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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
The Funnel that Makes This Banjo Player $5,000/month
🔗 Get Your Funnel Help: https://datadrivenmarketing.co/call
🔗 Check out Jack's work: https://www.banjoskills.com/
In this episode, I sit down with my friend Jack Kowalski who's built a $5,000/month banjo teaching business with just 5,300 YouTube subscribers. Jack opens up about his funnel strategy that gets a 7% opt-in rate (when most creators manage just 0.5%) and how his simple $17 tripwire product brings in $1,500 monthly. We chat about his approach to creating courses, why being passionate and showing your struggles connects better with students than trying to be a perfect expert, and how he turned his hobby into solid monthly income. Jack's story is really encouraging for anyone who thinks they need a massive audience to make good money teaching online. Lots of practical tips in this one that you can actually use right away!
It's honestly kind of crazy that I'm able to make 5k a month from 5,000 YouTube subscribers. It's weird, though, right Like that'll work for a month or two months and I'll just be like, cool, I found my thing, I'm just going to do nothing but that, and then it just starts to drop off.
Speaker 2:Jack has been able to reach $5,000 a month teaching banjo in just one year. He's played the banjo for 15 years as a hobby and after exiting a SaaS business he decided to make a go of teaching and in that past year he's built up his YouTube channel, built several courses, is building a solid banjo education business. Now, today we're going to be talking about how he managed to do that, what funnel he uses, how he built his YouTube audience, why being obsessive is better than being an expert and why he shows his struggles learning to his audience.
Speaker 1:People sign up. They binge everything in a couple days and then cancel. I'm like it's five dollars a month.
Speaker 2:Stick with me, yeah I definitely see course creators who are a few years in and are doing as a side gig and are not managed this yet. You've been working full-time on this right. That's pretty outstanding. 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 jack karowski. Jack, welcome to the show thanks, john so talk us through the journey.
Speaker 2:It's been a year and you've gone from complete beginner, like nothing in place, to making $5,000 a month. Talk us through that journey just in a few minutes to give everyone kind of an idea of how that's happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, funny thing too, is it kind of started with Breakfast With you. Shortly before I kind of started I said I'm sick of doing software. I'm either going to teach the banjo or open a corndog stand. I remember that.
Speaker 2:I was like what are you talking about?
Speaker 1:But yeah. So I started kind of putting out a few YouTube videos just as an experiment. They look like hostage crisis videos now. But yeah, around January of 2024, I just decided I'm going to get serious about it. I'm going to give myself a year and see what I can do. So the biggest thing I did was just get consistent with YouTube. So every single week I don't think I missed a single week, or maybe one week the entire year putting out a long form video every Friday and just kind of targeting YouTube search. So I'm in a pretty small niche Clawhammer Banjo. It's a specific sub-niche of banjo, which means search is really strong.
Speaker 2:But luckily banjo is a massive niche in and of itself, right.
Speaker 1:It's not bad.
Speaker 2:I was joking, but okay.
Speaker 1:No, it is. I mean it's okay, Like the sort of top performers in this niche maybe have a hundred thousand subscribers.
Speaker 2:Right, it is pretty small, pretty small, okay, and right away.
Speaker 1:The first thing I did was I said, well, I'm gonna do. When I got 100 subscribers and I said, okay, well, I'm famous. Now I'm a famous banjo player, I'm gonna try to sell something, I said I'm gonna do a live class. Um, I spent like two weeks kind of promoting it or whatever, and I sold it for ten dollars and I got one person uh showed up yeah ed.
Speaker 1:He still comes to all my things, which is awesome, nice, but um, yeah, and really just kind of talking to you, learning from our friends, um, I really learned a lot about funnels, um how these course businesses work. I built several courses. I was basically delivering them live at first to sort of get a feel for what works and just staying rock solid, consistent with that. Youtube nice.
Speaker 2:So it's been about growing on youtube. That's been your main channel. How many courses have you created over the over, the course of the too many?
Speaker 1:six or seven, yeah, okay, yeah, counting the mini courses.
Speaker 2:So some people really struggle with this. They won't. They'll like be like oh, it's six months to make a course and in a year you've made six or seven courses. Like that's pretty outstanding.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'm really lucky. My audience is super communicative, so I get a lot of emails. I talk to a lot of them and when they tell me stuff they want to learn and I know this is like a common struggle I'm just kind of well, maybe I can do something around this, and a lot of times it ends up turning into into a course. I was also for most of the year, I was delivering a live group class every week, so I'm using those to turn into courses nice, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So we'll go into each of these parts in in depth, but so overall, the concept is you've been really consistent on youtube, you've built up, you've done one video per week plus shorts on top right that you mentioned, you are targeting YouTube search in particular.
Speaker 2:So you're, like now, appearing high up on almost all the claw hammer banjo search terms. You've made six. You've done live classes. You've been in like real close contact with your audience. You've done turning that stuff into courses and you've been like selling the courses. How often have you been selling those?
Speaker 1:I don't sell many outside of the promotions because I'm kind of bad about updating my website, but, um, I do an email promotion every month the last two weeks and yeah um, so I sell pretty much everything during that time nice, all right, cool.
Speaker 2:Let's kind of get into a little bit more detail. So how did you choose YouTube as your content strategy? Why was that the channel for you?
Speaker 1:Well, when I started about 15 years ago, I learned a ton from YouTube and so it made sense. I felt like that was a good spot to target. That's where a lot of people teach, is where a lot of people go to learn, and I just figured I could put out some good content there.
Speaker 2:Nice, all right, cool. What kind of videos have worked for you on the channel? What's been the? Because there's different types of youtube videos you can do some more educational, some more entertainment, some more like um in detail, some more ridiculous. So what kind of things have you found have been like good video formats for you?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's tricky, right, because in my mind I'm like, oh, people just want like hard education, Right, and I found that's not like that helps. That gets me to a certain point, but it's not what a lot of people are looking for. So I'm just now trying to get a little more into general banjo entertainment or folk music entertainment entertainment or folk music entertainment.
Speaker 1:Um, but for the last year I've mostly been doing, uh, technique videos, um specific song lessons, uh some performances and then um sort of multi packs of songs. I call them. I'll say like we're gonna look at five songs about this topic or in this tuning or whatever give me an example, give the audience an example of uh, because I know like some of the some of the topics that you might yeah, yeah, oh, I did um, uh, for halloween I did five songs about murder.
Speaker 1:Um, so we looked at five classic murder ballads. I always like to make them fun like that. Um, sometimes I'll just do like five easy songs. Or you know, um, I think I did five recipe songs where, for some reason, a lot of banjo music just is recounting recipes for things like groundhog and stuff.
Speaker 2:Of course, what groundhog, like as in groundhog day, that little kind of thing that looks a bit like a chipmunk my favorite thing.
Speaker 1:A lot of times like um, and I didn't really think about this in the moment when I recorded, but I was like I asked has anyone ever actually tried groundhog, like I'd love to hear about, and I've gotten so many comments from people that tell me their stories about eating groundhogs wow, yeah I don't think I can't remember, I think I told you at the time, but I I mentioned something about the fact that you, um, were playing banjo and and I was about to say and something to uh, to my friend, and he said and uh, cooking rats in the swamp.
Speaker 2:That was just like if you play the banjo, that's, that's, that's your hobby number two, that's uh, that's the deliverance effect.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. Like I haven't seen this movie, but yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, that's where everyone gets their image of banjo players.
Speaker 2:Got it All right. Cool, they're the rat cooking swamp living banjo playing people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting. That's the thing I love about this. It's crazy such a cool, intricate history that is just across countries, across everything. And yeah, it's funny because people get that picture in their head of the banjo player, right, but it's like not not super accurate, but uh, it's a standard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so you've mentioned that you post on youtube once a week with long form. How often do you post short form? How many?
Speaker 1:yeah, I just looked at this actually. So I think I did about 130 short form videos last year, so I guess that works out to about three a week, but in practice it works out to every day for a month or two months, and then I get behind and I don't post for a month. Um, shorts are weird, right, because they tend to do a lot more views than the long form videos. Um, but it's weird. So I've noticed they convert at about 1%, and when I say convert, I mean convert to subscribers, convert to my mailing list, at about 10 of the rate of my long form videos, but they tend to do about 10 times the views of my long form videos.
Speaker 2:So I think it is worthwhile to do so. We'll get actually into the details of that, I think. How? How are you promoting your lead magnets and get people on your email list from short form, because I feel like that's an area where people drop the ball it's hard right, because no one clicks to the description right um so you just have to eat. I struggle to find where the description is still on the short form, even though I'm on YouTube for work all the time.
Speaker 1:It's weird, right, Because sometimes you want to see when a short was posted and that's only in the description, and so recently I remember having to click around a bunch to figure out where the description was.
Speaker 1:You can do it in the comments, but most people don't read the comments either, so I found the thing that works the best is to just say it or have something at the bottom of the screen. It or have something at the bottom of the screen. It's easy for banjo because I give sheet music away as my lead magnet, or tabs.
Speaker 2:So I just say, oh you know, check my site or check my channel to grab the lead magnet. Do you say, like banjoskillscom, slash whatever? Sometimes?
Speaker 1:I've tried a bunch of different ways for this. Actually, and I think that that is usually what works best is to give it a really simple URL like banjoskillscom. Slash tab or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, cool. How, when you're thinking about how much time you spend creating courses, creating YouTube videos, just playing banjo, how do you think about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a lot right. I think the nice thing is like I still kind of consider myself a student of it, so a lot of it is me exploring, but, like as an example today, like I'm working on my YouTube video for this week but, I spent about three hours before I came here today playing banjo.
Speaker 1:When I get home I'll record some course videos, I think in average it's probably about equal time spent doing all three, which equates to close to 40 hours a week. I'm trying as someone that is a compulsive course creator. I've made way too many. I'm trying to cut that down and spend a little more time on content. I would like to be more consistent with spend a little more time on content. I would like to be more consistent with the short form and things like that.
Speaker 2:You've mentioned before that you think it's better to be seen as being obsessive than to be an expert. Can you talk me through that philosophy?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, sometimes you look at these music instructors, right, and I've kind of looked at people across all you know types of instrument and things, things like that, and the ones that I really resonated, at least, are the ones that are just constantly exploring, going down rabbit holes, and sometimes they do videos on really weird little things, but that's kind of what makes me a fan of them.
Speaker 1:As an example, I recently did a video on doing harmonics on the banjo. You know, like those Van Halen guitar tappy type things, you can do that on the banjo. You know, like those van halen guitar tappy type things, you can do that on the banjo a little bit and like as a super tiny thing that most people aren't going to be interested in, but like I think that's a really cool thing to add to your channel, at least sometimes, because it's going to get the, the people that um do want to go down those rabbit holes you also told me that you are really willing to show your audience when you're struggling with something, rather than trying to be seen as, like I know, I'm the expert.
Speaker 2:I know about this, this thing which thing like um.
Speaker 1:It's funny I did. I did a live stream recently, so I do um.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of books of tabs and I did a live stream where I was recording the audio tracks for the book, cause I every um every tab in the book gets two audio tracks and, like, a bunch of people commented like it was really cool seeing you screw these up, right, because, like I had plenty of false starts or or you know, I got halfway through and hit a wrong note or something like that, like that. I think that makes you feel, um, it's weird, right, when you see someone that just plays perfectly, it doesn't, almost doesn't feel like they're human.
Speaker 1:So I think, it's better to just be, uh, super open, leave some of your mess ups in it, it's okay, and it also makes them feel better, like you. Um, you know, if people just think that the ideal is perfection, then it's easy to give up on the instrument. Even good players screw up occasionally.
Speaker 1:It's all right are just impossible to play. And I found like the hardest one in there and said I'm just going to try to learn this uh on for my youtube video. And I'm just completely frustrated by the end of it and just cursing angry like whatever. It was just like impossible to play this song. I actually left it and came back the next day but like in between I'm like I'm never going to get this song. I should just scrap this video. But that's the kind of thing like it's entertaining but also like it's it shows like this stuff's hard yeah, yeah, yeah, could you pull?
Speaker 2:maybe pull your chair up a little bit more. I think this might maybe a little bit far from sure, sorry now cool um. Was there any time when you found that was difficult to show that you didn't know what you're doing on something and like how did you get past that, if that's?
Speaker 1:the beginning, for sure, like one thing that kept me from starting for a while, like I kind of started thinking about this in like august and didn't really start until like january. Um, because when I started to do this content, I was like, oh, let me see what other people are doing. And I was like, oh, there's people that are better than me. Therefore, I can't, I can't teach whatever, and like I guess this is imposter syndrome, right and um. So when I started, I was very like, okay, you know only the best possible takes. I do a song you know 100 times to make sure it was perfect and all that. And then, um, I don't know, I guess I just realized like yeah, even there's always going to be people better than me.
Speaker 2:I think that, uh, it's better to just do what I think is is um is going to resonate with people, and if it does resonate with them, then then that's good if they want that perfect teacher that never makes a mistake, then they can find them as well you know, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Some of the people I watch, like fitness youtubers that are the most fun, are the ones who are like look I'm, I don't know what I'm doing right, yeah right, I am like I'm I'm watching these other people who really seem to know what they're doing, and I'm figuring it out and I'm trying this thing and this seems to be working for me right now, and I'm struggling with this and whatever, and you're like, oh cool, you're going on the journey with them, you know it's weird, right, like I don't see people give, like I mean, people can kind of give credits like the old time banjo guys oh, I learned this from this version, whatever but like I'm happy to be like I was watching this guy's youtube video the day he does this really cool thing.
Speaker 1:Here's me attempting it. You know, like it's fine to like spread that around and let people know about cool stuff out there, and I think that helps people connect with you more again too, because you're not sort of gatekeeping this stuff that you know about they don't.
Speaker 2:So what have you managed to get your youtube channel up to now in terms of subscribers views per month? That kind of thing.
Speaker 1:I think it's a 5300 subscribers right now. Okay, views per month are between 40 and 50 000 okay, and so oh, wait a minute.
Speaker 2:Is that including short? Yes okay, cool, got it. I was like that's massive compared to your number of private.
Speaker 1:I think it's about 30,000 long form views.
Speaker 2:And that's solid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it does All right, all right, cool. The rest are shorts.
Speaker 2:So one of the things you're doing incredibly well is you're managing to get a lot of the people who watch your long form views onto your email list right. What are you doing differently to other people on that?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think, and I think that's like the big um. I think that's why I was able to build a business with 5300 youtube subscribers. You know, um, the big thing is giving away like really good stuff.
Speaker 1:So if I if I play a song at all, I I'm always like, and you can get the like, I write out the tab and give that away for free. So anything you see me do, you can get like sort of the exact way I do it by just signing up to my email list and I give away 40 or 50 tabs like that I've written over the last year and I try to make it part of my video.
Speaker 1:Um and I try to make it part of my video. Yeah, so I don't. Normally if I'm teaching a song, I don't really show the tab on the screen too much, unless it's like a really you know small piece of it and I just say, you know, grab the tab to follow along. I put that right in the beginning of the video. Or I'll tell them like, hey, it takes a few minutes, cause it does for my email system to send it, so grab it now by for my email system to send it, so grab it now. By the time you're done watching the instructional part, you can dive right in. And music's weird, right Like music, and I'd be curious I don't know if other people notice this but a lot of musicians are really just looking for tabs a lot of times. So I noticed, like on the videos where I give away tabs, I have fairly low retention because I think people are watching, sometimes up to the videos where I give away tabs.
Speaker 1:I have fairly low retention because I think people are watching, sometimes up to the point where I give away a tab and like, oh cool, there's the link and they go get it and jet. But it's still really valuable for getting banjo players onto my list.
Speaker 2:What do you then do in terms of where do you put the link for the?
Speaker 1:first line of the description.
Speaker 2:First line of the description. Ok, do you do pinned comment as well? If I remember Right, OK, okay, do you do pinned comment as well, if I remember right. Okay, 30, 30 percent of the time, yeah so I was looking at one of your videos and it was missing. I was looking at some earlier today and it was missing something. It's either.
Speaker 2:It was not in the pinned comment okay or it was in the description, but not the first. I think it was in the first line in the description, but it wasn't in the pinned comment that's probably right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really good about the description. That's so good about the comment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what kind of opt-in rate are you getting on those videos?
Speaker 1:If I give away, like I think my highest one is five songs for beginners and I think that one's about 7% of the views have made it onto my email list.
Speaker 2:Wow. So for anybody watching who doesn't know, it's like if you never really tracked this slave. You never really tracked this. A normal opt-in rate on a youtube video is probably about 0.5, the way most people are doing it and most people have got. Maybe they've got a lead magnet somewhere in the description. They don't mention it in the video or they say, oh, I go and check out my website and then, but it's not like, here's the exact link. Here's the reason why you should get this particular lead magnet that goes with this video. It's in the first line of the description, and so changing these things makes a massive difference and it grows the email list way, way, way faster, which, then, is the way that you actually make money in this kind of a business is by having the bigger email list. So are there any other tips that you've learned? In terms of it sounds like you're doing an individual lead magnet per video Usually. Yeah, how much time is that taking?
Speaker 1:I have to well see. This is the problem with doing a music channel is I have to arrange songs. So much of my time just goes into finding old songs and making my own version of them. So actually writing the tab is just a matter of sort of balancing the banjo on my knee and typing it out while I play it, and it maybe has an extra 30 minutes to learning the song. The song can take me a full day, you know, to learn, but once I have that, it's pretty easy to do.
Speaker 2:How long does it take you to set up a new landing page or whatever? Have you got like a standard template?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I just literally duplicate the last one change out the the form.
Speaker 2:The whole process takes about 10 minutes.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, and you're doing that in kit uh kajabi kajabi he's kajabi for everything, just because I didn't know what I was doing when I started. I mean, I think they're really great, but they I wanted that all in one thing.
Speaker 2:They were just going to handle everything for me from an email marketing point of view, when you're actually making offers. You said you're doing a promotion once a month. What's your approach to that?
Speaker 1:yeah, um, so I do a week of content sort of related to the problem um so I usually do like two emails monday and wednesday, and then friday I'll do just an exclusive video just for my list, where I'd maybe do a 10 to 15 minute video that demonstrates an exercise or something that we've been talking about. I just say stay tuned Monday, you know, something cool is coming, and then next week I do six open cart emails.
Speaker 2:So Monday through Friday, two on Friday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then what kind of what?
Speaker 1:are you covering in those emails? The first email is really just to talk about the course within it and actually I've found I feel like I've done enough of these. I kind of have a decent formula. So that first email just says like here's the offer, here's what's in the course, go check it out the second day. I usually give some sort of preview of the course, so you know maybe a 20 minute chunk of the course, like the first 20 minutes.
Speaker 1:Then I'll usually talk about like the guarantee or whatever for the third email because, that seems to like make people feel better, you know, um, and then it's really just kind of that going, going on.
Speaker 2:You got 24 hours left, you got 12 hours left got it, and what kind of percentage are you seeing of your email list to buy when you do one of these? It's about half to one percent okay that's solid, really solid, nice, okay, and how does that add up in terms of like you're making like five grand a month. Is that all for most courses? How much is from like high, anything higher price that you're offering as well in terms of like one to one lessons or anything else?
Speaker 1:yeah, I, I do a few lessons here and there, I don't do a ton. Um, I think about half to two-thirds is from that promo and then the rest is from the tripwire offer, because I sell quite a few of those okay, so for anyone who doesn't know, can you talk them through what a tripwire is?
Speaker 1:yeah, so, um, when someone grabs one of my lead magnets, they immediately get a um a page that says your lead magnet's on the way. By the way, I've got this whole book of like 40 or 45 tabs and you get a one-hour class recorded. I'll teach you one of these songs and it's $17. And I think I wish I could remember the exact percentage. I want to say it's around 5% of opt-ins to the list end up purchasing.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's solid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it ends up being pretty decent.
Speaker 2:And how much do you make a month from that?
Speaker 1:I think in the last month I made about $1,500 from that.
Speaker 2:Nice, that's great Substantial part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's an order bump and upsell afterwards. Yeah, yeah, makes me so happy. And I want to say, like I recently finally did a welcome email sequence. I did not have one for a long time and like that's, um, I don't get like that many email list signups but um, I've I haven't looked at like what the percentage is, but I've sold four or five courses through that in the last month outside of the promo, which is nice because I wasn't really selling hardly anything outside of the promo before.
Speaker 2:So, on a YouTube point of view, one of the things that we talk through nearly every week is titles, thumbnails, ideas for videos, this kind of thing. What have you tried with thumbnails and what's worked? What hasn't worked for you?
Speaker 1:yeah, I've tried a ton um, and I'm still experimenting, sort of trying to find that that perfect uh formula. Um, banjo stuff is weird, right, like when I look at the stuff that does really well, a lot of times it's like an iphone pointed up the guy's nose that somehow has six million views. Um, so it's like hard to say um, what I found generally works best for for banjo or for like my stuff is those sort of standard youtube thumbnails the shocked face, you know, uh sort of highly stylized with some cool text or whatever. Um, weirdly, and I wonder if this is like a um a youtube size thing, is that the best thumbnails for me?
Speaker 1:just show the banjo super prominently and maybe it's just so it's very clear it's not a guitar video or something like that. But, like my absolute highest performing thumbnails are always just like a close-up of the banjo the round part of the banjo, with some text on it.
Speaker 2:Um well, wait a minute. You told me you showed me something the other day where you'd had really good click-through rate and it'd just been the picture with no text. And then you tried one with the text and it had done worse.
Speaker 1:It's just a closeup of the banjo? It's not even a very good picture. I had like an iPhone 10 at the time and the title is let's learn a spooky one Right. Like that one had like I don't have, I never have phenomenal click through rates, but I think that one has had like 6% click through rate over like a year.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:It's weird though Right Like and that'll work for a month or two months and I'll just be like cool, I found my thing, I'm just going to do nothing but that, and then it just starts to drop off. It feels like you need kind of fresh, at least for me. I feel like I need kind of fresh thumbnail styles to keep going dark, cozy, orangey background. I was using that and that was like getting me like five and a half percent click-through rates and then for like three or four videos and then just back down interesting.
Speaker 2:When I chat with uh oscar, who's been on this uh podcast before um, about this, he says that the point of the thumbnail is to stop the scroll and the point of the title is to get the click. So it'd be interesting to have a look at. Okay, well, what titles have you got with them?
Speaker 1:you know, maybe this works, but only with this kind of title yeah, I've had that thought too, um, and actually, um, I think that that let's learn a spooky one. I think that was, uh, inspired by someone you sent me, ollie parker, the trumpet, and he has just weird titles like that that kind of make you want to click right feel like that one.
Speaker 2:It may well have been the title that did it on that one yeah, and the type of titles that work for search versus discovery are like wildly different. So, like, let's play a spooky one. It's like a more curiosity based like oh, oh, that's surprising, what's? That's kind of you know, um, and what about? So talk us through. You've started using chat gpt because they've just released this new version of image creation, which is like crazy good.
Speaker 1:Yeah talk us through that because I was using um. I was using fiverr for a while, um, and it was okay. But um, and I was starting to get a little frustrated with it and um, chat gpt just dropped that new image generation thing last week and I just decided to try it and it's like incredible, like I can just put a picture of me playing the banjo just a screenshot and say, well, I actually want this facial expression or, you know, these changes to it, make it look like a stylish YouTube thumbnail. It just does it to it. Make it look like a stylish youtube thumbnail, just it just does it.
Speaker 2:um, so, but then I usually go crazy and start adding robot arms. You know have you tried any of them as an actual thumbnail?
Speaker 1:I haven't no, no, but the one I'm doing this week is like don't lose your nerve, jack. Come on robot arms yeah, maybe, maybe this, uh, yeah, because the one this week is like totally from from do it as an a b test I will.
Speaker 2:That's the right, that's the feature built in Done. I'll try it. Try it and see. Do banjo players like the robot arms?
Speaker 1:I'll give it a try.
Speaker 2:They'd rather see you have like a rat on a stick.
Speaker 1:Like, what do they want? You know, yeah, I'll try it for sure. What other kind of tried, like you know, vid iq and tube buddy and all this one, the one that, like I really love and I've kept up with his creator hooks, um, so they, I think it's just done manually. This guy, he just tracks every sort of outlier well, not every, but he finds outlier videos, like this one, performed five times better than average for this channel, and then he dissects the thumbnail on the hook um specifically like the title and he explains why it works and what's really cool is like it's super searchable the, the hook as well, or the title he calls the hook, the title and thumbnail.
Speaker 1:oh okay, got it. Yeah, it's really title and thumbnail, but um, he yeah, he kind of dissects why it works. I've kind of learned, I think maybe, and it might be kind of luck, but the first time I used it it was my best performing video of all time, so I think it might have been like a slot machine thing where I just okay, that's it, but no, it was really good for learning too, especially like it's all sort of categorized.
Speaker 1:You can say show me every outlier where they talked about mistakes like that, and like you can see all these, all these people's takes on it.
Speaker 2:Or you know videos for beginners and things like that yeah, yeah, titles, thumbnails, and then the hook at the start is like crazy important.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the other thing I've experimented a ton with is that is that hook um, because I'm a rambler, so my first several months of videos I would just talk for three minutes before I'd actually start the video and what I found is like, and I just started shortening it and I just I found that like that sweet spot for me is like 10 seconds, like just okay here's what we're doing. Let's go and like that's, that's what actually keeps my, my retention up nice.
Speaker 2:So anything else besides creator hooks, do you? Do you like one of 10? Do you not use that?
Speaker 1:I tried it. I found it really confusing okay it seemed like everything was bringing up was like, uh, gaming channels, and didn't quite seem applicable for me.
Speaker 2:I don't know, maybe I just didn't use it right got it all right, cool, so creator hooks, so you're not using tube buddy or vidakio anymore um, what else did I try?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to think there was something else. Oh, I was just going to say there was a video creators. I can't remember the guy's name, but he did like a pretty good course I bought in the beginning it was like a hundred dollar course about here's how to like set up your channel and stuff like that, and I found that to be pretty useful.
Speaker 1:Nice and you mentioned some video the other day you'd seen about like uh, 23 things to do after you upload your video. That was really good, yeah, because, um, that was vanessa lau. She does good like youtube and instagram stuff, but, um, it was all about how to get the keywords and all those type of things, how to um, uh, how to set up the description correctly, and I did change those things and again might be kind of like that what I said with creator hooks, but like the video I did, where I actually kind of stepped through and did all that stuff, it wasn't like one of my strongest videos. I went like it was super, like you know, nitty-gritty, banjo stuff. I didn't think it was going to do that well and it did better than average. Okay, um, and I felt like it did get some extra clicks from those couple of things.
Speaker 2:So talk to me about pricing for the courses. What are you charging for any of them? What's the kind of price range that you've got in place?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's tough right, because it's something I've struggled with a lot for the last year. I've charged everywhere between $10 and $200, $10 being my super early live sessions and then $200 being more recently. It's weird, right, because you don't want to price anyone out, but to go get private lessons is $75 to $100 an hour, and so I think that a six-hour course or whatever is pretty reasonable for like $100, $150. But it's weird. I find that people that learn online tend to be a little price sensitive, and so I've found about $150 is the sweet spot. However, I have a few super low ticket things that do really well. Like I said, that book brings in about $1,500 a month, and I did a beginner-level book recently. It was just 15 songs specifically for beginners. I sold that for $19. And that also does really well.
Speaker 2:I kind of keep going back and forth in my mind, like is it better to just be doing low low ticket items and um, maybe 150 is already low yeah, but like you look at like, okay, like there's guys in the banjo space that like they do a five dollar a month, patreon, that's their whole business and they do well, you know um yeah, I mean we've done so, we've done a lot of testing, including in the hobby space, including in the music hobby space, right, and it's almost always the sweet spot is between about 100 and 200 dollars, yeah, for a course.
Speaker 2:And it's like, and specifically for what you are selling in the monthly promotion in particular, because that's where the bulk of the sales come in, right, and and if you price much lower than $100 or any lower than $100, you're basically giving up the revenue. You'll have not that many more sales, but the revenue will be lower because the price is lower. And if you go much above $200, $250, definitely, then the number of sales drops off significantly. Then the number of sales drops off significantly. So somewhere in there, like about 150 is normally about the sweet spot we found with a lot of clients across a lot of different niches. So talk to me about experiments that you've run that haven't worked. What's some of the stuff you've tried that you're like actually, no, not anymore, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know, I just mentioned Patreon and like I thought, well, maybe that's like a good route the subscription revenue or whatever and I did a low-priced Patreon and I did it for about two months inside and shut it down. It was like a lot of work. I couldn't really figure out where to insert it because I have that Tripwire offer right, which makes more sense to me than the Patreon. I didn't really have a good place to sell the Patreon Churn on it was like incredibly high. You would see. You know I had a good amount of content on there.
Speaker 1:I was adding a video every week but you would see people sign up. They'd binge everything in a couple days and then cancel. I'm like it's $5 a month. Stick with me. I mean, I think I still have patrons I've forgotten I've had from years ago. Not that I want people to subscribe and forget about it, but like I don't know, I just I thought like it'd be a super low barrier to entry way to get more content. But what I found was like the people I don't know it was just like they, I think the people that were willing to do that versus like a more full featured course just wanted like a bunch of stuff real quick and then wanted to chat, you know.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the Patreon didn't work out. Anything else that you've tried and then and then ditched.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, in the beginning, really for a lot in the first year I was doing these live sessions like basically every week, right, and I thought, like banjo music, it's a community thing, people want to hang out, um, you know, in this sort of these live things and it might be a time zone thing too, since I'm in england, but, um, I found that people were much happier to buy a pre-recorded uh thing than they were to attend live sessions.
Speaker 1:Even when I would um sell like, say, I'm going to do these eight live sessions and you can get the recordings afterwards, most people would actually just watch the recordings the next day rather than attend the live sessions, which is kind of good for me, because sometimes it's hard to keep your energy up for like a 60 to 90 minute session. I feel like the product is better when I don't do it live. I just thought that my theory was that people would prefer a live session and it doesn't seem to be the case yeah, you just gotta suck it and see sometimes right you just try something out, right oh?
Speaker 2:yeah, that didn't work.
Speaker 1:You try something different yeah, so going, going forward. I'm not going to be doing, uh like maybe a live q a once in a while or something like that, but it's not going to be sort of the standard for my courses so if we add all this stuff up together, right, we've got you've.
Speaker 2:You've been doing your one youtube video long form every week, your four or five shorts a week for a period, and then dropping off, and then averaging two or three a week. Over the course of the year, that's allowed you to build up 5 000 subscribers and, more crucially, about 20 000 long form views. I think that's way more important as a number right too, because that's the views is what can convert into email subscribers um you? Then was it 20 000. I got that number right 30 000 30 000 was.
Speaker 2:Wasn't that total with the?
Speaker 1:short.
Speaker 2:No, it's about 40 to 50 000 okay, so 30 000 long form views and another ten or twenty thousand shorts. Okay, got it from that. You've got a high opt-in rate onto your email list, so that's that's a crucial bit there as well. And then, once a month, you run an email promotion to your list. Is it just once a month, or do you ever do two?
Speaker 1:I, I did. I tried in the beginning to do like two a month. Um found that to be a little stressful for me and I felt like I was kind of hammering them with offers constantly.
Speaker 2:One thing we do sometimes is one main promotion and then a flash sale like a two-day flash sale.
Speaker 1:I could see you doing something like that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it's easier to write Right and it's not like bombarding people. It's just like two or three emails over the course of two days and it's like, okay, cool, that gets another little bit of revenue. And then the main thing you're selling is the courses. You do have a little bit sometimes of some one-to-one stuff that you're doing on top. That's kind of allowing you to boost up the revenue. You've got order bumps, you've got upsells, you've got a tripwire funnel which is converting really well, and all of that is what's meant that in a year you've been able to get up to 5 000 a month in revenue.
Speaker 2:What has allowed you to be so consistent with all of that? Because I definitely see course, creators who are a few years in and are doing as a side gig and are not managed this, yet You've been working full time on this right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty much, yeah, pretty much. So I think the idea was coming from having a SaaS business. I think that sort of built that ability to be consistent for me and not wanting to do a SaaS business or get a real job is enough to kind of keep me moving along and steady here. And plus, you know, we have this weekly group that co-works. Every Friday we do a quick planning meeting and that just sort of keeps me on track with everything going on.
Speaker 2:I kind of want to come in there and say like, oh, the things I did, this is the progress I made, you know, and that actually that that bit of accountability is super helpful and if, if you're thinking what I could do with some of that accountability and someone helping me with this is like jack's got a slight advantage in that, like we're friends and so anytime he has a question about, like, okay, opt-ins or email promotions or whatever, we'll just chat about it.
Speaker 2:But if you do want help with that kind of thing, we do have a coaching program which is specifically designed for helping course creators to actually be able to get all of this stuff in place. If you want to find out more about that, go to datadrivenmarketingco and click on book a call and you can have a chat with us and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that. A call and, uh, you can have a chat with us and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that. Um, any more tips? Anything more that you've learned that you, a year ago, would have loved to have heard in terms of, like, make sure you do this or don't spend time on that, or like you know what? What advice would you give one year ago, jack?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think the biggest thing is just get those, get those things into place immediately, like your, your funnels and your email list and all that kind of stuff, and really be pushing that, because I have a tiny audience and it's honestly kind of crazy that I'm able to make 5K a month from 5,000 YouTube subscribers.
Speaker 1:But it's definitely possible if you've sort of got all these other things in place. And then, other than that, I mean I think the big thing is just to have fun with it. I was like I always stressed about, you know, my YouTube delivery and like you know all that kind of stuff and just being natural, minimal editing, just sort of have just let your, your enjoyment and your fun shine through, rather than these sort of tightly scripted things. Those videos were terrible of mine and when I was like, I was kind of like I'm like reading a script, looking like a deer in headlights, and if I just kind of relax and have fun, it comes out a lot better and it's easier for me, it's more fun so something you said in there is very, very different to what most people do.
Speaker 2:You said to start off from the very beginning with doing the work on the email marketing and the funnels and getting people onto your email list. Nobody does that, right, like almost everybody, or certainly everybody who I talk to. Right, all the people are coming to us haven't had any of that stuff in place until they've built up a much bigger following than you have. And it's like I talked to somebody today and she's got, uh, 1.3 million followers on facebook, 689 000 followers on instagram, 78 000 subscribers on youtube, and is making like much less money than you are because she hasn't done all of this stuff. So, like, what helped me to help them? If that person is listening, like, because this, I really really, really want to help people get their head around the fact they everybody's like, oh yeah, I'll do more. I'll do that later. I'll come back to that later. I'll do that when, whatever, but they should be doing it now, from the beginning. Like, can you help me to convince them?
Speaker 1:do you think they're trying to build a business or it's just like a hobby that they've ended up with? Don't?
Speaker 2:think of themselves as a business owner, they think of themselves as a creator, and they know they need to do this, but they don't really want to and they're uncomfortable, and then that.
Speaker 1:So they'll find a thousand excuses as to why they don't think like the, at the very very least, like as long as you start building that email list. So just make a lead magnet, put it out there and and say go, sign up for my lead magnet, send one email a month, you know, just to keep it warm. And even even if you just start that from like day one, I think you'll be in much, much better place. Yeah, yeah, and even even if you're not sure you're going to use it ever, whatever, eventually you can, you can just delete the email list if you decide because the thing is right with with youtube.
Speaker 2:If you had a video that goes crazy viral, you don't know it could happen at any point. Your best performing video you can't add back in the bit where you tell people to go sign up to the lead magnet and having that mentioned in the video makes a massive difference to the option rate versus just having it in the in the description and pin comment yeah, still about 20 of my list signups come from a video I made a year ago.
Speaker 1:It was like one of the first videos I made when I got serious with my channel. Yeah, it still gets views and so, yeah, it still brings in you know, I'm not sure how many. Quite a few like 20% of my email signups come from me in the beginning of that video, saying, hey, if you don't know what you're doing, go download this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's huge so if you're listening to this and you are, you're like, okay, jack, I've heard you, I want to go do this, but I don't know exactly how. We've kind of talked about it a bit in this episode. Go to data-drivenmarketingco resources, and I've got a couple of guides there that are going to teach you exactly how to do this. Go through the youtube channel, you know. Go, search data-driven marketingco slash youtube. I've got videos on there that are taking you through exactly step by step, how to improve your opt-in rate all the stuff that we've just kind of gone through today.
Speaker 2:Check out jack's channel banjo skills and then you're going to get, uh, your whole youtube algorithm will be messed up and you'll get loads of videos about banjo from loads of other people as well. But you will now be able to see that's what jack's doing. It's just where he mentions it in the video. This is where to put it. Make that change and future. You will thank you so much for having done this, because you'll have a much bigger email list and you'll be able to make like way more money from it. This is like a really, really big deal. It is like so, so valuable yeah, banjoskillscom.
Speaker 1:uh, youtube my banjo skills channel and that's just banjo skills well, jack, thanks so much for coming on today.
Speaker 2:If people want to go check out your stuff, where should they go? Yeah, just search for banjo skills and it actually does come up now it didn't used to and then I searched for like banjo skills, jack kowalski, and it didn't come up and I'm like, okay, you're gonna have to give me the url here, dude, no it's good now. So banjoskillscom search for Banjo Skills on YouTube. Go check out your stuff there. That's Wickman. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise with everybody.