50: James Pollard: How Automated Funnels Have Grown His Online Course Business to 31,000 Students

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. 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 deal and the link for Course in A box on AppSumo is in our show notes. And today we're in the middle of our course Creator series where I'm chatting with ordinary course creators just like you. We're talking about their 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 today I'm so excited. I have a special guest with me. I have James Pollard. James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, a marketing consultancy that works specifically with financial advisors to help them get more clients. He's also the host of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast, which has more than 100 episodes and is still going strong. James, thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited about our conversation. We've been talking for a few minutes here and and I know the audience is going to love our discussion today.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And I know we were talking off the air about how if I had someone like you in the beginning of my marketing business career, that it would have shortened my learning curve quite a bit and it would have been a huge help.

Well, you've accomplished a lot and I have a lot of questions for you. I definitely want to dig into the details here, but before I do that, why don't you tell everybody a little bit more about yourself, your firm, and exactly what you do.

So, as you said, founder of the advisorcoach.com, we've got the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, which is one of the most listened to, most downloaded podcasts in the Financial Advisor space. We have a lot of love. We're very polarizing. I've always been interested in marketing. First, I've always led with marketing such as Gary Halbert, Eugene Schwartz, Gary Bensivenga, Rosser Reeves, the old school marketers. I love them. Dan Kennedy studied them like you wouldn't believe. And when I was a preteen teenager, I got started with Google AdSense and started building websites and marketing those and learning how ads worked, how online platforms worked and just making money with that. And I Actually made more money with Google AdSense at that period than I had as a part time job as a teenager. So I've always led with marketing first and I realized that there was an opportunity because I also loved financial markets and I love people in financial services. You've got insurance, you've got banking, you've got mortgage lenders. That industry is something that I'm also super passionate about. So I was really good at marketing and also loved the financial services industry. And I noticed that there was a disconnect between the marketing training that was given to new financial advisors specifically and the retention rate. So I mean I don't want to get too technical, but depending on the study you read, anywhere from 80 to 90% of financial advisors quit or drop. Quit, fail or drop out, whatever you want to call it in the first three years. So if the marketing training was so good, this wouldn't happen. And I started looking at some of these companies training materials and the advice that the advisors were given from other agencies and other trainers and whatnot. And the advice hadn't changed for 30 or 40 years. So I saw an opportunity there, created the business, started off with one on one coaching. That's why the business is named the Advisor Coach. I don't do coaching anymore. I transitioned to an information products business and we can talk more about that in the show.

So I want to kind of back up a little bit. I want to focus on what you said about what you were doing in high school and that interests me a lot because I have two, I have four kids, but I have two older sons and two younger ones and my older sons did a little bit about what you were doing. They delve into kind of the Google Ads and made a few hundred thousand dollars honestly in high school just learning marketing and advertising and how they, how all of that worked. So you were doing this in high school? Did you go to college?

I did, I did went to college. I originally started as a double major in economics and psychology because I wanted to learn the psychology behind marketing. Ended up dropping econ and focused solely on psychology with a minor in advertising. The reason I didn't get a double major in psychology and marketing is because by the time I made the switch I wanted to graduate early. I knew I wanted to graduate in three years. So by the time I made the switch you were like well you've got to add on another year if you want to get the marketing double. So I was like okay, I'll just take advertising as a minor. So that's what I Got so psychology.

And marketing go hand in hand. So I definitely think that you are on the right track there. Did you. When did you start the business that you're in now? The advisor coach? Did you do that while you were in college or after or what was the transition? Tell us a little bit more about your career path.

So I was actually in a few marketing roles before starting the business. The one that means the most to me and the one that I learned the most from. I was part of a marketing department at a major casino and I kind of lucked into that because my family is extremely involved in harness racing and the casino and they really wanted me to be part of that because they knew that I was doing pretty well with marketing and they say, hey, why don't you do the marketing here? And me just being a nice person, I guess I don't really know what it was. I said, sure. And I started doing that and was good with that. And honestly, in a casino setting you see all walks of life. You see high rollers who are betting $100,000 a hand to blackjack, people who are doing $10 a pull on slot machines. You also see people who are losing their rent and like have serious problems like gambling addiction. So I have to. I was able to talk to each one of those and do business with each of these people and figure out what makes them tick again. Psychology degree in action, I suppose, and just was good at that. But I was still really passionate about the financial services market. I was really passionate about financial advisors. And again, that's when I started doing more research into that career and that path and the problems people faced and just saw the opportunity. I literally could not ignore it. So in 2015 I started one on one coaching with financial advisors, basically working with them one on one. And that was super effective. Like this is how your website should be. This is what your. I don't really do scripts anymore, but I was like, this is how your script should be. This is what your landing page should say. That sort of stuff, very nitty gritty. And when you're working with people one on one, it's pretty easy to get results because it's so custom tailored. But the problem I ran into was that I couldn't scale as well. So that is the path that I took.

So you were in the, you know, working for this casino and marketing and you started consulting with people on their own financial services.

Correct. So financial advisors. I had an in in the industry because I knew a financial advisor who basically needed help with marketing and talk with that person. And took it slow at the beginning because I honestly didn't know how to run a business. It's something that I had learned the hard way and like grow, but realized that one on one coaching was nice, but it wasn't really scalable and it wasn't the way to go. And I only have so much time in the day, so I would rather do something like you're teaching people. To do with online courses is to create something that is scalable, that does exist separate from your time. And I started doing that and I started creating products that help financial advisors. My very first one was called the Ultimate Financial Advisors Guide to Getting More Clients. And I basically took the coaching package that I had designed and condensed that into an ebook that was $97 significantly cheaper than the Coaching coaching program and started selling that.

How long did you do the one on one coaching before you moved into the digital product world?

Two years, I think. Don't quote me on that if you're a financial advisor listening to this because I'm sure someone's going to listen to it and be like, no, you did it for three years. But I think it was like two years, like 2015, 2017.

So you started your website, you were doing the one on one coaching and then decided, you know, I need to, you know, you know, number one scale and there's almost so much time in the day. And you created your first product base which was, you know, based on your, you know, the group or the one on one sessions that you were doing with with folks. What, where did you take it from there? Did you add additional products or when, what and what drove you to add additional products if that's the path you took?

So one of the pieces of advice that online course creators get pretty frequently and I also got this advice, is to ask your market what they want and do online surveys and get data from them. But I didn't have enough people in my world like the first year to really get a solid sense of what people wanted. I would ask the question and I would ask it to 100 people and I would get like 100 different responses. And some people were listening. Well, that's not, that's not possible. People will give you answers that are in certain categories, but for financial advisors, trust me, it's possible. So it wasn't until I got a couple thousand people on my email list, I would send out a survey and I actually gave them the categories. I said, do you want to learn about productivity? Do you want to learn about LinkedIn do you want to learn about how to get more referrals? Just as an example. And I sent out, like I said, sent out the survey and noticed an overwhelming number of people said they wanted to learn how to get clients with LinkedIn. So I created a product called how to get clients with LinkedIn. And then when I was done that, I went on to the second most requested thing. Then I did the third most requested thing. And before I knew it, I had a suite of products. There was like, 10 different products for financial advisors.

Interesting. I think that's a great way to survey your audience is to put it in those buckets, because, you know, sometimes people don't know what they don't know. Right. And that sounds like that's a little bit about what you were experiencing there. Tell me a little bit about your funnel. You have this suite of products. Somebody goes to your website. Do you have, like, everything set up so they sign up for a lead magnet and then you start selling them. How do you segment your list from there and sell them, you know, walk them through the buyer's journey, if you would, to purchase your other services that they may need.

So it's very interesting at this point, the business is at a size where we have different funnels that all operate differently. An example of a very simple one that someone can set up right away if they have multiple products, is a funnel that basically helps people figure out which is the right product for them. So if someone goes to the products page, which is the advisorcoach.com products, we have a survey at the very top of that page where people can answer questions or five questions about themselves and their businesses and what they would like, and it points. Points them in the right direction. One of the most common questions we got as we started to scale and get more email addresses and get more website traffic and more podcast listeners, is which product is right for me? And at the beginning, I thought that I made a grave mistake because there are some online course creators who say, just create one product and be really, really good at that. And I agree with that to an extent. But, I mean, I already had so many assets and so many different products that I didn't want to get rid of them. And. And I got a little freaked out. But then I realized I could just create something to help people understand what is right for them. So if someone answers to the question, are you a new advisor? And they say, yes, I'm a new advisor, they're pointed in the direction of your first year as a financial advisor, because that's honestly and truly the product for them. I don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole. I truly give them a recommendation that's custom for them. Another funnel that I have is very, very simple. It's actually inspired by Ben Settle, who I consider one of the greatest email marketers of all time. I was fortunate enough to have him on the podcast, and I respect him quite a bit. People opt into my email list. I send them an email every single day with something tangible, something valuable, a story, something infotaining and linked to a product. It's not complicated, but I am in touch with them. I'm on top of their inbox every single day, and I'm in front of them. And I just build a relationship with people and it works.

And you're doing all of this via email marketing. So basically, evergreen sales funnels. Do you ever do live launches or is everything in your business what we would define in the online course world as an evergreen sales funnel?

It is. At this point, they're all evergreen. However, one of the plans for this year of 2020 is to do something that is a live launch. And it's going to be a workshop style where I will send stuff out to my email list, I'll run paid ads, I'll do the retargeting thing, if retargeting is still a viable strategy with all these cookies being eliminated. But I will get in front of people and I'll say, this is only available until like, 21 days from now. I don't want to give give a live date because people will think, oh, well, he's actually doing it. I'll say, this is available for the next 30 days, you know, and after that, it's going away forever. It's a workshop. I'll show you how to follow up with prospective clients or something like that. And that will be a legitimate live launch. It will not be repeated. And the people in my audience will know that when I say that something won't be repeated or if I have a bonus that is only for a specific product, they know I'm not messing with them because they're all legitimate, my deadlines are all real. And we do have that in the works for later this year.

So it's a live workshop. So you're going to do it like via zoom, and you're going to have people attend. You're going to answer their questions all live, Correct?

Correct.

Okay. All right. So what made you introduce this in 2021 was right now, as we're taping this Episode. It's in March of 2021. You're going to do it later this year. What made you switch in or test this out is probably a better way.

To put it because my productivity has improved and we have so many different systems in the business that I have a lot more free time this year than I did last year and the year before. We have different sales that happen at different points of the year. The sales pages have been created, the emails have been created. I don't need to rewrite them, I don't need to create new sales pages. The follow up sequence doesn't need to be tweaked, it doesn't need to be. I don't need to reinvent the wheel at this point. So we're at 2019, 2018, 2020. I was creating systems and really tightening the business and really creating workflows and sequences. That's done. I mean, sure, I'm split testing and I can try to improve and we can talk about that if you'd like. But now I'm like, I've got more time than ever. And there is a segment of the financial advisor audience who wants that one on one help. They want to be able to ask questions, they want to be able to get advice. One of the products that I have is a newsletter and one of the perks with the newsletter is the ability to email me and ask questions. People love that. But how can I serve people who aren't newsletter subscribers who also want that individualized help? I don't want to go back to one on one coaching necessarily, but a workshop with a topic that people want. Again, I surveyed my audience and asked them if this is something they're interested in. They say, yes, I, I can run that, do it live and people can ask me questions on the spot and I can help them and actually improve their business that way.

So this is great information. So you spent the past few years really optimizing your evergreen sales funnels. You have your system set up, it's automated, you feel comfortable with it. You know your sales pages are good, you know your email sequences are good. Let's delve into some of the, some of that information and some of those numbers and exactly what you did to get to this point because I think a lot of people would love to get to where you are today. So tell us a little bit about what you did and what steps you took to optimize these funnels.

So it was low and slow. I am not an overnight success story. None of this happened super fast for me. It was just one foot in front of the other. You create this product. And even within creating a product or a course, I create the very first module. And in order to create the very first module, I had to write out the outline for it. They're just tiny, tiny steps. So I'm gonna write this part of the outline, I'll write the next part of the outline. I'm gonna create this PowerPoint presentation, I'm gonna create this email just one foot in front of the other for quite literally years to get to that point. It's amazing when you look back and see all of it together. I mean, we have a hundred plus blog articles, 100 plus podcast episodes, tens of thousands of website visitors per month, tens of thousands of podcast downloads per per show. It's crazy, but it did not happen overnight. The nitty gritty details of how it works is you try something as simple as, let's say an email opt in form. Like, I have one of my most popular landing pages got featured in OptinMonster for converting at 58%. So that was awesome. That was a home run. But we don't stop there.

We.

We continued optimizing that specific landing page, that specific opt in. We just changed a copy and ran a split test. Did that split test win? No. We run another one. Did that one win? No. And we kept trying until it won. And now at this point, this time of this recording, that opt in is converting at 63%, which is 10% improvement over what it was. And that can translate to tens of thousands of extra dollars per year, which is really nice. We just did that for every step of the business. So we did that for the webinar, we did that for products. We've changed the way that products work with each other. For example, if someone goes through your first year as a financial advisor, there will be mentions of other products in that product. That's something that didn't exist in the beginning. People would go through in. One of the pieces of advice is choose a niche. As a financial advisor, having a niche is one of the most effective things you can possibly do to improve your marketing. And we have a product called Deep Dive into Niche Marketing for Financial Advisors. And we went back and revamped our products to talk about having a niche and why it's so important. And it links out to the deep dive into niche marketing products. So there are just hundreds of little optimizations like that all throughout the business. They just come together to pack a whopper of a punch.

I love that. So even in your Courses, this is something that I've done actually fairly recently. I think I did this in 2020, is put those, you know, they're going through one product. Oh, you might be interested in this. Or if this is your next step, check this out. So that is excellent information. How these are evergreen sales funnels. Can you. Are you. Do you feel comfortable sharing some data on how these evergreen sales funnels are converting? Like, if you have a thousand people coming through there, do you know your numbers or am I putting you on the spot?

So I will get the numbers. I'll give you some actual numbers for the webinar funnel that we're running.

That would be great.

I'm gonna get it from an article on the advisorcoach.com blog, actually, about how financial advisors can run webinars to get more clients. It's an opportunity that not many people see. It's the ability to take what you're doing in your business and take that and extrapolate that to your clients. So I'm actually running a rep, running a webinar funnel. I'm actually testing these things. I have the data within my business and I say, okay, financial advisors, if you want to do this with your webinar, it's going to help you, hurt you, whatever it is. So the webinar that we're running is titled three Counterintuitive Ways Financial Advisors Can Set More Appointments with Email Marketing. The old headline for that or the old title, I should say is How Financial Advisors Can Set Appointments with Email Marketing. So we split tested that against three counterintuitive ways and three count. Three counterintuitive ways actually won that split test. I don't remember the exact statistics, but the signup rate for the webinar is 72.9% off the air. I told you I thought it was 50%. I was wrong. It's actually 72.9. The thing that we did that actually got my signup rate to be super duper high. I give a gift just for registering. A lot of webinar experts, gurus or whatever will say give them a gift for staying till the end. And that's awesome advice because you want people to stay till the end of your webinar, but you also want to make sure they sign up. I mean, you're not getting anywhere unless they sign up. And the cool thing about the Advisor Coach as a business, even if they don't come to the webinar at all, they're still on the email list and they still get information. They still get the Ben Settle style emails and that works too. So even if they don't attend the webinar doesn't really matter to me. So that's 72.9%. We got that by adding the gift. It was around 50% but that one change, adding the gift. The gift is a 25 minute MP3 with some of the most common questions I get about email marketing and so.

Kind of like a podcast, just a recording somebody that easily. You could easily make something like that.

Yep, totally.

So that sign that signing up for the webinar on the web registration page, you're converting there at 72%. What does it look like next?

So the show up rate is roughly 50% and then the purchase rate out of people who show up, depending on the traffic source, it's between 5 and 10%. So the lower converting traffic tends to come from Facebook because for some reason I don't know why, even if I select financial advisor audiences like registered investment advisors or stuff like that, it still shows to people who are not. I don't know what the heck is going on with Facebook, why they do that. The higher converting traffic tends to come from LinkedIn because in my particular space this is advice that may not be applicable to everyone, but in my particular space, because I'm serving financial advisors, I can hop on LinkedIn and. And I can quite literally say I only want to target people with CFP in their profile or like certified financial planner or I only want to target people with financial advisor. The downside to that, quote, unquote downside is that LinkedIn ads tend to be a lot more expensive. So I have to weigh the cost of getting a registrant with Facebook versus getting a registrant with LinkedIn. Now they, in the end they both could come out to be about the same dollars generated per person because it's twice, almost twice as More expensive on LinkedIn but the signup rate is also twice as good. So it's like a wash. But we advertise pretty heavily on both.

That is very interesting and I've. You're one of the few people that I've spoken to who have had success with LinkedIn ads. But I think to your point, I think it's because of the title that you're going out after. I'm just curious and you might not know this off the top of your head, what is your cost per lead on LinkedIn?

Let me pull up my LinkedIn account.

So, and just so everybody knows, I'm definitely putting you on the spot here. We did not talk about this beforehand.

So let's see. I'm gonna do all time. So for an article, come on.

There we go.

So for an article advertisement. For example, one of, one of the articles we just launched is an article called how financial advisors. Here's how you can get three clients in the next 30 days. So one of my big promises as a financial advisor marketer is getting people more clients. That's kind of what marketing is all about. So we are sending traffic to this article and we are generating conversions for $32.65 each. Our best performing ad on LinkedIn at this point in time. Hopefully I'm gonna beat this. It is actually a conversion ad with a video of me holding up my phone to the camera and basically saying, and it shows the gift I'm giving them, which is 57 marketing tips for financial advisors. I'm giving that to them for free. I hold my phone up to the camera, I say, financial advisors. I point at the phone, I say, I'm gonna give this to you for free. And I start scrolling. The thing that's impressive about my lead magnet is that it's 80 plus pages long. There are so many people who give checklists and cheat sheets and little itty bitty lead magnets. And they can work, don't get me wrong, they can work especially as content upgrades. But for a. If I'm casting a wide net and I'm like, I just want people in the financial services industry, something like that is impressive. Where I say, I'm just going to give this to you for free. And that is converting at that gets me email addresses for $15.90 and we'll do one more. The worst converting is actually an article about cold calling, which kind of sort of makes sense because if I think cold calling can work for financial advisors, but they're so adverse to it. And a lot of my marketing is about inbound or my marketing advice and marketing materials. It's more about inbound marketing. So they know me for email, they know me for webinars, they know me for LinkedIn. So for the financial advisors who are already in my world or who know who I am, they are kind of taken back. They're like, wait, cold calling? What is he talking about? So the cold calling article actually got me email addresses for $120 each. Yikes. So you can see the huge, huge swings between LinkedIn. So my 57 marketing tips video gets me email addresses for 1590, and the cold calling article is $120.16. That just shows you how Important it is to try different things, to just don't give up. Because you may be two or three split tests away from getting that 57 marketing tips video. If I stopped at the cold calling article and I just wrote off LinkedIn completely as being $120 per lead because that's what it was. Well, is actually I would have just stopped and I would have never kept going and never would have gotten the thing that actually works really well.

And I think you're bringing up a good point. And I've been doing a lot of the interviews with successful course creators just like you. And one of the things that's jumping out to me and it's coming through all these interviews is the people who are successful in this business is they are continuing to look at the data and they are continuing to test. They know what they have is, you know, people want it, they know they can sell it. It's just a matter of finding the right message, the right lead magnet and really, you know, the right messaging there. What other numbers are you willing to share with us? I know you've had a lot of success in selling your suite of digital products and you have a lot of them. Are you, is there anything else you'd want to bring up for the audience here?

I think it's important for people to know which metric is important to track because I'm on my LinkedIn account right now and I'm looking at the different metrics. So my 57 marketing tips video that actually gets me email addresses for the lowest cost out of all the ads that I'm running right now actually has one of the worst CTRs. But is that necessarily a bad thing? So the CTR is the click through rate for people who may or may not know. I imagine they know if they're listening to you. But so only 1.37% of people click through. That's because I'm very, very, very clear about what it is that I'm offering. And I say, like, essentially only click this. If you want to get this for free, you're going to click on this, you're going to enter your email. I'm not hiding anything. Which there are some people who are like, click on this and I'm just going to give it to you and download it right away. And then they get hit with an email opt in and people bounce and they have to pay for the click anyway. I think that's a big mistake. So in my video, I'm very clear, I say this is an email opt in. You're going to enter your email.

So.

So if people watch that ad and they don't want to enter the email or they're weirded out about that, they don't click on it and I don't get billed for it. I don't have to pay for that, which is really awesome. So if I were a marketer who is focused solely on getting the highest CTR possible or the lowest cost per click possible, and those are good metrics to track, but they're not your end all be all. My end all be all is the cost per conversion. If I cut this ad out because my CTR was lower than pretty much all the ads I'm running. Yeah, I think there's only one. There's one ad that does worse from a CTR standpoint, which is nuts to think about. But my low, my lowest converting or lowest cost per conversion ad actually has my second lowest ctr. You've got to focus on the right, the right metrics. So the other numbers that I can share with you is expenses. I know that you were kind enough to send over some questions before the interview. You kind of give me a heads up about what to talk about. And so we actually spend about $2,000 per month on podcast production. And if you're brand new in the online course creation world and online business world, that may be a lot, but it is so worth it because it makes me more productive. It gets a lot off my plate. I don't have to think about the little things. They handle the show notes, they handle the podcast production in the sense of making the audio sound good. They make social media images. For me, it is awesome. Then I spend $3160 per month on support. So this is like virtual assistants, people who basically help with customer service, things like that. And then I hire out individual freelancers and contractors on an as needed basis. So if I need something with graphic design, I will hire that as it's needed.

Very good. So you tell us a little bit about your course sales in terms of numbers. I know you have this suite of products and I, you know, you don't have to go into all the details, but just give us a general sense of what you've done there.

So as of January of 2021, we've served over 31,000 financial advisors across the, well, 31,000 purchases. So if we have repeat purchases, that number is going to be lower in terms of financial advisors. We should go back and update that. And I'm glad that you asked me about that because we will Update it. So on the footer of our site it says over 31,000 financial advisors served. Will you be next? And that is a tremendous source of social proof. Financial advisors will see that. They'll be like, this is a pretty neat, this guy. Obviously helping a lot of financial advisors. So we've been very, very fortunate, very, very blessed to help that many people and we will continue to do it in the future.

Would you say you've primarily been able to reach them through organic or paid advertising or organic reach on social or maybe SEO? What has been your biggest traffic source?

So we have used things like wicked reports, we've used improvely. We've used a lot of different tracking sources and tracking software over the years. What's interesting is that the majority of the financial advisors who end up actually buying stuff, I mean there are people who get on the email list or people who listen to the podcast or people who click through, but I'm talking about people who actually purchase stuff. If they come through a paid advertisement, they almost never buy right away. And that's just the nature of paid ads where you have a very small percentage end up buying purchasing. I mean the webinar funnel like we talked about. If I send a hundred people through a paid ad to the webinar, only a handful of them are actually going to buy it. That's just the nature of the beast. What's very interesting is that because I have so much content at this point and the flywheel is so big with the articles and the emails and the retargeting and there's just so much stuff. Even if someone clicks on a paid ad and they don't buy I a larger percentage of those people will eventually come back sometime in the next six weeks and get something. They'll do the quiz, they will opt into the email address and eventually there will be a sale within that six week period or something or a time limited offer, something that's made specifically for them. We do direct mail campaigns. Sometimes I'll send people stuff in the mail, I'll send them a postcard. There will be something that happens within that six weeks where it will take them from. Technically their first interaction with the business was paid, but they didn't buy anything from the paid advertisement. But then they saw me on LinkedIn four weeks later because one of their colleagues shared a post that I made. They click that LinkedIn post and then they get something that's kind of, that's where the bulk of my buyers come from. It is eventually organic. But they would never have been organic had I not run the ads.

I think that's very interesting, and I think it goes back to what you generally see in marketing. Like, it takes so many touch points for people to actually take action with you. So them seeing that paid ad and then later seeing that post from their friend, they're like, oh, yeah, I know this guy. So very, very interesting. So I wanted. I want to ask you, what do you see as the next steps in 2021? I know you've talked about doing a live workshop, which is going to be different for you. Anything else that you have on the plate.

The live workshop is going to be awesome. I am primarily focused on continuing to grow the newsletter offering that we have through the business. The newsletter is $99 per month. It's a subscription continuity revenue stream for the business. And it's arguably the best thing financial advisors can get because it gives them the most results. It's a steady nudge every single month. The newsletter model, however, is one of the hardest to sell. If I was a newbie, I don't think it would work at all because people are. When people subscribe to a newsletter, they're paying for something that doesn't exist yet. They're paying for something. If they subscribe in July, they're going to get the August issue. They don't necessarily know what's going to be in the August issue. They don't know what's going to be in the September issue. When you buy a product like how to lose 30 pounds in six months, you know what the result is going to be and you have a clear picture of what you're paying for. But thankfully, we've been blessed to have so much activity and actually get results for financial advisors that the newsletter is an easier sell now than it's ever been before. And we actually donate the very first month subscription, all $99, every penny of it, to a charity called FirstBook. And sometimes I'm like, wow, why did I do this? Because we donate quite a bit of money. But it's cool. I love helping the children. It's awesome to see. And it just lowers that resistance just a little bit more where people are like, okay, he's gonna help me with my business, and this money is going to help get books for children. Anyway, if I don't like it, I can cancel it. There are no refunds because we donate the money to charity. We're not gonna offer refunds on that, but that is what we're looking to grow more than anything else.

Oh, very good. So what advice, James, do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there? You know, some of them may be in the very beginning, some may be, you know, you know, they may have been doing this for years, a few years, and they're wanting to optimize. What would you have to say for anybody listening?

So at the risk of hyping this up too much, I will say that this is probably the most important advice I can ever give anyone who is looking to start an online business. This is critical. Focus on your productivity first. And I mean that in both your personal life and your business life. Productivity is not about having a million different checklists. It's not about having five different extensions and apps and to do list and journals and planners. It's all about input versus output. And don't let your emotion dictate which input you put into your business. And if I let my emotions steer the ship, I would create products and I would create content that please me. I would be happy with my products, but perhaps they wouldn't sell as well. A lot of people focus on marketing strategies because they like them. I don't necessarily like making LinkedIn ads. I really don't. People are shocked to hear that. Like, yes, I'm in marketing and yes, it's neat to see the results, but the actual creation process, I don't like it at all. But it steers the ship of the business. The emotions don't. I see that LinkedIn ads, they have a tremendous output. So I need to create more input to feed the machine and make the business more productive. That is really what it comes down to. If you want more output, whether that's clients, money, appointments, charitable donations. In my case, you have to focus on the inputs that get you there. If you can distill everything in your business to those two things, you have a higher chance of being successful then you'd be light years ahead of everyone else. So focus on productivity first.

Focus on productivity, but focus on productivity that gives you the most result in your business. And that really comes back to what our discussion was earlier is looking at the data and figuring out and let the data kind of drive what you want to do or what you should be doing. I should say absolutely. James, where can people find you?

Theadvisorcoach.com if they search James Pollard on LinkedIn, I should come up. If I. If not, I'm doing a terrible job. But those are the two places that people like to find me.

And I will make sure that those links are in the short show notes for us. James, thank you so much for the discussion today. I really enjoy chatting with you and learning more about LinkedIn ads, so that was good. Course Creators 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 Instagram. I hope you enjoyed this episode with James here. Would 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. Bye for now.