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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
How I Sell Online Courses (With Literally No Audience)
🔥 Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide
Most course creators think you NEED a massive social media following to succeed. Dr. David Hall proves them wrong.
In just 5 years, David built Psych Maven into a million-dollar course business and became one of the TOP performing schools on Teachable. The crazy part? He did it all without any social media following, YouTube channel, paid advertising, or even working full-time.
In this episode, David reveals his unconventional approach to building a course business through strategic partnerships and affiliate relationships. You'll discover the exact methods he uses to find high-value partners, the outreach strategies that never get ignored, and why he willingly gives away 50% of his revenue to the right affiliates.
This is NOT your typical "build an audience first" advice. If you're tired of creating content and want to see a completely different path to course success, this episode is essential viewing.
Check out Maven Creative Labs: https://mavencreativelabs.com
We hit the million dollar mark without any paid ads. That's David Hall, an applied psychologist and the founder of PsychMaven. David's got one of the top performing schools on Teachable and they've generated over a million dollars in revenue, and he did it all without having his own audience, proving you don't have to be a social media influencer in order to sell a lot of courses. In this episode, you'll learn how to build a million dollar course business without social media.
Speaker 2:I don't like social media. It just got gross and when I got into the online course space it just wasn't a place I wanted to try to figure out the follow-the-money strategy that finds your best affiliates.
Speaker 1:Who's spending money?
Speaker 2:to advertise to someone like me. What is it? Just to kind of draft behind them, to kind of follow behind them Because they're already spending the money. I'm not telling them to spend money, they're already doing it.
Speaker 1:And why he gives away 50% of his revenue. I'm happy to give half of my revenue for even what's a large course, because so I touched on it briefly because you explained to everybody who do you help with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them.
Speaker 2:So in the United States, if you are a licensed mental health provider of any sort and this is true for the most licensed professions in the US there's a requirement to get continuing education. And what's complicated is it's different in different states in the US, and so people ask me like, what's the requirement of it? And the answer is depends which state you live in, but usually you have to get a certain amount of credentialing to be able to offer it, and so I've done that for years. I got into that business in, as you said in the intro, in 2012 in a live seminar business, just because it was. I enjoy teaching.
Speaker 2:I don't enjoy being a professor. I've done it a little bit but I don't like grading papers, I don't like the bureaucracy, and I had some people that were in my life professionally that were doing that sort of work, and it was. I could see that they had income, flexibility and they could travel and all this sort of stuff, and so I got into that, and so the problem was just more of this is something that everyone has to do, and I will say it's nice being in a course business where people have to do it. They don't have to do. Mine is what I said, but they have to do somebody's, and I'm also in an industry where the quality I think most people in my field would say this the quality of options is typically fairly poor, and so I was just trying to do something interesting and so that was kind of my initial foray.
Speaker 2:But the way I have expanded is I also teach people in the mental health space different business practices or career opportunities, and it's really just kind of building off this audience I already had and I would get the questions about well, how did you get into the seminar business? And I've done other things like started medical practices or group psychotherapy practices, and so that would just bring up natural questions, and so I began to teach about that too. So the way I describe what we do is we offer approved continuing education from a variety of teachers and provide career and business development resources for those who work in behavioral health space, and so I help people that are therapists or therapists. Adjacent there are a decent amount of coaches, consultants, that will kind of come in as well in the orbit.
Speaker 1:Nice. Now I mentioned in the intro, you don't have an audience on social media, and when I was researching you, when we first were messaging, I was like, oh, I can't find much here on YouTube or Instagram, or certainly not on TikTok, whatever. And I messaged you and I was like, did I miss it? Am I looking under the wrong thing? You're like, no, they're just, that's not my jam. And I was like, oh, this is going to be an interesting podcast because nearly everybody who we have as clients, nearly everybody who I talk to, who's a podcast listener. That's how they build an audience on social media generally YouTube, sometimes Instagram, sometimes TikTok, sometimes SEO, whatever, sometimes podcast and then from there they build an email list and from there they make sales. But you're not doing it that way. So can you explain? How does that work? What is it that you are doing? I'm happy to.
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Speaker 2:Or click the link in the show notes, the pin comment or the description below I've been in the online teaching business only since 2019, which I realize a lot of people are more recent than that, but to me that doesn't feel like that long. And before then, though, as I said, I was in, had an in-person seminar business, and so some of it I got started before. Like social media, advertising was much of a thing for a lot of stuff and an in-person thing you wouldn't market quite in the same way because you were just trying to get people very locally and not that you can't do it like that. I know some of your story, john, of how you got into fitness program sorts of things, and that was all very local. But I hadn't heard your story then, so I just went off what I knew, and so I used to advertise for seminars by mailing postcards I would get. They don't exist much anymore, but there'd be list brokers where people you'd say like I want a list of, or I guess they do exist, they're just not very good. But you know, I could get a list of this many mailing addresses for mental health professionals, and what's great about my niche is it's a very identifiable group. Their names are on registries in state. They're searchable. I can look up who are the licensed mental health therapists in an area, and so I just do that.
Speaker 2:When I started, I would get anywhere between like 0.9 to 2.2% return, and particularly it was near break, even if I was doing like a little under the 1%. But if I could get anything over 2%, that was, that was great. And so that's just what I did. And when I moved online I didn't really have even my mindset, a mechanism of what that looked like. And on top of that, I've not been a full-time course creator ever. I've always had other jobs like and on top of that, I've not been a full-time course creator ever. I've always had other jobs. I work as a private practice psychotherapist, I've run a group practice, and so it was always something I did on the side and I'm honestly just not that organized for certain things.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I'm also just I don't like social media. I used to Facebook when it was in my days was enjoyable because no one figured, no one treated it as a marketing platform. It was just the way I reconnected with college friends. And then it just got gross. And when I got into the online course space you know 2019 is when I started but really kind of built up steam in 2020. And 2020 was a super gross time to be online.
Speaker 2:It felt like to me like it was just very and so, like it just wasn't a place I wanted to try to figure out. And so, since it wasn't natural to me, since it wasn't, since it wasn't part of my history, I just I didn't think about it very much and I was able to build momentum in other ways and then just became like I don't want to add one more thing and I would see friends that would do it and're it's. You know they're doing these, you know shorts or reels five times a day and it's. I just look at that like that just looks exhausting to me and so I could build momentum. And so I didn't, I just didn't do it. And so that's why and and you know, I told John I try to keep my LinkedIn update. That's kind. For the first time, like I've not ever done, paid ads until this year, we hit the million dollar mark without any paid ads, and so I'm not against it. I just don't want to be the one running it. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how does it work? So when you were doing it in person, you were doing direct mail and you mentioned some conversion rates and I know nobody here is probably doing direct mail, but I am fascinated so I'm going to ask you about it. So it was a 0.9 to 2.2% conversion rate. From what to what? From sending these out to people to send it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I know I probably could have mined my analytics better of like how many people were hitting the website. I would, I would look at it, but that was mostly so I could tell, like when the mailings were landing, because I hit a spike on the registration page. I had the most ugly website I built on Intuit because it was one of the first like DIY web builders and I did it for years and I in a conversation I was saying to my wife, or saying in earshot to my wife to somebody else, I'm like yeah, I built the website myself, it doesn't look that bad. And my wife's like, eh, it was functional. It was functional and anyway. But so I could have mined those analytics a bit more, but I didn't, so that was from the mailing.
Speaker 2:So how I typically do is, let's say, I would do an event in Atlanta, georgia, and so what I would do is I would make decisions on who I would want to mail to, and I try to be as strategic as possible. So I'd say like, okay, I want 5,000 pieces of mail to go out and I would sort it based on because there are different licenses in the mental health professions. In the US there's psychologist as a license, health counselor as a license, marriage and family therapist as a license, and I would pick a mixture of the two based on what I thought was going to be most advantageous to what I was presenting on. And I would try to do exclusions, like if no more than two pieces of mail to the same address, because a lot of the addresses would be people's practices and so there might be 12 people at a single address, and so to get more reach and I would said like no greater than like a 50 mile radius. And so I try to kind of work that some and I would do postcards and I like that because there's nothing to open.
Speaker 2:I would get things that would be like trifolds, but there was an action in it and so I would. I would just be the you know it was a high gloss, nicer postcard and you know, if I was doing it now, I put a QR code on it, but that wasn't a thing, and so it's just like here's the link, just try and get to the landing page, and I did it competitively priced. I did a little bit under what was kind of industry standard and what's again, what's nice about my field is that it's about courses for CEs are about like how many hours is it? That's kind of how you think about the value unit. It's like it's five hours, it's six hours and there's a general you know. It's like $15 to about $50 is the range right now Per hour.
Speaker 1:Per hour per hour?
Speaker 2:No, not per course, but if you get under $15, people will sell things for really cheap. When I'm advising people, I really encourage them not to do it too cheap, because I'm like I don't trust a cheap bottle of wine is what I say, like it may be great, but if it's too cheap I'm suspicious, and so you don't want to do that to yourself. And so I did just slightly under kind of the medium rate and no, but it was. It would be you know that range for people just how many pieces of mail went out. So it would. My cost for doing the postcards was about at the time 50 cents a piece. That's postage printing, kind of all that. And so if I spent $2,500, that would give me 5,000 pieces of mail and the conversion rate would be based off that 5,000 number.
Speaker 1:Got it, so you were making somewhere between four and a half thousand and whatever. That is $12,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah, minus expenses, and that's the other thing too about online courses. That is so much better. It was a venture and I lost money in in-person events because there would be what I would spend in the mailing and then I would have whatever travel, and then it was usually me renting out like overly air-conditioned hotel conference room spaces. I since advise people to do it differently. Now there are much cheaper ways to do that. I just hadn't thought of yet of public libraries, lodge halls, churches there are all these places that you can get much cheaper. So I would have typically, you know, a few thousand dollars in expenses and that's really bootstrapping, and so it would be minus expenses. But you know, if you have, you know an event would be the equivalent of a launch, and if you know I would, you would really, you know, suffer if, if you put too much out and because it's just like the expense was there. I guess that can happen in people's launches too, if you spend much on your advertising budget and all that. But so, yeah, but it would be and so it was.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was a significant part of my income for years, but it was still stuck in this. I had to teach the thing how much I could charge for something was based on how long it was and how long it was. It's how long it was and how long it was. So I typically do day-long events, which would be like six hours, and so I was kind of at that $100 to $150 price point for my offerings because that was just kind of market and it could be a fantastic training, but I wasn't necessarily going to get more than that. What's been cool, though, in my field is, since COVID, in-person trainings have gotten a lot more premium pricing, and so you can get away now, even in my field, of charging more for in-person, because since online is so much easier, a lot more people do it. But so you're really making a decision like I know, I want that high touch experience sort of thing, so I do a lot fewer in-person now, but I can charge a lot more for it. Okay.
Speaker 1:So you were running these direct mail campaigns and you switched over to online, but you didn't start doing work on social media. So what did you do?
Speaker 2:So what got me on the space was I was meeting with someone who's been about a bit of a mentor to me. His name's Bill O'Hanlon and in the psychotherapy world, like he's a decently famous person, like he's the most famous psychotherapist I know and he's at this point he has over 40 books published. He was on Oprah in 2000. Like, one of his books was like book of the month or something like that, and he's the one that inspired me to get into the seminar business initially, because we hadn't met. I just read an article in Trade Magazine that had come out and it was called my Indiana Jones Life as an Entrepreneurial Therapist and he had read Tim Ferriss's the Four Hour Workweek and got inspired. And so he had been in the live seminar business for years and was making money at that. And then he was starting to do at the time what he was calling tele-seminars I think the online course word hadn't solidified yet. This was like 2009. And I think he was selling them as like downloadable assets on like eJunkie. I mean, I don't think it was a learning management system yet. And so years ago that's what kind of inspired me and I got into the seminar business. We got to know each other. I actually hired him to do events for my company and then I got involved in some other startups and so I between 2015, 2018, I wasn't really doing very much in the seminar business. It existed, but like it wasn't my focus.
Speaker 2:And 2018 kind of come back up, re-engage in that and I connect with Bill and at that point Bill had some courses he was hosting on Kajabi and he's telling me he's like you got to put it online, this is what you got to do, check this out. And I had no clue about online course world. I didn't know about any of these systems. Like I had this idea to put things online, but I was thinking, like what he was doing before, of like people go to some online digital download sort of place. They like I didn't think about the process and so that introduced me to that world. And like a lot of people, when they first discovered, it feels like I could just make money in my sleep and it's going to be easy. And just like I've been, I've been schlepping around the world like or you have to do these in-person things like this will be so much easier, easy button, oh no.
Speaker 2:So 2019, I began putting my first things online and I think that first year I was on, I think I made $5,000 in sales, but it wasn't that. I had a group psychotherapy practice that was taking a lot of my energy at the time that was doing well, it wasn't. I was honestly doing it as a hobby. Well then COVID hit the next year and so I had a lot more time on my hands at home and there were a lot of people looking for online learning experiences and I know a lot of folks got into that. Their businesses really grew then. Mine certainly did, and so and I will say I'm ashamed of how, having been in a seminar business for so many years, how poor my email list was, because I didn't really keep track of people's emails that well. It wasn't my means of communication. So I think I think I started 2020 with like 400 people on MailChimp and it was a decently cold list and I thought, ok, I've got to figure this out.
Speaker 2:So I did do social media, I will say at the beginning, but in a different sort of way. I started a fake account, not fake in the sense of like it was. It was still me, but it was. It was. It was only for business purposes and I tried to.
Speaker 2:I went and found every private group that I could find in the mental health profession in the United States. A lot of them were like local and so it would be like Atlanta area mental health therapist or child focused therapist of Dallas or things like that. And a lot of these moderators have gotten pretty tight on this these days. But I would just reach out to say, hey, I am, I provide continuing education for therapists. They would often ask the question of, like you know, are you in the Dallas area? Are you in the Tampa area? And I would. My response was always I'm not currently in the Tampa area, but I provide continuing education for Florida-based therapists. And because it implied that I could come there at some point, it just kind of left that open and so I joined all of these groups and I put out a free mini course. It was on it, but it came with accredited hours and so as a lead magnet, I'd have since done that a lot over the years. It's a really sticky lead magnet and I would always ask permission from the like hey, this is a free thing. And so that was just kind of my guerrilla process to try to get leads out. So it was social media driven, but it wasn't. It wasn't me posting my own car, I was going on to other people's places and just posting a sleeve magnet and I probably got my initial 1500 people on the list then.
Speaker 2:But what really blew it up was going back to my friend, bill O'Hanlon, who I talked about. So he had since mostly retired Bill's in his early 70s and now, and he had mostly retired from the teaching space and was actually working as a songwriter in Nashville and but all of a sudden you know he's COVID hits and his investment portfolio for his retirement took a hit initially and he's a little panicked, and he was. He offered to do an affiliate support for me in one of my courses and he had about a 40,000 person email list that he had built up over the course of his speaking career and my first big launch was him doing affiliate support for me in this thing. And then after that I asked him because he had this, these Kajabi courses, but he wasn't doing anything with like it, just they're just kind of living on there because he wasn't really focused on that anymore.
Speaker 2:And I asked him I said, bill, you've got these other courses that you've created, and he probably had three or four existing at the time of some key teachings for him. I'm like, would you let me, I'm happy to host them for you. And he said, yeah, I'm happy to do that. And so we've done that for years. And so I initially was able to build up an audience by borrowing somebody else's, and because I basically went functionally from my 1500 email list that I got initially to now I'm working off of somebody else's email list, and it wasn't even just as an affiliate, it was. I was using his email list to market his courses.
Speaker 1:But they were on my platform.
Speaker 2:And particularly when I started putting some more lead magnet sort of things in his content to his audience, they would opt into his lead magnet. But since the lead magnet was hosted on my teachable school, that got them opted into my my world. And so I went. You know, $5,000 was what I generated in the first year and in 2000, we generated over $100,000. And it was without really my own audience, without me spending on ads, without kind of, and so that just kept me thinking like, huh, how do I do this again? Yeah, how do I just keep on doing this? And so that became a lot of my guiding principles for the next few years.
Speaker 1:And so how have you kept on doing that? So you had that, you've got his email list, you've got his courses. How did you take that any further?
Speaker 2:I would have liked to have been easier and I figured out more of how to do it. The problem was is that he was a unique sort of person, that he was somebody that had in my industry that had a pretty extensive. He was savvy about building an email list, he understood lead magnets, he understood kind of that whole process, but he wasn't interested in running it himself and that was kind of this weird mixture. Either there were people that because there were a lot of people in my field that had content and I would get reach out all the time to be like, oh, I've got this great course idea I've got. I'm like, but I would come down to like, okay, but how are we going to sell it? And do you have an email list? Well, no, okay, so it it that that affected things. But so most people that had the capacity to sell the courses, that had the way to communicate with their audiences, were doing was were kind of doing it for themselves. So it was more of just trying to find angles. And so what I began thinking about because I made the deliberate choice of not like, okay, I don't want to do the social media stuff, and I taught marketing for people at that point, building up psychotherapy practices of how to, and so I already had kind of my marketing philosophy, and one of the things is the best thing I find for marketing is consistency Decide what you're doing and just do it consistently.
Speaker 2:And when I would discover things that I wasn't able to do consistently, it's like I probably shouldn't do it. I put up some initial like YouTube videos. I tried some things initially, but it's like I'm not doing this consistently so it better just spend my energy doing something else. The other aspect of it and this was just what I found from my audience I didn't I've still don't really equate much in the way of social media followings with anything that excites me for like an affiliate partner. I like emails, I like email lists, I like open rates. Those are kind of the analytics I look at, because I've seen people that you know they'll have, you know 500,000 subs on YouTube, but I'll put something as an affiliate connection with them and nothing, there are no sales, and so it just it becomes these vanity metrics for some of it, at least economically, and so I was less interested in people now, but I would look at and one of the things I considered was it took me a few years to get to this point, but it is one of my things I advise people to do.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're trying to figure out an affiliate pathway, this is what I did. There is the because I discovered this in the Facebook account. I initially made to like join these groups, and I did that just because I wanted to create some delineated space between what limited personal things I did on Facebook and just not mix the two. But what I discovered was I began looking at the ads and I'm like huh, because I realized like I'm the avatar of my audience or not exactly, but I'm close and so what I got thinking about is like OK, who's spending money to advertise to someone like me? So you know, one of the things I do now is I started a completely fake Instagram account and it's not even pretending to be me. It's pretending to be a white female in her early 50s who's a mental health therapist, because that's the most common description of someone in my field.
Speaker 2:I created my avatar and I began following the accounts and liking things and interacting through this account and I wanted to see who was pushing content to me and what that told me was like here's somebody who's spending money to try to connect with this audience.
Speaker 2:What is it? Just to kind of draft behind them, to kind of follow behind them, because they're already spending the money. I'm not telling them to spend money, they're already doing it and I might have offers that aren't direct competitors to them, because a lot of the people that were really pushing into this had business opportunity offers. In my field, the most common ones are develop a cash base private practice, get out of the insurance business so you can make more per hour, start a group therapy practice so other people work for you, or create an online offer of a course, a membership. That's what everyone was doing, and there were lots of my offers that weren't in direct competition to that but that their audience would also be interested in, and so I would pitch it to them. As you're already spending money to get this attention and you can only monetize it so far, would you let me help you make money at it?
Speaker 1:And that's kind of been my method since then. And how many? When you'd reach out to people like that, how many of them would say, yes, that sounds great. And how many would say, you know, just ignore your message or like what kind of response rates do you get?
Speaker 2:I get a response, usually always. But it's a principle of mine, like I very much resist kind of any passive, aggressive ways of dealing with things. Like I'm in the American South, we're the closest thing in America to British in that, like I've had several close British friends and I've had to learn how to translate things. Like I would have friends that would say we'd go see a movie and what did you think of the film? They're like oh, it was quite good. Well, I didn't know that quite good meant bad until like as an English person you know what that means. It means like, ah yeah, I don't want to complain, I don't want to be like you're kind of reading between the lines. So for therapists one is I understand my avatar and we're typically kind of scattered and flaky and a lot of times not responding to a message isn't because I don't want to talk to you. Sometimes it's just I missed it, so I squeak the wheel and if it is that, basically I'm not going to take a hint on purpose. If you want to tell me to F off, you can tell me to F off, but until you tell me something now, how much energy I'm going to put to keep on reaching out to somebody has to do with, like, how much I want to connect with them, but I just find persistence sticks, and so I can't think of too many instances where somebody I really wanted to connect with that I wasn't able to do it. In the end, even if it's in it with them, they say no it's. I mean I'll get no's, but it's sometimes it's just like the person it doesn't feel congruent with what they're thinking about. Sometimes they have a pretty conservative mindset, they don't understand affiliate stuff, and it just feels and I don't spend a lot of time like if, because I've had some affiliates that I've really tried to get on board and there's so much work and I quit doing that because they have to be in the right place, but just move on to the next one.
Speaker 2:So I find, though, the longer I do this, the more I'm appealing to affiliates, and this the more I'm appealing to affiliates, and there's certain principles I think of. I always think, in the reach out, it's not like here's what you can do for me, it is here's what I, here's how I genuinely like to help you. I'm in an industry that's very weird about money, that's very weird about any economic sort of stuff and like Pat Flynn's voice I really like for this. He's got a great tone that I've really tried to follow of just you know, think of selling a service. So I always kind of lean into that genuinely because I want to think through, like, how am I offering them something beneficial? And to the example of, like, if I'm identifying that somebody's spending money on ads for a product that's to my audience but not what I'm offering, I want to offer them a really easy way for them to monetize the audience they're already building beyond what they're doing. And my goal from a first affiliate thing is that it's easy for them.
Speaker 2:It's a positive experience because I want affiliate partners to be excited to hear from me and my team because we made it so easy for them to make money without having to do that much. The longer I do that, the more I have a reputation for that, and so then it's easier to get people to respond, and I'm also very much willing, if it fits with my audience, to reciprocate as an affiliate for them, and at this point, as my audience keeps on getting bigger, I'm much more appealing to them in that way.
Speaker 1:So what kind of things were people selling that wasn't in competition with what you're offering? What kind of providers were you finding were good affiliates for you?
Speaker 2:There were two categories of people. One were other people offering continuing education and they're an easy group to find because there's a few national credentialers for that and they have directory lists and so I just scrubbed those lists and I will do assessments of them for affiliate partnership and automation tools, and AI has made this a lot easier to do. This analysis I'm looking at, I'll take a website and the first thing I'll do is I'll pull up on builtwithcom because I want to see what's in it, because if they're using like a Yahoo site builder from 1999, how savvy they're going to be to connect with me is going to be difficult. But if I see like they've got Facebook pixels installed or they're, I see that they're using one of the main LMS platforms of teachable Kajabi Thinkific, if I see that they've got, you know, clickfunnels, whatever it is, they will tell me like how much they're kind of marketing business minded. So I'll have to do less educating for them and there's that. And there's also like what's their price point? Ideally I want somebody my ideal person is somebody who's priced above where I am, because their audience is used to paint stuff.
Speaker 2:But for the people that are doing the really inexpensive, I don't try for them as affiliate partner, because there are people that will do things like here's a you know for there's a company called CEs for Less and it's like for $3, you can have unlimited CEs for a year and it's just. It's not my audience. I'm not trying to sell it Like that's somebody who's has to renew their license and they realize they need their credits and it's like and they get online and what's you know cheap, easy, but it's not very good content, it's not very like, and so I exclude them. So I basically find people that have like a marketing forward mindset based on what I can see, their tools are and their price points comparable, and CEs are one of those things that you have to keep on doing, like you have to do about. The average in the US is about 20 hours a year and so you have to do. Just having more content is helpful If it's a different subject, if it's a different course, because they only have so many courses, if they're quality courses and so, but their audience keeps on needing different ones because you can't keep on taking the same one and get credit. So there's that audience. I like more people that have the business development opportunities. Those are the ones that are, and in my audience I've identified those kind of three offers and one of my main business development offers it's called profitable mental health trainings, and I got into this because people would ask me, after being in the CE business, how do you do this?
Speaker 2:And so you get a question a lot. It makes sense for a course, so that's what. So I put together a course and initially it was just a course of teaching people how to do CEs. It's basically a B2B offer. I'm creating as a professional psychotherapist, I'm creating things for other psychotherapists, but I had a lot of people taking the course that were just interested in how to create more psychoeducational things for the general public, and so I redid the course over the years because I've done some of that. It's been less of my business focus, but it's a different way of thinking things. So I basically expanded the course and it's like I teach people how like an in-person method and online methods. I teach people how like an in-person method and online methods, and I teach people how to kind of create either a B2B trainings for other therapists or a B2B kind of enrichment, wellness of things, and that overlaps with, depending on the offer.
Speaker 2:So if you have a course about how to build a psychotherapy practice, how to start a group psychotherapy practice, my offer is not your offer, but your audience. Usually the person interested in the offer of how to start a group psychotherapy practice is an entrepreneurial, business minded psychotherapist who's often going to be interested in multiple entrepreneurial opportunities. So that's how I kind of pitch it to them. But even somebody who's got a close offer because there are a decent amount of people that are teaching like how to create an online membership and that is kind of a piece of that course but I'm the only person that I've been able to find that teaches how to do CEs as a business. And I mean, I've had people in other professions take my course because they've said, like physicians or attorneys take my course because they want to figure out how to do that for those professions, and they haven't found anything there and I'm the closest thing. So I just kind of angle it in that way and and of just like, hey, I know you have this offer on this, here's how mine is different and if there's any hesitancy, like, I'll offer to promote their thing too.
Speaker 2:And and I always wanted, I never want anyone to feel used. I don't want people to feel like I hoodwinked them. Um, I want them whatever it looks like. I want them to either feel really happy about how it went or even if, like, a joint venture doesn't go well, in the sense of like we don't have sales, or things like that I want them to to at least feel that I was transparent. And you know, I had one person she was a friend who smallest podcast audience. I did an affiliate launch with her where, and we ended up having multiple sales in it, but none of them came from her Cause. I did one email to my audience and none of them came from her and I just said, hey, I appreciate you. We did a joint webinar together.
Speaker 2:I like those as a lead magnet because I'm able to. I have my affiliate partners go to the webinar and they have the benefit. Where they're not, they're just sending their list to a valuable free thing. And then I do the, the, the direct mailing to them after the webinar. But that allows me to get more people on my list, but it keeps them from having to sell directly. And anyway, she just she went through the process with me and I'm like, hey, I'm sorry, I didn't. You know, we had some sales, but none of them came through you. I'd like to send you $300 on PayPal and you know it's just more of like. You know I appreciate your effort in it and for me I made sales in that launch. It felt totally worth it for that. I wanted her to feel good about that. She did it with me.
Speaker 1:So how many affiliates will you work with a year at the moment? Not as many as I'd like, no.
Speaker 2:Okay, I mean, as I said, john, like I am, I have been bootstrapping this for a super long time. When I had an in-person seminar business, it was my wife and I and that was what it was and then started putting things online. It was mostly me and I would listen to any number of people you and kind of like and everyone like you and you need to get the support, and some of it was is my ADHD made it difficult to explain things because it would. It would be quicker for me to do it at times than it would to sit down to try to explain it. I remember interviewing some VAs and they're like well, what are your SOPs? I'm like I don't have any. That's part of what and I didn't. I wasn't going after the level of people that could do it.
Speaker 2:And I tried some VAs but honestly I just felt they caught the I was fixing things. It took me more work and so it was really difficult for me to to get there, and only in this last year if I finally like started to get there and only in this last year have I finally like started to get more consistent support. But that affects, like you know, I can be pretty harem scarum, where I'm putting together, you know, the last bits of my webinar minutes before going live Now. I don't like doing it that way, but it tends to happen more often than I like, so the planning ahead becomes difficult. But what I appreciate now is I've been doing it long enough, that I have developed more systems and where automations and AIs are really kind of super helped me is that my ideal sort of workforce is a lot of agentic agents that I'm building on my knowledge and with human support in that.
Speaker 2:But, like I'm just now setting my calendar I'm good at batching, setting my calendar like, okay, what's going to be our affiliate calendar for the year and set an agent for that that has email capability and like is reaching out to people and versus what it'd be for me is I would think about something and be like, oh, I should contact John and then I might email you that day. I might forget I might, and then it, and so it's just so how many I want to work with in a year. You know. So it's just so how many I want to work with in a year. You know as many as I could treat well, as many as I could fit into my system, how it ends up being, is it will be anywhere from like 12 to like three in a given year, so it's pretty inconsistent in different years.
Speaker 1:And how does this all work out in terms of revenue? Like how what's? An average kind of month and I guess that varies whether you're doing an affiliate deal that month or not, right?
Speaker 2:Again, it depends on audience. Like my biggest affiliates I've worked with are people with like 100,000 plus email lists and I'll work with people even that 3,000 or something like that. It just depends, like I don't. If they've got an engaged audience that very clearly aligns with my avatar, then I'll want to do that and so it will be. We've had affiliates do anywhere from like $40,000 down and I think it just really depends on what sort of audience they have, how warm it is. Really the people with the warmest audiences that are clearly the most aligned of course have the best response.
Speaker 2:But I do, for my standard affiliate rate will be 30%, but for somebody who I'm pretty interested in I'll do 50. Because I want to give it part of it since I have multiple products in that I put out. I don't want to, you know, penny wise and pound foolish to, because I'm happy to give half of my revenue for even what's a large course, because if that gets that person in my ecosystem and they stay a long time and I have I've had pretty good retention throughout. My churn is pretty low in my email list People that I've had a lot of people that stick with me a long time and so it's kind of a lifetime value. It's totally worth it to me. I want to be over generous with affiliates again because I want them to be excited that that someone is reaching out to them from me and you also then promote other people's courses as well.
Speaker 1:Is that those affiliates the same ones you're doing the promotion with, or is that, is it a separate thing where you're promoting other people's course? It?
Speaker 2:typically ends up being the same, just because the people that have promotions I like are typically the people who I think well, I always want to put stuff in front of my audience that feels correct, that feels like, like it makes sense. I mean I'm not going to start, you know, putting out like Harry's razors sorts of things like it. Just I mean, though my audience shaves, I guess it's just more of like I part of the bar I'm trying to go above is that a lot of the knowledge content for professional development in my industry is either it's either just not very high quality, it's kind of old, or just not very innovative, and there are a handful of people that are basically doing the Lambrou sort of thing. It feels super salesy and a lot of my audience doesn't like that, so I always want them. You know I get really high email rate opens. It's the thing I'm kind of most proud of in my metrics, and part of it is is I want people to be excited to get an email from me, and it's I want it because they feel it's going to be something helpful, something that may be a free thing of value or, at the very least, something that feels like, yeah, I may not be ready to buy this, but I totally make sense. I'm totally glad to know that you're telling me about it.
Speaker 2:So that's how I think about affiliate offers. Like there's one I'm looking at right now with a colleague who she's not a psychotherapist but she's an accountant that specializes in bookkeeping and accounting for psychotherapy practices and she's done a. She wrote a book with Mike Michalowicz on like a version of Profit First for therapists, and so she and she has like a course on that. So that's not an offer in my ecosystem but it totally aligns with my audience, and so we're talking about doing a webinar together where I can and so. But usually if I'm interested in putting somebody in front of my audience, I'm usually going to be interested in being put in front of theirs, unless they're really early in the process. But even then I'll give them like an automated thing. I may not do a live webinar, but I'll, I'll, I'll give them something.
Speaker 1:And what's some of the challenges for you with, like your email marketing or your funnels? What's any of the steps that doesn't work as well as you'd like?
Speaker 2:I'm still having gotten evergreen down. I tried it for the first time last year and I built too complicated of a funnel and I know that's one of your like. It is one of the things I appreciate that as a consistent thing I hear from you, john, both on your podcast and also when I hear you guest on others, is people like John was asking me like where I first started listening to the podcast, the Art of Selling Online Courses. I'm not sure, but I've been a long-term fan of Jock Hopkins' online course show. I think it was just an Apple suggestion kind of from them. But you know Jock's very much an engineer kind of mindset. He loves kind of the fine tuning of things. And I remember you were guesting on his show and Jock was asking you a question about like segmentation, like well, how do you exclude to make sure that people aren't also being offered this offer in the evergreen sequence as well as this one at the same time? And you're like, yeah, we just don't worry about it that much. It's the and so you're that voice in my head at times when I'm building too complicated of a mousetrap. And it's just like if you build it too tight. And because I know, one of your things too is that stuff breaks and if the funnel's too long, finding where it breaks is harder and stuff will always break.
Speaker 2:And I had this, you know, almost $300 a month. And so I switched to go high level, which I pay like $90 a month and they don't cap me and kind of all that. But the problem is is I had a lot of lead magnets set up through that and so I'm getting emails like I filled out this form and nothing happened and I'm like oh yeah, that's another form we've got to replace for that. And I'm just thinking like if I had too many long funnels, that'd be the process. So I've not done as many because I make it too complicated in my mind. They don't convert like my live things convert and launches are hard. I'd like to do fewer of them. It's a, they're inconsistent and I do find like it's, it's like a lot of people, it's it's getting less and less productive over time. My affiliate relationships, I do think, kind of bring in new blood pretty consistently, but it's just a lot of work and but yeah, I've not come anywhere close to my live conversions when I'm doing a live launch versus Evergreen and and I'll think about different things and I'll just get overwhelmed because, as I've heard, you kind of walk through process of of, you know, building a self-liquidated offer and, like I'll be, I'll.
Speaker 2:I'll often listen to podcasts like I'm out exercising and I'll start early like, okay, yeah, and by the end, as my body's getting tired, my brain's getting tired, I'm like, oh gosh, that sounds like so much. Now I've come to accept it's not really and it's more of a mental thing for me, but honestly it's. The getting out of my own way is one of the biggest things. Like I, there's so many things that I've done that I've taken a while to do and I'll do them and it works much better than I thought. And my response to myself is, yeah, you could have been doing this a while ago. That and just figuring out consistent systems.
Speaker 2:Being a bootstrapper, that's pretty ADHD, who has other jobs, who sees lots of shiny objects. I produce a lot, but there's a lot of holes in the colander. Like there's a lot of water that comes in. A lot of it comes out, just enough comes in. That stuff works. But you know, I haven't always been a workaholic, but you know, online course creators turn me into one and I'd like, as a therapist, I'd like to work on that Nice.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks so much. I know that you've got something that you could point people to. Yeah. Check out some of your wisdom.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was. I need to double check the link. I think it was. I think it was Maven Creative Labs dot com. So I get thinking about what to share, because a lot of what I do is very industry specific and there may be people in my industry that that are there, and I think too, if anyone's in something like professional qualification related, there are people that could be doing continuing education in their field, but don't just, it's not what they're thinking through. But if you are doing anything that's tied to professional qualification you know accounting, law, nursing, like any number of things education that is a nice add-on to do and it adds a little bit more.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons I've been able to host other course creators and the reason they want to do it with me versus just doing it on their own, is because I'm credentialed in that space and that's something that they just can't do automatically. So that's allowed me to build up kind of a more of a collaborative process, because I have something I like there being a certain barrier to entry. I don't want it to be too high, but if it's just anybody can do it, then it's. You know you end up with a lot of noise, but, as I've talked about being really disorganized in my process. Where I've been excited is, you know, like a lot of people, ai has been interesting to me and I'm not a technical person and so. But I've really appreciated that as I approach AI, because I'm somebody who's constantly trying to figure out hacks in life, because life doesn't. It's what led me to be a therapist. I had to figure out the workarounds as a kid because school was difficult, social things were difficult, and I just figured out ways around it and so my brain constantly looks at how something can be solved in asymmetrical ways.
Speaker 2:And I've approached learning AI like that and so I've really just, you know, I haven't tried to treat it as like you know, I haven't tried to treat it as like here's a content creating machine, because I just don't think it does a very good job at that. It's good at content shaping. If you give it raw material, that's good. But you know it's kind of garbage in, garbage out. If you don't know what you're talking about or don't know how to like sift through things and you just kind of let the AI go, you'll end up with something that everybody else could do and it's not that interesting and it sounds like AI when you read it and they're in. It's full of blog posts right now that are AI generated off somebody else's YouTube videos, and it's just and that's super boring, and but what I've been able to do is I'll take certain things in my creative process and I'll just kind of set it aside in a automation or in an AI agent.
Speaker 2:And because it keeps a calendar much better than I do and I can, so, if I can, just okay, this is, you need to be the person that's organizing, or the agent that's organizing, the affiliate calendar. You need to send out the email reminders, you need to do even cold outreach, and so I've just been building this stuff and I've been doing a lot in Taskade, which is that's a fun, it's a, it's an organizational app, but they've created like out of the box agentic agents and you can build your own, and they have a lot of kind of natural integrations with a lot of different tools, a lot of Google workspace stuff, and so you can, if you get an integration with Google workspace, you can you can hack a lot of things. I've learned that because people have tried to take me off of using certain automation tools like, oh, this doesn't exactly. You know, integrate this way. You can't do this with Zapier this way. Tools like oh, this doesn't exactly, you know, integrate this way. You can't do this with Zapier this way.
Speaker 2:I'm like well, can this thing send an API update to a Google sheet? Well, yeah, well, can the Google sheet trigger the thing in Zapier? Yeah, okay, it works, and. But, but TaskAid, you can sign up for them for free and they'll give you, they'll let you build a agent for free and I can share agents. I build so because of I.
Speaker 2:You know, I might monetize it one day, but I'm not right now and for me it just I just the idea of like, when I find something that's really helpful for me, I get super excited and, um, you know, I'm people that know me, I share a lot of podcasts in that, like I've recommended this podcast to a lot of people, just because, when I find something like this is super helpful and be even like my methods of how I'm using AI, like I haven't built it yet, John, but when I subscribe to someone's newsletter, I haven't built yours.
Speaker 2:What I'll do is I have an app script in Google that will.
Speaker 2:Anytime an email comes in, it gets tagged and the content of the email goes into a Google sheet that then feeds the knowledge base of a custom GPT, and so there are all these sub stacks I've subscribed to that I don't have time to read, but I just feed the information into this and create a bot off of it and I can ask the bot things and I want to have reference for the email, Like I've done this for, like Rick Mulready now for years Cause, and so I'll ask like has Rick said anything about this topic?
Speaker 2:I'd be like yes, and then it can reference, since it's all in a Google sheet. It can reference the date of the email and I can go in my folders and find it. But that's just like okay, that saves me so much time. Because I'll spend so much time, think like scouring podcast episodes? Because I'll remember John said something once to somebody when was that? And just like I think it was maybe, and so I'll kind of reconstruct it in my mind and spend all this time trying to find the thing, and just cutting that out of my day is a huge time saver. So that excites me.
Speaker 1:So if people go to mavencreativelabscom, they'll be able to.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure, that is it, I am, I'm looking at what you gave me.
Speaker 1:Okay, then yes, yes. Whatever I gave you then, yes, and when they get there, they'll be able to access some of these. Yeah, we'll have some yeah, they'll, they'll be.
Speaker 2:We'll have a just and again it's a. It's nothing charged, in this at least. Well, and as of as of 2025, nothing is charged. If you end up going to that link some point, you know, in 2026 it it. You know it may cost a lot, but who knows as?
Speaker 2:of right now, as of right now in this year. Uh, yeah, I just it's just where. For other people in the creative space, where I found Time Savers and it excites me, I like sharing Down, where I'll give access to either custom GPT I'm doing some just custom GPTs that I've made, just put out and links to those and then also for different agentic bots on free plans for different tools I'm using Nice.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Okay, so mavencreativelabscom Wonderful. Well, david, thanks so much for coming on today. I really, really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you, john, and for everyone listening.
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