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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 To Sell Digital Products Online (Without Social Media)
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My guest Chris Zukowski hasn't tweeted in over a year, never posts on Instagram or Facebook, and makes more money than he ever did in corporate America.
As a game marketing consultant, he's built a 20,000-person email list with a 50% open rate and 10-15% click-through rate. When he launches courses, 3-5% of his list buys - that's nearly double the industry standard.
In this episode, Chris reveals why social media is terrible for course creators, why blogging still works incredibly well, and his simple system for building a profitable course business with just email marketing, weekly blogging, and occasional YouTube appearances.
If you're tired of chasing social media algorithms and want to build something you actually own, this episode is for you.
I haven't tweeted a legitimate tweet in over a year. I've never posted to Instagram, never to Facebook, never to LinkedIn. So I've done no social media. All my growth, everything comes from. My open rate is 50%. My click-through rate is 10% to 15%, and so it's like 20,000 people. It just works. I'm more profitable now than I ever was in corporate America and now I make more money than I did. I'm not here to brag, but I love it. It's so fun. I'm having the most fun I've ever had in my life and it's just, it's super dead simple. I know it's lame, I know it's not the hippest, coolest latest thing, but it works, folks.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Jon Ainsworth and today's guest is Chris Zakowski. Now Chris is a game marketing consultant and strategist. He's helped games as a service, companies, indie publishers and small to single person teams to understand their audience, communicate with them in a more personal way, and he specializes in optimizing your marketing for the Steam algorithm and creating fantastic Steam pages that sell themselves and setting up email marketing campaigns that fans look forward to opening. And today we're going to talk about why you don't need social media to build an audience and sell courses, why blogging is cooler than you think and why Chris doesn't have an opinion on things until he's done the research, made a spreadsheet and looked at a graph of it.
Speaker 1:I'm the dude, I own it. Oh my God, is my job over now? Do I have to go get a real job? Chris, welcome to the show, hey thanks for having me Appreciate you.
Speaker 2:So can you give the audience some idea of the size of your business?
Speaker 1:Doesn't need to be revenue, could be team size number of customers, audience size, whatever you're comfortable with sharing. Yeah, it's just me. I'm like a one man band. I was telling people I have I keep a dead symbol. John, here's a, here's a deal.
Speaker 1:It's like I came from corporate America. I my companies keep getting smaller and smaller, like IBM. Ibm was like, I think at the time, like 800,000 people and then I worked for American Airlines and then a startup and now it's down to one. I can't get any smaller than I am now. Otherwise it's just I'm out of a job. So I think retirement is my last thing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I just kind of got tired of the corporate rat race. I kind of always did this game stuff on the side and eventually it got big enough and I took a risk and I was like I'm just gonna quit my job. And so I did and it worked out and so I'm uh, I'm more profitable now than I ever was in corporate America. I got up to be a manager and stuff and I just I just hated doing status meetings and like standups and all that corporate BS stuff and now I make more money than I did in corporate America. And my wife basically says I'm like retired, like I do a lot of gardening and I volunteer my kids school and stuff like that, so I'm not here to brag, but I love it. It's so fun. I'm having the most fun I've ever had in my life Nice.
Speaker 2:So I know a bunch of people who have really stuck to the just one person I'm not hiring anybody approach. And I know a lot of people who have scaled to multiple millions and they've got a big team and what have you? Why did you stick to this? So you hated status meetings. So that's one reason not to hire anybody else. Was there like philosophical reasons? Did you think it was going to be more profitable? Like you just didn't want to do it? Like, why did you stick to just yourself?
Speaker 1:I think it's a stress thing. I don't know, because the last thing I did before I left Corporate Maker. I was a manager and I had about five employees under me and they were great people, but it's just, it was like a constant stress like, oh my God, do they have enough to do? Do they need, are they feeling fulfilled, all this stuff? And so it was this anxiety that wasn't even related to me. I was, I was inheriting other people's anxiety all of a sudden about stuff and so I was like I do not like this and a couple things too.
Speaker 1:It's like I don't know.
Speaker 1:I like this lifestyle where it's like I'm just going to take off and not do anything and then I would feel bad about taking a vacation or something or just taking off. Then I have to make sure that the employees are feeling like, hey, chris never shows up or anything, you know, and I just I have this anxiety of like what other people think that are under my employment and stuff, and plus financial if if I need to go in cockroach mode, I can do it very easily being a solo person. So it's just like I probably could make more money if I got a team and all that stuff. But I am just like I am the most chill I have ever been and sometimes it's like I couldn't pay for the amount of chill I have. So if I made more money, I couldn't invest in more chill. So I that's kind of it's kind of the John Maynard Keynes approach. He just said at a certain point we're going to make so much money that we will actually choose to make less money. So that's, that's my life.
Speaker 2:Okay so team size wise, just you, are you happy to share anything about, like, the number of customers you've got or the size of your audience, or have you?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah. So I have a mailing, so I operate a mailing list. That's the secret. That's where everything comes down to is the mailing list. So I have 20,000 people on my mailing list. I didn't write. I think I ran the numbers for you, john, and I think I sent them to you. You could tell me. I don't know off the top of my head how many people who have bought something from me of some form. I think I may have sent that you told us 3 795 customers okay, that that's what I did at that time so yep
Speaker 1:uh, so, and then we do um, it's pretty particular to gaming, although I've seen it spread out. We I use a discord server, which I don't love as much because I don't own it. I don't love Discord. There's a lot of things I don't like about it. But my industry lives on Discord so I have to have a Discord server. So it's also about 20,000. So it always scales up with my mailing list and I don't know the overlap. I don't know how many people are on the Discord and the mailing list. That's why I don't like Discord. It's very black box. I don't have access to their emails and stuff like that. So I don't know particularly how much overlap there is between my mailing list and my Discord. But it's also about 20,000 people on the Discord and then my website. I can't remember what did I tell you, john? I looked it up. I did my homework. It was a great exercise to look all that stuff up, but John, what do?
Speaker 2:the records say it says 22,000 monthly website visitors 22,000.
Speaker 1:So I should just answer 20,000 for everything 20, 20, 20, 20. That's my audience, and my industry is pretty insular, like it's a very specific industry, actually quite a small industry, and so it works for me. I just live the life.
Speaker 2:That's nice. I love that, and so I covered it briefly. But I don't know a massive amount about this whole space, so can you share for us? Who do you help with your courses? What kind of problems are you solving for?
Speaker 1:them. Yeah, so there's this platform called Steam. If you're not into gaming, it's on PC and they have just it's a very bizarre situation. The Steam it's run by this like elusive billionaire. I'm serious, this is all serious Like he's like he lives on a yacht and he just kind of cruises around the world. As you out for COVID, he like banked himself in New Zealand and just chilled out for the. He spent the pandemic in New Zealand and it's this privately held company called Valve and they made games and then they run this platform called Steam.
Speaker 1:That is the monopoly power, basically on PC. So if you're going to sell a game on PC, you have to go through Steam and they don't do advertising Like. In other words, you can't advertise, you can't pay for your game to get better placement. It is all like merit-based. They're like this real weird libertarian company that just like lives on a yacht and and they're super, duper profitable, but because it's private company, nobody knows how profitable, and so it's. It's this uh platform that if you do well, you can do quite well for a small team and, um, they let all sizes so you could be a huge company with making what they call AAA games and then all the way down to a single game developer and everybody. If your game's good enough, it's very merit-based and you can rise up the ranks and do it and make millions. These games make millions of dollars. But the problem is it's not a problem, it's a problem with a solution and it's me. It's a very weird, weird platform that if you do the wrong thing at the wrong time, it's like well, your game's cooked, you just got to make a new one, where it's like, because they have very specific visual visibility rounds that they kind of do like when, just to get a little specific, like when you launch a demo, what they call a demo for your game, which is a little slice of your game. If you do do it one time, you get this big visibility boost, but if you time it wrong or you don't do it in the right, when you have the right amount of visibility, you basically it was useless for you and you missed out on a huge visibility year.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't have a job, but I'm kind of the instruction book for this weird platform and so I help people understand the platform so they don't make stupid mistakes, and so my customer base is what we call publishers, which are like it's a middle tier that they fund games and then they publish them under their name and so they've got a whole stable of games that they launch every year. So they're bigger companies probably. Company size is probably like five to maybe 30 people are these publishers, and then I'll do game studios that release multiple games, and they're probably in the range of employees of like five also to 20. And then all the way down to small solopreneurs, all the you know, and they're maybe like you and them and a couple friends. So it's like one person team or one person in like three, three person team somewhere in there. So that's pretty much the range of my customer. It's very prosumer, but it's also a lot of like hobbyists. You know they want to do this hobby and they're with dreams of becoming millionaires, but you know they're still hobbyists. So that's kind of I really consider it kind of a prosumer thing.
Speaker 1:But I'd say, if I would boil it down to one persona, here's the funny thing about games when you turn 30 and you maybe studied computer science with the dream of one day making a game when you turn 30, you're like, oh my God, I haven't made a game. And so people go and they make a game when they turn 30. It's amazing. Like a lot of times I hear this thing like oh, I was in the corporate rat race and I decided I needed to make a game and I was like I can message people like you just turned 30, didn't you? And it's like more than anything. And it's funny because I actually did the same thing. I got married, or I was getting married and I turned 30. I was like I got to make a game, so I made a game. And it's like this universal thing Nobody wants a sports car anymore, they just want to make a game. Programmer, you do art and you love video games.
Speaker 2:You turn 30, you want to make a game that in a nutshell, is my core user Got it Nice, all right, cool. Have you got a lot of competition in that space or are you like the go to guy on it?
Speaker 1:So it's kind of. We have different business models. There's about four. I have one guy that I'm actually really friends with. Like we go on good drinks at conferences. We always go to a tiki bar for a conference and he writes a blog, but he's on Substack and his business model is a little different. He runs a paid Substack and he has an analytics platform and I have the blog and the courses. So we have different business models but we're both weekly bloggers. And then there's a couple other Substackers but I don't know. I don't know if it's just games are so fun, but nobody else is really in the space so to say so it's really. It's maybe two or three other people, but we're we're, we're friends, like we're not competing against each other, so nice.
Speaker 2:Okay. One thing that you've said is that you think that tiktok sucks, which I totally agree with that one. In terms of selling courses, it's terrible, so bad. Instagram sucks, facebook sucks and other forms of social suck. You even said that podcasting sucks. Now can you talk us through that? Why do you hate on all of these? What do you think is wrong with them?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think okay, this is a longer thing, but I think in general the internet because I'm a 90s kid, I grew up, I made my first website like an AOL and stuff and in general I. So I kind of came up through the blogging like I was 20 when blogging was there and I think that was peak internet, the blogging thing, because you basically owned your audience back then and that was the thing. Like people used to just make a website back then. And that was the thing like people used to just make a website. Like that was the day that I was like you could go to like Jim's tools and it was like Jim's tools and he would just do tool reviews and it was on his website and that was awesome.
Speaker 1:And then, and then these big platforms, I'd say like the 2000, like 2005, basically when, uh, what they did, web 2.0 and stuff and the business model became, oh, we're a big company, we can build an audience and it's very easy to submit, like you used to have to make your own HTML, upload it to a server and all that stuff, and it was hard. And then when these kind of web 2.0, these platforms like Google and stuff like that came up, it was just easier for people just to fill in a text box and post something and and then they got some visibility from that and that warped people's brains. And my general theory on this is that it's like those platforms became so easy that people forgot the basics of like how to just make a website that you own like, and that's why I love blogging is because I own the domain, I own the website, I own everything about it, I own my mailing list, I know every like, I am a, I'm the dude like, I own it and all these platforms they change and all this stuff and it warped people's brains. Like um, like when they're like a viral start. You always see stuff on new york times and stuff. They're like oh, this viral person went viral. And they're like on social media.
Speaker 1:Social media is a terrible conversion rate. It you lose the platform you know, like with x and twitter and stuff like that. You lost it. The audience shifted or the algorithms changed or new management came in. You just lose all this stuff and so it's flashy and it's fun and everybody talks about it, but it doesn't actually work that well. Everybody's like drinking the Kool-Aid here and that's why I say it sucks and so it's slower to do a blog, but it just works, works and it's not sexy and it's not like nobody's going to write an article anymore about blogging. It's cool. Like they, when blogging first came out, they made movies about it, like that movie, julia julia. Have you watched that movie?
Speaker 1:julia, julia, jules and julia but it stars a blogger and it's like that was peak blogging when they made a movie about a blogger. Nobody's going to make a movie about a blogger anymore. But that's not because blogging doesn't work it, it's just because social media is always sexier and so we've our brains have been warped about what's actually working versus not, and I just basically my, my strategy is I write a blog every week and it's not one of these corporate blogs. You know where it's like you read these things and this is the thing, john. There's always these competitors that come in with like marketing for video games, and then the most bog standard blogs are like top 10 ways to increase your visibility on steam and it's the most boring thing. My blog is weekly, but it is like I'm like an investigative journalist for the algorithm. I'm like, oh, let's try this thing, and it's silly and it's sometimes there's typos and it's it's crazy, but it's my voice, it's um, you know, I'm testing things and reporting on it. I don't know the answer or something. It's silly, and so I'm really investing in the blog. And just that weekly blog just spreads like wildfire. People hand it around and company things, because we're a very tight, insular thing.
Speaker 1:So I have an autoresponder that says hey, how'd you find me? And a lot of the times it's people going hey, so-, uh, you know, uh, so-and-so told me I have to subscribe to your blog. I'm a four minute company. My friend said you have to read this blog and that's that's how I find most of my customers. It's just it's there, it's a weekly blog and it's, it's genuine, and so that is that works. It works so well, would call me, like Chris, can you just interview like a YouTube thing. And so, yeah, and other people will quote my blog and stuff on their YouTube channels and that'll drive traffic. So when I asked that autoresponder, how'd you find me? A lot of people I saw on YouTube were there and so I would do these talks for like, like, if a university calls me, I will give them a free talk. I'll just, hey, let's, I'll tell you kids how to do steam and don't blow yourself up. And those got a lot of views and I was like, oh man, I got to do YouTube because I was giving away visibility to them. So I have a YouTube channel. It's not great but that works. So it's YouTube and um, and my blog, and it's just SEO.
Speaker 1:And people are like oh, seo is so hard. No, it's not like I outrank. If you search how to market a game or indie game marketing, I outrank, like Reddit and stuff. I mean, that's another one that works as Reddit. But what I do is I just, if you search my blog, my URL, you will see that anytime anybody asks a question on Reddit, I have a blog that has the answer. And somebody will just post the answer Like just read this guy's blog, he has the answer. And somebody will just post the answer, like just read this guy's blog, he has the answer. Like somebody asked a question like how do I get wishlists? Which is the currency on Steam? And people are like oh, just read Chris's blog and this is a link to my article. Or they'll have an internet fight, and they just link to my blog. So it's all word of mouth. People like, yeah, just here's the answer, just follow this. And so it is just my blog is like so specific, it is just the answer, it's not fluff. I like I legitimately give you an answer and if you just not try and do smoke and mirror stuff like legitimately, try and answer people's questions with real data, it works and that's that's what I do, so all that stuff works.
Speaker 1:And to your point about like hey, this sucks, this sucks, and so like, oh, let's just take podcasts no offense, john, but like I'll go on a a podcast and I have I've legitimately tested this, like on a somewhat popular podcast I'll be like listen, I'm going to give away a free course. All you have to do is email me and I just say my email address. I'll be like literally just email me and say free course, and I will send you a key to a course. Like not even the thing I was just testing. I got like one person to do it Like the click through rate on podcasts is super low, and like one person to do it Like the click through rate on podcasts is super low and it's just. I just think that it's. I think it's a lot of people are driving or running and so if you have a call to action or you do anything, people will have to remember that by the time they get back from their run and be like okay, I'll search this thing and it just doesn't work. Whereas like YouTube, like if you let me just qualify that If you do your podcast and you upload to YouTube, I think that could work, because you're either like on your phone watching a YouTube video and you can do whatever the call to action is, or you're at your desktop watching that thing. The call to action's right there. I just find podcasts are really a very low conversion rate as far as that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So, in a nutshell, that's it and all the social media stuff. It just doesn't. I've done call to actions and I've done all this stuff and it just has no impact and at one point I was just like I'm just gonna stop. So sometimes I'll tweet. If somebody says a compliment about me on Twitter or something, I'll retweet it, but other than that I haven't tweeted a legitimate tweet in over a year. I've never posted to Instagram, never to Facebook, never to LinkedIn. Actually, linkedin still points to my old job. I didn't even update it because I was like this is kind of weird to say I'm a video game consultant. So I've done basically no social media.
Speaker 1:All my growth, everything comes from a mailing list, a weekly blog and YouTube appearances, and then everything else just flows from there and it's super dead simple. I know it's lame, I know it's not the hippest, coolest latest thing, and it's just. It's super dead simple. I know it's lame, I know it's not the hippest, coolest latest thing, but it works, folks. It's just. Blogging is so freaking cool folks, I want to bring it back. I want to make another movie about blogging.
Speaker 2:So let's do it, john. All right, I'm going to give, because I obviously see a lot of people with a lot this. So YouTube is the one that I see work the most often, and it could be some kind of selection bias, but it seems to be at the moment that if you build an audience on YouTube, that converts really, really well to course sales. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is YouTube converts really well, or can convert really well if you do it right, to growing your email list Much, much better than Instagram, much better than TikTok. Second one is this is particularly for long form on YouTube versus short form. People who watch long form videos about a topic are therefore likely to be interested in the long form video course about that topic. That tends to connect quite well.
Speaker 2:Linkedin I only know one person who is making money selling courses where they've built their audience on LinkedIn and she is selling courses on how to build an audience on LinkedIn. That's a very specific use case. You know it's not very, not very broad. Instagram's terrible. It's not that you can't use it and I we've got clients who use instagram and they make money selling courses, but it's really hard to get someone from your instagram audience, or it's much harder to get someone from your instagram audience to email this. So you have to use many chat, you have to get someone to comment a word and then they automatically get sent a message and they get added in and there's like a whole kind of process to it.
Speaker 2:But it doesn't convert nearly as well as youtube does. Seo and and um and like. People who've got website traffic converts great, but I see over the years less and less of our clients, less less the people I work with. That's their traffic source. I don't know for definite why. If you've got a high traffic site, it converts better than any other traffic source. In terms of percentage of views to email subscribers YouTube you can generally get to about 2%. Website you can get to about 3% to 5%. I think your opt-in rate's like maybe about 3% or 4%, something like that, from what you told me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just find and here's another wrinkle I do this more qualitative. I used to be a UX designer. That was my job, day job, and so I do a lot of qualitative or quantitative studies in my audience. Like when they opt into the mailing list, I ask them you know, hey, how'd you find me? And then I, and then I always respond to them because they'll say, oh, I found you on YouTube. And I find this is not quantitative but qualitative. It's my gut.
Speaker 1:If somebody says like, oh yeah, my coworkers told me about it, or I just I found Google through Google search, I'm like, oh, you're working on something. They're like, oh, yeah, well, I'm the lead of the company, I'm the marketing director and I got to study this stuff I find if they found me through the blog and reading their upper management and they've got the purse strings, so they are the ones in charge of the money and hiring and spending stuff, that's awesome. And then if they come through YouTube and this is particular to the gaming industry, because a lot of people, like I said, it's prosumer, so a lot of people love gaming and they love it so much they're like I could make a game. And so I find, if my audience comes from YouTube, I always ask hey, are you working on anything? And they say not, yet I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2:So YouTube is a much younger audience.
Speaker 1:They're not invested in it, they're doing it as a hobby. So if you want to go with a prosumer way, the pro way. If you want to go pro, it's blogging and traffic from that. If you want to do kids who are like new to this stuff, it's a lot on YouTube. That's just my general thought. Both are needed. I need both, but I find that that's the basic audience breakdown. So if you are doing something pro-level, folks, blogging's still cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense, I think, for us, and we're kind of. I don't know many. You mentioned about podcasting, and so podcasting works fantastically if you can build an audience on it. It's a hard one to build an audience on, but when clients have come to us and they've said I've got whatever 20,000 downloads a month for my podcast, I'm like, oh, we're going to do great here. This is going to work really, really well, because podcast audiences are fanatically loyal, much more so than any other traffic source I've seen, maybe your blog readers. They sound fanatical, but because people will have it on their phone while they're walking or running or doing the washing up, whatever, they'll listen to every. A lot of people will listen to every episode and it's like, whereas with youtube it's like, oh, I've got all these other things I could go and watch, with the podcast people often like listen to, and some people have messaged me and told me I've listened to every episode of your podcast twice and I'm like oh, twice that's bold.
Speaker 2:There's a hundred episodes like or more I don't know what it is now and I'm like that's, that's really intense. But it's hard to grow a podcast because it doesn't have any of those socials at the top of it. You know, a podcast because it doesn't have any of those socials at the top of it, it doesn't have a discovery mechanism for it. So the thing that works there from our experience is guest podcasting. So if you do guest podcasting, it does lead to then people listening to your podcast. It doesn't lead to direct action like you're mentioning, like asking people to email straight away, and I've seen that it doesn't tend to. But I did a whole round of guest podcasting and a year and a half later we started getting a lot of inquiries from people who'd found us, heard me on another guest, another podcast, come and started listening to my podcast and then eventually been like I love it. Now can we actually have a chat about this?
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh, that's a long lead time but it does work yeah, yep, and that that makes sense, because that's actually how I find I love To be clear. I love listening to podcasts, I'm always listening to podcasts, but that makes sense because I have discovered other podcasts based on the guests. So let me just find out, make sure I understand your guest strategy. When you say, is you guest on somebody else's podcast, you take their listeners with you and back to there. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, it's just podcasting has no built in platform like YouTube where there's like some sort of recommendation algorithms or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and growing a podcast on YouTube although it's doable, is not that. It's not really the easiest thing to do on there. We've been working on it and it's like some progress, but you know it's not, it's not a smash success. But OK, you mentioned something earlier. I want to get back into more into specifics of your business. You mentioned earlier that the email list is the secret. That's the thing and that's something I bang on to everybody about all the time. So please can you go on a rant about why the email list is like such a such a big deal, why that's so important for you yeah it just.
Speaker 1:It just works like I don't know. I I was an early convert, like I back. I just heard about mailing lists and I was just like, yeah, I want to try this thing. So I just built it over years and all it is is just like. I have an opt-in. Actually, I have two opt-ins. I have a book and you can get a free book and I also did a free course. When I was first dipping my toe into courses, I did a free course and when you join it, it gets you into my mailing list system. But yeah, it's just, basically, it's my life raft, it's my thing where, no matter what I do, I know get them back to the mailing list and like it is something I own, like nobody can take it away from me. I have these email addresses and I have gone through multiple web hosting platforms, multiple like it was on MailChimp, I'm on ConvertKit Now. I've migrated different things, different platforms and all that stuff and it just works. My open rate is 50% 50% of people open up my mailing list.
Speaker 1:And then my click-through rate is like 10% to 15% click-through rate, and so it's like 20,000 people. It just works. I don't know what it is. If I need people to do something, I just email them and it works. And I think it's the reason it's so high is I have this established thing I am going to send you an awesome article about the latest trends in game marketing every single week and people just know it, they're just like okay this is my article and people tell me they're like Chris, your articles are great, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:You bang it on. It works. I swear, it just is awesome. And I'm also a believer and I think I listened to a couple of your past podcasts before I came on here and it's just like, just keep it dead simple. I have an autoresponder. I think it's like a seven email autoresponder. When they join, basically every other day I'm like, hey, try this or go over here, look at this thing. It's super simple. It's not like this complicated if then thing and that's it. And then they get tagged and ConvertKit.
Speaker 1:I synced it up with my course thing so I know how people buy. But I never really use that stuff and I just email everybody on the list every single week and then when it's course time like I'm actually in the middle of a course sale I just I hammer them a little harder. I'll do it multiple times a week, just like, don't forget, and I do fun stuff, it's like fun. When it's course sales time, it's fun stuff. I'm always giving them free information. So they love the opening rate because it's like, hey, I'm going to do this cool article about this thing. That's also in my course, and then they just get free information, so I just lavish them with awesome stuff. It it's just fun. I love it. I love email.
Speaker 2:Now you said something in the info you sent me in advance that I really want to dig into, because this is great. You said that 3% to 5% of people will buy when you do a promotion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's massive. I don't know if you know this, but that is massive. Like that's way, way above normal. Like most people, if they're launching a new course that they've never done before and they've got a responsive list and they do a great job, will get like two percent, and you're commonly getting three to five percent. So can you talk us through this a little bit more? Like obviously you've got a very high open rate, which is great. You've got a very high click-through rate, which is great. You've got a fanatical audience, which is great. So all of that is a part of it. Is there anything else you mentioned? Like you're lavishing people with fun stuff. Can you talk us through a little bit more? Like how long does a promotion last? What kind of discount are you doing Like and how do you do those promotions?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here's the other thing about and I joined everybody's mailing list. I'm on yours, john, I just joined everybody's mailing list. And here's the difference is I treat my mailing list like blogging. I really do where it's like. The reason they're on the mailing list is not because I'm on a lot of mailing lists and the only time they get emailed is oh, it's promotion time or all that stuff. That, or hey, it's like an old article that's like five years old or something you know and you can tell. It's kind of in this autoresponder. Like my weekly email is like stuff that's happening in the news, like right now in the gaming business industry. So it is up-to-date, latest stuff. And that's why my open rates are so high is because I literally wrote it like an hour before and then I sent it to them and that's what it is and it's not a promotional thing. So then when I enter into promotional period, which I am now, I just kicked off the thing I try and make it fun and I try and do multi-channel stuff. So, like I said, I have the Discord channel, so it is like a little mini conference when it's sales time, and so what I do is and I've tested this.
Speaker 1:I've done this previous thing. Sometimes I got lazy and I just did like, hey, sales on email and it just goes to the sales page and it's got all the discounts and I put all my courses on sale. I do them seasonally a couple times. I know you like to do them more frequently and I'm going to try doing more, but it's just exhausting to do them. The way I do them is I put it on sale total sale and I email my list. Now last year I did it and I got lazy and I was just like sales on and I email, blasted and the open rate or the open rate and click through was fine, but the sales were poor Not poor, but just they kind of scared me. I was like, oh my God, is my job over now? Do I have to go get a real job? And eventually they caught up. But I find and I confirmed it this week when I did it I kick off with a webinar.
Speaker 1:So what I do is and it's not one of those cheesy webinars it's like a live Q&A and it's fun and people come on and they ask their questions. It's like a radio call-in show and I do that the very first thing and then I do a promotion where it's like, if you come to the call-in show and you buy something during the live call-in show, I will give you a free thing. And I take one of my cheaper products, I give them to them free. And what I do is I keep it super dead simple. I just filter. I said whoever bought in the hour that my Q&A was, I will give you a free thing. So it's that call to action quick, get it on there. Everybody, bye, bye, bye, bye. And that just works really well. I see a good spike in the front and then it kind of trickles down. And then I do, basically every three days, something fun, like I will review. Steam. Pages are a big thing. It's like your landing page on the platform. So I'll do a critique. People submit their pages. I do a live critique and I make it fun and it's live. And then I do it on multi-channel. So on Discord you can do a radio thing and it's like a radio call-in show. I can actually get people on stage. They ask a question, I say thanks for your call and then I answer it. So I do that. So it is a multi-channel event and it's like a conference and I'll bring in guests that have special things and we'll interview them, and so it's just a party for two weeks.
Speaker 1:I also do affiliate sales with some YouTubers. I said YouTube is actually pretty big. I've just found people who drove a lot of traffic to my channel. In other words, when I see the email list, they'll say oh yeah, I found you on CodeMonkey. He's a really good YouTuber about code and gaming and so I just saw his name over and over. I found you on CodeMonkey. Found you on CodeMonkey and I was like okay. So I called that guy and I was like do you want to do an affiliate thing? So he does. So I usually go show up on his YouTube show and we do an affiliate thing, so I'll answer his audience's questions. That drives it. So it's just it is all on in this period and that just gets the numbers over. So that's generally my course launch strategy.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. That's cool man. I love that. Okay, so it's two weeks, it's all your courses are on discount. If they buy something, they get another free. If they buy something during the Q&A session, they get something else free as well. Do they get to decide what else they get, or is it just they get? No, it's just simple.
Speaker 1:Like I say, it's usually something that was recent, because I also do a conference. Every year there's a big industry conference and then I take the best speakers from that conference and I call them on the side. I'm like do you want to just move my side conference, as I basically give the same talk from the big conference, but it's mine and I charge for it and it's like 50 bucks and so every year I've got a little $50 conference and that's usually my giveaway. It's the last year's conference. It's just a collection of interviews that I do, very similar to what we're doing right now. But when somebody is there, I sell that and then I usually do that for the promotional thing. So you get a free thing and they all get to choose. Sometimes I see somebody if I can go in the system and I just add it to their account, and then I'll see they already bought it and I'll be like ah, here's another thing, I'll just find something else just to jam in there, and that's that's a tip to folks make something cheap. That're like I'm sorry about that here, take this for free. And they're like yeah, thank you. So it's a good. I consider it the mortar. It's just these little things that you can just plug in, something bad happens. Here's this free thing that costs 50 bucks, nice, nice, okay.
Speaker 1:So, in general, here's another interesting data point that I've found so, two-thirds of the people who buy because I run a promotion I'm doing it quarterly now, one of these big promotions every quarter about two thirds of the people joined my mailing list in the last six months. So, and partially, this could be that I have a flagship product and I don't do a lot of products. I have this flagship thing that's the moneymaker, that's my wishlist, invisibility masterclass. And then I have a second one that's similar but it's a little bit. I partnered with somebody to do it, but that flagship one doesn't change and I guarantee, I say, lifetime access. Here it is, and then I do littler courses throughout, but most of my audience has joined within the last six months. But it's not because people are falling off, I think, just people. Whoever's going to buy, if they're going to, it's a little bit longer tail, for that last third of the audience comes from the longer tail. So I don't know, I don't know. What do you think about that? Is that weird or normal? What's?
Speaker 2:the story with that? Yeah, it's not the most common. I think it may be the fact that you've got that one main flagship. If that's what everyone's buying, that main flagship product that is probably a big part of it. But normally what we see is that people's buyers are 20 times more likely to buy the next thing than the non-buyers. So if they've got someone who's bought a course versus a person who's just on the email list when they're selling a second course, the people who bought before 20 times more likely to buy. Last time I actually looked at the numbers exactly it was 22 times on one particular client.
Speaker 2:So the fact that you've got like nearly all your customers coming from the new ones, the new people signing up, it's like well. In that case it seems like, oh well, if you did another thing, you'd sell so much because you've got all these incredibly loyal fans. But you're kind of you're selling such a high percentage. It's like tricky to be like do something different, chris. It's like I don't know, man, something's working for you already, so, but probably that is still true. If you had something like here's the more advanced version, or whatever, you would probably sell a boatload of them to your you know to your existing buyers? Do you how?
Speaker 2:many other products do you have besides that flagship one?
Speaker 1:well, let's see, I've got something. So the history of my courses are the history of me learning how to make courses. So it's like, like the very first, my lead magnet, which is like how to set up your Steam page, that's my free course. And that was the first one I recorded and I was just like, how does courses work? I'll just make the smallest, simplest unit and I'll give it away for free as a lead magnet. So that's free. That's first. Then I do. Then the second one was like can I charge money for this? And I made it's basically my.
Speaker 1:I was really into copywriting at the time and so I had a big swipe list of all that stuff that I found like, oh, this is cool marketing. And so I just had this database of ideas that I had. So I was like I'll just sell that to see if I can sell anything. That was my second thing Can I sell stuff and what's the percentages? And stuff like that. So I built this database of game. I call it game marketing ideas and stuff like that. So I built this database of game. I call it game marketing ideas. So it's a swipe list that people can buy.
Speaker 1:And so that was my second thing for paid and I was like, okay, that converted, well enough, it is worth me to really make a course. And so then I did the masterclass, which is my flagship thing and it is everything I've ever known, just in that class, on how to market your game. It's a roadmap, everything right there. So that's my, that was my flagship. And then I did another course that is, and then I do every year. I do this mini conference, so that kind of kicks off the year and that's in April where I bring in industry people and I just interview them and so it's it's like a $50 ish course every. It's not a course, it's really a conference, but it's technically a course. And then I had Last year I partnered with somebody else who's got a specialty adjacent to mine and I coached them through the course and then we just split the revenue 50-50.
Speaker 1:And that's a different course that I run through the platform, so I don't know how many that was. So that's basically it for courses. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:And do you do anything like a you mentioned, like sales page critiques? Do you do anything like that on a paid, ongoing basis, like a membership or anything of those kind of things?
Speaker 1:I was thinking about it like a membership, something or other. I was thinking about it, but I don't know, how do those typically work? How does that?
Speaker 2:work. I don't know how do those typically work? How does that work? Well, it depends massively on how much you're willing to do live. So there's a range of how they work.
Speaker 2:I'm a big proponent of them in terms of increasing revenue for people. The downside is sometimes they introduce more complexity than some course creators want to have. So, as an example, I'll start with the standard and then I'll give you some examples of like how they vary. So one of the standard ones is that you have people pay a monthly amount and you have access not only to the course but q? A sessions with you on a in a group setting, and you can charge a decent amount for those, depending on, like, how much money your target audience is making, but definitely hundreds a month that people will pay. As a guy I know who's teaching how do you grow your YouTube audience. He charges $650 a month for doing those. We do something like that where we charge $950 a month for group coaching. So there's group coaching calls and then there is Q&A sorry, slack access. You can ask questions, or you can ask questions via email. What have you Then?
Speaker 2:I know a guy who hates doing stuff live. He doesn't want to have any calls booked in his calendar, but he did want to have. He did find that it was really useful to be giving people individual feedback as opposed to just courses. And he's helping specifically entrepreneurs who are normally aged about 30 to 50, who are successful financially but they want to get jacked and they are more scientific based and they want and it's only guys and they he helps them with email. He does email coaching only, so every two weeks they send him the spreadsheet with like here's all the workouts I did. Here's all the workouts I did. Here's all the stuff that I lifted. Here's my macros, everything I ate. Here's how much weight I gained. Here's my body fat percentage as measured by all these different places. And he'll be like, right, here's how we're going to tweak exactly what you're going to do.
Speaker 2:But all of it is through email and he charges like $700 or $800 a month for that because it's very bespoke, it's one-to-one but it doesn't involve any call. So normally if you do calls, you can charge more. If you do it group, you can charge a bit less. And then there's a whole way of kind of mixing them up in between interesting, interesting, yeah, yeah. If you fancy do it, doing it. I bet your audience. It sounds like, from what you told me, that your audience would be likely to. Obviously you have to test and find out right, but um, it might get in the way of all of your, you know, being retired gardening side exactly yeah, it would.
Speaker 2:It would step into my gardening time really I'm half retired here, john, so no, no I think it's cool.
Speaker 1:I think that sounds cool. Yeah, I just I would have to figure out how to slice it the right way. Yeah, interesting, interesting, I was like he's been built.
Speaker 2:He tried for a while building up like a big paid group coaching program, very sales focused, lots of sales calls to sell it, what have you. And he was aiming to like get hundreds of thousands a month in revenue and what have you. And it was really stressful and every month I'd have a call with him and he'd be so stressed and it was like, but he was making a lot of money but sometimes he wasn't and sometimes he wasn't working. He's managing a team and he hated it. And then he fired everybody and went back to just being him and an assistant and he's the most chill person that I know. He's so relaxed and he's like john, have you considered just working less and going rock climbing more? You know, rock climbing is really good fun. I'm just like james is onto something here.
Speaker 2:You your editor is listening to you say that right now and being like I know, right, it's like I have no plan to do it, but I was like I like my team, I like working with them, but I'm like James has figured something out. That is like there is something smart going on there. And you're kind of saying the same thing, right, just you, and you don't have to worry about everybody else.
Speaker 1:I don't have to learn that, Like I already know that Like as soon as I bring people on and then it's like the stress level is going to go up.
Speaker 1:The other money you can't pay to lower your stress levels I really don't think you can. So the secret is just not to have the stress levels so I don't have to pay to bring them back down again. So I'm just just give it a chill, just keep it chill. Everybody Like let's just talk, let's talk, let's talk less about hacking everything and just talking about chilling out everybody. Hey, let's all chill.
Speaker 2:What is there anything that you do find that's a challenge for you with your email marketing or your funnels or, like your, obviously not your audience building, but is there anything that you are finding challenging?
Speaker 1:I mean, though, that's.
Speaker 1:the main thing that I'm trying to figure out is how much I need to do is how much I need to do, and that's like I'm trying to like do as little as possible while still getting there. I mean, I'm afraid. I'm constantly kind of afraid that like the bottom's gonna drop out and it's like one day I'm gonna run a sale and it's not gonna work. It hasn't happened yet, and so I'm constantly kind of there. Like I said, last year I kind of went a little too lack and I just like sent an email like sales on, and the numbers were really bad. So I kind of like ran to catch up and I like in the middle of it, started adding more stuff, did more promotion towards the end of the sale, and so that's kind of my lesson learned was like how much do I actually have to do to get the sale to hit? And so that's, I think that's the constant stress is just like how much is too much and how much is too little. That's that's the stress I'm kind of having and just the fear of the unknown of like well, what happens if it all goes away? It just doesn't work, but so far it's OK.
Speaker 1:So I know I just the main thing that I don't like is the main stress, and stuff like that is usually after one of these call, Like, if I do a big call or something, there's just a comedown that I have to kind of like regulate myself back down to reality Cause it's just like also hyper. I'll get sweaty, Like I'm in Arizona, so I'm sweaty all the time anyway, but I will, I'll be like sweating by the end of it, you know, so it's. There's a, there's a recharge period, and also just emotionally. The reason I don't like one-on-one coaching I used to do that is it was just emotionally. Sometimes I'd have to tell people I was like this isn't working. I'm sorry, what you're doing just isn't working, but I'd have to put it in a nice way, in a coaching way, and that just stresses me out so much and I feel bad if I was like oh man, I was a little too hard on that critique and then it bothers me all day. So it's mainly the I don't know doing work stresses me out. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1:John.
Speaker 2:That's my stress. One of the things I think I want to harp on a little bit that you do that is great, that you mentioned during your promotions is that you're doing live webinars. He's like Q&A sessions, webinars, and almost nobody does them Like people. Just course, creators as a whole just don't seem to want to do them and they work fantastically well. And it bothers me because I'm like if you guys would just get over yourself enough to be all right with doing these, you would be able to like add 50% to your revenue. And I know nobody wants to hear it, so I don't. Always I used to bang on about it all the time and it didn't seem to make any difference, so I just kind of like, oh okay, people aren't going to do it. Let's just just talk about email promotions and still, people struggle with that one as well. But it's like at least it gets through and people do start to do them.
Speaker 2:But I've got a client at the moment who he very, very successful, very, um, you know, multiple millions a year in revenue selling courses. Um, is he as chill as you? I'm not sure, but he is. Uh, he's just done a promotion recently where he did a webinar for the first time and he made a shed load of sales and he's just like I should do more webinars. I was like banging on at him about yes, this is why they work. They're so good, they're fantastic because of this, this, this and this is why they work. They're so good, they're fantastic because of this, this, this and this is why they work so well. This is how much we've seen.
Speaker 2:And he's like done, I'm in, right, and he messaged me yesterday and he's just like should I here? I'm thinking about adding some webinars into this upcoming launch time. Yes, here's yes, do it. And like let's discuss it, let's talk about it, let's what topics you got. Let me help you plan it. You, you know, because they're so good and you're seeing that, right, that's something you said. When you didn't do that, it didn't work as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say I mean just not super scientific. But I was looking back at my last year sales numbers and when the lazy one, when I did lazy summer it was my lazy summer last year I so far I've tripled how much I make in that same period. So I did the lazy launch in my first 3 days are equal that 1 day of doing the webinar at the kickoff. So this year I did the webinar kickoff. That was equal to the first 3 days of my lazy summer last year. So it really does work and I can understand.
Speaker 1:I don't like to do traditional webinars either. I bet I could even earn more because I've watched some of those pre-recorded webinars that course creators do and they're very salesy. It feels like QVC, it feels like you're on the customer buying network or whatever you like, or an infomercial. I don't run them quite that way. I mean what I'll do is the reasons I do like them is you get in touch with the community, like what are the questions? Because I run them as a Q&A. I don't call them a webinar or anything, because the gaming audience is very cynical. They really are. So they're very savvy, they're tech savvy and cynical. So if I were like join this webinar. They'd be like so I just say, hey, it's a Q&A, and it is, it's a Q&A. So I say, hey, show up, ask your questions about game marketing and I'll just answer them.
Speaker 1:And then that does two things. One is I just find out what are the questions people having with marketing games. And sometimes I've got a notepad during the talk and I'm like, oh my God, my course doesn't answer that question. That's a good question, so I'll write it down. So it's feeding the course, like what I'm going to be writing about in my next version of the course. And then also, sometimes it'll be like you know that I can give you the short answer for this question, but the long answer is in the course. And here's the course and you would want to watch this. I'm just doing it.
Speaker 1:And then it's not like I'm just selling, selling, selling. It's like it's helpful. It's like, yes, I have a specific lesson for that. It would take me an hour to explain it. Just watch the course. They're like okay, he knows what he's talking about and the Q&A part just proves my expertise, because I can just answer any question. You cannot trick me with a question. I've heard them all. I've heard every question, so it is super powerful. So, yes, do the Q&A, do a webinar, but don't call it a webinar, that sounds gross. Call it a Q&A with your community and they love it. And so what I do is I do a Q&A on all my channels. I've got a YouTube Q&A tomorrow, I've got the. I have a webinar webinar like webinar software that I use and I did that yesterday, and then I do a one on my Discord server, a live chat, and that one's in a couple of days. So I do several on different platforms, different audiences, but it's all the same basic format of question and answers.
Speaker 2:So do it. Question and answers so do it. One thing I've been wondering about we messaged about this a little bit before what's similar between marketing games and marketing courses and what's different? Is there stuff that you've learned from marketing games that has helped you with marketing courses?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little bit different. So I mean, the hard part about games is nobody needs video games. Like nobody needs them, it's a pure luxury buy and it's a hobbyist market. So hobbyists will buy lots of games that they'll never play, but they just like the idea of it. It's a weird thing. Like people will buy, like whatever hobby. I don't know what hobbies you have, but any hobby I buy plants I'm not going to put in my garden. I love this plant but I can't figure out where I'm going to put it.
Speaker 1:If you're a knitter, you have yarn that you just like the color of and you buy it because of that, and so the mentality is different, whereas like, of course you know I need this information and I am judged by how well I produce that information. But games are so ephemeral. They're very much like jokes. Like why are some jokes funny and some aren't? It's the same way. Why are some games fun and some aren't? And this is a big thing.
Speaker 1:If you are a 30 year old person and you're thinking about getting into games, it is very hard. Like you listen, it's like oh yeah, I have always wanted to make a game. It is very, very tricky. I think people underestimate that because if your game is not fun, you're dead, Like there's nothing. No marketing can fix that, because people buy it to have fun.
Speaker 1:And so this is the hard part is, with a course, launch, like I said, like lazy, you know, lazy Friday or lazy summer last year, yeah, I messed up but I could fix it, I could get it back on. Or even if I had a bad course, like my first version of my course, not so good, and I fixed it with a game, if your game's not fun, it's very hard to fix it. You just basically have to start over and redesign a whole new game. You can't just, like you know, coerce it into something that's good. It's just just the nature of our art form. And so game marketing is very hit or miss. It's a hit driven industry where it's like is this gonna hit? It's like hollywood, you know, like this movie's a hit yeah, everybody loves it.
Speaker 1:This movie's not, and it bombs. And then if it bombs it goes away. It's just not there. And so you were asking like, what's the how? What lessons can you learn? And it's like I can't really. I wish I had a good answer for you, because with the course business and this, if you mess up your launch, all this stuff, you can fix your course. Maybe you adjust it, maybe you do have to record, maybe it's like oh, this offer isn't very good so I have to do a different course.
Speaker 1:But it's not like gaming, like if you miss the mark with games you're dead, and a lot of like with on PC, that platform, steam. If you are not selling your game on Steam, it's not going to sell. Like you are dependent on Steam, which sucks. I hate that we have to depend on another company, whereas course sales. It's my mailing list, my website. Sure, I might need a little YouTube, but you know I can sell a course I don't rely on. You know it would be if what was that mash? What's that other, uh, that scummy, uh tutorial site? Uh, it's like udemy or something like that. Like, we don't need udemy, we can just sell off my own website and so that's different course sales. You uh with video games you have to sell through steam and you have to follow their rules and their way of promotion and if you really don't, you're kind of toast, I think the only. There are very few corollaries between games and course marketing. I'm trying to think of some, but I don't know it's hard. Don't make games folks.
Speaker 2:If you're not already invested. Don't think Sometimes.
Speaker 1:So here's the thing it's a passion-driven audience and I find some people are like you know, I kind of want to make a fun game with my kid. Yeah, that's fun, make a fun game with your kid but it won't sell on Steam. It is like so serious, so hardcore. What sells on Steam, don't get into it. If you're not a super fan Like you have to love this stuff.
Speaker 2:Chris, this has been absolutely awesome If people want to check you out where should they go?
Speaker 1:and you've mentioned. I told you don't. I don't want any call to action. If you're not ready to make games, don't join my mailings, you're gonna you're gonna f my numbers up. I'm like man, I got all these subscribers from john's awesome podcast because podcasts work and it's like all these people and they're just here to like listen to my uh game marketing.
Speaker 1:And then I'm like, why aren't these people converting? Oh, they came from Josh Spikas. So if you're not into games, don't join any of my stuff. Now I mean, yeah, it's just go to howtomarketagamecom. Don't join my mailing list. I don't know, I don't care, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But yeah, howtomarketagamecom is my website. You can search me on YouTube too. You can kind of see my YouTubes or search YouTube for my name. Because a lot of the reason I did YouTube was because I was guesting on so many podcasts and I noticed every time I guested on somebody else's YouTube channel, their numbers would go up. I was like, wait, why am I giving away that traffic? So I should do it. But my YouTube channel is kind of like I don't really love it. So you could watch my YouTube channel, I guess. But yeah, that's it. But again, folks, unless you're a diehard gamer, don't make a game Wicked.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for coming on, chris. I really, really appreciate your time hey thanks a lot, John. It's been a pleasure, and everybody else listening. Thank you so much as always. We really, really appreciate you and we will see you next time.