Creating and Marketing Your Online Course Featuring Eelco DeBoer, Sandra Scheinbaum, and Dr. Brett Beckman - I Love Marketing Episode #440

Really realize that this is an insane business model. It's you create something, once it's your, you're passionate about something, you create it and then people buy it and they can buy it over and over and over again.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com creating and marketing your online course. So we're going to feature three Genius Network members who have created successful online courses in their niches. So from personal development to marketing, health and wellness, and even unique specialties like veterinary dentistry. Now think about that for a second. Entrepreneurs who are the very best experts in their field are often stuck in the success trap of trading time for money. So a great way to scale up and out of that one to one model to a one to many model and something you'd call evergreen is to create an online course. So with the right who's you can do this and it can be elf easy, lucrative and fun. And we're going to learn much more about that from our guests. So our guests will start out this session by sharing insights on this subject. So let me go ahead and introduce our three guests. We'll start from the one who lives furthest away, Ilco deboer. He's from Amsterdam. He's a serial Internet entrepreneur. He's an investor, author and speaker. He runs seven companies from payment processing, email marketing services, hosting and email commerce systems, and a coaching company. Now, through his company speeches and online courses, Ilko helps entrepreneurs adapt their business toward their lifestyle so they can claim back their freedom. And he does it all brilliantly. Now, Dr. Sandra Sheinbaum. She has the gold standard in health coaching education. Her podcast, her events, her coaching programs and online courses. They give transformative education to functional medicine graduates to help get people healthy, giving them personal transformation, confidence and competency to coach and access to better career opportunities. And finally, Dr. Brett Beckman. Now he's a veterinary dental specialist and he offers live and online veterinary dentistry courses. He still sees patients, but also provides other veterinary dentists the skills they need to excel in providing exceptional oral care for their patients.

I founded the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy. It was around 2014. I was 65, turning 65 at the time. And what I did was pull together what I had studied for so many years, what I had worked through a psychologist with people knowing that this stuff worked, whether it was positive psychology, mind body medicine, which I was doing long before these things had a name, and I was integrating them with functional medicine. Functional nutrition. And so I thought, okay, what if I went on a bigger stage? What if I created a program? And initially we thought very small. We thought we would just train a few people in our local area, northern suburbs out of Chicago, and perhaps create some corporate wellness programs. So thinking in a really tiny way. And I was fortunate to have an associate at the time who was much younger than I was, young enough to be my daughter, and she had a knack for marketing. So that was number one, the lesson that we know in genius now or gets who, not how. And so I knew I had my who. Somebody who bought into what I wanted to do and also dreamed just as big as I did. And so that's the second lesson, to dream big. So we thought, well, why are we just staying local? What if we went much bigger and trained people around the world? Because we could do it in a remote way. But how are we going to have the influence to do that? Because right at that point I just had this little business as I was a psychologist, this tiny windowless office, it was called feed your mind wellness. So it wouldn't have the reach. So I thought, what if we went to the institute for functional medicine ifm. So they train doctors, they have a stellar reputation, so what if we could collaborate with them? So had a pitch deck went to them and they loved the idea. They had wanted to start a program to train health coaches for some time, but the right people didn't come along to run it. So they were enthusiastic. So we entered into a formal collaboration agreement. Okay, now all we had to do was build it. So we did all that. We had no curriculum, no marketing plan, no experience in marketing. I had experience as a teacher. I had taught mind body medicine and psychology of well being and a whole history of teaching at universities and doctoral programs, for example, but nothing that would be the scope of what we were setting about to do. So fast forward now to the current time. We now have a staff of over 40 people. I took elements that I knew worked and I could talk more about this later, but I wanted to make sure that we had a lot of what's called synchronous learning. That was how I did my doctoral training. We met in cluster groups because it wasn't just a passive process. And that's some of the problems with online courses. That is you pay for them, you never even watch the material, you don't interact with them. There's no way assess like how have I really learned what is being presented? So I knew right off the bat that we wanted to create an experience as opposed to just passively watching a webinar.

So I want to share three pillars. So I've been teaching entrepreneurs here in Holland for over, I think 10, 15 years on how to sell and create online courses. And a lot of my students, they are amazing at the content, the teaching part of it, but they're not great at the second pillar that I'm going to talk about in a couple of minutes. So there's three pillars if you want to become successful with selling online courses. The first pillar is obvious. You need an online course. But it doesn't necessarily mean that if you create a course that you people will buy it. So it's very important with the first pillar, creating the online course that you create something that people actually want to buy. Just because you're very passionate about your topic, about your expertise, doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is very excited to buy that. So first pillar, very important to think about. Like, is this something that could sell easily? Is it something that people could talk about like hey, have you followed this course? Have you done this technique or whatever it is. So the first pillar, you need an amazing product. And creating an amazing product is not the biggest problem for most of us. Then we got the second pillar. I'm going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. And the third pillar is scale. So if you have your product, you want to sell your product. Obviously the great upside of selling an online course is that you can sell it unlimited. Like it's super scalable. Everybody can buy. The great thing with online courses is that if you have a, like let's say a normal business. If I asked a question to my audience, like if you would 10x your business next month or if you would even 100x your business next month, would you have more freedom or less freedom? We all want to grow our business, but growing our business doesn't necessarily mean more freedom. With an online course, doesn't matter if you sell 10x or 100x, you will have more freedom, as in more clients that you don't necessarily need to serve one on one, but you'll have more income. So that's the beautiful part of online courses. So the third part is skill. How do you skill? Well, that is ads. You got to be amazing at getting traffic to your offer so you can sell your online course. This is something that a lot of us struggle with. It's not easy to, to be great at ads to, to scale that part. So that's something the, that we struggle with. And the second Part is something we struggle with the most. And that is what I call a marketing masterpiece. So what you need in order to sell a lot of online courses is you need something that can sell your online course. Could be a webinar, could be a sales letter, could be a sales video, could even be like seminars or whatever, like when you have big groups. But you need something that is amazing at selling your online course. So you need to be able to create an offer that is irresistible. And this is a big struggle for a lot of us because we are great at creating an online course, but we're not great at selling it. We sell the content of the course. We're excited about the content of the course, so we sell the content. What we need to do is we got to sell what they eventually want. So there's three pillars. One is how to create an online course or create an online course. The second one is create a marketing masterpiece that can sell that online course. And if you have that, then you can scale easily. Because the better your marketing masterpiece converts, the easier it gets to advertise to that marketing masterpiece. So if you, for example, have a sales video where you sell your online course and it converts 1%, so one out of every hundred people buy, that's 1%. But if you can create a marketing masterpiece and 5% will buy, that means you will have like five times more results with the same investment. So the better that convert, the more you can advertise and the more you can scale and the more you can build a big online course business.

I started in 2014 after a lecture that I gave at the North American Veterinary Conference, which is the largest veterinary conference in the world. It's held in Orlando every year. The name's changed since then, but we generally would get three to 400 people in a room and we'd have a specific topic. And in 2014, January, I was the last topic on the last day. And it was a super niche topic in an inflammatory condition that cats get called stomatitis. And there were not only the chairs were full in the room, but people were leaning in from the doors trying to hear that topic. And so I got the inspiration to kind of go inside and say, well, if that many people like that topic, why can't I do it online? And there really wasn't a lot of that going on. And I had no idea how to do it. So I had a passive email list that I'd been collecting with an opt in at the bottom that said, join my newsletter since 2006 and I had about 350 people on that list. So I emailed them and said on Wednesday night, three months from now, we're going to be doing a feline stomatitis lecture. One hour, one credit for your CE and one email sent. And we had 71 people at $59 to sign up for that. So from that point on, I had a lot of other topics. And my takeaway here is partly related to that story in that. And it kind of feeds on what Elko had been talking about to have something that people actually want. And the great thing about online courses is if you have an email list, if you have a Facebook group, if you have your target market where you can contact them in some way mass you can create before you even create the course. You can have them say yes with their wallet. You can say, okay, three months from now, we're going to be doing this course and it's going to be on this topic and have a registration page, have pre registration where the email list, the Facebook group, because you are part of that list. You get the pre registration fee if you register now. And so you can, you can test your market before you even create the course. And that's what we did for 51 hours of online courses over the years, which is now what, what I personally have. And then I also have people who are in my veterinary space that are pain management specialists and surgeons and anesthesiologists that I've done that with exactly the same thing. You don't have to create the course. Here's what. I'll pay you for the course. It's going to be a workshop and we won't do it unless we get enough registrations. And so we send it out to the list, we advertise with Facebook ads and we know ahead of time if the market wants that course and then we create it. So that's kind of my takeaway for everybody. If you're just starting out, you really don't have to put the time and effort into creating it until, you know they want it.

I think the old way of selling courses is to create something that's huge. Like back in the days, like 2005, 2006, we bought these home study courses with 16 DVDs and three binders and all these CDs and all that stuff. Yeah. And I really feel that now 20, 21 and beyond is that we don't necessarily want to go to a webinar next Thursday evening at 8pm and go through like a two hour presentation and then buy a thousand or two thousand or five thousand dollars. Course what we want right now, I mean now with our iPhones we buy an audiobook with two clicks. So we want the information right now. And so there's a big opportunity now in for example organizing workshops. What Brett says and just organize a workshop and you know, doesn't necessarily need to be like 500,000, 2,000 bucks. Could be like 100 bucks or 200 bucks or 77 bucks which is very specific. It could be a one hour workshop or a two hour workshop. It doesn't need to be a three day. So we used to make all these big things but now people are very used to buying and buying information or buying a solution. So that's a, that's a big opportunity nowadays as well too. Instead of making it big, make it super small but very specific. For example, if you wim hof the iceman if he would do a workshop, it could be like a three hour workshop or it could be just a breathing technique that he teaches that he can teach in like 30 minutes. A lot of people would love to buy a life breathing technique exercise with whim. Compared to like a three day thing that people need to go through and have to search for the golden nuggets. What I see often is like these vanilla offers. It's too much in the middle. It's an improvement for something and we don't really get excited about that. We want an opportunity or we want a solution for our problems.

When I stay in touch, I stay in touch directly with a Facebook group. I do a lot of video directly for them. I repurpose things and provide them with content all the time through our social media director and it works real well. They feel that they know me well enough to call me by my first name.

I think the first step is to think about streamlining your content before you think about what platform really look at. Just because you think you have so much, perhaps less is more. So really look at what are the most, most important things that you want to convey. Start with old fashioned learning objectives. Like what do you want people to walk away knowing? What should they be able to demonstrate? How can they use this content? And then you look at how am I going to take all this wealth of knowledge, this information and divide it into segments like you're writing a book. So you create those like okay, we're going to do 10 chapters and then within there how are you most comfortable to use this? Do you want to do it with slides? Do you want to do it with just an Interview style, have somebody interview you. I've done a lot of that. It's really effective. If you do that, you can plug in some slides afterwards that would capture the key takeaways. Or perhaps you could do it BJ Fogg style, BJ Stock for us. And he just comes on and he just talks old school way. And so I think those are some of the things that you would need to consider first before you look at what is the actual platform that would be right for your course.

It's really important to realize if you are going to think about doing an online course, this is not something for a one off. This is something for a lifetime of really good passive income that you can create. And you know, we started in 2014, it's 2021 now and my business pretty much runs itself. I don't, I don't do much at all with it.

What matters is that it's effective. So what you're teaching is effective. And so for this topic A, you might need 44 minutes and for topic B, you might need 2 hours and 12 minutes. And maybe for topic C you might need like three and a half hours. So that's, that's what's most important. And then when it comes to price point, sort of the same like you can charge for a small course, you can charge 20 bucks or 50 bucks, but you can also charge like 300 bucks or 400 bucks. So it sort of depends. But what I see often is when you go to like the micro courses, the shorter courses, let's say an hour to two, three hours, what I see often is like 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 200 bucks. So hour, two hours, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 200 Bucks. And what you can then do, if you have like this bigger course or bigger product that's perfect to sell towards the people that bought your front end, fifty euro, fifty, a hundred dollars offer. So the front end, you get them in, you teach them one thing that really helps them, they get results. Because they get results, they're excited about what you're offering. And then it's a, it's a, a normal step or easier step for them to go to a higher ticket item for like a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks. There's no rules, there's no laws. Depends on how you want to position yourself. But this is what I usually see.

First and foremost it is the interactive element, whether it's through a discussion board, whether you're going to have. So I think that when it is that learning with others so it becomes a community, it's not just like totally different from like you bought the course, you get all the DVDs and you just listen or most of the time you don't listen. But here you are going to be with a group of other people. So the community is how you learn. And so right off the bat, one of the decisions to make is it going to be like an evergreen click and pay. You download the course, then you take it. That's one model and it depends on your audience and what your objectives are. The other is if you are going to have a course, perhaps everybody starts at the same time, there's a limited marketing time and then they take the course together. And where you can have discussion boards, you can have more interaction, you can have monthly zoom calls, all kinds of things. Part of that, but that's really important. The other thing that we found we have because we're training people to become health coaches. And just like in medical school, you can't just see it, you have to actually do it. So we have that experience, but also watching people do it. So we hired professional actors who are playing clients and then we're showing coaching in action. Good examples, bad example. So that has been transformational and people love that because we make it funny. And again, they're seeing what could go wrong and how to do it the right way.

Brad or Ilco, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, it's a great question, by the way. So last year we implemented a new type of way to share our content in our course. So usually when people buy a course, they get like unlimited access for maybe a year or maybe a lifetime. And what we've done last year is that if people, and they know up front, but if they, if people invest in the course, it's for example, a 100 day course and it's eight modules and every module disappears after a week. So the first module, they go through it and after a week it just disappears. So they need to follow the content. And it's sort of annoying for a couple of people because people want to have access full time to, to the material. But what we noticed is that the results of the clients, like it just 10x. We got so many, so much feedback from people who actually follow the course because they know that it disappears. I was on a trip last week, I was actually in Miami and I rented a movie in my room and it was a horrible movie. Like, like not one minute did I think like, oh, this is a great idea. But because I paid like 26 bucks, I wanted to finish the movie. So I didn't finish the movie, but usually I finished the movie. And the same goes with, for example, with time limited content that, oh, in one, in week one, you get access to this module. Week two, you get access to this module and people to actually go through it. And, and they get much bigger results. So you can look at maybe, for example, give them access to everything at the end or whatever. There's, there's other ways to do it. But we really noticed a big change in how much people consume the content that they actually invest in. So that was a big game changer for us last year. Very good.

Brett, what about you?

Yeah, so I think in general this is a sweeping comment, but I think it's just crazy that people will pay what they pay to buy online courses. And I always think that's going away, but it hasn't.

And I've been thinking that for 15 years.

You always think you're gonna run out of, out of people that are gonna buy, but that it just, it just feeds on itself. And that's just in general. But more specifically, the surprising thing that, that I never thought would, would happen is that people would literally pay to be in a workshop directly from Facebook that you, that you could get them to be interested enough to pay for a course directly from your, your ads. And we've done that really successfully. We do a lot of organic through our email list and our Facebook groups. We also utilize Facebook ads specifically for the workshops. And what a workshop consists of is, as I've said before, we most recently we did a. The head of surgery at Tufts in the veterinary space. I had him create a course after we got justification based on those registrations through our list and through ads that yes indeed, this is going to be financially good for both of us. And then that workshop and all the workshops we've done before have really surprised me in that respect that you can get people in mass, not just a few people, but for example, the first one that we ever did was a course that I had that I already had the content for and we open registrations and within three weeks we had 1,000 people at $97. And we did that over a month's time. So they get a 90 minute segment that we had pre recorded every week and then after that pre recording was watched, then I would do an hour and a half Q and A on Facebook in the group that they went to after they registered for the course. So those. That's. That's pretty remarkable that you can do that not only with your own stuff but also with. With other people's content.

Ollie, you're up. Go ahead. Okay, I'll make it quick. The concept of marketing masterpiece.

I really like that. If you can share a few of.

Those ideas just to get my creative juices flowing and the rest of the panel too.

If you've used something, that'd be great, I think.

Yeah, great question. So I think the most important thing before you start creating your marketing masterpiece is don't think about your product. Maybe even do it before you launch or create your product. Really think, like, what would be the dream outcome for my clients? What is their biggest desire? What is their biggest frustration? And start brainstorming, like, what would be the most amazing offer that I could create? Not like, because what we usually do is, oh, we have a product. How can we sell that product? Forget about all of that, really think, like, okay, what does my ideal client want? And what would be the ideal offer? And then just brainstorm the ideal offer. And even if you can't. So for example, the ideal offer, if you're in the Internet marketing niches, guaranteed thousand x on your money, you don't need to do anything. Like, that would be the ideal offer. Everybody would take you up on that offer. But it's. It's not. It's an impossible offer. But you have to think in an impossible offer. So create an impossible offer. Once you have the impossible offer, then think, how can I adjust this impossible offer towards the product that I'm selling? So because we get limited by what we've created, we get limited by what? Because we fall in love with what we create, we think our online course is amazing. It has this module, it has this technique, and it has all of these things. People don't really care about that. They care about them. They want a solution for their problem or they want something that can fulfill all of their desires. So really brainstorm almost the impossible and then adjust the impossible towards what you're selling. And so that's one of the most important things before you start creating your marketing masterpiece.

If you want to have a masterpiece course, who are the master teachers that you could pull in so it doesn't have to be on you and you could interview? I built a whole business track for our students with genius network members who came on. I interviewed them and it was getting rave reviews for this. And I didn't have to do the work of teaching the concepts. I pulled in the influencers. So that might be a place to start. Then some of those people could become your affiliates.

It needs to convert so if you have an affiliate and you have a mediocre offer, and I'm repeating myself, but if you have a mediocre offer that doesn't convert and they do all this promotion and it doesn't convert, like, that's. That's not great. So I think the moment that you want to make the move with affiliates, you have to be sure that the thing that you're offering, it actually converts very well so that they're happy as well.

We didn't talk about beta testing, but I would get a select group of people to beta test because they will identify things that you might not have seen seen anything from the quality of the video, getting the sound, to the actual content. So I think that's really important. And to survey. What do people want?

Before you begin, really realize that this is an insane business model. You create something. Once you're passionate about something, you create it, and then people buy it, and they can buy it over and over and over again and for months and for years. And what Brett said earlier as well, like, waiting for 15 years to decline. I've been waiting for 15 years for this to decline. It's growing and growing. So this whole idea that people pay you for a password, it's unbelievable. And it's 100% scalable. And what I see oftentimes that people think it's amazing, but they don't believe it 100%. They don't believe it's for them 100%. They think it's amazing. They think they could actually do it, but not 100%. And if you really believe in this and you go all in, you really commit to this, this can give you an amazing lifestyle. I've been selling online since 1999. I've been selling online courses since 2005. I've been traveling for multiple months every year since 2006 up until this year. And it's all because of online courses. And I have to pinch myself sometimes, like, wow, this is. This is really amazing. But you've got to believe in it 100%. And if you believe in it, commit to it, and you'll figure it out.

I echo exactly what Elko had said. And it does continue to grow, but you have to start. And I think the easiest way to start is today. You find the topic that you think your audience wants, send them an email with a registration link, and let them. Let them vote with their wallet. And if it flies and you get enough people, that's your topic. If it doesn't, then you need to get back to the drawing board.

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