't need to do the coaching and it keeps your life simpler, isn't that lovely? That's great, that's cool. If you want more money, this is a potential. This is one of the things you can do in order to get it. Obviously, others include you can do email promotions, you do better sales pages, checkout pages, all the stuff I talk about on this podcast all the time. But if you're doing all those things and you still need to make more or you want to make more, you can add this in. It changes the business entirely. Double your revenue is massive, okay.

Speaker 1:

So how to structure your coaching offers? There's a few ways to do this. There's not just one answer. So it could be group coaching, it could be one-to-one. What I've seen. Typically is that actually in the hobby space or so I'm looking at like fitness or learning music or learning a language, this kind of thing. It tends to be one-to-one feedback. So I mentioned Andy Morgan. There's an episode with him. If you go listen to that then he covers how he does one-to-one coaching via email. Daniel schreiber they do fitness coaching for women in taiwan. There's an episode podcast episode with him. They're doing that one-to-one. They have a number of different coaches who are doing this one-to-one feedback in the language learning space. Timothy Moser, who's going to come on the podcast at some point. They do one-to-one feedback about your language pronunciation. The music space I mentioned a couple of people. So Christopher and then Scott from Scott Space Lessons they're doing one-to-one.

Speaker 1:

Generally in business it's done through group. Now in business, if you're doing group, you've got the potential to have group and then one-to-one is an even higher priced offer. So let's say, for example, you're selling a group coaching program and you charge $5,000 for it and that includes feedback, maybe on a group coaching call via Slack, this kind of thing. On top of that you could offer one-to-one coaching as well for $3,000 a and a percentage of people will pay that much as well. So then that's what we actually do as a business. We have like group coaching program for about $5,000, I think yeah, just under 5,000. And then we have one-to-one coaching, where people get more support, more individual feedback, and that is then more expensive as well. Now, I'm not going to cover here how to sell group coaching, but I might cover that in another episode. So overall, this is the basic concept.

Speaker 1:

I want to try and summarize everything we've just gone through. There are a percentage of people maybe about 10% who will pay 10 times as much money and therefore you can double your revenue from your business. The way to do that is to offer some kind of coaching and not just courses, one-to-one coaching, group coaching, something like that. The reason that that works is that some people have enough money to be able to afford that and they want the additional support and therefore they're more likely to go ahead with it. If you've already got a big enough audience to be making a good amount of money from courses, then this is great. If you find product market fit, you find right what's a way that you can deliver this that works for your audience, works for you, then you can make a massive increase in revenue. You've already done the hard work of building the audience, building the courses.

Speaker 1:

This is like an additional thing you can add on top with much less effort, the kind of price generally we're looking at thousands for this, so we're looking at maybe it's 500 a month, a thousand a month, something kind of like that to make this whole thing worthwhile and add up certainly like five to ten times as much as what you're currently charging. If you want more feedback about this and you want to know more detail about how this could work for your business, drop me an email, john, at data driven marketingco, and I will reply within a couple of days probably with details about like okay, this is how it could work for you. This is examples I've seen elsewhere. This is the kind of pricing you could be looking at and just kind of giving you an overview of like how this might actually work. So just drop me an email, john, at data driven marketingco now if that's more detail than you need and you just want to know that general report that I talked about earlier where we're going to give you like. Here's the summary, here's the outline of like what you could be doing that you're currently missing, the steps that you should have in place, how much more money you could be making.

Speaker 1:

Then go to pimpyourfunnelcom. Pimpyourfunnelcom. Thanks, pimpyourfunnelcom. Pimpyourfunnelcom. Thanks so much. And if you found this interview, if you found this podcast episode useful and you want to get future episodes, then subscribe wherever you listen. Thanks so much.