The Art of Selling Online Courses

John Ainsworth
  • 4.7 (16)
  • 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. 2D AGO

    242 From 100K to 1M Subs With One Free YouTube Course

    Send us Fan Mail What would you do if someone told you to put your entire best-selling online course on YouTube... for free? Most course creators would say no way. Emma McAdam said yes. And it took her from 100,000 subscribers to nearly a million. In this episode, my new co-host Dominik Dragun sits down with Emma McAdam, a licensed therapist and the creator behind Therapy in a Nutshell, a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers. They talk about how Emma built a thriving membership business while giving away her best content for free, how she sells online courses to people who could watch them on YouTube at no cost, and what her email marketing, sales funnel and evergreen promotions actually look like behind the scenes. If you're a course creator wondering how to grow your online course business without feeling salesy or holding back your best stuff... this one's for you. 🎙️ Hosted by Dominik Dragun, co-host of The Art of Selling Online Courses 📺 Therapy in a Nutshell: https://therapyinanutshell.com/ 📺 Emma's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TherapyinaNutshell

    34 min

  2. 5D AGO

    241 Meet the Piano Teacher Who Built a $2M Online School

    Send us Fan Mail Joseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free. That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world. In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works in practice, what he's learned about converting free users into paying members, why a 30-day free trial completely flopped for them and what they did instead, and how he's thinking about growing the business in 2026. Really enjoyed this conversation. Joseph has built something genuinely special and there's a lot here for anyone running or thinking about running a subscription-based online course. 🔗 Check out Hoffman Academy: https://www.HoffmanAcademy.com 🔗 Find Joseph on social media:  @Hoffmanacademy   #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.

    35 min

  3. MAR 27

    240 Why Does Authenticity Matter to Your Audience?

    Send us Fan Mail 2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide Josh Wright is a classical pianist who's performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and on America's Got Talent. He's grown a YouTube channel to over 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views, and built a whole online course business teaching piano students all over the world. And yeah, that's all pretty cool. But maybe the more interesting part is how he actually built it. His whole channel is built around sharing his weaknesses. Not in some cringe, overly vulnerable way... just honestly. "Here's what I struggle with, here's how I fixed it." And his audience loves him for it. He actually calls it the superpower of the channel, which I think is a really good way to put it. So we got into why that works. Because I think a lot of course creators feel this pull toward seeming more professional, more polished, more put-together online. And Josh's experience is kind of the opposite. The more real he is, the more people trust him and want to learn from him. We also talked about the fear of promotion, which comes up a lot with course creators. Josh was pretty open about how uncomfortable he used to be with it and how he eventually got over it. If you've ever felt a bit weird about putting your stuff out there, that part of the conversation is worth a listen on its own. Really good episode. Hope you enjoy it. 🎹 Check out Josh's work: 🔗 www.joshwrightpiano.com 🔗 youtube.com/joshwrightpiano 🔗 facebook.com/joshwrightpiano 🔗 instagram.com/joshwrightpiano 🔗 Courses: https://learn.joshwrightpiano.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.

    49 min

  4. MAR 24

    239 How To Actually Build an Evergreen Course

    Send us Fan Mail 15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elements James Testani has built Good Guitarist into a channel with over 600,000 subscribers and nearly a million views a month... and he did it without chasing trends or trying to game the algorithm. His whole approach has been evergreen from the start. He releases lessons, they get a trickle of views, and then a year later they're just quietly bringing in people who searched for exactly that thing. It's a slower build, but it compounds over time in a way that trend-driven content just doesn't. In this episode we get into how that translates into course sales... because the journey his students take is pretty different from what you might expect. They don't usually opt in and go straight through a funnel. They watch his lessons for months, build trust, and then one day decide they want the full structured path. That changes how you think about your email list and your promotions. We also talk about the switch from selling individual courses to a subscription model, how he's thinking about quarterly promotions now, and the challenge of building a team around a business that's very much built around one person's teaching style. And we get into hiring... specifically how hard it is to find people who actually think about your business rather than just applying a formula they've used before. 🎸 Check out James's site: https://goodguitarist.com

    50 min

  5. MAR 20

    238 How To Actually Build a Course Around a Problem

    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 Tom Geiss is the founder of GD&T Basics, a training company that teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing to engineers and manufacturers. It's a topic he'll openly tell you is boring to most people... and yet he's built a seven-figure business around it with a team of 10, no paid ads, and no sales team. In this episode we talk about how Tom approaches building course content around the problems his students actually face at work, rather than just the material itself. It's a simple shift in thinking but it makes a real difference to how engaging a course becomes, and how much easier it is to sell. We also get into how he's built a bridge between selling to individuals and selling to companies, which is something a lot of course creators haven't thought much about yet. And Tom shares how his thinking about marketing has completely changed since he started the business... going from someone who wanted nothing to do with it, to someone who now sees it as the core of everything. Tom is a really thoughtful guy and it was a genuinely enjoyable conversation. I think you'll get a lot out of it. 🔎 Find Tom at https://www.gdandtbasics.com/ 🔎 Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-geiss/  #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.

    49 min

  6. MAR 17

    237 The Dark Side of Success Nobody Talks About

    Send us Fan Mail I've had the pleasure of meeting Benny Lewis a couple of times at conferences over the years, and I'm really happy to finally have him on the show.  Benny built one of the biggest language blogs in the world, with over 2 million monthly visitors at its peak, a bestselling book, and a growing team. But at the height of that success, he was working 20-hour days, clinically depressed, and struggling with his health. In this episode, Benny shares what that period really looked like, how he got through it, and why he made the decision to completely simplify his life and business. We talk about his approach to language learning and why speaking from day one is central to everything he teaches, how he built and maintains a highly engaged email list, the importance of finding your niche and owning a specific point of view, and what he's working on now as he prepares to relaunch his YouTube channel after years away from it. It's an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something online, what success can cost you if you're not careful, and how to figure out what you actually want from your business and your life. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too. #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.

    55 min

  7. MAR 13

    236 How to Build a Course Business Around YOUR Life

    Send us Fan Mail 🔥 Ready to double your course sales? Book your call at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/call Liam Ward is a blues harmonica player, teacher and founder of learntheharmonica.com. He's built a course business with 240,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views... and he barely checks his numbers. In this episode we get into why Liam thinks your business doesn't have to run your life, how he's built a passive income school that fits around his life as a musician, and why joy might be a more useful metric than revenue for a lot of course creators. We also have a genuinely good debate about data, because I'm not going to pretend I just agreed with everything he said. It's a different kind of conversation to what we usually have on the show, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time. If you've ever felt like your business is pulling you away from the reason you started it in the first place, this one will resonate. 🎶 Liam's harmonica school: https://learntheharmonica.com 🎶 Check out Liam's music side of things: https://liamwardmusic.com.  If you want to find out how to grow your own course business in a way that actually works for your life, head to datadrivenmarketing.co/resources where you can get access to a range of free tools and guides to help you do exactly that. #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.

    42 min

  8. MAR 10

    235 How To Actually Scale by Doing Less

    Send us Fan Mail 🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap Marnie Ginsberg built Reading Simplified from a private tutoring clinic into an online academy that's served over 16,000 members and reached more than 3 million children... and she did it with no business background and no outside capital. Which is just remarkable. In this episode we get into something that I think a lot of course creators will really resonate with. Marnie's business is literally called Reading Simplified, and yet her own instinct in business has always been to complicate things... trying every marketing channel, building out in every direction, doing all of the things at once. Sound familiar? We talk about what made her decide to stop, why doubling down on one channel is so much harder than it sounds, and how the same diagnostic thinking she uses to help struggling readers maps almost perfectly onto how you can find the bottleneck in your own sales funnel. We also get into her membership model, how she structures coaching without it eating up her margin, and the high ticket offers she's building out for 2026. If you've ever felt like you're working flat out but not quite moving forward the way you should be... this one's worth a listen. 📚 We mention Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt in the episode... both well worth picking up if you haven't read them. And if you'd like to get hold of my webinar resources, just drop me an email at john@datadrivenmarketing.co and I'll put something together and send it over to you. 🔗 Connect with Marnie: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReadingSimplified IG: https://www.instagram.com/readingsimplified/ Website: https://www.readingsimplified.com #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing

    41 min
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4.7
out of 5
16 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!

Information

  • Creator
    John Ainsworth
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    243
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Art of Selling Online Courses
  • Show Website
    The Art of Selling Online Courses

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