52: Ben Taylor: Freelancer & Blogger to Online Course Creator

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 we 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 have a special guest with me. I have Ben Taylor. Ben is the founder of homeworkingclub.com it is a global portal providing advice to remote workers and freelancers. His freelancing course, Freelance Kickstarter, released in September of last year and he now has over 100 students signed up. Ben, I am so excited to have you. Thanks so much for joining me. I am looking forward to our conversation and what you do. Why don't you take a second, tell the audience a little bit more about you and your business and how you got started.

Okay. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on the podcast. Yeah. As you said, my name is Ben Taylor. I'm the founder of homeworkingclub.com and I set up the site in 2017 after being a freelancer myself since 2004. So I've been a freelancer for a very long time. But my freelancing career splits very neatly into two parts because between 2004 and 2009, I was doing mostly IT consultancy, which was very lucrative but also very stressful. Pushed me right to the point of burnout by the time I sold off most of that business. And I actually sold off the business because my wife and I decided to move to Portugal and go and live in the sun, which was fantastic. And that was also a bit of a side story. That was facilitated by the fact that she was able to persuade the company she worked for at the time to allow her to work remotely. So that was what facilitated the move. Us getting to live our dream and go and live in a lovely hot country. And so when I say my freelance story splits into two, I'd been freelancing for all of that time, but I found myself in Portugal with some savings, a Laptop and a kind of dilemma of now what? So I sat there, literally as I always say, I sat there cross legged on my bed with a laptop typing as so many people do, how to make money online. And in the years that followed I did spent a lot of time down profit free rabbit holes but then also found out ways to make money on my blogs, became successful. I started doing a lot of freelance writing, all kinds of different things. Wrote for some big name sites and stuff like that. And then yeah, as homeworking club came out of that because we ended up back in the uk, I had plenty of freelance work and I was always chatting to friends and people said, well how did you get started? How did you go about doing it? How did you get the lifestyle that you've got? Because obviously being freelance, when we moved back to the uk we didn't have to move back to London again because we could work anywhere. So we now live on the coast, we had complete freedom of whereabouts we moved to and people were always fascinated by the lifestyle. And I thought, well for my next blog I think a site about freelancing and homeworking is the way to go. So I was also very conscious that in that sector there's a lot of kind of what I would call get rich quick schemes and a lot of false narratives around how easy it is to get into freelancing and homeworking. And I thought I'm gonna slogan I sometimes use is disrupt with integrity. I wanted to have the site that wasn't afraid to tell the truth. And a lot of my content is around having the need to pay your dues, the fact that it's not easy, the fact that there are times of feast or famine for freelancers and yeah, so it's a. I like to deliver a very kind of honest and down to earth take on what this life is like.

And you know, we've chatted a few minutes before we started recording here and I think that kind of comes out in everything that you're doing and I definitely want to talk about that a little bit more today. And one of the reasons why I'm so excited to chat with you and dig into this, I know that a lot of people in our audience and I've done a lot of interviews over the years with online course creators and a lot of them got started by freelancing. Maybe they're in their 9 to 5 job right now and they might be doing freelancing on the side until they can kind of build it up and make it a full time, you know, gig even with the pandemic, it's kind of forced some people as they've lost their jobs and they're looking for working at home type opportunities or freelance opportunities. So I know this is a very relevant conversation for folks out there. So in 2017, you've been freelancing for a long time before it was even popular, since 2004. In 2017, you decided, you know what, there's a market out there, I can help people. When you started blogging, how did you get started in it? What did you do first?

Well, I'd actually been blogging for a lot longer because one of the first things I did when I moved to Portugal, and that was in 2009, is I started a Moving to Portugal blog. And it was entirely a personal project. I never really thought anyone was going to be reading it between me and family and friends, but it gained a lot of momentum, accidental momentum. I didn't do any keyword research, anything like that, but I, I found that I got traffic, I found people were interested in it. And it's actually, it actually went on to spawn a book which we self published, but it sold, I think about 4,000 copies now. And so I'd already had the Portugal blog. I'd set up various other blogs that. Some successful, some complete failures as well. And I'd also done a lot of work on other people's blogs, like clients blogs and stuff like that. So I felt that I was very clear on how to execute new blogs, a new authority site. And I did. I started it off in parallel with still freelancing myself. So it was kind of. It would swing one way or the other. Some weeks I'd be able to really focus on homework and club. Other weeks I'd have projects to do and it would, it would have to take a back seat. And I mean, to an extent that still happens sometimes, but so, yeah, I was very clear on how I wanted to get started with it. So it was just a case of really pedal to the metal, getting lots of content out, looking at what was already out there, basically trying to do it better than other people were doing it.

So you have a homeworking club.com, it started out as a blog. You obviously had a lot of experience in setting up a new blog like this. What other content or traffic strategies did you use to drive traffic to this new blog?

Okay, so compared to, obviously to moving to Portugal, where I had, I had no clue about that. It was, like I say, it was very much an accidental success. Whereas by the time I started homework and club. I did know a lot about SEO, so I knew about. So I started off doing keyword research and to this day, the majority of my traffic does come from. From search. So yeah, I, by then I'd built up a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience about how to write content for SEO and how to do link building and stuff like that. I do have a decent social media presence and stuff like that, but it is, it is SEO that is my biggest, has always been and remains my, my biggest source of traffic.

And this is just kind of a. I'm interested in the answer to this. I know you have a podcast also. Is the majority of your SEO traffic coming from the blogs that you're doing or the podcast that you're doing, or is it a combination of both?

I would say overwhelmingly the written blog content, the podcast has been fairly successful. But I think I tend to bring in traffic to the podcast. Tends to be people who are already, who are already familiar with the site, who are on my email list, or people who are finding their way just to specific articles via Google.

It's interesting that you say that because that's kind of been my experience with my website. Also, the majority of the traffic comes from my blog posts. You know, SEO, organic type traffic. What I have been using the podcast for, what it seems to be kind of filling that niche, is building more that know like and trust factor because there's something about the, you know, the conversations that you can have with people in that aspect that you just don't get with a blog post. So that's interesting to hear you say that.

Yeah, I think so. And I think I was timid of it for, for quite a long time. I'm very grateful to the co host of my podcast because he was very instrumental in bringing me out of my shell and giving me the confidence to do stuff like this. I mean, I did a guest slot on a podcast a month or so ago where I actually did it on video and I was really nervous about that. But I'm getting a lot more confident with video content. And I think for a lot of my readers, especially people who've been reading Homeworking Club for years now, they were obviously very curious when I started actually talking and then started actually appearing on camera as well. So I think actually daring to take that step into it, it becomes a lot easier once you've. Once you've kind of just broken through that barrier, which I was really scared to break through for quite a long time.

So you started the blog in 2017 and last year you launched your course, can you tell us, and it's called Freelance Kickstarter. Can you tell us what drove you and kind of why you created that course? And then we can talk a little bit about your launch process and what happened there?

Yeah, absolutely. So the course really was. I ran a couple of surveys of my readers and I found that although I'd never intended to create a course because that's what so many people in the freelancing space do, they have blogs that are really just vehicles for selling courses. And I didn't want to really go down that path, but I found that people were asking me for one. And I think with the best will in the world, when you've got to the point where you've got. I think I've got somewhere between 300 and 400 blog posts, obviously covering all kinds of elements of freelancing. So, like posts on how to set your freelancing rates or how to identify different types of clients, how to fire clients where the relationship isn't working well. But what tends to happen with a blog over time is you, however hard you try, you create a bit of a monster and you end up with bits of information dotted around in different places. And where a course comes in is that you can actually lay it out step by step. And I think people who are looking to move into freelancing, there's a lot of overwhelm for them and it's like, yeah, but how do I actually start? And you can't really give them that step by step on the medium of lots of different scattered blog posts. It just doesn't work well for that. And so, yeah, I thought, yeah, I'll do a course, but I want to very much follow the same ethos as a very honest course. So my course doesn't come with any promises of you will be making X money by Y date. Because I think that's a. There are a lot of courses like that and I think that is a bit of a nonsense. And I think I've probably limited my sales by not coming out there with some big flashy promise. But it's very much. This is a course for realists who want to know the cons as well as the pros. But you know what, if you actually knuckle down, follow these steps, that you can make a success of it. So that was what I was aiming at.

So basically you had people coming to you asking for a course. They had been on your email list for some time now and they really just wanted a step by step system so they didn't have to go back and look at, go to different and search your website and try to find this and try to find that. So that makes complete sense to, to me. How long, I'm just curious, how long did it take you from the time you made the decision to actually create the course until you actually launched it?

You know, I'd say it was probably about a year, but it was a year not of solid work. It was a year of fits and starts, followed by, I would say, probably two months at the end where it became the clear priority. So I think, because obviously thinking of when my launch time scale was, I launched in September 2020 and the nine months preceding that was Covid. So obviously everything was thrown up in the air by that. So I think I would. I think I had initial plans to launch January 2020. Obviously that didn't happen. And then I think As I approached September 2020, it was like, if I'm going to get this launch done and have. Have a course ready for stuff like the Black Friday promotions and things like that, it's really got to be done for September. And so in the last few months, I was really like, no, this is happening. And I did a lot of late nights and it became the clear priority. I think had I could have done it so much quicker if it had been my primary focus sooner.

And I'm sure given what happened last year with COVID and the pandemic, you were getting, you know, a more demand for something like this. Were you? Were people, like, knocking on your door saying, I'm, you know, where is it? Or did you even tell your audience that it was coming?

I did tease it a bit, but I think Covid just had so many, so many profound and unexpected effects. So the one for us, in terms of how much work I could do. And it was that suddenly we had. So my wife and I both work from home and we both had our children at home full time as well. So that was obviously quite the challenge in terms of how much work it was just feasible to get done. Also in terms of homeworking, obviously homeworking is everywhere now. It's all over the news. I see it on a front page of a national paper at least two or three times a week. But what that meant for me is I was actually ranking number one on Google for homeworking, sort of in late 2019. But then suddenly Covid happened and Forbes, the New York Times, the Washington Post, everyone writing about homeworking. So I found myself like the kind of, I always is the mum and pop burger restaurant that and I didn't just have McDonald's open next door. I had in and out and Wendy's, a whole lot of them all open next door. So I also had that extra competition in my space. So that was that. Yeah, that was quite disorientating as well. So yeah, Covid just threw everything up in the air. So yeah, it was an interesting year. So yeah, I did tease the course and tell people it was coming, but I would say for a fair proportion of 2020, we were just putting one foot in front of the other and working out how we were going to deal with each day. Having the children at home and keeping them happy and keeping them educated and all of that, as well as getting as much work done as we could. So. So yeah, I keep mentioning it sadly, but yeah, Covid did just throw everything into a certain amount of disarray, I think.

So that's very interesting. So once all these kind of big players started blogging about your topic, did that change where you were landing in Google?

Massively, yes, and very frustratingly as well because I have some really, really deep content on various things to do with homeworking and remote working and freelancing. Just examples. Like we've got a huge article on work from home, interview questions, the kind of things recruiters are likely to ask you if you're. You're going for a remote job. And so I'd have articles that we put huge amount of work. I have a small team of people working with me as well and we put huge amounts of work in and then Forbes would put out a 500 word mini listicle article on the same, the same topic and unsurprisingly shoot straight up to number one in the Google results. So it was a very frustrating year and I think the frustration was compounded by the fact all of my friends were going, oh, you must be doing awfully well having a home working site. I say I wish it was that simple, but no, in actual fact, I've just become a small fish in a much, much bigger pond overnight.

Interesting. I never would have guessed that. So thank you for sharing that with us.

I don't think people do get it until I explain it. Then obviously straight away it's just like, well, of course that's what would happen.

I want to. Frustrating, definitely frustrating. I want to delve in the details of your launch. So you are working on it took you longer than you expected for all those reasons which are definitely understandable. To tell us a little bit about your launch process. How did you launch it to your, to your audience and what you did and a little bit of more of the details about what happened.

Okay. So I would say once it was ready, once I was at the point where it was almost 95, 99% complete, I did a good beta testing phase. So I actually sent out to my email list asking who would be interested in testing the course. And I was quite surprised because I expected to get a handful of people. I think I had over 200 volunteers. And so I picked out, I think I picked out about 15, knowing that when it came to it, not all of them would come back to me or be able to test the course in the time frame that I said. So I wanted to get a clear idea on a few things. I obviously wanted to check that it did what it said on the tin and that people were going to be happy with the course and how it was presented. I also wanted to get an idea on pricing. So on the Google form that I sent round to the beta testers, I actually asked, how much do you think this is worth? How much should I be charging? Because I thought there was no fairer way to price the course than to actually ask people how much. I obviously, from my perspective, having those beta testers also allow me to get some comments that I could use as testimonials for the sales page and stuff like that. So I did that and then I did, I planned very carefully a kind of email launch sequence to go to my email list and it went horribly wrong, sadly. So after laying out all of these, the email funnels, and actually checking with my service provider, who I won't shame by naming right now. But yeah, the day came and all the emails went out in the wrong order. And this was despite me checking every last detail of it. And for example, I had people getting the last chance email on the first day of the launch when they hadn't had any of the other emails. I had people getting all of the emails. So I've not tried to calculate because obviously I couldn't calculate how much money I lost because the launch went so awry. But yeah, the launch was. I was sitting in exactly the chair. I'm sitting and talking to you now, in total despair on the day of the launch. But no, it still went well. It was a little bit embarrassing having to send out an email apologizing for people getting the wrong emails. Not how I wanted it to go at all, but it still did okay. And I still, I still sold as many of the courses I hoped to, but I think I would have sold more had it gone more smoothly.

So you had 15 beta testers, they went through the course. Did you, did you charge them at that point or did they get access to the course for free?

I didn't charge the beta testers who was, who were road testing the course did get free access.

Did, did they, you know, actually finish it and give you feedback? Was that a worthwhile process? Tell us a little bit about how that went.

Yeah, it was absolutely worthwhile. One of the things, one specific thing that I got feedback on that I very valuable was I've taken a lot of courses myself and I've always found I learned better from reading than I do for video. And particularly from the perspective of going back and thinking there was something in that module that I want to find again. And I find it incredibly hard to find it in the middle of a video. And so I have got plenty of video content in the course, but I have also got quite a lot of text based lessons. So I wanted to be sure people with a lot of courses being video, I wanted to make sure people didn't feel shortchanged by getting written lessons instead of video. And I was pleasantly surprised that absolutely everybody said that. No, they found it easier to retain the information and as I'd said go back and look for things with some of those lessons being text. So yeah, it was good affirmation that I'd chosen the right medium for the right lessons and some constructive feedback that I. Some of which I acted on and changed things straight away and other things when I do further iterations of the course, I will expand on more when I when I grow the course in the future.

So did you just launch it to your email list or did you do any type of webinar or Facebook ads or anything? Or was it strictly a launch to your email list?

Okay, so to begin with it was strictly a launch to my email list. I've started tentatively doing some outreach. I've got it on teachable and I have the ability to have affiliates. So I have had done a few little bits of promo in league with affiliates. I've done offers like I've done a Black Friday offer and I did a kind of New Year new you offer as well, focusing primarily on my email list. But then I've also got a funnel set up for new people who sign up on to via sign up forms on Home Working Club that gradually it drips. Like all email funnels, it drip feeds lots of free content and does eventually give them a an offer on the course. I have done a little bit of Facebook advertising. I haven't found the formula yet. It's something I want to do more work on, but I haven't found a repeatable formula of spend X, make Y with Facebook advertising yet. Although I hope that's something I might manage to do in the future. And also, obviously, I've got a lot of relevant content on the site and I do just. I don't overdo it. I intentionally don't overdo it. But on some relevant articles, I do put a call to action that leads them to the course sales page. And obviously I can see where sales are coming from. And yes, sometimes it's a pleasant surprise that someone obviously read an article, Enjoy, I've had to say, and just gone on and bought the course. And obviously I can look and find out if they were already on the email list. And it's pleasing that I do still sell to people who aren't on my list. And I'm not. I haven't established that partnership with.

Okay. So that all of that's very good information. So you have several different ways that people can, you know, buy the course so they can come in through a lead magnet, and then you have an email sequence, and then at some point you offer them the opportunity to purchase the course. Can you tell us about the price point? Just to give everybody an idea of what that would look like. Is it a $2,000 course that they're buying through email or is it a lower type offer?

No, I've gone for 147. And when I did the survey on the. For the beta testers, of all the options I provided, the two most popular were 147 and 197. And I probably will put the price up in the future, but I'll put the price up in the future when I've added more content to it. So 147 was, I just thought, a good, happy medium and very much sort of at the lower end of what the beta test has said would be an appropriate price. So I want to make the course accessible to people because I want to. My reasons for starting home working club, my reasons for being in this game have always genuinely been that I want to help people to have that kind of lifestyle and as I always say, work to live and not live to work. And so I've not wanted to put the price point out of people's reach.

So very good. So they come through your website, maybe they go to a lead magnet and go through that, you know, nurture sequence and Then buy the course there, or maybe they even go to an article and directly from the article they're purchasing the course. So what are your plans for next or this year, I should say, in 2021. I know you mentioned you want to update the course, add more information and maybe even increase the price. Do you have any other plans to like, do a live launch or anything like that? What do you have on your schedule?

Okay, so I've got. There are two module, two additional modules crystallizing in my head I want to add to the course. And I'm thinking I'm targeting myself with a roundabout September, sort of the year's anniversary of the course, to make the course bigger and better. And I think at that point there will be more content, people will be getting more for the money. So I probably will. I'll do another launch and then I will maybe I'll do a discount on the launch, but I will probably then put the price up. I think one thing I should say and probably should have said before with the pricing is that I've set that price, but I don't have the course on sort of one of these almost perpetual discounts. I do run promotions. I've done the odd flash sale for just literally for a single day or for a set number of courses. But generally I've set the pricing based on genuine feedback for people who've genuinely taken the course. But it's not like a kind of, well, this is the price I say it's worth and. But you can always find a voucher code. It's not. I want to be completely black and white with that. So, yeah, I think I've got a couple of modules to add and then a bigger and better version of this course. But I also have two other courses. One is kind of in the works and one is little more than an idea in my head right now. But I'd like to get one of them launched by the end of this year as well, if possible.

Very good. So more courses, you know, improvements to what you have now. All good plans for 2021. We're running out of time, so I have one last question for you. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs or may, you know, freelancers out there who are just starting out and maybe they want to, you know, create a course in the future. What advice would you have for them?

I would probably say to just try to try to rise above this of inevitable imposter syndrome that you will get, because almost everyone has something that they know about that other people would like to learn about. And I think it's easy to undervalue that knowledge and that experience. And I think for me, I've been really blown away by the feedback I've had from the course. I've not had a single person come to me for a refund. I've had nothing but pleasant feedback and nice emails. And I think if you, if you're being authentic, if you're being authentic and you're attacking this with integrity, there is no, you don't need to worry. Is anyone going to want this? I almost, I think I wish I'd just done it sooner. So I guess that would also be my advice is make a start on it because obviously it's, you're not going to make any money from an idea. You do actually have to do the execution as well. And I think, I suspect there are an awful lot of people who get stuck at the, as I did at the idea stage and don't take it any further.

You know, that's very good advice and I hear that from a lot of people is I wish I had start. Started sooner.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean to hear from people who have, people who have taken the course and are actually starting to, starting to see those results and getting regular freelance gigs and stuff like that and thinking, wow, I'm actually doing this. And it's, it's obviously with online courses, not everyone who buys them completes them. And it's. But to actually see people who've taken the course who followed the advice, it's. That's such a rewarding that to me is more rewarding than the financial income from it.

So, Ben, where can people find you?

Okay, well, my main site is homeworkingclub.com and if you wouldn't mind obviously putting a link to the course in your show notes. So, yeah, homeworkingclub.com is the easiest way to have a look on the About Us page and that will explain a lot about the vision and values of the site and why it's there and what we aim to do.

And I will definitely make sure that link to your website and the link to the course is in the show notes in case anybody wants to check that out. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. I loved our conversation here.

For those of you listening, thank you for having me.

Thank you, Ben. For those of you listening, 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 ep episode today. 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 and bye for now.