69: Doug Noll: From Trial Lawyer to Online Course Creator – Making 40K in 10 Days

Foreign welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and automated sales funnels. In this podcast we tell the stories of ordinary business owners just like you. We talk about their story and how they got started, the challenges they've experienced and how they overcame them. And these are discussions with real people who understand what it's like to own an online course or membership business. Before we begin our show today, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by our flagship Course in a Box program which helps you create your revenue generating course in less than a week. Course in a Box is available on AppSumo at a special deal and you can learn more about Course in a Box by visiting the link in the show Notes let's jump right into our show. I have a special guest here with me today. I have Doug Knoll. Doug left a successful career as a trial lawyer to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award winning author, teacher, trainer and a highly experienced mediator. Doug's work carries him from international work, to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts, to training life inmates to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum security prisons. Doug, thank you so much for joining me. You have such an interesting story. I can't wait to have a conversation with you.

Well, thank you Destiny. It's great to be here and I hopefully can provide some wisdom from all the mistakes I've made in my life.

Well, why don't you begin and tell the audience a little bit about your story. You can go back as far back as you'd like and just give us an idea of how you got to where you are today.

Okay, so I was born in Southern California in affluence in an affluent community to upper middle class family. But unfortunately I was born with a lot of defects. I was born crippled, partially deaf, partially blind, bad teeth, left handed, lots of problems. However, I did manage to stand in the right lane for smarts. So I had a pretty good brain. But the problem was as a kid growing up is, I mean I couldn't walk until I was about three and a half years old. And so I was way, way behind developmentally with my peers and, and being a smart, geeky, klutzy kid was not a. It just was a. It was tough growing up, let's just put it that way. However, I ended up going to Dartmouth College and graduated and then came back to California and went to law school, did well in law school and decided to move into Central California because I love the mountains. And so from 1977 I until 2000, I was a hardcore trial lawyer. In fact, I joined my firm, I clerked for a year for a judge, and then joined my firm in 1978 in September and tried my first jury trial in November of 78. And the whole idea was throw me into trials, try as many cases as possible, and just become a big time trial lawyer. And so that's what I did for 22 years. And then through a series of events that I won't bore everybody with, I concluded that being a trial lawyer was not my calling. And I went back to school and earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies and became a peacemaker and a mediator. And I left my law practice and $10 million on the table in 2000 to open up my own peacemaking and mediation practice. And that's where my life really started. And that led to 10 years later. Well, I discovered some in my master's degree program, I was introduced to neuroscience and so became a lay student of neuroscience as it relates to peace and conflict in the brain and emotions. And then in 2004, stumbled across a technique that allows anybody to de escalate an angry person almost immediately based on some really interesting neuroscientific findings. It's incredible how it works. And then that led me to, with my colleague Laurel Coffer, founding Prison of Peace in 2010, where we were invited in by women who were serving life sentences in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world, to train them to be peacemakers and mediators so that they could stop the violence in their prison. And that has blown way out of what we ever expected. We're in 15 California prisons today. We're in a prison in Connecticut, 14 Greek prisons, and we've got startups in Nairobi, Kenya and also in Italy. Of course, the pandemic has put us on hiatus, but that has given us the opportunity to take all of our curriculum and put it on video. So we're hoping by the end of the year we will be able to offer our Prison of Peace curriculum, which is quite extensive, to any prison, English speaking prison in the world, and even non English speaking prisons, because we'll subtitle everything in whatever language we need to subtitle it in. So that's kind of the short version. I live with my wife on 10 acres south of Yosemite national park in the beautiful part of California. Where there's not very many people. And the pandemic has not affected us at all because we rarely leave our property except to go up mountain to the little, our little store and buy whatever groceries we need. And life is pretty darn good.

So I think it's very interesting that you left your trial lawyer job of 22 years, all that money on the table, and went back to school and majored in peacemaking and mediation. I've never heard of that major before and I have three college degrees myself.

Well, actually, if you look around, in those days There were maybe 10 programs across the country like that. But today, I mean, there are thousands undergraduate programs and graduate programs. Almost every major university has a conflict studies program or a conflict resolution or dispute resolution program. And of course, it's also in law schools. You'll find that many law schools have ADR alternative dispute resolution classes. So it's become quite, quite the thing in the last 20 plus years.

So going, you know, kind of the work that you're doing, is it primarily focused in working with this prison population or what other type of clients do you work with?

Well, I'll just give you an example. In this and this week, I have worked with a firm, a high tech firm startup, between two business partners and they were renegotiating the ownership of the company and they reached an agreement and the wife of one of the owners didn't want to do it. She thought her husband was giving away the ranch. So we did. They called me in to mediate that and we actually got the whole thing resolved in under an hour. It was amazing. Another case, you know, more typical case, an employment case where employee terminated and found a lawyer and was suing the employer for wrongful termination. That's a more kind of run of the mill kind of mediation case. And I got another case pending where a university is calling me in to mediate a dispute between the faculty of the English department and other institutional people around academic freedom, issues concerning equity, equity and gender diversity, issues that are being mandated. And the faculty say this is an infringement on academic freedom. And so, and they're at loggerheads and quite emotional about it. So I get called into these kinds of disputes where there's a lot of emotion, a lot of upset. Sometimes it's high stakes. I mean, I mediated a case once where it's a half a billion dollars in real estate at stake. A real estate partnership breakup took 60 days. And usually there are important issues, sometimes there's no money involved. Like the academic case where it's all about values. And I have a series of processes that I have developed over the years that allow me to go in and help people figure out what's really important to them and then on that basis negotiate in a non distributive way a resolution to the problem.

So.

And I get paid for that.

Yeah, that's, that's the important part too. And I can definitely relate. You know, I've worked as associate vice chancellor of academic affairs for university, so I could definitely relate to the faculty issues. So that made it extremely clear for me.

Right. And I'm the chair of the board of trustees of our local law school. And you know, I teach graduate school at Pepperdine University, at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution and also at our local law school. So yeah, I know the academic side pretty well.

I can see a high need for what you're doing, especially in our society. And I love the, you know, kind of the techniques and what you're doing to de escalate issues like this. Let me ask you this. So you've been working with and working with these clients and getting paid for that. At what point did you decide to add online courses to your portfolio?

Well, it was really 2008. I had a very thriving commercial mediation and arbitration practice where I wasn't making as much money as, as I was making when I was a trial lawyer, but I was making a pretty darn good living. And then when the economic collapse occurred, you know, no economic activity, nobody's fighting, nobody has any money. And so nobody hires lawyers and nobody's going to hire mediators. So I had to pivot and reinvent myself. And so I kind of did. I did a self assessment and thought, well, what do I really know and what can I teach online? Because I was, I've been a teacher, you know, graduate school professor since the early 1980s, so I know how to. And before that I've taught all kinds of things all my life. I'm a secondary black belt certified ski instructor. I mean, I've taught physical stuff, I've taught intellectual stuff. I'm a teacher. So I thought, well, what I really know is negotiation. And I probably know more about negotiation than almost anybody else on the planet because of my academic studies, research and also my experience. So I put together my first course, which was called Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Professional, which is a nine hour intensive advanced legal negotiation course. And what's interesting is that lawyers are terrible. Most lawyers are terrible negotiators. They think they're great, but they're awful.

I thought they were supposed to be good at that.

They think they're good at it, but they aren't because they don't learn negotiation. In law school, the professors that teach negotiation haven't negotiated themselves. So it's all an academic, intellectual exercise for them. And as a law student, you don't. You have no context to understand negotiation. So the way most lawyers learn to negotiate is they follow another more senior lawyer around to mediations and they just do what the, what the senior lawyer does, and that's how they learn. It's kind of an apprentice process. But the problem is the senior lawyers don't know how to negotiate either. And they don't know any of the subtleties and tactics and strategies, and they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And as the professor, I've mediated over 3,000 litigated disputes. I mean, out of those 3,000 cases, I've maybe seen 10 really good negotiators. Can you imagine that?

I would have thought in that profession a lot more people would be trained to negotiate effectively.

They are not. And so that's what got me going. I said, well, maybe I can make my job easier because if I can train lawyers to be better negotiators, then the mediations, the negotiations that I mediate, are going to go a lot smoother and faster because I'm dealing with pros instead of idiots. I mean, this case I had the other day, I was dealing with, one side was a pro, the other side was an idiot, and it just makes it a lot harder to get cases settled. But when you got pros who are trained and understand what negotiation is all about, you know, then you can, you can usually help the clients get to where they need to get in any given case. So that's what was my impetus to getting the, to building legal pro negotiator. And so that was my first online course. And then I learned something very interesting. Very few lawyers want to learn how to negotiate. Some do. I've sold. Sold a fair number of courses. But it's really interesting how few lawyers want to learn how to become master negotiators.

Well, in a. Going back to your point, they probably already think they are good negotiators.

That's right. They think they're good. They know deep inside they aren't. Here's the thing. Lawyers know deep inside what their limitations are. If they're any in any way honest with themselves. They say, you know, I really don't know much about negotiation, but they've got to kid themselves and kid their Clients and kid their colleagues that I'm a rough, tough, mean junkyard lawyer, litigator, trial lawyer. Most of them have never tried a lawsuit either, which is also. That's a whole nother story. But they just haven't, they haven't learned how to negotiate. And so they, so it's really hard for them to admit to a weakness in their knowledge and experience when this is what they do every day. And so it's been interesting to see who buys the course and who and how many people don't buy the course. I've been working, I've been doing a marketing campaign now to 15,000 lawyers. And so far in that group of random group of trial lawyers across the country, I haven't sold one course to 15,000 lawyers.

So who's buying legal pro negotiator?

People who probably don't. Mediators. I've got some government agencies that are buying it for their lawyers. People who are enlightened and recognize their, you know, the small percentage of people who recognize that they need, they want to learn more advanced skills. And I mean I'm talking advanced, we're talking about Bayesian theory, talking about behavioral economics, decision making theory, probability analysis, doing decision trees, concession planning, stuff that most lawyers have never ever heard of and don't have a clue about. But there is a small subset of lawyers out there who want to improve and so they buy the course. And it's just so interesting to me that there are so few lawyers that are interested in their own self development. Fascinating.

So that was one of your first courses, the legal pro negotiator. What other courses do you have and when did you launch them?

So I had developed this, as I mentioned earlier, I developed this process for de escalating angry people in almost in 30 seconds. And I taught that to mediators and Judges from about 2005 through again 2008, 2009, 2010, when the conference market dried up because nobody had any money. And then I decided that I would. This is so powerful. And then we started, I started teaching that was these skills were the foundation of our curriculum with Prisoner Peace along with a lot of other things. So I decided that I would teach these skills online. So I put together in 2012, I think 2013, I put together a course called It's Pure Magic. And it was basically these deep listening skills and not your mama's active listening. This is something very, very different, counterintuitive and counter normative but extremely powerful. So I put together It's Pure Magic. And it was basically probably three or four hours of lessons and exercises on how to listen to emotions. Essentially, that's what this is all about. And so that was my second course. And my plan was to build out. I created the website called negotiate a centeredlife.com, which is still out there, but it's pretty inactive. And my plan was to build up a series of courses to help people, to give just basic advice to people, because I recognized that people, you know, people don't know how to buy a car. They don't know how to negotiate. They don't know how to be in relationship with each other. They don't know anything about emotions. You know, 96% of families are emotionally dysfunctional. And so people come out of their families into adulthood emotionally dysfunctional. That's why there's a lot of problems. And our educational system is not teaching the things that it needs to teach for people to the practical skills that people need to have in order to have a thriving, successful, happy life. So Negotiate a Centered Life was initially set up to start doing those kinds of courses. And that's when I started doing webinars. And then I built another website called Advice and Wisdom. And what I was doing was flailing. I had all these great ideas, but I really didn't understand how to do online marketing. So I was, you know, I learned, sort of learned about the concept of funnels. I was using it. I've been using WordPress since it came out.

And what year was this when you.

Realized this was starting? 2013, 2014, probably six or seven years ago. It seems like a century ago to me now.

That's not too long ago.

So much has changed in seven years. It's unbelievable. So I did that for a while, sold some courses. My big struggle again was marketing it and figuring out who's my target audience and then figuring out price points. I did all kinds of price points. And here I got this goal. People would take this course and say, my God, this is life changing. And I just couldn't find the momentum for people to come in and buy the course. And at one point, I was offering it for $49.99. And then I just said, well, I'm just going to play around with price. So I played around. I priced that course anywhere between $1,000 and $49.99, $999.99, all the way down to $49.99, trying to figure out, well, is price the determining factor? And I determined the price is not the factor. It's how you target your audience. Who is your audience. And the problem that I have had with that course and the kind of the subsequent courses is that my audience is every human being on the planet, which is impossible because these are foundational life skills that every person needs to have. I got an email from a guy who took my latest course in India, and he said, this is every human being on the planet needs to take this. I'm going to make sure that every person in India and Africa knows about this course in the next 10 years. Well, that's pretty cool. We'll see what happens. So I get these kinds of incredible testimonials, and so I've learned now that I've got to retarget. So we started off with It's Pure Magic. Did that for a couple of years. Didn't go anywhere. Then in 2017, my fourth book came out, how to Calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. And it became an Amazon bestseller. And now it's in four languages and it's done pretty well. By the way, you don't make money selling books, so don't think you make a lot of money at it. I make a little bit of money, but not a lot. And that caused me to. Now I wanted to start learning how to market the book. So I got turned on To ClickFunnels in 2016, 2015, 2016, I tried putting up a course called how to be a Great Dad. I wanted to teach parents how to do this stuff. I said, okay, I can target dads who really want to learn how to connect with the kids and be emotionally competent. Dads didn't want to learn how to do that, interestingly enough. And so then I recast the course into de Escalation, how to de Escalate. And that was an upsell from my book. So the book, I would. People buy the book for 10 bucks, free book, just shipping and cost and you know, you can do it for 10 bucks. And so they'd sign up and then they get the list. Then I do the upsell. And I learned all about that upselling and all that stuff from Russell Brunson and clickfunnels and all that stuff.

And were you doing this via a Facebook ad funnel?

Well, yeah, I was starting. I was doing Facebook ads. I was doing Google Ads at that time. I wasn't using native ads, but that came later. And I was again having a difficult time. I mean, I was selling some stuff, but it wasn't barn burning like I thought it would just really be effective. So all of this then led to me. I Mean, I took dozens of courses and I took. I mean, I got into Russ Rufino's clients on demand thing, $9,000 course there a lot of money and learned a lot. But unfortunately, my big kick about them, his program is that just as you're starting to master what he's teaching you and you really need the coaching and help to get the details done, they abandon you unless you want to pay another thousand dollars a month, which after paying 9,000 bucks, I didn't want to do that. So I thought the program was good and I learned a lot. But the really key part of it, which is marketing, the fine, detailed marketing part would come at an extra cost. And so that although I learned a lot, it really never turned into anything. So then I turned away from courses for a year or two and got in and started thinking about affiliate marketing. So I took John Crestani' super Affiliate System course again. Learned a lot about affiliate marketing and. But did make a lot of money on it and didn't even cover my costs, which is what happens to a lot of affiliate marketers. And there's a reason for this. And then I ran into Igor Kaifetz and Igor and I actually became friends. He's a interesting guy, Ukrainian, Jewish guy that lives in Toronto now. And he's one of the most famous email marketers around right now, very successful. And he taught me a lot. And what he said is, the money's in the list. And so then I got started working on email marketing and learning about lists, but I still didn't get it. And then last year, I'd been following a guy by the name of Shane Mallah, who is Malaak, I think his name is. He lives in. He's a. I think he's Irish or English. Irish, I think. But he lives in Lisbon, Portugal, and he's got a company called Thrythemes. And I started using him. He had a product, a WordPress plugin, years and years ago, really advanced plugin at that time for generating email leads, opt in pages and stuff like that. And he had. I think he figured it out. And what he taught me was that you don't need a big list. What you need is a buyer's list. If you have a thousand people on your list who are loyal buyers, you can make a lot of money. And the proof of that was this last fall in August and September, My wife has a very large list, 10,000 people. And we. A lot of her people are empathic. They're highly sensitive people. And so I got the idea, well, we got this. You've got all these people that are. We've targeted. Why don't we do a course? And so she did a live course and had, like, a hundred people sign up for this live course. And then we took the live course and broke it into. She recorded everything. We broke it into an online course, and we marketed that over 10 days and made 40,000 bucks in 10 days. And I said, these guys, everybody, all the people I've talked to, they're right. If you've got a highly targeted list, you can make a lot of money, but you've got to have the targeted list. And the targeted list is the hardest thing in the world to build. It just takes time and money to build that list. You're investing. You're going to invest a lot of money and a lot of effort and a lot of time to build that list before you're going to be able to make a profit. And unfortunately, nobody really talks about that. You know, you can take all these online courses, all these Internet gurus say, you know, make money fast, and, you know, you don't have to do web pages, you don't have to do this, you don't have to do that, and all you got to do is follow my system, and you're going to make buckets of money. Not true. Not true.

You know, I'm actually surprised, Doug, that Russ's program, Clients on Demand, didn't walk you through that in that $9,000 program that you had.

They walked me through how? I mean, I loved Russ, and I loved the people that he came working with, you know, but they did. They. Unfortunately, they didn't take me the last mile. And that's what was really disappointing. I figured out they taught me how to do webinars and how to do a fun, you know, basic funnel processes and all that stuff. I mean, refining what I already knew. But they didn't. They did not. They didn't take me down the last mile. And so it was a lot of money with not a lot, with nothing to show for it. And I don't know what his program is today, how he does stuff. I mean, I will say that it was really excellent training. There's no question about that. I learned a lot. Just like Crestani's program, if you want to do affiliate marketing, that's the. And if you can stomach John Crestani, who's a weirdo, but he's obviously very, very knowledgeable about affiliate marketing, then it's worth it. And for people who are starting out, I mean, you do have to take a lot of training, you have to spend a lot of money taking courses to learn how to do this stuff. And the other thing is, it's changing all the time. So when we did the empath course, I mean that really, that proved to me that having the buyer's list is really the secret. So how do you go about building the buyers list? And that now then gets to the whole issue of targeting. So one of the other things I've done with this. So in 2015, 2016, I hired a consultant to help me put together, paid 5,000 bucks, I paid a lot of money to consultants over the years, paid 5,000 bucks to a consultant to help me put together the great dad course. Because I wanted to teach this stuff to dads. Because I figured if dads could learn how to listen their children into existence, which is my tagline, through these skills, you know, they would have really happy families and be very powerful fathers. Well, it didn't work. But I didn't give up on parents then. I wanted to do, I did a course called Parents Game Changers. Same ideas repackaged in a different way for parents in general. You know, if you've got a, if you got kids who are screaming and yelling or you got a three year old who's having constant tantrums, you know, there are ways that using the skills that I teach you can eliminate tantrums in four months. I mean, literally, I've had people email me saying, unbelievable, the change in the behaviors of my 3 and 4 year old in just a couple of months. And that's because I understand how childhood development and how the human brain develops. And parents are doing it all wrong. They're doing it all wrong. And, and because they don't know any better. So here's a course that says this is the right way to do it. And it's, and it doesn't require you to do it. You just have to do it. You just have to do something a little different than what you've been taught or what you think is right. And it works because it's how our brains are hardwired. So I did Parents Game Changer. That didn't go very far. Then, then I hired a guy for 2,500 bucks in London to help me really do Parents Game Changer. And this guy was smart and he, I learned a lot about marketing from him, but he wasn't able to get Parent Game Changer going. He's still working at it a little bit, but we just were not able to get any momentum Momentum on it. So what I've learned from all of this, and then, so then that led me to the current courses I've got, which are developing emotional competency and advanced emotional competency, which I'm just now starting to market. And here's the secret. The secret is before you build a course, before you do anything, find your market. And there's some. There's some really easy ways to do that. I learned this. I learned this from my guy in London. Facebook is love it or hate it. There are ways of using Facebook to test your audiences, and that's what you need to do. So what we did, what I've been doing, is you do a video, just pure information. No selling, no pitching, no nothing. All you do is give good information, good value. Video of 5 to 10 minutes long, post it on your Facebook page. You need a business page to do this. And then. And then boost it. Do a Facebook campaign. Don't do the post in the post boosting. You got to actually do a Facebook ads campaign and do a Facebook ads campaign and start testing target audiences and see who watches the video. And what you want to do is over a period of time, depending on how much money you've got and how much you can invest, you want to get. Wait until you've got 50 to 75. You've got a thousand people who have watched the video, between 50 and 75% of the whole video. And sometimes what you'll have to do is go in and redo the video. I had to do this a number of times because I'll say, okay, why am I getting a drop off of 40, 50% at 25%, and go to look at the video and say, what's going on? Why would people be dropping off? So it's a constant process of experimentation. But when you finally get a video that. Where people are starting to watch it all the way, pretty much all the way through, then you wait the month or two it takes until you've got at least a thousand people who have watched that video. And then what you do is you build a custom audience and from there you build a lookalike audience. And then you start marketing to the lookalike audience, which is what I'm doing now.

Are you marketing to them with a lead magnet to get them on your email list or how.

Yeah, now what I. Great question. So I've done. I did lead magnets for years, but the problem is that everybody knows what a lead magnet is unless you have a lead magnet that really hit somebody right now. Most of us are not going to give up our email address. We're besieged with emails. So you got to be either you have something super val. And the problem with lead magnets is that if you give too much away then there's no point in them buying the course. If you don't give enough then people are unhappy or they take the lead magnet and they unsubscribe. So lead magnets are okay. But what I'm doing now are quizzes. So what I do, for example, on emotional competency. What I'm saying is what do your emotions say about you? Take this quiz and find out. And so I'm directing this to right now my Facebook campaign is going to women who are tech managers. They're in management, business management, 35 to 55 U.S. canada and they are in some kind of tech management job. And with Facebook of course you can target that. And my Facebook, my targeting campaign revealed that that's a market where people are interested. And what's really interesting is that right now I've been running this new campaign only for four or five days, but I'm getting the most clicks to the quiz from women who are 45 to 55 years old. Really interesting. It's interesting to watch the demographics. So the idea is the funnel now is to. I've got a, I'll put this in a larger context in a second but just so people can understand the strategy that I'm using. It's so I develop my market, I build a lookalike audience, then I build a Facebook campaign driving traffic to an eight question quiz. It's a hard opt in. So if they want the report, they've got a. If they want the results, they've got to give me their email address. And then once they get give me their email address they go into a 14 day autoresponder. You know, it's an email sequence, automatic email sequence. And in that autoresponder for the first seven days all I do is give information. I don't do any selling, I don't pitch anything. And then on the seventh day I start to pitch the course. And so for the next seven days it's a hard pitch now and I'm just getting people to the end on this sequence. I'm just now getting people, they're still two days away from the end of the course. I've created urgency and scarcity. I have a countdown timer. If they get past the 14 days and then try to and change their mind, they won't be able to buy the course. It Just expires and that's the end of it. And it'll take them. It resets in 30 days. So they can come back in 30 days and buy the course. But. So urgency and scarcity is pretty important. And I'm testing, I'm split testing the splash page, the landing page where they come to the quiz off of the paid PPC from Facebook or Rev content. I'm using native ads too. Then they go to the quiz. I watch how many people go through the quiz where the drop offs. Why are people dropping off? Then they land on the opt in page and I split test that to see what my conversion rates are. So you got to figure that for every person that lands on your splash page for the quiz, you might only get 10 or 15% that are going to give you an email address. And if you figure that costs you a buck or two bucks a click just to get people to land on the splash page, you're now beginning to see that just to get the email is going to cost me 10 bucks. However, the gamble is that if they've gone through the quiz and they gave me their email address, they want to learn more and so they are going to be pretty interested. So it's worth it to me if I could spend 10 or 15 bucks to get a lead that turns into a sale where I charge, I'm charging $189 for the course. I'll do that all day long. So that's the thing. What's my cost of acquisition? In fact, if my cost of acquisition is even $25 to get a customer, that's that's highly profitable.

So thank you for laying that all out for us. And I can see why a quiz would be a great lead magnet in the situation that you have.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is again, something that I learned from the thriving people. And their platform is if you're a WordPress person, they have an amazing platform. I've got clickfunnels too, but I don't like clickfunnels that much anymore.

I don't use clickfunnels. I use other systems. What are you using for your quiz? I have try Interact. What are you using?

It's built into Thrythemes. So it's called Thrive. It's all totally built in. I mean, that's why I love Thrythemes. They've got a totally integrated system in WordPress. And there's another service that just came out called fluentcrm where you can integrate your whole email system into WordPress. So you don't need a getresponse or a mailchimp or an activecampaign. Everything integrates into WordPress so you don't have to ever leave your site to do everything from lead generation to emails, to autoresponders, to your sales and landing pages, to your quizzes, to courses. I mean, it's amazing. Now everything is integrated. It's incredible how it works. And you can control everything a lot better. And it's not that expensive. I mean, actually with fluentCRM, I'm going to probably drop getresponse here eventually. But I mean, getresponse is costing me, I don't know, 100 bucks a month and so that's $1,200 a year. CRM. FluentCRM cost me $270 a year for five sites. You know, I mean, incredible cost savings. And it delivers, delivers everything I need for email.

So, Doug, you've just walked us through this new funnel that you've built and definitely interested in hearing later about the results and really what you're seeing there. What else do you see as next steps in 2021?

Well, I've come to the conclusion that you've got to, if you're going to be building online courses, you've got to be prepared to drive traffic to your site in every way possible. So that means not only ppc, but also organic. So you've got to, you really have to understand search engine optimization. You have to be willing to generate a lot of really high value. I just posted yesterday, for example, a blog post. It's one of the longer ones that I've written. It's over 4,000 words long, but it's score. I use rank math for my SEO stuff and you know, it ranked 97 out of 100 with an SEO score. And you have to structure your website in a very specific way to make it Google friendly. And here's what I found. I mean, I rebuilt this website, dougnol.com I've had it for years. It was just sort of my speaker site and I really didn't do much with it. I tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it last August. And today my visitor count from organic is growing at 175% per month. I've got 5,000. I had nothing eight months ago and now I'm getting 5,000 visitors a week. And it's all due to how I rebuilt the website, the platform I'm using. I'm really, I've got a lot of, I write a lot of content. You got to learn how to, so, so here are the skills you need to learn. You need, you need to know how to do content writing. I took a thousand dollar course to become a certified content marketer to learn how to write content. And it's, I'm a good writer. I mean I've written four books, I'm a lawyer, I, you know, I mean I've written thousands of articles. But content writing is its own separate skill and you have to learn how to copyright. So I took another thousand dollars course on learning how to copyright and you have to learn how to do email. So I took a course on a bunch of courses on how to do email stuff. I mean these are skills that you have to be taught. You can flail around but, but you just can't. You don't expect to be successful unless you're willing to invest a lot of time and money, one, learning how to do it and then two, doing the work like that blog I posted yesterday. You know, that was two days worth of work to get that thing done. And now I'm going to start another blog today and learning how to do keyword. One of the things that I do is I use, I have a lot of tools so I do a lot of keyword searching. So what am I going to write about? What content do I need to do? And what I do is go out and using, I use keywords everywhere and I just think of keywords around all the things that I'm teaching and writing about and I find low hanging fruit. And so I'm looking for keywords where there's a lot of traffic and there's not a lot of competition. And then I have a whole content spreadsheet that I have set up where I've got 50 or 60 keyword phrases and I try to post, I'm gonna start on today on another one. And I've got a keyword phrase. It's getting on average 10,000 searches per month. Very, not very competitive. So I can rank for it probably in three or four months and I'll write a big blog on it. And in three or four months or five months or six months, I'll be ranking on the first page and I'll do it. Then I'll do a YouTube video to go along with it. YouTube and Google of course owns YouTube. And so whenever you do a blog, it's a good blog, then you want to do a YouTube video to go along with it. So you got to learn video adding, you got to learn how to produce video.

And what I'm hearing Doug, as we've gone through this conversation today, is that you're continuing to educate yourself and learn new things, and you've done that for many, many years. I have one. One last closing question for you.

Sure.

What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there? You have a wealth of experience, a ton of knowledge. What would you say to them?

I would say, don't start creating a course until you have an audience. We all have expertise at something, but is there an audience that wants our expertise? Is there an audience that's willing to pay 200 bucks because we have something to teach them? That was the biggest mistake I made. I mean, if you go back and even look back in 2008, when I did the legal negotiation course, I just assumed I had an audience. I just assumed that people, lawyers, were like me, were curious and wanted to learn and wanted to improve themselves. I was wrong. And I made the same mistake in 2013 around negotiated centered life. And it's pure magic. I just assumed these. I'd gotten so many testimonials and so many people saying, this is just amazing that I thought, oh, everybody in the world is going to want to want to do this. Not true. So what I would tell people is, if you've got an idea for a course and you want to do online, make money online doing courses, which is a fantastic way to do it. In fact, every Internet guru I've ever heard says the only way to really make serious money online is to produce your own stuff, because then you control it all. When you're an affiliate commission, you've got. When you're doing affiliate sales, you've got all kinds of other problems. However, you have to target your market. And the proof of that was the Empath course. When we made $40,000 in 10 days, I said, okay, everything that I've learned is right. But the key is having a targeted list and building that targeted list and investing a lot of money to build the targeted list. And let's say it cost me 20 or $30,000 to build a list of 2 or 3,000 people who are loyal buyers. If I release a. Do the math. If I've spent a year developing that targeted list, I'm not making any money and I'm spending a lot of money. But here's the math. Let's say that my average course is $200. I've got a list of. Let's just make it really easy. A thousand people who will buy anything I put up. All right? So every time I put out A course. If it's a $200 course and I got a thousand people, that's $200,000. I do three courses a year, that's $600,000 a year on a thousand person email list. That's where the money is. So how do you get that? So the secret is getting that thousand person list. And that's where you're going to spend your time and money is finding. Building that targeted list of people who love you to death will buy whatever you sell. Forever. Forever. And all you have to do is keep the, keep building the list, keep growing it. People drop off. You want more people, you know, obviously 2000. If you do, if you have a 2000 person list doing what I'm talking about now all of a sudden you're at 1.2 million a year and, and all. So you keep building the list and then the next thing is to just to build super high quality courses that your list really wants. And that's how you make money at this. You don't make money with a list of 10,000 deadbeats. That's why I don't like lead magnets. I mean, I've spent thousands of dollars with the Facebook lead program. It's a good way to get cheap leads. You can get really cheap leads, but they're not buyer leads. And you need to be thinking, I need to be spending 25 or $30 a lead ultimately to get people who are going to be really interested in what I buy. And that's a lot of money. I mean, you may spend 10 or $15,000 for a list of, you know, 500 people. But hey, I'll take 500 people times 200 anytime. 100,000 bucks. I'm not gonna. That pays for itself, but you got to have the money up front to be able to do that. Or you just go very slowly. And if you can't afford paid advertising, that's why the organic side of the business is super important. Build content, build. I mean the Google formula now is eat expertise, authority and trust. Make sure that you put up valuable content that people can find when they, when they do Google searches. That's the secret.

And thank you, Doug for that. I'm a big fan of organic content and doing your own content marketing, blogging, podcasting, that sort of thing. Where can people find you?

My I've got a lot of websites, but the primary website is Doug Noll no L L D O U G N O L L dot com. My email address is dougnol dot com. I am like most content creators, a solopreneur. I don't have an entourage, I don't have a secretary, I don't have assistant. So if you email me, I will respond back personally. You can go to my website and learn about all the kinds of things that I write about. Mostly I'm writing about de escalation and emotional competency, two things that I think are sorely needed in this world that we live in today. And I've got a ton of content courses and all that stuff. So that's probably the best way to find me and get to me. Of course I'm on all the usual platforms. I've got a big following on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. Although I don't hang out on social media, I do have followings, so. And I think that's important too. But I would not that, I guess another piece of advice, we're getting to the end. Don't waste your time on social media. Don't hang out on social media. It's a waste of time. Use social media smart. If you're on, if you're on Facebook more than 20 minutes a week, you're wasting your time, you're distracting yourself and you're not being productive. You use Facebook as a tool, you use LinkedIn as a tool, you use Twitter as a tool, but you don't hang out there.

And I would definitely agree with the comment that you made earlier is the email list. The money's in the list. And that is a very true, a very, very true statement. Doug, thank you so much for joining us today. I loved your very interesting story and what you do. I think it's very unique and loved everything that you mentioned to us and also loved how are continuing to educate yourself. So thank you for your insight today. We enjoyed having you.

Thank you, Destiny. I hope I was of some help.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.