What You Need To Create A Successful Online Course

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I'm really excited for today's guest because there's lots of applications that we can use by extracting his geeky knowledge of lots of different things. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, Six seven Sigma. You know him, you love him. He is dominating on Craigslist and Facebook with postingdomination.com thelandgeek. He is also dominating the world by helping us market our properties on landmodo.com it is a pleasure to have with me again Scott Todd from scotttodd.net Scott. How are you, Mark? I'm great.

How are you?

Good, good. See how I See how I mixed.

It up, man, I feel like I should be a NASCAR driver with, like, stickers all over my shirt, you know, like, you know.

No, you should. I think you should. I think should have posting domination.com thelandgeek sticker landmoto.com sticker scott todd.net sticker and it's all good.

Wait till the next bootcamp. Maybe I'll come in with, like, a driver's jumpsuit with all that stuff on there.

I don't think it's a bad idea. I also want to remind all the listeners, today's podcast is sponsored by Geek Pay. It is the automated set it and forget it system for getting paid online. GeekPay IO. Today's guest is really, really cool because he started in 2012, which, when you think about it, isn't that long ago, 2012. This guy's like a rocket ship. He created his very first online course through consistency, which is really important. Persistence, which may be just as important, and quality, which is just as important. He has over 400,000 students enrolled in his many courses. He is the CEO and the creator of Video School Online, and his courses have become best sellers on many of the most popular online learning platforms. He started the online course course master's podcast. Let's just face it, we're going to learn a lot from Phil Ebner. Phil Ebner, how are you?

Hey. I'm doing so good. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

So, Phil, you've got 400,000 students. Get 50 courses, you get 400 plus free tutorials. I mean, it's all about creation, right? So let's kind of talk about, like, the whole genesis of all of this. Yeah.

I started my career doing video production and that was my goal. Wanted to be a video editor, make documentaries and that was what I was doing after college. I graduated college in 2011 and I was bouncing around from a few different full time jobs, but always trying to make my own business on the side. So I was doing wedding videography, freelance video editing, all kinds of stuff on the side. Then I heard about this whole passive income thing and I was going to do a book, but that didn't end up working out. And at that same time, when I was writing my own book, I found out about online courses and this website called Udemy.com was just launching. And so I created my very first online course about video editing, which is what I know. And I made 60 bucks in that first month on Udemy.com and I got hooked. And ever since then I just kept creating courses. And it took me seven months to make $1,000 in a single month and then about two years to make 10,000 in a single month. And it's just grown since there. And like you said, being persistent and consistent, just putting out more courses, but also just a lot of content to build my brand and try to be everywhere so people somehow find me in my online courses.

It sounds a lot like Grant Cardone, Scott Todd, he wants to, I mean, just ubiquitous.

Yeah, yeah. Omnipresent, right? Like just be everywhere.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, be on YouTube, social media. To be honest, I'm bad at a lot of stuff and I'm learning a lot of this on my own. And that's the cool thing, is that you don't have to be an expert at social media to be good at this, but you can learn things along the way. So got my presence on social media, but mostly through my website and YouTube. That's where I drive a lot of my own traffic to my courses, but also these platforms like Udemy.com another one is Skillshare.com we're the author of our course and we have the rights to our course so we can put it on multiple websites, which is my strategy. And these marketplaces have millions of students on there already. So if you can get your course ranking in the search engine of these sites, you can have a lot of what I would call passive income from your course sales.

So Phil, I have a question. Yesterday, literally, I kid you not, last night I'm on Udemy and I find this course like one I was searching for the. I just did a Google search, I end up on Udemy. I find this course, I don't know, it's like 10 bucks because they have it on sale or something. I buy it, I go through it. It's like two and a half hours.

It's.

It's really lame, right? Like, okay, like, I know I can do better. What's that?

Is it my course?

No, no, no, no. I'm sure yours are much better. I mean, like, this thing is kind of. Kind of lame, right? And I know I could do much better. Okay, should that stop me. Should that stop me from, like, the fact that there's a course out there already or maybe 10 courses out there already on the same topic? Okay, like, should that stop me from looking at it and go, well, okay, maybe the market is saturated or is there just enough for everybody?

I personally feel like there's enough for everybody. Like you said, a lot of courses still are kind of that low quality in terms of production value, but also just the strat, like, the quality of teaching because it's such a hot industry right now and everyone's trying to create an online course right now. But I also think that on Udemy, students buy multiple courses, too. And I have an account manager at Udemy. We kind of work together, and they told me that it's okay if there's other courses in your niche because students buy multiple courses. And even off of Udemy, I think you can find your own audience. There's just not enough people in the world to find your own audience. And. And in every class that I've ever taught, there's always been another class or multiple classes on all of the platforms. So I wouldn't be scared of creating a class if there's other in your topic already.

It's a lot like land mark. There's just enough, right? Like, there's. There's just enough. I think that's the whole secret here in the world. There's just enough of everything.

Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, it's. It really comes down to an abundance mentality. And I think when you have an abundance mentality, it allows you to be more persistent when you do hit a roadblock, right? Because you kind of know, well, if XYZ can do it, I can do it. Right? And I can probably do it a little bit better. Right? And it's right, like, think of yourself right? Like the way you consume anything. If I'm going to read a book on marketing or management or sales, I'm not going to read one book on that topic. I will read multiple books from multiple authors, and maybe I'll have a favorite that I'll buy another book. From, but maybe I'll have 10 favorites. Right. So information in and of itself is, it's endless, it's massive. And I really think that, you know, the market is actually as big as the marketing. But I'd like to hear from Phil. Phil, what do you think of that?

Well, just. That makes me think too, just about where we are. We're recording this in the middle of 2017 and seriously, since like 2013 and 2014, people have been telling me, oh, is it too late? It's too late to get into the market. There's already too many courses. And every year people are saying that I wish I would have started in 2013, I wish I would have started in 2016. And I believe at least for the next few years, people are kind of going to continue saying that. And who knows my personal opinion? I'm always thinking that I'm like the worst case scenario guy. I'm like, okay, my course sales are going to dry up in a few months and I need to have like some sort of backup plan. And so if this continues for the next couple of years, I'll be ecstatic about it. And the reality is that online learning is here for, I would say, the long term. So, so starting now and getting your footprint in now is, I would say, the best thing to do even if you haven't started yet.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's so important in today's day and age when, you know, it's not like let's say my parents generation or grandparents generation, where you could work at one company, right. And they're going to take care of you, put money away and 40 years from now you retire. And for a lot of people, even the idea staying in one place is like anathema. Right? So it's almost like in today's world where, you know, let's face it, I mean, Scott, would you agree in a lot of industries, robots and artificial intelligence are going to take your job, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

So let's, let's just take a mid level management guy at a, at a Fortune 500 company. Right? That job will probably get taken at some point and then now that person has to create value some way. Right. A robot will not be able to create an online course. They just won't because someone has to actually plug that algorithm in. Right. I mean, it can help you make online courses, but it won't be able to do it in and of itself. So. And Phil, what if you say, well, I'm not an expert in anything, who am I to make an online course. What's your answer to that?

There's two sides of the coin with this. I think some people, I see online instructors who get really upset when there are people who aren't what I would consider the trained experts who have been in that industry for decades teaching courses about a topic. But I think there's a benefit in beginners or people who are sort of learning a skill themselves in teaching that because they are closer to the beginner who is the student. So you can teach it in a better way. So I have courses on a lot of things that I wouldn't consider I'm an expert in, but I know a lot more than the people that want to learn it. And over time, after creating 50 plus courses, I've learned how to teach things in a good way that helps students. So there's a couple different strategies with online courses. I think some people can have a lot of success with teaching one or two courses on their expertise, what they've been doing at their job for decades, what they studied in college. But then there's the strategy that I have, which is I create a lot of courses on a lot of topics. And now I'm actually partnering with a lot of other co instructors to help them teach courses, but also partake in the teaching and split the revenue. So I have like all these courses on all kinds of marketplaces that are all little streams of passive income. And that's my strategy that I've run my business off of.

Scott Todd, do you like Phil's strategy.

Or should we buy? No, I like his strategy. I really do.

So the strategy is, let's say that WordPress, for whatever reason goes down, right? Phil's got 20 other courses on 20 other different huge topics with huge markets like a WordPress. So it's sort of like this shotgun strategy of online courses at a very low price point. Like what's the average price point of a course, Phil?

Well, on Udemy, which is the biggest marketplace for online courses, the average selling price of a course is probably around 15 doll. Now that's another thing people get kind of scared about because they're like, how can I make enough any kind of money when my courses are going to be sold for $15? And hey, my courses are worth more than $15. Why is Udemy selling them for 10, $15 every day? And that's just the mark, that marketplace. And if you want to be on Udemy, those are the rules you have to play by. But there's such a big player and they have, I think around 20 million students now that you can make a lot of money on that platform. But if you're worried about that and if you think your course is worth 200, 500, $2,000, there are other tools now that make it really easy to create your own online course or online course platform like teachable.com or thinkific.com I mean, just a few years ago it was really hard to create an online course. You had to use your own website and plugins and video hosting and all this kind of, all these things put together. But now with those tools, you can start for free. And it's your own online course platform which makes it super easy. And that's when you can sell for a higher price. And that's something that I'm moving towards, trying to sell courses at a higher price because I know at the end of the day they, I think are more valuable than 10 or $15. But it doesn't mean you can't make a lot of money from a lot of 10 or $15 sales.

You know, I was watching a video the other day, I think it was over on Sunday, and there was a guy, he was basically saying that he created, he created like a course or something, and I forgot the exact numbers, but he got it to where he was making, I think like $7,000 a month. You know, just $7,000 a month. But then he took it to ClickBank. Okay? He took it to ClickBank, offered affiliates, he reduced his share to 25%, gave the affiliates 75%. And then he took. And then because of the ClickBank traffic and because of the marketing that went behind it, his bring home now is 25,000amonth. Okay. I mean like that, that is, that's pure, that's pure scale, right? Like it's. You can't do it by yourself. You have to have people. So if you have to give up a little bit in order to get, to get more, more beats nothing.

That's amazing. I got to take that strategy.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah. I mean, so there's so many different ways to sort of create this passive income stream in online courses, right? So what is the most difficult part of creating an online course fill?

I think that a lot of people get stuck with the creation process because most of these courses are video based courses and you don't have to do it. But I mean, for example, I interviewed someone on my podcast who teaches real estate courses in Indiana and he's doing over 250k a year on his own, basically teaching these classes. And it's all just audio versions of a live training that he's done. So super simple, not that high quality. So it doesn't have to be high quality, but people get caught up on what camera should I use, what microphone should I use, how do I set it up. And to be honest, that's kind of where I had a little advantage because when I started, that's what I went to school for. I had the equipment already, so I had that leg up in creating higher quality courses. But what I say is that it doesn't have to be confusing. There are a couple simple tools that you can use. For example, when you're starting out, just create a slide based slideshow based course. You can use Google Slides, canva.com, powerPoint, Keynote, whatever, to create slides and just make it audio with your slideshow. And you need a better microphone, but you can get a blue snowball microphone on Amazon for 50 bucks and make it as simple as that. So I think that's the most confusing part. And you know, it takes a while to learn how to create a great video. But people also just get caught up on the perfectionism of it all. And I think people just have to put something out there and then make it better later on, add the video aspect later on. But just start with something simple like a slideshow base course with audio.

A slideshow based course with audio. Scott, why are you smiling?

I just, I love it. I love this strategy, right? Like I think that, I think that like everything we over complicate things, right? Like I think everybody over complicates, you know, their businesses. And I think that the secret is just doing it. You know, I'll tell you, you know, like, Phil, when I look at like Udemy's, you know, like quality requirements, you know, I get a little nervous. Like, man, am I going to go through this whole process and then they're going to look at it and go, no way. It's not going to, not going to fly. It doesn't meet our quality requirements. How do I, how do I hedge that? How do I test that out?

Well, the good thing now is that on Udemy, you do have to post a test video. So before you go through all the work of creating your course, they ask you to post a test video to make sure that you meet their requirements. So you do have to do that on Udemy, and that might take a little bit of practice. But again, with a slideshow and audio course, it shouldn't be that hard. But if you don't want to Be on Udemy. You don't have to meet all those requirements. You can post it on your own website or other platforms. But like you said, it's just doing it and getting feedback and making tweaks along the way. That is the answer. A lot of people ask me, like, how to start, how to make a lot of money initially. And I'll be completely honest, I don't have many secrets. It's just the fact that I've been doing this since 2012, and I've been doing it every month and every week since then. I've seen a lot of people start and give up who never had success, or a lot of people who had success and then sort of switched mindsets and did something else. And that's fine if you're not enjoying it anymore, but if you kept at it, you would be a lot further than if you stop. So for me, there's no secret. It's just keep doing it.

So, Scott, is that the secret to success in any business niche, whether it's online courses or real estate or selling widgets?

I think it is. I think it's showing up and just staying laser focused.

Right.

That's the hardest thing is just staying laser focused. Are focused on what you're trying to do. And I think that's where the goals and, you know, what you're trying to accomplish and knowing exactly where you're going next so that you can stay laser focused. I mean, I like Phil's strategy, too. Like, I just think that, you know, I mean, how hard can it be to create a course?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's hard. Yeah. The only tweak I would make to that as far as, like, let's just take a general success outlook is there needs to be some market research done up front. So if I'm starting to talk about selling on MySpace.com right. I'm already out of the water. I have no market there. I think that's the first thing is you gotta actually go out, ask 100 people, what do you want? Right. And then go out and then create that value. I would actually make the argument, Phil, before I would make any online course myself or Scott, I'd say sell it first, make sure there's a market there, then you're forced to make it. What do you think of that, Phil Ebner?

I like it. I like it. And I think, Pete. Well, for no one, for people who have never sold anything, I think that's intimidating to try to sell something before you create it. But it's not hard to do anymore. Like I mentioned, with those tools, teachable.com or thinkific.com you can create a landing page and sell a course before you've actually created any of that content itself. And just this whole idea of validation or validating your course topic before you create it is important when you start to grow your business. I always tell people, just create a course on something you love to see if you have fun doing the process, if you can do the process. So if that means creating a course on brewing beer or adopting cats or whatever it is, just create that course just for fun. But to grow your business, validation is huge. And I've seen personally, I didn't really start validating my course ideas until probably a year and a half ago and I've seen my course revenue grow double and triple on a month to month basis from the past couple of years. So there's other ways that I do that too. One is surveying my audience. Like you mentioned, if you have an audience, super simple, just send a survey, ask them what courses they are interested in or what they need help with, or go on Udemy and Amazon and YouTube and see are there people searching for this topic. And I'll bet that if you go on YouTube and you search for a topic and there are videos, not your videos, but just any video with millions of views and thousands of likes, there is going to be an audience for people who want that online course. And since we're speaking about this today on Udemy.com if you sign up for your instructor account, they have this brand new feature that was just launched that allows you to actually do keyword research and see what the demand is for any topic on the market. Also the median revenue for those courses and the top revenue for the top selling courses in that. For that keyword. So it's actually really easy now to see least on Udemy, what courses are validated or viable.

Six minute abs. No.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Do it.

So, yeah, like health is big. Making money is big. Weight loss is big. Programming is big. Posting financial, anything is big.

Anything to do with financial.

Yeah, financial is big. So. And we're all an expert in something. And the definition I think of an expert is somebody that you know something more than somebody else. Right. So I don't think you should be intimidated by it. I would make the argument everybody should create an online course. Phil, great, great idea. Or.

No, I say that, I say that everyone can be successful or anybody can be successful teaching an online course. Not everyone's gonna end up Doing it. But any single person can, and at this point I think any expert or any person that has their own sort of personal brand, a website where you teach something, whether in the past it's through ebooks or through blogging or YouTube or through a podcast, everyone should have an online course because people are coming to expect that. And you see it now, you see every entrepreneur out there who teaches something creating their own online course now. So it's, it's kind of one of those things nowadays. It's like you need to have an online course to, to be considered an expert in your topic. At least it could be an extra income stream on your own. Own website.

Well, yeah, I mean, and that's the thing is like who if it's, you know, let's get into the nitty gritty, like how long would it take to make an actual online course? So what's my ROI doing this man, that.

Well, that's a difficult question because it depends on a lot of factors. But let's just say that an online course typically is between, I don't know, two to four hours. Some classes can be a lot longer and for me, I've been doing it for a while. But for me, I can probably create a course if I sat down and actually did it. Outlining, scripting, perhaps recording, editing in a week to two weeks of basically full time work. But you think about that and you're getting paid month after month, year after year. And I'm sure you talk about this on the podcast, but this whole trading your hours for dollars is no more. So the hours that I put into some of my courses, I've probably been paid back thousands of dollars per hour. I actually worked creating that course and, and the follow up work isn't that much. You get some questions from students, you have to update your course from time to time if there's something new in the topic you're teaching just to keep it updated. But there's not that much work afterwards in terms of the course. Of course, if you want to grow your business, you will have to promote and I do a lot of content marketing and that takes a lot of work and stuff too. So I guess at the end of the day it's, it's not necessarily easy to get into. It's going to be a lot of work. It's not a get rich quick scheme, but I think you could create a course in less than a week if you sat down and actually just did it.

I love it. I love it. Well now, Phil Ebner, we're At that point in the podcast, we're going to put you on the spot and ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now and improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Okay, well, my tip of the week, I'll say is if you are creating an online course is to focus on how much a student gets out of your course and not how much you get out of the students in terms of money. Stop. Stop worrying about how much you're going to make from each student. If you care about actually creating a great course that helps students learn, you're going to get paid back because your course is going to get good reviews. And it's going. And basically on any marketplace, if you get a lot of good reviews, that helps your course in the search engine and that's going to help create more sales. So really, if you're starting out, stop thinking about, oh, if I make all these courses, I can make this amount of money. Just focus on creating a course that students love. And then I'm going to send people to my podcast because, not because it's my podcast, but because I've interviewed up till now over 20 experts and we put out weekly episodes of the online course Masters show. We will teach you everything you need to know about online courses that we didn't cover today. And you can find that@onlinecoursemasters.com Phil, you.

Should have Scott and I on your podcast because we actually made courses.

Let's do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I did one on the fly. Like I pre sold it and then I created the content. I knew kind of high level what I wanted to do.

I would love to, I would love to share that because I haven't had anyone talk about that idea specifically.

I did it. It was beautiful. I loved it. And that's the way I want to create content in the future.

Yeah, we're experts in repurposing content, doing it. So look how we have a podcast guest, Scott, and then, you know, judo into becoming guests. Podcast.

Yeah.

I love that. Look, man, that's how you. That's how you do it.

That's how you do it. Yeah, exactly. You can't be shy in this world. Right?

Well, the worst he could have said, Mark, was, look, I don't like you guys. No. And he still might say that off the air, like as we stop recording, be like, I hated you guys.

No.

And that's okay. Even if he said no, it's okay.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And. But I think there, you know, I think there's a lesson to be learned. Like, you know, you've got to go out there, and you've got to put yourself out there. Right. It's not easy for Phil to come talk to two people about what he's been doing. Right. I mean, it's probably easier now, but when he first started, you know, it was probably hard to start a podcast and create this content, and now he's more comfortable with it. I mean, you know, I always say embrace the suck. You've got to start somewhere, and you got to just get out there. So if we're gonna, like, audit or revisit our. Our success sort of template again, start with a good market consistency, persistence. Right. And showing up and not being. Not being scared to look silly in a way. Right.

Like, and just know. Just know that there are hundreds or thousands of other people right. Right now who are probably wanting to create a course in whatever topic you want to teach. So there is an advantage of, like you said, just doing it now and getting it up there, because there's a whole pack of people wanting to do it who might never do it, but someone else probably will, and you want to get there first.

There you go, Scott. Todd, what's your tip?

All right, Mark, this one is just for Phil. Okay. It's for other people, too. It might be for you too, Mark, but I think Phil might like this. So Phil mentioned, like, creating slides and, you know, PowerPoint and Keynote, all those are great places to create slides. I know you like Slide Beam. Beam, Cole. Mark.

Yeah, I like Slide Beam, but, you know, it's 29 bucks a month. It's not cheap.

So check out. Check out deckset. Decksetapp.com I think is what it is. And basically, it uses Knockdown, Markdown.

Markdown.

I'm out of Dutch. It uses Markdown in order to create each of the slides. So you can literally edit the slides very, very quickly. And, like, the one I've been messing with is the template called Big Text, and it kind of just fills it in on the whole screen. Great. If you're gonna, you know, do something with a lot of words. Not necessarily. I mean, you can do images, too, like screenshots, et cetera. So great. You know, a great way of creating slides really, really, really fast.

Do you have to be a programmer, though? Do you have to know Markdown?

No, Matt, because, like, once you. Once you download it and you go to edit it, it opens it up, and you can pick it up very, very Quickly, like, okay, I just do this. I put this here. I put that there.

It's.

I think you could do it, Mark.

All right, well, I mean, it's 27 bucks. It's less than one month of slide bean.

Get the trial. Try the trial first. See, right from their website. I know you like the App Store or whatever, but forget the App Store for a minute. It's right on. Oh, I see deck, set, app.com at the top. It says free trial. Give it a try.

Free trial. All right, I'm doing it right now. I'm in. I'm downloading.

$29 a month.

All right.

This.

Well, I actually. I mean, could I export out all my stuff, I don't know, into desk set? Because I'm kind of, like, locked in now. I got a lot of slides.

Yeah, see, that's how they get you.

That's how they get you. I mean. Yeah, yeah. But. All right, good on them. Okay, great tip. My tip is gonna be learn more about creation at video school online.com videoschoolonline.com. there are free courses. There are photo courses, there are video courses, there are motion graphics courses, There are business courses. It's a lot of courses. There's something for everybody, just about. And again, I think everybody should definitely create a course. And we have now a Sherpa to kind of guide us on how to make a great course. So, Phil Ebner, are we good?

We're great. Yeah. This has been fun.

Scott, are we good?

I love it. I'm good.

All right. I want to thank all the listeners again. The only way we're going to get the quality guest, like a Phil Ebner, to come on this podcast is if you got to do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, and you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review to support thelangic.com we're going to send you for free the $97 Passive Income Launch Kit.

For free.

Easy.

Five seconds. There you go. I also again, want to remind everybody, geek, Pay that IO A. Set it and forget it. Automated Financial CRM, the only one of its kind. All right, thanks, everybody. Scott, we doing this? No, let's. Let's do it, Mark. One, two, three. Let freedom ring. Phil's like, oh, boy. They're not going to come on our podcast.

I think we did pretty well.

You got to practice it for my podcast.

We've been practicing it for, like, 200 times.

Okay.

We really have. All right, thank you.

We'll just skip that on yours.

Awesome. Well, yeah, I would love to have you guys. I think it'd be great. So. Because your courses are not on Udemy, right? It's on your.

No, no. Yeah, but. Yeah, but let's. I'm going to stop the recording here. And again, thanks, everybody. And, Phil, we'll go ahead and get you all the geeky knowledge about how we create courses right after. Thanks, everybody.