FASTEST Way to $10,000 a Month by Selling Courses

The numbers used in this video are estimates for an average creator business. HeyCreator insists you share more information in the comments. We will reply to them.

How can you make $10,000 a month with online courses? What's the fastest way to do it and how much should you charge? In this video, I talk about how you can develop and sell your expertise with online courses and the fastest way to build out consistent $10,000 months. I was also an early employee at Podia, which is a platform for selling your info products. And I've worked with some of the biggest and best online course creators, including Nick Huber, Bullet Journal, Dan Go, and Amanda Gitts. I've also sold over $100,000 in my own personal courses, so I've taken these lessons and applied it to my own work, and I wanna share it with you because it can change everything about how you create content, build courses, and grow to that first $10,000 month.

[MUSIC] All right, the fastest way to $10,000 a month with courses. Matt, we talk about courses all the time. We've launched our own courses, we've launched courses for clients, and courses, as I'm sure you'll tell us, have the highest upside. You can jump way past $10,000 a month with courses. But first, how do we get to that number?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting to think about courses in two different ways. So what most people are used to when it comes to courses is the traditional, like, say, quarterly or every 6 months, or maybe even just once a year, like, course launch model. You build to a course launch, you send it to the entire list, you're going to do a cohort, there's an event aspect to it. So I want to like make people think about the way that you normally consider courses may not be in the like month-to-month sales and more of like an average over like 3 to 6 months. I made this mistake when I first became a full-time creator because I had a course launch and my, my goal was $10,000 a month. And the first launch that I did, I made $35,000 in January, and I was like, man, off to a great start. Then I didn't launch anything really in February, and I did like a little coaching program in March. Then all of a sudden I was like, oh, I really need this April launch to go well. And it did not go as well as I wanted it to. And so then all of a sudden, that $35K launch followed by, I think it was a $5K launch in April. Now I'm like, oh, I'm way off my $10K month. So important to think about if you're doing like an event-based, like launch calendar type of schedule for your courses, make sure you're kind of like averaging that out when you're thinking about what if you can get to $10K a month. The other way to think about this, and it's kind of similar to what we were talking about with coaching, is the fastest way to $10K a month with courses is to offer expensive courses. So one way to actually think about this, to connect coaching and courses together, if you're doing a higher ticket, say 2 or 3 or $5,000 coaching program, what are the common threads with your coaching clients that you could turn into a group coaching program that you turn into kind of like a course? We've talked about this with the 7 Steps to 7 Figures. We've talked about this with kind of like the Hershey Kiss model, the top-down approach of start with high-ticket coaching and move further and further down until you're doing courses and you're doing more templates. So those are other things that we can talk about, but when it comes to $10K a month courses, make sure you're averaging everything out. And it's probably going to be helpful at the beginning to think about what's the highest ticket version that I can do, because it's, again, it's probably going to be easier to get 10 people to pay you for a $1,000 group cohort model course than it is to find 50 people who are going to pay you for a $200 course.

So I wanna back up just for a second. With these courses, I wanna emphasize that they are being launched through the email list. I'll tell the quick story of how we had a client do $100,000 in a weekend and 95% of the sales came from their email list and they have 100,000 Twitter followers. So their email list is pretty big and that was enough to push them over this 100K mark. But 95% of the sales came from the list and not from social media. That's a common misconception about courses. That's the first thing. The second thing, understanding the conversion rates of that list, right? So obviously we've talked about the more subscribers you have on your list, the higher revenue numbers you have because there is a certain conversion percentage of the list, right? Because you can't expect 100,000 people on your 100,000-person list to buy. It's just completely unrealistic. It's unrealistic to expect for 50% of your list to buy. So Matt, I want to talk about a little bit these conversion percentage numbers because I want to know what's an actual percentage that might convert depending on the price of the product, right?

Yeah. Thank you so much for backing, backing me up there. That's very true. And, you know, like we said at the disclaimer at the beginning of these episodes, these numbers can vary based on, based on a lot of different factors. But let's say you have a $100 course. Well, to get to $10,000 for a $100 course, you need to sell 100 of those. And we've seen that the conversion rates for something that's like a $100 course can be like in the 7 to 10% range, possibly as high as like 12 to 15%. But it's probably not going to be higher than 15%. In fact, that would be, that would be amazing to convert 15% of your list. The other little caveat to make for this is that often your very first like major launch will be like, for a lot of people, it's going to be the best launch because that's when your true believers, your super duper fans that will literally buy anything that you, you put up, that's when like they'll do their best buying. But if we increase the price of things a little bit and say we go up to $200, well, if we're going up to $200, then we only need 50 people to buy. Well, then that is probably more in like where the $100 might be at 10% at most on average, the $200 probably more like 7%. Okay. So you would just, if you have 1,000 subscribers, you can expect probably about 70 of them to purchase. Now let's go up even further, that $500 price point. And if you go like even higher than this to say like a $1,000 cohort program, you're probably looking at something in the 2 to 3% range. In fact, this is something that we've seen with a lot of our clients that we've worked on courses with, and we've worked on courses with Bullet Journal and Dan Go and a bunch of other, bunch of other folks, is that there's surprisingly not a huge difference in conversion between like a $500 product and a $1,000 price point. Definitely don't get half the conversion. So it's like there's something about— we've talked about this on the show— there's something about that $300 to $500 range that I think is going away. It's hard to sell in that, in that range. So if you went up to $1,000, I actually think that you'd make more money if you, if you went up there, but you're probably looking at like a 2 to 3% conversion rate.

Let's go through a checklist of how someone could launch a course offer properly, because we've talked about list growth. We talked about conversion percentages, but like what actually goes into selling the course. So first, obviously audience and list size, but the second one, all of the questions that pop up, how long should my course be? What should I charge? Where do I host the landing page? Everything like what's the next step. I know I can help someone and I have an audience to do I do it. Now, how do I structure it, package it, and sell it?

Yeah, I'll say right at the top is that we do have a course launch blueprint course, course about a course that you can buy as a part of Hey Creator. You also get access to it in the Hey Creator community. But the very first thing that I would do is just put a newsletter-style landing page up, something simple, something you can do in 30 minutes, an hour at the most, to start collecting specific emails for your course waitlist. These are going to be the people that, even though we might say 10% of your list overall, would convert. For a waitlist specifically, that number goes way up. You might get 25 to 30% of a waitlist to convert. So we want to start gathering in and being specific about the subscribers, the followers, the fans that you have that are interested in this course that you're about to develop. That's the, that's the very first thing is to build a waitlist. And you can do that with a really simple, like, newsletter-style landing page. You can do it in ConvertKit. There's a bunch of other tools, but the So that's, that's step 1, build your waitlist.

Can you walk me through the other things like quickly? Like I know I need a landing page. So we've talked about that. Like how do I write like a sales email sequence or like how do I get people to be affiliates for my course?

Right.

I want to sell more. I want to exhaust every opportunity I can to make sure this course launch goes well so I can get to that $10,000 a month mark. What would you like suggest there?

Yeah. So after the waitlist, then I would start building, building the course itself and Again, a lot of variables that can go in here, but usually I look for a course that's 10 to 15 lessons, and then I'm thinking about what is the transformation that my customers, that the people going through the course can expect. And the other thing that I've been thinking about, and you can go back to our episode with Billy Broaz about this thing about like sales arguments, is what kind of beliefs do my potential buyers need to have in order to convert them to the sale? So there's a good resource that we can, we can share in the show notes in the description to kind of walk through this, but those are the things that I'm thinking about. And then in terms of the sales emails, often you should write more sales emails than you expect because I'm guessing that probably what you're thinking is 1, maybe 2 sales emails when in fact you probably need to write like 6, 8, maybe even 10 sales emails in order to like get the number of conversions that you're looking for. Now keep in mind, the waitlist is really important here that you want to send the majority of those emails to people who are on your waitlist, or if they joined like, say, a launch webinar that you had. And the other thing that's important to do is to like use these opt-out links. They're easy to use in a tool like ConvertKit where you just have a little like not unsubscribe— that's important— but a little opt-out link that says at the bottom, hey, if you're not interested in this promotion at the time, click here and we'll take you off the promotion list. And that's just a link trigger in ConvertKit. It's getting in the weeds a little bit, but Like I said, we go through this a lot in very, very fine detail in the Hey Creator community and in the course launch blueprint that you can, that you can get from Hey Creator.