How To Create Visually Appealing Courses by Dot Lung | Online Courses | Avi Arya

My name is Dot Lung. Dot is short for Dorothy and long means dragon and Mandarin. And I work in social media marketing. For the last 15 years, basically have been traveling around the world living my dream, being able to teach and inspire over 34,000 students today and basically giving them the tools so that they can build their own dreams and make their businesses and dreams come true. The thing is, Instagram is huge. There's five different channels, There's Instagram feed, Instagram stories, Instagram igtv, now Instagram reels and knowing what to do in each of these areas. It's its own social media channel management. So I'm just basically creating a course, you know, each part of Instagram.

My name is ABHI Arya, Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer, turn hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of the Internet Moguls of the World, a family digital marketing school which I'm building with my two daughters, 14 and 11, to be able to inspire families around the world to learn digital marketing so that they can make an income sitting at home with their loved ones without having to travel.

That's amazing. I love that so much.

Thank you. Over to you.

So my name is Dot Lung. Dot is short for Dorothy and long means dragon and Mandarin. And I work in social media marketing for the last 15 years, basically have been traveling around the world living my dream, being able to teach and inspire over 34,000 students today and basically giving them the tools so that they can build their own dreams and make their businesses and dreams come true.

That is fantastic. That's fantastic. That's Aviana, my co founder.

Hello, co founder. So cool. Really, really amazing.

We're together building a school. It's called Intraday and Moguls of the World, a family digital marketing school. We want them to be inspired by amazing human beings like you and all the other people who we interviewed. We were going to be bringing in courses, we'll be bringing in interviews, and we'll be bringing in how they can use various digital marketing tools with one aim in mind, that if there are four members in the family, everybody learns some aspect of digital marketing so that they can say, you know what? I can make an income sitting at home. And that three, four hours that I've saved every day, going in traffic and coming back 15 hours a week, 60amonth, 720 a year, that is safe and give back to their family and find their happiness quotient.

That's literally why I left la, because of the traffic that I had to drive to and from work. And I was like, this is not. Not how I want to be living my life. And now that you did, like the math to it. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

And that person, like you and I, who are, who's living in a big city, we spend three years of our life in traffic.

Yeah, it's terrible.

Yeah. Okay, so my next question is, you are building, you're already built one of the most prominent online course academies. How do you. How do you find out the right topics? How do you find the right marketing? And how do you marry them, too?

Well, I actually haven't launched an academy yet. I just have one course out, and I'm producing two. One, building two more courses that are coming. And it's basically what people tell me they want to learn. And right now, Instagram is a really hot topic. And fortunately, I kind of figured out how to do it not only for myself, but all of my clients and many of the global brands that I've built around the world. So people wanted to learn it. People were always universities, businesses, they want me to come and teach and speak and. And I had to figure out how to actually teach what I'm doing. And that's how the Dragon's formula, you know, came, came around. Because I needed a way to actually condense everything that's in my head so that, you know, other people can understand the breakdown and methodology, the methodology on how it. How it's worked for me. And so the thing is, Instagram is huge. There's five different channels. There's Instagram feed, Instagram stories, Instagram igtv, now Instagram reels, and knowing what to do in each of these areas. It's its own social media channel management. So I'm just basically creating a course about each, you know, each part of Instagram. So it's a series of courses that will basically help you, you know, hopefully understand how to leverage Instagram for your business and ultimately generate sales and conversions, which is, you know, the newest workshop that I. I'm just taught and I'm turning into a course.

So tell us, how do you. For all the other people who are watching this interview and they want to start their own online course, can you run us through a journey of how to discover the right keywords, what is the demand in the market, and how to go ahead with it, launching your own course?

I think the most important thing is to actually know who you're creating it for. Like other people that want to learn the knowledge that you have and seeing if there's an audience for that, really interviewing, you know, your own community first and seeing if this is of value to them. And that's kind of how, you know, I got started into wanting to create online course because so many people. Well, I see all the courses that are out there. So that's a good way to also figure out which courses you should make. Because if somebody's already made a course in a particular topic, there's. You can also create a course in that topic because it's almost like the validation is already done for you that, you know, this is, well, a successful course, right. So you want to go just look at other people's courses and see what's everyone interested in. All the numbers are out there, right? So that's a way to hack the research and validation part. Just see, you know, what topics are already trending and interesting. And that's what I would do. But.

Yeah. So my first question is, what was your biggest, like, struggle when you were building your business? Something that you would say to your audience to avoid?

So there were many struggles. I think the one like really main one that I have struggled for a very long time with was my self confidence and really, you know, being investing in just myself and, and confident enough to launch my personal brand, which I did only just two, three years ago. But before two, three years I was already. I've been working in marketing for 15 years. But it wasn't until I built enough confidence and like belief in myself. Like, oh, I guess people do want to hear from me. I guess I have things and experience to share. So that took a really long time because I wasn't comfortable with the way that I looked on camera. I wasn't comfortable, you know, taking selfies of myself. Like these are things that I had to practice and do more and more. And I think part of that is because, you know, maybe the way that I was raised or I'm from Los Angeles, you know, everyone has to look perfect there. And I even, you know, really struggled with my identity, especially, you know, growing up in a affluent, mostly predominantly white, white neighborhood, that I was like really trying to reject my Asian identity. So it wasn't until that I, you know, had enough confidence and, you know, built this belief in myself and invested myself that I was able to even launch my personal brand, which is Mother of Social Dragons, because I had really struggled in, you know, fighting, you know, my Asian ness and not using, you know, my Chinese heritage because I was embarrassed of it. So that was a huge struggle throughout my entire life and it really affected how I was going to present myself in public, but also online. Right. And it took a long time to get over that. And that was a. That was a personal struggle. But in business, there, There have been many, like learning. Learning entrepreneurship without going to business school, learning to launch your first company in a foreign country where you don't even speak a language. So those are all struggles as well. And, yeah, there's a long list.

That's amazing. So you were saying that once you went back to your own self to say, I am Asian, I've got Asian stories. I'm raised in this family. The more authentic I am, the more real I am, the more people will come to me. So when you went back to your roots, you not only connected with the Asian community, you connected with communities all over the world. And so your message to people would be to go back to, you know, being who they are.

Owning. Owning. Being. Well, one of the. One of the elements in the Dragon's formula is authenticity, and that's really owning who you really are and being completely true to yourself. Like, you cannot fake it till you make it. Right. So I couldn't, like, fake to be some blonde girl or whatever it was that I wanted to be. I had to just be myself. And that's when, you know, I started to succeed more, when I accepted who I was, you know, embodied the dragon, because my family's last name is Dragon, so I embodied who I really was, the origins of what I am. And that's. And that's really what set me apart against my competitors. There's no other dragon that does social media marketing. I don't know anyone. Do you?

No. No. But you've got 30 dragons now, so.

Yeah, I have 34,000 dragons around the world, which is freaking crazy because I just. I didn't know it would just. I had no idea it would just explode. I really didn't have expectations. I just. I was happy with just 200 students, and I was like, okay, this is.

Fun, you know, that's fantastic. Do you have another one?

Yeah. So my second question is, how did you work at when you were starting your business? It probably took a long time to get there. Like when you were in Los Angeles, to get there and go to work and then come home and spend time with your family.

Right.

How did you try to balance that out?

Like, work life balance. Is there anything like that or.

Well, I'm a believer in work hard, party hard. So, yeah, you make room for the things that you want to do. Right. So I think when I was in la, I was working a corporate job for predominant part of my early career, and I realized that this is not for me. Like, this is not how I want to. Anything that has to do with, like, following guidelines or rules. Like, I always color outside the lines. And so it just. There was no balances either. It was like all work. And then you have to be like a weekend warrior, they call them. So you would, you know, work like, 40, 50 hours a week, you know, with. Including driving, maybe 60, and you're exhausted by the time you get home from work. And I don't even have kids, right? So you're too tired to go out, and so you save up all of your energy for the weekend, and you become one of these, like, weekend warriors, and you party your brains out on the weekend. And that's not balance, right? Whereas now that I have my own freelance business, I'm able to really control. I have control over my time. And if I don't feel like working, I want to rest or spend time with my family or be with my partner, I'm able to have that freedom and really not feel overloaded. Of course, in entrepreneurship, there's this hustle, hustle mindset and mentality, especially when you're trying to build. And I'm. Of course, there was all of that, especially because this is, you know, I've had. I've had, you know, a company that I closed in Barcelona mainly because I did not. I was not able to have work, life, balance. When you are, you know, when you're an amateur, when you're getting started, like, you don't know, like, when. And this is why. The reason why that company failed is partly due to not having this balance. You know, it was all work and no play. Whereas now with my freelance lifestyle, it's so pertinent that, you know, there's very limited hours that are spent on, you know, hard work, and most of it is playing to keep, you know, keep the mind creative so that the work is easier.

Right? So dot your message to everybody who's watching and wanting to build their own businesses, become like you become a course creator and, you know, find their own voice. Is that a. Be yourself, be authentic. Don't be scared. Because the minute you became authentic and you said, this is who I am, you know, you started seeing people from all over the world, started getting attracted to your brand, and you got 34,000 students. So that was the first message we got from you. Second was that people like to say that we work hard, we party hard, and, you know, both those things don't collaborate because sometimes you feel that you need to fit into other people's lifestyle and, or a lifestyle that belongs to a particular city and that wears you off. When you became your own boss and you started creating online courses and teaching other people, it would. The relationship shifted from you and your students. And now whatever you're doing is thinking about the benefit of the students. And, and you can do that in the morning, afternoon, evening, whenever you want. And so that gives you flexibility of time. So it's on. My next question is, does all for all the audience watching over here, like I said, this is an online digital marketing school. Lot of people will be joining in here and what is your message to them? If they want to start an online course business, do they have to be an expert? Do they have to be the best in the field at doing what they're doing? How can they start an online course business? Can you give us like a step by step breakup?

Well, there's different ways to approach it. I know like one of my friends, she actually has an online course business, but she doesn't create. She creates hundreds of courses, but for other course creators, she actually doesn't have her own course. So you can actually be the content creator, you can be the producer. It depends what your objective is. But if you have knowledge that you want to, you know, wrap, you know, package, if you have knowledge that you can package into a course and sell it, you really have to like. My advice would be to have extreme clarity on what you're going to be teaching and if there's an audience for that. So before you even create the course, you shouldn't create the course. The first thing to do is not to create the course. The first thing to do is maybe just create an outline of the course and then interview some potential students that you think, you know, might want to take it and see what they actually want to learn so that you can really craft the perfect course for the end user. I would do as many interviews as possible, definitely at least a dozen of them, to really see what the market wants before you just create a course. Don't like, just create a course, you know, because that comes easy. You have to create a course that people want.

12 interviews, practice, sweat more in practice so that you bleed less in war.

Yeah, exactly.

Got it, got it. So that's really, that's really a great idea because we are also building our online courses and we feel we know the community well. But you're saying a dozen. I like that because the more you go into the Eventual market of the purchaser, the user, the consumer who wants that shift from A to B. The more you're in touch with that person, the more you have your ear to the ground, the better your course will be. I love that idea. Okay, I've done my 12 interviews. I've got these people right. What next? Because what really, you know, like you create such beautiful looking programs as well you, it's so visually appealing. What if I do not have the aesthetic sense or the budget to be able to create the kind of amazing looking courses that Dot creates. Can I still create a course?

Absolutely. There are so many tools like canva.com my course, like it was made, you know, I had some designer help me create the brand. But after I have the brand, you can just, you know, take your aesthetics, your favorite colors, like no more than two or three, and put it into canva.com put it into keynote. There's plenty of templates. Honestly, simpler is better. It's not about aesthetics. It's really about first creating content that people are interested in. And then if you have budget, you can invest in aesthetics. I never had a website, I never had a logo or anything until three years ago when I was like, okay, I'm going full on into my personal brand and I'm gonna have this course. And I took my personal branding and made all of my course material consistent because for me and my students, my target audience is very interested in esthetics because they're designers and creatives and artistic people. But if you're teaching like science or if you're teaching math, like you probably just want clarity and have it in black and white. It's not necessarily, you need, doesn't need to be pretty and colorful. So it depends again here on your audience and what their needs are.

So don't over stress, make sure. Okay, now my next question is when it comes to structuring the knowledge, I know I can take you from like I teach people how to use videos for getting known, getting leads and getting sales. So everything so nobody knows you on the Internet. You need to do these kind of videos so your personal brand grows. Then these are the kind of videos that you put on your landing page funnels to get leads. And these are the sales videos. When you get the leads, do a zoom call with the client and you know, close the deal on video. That's what we teach now. It's a formatted program for all the audience watching. What would be your advice on the structure of the course? I know how to take people from where you are today, after three months of my course, you'll get known, get leads, get sales. How do you have, how do you advise people structure their outline once you know that this is the eventual outcome, how many sub steps should you have in your course? 5, 10, 20? I mean, how.

So that depends on what the. Where you're starting and what the end goal and result that you're going to help your student achieve. So normally what there is is at a minimum of what I would say like four units. Right. The first one is like an introduction that might be about yourself, your history, your background, and what you're about to learn in the course. The second one is basically like the pre production. Right. Like what do you need to have set up? Like, what are the basic theories and formulas? Like the knowledge to take you into the third unit, which is the production, how you actually do it and produce what you learned in units in this, in the unit before. And then the last unit is usually post production, which are, you know, all of the results and the conclusions and how you utilize that information or how do you actually, you know, finalize, you know, the course. So that's like an easy way. It could be much more than that. But in general, like the flow would be, you know, before, during and after. And that's actually how I plan out social media launches as well, is really. That's how you take people step by step. You need to hold their hand, you need to be the guide and just figure out what's the easiest way that you can take them from beginning to end. And the main, the, the main pillars to get there. The main. Yeah, the main steps.

Got it. So Dodd, for all the audience over here, they're like, you know what? I'm sitting at home, I understand Internet moguls of the world. This school is telling me to spend more time with my family. I'm watching Dot and I'm saying I should create an online course. What will it give to me to change what will happen in my life? What will be the transformation? So online courses, I'm sure your courses allow you to get connected with your 34,000 students. Somebody is a professor somewhere. Somebody's inviting you to speak. Somebody will give you an agency retainer work. So a real whole world of opportunities open up. Online course, it's just one part of getting into the market with one business idea. Would you like to talk about that?

Sure.

Like about the opportunities that have opened because of the course? Yeah, I think most of the opportunities are people like yourself, people contacting me because they have seen an advertisement, they might not even have taken the course, but they see the quality of the promotion and, you know, they see the content that is in the course. And I have been. I have been, you know, invited to speak at even more conferences than I was already. You know, I've already been invited, you know, to speak in over 30 different countries before I did the course. And the course was basically like, okay, I can't keep on traveling, you know, to 30 countries a year. I'm going to, you know, have this course and slow down my, you know, all of the speaking, the speaking circuit that I'm doing. And especially now that I. Especially now that I'm more like, I've. I've been doing so much traveling and because I love. I love traveling. So. So that's why I accepted so many speaking engagements. And now there's. The quality of the invitations are getting higher. So I think that's like when you grow as like a business or a personal brand. Yeah, like the. This. It's a steady. It's slow and steady. Right. It was. Didn't happen overnight. I've been, you know, I've been around doing this Internet marketing thing for 15 years. I've been on Facebook for 15 years. So now it's just like at the point where, okay, I finally published my first course six months ago only. And now just new opportunities. Like, I just spoke at the same teachable summit as Gary Vaynerchuk, who was like the number one in my industry. So it's just a slow and steady crawl up to, you know, up to the top. And I just want to teach, you know, teach and inspire others to do the same if that's what they.

And thank you for saying that the quality of invitations has gone up because we will include ourselves in that question. Yeah. That. Internet mobiles.

So my last question is we use the term Internet moguls a lot. And to us, an Internet. Sorry. To us, an Internet moguls means someone who is there, spends quality time with their family, but also is growing their business and improving their business. So what would your definition of an Internet moguls be?

I think when I first heard this term, it was a bit, you know, a bit polarizing because of the, you know, uncertainty of what the. That. What this term is meant to be. But I think at the end of the day, it's no matter what, it's someone that has able to achieve freedom in, you know, freedom of time, freedom of financials, freedom of creating the life that they want to live because of the Internet. Without the Internet, this wouldn't be possible. So I think Internet Mogul would be somebody that was able to achieve success and freedom because of the Internet.

That is fantastic. I think we asked for half an hour and our half an hour is over. So we really want to thank you. Avi, my daughter is named after me. She's Aviana. And Aviana, she promised me she won't grow beyond 5 o'. Clock. Beyond 5, I said remain 5. But she is now 11 years old and got up in the morning at 6 o' clock to do this interview with her school. We've already done 52 interviews. The second of our course, second is we have 52 course creators who are contributing a course to us. So we have 52 courses and we are also interviewing founders of all the major tool companies. So we'll have 52 tool interviews. Once we have 52 interviews, 52 courses, 52 tool trainings. Then with that content, we're going to be launching the we go do an online summit and we introduce Internet Moguls of the World, a family digital marketing school to the world.

I love it.

And so I'll give you a quick backstory. On the 29th of October, I'm going to be 44 years old. But when I. Thank you very much. When I was 18 years old or born and brought up in New Delhi, all I wanted to do in life was to become a streetcar racer. I thought I'd go abroad, learn how to race cars and become a streetcar racer. One day my dad called me to his office and he said he's lost everything in his business, he doesn't have the money. He gave me one option. He said he's got a small 27 room motel. He said, avi, join that. Start coming to the office from tomorrow because that's the only way we can all survive working together. Otherwise you leave the house, you can't work with us or whatever. So in one night I came back from, you know, hanging out with my buddies. My life completely changed. The very next morning I found myself behind my dad's small motel reception one. I didn't know what to do. I was just struggling. One day a international tourist came. He paid us in Dutch guilders, which was pre Euro currency and that was three times almost of the Indian money that we charged. And I'm thinking to myself, what if I fill up all 27 room with foreign clients? But the only thing was, how do I introduce a 27 room hotel to people all over the world? There was a dot at that time There was a new phenomenon on the market in the late 90s called the Internet which allowed you to connect with people in different parts of the world. But there were only two places in Delhi, the British school library and one five star hotel which had the Internet. So I didn't know it was very expensive. Another six months there was an ad in the paper which said a company is looking to give cyber cafe licenses. I was the first to apply for that cyber cafe and now I had the 24 hour access to the slowest Internet on the planet. And, and that's how my journey started. In the next four to five years, our hotel business did extremely well. We were able to build multiple properties just because of the Internet. Because late 90s, early 2000, we were one of the first people by far in India who were doing this. Once I understood how to do this, I built hundred websites on tourism and travel. And I started an affiliate marketing business with all the other big travel companies. So I was doing very well as a 25, 27 year old. Then in 2009 I wanted to do something completely on my own. So I started a digital marketing agency with a small team of four people. Bootstrapped. I had no idea how this works when I do it for other people. And then we grew it from four to 200 plus people and it did very well for 10 years. And then Covid happened. Covid happened and my beautiful girls were growing up and I realized that what am I doing? I am spending too much time with this business and I'm two girls, six dogs. So to be able to do something which is more meaningful, we said we scale down the agency business. I'm doing more online courses, more trainings, more virtual workshops. And now me and my two girls, we're building this online digital marketing school for family. We'll be promoting the school, we'll be teaching, we'll be doing all of that so that the next five, six years when they're home and not going to university, we're able to build a business together which I will cherish for life. Hopefully they will cherish for life. They will learn a lot and hopefully we'll get a lot of students or family members who will learn from our mission.

What a meaningful business.

It took me 44 years to find a meaningful business. And you know, like for two years back when somebody asked me, what do you do? I could give you a one hour speech, but it's the first time when somebody says purpose, I said yes, I have it. So that's sort of the purpose. Behind. Thank you. This is the purpose between Internet moguls behind Internet moguls of the world and I really aviana and I really appreciate you taking the time out and contributing to this cause.

Thank you for having me. I'd love to introduce you to my friend Dr. AI. She's actually a PhD in education and is starting also a school called Classroom Without Walls. It might be someone interesting for you to connect with in terms of, you know, family education because that's kind of what she teaches is like children and adults digital media technology together which could be really interesting.

I would really appreciate that. That's what we say. Internet and Moguls of the world a family digital marketing school for kids, their parents and their grandparents. Even your grandparents are in different parts of the world. They all log. We give one ticket price, one pass and everybody gets four people get an access. So your grandparents are also logging in. They want to learn YouTube marketing with the grandchildren.

Yeah, that's great. Very cool.

Sa.