Doug: Hey, what’s going on? It’s Doug here. And I wanted to do an intro for this episode because really, it was just me having a conversation with Olga Zarr from SEO Sly. She’s been on the show a bunch. And I think If you go back and you check out some of the earlier episodes, it’s been a while, but I’m, I’m pretty sure I highly encouraged her to create a course to like do a podcast and we had conversations offline as well, like after we did the interviews and stuff, but anyway, if you go back and check it out, you could kind of follow the progress of what she’s been doing and I think.
At one point, she was thinking about launching a course in the chat GPT for SEO for marketers and that sort of thing, but decided not to do that, which ended up being, I think, a pretty good move because the chat GPT and AI space, well, it changed a lot in a very short time, and it would have been a to keep a course updated.
So anyway, this whole episode is really just us chatting about her experiences as course creators. So she launched her first course a couple months ago, and we talk about some of the results, including the number of students she had. And if you go check out the pricing and all that, you could figure out how big of a launch she had.
And then I’m in. I’m in a different spot. I’m at sort of like the end of the life cycle of courses. So I created a one big flagship course and iterated on it. I created other smaller little courses and I decided to sunset my courses the other, uh, like month ago or something, a couple of months ago, but essentially I just like slowly sunset them over the course of probably like 18 months or so.
When I look back and think about when I first started. Thinking about it, I didn’t have a full like plan and roadmap to do it, but basically I slowly took my foot off the gas and pushed on the brakes a little bit to the point where I like stop promoting the course, sunset it, removed access, stuff like that.
Now, one of the things that we talk about is just like, me giving access to people that paid for the course in the past, and maybe they Still wanted to check out the course, even though I’m telling them that, Hey, about 50 percent of this is probably not relevant anymore. And the framing and the context and the work that I’m advising you to do, maybe it was great, like three or four years ago, but now I wouldn’t advise people to do it.
So anyway, we talk about all that stuff. And like I said, it’s really just a candid conversation to the point where I remember there were a couple of questions that she asked me. She actually asked me a lot of questions more than I asked her, which is great. But. I remember thinking like, yeah, this is a time where I’m in between projects.
I’m trying to figure out what to do. Luckily I’ve been doing this working online, working for myself for about 10 years. So I have runway, I have plenty of runway. I don’t have to figure out anything in the short term. I can actually like take a break and go on a sabbatical and test out some things and see if they work.
And one of the things that. Hasn’t been working that well is the newest podcast. So last week when I published the episode, it was sort of like bigger news. Like I’m, I’m figuring this out along the way, which is, it’s a little bit more it’s scarier because. Don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And I’m telling you, I’m like, Hey, this is fucked.
Like, this is not working. How I thought I assumed several things, many of my assumptions were wrong. And I didn’t even need to be successful in like 80 percent of the things that I tried with the project. But a lot of things just like this didn’t work. That didn’t work, this other thing didn’t work, and it kind of pointed out, actually, I’m going to ramble on for too long, so I’m going to wrap this up.
But it’s not like I needed the Ranking Revolution podcast to work really well, and I didn’t need to hit a home run in any one specific area. Of marketing and promotion, for example, but I needed like one or two things to go. However, when I look at it, I was like, I guess I need to look at my projects, look at my plans and figure out like, okay, I can be successful at this.
Even if only like 25 of 25 percent of the things that I try are successful, something like that, which I’ll have to go back and reflect on it a little bit. But I mean, it’s also a lack of effort. Right. I mean, I’m only putting in a certain amount of time. So anyway, the whole point is it’s a good conversation.
It’s really just like her and I having a talk and no one else is listening. And we try to dig out some like nuggets of useful stuff and generalize. So we have the conversation, we go back and forth a little bit. We jump around a lot. I think we could have talked for like four hours or so. And then we, we do try to wrap it up at the end and give like a lesson, like, Hey, Here’s what worked for me and here’s what didn’t work for me.
And if I was doing it again, here’s like the advice that I would give to myself. So anyway, please check it out, check out Olga’s podcast. I think she’ll actually be publishing this episode. So check out some of the others. It’s a, it’s very good. She also has a great newsletter. So check that out as well.
We’ll link up and she will be launching her course again in November. So when this episode comes out, I think it’ll be roughly the end of October. And we only recorded it like a few, like one week ahead of time. So, it’s fairly fresh. Sometimes I record like way ahead of time and sometimes I’m more we’ll say timely.
So anyway. Sign up for her email list so that you’ll be able to buy the course. And if you follow my link, you may actually be able to get in there through the side door. She alludes to it in the conversation here. And finally, if you’re not on my email list, please sign up for the email list. We’ll put a link in the description.
And I’ve been trying to email a little21 bit more often, but just like shorter things that I’m. So do hop on there and that’s it for today. Thanks a lot to Olga and I’ll send it to the interview now.
Intro Music
Olga: So hi Doug, how are you doing? Long time no see.
Doug: I’m great. Yeah. Everything’s good here. Been enjoying the summer. It’s starting to cool off a little bit for the fall. How about you? What’s new?
Olga: I’m great too. I’ve been like on a couple of trips, still trying to recover my busy mind. Everything is great. The dust after launching my SEO course has settled, but now Black Friday is coming, so I am again.
Getting busy and nervous.
Doug: Are you doing a, uh, a big launch for Black Friday? Is that the idea?
Olga: Yeah, probably I will do like the second enrollment because before that time I will have way more Videos way more material. I keep adding new videos and recording them I even recorded one before two before our meeting So I think that’s that’s the plan, but I recently Listened to your show.
I always listen to you when I bike and And you said that you are now retiring your course. Can you tell me about, about that? Why? I know you explained it. Why? But if you can tell me more here.
Doug: Yeah, you got it. So for people that don’t know, I’ve had Online courses since I started blogging in 2013. So at first it was like an ebook and then multiple iterations and different sort of reboots and approaches.
And eventually in around 2016, I did like a full flagship video course. So it’s like a transformational course, right? One where there’s, you know, six to Nine units or so. And there’s a lot of information and basically it takes you from like side hustle to like potentially going full time with affiliate websites and SEO.
Well, after rebooting and, and updating the course over a few years, things changed with Google and AI rolled out in the last, I would say two years. With great impact. So. The course and the overall approach was not as effective. It was kind of a slow decline. And then all of a sudden it was very clear that, you know what, I wouldn’t guide someone to approach it in the way that I was teaching because things have changed so much.
And on top of that, I didn’t want to teach any AI specific content because I knew that it was potentially. Shaky ground and maybe not a good foundation, it wouldn’t have longevity. So I would sure hate it if someone enrolled in the course, started doing this AI bulk publishing. And then within a few months, it was no longer effective and tools changed.
And it wasn’t something I wanted to do. So I decided A little over a year ago that I wasn’t going to promote the course anymore. I would allow the people that were in it to continue using it and all that stuff. But I was like, you know, I’m just going to not sell any more new enrollments. So. That was over a year ago.
And then as time went on just running a business and cash flow, you have to be aware of the subscription software that you’re paying for. And one of those was the course platform, which is very expensive. It’s you know, one of the premier, I think you use it as well. Kajabi. And I still have the skeleton of an account over there.
And I still would advise people, like if you have, if you want a full marketing suite and a funnel and the course platform and the community and coaching, and you could even host a podcast over there, if you want all of that stuff, it’s actually a better deal than paying for separate services, maybe not best in class for everything, but it’s pretty good for most things and they’ve gone through some acquisitions, but anyway, I was coming up to either renew or not renew that expensive software.
So I decided to just sunset the course and I provided access for people through another platform, which is, you know, I just put it in Google docs and, um, or a Google drive and share that. So anyway, people can get access if they want it, but I told. I told everyone, Hey, this is not relevant anymore. Like probably 50 percent of it can be helpful in some way.
Like if you want to hire freelancers or if you want to write good content, ignore the SEO portion, but if you want to write content. It could be useful. So with that said, a lot of people actually still wanted access for those other little pieces that they wanted to go reference. So overall, like the course was no longer relevant and I wouldn’t want someone to, maybe they bought it two years ago and they’re like, well, now I have time to go check it out.
I would caution them. Hey, this is. From a couple of years ago, everything’s changed. So I’ll pause there. Long answer to, you know, deciding to sunset it.
Olga: But can you tell me like a few examples of things that are no longer, no longer relevant that you were teaching in the course? I’m just curious.
Doug: So part of it is around like ranking websites with long tail keywords.
Which. Can still be effective, but it’s not nearly as effective as it was three years ago or six years ago where you could rank like within a couple, yeah, really a few weeks for a very long tail keyword and get traffic and actually start earning money. I think that’s changed. I like, I don’t think you could rank that quickly for as many keywords.
It’s really more saturated now too, because more and more people were doing it. On top of that, and things are still shifting, but like big websites like Forbes were ranking for tons of keywords that maybe they didn’t have business to rank for. And I think at the time where we’re recording this highly likely that Forbes got a manual penalty and people can read up on some of the really drama that went on around that.
That’s just like a small thing, but overall, like some of the main ideas might still work, but the timelines are much different And the overall effectiveness is much different. On top of that, people are getting information from different places. So if I’m telling people, Hey, write this by hand and, you know, publish one article per week for a quarter.
Other people are saying, Hey, publish 15 articles a day. Use AI. It’s very confusing for A novice to sort through all that and figure out like, is Doug working in the dark ages here? Like, is he telling us to write with a typewriter and like fax it in or something like that? So there’s just a huge disconnect on like what things are happening now and what’s in the course.
Olga: It makes sense. So you were, I think, the person who inspired me to finally launch my course. I’ve been planning on doing that for five years or so, but I never kind of had the guts to do it. I was maybe a little bit afraid. I, I had little knowledge. You gave me a lot of great tips and I think thanks to you and your tips and the videos I watched on your channel, I think I can call this first course a success.
But I have a few questions about your course. So at this latest stage version, how many videos did you have in there and how many, when you started, if you remember, like more or less.
Doug: It’ll be a guess and relying on my memory, but roughly at the end, I think I had about 70 or 80 videos. And this is across, I think, 12 different units.
So, It’s divided up a little bit, but ,
roughly in that range. And in the beginning, I think I still had maybe 30 plus videos or so. Most of them are between four. long. So pretty short in length. I never covered too many topics and kept them moving pretty quickly. Occasionally I would do like a demo video and it might be 20 to 30 minutes where it’s an over the shoulder type video.
And. It’s, it’s more tutorial based versus like concepts and other stuff like that. And I’m curious, how many videos do you have in your course in the beginning and do you have a target?
Olga: Yeah, so this is something I think I’m struggling with a little bit because of my ADHD personality and attention to details and wanting to cover everything.
So I started with 20 something videos and some of them I think were longer than 20 minutes, but more or less it was the range. Now I think I have close to maybe 50 or so. And there are videos which are really like 40 minutes, 30 minutes. Some of them are longer and explain a lot of concepts because it was supposed to be about SEO auditing, but I started to get some questions about some things from people in the course.
And I decided that I will also record like a video entire module about SEO for people who do not understand all of those things. So like basic concepts, but basic basics of technical SEO, and it kind of started to evolve. It is evolving and I think it will be in probably in hundreds in some time and. I don’t know where to put a stop because I could easily be doing that forever.
Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. Okay. So I have a great, a great way to look at it before we get to it though. I want you to talk about your, the overall. Course that you launched and the success of it because we kind of, we kind of glossed over, but I want people to hear because really they could go back to interviews that we had maybe two or three years ago.
I don’t even remember when we connected, but we had a few and I was like, you got to have, you need to do a course. We would. Talk for an hour after an interview. And I was like, yeah, you should, you should be a little bit more independent. And the, one of the best ways is like to sell your own digital products.
Courses are a great way to do it, especially with the content you were doing. So. Can you talk about like the success of the launch, maybe how many students, any other details that you could share so people can understand like how successful it actually was?
Olga: Yeah, sure. So initially I had an arrangement with a person in SEO that if I record the first version of the course and will be ready to sell it, pre sell it by end of, I think, July.
Then they will be able to help me promote it, and they will do an interview with me. They will send, promote it to their very, very huge, like, I think, one hundred, thousand subscribers. And this was something that gave me this deadline. And I also knew there are a few other SEOs who want to help me with promoting it.
So I decided, okay, so I will start pre selling it. And if I am sure that there is enough people, then I will actually start to record and release on a specific date. I promised because I didn’t want to record because this is basically from you. I didn’t want to record something that no one would buy. And it turned out that actually people are buying.
Fortunately, I was tracking from the beginning where those sales are coming from. I even ran Google ads and this is a funny thing, but No one bought the course from the recommendations from other people. The people who bought the course were the people who have been following me for some, for some time.
I got, I think, most sales from my newsletter, from my YouTube, from and from LinkedIn, LinkedIn, basically. And a few like from organic traffic to my website. So this is something I did not really expect. I was sure that. Mostly, it will come from, from those people. I ended up with, I think, close to 80 students, which is, I think, quite okay for the first course.
I was ready, kind of, to fail with that one, but it turned out it went quite, quite okay. And that’s why I keep working on it and keep learning. Cannot really like find this line where I should stop.
Doug: No, that’s amazing. 80 students and, you know, a couple of observations. With, with your audience that you’ve been building trust with for a couple years, like it makes total sense, like they were ready to buy something from you, you probably occasionally had ads or other things that you promoted, but generally you were just providing like great value and.
They potentially could hire you and then become clients or something, but this was a great way. Cause a lot of people are, they might even run their own business, but they can still like learn what you were trying to teach, which is, you know, a high dollar service and very profitable. So really if someone.
Could just sell one or two things that they learned from the course. Like they pretty much pay for the value, like right away. So yeah, 80 students is huge. I was a little surprised I didn’t, um, convert, I don’t think any students from my list. And the thing is, I
Olga: had like. Around five people helping me.
Doug: And no one did.
Olga: No one did. And I had Google ads campaign and I had a lot of clicks from that campaign, but no one bought the course.
Doug: Interesting. Well, and the thing is like, you’ve been on my show so many times that people would know you from that. So I was a little surprised, but I did tell you, and we could maybe talk about this a little bit, but pull it back on track.
Cause it’s getting away from the course topic area. So I was a little surprised because. My list does know you, but it’s going through a transition right now. So, as I mentioned, like I retired my, my courses, I stopped even trying to sell them and the people on my list, it’s an interesting mix. So it’s some side hustlers that maybe are just getting started or maybe they haven’t started yet and they’re just like learning about.
Working online in general. And then there’s another set where they’re like really advanced and they’re really like business owners or they’re, you know, creators and their, their peers essentially. So it’s a weird sort of transition and with niche sites and content sites, sort of dropping off the map. And Google updates are scaring everyone.
It’s not really a hot area. So I think like a lot of people on my list were just like, well, I’m not, An SEO agency. I’m not really sure if, you know, Olga’s course is the right one for me because I, I wouldn’t even have anyone to sell to. So I was a little surprised I didn’t convert anyone, but at the same time, like I can look back and, and connect the dots and kind of see why that was the case.
Olga: I can double check if maybe it’s changed because I got a few like a new sales over the last few weeks around five I think because I didn’t block it entirely. I, I, I wrote on my website that the course is closed. The next opening will be there, but still a few people bought it. So I may, I may double check if it changed because maybe they came from you.
Doug: It could be, it could be, um, one other thing. So I, in the last couple of years, I haven’t had many affiliates convert for, for my courses, but it was when affiliate marketing. Sort of a golden age or something like that. It was roughly 2017 to maybe the end of 2018 or so, maybe 2019. But basically I had a couple of huge launches where affiliates brought in maybe 30 to 40 percent for like a couple of launches in a row.
And those were, those are pretty big launches. And I would do them every quarter. So some of those were like 50 to 70 K, which was like mind blowing. And, and I think, I mean, people could do the math and do the numbers on yours, but it’s like, we work, especially earlier in our careers, we’re like just happy.
Anyone signs up for the email list. You sell a couple things or you promote a product and you’re in some affiliate income, but like when you have these launches, it’s mind boggling because you’re, you’re getting like notifications on your phone of hundreds of dollars over and over and you’re like, Whoa, this is, this is crazy.
Like it’s people you haven’t met before paying you money on the internet. It’s real.
Olga: Like one, one morning I woke up and there was like, I don’t know, seven or so new sales. It was like, I think close to the, to the end. And I finally realized that, yeah, I am finally making money while I sleep. So this is finally the time has come.
Doug: It’s crazy. Okay. So before I forget, as I, I tend to do when I start talking, you are facing something interesting. And you were talking about like, you have the initial scope of the course and it’s to do technical SEO audits, right? It’s an advanced. Not
Olga: necessarily technical. Like, All like in depth full SEO, all this technical is a huge part of it, but I want to like touch upon different parts.
Doug: Okay. So the, there’s a couple of issues. Number one, if your course has too much stuff, it’s like overwhelming for someone. So you were like, Oh, there could be hundreds of videos. There’s probably too much. There’s probably too much. I know you want to add a lot of value, but at some point it’s like, It needs to be usable, and if it’s hard to figure out what you need to study, then you run into an issue so that sheer volume becomes a problem.
The other thing is. Your, your courses should have like a specific scope and it’s, you know, SEO audits, some of the stuff that you’re describing does fit in to that scope, but other parts like, you know, beginner SEO or some of those, those. Should be other courses, probably like if you could say the goal of this course is SEO audits.
The goal of this course is to introduce SEO topics that’s different and you could slice it and dice it however you want later on. You can bundle it together. The initial 80 students, you can give them access. Like they trusted you to buy this early version and then you could just give them access to the newer stuff that you add if you want to.
But I would say like, you have the opportunity to like have multiple products, which is the real goal. Like I retired all, all of my courses. I think I had six. And it’s a lot of them were small pieces.
Olga: But in this, for example, introduction to SEO, I think there will be, there are like four, maybe five videos.
So can five videos be a separate course? So some
Doug: people call them mini courses, but it’s just like a course that is smaller in scope. So it just does like the one thing that you’re talking about and it would be cheaper. So instead of. Whatever the price of your courses, it would be like a hundred dollars.
Maybe like the smaller course, maybe it’s 47 or 97. You could price it, whatever you want, of course. And you could test, but essentially it’s, it’s. what a unit would be. So when I think about my, my course as a unit, maybe has like three to five videos or so on average. One of the quote mini courses would be just one unit or maybe two, but essentially it’s just smaller in scope and there’s much less material.
Olga: Yeah. That’s, that’s, I think a brilliant idea because There is like this main part, which is like in depth SEO checklist. It is divided in like four stages, which is like crawling, rendering, indexing, ranking, and will have like, has different points checks that people have to go through. So this could be like one, but there is also a very long.
theory introduction about like being an SEO auditor. There are a lot of videos there. There is this module about SEO basics, and there will be modules about specific types of audits, like audits for an e commerce website. So those, I think, Could be like, there could be a separate course for just doing an SEO audit for specific types of websites.
And there will be like one video for each type. Would it make sense? Yeah.
Doug: Potentially. I mean, I think, you know, it all depends on how you want to frame it and market it, but yeah, I mean, you could, you could do, I mean, you could divide it up however you want to individual pieces. I mean, I, I purchased courses from.
It doesn’t matter who, but I purchased courses and one of them was just like. Evergreen funnels. So it was like how to sell like courses, like hours on an evergreen basis. And I think it was, I think it was four videos. They were about 15 minutes long. It wasn’t even with the main creator of that platform.
It was like one of the, one of the tech guys. Like going through like, Hey, here’s, here’s how you want to set up the funnel. Here’s the do’s and the don’ts. It was literally only one hour of content. I think I paid like 500 for it and it took me a little time, but I actually implemented evergreen funnels.
So like you’re doing launches, which I. Did for the last couple of years, I removed the complexity of an evergreen funnel, but the evergreen funnel was awesome because then there was always a launch going on. So like whatever, once a day, like probably someone was buying the course. So like, like you said, while you sleep, I mean, I wrote all the emails before it was right there.
I just had to. Put it into the right funnel. The point being, it was a very simple course that only teach me one thing. And it assumed a lot of prerequisite, you know, I had to have a course, I had to have a good launch. And if so, then I should be able to use that. So you could build like uh, smaller course with different audits for different websites.
And. And bundle that together, but you can also pull it apart and say, do you want to do audits for law firms? Here’s one little module, like, and it’s pretty short.
Olga: Yeah. And there is one module I forgot about SEO tools. So this is going to be very in depth and I will definitely leave that content for, for those initial students who trusted me at this very, very beginning.
Can you. Tell me about the courses, about the mistakes you made, some things that you wouldn’t recommend replicating.
Doug: So I’ll tell you, we haven’t talked about this yet, but you know, I had a podcasting, it was a workshop. Technically it was a podcasting workshop. Do you remember getting the emails where I launched this?
Olga: I don’t, I don’t know.
Doug: Are you not on my email list? Come on. You got to say it. I am like
Olga: on two of my emails, personal and work.
Doug: I’m just kidding. Well, I’m actually, maybe this is a good example. So I. Here’s a mistake that I made. It’s a classic mistake. So I’ve launched a lot of courses and pretty much like since the beginning, they have converted pretty well.
I’ve always sold even my very first one where I didn’t know what I was doing. I think I had like 11 people sign up. So the last launch that I did, No one signed up. Zero people signed up. I did a full launch. I know how to launch stuff. I’ve launched, like I said, six or seven courses. And if you look through everything, I’ve launched more stuff than that.
And people always seem to convert, but in this case, it was like the wrong product market fit completely. And I kind of knew that it was a little bit of a mismatch, but I thought the sheer numbers would work out. So. Essentially what had happened is I have an email list where people are most interested in building content and niche authority websites.
So that’s what it’s been the whole time. There’s some interest in SEO and. I was trying to promote a course and workshop on how to launch and run a podcast. So
Olga: yeah, I remember now. Okay. Okay.
Doug: There’s some overlap and people that have successful websites, or if they have online courses, or if they’re an agency, or if they run a software company, there’s a strong chance they have an interest in starting a podcast.
It’s a, it’s a great format. And a lot of people are more interested now than they were a couple of years ago. And it just fell flat. And I had testimonials. I actually had run through sort of a beta group before with three people. They all launched their shows. Like they’re all doing good. The issue was.
All the people on the list basically were not interested in it. So it’s like going in with a great deal and just trying to sell it to the wrong people. So I had to just decide, and I mean, I did it as a workshop because I was like, I don’t want to develop the full course just in case no one buys. I want to make sure this is right.
So I ended up basically just like, Nobody signed up. I didn’t have to refund anyone. Like if only one person signed up, I might just refund them. So I just decided, Hey, I’m going to close this off and I’m not going to do it. So that is the worst mistake you can make is a wrong product market fit. And the one on top of that, which I haven’t made this mistake, but I want to emphasize it.
You should not develop a course until you pre sell it. You need to make sure that people bought it. Because if I, if I spent six weeks. writing all the scripts, recording it, editing, doing all this work. I would have been super disappointed. I mean, I was a little sad, but it was going to be fine because I, you know, I marketed the course, but nobody bought it.
So those are the two main mistakes.
Olga: Makes sense. So yeah, this was like the second one was the one I was the most afraid of. That’s why I decided to go with that pre sale, pre sale stage, which I think, yeah, it was, it was great and helped me believe that people can actually buy it.
Doug: And 80 is so many too. I think, um, you know, what’s that conversion rate for you, do you know, from your email list, like overall,
Olga: to be honest, I don’t remember exactly, but I would say that’s more than half.
Probably 60 percent is from email
or
Olga: so, and what conversion rate it is, I don’t know, but, but it is pretty, pretty much okay. And I had like two refunds only, I think two or
Doug: three. One thing that I’ve seen people do is after a launch. Just one launch. They try to automate it. They try to put it in their email sequence and it doesn’t work that well because they didn’t optimize it.
So I spent really two years every quarter I was relaunching and testing like one, sometimes two little variables whether it was something on the sales page or my approach with an email sequence and the launch. Maybe it was the pre launch sequence. Maybe it was how long the launch was. So I was testing all this stuff and I started with like a 14 day launch with a bunch of emails and went down to seven and then five.
And then I tested what was in the emails and all this stuff really slowly over time and like improve the conversion rate over several launches. And only then after about two and a half years, then finally, that’s when I tried to automate it a little bit and put it in the evergreen funnel sequence.
And it was only through like the optimization, but it takes, it takes a long time. Like the feedback loop is pretty long. And even if you sell well, you have to watch out for refunds, right? Because if, if you. If you’re really good at selling, then you’re going to sell it to people that don’t need the product or don’t want it, which is, it could be okay.
But I mean, really you want to have successful students, but if you sell too well, then you’ll end up with like too many refunds and you realize, okay, it converts well, but at the end of the day, like it’s creating. a lot of refunds and admin work and it actually costs you money to do refunds nowadays. So,
like Stripe and PayPal, you could refund the money, but you still have to pay for the fees, which if you’re selling something that’s a thousand dollars, like you’re paying like 30, 40 bucks for the processing fees.
Yeah.
Olga: So a question here, like how long your sequences are and how often? Do you send emails while there’s pre selling, selling, period, and overall when you are launching? Because I didn’t set up any sequence. I was basically sending my weekly newsletter and a couple of dedicated, maybe two, three dedicated newsletters.
I was Too afraid that people would simply unsubscribe and a lot unsubscribed, but they weren’t interested. I’m curious to learn your thoughts.
Doug: So this was through a lot of testing. Could be a little bit different now, but I have shared this on some other like course oriented platforms and podcasts and stuff.
And they nod and say, yep, that’s what we’ve arrived at too. So. I like a five day launch, five day launch. I send six emails, one each day, and then two on the last day.
At
Doug: the end of the last day, I usually send one about six or eight hours before the doors close. That way I can just say, Hey, reminder, it’s closing.
Take action. There’s scarcity. So the five day sequence is really good. And we can talk about the details of that. Later, but the other thing that you really need to do is let people know that the launch is coming. So I have a pre launch sequence, which is three emails. Sometimes I usually just send like one email per week or so.
But I, I turn it up because people don’t open every email. So I want to send three emails the week before, maybe four. And usually I take them through like a little mini lesson where they’re getting some education, they’re learning something, maybe a little entertainment in there as well. So they’re getting something out of the email and they’re typically.
Sort of like serialized. So it’s like you need, like, you want to read the first one and then you’re like, Oh, what’s coming up next? I want to read the second one and I want to read the third one. So there’s a bit of a sequence in there where there’s an open loop at the end of each one of those. So that way.
They want to open email two and three. And then at the end of email three, they’re like, Oh, I can’t wait for next week. And throughout that pre launch you’re letting them know there’s going to be an offer coming next week. Like, by the way, don’t. Don’t miss out. I’m going to send you more emails next week.
And yeah, people are going to unsubscribe cause you’re, you’re probably sending more than you usually do, but you could gradually like start sending a few more emails like the weeks preceding, but five day launch, six emails during the launch week. Two on the last day, three emails the preceding week to make sure they know an offer is coming.
Cause the worst thing you could do is send an email and say like, Hey, I’m selling something and there it’s like out of the blue. Like that never, that never works. You have to warm them up. So, so what do you think of that? Did you do anything similar?
Olga: Not really nothing similar. Like no, I’m using convert kit.
You also use it kit. I think it is now called. There are like sequences, a lot of templates, I haven’t used any yet, but this time I want to be like more conscious about it and more strategic, so I will probably use some of your guidance. Have you ever counted like how many unsubscribes in total you had after one launch?
Or more, more or less?
Doug: Oh, I’m sure I counted at one point, but then I stopped, I stopped looking or whatever. If I had to guess, you know, my email list was typically it sat around 10 to 12, 000. And I would say potentially it could have been like 80 to 150 or something like that. So people would like every email, like dozens of people would hop off.
Olga: So this is like similar, I think, to what I have.
Doug: And to your point, like, you know, you want to get them to make a decision. And it’s either like, Hey, I’m, I, I don’t want these emails anymore. That that’s the worst scenario. But the thing is like, if they don’t want to read your normal content, cause you’re providing a ton of free value, right?
You’re not selling constantly. Like some email list, it’s like every second or third email, they’re selling something. So people can decide to, Hey, I’m going to, I’m going to ignore the emails for the rest of the week and I’ll pick back up later.
Olga: So
Doug: yeah, if they unsubscribe. No big deal.
Olga: Makes sense. And what about the sales page?
Can you share like your best practices, like your thoughts on how to create it, how to design it?
Doug: So I would have to look back a little bit, but there’s a couple of key pieces that I could highlight. And I’ll mention that most software, and I’m pretty sure Kajabi, I just use one of their templates. They have.
Like every section that could be used for a sales page. And it’s very thorough and sort of key things that sometimes people forget, or that maybe they should add a little bit more of one is a testimonials. So that’s one thing you’ll be able to add now that some people have gone through the course material.
And I like to have different avatars. So not just have testimonials, but have like. The, the single mom, the it professional, the. Digital nomad fill in the blank, right? The people, you know, in your audience, you want to show them someone that’s similar to them because then they can imagine that they are doing it.
So diverse testimonials, a good guarantee, and that removes risk, right? You want to make sure. They feel like it’s a reversible thing. If they run into any issues, if they’re not happy for any reason, they can get a refund. A lot of times people will set it a little bit too short and you want to make it like so good that.
it shows that you’re confident about the material. So I would say at least 30 days, like, I think I often did 60 days. So it’s just like, if you’re not happy, I put some fine print in there, right? Cause if people were jerks, I wanted to, honestly, I wanted a way to say like, no, like, I’m not going to do it. You were a jerk.
I rephrased it, but that was the idea. So you could put some, What
Olga: were those situations where you wouldn’t refund a person?
Doug: I’m apparently I’m really good at just like getting rid of memories that I don’t like because I used to really hold a grudge more so I want to say sometimes people were just rude in their email so that would they would ask more questions than normal, right? So they would ask more questions than normal in a pretty rude way.
And then I would try to help them. And they would continue to be rude. And then eventually they would ask for a refund and oftentimes, so the fine print is you had to at least like go through some exercises, like you had to try to do some of the work because some people will look at it and they’ll be like, Oh, I already know how to do this.
There’s, there’s no value here. And they wouldn’t do any of the exercises. They wouldn’t create any brainstorming spreadsheets or whatever. And I, I’m like, Just because you think you know it and you’re not doing the work, it doesn’t, it’s not my fault that it’s not working for you because you’re not doing the work.
And people would read it and think, Hey, I know that. And then they would ask for a refund. So I, they had to at least go through the motions that they were trying to go through the course. So typically it was just rudeness. And on top of that, if they just didn’t do the work, then I was like, okay, I’ll give you a lot of times I would give like a partial refund or something like that.
I would negotiate with them essentially because at the end of the day, like, I don’t actually want to make people unhappy, but if someone’s a jerk, then I was like, all right, like, I don’t want to work with you anymore. If I, if I see you try to buy any other of my products, I’m going to refund it and I don’t want to work with you anymore.
So it’s a luxury, but yeah. So, back to the sales page, you want to have a good guarantee. FAQs are really good. So now after you’ve launched the course, you’ll have Actual FAQs that people ask, and you could, you could put that in the sales page and it helps again, remove some of the risk and uncertainty.
And you could use a lot of the information that’s on the sales page for your emails that you’re sending out. So a testimonial, right? You could put that in there to FAQs. You could just say like, Hey, here’s what people are asking about the course and send that out. Because a lot of times. For a premium course, the sales page is a little bit long, and if you could break it up and send it via email, people are going to read it, then maybe they’re a little bit more likely to read it.
So those are a couple of main things. The other part is, you know, at the very beginning, it’s great to. Make sure when the person starts reading the sales page, they are like, Oh yeah, this person understands the struggles that I’m going through. It’s like, I want to do these SEO audits. Like my customers are asking for it, but I’m not sure how to do it.
I don’t know how to do a, like a premium high level audit so that I could charge like a premium. Amount for it. So you could put those kinds of things in there and then, you know, you covered some other stuff in your, your sales page, I know. So yeah, those are the main things. And usually templates are so good with every section that you should put in there, um, and you can make it as long or as short as you want.
Olga: I think I used one of those templates because I had the sales page on my website and also this sales page, Kajabi sales page. So this was templated, I would say. So I think, yeah. What about Black Friday? Have you ever been doing Black Friday launches of your courses?
Doug: No. So I, I never did. So one thing I probably heard it once or twice, but it was from creators that I.
I like what they were doing and they never put their products for sale. So I was like, I’m not going to put mine for sale. The value is what it is. And you could buy it at, you know, my normal price or catch it later. So I never did a Black Friday sale. I didn’t want to cheapen the brand.
Olga: And one thing I heard someone say, someone told me because my course was supposed, is supposed to cost 5k.
Assuming that after completion, you can sell 5k audits. And the first time I was selling it for 700 or so, and I am now wondering if it makes sense to have those, because this was like 85 percent discount or 90 percent at some point. So really it is huge. But on the other hand, this course was like 10 percent done.
Doug: Right. That’s a tough one. It depends on who you’re selling it to, because if you’re selling it to say a large, like a very, very large marketing agency, they would, they would be like, Oh, 5, 000 course. Okay. That fits in our, in our budget. Like we’ll, we’ll buy that. That’s not a, But if it’s individuals, then 5, 000 is a lot, and that would usually mean, you know, more than just the course material would mean like maybe some coaching or something like that.
Like there should be other touch points, most likely, but it depends because it’s just. It’s based on the industry and who you’re trying to sell it to. So it’s hard to answer. I would say having, you know, for the 5, 000 listed and then have like the whatever 70, 80 percent discount that seems steep. So I would potentially true it up and either charge more and like not have as big of a discount.
So it’s like, you know, the normal price is 5, 000 and I would actually open it up. So like, if people want to buy it at 5, 000, when you’re not launching, like I, I, I never wanted to misrepresent like what I’m selling it for. So if I say, Hey, the normal price is 5, 000, I would actually list it for 5, 000 for a portion of the time.
And then. Whenever you’re actually launching it, then you could say, Hey, I’m doing a launch right now. It’s like a live cohort that’s going to come through and it’s 2, 500 or something like that. So, and of course that’ll completely impact your conversion rate because now it’s like a different level of audience.
So it’s like, I mean, you may have 10 percent of the people purchase it, but you know, you’re charging a lot more, so it can make a huge, huge difference, or you end up with about the same revenue at the end of the day, just fewer students. Very
Olga: good point. So I have another question. So you have now retired your courses.
So what are you now focusing on? What is now your focus in for generating revenue? Is it like YouTube or podcast? Or what?
Doug: So I’m still thinking about this because technically I still think the podcast workshop idea is decent, like the people that went through it were happy with it. However, I am at a spot where I’m like, do I want to do that?
Do I want to, do I want to put, do I want to try and build an audience in the podcasting space and like try to run workshops? I’ve had other people like refer other folks to me and people are interested to answer your question. I’m not sure I’m trained to figure it out. I think ideally what I would want to happen is I continue to produce the Doug show podcast where it’s like affiliate marketing, SEO, online business.
I’d probably like sort of broaden it to online business and side hustles. And then I have my other podcast, Mile High Fi, which is personal finance and financial independence. And I would just produce those two shows and then have ad sponsorship. So. That’s probably what I would like to do because I’ve created the courses, I’ve sold courses, I’ve hit some, you know, Basically a mismatch with my audience and the product I was trying to sell.
And I’m like, okay, I’m not going to keep trying to push that boulder up the hill. So at this point I like creating the content. I like doing these interviews and chatting and I like my other show as well. So if I could just have sponsors that like pay the bills, that’ll be good enough. And I’m also like I’m, I’m working less like overall.
So my wife just retired a few months ago. Yeah. So I’m just like not doing as much stuff. And I thought I would do a little bit more, but it turns out doing less work is more fun. So I’m doing less work than I was.
Olga: Yeah. So how, how much is less?
Doug: I’m probably doing, I’d have to think about it. I’m probably doing like two hours a day, like four days a week, something like that.
So what is that? Eight hours. And sometimes it’s a little bit more, sometimes it’s a little bit less, but I mean, I don’t have, you know, if I, if I add sponsors, I would have to do a little bit more like account management type stuff, but I wouldn’t end up producing like more episodes or anything like that.
So, so that said, if you want to sponsor the Doug show, let me know. Cause I have been looking around and I may, I didn’t want to have to go to like, like, A podcast agency or anything like that to help find sponsors, but like, that may be the best route, especially for mile high five, like my high five is a decently sized show.
And if I just got a couple more sponsors, it would be. Well, a lot more profitable because I only have one sponsor right now. So yeah. What do you think? What, do you have any tips for me
Olga: regarding finding sponsors
Doug: or just what I’m working on?
Olga: So I think like the YouTube route is, is, is the right one. This is also something I would like to improve on, on my side.
And I think. If you have enough people, like, watching you, they will be coming to you and just asking. I get a lot of sponsor questions, like, offers, through email, through my website, so maybe Getting some traffic to your website, maybe also having like an interesting sponsor page on your website showing like the numbers you have, the reach you have, or do you have one?
Because people may not be aware of how actually big your list is, for example, or your channel, you have like 30K subscribers, something like that.
Doug: on YouTube.
Olga: Mm
Doug: hmm. It’s like 130 130.
Olga: Oh,
Doug: it’s much bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I do have, I have some information. So I have a media kit that’s on my podcast page.
But you’re right, I probably need to mention it more. Because the thing is, I’ve actually seen I’ve been doing live streams a little bit more. And it’s getting a little bit more traction. Now that consistent with it and basically I think there should be sponsors contacting me because I honestly I get a shitload of those like just generally but a lot of times the offers are weird or it’s the wrong product or whatever.
But for some reason, like, The right sponsors are not reaching out. So I did have a couple in the last couple of days where I was like, Oh, this could work, it might not work, but it’s, um, it is interesting. Cause like I am at a spot where there should be good sponsors reaching out, but also, I don’t know if it’s like, they don’t know that I’m looking.
It’s weird.
Olga: Maybe you could like focus the channel a little bit in one direction, like maybe make it more about SEO or seem like that because for me it is like only people, tool owners, only like SEO people from the SEO crowd that are reaching out to me. So yeah. Cool. Maybe that’s something or you can record a video about the fact that you are looking for sponsors.
Doug: Right. I do. You know what? I probably should do that. I often mention it like while I’m doing a live stream or like at the end of an episode. So it’s like, if people miss it, they don’t hear it. Or, I mean, people might be like, ah, he’s usually talking about niche sites. Which I would say I ended up talking about a bunch of other stuff.
I’ve shifted around a little bit, but, but yeah, yeah, it has actually, you know, it’s been more difficult and you’ve done a few introductions for sponsors that work with you. And those haven’t come through yet. So I was just like, ah, interesting. And some of the companies I’ve even worked with in the past, I’ve seen some sponsorships on your newsletter and I was like, Oh, I’ve worked with, um, like man goals Uh, yeah, yeah, I’ve worked with them for a few years, but yeah.
And I was like, Oh, that’s cool. I saw they, they reached
Olga: out to me, I think through LinkedIn. Yeah.
Doug: Okay. And it may just be the channels. And back in the day people were on my list and then they would email me to sponsor the, you know, have a spot or a video or something like that. So anyway, I’m in a rebuilding portion and I think it’ll be, If I keep getting like good views on the live streams, I think that will be a good route because for some reason, I don’t know if you’ve done many live streams.
Olga: Google
Doug: definitely favors the live streams, like they get favored in the algorithm. So if you’re doing something like you’ll get pushed more stuff, especially while you’re live.
Olga: Okay. I did just a bunch, but maybe that’s something I will be doing. I am still. in this phase when I prefer to pre record, edit it, because like on the live stream.
But on the other hand, live stream, you just stream it and it’s done.
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Olga: Way less work.
Doug: It’s yeah, it could be a mess. It could be a real mess sometimes. But Typically, it’s been, it’s been okay.
Okay. So,
Doug: well, I was going to ask you really quick. I know we’re probably coming up towards the end of time.
Yeah. So what do you, what do you think you’re going to do for Black Friday? Like, you know, like I said, I’m, I am, I never put my stuff on a discount. So are you going to do like a big discount or what are you thinking?
Olga: I think I will do another, like, enrollment, there will be a discount, but it won’t be that huge because there are, like, there will be, like, three times more videos in the course, so.
Let’s say the course now will be worth about 4 3k, assuming the number of videos it has. So maybe I can discount it to like 2, 000 or something like that. I will try to like make some calculations. So because now. The course is, is there people are not paying for something that I will create. So that I think should be priced and Black Friday, everyone is like in this buying mode.
So I will try. I’m just curious to see how it works on Black Friday as well. Like, will it be better? Worse? One,
Doug: one other suggestion. I don’t want to give you too much stuff, but you do have time. to figure this out. So typically, from the very beginning, I always launch with three different packages. So you have like, I did basic, advanced, and premium.
And that way you have three different price points. So if you could figure out how to do different packages, that would help a lot. And what it does, you know, it gives people a cheaper option if that’s what they can afford. But then with the premium, high level option. It sets a price anchoring point that’s higher, so more people buy the middle one.
So you have to play around with the pricing and stuff like that. And funny enough, the, the founder of ConvertKit, or now Kit, is Nathan Berry. And Nathan Berry wrote a book called, I think, Authority. Right when I got started and I remember reading the book and somehow I ended up at a dinner with him last year.
So I sat with him and talked to him for like a couple hours at this dinner. And I was like, yeah, like I, I kinda know you Nathan a little bit. And I was like, reminded that he, I can’t remember why, but he was like, oh yeah, did you read authority? And I was like, yeah, yeah. I did my pricing. With a three tier pricing.
And he was like, yes, that’s like the only thing I wanted people to get out of it. So anyway, if you could do three tier pricing, it will most likely boost your conversions. Because even if someone’s like, ah, it’s still whatever 700, they’re like, well, it’s not 3, 500. Like the top package is 3, 500. I’m getting most of the value with just the lower package.
So if you could figure out how to do that, maybe you add in coaching for the top package. That’s always good. People like one on one coaching.
Olga: That makes sense. Thanks.
Doug: Yeah. I will
Olga: definitely play with that.
Doug: Yeah. It’s it’s an interesting thing and then again, you have to play with the pricing over the launches because you don’t want, you kind of want a bell curve situation as sort of the best scenario.
Olga: Yeah. Okay. So probably there will be an update in like three months or so, so we’ll see how it went.
Doug: Yeah. All right. Cool. What else should we talk about? Okay.
Olga: Yeah, I think like we pretty much talked about the course thing. So maybe you can like give one final tip, one final piece of advice.
Doug: I’ll give a couple little pieces and somewhat of a summary.
So make sure you have a good product market fit. Like it’s sort of. like selling a product 101. And I, even as an experienced course creator with an audience, I managed to sell zero products with the wrong fit. And I talked to another creator that probably a lot of people know, and they all, I won’t mention who it is, but they launched a course the same time as I did.
And they. were also in the sort of niche site area. They sold zero of their product that they had been selling for years. So that he was like, yeah, the, the market has changed so much. I just did a launch and it, it did nothing. So I’m not the only one out there. I just happened to share it. And the other thing is like, courses are great.
Like you, as we’re talking, like I’m telling you, you could basically make any decision you want, you could have. multiple tiers, multiple price points. You can make smaller courses. You can make larger courses. You could basically do whatever you want. Unlike a job, you don’t have to get permission or approval or anything.
You literally can just test it and see if it works. And then if you don’t like doing it, you can just turn it off. You could just close it down or refund the money and say, Hey, you know what? That’s it. There’s not enough people that signed up. Like we can’t do it like this. You can do whatever you want to do.
So I encourage people to give it a shot. And I, I want to ask you one final question. So you just went through the launch. You asked me about lessons learned any big mistakes. So did you make any mistakes? That you’re sort of fresh off of that, you know, you’re going to correct for this next launch.
Olga: I would say the mistake of making the syllabus too big and planning, like, too many things because, like, delivering all of that will probably take a lot of time and I don’t want to overwhelm people.
That’s something I will work on fixing. So I think this is the biggest mistake.
Doug: Too much scope.
Olga: Yeah.
Doug: Gotcha. All right. Well, that’s great.
Olga: So thank you, Doug, for catching up and see you soon.
Doug: All right. Thanks a lot. Talk to you later.