The Art of Selling Online Courses

212 1.5M Sub YouTuber Exposes How She Grew Her Social Media

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 212

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🔥 Want a free funnel review? Email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.co with "free funnel review" in the subject line. 

Laura Spaulding has 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, over 4 million on TikTok, and a million on Instagram. She's had videos hit 14 million views in less than a week. And she's built a business selling courses and $45K coaching programs teaching people how to start crime scene cleaning businesses.

In this episode, Laura and I dig into what's actually working for her right now and what isn't. We talk about the surprising difference between YouTube and TikTok when it comes to generating revenue. She shares the simple approach to video titles that's helped her content go viral. And we get into some of the gaps in her funnel that are leaving money on the table.

If you've built an audience on social media but you're not seeing the sales you expected, this conversation will give you a lot to think about.

🔍 Check out Laura:
Laura's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCv6ycrTS6JXAEfs5dFZfijg 
Laura's website: https://lauraspalding.com
Laura's courses: https://crimescenecleaningtraining.com

SPEAKER_01:

As you can see behind me, we have the YouTube Gold Awards. So we're about 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. It's massive. On TikTok, it's about four and a half million. And then it's about a million on Instagram. And that video got 14 million views on just four or five days. It was insane. We were able to quantify that we we got about 2.5 million in revenue just from organic social media. The social media reach is unbelievable. It really is. They get people like, oh my god. And I think we've probably generated uh right under half a million dollars in the last uh four to five years off of no ad spec.

SPEAKER_00:

The content of course is Hello and welcome to the Art of Telling Online Courses. We are here to get winning strategies of performance in the online course industry. My name is John Henberg, and today's guest is Laura Folding. Now, Laura is a serial uh investor, a former police officer who's built multiple multimillion dollar companies on the ground up. She's best known as the founder of Folding Deacon, one of America's leading crime team companies, and has been featured in the Wall Street of Income, Entrepreneur Magazine, and other major media outlets and experts at scaling unconventional businesses. She also created and produced the hit YouTube series Crime Steam Cleaning, which has garnered more than 100 million views. And today, through Crime Steam Cleaning Academy, she helps new business owners to start and scale our own successful crime scene cleaning business. Laura, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, thank you, John. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

So can you take us through, I kind of covered very briefly, but can you take us through in a little bit more detail? Like who are you helping with Crime Scene Cleaning Academy and like what are you helping them to do?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so what I noticed is uh back in 2016, I actually franchised the business and I realized, wow, there's a really a lot of people that want to learn this business. It's very high margin and it's recession proof. Two big things, uh especially after the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the ups and downs of the economy. I knew that that that's probably what was motivating people. Um, a lot of people can't afford a franchise or don't want to be a part of a franchise. So that's when I kind of decided I'm gonna create some courses to teach people how to start their own business and how to do this business. So that's what I did. And I started it about four to five years ago.

SPEAKER_00:

So that's the the ones that you started four or five years ago was was a course on how to do it, right? Yeah, okay, cool. How much do how much does that cost? How much people pay for that?

SPEAKER_01:

So what I did is I segregated it because I figured not everybody's gonna want the full gamut of services. Um so I have boarding cleanup, I have crime scene cleanup, I have a drug lab cleanup, then I have meth testing, meth, you know, I so I separated everything so you didn't have to take the full thing. But if you want to take the full thing, it's about$4,500.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, gotcha. And then people can just buy individual courses within that for like whatever, maybe a thousand dollars each or something like that?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, but it right under that.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, perfect. And then how long ago did you start also adding coaching in as well?

SPEAKER_01:

So that's only been three months uh that I've started adding uh group coaching and then private one-on-one coaching.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. And how's that going so far? Are you enjoying that? Is that a good does it feel like a good product market fit?

SPEAKER_01:

That is a better fit for me than the franchising side was for sure. Um, it's a shorter term, it's a six-month term of the coaching program, and I get to help people launch correctly, and then I get to see them start to scale. So this is like a perfect fit for me.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. So it sounds like the franchise was really successful, but this is even better for you. This is a better fit for you.

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't enjoy the franchising at all. I felt like it was a lot of adult babysitting, um, you know. And uh that's just not where I want to be at all. Uh and I'm I'm chasing people for royalties. This one, coaching, they they don't pay me any royalties, you know, they pay me up front. It is a high ticket because there's a higher ROI on it. So um, you know, you tend to weed out all the tire kickers.

SPEAKER_00:

So how much are people paying you for that coaching?

SPEAKER_01:

It's$45,000.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And is that like over the course of a year or how does that kind of work?

SPEAKER_01:

No, it's a six-month program.

SPEAKER_00:

Six months. Okay, gotcha. And where are the leads coming from for these? You've obviously got uh the YouTube channel that we talked about before. Is that like the main source of it? Because I know you've got other uh other channels, TikTok and what have you, as well. Could you kind of talk us through maybe the size of your audience on those other places and then where which of them are what leading to leads for your for your coaching or your courses?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So originally the courses that I launched four or five years ago, we have done zero advertising for them. I just kind of did it uh organically through social media. So that's been kind of set it and forget it type revenue, really. And I think we've probably generated uh right under half a million dollars in the last uh four to five years. So off of no ad spend. So I'm I'm okay with that. Um I'm gonna put start putting some ad spend behind it. But in terms of the coaching and consulting side of thing, what we're doing is basically meta ads and social media, organic social media and then meta ads.

SPEAKER_00:

And so with the, if I've understood right, then with the courses, the do-it-yourself courses, it's all people saw your videos on YouTube or TikTok or whatever else, and then went do you link in the description through to the website whether for sale, or how does it come on? What's the next step someone could take?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I believe on the social media profiles, each one there's kind of a link tree. So if you want to learn more, you can access the the coaching courses or the online do-it-yourself courses.

SPEAKER_00:

And what's the what's the size of your your audience on some of these places? How many uh how many views do you get a month on YouTube?

SPEAKER_01:

A lot. I'm pretty fortunate. So as you can see behind me, we have the YouTube Gold Awards. So we're about 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube.

SPEAKER_00:

That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's it's massive. On uh TikTok, it's about four and a half million, and then it's about a million on Instagram. So I'm leveraging that organically, uh, to be, you know, it's kind of a lazy person's way of marketing. Uh, because I'm not really, you know, putting too much effort or any money into it. So uh we're just leveraging what we already have.

SPEAKER_00:

And then what where does email fit into your your marketing system at all?

SPEAKER_01:

So I just started doing that with the um the private consulting coaching. Uh and we use uh software called Go High Level to do all of our nurture campaigns and uh texting and you know that type of thing. So it's actually currently being built out. I had a previous developer who did a terrible job, so I'm really having to start from scratch. So be careful who you hire. Um I'm on my third developer right now. So um hopefully we'll get it right this time.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. And so has that has that you haven't used that at all for the do-it-yourself courses. That's not been a part of your your marketing for that. Okay. No. So my experience in do-it-yourself courses businesses that have got a big social media following, about 80% of the potential revenue is in email.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's like if you can go, it's it's harder, it's not impossible, obviously. You've proven that yourself with your half million in sales, right? But it's harder to go straight from YouTube link to buying the course than it is to go YouTube to a lead magnet and email subscriber, nurture them a bit there, and then make the sale through email. So we've typically seen when people have have started doing that. Because a lot of a lot of the people that I talk to are basically using the same kind of approach that you're talking about. They're like everything is direct from YouTube. They're great at content creation, as you clearly are as well, right? Right, right. Great courses that people love, and then some of those people go and buy the courses. And when we help people switch over to uh to go lead magnets, so they build up an email list, then they make promotions every month to their email list of the different courses. Typically, sales will kind of two to five times uh how much you can make from it. Now, I don't know, you've obviously got the coaching, it seems sounds like that's your main focus at the moment.

SPEAKER_01:

It is.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, but that's I just want you to know that sitting there waiting for you because you've done all this hard work, right? Building up this massive audience in these great courses. And this is the bit in between that kind of helps helps make more money. Can you talk me through what are you doing at the moment to get people onto your email list? Is that a focus or is that kind of like in the free or where is that?

SPEAKER_01:

So it's it's right now we're getting it from the meta ads. So the meta ads go to a landing page. The landing page is a sign-up form for a webinar. And then um if they don't show up at the webinar, they're in a different funnel, of course. If they do show up on the webinar, then they're in a funnel device.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha, gotcha. How's that working in the webinar? I love webinar funnels, they're one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it it it's it the developer that I had hired recently didn't do it properly. So um the the ironically, all of the students that I have right now, not a single one came from the webinar. It all came organically, organically through social media. So once it gets working correctly, I'm hoping that it'll uh it'll work better.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Okay. Do you know how it's working in terms of like what percentage of people are actually registering and then what percentage are uh attending the webinar and that kind of thing?

SPEAKER_01:

Slightly. So um one thing that I've noticed that I've been told by my ads person is that he can't believe how cheap I'm getting all these people. So we're having an average of 190 people sign up for a webinar uh per week. And um that's only costing me$350.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, do you know if they're the right kind of people?

SPEAKER_01:

No, well, that's what we're still trying to figure out. So out of the 190, only about 35 are showing up for the webinar.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So now I'm trying to figure out if that was just for targeting or if that was the crappy funnel that was set up incorrectly. So that's why we're kind of like starting from scratch again, because it it just there was a disconnect there, and I'm still trying to figure out what that is.

SPEAKER_00:

So one of my favorite ways to to start to figure that out is to put a a let me take a step back. Is it an automated just in time webinar where they can watch it straight away, or is it like at a set time once a week? It's live. Okay, got it. So if you put a um a survey on the confirmation page after someone has just registered for the webinar, you will find about 50 to 70 percent of people will then complete the survey just because it's on the confirmation page. If you did it by email, you might get three to five percent.

SPEAKER_01:

What kind of survey? Like what are you asking them for?

SPEAKER_00:

So to find out if they're the right kind of fit. That's basically what you want to know right now, isn't it? It's like, are you getting the right leads? Because if you're getting the right leads, all we need to do is get a higher percentage attending or something like that. Right. So I guess it would m my question would be to you is like, well, what is a good lead for that webinar? Is it that they have to have a certain I mean, obviously they've got to have 45 grand right? So something about current earnings or yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So I mean, we tell them that they need to have at least 150,000 disposable to them because you're starting a business, you know, you're getting a vehicle, you're buying equipment, chemicals, PPE, all that type of stuff. So it's not just paying for me. Um if I'm gonna set you up for success, I need you to be able to have the equipment and and chemicals needed for the job.

SPEAKER_00:

So one of your questions might be something like that. You know, are you one might be like, Are you are you uh how serious are you about starting a new business? Is it like just interested all the way through to I am looking for what opportunity to choose? You know. Right. And another one might be how much money have you got to invest in getting a business like this started? Uh, because this kind of you know, businesses involve uh upfront capital, uh, how much have you got available to invest? And then kind of and it's not going to get you people lie in surveys a little bit, you know, especially around money, that makes it a bit uncomfortable. But if you have it as multiple choice, people are more truthful generally with that. Okay. And it will give you an idea of how many of them are the exact the right fit. The other thing, and this is a little bit more labor-intensive, is it tells you which of those leads are the really good ones. And so what you could do is you can then do personalized follow-up with the really good ones. When you go, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's what I have not done successfully. That that's been my fault that I didn't know that we need a actually a human intervention to follow up with that. We it we relied strictly on the automation of the funnel, and that was a mistake in hindsight.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and it can work, but it's it's harder to get it working perfectly straight away in an automated way. Right. And it's easier to you can you can screw a few things up if you're doing it manually and there's like, you know, you can go back and forth a little bit with people, and then you get more of a sense of like, oh, my audience needs to hear this. They have to see me talk about that, they have to have this question asked them, whatever. And then you can automate some of that stuff later, or you can hire someone to run it, or you can go, well, I'm gonna spend an hour a day doing that, whatever, you know, kind of choose your poison. Um, but it would give you an idea for definite of are you getting the right kind of leads from your ads guy?

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. What's the point of the thing? You know, one thing that's been that's surprised me greatly is you can't you can't get granular on meta on who you want to target. Like it's it's very broad. You can't even target people by income.

SPEAKER_00:

No. And you used to be able to, and what happened is they changed the algorithm over the years to be to be more like, trust us, we've got this. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's true to an extent, but you then have to you have to know how to tweak it to tell it these are the right people, these are the wrong ones. So one of the things that if you have enough people per week signing up who are a good fit, it might be that your ads guy could change his success criteria with Facebook to be we had these ones who signed up and got to this page after the survey, as in they, you know, you have two uh pages after the survey, one for those who are great fit, ones for those who are not such a great fit. And uh it might be that the people who you send through to the page who are great fit, that could be feedback for um Facebook. Because you could do that with e-commerce, right? You can you don't just pay for people coming through to a page, you can say, These ones bought, send me more like that.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And so obviously you need to check with your ads guy. I don't run ads, but I just I work with people who do. So I'm like, some of my stuff you'd have to double check with him that he can that the current system in Facebook or Meta allows you to do this. But I I think that's possible. So then it would send you more of the correct people, maybe a higher cost per lead, but more of the That would be great.

SPEAKER_01:

Because I'm I I feel like I'm, you know, my friends are paying$2,000 to$2,500 for the same amount of leads that I'm getting for$350. So I feel very fortunate there, so I can really play with things to try to tweak it. And I can, you know, kind of afford to do that. But I I'm getting a lot of people that are just not financially qualified.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Yes.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm uh I'm able to send them to the do-it-yourself courses at that point.

SPEAKER_00:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01:

So I guess you would consider that a downsell. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. And then let's go back to the to the I think you've got a potential with your all of your social media followings to grow your list, your email list way faster and then promote either the coaching or the courses or both to that, and that it would it would completely change the business.

SPEAKER_01:

So, and that's one thing that I still don't know how to crack because you can't I can't go to my 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and say, give me your email. So I'm still trying to figure that out. How do you get their contact information to retarget them?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So there's there's three main parts to it, and then there's some nuance. So I'm going to talk you through it. So we do this with a lot of people. One place, so what you do is you promote lead magnets. Okay. You come up with something valuable to your audience that solves a a small problem for them for free. Uh might be something from in your course, it might be something, uh, an extra thing that you create. It might be your webinar, it could be a case study, which, you know, like there's lots of options of what it what can work, but um, you choose something that is going to be great. And you might have multiple ones for in different videos, you know, relative that's relevant, sorry, to to what the topic is in that video. Then you you put promote that in three places. One is it in new videos that you do, you promote it within the video itself. So you do like a little ad for your own lead magnet. So you mostly would do this after let's say you've got six points. If you're doing a if you're doing a listical type video, you know, then after point one, you would say, and if you want more information about this, just grab our our guide. It's available link in the description below. And so that doesn't have to be very long, but the people who are the most interested, somewhere between one to four percent of people, if you do this right, will then sign up for that lead magnet. Okay. So then you put that link in the description and you put it at the very, very top of the description. So you know in in YouTube descriptions that there's that uh read more or just click more or something like that. You want it to appear before that. Right. And that makes a substantial difference to the number of people who will get that. Because very there's a lot of people who, even though it's such it sounds like such a tiny thing, they won't click more and then read through all the links. It needs to be the top one that they see. Then the next place you can put it is a pinned comment. So now it's in three places. It's in the video, it's in the description, and it's in the pinned comment. Now you can't go back to your old videos and put in that ad promoting a lead magnet, but you can go back to all of your previous videos and update the description in the pinned comment.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Include a link to whatever you suspect your best lead magnet might be. And you could change that later if you go, oh, I found this one's converting way better to leads, or it converts way better. Let's say the webinar is fantastic and it works great, then this webinar converts better to sales, you can promote that. A webinar is going to get you less leads because it is a bigger ask of people. Like if you're saying to people, I want you to come and spend an hour watching this other training versus download this guide that you can look at whenever you like, then it's like, oh, that's a bigger requirement, you'll get a lower number of people who sign up. But it will convert better to sales than most lead magnets. So you kind of need to, there's a lot of bits to look at, but the basic concept is the same. Some kind of lead magnet. So we've like, if we take um we had a client in the architecture space who uh running a business called 30 by 40, and he wasn't doing this at all, didn't hadn't built up email lists at all, but he had over a million subscribers on on YouTube, had some very had had fantastically high quality videos, um had done an amazing job with building up his audience. And he was doing kind of low-ish five figures per month, something like that. And so we switched him over to this, built up his email list, um to I forget the exact number, I think when we first started doing email promotions, it would have been about 60 or 70,000, something like that. Um, started running email promotions and had him hit his first ever six-figure month in like month two or three, something like that. So it's like that's the kind of difference that's possible when you switched from you know just drive-by sales to to direct by email. But yeah, that's the basics of it. But I'll send you through, I've probably got some podcast episodes or some YouTube videos where I've shown like in detail screenshots, everything like that, exactly. Oh, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_01:

I'd appreciate that, John.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no problem at all. Let me make a note for myself. Um, and I'm gonna see actually if I can find those right now, then I'll be able to tell everyone who's listening where to go find those as well. So let me have a little look. If I go to our YouTube, which is datadrivenmarketing.co slash YouTube, we'll take you there. I'm gonna do a search for maybe Opt-in. Okay, so I'd done a I've done a podcast episode called How to Increase Your Opt-in Rates in Just Four Steps. And that is if you just want to listen to it on the podcast, that's there or it's on YouTube. And I did a full number on that. Episode number, let me have a look. I at one point took out we used to have all episode numbers written into every single one. And we took them out to try because we thought, oh, maybe it's like distracting from these engaging titles we've come up with. And uh it turns out it's really annoying because I can't say up to uh episode numbers as easily. Right. So episode 100, how to 2x your opt-ins, uh covers this. And then here we go. And then episode 10, uh, I go through it with Yosip as well. But I'll send you over the links to each of those afterwards.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, let me recap a little bit because we've we've gone on a couple of tangents. We've talked through how do you grow your email list. Uh what size is your email list at the moment?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh gosh, it's uh it's probably in the 5,000 range.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And do you have you run any promotions to that email list after the webinar, like kind of to follow up with people?

SPEAKER_01:

So I did a um if you come to the webinar and stay for the webinar, I send out uh free top ten mistakes to avoid when starting your own crime scene cleaning company. So in terms of that, that's that's about it. Um I have given 10% off of online courses too in the past.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you have any other suggestions?

SPEAKER_00:

I've got lots, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Um that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So what we've found with email is that the ideal rate to email promotions to your email list is once a month. So if you've got enough offers, which you do because you've got multiple do-it-yourself courses plus your coaching, then you can have a discount and a promotion on one of those each month. And we've tried doing every two weeks. There's there's benefits to that. We'll still sometimes do that with some uh clients where we'll do a full promotion plus a flash sale, maybe. But we used to we tried doing like two full promotions a month and it would burn out the list. We've tried doing it every two months and you make less money from doing it every two months or every six weeks. One month is the the kind of sweet spot. And so what we've what we find is the ideal is to do uh a week of warm-up where it's just just content emails about whatever that topic is. So let's say in your case, you've got the um the course about meth testing, for example, right? So you might do a week of content. We have a a structure called Pain Agitation Solution that is about that topic, but and is useful and is helpful and doesn't promote anything, has no mention of a course, doesn't talk about that, but it talks about the topic, and so it gets people excited about that topic. So they're kind of primed and ready to hear about a promotion. So the pain agitation solution framework um is that first of all, you talk about a pain point that your audience has that you know your course solves. We're not mentioning the course at the moment, but we're just talking about that problem. So um maybe one of the problems that it solves for you for your audience is um being recession proof, you know, or maybe one of them is uh this is something that one of you tell me what's what's any of the problems that that the meth testing course helps them with.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the meth testing. So I created a course specifically for home inspectors to test for meth. So home inspectors typically make like$350. Well, they could double their sales if they also test for meth while they're at the house.

SPEAKER_00:

Got it. Okay. So that would be uh only appropriate to a subset of your audience?

SPEAKER_01:

That's just for the yeah. And the other one would be um restoration companies that want to start learning how to test for meth.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, gotcha. So what's one in there that's a there's a broader one? Maybe the the crime scene cleaning? Crime scene. Crime scene, yeah. But let's take that then. What's a what's a benefit to the or what's a pain point that your audience has that course solves for them?

SPEAKER_01:

So they can um work it as a side hustle. They don't need to quit their jobs and go all in, or they can start a business that's fully doing this with high margin recession proof. Um, they can 10x their wealth.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So you might, let's say, just for sake of argument, then we chose that the the pain point we're going to focus on is being able to have a reliable side hustle. So then the pain email, you would talk about the problem that people have with starting a side hustle. And you would you would bring that pain point to life. You might need you, you'll have lots of information probably from the people that you've worked with, franchise owners, your coaching clients, whatever, if they've tried to do that before, about why it was so difficult, what went wrong with it, how come they are they tried, but they never managed to get anything set up and they didn't know exactly what to do, and there's just too much stuff to learn, whatever it is, right? So then you agit the next email, you're gonna agitate that by bringing to life all the issues that that problem causes in their life that they can't see because they're too close to their own situation. So it might be that that means they then can't go on the holidays they want to go on to or pay for their kids' college or have their own kind of schedule or whatever it is, have do their pl do their hobbies, what have you. And you start to bring that to life as a story. And I've got some examples of each of these I can kind of send you. And then the solution is you then explain, well, that is solvable if you run a kind of business like crime scene cleaning company, and you give them some tips, but just short ones, just to kind of explain this is how you would get started in this kind of business. And the end of that solution email, you say, if you want more information about this, next week we're gonna have a discount. We're gonna have a promotion and a sale on the course that's gonna teach you everything you need to know about that. Right. So now some percentage of people who've been reading those will be like, oh, right, and they're all excited about getting the emails on the screen.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

So then you have the promotion week. So you have a discount. Typically, we'll do about 30% off sticker price um during that week. So it gives people real urgency to take action right now. And then the emails within that week, so it's six emails over the course of five days. Sometimes we'll do even eight and kind of go into the the weekend as well. So I'll talk you through like all the all the emails that can be included in there. So the first one is a gain email, and the gain email is about all the benefits that they're going to get from uh implementing everything from in this course. So you're gonna talk about how great the, you know, all the benefits they get when their life is better, how much more money they can make, um, everything that's fantastic about uh the success stories that people have had once they've implemented all of this. And then within that, you also are gonna give details of okay, well, this is what's in the course. This is the bonuses, this is the price, this is the regular price, this is all of the the value of the bonuses, this is all the stuff that you're getting included for free, isn't it? And you're getting 30% off this week, all of that. Then you do the logic email. And the logic email is more about fact, studies, statistics that show why this is particularly a good idea. Uh historical data has shown that these kind of businesses are recession proof because 68% of the funding comes from this place, and therefore it doesn't matter, you know, like whatever it is that's that's that shows logically that this is a good idea. And the reason you're doing that is because some people are more logical-minded and they need more of the facts and the figures and statistics to kind of logically make sense of it. But then, of course, some percentage of the audience are more emotional driven. And so the next email is the fear email. And it doesn't have to be fear, but that kind of brings this to life a little bit. It's about the emotional side of it. What is it that they're afraid of that they won't be able to achieve? Why do they think they won't be able to do it? What's some of the emotions that you know your audience goes through that stop them from taking action and getting one of these kind of businesses started? Then you've got uh future casting. And this email is super powerful. What we always used to find is when we do a promotion, the beginning of an email promotion, there would be a big spike. And the end of the email promotion, there'd be a big spike in sales when the discount was about to go away. But in the middle, it would kind of slump a little bit. When we added future casting in, that brought another spike in the middle of it as well. And the idea with this email is a lot of people struggle to see themselves in that future state. They struck they they understand theoretically, oh, these are the benefits, you can make much more money, et cetera. But how is my life actually going to be different? Is too big of a jump for people to think through and to really believe. And people don't know if they'll take all of the action that they're supposed to be able to take. They don't know if they trust themselves completely to follow through on everything. So what you do in this one is you talk through what will their life be like in a day, a week, a month, three months, six months, a year if they get this course and they implement a re to a reasonable level. They're not your star student, but they do do it. You know, they do whatever amount of time it is, you know, five hours a week, ten hours a week, twenty hours a week, whatever it is they need, in your opinion, to kind of go through and do that. And that helps people to go like, oh, I can kind of see how this could work. Like there's some um there's some great ads for some piano course that I've seen where it's it's showing, I think, somebody learning it was the theme song, the main song from Pirates of the Caribbean. And it was showing after after a week, someone is playing it like one note at a time, but you can kind of tell it's the right thing. And after two weeks, or could now it's sounding a little better, and after a month they're playing all the chords, and then after six months, they're adding in the bass with the other hand, and then you know, it's just like it's much cooler. So you can kind of go, I could see how I could do that. That I that feels believable. The next email is then frequently asked questions. And so this is a very long email, often a couple of thousand words, and very few people will read all of it. But what you're gonna do is you answer all of the questions someone might have, and then they'll find their own question that they're interested in getting answered, and they'll scroll through and find that. And so that's really important for those people who are more like, right, I just need to know this exactly how is this gonna work, not the ones who are like a quick start, let's go. The ones who are more like, right, I need to understand this and more analytical, kind of think it through. So then the last three emails are very uh much shorter, and they're about urgency. And this is just saying this discount that we've talked about is going away in like 24 hours, and then one saying three hours, and then one saying like an hour, or it's six hours and one hour, something like that. And so you remind the mayor of the benefits and what's included and the bonuses and the guarantee and all that for that kind of stuff. But the focus of those ones is about urgency. And so that is the full promotion. There's a lot to it, it takes a lot of kind of building it all out. Um this is fantastic. What we'll find is somewhere between 0.3% and about 2% of your email list will buy in any given promotion, depending on how warm the email list is, how much you've warmed them up, if they've come from your YouTube content, they'll be warmer than if they've come from how good of product market fit there is between the course and your audience, um, how good your discount is, lots and lots of things. But that's the kind of percentage you'll tend to get. Now, at 5,000 people, you'll you'll get some decent number of sales from that. If you start doing it though, and start getting the hang of making those sales to people, and at the same time put the email uh lead magnets in and start to grow your email list, then it starts to compound. You know, then you're making more higher percentage of sales to a bigger email list, and then the whole thing starts to really take off. So I think you're sitting on from everything that you've told me so far, you know, without having dug into your business, I think you're sitting on quite a big amount of potential for growing the revenue from from both the courses and the coaching to your existing social media audience.

SPEAKER_01:

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00:

Which is nice.

SPEAKER_01:

That's amazing. Yeah. It's just a bit like you said though, it's it's if you don't know how to leverage it, it's pointless. And you just pointed out a bunch of things that I didn't even know.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of why I started this business, is basically because I could see that there were so many course creators who were amazing at content creation, amazing at creating courses, but just didn't know that this bit was how, you know, how exactly this bit worked. Um Exactly. So, yeah. Okay. Right. So we've covered how you increase your your email list size. In fact, I'm gonna just for everyone listening who was interested in the uh how to uh improve write better email campaigns, I'm just gonna find a couple of podcast episodes where we've talked about that. So let's have a look. So there's an episode called How I 2X Revenue in 90 Days with These Emails, which is doesn't seem to have seem to have an episode number, but it's from June 12th, 2025, where Dominic talked us through the uh the email structure that he's helping people with. We've got one called, which is a good one here,$67,500 in 15 days with this boring funnel from May 29th, 2025, where Josip had broken down an email campaign like this. And then I want to find one that's more just technical in terms of like the exact contents of these emails. Uh here we go. How to send more emails without sounding too salesy. This was April 4th, 2024, episode 131. So those three I think would be great if you're interested in kind of learning more about like how to improve your improve your email marketing. Okay, so we've talked about I want to take a little step back and talk about how did you manage to grow such a big YouTube audience? What what have you been doing? I saw some of your videos that have got the most most views on them, and I'm like, oh, that's like could you tell us some could you tell people some of the names of like the the kinds of videos or the the the kind of topics you cover in your mouth?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of it I would say the content of of course is is unmatchable. So people are very interested in true crime, uh crime scenes, you know. Obviously, true crime is probably one of the highest rated podcasts. So I I'm fortunate enough to be in that genre. Um secondly, I think if you name your videos appropriately for shock and awe, you get more views. So um, like we had one recently where a lady passed away in a hot tub and no one found her for I think three days. So we I think we called it a human proc pot or something like that. So it was it's it's those type of of labels that get people like, oh my god, and that video got 14 million views in just four or five days. Wow. So it was insane. So I think it's a combination of those two things, the genre and the labeling of the videos.

SPEAKER_00:

What kind of percentage? I know you won't know an exact answer on this, but like what kind of percentage of the people who see those very popular viral videos do you think are like target audience for you for then what you're actually selling in your courses?

SPEAKER_01:

I've been asked that a lot. And it uh of course it's hard to quantify, but what I can say is that we've gotten many, many jobs of people that have said, my daughter saw you on YouTube and she recommended you, or um a a property manager follows us and she's like, We had a death on the property and I called you. So it it definitely does work, but it's very difficult to quantify uh the ROI on it. We also have gotten employees from it. Oh my God, I'm obsessed with the channel. I want to I want to do this. I've sold courses because of it. So, you know, the the social media reach is is unbelievable. It really is. It's it's harder to quantify when you sit down. And I think one year we I put a lot of resources towards it. I think it was uh 2020 or 2021, right around there. And we were able to quantify that we we got about 2.5 million in revenue just from organic social media.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I put a lot of resources towards, hey, let's really figure this out. And then what we did is we kind of did special tracking phone numbers on um our social media and stuff. So when people would call, we were able to kind of back it up to call rail and then really follow it. Because sometimes people say, Oh, social media, but they won't say the channel. So it was harder to identify the channel. Uh, but as a as a whole, it was about 2.5 million for that particular year just off social media organic.

SPEAKER_00:

And of did you get then we were you able to break it down by channel or or was that like No, no, okay, okay, okay. Yeah. Do you have any sense of like YouTube versus TikTok versus Instagram at all? Of you know, which one brings in the most revenue?

SPEAKER_01:

I I if I had to guess, I would say it's YouTube just because um on YouTube we we were able to put the longer form videos and then we were able to put an ad in our own videos for pop-ups for courses and things like that. So we were able to kind of attribute a lot of that, like you know, when they would come to the course, how did you fear about us? They would say YouTube because that's where we had the pop-up. So loosely, I I I definitely can't get down to even the thousand, you know, to to say how much we've generated off each channel.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Most of our clients, what we're finding generally is that people are making most of the revenue from YouTube. Most people who are successful course creators, they have a YouTube channel rather than Instagram and or TikTok or whatever else. And those who have multiple channels, really YouTube is a is a especially YouTube long-form views, is a much, much bigger prediction of revenue than than TikTok or Instagram. You know, and there's a few reasons, I think. One is if people are watching long-form videos, obviously you're building a lot more trust with them, they're building much more, you know, connection with you as a content creator than if someone's watching a reel or a you know a TikTok clip or what have you. And also there's a little bit more intent, you know, like committing and showing they're interested in that topic than just when you're kind of scrolling through and see see something short, because like YouTube Shorts definitely is um much, much, much less of a big deal than than long form. Um but I I feel like there's something more because we generally we I've only seen one course creator who is who is successfully using TikTok.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, really? That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

That is surprising. I thought, well, okay, it's gonna be less, but it wasn't gonna be that, you know, not that much less. Whereas Instagram, it's like it's considerably less than YouTube per subscriber, per view, whatever that you get. But TikTok is even more, even more less.

SPEAKER_01:

So well, I've never been able to crack TikTok. So we have about four and a half million followers on TikTok. And I I I want you to guess what our monthly revenue is.

SPEAKER_00:

From from ads, just TikTok. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

No, no ads. Just just by having people, you know, watch our videos and that type of thing. We're I mean, we're not selling anything on TikTok.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I don't know, uh 10,000.

SPEAKER_01:

Zero.

unknown:

No.

SPEAKER_01:

We make zero from TikTok. And you know, it it's everybody I think you have to sell a product or sell something on TikTok in order to get that ROI, but it's not like Facebook, where Facebook pays us based on interactions, time watched on video. Like we get I can't figure out TikTok's algorithm, but it we get zero. And that's a and that's where we have our most of our followers. So I I don't get it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. If somebody wants to go check out uh your YouTube or or find out more about you, where where's a good place for them to go? Where should they go check you out?

SPEAKER_01:

So the YouTube, um, if you have a strong stomach, I want to preface that because I don't want anybody to go, oh my god, I was eating lunch when I when I went there. So I I will preface that. You have to have a strong. Strong stomach. And if you like that type of stuff, go to Crime Scene Cleaning. Um, and it we're crime scene cleaning on TikTok, on YouTube, and on Instagram. And then um for my particular courses, it's just LauraSpaulding.com or CrimeScene Cleaning Training.com.

SPEAKER_00:

LauraSpaulding, that's S-P-A-U-L-D-I-N-G, LauraSpaulding.com. Or say the other one again. Crime scene.

SPEAKER_01:

Crime Scene Cleaning Training.com.

SPEAKER_00:

CrimeScene Cleaning Training.com. Got it. Got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, cool. Yeah, but you got it.

SPEAKER_00:

Perfect. Um, and if you want to go check out those other podcast episodes that I mentioned, uh go listen to those. And uh as always, thank you so much for for listening to the podcast. Really, really appreciate you. And Laura, thank you so much for coming on. This was absolutely fantastic.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for having me, John. I learned more than you did, I think.