You've probably got a course creator that at least an idea for a course and you want
to know how to sell it online.
Well, that's the whole point of why I produce YouTube channels for my clients.
We turn these YouTube channels into lead generation machines for them so that they can sell their
courses and other programs.
And I'm going to break that down in this episode.
-I'm excited to talk to Nate today about how to make money selling courses online because
Nate, you have several clients who you produce their YouTube channels for who make a lot
of money selling their courses online.
So, first question is "What kind of expertise do you need to be able to sell a course?"
-Well, that's a really good question.
I think if you have experience then you have expertise.
And if you have expertise then you can create a course.
But what I found is that a lot of people don't have that confidence.
They think, "Oh, I've got to be a professional.
I've got to have a business license.
I've got to have a logo."
Who knows what the reality of that is.
Or if it's all in our head.
But the other question could be like, "How much money are you going to charge for it?"
Like if you haven't ever done it before, can you get away with selling a 5,000-dollar course?
Probably not.
A friend of mine John Jonas, his son learned how to do some sales online, alright?
To kind of find a product and create a website and sell it.
And he made a course.
He sold it for $17.
The course is how to do this type of sales online.
And yeah, he learned to do something and now he made a course showing other people how
to do it.
So, I mean, you could sell anything for $17 bucks.
-Yeah, that's amazing.
Love to see that kind of like fire and spark out of a kid, right?
Is there a specific length when you're going to shoot a course?
How long should it be?
-Long enough.
Okay?
Long enough to do what you promise.
So, when you look at a course, instead of looking at it like, "Well, I want a course
that's worth $1,000.
I want to be able to charge $1,000."
So, how long does it need to be?
Like that's the wrong question.
The right question is "What should the people be able to do by the end of the course?"
Or "What will they be able to accomplish?
What will it deliver?
What will it transform in them?"
And that's how you determine what the cost or the value of the course is, right?
So, if it needs to be 3 hours of videos plus all these assignments in between for them
to get a certain outcome, right?
So, that's more of an outcome-based approach vs a feature.
The length is a feature.
I mean, if people were trying to sell a feature, it's like, "Well, my course is 4 hours.
So, you should buy mine."
-"Oh, mine is 5."
So, I mean, it needs to be long enough to deliver something.
-Are people really willing to pay like big money?
You see some of these courses that are tens of thousands of dollars.
I mean more the cost of college tuition.
Paying this type of money instead of investing in traditional education.
-Well, I think you've touched on a good point.
That really emphasizes the point I made of selling an outcome.
Because like school or university or you're going to get a degree, that's a number.
That's a stat.
That's a benchmark.
But it's not based on an outcome.
It's not like...
There are some like if you're going to go to a dental school or a medical school and
get a degree or a lot of degrees or something.
I mean, that has an outcome but those schools definitely cost a lot more.
When somebody has a 10,000-dollar course, or I sell a 100,000-dollar program, why are
people willing to invest in that program?
It's because of the result of that program delivers.
And if you have a track record saying, "Look, look at all these people that spent this $10,000
for this course.
And look at these testimonials.
Look what they're able to do."
And if it's a person, you know, if it's just a consumer that's looking to buy something,
that's a lot of money.
But if it's a business and they can turn that $10,000 into 100,000(dollars) because of what
they learned here, it's totally worth it.
And that's why people will spend money like that in a heartbeat.
-Yeah.
What are some of the best ways to market a course once you've got it?
-Well, I'm biased.
I mean you can do any types of advertising.
The type of YouTube channels that I build works so well to sell a course.
They work so well but the disadvantage is it takes time.
So, if you have a course ready today, and you start a YouTube channel with my strategy,
you're not going to sell any courses on day one or in month one.
I mean you might start getting a trickle.
But if you're starting at zero subscribers, you don't have a following, you don't have
an audience yet.
You just...
You got this amazing course, it's going to take at least 4 months in my experience for
you to really start getting any momentum.
And it's going to take a full year before you're really making the big bucks.
Like you're jumping for joy.
Like, "Man, this is the best thing I could have ever done."
Now, comparing that to advertising.
Like you're going to pay for Facebook ads.
You can have a course, you can pay for ads.
Send money right to a sales page and you can make sales now.
So, that's awesome.
That works fast and you can tweak that and finetune it.
But if you do that and you do it concurrently with YouTube, your YouTube channel will eventually
bring you such valuable leads way more valuable leads than you'll ever get from paid traffic.
Some people would even turn off their paid ads.
It really depends on what you want.
Because the leads that you get from YouTube, it's like there's already a relationship there.
It's like these are referral quality leads.
So, they close a lot easier.
You don't have to sort through and filter the right clients.
These are your target audience.
And often, they'll move a lot higher up your value ladder than the paid traffic that you
get.
The percentages are much higher with the YouTube leads.
-So, is it course the best way to monetize a YouTube channel?
-Well, I have a bias.
And let me share the bias comes from.
So, Kris Krohn is the first channel that I started implementing my full strategy.
And we built the channel to a great amount of momentum.
There are lots of comments on there saying, "Hey, Kris.
How can I work with you?
Do you have any programs?
Do you have any courses?
Do you offer coaching?
How can I learn real estate investing from you?"
So, there's so much interest.
And yet, what he was selling at the time is he want the people to come to Utah to attend
his 3-day event.
And at the end of these 3-day events, people would have had such a great experience.
He would then offer his high-priced programs and they would buy.
But the YouTube audience was not coming to Utah.
I think in the previous year when we were having this conversation, he had one person.
So, with all this interest on YouTube, he had one client.
And so, we had talked a lot.
Like, "Kris, you need to create a course.
Create a course.
Something that they can just buy and have without having them to travel."
Well, it took 6 months from that first conversation before he finally launched a course.
It was a 6-figure month.
It was a thousand-dollar course.
And he sold over 100 of them, right?
So, he made over $100,000 in that first month.
Month 2 is about 60,000.
Month 3 is about 60,000.
And during that time, he was tweaking the landing pages doing the split testing and
whatnot.
And so, like in month 4 and onwards, it just started climbing back up.
Couple things that I learned from that experience is courses are much easier to sell than travel
or big-ticket items or events or something like that.
But then 2 years later, I was having a conversation with Kris and he told me that he had just
put on an event.
There were 250 people in attendance.
This was pre-covid.
Okay?
250 people were there.
And he said...
I can't remember if it was 90 or 95.
So, we'll just say 90.
He said 90% of the people there were because of YouTube.
They have traveled out of state to come to the event.
-Wow.
-So that's cool.
But his channel was at much bigger place.
So, it took an extra 2 years to that point.
Courses are going to be a way that you can monetize your YouTube channel a lot faster.
But you can lead in other things.
And I'll share with you another quick example.
So, Paul Jenkins, he's an expert on positivity.
He's a positivity psychologist.
He's an expert on relationships and an expert on parenting.
Parenting is his first topic that really took off on his channel.
And by the way, the backup.
Like he made a big part of his living when I started with him through public speaking.
He'd be hired to go do keynote speeches.
In addition to coaching that he provided.
Well, parenting really took off on his channel.
So, he created a parenting course.
And he started making money right off the bat because it was an easy thing to sell from
YouTube.
But about 20 months in, the YouTube channel started getting him keynote speaking engagements.
And the reason that we know that they came from YouTube is his wife who's also a parenting
expert but had never done any coaching or speaking, when they called up Paul and schedule
to hire them for the keynote, they said, "We want you to bring Vicki, too."
You know, because she had been in a lot of his parenting videos and stuff.
So, just kind of...
A lot of benefits that come from this YouTube strategy.
And that's why I think creating a course is one of the best ways because it's what you
can monetize the fastest.
-So, I want to get down into some of the nitty-gritty details of actually creating the course because
obviously, if you don't have a course, you can sell it anywhere.
So, do you need to hire a professional production company to come in and shoot the course and
edit it for you?
-On that one, I would typically say yeah.
Just because you want to be professional, the more money you pay for it, you really
want it to look sharp.
You know, I talk a lot of times about your episodes on your YouTube channel.
You can just film with your iPhone.
You know, face a window.
I talked about have it close so the audio sounds good.
But if people are paying a premium for theses videos, you do want it to come across as looking
professional.
-Yeah.
And what about hosting?
Are there places online...
Like what's the best way to deliver the product itself once you have it?
-Well, people have that question like "Could I host them on YouTube?"
And we all know that YouTube is an amazing resource for free content.
And so, we typically don't pay for that.
You can set those videos on private or unlisted right.
Or there's Vimeo.
I think that's really the only value I see on a platform like Vimeo is if you have a
course, you can host it there.
But nowadays, most course platforms...
Like the one that I use is Thinkific.
I can just upload my videos natively right to Thinkific.
I don't have to host them on YouTube or Vimeo or something like that.
So, you got a lot of options.
-So, paint the whole picture for me, Nate.
How do you sell a course from a single YouTube video?
-It's a really good question because we're not actually doing a sales pitch in the video.
The video itself is not a commercial.
We're answering questions, right?
So, there are how-to videos that build a relationship.
And there's nothing sold.
And we get to the end of the video.
And now that we've built this relationship of trust, we give them a free gift.
So, we give them even more value.
We say, "Hey, now that you've learned A, B, and C, would you like to learn even more?
I want to give you a free gift."
You know, whether that's a book you're giving away or something like that.
"Go ahead and click the link below and you can get access to that for free."
-Yeah.
-So, when people click, they go to that page, they fill out their name or email or whatever
they need to get their free gift.
Then there's this thank you page.
And that's where you can put a promo video.
And on your website, they expect to see promotional material there.
Also, they're on your email list.
And so, they're going to get...
You can continue to build that relationship through email and then you send them a promotion
email that takes them to another landing page that sells your course.
Or your lead magnet requires them to give you your phone number, you call them on a
phone.
Or oftentimes, you can have little forms of saying, "Hey, would you like to schedule a
30-minute strategy session?
Go ahead and fill this format."
So, just by them coming to get the lead magnet, you're starting to get appointments and leads
that way.
And that's where the sell happens.
Now, one of the best examples that I have of a client of mine making money from selling
courses online is Noelle Randall.
I'm going to link to a video right here that she and I filmed together.
I interviewd her about her experience in using my strategy and how she did it to sell so
many courses.
Go watch that one right now.