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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
Skip the Funnel: My Simpler Course Strategy
Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
When Wendy Solganik spent months building out a sales funnel for her art courses, she was following all the conventional wisdom. She'd already seen the Jeff Walker launch formula work in other industries. She knew the playbook. But after investing significant time, energy, and money, the funnel simply didn't convert.
Instead of doubling down on what the gurus were teaching, Wendy made a counterintuitive decision. She went back to simple email marketing and built her online art school into a thriving business that now features courses from 40 different creators.
In this episode, Wendy shares her journey from law school dropout to successful course creator. After developing irritable bowel syndrome from the stress of law school, she took a year off and followed her urge to learn pottery. That decision eventually led to running a stationery company for 15 years, followed by a stint in the online diet industry where she first learned about course marketing.
Today, Wendy runs a unique online art platform where she positions herself as "the primary student in my own school." Rather than trying to be the star, she curates courses from artists she's genuinely excited to learn from. Her approach challenges many assumptions about online course businesses - she deliberately keeps prices low ($27-$147) despite seeing competitors charge $2,000, and she's built her success on passion rather than psychological marketing tactics.
We discuss why organic Instagram is now "very very little of the effective marketing" she does, despite having a large following. How she's become "partners with Meta" through paid ads, spending significant money daily. Why she has "no idea where my sales are coming from" due to tracking challenges. And how email marketing became her most effective channel after abandoning complex funnels.
Wendy's story offers a refreshing perspective for course creators who feel overwhelmed by complicated marketing systems. Sometimes the simpler path, driven by genuine passion for your subject matter, leads to better results than following someone else's formula.
Check Wendy's work out: https://www.willawanders.com/
It was so psychologically powerful that formula. I spent a lot of time, energy, effort, money setting up a funnel, and it did not convert. And then I was just like, oh, I'm just gonna go back to doing what's working for me. Collecting people's emails and then communicating with them through my email newsletter is really probably the most effective thing that I do now. And I think that is just a huge part of why this has been successful.
SPEAKER_00: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 John Answer, and today's guest is Wendy Sorganic. Now, Wendy transformed her creative passion into a thriving online education business teaching mixed media art, watercolor painting, and handmade book art. She left behind a law degree in a corporate career and built her expertise as a production potter, illustrationary company co-owner before discovering her true calling in online course creation. She's developed a really unique educational philosophy that focuses on the joy and the process of creating rather than outcome-driven art and that's resonated really deeply with her student community. Through her online classes and custom Willard Journals business, Wendy successfully turned her mission of encouraging creative play into a sustainable course-based business that serves women seeking fulfillment through art. And today we're going to be talking about why Wendy got started with this, how she decided on what kind of courses, what products to create, what takes the time in the business, how demanding she finds it to keep going at this pace. And I'm going to try and weigh in with some tips that I've discovered to make this kind of business more sustainable. Wendy, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much. You did such a beautiful job of explaining what we do.
SPEAKER_00:Well, tell us a little bit more about it. Dig into it for and tell us you said it's just you're just focused on working with women, and it is fulfillment through art. What does that mean?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the first thing I want to say is we don't intentionally only focus on women. It's just that the types of arts and crafts that we create, and also probably my style, like my personal style, which which does drive a lot of interest in the products. It is probably more on the feminine side. So we do tend to attract, you know, females, women more than we attract men, like, you know, at a rate of 99.9999% or zero zero zero one percent. But we are absolutely welcome to people of all genders and we don't care. It's just that's that's what that is. And then um, wait, what was your other question?
SPEAKER_00:The sir helping people who are seeking fulfillment through art. I love the idea. What does it mean?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so for me, having been someone who knew as a a very young child that I was very lit up by making things with my hands. Like just again, I as far back as I can remember, I was always crafting and playing with art materials and upcycling things and all of that stuff. It it became this question, I think, that I always carried with me, which was, you know, how could I do what I'm passionate about and also try to sustain myself, right? Because it's just something that humans feel like they need to do, right? It's like you grow up, you feel like you have to get a job, you maybe you want to have a family, you want to support your family, all of these things. And so I always kind of carried this question. I remember talking about it with my mom actually, and my mom kind of encouraged me to go to this famous design school in the United States. And I was always poo-pooing her. And I never thought like I could ever have a career in art or design. And then what happened was I just kind of like shoved it all down, like deep down inside of me, that I even cared about art and craft until it could not be shoved down any longer. And I basically ended up in law school, and I immediately knew like I had made a terrible mistake and that this was not where I wanted to be. And I started to just think about like, what do I want to do? And I took a year off of law school, and the first thing that came to my mind was something that I had been shoving down and care, but but still carrying with me. And that was this feeling that I had that I wanted to be throwing pots on a wheel. And so had you done that? Had you had you done that in the never done it before, but I had this feeling in myself that I I just it was like a very physical urge that that was what I really wanted to do. So I was basically in law school and I decided, okay, this is literally making me physically ill. I developed irritable bowel syndrome because I was so stressed out. And I decided I needed to take a year off of law school to try to figure out like what did I really want to do? And as soon as I ended my classes for the semester, and that was going to be like my break year, that the school agreed to give me a one-year break from school. Um I just was like, I don't know why I was like opening up the phone book. It was back when there were phone books, and I was like looking for pottery studios, and I found one that was really close to where I lived. And it was just like that was it. I was, I was like, oh, this is exactly what I need and want to be doing with my life. And then it was, and then it was a process of just figuring out, well, how was I gonna make that work? Given that, okay, this is who I really am. Truly, my nature is this. I'm a creator. How am I gonna actually like make a life from this?
SPEAKER_00:Wow. And how did you start doing that? Like what was the process of getting into online courses?
SPEAKER_01:So it didn't start with online courses. It started with trying to sell pottery, realizing, okay, this is this is a very difficult road to go down, like actually physically producing products, and and I kind of got a little bit hopeless about it. And I this kind of a funny part of the story that I always tell, which is I decided like I couldn't give up on the wanting to be a creator, but I could give up on the part of like it's gonna be sustainable financially. So I gave up on this idea that I would actually make money doing it. And I decided, okay, the way to do this is to find a benefactor, essentially a husband who would support my dream of being a creator. And I did. I I found a wonderful man and we got married, and he was like, I will support you. You can you can do whatever you want. And he actually bought me a book called How to Make Money from Your Crafts. And I don't even think I ever read the book. I was like, is this a joke? Like, I don't think I'm ever gonna make money from these crafts. Um, but I eventually did. So I did end up co-founding a stationery company with another person. And I ran that with her for 15 years. And we did end up manufacturing a craft product and selling it and being very, very successful doing that. So that's kind of part of the story about why I think my online school is very successful, is that I did have 15 years of actually oper, you know, running, operating, doing marketing, doing sales, um, you know, bookkeeping, accounting, all of the things that go along with running a business, hiring employees, firing employees, paying employees, like all of these things. I did it for 15 years. And then after 15 years, I was just kind of burned out on that business. I sold my half to my partner. And then I decided I'm gonna, I'm gonna just stay home with my kids. So during this whole story, which really took place over about 20 years, I had three children. And I decided I just want to chill out for a little while and and be with my children. And I guess, okay, so you want to hear all the nitty-gritty of how this happened?
SPEAKER_00:Sure, go for it.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, because it does have to do with like Jeff Walker and the launch thing. Okay, so you're ready for this. So, okay, I don't know if I've ever really told this story exactly, but I'll tell it to you because this is this is the audience who would actually be interested in this. So while I was running my printing company, I got very, very involved in diet culture. I don't know if you're familiar with this word, but I got really, really involved in this idea that it was very, very important for me to be like in the smallest size body that I possibly could. And of course, you know, as a as a society and online educ, you know, all this online stuff, it was very, very easy for me to get sucked into like the world of dieting online. And so while I was running the printing company, I was spending a lot of time online looking at how to shrink my body. And I ended up I ended up starting a blog about it. And I kind of fell into this particular world, this particular like subset of the diet industry, which is called plant-based diets. And I had a blog, I was very active in the plant-based community. I was very, let's say, obsessed with this idea that if you only ate plants, then you would be in the smallest size body you could possibly be in. And I ended up getting involved in a variety of different online course creation, online course marketing, online course sales, and pretty much all of it involved Jeff Walker and the launch formula. So I had a framework for how people marketed online courses. And after a while, I kind of woke up and I realized, okay, this is this is actually kind of destructive and really not healthy for people. And I just very quickly exited and I was like, this is not healthy for me. This is not healthy for other people. I'm getting out of this business. And I just thought that'll be the end of it. I'll I never thought I would ever market another online course again. And I just decided to pursue what was really in my heart, which was my own art and craft. And I started posting pictures of what I was making on Instagram, and I got positive feedback and positive attention. And then one thing led to another, led to another. And eventually I was launching my own courses, and I was thinking a lot about how other courses that I had been involved in had been launched in the past. And what did I want to do and how did I want to market myself? And I realized pretty quickly that my greatest strength was in my own passion for art and craft, and that even without using a formula, that my own passion could actually carry me really far. And so I did try a funnel for a while. It did not work very well at all. It was kind of a little bit of like a big time, I, you know, not 100% like, was it a waste of time? Because I needed to try it to see if I could get a funnel going. But ultimately, what I ended up finding out for myself is that what drives my success in this business is in my own passion for what I create. And that's taken me really, really, really far, even with a failed funnel, let's just say.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. And so when you say your passion, like what does that, how does that translate? Do you mean like you're putting a lot of time into content creation and people are really loving the stuff that you're you're creating now?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, exactly. So I I true like my business is truly based on my passion for making the things that I make and how I make them and why I make them. And by by sharing that with other people, that's really inspiring and encouraging for other people to use their like precious free time to also create. And that's taken me really, really far.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. I see you got a big interest, a big uh following on on Instagram. That seems to be your biggest kind of uh um social media following. Is it do you put a lot of time into that?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I put an inordinate amount of time into us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00:What does that look like? How much how much time a week? How are you thinking about your Instagram channel? Like what's the approach?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's changed over time because when I first started posting my art on Instagram, which was about, I'm just guessing here, like about seven years ago, Instagram was like a thriving place for artists, and people were really making connections with each other and learning a lot, and it was really, really fun. And Instagram was really, really supportive of the artist community. A lot, a lot has changed over the years, and now it just seems like, you know, with the whole attention economy and how difficult it is for these platforms to keep people on them. And like, I'm a I'm a capitalist, I understand. Like their goal is to make as much money as possible. And in order for them to make as much money as possible, they need people to spend as much time as possible on those apps. And that means that, you know, if you can create something, if you can create online content that makes people enraged or makes people just feel a certain kind of way that that's gonna be promoted a lot more. So the kind of content that I make is much more calming, it's much more based on photography and not video. And it's kind of difficult to adapt who I am and what I promote to sort of the new reality of Instagram. But when in but like seven years ago, eight years ago, it was like the perfect platform for me because essentially I had done so many years of food photography for my dieting blog. And that was like a big part of what I loved to do when I was doing that diet blog was like take beautiful pictures of food and make these pretty setups and everything like that. I was able to apply all of my knowledge and experience about product photography essentially to my art on Instagram. And at the time, that was very, very appealing for other artists to see like pretty pictures of what other people made. Just still photography. Not to say that it doesn't have any room in the in the world of Instagram now, but it's just it's much, much, much more. It's like very diminished compared to what it was. So so you were asking me like how much time I spend on it. I would say the bulk of my time is spent in creating art and then photographing it, editing the photos, sometimes making reels, and then very it's just it's really changed a lot. Like I used to spend hours and hours a day scrolling Instagram and engaging with other artists on Instagram, just supporting each other, learning from each other, enjoying each other's content. And it's it's just really changed a lot. So I don't spend nearly as much time scrolling Instagram as I once did.
SPEAKER_00:And then you said you're gonna you tried out having a funnel and then and then you kind of found that wasn't working for you. So does that mean that there's there's no email marketing going on for your Oh no, no, there's heavy email marketing going on. Great. Tell us all about that then.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So um let's see, let me think about this. So pretty quickly after I saw that people were really responding very nicely to my art, and they they actually, people on Instagram were saying, When are you gonna teach a class? When are you gonna teach a class? And that was actually what started the whole online class, online school thing. People started asking me, I had no idea actually at the time how to film and edit video. And I was thinking, I don't know how to do this, I don't belong in this industry, why would I even try to do this? And then the pandemic happened. And so I was at home twiddling my thumbs a little bit and thinking, well, I guess I could try to film and edit video.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I did, and I launched my first course, and I knew because of having a blog in the diet space, I knew that asking people to come to a site and give me their email addresses so that I could communicate with them off of Instagram. I mean, already when I launched my first course, everyone was talking about how you better have an email list because you can't have Instagram, you know, owning your business. So you've got to have your own email list. So I started developing a website, an email list, email marketing, that kind of thing. And then over time, that just grew and grew and grew and grew. So at this point, I would say that Instagram marketing is probably, well, it's complicated because I do run a lot of online ads. I would say the organic Instagram marketing is very, very little of the effective marketing that I do. The online ads have been highly effective. And then, you know, collecting people's emails and then communicating with them through my email newsletter is really probably the most effective thing that I do now.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so you've you've got organic that you're doing, you're creating art, you are for uh photographing it, you're putting that up onto Instagram and onto Pinterest, and you're putting videos up on. I'm looking at your YouTube channel to see you've got 110 videos up on YouTube. And from there, you're getting people onto your email list. And then a lot of the community and then also ads as well. And the ads is is on Instagram only, or where else are you doing those if anywhere else?
SPEAKER_01:Actually, it's it's meta, so it's Instagram. They they decide are they gonna do it on Instagram or are they gonna do it on on Facebook? And actually, I think the Facebook ads are really where my audience is because my typical customer is like either near retirement age or retired.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. There's a couple of episodes actually, I don't know if you've heard them, I did recently with with other artists who are one of whom is doing very well with with Facebook ads as well. And I think her audience is is reasonably similar to yours in terms of it's nearly all women, and I think it's that same kind of age group. And that was with uh Florence. I'm just gonna see if I can find for anybody listening along who wants to go check this out, I'm gonna see if I can find the the name or so the number of that episode. It was uh on May 1st, 2025, with Florence, and it's called Meet the Artist running a two million dollar online business. And I also did one with Remy the other day, who is a French guy who also is teaching art mostly to women, but he does it very differently. I don't know if I can find here we go. That was July 31st, 2025, and that was an episode with Remy as well. So that's really interesting to hear that the ads is such a big, a big part of it for you, despite the fact you've got a big organic audience.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's like I knew when I was doing this, like it was so obvious that I was basically gonna become partners with Meta, right? Like I start this Instagram account, it grows and grows and grows. They basically allow me to start a business, like without investing any money in marketing or sales, like zero doll. And because I had previous business experience, and for whatever reason, it was like, it was so obvious to me that I was eventually gonna have to pay the piper.
unknown:Right expression.
SPEAKER_01:I was like, it can't be that I have this thriving business where I'm making actual real money that supports a family, like, and they're giving me this marketing for free. There's gonna be a catch to this. I knew it. It was so obvious to me and a lot of other people. So that was again why the drive was that you have to get, you know, people on an email list because there's no way that Meta is just gonna allow you to just profit off of their hard work. And again, they're a publicly traded company, they're only in the business of making profit. So they had me by the balls. And I think when did I start advertising? I started paid ads a little bit over a year ago, and now I am spending a lot of money per day on paid ads.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. Okay, so it's it's paid ads, and that goes through to a lead magnet or to a cheap course, or what do you what do you send them through?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So, okay, so there's there's two different kinds of the what would you call it? Two different things that I have going on with with the paid ads. So one one thing is I have a low cost, a low-cost course, which is$27, and it's a very, very high value course, but it's just$27. And that's one avenue. So people do the course, and then while they're doing the course, and we only run that course once a year, because it's it's a it's it's months and months and months and months of preparation and a huge amount of of energy and effort while we run it. And during that time, some people love it and they sign on for a bigger course. And some people are like, oh, I paid$27. This is, you know, not my cup of tea. And then that's it for them. But that that's a huge, I guess you call it a lead magnet.
SPEAKER_00:Uh trip, we'd call that tripwire. Yeah. Okay. I never even heard that.
SPEAKER_01:So, okay. So that's one thing. And then another thing that I have is um a different course that I I just believe in so wholeheartedly that this course is good for people that I just run ads pretty much all the time. So it's not a once-a-year thing. It's just an ad that's constantly running. Um, and the course, it's not expensive. Like I know that I know that if people don't know me, why would they sign on for some expensive course with me? So it's still, I think, a reasonably priced course, especially for what it is. It's 36 hours of content for$147. And through that ad, and I run and I get, you know, that's also advertising. That's how I bring people in, the meta-ads. Um, so I have two things going.
SPEAKER_00:Got it. All right, cool. So you get people in through that. When you run those ads to the to those two offers, do you do you break even on those? Do you make any profit on those at the front end? How does that work?
SPEAKER_01:So it it definitely uh on the course that's more expensive, it's still a profitable course, even with running the ads.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, on the$27 course, at this point, it's sketchy whether I actually whether anyone's profiting much off of that. It's the ads are getting increasingly more expensive. So I really started heavily running ads over a year ago, and I have just seen the cost of each lead just creeping up higher and higher and higher and higher. And I don't know if the reason behind that is because people are just tiring of being marketed to, which there's definitely like a level of fatigue, especially as like more and more artists are not able to organically market on Instagram. More and more artists are like, oh, let me try running ads. And so it's like, I know that as an artist on social media, I'm constantly flooded with ads from artists. And so I know that that's, you know, gonna make it harder for all artists, or it's gonna make the cost of getting a lead much more expensive the more people are using meta advertising.
SPEAKER_00:Got it.
SPEAKER_01:Um I forget what else I was gonna say. I mean, I've been in this thing called perimenopause, and it's like your brain just exits your head.
SPEAKER_00:My friend was telling me about that the other day. She was like, it's just like I can't remember anything. I was like trying to talk to her about how I was trying to remember the name of an actor in a movie, and I was like, oh, he's the guy who was he was in that other film, and the other film had this bloke who who was like, then he was a gangster, but then he and I was like, oh my god, where am I going with this? This is so useless. I had I what I found actually is I put it into Chat GPT and it gave me the answer. It was like, oh, you're talking about this movie and this actor. It was brilliant. But she was like, that's what my brain's like all the time at the moment. I was like, oh no, all the time.
SPEAKER_01:I can't remember something from one minute to the next unless I wrote it down.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so where we were was I'd asked you about the cost on the ad. So you you totally had answered that. But then the next thing I want to ask you about is then the email marketing. So I know you do a newsletter, you mentioned that. How often does that go out? Is that every week, or how does that work?
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So if you looked at our schedule of email newsletters for September, you'd be like, holy crap. Um, a lot of what we do is email marketing, communication, not just marketing, it just communication. I would say, like, more than anything else, a huge part of what we do is communication. So whether it's advertising for a new course we're doing, or it is just communicating with the people who've already bought the course about the course, what's coming up, you know, like 90% or more of what I do is pre-recorded video content with lifetime access on a teachable school. And then we do a little bit of Zoom content, but that Zoom content requires a lot of communication because it's like we're gonna be, you know, zooming tomorrow, we're gonna be zooming in an hour, we're gonna be zooming in five minutes. So anyway, there's just a ton of email communication.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And when you're doing the the the communication or the marketing about the new courses you've got coming up, what does that look like? Are you doing Jeff Walker style launches on a regular basis?
SPEAKER_01:Or are you kind of because you said you you changed the the approach of the Okay, so what I'm not doing is the whole give people three videos, you know, each of those three videos being like really, really um powerful information, and then give them like the fourth video where it's like, oh my gosh, and then telling them, you know, if you want more of this, join my thousand dollar course. Like that was what I was familiar with in the diet industry was I'm gonna teach you these three tricks, and then let me give you a bonus trick and then sign up for my thousand dollar course. Yeah, yeah. I was so sucked in by those things. Um and then oh, and then what okay, so then what happened was I saw an artist doing it. And this was even before I had started selling my own art classes. Um let's see, it was before I started selling my own art classes, but roughly like around the same time that I started doing it, I saw this artist. I'm not gonna name any names here, um, and I signed on for his free course, and it was very powerful. And then, of course, at the end, he was trying to sell, or he does sell, a$2,000 art course. And I was so close to spending$2,000. It was so psychologically powerful that formula, and I was like, Wendy, you know the formula, you don't even want his course, you're not interested in making the kind of art that the artists that buy his course are making, but you feel so captivated by the information that he's giving you. And I was so close to spending that$2,000 and I don't even know how I resisted, but I resisted. And it's just, it's just not, it's I I just don't feel that the the the message that I bring, the market that I sell to, I just don't feel that it's appropriate for a variety of reasons. Number one, I don't think it's appropriate to sell people very expensive courses because I'm not teaching somebody a way to make money. So if you're teaching somebody a method that could result in them making money, I could see okay, there's like, you know, there's an argument for that. That's very financially valuable information you're you're sharing with them. So you can charge a lot for that. But also in the market that I compete in, which is a very, very, very oversaturated market, there's a ton of downward pricing pressure. So I can't I can't sell a course for$1,000 or$2,000. It's unheard of in the market that I compete in. So I just had to kind of go with what was working for me and what felt ethically right for me, which was okay, everyone's selling pretty low-cost courses. Okay, I've got to do that. And I don't want it to be psychologically overly manipulating. Now I do use certain things from marketing that are tried and tested and true about helping people get off of that fence. So things like early bird specials. We always have early bird specials on our courses. Um, you know, with lit limit, you know, with with with days and times where that price ends and the price goes up. So yes, do I use some very normal, I feel marketing tips and tricks? Yes. Do I go for the whole full Jeff Walker? I did try actually, but not to sell somebody really expensive, but I did set up a funnel. It's kind of like I've blocked it out of my mind. I spent a lot of time, energy, effort, money setting up a funnel, and it did not convert.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Um, I have to think about what was in the funnel. Well, I know what it was. Okay, so basically the funnel was a$19 course where people got a lot of information, and then it was a series of emails of like, hey, if you enjoyed that, then here's more and these are the options. And creating the sales page with here's more and these are the options was a very, very lengthy process. And it just did not yield the kind of results that made it worth all of that time, energy, and effort. And then I was just like, oh, I'm just gonna go back to doing what's working for me, which is just more standard email marketing, I would say.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I like, I think Jeff Walker does a lot of great stuff. We don't use his approach. I have done. I have gone through the whole Jeff Water Jeff Walker product launch formula, all the training, studied it, built form built promotions using that approach. What what I found, and it's kind of similar to what you're saying, is it was a little bit overkill for low-ticket courses. Um it seemed to be like a it does work, but it's more than what you need if you're selling a you know$150 course, something like that. So it ends up being more work than than you're gonna need. Kind of similarly to we find the same thing with webinars. It's like webinars are amazing, but they're kind of more appropriate if what you're selling is something a little bit more expensive, where you need all of that build-up and hype and excitement and everything else to get someone kind of signed up for it. I know that's not exactly what you're saying, but it's it's some similarities between why we don't use that approach and why you didn't. I have found it converted though. So that I'm I'm quite surprised that it didn't work when you when you've done that, especially since you'd done that previously in a different niche.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I don't know what maybe the$19 course wasn't powerful enough. But there's so many other possible factors that go into like why somebody would make a buying decision. Like maybe people didn't even make it through the$19 course. Maybe the$19 course wasn't good enough. It just, it just, it wasn't working for what I sell.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I don't know that it could have been repaired.
SPEAKER_00:So what is the the vision for you now? Are you totally happy with how everything's running, or are there areas where you're like, oh, I want to improve at this part of what we're doing? I want to improve the ads funnel or whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_01:So that's an interesting question. I feel like in my business, and it's not just me, I have multiple people working for me now. I have a marketing specialist who is a consultant. Um, I have a full-time administrator who I call my executive producer. I have other people that are working for me. Um, I feel like we make improvements in what we do every single day. Like we make the user experience better, we make the community better, we make the courses better. Like it's been such a steep, steep climb to creating this vision that I have. And I also want, I want you to know and other people to know that I'm just on my platform, I am one of about 40 creators. So I'm not creating all of the content that we sell. And I think that that is just a huge part of I think why this has been successful is I'm not looking to be the star of the show. I've known for a really long time that I have a certain energy about me when I'm enthusiastic about something. And I love to share what I'm enthusiastic about. And so I work with other teachers where I feel very enthusiastic about the kind of art that they are creating. And it's driven by my passion for wanting to learn from them. And then that passion for that passion and excitement, it's real. It's not fake, it's not funny. Like, like I am the primary student in my own school, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally. That's really interesting. I think that's part of what I like about this podcast. I get to talk to people, and sometimes I get to help people who come on the podcast to improve their like spot some things, improve their funnels, and sometimes I get to learn from what they're doing. And it's like a a good kind of um experience, and I really enjoy that. So I I think that's um that's really interesting. So, what it how does that work when you're saying you're learning from them? What is the what is the structure? Are you interviewing them for courses? So you like what what is it for any of your content on Instagram? What does that actually look like?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so this is what it looks like. So instead of me selling a course that either I create or someone else creates for the purpose or for the sole purpose of selling that course and providing income for the teacher and myself, my primary driving motivation is that I want to learn what that teacher knows. And so the like I'll just I'll just use as one example of the many, many examples is a year-long program that I operate called fodder school. So the word fodder comes from the agriculture. Fodder is like food for farm animals. And but there's an there's a a term that that started being talked about in the art community. The term is collage fodder, and it's like it's like food for your collages. And I interpreted that as sort of like food for your art. So I I started this year-long program called fodder school. And the basic thing of it is we make food for our art and then we make projects, and we have a new project pretty much every single month. So it's a cycle of learning from one teacher per month, and we make the fodder and then we use the fodder in a project. So I love to make fodder and I love to make art projects. So I'm the primary student. It's like I'm I'm loving what we're doing in my school. And just as much as someone who purchases the school is excited about what we're doing next and engaging in that creative process of making new collage fodder and then using it in a really cool project, I'm right there with everybody just as excited. So every new course that I release, and they're not all part of a year-long thing. I have a lot of solo courses, but every course that I release is because I'm excited myself about learning from that teacher so that I'm relaxing my nervous system because that's a huge part of it. It's in my school, we're not making art because we think that we're gonna go try to sell it in a gallery or at an art fair. We kind of understand who we are, and and that just might not be part of why we make art. We might make art. A lot of us just make art because we really like to make art, because it feels really good. It's really relaxing. We get to really disconnect from the world when we're making art. So I hope that kind of answered the question. I don't know if it did, but I'm I'm driving like my own creative interests and passion. And I'm sharing my journey with all of the people that essentially subscribe to my newsletter. And then every once in a while, it's like, I've got a new course. Guess what? Like, like this is something like people don't even know about what's coming, but we're about to release sewing classes on my platform. Now, there are sewing classes everywhere. You don't need to, you don't need to take a sewing class from me. We're not reinventing wheels here, but I'm I've always been very passionate about sewing, and I love incorporating and integrating a sewing practice into my mixed media art practice. And I know that there's a lot of people out there who've never used a sewing machine, and they they they have like a fear of a sewing machine. And then there's me who I'm very comfortable with a sewing machine, but I've never learned how to quilt. And I've I have a lot of fabrics. I've been collecting fabrics my whole life, and there's a whole sort of there's a whole genre of of art and craft that I don't even know and I haven't explored yet. But I'm like, my intuition is burning inside of me that I want to learn that thing. I want to learn how to quilt. I love textiles. Why wouldn't I know how to quilt? And why wouldn't I learn how to make like 50 projects where we use like things we've quilted to make bags and boxes and home accessories and things that are useful and all of this stuff. And that passion is what drives the courses that I release. I hope that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I just had a chat the other day with um Bethane. I'm trying to find her last name. I don't think she's come on the podcast yet. I think we were planning it and she hasn't actually come on yet. But she uh Bethane Namesh and she teaches not exactly quilting, there's like a quilt cover. I don't know much about quilting. But she teaches something about like how to create is called uh white arboquilting.com. And um I was chatting with her about like the whole process around that free motion machine quilting. Do you know what that is?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, that's what she teaches. Had a long chat with her about that the other day. She's got a fascinating business teaching, teaching that to people as well. And I think a lot of them, similar to what you're saying, it was like women around retirement age was her was her kind of audience on that one as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, cra arting and crafting definitely is a natural thing for people at a certain time in their life, especially for women, when they are doing less caregiving and more sort of searching for meaning in other ways in their, in other, you know, in other in other ways, I guess is really all that it is. They're just they're searching for purpose, right? Everybody needs to feel like their life has purpose. And when you've spent your whole adult life essentially caring for other people, and then suddenly your children go off and start their own lives, it's it's very jarring for a lot of women. Myself included, I have three kids. It's it's it's like, who am I? You know, who am I if I'm not thinking about my kids all the time?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So going back a couple of steps, you talked us through that kind of driving motivation and how you make these courses. You talked a little bit about your team. One of the questions I wanted to get back into was like, what's the what's the vision for you? Like, what is is there anything that you want to make better or anything that's like an issue that you're like, oh, this is a thing that I'm finding difficult in the business?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, definitely I'm struggling with my own burnout.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Um, you know, the I think the answer to that is just hire more people to help and not try to do so much myself. And I've been doing that and it's been very, very successful. So I would say that right now I'm feeling particularly calm in the business and that, you know, things are not getting away from us because I have an amazing, amazing team of people behind the scenes that's helping. I would say probably my biggest concern is that the team that I've built is gonna move on to other things and then I'll have to retrain other people. So, this is something I've always struggled with, even when I own that stationary company for 15 years. I've always struggled with that whole thing of, you know, having somebody become a part of this world that I've created, and them having all of this institutional knowledge that like in the normal course of things, people move on. They have their own life goals. People's goals are not to help me run my businesses, you know, for the rest of their life. And so at this point, my executive producer is so well trained and has so much institutional knowledge and is doing such a phenomenal job. And I don't know that I can keep him because he has his own goals and aspirations, and he's very, very talented. So it's like I could do my best to keep him, but I know that realistically he's not going to be around forever. So to it's just okay, then training another person, that's like, wow. That becomes a big Herculean task.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. Okay. And what's the uh do you feel like from a the current position, everybody say everybody just stays at the moment, nobody, nobody leaves in the immediate future. Is everything all good? Or are there any areas where you're like, oh, this this thing is still uh a challenge on a regular basis?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so I would say there is one thing that I have not been able to crack the code on, and that is, and it's getting better, it's a lot better than it was, but it was a real well, no, I okay, sorry. It might actually still be a problem. So here's what I I have not cracked the code on, and you may have expertise in this area. So, all right, so I've got an Instagram account, I've got a YouTube channel, I've got my email marketing, I've got whatever else. Oh, I've got the meta ads running. I have no idea where my sales are coming from. I don't know if it's, I mean, I can kind of tell with the meta ads, although the tracking is kind of for shit. But like, I don't know if people are coming from Instagram, from YouTube, from my email. Like, I don't know. And so it's a little difficult to make decisions sometimes about where to focus efforts. Cause it's like, should I be focusing really hard on my YouTube channel? Should I be focusing really hard on Instagram? Should I be focusing really hard on my email newsletter? Like, whatever it is, it's uh that's a little bit out of control. But I just kind of live in that space of like, I do it all and I put a lot of energy toward each and every one of these things. And I don't exactly know, but there's something changing on Teachable actually that is going to make a huge difference. So it actually has already changed for most teachable creators. So in the shopping cart experience, you can now ask people like how they found you or some some question to get the information about where did they come from? And that should make a big difference for my business so that I know like, did somebody come from my email newsletter? Did they come from YouTube? Did they come from Instagram? That will help. But I haven't gone into that. Well, that's not true. Okay. I've tried figuring out how to do a comprehensive tracking of all of the different things that I do, and I have not found success with it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's a it's a very, very important part of a course business, and it's also quite tricky. So I understand why you haven't got it totally cracked. We spend a lot of time on this. I mean, I I don't know if I said, but my my um business is called data-driven marketing. So it's like everything that we do, we're we're um doing it based off analysis of the data. And there's a few elements to this as well. It's not just a case of where did somebody hear about you, because there's first touch and there's last touch, and then there's everything that happened in between as well. So somebody might first of all find you through YouTube and then get onto your email newsletter, and then go through a bunch of your free content, and then there's one specific promotion that gets them over the edge to actually take an action. And so when you're doing the analysis of like, well, what is it that you're doing that's working? You can't just look at what's the last touch. It's like because YouTube is what got them to find you in the first place, or Instagram, or what have you.
SPEAKER_01:Um because I appreciate what you're saying and I know I kind of understand that, I don't stress out that much about the way that I'm running things because I'm like, I know that every one of these touch points makes a difference.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And the good news is that it is possible to track these things to an extent. There is no perfect answer, and I think that's really, really important. And some people really struggle with that because they want there to be a perfect answer. But you can't track every single part of it, but you can track it, you can track where does someone first get onto email list from? And that's a really important one because that helps you understand well, where do you need to put your lead gen efforts into? And you can track what is it that was the last touch that actually got them to take action for certain. Like we do a lot of work with people around this. And it's not it's not a simple, straightforward thing, but it is doable, and that does help with knowing where to put your efforts into. Um and then there is a s a little bit of like you're saying, it's like, well, I gotta do all of them because it it's all of them together, is definitely working. Um, but you can you can get an idea of of where to where to focus a little bit more. Um I'm trying to think if I've done any any episodes. So if anybody's listening to this and is thinking, right, I want to know how to um how to understand this better, where to go learn more about it. This is a a very much a Yosip kind of um uh Yosip kind of topic. Yosip's like my head of funnel strategy and he loves tracking. He like he's half man, half spreadsheet. There's an episode 77 called How to Use KPIs to Scale Your Course Business. It was on March 1st, 2023. So if anybody's listening and wants to go learn more about that, then that's a good episode. I might actually do, since that's two years ago, I might do another episode about that some point soon as well. How do you feel from that? Do you feel it sounds like you've made peace with it to a certain extent that you haven't got it totally figured out?
SPEAKER_01:But does it so I spent a lot of the beginning of this year trying to get it figured out? And it was such a miserable failure and a huge waste of time and money that I actually just let it go at some point in the middle of the year and got distracted honestly by doing the things that have worked.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And when I tell you, like it was a huge time suck on my business of trying to get this situated. And I was interviewing different companies that promised that they would be able to track these things and sitting with people for hours on Zoom calls installing pixels and codes and all sorts of stuff. And then finally I was like, this isn't going anywhere. Like I would have a company install all this stuff only to tell me later that like their technology does not work with teachable. And it's like, wait, this is a waste of my time. We had to sat there and stalled, they promised me it would work. I signed up for their monthly, you know, really expensive plan. And they're like, no, no, we promise this is gonna work. And then after like hours and hours, and many people from their company, they'd be like, Oh, this is never gonna work. We're gonna give you your money back. You just wasted like days of your time.
SPEAKER_00:I was actually, uh Yosip was telling me the other day he was talking with a um a client of ours who had spent a lot of money and a lot of time on data analysis and and trying to track everything. And he said to them, and they'd actually hired a data analyst in-house, and he actually said to them, two-thirds of what you're tracking is useless. It's just that it's not worth it. You're not gaining any information from it. So there's a certain amount of like trying to find that sweet spot, you know, like which things is it worth working on and tracking and which are helpful and which ones are actually a waste of time and and you can cut it and and you know, save yourself all that kind of pain. Yeah, teachable's not the easiest for tracking.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's really not. And some people might say, oh, well, just move your school, like well on the adjustable. Like you can't track how your, you know, how your customers are are buying. You should move your school. But I feel that I get so much value from my relationship with Teachable. I feel very, very, very like connected with that company. They have really helped me grow my business in ways that I could never have imagined. And I would not abandon them over the tracking.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. That has been fascinating. I know I only had kind of an hour, hour of your time booked, so I'm gonna suggest we call it a day there. If anyone wants to go check out your Instagram, your YouTube, see what you're doing. Maybe if maybe they're interested in crafting themselves, where should they go?
SPEAKER_01:Definitely my website. So Willa Wanders, W-I-L-L-A wanders.com. That's where that's like the the the hub for everything. Got a podcast, YouTube channel, lots of free content, blog posts, just everything. All the all the courses, all the paid courses are on there.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. Okay, cool. Want to say thank you to our audience. Thank you so much as always for listening. Really, really appreciate you. If there's anything that you're thinking, you know what, John, I wish you'd do an episode on X. Just drop me an email and let me know. John at datadrivenmarketing.co. And um, if I can, then I will uh I'll record an episode on that as well. Wendy, thanks so much for coming on today. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been absolutely fascinating, and uh I I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01:I loved meeting you. I I feel like I'm gonna listen to every one of your podcasts now.
SPEAKER_00:That's wonderful. Thank you so much, and uh thank you, everybody, and we'll we'll see you next week.
SPEAKER_01:All right, thank you.