How We Made $200k+ From Our Courses Last Year (How to Make a Course that Sells)

Unknown Speaker 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

Unknown Speaker 0:14
Hey guys, Sharon from digital nomad quest, and today we’re gonna go over how we made over $200,000 in core sales last year. So first off, I didn’t really want to make this video honestly, it’s because I feel like course creators kind of get a bad rap. I’m sure I’m gonna get hate comments on this episode. But I truly think that courses are a great way to learn. And I feel like people who have knowledge in something should totally productize their knowledge. But I did want to create this episode because people have asked me about how to create a curriculum, and I’m sure there will be a lot of people interested in hearing about this topic. I personally pay a lot for courses, I am always trying to invest in my business and investment education. So I’ve bought a ton of courses to learn along the way, I feel like it’s a great way to learn. I prefer over free content, because usually they’re gonna have better material, they’re gonna be step by step in a long curriculum that I can learn from and not only courses, I pay for guides, workshops, conferences, events, and even coaching calls and they have all dramatically changed my life, I wouldn’t be where I am today, if I didn’t invest in myself and my business case in point me and Shawn actually spent $6,000 on Pat Flynn’s course workshop to learn how to make better courses and deliver the best material to people. Obviously, it’s helped us as you guys can see here, education is one of those things that I don’t really think twice about spending any more because I know it’s gonna be worth it. And for me, particularly, I’m more introverted and anxious when it comes to like one on one coaching. Whereas with courses, I really like to deliver value that way, and I find more comfort in it. Because first of all, it’s efficient, and it’s scalable. With one on one coaching, you’re reaching one person. But with products like evergreen courses, you can reach people at a global level, so people all over the world can have lifetime access to my content. If you guys aren’t interested in making your own course, make sure to check out teachable in my link below, I highly recommend teachable for creating your courses. So let’s just get right into today’s topic where I talk about how we were able to make over $200,000 with core sales, I’m just going to go over kind of my journey with it total sales was $226,391, my earnings were $117,285. That’s because one of the courses the remote rental riches course is with my husband and I so half of those earnings from the sales goes to him as well as I have a course called Blog launch profit where I talk all about blogging, and I have that with my other friend who we split the profits on that as well. So if you basically count my earnings and my husband’s earnings from last year, you will find that it’s over $200,000 All together. Alright, let’s go back into it. So my first course was actually the Etsy entrepreneur. This course taught people how to make $1,000 a month in passive income by selling digital products on Etsy, I ended up spending over a year on each of the courses I made. Actually, I wanted to perfect it, I wanted to make sure that it was up to par. So I made sure to get people to take the course first before I launched it and things like that, so that I could see what they actually thought about the course I also tried to look at other courses and see how I can improve mine as well. So all that takes a lot of time, the filming the editing the outlining all that stuff. It takes a long time. I’m sure I could have done it in a quicker amount of time. But I kind of took my time with it. And I’m actually happy that I spent that long of time on each of my products, because I made sure they are good for my audience. But when I launched the Etsy entrepreneur, I didn’t exactly really launch it. What really happened was, you know, at the time, I only really had a blog, I didn’t have much of an Instagram presence, YouTube presence. I didn’t even start my youtube channel at the time yet, I didn’t have a tick tock account. So my follower base was mainly through my blog, my email list and things like that. But I felt like such a small fry. And I was like, why would anyone listen to me? So I didn’t tell anyone that I made the course I spent a year on it. And I didn’t even announce, you know, creating this course. So just kind of funny looking back, I really just felt like who would even want to learn from me. So again, I didn’t tell you when I launched it, I put it on my website, and I just heard crickets, obviously no one’s gonna say anything about it, because they don’t even know that it exists there yet. But honestly, I didn’t really care. I was proud of creating a course and putting it out there. And it made something that I could refer people to in case they wanted more step by step instruction on Etsy. I feel like my overall goal with all this content stuff is that I want to make a huge repository of content on YouTube, huge repository of courses that people might want. That really helps people get from A to B. And that’s kind of my plan. So I was just excited to have that out there. So that’s one thing. First of all, make sure you’re creating a course that you want to create that you’re proud of. Secondly, don’t make the mistake that I made, right, you want to make sure you announce the course you want to let people get excited about it and tell people about it. Even though I didn’t have a hard launch. I later kind of did some guest podcasting and started getting interviewed about Etsy and things like that. So I started putting myself out there getting interviewed about how I was able to make passive income stream

Unknown Speaker 5:00
means at the end of the interviews, I would usually plug my course and let people know about it in case they wanted to sign up with it that honestly helps with getting more backlinks to your course. So with backlinks more websites are linking to your course. And that shows Google that your course or your website is something that should be ranked higher on Google. It’s like having more credibility, because other people are mentioning it. And that’s why Google is going to rank it higher. So I’m sure that honestly helped with my rankings. But it also helped with promoting it to other audiences, right. When you go on other people’s podcasts, you get to tap into their audiences and their regular listeners. So that helped a lot. So if you guys are launching a course, I think a great way to get the word out there is to get on people’s podcasts. I also created an affiliate program with my Etsy course. So whoever supports my content my course and really wants to promote it, they can be an affiliate and get a percent commission. That’s the great thing about teachable is they handle all that they handle coupon codes. So if you want to add affiliates to your course, you totally can. So with my affiliate program, if people purchase through their unique referral link, they’ll get a 30% commission for the sales they make to the Etsy entrepreneur and with teachables affiliate program, you can sign up those affiliates and give them those unique referral links to promote your course. This is another great way to get the word out there with your course after the Etsy entrepreneur I launched blog launch profit, I worked on this with my friend spent over a year on it. He’s actually a digital nomad. So he actually came over for two weeks. And we just spent a long time kind of cranking out the curriculum started recording the episodes. But it still took over a year because we were talking marketing strategies, we are always talking about how we can improve it on this part in this part and taking notes. So it ended up taking a long time. But again, it doesn’t matter to me because I like having that material on my website, I like that I’ve created something I’m proud of. And because we spent so long on it, we can be sure that it’s a quality product. Now with blog launch profit, this time, we did blast it to our audience, we sent emails out about it, I talked about it on my Facebook group, as well as my Instagram. But here’s the problem, it was not a topic that a lot of my audience was interested in. And the reason is that I didn’t talk about blogging that much in my free materials if I never talked about blogging, and then I suddenly put up a blogging course, why would my audience think I knew what I was talking about with blogging, for example, because of this, I honestly should have spent more time serving my audience about what they wanted to learn to me, it doesn’t matter because I’m so happy I put that out there. But I think a lot of people get hung up on like, oh, this course failed. It’s not getting that many sales, I spent way too much time on this. And it didn’t even make money. For me, it doesn’t really matter because I’m like, great, I have this awesome curriculum that I spent a long time making. And I can redirect people to it if they ever want to learn more about blogging. But anyway, around that, I guess my tips are, first of all, don’t get hung up on failing, you have created an evergreen course that you know people can get value from, you can always redirect people to it, if they need help on that subject, you should be really proud of the content you created out there. And then secondly, my mistake here was that I didn’t survey my audience about what they wanted to hear, I should have thought about kind of what was the stuff that I was talking about what kind of content was I creating for my audience and giving value about and then creating a course around what people were struggling with, right? If people are like, Oh, I’m really struggling with Etsy or struggling with real estate, then kind of creating a blogging course is just not something that like they were asking for, right? So you want to make sure your course is something that people are actually requesting from you. Now let’s talk about my latest course that I created in 2021. We launched it in January, and it’s called Remote rental riches is talking all about as say investing buying your first rental property. And we launched this after all my learning from my previous courses, as well as taking Pat Flynn’s course creation workshop that we spent $6,000 on we finally had a lot of good understanding of what we should do with this court. And I really feel like we did all the right things with this one. First off, I’d kind of gone viral on tick tock, I got over a million views on this real estate video. And I really started talking more about buying rental properties, buying properties out of state and I got so many questions about real estate about how to buy your first out of state rental property. That’s when we knew that this was something that was in demand. Shawn and I had actually outlined the material already at Pat Flynn’s course creation workshop. So we had this outline, we started building the curriculum, knowing that my audience was really asking for it. It was really exciting that we were putting something out there that people were actually wanting to hear about when we launched it. We made over $60,000 Within two weeks, we ran a discount that was going to be the biggest discount we ever would put out and we ran it for those first two weeks. We promoted it with Instagram with emails on the last day of our course launch. We even did many lives. I remember when we were doing the lives we were just getting sale after sale after sale. We’re talking about real estate investing and people who asked in the comments like how do I get more information we just plug the course whenever people ask for it. So it actually worked really well that way when you’re launching a course out

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Let’s say testimonials are very valuable. So before we launched it, we actually gave the course for free to a couple beta testers and ask for their honest reviews. And those honest reviews are on the core sales page. I would also say that putting a time limit around the discount is important. So when the last few days are coming up, or the last few hours are coming up with your sale, you should definitely be plugging it letting them know on Instagram Stories, Facebook group maybe or on your email list, let them know that there’s only a few hours left if they want to grab the course. And before you launch, you should be providing free value to people in serving, what their struggles are right, you should always be helping people. And this core should be something that solves their problems. So let me go over some of my tips. I already spoke about a lot of tips during this journey. But let’s go over the overall tips. First off again, don’t be afraid to announce your course launch. Second, be proud of your material. And don’t be worried about failing. If you’re providing value about something that you’re passionate about, you’ll probably be happy with the result. Next tip, I wanted to say that you are allowed to teach because you are knowledgeable in something I think a lot of people get hung up on like why would anyone listen to me I’m not like a Grant Cardone, or like a Tony Robbins or someone else who might currently have like authority or whatever. But ultimately, I feel like everyone has their unique perspective, people relate to you in different ways. So you would actually be surprised that some people would probably rather learn from you than from others, okay, so even if you have a little bit more knowledge than others in an area, don’t be afraid to create a course. Another tip I have is when you’re creating courses, you should take other people’s courses, you should watch other people’s lessons, learn from them and see how they are actually teaching. This is going to help you teach better, it’s going to help you figure out your curriculum better, you could also take those courses and see what they could improve on and then see how you could actually provide better value than those people. Now when it comes to marketing. I’m sure you guys want all the tips around this part, right? Like I mentioned, testimonials are very powerful. The reason testimonials are powerful is if I create a course and I tell you, it’s the best course ever, it’s not going to really mean anything. But then if someone else says My course is the best course ever, that’s gonna mean so much more that testimonial is going to be worth a lot because they actually took the course they actually really enjoyed it. And they’re just a third party that wants to tell other people about how they enjoyed the course people will trust those testimonials more than my own testimonial about my own course. So get as many testimonials as you can get beta testers to do honest reviews of your course. And honestly doing that will also help you improve the course because maybe there were things that they say that you could have done better on and it will actually help you revise your course and make it better. I would also say Instagram is a very powerful way to promote your course I use Instagram stories a lot. I would promote through Instagram reels as well as through video posts. I try not to sell all the time, right, I did promote it during those two weeks a good amount. But I also wanted to provide free value as well. So I did a cadence of free value as well as promotional materials. So they know about the course launch and can look there for more step by step material. So when you’re promoting on Instagram Stories try reels like put it at the end of the caption like provide value first. And then at the end, you can say for more information, check out the course you can also do story posts where you can say, Did you guys know there is a discount on the course, tap the link below to check out the course. So you can put the link stickers on your stories and redirect them to the website. And you can also post FAQs and testimonials. So that’s another thing I did with my email and my stories, I posted testimonials of what other people were saying about the course as well as frequently asked questions. So whenever people had questions about it, I tried to address them on my stories in my emails, so students know the answers to them and feel safer purchasing the course. For example, they might be asking about a refund policy, or about for example, with our course like how much money do you need to invest in real estate? Does this work for Canada? Or is it only for US residents, stuff like that. So it’s a good way to address people’s concerns. Another thing you might want to do is create a free guide for people and collect people’s email addresses. And then you can put them down in an email sequence. And at the end, if they do want to sign up for your course you might plug a link to the course maybe with a discount, and they can decide if the course is for them or not. So that’s another way to market your course it’s like if they want it fine if they don’t they have a free material that you gave them and hopefully that provided value for them already. affiliate programs are a great way to promote your course. So get affiliates to promote your course I would say I have more affiliates for my Etsy course with affiliates. I honestly could be doing a better job with that I only really gave access to affiliates who requested that access to my program but I haven’t sought out affiliates myself. But this is something you can offer to people who have already taken your course if they really support it and they want to possibly promote it or tell their friends about it. You can give them access to your affiliate program so they can make some money out of promoting your course lastly podcast interview

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Use in collaborations are really powerful. So I honestly feel like with my Etsy course, the podcast interviews and collaborations in the affiliate program have been really big drivers for sales on that course. So don’t underestimate podcast interviews and collaborations because you get to tap into those audiences and let them know about your product. So that about wraps up how we were able to make over $200,000 in core sales last year, I hope you guys got a lot of value around the techniques and strategies around course creation and launching the course we’ve learned a lot along the way. I’ve learned a lot from just like making these courses and putting them out there. As you guys can see, I made many mistakes on the way I’m also glad I took a course workshop that kind of teaches how to really launch it better. And these learnings that I mentioned in this episode are really things that can help you a lot if you implement it and launch your course this way. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai