187 | How to Make True Passive Income as a Podcaster with Courses, with Jacques Hopkins

Online courses, a great, passive way for you to monetize your podcast and bring more revenue to your business, right? Well, odds are you agree with me if you have never launched an online course before. If you have, you understand that they aren't as easy to just make and sell as they are all cracked up to be. It is a common struggle for many entrepreneurs, and I've seen many times, many entrepreneurs create a course, launch a course only to either get crickets and nobody buys it, or to find out that it's way more work than they thought. So how do you get this right? How do you strike the balance between creating and selling an online course that actually sells, with putting in enough work to make sure that the course is actually good, and people who buy it are happy they bought it and get results. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, I'm your podcast growth coach, and today we are on the monetization side, because today we are diving into a crucial question, how can you effectively build and market an online course that actually delivers results and scales your business? To help us answer that, we've got the online course guy himself, Jacques Hopkins, who is a successful course creator, who's generated over $4 million from his online piano course, and now helps others do the same with his brand, the online course guy. On my conversation with Jacques, you can look forward to learning three key things. Number one, the steps to creating an effective online course that delivers real results. Number two, how to build a sales funnel that converts listeners into customers of that course. And number three, strategies for using your podcast to drive course sales without needing a massive audience. And we're also going to uncover how Jacques turned his smaller podcast audience into a high revenue coaching business that might change the way that you think about monetizing your podcast. So if you're ready to transform your expertise into a thriving online course, stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. Jacques, welcome to Grow the Show. So excited to have you here, man. Kevin, it's an honor and a pleasure, man. I'm excited what we might dive in here to today. Yeah, pleasure is all mine. Actually, folks might not realize this, but this is actually your second appearance on Grow the Show. If you go way back to episode, I think it's episode four of the Grow the Show podcast. Your voice doesn't appear, but you are mentioned by Pat Flynn on the show because of, I think you, what, what did you, like, take his course just like that? Why did Pat mention you in that episode? Oh, gosh. Yeah. So very indirect first appearance on Grow the Show. You were focused on improving your intros and you picked an episode of Smart Passed Income by Pat Flynn, and it just happened to be the one that I was featured on. Pat Flynn interviewed me on his podcast, and that's the episode you picked to go over his intros. So we talked about me in that intro that you critiqued. Yeah, it's so funny. And I remember when we linked up earlier this year, we had a moment where we were like, oh, my gosh. And I was like, I know this guy from somewhere. And it was that I was like, no, no, we didn't have a moment. You had a moment. I had spent something. And you looked at me like, you know, you just saw me hit a bus or something. You looked at me like I was crazy because you put the connection together and then, and then I guess after that, we had the moment. That's right. And you're like, can you please tell me what just happened? And I was like, I finally just recognized why I've heard of you before. Okay, cool. Well, why don't we fill folks in before we dive into podcasting and course creation and all that stuff? Can you give us just a little bit of background about how you got involved into the course space? I got an idea for an online course in 2013. At the time I was working as a full-time electrical engineer, I worked that job, that same job for eight years. In fact, my whole life, I wanted to be an engineer, never, never thought about being an entrepreneur of any sort. Certainly, when I was a kid growing up, online courses weren't really a thing. I'm kind of old. I got a few gray hairs here, Kevin, more than you. And I never wanted to be an entrepreneur because it seemed like being an entrepreneur in my head was like, we have to have a brick and more presence. We have to take out a lot of debt or get people to invest in us. We have to have a lot of employees. We have to work a lot of hours. None of that appealed to me. What did appealed to me is going to get a four-year education, not having to go to grad school to get a high-paying job as an engineer, very left-brain, good at math, horrible at English and whatnot. So, all my life, I was like, I'm going to be an engineer, no problem. My senior year of college, a brand new book came out that I don't even know why I picked it up, probably because of the title. It was called The Foreral Workweek. And reading that book for the first time, I was like, I kind of want to be an entrepreneur. But I want to be this kind of entrepreneur as a total paradigm shift for me because he explains like online businesses and outsourcing and how you didn't have to have a brick and mortar presence. You didn't have to take out a lot of capital or debt. You didn't have to have necessarily a local team. It talked a lot about outsourcing and automation, really cool stuff that I learned about in that book. The most important part was not just what he created in and of itself, what I was really drawn to was all these cool things that that thing he created allowed him to do. All these adventures, all these cool things with his life. So, I was like, okay, this sounds amazing. I already had my job lined up. So, all the while I was working as an electrical engineer, I was trying to create some kind of online business like Tim Ferris did, the author of that book. And I tried several different things. He doesn't mention online courses specifically in that book, I don't think. Right? So, I didn't go straight there. I tried to create an app, a blog, there were several different failed attempts, a physical product, an online course, you know, I mentioned 2013, I got the idea for an online course. It was this progression of after reading that book of ideas for an online business. And it was my seventh idea. The first six, never made a dollar, I got an idea for an online piano course in 2013. It was not an overnight success story, but it has been a success story. And at the end of the day, it did work out, it did allow me to quit my job, it did allow me to do some cool stuff that I wanted to do. At this point, it's brought in over $4 million from a single course, and still churns along nicely. So, that's the genesis of courses for me. I want to talk about courses. Now, unlike 2013, they're everywhere online, especially for those of us who have online businesses. I speak with online business owners all the time. Some of their whole business is based off of courses. Some of them might have a service business that they just kind of like through a course together and sometimes offer it or whatever. And it seems that everybody has one. So, I want to ask you, what do you think makes a good course as compared to one that's really not that great? A good course, I mean, put simply, it gets the desired result for somebody and it gets it well. Right? So, it's not the length of the course, it's not the amount of bonuses that you include. It's how well and how quickly and easily it gets the desired result, the dream outcome for somebody. Right? So, my course is called Piano in 21 Days. The dream outcome is somebody that learns piano quickly and is little as 21 days, sometimes even quicker. And so, the first version of my course had that dream outcome, like in mind, that's where I try to get people to go, but it didn't do it, that first version wasn't very good, right? A few people kind of sort of learned. Now, I've learned so much about my audience in my customers throughout the years. I'm on version six of my online course. And it gets the dream result really, really well. And that's because it's plugged in any holes in the learning process. So, places where I got the same questions over and over again, people were really struggling in certain spots consistently, I fixed those over the years. So, how do we measure success? That's it. It's not about the features, it's about the dream outcome. Yeah. Okay. So, I want to stick with this for a moment because I know that a lot of the podcasters and business owners that I work with, when they think about creating a course, they think about it very much, a lot from sort of what it's going to do for them, right? Because we think, oh, I'll just launch a course, I just record some videos and then I just sell it forever, right? It's just quote unquote passive income. But what I'm hearing from you is that even your first one, which is quote unquote passive income, which was featured on the Smart Passive Income podcast, isn't all that passive even six iterations in? Is that accurate? Well, I mean, what is passive income, right? Like how passive does it have to be to be passive income? I could have stopped it at first version and collected a little bit of passive income, but that wasn't good enough for me. I needed more, I needed more money, certainly, but like a higher completion rate, a higher success rate, and I knew it wasn't as good as it could be. And that's why I redid it as many times as I did. Now fast forward, in the past two to three years, I've barely touched that business, barely touched it. I've got a small team. It's a little bit for me, but on any given month, today, I'm touching piano in one of the days, maybe 30 minutes. So the intro, or whatever you call it, like the bumper or whatever you want to call it for a Smart Passive Income, he says, like work hard now so you can read the benefits later or something to that effect, right? So I think that's kind of the idea behind passive income, but mine isn't like 100% passive, but it's pretty dang close at this point because of all the hard work I've already put in. So let's go back and talk about how you can plug those holes because I know that, again, I'm just thinking from the perspective of the business owners that I work with and other creators who have courses, there's a lot who really don't look to see, did the people who bought the course get the outcome, right? As far as they're concerned, maybe not consciously, they're like, they're not being evil, right? But it's like, yeah, I mean, course sales, but the job isn't over, right? We need to make sure that the people who bought the course actually achieved the thing that they bought the course in order to help them achieve. And what I heard from you before is it sounds like you were going back and seeing. Did people actually achieve it? Did they get stuck? So do you have a process for understanding whether or not your course works? Absolutely. Yeah. So there's a couple of layers there, but it all revolves around getting feedback from the people actually on the other side because we are so impossibly and incredibly biased on our side as the ones that have created this product. And I remember about a year or two into my business, I was still barely making any money. And I maybe had sold 10, 15 copies of my course. And I was talking to a mentor of mine at the time, asking him, how do I get this thing to grow? And he's like, well, the first thing he asked me was like, have you talked to the people that have bought your course to see what they think about it? And at that point, I hadn't even crossed my mind, I talked to the people that bought my course. We were talking about. And he's like, yeah, you got to make sure you have a good product first and foremost. And so I actually reached out to the people, emailed them on an individual level to get feedback, which was terrifying at the time. So it starts with just like asking, I share that example just to show my state of mind, like that wasn't even remotely on my radar. Fast forward to a few years ago when I was going from version five to version six, I recognized like some of the holes I needed to plug just from the consistent feedback we were getting from people with the questions they were asking. For example, we knew day seven, people really struggled with day seven. And the best feedback we could give to people was like, okay, you're just going to have to practice more for that day, you know what I mean? So when I went to redo the curriculum from five to six, I updated it based on all the feedback that we had gotten. But if you want to take it another step beyond that, you test what you're proposing before you put it out there. So here's what I mean, going from five to six, instead of just redoing the curriculum based on what I thought would be best, re-recording it and then putting it out there, I tested it on eight people. And here's how I did it is I called it a piano boot camp. So I gave it a nice name. And I said, hey, I'm looking for eight people to join me for the live version of piano in 21 days, essentially, we'll meet, I think it was for seven weeks, three times a week, or seven weeks, which is the 21 lessons. And I'll teach you this stuff live. In fact, it's my latest and greatest curriculum that I want to share with you all. And sometimes you can even charge a premium for offering that live thing like that. Now, think about all the benefits that I get as the creator for getting eight people to do that. I get validation on my curriculum. I get people that are very likely to give me a testimonial because I'm kind of forming a relationship with these people. And I get a potential bonus that I can include in my course. If I record these videos, people can kind of watch the live version of the course as a bonus if they want to. So it's very beneficial for me to do this. So I put the offer out there accordingly. I said, if you want to take part in this, it's a thousand dollars. But if you show up every time and you do the work, I'll give you a full refund at the end. Because I only get those three benefits if everybody shows up and does the work, right? So they say when people pay, they pay attention. So I charge a higher amount for, you know, this is a non-money making niche, right? You could charge a lot more than that if I'm teaching somebody to start a business in 21 days, right? But I'm teaching them, you know, a thousand bucks, it's a lot over 21 days. And then incentivize them to want to get that money back too. So all eight people, they ended up getting their money back. I had to hold on to their eight thousand dollars for a couple of months. And it worked. It worked. Can I give you one example of, please, of like the feedback that I got during that process? I had one brand new lesson that I was really excited about that had never been in the course before. It really felt like it was going to plug up several holes by just having this one whole new lesson, right? It was day nine. And so I was very nervous going into that lesson because it was brand new. I was excited about it, but I didn't know how it would land. So I presented the lesson that day and it went great. It went phenomenally people like the floodgates were open. I heard that term like people's minds were kind of it was a music theory lesson explained in a different way than they're like an engineer would explain it not a music teacher. And so people kind of understood what scales and keys and music theory were for the first time was really excited about it. It worked. It landed. I was on top of the world. I thought I was the man. I thought it was the greatest piano teacher ever. Awesome. It was a keeper, right? That was the lesson they're there going into the next lesson day 10. I still think I'm the man. I'm teaching a concept that I've taught plenty of times before. And these people looked at me like they like they didn't know what I was they just went so far over their head that very next lesson. And so I had to tweak that next one. So I got the feedback on the the one I was nervous about the new one that it was good. But then going from that concept to this other one that used to be earlier in the course did not work. So I got positive feedback and negative feedback. I wouldn't have known that had I not taught it to these people live. Gosh. That's so funny. How many times I've been just whatever my expectations were, I was totally wrong, right? And I'm like, this is going to be the best. Crickets. This is going to be horrible. People love it. It's so funny how you just never know, even years into the game. So how do you know when it's time for a new version of the course? That's very niche dependent. You got to think about how evergreen or topic is, right? The actual piano hasn't changed in hundreds of years, if ever, right? I have a very evergreen topic. However, if you're teaching a course about chat GPT or something else, you know, technology based, I've got courses on how to use like online course software, like how to use Kajabi, how to use school, right? I've got to kind of update those every year because the software, the technology itself is changing. So the way that I know when it's time to update that is when I get an abundance of questions from people saying, hey, this isn't where you said it was in this video. And that's not where you said it was in this video. It's like, okay, it's time to re-record that. As far as not the reason being because software and technology changes, how do you know it's time to update the course, I would say if people are getting the result or you're getting a lot of feedback from people kind of with the same questions. And you know that you could do a better job the next time, right? That version six that has been in place for two or three years now for piano and twenty one days, I was at capable of recording that course without those previous five versions. It had to go through this process. And I know that if somebody else is starting from scratch putting out an online piano course, they're not going to be able to make one that good at the beginning, you got to go through these iterations to get something amazing. One of the hardest parts for me about creating course material is not putting too much stuff in it, right? Because I've just got all this knowledge about here, do this, you know, there's these hacks, there's these tips, there's these tricks. And also when it comes to conceptualizing, making, growing, and monetizing a podcast, there's a lot to do. So I'm curious, when is it enough for a granular course versus how can you tell if you're trying to kind of put too many things into one course? Do you have a way for parsing that out? Yeah, the way that I do it, and there may be better ways out there, but is I actually envision real people going through the process? So if we're talking about something you're working on that hasn't launched yet, I have this sticky note method where you can do either do it physical or you can do it in sticky note software, but you want to lay out your entire curriculum by modules and lessons out on, you know, I keep pointing to my big desk here. Most people are probably listening with audio, but there's great online software like mural.co, M-U-R-A-L.co is what I use when I want to do with the online version. You kind of lay out your curriculum, it should be step by step in order, everything they need, but nothing more. And then what you do is you take sticky notes and you put real names or real people that you have helped with something like this before or that you know you could help with something like this. And you say, okay, Spencer, let me, let me picture Spencer going through this. Let me think about what problems obstacles he would have. How would he go about this? Would he really want to do this after this and so on? So it's not theoretical, you're thinking about real people going through this process and you want to ask yourself questions like, is this too much? Is this unnecessary? Is there anything we can cut here? Because we want to get people to the other side of this, which is the dream outcome they're looking for in the easiest and fastest and sometimes cheapest way possible. So it's not about including as much as possible. You actually want to get them there. Is you're in faster, piano in 21 days, not piano in 21 months. And then as far as like bonuses you include with your course, the bonuses should not feel like more work. Sometimes when you include bonuses along with your course, you're doing it because you want to increase the perceived value of what you're offering, but it actually decreases the perceived value because it to the person on the other end, it feels like more work. It's like, oh, I'm going to have to do that too. Oh, I'm going to have to do that too to get to the desired outcome. The bonuses should make the dream outcome be even easier and faster than they should not feel like more work. My pitches, they are not going to be an expert. They are not going to be world renowned concert pianists. They're going to be competent. They're going to play basic versions of pop songs in the piano and press their family and friends. And they want to get to that point with this little effort, not that it's not going to take effort because they want to get to his little effort and as little time as humanly possible. So if I include a bonus that's like how to read sheet music, right? I do not teach how to read sheet music. That's one of the ways I get people to resolve so quickly. But if I had a bonus that was how to read sheet music, then people might be thinking, oh, shoot, I do have to learn how to read sheet music too. That's just going to take more time and effort. I don't know about this. I feel like I got the whole include bonuses, right? Include bonuses. It'll raise the value. But I've never ever thought of it that way. Looking at the bonuses as sometimes they look like more work, sometimes they look like less work. I think just relating that to myself, like I might make a bonus that's like how to do solo episodes where it's like, oh, I got to do a different type of episode as compared to. Here's a chat you be tea prompt that will write a solo episode for you, right? It seems like that's, it's so subtle. But the second version, it's like, oh, that's something that'll maybe take less time. Yeah. And look, they can also help answer objections people might have too, right? So the solo episodes thing is a great example because you would only want to mention that as a bonus, if that is an objection somebody has or it adds to something you've already mentioned in the sales pitch, if they understand already that having solo episodes is part of the process to get to the dream outcome, then they're going to be like, okay, I get that Kevin, but like, I don't know how to do solo episodes. So then your bonus comes in, it's perfect. It's like, okay, yes, I need that in order to help me get to that desired result faster or easier. Got it. But if you're just throwing it out there, just to throw it out there, and it's kind of random, then they're going to look at it as more work instead. Yeah. I'm assuming you're not getting on sales calls with folks to sell the course. And if you are, how can you know what the objections are that you want your bonuses to handle? So I'm not doing sales calls. My typical course sale at this point is about $800, so it is a higher price on my course, but you won't typically see people doing phone calls for that level unnecessarily. But I did, in 2016, I did 500 sales calls because I wanted to get to know my people more and just try that. And so that is one way to do it is to actually talk to people. So I did talk to a lot of people and sold my course primarily on the phone for an entire year and learned so much about people. That's scary for a lot of people. I mean, even today, I will recommend people do that, even if it's just for like a week or a month, just to get to know people. Earlier, I talked about talking to the real people inside your course, but it's also good to talk to prospects too to know what those objections are, to know what their struggles are. So yes, that is one way to do it. But also one thing I like to do in my email sequences are like launches and everything. When we have like open cart, close cart, or maybe a discount is beginning and then ending, is after a launch period, send one more email asking people why they didn't enroll. That's what I always like to do. Hey, you know, the subject is literally you didn't enroll question mark and you keep it super casual. You don't want to have any images or links in that email. I've even had people where all of my launch emails went to spam because there's links and it's promotional and then they get that last, last email asking whether they didn't enroll. They're like, oh, I didn't even realize I just found out it all went to spam and they end up signing up. So it has actually saved some sales. But the primary motivation is to get feedback from people on why they didn't sign up. So sometimes they'll give you reasons about like the course specifically and then sometimes they'll give you objections to the niche, right? So sometimes I'll get, oh, I don't have a musical bone in my body. I can't learn piano. That's an objection. But to take that, even another step, if you send that email, ask people for three reasons why they didn't sign up because people will almost always say money or tires. Time. Yep. Price, time, right? Almost always. That will be one of the go to reasons. If you say give me a reason why you didn't sign up. But if you ask for a third reason, you say give me three reasons, then you might start getting into the real reason. The actual reason. Yeah, we say that on one on one sales calls is that timing and price. Everybody says that's why they're not buying. That's true for maybe 10, 15% of them. For the rest of the 85%, there's something else that they're just not saying because it's just so much easier to say, oh, it's too expensive. That's brilliant. So I'm guessing then you would get that feedback and then for the next go round, try to just adjust your marketing and sales process for the course to try and plug those objections. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, keep a running list of those objections. That way you can use them when you talk about your marketing or use them when you're crafting bonuses that you include with your offer. Yeah. So overall on both sides of it, it sounds like the game of growing a course business. And when I say that, I mean a business around a particular course is you start doing it and then both on the sales side and on the customer side, just listening and seeing it. Why didn't you buy? Why didn't you finish it? What questions do you have? And just over the course of years, continuing to iterate and iterate everything about this course so that hopefully it hits every potential roadblock, right? Yeah. It's a jack model that I teach the people I help with with online courses now. We break it down to traffic, funnel, offer, and then your course, your product itself, membership, coaching program, right? So you've got those four layers that you need to create and set up, but then you iterate. You find the bottlenecks and I like for my people to be working on one of those areas at a time. So you set it perfectly, right? When you said iterating those things, some people might have amazing offers and amazing course and amazing funnel and they just, they need to be getting better and better at traffic. So people maybe have a lot of traffic and they have a funnel in place and they have their course that's providing results, but they're offer, they're consistently getting feedback from their offer. That is just not something right offer for them and we got to, we got to just get that market feedback and that's the number one thing we need to use when we go back and find the bottlenecks and want to iterate. Yeah. Once again, I think that flies in the face of the assumption that I see a lot of folks make when it comes to, oh, I'm going to sell a course, which is the idea is you just make it and sell it and you never have to interact with anyway, but it sounds like quite the opposite. That's actually what determines success here is interacting with the people who are considering and interacting with the people that are buying. So you've worked with, I would imagine, several folks on their courses. You mentioned memberships. So right now I know it's really popular. I see a lot of creators big and small switching from high ticket coaching to monthly memberships, switching from cohort based courses to monthly membership. What does your take on that? Have you seen, first of all, that, have you seen this happening in the scene? Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. It's very appealing. I mean, look, memberships have always been really appealing. I remember when I first got started, there was a very popular piano course, quote unquote that was $20, $30 a month and for the first month, it was a dollar. When I was getting started, that was really popular. First month is a dollar and then they have your credit card information and then once they get you in, they can keep charging you and it's very, very low price. The reason the idea is so popular is because it's monthly recurring revenue, right? MRR is like passive income or so it seems. But it can typically be a lot more difficult to run a membership. Typically there's higher expectations from somebody that is not just a course. There's going to be a community or interactive elements and the name of the game is turned. How long can you keep one person around? And oftentimes the numbers just don't work out like you want. To be honest with you a couple of years ago, I was looking to revamp my offering for my second brand called the online course guy and I was looking to launch a roughly $100 month membership and I was working with my coach at the time trying to put things together. She's like, Jacques, look at this. These numbers just don't work like you'll never make any money from this. Even if half of your entire audience signs up to this, it's not going to be what you want. So I do find that that often happens. So we ended up launching a high ticket project instead that's done really, really well. So I think that the idea of it is more appealing than how successful they end up being. Yeah, I also think that just from kind of being on both sides of it, we've tested out a $100 per month option and I've also recently with the advent of school and again, it's kind of hot right now for creators to do this where they just offer, oh, you know, from somewhere between 50 to I've seen up to 400 bucks a month. Access to everything. And what I found is as a consumer, when I purchase that, I never open any of the material. Like I'm just, I never use any of the stuff. And then after two months, I'm like, I'm not using this. Why am I paying for this? And then I cancel. Whereas if I would have, if I was required to commit upfront, I think more like commit, like, hey, I have to commit to a year upfront or even if it's just like a flat rate course, I find again, as a consumer, I learn more and I implement more. If I have that skin in the game where it's not just this ongoing, like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe next month, I'll use it more, right? It sounds like you're saying that this has been around for a while. I've been in the industry for like four or five years. So to me, it feels new. But it sounds like you're saying that this is something that people have been trying to do for ages, the recurring revenue, and it just still doesn't work, right? In different forms, it can work. I just feel like more people are drawn into it because of that recurring revenue, that passive income. And it doesn't make sense for years, many people that are drawn into it. People don't pay for a course. They pay for a desired outcome, right? And that's harder to pitch with a recurring revenue model, right? People have tried to convince me that piano in 21 days should be a monthly membership. I'm like, look, I'm pitching a result in 21 days. I don't know how I can do that with integrity, saying, but pay me month over month after month to learn piano in 21 days. You learn piano in 21 days and you're going to pay me forever. Right. So it's hard to ask, it's hard to really sell that desired outcome and then say, hey, pay me monthly forever to get that desired outcome, right? People want you to buy the outcome. And so you tell them the price to get there. That's what works better. Typically when we ask somebody to pay a monthly recurring charge, it's for ongoing support in something, right? And not necessarily desired outcome, which there is a market for. But for example, with my coaching program, it is recurring because people want ongoing support with starting or growing an online course business. Probably very similar to you and growing a podcast, right? It's something they can never achieve the ultimate destination, right? Everybody's always looking to grow their podcasts. Right. And so another example where it may make sense to charge more of a monthly fee for, but in most cases, people are going to pay for that desired outcome and it makes more sense to be more of a course than a membership. So let's talk about marketing. I work with a lot of course creators and one of the biggest questions that I get from them is around the idea of not putting everything in their free content. So if they're a podcaster, not putting all the information in the podcast on YouTube and their social media or whatever, and there seems to be this belief that, oh, like if I give everything away for free, nobody's going to actually want to buy the course. And people will just use the free content. So I said, first of all, do you get that question along all the time? I probably have a question I ever get. No, it's okay. Cool. So it's not just me. How do you handle that? What do you say when someone brings that to you? I can speak for my own experience. I don't hold anything back from my free content. There's nothing in my course that you won't also find, you know, for piano 20 days, I'll be honest with you. My main marketing platform is YouTube. For my second business online course guy, it's a podcast. So I am a podcast or you know that. But there's nothing I, like you won't find anything in my course that's not somewhere in my YouTube channel in terms of concepts on the piano. People are paying for not the information, they're paying for the transformation, that dream outcome, right? And so it's going to be very hard to achieve that with just my YouTube videos because they're not in order, they would, you know, they wouldn't know which order to put them in. It's not this one nice, clean package that they buy and then they can just start going through it, right? So from my own experience, one person, it has not mattered. And in fact, it's a good thing because they, there's a lot of content I can put out there. Everything that I have to teach on piano is out there on my YouTube channel, as well as it's not inside my online course, it's just packaged up differently. I've been preaching that message forever and so I have plenty of people that were skeptical about it, but trusted me and put it out there and it served them well. When it comes to marketing, of course, what are some common mistakes or misconceptions that you see in what folks do or what they think? I believe that we should price our courses on the higher end for several reasons, which we can get into it a little bit if you want to, but when you, and then when you price it higher, it's harder to just market a high price course. And so that's why I like to have a nice funnel in between. And so I think a mistake that I see is just trying to go straight from marketing messaging to buy my course, right? Meaning traffic straight to a sales page. And that can work for courses that are less than $100, but you would need a really big audience to make any significant money from, of course, that is that inexpensive. So I think that's probably the biggest thing, the dropping a good funnel in there that builds trust and authority with you and leads people to the offer into the sale in a non-salesy way. For me, I didn't have a funnel. Once I dropped in a funnel in late 2016, it literally 10x my business. I think it was traffic. Same offer. Yeah. We got to talk more about this. Okay. So we're going to let's double click on this right now. So cool. First of all, the difference that you're describing is in one sense, you don't have a funnel, which is where you're, it sounds like you're saying you go from content right to sales page. Sounds like you're saying there needs to be something in between. What is it that goes in between? So four years, you'd go to pianoinswaylandies.com and it was basically like a sales page. Here's a little sales video by now or don't and I would just send my traffic there. That's basically not having a funnel, right? That's what I'm saying don't do because I was in business for about three years. I was still working my full-time job, making about a thousand dollars a month. I was selling maybe three courses a month with that strategy because I had a decent amount of traffic. My YouTube channel was doing pretty well. I really learned about funnels one day. I was listening to a podcast with this guy who sold courses was specifically talking about this amazing funnel he had to sell his online course. I was like, okay, I get funnels now and he went through a great detail about how his funnel worked. It was these three videos, right? It's the product launch formula sequence made famous by Jeff Walker. Jeff Walker was not the guy talking about it that day. It was somebody who learned from Jeff Walker. So I learned how to do that pre-launch sequence with what's called pre-launch content and then have an open cart, close cart with urgency with your offer. And so with the same course and the same traffic, adding in a funnel in between, 10X my business overnight. That's how I started making five figures from piano in 21 days. We were doing about a thousand dollars a month, struggling, trying to make this thing work, dropped in a good funnel, we started making ten thousand dollars a month, ever since then we've never made less than five figures in a single month. That's fascinating. How do you ethically add urgency and scarcity to something that is evergreen and is free to replicate? Love it. Love that question. Okay. So first of all, the number one way to do that is make sure what you say you're going to do is true, right? So always be truthful. So if you come to my website, Kevin, you opt in. And in like 12 days is the close cart day and I say, hey, last call at midnight tonight, you're not going to be able to get this anymore. And you click on it the next day at 6am, you shouldn't be able to get to it anymore, right? So it starts there. What I learned from that guy with that funnel back in 2016, I set it up exactly like he said, set it up, which was instead of having a sales page, having an often page that says, my course is currently wait listed, but while you wait, download this free, you know, for me, it was a workbook, right? So there is a little bit of a gray area as far as integrity, authenticity of a digital course, a digital product, not being available all the time, you know what I mean? So I did it that way. I used the availability as my urgency for several years because it worked. But I got one too many messages of people saying, hey, Jack, why are you doing this? You're such a scammer. I know it's available. You're just using these marketing tactics. I didn't get a lot of them. But at once I finally got enough of them, I'm like, all right, it's time to switch something up. You tasted some pretty good success, like I don't want the success to go away. How can I do this even more ethically, if you will, right? So there's three main ways to do urgency with online courses. The first one is the availability. That's the method we're talking about. And I was doing it on an evergreen basis. I use some really cool software called Deadline Funnel to make the deadline real true and accurate for everybody, even though I'm essentially doing 365 launches a year every day. That's the availability. And next one is actually my favorite, and I feel like it's more ethical, and it's using a discount instead. And the third one is that some sort of bonus could go away, all right? So the reason I didn't do the discount for so long is because so many people, so many gurus for so long told me never discount my product because it devalues it. I don't know if you've ever heard that advice before. Oh, 100%. Oh, I'm on the edge of my scene, man, because I've been exactly there. And I've heard that from all over the place and Lord knows I've, you know, used different discounts and things like that in the past. So I'm eager to hear what you're about to say. I heard that from so many different people, so many people that I trusted don't discount your product. It didn't make sense. Like let's try to get the most amount of money per sale and all this and that. One day I was it's like, you know what? I like discounts, like, discounts make me more likely to buy something. And just because I buy something discounted doesn't mean I'm not going to use it. Like from my own personal experience, discounts are great. Let's try it. So I tested it. I tested switching the urgency from the availability to a discount. This was maybe four or five years ago now. And over the course of a month, I tested it for an entire month and it turned out to provide 50% more revenue. It actually worked better. So how did that work? Was it a, they limited time discount? Yeah, so it's still an evergreen funnel. Before I switched, you would come in, you'd see the page that said, like, oh, the courses wait listed, get on the list, get the workbook. And then your funnel would start with some free videos, some free content. And then about a week after you opt in, I'll say, hey, the course is available. You can buy it now. And then it's a five day open cart period and then the cart closes. So there's the urgency. Like we have a deadline. And then if John were to opt in tomorrow, his deadline would be a day after yours and so on. Right? So all I did was instead of the deadline being associated with a, with the availability, I changed it to where the deadline was associated with a 20% off discount. Okay. So that often page no longer said courses wait list that it said, hey, get this free workbook. And then I think like in parentheses, it says, and you'll be on our email list every once in a while, we offer discounts or something like that. Got it. I also added a sales page at, at the menu of my website where people could buy at the full price. That's part of it too. Got it. So it makes sense? Yes. 100%. And I know we're in the weeds, but I, I can hear my listeners loving this. So this is great. I can feel you listener loving this or at least I love it. So basically what you're saying is each individual person had a window based on when they opted in, when they would be offered at discount for a limited time. Yes. Okay. What was the third one? Third way to do urgency. So by the way, that discount of price is still the way that I do urgency today. So I've had it that way for several several years now. Like I said, it worked for me 50% better than availability. So the third way is a bonus can go away, right? That one is probably the most has the most variation as to how well it works because it really depends on what your offer and what that bonus is, how compelling that bonus is. In general, I like to say that it works the least, but if it's a great bonus, it might work the best. And then you can also combine that one with say a discount, right? A discount and a bonus could be going away. Yeah. Those are the three main ways to include some sort of urgency, whether with a live launch or with an evergreen sequence, it's still those three choices of availability, discount or a bonus going away. Got it. Okay. Fascinating. So far, we've mainly talked about your first course brand, Piano 21 Days, but we haven't really talked as much about your other brand, which is the online course guy. Now that brand is largely driven by a podcast, right? You said that your first brand is largely driven by YouTube. This one is driven by a podcast. So first of all, why is that different? Why is podcasting right for the online course guy brand? I don't claim to be a podcasting expert, but I like for people to have at least one content marketing platform, if they're going to try to sell courses, memberships, coaching, right? So for Piano 21 Days, I started 11 years ago, podcasts were a thing, but to me, it didn't make sense to start a podcast teaching piano. Like I feel it's kind of a visual learning thing. Right. Even though I was a big fan of podcasts back then, it felt like YouTube was the best way to go. Then in 2017, when I started this other brand, I'd always wanted to start a podcast. Like I said, I love podcasts and we're talking about online business and it just made way more sense for that niche, in my opinion, to be audio-only. Now, certainly, we have video podcasts now. We do that now, but it just felt right for the two niches, piano, YouTube channel, talking about online business, online course businesses, podcasts. I don't think that audio only is going anywhere, but you're right. They're starting to become synonymous. So you have an audio-only podcast that is driving your coaching business and you're getting pretty solid results. And from what I hear, the audience is not hugely massive. Is that right? It's all relative. I don't think so. You can tell me where I fall in the grand scheme of things. You know, I've said it. I love podcasting. I have my own. I've been doing it since 2017, okay? So I have 250 episodes in the books. You were on a recent episode, Kevin. It was great. You brought massive value there. I'm a listener of your podcasts or the show, big fan. So I love podcasting. I'm just not good with overnight success stories. It took a few years for me to really monetize it in any way. So I was just kind of doing it as a side gig to my main piano thing, but now this is my main thing. The online course guy is my main thing. And I have figured out how to monetize it. So I mean, per episode, we're like one to 2,000 downloads per episode, right? Yeah. I think I had some podcast network reach out to me, pitching me to join their podcast network. I don't even know what that means. In fact, I thought about running it by you to be like, should I even reply to this email? I love it. And so I did. Like, they kind of gave me a quote. They were like, how many monthly downloads do you get? So I think it was like 6,500. And so I got a quote for like $135 is how much I could expect to make. I guess from adding ads to my podcast, yeah. What you experience with that podcast that we're reaching out is basically what I don't think a lot of people realize is that how much money you make from your podcast is only directly correlated to your audience size if the only way that you monetize your podcast is sponsorship. So what you experienced is that at 6,000 downloads per month, if you monetize with sponsorships, a network who's probably going to take a 40% or more cut, yeah, your take home monthly is going to be a whopping 130 bucks, right? Which is not worth it. But can you share, I mean, would you be willing to share how much business the show is generating for the coaching business? I mean, roughly a half million dollars a year at this point, through a coaching program, right? That's the offer. It's not just a passive online course. It's a high ticket program, coaching program, like 5 to 10 gay per person from an audience that's maybe 2,000 people, something like that. So that's the way, you know, I mentioned the numbers working out earlier, right? I was thinking about doing like a $100 a month membership. I have a fairly small audience on this side. And that just wouldn't have worked out really well. So I went to high ticket coaching program, forcing I really love this stuff and I love personally working with people. It's a group coaching program. And my audience 100% comes from the podcast. Now, I'm not a new podcast, I've been around for seven years now. And so there's a big backlog. But what's amazing about podcasting is just like, I haven't seen any other platform that can just build the trust and authority with people, like a podcast does. I don't always do calls with people before they join my program, but sometimes I'll do. And like half the time people are like, wow, it's like surreal to talk to you live. I've listened to you for hours and hours and hours. I feel like I know you so well. Right. So the amount of goodwill and trust and authority you build with the podcast is just unlike anything else. Comes from somebody's had a YouTube channel for 11 years. I've worked with lots of people who have been successful with, you know, TikTok and Instagram. There's nothing like podcasting in my ratio of size of my audience to how much money I'm able to monetize that audience. I feel like it's huge and I feel like it's because my medium is a podcast. 100%. I literally just sent an email to my list this morning all on the lines that talks about this where I come across tons of entrepreneurs who, yeah, they have a few hundred to maybe a couple thousand downloads per episode and they're making unbelievably outsized revenue from that show. Now, yes, granted, you have an entire coaching business on the back end, which is a lot of work, right? Like you still have to build and run a business, but you're right. Like the show doesn't have to be huge in order to bring significant returns. So my question for you and then we got to wrap is how are you currently getting folks from listener to especially you're not always doing a call. What does that process look like? Are you CTing on the show like how are you getting people to join your program from the podcast? We pitch our lead magnet, which is the start of our funnel, all right. So we have we have a funnel with a little bit of discount involved if you get into the funnel of the coaching program. So we have a free workshop, you know, webinar funnel. So we pitch the free training in the podcast. So that that's how we get evergreen sales into the coaching program, meeting on any given day. But then we'll also a few times a year do more live launches, right? I've got an email list of 2000, 2500 people that will launch to, but what I've found with the podcast that works really well is to utilize the podcast feed in conjunction with your live launches. That has worked really, really well. So when I send out an email to my list that says, Hey, this offer is now available. I also have a corresponding podcast episode. Sometimes they're five minutes, sometimes they're 20 minutes, something like that, talking about the offer, talking about the opportunity. And then once the offer goes away, I just removed that episode from the feed. Got it. So I don't know if that's a Kevin endorsed method, but that's worked really well for me is if you just drop in little episodes here and there trying to sell the program and then remove them from the feed so that people finding the feed later on, they'll see them. That's the key part. That's what a lot of people forget is to remove it because then you get people later that are like, Oh, I want that thing. You know, like, Oh, no, that was last year, but no, it's, it's incredible. And what's funny is I feel like we tend to weirdly get stuck because what I'm hearing you say is like, you'll throw a little like five minute thing, maybe on an off day, right? A day that you don't usually publish an episode, which is totally freaking fine. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. But I even myself get caught like thinking, Oh, well, I only publish episodes on Tuesday. So you know, well, what do I do? But yeah, you can just totally throw something on the feed and it'll be the quickest way to reach your warmest leads. Because like you said, those are the people who are hearing your voice at this point. If they're listening every week, they're probably hearing your voice more than some of their family members during the week. And so the no like trust factor is just 100% there. So yes, you officially get the Kevin Sam of approval on that one for sure. And hey, if it works, keep freaking doing it. That's awesome. Okay, jock. So if someone wants to learn more from you specifically about online courses, what can they do right now to enter your sphere? Cool. So if I've mentioned the name of my podcast at this point, it's called the online course show. Very basic, the online course show. And then also I've got a free training on some of the things we talked about today, you know, the three ways to do urgency. It's basically on what I call the online course business formula where we go over this model of traffic, funnel, offer, and your course or product itself. And there's a couple other components as well. We talk about how all the components interact with each other, how to do each of the components, the reason that people fail with each of them. So it is truly my formula to success with an online course business, the online course business formula. This kind of came up earlier, but what I like to help people do is succeed with an online course business and not just a course. And that's kind of where, you know, at a high level, most people fail is they go and they make the course. And they think that's kind of like the biggest part and they don't really do anything else. So I help with the entire online course business and you can learn that framework, that structure, and that free training. You can find that at oc.show slash workshop, oc.show slash workshop. Oh, yeah. We will throw that link in the show notes. Shock, I've been feeling we will probably have you again on Grow the Show someday. If you are willing, I feel like we just scratched the surface here. But for now, I want to thank you so much for the time today. I want to thank you as well, Kevin. Appreciate the opportunity. My pleasure. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now I have a quick favorite ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating. And if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now, it just takes a couple seconds. But it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests. And it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment. Leave us a five-star rating. Maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by Podcast Boutique. And if you want your show to be post-produced with quality, really freaking fast. And if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with Podcast Boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode. And neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for a girl-to-show. My name is Kevin Schmidtland. I'll see you next time.