45: Debbie Gartner: Using Her Blog and Course Revenue to Pay off $238,000 of Debt

Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host, Destiny Kopp, and in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. But before I begin, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by my Course in a Box program which helps you create your revenue generating course in less than a week. Course in a Box is on the AppSumo marketplace at a special deer and I will make sure that the link for Course in A box on AppSumo is in our show notes. And today we're beginning our Course Creator series where I'm chatting with ordinary course creators just like you. We're going to be talking about their entrepreneur journey in their online course business, how they got started, the challenges they've experienced, and how they overcame them. These are real discussions with real people and I'm so excited to get started. And my special guest here with me today is Debbie Gartner. Debbie runs a successful home decor blog, theflooringgore.com she's been blogging since 2010 and has leveraged the power of SEO to get over 500,000 page views per month and generates over 20,000 net profit a month. She has leveraged her blog income to pay off more than $238,000 of debt. Debbie has coached over 100 bloggers on SEO and she's a better best selling author of two very successful SEO books, Easy on Page SEO and Easy Backlinks for SEO. She has sold over 3000 eBooks and courses to bloggers and entrepreneurs and Debbie, I'm so excited to chat with you today. Thanks for being here.

Oh, you're welcome. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So we're going to jump right in and I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about what you do and who you help.

Sure. My name is Debbie and I'm known as the Flooring Girl. That's what people here locally call me because I used to have a flooring business where I would go to people's homes and help them pick out their flooring and fast forward. I created my website TheFlooringGirl.com in 2011. I did not do it to make money. I did it to help get customers for my business so they would find me if they happen to be in my local area here. I live in New York, just outside New York City in the suburbs here. So that was my business and I had no idea at the time that you could even monetize or make money from your blog, but it was working pretty well, for me. So that's what I did before.

So let's back up. So you started the flooring girl.com in 2011, and really the intent was. Was for local people who are interested in flooring in their homes or maybe their businesses so they can find you and bring you out. Is that what you were doing?

Yeah, that's all I was doing. I just wanted people to find me. I remember when I first started my blog, my dad said, why would anybody want to read your blog? And. And I said, oh, nobody will want to. I don't care about them. All I want is the people that need to get their flooring done to find me. So he did not understand the concept until many years later. But my whole thing was based on SEO. So if they had a need or a question, they would go onto Google and type it and then they would find me and then they would read my blog post and they would, you know, trust me and like me and learn from me and then call me into their home. So I actually found out as time went on because a lot of people found me that way. They already knew me by the time I went to their home, so they welcomed me in and they were much more likely to buy their floors from me because they felt that we were already friends from reading my blog. So that's how it started.

Amazing. Just simple SEO practices and people could find you, quite frankly, all over the world. And you probably didn't even know about that at the time.

Oh, totally. That's the thing. I was only trying to optimize. Optimized for local people. But, you know, I wrote blog posts that I guess appeal to everybody who has questions about their flooring. So then, yeah, my traffic started going up. I started getting calls from all across the country and other countries too, but mainly in the, you know, us People would, you know, message me or email me different questions and things like that. I just, I didn't know what to do with all these people. So I used to have the phone number on the site, so then my assistant could take care of the appointments, but then the calls were coming in like crazy and she couldn't even keep up. And I was like, oh, my God, what are we going to do? So then I came up with the idea of having a different phone number. So the people that found me online that weren't local, they would call a Google voice number or something like that. And if I happen to be in my car and driving, I would once in a while, you know, answer the phone. But it allowed her to at least take care of all the real customers that wanted real local appointments here. So, yeah, not a big plan, but it just, everything kind of evolved over time.

So let's take a step back. I want you to tell me a little bit at the start of your entrepreneur journey. What were things like for you? How did you feel? Tell us a little bit about what was key. You up at night?

Yeah, well, I think for like any small local business, it's always, you want to find more customers and you want to grow your business. You want to try to scale. I mean, scaling and blogging is way easier than scaling a one on one business. You know, I was basically the main face of the brand and I would go to people's homes and help them pick out their floors. And then I was able to, you know, hire people to do the work and to manage the workload and to answer the phones. But at some point I kind of capped out. There are only so many appointments I could do per week. You know, I have to go there, drive there and, and then do the estimate, take measurements, do the proposal, follow up with customers. So there's only so much that you can do as one person at. Towards the beginning, it was more like, oh, how do I find more customers? Any customers, I don't care. Like, I will drive to New Jersey to take a customer with whatever I can. But as time goes on, you get more customers and you get more repeat customers. So then the question becomes, okay, now that I'm busy enough, how do I get better customers? You know, how do I go to things that are better use of my time? The ones that are more likely to say yes. So we would then kind of say, okay, well, we're only going to take care of people in my county if they were counting away. If I have to go over a bridge, like, no go, I don't need that now. I have enough people calling me and then it was, okay, how do we make sure that they're ready to buy now? So my assistant who was answering the phone, she did a really good job of screening people. And so if they were not ready to buy yet, instead of being totally rude, she would just book them out for three or four weeks from now or something. And so some of them, if they were in a rush, they would just drop out, you know, so. Or if they sounded like they were a bad customer, like, I. E. That they were just price shopping or something that we were not really good at or that wasn't as, you know, profitable for us or likely to Close. She would try to push them out. So over time, she got much better at managing my calendar. So, you know, it's one of those things where you just build in stages over the years. First, how do I find leads? Okay, got leads now. How do I get those customers to have appointments? And how do I get better with the customers I'm meeting with? How do I close more sales? And then just do it again and again and again, year after year, you know, so. And then you start looking at your high times. You know, for us, spring, summer, and fall were pretty busy, but the winter was not busy. So then what do you do in the winter to make up for the fact that it's snowing outside or it's cold or, you know, when I get to. Right around Thanksgiving, people start putting Christmas trees up, and then they can't do their floors. It's too late. So then how do we supplement? And then you start going to the next level. Okay, well, lots of people won't do their floors in the winter because they don't want people trekking in their house. But who needs to do their floors? Okay, well, there are kind of two sets of people that need to do their floors. One is the people that are moving into new homes, right? They want to get their own ready so they can move in. So then it was okay. Go find real estate agents and find referrals that way. Find painters also, because if they are doing painting, they often do flooring. The other big reason people might need to do their floors in the winter is, and I hate to say this, but that they often have some sort of accident or something like that. Like the they had a flood and their floors are ruined. And while that's very unfortunate, the good news is that it's usually covered by insurance, so it's at least paid for. So then it was okay. Find the restoration companies that are doing that, or people have ice damming, you know, all those, like, little things that kind of ruin your floors and you have to have to get them redone. So then it was okay, well, let's be the. The person who comes and saves the day and helps them out and gets them through their worst times, and hopefully they will see you as a hero and not that this is the end of the world.

And what I'm hearing from your story there is that you're always continually looking at your business, seeing how you can improve and seeing how you can make things better for your business and quite frankly, for your. For your customers.

Exactly, exactly. And it's kind of Moving one lever at a time in the same way that it is for blogging. Right. Right now. So, you know, how do I, how do I get more effective with my marketing? How do I make the appointments, get the bigger bang for the buck in each one? How do I better follow up with my customers so I close more sales? But you kind of, at the beginning, you know, you don't know which way is up, but you have to figure it out. Because if you don't figure it out, like, you won't make any money and you're going to lose everything. Right. You know, I used to work in corporate America and I really enjoyed it, but you would get a paycheck every two weeks even if the business did bad. I mean, I worked really hard on my businesses, but you always knew the money was coming in here. If you're not making sales, you're not making any money. And you can even go into the red, especially during the winter months. So you have to hustle and keep learning and getting better and you learn from other entrepreneurs as well.

And that kind of brings me to my next question. You had mentioned that almost four years ago, you found yourself in a very bad place. You had $238,000 in debt without a means of income. Can you tell us a little bit about what was going on in your life and then what actions did you take and what did you decide to do about it?

Gotcha. Yeah, so I can't go into details about how that happened. I will just say that sometimes life is very unfair. But I had to sign a confidentiality agreement, so I can't give you the details. But basically I had to close down my business and I had 24 hours notice and figure out what the heck to do.

Wow, 24 hours notice to close down your business.

Yeah, it was a long, it's a long story, but it was very tough, tough decision, but I mean, if only I could go back in time and tell myself it would be okay. I did, did not know that at the time, but I figured this is the best scenario that I can do. I'm just going to change everything. And I did not realize how badly I was in debt at that point in time. I knew everything was hard and it was hard paying the bills and things are going to be very hard. So I knew that. But I basically could not do flooring for two years. So everything I'd worked for, for, I don't know, eight or 10 years, like down the drain. And all of a sudden I had no job. I had people Calling me, saying, hey, can you take care of my floors? But I wasn't allowed to because of this document that I had signed. So I honestly, I wish I could say that I was really great at handling it, but I was a total, total, an utter wreck. You have no idea. So I was, I was in shock and I was terrified and I was crying every day. I probably hyperventilated. And I live in New York in an expensive suburb and I own my condo. So I'm like, how am I gonna, what am I going to do? How am I going to pay my bills? And I did not want to go back to mom and dad, but the fact is I own my place. I had put money into the apartment and everything. So there's a lot of. It was sunk cost, but it would have been all lost basically. So I think I just have to figure something out really quickly. So I had this blog and I was getting a lot of traffic to the blog. I think I was probably getting around 100,000 or 150,000 page views a month. And I wasn't really trying to do that because back then I wasn't monetizing my blog, as I said, I was simply getting, trying to find local people who needed their flooring done. But by accident I brought in all these other people across the country. So I said, there must be something I can do with that traffic. There must be something. And I had thankfully been reading some blogs and listening to podcasts back then. People like, you know, like Pat Flynn and everything and seeing what they could do. And I'm like, oh, maybe I could do something like that, you know, I don't. I do. I know the hard part. I know how to do SEO. I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know how to monetize, but I should be able to learn. It was kind of my logic. But I knew that it would take me a long time to make money and thankfully I knew that. So I said, I need to figure out a stopgap so that I don't lose my condo. So I said, okay. I took on two part time jobs. So one of them was blogging and doing SEO because they already knew how to do that. So I found some clients that I could do work for and thankfully I had the stats on my blog for them to believe me that I could actually help them. And, and so I did that. But that was only, you know, a part time job and I knew it wasn't enough. So I went to one of my painters that I Knew so someone that I used to give painting jobs to for my flooring people. And he would give me flooring jobs for his painting people. And I just, I honestly, I just begged him to take me on and I said, can, can I, can you teach me how to do this? Because I can't do flooring. But flooring and painting go together. And we had done a lot of joint appointments and he's like, no, it's January and nobody paints in January and nobody paints in February. Just like, they don't do floors. I mean, he's exaggerating, but he's like, I don't really need anybody. And I was devastated. And then he called me back a day or two later and said, you know, I know I don't really need you now, but I know you're really good with the customer. And I think that we could do this if we do it on a commission basis. So you basically only get money if you sell a job. And then it was low risk to him. It was January, February. He wasn't too busy. So he's like, I have some time to train you, so when you find the right person, you should hire them instead of vice versa. So he saved me, but that's what I did. So I did those two part time jobs for like maybe sort of a year and a half while I built up my blog. And so that kept me afloat because as I'm sure you know at the beginning, making money, your blog is, it's pretty frustrating and pretty slow. Yeah. So that's how, that's how I made it through.

So you basically couldn't do the flooring anymore, so you found two part time jobs to kind of tide you over. So you didn't lose your condo, but you also had this website that you wanted to figure out how to monetize. So let's exactly move into that. What did, how did you begin to monetize your blog? What kind of products did you sell? How, what steps did you take then?

Okay, yeah, so I, back then I did not really know anything about selling products or that potential, but I had a lot of traffic to my site so I decided to just turn the ads on. And that was, you know, when I did that, I made, I forget, like I did that. Oh, sorry. I had done, I had dabbled a little bit and I mean a little bit on Amazon Associates. So I was maybe making $300 a month. So then I turn on the ads and I made $1,000 for the month. And I'm like, oh yay, Because I knew, you know, it's gonna be better the next month. And next month I made fifteen hundred dollars. I'm like, yeah, look, it's working, it's working. And I'm like, it's gonna go up. But no, of course I just flatlined, you know, for a while. So I mean, at least I was making some money. But you know, then it went to like $1300, you know, it was just like flatline there. So. And thank goodness I had those other jobs because the purpose of those was not long term. It was simply to get me through the two years and make enough money until my blog could make enough money to become self sustaining. And then from there I learned how to do affiliate marketing much better. And I will tell you that I was a slow learner. I, I did take a couple of courses, but it really wasn't until month 11 when things started to kick in. And then I got it. A combination of getting it, but also combining it with the SEO together and then just having time for those to, you know, simmer in Google. So in month 11, which was November of that year, I made $3,100. And I was like, oh my God, you know, oh, sorry. In October of that year, the painting job I had, the guy decided to close the store. So all of a sudden I lost one of my part time jobs. I'm like, oh my God, I have to make this blogging thing work or I will go under, you know, again. So I worked really hard in October and then in November and that's when I made $3,100 on the blog.

And you were, you made that money just from either ads that you had on the site or affiliate marketing that you.

Exactly, exactly. So I was only doing those two things to monetize. And it was that way for my first two years, practically my first two years of blogging. So, you know, then I went to 3,100. I'm like, I'm starting to get it now. I did more then I went to 4100 and then January I went to 4400 and then I went to like 6300 and then 6600. And then I think in March or April I was like 8,000. And then somewhere in July I made what I make, 10, 10,000, $10,100. And by the way, all those numbers are profit numbers. I hate when people tell you the revenue numbers and not tell you the profit numbers. But I needed profit because I needed to pay, pay my mortgage and I needed to pay off that debt. So I basically needed, based on where I live and the debt that I had without making major down payments to the debt, I needed $10,000 a month just to survive and to be able to have enough money to also pay the irs, you know, whenever April happened. So I just worked really hard. But. But at some point, the blog started to really take off and grow.

So as of right now, you have the ad money coming in, the affiliate marketing coming in, and I know you started to add some courses and some books to your portfolio to sell them. When did you do that and tell us why you decided to go down that path and how has that worked out for you?

Okay, so it worked out really well. But I wish I could tell you that I had a strategic plan throughout all of this, but I did not. And as you hear my story and ask me questions, you'll see how backwards I did everything. And hopefully your listeners can learn from what I've learned. They do it more strategically than I did. So my. I needed money still to pay off the debt. And someone randomly in a group that I was in, a Facebook group said, does anybody know a good SEO agency that I can hire? And I knew that that can be do a lot of damage because if you hire the wrong one, they'll ruin your website, you know, for life. And he was someone I knew a little. So I just sent him a private message, and I said, you know, I think I can teach you how to do SEO. I think I can teach you in an hour. And if you're willing to pay $75, I'm willing to give it a try. And he thankfully said, sure. And of course, it took me more than one hour. But anyway, it was great, and he paid me, and it was a lot of fun. And I didn't tell anybody back then that I knew how to do SEO. I just did it. And I wasn't looking for additional clients or anything. I just did it. And then he said, oh, my God, you totally know what you're doing, what you're talking about. You should start a blog on SEO. And I said, well, I don't. I don't like blogging about SEO. That would just bore me. And then a week or two later, someone else had a similar problem. And I said, you know, I think I can teach you. And she said, sure. And then. And then some other people said something, and then words started to get around. Okay.

And you did all of that just by finding people in Facebook groups?

Yeah. And the funny thing is, I was not even looking for people to do this for. But what happened is my dad got really, really sick. So thankfully he's okay. But his. He needed to get brain surgery, and we didn't know what it was at the time, so he was. He just turned into a different person. And I don't know who he was. But after he later got brain surgery, everything was fine. But anyway, I couldn't deal with it, so I needed to take my mind off of it and I needed to make money. So I'm like, let me just do more of these appointments. I just did them over the phone, you know, and then it'll help me mentally and it'll help me get my debt paid off sooner. So I started doing that, and seriously, like, in the Facebook groups, word started to get out, and eventually I was booked for three months straight just for SEO consulting.

Just talking with people over the phone. That's it.

Exactly. Just teaching them how to do SEO. That. That's it. And then, like, people would say, oh, I want to do it too, and, oh, Debbie knows what she's doing, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah. So three months out, and then I was feeling overwhelmed and did not know what to do. So I had coached all these people, and they're really nice. And in the Facebook groups, they started saying, well, why don't you just create a book? So that's how it happened. So I created an SEO ebook. People call it a course because it's very in depth. And I just launched the book. And that was month 24, so December of my second year. And I did, like I told you, I did everything wrong. So I did not even have an email list. Like, I didn't even have email. I didn't use email. Like, I. And I hated email. So I'm like, how the heck am I going to launch a book when I have no email list? And then someone said, affiliates. Do affiliates? And I said, oh, good idea. So I did. So I launched my first book solely with affiliates and also my past customers. I mean, voluntarily. Like, I didn't, you know, I didn't coerce any of this stuff, but they would just say really great things, and people would buy my book, and then people bought the book, and then they would go in the Facebook group, say, oh, my God, like, this is something I didn't even know existed. So back then, my first book was about backlinks, because, you know, there's a lot of SEO stuff out there, but no one was talking about backlinks. And I knew that it was so important. So I wanted to Differentiate. So that's what my book was. Then people say, oh my God, I've never read anything like this. And then more people would buy it, and that's how it started.

And tell everybody listening because they might not know what backlinks are. And just for the record, this is something I want to learn about because it's something I know that I need to do better with on my website. But tell them what backlinks are.

Yeah. So basically there are two main parts to SEO. Once you've decided what to write, there's what's called on page SEO and there's off page SEO. On page SEO is everything that the customer experiences on your site. So it's the actual content that you wrote, how well it's, you know, optimized for the keywords that you want to rank for, you know, the pictures and your site speed and everything associated with their experience on site. The other part, which is probably the other 50% of what accounts for your rankings, are backlinks. And backlinks are basically when you get a powerful backlink from another site to your site. And in Google's eyes, they are basically like votes for your site. So you basically want to get more votes and more backlinks to your site. And that is the whole idea. Now, it's not quite as simple as that. Like, not all links are created equally and, you know, you want different types of links and this and that, but that's what the whole ebook is about. So why backlinks are so important and, and importantly, where to find them, the different criteria that you want and the places to actually go and find them. And that was the book.

And we took a little bit of a tangent there, but I think that was important just so people knew exactly what backlinks are, because a lot of people might not know. So in 2020, you created two other courses and two other books. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so actually I started. Let me go through all the stuff that I did because when the book launched, I was afraid there's gonna be a failure, but it was the exact opposite. And then I saw, oh, look how much money I made. So in. I made $14,000 that month. And then I just. From the book launch or additional, I mean 14. I mean $14,000 in profit.

Okay, gotcha.

That month. And then I could see how powerful that was. But I could see. Well, you know, I only talked about one main part about SEO. I can see all these other people who are more beginners, need to know about all the basics on SEO. So I created another book. And people call them courses even though they are books. And it did really well. And then what I found out is that it made both books do better. And then I sold them as a bundle. And so in. Let me see if I got this straight in February of my third year. So, like month 25 or no, 26, I guess it was. I ended up making $18,000 for the month, and then the next month, in March, I ended up making $24,000. And I also was scared about having the money to even pay the irs. I did not know how much I needed to pay them or even if I would have enough money to do it. So I just worked harder and harder and harder. But I made $24,000. And I'm like, holy moly. You know? Now part of that was because I had a new launch and I ran a sale because it was a launch. And that's not all consistent. But then the next question became, how do I create more consistency? Because I can't just have a 24 hour, $24,000 a month, and then $12,000 a month, like, that would be awful. Like, especially when I had all this debt to pay off. So then from there, I started to really think through things like how do I actually create an ongoing audience? And that's when I started a. An email list. So I created a free SEO course to get people into that, and then some of them end up buying my book. And then from there, later, the end of my third year, I created my first course course, if you will. So an actual course. And it was. It's a more advanced course for SEO. So it's called Easy SEO Revamp. And it's not for beginner bloggers. It's for people that are already getting some SEO traffic. And then how do they get their articles to rank higher? So if I'm on page two, how do I get from page two to page one? If I'm on page one, how do I move up into slots? You know, 1, 2 or 3 or 4, 5 or 6. So I put that together then, and now I actually sometimes sell all them as a bundle together. So it's meant to be, you know, after you have like three to six months of traffic, then what's the next level? So that was the first course course I did, and I did it on Teach, and it worked well. I was. I was supposed to launch it sooner. Everything I do takes longer than what I think it's going to. So I was supposed to launch it in November, and I didn't get to finish it until December 17, which arguably is a terrible time to launch a product right before Christmas. But I think I ended up making over $6,000 that month in the course launch. And considering There are only 13 days or 14 days left in the year, I was, I was pretty happy with that.

So let me ask you this. You mentioned that to build your email list you created a free SEO course. Can you talk? And I'm a huge fan of online course creators using kind of free or low cost mini courses to build their email list. Yeah, tell us how that's working for you. How much has, when exactly did you launch it and how much is it growing your email list?

Oh, it totally helped. It's the only way that I grow my email. Well, I shouldn't say the only way. It's the main way that I grow my email list. So. Okay, I, like I said before, I did a lot of things backwards. So my blog is about flooring and painting and has nothing to do with SEO, right? So I'm like, well, I'm not going to blog about SEO on my flooring blog. I'm not going to ruin the SEO on my own blog and no one's going to find me and I'm never going to rank, so what the heck? So at the beginning, I did it all through the combination of affiliate marketing and this free SEO course. And I basically would, if someone was asking SEO questions in Facebook groups, I'd say, oh, I have a free course and here's you can take it right here. And then people signed up. So I started that, I think six months after my, six months after my first book launch. So very backwards. But yes, it works out really, really well. And that's how people get to learn some basics about SEO. And then hopefully some of them know like and trust me. And then they end up buying at the end of the sequence or they just stay on my list for a while. And I do my best to try to provide high quality content on my email list because I don't have a Facebook group, I don't have a blog about blogging. So this is my only way to connect and provide value to people. So I teach them as much stuff as I can in there and then over time, some of them end up buying my ebook because they see how SEO can really help them and they believe me.

And we will make sure that that link is in the show notes for everybody. You have been extremely forthcoming with numbers. So tell us kind of where you are today. If you don't mind.

Oh, sure. Yeah. So, first of all, good news. I paid off my $238,000 in debt. Yay. I was gonna say this year, but it's. It's last year, so it's. It was bestial day. So July 14, 2020, I couldn't believe it. So I have no more debt. At least no more bad debt. I still have the mortgage on my house, but I consider that good debt. So that happened, you know, like, six months ago, I guess. And then I've been making $20,000 a month in profit for the last 22 months in a row. And hopefully this will be month 23. We'll see. I've had other months where I've done, you know, better, but every single month has been at least $20,000. And so I've been trying to scale in different ways, which we can talk about in a second. But, you know, obviously with the pandemic, things got hard again, and I had to pivot, like, four times. So when the pandemic hit, of course, my ad revenue went down a lot. And also I make a lot from Amazon Associates, so I currently make four to five thousand dollars a month. But I was making more, but there was a slash there that was around, like, the commissions went from 8% to 3%, so that was like another $6,000 a month. And then I had another affiliate that was paused because they couldn't make the products. So I was basically going to be down $12,000 a month, which, of course hurts, but it really hurts when you're trying to pay off debt and you're feeling like, I've been working on this for so long, so how can this really happen? So I decided that I would focus much more on products and affiliates and my email list, and less on traffic, be less reliant on traffic and ad revenue. So I had to kind of redo things in April of last year, and I focused more on products, and that has enabled me to keep growing my income. So the second half of last year, everything got stronger and stronger. So I had one month in July where I actually made $31,000. Actually, I think it was like 31.8 or something like that. And it was a bit of a fluke because I did really well on some affiliate promotion. And so I got a little. I got a nice little bonus of money there, but I just kept growing, growing. So if I look at last year, on average, I made, I think, $26.6K per month. And then November of last year, which is a fluke. So I'm not going to say if this is a normal baseline number, but I launched another course. So I launched my Amazon course because I still do very well with Amazon, despite the lower commissions. So I still make four to five thousand dollars a month. And what's interesting is I haven't even done any new articles for AMAZ for over a year, but I still make all that money passively. But I launched a course on all the tips and tricks from even if you're like a beginner and don't even know where to start, to the much more advanced tips and tricks. And I launched that then. And then there was Black Friday week. It's now become a week, or a little bit more than a week. And so with the two of those. So I ended up making. I had one month where I made $45,000, which couldn't believe, but it was just the time of year. And the earth and the moon, the stars all aligned and perfectly, but it was. It was a very good month.

So when you talk about it, you're like, oh, it's just a fluke, or it just happened. What I'm hearing from your story is just the opposite. What I'm hearing from your story is that you are always looking for, if something doesn't go right, you're always looking for, well, how can I improve or how I could, how can I pivot or how can I make things smart, better?

Right?

That's really where I see why you have been successful, is you didn't give up. You said, this is what it is. Or you analyze your data and said, this is what I need to change.

Right, Exactly. Yeah. I had to keep pivoting. And I love data analysis, too. I'm real numbers person, so that just comes naturally to me. But. But I had to keep. You know, you got to go with the flow. And you have to really say, well, what is. What's most sustainable and what can I control the most? So even though I was making a good amount of money on things like ads, I was probably making on an average month before, maybe $7,000. I'd make more during the holiday season. But it's like I can work and work and work and work and make that into from $7,000 to $8,000 or $9,000. And that's not the step change. I really wanted to do more on products because I learned after having products that not only could I make more money, but I could have more control over it. So there was another blogger who was doing Much better than I was. She's like, oh, my God, I may end up making $100,000 this month. I've already made 80,000 so far. What ideas do you guys have that I can do to make $100,000 this month? And of course, she hit it with flying colors and probably made $120,000. And as it happened, I think the month after, I need to figure out how I was going to pay the irs. And so I did the same thing. I was like, what ideas do you guys have? And then I implemented them or some of them, and I exceeded my goals. And then I realized, oh, gosh, like, I have more control. So if I have an email list, even if my email list is small, I can actually leverage that email list into money somehow, which at first I was clueless on. But if you think always with a customer in mind, okay, my customer right now for that email list is a blogger. What do I need? I'm not trying to just make money from them, right? Because that would be, like, horrible and backfire many different ways. But rather, I am trying to help them, and I'm going to help them by teaching them, and I'm going to share information with them. So I share my income reports with them. I share what I've learned through this whole journey. Every month up until July, I would have my income report that then said, here's how much debt I had left. And they would see the number going down and down. I had this cheering squad, you know, rooting for me to get this thing down. And it was really. It was really kind of cool. But I realized that, gosh, there's a lot more that I have control over when it comes to products, because I can create a new product as long as I can focus, which I'm not the best at focusing. But at times I can focus. Like, especially when I need more money. Like, I will do that. And I can focus on writing emails. And I can then say to myself, okay, so I have this funnel, right, of this, my free SEO course. And then those people become on my list, and then some of them buy, okay, so the next question is, how do I get more people on my email list? And I just tried different ways. So I also started last year running Facebook ads. So the theory was, okay, how much is each subscriber worth and how much does the ad cost? With the ad is costing me less than the amount that I'm making. I can just scale up the ads. So I started at some point last year, I think maybe in January, doing like $300 or $350 a month in ads. And, you know, I was very careful because I still had so much debt and things messed up. And that was before I even knew that Corona was going to come our way. But I just gradually increased it. So I'm like, okay, I'm paying more, but I'm getting a return on that. Let me recycle that. And then it became, you know, okay, I'm going to spend $400 a month. And the next month it was 500. Next month it was 600. So it just kept scaling my email list. So that really helped. And I'm always looking for ways now to improve the funnels, to create more funnels, to create more products. What's the lead in for that? I still have tons, and I mean tons of work to do. But I figured, you know, we're in a new year, there are 12 months, so each month I can get at least one more thing done, and then I can just keep building and insulating my business because, you know, blocking is not always stable or consistent. And so you have to diversify what you have and also keep growing, because if you don't keep growing, you're going to eventually, eventually slide away. So I'm just like, okay, you know, before the coronavirus happened, I knew the year before they were talking about recession. And, you know, recession is nothing new. Like, recessions happen, what, every four or five years on average. So I said, okay, what's going to happen when that happens? Okay, ad rates are going to go down and this and that. So I need to build up because I need to make sure I'm getting enough money to pay down this debt and to continue paying my mortgage. So if I overshoot it by maybe 25%, then when something happens, I don't know what it will be, but I will still be okay because I'll still be above the amount that I need. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. And I love your inspiring story. I mean, one of my key takeaways from hearing it in the conversation that you had or the conversation that we had here is you're constantly looking at your business. You're constantly digging into the numbers. Numbers are so important, and quite frankly, many of us don't look at them as much as we need to. But the data will tell you what you need to do the data, and then looking at the marketing trends and everything that's going on in the industry.

I totally agree with you. But there's another key source of learning for me, and that is learning from other bloggers. So I am a constant learner. When I started monetizing, I did not even. I did not even think I was gonna do a product. These people were talking about products. I'm like, what? Like, what a product? Like, I can't create a product. Like, what product would I create? You know? So my SEO books were not. They were not planned. They just kind of happened by happenstance. But now I have seen so many bloggers in so many niches be so successful with their products, with their printables, with their courses. And that has inspired me because now in my home decor side of my business, which is where, you know, probably the bulk of my income has come from, now I've been trying to figure out how do I do the same thing, how do I create an email list and how do I create products for home decor? You know, instead of just blogging out, blogging stuff, how do I do that? So that was one of my other things. I decided in April or May of last year, I'm going to create some products, and I decided to start with some printables. I also, and this could sound so stupid, but I saw someone else's idea in a Facebook group, and she had posted about somebody else's idea saying that you could sell your blog posts, turn them into ebooks for $5. And you don't lie to people. You don't mislead them or tell them, oh, you know, you put it in different place. I told them right on the post, like, this post is long. It's, you know, because I took posts that were like three or four thousand words in them. I said, this post is long, and you can read everything you need to in this blog post. Or if you like, the PDF printable PDF version of it, it's only $5, and you can keep it and save it on your computer and. And then. And have it forever. And no ads or anything like that. And so I did that. So I started to make some money from that, and then from there after that. I then said, okay, let's take it to the next level. Learn what I Learned from my SEO eBooks, which is, you know, I have one ebook, but I can bundle it together with the second one. It becomes stronger. So I didn't upsell of my printables. And we're not even talking expensive printables. I have some printables that are like $7. So I'd say, okay, if you buy it with this $5 book, then you can get this printable. It's normally $7, but you can get it for just $4. And some. And many people bought it, so I just kept doing that and. And some of them worked and some of them didn't, and I switched them and stuff like that. But I'm, you know, making. Making some not huge amount of money, but I'm making some good money on that. So last year I was making maybe $600 a month extra on that, and if I put more time into it, then I would have been making a lot more. But I was, you know, working on my Amazon course and everything like that.

And I'm just curious, are you using any of those as tripwires on your Facebook ads to help pay for them?

Oh, on my Facebook ads, I do have a tripwire. So Facebook ads right now, I've only done for my SEO stuff because I know that that converts really well. I know people are super satisfied with my products there, so I'm willing to invest there. I did have run a test for me with one of my home decor things that was maybe $17, and it just did not pay for itself at all. But that could have been because the product I was talking about was. Wasn't necessarily a good product or we didn't have the right audience, or it could have been that it was the wrong time of year because it had to do with selling your house, which a lot of people don't do, you know, in October, November. But they might do it now. So I may, I may retry it. But on my SEO stuff, yes, I do have a tripwire for. I have a book on Google Analytics and how to read that, because a lot of new bloggers don't know how to do that or the important things to focus on. So it's, you know, it's marked down, it's very inexpensive if they get it that way. But it does help fund it. Yes.

So closing question for you, Debbie. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs or bloggers out there today?

I have tons of advice. Always.

I'm sure. I'm sure you do. You've given us tons today.

Yeah. But today, in terms of courses, I guess my advice would be it's like twofold. Just do it. Like, don't. If you have a good idea, do it and just get it done. And do not think that you need to launch expensive products. So there are a lot of course creators out there who are selling things for, you know, $100, $200, thousand dollars, wherever. You don't need to do that. Small products sell Very well. So I've had great success selling Items that are $47, $97, $27, $11, like all different price ranges. So a lot of times if you just narrow down to what is a need, a product need and fill that and get going. Because once you get going, you can keep building on it. So on some of my courses, I started them out at a lower price point and have an intro price. But over time I added to the courses and I made them meteor and then I made the prices a little bit higher as well. Then I've combined things I've done, you know, upsells and stuff like that. But you have to get started and do not think that you need to have a huge product. You can sell anything. I even sell some printables for like $3.

You know. And Debbie, I completely agree. I would say if there was one mistake that I made in the initial part of my entrepreneur journey in this online course world was trying to create like the signature course from the beginning. Right. I ended up completely kind of changing my process and now I start with more mini courses and then some of them I've added on over the years, kind of done what you've done. We're combining things and they, you know, so I have some higher priced ones, but I have a lot of lower priced ones too and they sell extremely well as you.

It's so true. Yeah. And I'm not saying you can't do higher price items. I'm saying just get started and don't let the price be the intimidation factor. Because just like what you're saying, you get started with those other ones, you're bringing people into your, into your audience. You know, so like even my Tripwire book, that's for Google Analytics, it's, you know, often they can get it for maybe $9 or something or which is small. But I purposely did a small price because these are for newer bloggers. And then the people that read it, like they actually see that I put out quality content, you know, I put out quality content in my free content as well. So then they will trust me that my paid product is going to be good. And I already have loyal fans. So if you think about this in the same way I think about my flooring business, okay, well, every customer, it's not just one customer that I get. Those customers become repeat customers and those customers have friends and their friends have floors. And so one customer can be worth five or six others in the same way that they might buy five or six of your books or Courses that you make over time. Like, I never thought I would even do any products, let alone have several of them at this point, you know, but they just keep happening and then people suggest other products and I just keep going from there.

Debbie, what's the best link for folks to go to to get your free SEO course?

Oh, I don't. Yeah, I should have prepared for this. So, first of all, my site is TheFlooringGirl.com the Flooring Girl.com.

We'Ll put the link in the show notes.

Just so exactly. Now, because my site is flooring and painting, I do not publicize any of my blogging stuff. There's only one place on, on there that you can find it. So if you go to the homepage, there are like eight blocks in there and the eighth block or square says my books and courses. And if you click on that, you can find everything. So you can find my free SEO course. You can find my other courses and books, you know, in there as well. And if you want to post a link in the show notes with this exact link to get there, that would be extra awesome.

I definitely will because I want to make sure people can find the SEO course. Debbie, thank you so much for joining me. I absolutely loved your story. I was so inspired by it. And congratulations on what you've been able to accomplish in your business. Paying off your debt, increasing your revenue per month. And I would love to talk to you again next year. This time, what you did in 2021, I know.

Let's hope it continue. I'll be happy, honestly, if things are just like, stabilized. Like, I just want to, you know, I would love if I could somehow make $30,000 a month, but do it with less work. So I've been kind of trapped inside like everybody else and I've been. I'm immunocompromised. I have to be careful. But I'm going to keep working until after I had vaccine and things are safe. And then I am planning to go swimming a lot and I am planning on actually taking a vacation and maybe even two of them. So I need my business to be working for me, not vice versa. So that's my goal. And in the summer, I really, I want to spend less time on my blog and have it working passively for me.

Well, I have full confidence that you will be able to do that and spend a lot of time in the water and at the beach.

Thanks, course creators.

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you have any questions about course in a box, which is offered on AppSumo. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn or DM me on Facebook or Instagram. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love for you to rate and review the podcast on itunes or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.