.jpg)
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
8 Years Teaching Online: What Actually Makes Money
🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
Kyle Cook launched his first course after just 3 months of experience with the topic. He offered unlimited refunds from day one. He ignored every social media platform except YouTube.
Today he's got 1.7 million subscribers, 14,000 paying customers, and course launches that bring in $30K to over $100K.
In this episode, Kyle and I talk about why you don't need to be an expert to teach something — and why being an expert can actually work against you. We dig into his unlimited refund policy and why it hasn't hurt his business at all. We talk about how he spends 6-9 months creating each course, with 75% of that time spent before he records a single video.
Kyle's also refreshingly honest about what he's not doing well. He's got over 100,000 people on his email list and almost no automation in place. No tripwire funnel. No real welcome sequence. He admits he's leaving a lot of money on the table — and we talk through exactly what he could do to fix that.
If you've ever held back on creating a course because you didn't feel ready, or you've been nervous about offering longer refund windows, this conversation will change how you think about it.
#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing
👨💻 Check out Kyle's website: https://webdevsimplified.com/
🧑💻 Follow Web Dev Simplified on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WebDevSimplified
🤝 Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.
I had zero experience with it. I I didn't even know what it was until probably like three months before I decided to make the course on it. Absolutely dinner. My refund policy was literally unlimited. I said if you take the course and you don't like it, I don't care if you bought the course today, if you bought it ten years ago, just let me know. I'll refund you 100% don't like it. My refund rate is incredibly low, but I don't use any social media at all. It's around 1590 is a month, anywhere from like uh$30,000,$40,000 line all the way up to over$100,000.
SPEAKER_00:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies. My name is Daniel, and today's guest is Kyle Cook. Now Kyle runs the YouTube channel, Web Dev Simplified, got over 1.7 million subscribers. He's been a full-stack web developer for over a decade and teaching web development since 2018. He quit his developer job at the peak of COVID in 2020, continued teaching full-time and hasn't looked back since he's got some great opinions about the way that course businesses should be run, and I really want to dig into that with him today. Kyle, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. So talk us through, I covered very briefly there, but who do who are you helping with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I would say my co courses are really leaned towards like two different groups of people. The primary group is like beginner people that want to get into web development. Specifically, I teach kind of front-end web development, which is like a even a further niche of web development. So I kind of really focus on that group and more in like the beginner space. Like people that have almost no programming experience at all can take my courses and work through them all the way to the more advanced ones. But I do have multiple of my courses with multiple tiers. So I have like a beginner tier and then a more advanced tier. So people can go from that absolute beginner stage and progress all the way to like a more mid-level intermediate level. So pretty much anything between beginner to intermediate level is really where I focus on with my courses.
SPEAKER_00:I think I know, but I'm not even totally sure that I'm right. Can you explain to us who don't know about this what is front-end web development?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I like to explain this for non-technical people. There's two types of web development. There's front-end web development and there's back end web development. Front-end web development is like the things that you see, like how does the web page look, what are the styles on it, different things you can interact with on the page, and back end web development is all the stuff you don't see. So like the database where the data is stored, all the stuff that happens behind the scenes for authentication, everything you don't see is backend development, everything you do see is front-end development.
SPEAKER_00:So if you were if someone was coding a CRM system, then even though the consumer isn't seeing that, like it's kind of the back office stuff for the business to do. But the bit that the person who's using the CRM is seeing, that's still the front end. Correct. Yep, yep, 100%. Got it. All right, sweet. Um and you've said in advance that you think that when you're selling courses, that people should have really long refund windows. And I really like this. I want you to help get people on board with this because I'm totally, I totally agree. I got I've had clients who are like, oh, I don't know about doing refunds because sometimes people take the course and then refund it. I'm like, yeah? So what? Like, that's all right. You know, that that's okay. Maybe they didn't like it. Maybe they took all of it and then went, nah, that wasn't quite right for me. Um and you said that you've actually had like an in the past, you had an unlimited money-back guarantee. Can you talk through like why you do that and why you think that's important? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So ever since I made my very first course, my refund policy was literally unlimited. I said, if you take the course and you don't like it, I don't care if you bought the course today, if you bought it 10 years ago, just let me know. I'll refund you 100%, no questions asked. And it's mostly there is like when I buy a course and I take it and I'm like, you know, I usually don't take it right away, like I maybe take it a couple weeks later, and then I'm like, ah, you know what? This course kind of sucks. It really wasn't what I thought it was. But oh, it only had a seven-day refund window, so I'm screwed out of a couple hundred dollars, you know, like whatever it is. It feels bad as the person buying that. And I'm never gonna buy something from them again because I was kind of burned by that experience, even if a future course maybe would, you know, appeal to me. But with mine, I'm like, I want the people to feel good. Like if they buy my course and they take it a year down the road and they don't like it, I just want to let them get their money back because maybe in the future they'll want one of my courses. And even if they don't, like I want them to feel good about the experience they had with me. I like I want it to be a positive interaction. And like you said, I used to have an unlimited refund window, which I had no issues with. The only issue was that PayPal, which is one of the providers I use for payments, stopped supporting long refund windows. They reduced it to a year, so you could only refund maximum to a year, and then they changed it to six months again. So, like right now, my refund window is six months purely because I can't refund people after that from PayPal. I have to literally send them money as like a PayPal payment, which I did for a few people before I realized that you know PayPal stopped me from doing that. But I haven't noticed any drop in like, you know, increase in refunds, essentially. Like I haven't noticed a negative impact on my business. My refund rate is incredibly low, especially like when I talk with other people, like it seems like their refund rate, especially if they're running lots of like ads and stuff, is much higher than mine. And, you know, people will take advantage of this. Some people will buy the course. I have all my videos available for download from day one so they can download all the videos and then ask for a refund literally the same day they buy the course. I've had people do that. You know, they take advantage of that refund policy, which sucks, but those are the same people that are just going to pirate my course for free anyway. So like it doesn't hurt me as much as you'd think it would sure I have to pay, you know, like 3% fee or whatever from Stripe. For the most part, having this really long refund window, all it does is it gives your customer confidence, like, hey, when I buy this, even if it doesn't work out, I can get my money back. So there may be more incentivized to buy. And if they do end up getting that refund, they feel good about the experience and may come back in the future for another course you have, or maybe when they're actually ready to take the step to buy your course another time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's I think it makes sense from a number of uh perspectives. One, you get to feel good about it, you know, like it's very like you're saying, there is the three percent uh that you pay in terms of fees, whatever, but overall it's not like with a packet of crisps or a uh you know, a chocolate bar, it's not like, oh no, it's gone off now. Of course you can't have your money back on it. It's like it's a it's it's ones and zeros, you know, it's not it's not a real physical thing. But I think it also makes sense from a marketing point of view because if people feel a lot of confidence in buying from you, then all there's more of the people who are on that line of like, should I get it, should I not, who will then go ahead and buy. And so you might get more refunds, but you'll also get more purchases. Um there's this company, I think it's called I think they're called Leatherback, something like that. They sell bags, leather bags. And they have, I don't know if this is realistic, right? But they have, I think they call it a hundred-year guarantee. They're like, if you or any of your ancestors have a problem with this bag, they can bring it back to me and then or any of my not ancestors, what I mean, descendants. You or any of your descendants have a problem with this bag, you can bring it back to me or any of my descendants and we'll we'll refund it for you. And I just thought that was so like dramatic. It was like, oh, that really makes the point about it. I know um Ollie Richards, a friend of mine, he does uh 365-day money-back guarantee on stuff. And he said it just didn't make any difference to the refunds.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, most people that are gonna get a refund are gonna get it within that first, you know, seven to thirty days, most likely. And anything after that is like very unlikely that someone does refund, but it does give them that confidence when they purchase. So, like if you see a seven-day refund window, you're like, oh, I don't know, I have to take this thing really quick. But if you have a you know one-year wavefront window, it's like, oh, you know, I can take my time, like it gives them more confidence.
SPEAKER_00:Something else that you uh you mentioned is you said that you don't think that you have to be an expert to teach something. And and in some ways, it's almost a disadvantage being an expert when you're trying to teach people stuff. Could you talk us through about that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%. The very first course that I I taught for that I started selling was a course on React, which is like a front-end kind of thing that you do in uh programming. And I did not JS.
SPEAKER_00:Is that the React JS, yeah, yeah, that's what it is. Yep. I've heard of it.
SPEAKER_01:This is all I had zero experience with it. I I didn't even know what it was until probably like three months before I decided to make the course on it. So I was an absolute beginner. I had a little bit of experience because I started using it at my job, but other than that, it was very minimal experience. So I was able to learn alongside like the teaching process I was going through. So as I ran into issues like, oh, this thing is really hard, I don't know how to do this thing. That was a great point for me to be like, oh, I ran into this issue. I bet other people learning this are running into the same issue. So it's easy for me to focus my teaching on the things that are the real world problems people run into. Fast forward, you know, now I've been programming for 10 plus years. So when I go back to teach like beginner-focused concepts, things that I've been doing for over 10 years, it's hard for me to remember what it was like not knowing these things. So like if I try to teach this thing, obviously I know everything about it, I can teach it really easily, but I don't realize where those pain points are as easily as I when I first started learning something. So sometimes when I go through teaching these beginner concepts, I may think, oh, you know, this thing's really easy for me, but for someone just learning, this was actually something that was really hard for them. So it's sometimes more difficult to gauge where those sticking points are going to be. And I recently gave a workshop on like an absolute intro level concept, and I assumed a few things. I was like, oh, this is super easy. They're going to be able to do this really quickly. And I realized when I was in person teaching this workshop, I was like, oh, they're actually really struggling with this thing that I thought they were going to breeze through. So it's one of those where like you don't have the same perspective when you are an expert in a field versus just kind of starting out and learning something from the scratch. So what do you do about that? The biggest thing is, you know, try to put yourself in that mindset when you're first and learning, try to think back on what it felt like, but also try to just do research, talk with people that are learning it for the first time, do any in-person teaching that you can, and even just like read through people asking questions. Like the most common questions that you see come up for that topic, if you're you know expert in that topic, is probably something the beginner people are struggling with. Cause most likely the people posting questions for these things are going to be more beginner-minded. And the more often you see a question, the more likely it's something that's really a sticking point for them. So that's kind of what I did is I was like, okay, I'm going to look at all these questions that are happening, talk with people that are actually learning this thing and see where their sticking points are. And even when you release the course for the first time, you know, it's not the final version. You release the course, people go through it and you realize, oh, you know what, this is actually harder than I thought it was going to be. I'm going to add a new video or re-record that video or do something to make that particular section a little bit easier for them to understand.
SPEAKER_00:One of the things we did is we've got we've got our own course for teaching people email marketing and funnels. And then within that, there's like the main videos, and then there's um like sub-videos for answering people's questions, with the expectation not everyone will go through every video, but if someone's stuck on one particular thing, they can go through it. And so as we were doing the coaching on that program, we would find certain questions that would come up again and again. And so we'd either take a clip of what was said during the coaching or re or record separately another video to add in to kind of answer it. But it is tricky, isn't it? It's like, how can you how can you know what it is that someone's going to be s uh getting stuck with? One of the things you mentioned is that you you spend about six to nine months on each new course trying to make it great. Like, what are you doing during that time?
SPEAKER_01:Is that is this part of that process the So that six to nine month process that I take for most of my courses, I would say 75% of that is before I even record a single video. Almost all of it is planning out the course. Because like when I get to the point where I have the whole course planned out, figured out exactly what lessons I want to do, the order I want to do them, how I'm breaking them up into different modules, that's the hard part, you know, because you know, you could teach one thing in a million different places in your course. Finding the exact right order for everything, I think, is the hard part. So once I kind of get that narrowed down, the actual process of recording and editing and uploading the videos is incredibly quick. You know, you can just sit down and crank through 10 videos in a day or whatever it is, however long or fast you can go. But the process of getting the order of those videos right, that's where I spend most of my time. And it's not like I'm spending eight hours a day for six months planning out the order of the videos. It's something I do in the background. Like I'll go for a walk and think about the order I want to do things in, or I'll start writing things down, looking through these different comments and stuff like I talked about to figure out where those sticking points are. It's a slow process, which is why it takes so long. But I feel like it's one of those things where if you just try to sit down eight hours a day and crank through what the order should be, you're gonna run into a lot of problems because you haven't had the time to really think about all the different permutations of what can happen, which is why I take a slow approach to that instead of trying to crank through it. I'll do, you know, hour here, hour there, a couple hours a day, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_00:And is much of that going off and talking to potential customers as well to try and understand that stuff about, okay, I think I'm gonna do it like this. Would that make sense to you? Or are you just trying to figure out as a teacher what you think is gonna make sense?
SPEAKER_01:Most of the time is spent not necessarily interacting directly with people. I may like post to like my community and stuff and be like, hey, you know, I'm thinking about doing this, this, and this, like, or what is the things that you get most stuck on. Sometimes, like with my newsletter, I'll like send out an email that's like, hey, here's the overall kind of view of what I think the order of the course is going to look like. It's still up in the air, but like, hey, let me know if like there's something you think is missing or there's something that you think should be moved earlier, like trying to get feedback from people that you know have some experience, have no experience, have lots of experience. So it kind of gives me a gamut of different approaches. I don't get tons of amazing feedback from that, but I do get enough that it's useful to reach out. But most of it is time spent like doing research, looking at other courses, seeing what they're teaching, reading through like copious amounts of documentation and other things to try to like learn these things at a super deep level. Because just because you know something doesn't mean you know enough of it to teach. So I really try to like learn everything during this period too, if I haven't learned it well enough. So that helps me coincide with like, okay, what order am I going to teach this in? Because certain things chain off of each other.
SPEAKER_00:Hmm. And can you give everyone some kind of idea of like what's the size of your business now, of like revenue if you're happy to share it, or number of students, or whatever's Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Let me let me pull over some numbers here so I can take a look at them. So if we're looking here specifically, I'll kind of go through a couple different numbers. So like my email list specifically has a little over 100,000 people on it. I have about 115,000 people on my email list. So a relatively large email list. I did a big cut down recently, so it was closer to 200,000, but I cut you know all the inactive people and spam emails and all that different stuff. Uh, when it comes to my students, it's a little bit harder for me to track because I have free courses and paid courses, but I have about 58,000 students that includes my free courses, and about 14,000 sales for my paid courses. So I probably have around 13,000 or so actual paying customers and then you know another 45,000 or whatever it is that have a free course on top of that.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Okay. What's next for you? Like what do you want to where do you want to get to with the course business?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for me, I'm kind of happy for the most part with where it's been and where it's at. Obviously, during like 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, like the big COVID peak where lots of people are online, learning new things, lots of people were learning web development during that time. Like that was the peak for my business. And it's been down since then. Obviously, a lot less people are learning these skills now. So I kind of want to get closer to that peak by trying to focus more time on like the more funnel side of things, the more email marketing side of things, because that's something that I haven't spent a lot of time on. I'm not really that great at it. I don't really enjoy it very much. I spent more time on like, okay, I'm gonna grow a large audience, I'm going to teach really good courses, and that's gonna be my selling point. But you know, that'll only take you to a certain point. At some point, you really need to, you know, get good at the email marketing, get good at the funnels and all that different stuff to help guide the people that you've grown your audience to actually the courses that they need.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, what you said is is pretty much what every every course creator I talk to feels kind of the same way. I was like, I like making content, I like making courses. Why do I have to do this stupid email marketing funnel? God damn it. Unfortunately, it's the bit that makes the the money. Yep, yep. Um one of the bits you were saying about is that uh when we messaged before this, is that you you don't have anything in place after someone signs up for the lead magnet. Did I understand that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I have technically one email sequence for one of my lead magnets. It's like three emails, and it's not a very good email sequence. It's mostly like, hey, here's this other free thing. Hey, here's this course I have, and that's pretty much it. Like it's not a very good lead magnet, but I kind of threw it in place. It was like the first one I ever made. But since then, yeah, literally every freebie that I have, it doesn't lead to anything else. It's just like, hey, here's that thing that you signed up for. Now you're on my you know bi-weekly newsletter that I I usually try to post a blog article every other week or so. So I send out an email associated with that. And then when I do a course launch, all those people are on the course launch email. So if I'm not launching courses, essentially all I'm doing is paying money to have these people on here because they're not being marketed to in any way.
SPEAKER_00:How much of a spike do you get when you do launch a new course in terms of revenue?
SPEAKER_01:It depends a little bit on the course and if it's a brand new course or an update, but it can be anywhere from like a$30,000,$40,000 launch all the way up to over$100,000 for the launch. It really depends. Like if it's a brand new course that's a popular topic, you know, I can easily do over$100,000 on that launch. But if it's a small update for a course that's maybe not as popular, it'll be you know lower, maybe like$15,000,$20,000. But it's a very large chunk either way.
SPEAKER_00:Do you have anything on the confirmation page after someone signs up for the lead magnet? Like, does it just say thank you very much for signing up, or does it give them the lead magnet straight away, or do you have anything for them to buy on that page?
SPEAKER_01:No, so if they sign up for a lead magnet, it essentially says, Hey, thanks for signing up. You'll get an email with the thing, and it sends them an email with a PDF or whatever it is that they're getting. But that's that's literally there's no extra thing to buy or anything like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So this is something that um it's not a massive amount of money that you get from this, but it's a really, really consistent, like straightforward thing to have in place. Um it's called a a tripwire funnel. Do you ever do you know that term?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:No, okay. So the idea is you basically have something that's relatively inexpensive that someone can get on that page that kind of makes sense as the next step after the lead magnet, and you have like a great deal if they buy it straight away. So it tend it tends to be something you sell for like$27,$37, something in that kind of ballpark. It varies niche by niche as to how much people will pay, but something kind of like that. And it's it's really powerful for a couple of reasons. One is uh the people who've just signed up to your lead magnet, every single one of them will see it. Whereas if you have uh an email promotion go out, only the people who open the email are even got a chance of seeing the offer, and then only a percentage of those people are even are going to click on it. So only a small percentage of people will ever see the sales page. Whereas with the the triple R funnel having something available there, everybody sees it. And secondly, it's uh it's when someone's just signed up for you the the freebie, the lead magnet from you, they're in a state where they've got the a problem quite clear in their mind, like, oh I know I need some help with this, and they've they've just consumed some of your content, watched one of your YouTube videos probably, and then they've said, Oh, I want this lead magnet sign up for it. So they're they're quite like primed to take some action. Um, and so it gets a really high conversion rate. So it's not a it's not a uh not gonna be one of your more expensive courses, but like you can get between about three and ten percent of people will buy something at that point. And so we've had clients where they were making it depends on the the number of you know amount of traffic and everything, but we've had clients who are making thirty thousand dollars a month just from the tripwire funnel. Yeah, that's good. So I'm just trying to think, how many how many new opt-ins do you get a month at the moment? Uh let me s pull that up and see here. I think you said something like one to ten thousand, depending on like how many Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So it looks like passively I get about a thousand a month if I do literally nothing. But if I'm like actively promoting a freebie in a video, then yeah, like one to ten thousand in the month. It kind of depends on the topic that I'm promoting the freebie for. You know, if it's a more popular one, larger, less popular, smaller, obviously.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Okay, so let's just do a little bit of math here then. So if it was ten thousand and you got, let's just say uh a seven percent conversion rate, something kind of middle of the road. And it was$37, but then you had some other offers that went with it that made it maybe on average people spending$50. Oh, that's quite a lot. That's like$30,000. Yeah, that that's very significant.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, when you said the conversion rate of a few percent, I was like, a few percent is pretty good because some of my freebies have, you know, eighty, ninety thousand people that have downloaded them like, oh man, you know, two percent of that even is uh a big number.
SPEAKER_00:It adds up for definitely 'cause you've got such a big channel, you know, all of these numbers when you when you put something through that it's got like a a really high potential. So we had the client in the um spirituality space and And they had, I don't know, I forget like a million subscribers-ish on YouTube, something like that. And we would get them, I think it was going to average about 20,000 opt-ins a month. And then the the lead magnet, they had one that they were promoting everywhere, which was five free meditations. And the then the offer that we had, as the tripwire sat behind that, was 27 meditations for$27. And so it was such a good fit with the freebie that lots of people who adopted in were like, oh cool, I would like some more of the thing that I just now you can't always set up everything to kind of fit together quite so so beautifully between the lead magnet and the offer, but that one converted at 12%. Um and that was bringing them in at like$30,000 ish dollars per month, something like that. So that's one thing that definitely could work for you in terms of having that kind of front end in place. And then what did you say about your welcome sequence? You've got like three, three emails and that, was that right? No. My my welcome sequence is literally one email.
SPEAKER_01:If someone it depends on how they get to the email newsletter or my newsletter. If they sign up for a freebie, they get the email that's from the freebie, and it's like, here's the freebie, end of story. If it's the one specific freebie I have that has a sequence, the sequence essentially says, here's the freebie, next email is here's another freebie that's kind of related, and then the next email is like, hey, buy my course. It's not the best. And uh otherwise, if they just sign up for my newsletter through like other methods, like a direct sign-up or something, it'll just send them essentially a blog article that's like, hey, here's my normal newsletter, here's a blog article, and then they're just on my list. So really there's no sequence for initial sign-up, really.
SPEAKER_00:So there's a guy, Kyle Jordan, who uh we've done some work with before. Here we go. Episode 70. So if anyone listening who wants to kind of work on this, uh, and I'll send this through to you as well, Kyle. Episode 70, how to convert prospects into buyers using email onboarding. And he uh he specializes, Kyle, on welcome sequences. He's a very good copywriter overall, but he he specializes in that. And I think that episode kind of takes you through like what's the the overall structure to it. The basic kind of outline to it is the first one is uh welcome and reassure. So he's sending through their lead magnet um and then reassuring them that they're in the right place, that this is going to be super helpful for them, they're gonna get useful information for the uh from you. And then the second one is a a differentiator. Um and so you're talking to people about like what's different about your brand, and like uh if there's if people have got real concerns about like the things that might stop them from achieving their results that you can help them with, then you're kind of talking about talking about them. Then email three is the uh you're trying to get them into the exclusive group, so you're you're making them feel like they're really part of the gang. And then the fourth one is social proof and trust. And then the fifth one is more of that social proof and trust, and then you introduce um an offer in the in the sick email. Well, I'll send you through like more info about all of this afterwards, but like there's a real structure to it, right? It's like you don't have to just sit down with a blank piece of paper and go, what should I say to kind of get people on board? Like each of these has got like a a proven a proven structure. So then the last couple are like real uh urgency ones um to get people to actually take action. So I think yeah, if you had both of those in place, what what do you think, or what do you have at the moment that's like the the offer that you promote first to people? Like a freebie are you talking about? No, uh you you mentioned didn't you in that email you you're promoting one of your courses?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah. So the freebie for that course is specifically related to a topic called CSS, and I have a course on CSS. So the freebie is CSS related, the extra bonus freebie is CSS related, and then the course itself is obviously a CSS course that I'm promoting. Do you know how well that converts at the moment? I have no idea. Unfortunately, the the course, the course platform that I use is not great at letting me track conversions very well. It's it's okay for like helping me track like the amount of people that come to the page, but it's really poor at helping me track conversions. So I don't have great numbers on conversions because it doesn't let me track that very well.
SPEAKER_02:Hmm.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Yeah, that would be super interesting to look at and kind of figure out how much potential there is for an increase there as well.
SPEAKER_01:My guess is it doesn't convert very well just because it's not set up very well. Like I made it years ago. I mean, I probably wrote this five years ago, like right when I made the course. So it's it's definitely not set up optimized.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. The um our general approach to this is is that you should only have quite a short um automated sequence for this kind of thing. Because some people have like, you know, a six-month or one-year automation that takes people through and promotes every course kind of one at a time. And we tend to do like seven to fourteen days is like the longest we'll ever go to. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that manual promotions work better than automated ones. And the part of the reason is because you can tie it into something that's going on at that particular time. Uh so the automated one just happens 14 days or a month or whatever after someone has just signed up to the email list. Whereas the manual one you're connecting to, right, you know, I mean, the most obvious one is it's Black Friday mail, but you could do other things like New Year, New U, and like, okay, where it's just been, whatever you can connect it to something that's maybe there's just been a big conference about uh a programming language or something in the news about it, or whatever, something that you can kind of hook into so people kind of feel like that's current. And the second one is that when you do long automated sequences, tons of stuff breaks and it's really hard to find out what. Um it's just like it's the internet shit breaks all the time, you know. And then the last one is when you do a bigger campaign, it's really easy to like look at what worked and what didn't, because you get all the data in one go. Uh and when you have a longer sequence, then it's like it's it's much easier to just go, oh I just kind of let that run, and you never go back and look at it, and you never go, oh shit, this thing in here is not working, and this one, this one is. But all that said, having that first initial like seven to fourteen days in place, something like that, is a really good idea and does tend to does tend to work. We had someone we work with recently, we took their front end funnel from I think I was making 12,000 a month, and we got it up to like 26,000. Yeah, just over 26,000, just by all the stuff I'm talking about, you know, putting a better offer in and improving the the the welcome sequence or what have you. Um what else is this like? What's the point of the business for you? Is it like, is this something that is you know, it's it's it's what you need to be doing to make enough money, or is it like a is a lot of this about uh is there a mission? Is it like uh something that you're uh just fascinated by? Like why do you why do you work on it so much?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think there's a few reasons. I mean, obviously, a good reason is like it makes good money and gives me the freedom kind of to go do the things that I want to do, but more so than that, I just really enjoy the process of teaching. Like even when I was a kid, like I would always be helping my friends out, like learning things in school. Like I always have liked teaching. So being able to teach full time has been really great. I quite enjoy that and being able to like see the impact that you have on people. Like when I get an email from someone that's like, hey, I was able to take your courses or watch your free videos, and I was able to like go from this job that I hate to like actually working as a web developer. Like, that's pretty much what keeps me going on it. And like when I'm having a rough day and I don't really want to do it, I'm like, okay, remember what you can like do by teaching people, even if it's just the free stuff or the pay stuff, it doesn't matter. Like the impact you can have on even just one person like changing their life is is an incredible feeling. Like that's what keeps me going. But I don't have like some big like mission to make this, you know, a multi-billion dollar business kind of thing. Like so many different course creators and people that have companies, like they want to grow it and grow it and grow it. Like, I'm not that kind of person. I'd rather keep it small, small team, even just me, like keep it small, like make enough money, good money to be able to support myself and my family and all that. But it's like I don't need some massive, you know,$10 million a year revenue kind of business. Like I'm super comfortable with like a you know moderate to high income that I get from this and having the freedom to be able to like, okay, you know what? This month I'm going to like crank out some videos and get ahead so that way next month I can go, you know, super easy, take a lot of trips, vacations, and like not have all that stress of, oh, I have 20 employees that are all depending on me to make tons of money.
SPEAKER_00:How big is your team? Is it just you or is it going to be a good thing?
SPEAKER_01:It's just me. I mean, I have an editor, but he's on like a contract purpose. Like I don't have him as like a W-2 employee or anything, but he edits all my videos for like the last three or four years. Nice.
SPEAKER_00:And when you're saying that you've got like, okay, if I get ahead now, then I don't have so much to do later. Have you got like a plan of okay, this is how much needs doing? Or I suppose you've got like maybe a frequency that you're putting videos out on your YouTube channel.
SPEAKER_01:Is that what you mean? Yep. I used to do two videos a week and one YouTube short a week, but I scaled it back to one video a week and one short a week, and I pretty much just have kept it that the last couple of years. So for me, it's like, okay, if I want to get ahead, I'm like, okay, if I record four or five videos, that's a whole month worth of videos that I have done and ready to go. Obviously, it's kind of difficult because sometimes there's timely things you want to throw in there, so you always have stuff that you can be working on. And there's more than just YouTube videos, obviously. But that can kind of help me be able to get ahead and be like, okay, I'm gonna crank out a bunch of videos, get you know, a couple weeks ahead, and now maybe that opens me up to spend more time working on a course or more time working on an email funnel if I really, you know, hate myself that day and I want to be working.
SPEAKER_02:You know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's one of those things where it's like I can do this work up front to free myself to either do less work or to work on different things. And I think that's really important because a lot of people are like, okay, I could produce three videos a week and that's my maximum workload. So I'm gonna do three videos a week. But it's like then you have no time for anything else, and everything else kind of starts to fall apart. I like to keep my workload smaller. Like I could do more than one video a week, but by keeping it one video a week, that means I have more time to focus on other things and also more time where I'm like, okay, you know what? I want to take a two-week vacation with my wife. I can throw that in there easily without having to kill myself beforehand trying to get caught up or ahead. And it's obviously working. What are you doing?
SPEAKER_00:Like what 1.5 million views a month or something like that, did you say?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's lower now than it was obviously during like the COVID peak. But yeah, it's around one to two million views a month. It used to be, you know, like three to four back during, you know, a couple years ago. But again, like I said, everything's kind of lower since then. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, especially because my channel is quite a bit smaller back then. So like the ratio between subscribers to views was much higher back then than it is now. But yeah, it's a lot of, you know, now that I don't make as many shorts as I did then, and those get a lot of views. The view to video ratio, you know, if you have more shorts, you get a lot more views a lot easier. So it's like I don't do as many shorts now as I used to back then. So that also decreases the view amount.
SPEAKER_00:What's that? Do you have like certain times of year when you're working harder on this and when you're working less? I generally go through kind of like a seasonal approach to work.
SPEAKER_01:So usually the fall time period is when I work the least because my wife and I type to take our vacations around fall because you know, kids are in school, so it's less busy. The weather's usually nice and cool, it feels nice. So like we tend to vacation a lot in the fall time period, but like winter, we don't really go on very many vacations because it's cold everywhere. So we I tend to work more in the winter and like even into like the spring, I work a little bit more and then you know, summer, fall comes around. I'm like, okay, you know, I want to spend more time outside, I want to do more activities, I want to go on these vacations. So I tend to scale back the workload then. So usually when I'm doing my courses and stuff, I try to do them during that winter, spring period, crank through them during that time, release them sometime in like April, March, or whatever. That way I can then take essentially a break after that because those are a really high stress, high work periods of time.
SPEAKER_00:I was interested by what you were saying about the whole like what your goal is from the business and how much you need and not wanting to scale almost infinitely. I was trying to had uh um Neil Patel on, you know that is. I've heard the name, but I I don't know much about him. Marketing guru type. And so he came on, he was talking about how he used to run a course business and he was making his best ever month, he made over a million dollars in the month. That's crazy. And it was too small. He was he closed the whole course business down because it was that was too small and he wanted something much, and now they're doing his his business is doing like, I don't know, a hundred million dollars a year or something like this. It's just like I said to him, like, why?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And he's like, it's just never it's something like it, it's just never feels like enough. Like it will be cool for a day when I hit a new number, and then that's it, and then I'm like, oh no, I need to do more. And I'm like, oh, that sounds tiring. You know, like I didn't get into it as much with him. I wasn't quite sure whether to ask him more about it or not. Um but it was fascinating. And I've got this friend James, and uh he's been on the podcast before actually, and he he runs a course business, and he's like he's the most chill person I know. He's so relaxed and so calm, and it's just him and an assistant. And he had a period of time where he decided that he was gonna like scale his business, and he like built up a team and started selling higher ticket programs and was running loads of ads and uh hired hired a whole bunch of salespeople and whatever else. And I've never seen I've never seen anyone more stressed than him when he was going through that. And then he decided, fuck it, I'm gonna stop doing that again, and went back to just being him and an assistant running, and he went back to being the most chilled person I've ever met. You clearly should have that kind of business. Like, you clearly do not really want this high pressure, you know, like scale it to the moon kind of thing. And it's made me think a lot about it with a business. Like, oh, well, I like I already make enough money that I basically could do all the stuff I want to do. More money would be cool, right? Don't get me wrong. It's like I'm sure I could find some fun things to get within. It's nice to have more savings and everything, but it's like I don't have massively expensive tastes. So to me, it's kind of it now, it's more like it's the game of it. It's like, how can I help more people? How can I build a bigger, but not there's no point putting myself under lots of pressure in order to to do more of it, you know?
SPEAKER_01:I think that's part of the reason why I haven't spent nearly as much time on like the email marketing and funnel side of things. So it's like I make enough money to do the things that I want to do, have enough leftover to be able to save. Why would I spend my time on the things I don't enjoy when I could spend my time on the things I do enjoy? So like that's part of the reason why I haven't spent as much time on that, and part of the reason why I'm wanting to spend more time on it going forward in the future, because it's like, okay, now that the big COVID boom is over and it's like things that were absolutely massive are scaling back down to normal size. It's like, okay, now I can actually, you know, spend my time on that and see some benefit from it. Because back then it's like if I made more money, it made zero difference in my life at all. It's like now if I make a little bit more, I'm like, okay, I can actually see a tangible difference to that amount of money versus back then where I was like, I'm making way more than I need. Why would I spend the time on these additional things?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think one of the reasons that it it can be worth it for course creators, and I kind of push people a little bit with this, is even if they're making enough money, it's like you don't know this is gonna last. And that's like a bit of a negative thing to say because it's like kind of puts a bit of uh stress, but it's like, but it probably won't. Like the world 15 years ago was not the same as it is now, and it won't be the same in another 15 years, and the market won't be the same and and whatever else, you know. And um so some to some extent, it's like, well, take the opportunity and and put the money aside, don't spend it for God's sake, you know, and go, oh, now I've made even more money, let me go and and live a lavish lifestyle. It's like, no, just put it aside, and then later on you'd be like, Oh, cool, I'm glad I did that. Um but also it means you know, if you run more promotions, you probably get your course out to more people and more people get it and get the benefit from it, and you know, so there's that side to it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that this kind of stuff is a quite temporary thing. Like, I've been doing YouTube for almost eight years, which in YouTube standards is pretty much geriatric. Like most people don't really make it past five years of YouTube. So it's like doing YouTube for eight years is like you're past the timeline for most people. And like same with course businesses, like you know, you could have a course business that lasts you decades, but you know, a lot of times it may be something that only has that, you know, gravy train for three, four, five years. So it's like, don't just because you're making a lot more money now, go out and spend all that money. Like, you really gotta be diligent to save it because five years from now, you may, you know, business may not be the same as it was, it may be 10% of what it used to be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I'm quite lucky, I think, in that like I mean, I live in London, so it's quite expensive, but like pass the things that I that I like, I'm like, I just don't I'm just not fussed about the other stuff, you know? Like, I just don't want things that are, you know, much fancier. And um so I can just start putting everything aside after that. What's any um what's any other like lessons that you've learned that you like want to kind of pass on to other people while we're on here and you've got the opportunity to talk, talk to people, other course creators?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think one lesson that a lot of people can take is that they don't need to run ads as early as they think they do. A lot of people think like, okay, I'm making this awesome course. I probably don't have an audience because you haven't spent time building one, so I'm gonna go straight to you know running paid ads on my course. And sure, that can work, but you're gonna have a much better time converting from your paid ads and a much better time overall if you figure out how to convert organic traffic and warm traffic. Because if you can't convert people that already know you and trust you, you're not gonna be able to convert people that don't know you from these cold advertisements, essentially. So finding ways to be able to actually convert people before you start running ads, I think is really important. And you may find you don't even need to run ads because that is a whole nother skill set, time commitment, stress that's on that. So, like you may find that, hey, you know, it's not worth the extra stress and time to run these different ads, but you'll never really be able to truly convert people well if you don't know how to convert a warm audience first. Because that's much easier than converting a cold audience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, for definite. Like I always said to people, if you if you have a funnel that works with a warm audience, it does not guarantee it'll work with cold. But if it doesn't work with warm, it definitely won't work with cold. There's no way. Yeah. So um it's worth like getting all that stuff built, refined, and then you can look at, right, am I sure that I want to do ads as well? It's like, you know, there's a thousand tactics always, aren't there? It's like, oh, I could also I'm doing YouTube, I also could do Instagram and TikTok, and I could do more work on SEO or getting ChatGPT to recommend me or ads or whatever. It's just like it's it's so hard to get good at all of these things. Like, even to get good at one is hard.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's actually an advantage I have. Like, I don't use any social media at all. So like I don't focus my time on like Instagram reels or shorts or whatever they're called, and like Twitter and TikTok and all those things. Like, I just do YouTube. That's where all of my effort goes into. So like I've gotten really good at that, which has helped me grow very large on YouTube. But I feel like if I split my time between all these different things, I would become okay at all of them and probably be, you know, 10% of the size on all of them that I am right now. So it's like by focusing on one, I was able to grow much more. And it's, in my opinion, much better to be at the top of a field in one area than to be mediocre across a bunch of different social media platforms. And also, you know, social media I find is a big waste of time most of the time. So like not being on that is helpful because it gives me more time to focus on other things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And like your experience in terms of what platform is working is very similar to nearly everybody else we've got um on the podcast and and as clients as well. It's like YouTube and courses go together. Like uh, what did someone on American say to me once? Like peanut butter and chocolate. And I remember saying to them, like, What? Do they go together? They're like, Have you not had Reese's? Yeah. I don't know what that is. But anyway, like two things are going hand in glove. It's like YouTube and courses is like the perfect fit. I we have clients and we've had people on where it's with different platforms, you know, where Instagram's worked out great for them, or we had one person on who TikTok worked out great, only one, you know. But uh, but TikTok for them, and we had other people where it's like a podcast or SEO, but they're the sh the they're the minority. It's like nearly everybody is YouTube, and I think it's like long form YouTube content in particular, because the long form content on YouTube fits really well with people who like courses, and it's like much longer form than stuff that you get on Instagram or elsewhere, so it's you've got people's attention for much more, so they build much more trust with you, and just the whole thing fits together really well. So, yeah, I'm on board with you about the ads as well. I just think most people um probably shouldn't touch them, and I occasionally come across. Someone who like we had someone on the other day, um, it probably would have gone live by the time this one's live. Ashley. And she'd done YouTube and then started ads and then got good at ads, but she's she committed to it. Like she's like, right, I'm gonna I'm gonna spend money on ads every day, even when I'm losing money, and take these courses and work on this and become an ads person. I was just like, I respect that, but that's that's not easy, and that's not something most people want to go through, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I kind of think along the lines of ads as well, one thing that I find a lot of people get discouraged by when they're first getting started and they're listening to all these podcasts and stuff, and they're hearing people be like, oh yeah, you know, we make five million dollars in revenue with our business. What a lot of people don't realize is when they say they make five million dollars in revenue, they're not telling you their net revenue, they're telling you their gross revenue before they account for their$4 million in ad spend that they had. So it's like, sure, it sounds really impressive, but if you actually take a look at it, they may be making significantly less money than they're actually telling you they are because they're not taking into account that they're spending four or five million dollars on ads to make five million dollars in revenue.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and the other thing with ads that I think a lot of people think, oh, I want to have ads because then you can just run it and set it and forget it. And it's like, no, you can't. Not even slightly like ads, especially the higher you go in terms of ad spend, they consume creative like nothing else. Like you have to just feed the ad monster constantly with new creatives, new copy, new images, new videos for the ads. Um, one guy who I'm trying to convince to come on the podcast, a friend of mine, he spends, I think, three million a year on ads, and he says that he he told me the amount of creative they went through in a year, and it it was such a high number that I I'm I'm gonna say what I remember, but I kind of can't believe it was true that it was like 10,000 creatives, and it's like something like that. And I I might have remembered it wrong, but it was certainly thousands, and I was just like, that's that sounds exhausting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's that's part of the reason I don't want to do ads. It's like I don't even do the email funnel side of things. Like, that's way easier than doing ads. So it's like I don't I like being good at teaching, you know, that's what I'm good at. So it's like if you throw an ads, you also have to become really good at ads, otherwise you're not really gonna make any money from them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, you've got for you in particular, you've got such low-hanging fruit with like if you ran some more email promotions, had a tripwire funnel, had a welcome sequence, like you you could probably I'm just gonna uh eyeball it here, but like two or three times your revenue.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I can I could see that easily because it's like anytime I do a course launch, you know, the revenue I get from that is exponentially bigger than the revenue I get, you know, from just individual days of selling things, like you know, so it's like I could easily see it if I do more launches because I don't even think I did a single launch last year, like at all. So I you because I don't think I made a new course last year. Yeah, I mean, most of the time I'm doing like one to two a year because I do like one to two new courses or course updates. But last year I don't think I did anything, so it's like maybe one at the very beginning, I don't remember. It's not not ideal, I'll tell you that much.
SPEAKER_00:And I get it, right? Because you that's not your bag, but like to me who like is is really into email marketing and funnels and like could just see the money that's being left on the table, that's like oh, makes my makes my heart hurt. Anyway, this has been awesome. Um I uh I love what you're doing. This is it sounds like such a great kind of um lifestyle that you've built for yourself, you know. Being able to create such high quality courses, build such a big audience, it's it's absolutely fantastic. Um I know that if people want to go check you out, they can go to webdevsimplified.com or webdev simplified on YouTube. Is there anything else you want to leave people with?
SPEAKER_01:No, I mean, yeah, if you want to check me out specifically to like learn web development or to see how like a larger YouTube channel is run, that'd be great. If you want to check me out to learn how to sell courses, don't. I'm not gonna be teaching you that on my channel. But yeah, if you if you kind of want to see like, okay, hey, how does a larger YouTube channel, you know, release schedule, thumbnails, that kind of things, like you can check out my channel. That'll hopefully help you with those types of skills.
SPEAKER_00:Uh and then in terms of the stuff that we covered, uh, I want to point people to resources for that. So I mentioned episode 70 was about welcome sequences, and then I talked about tripwires as well. Um, if you want to check that out, then look at episode 102, where me and Yosip, uh, who's like the head of funnesty at the agency, he uh and I talked through tripwire funnels and then we did another two episodes on them as well: 125 and 132. So go check those out as well if you want to find out more, and then I'll see if we've got any resources on the website as well for it. Yeah, so if you go to datadrivenmarketing.co slash resources, there are tripwire product ideas there. And now there's nothing about welcome sequences, but there's tripwire product ideas on that on that page, data driven marketing.co slash resources. Kyle, this was wicked. I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me on.