The Art of Selling Online Courses

John Ainsworth
  • 4.7 (17)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Daily

The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses. The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!

  1. 1d ago

    291 $126K in Year One With Unedited YouTube Videos

    Send us Fan Mail Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire Melissa Mae Dillon left her teaching job in 2022, shaved her head, got a pink and yellow mohawk, and started filming insurance exam prep videos on YouTube with zero editing. No fancy setup. No plan. One take, every time. Her first year she made $126,000. Her courses now bring in $130,000 to $150,000 a month. I sat down with Melissa to talk about how she built Insurance Exam Queen from nothing, but what I didn't expect was how little of the conversation would actually be about tactics. Melissa is clear that the most important thing she did to build her business was internal work, not funnels, not email sequences, not better lighting. She talks about hiring from guilt, creating offers from desperation and watching them attract desperate clients, and how she eventually figured out that the energy you're in when you build something leaves an imprint on everything that comes from it. We did get into the practical side too. Her YouTube channel sits at 103,000 subscribers and drives almost all her top-of-funnel traffic. Her Facebook study group has 22,000 members who actively sell her course for her without being paid. She has 3,400 five-star reviews. And we walked through an eight-email welcome sequence together and worked out how it would fit her audience. Melissa is one of those guests who makes you think differently about what the work actually is. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Melissa's work: 🌐 https://melissamaedillon.com/ 📸 https://www.facebook.com/melicious.pixie ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@insuranceexamqueen

  2. 3d ago

    290 No One Bought at $1,000. So I Raised the Price

    Send us Fan Mail Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Azhelle Wade spent years inside the toy industry, earning three patents, managing six brands at Toys R Us, and eventually reaching VP level. Then she walked away and started teaching complete strangers how to do what she used to do for a living. Dominik sat down with Azhelle, known as The Toy Coach, to talk about how she built her audience from 20 podcast downloads per episode, how a chance meeting at an industry networking event sparked the whole thing, and what actually happened when TV appearances on NBC sent a flood of leads her way with no real funnel to catch them. They get into the real business decisions too. How she used AI to role-play as her own ideal customer and audit her sales page, discovering she was trying to speak to too many different people at once. How she restructured Toy Creators Academy from a cohort model into a self-study program with a separate one-on-one offer. And how raising her price 2.5x turned around a period where she could not understand why nobody was buying. There is also a student story in here that genuinely stopped me when I heard it. One of Azhelle's students, Samantha, came close to quitting after her factory fell through. Azhelle talked her back in. Samantha ended up on Dragon's Den and disclosed $465,000 in revenue last year, then told Azhelle the number was already higher. It is a good one. I think you will enjoy it. Check out Azhelle's work: 🌐 https://www.thetoycoach.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/thetoycoach ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/thetoycoach

  3. 5d ago

    289 $1,500/Week on Meta Ads With 0 Following

    Send us Fan Mail Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Nick Pezzopane spent 15 years doing motion graphics and animation for clients like Blizzard Entertainment and the History Channel. Then AI showed up, and instead of feeling threatened, he went deep. He taught himself to install and run open-source AI locally on his own machine, built custom setups for paying clients, and turned that knowledge into a course business called Pixel Pandorium Academy. John sat down with Nick to dig into how he's building this from scratch, without a social following, using Meta ads as his primary traffic source. Nick's running one ad, spending around $1,000 to $1,500 a week, and has managed to break even on the front end while seeing roughly a 40% conversion rate on his $97 upsell. He's honest about what he got wrong with the ads early on and what he's still figuring out. What made this conversation interesting was how clearly Nick thinks about the value he's delivering. His argument for running AI locally, cutting out subscription costs, removing censorship restrictions, and getting more raw processing power, is simple and compelling. You can feel how much he wants his students to actually succeed with this. There's also a genuinely good moment near the end where Nick talks about waking up and realizing he's running a real business for the first time. It's the kind of thing that's easy to rush past, but worth sitting with. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Nick's work: 🌐 https://pixelpandorium.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/pixel_pandorium/

  4. Sep 4

    288 The Product Almost Doesn't Matter

    Send us Fan Mail Add 30% to your revenue with order bumps in 3 simple steps 🏅 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/order-bumps Simone, known as The Bearded Guitarist, spent over 15 years teaching private guitar lessons before he started posting on YouTube in 2020. He now has half a million followers across platforms. And until about a year ago, he had almost no idea how to actually sell anything. That's the honest thing he said early in our conversation, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Simone has clearly put in the work since then. He's built out a sales page with a VSL, testimonials, bonuses, multiple guarantees, an order bump, and a post-checkout upsell. He launched a coaching program structured more like personal training than traditional lessons. He's grown his email list from around 1,200 to just over 4,000 in twelve months. We went through his funnel together on screen, called out what he's doing well, and got into the specific things worth fixing: where to place the pain-agitation-solution section, why an eyebrow headline matters, and what's missing from his checkout page that's probably costing him sales. The bigger conversation was about email. Simone is getting around 300 new subscribers a month right now. John thinks he can get that to 1,000 or more, and explains exactly how monthly email promotions, done the right way, become the engine that makes everything else work. Simone is the kind of guest I really enjoy talking to. He's far enough along to have made real decisions and learned from them, and honest enough to say where he got it wrong. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Simone's work: 🌐 http://thebeardedguitaristcourses.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/its_thebeardedguitarist ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@TheBeardedGuitarist

  5. Sep 2

    287 Why Scaling Might Be What Kills Your Course Business

    Send us Fan Mail Jessica Lackey has a Harvard MBA, worked at McKinsey, and spent years inside Nike watching the company chase scale until it broke. Now she runs a multi-six-figure business on a list of 2,000 people, more than one in ten of whom buys from her every year. And she built it that way on purpose. Dominik sat down with Jessica to find out how that actually works. What came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on this show about what the online course industry gets wrong and what it costs people who follow the standard playbook without questioning it. Jessica talks about how she spent four years doing free monthly workshops without selling anything, how she personally emails everyone on her waitlist before a launch, and why she keeps her prices low on purpose so she never has to sell hard. She also gets into the moment she realized that most marketing advice isn't bad, it's just built for a different kind of business than the one most people are actually running. There's a section about the pull she still feels toward bigger numbers and higher prices, and why she chooses not to go there even when she could. That part stuck with me. It's rare for someone to admit that so clearly. She also shares two sharp pieces of advice: one for people who haven't launched yet, and one for people who've plateaued after two years. Both are worth hearing. Check out Jessica's work: 🌐 https://www.deeperfoundations.com/ 📸 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-lackey/

  6. Aug 31

    286 He Hasn't Posted in 2.5 Months. Leads Didn't Drop.

    Send us Fan Mail Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements Leo Coelho trained as a doctor, worked in medicine for about a year, quit to become a digital nomad, tried translating, tried dropshipping, became a tour guide in Lisbon, and then the pandemic shut everything down overnight. So he started making YouTube videos about the Portuguese language. Fifteen months later he had 100,000 subscribers. Today Portuguese with Leo is the biggest channel for learning European Portuguese as a foreign language, with 290,000 subscribers, 22 million views, and a course business doing low six figures a year at around 70% margins. John sat down with Leo to talk through how he built all of this, and what he's working on next. They got into why Leo thinks YouTube consistency is overrated, how he keeps pulling in 1,500 new email subscribers a month without posting a video for nearly three months, and how his evergreen content does the lead generation work for him. Then the conversation shifted into something closer to a live strategy session, covering order bumps versus upsells, checkout page conversion, warm-up email sequences, and how to run promotions more often without burning out your audience. Leo's got a clear north star, living and travelling on his own terms, and every business decision he makes runs through that filter first. That shapes everything about how he operates, and honestly it makes for a really interesting conversation. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Check out Leo's work: 🌐 https://www.portuguesewithleo.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@PortugueseWithLeo

  7. Aug 28

    285 You Don't Need a High-Ticket Offer to Succeed

    Send us Fan Mail 15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements Lindsay Müller built a Facebook group of 30,000 ukulele beginners without spending a single dollar on ads. She did it by showing up every day for five months, posting chord sheets, tutorials, and tips on a simple rotating schedule she made up herself. Then one day in January 2024, it just took off. Dominik sat down with Lindsay to talk through exactly how she built that, and what she did with the audience once she had it. She walks through her posting system, how she turns free chord sheets into email signups, and why she deliberately teaches so much for free inside the group rather than gating it behind a paywall. Her logic is simple and it works. There's also a really honest stretch of conversation about high-ticket offers. Lindsay is pretty much the only guest we've had who's looked at that whole world and said, that's just not for me, and then made a clear case for why it doesn't have to be. She's been at this for two and a half years, she's found something that works, and she's not pretending to have it all figured out. Oh, and her children's song Grateful Heart just crossed a million streams on Spotify. She wrote it for a challenge and almost didn't record it. That story is worth hearing too. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Lindsay's work: 🌐 http://LindsayMuller.com/Ukulele 📸 http://instagram.com/ukelindsay ▶️ http://youtube.com/LindsayMuller

  8. Aug 26

    284 Content Won't Keep Members Anymore. Community Will

    Send us Fan Mail Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide Shelley and CJ Hitz have run the same low-ticket membership for over eleven years. That alone is worth paying attention to. They built Christian Book Academy for Christian writers, people who want to finish and publish their books but keep getting stuck. The membership costs $49 a month. They have over 300 members. And they have had to figure out, the hard way, what actually keeps people paying month after month. Dominik sat down with both of them to dig into the mechanics. They talked about how they get 20 to 25 new paying members from a virtual conference twice a year, with no ads, just speakers emailing their lists. They talked about progress pods, small accountability groups inside the membership that have become so valued that one member's pod literally paid her subscription so she could stay. They talked about why removing the countdown timer on their conference offer tanked sales. And they were honest about the moments they almost walked away. There was also a moment I did not expect. They turned down a spot in a book that hit the USA Today bestseller list because the topic did not fit their brand. No hesitation. They would do it again. If you run a membership, or you are thinking about starting one, this conversation gets into the real economics in a way most people do not talk about publicly. I think you will get a lot from it. Check out Shelley and CJ's work: 🌐 https://www.trainingauthors.com/ 📸 https://www.facebook.com/kingdomwriterspage/ ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@kingdomwriterstv/

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4.7
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses. The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!

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