Making $200/hr As A Notary And Teaching 70,000 Students - with Mark Wills

I'm 25, broke and I'm like $150. That seemed like $10,000 an hour. You don't pay for information, you pay for execution. My course works. It's not even a question. I can help you make 500 bucks a month or $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month. What is in question is the effort behind the course.

Hello, and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and and today's guest is Mark Wills. Mark is the course instructor of the top rated loan signing system agent training course. He's been an active professional loan signing agent for nearly 20 years. He owns a loan signing service that does thousands of signings a year. And Loan Signing System is the nation's premier notary public loan signing agent training course. It's the only signing agent course that's an education partner of the American Escrow Association. We're going to be talking to Mark today about his course business, his membership, how he started it, who he helps, how he built his audience, and how his whole funnel works. Before we dive into the interview with Mark today, Yip is our funnel strategy lead here at Data Driven Marketing. And while working on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects, he's developed and tested most of the systems that we use here at Data Driven Marketing to help our clients make millions of dollars. And what we did is we took all of the training that Yip's ever done for clients and we used it to train an AI version of yosep. YOSEP AI. And we've made this available completely for free. You can ask it questions about your course or your membership business, get its help with writing copy for your emails, whatever you like, go to Data Driven Marketing AI to get access to it for free. Mark, welcome to the show, man.

I appreciate you, brother. Glad to be here, man.

I gave a, I gave a bit of a summary there at the beginning, but for those of us who don't necessarily know what all of that stuff means, can you talk us through, who do you help with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?

Yeah, we're in the money making niche. And so what I do is I help people. A lot of people help make money in the notary public niche here in America. And so what a lot of people don't know is, you know, a lot of people in America think, oh, I hear the word notary, I hear they make $5 per stamp signature. They make $2 per stamp signature. But I don't realize there's a lot of really cool niches within the notary industry. And so, you know, I specifically help notaries who are part of the real estate mortgage industry in our country. And so a notary for watching someone sign the borrower, sign their name 100 times on their loan. Mortgage docs make $150 to $200 an hour. And so what I help is making sure that they understand who to approach, how to get the business, how to execute the jobs, and really how to make money in this little niche that most people don't realize in American Mortgage. That is every single house in America has to have a notary to close. So I teach them from scratch via an online course, just like you mentioned earlier. And I've helped over 70,000 notaries accomplish that goal of learning turn the notary commission into dollars. I have students who make seven figures a year, students who make six figures a year, and students who make 1500 bucks a month part time. So it's a cool business that you can kind of make as big as you want or keep as small as you want. And so just kind of like anything in life, the best thing to pay for someone's experience, to shorten that learning curve. And that's all I do, man.

And so how did you get started with it? Were you a notary yourself? Like, what was the background here?

Great question. So if you want the genesis of all this, it's actually a pretty cool story. And so, you know, especially for, you know, your audience specifically, I'll kind of break down the story. I've always been a successful notary. Right out of college, I tripped in the notary business. I had a buddy of mine who was a real estate agent, and I'm 25, not knowing what to do with my life right out of college. And he's like, dude, these notaries were making $150 for watching people sign their names. And I'm like, tell me more. And so I'm literally, I'm 25, broke, and I'm like, $150. That seemed like $10,000 an hour. And so he told me about it, and I jumped in two feet first. And I just went through school of hard knocks, figured out how to scale the business. So. But here's where it kind of gets cool to where we are today. And so I was literally 26, 27 years old, making a hundred grand a year. My friends are like, I'm still bartending, making a hundred bucks a night. And so just because I'm a good friend, I was teaching all my buddies. I'm like, dude, get out of the bar industry. Get out of selling insurance. And I start teaching them just because as a friend. So let's fast forward like six or seven years. Then I have another buddy who is now my business partner with loan signing system. He's actually up in Northern California. So he literally hits me up and says, hey man, I see you helping all our other buddies getting this notary business. Can you help me? And I was like, done, bro. So we jump on FaceTime and I go through the entire thing with them. It's about two hours and at the end of it, usually I get this huge thank you, mark. Like, oh my God, you're the man, Mark. Super. Thank you. But for him, I got like dead silence. And I'm like, kind of waiting for the validation as a buddy, you know, like, you didn't die, it's cool. And so then all of a sudden, what comes out of his mouth is that you just taught me how to do this over FaceTime. And I'm like, yeah. And I'm like, I gotta go. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. You just taught me over FaceTime. And that was our aha moment. His. And I go, wait, what do you mean? He's like, well, if you taught me, why can't you teach everybody? And so I was like, oh, you mean an online course? He goes, yes. And I'm like, well, I'm just a notary's taught five or ten of our buddies. I mean, if you go get me a couple notaries, I'll figure it out. And so he thr website called moneynotary.com and as this is an online course community, so they understand that what paid traffic is. So we had no paid traffic. It was moneynotary.com and threw up a couple blocks behind that. And so through that, we end up getting 25 signups in the first week. And then he calls me up and at this point, I'm not really good in digital marketing. Now I'm an expert, right? But then I was like, he's like, dude, I threw up a wet landing page. No tripwire, Nothing. We thread one blog on there and we got 25 signups. And like, is that good or bad? He's like, unbelievable. So then I teach 25 people how to do this over literally a gotowebinar Zoom wasn't even then this. We were about eight years Old. So he was in Gotowebinar. And so we went to good, we did a Gotowebinar and I taught people how to do it. And he's like, you know, let's try to get more people on. And so we went from literally 25 to 50 to 100 to a thousand to 10,000. Now we're 70,000 deep. And so it was my buddy's just aha moment of if you can teach me over FaceTime, let's figure out how to teach everybody else. And so now we have a very sophisticated funnel which I'm sure we're going to get into. But that is kind of the genesis, man. I was a notary making six figures. I want to teach my buddies and it was my business partners brainchild to really take this to the next level. And so like I said, we know we're 70,000 students deep, 300,000 person email list and so opt in which I'm pretty proud of. So yeah, and that's, that's how it started.

Beautiful man. That's really cool. So that's how long that was eight years ago when you had that kind of aha moment. Cool. Okay. And talk me through then. So you mentioned some numbers there. So you'd said 70, 000 people. That's the number of people who've actually gone through your training course, is that correct?

That's correct. So in eight years that 70, 000 people pay for the course. We do have a free trial. I'm sure we can talk about that in, throughout the course of this conversation. But we have 70,000 paying notaries and then of the 70,000 we have a subscription model. And so of the 70,000 we have 11,000 notaries in a monthly subscription model that if you want to ask me what they get, we can as we go through this. But yeah, that's where we currently stand today. So it's all about top of the funnel, getting people in, helping them with their notary business and then helping them mature throughout the duration. Because this is a real business, it's not a get rich quick scheme. So they need kind of that ongoing support. That is what the subscription model basically is.

And what's the kind of system, is it a high ticket thing that you're doing with a sales call or is it like lower ticket you're doing selling through email or webinars? Like what's the process you've got there?

Yeah, great question man. So it's kind of a. We have a sophisticated funnel at this point, right this point. It Is, you know, retargeting ads. If you're on this page, you get this subset of retargeted ads you land on this page. So now it's a pretty sophisticated funnel. So I don't want to make it super generic, but the answer is we usually do what we use Russell Brunson's perfect webinar that is by far our largest. Believe it or not, we've had the same. We just updated our webinar from seven years last, last year. So my point is it, it works. So we use but the majority of our business comes through an email trip. We really believe in the five plus one system. So the five plus one system is kind of a little bit of, of a Brendan Bouchard OVO option Value. What does it stand for? Opt in Value Opportunity. So we use a five plus one. So what does that mean? We want to educate people on the space, you know, and so we do five emails of this is how you become a notary. This is how you do a loan signing. This is what you need to do. And then on the sixth one we say, hey, if you need some help, we do have a course to offer. And so we're really big on basically letting people know we're going to give you this away for free. Because the value of an online course isn't information. Information is commoditized nowadays, right? You can learn how to do anything on YouTube. So I think a lot of online or beginning online course instructors really try to gatekeep information. And the truth is you need to give it all away, but you need to give it away in a manner that makes them realize how overwhelming it is by them doing it on their own. And then you say, hey, where the op where the option to really streamline this education we just gave you. And so we're really about giving people value. You don't need to take my course and you'll figure out how to be a notary signing agent. But if you want to expedite a 12 month learning curve into three weeks, we got a course for that. Now to answer your question, are high. I don't believe in high ticket sales. I'm probably gonna get some online course instructors be like, oh, our Chorus goes from 3, 5 and $800. We just increased our highest course from 5 to 800 a year ago. And so my belief is this is if you have a high ticket product, there is massive expectations that that is going to change their lives. If you have a smaller ticket item, you've changed their lives. Now you Have a customer for life. And so I think a lot of them because I get hit up all the time, Mark, you know, how'd you build what you've built? And we built, we got to 10,000 students within 24 months. So we scaled this exponentially quick. And I believe the key to our success was massively over delivering and then get them to do a subscription model. So it wasn't massively over delivering without kind of a secondary revenue option. But I think a lot of people, you know, I get hit up by people, oh my gosh, Mark, I have this, I want to sell this course for 5,000 bucks. And I'm like, dude, for $5,000 they're expecting a million dollar return. It's very difficult to live up to high ticket items in my opinion. And I've met thousands. Now I'm not saying there's not a time and place or niche with online courses for high ticket. I'm just saying that the expectation when someone gives you a thousand bucks, I think there's a disproportionate amount of expectation. But when someone gives you 300 bucks, there's no longer that disproportionate expectation in my opinion. Now you can really over deliver and then get them into a subscription model because that's all we want, right? We want aar, right? We don't want mmr. We want annual reoccurring revenue. And so if you can lock them into something that really gives them value, now we keep going. So I'm sure you're going to ask me what my subscription model is coming soon and I'll it right now is we only charge 27 bucks a month because again, we want to give massive over. I want someone to stay with me for five years, which I do have people five years. And so I think again, online course instructors chase the money, not the value. And you can create a very lucrative online course at 3, 500, 300, 500, 800. I'm living proof of it. I think the biggest misnomer in the online course community is they're trying to figure out, you know, because they see a lot of these Instagram influencers, right? We can name off top of head and like get what you're worth, only you know, don't worry, $5,000, you know, and yes, I think that's works for a very small population of the online course industry. I think what you need to do with online course industry is really focus on value and over delivering. If you can over deliver, they will automatically almost walk into your Subscription model. So I don't know. We went.

One of the things I think is really interesting with the kind of high ticket versus low ticket. So we mostly work with people doing or almost completely work with people doing low ticket. Right. So. And generally even cheaper than your. Your highest price one. So stuff like under 500 bucks normally.

And the reason we raised up my 500 a year ago, John, So it was massive data of like, okay, we're seven years in. We have massive social proof and it's appropriate, but we still have a 3, 5, 800. Yeah, continue.

Yeah, so it's. It's a very different business. Once you start doing the $5,000, even anything above kind of $2,000, you start to need phone calls. And once you've got phone calls, you know, either you're doing it or you got a sales team doing it. And if you got a sales team that you're managing, it's a very different business than running. Like, you got that webinar, right? You made that seven years ago, and you only just changed it.

That's right.

You can't just. You can't just train a salesperson and then seven years later come back and have another chat with them. Like, that's. That doesn't work like that. So you've got this whole extra headache that's going on.

Well, I think the bigger headache, John, is is the expectation someone's spending $2,000. Your course better change their life. Right. And so I think at three, here's my personal opinion. I think if you're charging 3, 500 bucks, which was my price point for literally seven years, it's now 3, 5, 8, which is not dramatically bigger. Most of my sales are still the 500 course is they feel like they got. They. My return rate is less than 1% because my course not only works, but I hope everybody hears this is my course empowers them. So even if they don't make a dollar in the notary business, they still feel like I am. If I apply what I just learned, I feel like I could go make the money. The fact that I haven't made the money actually isn't on Mark and his course. It's actually on me. And so my return rate's low because at 3 or 500 bucks, there's. There's not this expectation that they have to make $10,000. There's an expectation, did Mark course deliver empowerment? And that's what my course does. And. Right. So my course works. It's not even a question. I can help you make 500 bucks a month or $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month. What is in question is the effort behind the course. So yeah, three or five hundred dollars. Though the Pearson buying it realizes that's on me at $2,000, they're almost expecting it to be on you did that land. So like if they're tripping 2000, like all the work to help them get successful at three to five hundred dollars, they're like, look, you've given me the tools. My expectation of you handholding isn't really there. Yeah, I only paid you $300. But as long as you can make sure that they feel empowered to go make the money or whatever the transformation is, it's losing weight, whatever it is, as long as you can. Your 3500 bucks makes them truly feel empowered to get to transformation. You've won because now the consumer goes, look, it's on me from here on out. And so at the 3 to 500 price point, I love that price. Anybody who ever asked me to take for advice, I go, go sub 500. But what I tell them before that and I don't and I think we, you know, your audience is a lot of new, new online course and creators. Here's the number one piece of advice I give for every any new online course creator is make sure your product freaking works. A lot of new online course creators do not validate. They make the assumption I'm super smart and what's in my brain it can help somebody else. And they have no case studies. And so and number two, they or they're just chasing the money and they're trying to throw a garbage product out in the marketplace. The consumer is way too sophisticated for that today, in my opinion. There are so many online courses, so much information that you actually have a product that needs to work. And so before you figure out your email strategies, before you start work forward much your landing pages, before you start worrying about your retargeting ads, is does my product transform somebody? My product works like I will, I will help you make money. In the notary niche, there is zero doubt. Not because I am arrogant, because I have enough case studies to prove that. And so I think online course instructors worry more about their pricing strategies, worry more about their email web funnels. They worry more about their retargeting ads, worry more about everything else. I literally got on the phone call last week with someone who's trying to sell a pitching product. He's like for baseball players, he's one of the best pitching coaches. In America. And he's like, oh, this is a 5,000. I'm like, well, have you proven that you're on, like, in person you can train somebody? That's not a question. But can you train someone via video instruction the way you did it in person? Well, no. Well, why are you trying to charge someone $5,000 when you haven't proven that that actually works? He's more concerned about the value and how much he's going to make than does my product actually work? And so my product works like, there's not even a question. I knew my product worked six months in because all I did was validate, can I help somebody? And so, you know, if you're newer, listen to this podcast. In your online course industry, like, get rid of your sales funnels. That's not your concern right now. Your concern is, can I create transformation? Does my course actually work? Not for one person, not for two? Because remember what I told you in the beginning, I coached 25 people, then I coached 50. It was a gradual stepping stone of can I actually help humans via video instruction with my product? And I think of online course correctors more focused on that than these funnels and these landing pages and these websites. Of course, it almost build itself.

I see. So it's interesting, right, because you're talking about people who are coming along and they've got a thing that they're teaching and they're thinking about how much money they're going to make out of it. I think there's a couple of, of different groups within course creators. I, I see this quite often quite distinctively. You've got people who started out by building an audience. So people who started a YouTube channel or started a blog or a podcast, what have you. And then eventually their audience were like, asking for courses from them. And so then they made the courses. And those guys, they don't have sales funnels. They underprice almost everything. They don't do any email promotions, they don't have great sales pages, what have you. And then you've got another group of people who come along and go, I'm great at something and I want to get paid a lot of money for it. And they don't tend to have a big audience yet. And they haven't necessarily got a great course because their focus has gone from I've been doing something in person and I'm really good at it to I want to make. Make a bunch of money from it. And I see those. I. It's not, of course it's not Black and white. It's not just one or the other. But I do tend to see people at kind of extremes reasonably often with that. Have you come across that at all?

Yeah, I mean, look, I. I would. This personal, nameless. I'll just say that this person is one of the largest online magicians, right? There's a ton of them, right? There's, you know, 5 million followers, etc. And so I'm pretty big. I'm pretty well known here in the Southern California online course. We're a pretty big online course from here in Southern California, from Los Angeles down. So this, this, this guy, this gentleman got a hold of me. He said, hey, man, I seen what you're building. Everyone's telling me that you're, you know, you're doing really well and you're helping a lot of humans. Can you help me? And so his first inclination was to create a magician course. And he. But what he did, what he failed to realize is he needed to get the reps on how to show people to do what he did. But he just put out magician horse, saying, well, I'm. I'm the great magician. And so I'm just saying. But he didn't. He failed to remember there's still a validation process. And so I have a handful. There's another person that came up to me, has one of the largest. He's a hairstylist, has millions and millions of followers, and he's one of the best at dying hair. Same concept. And he's like, you know, well, I think you have to test. Does your video translate to transformation? And. And part of being a good online course instructor is also being a good teacher. And so, you know, my favorite analogy is like, Magic Johnson was a terrible basketball coach. I'm the best point guard in the history of NBA, right? But he wasn't able to teach what he knew. And so part of being an online course creator is validating you can teach somebody. And by the way, I do think anyone can be a good teacher, but you need to just validate. Am I doing. So what happened with this that this magician is. He put out a product that no one could actually learn the tricks because he wasn't able to communicate how his sleight of hand was working, right? He was like, do this. I'm like, bro, no one can do that. And so I think the two buckets is. I actually like the person who doesn't have the audience because people have audience tend to be a little more arrogant, and they end up what I've seen In my experience, and again, this is not black and white is the person with the audience is a little bit not as willing to test and not as willing to get in the trenches where the person, you know, just has an idea is like, oh, I get it. I gotta like do this video four or five times. I gotta give it to my aunt, uncle, brother, sister so they can see if they're actually doing what I teach on, on video. And so yeah, I do. I've experienced both ends of it. I get hit up all the time for advice in the online course space, whether it is influencers and, or brand new people. So my, my opinion is, of anyone online course, I don't care if you have a million followers, you have zero. It's validate your product. Like, you know, my course works, I can help you make money. There's zero doubt. There was zero doubt when I sold my course. And so if people really online course credits really get into this mindset of like my product, am I good? Am I capable of teaching? And I think teaching is a skill you can learn. You got to be able to get on a mic and teach and communicate and, and, and, and put the passion through the video. And I think it's all learnable skill, but it's definitely part of the process.

Now one of the models that some people use when they're trying to figure that out, they're like, okay, I know how to do the thing. I don't know if I know how to teach. The thing I want to sell the course is they start out doing group coaching programs. And that's somewhere where people are, are probably charging more money for it. Right. So they, they often start out doing a group coaching program which is maybe a course plus one to, you know, group sessions every week on zoom or something, or the stuff's taught live over Zoom and then there's questions and answers afterwards. And so that's kind of a way of like tweaking it, validating it.

Yes.

How do you see that? Is that, is that a model that you like or do you feel like, you know, you're charging 2,000, it's too much. They're not going to. What if they don't get the result? Like, what's your kind of feelings on that one?

Yeah, I mean, look what I would. So, so let me tell you about this. My, my course was $15 when it first started. And so then it went from 15 to 47. 47 and 97, 97 to 1. So as I validated the transformation and here's Something else that I think on early online course graders, I actually doesn't matter if you're making multi seven figures, you should always be collecting social proof. So I think at the beginning of anybody's online course journey, it should be almost giving the course away for free. Excuse me. In exchange for social proof.

Right.

Mark's course worked. And so again, I think people are so lost in money. Stop with the money, man. You gotta be, you gotta be focused on transformation. Can my product work? And the moment it works, get social proof. Put that all over your website. 50% of my my ads are social proof. It is paying to get testimonials in front of my traffic. Social proof is the most powerful thing we can do as online course creators. But the problem is, early on, course creators focus about money. I would tell you to do a group coaching call for free. Like I did, right? I did that for free. And then like, oh, I go. Then like, oh, this works. Let me charge 15 bucks. Oh, it works. I'm charged 47. Oh, it works. Let me charge 147. People have this. I think they get very bad advice, like, you know, only sell what you're worth. Like, you don't know what the, the market tells you what you're worth, not your ego. And I think a lot of online course instructors go, well, I'm worth 5,000 bucks. Says who? The market or you? And so I start off with a free product, went into 15 bucks, went into 47. Because the only thing that matters to me is helping another human. And I think if an online course creator, it leads with their heart. The revenue comes. But I, I see it every day. People like, oh, my gosh, I can make so much money with my knowledge. To me, you've already lost. It should be the first statement out of your mouth, in my opinion. I don't want to speak from a soapbox right here because it's all things to all people. But I prefer somebody like Mark. I know what I know could help another human. Boom. Now you got something. Instead of like, I know I can make a million bucks with this idea. And so when I came out, when I was teaching my friends, it wasn't about money. It was about trying to help another person. Like, you're struggling. Yeah, Stop struggling, dude. I think I can. I know something's gonna help you stop struggling. And so I think of online course creators. I meet them all the time, and they're all money hungry. They want to do an hour with me. They want to do lunch. Give me 15. I met this Guy at Tony Robbins and I went to a Tony Robbins event six months ago. And we know, I don't know if you've been to Tony Robbins event, but they break you out in little groups if you have been to Robbins. It's awesome. So anyways, you know, they shared. So some guy found out as an online course creator and first pitch, I got this idea I could make a million bucks. And I'm like, dude, the fact that that's what you're leading with, in my opinion, is why it's gonna be tougher to scale. I, I do think you can pro, obviously make money when money's a meeting leading magnet. But the truth is people got to feel that you're in it for them, not the money. And when the moment they feel like you're in it for them, you, you will make the money. And so that's what I've done for seven years. I'm just like, look, I, I can help you make money in the notary niche. There's no doubt about it. You know, people think it's crazy. I have 70,000 students, right? 11,000 seven years in. I still personally do the welcome webinars. People like, why do you still do the welcome? I can pawn that off to someone on my team because I care. That's why. You're not a number. You're still somebody I'm trying to help. My mission hasn't changed from day one. And I think a lot of people try to figure out how quick can I get out of, of the day to day. And look, I do think there's a sense of you being in the business versus on the business that we need to talk about, which I've definitely done less of that. But I still do the welcome webinars because it's about them. It's not about me. And then you. But people gotta understand too is your customer, is your best salesperson. That's what people understand. And so I need to, I want my people to feel my community to feel like I'm in it for them. And they in turn are my best salespeople. Like man March still does the welcome webinars, boom to new sales. And so because, because when they realize I care, they are it, you know, and let me, let me say this to the online course community. Paid traffic is only getting more expensive. If I told you what I used to pay for Google Ad versus what I pay today, like, it's insane. So the only way to offset your paid traffic is free referral business. Let me say that one more Time. The only way to offset your ever increasing paid traffic costs is getting free referral business from your current customers. That's the only way to offset it. So my, my end of the day, my ROAS is a little bit off. My, my top line revenue is still on because I'm getting massive referrals.

Yeah.

Because I care. That's what people got understand.

So, so let's talk through some of that. The practical funnel side of things. Like you mentioned the 5 and 1. What's the kind of the process you're running? Ads. Where are you running ads to? Is that to your webinar or what's the. What's kind of process?

Yeah, great question. So the number one thing is to. To an email. We have failed if we're not gathering an email. We are email marketers. People say you're an online course creator. No, I'm an email marketer. And so, you know, I get a lot of people who are running these Facebook ads that are trying to go directly to a sales page. I'm like, you've missed the boat in my opinion. You got it in my. This is one man's opinion is, you know, you got to have a conversation with them. And so email. So we're trying to run everything doing email now. We're running the email to get the webinar, by the way. But it's not click this ad. Go directly to webinar. It is, oh, get a free webinar. Drop your email in here right now. And so we're all about. So I think I shared early on this conversation. We have 300,000 plus opt ins. All opt ins. That's insane. And so you need a good trip wire. What? Again, I don't like the word tripwire. It's almost. You just need a good value. And so we give someone a nine step checklist to become a notary on their own. I want somebody to feel empowered that they can do this without me. I've won at that point. In my opinion. I've won their heart. A lot of people are about, oh well, how can I give away little information? And they're going to pay for it in the back end. In my opinion. What we do is you don't pay for information, you pay for execution.

Mm.

Say that one more time. I think a lot of online course directors need to pivot. It's not because information is. I got this one buddy who wants to do a personal. Wants to help people through personal therapy, you know, like physical therapy. Excuse me. Frankly, you can go on the Internet right now and you can find a lot of chiropractors and PTs giving information away. So I'm like, well it's not, you can't really sell that anymore. But what you can sell is execution. And so I want people to feel empowered by what I give them and then they're paying for me to help them actually implement what I just gave away for free. So it's almost less information that I'm having them pay for and more paying for implementation of the information. And so my trip wire is or my value opt in is what I prefer to say it under. The industry calls it a tripwire. My value opt in is you can do this without me. And then in the emails I get value, value, value. Hey, if you need help implementing everything you just learned, here's an offer for a product. So it is email marketing. Everything's run into an email, but the email is, you know, get the nine step checklist on how to become a notary public loan signing agent. Plus watch a free webinar how to learn this, do this step by step. So now they're like sweet, solid, I'm in. And so the, the webinar is not, you know, a fake live, it's a pre record. They know it's pre recorded as they go in and watch it. But then yeah, I mean our retargeting is pretty sophisticated. You know, if they land on a certain blog, we'll be able to be, you know, they turn page and it's, you know, we know that they're a female. We have a quiz funnel which also helps us dilute direct what, what blog or retraffing they're going to get. And so at this point to get to our size, it is a pretty sophisticated funnel. But at the very crux of it, it is just a value opt in free information how they can execute without me. And the course is if you need help executing, here's the course.

And I don't think we've ever done an episode about webinars. If anybody's listening to this and they're like, okay, what is this? Russell Brunson's perfect webinar then Expert Secrets is a great book. Go grab that, go through that. But could you give me like a summary of how that process works?

Yes. So, so we actually paid for the perfect webinar eight years ago. It is now free on YouTube. So Russell Brunson has now given away free. So I think it's even more awesome. And so what, what how, what he's developed is one hour webinar. The third first 30 minutes is something of massive value, meaning like something that you can actually do. And so the first 30 minutes is massive transformation. So for instance, for me it is basically if you want to be a notary public loan signing agent, step one is to get your notary commission. Step two is putting your name in all these databases. Because in our business, business, you can get money without any sales. There's a text message system. And so you just get a text message, boom, you get business. So I teach that in the webinar. So step one is your noted commission. Step two is it put your name in these five databases. These are the way notary placement services call. You do. You don't need sales, you don't need any background. So put your name in these five databases and then the last 10 minutes is when they give you a call. This is the expectation of what you need to do when you're at the appointment. So it's like, wow, you told me I get my notary commission. You taught me how to get business without any sales, and you taught me what to expect at the closing. So. And then Russell is this very, you know, and what I love about Russell, he's all about value. You know, I feel, feel like he's a very heart driven entrepreneur and you know, and he's very faith based. So I think it's a beautiful thing. And so at the end of your massive value, it's like, hey, if you'd like to continue massive value learning, what you just got was a tip of the iceberg of what you'll get in my course. And so the webinar is massive value then rolled into like, if you love this massive value I just gave you, man, join me in my course because you expect way more. So you blow their mind away with amazing information that is actually transformational. You're not gatekeeping and then you roll into your clothes or your pitch quote, unquote is, if you liked what you just watched, imagine what you're going to get when you pay for it. And so that's the Russell Brunson. And we've used it and it's been very, very successful for us.

Nice. Yeah, I'm a massive fan of the perfect webinar process. Like everybody I know who does really well with webinars is using that process and they put the webinar together.

Russell tells you though, and, and I think now in 2024, at the time of this, you know, early on, you know, you used to sell information. Now information is it's free. And so in the beginning, people would gatekeep on that massive nugget feed of the webinar. Working is giving away something that hurts you. You're like, oh my God, they should be paying for that. That's what you should give away. So people always ask me, mark, what do I do on the webinar? You said you, I said you give away something that like stings. You're like, you should have paid for that. Boom. That's what you give away. Because people are sophisticated now. They know. They go to chat GPT and be like, give me a business plan on being a notary. What they can't get is the implementation. They can't get the support, they can't get the raw, raw, raw. They can't get the community. And so just give away something massive and then let them know this is just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to get community where you are. You're going to get all like. Part of what makes my course special is we have a massive community. 11, 000 subscribers. That's the community. That's LSS destination. And so you know, the community is also what you're buying into. So I, I, by the way, I've done a lot of these conversations. I think this podcast is money. So I hope everyone really listens to it because I mean, you know what you're doing and I think there's been a lot of value in this, in this podcast so far.

So, okay, so we've talked through a bit about how your funnel works and the fact you, the way your front end funnel works, where you've got the tripwire or, or you call it, I think a value offer value opt in. Great. We've got the webinar and the kind of the process around that a little bit.

We've got.

How do you make sure you've got an absolutely fantastic course, don't charge loads of money up front for it, give it away for free or charge very little amount and then gradually prove that it works. Get all that social proof. Talk to us a little bit about the traffic side of things. Is Mo, you mentioned paid traffic. Is that where most of your traffic comes from now? Or is it SEO or like where do you get your audience?

Yeah, and I want to be very transparent, right. We are as big as we are because we are. SEO is very good to us. Okay. So and so I don't want to say that we have this mat. We do have a pretty big ad spend but SEO is our number one you know, people are typing in how to make money, how to make money as a notary, and we just garner that. So that's very powerful for us. Now what I will say though is, you know, as you know, everybody listening to this webinar knows very rarely people will buy anything off of first blog. So while we do get them in, once they land on a website, we cook your pixel them and then boom, you're part of the retail targeting program. And so depending what blog you land on, what landing pages will determine what retargeting campaign gets sent to you. We're going to send a different retargeting campaign if you are on our checkout page and you didn't go in, we're going to give you a different retargeting campaign if you're just on our course pricing page. We're going to give you a different retargeting campaign if you are just on our homepage. And so we have different retargeting campaigns based on, you know, five or six massive areas you land within our website. Right? So if you're in the checkout page, haven't bought, you're going to get basically social proof, right? But if you just land on our website, our homepage, you're going to get a lot of educational like, did you know notaries are making $150? Did you know? So then we're trying to get them from the did you know retargeting campaign into more of a sales funnel, which is then, okay, so then they land on, then we send them to our course pricing page. Once you're on our course pricing page, they get testimonials, but they get a different type of testimonial. The testimonial now is, oh, the course was worth it. It. So now we're our, our belief, their objection is, okay, there, it might be too expensive. Well, nothing's never too expensive. It is, do I see the value in the money I'm spending? And so then we send them a different type of testimony, but they're on now they're on the checkout page. They just need a little nudge. And so, you know, we're pretty sophisticated with, you know, what we're sending them at per the retargeting. It's just not this, you know, a lot of early online course creators just kind of send the same retargeting regardless where they are on your page. They land on my page. You're getting abc, by the way. We used to do that. As we become more sophisticated and as our Revenue has grown, we are able to, you know, hire media buyers, etc. But at the end of the day, it is, it is really about SEO for us that leads to our paid traffic. Our paid traffic really is more retargeting than top of the funnel. But we do paid traffic on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, believe it or not, for us, works well. YouTube is huge for us.

But yeah.

Any other questions, let me know.

And then the pricing you've mentioned a few times, you got 300, 500 and 800 bucks for the course. What's the differences that people get?

And also let me say that we have a payment plan and 7% of all of our businesses through the payment plan. We love payment plans. We do incentivize a little bit to buy the package up front like most people, but we kind of like the baby plan because rolling in a subscription just becomes that much easier kind of use of it coming out of their account. Because where the payment plan is little for us is our end goal is to get you into, give enough value on the main product that you want to stay for the subscription. So let me just talk about this for a few, few minutes is we will sometimes. So we'll do a payment up front, 497 or 6 payments of 137. Don't quote me on that. But if they do the 497 front, we give them free months of the community mentoring with the upfront payment. So then six months later we try to get in for a subscription. We've actually find the data, say it's a little bit harder, but if you're already in a payment plan, it's easier to roll them in for per our data. To me, the psychology is, well, I've already paid up front, now six months later, you want more money from me. And so it's just a little bit easier. So I think, I think a lot of times online course creators are kind of against payment plans where I actually find it's easier to roll them into a subscription from a payment plan than it is up front. So I don't know if that helps anybody. And so our payment plans are almost 7% used of the time, not our full page. So it's really not 3, 5 and 8. It's more like 68, 137, 1, 179.

Gotcha.

We have a full money back guarantee, no questions asked, 30 days. Yeah.

And what's the difference between what they get at the 300, 500 bucks?

Yeah. So basically it goes with marketing. So if you get, it's all our fundamental course. You just get the fundamentals. The next one's called the professional course which is a little bit of fundamentals plus a little bit of marketing and the six figure courses. You, you're here to make big money. Let me just give you everything. I got social media, marketing, websites, landing pages, the whole 10 yards. So depending what it is, what we find is a lot of people come in with the fundamental. Most people buy the fundamental because they still aren't completely sold that I can transform them then once they're in, it's almost always an upgrade.

Yeah, got it. Nice. Very impressive. Beautiful business. I love what you're doing.

Yeah, no, I appreciate what you're doing. Helping the online course, meaning I get it all the time. I don't have the bandwidth, you know, help as many people as I'd like to on that side. You know, my focus is notaries. It's the best kept secret America for income opportunities. We're up against big boys in the money making space, right? Shopify, home flippers, right? I mean you name it. And so we've card out, we've card out a nice little niche within the home money making niche which is one of the hardest ones, the most expensive to run paid ad stores as you can imagine. Got all the crypto guys and the home flipper guys dominating that. So you know, we've done a really good job of carving a little niche in the money making space. But you know, the key to my success is I'm solely focused on transformation and I really hope course creators understand that. It's like there are, there are certain online because look, here's the truth. I mean John, what has working against the people who are really doing this for true authentic reasons are the people trying to make a quick buck. We're going to be judged on those online course creators who aren't ethical, who are just trying to make a two bucks, who don't have a help center, who don't have customer service. And so that to me is why it's so much more important. We can get the online community really start focusing on transformation. I think it's the most beautiful entry in America. We can kind of start pushing out these quick get rich quick guys and we can start really focus on what I think the online course is beautiful. Everyone's experts, everyone can ask for transformation or can provide transformation. And so if you're out there right now, my biggest advice which I get asked is make sure your product works. My product works. There's no doubt and, and I don't, I don't say that elementary like obviously, but like I don't mean works, it means transforms. Like really, if someone's giving you 300 bucks, they should get a thousand dollars worth of transformation in return. Someone gives me 500 bucks, I want them to have a thousand dollars worth of transformation. One of my mentors, his name is Craig Clemens. He's one of the best copywriters in the world. He's at Craig. He's that big of a deal. I'm like, how did you get the reg Instagram handle anyhow? So you know, he says, you know, everybody tries to get one dollar from a hundred people. He's all, all marketers are trying to get a $1 for 100 people. Tell make a hundred bucks. He's like, I believe you should try to get $1 but give them a hundred dollars worth of value. And so that really stuck with me. He's like people want $1, 100 people. So why don't you try to get $1, give them $100 worth of value and see what where your business goes. And now he has a billion dollar. That's what the b. A billion dollar business. And so you know, I just. This online course business is amazing because we can transfer humans in a way it's not been possible ever. Right. You're in London and you're reaching people in America and people oversee like it's an amazing thing we have. And so if we focus on truly helping the next human, you can make money but also change the world. And that's what I think online course is all about.

Beautiful. If you have found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened. Thanks so much Mark for coming on. Really, really appreciate your time today.

You're welcome, man. If you want more information about being a loan signing agent, go to loan signingsystem.com that's the name of mine. If you want to I tell people on these on John. If you want a really good idea of what my funnel looks like, well, often so opt into loan signing system. Go to my webpage loan signingsystem.com it's a 40 email drip. I don't think I shared that. So if you kind of want what's Mark's five plus one formula? You know what's made him so successful? Jump in, watch the webinar. You can see all the strategies. You know. If you'd have never heard of the perfect webinar, watch the perfect webinar. Go back, watch mine, and then you can see the similarities between that. So, yeah, go to loansigningsystem.com all my social channels, loan signing system, or Mark will. So thanks for having me, brother.

Appreciate it. Thanks, dude.

Later.