The Art of Selling Online Courses

259 Make Something Once, Sell It Forever

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 259

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Abbie Emmons built a YouTube channel closing in on 600,000 subscribers, 7,000 students across her courses, a Patreon membership she 10x'd in six months, and a traditionally published book on the way. And she teaches people how to write novels. 

In this episode, I sit down with Abbie to pull apart how she actually built and runs her business. We get into the move from Patreon to her own membership site, why she prices and sells courses both inside and outside the membership, and how she turned $3 templates into a surprisingly meaningful revenue stream by simply deciding to stop giving them away for free.

One moment that really stood out was Abbie describing how a single quiz video brought in around a THOUSAND new email subscribers. 

We also get honest about something a lot of creators struggle with. Abbie openly says her courses "kind of sit dormant" when she isn't actively promoting them, and the two of them dig into why that happens and what to do about it. I walk through the problem-agitation-solution email framework we use to give creators a real reason to talk about their courses, not just when something new launches.

If you're building a creator-led course business and you've ever felt weird about promoting what you've made, this one's for you.

Check out Abbie's work:
🌐 http://www.abbieemmonsauthor.com
📸 http://www.instagram.com/makeyourstorymatter
▶️ http://www.youtube.com/abbieemmons

Make It Once, Scale Forever

SPEAKER_01

My mindset toward creating content and creating offerings has been how can I make something once and sell it forever? And how can I scale it? That alone helped me to 10x my Patreon. We're about to hit 600,000, which I'm really excited about. About 7,000 students in my courses in my online university.

SPEAKER_00

Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret acts for top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth, and today's guest is Abby Emmons. Now, Abby is a novelist, a writing coach, and the founder of Abby's Story University. It's an online platform that teaches writers how to harness the psychology and neuroscience of storytelling. About seven years ago, she started pointing a camera at herself and posting videos breaking down the mechanics of storytelling, how backstory works, how to build characters that readers care about, how to craft unforgettable villains. That YouTube channel now has over 550,000 subscribers, and her wider Make Story Matter community is north of half a million writers worldwide. She's the author of the indie novel 100 Days of Sunlight, The World, and the Best Christmas Ever, and her first traditionally published book, Make Your Story Matter, is coming out through Bembela this August. She has exactly the kind of business that I know so many of our listeners are working towards a creator-led brand combining a huge audience, book deal, and a thriving online course offering all anchored to one big idea.

Who The Courses Serve

SPEAKER_00

Abby, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much for having me, John.

SPEAKER_00

So talk us through, I kind of touched it there, but talk us through who is it that you're helping with your courses? Who's like the target audience for you?

SPEAKER_01

For me, the target audience is any writer out there who is struggling to find a clear focus for their next steps, whether that is finally brainstorming and outlining the novel of their dreams, or finally writing that first draft, or editing their novel, getting it ready for publishing, whether they want to pursue indie publishing or traditional publishing. My content and my videos really speak to any writer at any stage of their career. I try to meet writers wherever they are and make my content relevant to meet them at that stage. So a lot of my courses center around indie publishing and some of the more intricate aspects of how to make your book stand out, but also blend in. So also look professional, look polished, even if you're not using a traditional publishing house to get your book out into the world. So that's that's who my um that's what my content is really built for.

SPEAKER_00

Is it all novelists? Are there any people in your audience who are doing nonfiction?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. So there's a lot of nonfiction authors and actually a lot of writers who write across different mediums. So I have writers in there who are screenwriters, they're students in school writing short stories, people writing video games, people creating webcomics, even people follow my channel who just want to play Dungeons and Dragons better. So all kinds of storytellers from all over the world who are just really interested in crafting and honing their skills of understanding story.

SPEAKER_00

And are you helping them with how to then promote the book, or is it solely focused on writing the best book

The Patreon Live Training Engine

SPEAKER_00

possible? Like what's the kind of the breadth of what you'll help with?

SPEAKER_01

Kind of meet them at every stage. So you on my channel, you can find videos on how to come up with a story idea. You can also find videos on how to market your book and sell more books on Amazon. So really like soup to nuts, the entire journey. Um my courses are more in-depth on different aspects of the publishing stage. So editing your novel like a pro and formatting your book to be a professional, beautiful print book. Writing a best-selling book blurb is another one that I have a complete course on. And these aspects of publishing, I feel like there's just a lot of um, there's a lot of confusion around those stages of publishing where a lot of writers get stuck and they don't know how to proceed. They don't know how to write a great description for their book, or they don't know how to make their book look like a beautiful, traditionally published book that you might pull off a bookstore shelf. So I try to meet writers wherever they are in their journey and really listen to my audience and see what is it they want. Like what what are the pain points that they're experiencing and how can I help them find solutions to those problems?

SPEAKER_00

And can you give people some idea of like the size of your business? It doesn't need to be revenue, but like maybe number of students or number of people in your membership, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so I am currently working on moving my membership to my own website, which has been a whole process.

SPEAKER_00

Um I've it's more work than you might expect, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01

It is. It really is. But hopefully it will be worth it. So I'm kind of in a transition phase at the moment. But as you said, I have I have over 500,000 followers on YouTube. Nearly 600,000. We're about to hit 600,000, which I'm really excited about. Nice. And about 7,000 students in my courses in my online um university so far. Through Patreon, I've been able to offer monthly live trainings to my um writers. And that's something that I've been doing for about the past five years. And that alone helped me to 10x my Patreon. I originally had like a podcast that I did like just a QA session at the end of each month, and there wasn't a lot to talk about. There wasn't a lot that I could like package with that and make it look appealing and interesting and flashy. So I started doing monthly live trainings on my Patreon each month, and that kind of gave me an excuse to talk about, hey, there's gonna be this event this month on my Patreon. And that alone, like 10x my Patreon within six months.

SPEAKER_00

Is Patreon a big part of your like is it big revenue streamed in terms of versus the courses and the membership? Or is the membership the Patreon? Is that the same thing?

SPEAKER_01

I'm currently moving from Patreon. Well, I'm I'm still gonna keep my Patreon, but I'm currently like migrating some of the content into my own membership site. But yes, Patreon so far for the past like five years has been a great source of revenue for me. And it's been just a great way to um kind of expand and monetize what I'm already doing on YouTube.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

Milestones, Momentum, Book Preorders

SPEAKER_00

I uh have you got a plan for how you're gonna celebrate 600,000?

SPEAKER_01

No, I need to come up with a plan because it's fast approaching. I I feel like there at least needs to be some cake involved.

SPEAKER_00

Something. You've gotta have you've gotta here's the thing, right? Here I noticed this about like um people who run their own business a lot. Is when things are going badly, they're like, oh, but I'm gonna turn it around, I'm gonna figure this out, I'm gonna do whatever. But then when something actually goes well, everyone gets really nonchalant about it, like, oh yeah, you know, no big deal. Of course I just did that thing, you know. And I um when I was 22, I I got I probably my first proper job or something. And I was very nonchalant about it. And my sister was like, No, this shall not pass. What I need you to do is I need you to stand up on the chair and put your hand in the air and go, ever since that moment, I've passed this on to many other people. Yeah, I just did a talk at a conference, I did the uh closing talk at a conference set in Mexico last before last. And so I was teaching this to everybody in the audience, and so I made them all stand up on their chairs at the conference. I got someone to film it, I might share it somewhere on YouTube or something like that.

SPEAKER_01

That's great.

SPEAKER_00

Um it was awesome. Um I think it's so important because I think that success, celebrating success creates momentum in our brains. So you kind of get if you certainly have lots of and like 600,000 is a big milestone, right? That's a really big one. But like any time that you have success, I think it like allows you to go, oh yes, we're winning here. Let's keep going. Let's like let's feel good about it all. And that's like that momentum. You see it a lot in like sports games, but I think in business, like that momentum can help carry us to to greater heights. So we need a plan, Abby. We need a plan.

SPEAKER_01

We do, we do. That's so true. I recently did something very similar, jumped out of my chair and fist pumped in air. And I saw my um my new book, Make Your Story Matter, the pre-orders. I can see like the pre-order numbers each month come in. And my goal every month has been just double what it was last month, like exponentially grow the pre-orders. And when I checked for May's pre-orders this month, I saw that it was exactly double of last month. I'm like, yes.

SPEAKER_00

That's fantastic. And how you've been promoting that? Is that to your email list? Is that in direct in videos? How are you doing it?

SPEAKER_01

Kind of all the channels. So I've been kind of um promoting on YouTube, promoting through my email list, um, social media, kind of trying to like, and then doing some paid promotion as well, but like try to like uh utilize all of the avenues possible. Um but yeah, I it's it's been quite a journey. It's interesting. Promoting nonfiction is very different than promote promoting fiction, because with fiction, you're trying to pull someone into a story and get them emotionally invested in these characters and what it would feel like to be part of their story. Whereas nonfiction is very much I'm solving a problem. We're trying to solve this problem together. And with Make Your Story Matter, I feel like I've had a great background of the past seven years. I've been helping people video by video solve these problems with writing. So I do feel like I'm definitely prepared to be able to give this book to the people who need it the most and get it in front of them. So

Writing Nonfiction Without Overwhelm

SPEAKER_01

that's yeah, that's been the challenge.

SPEAKER_00

How long did it take to write? I've I've I wrote a book on um email marketing and funnels for course creators, and I wrote like three drafts of it, and then it turned and there was another project that came up that was was more important. I had to put it back on the shelf, and I was like, it's so much work. It's so much work.

SPEAKER_01

Especially like I find nonfiction is harder to write than fiction because I don't know, fiction is like the story just kind of flows out exactly as I'm see imagining it. But nonfiction is like, okay, how do I make take all of this information, make it make sense and not be overwhelming? And that's really that was my goal with Make Your Story Matter is I want it to be easy to digest. I want it to be fun, interactive, fresh, not like one of those boring writing manuals that you end up using as a doorstopper because it's just like too much to get through. So yeah, kind of just using that as like my guiding compass going through the process. It took me about two years, I would say, from like the very beginning to um the finished product, and then rounds of editing, and then an additional year to like get an agent, get a publishing deal. So yeah, it's been a long, a long road.

SPEAKER_00

I was chatting with my friend Itamar, and uh he was writing a book about his uh he's a mindset coach. Um people who are regular listeners to the to the podcast might well know uh he's been on before. Let me see if I can find some podcasts, some episode numbers for people if they uh number eighty, episode number eighty, how to know if your mindset is off with Itamar Morani. Um and he wrote a book about mindset, and he basically took I've gone through like his um group coaching programme, I've done some one-to-one coaching with him, um, I've been to a bunch of his events, and you read the book, and it's like, yeah, obviously that was what should be in there because it was all of the best stories he'd ever told, and it was all of the things he'd ever said, but kind of just summarized and said most concisely, you you know, very concisely. And it's like, and I asked him, like, well, how much because art when you read it, you're just like, oh yeah, I kind of I knew all that stuff, and it's obvious that you would put all of this in. And I was like, How long did that take to write? And he's like, six hours a day, ever six days a week for nine months. I was like, okay. That's how long it takes to take everything you've already said and summarise it that concisely. It's so much work to get it to kind of like, like you were saying about make sense, but also be um to include everything, but not too much, not be too complicated, like just be at exactly the right level. Makes YouTube videos seem easy, relatively, which is also not true, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I know. It's amazing. And and it's interesting how YouTube videos, the ones I create for my channel, honestly, they follow a similar structure to the book, in that like we're addressing like what's the pain point? What is the prospect struggling with? And how is this going to be their solution? And how is the solution different than other solutions out there? That's kind of that's like the whole essence of like the hook for uh any nonfiction book.

SPEAKER_00

Just think it, just think about your YouTube videos. I saw you've got a video, what your most recent one. It's like a two-hour you're in a um uh like a Zen Buddhist temple at the top of a mountain, and like you're uh you've got your two hours of writing time, and it's like you kind of it's a background video, I guess, to kind of keep everybody focused, like their Pomodoros. Is that a new thing? Had you done I didn't check through a lot of your videos, but have you done that before? Is that something people like or is that a new test?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, I've done that in the past. Um I've done it for probably like three years now. I've been putting out those videos, and each one's different. It's like a different environment, different genre. Some are like a cozy cottage by the sea, some are like fantasy, like you're traveling through a medieval fantasy world, others are like you're in a haunted Victorian mansion. So they all have like a different mood and sound effects. They take a long time for me to put together, but I love it. It's it's fun. It's almost like you're building this fantasy world. And people seem to really like them and return to them a lot. So I even use them myself.

SPEAKER_00

I was thinking it's like it could be a really good one from the point of view of if someone's starting, the idea should be they're doing the whole two hours and then hopefully going back and watching, like it's great for you know, it's not it's not it's not like a traditional YouTube video, but it's great for building like, you know, stats and for like uh increasing the the watch time, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01

Right, exactly. Yeah, that's that's the hope is that they stay focused and stay to the end.

SPEAKER_00

If anyone is kind of interested in this and hasn't uh doesn't kind of know what exactly we're talking about, go and check out Abby's uh YouTube channel. I'm just ch finding your uh it's uh at Abby Emmons, A-B-B-I-E, E-M-M-O-N for November S. And oh yeah, 596,000 subscribers, you're so close. Yeah, we're gonna go check that one out. So

Building An Offer Suite That Sells

SPEAKER_00

talk us through your your offerings. You've got the membership, you're moving over. Um you've also got courses, and then you've also got some really low ticket stuff, like five dollar little templates as well. Like how um is it are there other things you don't do you do any group coaching? Um, do you have any higher any kind of mid-ticket stuff? Like what's your kind of uh the the structure of your offerings?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's a great question. My mindset toward creating content and creating offerings for the past you know five, six years has been how can I make something once and sell it forever? And how can I scale it? So when I do like, for instance, group coaching, is that is an option of like I could do a a coaching program where there's you know no limit to how many people who can join and it's the same um the same amount of time on my part. That's kind of the the idea behind the monthly live trainings, is because I was originally doing a Q ⁇ A podcast and I had a limit of like how many questions I can answer, because I would be sitting there for an hour and a half answering questions on audio, and I'm like, this is not scalable. So I realized like if I make a presentation and I do basically like a virtual talk, I can scale that, you know, to as many people as I want, like as many people can join, and I'm doing the same amount of work. Um, same with selling templates. Templates I used to use as just lead magnets, which I would recommend for if you're just starting out, offering them for free, growing your email list. But once I got to the point where I'm like, I could be offering these for $3, $5, like I know people would buy them for just like that small price tag, and I still get their email because in Square Up Space, when somebody purchases a digital product from you, you also get their email. So I was able to also get their emails, also a lead magnet, but I'm selling those templates instead of just giving them away. And it's interesting how over time that compounds into thousands of dollars. And you don't think of it in the moment, like, oh, well, three dollars or I could give it away for free. But it's actually really worth it to give it away for three dollars because it does have value to it. And you'll find that there's a lot of customers out there who are willing to buy it for $3. Like we impulse by a cup of coffee for $6. Like it's it's not a big ask. Um, and then for other offerings, like I realized for my courses, like there is a bigger gap here where there's a um there's an audience who needs to find a solution to this specific problem, like formatting a book. And that was something that I struggled with. Like I I learned it just from like watching YouTube videos here and there. Like, how do you format a book with Microsoft Word and make it look like a beautiful book that came off the press at Simon and Schuster? And it's it's harder than it looks, it's harder than it sounds. But it's like there were moments in that process where I was like pulling my hair out because I just clicked the wrong button and it was like click this button instead of this button. I'm like, I don't want other writers to have to struggle with this. So I, as I was formatting one of my books, I just filmed the process and kind of talked everyone through it and put that together as a course. But yeah, just listening to like what does my audience want? What are what are their pain points? Even surveying them, um, putting out polls, asking them like, what is it they're really looking for? What is it they're struggling with the most? And how can I offer them something that I can make once and scale forever?

SPEAKER_00

And so how does the does the membership include access to all of the courses? You'd mentioned you've got the the monthly training that you do in Patreon, and you're kind of moving that over, but like, is it how what's what is the membership? What does that include?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so the membership is going to be all my videos ad-free, all my templates, all my live trainings, and current, and all my courses. So kind of the hub for like everything's gonna live here and be available to anyone who has a subscription. And the subscription is gonna be $45 a month or $450 a year.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. Are you still gonna sell all the courses separately as well?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of um writers out there who like they just buy the courses because they're at that stage of publishing and they're like, oh well, I need to, I'm at the stage where I need to write a book description, I need to format. And so they, you know, go to the course for that specific need. Um, there's also an opportunity for me to sell the courses as uh single products within my membership. So I'm gonna be doing that as well.

SPEAKER_00

How do you mean? I thought they were all included in the membership.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, they are included. But if you I'm using the platform UScreen. So in UScreen, if you go to somebody's membership site and you see all their catalog of stuff and you're like, well, I don't want to subscribe, but I do want this one program. Like you can buy that one program and then you're forever like in the system as like you're a member, but you're not paying the monthly subscription. It is cost effective to just get a monthly subscription.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, but it's not everybody wants to, right? And it's like I think it's really important to have both because I think a lot of people, a lot of course creators are quite romantically attached to the idea of a membership because they're like, it's just simpler.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And it's like, oh, I just it's simpler and I have recurring revenue and that's coming in every month, even if I'm not doing anything that month. And that's true, right? That's all that's all true. But you've also got to look at it from the customer's point of view. And some people look at it and they go, Oh, this is great value. I'm paying my $45 a month, I can get access to everything. And other people are like, I know it's gonna take me a year to go through this one course, but I want to get it now. Why do I need to pay for a year's like for me, $450 is too much because actually I could buy the course for whatever, $200, let's say. Um and and I want to have access to it forever. So it's like, okay, well, let people buy however they want to buy, right? You know, it's like some like if you go to your TV, you can you can pay for whatever Netflix or or Disney Plus or what have you, or you can go buy a movie from Amazon Prime or somewhere else. It's like, let people buy however they want to buy. That's all fine. Let's just, you know, make it easy for people.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00

Um and I think so many people just don't. They just have one or the other, and it's like, no, why not? Why not have both?

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_00

Um, so what what do you know what kind of the average amount of time someone sticks around in your membership for?

SPEAKER_01

You know, I wish I had that stat off the top of my head, but I don't know. No worries. Um because right now the membership's still like the new platform is under construction still. So yeah. Basically teachable and Patreon. And I honestly could could look at those churn rates more often. Um I I do find that each month there is like an equal amount of people who drop off and join. So the churn rate, even though even though there are people leaving all the time and canceling all the time, there are new people coming in so that it kind of balances it out.

SPEAKER_00

Do you do promos for the membership, like as in, you know, like a discount every so often or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so I'm actually setting up a few discounts at the moment. One is for like sort of my founding members who will be my current Patreon users, and I want to bring them sort of into the new membership in a way that just is as frictionless as possible because it is a bigger ticket ask. Currently in Patreon, the highest anyone's paying is $17 a month. So it's a bit of a jump to the to the membership, but there's a lot more value included there. Um also offering a discount for anyone who pre-orders my book. So I'm gonna be hosting a write virtual writing retreat, which is something I do every year inside of the membership in July. And basically, if you pre order make your story matter, you get a code to get 30 days free of my membership. So that funnel is sort of something that's in progress right now. But I'm gonna set it up so that anyone who pre orders the book basically gets into my virtual writing retreat event for free and gets into the ecosystem of my. Membership.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. I think this is another part of the reason why I'm such a big fan of having courses and membership. Is if you're doing if you do promotions for membership, it's like, how often can you do it? Like every three months, right? Of like not mentioning to people you've got it, but like doing a discount on it. If you do a discount on a membership every month, then people are like, well, I just wait till next month and there's no urgency anymore. Whereas if it's every three months, every six months, and it's like, oh, okay, this is a big deal. I should sign up now rather than waiting till later. So it's like you need something to promote in the months in between. You know, like like our our model is we normally do like a promotion every month of people. Sometimes two in a month, but like normally what normally one promotion a month with a discount, and that's like it drives a big load of sales. And you can't do that every month through the membership, but you can do it every month if you promote different courses because you've got a different angle that you're kind of you know hitting them with.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_00

What's the um do you do you know how many people are joining each month in your in your mem in the Patreon or the membership at the moment?

SPEAKER_01

In Patreon at the moment, I don't have those numbers off the top of my head. Okay, no worries, no worries. Yeah, I it I know that it is like balancing itself out every month. So if there is churn, but there are new people always joining because of the because of the new live trainings. Like what you're saying about promoting each month, like that's kind of my excuse to promote. Well, that's nice. I like that. Oh, there's this new event and it's happening inside here. And by the way, when you join, you get 50 plus hours of previous live trainings and you like unlock the archive vault. So I have new people coming in each month for that. So even when they turn and they drop off, like I have a whole new group of people coming in each month. Um, and I have about 1200 to 1300 people in Patreon in total. So I know that it's like, you know, it's it's stays around the same like revenue level each month. So I I know it's because like I get to talk about it each month. And I'm gonna do the same thing with my membership because new events, live events, exclusive content, like all of that, all those things are great excuses to like talk about it and keep it feeling fresh and new.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's nice. Having like having a reason why you should talk about that right now with the with the live event. Right. So people really like that. Do existing members come along and attend the live uh trainings a lot? Because they can access like all of these past ones, right? They could go and watch any of them as videos, but like this one's live. How much of a difference does does that make for them?

SPEAKER_01

Honestly, I think it does make a big difference, especially since I have a QA segment at the end of each um session, so they kind of get the chance to ask me questions live, which is also a a good appeal to them. But yeah, I I it's interesting to me. I have about like 500 people in Patreon at that tier level, and usually only get like 80 to 100 people on the live. So it's it's a good percentage, but it's like not not everyone is taking advantage of it. There's like a lot of like people who are sleeping on their membership. Um, but yeah, just just putting it out there and having um an excuse to talk about something new, a new event, um, definitely pulls new people into it and and kind of allows

Promotion As Service, Not Self-Interest

SPEAKER_01

me to spread the word about the exclusive content I offer to people who have no idea that I offer it. And a lot of times that's the that's the problem. Like that's the sticking point of like if you're not making sales, you're not seeing conversions, it's like, do people even know what you're offering? Are you talking about it enough?

SPEAKER_00

Most course creators are not. I can attest. This is like so the standard model is you know, YouTuber who is passionate about teaching something, people say to them, Can you please make a course on this? They make the course, uh, they have courses available, um, but they don't like promoting and they don't like telling everybody about it. And so like that's that's a lot of people. Uh I I see you. If you're listening right now and you're like, oh yeah, that's me. I see you. This is like, it's okay, but we can do something about this. We can make you richer.

SPEAKER_01

I like to re-thrame it too in my mind, because like I know so many people who hate self-promotion. They're like, oh, it makes me feel gross. But it's like if you think, if you reframe it, like you created something that's gonna solve somebody's problem, and they're gonna be so glad and like grateful to you that they get to experience and learn from you. Like they get they get to have this special thing that's gonna solve a problem in their life. Like you're making their life easier. Like if you reframe it like that, I think it's a lot easier to promote because it's something that you're actually excited about. You're excited, you were excited enough about it to spend thousands of hours putting this course together. Like it's gonna genuinely help somebody's life.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's a service, right? It's like the whole point of this, the whole reason why you made these courses was to help people who had a specific problem. And if people have that problem, but you don't mention to them at all that you have a course that solves that problem. It's like, how's that the right thing to do? It's like you have to tell people about these things.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, exactly. And I think people maybe get a little bit shy of asking for money for what they offer, especially if they are also offering free content. Like I I have, you know, occasionally comments from people who are like, why isn't this available for free? But the uh the overwhelming majority are happy to pay for my paid offerings because they see the value in it. And if you think about it from like your own perspective, would you be willing to pay for a service or product or course from somebody else who is who you respect and admire? And this course or program is genuinely going to help improve your life, you're like, of course I'm willing to pay for that.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So online courses are sorry, gone.

SPEAKER_01

No, I was just gonna say like it shouldn't, it shouldn't be um anything that you're shy of like asking for money for.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and like online courses are so cheap.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Like in terms of absolute amount of money, it's like, you know, $45 a month. There's like, this is not a lot of money. We're not, you know, we're not asking someone to remortgage their house. This is just like it's just like part of the reason why I'm so obsessed with helping people sell courses is because I got so much value out of taking courses myself. There's a uh friend of mine, Taylor Pearson, super smart dude, like to the point where you're like, man, why do I even bother? You know, like so much smarter than me that I'm like, well, okay. Let me just go ask Taylor what he thinks about it. But he made a course about productivity, and it was so well thought through, and it was so um self-evidently true and clearer than all of my thinking on the topic, and it helped me so much, and I think I paid him like, I don't know, hundred, hundred and fifty dollars to get this course. And it was just like, you know, life-changing. It meant everything I did from then on was like uh more in line with my vision of who I was as a person, with my vision of what I wanted my life to be like. I was not spending time on tasks that were uh uh interesting and useful but didn't actually fit with how I wanted my life to be. It's like helped me to get clearer about who I wanted to be as a person. It's like, oh my god, just completely life changed. And it's like 150 bucks. I saw him the other day, and he's just he just uh spent the last, I don't know, five years running a hedge fund. And um then he sold his portion of it to his business partner and he was saying he might start up uh writing again and making courses. If anybody wants to go check him out, Taylor's Taylor's absolutely brilliant. I think it's Taylor Pearson.me. Uh Taylor T A T-A-Y-L-O-R Pearson P-E-A-R-S-O-N. Uh yeah, Taylor Pearson.me. Um brilliant writer about all kinds of topics, but particularly about business. And uh he was like, I'm I'm thinking I might go back to making, you know, writing and making courses because I love doing that. And I was like, oh, that would be great. Like whatever you come out with, I really can't wait to see what it's going to be. And it's like the idea of being able to take this incredibly smart person who I'm like blessed to know, and and get all like he'd spent so much time, hundreds of hours, trying to take a complicated topic, boil it down into something straightforward and simple, and then share that online. And I can get that for $150. And I'm like, what? This is ridiculous. I can learn everything that Abby knows about writing for $45 a month.

SPEAKER_01

What? Right. Exactly. It's like it's such a small ask, really, especially when you think about how much people spend on education, like going to university, going to college, like when you compare it to that, it's like this this is education. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I think university is a terrible, terrible waste of money. And I'm in the UK. We didn't I didn't even pay for it, but I was just like, I still spent three years on, you know, studying, studying hard to learn stuff that I was just like, what was it? Was it useful? I don't know. I've never used any of it since. So like, what was the purpose of that? So anyway.

Lead Magnets, Quizzes, Email Growth

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Talk to me about your email list. Because I'm fascinated by this. You told me that you're getting 700 subscribers a month, but your email list is 91,000 people. The maths doesn't I don't understand the maths on that one because that would mean you'd have to have done that number of subscribers every month for 13 years, and you started YouTube seven years ago. So where else are you getting how did you used to get more people on your email list per month? Or is it like what's what's kind of going on?

SPEAKER_01

It's gone up and down. So there at the beginning, it was slow, very slow going. Like I had a blog. Uh-huh. This was probably over 10 years ago. I had a blog, I talked about writing, I talked about productivity. Um, and basically it was just like a lifestyle blog. And I talked about writing, but it wasn't my main thing. Um and in that, in that blog, I would give out like freebies, like templates and handouts of different kinds. And that was basically my way of getting people on my email list. So it was like slow growing at the beginning. And then as I built my YouTube channel, I started offering other freebies and printables and templates and everything. I was like, every video I made, I'm like, can I make like some sort of printable or handout and like make this a lead magnet? Like even if it made didn't make sense necessarily, like I don't have an idea for one, like I would come up with an idea for one, make it create a lead magnet.

SPEAKER_00

Um so that So you were doing one lead magnet for each video at the time.

SPEAKER_01

I don't think it was for each one, but it was like I was challenging myself to like do as many as I could. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So most of them, yes. Um, and that that helped to grow the list. Um and just having those links, like having those lead magnet links in all my videos, even I'm still getting like signups from like videos I posted like five years ago, just because people are finding these templates um and wanting to get them for free. So that was like my original plan for growing the list. And then as I started just offering other things, I was able to grow it more with different offerings. Um, and then with selling templates on my website, I now was able to pull website customer emails. I pulled my teachable student emails, um, and also like offering just anything that was like, okay, this is here's a free thing I can give away that I want to get a lead magnet for. Um, so that was basically my strategy. And then certain certain peaks will happen like throughout the course of that. A past, I think it was like three months ago, I posted a video that was like, what um author archetype are you? And I basically like created seven archetype ideas based off of Young's character archetypes, and they were all authors. Like, how does this look as an author? And I built a quiz to go with that. And through the quiz, I was able to get like a thousand new email subscribers just from that one video. So there's been like moments that I'm like, okay, there's an opportunity to get more subscribers. So there's like peaks throughout the history of that. So it wasn't like consistently 700 a month for for however many years, but it has grown to the point where last or the last few months was like 700 a month.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, okay, gotcha. So I I need to have a look into it and I'll I'll have a look after um after we get off the call. But like I'm typically seeing the Oh, do you know how many? I know you got nearly 600,000 subscribers. Do you know how many views you get a month?

SPEAKER_01

Uh average of 1.2 million per month.

SPEAKER_00

Nice.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So it's great. From what what I've seen across nearly all niches, nearly everybody can get about, if you set everything up right, about 1% of views per month as opt-ins, which would mean at 1.2 million views a month. Is that long form or what is that a long form plus short form?

SPEAKER_01

I think it's everything.

SPEAKER_00

Everything, okay, cool. So uh of long form views, about one one percent, sometimes two percent. So that might mean like 5,000 opt-ins a month. So I'm gonna have a look and send you through some info afterwards because I feel like you're there must be something missing. Because you're doing lead magnets, you've come up with lots of lead magnets, you're promoting them. It's like, so why is it 700? I'm gonna have a little look and see if I can spot like what might be going on.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like if you've got the email list. Way bigger.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah. 91,000's a lot of people, right? But it's like more is better. Yeah, yeah.

unknown

For sure.

SPEAKER_00

We had someone we worked with once. Teal Swan. Do you know who that is? No. She's like a spiritual guru type, and she's like uh teachers courses about um self-development, relationships, this kind of thing. And we'd helped her, she was getting like a hundred opt-ins a week. So what's it four hundred a month? She'd gone up to we've got it up to like five thousand a week across all her platforms, so twenty thousand a month. And it's just like sometimes there's just this massive, I think she what she was doing less than what you're already doing. So I don't think there's that much uh potential, but it's like there's sometimes this massive untapped potential if you make some tweaks in terms of like increasing the opt-ins, and it just changes the business. You know, like if if you just got like twice as many people opting in, it just changes the business. Do you do a lot of email promotions out to you? You mentioned earlier that you were promoting your your book through the email list. Do you promote like the membership and the courses and that kind of thing through that?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. So I every week when I put out a new video, I use my email list to promote that. I promote every live stream I do. I do like weekly write with me live streams as well on my channel for free. Um and then of course my monthly live trainings and promoting the courses as well. Honestly, I could be promoting my courses more. Full disclaimer, like I I need to find more excuses to talk about them because I do feel like they kind of sit dormant, and their main um, their main source of of traffic is from those original videos that are pitching them. So yeah, I think I could I could use the email list more for actual course promotion. But yeah, as far as like all my new content, all my new offerings, like I'm constantly like just using the email list mostly for that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It's really interesting. You mentioned about like finding an excuse. I think that's I know we've done a lot of testing. The hook, the the reason why you are talking about this course right now is like one of the most important things about doing a promotion. And I think it's for a couple of reasons. One, you need the audience to be like, have some reason to be interested in hearing the promotion. Some people are just like, I know I have this problem, I know I need a solution, oh my god, you've got something available and it's for sale, great. But then there's a whole lot of other people who are like, their life is busy, right? You know, they have kids and they have a job and their uh shoulder hurts and they've got to try and organize the choir that they're taking part in, or what, you know, they've got a thousand other things going on. And yes, they are working on their book and they know they kind of have thought about, yeah, I should work on my blurb or whatever it is, right? But it's not top of mind for them. It's not like really clear in their head why they should be thinking about this right now. And so that process of like bringing that to life and getting that really clear, it really helps them to pay attention to why they should listen to what modules you've got and what the bonuses are and and everything else in your course. But I think the other reason is for yourself. Like if you have a really clear reason why you are talking about this at the moment, it makes it like easier to get round to doing the promotion. And so we've done like sometimes we'll do things as like a like we're always looking for what's the angle, what's the reason, what's the why are we talking about this right now? And there's a there's a bunch of different ways of doing it. One of the ones that I like that's the simplest is just to look at your audience surveys and go, what problem have they told me that they have? What thing are they struggling with? What are the what is bothering them? And then read through like the survey answers that are about that particular topic and find the if you can read someone's actual words and you get really clear on how much pain you can see how much pain they're in, and you're like, I could solve this, I could solve this for you. Then it's like, okay, we need to, we okay, I've got some urgency for myself. We need to like get this out there because people have actually got this, they need to get this problem solved. And they're not nearly as clear as you on the di on the connection between the issue that they've got and how this course is going to actually solve that. They're nowhere, they're like a a fiftieth as clear as you are as to the fact that they need that. They'll be much more vague and like, you know, um, I just got this fear that nobody's going to ever read this book, even if I spent all this time writing it, or something like that, right? And it's like, well, okay, I know how to solve that, but that's that's they're at like a a fear level, whereas you kind of can then translate that in your head easily probably into, right, so this is the actual problem, and then this is why this this is the solution, and this is why this is the solution. So that's one kind of angle. But sometimes we'll do other stuff like what's going on in the news at the moment, you know, like what's happening in the world, what's what's giant book releases just happened that you might be thinking about, or we did some stuff once about when the Olympics was going on, we're like, okay, let's hook this into this topic that's going on in the world and then tie that back to the particular course that we're promoting at the time. And having that as like the the model that we use is we'll do three emails that are just warm up. So we'll do no promotion at all. We're not even talking about the course, but we're just talking about the problem that the course will solve and then helping people to solve it. So the model is uh problem agitation solution. So that's one week, three emails. And the problem one will be bringing the problem to life for people, really getting it clear in their heads. The agitation one is showing them how can how is this problem actually affecting your life in a bigger way that you might not be able to see because you're too close to the problem. And then the solution one is giving them a solution to it, giving them like a tip, a thing they can do in like 15 minutes that means that the their life will be better right now. And then you can lead into, and if you want to solve this problem properly, next week we've got a course on sale. I'm gonna talk about that next week. And all of that gets people thinking, oh, yes, I do need to solve this problem. I do trust Abby. Abby knows lots about this. Uh, this is so helpful. Gives them, you know, even if they never buy from you, then it gives them some useful tip in one in week one, and then you can lead into right now. Well, let's actually talk about the course and why you should get this and and what the benefits are gonna be. So um I'll send you through details afterwards of like what's the what's the structure of that because it's kind of a useful um yeah uh uh model for it as well. But like I think that sorry, I've gone off on a full a full rant there, but like that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01

I love that.

SPEAKER_00

I think that that you you know, it just brought came up because you mentioned like, you know, having a reason to talk about it. And you kind of feel, I think, from what I'm hearing from you at least, you feel like you've got that when it's a live thing, or you're launching something new and you're not feeling it as much when it's like, well, I made this course two years ago. Right. And it's like, but but this, you know, it's still it's still just as good as it was two years ago. You've still got a there is a good reason to promote it, it's because people have that problem and they can they could do with your help, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Yeah, exactly. That's so true.

Picking Training Topics And Final Links

SPEAKER_00

The stuff that you're doing in your your monthly trainings, are you going back through old like how long have you done those for? And like are you finding you're running out of topics to talk about as another training? Like, is it like little bits from in your like how are you figuring out what you're gonna cover that month?

SPEAKER_01

Um, so I've been doing it for about five years, and yeah, I sometimes do feel like, oh my gosh, what am I gonna talk about this month? I talk about everything. But there's like always something new to talk about with writing. Um, so I usually look to what is what is something that I could make a short form video about. And by short form I mean a long form, like you know, a 15-20 minute video about. And usually I do that part first. So maybe it's about like how to write a compelling villain or how to um write character voice better, or the even like a ranty video, like the the character traits I can't stand about modern female characters. And then in that video, I'll think like, okay, what is some aspect of this topic that I could expand upon for 45 minutes? Um I want to be able to naturally plug in a pitch for the live training inside that video, usually like a mid-roll piece that I talk about the upcoming live training. Like, if you want to go deeper, we're gonna have this training this weekend, and here's everything that we're gonna learn. And yeah, usually it starts with starts with the small idea, and then I think, okay, how can I expand on that? How is there like an element of this that we can sort of crack open and talk about in more depth? So usually it comes from like the YouTube video idea first.

SPEAKER_00

So then you record that video that month to promote that month's training. Is that right? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

And usually the presentation isn't even built at the time. It's like I'm I'm selling tickets to it basically, but it's it's not even made yet. And then I'll go make a presentation in Canva. And at this point, I just kind of add lib as I go through my presentation slides. Um, so I don't have a lot of notes, but yeah, usually just like kind of expanding off of what people already were interested enough to click on and learn from in the YouTube video.

SPEAKER_00

Makes sense. Abby, this is great. I love this. This sounds fantastic. Um if someone's been listening to this and they're like, I want to know more about storytelling, I want to write a book, can you can you plug your stuff, your your website, your YouTube channel, all those kind of things?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, absolutely. So if you want to start diving into this whole world, I would recommend for starting with my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/slash Abby Emmons. You can also find me on my website, which is abbeyemonsauthor.com. And if you want to check out my new book, go to make your story matter.com. That is um the website for my new book. So you can pre-order your copy. There's lots of fun bonus goodies that come along with that. Um, yeah, but really exciting stuff coming down the line.

SPEAKER_00

Beautiful. If you have been listening to this and you want to um you were interested in what I was saying about the email promotions and like the structure of that, I've got some templates for that. You can go to datadrivenmarketing.co slash resources, and I've got uh it's called two secret high performing email templates. It gives a breakdown of that. And um we've also got some podcast episodes on the topic as well. Actually, I'm gonna find a couple of the uh the best ones on that email promotion. Um oh, you should check out episode 28, how to overcome the fear of sending email promotions, which is a great one. And then let me find another one, this would be really good. Um, episode 180. Oh, I two times revenue in 90 days with these emails. And I went through this with Dominic, and we went through and kind of explained the most common issues people have and what to do about it. As always, thank you so much for listening. Really, really appreciate you guys. If you need anything, just drop me an email, John at datadrivenmarketing.co. And Abby, thanks again for coming on. This was absolutely fantastic.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much, John. It was wonderful. I've learned a lot, and I'm so glad we got to have this conversation.