The Art of Selling Online Courses

261 How AI Is Crushing YouTube Traffic

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 261

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There's a guitar teacher in Colombia who has nearly 600,000 YouTube subscribers, has taught over 70,000 students, and is personally answering WhatsApp messages from every new student himself. And that last part is completely intentional.

I sat down with Miguel Martinez, founder of ClasesDeGuitarra.com.co, to talk about what's actually happening to online course businesses right now, especially in the education space. Miguel has been doing this since 2012 and he's seen a lot change, but nothing like the last 12 months. YouTube reach for his channel has dropped to around 500 views in the first 48 hours of posting. The same video on Facebook? 20,000 to 30,000 views. So he adapted.

What I found really refreshing about Miguel is his philosophy around AI. Instead of trying to automate everything, he's doing the opposite. Weekly live classes, personal WhatsApp replies, a lean email list he cleans every three months so only engaged readers stay on it. He genuinely believes the answer to AI is to be more human, and he's building his entire business around that idea.

We also got into TikTok, which is working for him in ways most course creators never figure out, including a smart insight about why you won't see TikTok showing up in your referral analytics even when it's driving real traffic.

Miguel's market is Latin America, his courses top out at $79, and he's making this work on his own terms. It's a really different perspective from most guests we have on, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time.

Hope you enjoy it.

Check out Miguel's work:
🌐 https://clasesdeguitarra.com.co/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/clasesdeguitarracomco/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/clasesdeguitarracomco

AI And The YouTube Reach Crash

SPEAKER_01

Now the reach at YouTube it's terrible. If I post a video right now in 48 hours, it can get 500 videos. Channel my size. That's all the same video. Same video. 48 hours. Facebook 8000, 2000. Education channel and YouTube is really really bad times right now because of AI. I mean it's love to know people go to AI, ask the question, do not have to watch a video anymore. To go ask to get your answer and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00

You got what you wanted. What's the kind of the goal for you? Where do you want to get to the business in the next 12 months?

SPEAKER_01

Honestly, John, survive AI. I believe that the best way to fight it is to be more human.

Meet Miguel Martin And His School

SPEAKER_00

Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to win top performance in the online course industry. My name is John, and today's guest is Miguel Martin. Now, Miguel is a music educator and author for both artists, currently based in prayer funding, the founder of Fastestegitarra.com.co, which is an online music education platform created in 2012. He's got more than 30 years of teaching experience. He started at the age of 15. He pursued university studies and music with an emphasis on composition and musical arrangement. He's dedicated much of his career to designing comprehensive academic programs, both to Music Academy and his own educational project. He's the author of 11 music education books and the creator of online educational programs with a depth comparable to university level academic curriculum. He's also directed an educational YouTube channel with nearly 600,000 subscribers focused exclusively on music education and guitar technique. Miguel, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here. So you started teaching at 15. That's amazing, man. That's uh how come you started so young?

SPEAKER_01

Uh I'm just a bit curious about music all my life. So I started starting very young, and some of my friends wanted to learn to play instruments, so okay, I can teach you. And that's the way I started. And it became, you know, the mouth-to-mouth marketing. Yeah. And okay, he's a good, is he's extremely young, but he's a great teacher, so you can learn with him, and it's just started to grow. And nowadays I still do it. It's it's it's incredible. It's been my entire life teaching guitar.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. And who is it you're helping with your courses? Is it focused on beginners? Is it the whole way through, no matter what level they're at? Who are you kind of focusing on? Everyone. Uh obviously I get a lot of beginners.

SPEAKER_01

That's the main market. But I also get a lot of advanced guitar players who want to learn uh jazz, blues, uh, different kinds of styles, improvisation. Um I got uh

Teaching Theory So Guitarists Understand

SPEAKER_01

got all kinds of people, all kinds of levels.

SPEAKER_00

And what kind of problem are you solving for them? Are there certain aspects of guitar that you're particularly focused on?

SPEAKER_01

For what I for my my experience, uh I noticed that uh music, especially, it's an area where you can play an instrument without not knowing anything about music. And it's pretty funny, you know. You can play guitar, you can play all some songs, but you don't even know what chords are you playing. So a lot of people, most of the people have a lack on the part of music theory. They don't know anything about music. So that's one of my own strengths. So people always search me for that. For to learn music theory to understand what they are playing, and maybe in time start writing their own their own songs.

Weekly Live Classes And Real Support

SPEAKER_00

I know one of the things that you're really focused on is like helping people actually finish the course and learn what it is you're teaching. Now, I was reading through your sales pages, and it said that you hold weekly live classes to answer questions and provide personalized feedback. Is that is that right? Was that actually included in all of those?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, that's that's included. It's an amazing it's it's just I I love teaching. So for me it's it's not working. I just love it. So I decided to open a one-hour spot Saturday it's morning, uh, to get uh we created a um private group on Facebook, sorry. And we get the lessons there, we do we do the lessons there, one hour a week. And a lot of people get into the lessons. Uh you have the uh the ones that always get connected to the lessons that are always there, you know, they're good they're gonna be there. And the new ones, and we have a great time. We discuss music, we discuss guitar, we talk about many issues, some of it uh of the stuff we have in the courses, and yeah, it is working really really well. How many people do you tend to get turning up for that? 15, 20, 25 people. It's not but it wor it works. I actually uh I did it uh something I started like seven months ago, and I did it because with those with all this AI we have right now, the best way uh I believe that the best way to fight it is to be more human. So I want my students to have a direct chat with me, to see me like we're we are right now. That kind of stuff, like humanize the school. Instead of going all digital, automatic. No, I want it to be more humanized. Even right now, I'm answering all the questions I got on WhatsApp from from new students like myself. I do it. So I want them to have a real connection with me.

SPEAKER_02

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01

Not chatbot, not anything automatic.

SPEAKER_00

I think there's something there, but I've been talking to a lot of people on the podcast recently about like what's your plan for dealing with AI? Is it like how are you using it to your advantage or how are you using, you know, what are you doing to like distinguish yourself from any different AI options? And a lot of people have been talking about um community and like group coaching sessions, like you're talking about with your your weekly session and like things that you just can't do with AI that's to do with people. So I really like that. Have you found like have you noticed a difference from that? Or is that more of like kind of a philosophy that you've got that's that you're gonna do, you know, no matter the results?

SPEAKER_01

Just that um music right now is having a huge deal with AI. You know, you can make a song like in 30 seconds, uh something like a composer, songwriter will take a week to do. So we have to make things different, we have to make things more human. That's something I strongly believe. If you see even a great artist, a great advance, uh Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson, the singer, he actually recorded a record uh month ago and he said we're completely anti-AI.

SPEAKER_02

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01

We did it ourselves, we recorded live the record, that's something that's not done. That's not common. We recorded the record ourselves, live, and you can see the tempo sometimes goes up, goes down. It's human. And it's something I strongly believe. We have to fight AI that way, be more human.

University-Level Courses Plus Companion Books

SPEAKER_00

One of the things, if I understood right, that you said is that your courses are built with a depth of university level academic curricula. What does that look like in practice? What is that different? How is that different to a normal online course?

SPEAKER_01

One of the things that really makes it different, it's that most of the guitar course you see uh and do anywhere, it's I'm gonna teach you to play this song and that song and another song. On my guitar courses and and are really successful, that's the weird thing. I don't teach I don't teach one song, any songs. I don't teach you to play, to play songs. I teach you to understand music, to understand the guitar. So that way you wanna play a song, you go to the core charts or whatever, okay, it goes like this, and you can do it by yourself. So I always work on teaching you music, not necessarily gonna play this middle song, or nah, nah, not of that, not of that. And that's how most of the time music is taught on universities. That's the way it's done. You gotta learn a lot of theory, of course, you will have some practice, maybe you will have they will have uh they will ask you to play some songs and give the shit the shit music. Okay, you gotta prepare this for the exam, but most of the time you're learning, learning, learning resources, learning tools to play. But not necessarily you're playing songs. It's one of the main the main differences that I worked really hard to uh for my for my school, for my online school.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting. And you've also written, I know, 11 books. Like how do the books and the courses kind of connect? Do they tend to be on the same topics? Or what's the is there a relation between them?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it it it's it's it's a fun story. You know, um when I started the the online school, yeah, I decided, okay, uh, in order to make this successful, I will have to give my students something more, right? So I just I thought anyone, okay, PDF. Let's make a PDF for the course, for the companion of the course. I wrote the PDFs, organized the PDFs, and then I discovered Creative Space for Amazon from Amazon, creative space. I say, okay, let's try it and publish the book on Creative Space, but I didn't do any editing on it. So it was uh raw? That's the word. So pretty, pretty raw. Bad books, really, bad books. And they started selling and they started to become successful. I still don't understand why. So I said to myself, okay, I keep maybe I need to focus on this and really make it really professional. So I had to hire some editor, some stuff, and really start working on that books. Because I I still don't know. Don't know why. And the people who who got that books, if you look at them, you're gonna say, okay, this is a bad designed book. The contents were really good, but the design was awful. And they worked. So okay, let's get serious on this. And for I have like 15, 16 online courses on my website right now. Yeah. Eleven of them have books. It's actually have some of them here. This is the jazz guitar book for the for the guitar.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so each of the courses has a book that go or 11 of the courses have a book that go with them. Wow. It's a nice book. How do you find people use that? Like, do people tend to do more of one or the other, or do they tend to like go do people take the course and then read the book? Like, how does that how do they work together? Okay, that's that's something really interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Uh as you know, I live in Colombia. Many of my students live um in hard-to-reach places. I I don't know how to say it. Places that are really hard to get to. And the internet connection sometimes just is non-existent. Right. The main cities, yeah, they work great, medium cities work great, but we have a lot of people who live in really, really, really small cities where connection is really an issue. So for them, this works. That's one of the main markets of my books, as far as I have noticed. Yeah, and many people also uh get enrolled in the online course and they say, okay, I also want the book. I'm so happy with the course, I also want to have the book. So, okay, that's another way I I I I reached an audience, I took to monetize them. But uh for as as far as I've noticed, most of the people who get the books is people who have really uh issues, who have issues with internet connection.

SPEAKER_00

Got it. Okay, that makes sense.

Pricing And Scale In Colombia

SPEAKER_00

And can you give the listeners some idea of the size of your business, like revenue, number of students, that kind of thing that you've got at the moment?

SPEAKER_01

Okay, uh first of all, we have to understand that that I live in Colombia and you can go you cannot go to like really high ticket with your courses. Yeah. So my courses uh for the Latin American market are high ticket. But high ticket for us means $79.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

And that's $1,000, it's $100, no. Less than $100, $79. So I'm around uh this month, I have $70,000 students in my line of school, and the revenue goes around four to five thousand dollars per month. For us here in Colombia, that's a lot of money. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

You can build with that money. I got quite a few friends who've who uh have spent a bunch I've not been to Columbia, but I've got quite a few friends who spent time out there, and they say it's just a wonderful place. Yeah, like absolutely beautiful. What's the I'm trying to think the name of one of the uh the cities everyone keeps telling me about. I think where's it where the where's is a a place called the land of eternal spring? Medellin, that's it. That's where I've got a bunch of friends who lived out of Medellin. That's Colombia, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Medellin, it's uh a big city here in Colombia. It's a metropolis, so it's quite noisy and polluted. It's I live in Pereira, it's a really small city, a really, really small city, and one of the coolest things about the city is that anywhere you look, you see green. You see green everywhere. That's amazing. It's it's yeah, and the air is so pure, it's it's amazing. I really love it to live to live here.

SPEAKER_00

I was just out in Mexico City and I was there like two weeks ago, and I was just absolutely astonished by how green it is. Certain areas at least, like uh Condesa, Roma, that kind of thing. But you were just saying about the quality of the air. The the air quality there is terrible.

SPEAKER_01

It's it's not green. If you get Colombia one day, Armenia, Pereira, you're gonna see green.

SPEAKER_00

I've seen real green cities. Everywhere amazing, it's amazing. And the airport is amazing too. I'll have to go check that

Switching Traffic From YouTube To Facebook

SPEAKER_00

out then. Okay, so talk to us about you started on YouTube a long while back. Is it 2012, I think you got going? Yeah, yeah, a long time ago. What caused you to start posting on YouTube back then?

SPEAKER_01

That's also a funny story, you know? Uh when I started on social media, I started posting because I wanted to promote my lessons. I started at Facebook. And it worked, it kept working pretty well. To build a community, it's amazing. And YouTube for many years was was like my secondary social media platform. I was focused on Facebook. And the videos uh I did for Facebook was I I used it uh as at YouTube as well. The same video posted on both social media. And when the YouTube channel started growing, started growing, I changed my focus, okay, became a full YouTuber because I noticed that using the YouTube analytics that YouTube sent to my website a lot of traffic and qualified traffic. And that's where most of the people get to buy my courses. They discovered me at YouTube, joined the channel, watched a few lessons, and then went to my website. The funny thing nowadays is that it has changed again. Now YouTube, it's like in my like in my third social media. We'll discuss that later. You're gonna be surprised. And Facebook now is my number one again.

SPEAKER_00

Ah interesting. It changed. Why do you think that happened? What's what's led to that, do you think? Excuse me. Do you any have any ideas how come Facebook's gone back up again?

SPEAKER_01

Acquisition and reach. Mostly. Mostly. The YouTube algorithm has changed a lot the last year, a lot. And the AI also is hitting hard all the educational channels at YouTube. Really really, really hard. If you go to Reddit and you go to investigate a bit, you're gonna see channels complaining that they have lost 80, 70, 80% of the traffic in just one group. The education fun uh the education channel at YouTube, it's getting really, really, really is really really bad times right now because of AI. And it's logical, you know? People go to AI, ask the question, you don't have to watch a video anymore. Just to go ask, you get your your answer, and yeah, it's okay. You got what you wanted. You got you don't have don't have to watch a video again. Even music that you have to watch someone playing, we're getting hit really hard by that. And now the reach at YouTube, it's terrible. For you to have an idea. If I post a video right now on YouTube, it will get in 45 48 hours, it can get like 500 visits, 500 views for a channel my size. That low. The same video, same video, 48 hours, Facebook any thousand, 30,000 views. It's logical to have to point your own audio.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

It's it's logical. And has Facebook uh gone up in that time when YouTube went down, or is Facebook just stayed the same and it was that YouTube decreased? Just stay the same.

SPEAKER_01

Facebook just always stays the same. Same bridge, same numbers. Sometimes something explodes and goes and and then what goes again to the average.

SPEAKER_00

Always stays. And how are you promoting on Facebook? Have you got a Facebook page, a Facebook group? Like what's working for you there? Facebook page.

SPEAKER_01

Always a Facebook page, always always have a fa a Facebook page. And now, of course, uh the retention time at Facebook, it's a lot lower than at YouTube. So you have to redesign the videos. They can't be too long. You go uh at YouTube you can make a 20 minute video and people can watch it. At Facebook, that does not work anymore. You have to go five minutes for and that's long. You have to make shorter videos, but it works. The reach is amazing, and the conversion rate it's a bit hard. You have to work on it. And another funny discovery was TikTok. I I I now work in a TikTok too, and uh amazing rich. Amazing rich, also retention, not so good, but amazing rich. And people used to write a lot at at TikTok, send you messages. How do I do this? I wanna learn and that, and then you go and start the conversion process and get into the alignment school. So it's funny, TikTok is becoming really important for me right now. Uh also I hate TikTok. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it as a user.

SPEAKER_00

Uh for business, it works pretty well. Pretty good, pretty well. So so tell me again what the

Making TikTok Work With Low Retention

SPEAKER_00

process is there. Someone watches the video and then they message you, and then from that you connect them through. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Work like that. They write a message or write a comment. Uh, it's just interesting, I want to learn more. Okay, go to displays, go to my website. It's it works um as different as uh from other social media at TikTok, people like to ask and like to write, like to comment. So for me, it's now getting it's I'm getting used to wake up and see like I have three comments to answer. That's okay. Let's start the selling process. And you're doing that all personally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, as I told you, I I want to do it myself. I want them to have and and it's so funny because uh sometimes at WhatsApp, who am I talking to? You're talking to Miguel Martinez. Ah, the teacher! I can't believe it. It's amazing. I can't believe it. Sometimes I have to send in a photo. Yeah, yeah, it's me. It's me. I'm talking to you. It's amazing. It's it's it's so funny, but they really appreciate that. They really appreciate that. And after that, most of them go, no, I'm I'm gonna study with you. Tell me what's the course, tell me where how to buy it, and let's start. That's that's something that's working. It really appreciated that. It's and sometimes it's really, really, really funny. It's that's it's uh it's an honor to see you, it's an honor to be talking to you. Okay. Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_00

It's it's it's so funny sometimes.

Email List Friction And High Engagement

SPEAKER_00

So if the YouTube video views have gone down, do you know about how many view uh how many views you get a month on YouTube now? Excuse me. Do you know how many views per month you get on YouTube? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Like at the moment I like uh 60,000 per month. And that's low for a channel my size. That's low. That's really low. But uh four or five um four or five years ago, it was like two thousand views a month. Oh no, sorry, sorry, sorry. I I give the wrong number. That's weekly. That's weekly, weekly numbers. 60,000 per week. Views per week, and five or four years ago was two thousand views per week. That used to happen at my YouTube channel. Hmm. So the product has gone way low and keeps getting lower every time.

SPEAKER_00

And what's the process for someone getting onto your email list from YouTube or Facebook or TikTok?

SPEAKER_01

Okay, my YouTube list is um not as big as you would expect it to be, but I have a really high um reading rate, answer rate. I do open the messages a lot, like 670, 60, 60, 70% of the people. Yeah. So it's really high. That's because uh every week I do a cleaning. And if a person has been opened a message, uh one of a message in the on the last three months, okay, away. You're not you're not in the list anymore. The process, I also try to find the best qualified links. I'm not about uh curious people. So I have on my website three demo courses from. From one from beginners, two for intermediate players. If you want to take the course, you will have to join the mailing list. So sometimes the conversions get a bit low because of that, that creates some friction. But I do know that the people who take the demo courses and join the mailing list are highly probable to become students of the school. That's why I keep uh a small list but a really effective list. That's whatever autosign.

SPEAKER_00

And what's the so is those three courses, is that the only way that someone can get onto your email list to sign up for one of those three courses?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I've been in in this business many years now. I tried a lot of things, you know, as having a banner and depending on the mailing list to get a PDF or whatever. What I've noticed is that most of the people who joined the mailing list by that medium, by you just to get a PDF or something, they didn't read the messages that I sent them. So yeah, the number, the number look great, you know. I have 10,000 email subscribers on my mailing list, eh? Amazing. But no one is reading the messages. So it's just nonsense. Does not work. I decided, okay, let's create some friction, let's get the people that really want to learn, and the people I know that will learn and that will um open my messages. Sometimes uh when I get them out of the list, a few months later they write. Miguel, I I stopped getting your messages. Have you deleted me from your mailing list? Yes, I have. Sorry, I'm gonna put you again. So that's funny, that's how compromised they are.

SPEAKER_00

What's the process once someone's on the email list? Are you sending email promotions for your courses? Are you sending connections to your new content? Like what emails are you sending out to people?

SPEAKER_01

The follow-up sequence that most of us do, I believe. Uh welcome to the site. Here are some stuff to complement the course you're gonna take, some instructions for it. And then what I look or what I search or for for the people who join is to try to contact me directly to be more human. So are you stuck? Uh the second email is how you're doing with the online course. Have you already started? Did you have any questions? And the third email, it's something like tell me what do you want to learn? How can I guide you for the things you want to learn? Because I have a lot of material, not just uh not just on the online school, and also have a YouTube channel, Facebook, TikTok. So tell me what you want to learn. And the fourth one is more like having any issues, things you technical issues you can play any, and you having troubles with a chord, with a scale, whatever. How can I help you? That's what I'm I'm always looking for. You see, there's no promo no promotion there. There is no promotion. I wanted to talk to me and let me become the teacher. And every 15th of the month, I do a promotion on my website and they'd get an email. Right now, I'm uh this week we have a promotion running on the web at the website. And they get that they get they get the email and usually works pretty well.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. Okay, so you send one email to the list about the the promotion? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

It's it's it is it but it's not on the on the follow-up. It's just uh the 15th of every month. I just send I do a promotion on my site. It's uh I an email. Ah, and of course, sorry. Uh every every every Monday, they get a message, a general message. Well, they have they can see my courses, they can see my books, but the the core of the message is five lessons or four or five lessons that I have on my blog that I want to share with them. Because you have here lessons about chords, about scales, about music theory, about guitars, about gear. And that's uh that's why they open. They find they find really useful information on it, on the messages.

SPEAKER_00

Nice.

SEO Systems To Survive AI Shifts

SPEAKER_00

Nice. And then what's the kind of the goal for you? Where do you want to get to with the business in the next 12 months?

SPEAKER_01

Honestly, John, to be honest with you, uh survive AI. That's been really, really, really hard. It's it's for me, it's unbelievable how much the business has changed during this past 12 months. It's it's amazing. It's it's absurd. It has changed so much, it forced me to do many things to optimize many things on my blog, on my website. My YouTube channel, for example, right now it's a SEO machine, a perfect SEO machine. I have like a thousand videos and I did the optimization of the thousand of each each one of them of the videos for CEO. And start making links, interlinks between the videos, something to keep it working by organic, organic and by search mostly. But I had to do a lot of things this year because the business is changing and it's changing. Well, it's really extremely hard. So I will say for the last uh 12 months, my expectation just to survive AI, and I think that at the moment I am doing it quite well. I think this is not the moment to think about growing. It's just like try to survive this because try to understand how people are now uh using the content and how to convert them to your to your students. It has changed a lot. And as I told you, you can check on radio, check as uh in many many forums, and you will see that people are complaining about that. The traffic for most of uh social media has gone really, really low for educators.

SPEAKER_00

You mentioned earlier that that a lot of your say or most of your sales were to people in Colombia. Do you find you sell to many other people in in Latin America or other Spanish-speaking countries, or is it like really like nearly all of them from Colombia?

SPEAKER_01

The um if I go, you know, to to to uh to to make a ranking, you will go Mexico. So I have those students are Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Spain. Spain, okay. That's like the top five. Um funny thing, have students from Japan. Wow. I didn't know, but uh Japanese people, some of them love Spanish. Love Spanish as a language. So they use the um the guitar courses to force them to learn more Spanish. So they have a lot of Japan.

SPEAKER_00

That's uh that's that's just really, really, really, really funny. I've been uh I haven't uh worked on any of my languages in years, and uh my girlfriend is German, and I've been trying to I've been thinking about like starting watching a German TV show so that I can practice my German. I was watching something the other day and I was like, oh my German's really bad. I could understand like a third of what they were saying, something like that. And I was like, but I think I know enough that if I watch something simple, no, like maybe a cartoon or something, just really basic, then I could use that to kind of improve my German and uh and get better that way. So that's really interesting to hear that people are learning they're learning guitar in order to learn Spanish. That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01

What happens a lot uh with Brazil? You know, Portuguese and Spanish are are are really really similar. So I do have a lot of a lot of students from Brazil. And it's funny because when they get the they write answers on the site forum, I I go like, what? It's amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing to see that you can reach people so far away as Japan.

SPEAKER_00

It's incredible. That's beautiful, isn't it? I love that.

Tracking TikTok And Sharing Final Links

SPEAKER_00

What's um what's working for you with TikTok that's different to what works with like YouTube or Facebook? How's the how are they similar? How are they different?

SPEAKER_01

TikTok is weird. Uh it's it's it's a weird platform. And it can deceive you, even if it's the world, because sometimes when you go, you post a TikTok, a TikTok, as they call it, you post a TikTok, and you go see uh the numbers, and you get to see like you have 10,000 views, and you go, hey, 10,000 views in 24 hours, and you go to the retention time, 1%. Oh, right, yeah. Oh, okay. This is not working. Yeah. Because uh TikTok counts every scroll as a view. Right, right. So the algorithm shows you that's a view, even if they don't watch the video. So it's um it's really hard to work at you uh at TikTok because of that. Retention times are extremely, extremely bad. But the rich it's enormous. Right. The rich at TikTok is amazing. So you can reach many, many, many people, and I do believe that if they keep seeing you every day, sometimes they're gonna stop or I don't know, erase you if they can, or maybe stop and watch what you're talking about. Yeah. And that's uh the way I started with TikTok, it was it was uh really funny. I also have an Instagram account with from my school. That one just does not work at all. It does does not move at all. Uh Instagram is not the best place for educational videos. But I had like 300 videos at Instagram, so I started to do some recycling. I'm gonna use that and post it at TikTok, a video from three, four years ago. Gonna post this one, okay, this one at TikTok. Start posting at TikTok. And without noticing, TikTok just started. I'm I'm about to reach 20,000 followers at TikTok. So it it just keeps growing, keep growing, keep growing. And and because I I I used all the material that I had, all the old material, and start publishing. Publish it at TikTok and really start growing. So you can see that the reach, it's really, really, really, really amazing, but it's hard to get good retention times. So the CDAs, you will have to put in almost at the at the beginning of the video because you know not many people gonna watch them. But the people who watch the videos, maybe that one, two, three, four percent, they like to comment and to write, to send you personal messages.

SPEAKER_02

They like to package it.

SPEAKER_01

That's how I discovered that okay, it works. Some uh in on its own way, TikTok works.

SPEAKER_00

And is that what you do in terms of the the call to action in the video? Is to to ask them to comment or write to you, or do you promote lead magnets or your courses, or what do you do? They do it by themselves. That's the funny thing.

SPEAKER_01

I I don't have to ask them, they ask me your number, they just watch the video and hey, I love this. How do I uh learn more of something? They do it by themselves. When I use a CDA, a call to action, sometimes it's like uh go check my my online school. You wanna learn more, you are serious about learning guitar, go to classes.com.co. That's the main CDA, and I just say it at the start of the video or the half of the video. So I know that on TikTok, especially the retention times are extremely low. Yeah. You have to put that. If you wanted to see that to see it, you have to put to put it really early on the video.

SPEAKER_00

As very few people who I've met, very few course creators who are successfully using TikTok. So it's really interesting to hear how well that's doing for you. There was one person we did have on the podcast. I'm gonna try and find the um the episode number if I can. And she was selling a course about something, it was something interesting. I can't find the episode number now. Um it was something, I think, about how to become a a copy editor or something, something along those kind of lines. I forget for definite. But she was helping like people who were to kind of to get out of out of a normal job into doing this like online work. And she shared it on TikTok and it did really well, and then she shared it and then she kind of started promoting it more heavily, and it did uh that did great for her. She was doing like sixty thousand dollars a month from TikTok.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

Nearly everybody else I've ever met has said I've tried TikTok, but it gets me views, but it doesn't get me sales. And so it's really interesting hearing it's working for the other only other person I've I've talked to who said it was working was um teaching banjo. So another another music creator, and he was telling me it was working. I'll have to check back in with him as well and see how it's if it's still working.

SPEAKER_01

What you have to keep in mind is if you use TikTok, you use Google Analytics, for example, the conversion or the traffic, it's not referred for TikTok or as TikTok. It's not referred. Why? Because TikTok has a really strict and really, really, really, really strict. Uh it's really strict about um how do you call them? Links, HTMLs, hyperlinks, hyperlinks, hyperlinks. It just does not allow any kind of hyperlinks on your post. It will block them. So uh no distribution for the product for the post. So that means that if you go to analytics sometimes and you go you you won't find anything related to TikTok because no one is getting from TikTok to your website. But as far as I have noticed, I have noticed that the direct um direct source, I see an analytics, I have organic, have YouTube, have the direct has increased since I started using TikTok. What that means, that they see the video at TikTok and they go to clases de guitarra. So many team many people think that it does not work. Yes, it works. But you have to keep seeing the right the right um the right stuff at analytics. In this case, the direct source of traffic for your website. You have to see if you start publishing at TikTok if if the number starts going going up. Yeah, you know, if you use Facebook, you use at links at Facebook or YouTube on our links, you will see them. You will see YouTube referral, YouTube referral, uh Facebook referrals, TikTok, uh-uh. But you have to keep watching, keep an eye on direct traffic. That's what you notice if the strategy is working. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00

I'm gonna look into that some more. Miguel, this has been absolutely fascinating. I love what you're doing. Um and we don't have a lot of people on the podcast who are teaching courses in other countries and other languages. And I I found it fascinating kind of hearing what's what's working differently in Colombia, what's working differently for you. If anybody's listening and they're like, I want to go and check out some of your guitar courses, I don't want to learn Spanish by learning guitar or whatever it might happen to be. Where should they go? Could you could you uh tell everyone your YouTube and your Facebook and your TikTok uh links?

SPEAKER_01

Everywhere I'm class de guitarra, uh clases de guitarra.com.co or class or without the dots, classes de guitarra com co everywhere, you know, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, my own website. You can find me there.

SPEAKER_00

Perfect. So that's classes C-L-A-S-E-S, D-E, and then guitar G-U-I-T-A-R-R-A.

SPEAKER_01

So I did some great work um positioning my my own biography um on the internet, so you can check Miguel Antonio Martinez, and they will say they will I will be there, and and they will uh it will give you all my links mostly.

SPEAKER_00

Nice, perfect. So Miguel Antonio Martinez or Cluslasthegatara.com.co. Amazing. Miguel, thanks so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you. And as always, everyone listening, thanks so much, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here.

SPEAKER_01

It's it's it's been a great time. It's been great to have the chance to share with all of you the things that are happening in the Latin American market.