The Art of Selling Online Courses

John Ainsworth
  • 4.7 (15)
  • 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

    234 How To Actually Make Money With a Small Audience

    Send a text 🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Alexis Haselberger has built a multiple six figure business with a small audience.. and honestly, most people are surprised when they hear that. She's a time management, productivity and stress reduction coach who helps busy professionals do more and stress less. Her clients include Google, Lyft, Workday, Capital One and Upwork, and over 229,000 people have taken her courses on Udemy. In this episode we dig into how she's built four different revenue streams that all pull their weight, why she nearly burned out with 35 one-on-one coaching clients and a six month wait list, and how that pushed her toward building courses. We talk about the difference between selling on Udemy versus selling on your own site, and why those are completely different games. We also get into her approach to YouTube and LinkedIn, and we actually pull up her YouTube analytics live to look at where her best performing videos are getting their traffic from. Turns out 52% of her top video's views come from search, which opens up a really interesting strategy for her going forward. We chat about webinars, evergreen funnels, and whether email marketing works differently when your audience is made up of super busy people who barely read their inboxes. Plus we get into some really cool stuff about AI and courses, including how one course creator replaced her course with an AI chatbot and 3X'd her best launch. And Alexis shares some genuinely practical productivity tips that I think any course creator will find useful.. especially around getting stuff out of your head and being realistic about how much you can actually get done. This was a really fun conversation. Hope you enjoy it. 🔎 Find Alexis here: 🔗 Website: https://www.alexishaselberger.com/  🎙️ Do More, Stress Less Podcast: alexishaselberger.com/podcast  📖 Distraction Action Plan:  https://www.alexishaselberger.com/reduce-distraction  🔗 Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/domorestressless  🔗 Insta:  @do.more.stress.less  🔗 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@do.more.stress.less  🔗 FB Group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/domorestressless/   #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    47 min

  2. FEB 26

    233 Your Plan B Is Killing Your Business

    Send a text 🔥 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 Spencer Russell went from classroom teacher to building a business with over 5 million followers and 10,000 customers. In this episode, he shares why he believes your backup plan might actually be the thing holding you back from success. We get into the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy and how Spencer found a niche in the toddler reading space that nobody was tapping into. He talks about the moment he decided to quit his safe teaching job, even with a young kid at home, and why he believes that burning the bridge and going all in was the best decision he ever made. He shares both the spiritual and practical arguments for betting on yourself and how necessity became the fuel that drove him forward. We also dive into the future of online courses and why Spencer thinks the industry needs to evolve. He talks about protecting your business from AI, why community might be the most important differentiator going forward, and how he balances selling physical products alongside digital courses with a 50/50 revenue split. On the tactical side, Spencer walks us through his plan to use a quiz funnel that segments parents by their child's age and routes them into different webinars with tailored offers. We also talk about his email marketing challenges and what he is doing to fix them now that he has taken his business back after selling it to Love Every in 2024. 🔗 Check out Spencer's work at https://toddlerscanread.com 🔗 Find Spencer on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram at  @toddlerscanread  . Thanks for listening and I will catch you in the next one. #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    48 min

  3. FEB 19

    232 How I Created a Career That Didn't Exist

    Send a text 🔥 Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/lead-magnet What happens when none of the careers in your industry feel right? Sahara Rose De Vore found herself in that exact spot. She had a degree in hospitality and tourism management, she'd traveled to over 84 countries, and yet nothing in the travel industry clicked for her. So she did something most people wouldn't even consider. She created an entirely new career path and built the world's first and only ICF accredited travel coach certification program around it. In this episode, Sahara shares how she went from broke college student to building the Travel Coach Network, a global community of over 750 certified travel coaches from more than 40 countries. We talk about how she educated a market that didn't know it needed her, how she generates sales through strategic price drops, and how adding a single deadline funnel to her email list brought in over $25K. We also dig into her surprisingly low ad spend, her experiments with Reddit ads, and what she'd focus on to grow her email list from 200 opt-ins a month to over 2,000 with the 70,000 monthly visitors she's already getting. If you're a course creator trying to figure out how to sell in a niche that you've had to explain to people, this one's for you. ✈️ Check out The Travel Coach Network: https://thetravelcoachnetwork.com ✈️ Follow Sahara Rose on social media: @sahararosethetravelcoach 🧨 Check out The Dynamite Circle: dynamitecircle.com Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    40 min

  4. FEB 13

    231 Meet the Man With 980,000,000+ YouTube Views

    Send a text 🔥 Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements Mark Smith films birds in slow motion. That's his niche. Ospreys, eagles, hawks in ultra slow motion. And it's got him 980 million views on YouTube and 6 million followers across platforms. In this episode I sit down with Mark and we get into how he built this massive audience from one incredibly specific niche. He picked up a camera again at 40, almost didn't start YouTube because he thought nobody would care, and his son had to convince him to post his first video. That video got a thousand views overnight and the rest is history. We talk about why he compares himself to Bob Ross and how the best creators make things look possible for their audience. We get into why YouTube crushes every other platform for selling online courses and why short form content doesn't convert the same way. I also pull up one of his sales pages live on the call and walk through what's working and what's missing. Mark is honest about the fact that he'd rather be outside photographing wildlife than working on his email list or his funnels. His email list is only 2,500 people despite having millions of followers. He knows he's leaving money on the table and we dig into exactly where that money is and what he could do about it. If you're a course creator with a decent audience but you know your business side isn't keeping up with your content, this conversation will hit home. 🦅 Check out Mark's YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@MarkSmithphotography 🎁 Want the free customer avatar course I mention during the episode? Drop me an email at john@datadrivenmarketing.co with "Customer Avatar" in the subject line and I'll send it over.

    47 min

  5. FEB 10

    230 How To Actually Pre-Sell Your Course

    Send a text 🔥 Need better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templates What would you do if you had no audience, an email list of 50 people, and zero courses to sell? That's exactly where Trevor Dimoff was when he decided to figure out how to sell a course before he'd even built one. He talked to 50 people, listened to their problems, came up with a solution, and pitched it back to the same people he'd interviewed. The result was $2,000 in pre-sales for a course that didn't exist yet. In this episode Trevor walks through his entire process step by step. How he found people to talk to, what questions he asked, the three things he did during every call that made the pre-sell possible later, and how he delivered the pilot course live on Zoom. He's also really honest about what went wrong after that and why he lost momentum trying to scale too fast. If you're just getting started or thinking about launching something new, this is a really practical episode. Trevor doesn't sugarcoat anything and the lessons from his mistakes are just as useful as the wins. 🔗 Check out Trevor's work: https://trevordimoff.com 🔗 https://trevordimoff.com/aosoc 🔗 If you'd like to connect with Trevor or to ask him questions about having research conversations you can contact him at: https://trevordimoff.com/aosoc Trevor would like to thank Jacques Hopkins, the Online Course Guy and his Online Course Show podcast. Jacques interviewed Trevor on episode 90: https://theonlinecourseguy.com Trevor learned the process he used for market research and course creation from: Danny Iny, founder of Mirasee, where he helps online teachers and coaches monetize their gifts: https://mirasee.com #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    36 min

  6. FEB 6

    229 I Started Posting 1 Short A Day. Here's What Happened

    Send a text 🔥 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 Jori Chisholm has been teaching bagpipes online since 2003… before YouTube even existed. He was literally the first person to ever teach a bagpipe lesson on a webcam. Fast forward to today and he's running bagpipelessons.com, reaching students in 30 countries, and last year he hit 3.2 million views on Meta and 320,000 on YouTube. The wild part? He wasn't even trying to hit those numbers. His strategy was simple… post one short video every single day. And it worked. In this episode we dig into how Jori built a thriving course business in one of the smallest niches you can imagine. We talk about why he has courses AND a membership AND physical products, how he uses his email list to actually drive sales, and why he thinks AI is going to wipe out a lot of generic information-only courses but won't touch businesses built on real personal connection and trust. Whether you're in a tiny niche or a massive one, there's a lot to learn from someone who's been doing this successfully for 25 years. #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing 🎵 Check out Jori's work at https://bagpipelessons.com 🎵 Jori's YouTube channel:  https://youtube.com/bagpipelessons 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    37 min

  7. FEB 3

    228 Here's How You SELL Courses (Even If You're Not A Marketer)

    Send a text 🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Here's something I hear all the time... course creators telling me they feel weird about selling. They got into this to teach, not to become marketers. Kerstin Cable gets it. She's been at this since 2013, runs a language learning business, has recorded over 240 podcast episodes, and recently started AI Language Club.  When I asked her about marketing, she literally said "but John, we're not marketers." And honestly, that's what makes this conversation so good. We dig into why selling courses has gotten harder post-COVID, whether social media is even worth the effort anymore, and how Kerstin promotes her stuff without feeling sleazy about it. Her approach is dead simple. Talk about what you know, then make an offer. That's it. But the way she explains it actually made something click for me. We also talk about the mindset stuff, why so many of us hold back from promoting our own work, and what changes when you reconnect with what you actually believe about your course. #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing Connect with Kerstin: 🔗 https://fluentlanguage.co.uk 🔗 https://AILanguageClub.com 🤝  Get In Touch If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

    44 min

  8. JAN 30

    227 How I Made $650K+ Selling Courses

    Send a text 🔥 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 Alison Ellis has made over $650K selling online courses to florists over the last 10 years. She's got 10,000+ students enrolled in her programs and literally built her office from the course revenue. But here's the thing.. a lot of the "proven" strategies just didn't work for her audience. Tripwire funnels? Didn't convert. Webinars? People signed up but didn't show. High-pressure countdown timers? Her audience doesn't respond to urgency the same way. Why? Because florists are creatives. They got into flowers because they love flowers, not because they love marketing. They'll spend $5K on a fancy design workshop but hesitate on a $500 business course. In this episode we dig into what actually works when you're selling to people who don't think like marketers. How Alison went from making YouTube videos she didn't think anyone watched.. to $9K in her first five weeks.. to building a course business that's been running for a decade. We talk about her Flower Math course, her $1,500 Art of Good Business program, her Patreon membership, the in-person workshop she runs in Vermont, and what she's changing this year to get more sales. If you sell to creatives, coaches, artists, or anyone who's not naturally business-minded.. this one's for you. 🔗 Check out Alison's website at https://realflowerbusiness.com 🌸 Find Alison on Instagram and YouTube at @realflowerbusiness

    43 min
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4.7
out of 5
15 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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