The Art of Selling Online Courses

John Ainsworth
  • 4.5 (17)
  • Marketing
  • 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. 6h ago

    317 No One Wants to Be Sold to, but Everyone Wants to Buy

    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 Taylor Boone spent 25 years as a commercial photographer and director working with seven and eight figure brands and big ad agencies. She had a full career. And then she walked away from it to teach the one thing she kept watching every client skip. Dominik sat down with Taylor to talk about brand messaging, not logos or color palettes, but the layer underneath where people decide in the first seven seconds whether something is for them. Taylor calls it the "who, what, and why," and the conversation gets specific fast. She walks through what happened when a client finally nailed their ideal customer, why AI is making distinct brand thinking more valuable rather than less, and how she uses her "triple seven" framework to think about buyer attention and follow-up timing. A few things Taylor said that stuck with me: that most businesses don't have a niche problem, they have a point of view problem. That AI content is making people scroll faster, not slower, because everything is starting to look and sound the same. And that going back to the people who already bought from you is often the most overlooked growth move a creator can make. She also talked honestly about her own visibility struggle, spending 25 years behind the camera and then suddenly having to be the face of the brand. That part of the conversation is worth staying for. If you work with online courses or any kind of digital product and you've ever felt like your message isn't quite landing, I think you'll get a lot out of this one. Check out Taylor's work: 🌐 https://www.taylorboone.com/  📸 https://www.instagram.com/1taylorboone/  ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@1TaylorBoone

  2. 3d ago

    316 One $8K Student Beats a Lot of Little Courses

    Send us Fan Mail Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire  Michael Gaeta got an email from Teachable in December 2022 congratulating him for being in the top 0.1% of course creators on their platform, having sold over a million dollars in courses. Two months later, they told him his school was being shut down in 48 hours. Dominik sat down with Michael, a natural health practitioner and educator based in Boulder, Colorado, who has been treating patients for 36 years and teaching other practitioners for 33. He runs a clinic and an online school with more than 70 courses, and his flagship functional medicine certification program has been running since 2012 at around $8,000 a year. What struck me most about this conversation was how honest Michael was about where he's been getting it wrong. He's been launching a new course nearly every month this year, and when Dominik pushed back on that, Michael said, right there in the conversation, that he's changing course for next year. Fewer launches, more focus on the flagship. It's not often you hear someone recalibrate their strategy in real time. He also talks about why reputation has driven more of his growth than any marketing tactic, how he structures affiliate deals with co-teachers, and what it actually cost him when Teachable pulled the plug on his entire school. That last story alone is worth the listen if you host your courses on any major platform. I think you'll find a lot in this one worth sitting with. Check out Michael's work: 🌐 https://michaelgaeta.com/ 📸https://x.com/gaetainstitute 📸 https://www.facebook.com/gaetainstitute 📫 https://t.me/gaetainstitute 📸 https://www.instagram.com/gaetainstitute/ ▶️ https://vimeo.com/thegaetainstitute ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/GaetaCommunications ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@gaetainstitute 🌐 https://rumble.com/user/GaetaInstitute 🌐 https://mewe.com/i/michaelgaeta 🌐 https://substack.com/@gaetainstitute

  3. 4d ago

    315 Stop Waiting to Launch: How I Got 3,000 Students Before I Felt Ready

    Send us Fan Mail Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Bibby Gignilliat stopped painting at 12 after a critical art teacher left a mark that took decades to fade. She went on to build Parties That Cook, a mobile cooking events company that ran across four cities and grossed over a million dollars a year. Then someone called it a lifestyle business, and she realized she had no lifestyle left. So she signed up for a painting class. She was, by her own admission, the worst one in the room. That was her starting point. This episode with Dominik covers the whole journey: how Bibby went from a hundred square feet of studio space to a fifteen-hundred square foot Sausalito studio, how COVID pushed her online in 2020 with around 150 sign-ups on day one, and how she now has 3,000 people through her online programs. We talked about why she gives away around 80% of her content for free on Instagram, how she structures her self-paced courses to generate passive income, and what she'd tell any skilled person who has never taught online before. The piece that stuck with me most was her answer on what to do when you feel stuck as a course creator. She said the more you change yourself, the more your class will change. Simple, but it lands differently when you hear the context behind it. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Bibby's work: 🌐 https://bibbyart.com/  📸 https://www.instagram.com/bibbygart/  📸 https://www.pinterest.com/bibbygart/

  4. 5d ago

    314 70K YouTube Views a Month, No New Videos in 2 Years

    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 Louise De Masi is one of the most-followed watercolour teachers online. Nearly 3,000 Patreon students, 184,000 YouTube subscribers, 70,000 monthly views, and a blog pulling close to 300,000 visits a year. And she hasn't uploaded a full YouTube video in almost two years. I sat down with Louise and her business partner Dom to talk about how they built all of that, and what they're doing next. Louise started on Skillshare after a cold email, having spent years as a primary school teacher and full-time artist. She never set out to build a course business. She just started sharing how she paints, and people kept showing up. Dom came on board to handle everything behind the scenes, from SEO to funnels, so Louise could focus entirely on teaching. What struck me most was how deliberately they've avoided being aggressive about sales. Their newsletters are almost entirely informational. The promotional links are, as Dom put it, "very, very hidden." And yet the business keeps growing. We talked about what that's left on the table, and I walked them through how a different approach to email could work without compromising what makes their audience trust them. We also got into their long-term vision, a searchable database of Louise's 300-plus classes, guest teachers, and eventually a business the next generation can take over. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out Louise's work: 🌐 https://www.louisedemasi.com/  📸 https://www.instagram.com/louisedemasi/  ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@LouiseDeMasi

  5. 6d ago

    313 You Can’t Give Away What You Don’t Own

    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 Jeremy Siskind has won international jazz piano competitions, played on Arturo Sandoval's record, and written more than 20 instructional books. He also has 34,000 YouTube subscribers, around 5,000 people on his email list, and personally writes to every single customer who buys a book from his website. Dominik sat down with Jeremy to find out how someone builds a real course business without a viral moment, without a big launch, and without ever feeling like they're chasing attention. What came out of that conversation surprised me. Jeremy makes a strong case that you cannot teach well online until you have taught in person first, because the room reveals things a screen never will. He talked about posture, rhythm, the questions students ask when they feel safe enough to admit confusion. None of that shows up in your analytics. He also talked about his "sloppy first draft" approach to creating, why he thinks beginners are the most underserved and most important audience in almost any field, and how he treats the third-party platforms he teaches on as breadcrumbs that lead people back to him. And the thing about emailing every buyer personally? He explains exactly what that looks like and why some of those people end up staying connected to him for years. If you've been wondering whether you need to be louder or more strategic online to grow, Jeremy's answer is worth hearing. Hope you enjoy this one as much as Dominik did. Check out Jeremy's work: 🌐 http://www.jeremysiskind.com  📸 https://www.instagram.com/jsiskind2  ▶️ http://www.youtube.com/JeremySiskind/

  6. Oct 26

    312 More Courses Won’t Grow Your Course Business

    Send us Fan Mail Janette Karaca has two million followers and built one of the biggest English learning brands online. She also came to believe that creating more courses was making things worse, not better, for her students. Dominik sat down with Janette to dig into how she got there. She started from a pretty unlikely place — she used to hate English. She failed an audition for a publishing company's YouTube channel, went home frustrated, and her husband suggested she just start her own channel instead. That became English Era. What's interesting about Janette's story isn't the audience size. It's what she noticed after building it. Year after year, the same comments kept appearing: "I know English but I can't speak it." "I freeze." "I'm scared people will judge me." And she realised she kept responding by making more courses, which gave people more content to consume passively, which was exactly the problem she was trying to solve. So she stopped. She pivoted away from launches, narrowed her audience to a very specific type of learner, and started building toward something that actually made people use the English they already had. She's honest about what she wishes she'd understood sooner, and her thinking on the difference between followers and buyers is worth sitting with if you have a large audience that isn't converting the way you expected. I think you'll find this one genuinely useful. Check out Janette's work: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_englishera Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/englisherafb/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ENGLISHERA TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_englishera

  7. Oct 23

    311 She Teaches One Thing. That’s the Whole Business.

    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 Anna Brick built her entire course business around one thing. Not a broad niche, not a category. One technique: flowers made out of wafer paper. And she did it on purpose. Dominik sat down with Anna to talk about how that decision came about, what it took to actually turn it into a business, and why the last two years nearly sent her in the wrong direction entirely. Anna has over 100,000 followers, more than 6,500 students around the world, and has never paid for an ad. But the part of this conversation that will probably stick with you has nothing to do with those numbers. Anna is one of the most clear-eyed people we've had on the show when it comes to the difference between building an audience and building a business. She talks about why she now sells in every single email she sends, three times a week, and why she thinks using the word "free" in your marketing trains people never to pay you. She also gets into her $9 thank you page offer, how she thinks about the first sale, and what happened when she spent two years trying to teach business strategy instead of wafer paper. Spoiler: her audience didn't want it, and going back felt like a relief. If you've been wondering whether you're spending too much time making your course better and not enough time selling it, Anna has a lot to say about that. Hope you enjoy this one as much as Dominik did. Check out Anna's work: 🌐 https://floreacakes.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/floreacakes/?hl=en ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@floreacakes

  8. Oct 22

    310 51% Growth in a Year Without Going Viral

    Send us Fan Mail Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap PJ Wren celebrated her 50th birthday teaching a fitness class. Seven days later, she shut her studio down for good and never went back. That moment, March 2020, is where Over 50 Fitness really started. PJ had 32 years in the industry behind her, from rec center classes and home visits to cardiac rehab at St. Paul's Hospital to owning her own studio. But a lease technicality and a pandemic gave her an exit she didn't plan for, and she took it. Dominik sat down with PJ to talk through what she built from there: a subscription app for women over 50 who want to get strong, not just move more. They got into a lot of specifics, the 14-day onboarding sequence, why she removed 17,000 people from her email list and felt good about it, how she words a discount offer so it outperforms a straight percentage off, and why she limits promo codes to twice a year on purpose. What stuck with me most was her take on going viral. She's not against it exactly, but she's seen friends blow up and then watch it fall apart because the systems weren't there. Her line was simple: "Random workouts give you random results." She applies the same logic to growth. If you're building something in a specific niche and wondering how to hold members long-term, there's a lot here worth your time. I think you'll enjoy this one. Check out PJ's work: 🌐 www.overfiftness.co 📸 https://www.instagram.com/overfiftyfitness.co/ ▶️ https://www.facebook.com/overfiftyfitness.co 🌐 www.fitnesswithpj.com ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/fitnesswithpj 📸 https://www.instagram.com/fitnesswithpj/ 📸 https://www.facebook.com/fitnesswithpj

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4.5
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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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