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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
I Wrote 300+ Newsletters. Here’s What Actually Works.
🚀 Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
What happens when you lose all your clients overnight and decide to start writing about Java programming instead of playing terrible golf? You end up building one of the longest-running tech newsletters in the world.
Dr. Heinz Kabutz survived the dot com crash of 2000 by doing something counterintuitive - he started giving away his absolute best content for free. 25 years later, his newsletter reaches every corner of the globe (except the Vatican), his courses help students double their salaries, and he makes sales while sitting at Greek tavernas.
This conversation reveals why bad video and audio quality can actually sell better than perfect production, and the psychological reason most course creators sabotage their own success. You'll also discover how giving everything away for free became a premium pricing strategy, why humor matters more than you think in technical content, and the surprising relationship between passive income and satisfaction.
Heinz shares stories about getting recognized by strangers on the streets of Romania, why he feels guilty about making money while relaxing with friends, and his approach to building genuine connections with readers across 156 countries. He also explains why he avoids running the webinars that work so well for him, and how fear of rejection holds back most course creators from the success they deserve.
📧 Java Specialists Newsletter: https://javaspecialists.eu
🔥 Our FREE resources: https://datadrivenmarketing.co/resources
🤝 Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.
said to me this is like the best value for money course in the world and it's so easy to focus on the ones who are unhappy rather than the people who love what you do. Some of my best sellers were just with the webcam and really funky sound. You know echoey sound and I write my technical articles. I always start with a little funny anecdote. If you can make someone laugh and chuckle, you've got an instant connection with the person. I was sitting at a taverna with some friends and afterwards I'd say, oh, just made a couple of sales.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling online courses.
Speaker 2:We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry.
Speaker 2:My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Dr Heinz M Carbots.
Speaker 2:Now Heinz is the author of the Java Specialists newsletter, which is read in 156 countries around the globe. The Vatican does not have a reader yet, but the Faroe Islands do. Today, we're going to be talking about why you should give away your best content for free, why you need to make your audience laugh and why video and sound don't matter as much as some people think. 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 Dr Heinz M Karbutz. Now Heinz is the author of the Java Specialists newsletter, which is read in 156 countries around the globe. The Vatican does not have a reader yet, but the Faroe Islands do. Today, we're going to be talking about why you should give away your best content for free, why you need to make your audience laugh and why video and sound don't matter as much as some people think. Heinz, welcome to the show. Hey.
Speaker 1:John, thank you so much. I'm really honored to be invited to this.
Speaker 2:So talk us just through briefly, like what do you have in your courses? Who are you helping? What kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 1:So my courses target or provide material for advanced Java programmers, and there's not much material out there for advanced java programmers. There's lots of beginners how to write hello world um, you know how to do. How to write a tic-tac-toe game. You know how to get java onto onto your android device but there's not much in the high end. How to tune a multi-million dollar banking system to be fast and save you. You know a hundred thousand dollars a day.
Speaker 2:Okay, so your target audience is senior programmers, is that?
Speaker 1:right. Senior program. Senior programs what?
Speaker 2:counts someone as being senior, are they still coding when they're a senior programmer? Are they managing other programmers like what?
Speaker 1:no, no, they're definitely coding. So they definitely are the people who are coding in Java or who are tuning these big systems, complicated systems, got it?
Speaker 2:Okay, cool, that's my target. That sounds pretty niche. What kind of number of? I know you've got, obviously, a lot of readers, people from 156, from 156 countries. But like, how big of an audience is that, even in the world? Have you got any kind of idea of how many senior Java developers there are in the world?
Speaker 1:Well, there are not that many senior Java programmers in the world. There are about 10, 11 million Java programmers in the world. Okay, java programmers in the world. Okay, and I'm not actually not sure how many will be there next year, because ai is supposedly going to take our take over our jobs. So maybe next year we'll have like one million java programmers and the rest have gone into farming or something. I was actually doing another interview and and and the guy was interviewing me used to be in the construction business and and he, he told me that construction business isn't that different to to the software business.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I said to him okay, so when, once we lose our jobs with ai, can we go back, can we go to the construction business? And he's like, well, you know, you need a certain type of body for that, which is probably not going to be the right body that Java programmers have.
Speaker 2:So how have you built this audience of senior Java programmers? How did you manage to get in front of them in the first place?
Speaker 1:I started writing articles, newsletter news, five years ago. It was in the year 2000 when basically the world was going down the tube in the it business because companies had over invested in the it business and they, they were absolutely tired of spending anything on it. Like I had about four or five customers in there. I lost them all within a month and so I had nothing to do and I started playing golf and I was really bad at golf. You picked up that I'm South African, so I'll give you a South African version of golf. It's basically called Mournsouk.
Speaker 2:Okay, but that's.
Speaker 1:Afrikaans. So your South African audience will now have a big chuckle, oh okay, right. You'll be wondering what I meant over there. Basically, I knew every single square inch of the Gulf Force, except for the green.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, got it, yeah, yeah yeah, I got bored and I thought, no, I've got to do something else. So I started writing this newsletter because I had a lot of ideas about different things, different advanced topics I could explore. And people always said, hey, why don't you write a book? And I was like, no, that's too much work. You know writing a book and I have written books. But it's like, yeah, that really is a pain to write a book.
Speaker 1:So instead I I'd write individual newsletters, sent them out and, um, the first one was really terrifying because I sent it to about 80 people that I knew, um, and the problem is that I knew right and I got back like some responses of I don't care about joven and not interested in this topic, to like this is a great newsletter. And the problem is that when you get 10 positive results and one negative result even if it's like I don't work with Java anymore the 10 just gets obliterated by the one negative comment. So you have to sort of ignore everything and just keep on going. So you have to sort of ignore everything and just keep on going, and I think I believe that mine is the longest running, continuously running Java newsletter in the world. Wow, okay, there's one that started about three weeks after me and he'll never catch up because I started three weeks before him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, but I don't talk about exact numbers because you know they fluctuate. People come and go and it's like but it's, it's, it's a big reach, it's a really big reach. And I, I keep on going to conferences and then people want to come take photos with me and you know they want to shake my hand because I've been reading my newsletter for 20 years and in fact, I get in trouble with my email provider because I say these email addresses can't still work.
Speaker 1:And I had this really weird experience, john, when I went to Romania once. I was in Bucharest and I was wearing one of my Java Champion this is a Java Champion shirt, it's a thing that I've got in 2005, I think and um. So I was walking there, I did some shopping and I was walking carrying these, these, these shopping bags, and this guy in romania walks up to me and he says are you heinz carboards? And I'm like, uh, yes, just a random guy on the street that doesn't normally happen to me.
Speaker 1:I'm not like an influencer. People don't know who I am except in my. Not like an influencer. People don't know who I am except in the Java world. There they know who I am, but just this random guy. Hey, are you Heinz Kalbert? I'm going like, yes, who are you? And he says to me, I'm not important, it doesn't matter who I am. I said, yeah, but I want to know who you are. And he would not tell me who he was. He was so proud that he spotted me in Bucharest and I still, to this day, have no idea who this guy is. His name is probably Alexandros, because every second person is called Alexandros.
Speaker 2:But I've got no idea who he is.
Speaker 1:And this happens to me quite frequently that people know me through the newsletter.
Speaker 2:And it's a wide reach.
Speaker 1:it's a very wide reach.
Speaker 2:So you so, but you. You've been running it for 25 years, but how has that led to the, the growth in the audience? Is it word of mouth from people who read it telling everybody else about it? Is it seo from the, the articles that you're writing like how did that, how did that get in front of so many people?
Speaker 1:um, okay, so I got a bit of a foot up. When I started, there was a very famous author who put me on his website.
Speaker 2:Oh nice.
Speaker 1:Guy called Bruce Eccle. He doesn't do Java anymore, there's other languages now and I think he might be retired or close to retirement. But he was very kind to give me a start and put me in front of, you know, on his website, and so I got a lot of people signing up from that. But now it just grows organically, so I don't do any specific SEO. I had my brother-in-law help me with SEO years ago, but I haven't done any of that for a very long time.
Speaker 2:Why do you think? One of the things that you'd said when you messaged me before was that you think it's important to make your audience laugh, and it sounded like you almost think it's more important to entertain them than for them to actually learn anything from you. Why do you? Why do you think that took me through that?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's 100, 100. You know the. So what I'm trying to say about my audience is these are like incredible people in key positions. So you'll have, like, the technical director of blah blah blah bank will be on my newsletter, wow okay yeah and um, and I've got a connection with them.
Speaker 1:Um, and the connection is is a. It goes far beyond the technical. If you can make someone laugh and chuckle, you've got an instant connection with the person. It's like public speaking. If you, when I do a talk, I always try to make the audience laugh within the first you know, five seconds. Right, you know. And if I do that, there's an instant connection and you have oxytocin flowing and everybody's happy and you're having a good time.
Speaker 1:I remember I was in Athens once and there was a Java conference put on by I think it was Sun Microsystems at the time, and before my talk I sort of mingled through the audience and chatted to people and I sort of got a feel of what people are thinking about. And then I got up and I said something and the whole audience started laughing. And afterwards I had lunch with one of the other speakers and she was a very, very experienced speaker. She used to speak in front of thousands of people and she said to me Heinz, why did they laugh? It wasn't even funny what you said. And I said I know it wasn't funny, but it was the right thing for this audience. And so what I do is when I write my technical articles, I always start with a little funny anecdote.
Speaker 2:It could be something.
Speaker 1:You know something Because I live on the island of Crete, so I've got this really like incredible lifestyle. In the morning I go to the beach and go for a run and go for a swim and like 300 days a year, you know, I go for a swim in the sea here which people can just dream of. You guys from london, you come here for a week and they like get drunk every day in crete and then go home again, but we have this every day, not getting drunk every day, but going to the beach every single day. It's really a fantastic place. So I write something about that or you know, just just some some weird stuff, that about my, about my life or about something funny, and so people get this connection and so I try and include humor in my newsletters. And the other day I was going through my archive because I've got over 300 of these things I've written over 25 years and I was reading some of them and I actually packed out laughing at my own jokes.
Speaker 2:Like oh God, so funny.
Speaker 1:I was mocking the sport of cricket. It was like such a bad burn.
Speaker 2:It was terrible. I do find it's interesting because I'll I'll read something that I've written that I thought was funny at the time and I'm like I don't know if everybody else will find this funny. But when I read it back and I've forgotten that I wrote it, I'm like that was really funny I find me very funny like and not just because I know it's me like I've read stuff before.
Speaker 2:I remember one time I was at school and some sign had been defaced and somebody had written something on it and I read it and I thought it was very funny and my friend Tim said you know who wrote that? I said no, he said you did, and I was like I think I'm really funny. Not everyone agrees, but that's okay, that's all right I'm sure your teachers were not impressed you know, oh yeah, that's fine. That wasn't the job.
Speaker 1:That wasn't the job to make them laugh and, and you know, john, with that, um, I'm not a good writer, okay, my actual prose, my grammar is all messed up and I use very I try and use very simple words because, um, I've got readers in 156 countries, you know, it's like all over the place and, um, you know, the number of countries who have english as a first language is usa, canada, south africa, uk, okay, scotland. I don't know what they speak in scotland, gaelic or something that's welsh, I don't know but basically, australia, new zealand, that's it, and the rest is like English is a foreign language.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so if you write with the perfect prose and you know the perfect grammar and perfect words, often you just lose people, and for me, I will rather pick a word or a sentence structure which I find funny than one which is correct. If it sounds funny, I'll go for that nice.
Speaker 2:One of the other things you'd mention is that you think you should give away your best content for free and that you've like basically given everything away over the years in the newsletter, one thing that. So I was having this conversation right with someone the other day and he's a very smart guy and I'm in a mastermind with him, and he sells um spanish coaching, so like mass market, but a little more expensive than kind of the average, like it's a few hundred a month. He's been on the podcast before and I said to him that he should sell a low ticket course. So like, not just the coaching, but try, try selling a course. That was like they could do on their own.
Speaker 2:And he said but what we've always promised is that you could get everything from us. We give everything away for free. And I'm like, of course you give everything away for free. Like he's got the book, he's got a podcast himself and in the podcast they give everything away for free. It's like nobody, like everybody who teaches courses gives everything away for free because otherwise you'd run out of content. The point of the course is not that it's different, it's always going to be the same stuff. It's just it's going to be packaged better and it's going to be organized in a structure that helps people to learn correct and I don't know, he didn't seem to, I don't know.
Speaker 2:It kind of didn't fit fit in his brain because he's always had a marketing point of the give it away for free. But I'm like, I'm totally with you on this. It's like, of course, like otherwise, what are you giving away your second best stuff? And then it's like, how's that going to help you build an audience, right? Why do you? Why do you think it's so important? Why do you think it matters so much?
Speaker 1:well, the difference is in the consumption of the product. Yeah, so if somebody comes to you and they say to me Heinz, you know, I really want to, I want you to teach me everything that you know, okay, I'll say well, start with newsletter number one and read through to newsletter number 323 or five or something like that, and everything, almost everything.
Speaker 1:I've got a few things that are not in there, but almost everything. I've got a few things that are not in there, but almost everything I know is in there. It's all there for free. The archive is available, just read it. And I do have people that print them all out and got like an archive of all my newslets and print them out and read them and study them all and they really benefit from it. And for me it's a really great way not to drop my prices because I get people coming to me. They're saying they're students, they are students, they're students at university, they want to buy my course. My courses are priced for the professional Java programmer. They're not priced for students. So, for example, I've got a bundle that concludes all my material, all the courses, and it's $1,870. And I never give a 90% discount like ever. It's never going to happen and there's a reason why I've got that price. There's a lot of research behind it. But also I'll actually mark the exercises that people do and I'll give them the certificates based on the exercises.
Speaker 1:So if they get a certificate. It actually means something. And I sometimes get people that will send me their certificates, which they just copied and pasted from my solutions, and I spot that in an instant and then I send back a polite email saying well, thanks for sending those to me. Will you please maybe do them yourself or something like that and send them again. So it's a in terms of the product, it's a very premium product, but not everybody can afford that. You know somebody who's a professional Java programmer working for a bank in London or New York or Germany, somewhere. They're going like okay, I've got a budget for the year, let me spend it on Heinz's premium product and I'll learn a heck of a lot and and, of course, also teach in a in-person courses as well, besides the self-study courses. But then you have other people who are just starting and they're beginners in job or they're students or something, and, um, they've got a lot of time available. They actually can afford to spend the time reading the books I recommend and reading my newsletters.
Speaker 1:So, there's no reason for them to buy my course. It's a complete waste of money for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because they can just spend the I don't know three years or whatever it takes to read my archives and get through that and get everything they need from there.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm yeah, I was chatting with a friend, mark.
Speaker 2:He runs a podcast called authority hacker and it's it used to be they've changed it now to to be ai focused, but it used to be for helping people learn how to set up niche sites or authority sites, you know, like a site where you have content on one very specific topic and then you'd make they'd often make money through selling, through having ads on the sites, and so it was mostly based around search engine optimization.
Speaker 2:And I was talking to him about how I'd been doing the podcast for like I don't know a year at the time, something like that, and how I was like I don't know what else to cover because I've covered all of the topics. You know there's only so many things in email marketing and funnel discovery. It's like there's only two things in SEO, like write really good content and build more links. It's like and I've been doing this podcast for five years and I still have people come up and they're like, oh, I kind of starting to get the hang of it now it's like you've got to find so many so you don't have to worry about giving away the content.
Speaker 2:That's not the problem. The problem is, can you make it entertaining enough and interesting enough and then get people to pay you know, want to be in the audience and want to listen to you and then can you make your courses organized enough and, like, help people to actually achieve the outcome. Because it's like you know lots of people I know who listen to the podcast. They don't, they haven't done the stuff yet. Like, I want to achieve these things and it's helpful and it's useful, but they might do. They might do a little bit here, a little bit there, and then they sign up as a client and they go through the course. It's like, right now you're taking it seriously, now you're going to go through and do everything step by step well, it's like paying for a gym right.
Speaker 1:Once you pay for the gym, you're more likely to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, yeah once you sign up for the course, you're more likely to do it yeah one of the things you said about courses themselves was you think the video and sound don't matter as much as as people think they do. That's I think you were talking about the course rather than like social media content right yeah, correct.
Speaker 1:I mean I've spent a lot of money on my equipment you know the camera I'm using now. It's a black magic uh, home studio camera. You know thousands of dollars. Even my tripod is like a completely, a complete overkill. It's like a graphite tripod man, it's completely ridiculous I've got a teleprompter. I've got a. My mic is like a thousand dollars just for the microphone you know and and and um, and I've invested heavily in my equipment.
Speaker 1:You know top macbook pros and you know elgato lighting and stream deck and you know the works. I've got really a great studio here, um, however, some of my best sellers were just with a webcam and and really funky sound. You know echoey sound, um, and the weird thing is that I mean I prefer listening to, to good sound and and and having a great microphone. This I'm using a dpa microphone, which is really, really expensive, but it's it's amazing, um, but what's nice about my microphone is that I don't have to any. I don't have to do any post editing. I record it and it's, it's finished, finished product. So I save myself a lot of time by having a great microphone, whereas before I'd always have to try and tweak it and improve it and so on.
Speaker 1:And so what I'm saying is that if a course isn't as good quality in other words, if your content is amazing, but the recording quality is not so good, sometimes and in fact I'm going to say usually the person listening are going to pay more attention to listen, which is kind of weird, because you expect the opposite. You expect it's got to be perfect so they can pay attention and so, even though I really have spent a fortune on my equipment to get it to where it is now even a teleprompter so I can look at you directly when I'm speaking to you. I can see you're looking slightly down. I'm looking straight at you at your picture, and that's an expensive thing to have, but it's not as important as good content, and having something which is slightly off and slightly not perfect is often going to be better than, first of all, having nothing or having perfect quality and boring content Like AI generated content has got to just be the worst.
Speaker 1:That is not fun at all, I don't think anybody likes to watch AI generated content.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was talking to some friends recently about how come LinkedIn seems to have had this big change and some people have a massive drop in number of views of their content, and a theory that I'd heard was that there's so much AI-generated content on LinkedIn now it's just spread where people are seeing there's just so much content that it's diluting. But it probably also means that if you're able to make really good content, you'll then stand out and get shown more. Maybe their content was not enough better than the AI content that's being Well, AI cannot write humor.
Speaker 2:Hmm, is that true? I don't know. Maybe they can't write Dr Heinz in a little humor, you know? No, no, it can't, it cannot write humor.
Speaker 1:Try and make it write something that you will actually really laugh at, like a heartfelt laugh. It won't do it. It's like my little thing where I was mocking cricket, the sport of cricket. If it's taught to be, write a joke about how stupid cricket is, they'll say no, no, that's not, it's not a stupid.
Speaker 1:People like that sport and the English love watching cricket and the New Zealand love cricket and South Africans love cricket. And it'll go like okay, I get that, but you know, just make a joke about it. And they said well, it's not nice to make joke about other people's favorite sport, you know?
Speaker 2:and it'll just carry on and on like that and you won't get it to actually make a joke about something like that. I mean I might be wrong. Maybe chativity 5? I'm asking it now to see. Yeah, exactly, it says a game so slow. Even the grass growing on the pitch gets bored. I think that's actually not too bad they call it a test match, because a real test is how long can you stay awake? Yeah, okay okay, it's it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better it's catching up, so when?
Speaker 2:you when you uh it comes time for you to like launch a new course or promote one of your courses. What's your kind of approach for that? How often are you running email promotions? What does a kind of promotion look like when you send them out to your audience?
Speaker 1:Well, I've got a bunch of people on my Teachable platform that I email and then I'll email it through to my standard newsletter and I'll include links to that in my next upcoming newsletter as well. So it'll be like an email to everybody, an email specifically to my Teachable students and then also an email links inside my upcoming newsletter. Okay, but I don't send too many emails. I send a lot of emails over Black Friday. That's where I'm really going. Newsletter Okay, but I don't send too many emails. I send a lot of emails over Black Friday. That's where I'm really going crazy.
Speaker 2:Okay, and have you tried doing promotions, bigger promotions, more regularly during the year?
Speaker 1:Yes, a really good time for that is springtime, may. So May and November are really good, and every year I say to myself I'm going to do it, and then I sort of miss it I get busy. I've left all this money on the table, but I didn't do it, so yeah, I also also do like a sales webinar um yeah, in, in, in, uh, in may, and okay, that was always very well received. Yeah, um, I just haven't done it this year or last year or the year before.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know, john, I can't tell you why I didn't do it.
Speaker 2:I had a friend I was chatting with the other day. She sells coaching, so hire a ticket. I think her program is like $8,000, something like this. Oh, I need to increase my price, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, something like this and she works my price? I think, yeah, right, she works in the. Uh, she helps people to invest in property out of state in america. So like, if you live in in in california but you want to, you you're finding that rent buying and renting out properties in californ, california is not great for taxes, whatever. She'll help you to be doing it in Wisconsin or Virginia or whatever. Right, quite niche. But kind of how to make more money. She does it herself. She has like 10 or 20 properties herself and she has an audience 6,000 people, I think-ish. And she was like how do I? I want to make some more money.
Speaker 2:She hadn't worked that much for a while now and she's kind of everything was just ticking over and she wanted to make some more money. And she said well, sure, what do you think I should do? I said you should run a webinar. And she ran two webinars. She did one to her own audience, one to um, a partner's audience, and she made 170 000. And she said what should I do now? I said run another webinar. It's like it's working. Webinars are not everybody's going to make $170,000, right, you know, if she had a particularly high spending audience, but still I was just like oh my god, webinars are so good, so what? What's worked well? I used to do like a.
Speaker 1:So other thing I used to do is, once a month I used to do something called happy heinz's happy hour, my wife actually came up with that name and it was basically like one. I think it was Tuesday or Thursday a month, the first Tuesday or Thursday a month, thursday a month and we got together just the technical stuff, just talking about technology and Java, and I'd show them something new about Java, and it was really.
Speaker 1:It was such a nice community, but it wasn't a sales webinar, and so I didn't make a lot of sales and I did it the first year and I made enough money to make it worth it for the first year, and then the second or third year it didn't really pay for itself and then I just got tired of it. But I still meet people today. This was quite a while ago, it was about 10 years, more than 10 years ago. I still meet people today say, oh man, those happy hours were amazing. Can't you do them again? You know, um, but but the, the sales webinars are really good at it, and what you can also do with that is is, once you, once you've perfected it, once you've done maybe 10 of those, you can turn that into an evergreen sales webinar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and then you're making money without doing anything.
Speaker 1:It's like they join it. It feels live, yeah, yeah. And the other thing is that you always want to. People want to be connected to a group. They want to feel connected, and a webinar really does that. If you feel like you're part of something, and this live experience is really worth a lot it really is worth a lot.
Speaker 1:So yeah, something else. I don't know if I didn't put it into my into questions, but something else I was thinking about whilst we were talking is when you mentioned the5,000 for the webinar. One of the challenges of selling courses or, in fact, not selling courses, selling anything online that has a relatively low cost per item but a high cost of production is that you can actually produce a fair amount of passive income from that, and I found that to be a very unsatisfactory income.
Speaker 2:Okay, interesting.
Speaker 1:It's weird. It's like you know, when I'm actually teaching a live course.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I've got you know 20 people in the course and they're all paying me whatever Not 8,000, unfortunately, yeah. But you know 20 people in the course and they're all paying me whatever Not 8,000, unfortunately, yeah. But you know it's all paying me. I feel, at the end of the day, that I've done some work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if I just have the money coming in without seemingly doing anything, at that moment it doesn't feel as satisfying and I think that's just sort of the upbringing you know that you must first work and then you get your pay. Yeah, this is sort of the upbringing you know that you must first work and then you get your pay. I don't know if it's that or if it's just me, you know, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's a mindset change because, you know, it's quite often that I was sitting at a taverna with some friends and afterwards I'd say, oh, just made a couple of sales whilst we're sitting here and they're going like how do you do? That was made in a couple of cells whilst we're sitting here and they're going like how do?
Speaker 2:you do that. So how much of the money that you make comes from the pre-recorded courses and how much comes from the uh doing, doing coaching to 30 people, like you mentioned?
Speaker 1:um. Most of it is from pre-recorded courses yeah, okay, most of it. Yeah, yeah, because it's um, it scales yeah, yeah, it's a beautiful thing. I think it's on demand like I'm talking to one company. Now we're going to do a course in november in person in germany somewhere. So, um, I've got to organize flights, hotel and you know, if you organize all this stuff and it's it's a low snow, it's very slow, cumbersomeome process to get there and to teach them.
Speaker 1:But if the same programmers wanted to actually take my class now, they could just buy it online and study it by themselves. Obviously, there are advantages to doing it in person, but it's just immediately accessible if they want to do it right now, if they want to do it right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what we found in terms of running email promotions or running webinars to an audience is that it's actually for most people pretty much everybody it's possible to do it much more often than people think you can do it.
Speaker 2:So nearly everybody that I talk to when they come to us does one to three promotions a year friday, like you mentioned, and then when they launch a course. So then if they're launching one or two courses a year, they'll have two to three total promotions that go out, and you'll always see a spike in sales when you do an email promotion, always. So the question then is well, what would it take to do more of those email promotions? And the concern that pretty much everybody has and I'm just going to mention this and you can tell me if this applies to you or not is that people are worried that the audience is going to get annoyed because they're getting all these emails and they're going to feel kind of salesy and spammy and they're worried that all of their audience is going to unsubscribe and then it's like that was not the kind of thing I wanted to happen. Does that resonate with you, or is there kind of different reasons why?
Speaker 1:Well, I've got a, I've got a way around that. Okay, what I do is so I've got my newsletter, which is really a technical newsletter, and if a winner sent out a salesy promotion, I'll always at the bottom have a very big button, like a big red button, that say opt me out of further course emails. And if they don't want to hear about my course, I don't want to send them stuff about my courses. And so whenever I send out anything like that, anything that people could say is spammy. Right at the bottom of the email there's an unsubscribe from all the emails, but not that many click on that. What they will click on is I don't want to know about courses anymore, right.
Speaker 1:But what is interesting is there's also a relationship between myself and these people who are reading my newsletter, and sometimes there comes a time where somebody will will send me a question about something, and uh, and, and I'll look them up on my newsletter to see how long they've been on there for, and so on some 20 years, whatever, and and it does affect how I feel about them when I see that they've opted out of my course. It does, it just does. I mean it does. I'm thinking like so you're just consuming my content, but you're never, ever going to be a customer. It does change how I feel about them. I'll still treat them nicely and I'll still answer their questions.
Speaker 2:But in terms of feeling I'm going like.
Speaker 1:So Peter doesn't want to hear about any of my courses, but now he wants help for his project.
Speaker 2:The thing we do is kind of similar but a little bit milder from the effect on the business point of view. We will say we'll have an. We do with our clients, we do an email promotion every month.
Speaker 2:So every single month there's a promotion going out and we'll do a week warmup where there's no promotion going on. We're just talking about the topic. So let's say it's about relationships, right, choose something else completely. There'll be a week's content about relationships that doesn't mention the course, and then there's a week's content about relationships that doesn't mention the course. And then there's a week saying and we've got a course that goes into more detail on this topic. Here's why you might want to get it, here's benefits of it, testimonials, etc.
Speaker 2:That kind of thing with links to the course, with links to the course to buy in that second week yeah and in the second week's emails and in the last email of the first week we include a link that says we're gonna have during this course. This week there's going to be more emails than normal about this course. If you don't want to hear about this course, click here to opt out okay, so you're more fine-grained.
Speaker 2:You're more fine-grained promotion but then the next month there'll be another one and they can opt out of that one if they want to as well. But but they're not opting out of all course promotion. They're opting out of that month's course promotion Because we find sometimes people aren't ready, they're not in a place to buy something at the moment, but six months later they are, and so it's kind of like giving that option and that's like I feel really good about that because it means that people are in control.
Speaker 2:They don't have to opt out completely. That people are in control. They don't have to opt out completely. They don't have to get annoyed at us if they don't want to hear about it, but they also have the option the next month. You know they're also going to hear the promotion the next month. I like that, so I find that to be quite a good balance.
Speaker 1:Personally, yeah, yeah, that's actually. That's better than my approach.
Speaker 2:What stops you from sending email promotions more regularly than you do at the moment? Because it would. If you did it more often, if you promoted some of your, your existing courses more often, then it would make you more, more revenue. You might not feel that you've earned it, because it's, uh, because you know you haven't worked for it like. Is that the reason, or is there any other reason? How come you don't send more promotions?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's good question. Why don't you see to? To put together one of my technical newsletters takes quite a bit of effort and I normally do that once a month. I do my, my actual newsletter, the, the java newsletter, um and um. So for me to then also send them emails, promotional emails, as well as as the newsletter, if I send them, like you know, once a month also promotional newsletter, um, that might be too much. Maybe it's not too much, maybe I should do it, maybe I should, maybe I should do one promotional and one. But I like your idea of, of, of having like a, having like three, four, like having like three, four, because that's easy to set up. I mean I can, I use infusion software. I can just make a sequence in there and say if they click, if I click opt out for this particular course, then just you know, take them out of the sequence, it's really easy to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, um yeah, so that piece of cake to do so I think it's psychological because I don't want to. I don't, I don't want to be, I don't want to lose my audience. I don't want people to unsubscribe yeah, um from me completely or lose reputation yeah his reputation.
Speaker 2:A good reputation, good name, is worth more than silver and gold yeah, what we found and we've tested a lot is that if you do one promotion a month with opt-outs, with like we, we run something we call nurture promos, which is basically we're trying to both nurture the audience by providing value and promote the course at the same time so that the emails themselves are useful, and valuable even if you don't buy the course. That's the goal of them.
Speaker 1:Yes, obviously there is some direct promotion in there, but we're trying to interweave the two so they're going to get a benefit by reading it, even if they don't buy the course exactly exactly.
Speaker 2:That's what we're. That's that's the goal, that's the approach that we take and we found if you do that, uh, twice a month, the audience gets burnt out. It gets uh more people unsubscribe. Over time, the the number of sales decreases. If you do it once every two months, then you make more money than If you do it once every two months. Then you make more money than if you're only doing it two or three times a year. But if you do it once a month, it seems to be the sweet spot and that is basically you can do it without burning out the audience and you make more money. You make a lot more revenue and it's dramatically more right Because you know the spikes that you get around.
Speaker 2:Black Friday, we had a client in the architecture space. He had a big audience. He was just mostly making sales organically. People would go from his YouTube channel or his website through to his courses, have a look at them, buy. And then we implemented this, ran this for him, and he was out on a boat with some friends on the day when the sale was going on and he showed his phone to his wife when they got back to the dock, because they got back again and she looked at it and she was like, well, that can't be right, that can't be, that can't be true. They can't have made that much money.
Speaker 2:While we were on that boat and it's just like and that can like, he got into six figures a month and then, like I think his best ever month was like 200 000, something like that. Um, but six for like 100 000 was kind of like, became a regular month and that was just, he had the potential built but he just hadn't been doing that kind of promotion um and it continued like it. We've like, we've got the lucky situation where, because we've seen clients for years work with us for years, we're able to see is the sales gradually going down or is it staying consistent, and what happens if we tweak this variable or that variable and um once a month, or, like you were mentioning about your, your webinars. That's a great way to do it. We've got a client we work with where he will sell.
Speaker 2:He will run the webinar he actually does paid ones and then he'll only send the promotional emails to the people who attended the webinar yes you can do that with free ones or paid ones, and that way, most people in the audience don't even see anything yeah, it's only the ones who showed a specific interest in that topic and then seeing the promotion, and that's a really beautiful way if you, if you're able to do that.
Speaker 1:So how many webinars a year would you run?
Speaker 2:so it depends whether you're doing that as the main approach or the as the, the email campaigns as the main approach. But if you were doing like the friend I mentioned with the coaching, she's going to be doing one a month, so every month she's going to have a webinar. A lot of people that we work with they'll do webinars like every three months and in between they'll do email promotions. A lot of people don't want to do webinars and I don't know exactly why not, but I just it's true, course creators particularly don't want to do them and it upsets me a little because I'm like but they work.
Speaker 1:So well they do, they work really well. They work really well and I really should be doing them, because every time I did them I was like blown away by them. Come on, joking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why don't you do them?
Speaker 1:Oh, because they just work too well, you know they're too good.
Speaker 2:They start feeling guilty for well, if you want some help afterwards, if you want to have a chat about it, uh, we could do that. We've got a lot of clients where it's like we, we help, kind of um, what, how could you put it? We're like providing the emotional support throughout the promotional campaign as well. That's the problem.
Speaker 1:That's what problem, john, it's, it's psychological, it's. It's it's like um, I know that I'm. I mean, I told you I've got this little thing that they, that oracle, gave me yeah um, it's the java lifetime. What's it? Java community lifetime achievement nice little trophy they gave me. Yeah, london in may, um for 25 years of writing a newsletter right yeah, um, and so I've got this incredible um goodwill that I've built up for for 25 years, you know and you don't want to lose that yeah no, no, what I mean is.
Speaker 1:What I mean is that, um, I'm really not um, I don't want to say take advantage of, because it's not, that's not the right word. It's not me taking advantage of the, of the connection, but rather, um, the community is is losing out if I don't share with them the fact that this training is available, because, because whenever people take it, they go like they're blown away by it. I mean, I had one guy.
Speaker 1:He said to me he's from I think it was from uae, from dubai somewhere. And he said to me this is like the, the most the best value for money course in the world because you do the course and you like double your salary.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like you said, it's way too cheap, you know yeah, it might be too cheap, you mentioned earlier like way too cheap you mentioned earlier how like these are priced for professionals and these senior people and I was like, oh, so I went in your website to have a look at what they were priced for and I was like, well, they're not. They're not priced very high, are they like a hundred dollars or something like this.
Speaker 1:You know well. No, I mean, I do have some 400, but most of most people would buy the super pack, which is almost two thousand dollars, which is for a self study course. Is is a chunk of change yeah, but that's.
Speaker 2:I think that was everything you. You said that's with everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's what most people buy, unless they buy other bundles as well. But that's the most common, most common, most common sale is that one java specialist super pack 2025.
Speaker 2:That's everything in the kitchen sink, got it? Yeah, yeah. So, like a big part of our job, um is is helping people in a similar situation to you actually to like be okay with with sending you know promotions out and be like okay, you're concerned about this thing.
Speaker 2:What are we going to do to address that? Either how do we make sure you feel better or you know who it is we're working with feels better, or what are we actually going to tweak to make sure that you know you get, you get to have the experience and your audience gets to have the experience that you want to have? Because at first, what I used to say to my team was oh god, it's hard enough dealing with our own emotions if we're also trying to, like, help clients with their emotions then that's like, oh, it's going to be too much.
Speaker 2:And then I realized after enough time it's like, no, that's what, that's what's needed. Yeah, absolutely relatively. Doing the email marketing and funnels part of it. It's not like this is a skill that took years to develop and we spend a lot of time on training the team or have you, but that's not the the hardest part. The hardest part is that the emotional process that put that everyone's going through yeah, um, so that's kind of that's now like a yeah, that's something that that I actually think of that as part of our job is helping at its core is the fear of rejection.
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, yeah, which is a big one, right, big one, very big one, because you'll get like, um, you know a bunch of people and they will of your whatever tens of thousands of people reading your newsletter, some will unsubscribe, some will send you a nasty note saying this was a waste of my time.
Speaker 1:I'm unsubscribing and then others will just buy something from you. And it's so easy to focus on the ones who are unhappy rather than the people who love what you do. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On the ones who are unhappy, rather than the people who love what you do. Yeah, yeah and the other thing the other thing you know I'm sure you've heard this concept before that you need all you need is a is a thousand real fans, true fans kevin kelly yeah, yeah, a thousand true fans.
Speaker 1:True fans, that's the right word. Um and so um. If you've got a thousand true fans, who'll buy anything that you do, anything that you produce? Um, you get to go.
Speaker 2:You don't need to have 100,000 fans, 1,000 true fans is more than enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so the question is, how do you build these true fans, which I do, which is I don't know if it's unique, I don't know if any of the other people do this, but if somebody signs up to the newsletter, they get like a personalized email. But it's not personalized, it's automated. So the way I've written it. So if you've not signed up to my newsletter, you should sign up and you'll get the automated email and you'll see what I mean.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:After a couple of days, it's after you confirm. It's like a few days later you get the email and then it's like hey, I'm Heinz, bit about myself and asking you a bit about yourself. And what's so interesting is the responses I get when people respond to that, because a lot of people get hundreds of responses a year from the email and they all know it's an automated email, right, and they still respond to it and they say you know, I've never responded to something like this before. You know, yeah, but the way I've written it sounds so personable that they want to respond to it. And once they've responded to it, then I respond to them. Now we've got a connection, yeah, yeah. And this is just the first step towards a relationship, towards a friendship. I would say that hopefully is going to occur in for the next 10, 20 years.
Speaker 2:Beautiful if somebody wants to sign up to your newsletter, they're not going to be java developers, so, uh, I don't know if you want, yeah, yeah, well, they should, they should.
Speaker 1:If they want to try it out, they're welcome to to get some tips from okay, where would people go to to see that?
Speaker 2:well, just go to javaspecialistseu yeah and you'll see there's a sign up sign up page there and then once you've, once you've signed up, just you know, unsubscribe again once you yeah, once you get the email, just just just hit the button that says don't tell me about courses, you know?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, you know basically, once you've seen the, the response to that you, you can then unsubscribe, basically, yeah yeah and I'll delete you again from my, from my newsletter on the list.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, because, that's.
Speaker 1:The other thing is is I? I? I make sure that the people that sign up really want to get it. So, in other words, if you sign up and a few days later you unsubscribe, I'll pick that up and I'll delete you from a database again. It'll be gone again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, perfect, heinz. Thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:I've really learned a lot and it's been quite inspiring, because what you did is you sort of gave me permission to do something which is considered antisocial.
Speaker 2:What sell stuff?
Speaker 1:No, be a pest until they buy. Be a pest until they either buy or go away. Yeah, both, both are wins, sort of yeah, both allowed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so if someone wants to go check you out, javaspecialistseu, and there's an s at the end of specialists, um and uh, thank you so much for coming on. Really really appreciate it it's been. It's been really good fun. Um and dear listener, thanks so much as always for for listening in. Uh, love you guys. If you've got any questions about this stuff, if you want to have a specific topic that we cover on a future episode, drop me an email, john at datadrivenmarketingco, and if there's any of the topics that were covered that you want to get some more resources about, then a good place to start is go to datadrivenmarketingco, slash resources and we've got all of our free downloads there stuff about email promotions and opt-ins and what have you. Otherwise, I will see you in the next episode, heinz. Thanks again.
Speaker 1:Thanks, john, it's been fun. Thank you very much.