Sell Online Courses Through Your Website ON AUTOPILOT

If you're using a tool like Udemy or Skillshare to sell your online course, or you're even thinking about using one of those tools to sell your online course, please don't. You're going to have a lot more success selling your online course through your own website rather than using a third-party provider like Udemy or Skillshare. Now, there are pros and cons. There are people who've been successful, but there's a couple of main reasons. Why you are way better off selling an online course or online courses through your own website. First, there's no middleman. You get to charge a lot more money for your courses, and in turn, you get to keep more revenue. The average course on Udemy or Skillshare is somewhere around like $15 or something like that, or any other platform similar to that. There's some more, some lower, but on average, they're usually around that much. You're not going to see $100 courses, $500, or even $1,000+ courses, which is what you can do selling through your website, assuming that you're providing enough value. You also get to have better relationships with your customers when you sell your online course through your own website. You're in more control of your business. And my favorite part, which is what we're going to dive deep into today, you get to create an automated funnel. Now, I know I said funnel. Don't leave me. Don't leave me high and dry. I'm not Russell Brunson. We're going to make a very simple cut-and-dry funnel, and I'm going to walk you through the entire process today. So without further ado, let's dive in to how to get discovered online, bring people to your website, and sell online courses through that on autopilot. Welcome to episode number 17 of the Profit Your Knowledge podcast. I'm your host, James Allen here to help you turn your knowledge, passions, and skills into an online business so that you can be your own boss, do work that you love in the world, and ultimately live a life of freedom. Selling online courses through your website, specifically doing it on autopilot, is how we do it. Honestly, that is the meat and potatoes of what I help people do and what I teach on this channel. If you are new, if you are new and you get value from today, or maybe you watch some other episodes, please do hit that subscribe button and like the video. Just show me some love because it helps me see that I am making a big impact in other people's lives. I'm really doing the best that I can to give you guys the best information that I have learned and continue to learn in terms of building an online business around the things that we love. So today's going to be all about that. I'm literally going deep dive, how to get discovered, how to bring people to your website, and sell your online courses through your own website. Again, you just have a lot more control when you're able to sell an online course through your own website. Udemy, Skillshare, any other tool like that can go down any second. They could just stop promoting your course. You know, I, I don't— I haven't sold courses through Udemy, but I have met people who have, and I've heard things about it. I've read about it. And selling through your own website is just way better because, yeah, you get to charge more for your courses too. And you just have a lot more control over your business, which I'm a big fan of myself. So before we get too deep into the content, if you're someone who's thinking about building an online course, which I imagine you are, and selling that online course not just through your website, but making it automatic, making it a recurring revenue stream, or having multiple courses that are sold automatically through your own website, then I highly recommend you pick up a 5-step action guide that I created. It walks you through the exact process. You can replicate this process with every course from a mini course to a full-fledged course to one-on-one coaching programs if you wanted to as well. It's really a short guide. It's actionable. I wrote down this entire model and method, compacted it into an 8-page PDF to make it as actionable as possible, like bullet notes. You know, bullet points, give you the action steps because I want it to really help you and actually be a great resource that you can pull up and you could say, okay, now I know what to do first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. If this is something that you are interested in, even if you don't know what your idea is and you're just kind of browsing about online courses, listening to this or watching this, this will still be valuable for you because that's the first step, figuring out what that winning idea is and the target audience as well. So to pick up your guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide. It's free, it's yours, it's my gift to you. And there's a link in the description of this episode as well. So let's dive into this, how to actually sell online courses through your website and make it automatic, sell it on autopilot. I'm assuming that you have an online course right now. I do not know where you are at right now because I'm just making this episode, so I don't know where you're at, but if you— I'm assuming that you already have an online course and you're thinking about where am I going to actually put this thing up? I'm thinking about doing it through my website or doing it on something like Udemy or Skillshare or something like that. Um, if that's you, here's what we're going to do. Here's the game plan. First, I hope you— like, I'm assuming that you've already done the research. You created something that, you know, people are going to like. If you haven't done that, I have other episodes on my YouTube channel or my podcast as well, where you can go look around. I talk about product creation, you know, all that kind of stuff. So you can always leave a comment down below and I can point you in the right direction if you're on YouTube. So the first thing we want to do in terms of like selling our online courses through our website is obviously to create content. We need people to get to the website somehow. And if we want to make this automatic and create this passive income stream and this autopilot version of selling our online courses, We have to create content, but a specific type of content. Content is not all created equal. Social media posts are different than a YouTube video. What I recommend is to focus on evergreen content. This is what I've learned from my mentors, and it just makes sense for a couple of reasons. Evergreen content, if you don't know, it's just sustainable, searchable, and shareable content. So think blog posts, YouTube videos, or even podcasts. If I were to tell you, pro tip over the years of me being in online business, teaching and learning this stuff, focus on blogging and YouTube's— YouTube's— YouTube videos. I would even say primarily focus on YouTube videos. So what I do is I focus on all three. Actually, I make a long-form YouTube video like this and it goes up on YouTube, but I also record the same audio file and upload it up to my podcast, which gets distributed on every major platform. I also convert the outline that I create for my content for the same YouTube video and podcast episode. And then I write up a short or semi-short, it's like 1,000 words on average, maybe 2,000 blog post depends on the piece of content. So I'm on all 3 of these and that's how I'm able to have multiple streams of traffic coming in and it's all pointing to my website. I talk a lot about content creation, evergreen content, content strategy and whatnot for our online business on this channel. I'm not going to dive too deep into it because I could literally talk about this all day. I want to keep this as concise as possible. The biggest thing to remember with content creation and evergreen content, making YouTube videos and blog posts, is to really just understand your target audience. Find the questions that they are asking related to what your course solves or your service. It can be as well. And, uh, you want to just create content answering people's questions, like in the most simple version, uh, or most simple way to put it, that is what content marketing is all about. And you want to be consistent. Think about your favorite TV show, whatever it is. I've been watching Game of Thrones, by the way, but I've been binging it. So I always think like, I can't imagine watching this when it first came out and it was like, oh, you have to wait a whole week until it comes out. But that's the thing. When shows come out, like Breaking Bad was a show I really, I love and I really got into when that first came out, a huge show, super popular, but it came out the same day and time every single week. So people would round up their friends or family and sit down and they would watch it because they knew that a new episode was going to drop every day of the week at that specific time. Okay. Or once a week at that specific time. Your, your content should be the same. Not that people are really sitting there like bookmarking something, you know, thinking like, oh, I'm going to wait until this person releases their new episode on Tuesdays at 7:00 AM or whatever. But you just want to be consistent because search engines also reward creators that are pumping out regular, consistent content. It is— people say, oh, consistency doesn't matter. It does, because the more content you can have out there answering people's questions and the more quality that content is, the more you're going to win. Okay. The other component to creating content: focus on evergreen, make it consistent, and obviously make it very valuable answering people's questions and finding those questions. Always offer a lead magnet or some sort of call to action. If you don't have a lead magnet yet, you can start with just saying, hey, leave a comment down below, share this video, share this podcast episode, um, leave a review. That's a call to action. You're asking them to do something for you once you've delivered value to them. So a lead magnet is the ideal situation in terms of selling your course through your website, especially on autopilot. And that's the next piece, building a lead magnet. A lead magnet, if you're not familiar, is just a simple PDF, like a PDF guide. Full spoiler alert, my 5-step guide is a lead magnet, but it's also super value-driven for you. Okay? It's going to really help you. And there's videos that I link inside of it. If you're interested in creating an online business, that's how you do it. You build a lead magnet. It brings people over to their website, which is where they opt in to pick up your lead magnet. You can also do— you can do the PDF guide, which I think I would recommend, or a cheat sheet or even a checklist of some kind. You can even do a video. But honestly, I would say just stick with PDF guides, cheat sheets, or checklists of some kind. And these can be anywhere from 2 to 10 pages. Some people even make a single page that they get. That's it. It does not need to be complicated. Do not make it complicated. I'm going to tell you in just a sec How to make a great lead magnet from 2 questions. And now I build mine inside of Google Docs. I go to File and then Convert to a PDF once I'm done. That's it. And then I upload it up so people can give me their email address and then get their lead magnet. The 2 questions that you can ask to make a great lead magnet are this: What is the most intense and consistent problem that your audience is currently facing, the most intense and consistent problem or challenge that your audience is facing. When you realize what that problem is, maybe you just know right off the top of your head, think about what is the single most, the single most valuable or immediate solution that you can offer to solve that problem. Okay, so what's the most intense problem, consistent problem that this person or ideal person keeps facing? What's the single most valuable or immediate solution that you can offer to solve that problem? A great example is a guy named Greg Faxon. He's a mentor of mine. He helps coaches— he's like a business coach. He helps coaches fill up their client roster, to put it simple. And he has a lead magnet called 21 Ways to Find Potential Clients, because he knows that one of the biggest problems that people have in terms of like coaches finding clients is how to find them. Where the heck do I find clients? And that's what he does. 21 ways to find potential clients. It could be like, holy crap, 21? I thought that there was just like 3 ways. I thought it was just like Facebook or Instagram. Like, no, there are many different ways you can find clients. And he lays it all out in a short guide. I think it's like 2 or 3 pages. Perfect example of a lead magnet. The biggest thing with the lead magnet is that you answer those 2 questions like we talked about. It's short, it's concise, it's easy to digest and easy to create for you. Most importantly, it's congruent with your product or service. And obviously that your target audience, it would be like a no-brainer for them to download that. So it's got to be congruent with your product or service that you're offering. Then what we want to do is create an email funnel. So recap, just real quick, you're creating evergreen content. The reason we do that too is because you can have a YouTube video or a blog post that you put up 3 years ago, or more, and it's still getting discovered, still getting shared, still people can read through it, get value from it. And in every single piece of content, you're offering a lead magnet, which is something you're giving people that's solving a quick problem for them, benefiting them in exchange for their email address. That's really it. So why does this matter to selling online courses through your website? You're getting discovered on autopilot from YouTube. YouTube is working for me right this second. I get subscribers, I get views, I get likes, comments, all that kind of stuff. My blog gets discovered. My podcast is getting discovered. These are all running 24/7, day in and day out. I'm always offering lead magnets of some kind. I have multiple different lead magnets. The primary one is my 5-step action guide. So those people can hear my content, maybe watch a couple episodes, but I keep bringing up this lead magnet. Then they're like, holy crap, I want to pick that up. You know, just give it a, give it a shot. They click it, they go over to my website, which goes to a quick squeeze page. And if you want an example of a squeeze page, it's basically just a really short page with one little option to either give you their email address or they give you their email address. That what I said? Or they can leave the page. They're either like, do you want it or no? Yes, yay or nay? So if you click on the link in the description, profityourknowledge.com/guide, It's going to take you over to my website or a page on my website that is a squeeze page. That's a great example of it right there. So build one of those for your own, um, lead magnet and just make sure that the lead magnet automatically gets delivered to them. I'll get into a couple of different tools that you can use here in just a sec, but how we're going to make it automated to where it actually sells your course through this is by creating an email funnel. I know I talked about funnels. It's okay. We're not doing any crazy pages. You're just gonna be sending a series of emails. Okay. And I'm going to walk you through exactly what that email is and what to say or what to base the email around. Just make sure that this email automation or email funnel is triggered automatically. And in order for like people to give you their email address, you have to have a tool that can allow you to collect email addresses. So it can be a tool like MailChimp. ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, or you can use Kajabi, which is what I use to run my entire online business. I actually have a link in the description. I'll put one in of a video that I did on YouTube where I did a whole run through of Kajabi. So it's like a full overview of the platform. And you can, in my opinion, it's the best tool. Kajabi is by far the best because you can sell products. My whole website is done on Kajabi. All my emails, automations, everything is done inside of Kajabi. So if you're interested in checking it out, I'll put a link in the description. You can watch full walkthrough of the video and then you can decide if it's something you'd like to look into. But yeah, so people discover you online through a podcast, YouTube channel. I hear about your lead magnet, they say, I got to have it. They click on the link, go to your website. Now they're on your site and then, um, you've automatically triggered this automation, email automation. So Important note, when you're doing Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit, it— this automatically comes with Kajabi. You have to make sure that you can use automations and there's no set amount of automations or you need at least 10. But usually it's like you can get one automation, which is like to deliver a lead magnet. If you use Mailchimp's like free plan, you have to upgrade to their like $10 plan in order to have the automation. So something to consider. You will have to make a couple investments. They're very minimal, but they're worth it. Just make sure you can use automation. So as soon as someone opts in, they get their lead magnet, and then the following day it triggers the 5-day autoresponder. Okay. And that's what it is. So we're going to send one email per day. This is the funnel for 5 days. It's a 5-day sequence. You're going to pre-write these and then you're going to put them into your software like MailChimp. They call them customer journeys. Kajabi, they're called automations or sequences, they call them. Uh, and then ActiveCampaign ConvertKit. You just need to make sure that it's a sequence that's getting delivered with you being hands-off. So the 5 emails, first email, first day, this is the day after, or actually this would be the day that someone opts in. So they're going to get their lead magnet and then another email right after they opt in. You want to teach them something. Um, and you also want to be adding value here by teaching and building trust by teaching. So we're just teaching this person something and it has to be related to your online course or your product that you have. The second day, we want to do the same thing. We want to teach, add value, build trust. That's all we're doing. So this person found us online, got a bunch of value, downloaded our lead magnet, got even more value. Now they're getting a series of emails with even more value. They're building trust with us saying, wow, this person's really helping me. This is cool. And it's all automatic. Day number 3 is each one of these emails is one day after. So the first email is immediate. As soon as they opt in, the second email is 24 hours later, the third email, 24 hours later, so on and so forth. The third email, you want to teach a little bit and then halfway through or so introduce your product. So transition into introducing the product. As if it's being the biggest solution to this problem that you're talking about. Okay. Because when you're teaching, you're teaching about what you're teaching inside your course, introducing problems. You're building a little bit like a mini series. Think about that. That's, that's how I like to think about it anyway. But yeah, introduce a product and its benefits. And then day number 4 and day number 5, you're going to pitch. You're just going to offer directly your product. Do not hold back. Don't feel like you're being sleazy. I have other videos where we talk about sales and stuff like that, but that's really it. So you're going to teach day 1, day 2, teach day 3, teach, and then transition into introducing your product and the benefits of it and how it's a great solution for their problem. Day number 4, just pure offering, talking about how awesome your product is. Day number 5, talking about how awesome your product is. Each email should build off of the previous email. We want to make it like a narrative, or like I said, an email miniseries, if you will. And it has to be congruent with your content topic, your lead magnet, and your product. All of it has to be congruent. That's what really makes this work, because if people found you online and you had like Greg Faxton, 21 Ways to Find Clients, uh, find potential coaching clients. You're like, yeah, I want to learn how to do that. Now the emails are teaching about how to find potential coaching clients or how to build your business so you can get more clients, because that's what his real offer is, getting clients. Okay, but it's all related. And then he has a product where he sells it. I know because I've gone through the whole entire thing, but that's what we want to do. That's literally just— that's how it's done. And when you're really adding value to people through your content, lead magnet, and the email sequence, and then your product is the ultimate solution, and you're being cool about it, people are gonna feel like it's a no-brainer. Is everybody gonna buy? No, but a lot of people will. And it just comes down to the amount of traffic that you have, to opt-ins, to sales. That's really the big 3 metrics that we can cover. Inside of each one of your emails, when you get to actually offering your products, so day 3, 4, and 5, you wanna make sure there's a button or a link or maybe even a couple links that all point to a sales page. Now, if you're using like WordPress, you can build a new website page that's just a big written page and it's basically just selling your course. Okay. And I have other videos, I have other resources where I talk about doing that. I, if I talked about all of this in super depth, I would be here all day. So would you. Um, but you want to lead to a sales page and then, uh, you can also use a tool like LeadPages or ClickFunnels or Kajabi. Inside of Kajabi. They make it super easy. That's again, the tool that I use, but these other pages will work fine. And yeah, like I said, WordPress, just create a new website page. Okay. So that's what we're doing. You basically just having this email sequence, giving them value, offering your product with those 5, 5 emails that I gave you. And then we obviously have to deliver your course because you're selling this directly through your website. Make sure you have a payment processor like Stripe. That's what I'd recommend. You can also use PayPal, but Stripe's just easy. It's free, kind of. They do take 0.03% of your payment. So if you sold like $200 or a $197 course, they're going to take 0.03% to them. That's like their cut, okay? But it's really minimal and it's worth it. You just need to make sure that your course can actually get delivered to people. So as soon as they say, heck yeah, I want to get it, they buy it, now it gets delivered. Okay, again, inside Kajabi, you can like say, if someone buys this, they grant this offer. They make it really easy, but it may take you a little bit of testing. Again, if you have questions, you can always leave a comment. You can use a tool like Teachable, Kartra, SamCart, or Kajabi, like I said, because these are what I'd recommend. They are more expensive because they typically have a lot more features than other tools, but they also have way better templates for actually delivering your course. Your course just feels a lot more professional. It feels a lot cleaner. So Teachable, Kartra, SamCart, Kajabi, check those out, decide on which one's best for you. A low-cost option to actually deliver your course, not my favorite, but if you're crunched on money, these can work. You can actually put your course videos on YouTube, just make them unlisted. And then what you can do is go to like a page on your website, an extra page once they've actually bought from your sales page. Where you have links to the videos or you can embed them into that page and that can be how you deliver your course. It's not my favorite because it's not the best or the most user-friendly, but it's an option. You can also use Vimeo or even Dropbox. The only thing to think about and pay attention to is bandwidth. So bandwidth is the amount of content that you're allowed to upload to these platforms. So with Vimeo, for example, I actually ran a course. One of my first courses was through Vimeo. It was before I started doing Kajabi. Vimeo was free or was really low cost up into a point where I, if I uploaded like one more video, I'd have to upgrade and it would've gone up to like $50 a month or something or $100 a month or something like that. Okay, so they really get you with bandwidth. With YouTube, having unlisted videos in like a separate playlist, the nice thing is that you have unlimited bandwidth inside of YouTube, which is super cool. The only thing is that YouTube then owns your course. You know, I think a better option would be to build out that one page and just embed the videos on your website. Just build out a separate page or put links to it that link to something else. I think embedding them into your actual website would be better. Okay, again, Kajabi, you get unlimited bandwidth with all your plans, every plan. So check out the video below. I walk you through what Kajabi is, how it works, and that's just an extra resource for you as well. Okay, so I know I covered a lot. But that's really how, how we get discovered, how we bring people to our website and how we actually sell our course and make it automatic. The real meat and potatoes of it is that you create evergreen content so people can discover you 24/7 while you're working or not, and they're always working for you. You're always offering your lead magnet, which is something that answers their most specific and intense and consistent problem with a very specific single solution. You're providing a solution to their most intense problem. It's very short and it's single, one thing. Every video is doing that. Someone could watch for a little bit, be like, I'm ready to do it. I'm going to pick it up. They download it, they give you their email address. That's where the email funnel comes in. So just 5 days. You teach, you teach again, you teach and then introduce your product, and then you pitch and then you pitch. 5 days just like that. Make sure that you have the automation feature. If you use MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, or ConvertKit, you will need to upgrade to like their, like just above their free plan in order to get that. That's typically how it works. Okay. Or check out Kajabi. That's my favorite tool. It's the one that I use. They make it super easy. And then just make sure everything's congruent. That's really the biggest thing in terms of delivering your course. Either use Kajabi, Teachable, Kartra, or SamCart, something like that, so it looks and feels really good, your course, but also you can create a separate website page in like WordPress where you just embed the videos in there. And honestly, you'll be fine. As long as you've done your research and you've created a quality course, you should be good. Okay, if you have questions, let me know down in the comments below. And most importantly, if you want just like the cut and dry action step guide to this exact process and a little bit more, then definitely check out my 5-step action plan, link in the description. It's going to walk you through all this stuff, uh, profityourknowledge.com/guide. It's free, it's my gift to you. And again, it's in the description. So pick it up, check it out, run through it, take action. That's the biggest thing. That's all I got for you today. I hope that this was able to kind of inspire you to think about selling your online course through your website. To be more profitable, to get more done, and to have more control over your business as well. That's it. If you got value from this, please subscribe, like this video, subscribe to the channel, or leave a comment below. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on what was the big takeaway from this. If you're on the podcast, you can always just email me as well. james@profityourknowledge.com. That's all I got for you. Okay. Take what you learned here. Get out there. Start selling your online course through your own website, make it automatic so that you can build a life of freedom. And I will see you in the next one.