565 – How To Market And Automate Your Online Course

Podcast: Download (Duration: 47:24 — 43.5MB)

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John Lint

In the interview:

02:50 – Automating the launch strategy
04:58 – The $200 clarinet course
06:17 – Four main campaigns
08:08 – Start by preframing
08:51 – Value in three videos
11:30 – Limited time only
12:54 – Wait, there’s more
14:03 – The four-day sale summarized
16:57 – How to avoid tech overwhelm
20:32 – Four keys to success
27:35 – A Swiss army knife of a product
32:23 – Support and affiliates
36:32 – For the hardcore marketer
43:10 – In summary

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today we’re talking about online courses, because that’s a hot topic. And for this subject I’ve brought along a friend of mine, John Lint. How are you, John?

John: Good. How are you, James?

James: Very good. Now you have an unusual accent. What don’t you tell us where you’re from?

John: Yeah. I’m originally from Belgium but I never actually lived there. My parents obviously are Belgian and we traveled a bit. My father used to work for the government and I ended up in Australia. I married an Australian, so I am also Australian. And now I’m living either in Canada or in Thailand and I spend my time as well as in Australia. So that’s me. [Laughs]

James: That’s pretty straightforward. So you’re a Belgian Australian Canadian Thailand resident.

John: That’s right.

James: Well, we’ve become great friends through our Maldives trip. You and I have spent a lot of time talking about business and floating around the Indian Ocean, catching waves.

John: That was amazing. I loved it and I’m looking forward to next year.

James: Yeah, we had a great time, didn’t we, on that trip?

John: I mean we are booked up, the boards are coming so we’re ready to go.

James: Booked up, sold out, yeah. It’s all happening. And one of the great things about that is, you know, we get to exchange ideas and you’re a member of SuperFastBusiness where I’ve been doing my coaching, and I’ve watched the development of your progression through the various fields.

But what I’ve came to realize is that you are somewhat of an expert when it comes to launches and online products and software. You really have a great brain for this stuff, and I thought it’d be good if you could come along and perhaps share some of the key insights and lessons that you’ve learnt over the years, being behind the scenes, seeing what actually goes on with online courses and learning from the mistakes of others so that we don’t have to go down that path. So would that be okay?

John: Yeah. Sure. Let’s talk about that.

James: So in a previous lifetime, I think you came through a software platform phase of your career and now you’ve been helping people with launches in the background, making everything run smoothly. What sort of data or information do you see at scale that surprises you?

It’s all about structure

John: In regard to launches, I think it’s really about how you structure it, how you manage it, and how you do it. And there are multiple types of launches, obviously. When you talk about launches you think about those big product launches online, the JV stuff, and that’s something that you talk about as well, where that’s not really the business model that you would recommend. And I kind of agree about that, if you just rely on the big, big product launches.

But for me when I talk about launches as well, it’s stuff that you can do, you can take that strategy and really apply it to your own list, right? And when you do those internal launches and then you, more importantly, you then automate them, then you have a real business asset. A business asset that’s going to do a lot of things for you. It’s going to provide value upfront to your marketplace. It’s going to position you as an expert, as an authority, because you are providing all that value. And then obviously, at the end, you’re going to maximize your sales because you have a limited time offer and that’s rebuilding the core essentials of a launch campaign.

And of course throughout, you have that social proof because you have those comments going on and you’re engaging with your audience. And that’s something that you can absolutely do on autopilot, when you automate. And automation has really been my focus this year with the software that we’re building, KLEQ, and with everything that we’re doing.

We also have something that, we work on the side with clients, so we have a consulting agency as well. I work behind the scenes and I help them with their different campaigns. And that’s something that right now, the focus is about real automation, automated campaigns. and the reason is very simple, it’s because just like you teach, James, you need to be building assets. Assets that are going to help your business grow, and basically systems that are going to work for you 24/7, right? Consistently and predictably generating leads and sales. That’s really the goal.

So when it comes to a launch, the launch strategy is great but I like to take it and really start and automate it as much as possible. If that makes sense.

Let’s just suppose…

James: It does, and I think it would be helpful to provide some kind of an example, and it can be an imaginary scenario. I’ll provide you an example perhaps. Let’s say I teach people how to play the clarinet. Now clearly this is a made up example, because I don’t know how to play the clarinet so I shouldn’t be teaching people how to do it. But let’s say that I teach people how to do clarinet and maybe I’ve put together an e-book or a couple of videos and I’ve put them up on my website and I currently sell these trainings for a one-time fee of say, $200. Let’s say that’s my current scenario. What would you say to someone in that situation to make some improvements?

John: Okay, so $200. Great price point. And one of the mistakes that most people make is, alright, I have my clarinet course, $200, here it is on my homepage on my website, and hopefully someone will come to my website and buy it and you know, hopefully I’ll make some sales. Unfortunately, home marketing is not our strategy. So what I like to do is I like to be a little bit more strategic and our job is always to build an audience. So once you start building your audience with maybe a free lead magnet and all that, then you can go into, alright, let’s deploy a campaign about that course.

The four main campaigns

Basically before I talk about that, I want to mention the main campaigns. There are really four main campaigns I like to use.

We have the limited sale offer: basically the product’s available. You have a limited time to buy.

We have a campaign that we call the quick value sale, which is provide a little bit of value and hey, by the way, if you want to buy it, here’s the next step.

Then you have the launch campaign, which is basically a three-video series. So you have, in this case you might have one, two, three, usually two or three videos before you ask for the sale, and you’re providing value.

And then the fourth campaign is the webinar campaign. So these are really the four main campaigns, the staples online, in my view, that I have been using a lot with my clients.

And then stepping back… alright, so if you talk about the three-video series, which is a great campaign because some people are not comfortable being on a webinar, for example, or doing webinars. The three-video series is awesome, either when you are releasing a new product or you’re new in the market and you want to establish that positioning, and you’re going to do that by providing value.

So in this case you have that $200 product, maybe a new product, maybe something that you’re new in the market, you’re just entering the market. So in that case, you’re building that list first, we’ve maybe like you say, content upgrades that you teach in OTR, or you know, you just have a cheat sheet and you have a landing page. All right, well now they are in and then you can start building that release, that launch, basically.

What I have to do, I teach it in three ways. The first phase is the preframe. You’re going to preframe that, hey, something’s coming up. The second phase is the workshop, which is basically the three-video series and then the final phase is the sale, where you’re going to say, hey it’s open. So if you’re going to be doing a three-video series and it’s live, we can talk about automating it later, because that’s the next step. That’s really the final step and a very important step. But let’s say the first time you do it, in that case you can do an internal promotion with your list and you’re going to follow those three phases.

Preframing the product

The first phase is the preframe. And you can start start it out, you always start it with value. So you’re going to be telling them, hey, I’m thinking about teaching something about this, clarinet, let me know what are the top questions about it. I’m going to create some new videos for you and I want to make sure it helps you. So then you’re getting a bunch of feedback. So then now, you know, OK, well these are the things that they might like to learn about. This is going to help you to maybe make your clarinet course even better or it’s definitely going to give you ideas for the videos that you should release during that preview, that three-video series.

So now you are getting all this feedback. So as the preframe, you’re letting them know that, hey, there’s going to be a free workshop coming up. It’s going to be awesome, I’m going to be teaching you about some awesome advanced strategies of clarinet. And if you’re a beginner, you’re going to love it too, because I’m going to show you exactly how to get started. That’s great.

The video workshop

So then the second phase of the workshop is basically the three-video series. In that case, it’s all about providing value, and you’re going to be basically releasing three videos. Nice and easy. Each of the videos, great tip, right, let’s keep it simple. Let’s not overthink this. Great tip for each video. But of course what you want to do as part of those videos is as well, kind of obviously tease about your future products. The product that’s coming up. This is a three-video series that is part of the release of the new product that you have. So they can take the next step and get even more results with your stuff, because that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to help people get specific results.

So you’re giving them those results first, in advance, with that three-video series. You’re telling them about, hey, this is coming up. And I like telling, in the end of video two or usually on video three, in video three you’re going to tell them, hey, if you enjoy my three free videos, you’re going to love my new product. This is what it is, this is what it will do for you, this is what you need to do next, and keep an eye on your email inbox, I’ll tell you more about it in the next video coming up in a few days.

So you have three videos, provide value, position the product as the next logical step. At the same time here, what you want to do is you want to destroy objections. So you cannot know. Well maybe it’s going to be about the price or maybe it’s going to be about the time that it takes to play the clarinet. So you kind of want to destroy these as part of your free videos that you are giving.

At the same time, you’re going to get social proof and get positioning, because you are here to help them. So you say, hey, if you have any questions, let me know below. Boom, and you’re answering questions. And you can do that, too, you can absolutely do that very easily with a Facebook comment box, for example, that you can add to your pages. You simply answer it. You help people. It is all about helping people right there during those three videos. And that’s something you can absolutely do when you set up that whole campaign. A little more about that later as well, I can show you how to do that.

But bottom line three videos, provide value, help people get results. They love what you do, they now see you as an expert because you’re teaching them stuff, right? You’re helping them get results. So, awesome.

By the time of the third video, hey, this is coming up. This is what it is. It is going to be limited. Why is it going to be limited? Well, because there’s a special offer. What’s that special offer? Well I’ll tell you more about it in the next video. But basically, it’s going to be awesome and the reason why, you want to have a kind of a reason why. The reason why is because you went through the whole workshop and you know, I’m just releasing it, it’s brand new, whatever you want.

And when you automate it, you can obviously change that message. You just say, hey, it’s special because you’ve been through the workshop, for example. That’s it. And then two days later, what I like to do is I like to send a recap as part of that strategy. Recap email, hey, these are the three videos that I’ve released, blah blah blah, and a link to the three videos.

The limited time offer

And then you start the sale campaign. In that third phase is basically the limited time offer. So that’s the traditional sales strategy where you have, I like to use four days, some people use five days, seven days, it’s really up to you. But it’s basically a four-day open.

And the structure I like to follow during those four days opening is basically first day, hey, we’re live. The clarinet course is live, here it is. This what it will do for you. Click here to find out more, in that page where you have a sales video. And that can be as simple as a sales video and some text below. Or you can have a more elaborate sales letter. I mean that’s fine.

And in there, it’s just about, hey, no crazy pitching, it’s just, hey, you’ve been through the workshop. Hope you enjoyed it. And this is what the course is all about. Describe the course. Tell them what all the modules are all all about, what they are going to get, what they are going to learn, and more importantly the result that they are going to get after taking that course. At the end, they are going to be able to do this. You’re going to be able to play the clarinet very easily and you’re going to be able to play in front of your friends and it’s going to be awesome. Something like that.

So you describe everything that they’re going to get. You describe all the modules, obviously, at every single step. It’s all about the benefits. It’s all about making your valuable offer. So you’re going to learn this, so you can do that, so you can get that result. You do that and then at the end it’s basically positioning your offer. This is the offer, if it’s a discount for example, then you know what the discount is all about.

Adding bonuses

The bonuses, you want to add some bonuses. I like to add three bonuses usually. That’s optional. You don’t have to start with bonuses if you don’t want to, but something to remember is that everyone can offer a bonus. You don’t have to create other courses to offer bonuses. You can absolutely offer yourself as a bonus, right? For example, you take the course and for the next six weeks we’re going to do coaching calls and you can have your coaching calls every single week. Or we’re going to have one-on-one coaching calls, where you can go on Skype with them or you can do office-calling hours, which is something really easy to do. “Hey, every Thursday you can call me on Skype at that time.” I mean, there’s so many different things that you can do where you are offering your time, which is extremely valuable. Extremely valuable.

So that’s if we’re talking about a $200 clarinet course and you’re a clarinet expert and you spend years learning the clarinet. How much is your time worth? If you say you’re going to give them one hour every single week, I mean that’s at least 100 bucks or 200 bucks minimum. So if they’re getting six weeks’ worth of that coaching, it’s a very valuable bonus, right? So you can think about those type of bonuses to really make a very valuable offer.

Summarizing the four-day sale

So that’s kind of the offer, and basically if we go back to our four-day sale, what I like to do Day One is open; Day Two, here are some FAQs, frequently asked questions and you answer them in that email and then link back, always linking back to that sales video. Third day is maybe a bonus, telling them about one of the special bonuses that you have and reminding them that hey, it ends tomorrow. And then on the final day, it’s basically, hey, just a courtesy reminder that it is going to end tonight at midnight. Here it is. Here is the link to find out more. And maybe on the last day what I like to do is have two to three emails, usually two, and just one in the morning, one at night reminding them that it’s going to end.

And then some people have this issue about, isn’t that too many emails? I mean, one email every single day? For me the answer is No, because if they are in your list, why are they in your list? They are in your list because they want a specific result. They got that free stuff at the beginning because they wanted to learn this.

And you are an expert, obviously. I’m talking to people here that are true experts, right? You can help people. You can help them get results. So your job as an expert is to tell them, how can they get even more results? If you don’t do that, then what’s the point? Why should they be on your list? Might as well unsubscribe. So don’t worry about it, because I know that that’s something that stresses people out a bit. Why else should I send all those emails? It’s not a problem. And yeah, so that’s what you do during those four days.

And then on the last day is the reminders. And that’s really the campaign in a nutshell. Now the next phase is obviously to automate that, and for that you need specific a kind of tools that will allow you to really have true evergreen technology. The danger right now, and I don’t want to overwhelm people with too many tech stuff right now, so I’m just going to keep it short. But you just want to make sure they use the right technology so that when you say on your emails, “This is a one time offer,” or “This is the last day,” especially on the last day, “This is your last chance,” it’s really their last chance.

So what you don’t want is, for example, they open the email on their desktop and see that you said it’s the last chance, they go, alright, the countdown timer says only 10 hours left. But then when they go to Starbucks later and they use their phone, now it says, oh, 12 hours left. Or still 10 hours left. You want to use a timer that’s really going to allow you to do true evergreen technology, and there are many solutions out there. And that’s basically how you do it in a nutshell. I know I went fast, but that’s basically the launch.

James: This may be the easiest podcast I’ve done in quite some time. So if I was a clarinet teacher, I think right now my mind would be blown. Because you put it out in every step, very good. And I’ll recap that in a little bit because I think, you know, you may even need to go back and re-listen to this or read the transcript, because I mean, please, don’t underestimate how important the information you just heard is. It’s just phenomenal.

Avoiding tech overwhelm

So a few questions there. I know why I want to go from my $199 course to something more advanced, because you know, I don’t want to be just hoping that people are going to buy from me. I now know, that’s great, John, good theory. It sounds smart but I’m really stuck on the how. Now James Schramko isn’t stuck because he’s got a team. But what about the clarinet teacher? He probably is busy teaching clarinet and is most unlikely to have a webmaster. Does he have to go out now and subscribe to all these different bits and pieces, like the tools that do the countdown timers and the tools that send out the emails and the tools that house the information and the tools that collect the money and all of this? That’s really the objection that I imagine would come up at about this point. So can you help us out through that?

John: Yeah, and that’s a totally valid question and objection and concern, because we know the number one reason people fail online is really overwhelm, frustration. And tech overwhelm is one of the big factors and that’s something I focus on. My goal is to try to reduce that. And I do that with the softwares I have, the softwares I publish through my company and and through the different consulting that I do.

So yeah, tech is a problem. And so you have two ways, right? You have two ways. Like you said, you can go one way, try to figure out and try to buy your bunch of things and then try to stitch them together. And if you’re techy, yeah, you can figure it out, you’re going to spend a lot of time. Or if you’re not techie, you’re going to probably hate everything about it, and like most people you’re probably going to give up at some point. You’re going to be overwhelmed and frustrated.

The second way is to try to get the fast solution. And like you said, in your case, James, you have massive leverage because you have a team. So you have the experts, you are leveraging other people’s skills and they can do all of that stuff for you and that’s no problem. The majority of people don’t have that. So when you don’t have that, you need to look for tools or systems that are going to allow you to do those things very fast without stressing out with tech.

James: And I might add, it’s not cheap because even when you have a team, I’m paying wages, hosting, a shopping cart. Although, luckily, I found a one-time deal that was amazing. Autoresponder and webinar software, which I still don’t actually use that often, which is hilarious. And then there’s Deadline Funnel for our countdown thing. And then of course, when we want to change things or design stuff we’re getting involved with designers and there’s an element of coding, then we run our own testing.

But there are a lot of components that can actually add up and be fairly complicated to use all at once. So I just know from having had a website development company that this is where people just lock up. And I’m sure they probably just go to a solution like one of these online course places where they can load up their course and get a commission whenever it’s sold and they don’t have to handle anything and they get in some cases great commissions. But then the course companies can do some pretty weird stuff, like just you know put their course available for $10 for months on end or give them just a fraction of the percentage of the value of their training if a coupon was used or something. So they don’t have much control of that and it’s most likely that at some point the commissions will be changed or that they’ll be drowned out by another competitor. So I guess the nirvana would be you’ve got your own solution but it’s actually manageable.

Four key areas for success

John: Exactly, exactly. The easiest solution is to have a platform that allows you to do all of that, where you just basically use the stuff, use the different tools available and really help people do all these things. And that’s one of the things I focus with KLEQ, which is the platform that we’ve built, which is all these four things, the four key areas that you need to build a long term, successful online business.

And the four keys are: create, market, automate and boost. The last step is boost. The first one, create. Create online courses, or create a membership site, a way where you can create an online product that can be for them and so your clarinet course, you can have the clarinet for beginners, you can have the clarinet course for intermediate, advanced, or whatever different, solo techniques for clarinet. I don’t know anything about clarinet.

James: Me neither. So there you go.

John: Solo techniques or band techniques, whatever. You can have one or several and then obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, you love that, the content that you teach, James, which is all about having your own membership site, having your recurring business, and that’s awesome, you know? And when you think about a recurring business, especially if we look at what you did with SFB, you have different components there.

So you have the content, the training, so that’s going to be your online courses.

And then inside the membership site, you’re going to have coaching. So you can have group coaching, where you can build a community and people can talk to each other and then they can obviously talk to you and then they can post stuff, that’s awesome.

And then the third component, which I love, I mean I think it’s awesome the way you do it, is how you have the private coaching as well, where you’re engaging one-on-one with people, and that’s all part of the membership site.

So all of those components, you want a solution that allows you to build all of that and that’s what we focus with KLEQ. That’s the first area, you create. Create your solution, create either your online course, if this is the first one, or create your membership site if you have already some online courses or you already have some coaching going on, that’s totally cool. You build that one center.

The second component is market. And in market, you have three things that you want to do. Number one is accept payments online, that’s fine. For that, you need to have some type of checkout system accepting payments. Now the good news, these used to be super difficult before and super frustrating, you had to apply for a merchant account, deal with the bank. Nowadays, it’s actually super easy. You can get started with Stripe, stripe.com, which is fantastic, and PayPal as well. PayPal is still working really well.

But what you want to do is you want to have nice order pages that will allow you to make sure that everything is integrated, right? So when they buy, great – they are going to automatically be registered to that online course. That means they are automatically going to get access to the membership site and they are going to get their email saying, “Hey, welcome, here’s your login details.” So you want something that is already built in, so you don’t have to stress out trying to integrate everything, because that’s really a pain. So that’s one component of our market phase.

The next one is obviously build your audience, and that’s building your email list, and for that you need to build landing pages, which are opt in pages, very simple pages where people just can enter their name and email in exchange for something awesome, such as a PDF cheat sheet or a checklist or a content upgrade. Something that we do, as a side note, is something called optin boxes, which is something that you use a lot of, James, on your blog. And I know you use something else, but that’s totally cool.

Optin boxes (we call them optin boxes), is basically a little piece of code that you put on your blog, when they click, there’s a pop up and there you can build your list by offering a content upgrade, which is something that you teach all the time, James. So I love that. So that’s the second part of your list.

The third part is obviously, make offers. So that’s allowing you to build sales pages, sales videos very easily. And you know, as part of KLEQ, we have an awesome state-of-the-art page builder that we spent a lot of time really perfecting, which basically allows us to build any kind of page. So these are the three things of the second phase which is the market.

Making things awesome with automation

And then we have automation, because like I said, that’s awesome. You have a product, you have some campaigns, but you don’t want to just do that, because then you don’t have a real business. You don’t have something that is working for you. Just like when you and I went to Maldives, it was awesome. No worries, right? We were surfing, and your business was running on autopilot. And everything is running whether you’re working in your business or not.

So for that you need automation. And as part of the different tools that you want, you want for example to make sure that the different pages inside your campaigns basically are open and closed based on when they register. So whenever someone opts in, which is usually the first registration point, you want to make sure the other pages that are part of your campaign (and that can be any campaign by the way, that can be a webinar campaign, that can be a launch campaign, that can be a sale campaign, whatever it is) you want to make sure that those pages are opened and closed correctly, at the right time.

You’re going to be using your emailing system to make sure your emails are sent on autopilot as well, at the right time. So one day you can automate all that very easily with any emailing system and we integrate all the emailing systems, so that’s not a problem. But that’s the second part of automation.

And then you can use things like automated countdown timers. And the countdown timer is very important because not only will it add urgency and scarcity to your offers, but it also controls who should have access to that page. And if they arrive on the page and there’s still some time, that’s awesome. They see the countdown timer and they can access the page, but if they go too late, the countdown timer will then automatically redirect them to the closed page. And you know, they were too late, the offer has ended. So that’s really the automations part of it.

Once you’re automated

And then you have the boost. And in the boost, we have extra stuff, like for example email countdown timers. I mean these are things that we see in the marketplace and we work with different people and we see what is actually working really well. So email countdown timers is a cool little thing you can use.

The boost phase is kind of like sexy stuff, but it’s not something you should focus on right now. It is really once you have everything automated, okay, how can I get more leads and make more sales? What are the little things I can do to maximize my profit? So email countdown timers are one of them. Some people use social notifications. I mean that’s kind of where we’re experimenting with that.

Obviously you have one-click upsells, downsells. This is very important in your campaign to really have a good backend. You need to make sure you are able to do all of that and you’re able to easily do that without having to, again, buy a deadline funnel, a script or buy an email countdown timer thing. Or something else that we do, we have a feature called viral share where it allows you to, when someone’s opted in, you can offer something else like an extra upgrade. And this is something that’s working really well.

We have a member who basically built a list of a thousand people in five days just by promoting initially a little cheat sheet on the front end and then offering maybe an e-book on the second step. And he’s in the ice hockey markets. So very, very tiny niche. So thousand people in five days, I’ll take that. So this is called a viral share. And in fact, in this type of strategy they opt in, and then you say, “Hey, you want this other good stuff? Simply tell your friends.” So that’s a little booster, we call them boosters and you can really deploy those boosters as part of the platform. You can really choose which booster you want. And it’s really about trying to get more people in.

So these are the four phases – create, market, automate and boost.

James: Nice job. John, you’re a genius. It’s hard to comment on this podcast without making it sound like an infomercial because I feel like you’ve gone out and created the solution that someone might ask for if they waved a magic wand and said, “What would you like?”

Bringing things together

You’re obviously an active student and participant in this market and you just get so excited about it. I guess one thing I’m curious about is, you know, some people spend all their energy just making a shopping cart or just making a deadline funnel or just making a landing page builder. How on earth can you bring all these things in together and and have this Swiss Army knife of a product?

John: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. And that’s because number one, that’s something that I’m building this, initially, I built this for me, because I don’t like to have multiple things because otherwise it just gets overwhelming, it gets confusing. You basically then need to hire someone to be able to manage that. So I built this for me and then I also built it for some of my friends and tried to get people in. That was the objective at first because I didn’t want to have to do, OK, I want to have this type of page. OK, well now I need to get this other thing. I didn’t want that. So that’s how it started way back. But then right now, the way it is, yeah, we can do all of that and I focus really on the 80/20. Really making sure that you’re getting all the things that you really need that are the most important. We focus on those features first and getting the result first. That it allows us to have a development cycle that is short. We are able to really develop and release features very, very fast and I don’t have this crazy huge team either.

But because it’s so focused on the feature that it’s going to really help, that it’s actually proven, features that are proven that we see in the marketplace, “hey this is really, really cool” or “hey, we should really do this well,” then we focus on that first, make sure that this is what all our members can do. And then as time goes, we get feedback from our members and then we just add to it. That’s why our members are really happy. And that’s what I want.

The way I’m trying to build this is to make sure it’s my small community, just like you have SFB, well KLEQ is going to be my thing where everybody’s in and I listen to everybody’s feedback. And hey, if this makes sense for everybody, well let’s build it in, like that. We don’t have to struggle and buy something else. If it doesn’t make sense, yeah, maybe it’s not going to make the cut straight away, but my goal is to make sure that all of those features make sense. It’s the fastest way to get the result because at the end of the day, you can play with all these bells and whistles and you can try to do all these things but none of that matters.

What really matters is really getting that conversion flow. And obviously it all starts by understanding your market’s problems. That’s obviously what we all need to do first. Then after that, it’s like, well, how can I quickly position my product in front of people? How can I provide value? How can I invite them to take the next step? And what are the things I need to do?

OK, I need to do a webinar. OK, well what are the main things I need to do for a webinar to work online? OK, I need do that. OK, great. Well, I focus on that. Let’s get results on that. And then later, let’s look at how we can really, really optimize it by doing different things.

And I think that people, because there’s so many sexy stuff being promoted as this new shiny thing, they just forget about that and try to say, oh, but I can do all these things. But the reality is you’re not going to be using all these things. You’re going to be using 20 percent of it that’s going to give you 80 percent of the results and that’s what you really need. So that’s what we focus, we give you all the main thing. You can do all those main things, but it’s going to be the things that really matter, if that makes sense.

What about the domain?

James: It does. Now I’m curious with this platform KLEQ. What about if I’m still my clarinet player here and I’ve got my own domain name which is like a clarinet-course-related domain. So I won’t say a name because some smarty pants are going to register it. But I can’t wait to send a clarinet player to this podcast and say “Hey, you should listen to this.” It’s going to blow their mind. Do I have to host it on KLEQ, or what?

John: Yeah. So you buy your domain name and it’s going to be your brand. Now we host everything, so that way we take care of the backup, security, all of that. So it’s basically your software as a service. So everything is taken care of for you. That way we can deploy all those features. But you basically have your own site in your own domain and it’s your own brand, so it’s not going to be clarinet pros, clarinetelite.m10pro.com. It’s not going to be like that. You just buy your own domain name, link it up, and then you’re going to be able to use all the features and be able to build all the pages and create your courses and build your membership site very easily.

Support and affiliates

James: What about things like a support desk or affiliates?

John: Yeah, I mean inside inside their own sites for each people?

James: Yes.

John: Yeah, totally there is an affiliate program, so I’d mention that. Yeah there’s an affiliate program, so you can build your own affiliate program for your clarinet course, get some people to promote it, and you can easily see who has referred, what are the sales, the commissions, and then you can easily pay them.

And yeah, and then from support you have different features inside where you can basically manage your members and help them out right there in the membership site.

James: Am I using the M10 Pro system for sending out the broadcast emails, or does it integrate with a different email provider or both?

John: It integrates with all the emailing systems in different ways, depending on the emailing system that you have. But the email broadcast, we leave it to the big guys. Because it’s something we can do, but talking to my members that’s not what they wanted right now. Like, a lot of them are using great solutions – ActiveCampaign, Drip, Infusionsoft, Ontraport. I use Infusionsoft a lot.

And I know that it will be very easy to add email broadcast to the platform, but for now that’s not something I’m doing because I still believe there’s a lot involved when it comes to email. There’s reputation going on, IP management. One is you want to make sure that when you’re sending your emails, they’re going to reach the destination. You want to make sure you have someone that knows their stuff when it comes to email to manage the reputation of your IP. And that’s a bit technical stuff, but bottom line you want to make sure that your emails are going to deliver.

So for that reason, M10 Pro integrates with the emailing system, we basically partner with them and you get your leads, which is the most important thing in your business. Your email list, it’s in under your control in your emailing system and you can do everything you want there. So we’re helping you out building your leads, but you are always in control of that.

James: Yeah, that sounds good. What about if you want to offer customer support to your members? You know, they’ve got questions about their clarinet or how to join or they forget their login, this sort of stuff?

John: You have different solutions out there that you can use. Some people if you just want to get started fast and it may not be the most recommended solution, you can have just a support email and then we can do that. Or you can use things like Help Scout, which is awesome. And then you can easily integrate. So if you need to have some help desk, you can have like a little embed, like a little thing on the side of the screen that says, “Hey, contact our support,” and there’s a little popup. You can add all of those things, because you can add embed codes on your settings, which basically means that hey, you can simply use anything you want. You add their little snippet and then you can use their system there. If you’re using, for example, something like maybe Zendesk or Zopim if you’re using live chat.

James: Or Intercom.

John: Intercom, exactly.

The tracking

James: And you could put a tracking pixel for conversions and remarketing. Basically, you’re letting people use the header or footer or something.

John: Totally. So you put all your tracking for Google Analytics or Facebook. And you know, if we’re going to go into advanced stuff, then we do have like advanced e-commerce tracking, which is something that most people forget. That’s basically, like after the purchase, then on the Thank You page we do support advanced e-commerce tracking, which means that if you’re using Google Analytics, for example, then you are going to be able to get all the e-commerce data. So you’re going to be able to send that to Google Analytics that, hey, they just bought this product at that price, this currency, et cetera. And you can do the same with Facebook, again, very easily. Without having to purchase something else, without having to hire a developer to do it. Just copy, paste, put it in the page, and by using the page builder you’ll be able to do that very easily.

James: Very good. Well, I’m curious. Out of all of the launches that you’ve done and all of the users on your platform, what sort of boosters do you think are easy wins for someone to implement if they haven’t already tried it?

John: Yeah, an easy one that we see a lot of people use is the email countdown timer. I mean that’s an easy one. Copy-paste again, put it in your email. I like it because it helps you do the job of that email, is to get people to click to go into your sales video. So having your countdown timer that is right there on the email, where they see that the time is counting down, is cool. A lot of people are using it right now. It works really well.

Being hyper-relevant

Something that’s a bit more advanced but it’s there as part of the booster, so when you’re ready you are there, and if you need help, we are here to help you out to make sure that you know how to use it. But something that we call hyper relevancy, and you would have seen it in the top launches, you would see people use it. And this is the unique thing with M10 Pro, we are the only ones that allow you to do that, built in. Hyper relevancy is how to be relevant to a lot of people at the same time. So you would have seen this in some launches, and maybe for clarinet that’s a bit too hard core.

James: We’re looking for a hard core clarinet musician ready to dominate the global media.

John: If you do that in your clarinet business, you’ll be definitely dominating, so that’s for sure. So how does it work? How does hyper relevancy work? It starts with a question and usually the way it works is you see it online in the opt-in page, you can opt in for the three… Let’s talk about the launch, alright? So you have the three-video series. You’re going to opt in, people are going to go there, hey, opt in to get access to the three-video series, great. When you click on that button, the first thing that happens actually is a question, “Hey, what best describes you?” for example, very simple. You’re going to have something a bit more elaborate but let’s keep it simple. What best describes you?

You have several options, let’s say four options. You have A, I am just getting started with clarinet; two, I’ve been playing but haven’t really made any progress; number three, yeah I know a couple of songs but I don’t know what else to do. And then four, hey I’m an expert. I’ve been doing this for a long time but I’m kind of bored, I want to have something cool. So now you have your four segments and you know, that’s something that Ryan Levesque teaches a lot with his ASK method. So we’ve been actually working with buckets and all that, which is his structure.

Bottom line, you have that question and now you are segmenting your audience. As part of M10 Pro, you have what we call the audience booster. You’re creating that audience. So, now you know, OK, James he answered, “I’m just starting out.” So he’s part of segment one. So what you can do using the page builder, you just go to your video and you say, OK, this is a video from my first video of the three-video series, but it’s not any kind of video. It’s a dynamic lead-generated video.

So now you can say, well, if they are segment one, use this video. And that can be a self-hosted video that you have maybe on Amazon S3, or it can be a Wistia video that you’re using, Vimeo or YouTube or whatever you want. Well, segment one gets this video. Segment two gets this video. Segment three, this one; segment four, this one.

So depending on what the answer, you are customizing the entire launch on the fly. We know who they are. We know which segment they belong to, and everything is customized. And of course, you can customize the sales video. Why does that matter? Well, because if you’re talking to them as you’re talking one-on-one, it’s obviously going to help your conversions and your sales.

And what the cool things you can do is, for example, someone’s just starting out, you don’t want to say, “Hey, this course is awesome because I’m gonna show you some advanced stuff,” and all that. Better to tell them, talk about the benefits for someone just starting out. So “Hey, it’s easy, I’m going to show you step by step how to do it and you’re going to be able to play the clarinet very fast after the first lesson.” That is a great message for that segment.

But if you say that to the advanced guys, well they’re going to be like, “Well, this is not for me. I mean, I already know that.” So that’s why when you’re using hyper relevancy on the fly while that video, they’re still on the same page, but that feels different. And for them, for example you’re saying, “Hey, this course is great because you’re going to be able to play those advanced songs and I teach you those cool stuff,” So you can really tweak your message.

You can talk about, for example, you can show different testimonials. That’s one strategy. You can talk about different benefits, that’s another strategy. You can destroy different specific objections based on which segment they belong to. Right? So you can really customize that message and have those videos. And that is the audience booster. That is basic hyper relevancy and it’s working really well. If you followed some of the big launches, well, that’s what they all use because then people go through the launch or go through the campaign.

Not just for launches

It’s not just about launches. I just want to make that clear. You can use that for a very simple sales campaign, for example, where they opt in, and then on the next page you can tell them, “Hey awesome, I’ve sent you the cheat sheet to your email. But in the meantime, I’ve just did this video where I give you even more information about it.” And then they can watch the video. And in that video, you can then talk about maybe a one-time offer. That’s another strategy. It’s called the quick sale.

So you can use that for that as well, because if you have segmented them before, you know what they are most interested in. So you can use it that way. You can use it for an automated webinar, for example. So then the webinar is actually dynamically different based on which segment they belong to. So it’s a bit more advanced, I hope I didn’t lose too many people here but that’s one of the great boosters that we have, it’s called the audience. Otherwise we have other ones such as the one-click optin which is a link that you can use with your partners, for example.

We were talking about affiliates. OK, awesome. So one of the great strategies with affiliates is, when an affiliate is going to promote your stuff, you are going to give them something awesome for free that they can give to their audience. So what’s the usual process? The partner tells their audience, “Hey, this is awesome, you’re going to learn this…” They click on the link. When they click on the link, they go to a landing page. And in the landing page, basically, they can opt-in.

We have a one-click opt-in, and obviously, you need to make sure that everything’s cool and you’re telling people what’s going to happen. But with a one-click opt in link, for example, they can have that link there and you can tell them, hey that’s it. If you want it, click on the link and you are going to automatically receive this thing from that person. Something like that, for example.

And if you use that for example for a webinar campaign, that works really well because then you can immediately get registered for a webinar. You can do that with your own list or of course, with foreigners for example, just making sure that you know everything’s clear and that you’re telling the audience what’s going to happen. So that’s another booster. I mean we have many more, but I don’t want to spend hours here on the podcast. But these are some of the ones that are working really well.

James: OK, so I think the summary here is, John, like some of our audience would really have appreciated that advanced stuff, because we’ve talked about a lot of these topics but never all in one grenade like this episode. This has been a fascinating information compilation, so I’m going to relish relistening to this one, which I would occasionally do when there’s such dense information. I’ve definitely made a few notes for myself, because I’ve got some of these boxes ticked. I have some of that relevant funnel stuff and we do have the countdown timers, but I think it’s a great concept there. It’s such a simple one, sometimes we forget to make another offer, like a quick sale now that we have that customer right there. I think you’ve done a great job of putting this all in one place. You must be immensely pleased that all that hard work has paid off.

Quick summary

So let’s do a little quick summary.

We’ve been talking about your information products and how you might get better results. So that’s why I’ve called this episode 565, How to Market and Automate Your Online Course, because everything we’ve talked about really does come back around to that.

So we’ve talked about your four main launch campaigns being your limited sale offer, a quick value sale, a three-video launch series, and your webinar campaign.

You took us through an entire launch sequence of the preframing, where you were basically giving people a notification that there’s going to be some new stuff coming and you’re announcing it.

And then you go to that workshop phase where you have your three-video launch with simple tips and teasing the future, offering some objections and then destroying them and then you’ve got social proof and questions happening there.

Then you go into the sales phase, where you’re live and you talked about the four different days – we’ve got the hey we’re open, here’s what it’ll do, here’s what we’ve got.

And then you have the Frequently Asked Questions phase and then the bonus phase and then the closing phase, where you do a few emails. And you told us how it’s okay to send a few emails because they’ve joined that email sequence to be better off and they want to learn from you. And there’s always value and you’re always priming what’s next and you can offer some kind of bonuses especially yourself, six weeks perhaps or office hours and placing a real value on this, because sometimes we tend to value all the experience we have.

And we covered the technology, that was the big concern, how do you actually make this work, and what you’ve done is pretty much harvest the 80/20 of all the tool sets out there and put them into your M10 Pro solution. Now, I haven’t used M10 Pro, but I do know a few clients of mine I’ve been coaching in my private section have used it, and they rave about it.

And I know you, and you are obviously very bright and we’ve had some amazing conversations about what you’ve been through with your previous software things. You’ve built actually some pretty famous products behind the scenes and you’ve also been behind the launch of some really big products. And I know you’ve traveled around and been to courses and done a lot of study and certainly I’ve been really enjoying our back and forth discussion in our private coaching discussion where you implement things so quickly and you’ve always got such well-considered responses, so this has been a really exciting, interesting and extremely educational discussion.

You’ve taken us through the phases, the create, the market, the automate, the boost. You even shared with us what some of the elements will be and your best booster tips.

To look up John

If you want to look up John, you could check out his site KLEQ.com. We’ll put a link to that software as well from our episode. There is a full transcription and my team will (and they’re going to have to work really hard on this podcast episode) go through and summarize the main points into a PDF action list. And if that’s alright with you, John, we’ll co-credit you and I as a PDF cheat sheet and we’ll put a link to M10 Pro.

John: Awesome!

James: Wow. This was your first appearance. I suspect you’ll probably be back and in the meantime I’m looking forward to catching a few waves with you when you visit Sydney next.

John: Yeah, man, so I know you are going away, but in January we’re on, no?

James: We are on. I just got a brand new board, just to make sure that of all the problems I could have surfing, equipment isn’t going to be one of them. I know you’re doing the same. Always great to hang out with another marketer, a business owner, someone who gets it.

Please, if you enjoyed this episode, give us a rating on iTunes. We don’t seem to have enough reviews for the amount of podcasts I’ve put out there.

And John I’m so excited about what you’re talking about. Apart from wanting to go and find a clarinet player and point them to this episode, I was almost thinking what sort of a course could I make or get going to put up on this platform to see how it works. Because it just sounds like it’s designed for the person who doesn’t want to have a big team or try and glue together 20 bits of software. So I think you’re onto something.

John: Awesome! Thank you very much.

James: John, thank you. Take care.

John: Awesome.

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