This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income become financially free and design the best lives. Hey guys, Sharon from digital nomad quest, and
this is Sean with everything, Rei.
And today we’re gonna go over how we made over $60,000 launching our course. So this year has been insane. We launched this course in the beginning of the year, and I had made two courses before. But this was something that a lot of people had asked for. This is about how to say real estate investing, and people wanted that step by step on how to buy your first rental property. So that’s why we launched this course this year. Now I really believe in online education, I feel like people are looking for new ways to get high quality education at an affordable price, right. So instead of spending like hundreds of 1000s of dollars on you know, getting a degree and you know, going to college, you can actually buy courses for hundreds of dollars and get a lot of value from online education. And I also feel like with online education, it’s scalable so that you can impact people globally, you can do one on one coaching. But if you want to productize those lessons and actually put them up as evergreen courses, people all around the world can access it and learn from it. So that’s why I highly believe in courses and I’ve taken a ton of them myself to exponentially improve my life and my business, so I highly believe in it. And that’s why I wanted to make this episode today to talk about how you can make your own courses around things you are passionate about and teach people and impact people. In this episode, we’re going to go over our journey and talk about how we launched our course and how we created it so that you guys can learn from it. So again, like I mentioned, I was making all these tic tock videos, a lot of them were around real estate and I started getting so many comments and DMS asking me to create something like this for them. A lot of people didn’t know where to turn to. And a lot of the free content out there is not going to give you that step by step. So that’s why we created remote rental riches. Now before we created the course we actually went to Pat Flynn’s course workshop it we spent $6,000 to go to this workshop. That was one weekend, he sat down with us and taught us how he makes his courses. And to be honest, it confirms a lot of things I knew, but it made us go harder on marketing the course I’ve already had two courses out there. One is on Etsy one is on blogging, but I really wanted to make something that people were asking for.
So we were at Pat Flynn’s course workshop, we learned how to mind map our actual course. So instead of just thinking on the fly, like I’m talking about this, I’m fine with that, we actually outlined everything, broke it down to the post it notes, and then had it everywhere there and then decided which section we were. So it was really cool just like seeing how someone like Pat Flynn does his own courses. And we got to learn how to do it with his best practices.
Normally, I do you know, a Google doc of everything and write down all the curriculum. But mind mapping definitely helps if you guys want to try that out, just put down your ideas on post it notes and start moving them around categorizing them, so you know what your whole outline is going to look like. So with that step, we did transfer those posts and notes into a whole outline. So we already had this outline created at the workshop that we wanted to make. So we already mapped our out estate rental property course. And then after the workshop, we decided we wanted to really flush that out at the time, I wasn’t like big on social media. And when it started blowing up, that’s when we were like, Alright, let’s go for it. So we spent about a year making this course we worked really hard on making it so that people can go from A to B to buy their first rental property. So we
were finally ready to start filming it. We started filming it one module at a time, when we kind of ping pong back and forth, I would take one chapter shooting another chapter. And the actual course itself wasn’t that difficult to film, we just put all the information we wanted onto these PowerPoint slides. And then we were just talking through the slides without even showing your face. So it made it really simple to edit every single module so that it was very concise. Yeah,
we figured PowerPoint slides would be easier because there were notes already there. And people could just hear us talk and you know, understand what was going on. So we decided to do that instead of talk directly to the camera. We do have intro and outro slides where we do talk directly to the camera to make it a little more personal. But then we went you know, to the PowerPoint slides so people can refer to them. We also added things like homework assignments, case studies, quizzes, even like a drawing of kind of the overview of real estate investing. So we try to switch up the curriculum to be more interesting versus just talking the whole time, right? We wanted to keep people engaged, so that they would actually do the work step by step. Our goal was really that we wanted to make sure they would actually do the homework, right? We didn’t want them to just watch it and not do anything. So we’ve gotten a lot of students really happy buying their first rental property. So that’s really exciting to us. So you want to make sure when you’re creating your course you’re trying to make sure they’re successful, right? You don’t want to just put something out there and not care about what they’re going to do. And I think the case studies helped to where I actually went and called property managers visit properties and talk to people because they wanted to see that behind the scenes, they wanted to get an understanding of what everything looks like. So when creating your courses, make sure you think about the best format to creating them. Some people even do just all text, right? It depends on what you are trying to go after. For us. We did PowerPoint slides, so figure it out for your topic. Now the
sales page is actually really important. That’s where you can have your title, your tagline, you have an intro video, as well, we have all these testimonials from people that we gave early access to, and they gave us genuine feedback, I managed to improve our product even better. So when we finally launched the course, it had been very successful, you definitely have to make sure your sales page is very good. So take a lot of time to make sure that thing is solid before you launch your product. Yeah, we refer
to you know a bunch of different sales pages to to kind of make sure we are on the right track. But the course workshop definitely helped us a lot. So make sure when you’re making it, your tagline really tells your students where they’re going to be if they take the course, for example, for us, it was pretty clear that if you took our curriculum, you would be able to start getting your first rental property. So that was our goal for the students, we wanted to get them from A to B, the best courses are getting them from A to B. So make sure that you hone in on what they’re going to get out of taking your course in the sales page. We also made sure to address people struggles so that people can relate to the copy. And again, like Sean said, we got a lot of testimonials. So Shawn actually has a meetup. And he spoke with people and said, if you guys want our course for free, we’d love to give it out. And you guys can give an honest testimonial of the course. So that was basically what we did, we got a few different video testimonials, as well as some quotes and things like that based off of people actually taking the course. So that’s really helpful. So when you’re launching your course make sure to have that ready. And the feedback we got from it really made us go over the curriculum again. And again, to make sure that it was the best it could be We did different parts of it, we made sure to walk it through and see if it all made sense to you know, a complete beginner.
Now, when it comes to pricing, you have to look at what’s out there in the market already in the real estate space, you know, locally, a lot of the courses out there are generally going to be in the 1000 $2,000 range, we didn’t really want to be there, we want to be a bit more affordable, especially to the crowd that she was catering to. But we also didn’t want make it too cheap because you need the course too cheap. And he will think that it’s a bad product. So we have to find that happy balance between there that it would sell. And people think it’s a good value. So we don’t come in with the number of $347. And then for the course launch, we actually discounted significantly so that we could boost those core sales. Yeah, I
believe we did $120 off for the course sale. That discount period was two weeks when we launched it. So we launched it on January 19. And ended it February 3, going back to the pricing, really priced it at what you think it’s worth right for us. I wish I had a course like this because I was stuck wanting to invest out of state for the longest time, but I was scared about doing so I didn’t know the exact steps. So to me, it has a lot of value. So that’s why we priced that what we priced it at. If you think that you’re undervaluing yourself, then you definitely should price higher definitely price at what you think it’s worth. A lot of people say price even higher than what you think it’s worth to be honest. So just make sure you price it right, I would say one thing, it is easier to increase it in the future instead of lowering the price later. So I did have a course launch before where we ended up lowering the price in the future because people weren’t as interested in the product as the one that we actually put out this time. So pricing does matter. I think that a lot of people preach to price it really high. But I think price it to what you think is fair. Now, I think a lot of you guys are interested in the marketing portion in the course launch. First of all, everything we mentioned is really crucial already for the launch, you want to make sure the quality is good, you want to make sure that you have the testimonials, the sales pages robust, you know, a crappy sales page is going to turn people off. So these are all important components. But when it came to the actual launch, we actually blasted on all different platforms. In the past, I was scared to talk about my courses. So I just like put it out there and never told anyone now this time we actually put it on Instagram, we sent out emails, put it on our stories, I put it in my Facebook group, he talked about it and his meetups. So we just, you know blasted it wherever we could, because we’re very proud of this product, we spent a year on it. A lot of people were asking for it. So don’t be afraid to you know, blast your course and really talk about it, especially if you spent a long time on it and you think it’s good quality, it’s going to benefit someone so make sure that you really push it out. And when we pushed it out. We also had different tracking codes for every different platform. So we have two people and we had multiple platforms. So he had a bunch of different codes. We had ones for Instagram, email, his Instagram, his email, just like so many different ones so that we can make sure we know where the sales are coming from, then we know that you know which one’s better which one isn’t how we can improve it. Tracking is helpful so that you can optimize your process later when it came to the emails. We sent out a few different ones. We did one about what the course was about. We did one on Frequently Asked Questions So if people had questions on the course, we addressed it in that email. We also had one where we talked about the testimonials. So what students actually felt about our course so that people can see if people were happy with it or not.
And another big marketing tactic that we use this time is we actually went on lives. So again, sharing the time had a very large tick tock following and Instagram following. So we went on both Tik Tok and Instagram Live, just talked about real estate investing in general, and also shout out our product every 10 minutes or so. And I remember just seeing like floods and floods of sales, because we decided to go live on the very last night, let everyone know, hey, we launched this product out there, people are like, Oh, my God sharing, I love your tic TOCs. And then they learned that we have a real estate product that oh, shoot, I can learn from them. And then they’re buying. So that was very good, too. So if you have a presence on social media, and they have a live component to it, definitely going live, especially on your very last day when the sale is about to end. So many people decide to buy at the very last minute, oftentimes, we actually extend our sales, another 10 hours of sale, because you know that there’s a lot of last minute people who want to buy and they’re on the edge, but you know, give them some time, the light. Now, if
you don’t have like a huge social media following, I don’t want that to deter you. And that was like a big mistake I made before because of my Etsy course, I did not talk about it right. But I think you should be proud of it. Like I mentioned, blasted on your socials. Even if you don’t have a large presence, you’re going to grow that following in the future later anyway, so you’re going to be talking about it in the future. So put it on your link tree in your bio announced the launch. So the way we announced it was we actually made that video, the intro video that’s on the sales page. But we made an Instagram version of it and talked about it, we had a series of posts that we prepared when we were doing this, we had one where we were in front of one of the properties took a picture with it. So plan out your launch with you know series of posts and series of emails where you blast the product. Another thing we did was we created a free opt in afterwards. So we created the rental property toolkit. If anyone signs up for that they get a series of emails where in the end, they will also get a 10% off to the course. So that’s a great way to create an automation and upsell a course in the future. So if you’re going to do that, you want to make sure your free lead magnet is actually helpful to them. And then they know that you know what you’re talking about. And then they want more from you. In our case, our real property toolkit talks about the benefits of real estate and really dives into like some of the tax benefits cashflow appreciation, a lot of different things as well as talks about the series of steps you’ll need in order to get your first rental property. Since we have hours of content in the course we’re like, if you do want that step by step, you can take it with that 10% off that we give you so that lives on our sites, and people can grab it if they want to. So here is a screenshot of our sales, it looks like we made $65,310 on remote rental riches from period between January 19 to February 3. Now that’s basically all the steps that we took when creating this course. Again, this was a year out. So it was a long time coming. And a lot of people ask about the ROI of creating a course. And I feel like to me, it’s more about having that evergreen material in our portfolio that we can direct people to in the future. So don’t worry, even if your course doesn’t sell as much as you want it to. Because this course is going to live on your site forever, right? You can redirect people to it, you can grow your following in the future and people might get it in the future. So I’m very proud to have all three courses that I have out even you know, my blogging one doesn’t get as many sales as this one, right. But people still get it if they are interested in blogging. So I’m happy that I’m covering a lot of material that I have learned over the years, right. So for blogging, I’ve done it for like six years now, it’s nice to pass on that knowledge in a step by step curriculum. So view it that way instead of viewing it like I failed on my launch right from my two other courses that I’ve created, I’ve gotten a lot of knowledge that I’ve put into this course launch. So having that experience is really helpful. So you should just go and take action, create those courses that you want to create, it’s going to live in your portfolio and you’re going to be very proud of you know, creating them and in the future you can also revamp it so the platform we use is teachable so if you guys want to try that out I’ll have a link below but teachable is just really nice to put your entire curriculum out there in an easy way you can put video audio text really easily into the platform so try out teachable if you guys do want to try out you know creating a course I hope you guys found this really valuable because this is something I would have wanted to see when I first started creating my courses. 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