The Art of Selling Online Courses

Send us Fan MailI sat down with Dan Lee, a self-taught wooden boat builder based in the Cotswolds, who turned a lifelong obsession into a full-time business, funded almost entirely by online courses he runs from a farm workshop. It's a genuinely great story.Dan started building model boats at eight and full-size ones at seventeen. When COVID hit and his previous business, making tree-shaped bookcases, looked like it was going to collapse overnight, he decided to go all in on something he'd always wanted to do. He built a website, started modernising old wooden boat plans using CAD and CNC technology, created his first online course on varnishing, and never really looked back.What I found fascinating talking to Dan is how clearly he's thought about why online teaching actually works better than in-person for hands-on crafts. The camera angles, the controlled lighting, the ability to overlay animations showing wet edges drying in real time. It's not a compromise on the in-person experience, it's genuinely better for teaching the foundations.We also got pretty honest about where Dan's business has room to grow. He's doing well with Facebook ads and his courses are covering his workshop overheads, but his email list is sitting mostly untouched. We talked through what that could mean if he actually started using it properly, and the numbers are exciting.If you're building a course business around a physical craft or a niche skill, I think you'll get a lot from this one.Check out Dan's work:🌐 http://www.danleeboatbuilding.co.uk📸 https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding▶️ https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapBrad Yates has 425,000 YouTube subscribers and 60 million views, built over nearly two decades. He has never once sat down to plan a content strategy.I had a genuinely fun conversation with Brad for this episode. He started out as an actor, trained as a hypnotherapist when his first child was on the way, stumbled into EFT tapping through a workshop, and then one day thought it would be cool to put a guided tapping video on YouTube. He uploaded it, figured he was done, and came back six months later with another idea. That's basically how the whole channel was built.What struck me most was how clearly Brad has thought about what he actually wants from his life and business, and how little he's willing to compromise on that. He talked about limiting the number of emails his marketing team sends, refusing to redo popular videos just because they performed well, and turning down tactics he knows would probably make him more money because they don't feel right. He quoted Bowie on why the mid-80s were the worst period of his career. It all hung together in a way that felt unusually honest for a business conversation.We also got into his product lineup, his two memberships, his evergreen programs, and a new platinum lifetime membership he recently launched. If you're curious how someone builds a real business almost entirely on free content and genuine purpose, Brad is a great example.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Brad's work:🌐 https:///www.tapwithbrad.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCiHZMZejDS4RIxDdBwoie9A

Send us Fan MailNeed better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesDr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know. So she started recording it. Her colleagues thought it was a strange move for a serious physician. She did it anyway.In this conversation, John sits down with Andrea to talk about how she built that audience, what she's learned about YouTube after 240 long-form videos, and where her business is headed. One shoulder exercise video she filmed in her home during the pandemic, hair a mess by the end of a full day of recording, has now crossed ten million views and generated over $60,000 in ad revenue on its own.They also get into the practical side of things: how Andrea runs two separate email lists for patients and healthcare professionals, how she uses AI to help develop scripts and thumbnail ideas, and the funnel advice John shares live on camera for growing her healthcare professional list faster.Andrea is thoughtful, generous with what she's learned, and genuinely funny. If you're a course creator who came from a professional background and wondered whether your credentials could translate into an audience, this one is worth your time.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Andrea's work:🌐 https://www.doctorandreafurlan.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrea.furlan▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaFurlan

Send us Fan MailTimotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That last one tends to annoy people. Timotej makes a pretty good case for it.They also get into the real stuff, the Facebook ads that do the heavy lifting, a Black Friday email disaster that tanked his deliverability for a year, why his School community experiments mostly flopped, how he went from doing every sales call himself to building a team of ten coaches, and the moment he raised his price to seven and a half thousand euros and a client just said yes without blinking.There's a lot of honesty in this one. Timotej doesn't sugarcoat what went wrong, and his advice to his younger self, the kid with the headset on streaming to a few hundred people on Twitch, is just two words: sell earlier.If you're building a course or coaching business and thinking about where to focus your energy, I think you'll find something useful here.Check out Timotej's work:🌐 https://timotejbonifer.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/timotejbonifer/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@timotejbonifer

Send us Fan Mail📨 Get your lead magnet ideas here: https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/8-highest-converting-lead-magnets-aMost people who build a 122,000-subscriber YouTube channel and help over 20,000 students learn an instrument have figured out marketing. Beth Blackerby hasn't. And somehow it still worked.Beth is the founder of Violin Lab, one of the very first structured online violin curricula on the internet, launched before "online course" was even a phrase people used. She started in 2007 because she noticed that adults learn the violin completely differently from children, and almost nobody was teaching to them. So she built something from scratch with no playbook, no subscription model to copy, and no real marketing strategy.In this conversation with John, they talk through how her tiered membership works, from $35 a month for full curriculum access to $95 a month for weekly personal video feedback. They get into why she built loyalty pricing that dropped members down to $10 a month over time, what made her vibrato video the one that changed everything, and why she hid a marketing trick inside one of her most popular videos that had people emailing her every single day.John also walks Beth through what an email funnel could look like built on top of everything she's already created, and it's one of those conversations where you can hear someone seeing a whole new layer of possibility for the first time.Beth also talks about the in-person workshops she's been running since 2012, including one at a music retreat outside London, and why playing together in a room is something no online forum can replace.She's warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Beth's work:🌐 https://violinlab.com/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@violinlab

Send us Fan MailScott Gardiner does around $100K a month and has never taken a single sales call. No closers, no discovery Zooms, no objection handling. Every offer is evergreen, bought at whatever hour suits the buyer, while Scott is somewhere else entirely.He helps men whose marriages are falling apart, guys whose partners have already said they're done. And he got into it the hard way. Six years ago his own wife told him she was done.Dominik sat down with Scott to hear the full story, from being made redundant during COVID, spending $15,000 on a mentor he could barely afford, grinding through a fitness offer with four offshore setters and $2,000 a week in ads, to the moment his wife said she couldn't do it anymore, and how that sent him in a completely different direction.They got into a lot of the practical stuff too. Why Scott thinks sales calls are only necessary if your offer is unconvincing. How he uses a $7 sprint course to feed his weekly subscription. The difference between problem-aware and solution-aware buyers, and why so many creators are building audiences full of the wrong one. What his email strategy actually looks like, three to five times a week, workshops, loom videos, and a document with payment at the end of a survey. And his kitchen table test for anyone thinking about launching something new.Scott is one of those guests who has clearly thought hard about all of this, and is honest about the mistakes along the way. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Scott's work:🌐 https://elevatedman.com.au/q📸 https://www.instagram.com/iamscottgardiner/

Send us Fan MailMost productivity coaches tell you to do more. Carl Pullein built a business teaching people to do less, and better. And it's working to the tune of around $300,000 a year.I sat down with Carl recently and really enjoyed this one. He's a British productivity coach based in Seoul, South Korea, with over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, 17 million views, and an email list of 25,000 to 30,000 people. He built all of it over ten years, one video a week, around two proprietary frameworks he developed himself.We talked about who he's actually helping, how his business breaks down between courses and coaching, and what's driven his growth. But honestly the most interesting part of the conversation was watching Carl work through some things in real time. He knew he was leaving money on the table with his YouTube promotions and his email list growth, and we got into the specifics of what he could change and why it would make such a difference.He's also thinking bigger. He wants $500,000 this year and $10 million by 2030, and he's got a clear idea of how corporate training fits into that picture.Carl's a thoughtful guy who's built something real, and he's genuinely honest about where he's been too relaxed and what he's going to do about it. That combination makes for a great conversation.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Carl's work:🌐  http://www.carlpullein.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Carl_Pullein

Send us Fan MailAlex Dunitz has built one of the top Italian language learning channels on YouTube. 266,000 subscribers, nearly 30 million views, a custom app with gamification, private lessons, group courses, books, webinars, trips to Italy. The whole thing.And yet, when I sat down with him, the first thing that struck me was how much opportunity he was sitting on without fully realising it.Alex is brilliant at what he does. His co-host Marta Cappellini spends around eight hours preparing a single ten-minute video. They have a genuine teaching philosophy, a real community, students who argue with them about lost points on the app. The product is genuinely good. But like so many course creators I talk to, the gap between what they've built and what they're earning is bigger than it needs to be.We talk about how Passione Italiana grew from a local adult college side hustle into a global brand, why Marta was such a turning point for the channel, and what Alex calls the "euro drop" moment, his version of the penny dropping when a student finally gets it. We also get into the gamification system he's built on his website, including a points and ranking structure where students can rise from peasant all the way to emperor using Roman coins called Sesterzi. Genuinely fun stuff.Then I put on my consultant hat for a bit and we have an honest conversation about funnels, email lists, and why pointing YouTube viewers at every product at once might be the thing holding the revenue back. Alex takes it well. Better than well, actually.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Alex's work:🌐 https://www.passione-italiana.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/passioneitaliana.official/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8gGkW17A_kbDCVNGvzGMrw

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireDerek Callan has been coaching business English for over 22 years, has clocked more than 10,000 hours of in-company training, and has built a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers and nearly 10 million views. He is, by any measure, someone who knows his stuff. So what I really wanted to get into with him was the messier side of the journey, figuring out who your real customer is, what they actually want to buy, and how to build a funnel that lines up from first click to paid client.Derek recently launched a high-ticket one-to-one coaching programme targeting professionals who freeze under pressure, presentations, meetings, the calls that matter. He sold out his founding five spots from a small segment of his email list. We talked through where to go from there, how to price it, and a specific idea around selling a paid assessment as a tripwire that leads cleanly into the main programme.We also got into what he learned from our Instant Course Sales programme, why mindset is the biggest barrier in language learning, and what it actually looks like to try to align your YouTube content, your lead magnets, and your offers when you have several courses running at once.Derek is genuinely great to talk to. Warm, thoughtful, honest about what is and isn't working. And the bit near the end about asking his wife to summarise the podcast for him... I will say no more. You will enjoy that part.Check out Derek's work:🌐  https://www.derekcallan.com/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@derekcallan-englishforpros

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideThere's a guitar teacher in Colombia who has nearly 600,000 YouTube subscribers, has taught over 70,000 students, and is personally answering WhatsApp messages from every new student himself. And that last part is completely intentional.I sat down with Miguel Martinez, founder of ClasesDeGuitarra.com.co, to talk about what's actually happening to online course businesses right now, especially in the education space. Miguel has been doing this since 2012 and he's seen a lot change, but nothing like the last 12 months. YouTube reach for his channel has dropped to around 500 views in the first 48 hours of posting. The same video on Facebook? 20,000 to 30,000 views. So he adapted.What I found really refreshing about Miguel is his philosophy around AI. Instead of trying to automate everything, he's doing the opposite. Weekly live classes, personal WhatsApp replies, a lean email list he cleans every three months so only engaged readers stay on it. He genuinely believes the answer to AI is to be more human, and he's building his entire business around that idea.We also got into TikTok, which is working for him in ways most course creators never figure out, including a smart insight about why you won't see TikTok showing up in your referral analytics even when it's driving real traffic.Miguel's market is Latin America, his courses top out at $79, and he's making this work on his own terms. It's a really different perspective from most guests we have on, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time.Hope you enjoy it.Check out Miguel's work:🌐 https://clasesdeguitarra.com.co/📸 https://www.instagram.com/clasesdeguitarracomco/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/clasesdeguitarracomco

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireNatalia Rethmeyer had 80,000 YouTube subscribers and not a single person on her email list. No tripwire, no funnel, no strategy. Just videos going out every week into what felt like a void.That's where Dominik sat down with her for this one, and what came out of it was one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.Natalia moved to Germany from Ukraine 12 years ago, couldn't speak the language despite three years of studying it, worked as a waitress while trying to get her masters, and eventually built Learn German Fast into a proper online course business with a team, a feedback system, and a list that grows by around 4,000 subscribers every month.She doesn't chase trends. She hasn't launched a new product in years. And her revenue keeps growing anyway.They get into how her email promotions actually work, why she sends around 20 emails in a two-week window and why it works, where her funnel has real gaps (Dominik is pretty direct about that), how she built a course with live teacher feedback that nobody else in her space was doing, and what she'd go back and tell herself if she could.Her answer to that last one is not what you'd expect.Dominik also pushes her on surveys, tripwires, order bumps, and the stuff most course creators avoid thinking about. She takes all of it in good spirit and it makes for a genuinely useful conversation.I think you'll like this one.Check out Natalia's work:🌐  https://learngermanfast.de/📸  https://www.instagram.com/learn.german.fast/▶️  https://www.youtube.com/c/LearnGermanFast

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideAbbie Emmons built a YouTube channel closing in on 600,000 subscribers, 7,000 students across her courses, a Patreon membership she 10x'd in six months, and a traditionally published book on the way. And she teaches people how to write novels. In this episode, I sit down with Abbie to pull apart how she actually built and runs her business. We get into the move from Patreon to her own membership site, why she prices and sells courses both inside and outside the membership, and how she turned $3 templates into a surprisingly meaningful revenue stream by simply deciding to stop giving them away for free.One moment that really stood out was Abbie describing how a single quiz video brought in around a THOUSAND new email subscribers. We also get honest about something a lot of creators struggle with. Abbie openly says her courses "kind of sit dormant" when she isn't actively promoting them, and the two of them dig into why that happens and what to do about it. I walk through the problem-agitation-solution email framework we use to give creators a real reason to talk about their courses, not just when something new launches.If you're building a creator-led course business and you've ever felt weird about promoting what you've made, this one's for you.Check out Abbie's work:🌐 http://www.abbieemmonsauthor.com📸 http://www.instagram.com/makeyourstorymatter▶️ http://www.youtube.com/abbieemmons

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapRoss Rosenberg has 38 million YouTube views, over 200,000 books sold in 12 languages, and a podcast in the top 2% globally. Ross is one of the world's leading voices on codependency and narcissistic abuse. He founded the Self-Love Recovery Institute back in 2013 and has been building his audience online ever since, mostly by figuring things out as he went, which is both the charm and the challenge of his story.We talked about how a throwaway tip at a dinner party got him onto YouTube before almost anyone else in his field. We got into why the shift from long-form to short-form content nearly crushed his business model, and what he's doing differently now to rebuild. He was refreshingly candid about a marketing company he hired that sent him clickbait scripts he flatly refused to follow, why his curated 10,000-person email list carries a 30 to 40 percent open rate, and what he's trying to get in place before he steps back at 67.Ross isn't your typical "here's the funnel that made me a million dollars" guest. He's someone who built something genuinely significant, navigated a slowdown with honesty, and is still pushing forward on his own terms. I found his perspective really refreshing.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Ross's work:🌐 https://www.selfloverecovery.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/rossrosenberg_slri/▶️  https://www.youtube.com/rossrosenberg

Send us Fan MailEddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story genuinely interesting is how he got from that COVID wake-up call to running Eddie's Drum Academy, an online platform built around a completely different way of teaching drums. Not fill packs, not lick libraries, but a creative framework that teaches drummers how to think.In this conversation, Eddie and I got into a lot. His burnout at music college and how studying meditation changed not just his playing but his whole approach to business. Why he believes you have to be okay with being ignored if you're building something real. His Meta ads funnel selling a 37-euro ebook with a 2.5 to 3.5 ROAS. How his order bumps are converting around 40%. And what he's working toward next.He's honest, thoughtful, and clearly someone who built this from scratch with no marketing background. I think you'll really enjoy this one.Check out Eddie's work:🌐 https://eddiesdrumacademy.com/📸  https://www.instagram.com/eddievandongendrums/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@eddievandongendrums⁩  

Send us Fan MailGillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and her reasoning for it is worth listening to carefully.They also get into webinars, which Gillian is pretty blunt about. She says 10% conversion is her standard, and anything under that feels like a flop to her. She breaks down exactly which price points make sense for webinars and which ones don't, which is genuinely useful if you're trying to figure out where they fit in your own business.There's also a great section on how she found and hired her integrator, how she thinks about building a small team without losing her lifestyle, and why shrinking her team actually made the business more enjoyable and sometimes more profitable.Gillian has been making videos about online business since 2017 and has clearly thought carefully about how to build something sustainable. A lot of what she shares here is quietly counterintuitive. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Gillian's work:🌐 https://gillianperkins.com🌐 https://creatorfasttrack.com🌐 https://startupsociety.com 📸 https://instagram.com/gillianperkinsonline/▶️ https://youtube.com/gillianperkinsonline/

Send us Fan MailKim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually need. She talked about how she found her real niche through trial and error, not planning, and what the analytics told her that she never would have guessed on her own.Then things got practical. John pulled up Kim's funnel live on screen and they walked through her opt-in rates, her confirmation page, her tripwire offers, and where the gaps are. It's a rare moment where you get to watch a real funnel audit happen in real time, with someone who's genuinely open about where she's leaving money on the table.They also talked about her push into in-person speaking, the challenge of getting booked when you're known as a YouTuber, and why she's on the hunt for an integrator to help rein in her visionary side.Warm, specific, and genuinely useful. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Kim's work:🌐 https://drkimfoster.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/drkimfoster/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/KimFosterMD

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapMost course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.It started with a small set of screen-recorded training videos made for new staff at his architecture practice. No grand plan, just a way to stop repeating himself. Then Brexit hit, the practice started struggling, and Adam picked the project back up with a lot more intention. He renamed it, rebranded it, and started building something much bigger.When a provider quoted him £120,000 to build a custom platform, he learned Claude Code and built it himself over three to four months. What he ended up with is not just a course library. It's got gamification, a leaderboard, AI-generated contracts, portfolio hosting, CV builders, project trackers, and an AI assistant. All built by an architect who had never coded before.He also talks about why his most valuable members never cancel, how he grew to over 150,000 Instagram followers starting with £10–15 boosts per post, and what he tells course creators whose revenue has flatlined.Adam is a genuinely straight-talking guy and this one had a lot of good stuff in it. Check out Adam's work:🌐 https://www.archademia.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/archademia_/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/archademia

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/the-complete-lead-magnet-guide David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn't really come.That's where this conversation gets really interesting.John sat down with David to dig into the gap between attention and revenue, something a lot of creators feel but rarely talk about this honestly. David runs the marketing and business side of the school while Ksenia teaches, and he's refreshingly open about what's working, what isn't, and where they've been getting in their own way.They get into the tension between being an artist and running a business, why Ksenia only wants one sale a year and what that's costing them, the €12 choreography challenge that brought in 70 new members at Christmas, and how to use analytics to figure out which part of your funnel actually needs fixing.John also walks David through how to think about conversion benchmarks, monthly promotions, and why urgency works even when it doesn't feel like "you."If you've ever felt like you're creating great content but not seeing it turn into consistent revenue, this one will resonate.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out David's work:🌐 https://kseniaparkhatskaya.com/🌐 https://secretsofsolo.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/ksenia_parkhatskaya/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@secretsofsolo⁩  

Send us Fan MailJayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and honestly, it's one of the more refreshing conversations we've had on the show. No complicated funnels, no big ad spend, no content machine. Just Jayne showing up in Facebook groups, having real conversations, and being, as she puts it, the most helpful person in the room.She also talks about how she uses her podcast not to attract new leads, but to close them. How she keeps a personal list of warm prospects on her phone. Why her affiliate partners outperform paid ads by a wide margin. And why she thinks copying someone else's funnel is a trap most course creators fall into.If you're building something in a specific niche and wondering whether you really need ads or a massive audience to make it work, Jayne's answer is pretty clear.I think you'll find this one genuinely useful.Check out Jayne's work:🌐 https://thecpsm.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/snoozefestbyjaynehavens/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Becomingasleepconsultant

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideBethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, learn to play worship songs using a simple chord-based method. She built the whole thing around four chords: C, F, G, and A minor. That's genuinely it.What I loved about this conversation is how much of Bethany's business was shaped by constraints. Health challenges that made a 9-to-5 impossible. A toxic mold situation that forced her family into her parents' basement. Five kids. And yet she and her husband built something with 450,000 monthly YouTube views, around 160,000 email subscribers, and a model that's mostly evergreen and automated.We talked about how she gets 4,300 new email subscribers a month from a lead magnet so simple it's almost obvious in hindsight, why she switched a one-time offer to a recurring membership almost overnight and barely noticed a dip, and what she wishes she'd known earlier about getting in front of real students and listening to them properly.Bethany is warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll like this one.Check out Bethany's work:🌐 https://www.simplifiedpiano.com▶️  https://www.youtube.com/c/simplifiedpiano

Send us Fan MailNeed better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesNicole Hullihen runs a full-time VP role in pharmaceuticals, leads a family, and still finds 25 hours a week to build a course business on the side. I honestly wasn't sure how that was possible, but listening to her talk about it, it starts to make sense.Nicole is the founder of Execute The Vision, where she teaches Excel and business operations skills through courses, done-for-you templates, and a work management software she built herself from scratch after deciding to learn to code a couple of years ago. She's got around 365,000 followers on TikTok and has sold to roughly 800 course customers in just over a year, all while keeping her prices deliberately low because, as she puts it, she just wants to get the information out there.We talked about how she drives traffic from TikTok and YouTube to her site, the frustrations of linking off social platforms, why templates have actually outsold her courses, what shifted in organic reach after the TikTok ban situation in the US, and her thinking on content format and hooks for educational video.There's something refreshing about someone who isn't trying to squeeze every dollar out of their audience and is just genuinely passionate about helping people work smarter. She's got a clear point of view and a lot of hard-won experience to back it up.Hope you enjoy this one.Check out Nicole's work:🌐 https://xecutethevision.com/home📸 https://www.instagram.com/xecutethevision/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@XecuteTheVision

Send us Fan MailLeah Bolden built a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and nearly 200 million views by teaching one thing really well: how to fix your home. And she did it by speaking to people exactly like a friend would, not like a tradesperson trying to impress anyone.Dominik sat down with Leah to talk about how See Jane Drill went from a classroom suggestion to a full course business, and the conversation ended up being one of the more grounded and honest ones we've had on this show.Leah talks about how a video on tape measures quietly racked up 18 million views and got Good Morning America calling. She explains why her audience turned out to be 78% men when she expected mostly women. And she gets into the real engine behind her course sales, which is soft mentions in YouTube videos and a newsletter, not complicated funnels or big launches.What really stood out was her take on community. She meets with her course students once a month on Zoom, takes their questions, and says that single hour is probably the most valuable thing she offers. She also gets honest about what she would do differently if she started over, and her answer on the membership model is worth the listen on its own.There is a book coming, some thoughts on AI that she is genuinely uncertain about, and a clear through-line across the whole conversation: authority and trust come before anything else.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Leah's work:🌐  https://seejanedrill.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCraGaDLfWec67xl9FEPndtw

Send us Fan MailPete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.We got into the structure of his three-course academy, how a software reseller deal quietly generates £50–60K a year in near-passive recurring revenue, and why his email list of 18,500 people opens his weekly digest at 60% but almost never gets asked to buy anything. Pete knows he's leaving money on the table. He's remarkably candid about it.And Pete built all of this without a plan to monetise at all. He picked up a video camera in 2009, started answering basic finance questions in the Cornish countryside, and after 150 videos got his first client completely out of nowhere. That foundation of just genuinely trying to help people is, I think, a big part of why his audience defends him when anyone questions his sales emails.Pete is thoughtful, funny, and completely honest about the gaps between where his business is and where it could be. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Pete's work:🌐 meaningfulmoney.tv🌐 meaningfulacademy.com🌐 jacksons.life📸 https://www.instagram.com/meaningfulmoney.tv▶️ https://youtube.com/@UC39PLqUmy-AKK5HGYYfwFYw

Send us Fan MailArnel Nisbet has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, 700,000 monthly views, and runs her entire business completely on her own, no team, no editor, no outsourcing. She's also a full-time mother of three. And when Dominik sat down with her for this episode, she openly admitted her biggest blind spot: "My email list is my weakness."That kind of honesty is rare, and it's what makes this conversation so good.Arnel started her channel out of pure necessity. She had three tiny kids at home, limited work options locally, and thought if she could earn enough to buy herself one cup of coffee a month from YouTube, that would be a win. Now she's built Gravotion, a growing international learning platform, and she's thinking about where it'll be in ten years, not ten months.Dominik walks her through exactly what a funnel could look like for her business, lead magnets, welcome email sequences, repeat buyer strategy, all of it. Arnel is taking notes in real time. It's one of those episodes where the guest gets genuine value on air, not just in theory.They also get into why passive income is mostly a myth, why you don't need to outsource to build something real, and why "you are your own niche" is actually useful advice and not just a cliché.Dominik hosted this one, and it's a really warm, honest conversation.Check out Arnel's work:🌐 https://arnelseverydayenglish.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/arnelseverydayenglish/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_XZoWueXyWuwVG4B_AEmmg?view_as=subscriber

Send us Fan MailLooking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapWhat happens when a digital artist with 1.1 million YouTube subscribers decides she wants to work less, not more? That's exactly where this conversation went.I sat down with Flo Visser, the founder of Art with Flo, one of the most popular Procreate tutorial channels on YouTube. Flo started the whole thing almost by accident, after a friendly Instagram competition with her boyfriend spiralled into a viral post, a Patreon membership, and eventually a full creative business built around teaching people to draw.We talked about how she structures her Patreon, why she's been on the platform for seven years and still has a love-hate relationship with it, and how she's built a library of over 250 tutorials across multiple subscription tiers. But honestly, some of the most interesting parts of our chat were about everything else.Flo is training to become a yoga teacher, planning creativity retreats that combine drawing, improv, yoga, and real human connection, and she recently became the only person in her voice acting class invited to continue to the next level. She's also figured out that her elbow is her early warning sign for burnout, which I thought was brilliant.This one was different from most episodes. Less funnel talk, more about what it actually looks like to build a business around the life you want rather than the other way around. Flo's got a clarity about what she enjoys and what she's moving toward that I found genuinely refreshing.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out Flo's work:🌐 http://artwithflo.com📸 http://instagram.com/@floortjesart▶️ http://youtube.com/artwithflo

Send us Fan MailGet your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwireMark Smith has been teaching bass guitar online since 2013. He has 450,000 YouTube subscribers, 150,000 people on his free membership, and a back catalogue of courses that includes one with 25 hours of video content. By any measure, he has built something real.And yet, sitting down for this conversation, Mark is the first to say he's left an enormous amount of money on the table. No tripwire funnel. Email campaigns with one email at the start and one at the end. About three minutes spent writing each one. Mark talks about the first two or three years when the business made nothing and his wife's gigs kept them afloat. He talks about sitting in the bath hearing PayPal pings for the very first time after launching an ebook, and thinking, we're making money. He talks about watching his friend Scott Devine pull ahead and knowing exactly why. We also get into why retirement-age students dominate music course audiences, why being relatable on YouTube matters more than projecting authority, and how Mark scripts his videos using a teleprompter while going off script the moment he picks up the bass.He's currently working through a funnel audit with our team, and it was great to have him on before that process really gets going.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Mark's work:🌐 https://www.talkingbass.net/📸 https://www.instagram.com/talkingbasslessons/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@talkingbasslessons⁩  

Send us Fan MailJason Kleinberg was trying to become a rock star. That's genuinely how this whole thing started.He played in bands, toured the world, recorded music. Sounds great until he tells you it mostly meant sleeping on floors covered in dog hair. At some point he started teaching fiddle, put some videos on YouTube for one student who kept asking him to film everything at 9pm when Jason was starving and just wanted to go home.. and somehow that turned into Fiddlehead, a full-time business doing just north of $200k a year.He didn't plan any of it. He'll be the first to tell you that.We had a really good conversation about how he built it, what makes his teaching approach different, community, AI, and what it felt like to finally get an app idea made that he'd been trying to get built for ten years. Developers kept flaking on him. He got it done with Claude Code in an hour.Jason's just a genuinely interesting person to talk to. He's honest about what he knows, honest about what he doesn't, and he's clearly still really enjoying what he does. That comes through.I think you'll like this one.Check out Jason's business:🌐 https://fiddlehed.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/fiddlehed/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@fiddl3hed

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - Get our free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsThe job market is changing fast. My guest today thinks we've got about 6 months before it looks very different to what it does now.Hemanand Vadivel is the co-founder of Code Basics, an EdTech platform out of India with 650,000 registered learners and over 6,000 five-star reviews for their courses and bootcamps in AI and data. They're doing about $2 million a year in course revenue... bootstrapped from day one, no outside funding, and no sales team.What I love about Hem's approach is how straightforward it is. 80% of everything they put out is completely free. The idea is simple... if people genuinely love what you're teaching them, they'll come back and buy the paid stuff. And it works.We got into how his whole team has shifted in the last few weeks, with everyone vibe coding and shipping products at a pace that would've seemed impossible not long ago. Development time that used to take six weeks now takes three days. They've built over 30 internal products recently with 12 already in production.We also talked about why institutional education is struggling to keep up with the rate of change in the job market right now, and what course creators should be thinking about to stay ahead of what's coming.Hem is a genuinely thoughtful guy and this ended up being one of the more interesting conversations I've had on the show in a while. Hope you enjoy it.🔗 https://www.codebasics.io📺 https://youtube.com/ ⁨@codebasics⁩  

Send us Fan MailWhat would you do if someone told you to put your entire best-selling online course on YouTube... for free?Most course creators would say no way. Emma McAdam said yes. And it took her from 100,000 subscribers to nearly a million.In this episode, my new co-host Dominik Dragun sits down with Emma McAdam, a licensed therapist and the creator behind Therapy in a Nutshell, a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers. They talk about how Emma built a thriving membership business while giving away her best content for free, how she sells online courses to people who could watch them on YouTube at no cost, and what her email marketing, sales funnel and evergreen promotions actually look like behind the scenes.If you're a course creator wondering how to grow your online course business without feeling salesy or holding back your best stuff... this one's for you.🎙️ Hosted by Dominik Dragun, co-host of The Art of Selling Online Courses📺 Therapy in a Nutshell: https://therapyinanutshell.com/📺 Emma's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TherapyinaNutshell

Send us Fan MailJoseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free.That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world.In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works in practice, what he's learned about converting free users into paying members, why a 30-day free trial completely flopped for them and what they did instead, and how he's thinking about growing the business in 2026.Really enjoyed this conversation. Joseph has built something genuinely special and there's a lot here for anyone running or thinking about running a subscription-based online course.🔗 Check out Hoffman Academy: https://www.HoffmanAcademy.com🔗 Find Joseph on social media:  @Hoffmanacademy  #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideJosh Wright is a classical pianist who's performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and on America's Got Talent. He's grown a YouTube channel to over 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views, and built a whole online course business teaching piano students all over the world.And yeah, that's all pretty cool. But maybe the more interesting part is how he actually built it.His whole channel is built around sharing his weaknesses. Not in some cringe, overly vulnerable way... just honestly. "Here's what I struggle with, here's how I fixed it." And his audience loves him for it. He actually calls it the superpower of the channel, which I think is a really good way to put it.So we got into why that works. Because I think a lot of course creators feel this pull toward seeming more professional, more polished, more put-together online. And Josh's experience is kind of the opposite. The more real he is, the more people trust him and want to learn from him.We also talked about the fear of promotion, which comes up a lot with course creators. Josh was pretty open about how uncomfortable he used to be with it and how he eventually got over it. If you've ever felt a bit weird about putting your stuff out there, that part of the conversation is worth a listen on its own.Really good episode. Hope you enjoy it.🎹 Check out Josh's work:🔗 www.joshwrightpiano.com🔗 youtube.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 facebook.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 instagram.com/joshwrightpiano🔗 Courses: https://learn.joshwrightpiano.com/#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsJames Testani has built Good Guitarist into a channel with over 600,000 subscribers and nearly a million views a month... and he did it without chasing trends or trying to game the algorithm.His whole approach has been evergreen from the start. He releases lessons, they get a trickle of views, and then a year later they're just quietly bringing in people who searched for exactly that thing. It's a slower build, but it compounds over time in a way that trend-driven content just doesn't.In this episode we get into how that translates into course sales... because the journey his students take is pretty different from what you might expect. They don't usually opt in and go straight through a funnel. They watch his lessons for months, build trust, and then one day decide they want the full structured path. That changes how you think about your email list and your promotions.We also talk about the switch from selling individual courses to a subscription model, how he's thinking about quarterly promotions now, and the challenge of building a team around a business that's very much built around one person's teaching style.And we get into hiring... specifically how hard it is to find people who actually think about your business rather than just applying a formula they've used before.🎸 Check out James's site: https://goodguitarist.com

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsTom Geiss is the founder of GD&T Basics, a training company that teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing to engineers and manufacturers. It's a topic he'll openly tell you is boring to most people... and yet he's built a seven-figure business around it with a team of 10, no paid ads, and no sales team.In this episode we talk about how Tom approaches building course content around the problems his students actually face at work, rather than just the material itself. It's a simple shift in thinking but it makes a real difference to how engaging a course becomes, and how much easier it is to sell.We also get into how he's built a bridge between selling to individuals and selling to companies, which is something a lot of course creators haven't thought much about yet. And Tom shares how his thinking about marketing has completely changed since he started the business... going from someone who wanted nothing to do with it, to someone who now sees it as the core of everything.Tom is a really thoughtful guy and it was a genuinely enjoyable conversation. I think you'll get a lot out of it.🔎 Find Tom at https://www.gdandtbasics.com/🔎 Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-geiss/ #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan MailI've had the pleasure of meeting Benny Lewis a couple of times at conferences over the years, and I'm really happy to finally have him on the show. Benny built one of the biggest language blogs in the world, with over 2 million monthly visitors at its peak, a bestselling book, and a growing team. But at the height of that success, he was working 20-hour days, clinically depressed, and struggling with his health. In this episode, Benny shares what that period really looked like, how he got through it, and why he made the decision to completely simplify his life and business.We talk about his approach to language learning and why speaking from day one is central to everything he teaches, how he built and maintains a highly engaged email list, the importance of finding your niche and owning a specific point of view, and what he's working on now as he prepares to relaunch his YouTube channel after years away from it.It's an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something online, what success can cost you if you're not careful, and how to figure out what you actually want from your business and your life. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Ready to double your course sales? Book your call at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/callLiam Ward is a blues harmonica player, teacher and founder of learntheharmonica.com. He's built a course business with 240,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views... and he barely checks his numbers.In this episode we get into why Liam thinks your business doesn't have to run your life, how he's built a passive income school that fits around his life as a musician, and why joy might be a more useful metric than revenue for a lot of course creators. We also have a genuinely good debate about data, because I'm not going to pretend I just agreed with everything he said.It's a different kind of conversation to what we usually have on the show, and I think that's exactly why it's worth your time. If you've ever felt like your business is pulling you away from the reason you started it in the first place, this one will resonate.🎶 Liam's harmonica school: https://learntheharmonica.com🎶 Check out Liam's music side of things: https://liamwardmusic.com. If you want to find out how to grow your own course business in a way that actually works for your life, head to datadrivenmarketing.co/resources where you can get access to a range of free tools and guides to help you do exactly that.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapMarnie Ginsberg built Reading Simplified from a private tutoring clinic into an online academy that's served over 16,000 members and reached more than 3 million children... and she did it with no business background and no outside capital. Which is just remarkable.In this episode we get into something that I think a lot of course creators will really resonate with. Marnie's business is literally called Reading Simplified, and yet her own instinct in business has always been to complicate things... trying every marketing channel, building out in every direction, doing all of the things at once. Sound familiar?We talk about what made her decide to stop, why doubling down on one channel is so much harder than it sounds, and how the same diagnostic thinking she uses to help struggling readers maps almost perfectly onto how you can find the bottleneck in your own sales funnel.We also get into her membership model, how she structures coaching without it eating up her margin, and the high ticket offers she's building out for 2026.If you've ever felt like you're working flat out but not quite moving forward the way you should be... this one's worth a listen.📚 We mention Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt in the episode... both well worth picking up if you haven't read them.And if you'd like to get hold of my webinar resources, just drop me an email at [email protected] and I'll put something together and send it over to you.🔗 Connect with Marnie:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReadingSimplifiedIG: https://www.instagram.com/readingsimplified/Website: https://www.readingsimplified.com#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapAlexis Haselberger has built a multiple six figure business with a small audience.. and honestly, most people are surprised when they hear that.She's a time management, productivity and stress reduction coach who helps busy professionals do more and stress less. Her clients include Google, Lyft, Workday, Capital One and Upwork, and over 229,000 people have taken her courses on Udemy.In this episode we dig into how she's built four different revenue streams that all pull their weight, why she nearly burned out with 35 one-on-one coaching clients and a six month wait list, and how that pushed her toward building courses. We talk about the difference between selling on Udemy versus selling on your own site, and why those are completely different games.We also get into her approach to YouTube and LinkedIn, and we actually pull up her YouTube analytics live to look at where her best performing videos are getting their traffic from. Turns out 52% of her top video's views come from search, which opens up a really interesting strategy for her going forward.We chat about webinars, evergreen funnels, and whether email marketing works differently when your audience is made up of super busy people who barely read their inboxes. Plus we get into some really cool stuff about AI and courses, including how one course creator replaced her course with an AI chatbot and 3X'd her best launch.And Alexis shares some genuinely practical productivity tips that I think any course creator will find useful.. especially around getting stuff out of your head and being realistic about how much you can actually get done.This was a really fun conversation. Hope you enjoy it.🔎 Find Alexis here:🔗 Website: https://www.alexishaselberger.com/ 🎙️ Do More, Stress Less Podcast: alexishaselberger.com/podcast 📖 Distraction Action Plan:  https://www.alexishaselberger.com/reduce-distraction 🔗 Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/domorestressless 🔗 Insta:  @do.more.stress.less 🔗 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@do.more.stress.less 🔗 FB Group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/domorestressless/  #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapSpencer Russell went from classroom teacher to building a business with over 5 million followers and 10,000 customers. In this episode, he shares why he believes your backup plan might actually be the thing holding you back from success.We get into the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy and how Spencer found a niche in the toddler reading space that nobody was tapping into. He talks about the moment he decided to quit his safe teaching job, even with a young kid at home, and why he believes that burning the bridge and going all in was the best decision he ever made. He shares both the spiritual and practical arguments for betting on yourself and how necessity became the fuel that drove him forward.We also dive into the future of online courses and why Spencer thinks the industry needs to evolve. He talks about protecting your business from AI, why community might be the most important differentiator going forward, and how he balances selling physical products alongside digital courses with a 50/50 revenue split.On the tactical side, Spencer walks us through his plan to use a quiz funnel that segments parents by their child's age and routes them into different webinars with tailored offers. We also talk about his email marketing challenges and what he is doing to fix them now that he has taken his business back after selling it to Love Every in 2024.🔗 Check out Spencer's work at https://toddlerscanread.com🔗 Find Spencer on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram at  @toddlerscanread  .Thanks for listening and I will catch you in the next one.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Want to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/lead-magnetWhat happens when none of the careers in your industry feel right? Sahara Rose De Vore found herself in that exact spot. She had a degree in hospitality and tourism management, she'd traveled to over 84 countries, and yet nothing in the travel industry clicked for her. So she did something most people wouldn't even consider. She created an entirely new career path and built the world's first and only ICF accredited travel coach certification program around it.In this episode, Sahara shares how she went from broke college student to building the Travel Coach Network, a global community of over 750 certified travel coaches from more than 40 countries. We talk about how she educated a market that didn't know it needed her, how she generates sales through strategic price drops, and how adding a single deadline funnel to her email list brought in over $25K. We also dig into her surprisingly low ad spend, her experiments with Reddit ads, and what she'd focus on to grow her email list from 200 opt-ins a month to over 2,000 with the 70,000 monthly visitors she's already getting.If you're a course creator trying to figure out how to sell in a niche that you've had to explain to people, this one's for you.✈️ Check out The Travel Coach Network: https://thetravelcoachnetwork.com✈️ Follow Sahara Rose on social media: @sahararosethetravelcoach🧨 Check out The Dynamite Circle: dynamitecircle.comWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Double Your Email List Guide 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guide#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Struggling with low conversions? Grab our FREE checklist of 15 must-have elements to optimize your sales pages! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsMark Smith films birds in slow motion. That's his niche. Ospreys, eagles, hawks in ultra slow motion. And it's got him 980 million views on YouTube and 6 million followers across platforms.In this episode I sit down with Mark and we get into how he built this massive audience from one incredibly specific niche. He picked up a camera again at 40, almost didn't start YouTube because he thought nobody would care, and his son had to convince him to post his first video. That video got a thousand views overnight and the rest is history.We talk about why he compares himself to Bob Ross and how the best creators make things look possible for their audience. We get into why YouTube crushes every other platform for selling online courses and why short form content doesn't convert the same way. I also pull up one of his sales pages live on the call and walk through what's working and what's missing.Mark is honest about the fact that he'd rather be outside photographing wildlife than working on his email list or his funnels. His email list is only 2,500 people despite having millions of followers. He knows he's leaving money on the table and we dig into exactly where that money is and what he could do about it.If you're a course creator with a decent audience but you know your business side isn't keeping up with your content, this conversation will hit home.🦅 Check out Mark's YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@MarkSmithphotography🎁 Want the free customer avatar course I mention during the episode? Drop me an email at [email protected] with "Customer Avatar" in the subject line and I'll send it over.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Need better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesWhat would you do if you had no audience, an email list of 50 people, and zero courses to sell?That's exactly where Trevor Dimoff was when he decided to figure out how to sell a course before he'd even built one. He talked to 50 people, listened to their problems, came up with a solution, and pitched it back to the same people he'd interviewed. The result was $2,000 in pre-sales for a course that didn't exist yet.In this episode Trevor walks through his entire process step by step. How he found people to talk to, what questions he asked, the three things he did during every call that made the pre-sell possible later, and how he delivered the pilot course live on Zoom. He's also really honest about what went wrong after that and why he lost momentum trying to scale too fast.If you're just getting started or thinking about launching something new, this is a really practical episode. Trevor doesn't sugarcoat anything and the lessons from his mistakes are just as useful as the wins.🔗 Check out Trevor's work: https://trevordimoff.com🔗 https://trevordimoff.com/aosoc🔗 If you'd like to connect with Trevor or to ask him questions about having research conversations you can contact him at: https://trevordimoff.com/aosocTrevor would like to thank Jacques Hopkins, the Online Course Guy and his Online Course Show podcast. Jacques interviewed Trevor on episode 90: https://theonlinecourseguy.comTrevor learned the process he used for market research and course creation from: Danny Iny, founder of Mirasee, where he helps online teachers and coaches monetize their gifts: https://mirasee.com#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapJori Chisholm has been teaching bagpipes online since 2003… before YouTube even existed. He was literally the first person to ever teach a bagpipe lesson on a webcam. Fast forward to today and he's running bagpipelessons.com, reaching students in 30 countries, and last year he hit 3.2 million views on Meta and 320,000 on YouTube.The wild part? He wasn't even trying to hit those numbers. His strategy was simple… post one short video every single day. And it worked.In this episode we dig into how Jori built a thriving course business in one of the smallest niches you can imagine. We talk about why he has courses AND a membership AND physical products, how he uses his email list to actually drive sales, and why he thinks AI is going to wipe out a lot of generic information-only courses but won't touch businesses built on real personal connection and trust.Whether you're in a tiny niche or a massive one, there's a lot to learn from someone who's been doing this successfully for 25 years.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🎵 Check out Jori's work at https://bagpipelessons.com🎵 Jori's YouTube channel:  https://youtube.com/bagpipelessons🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapHere's something I hear all the time... course creators telling me they feel weird about selling. They got into this to teach, not to become marketers.Kerstin Cable gets it. She's been at this since 2013, runs a language learning business, has recorded over 240 podcast episodes, and recently started AI Language Club. When I asked her about marketing, she literally said "but John, we're not marketers." And honestly, that's what makes this conversation so good.We dig into why selling courses has gotten harder post-COVID, whether social media is even worth the effort anymore, and how Kerstin promotes her stuff without feeling sleazy about it.Her approach is dead simple. Talk about what you know, then make an offer. That's it. But the way she explains it actually made something click for me.We also talk about the mindset stuff, why so many of us hold back from promoting our own work, and what changes when you reconnect with what you actually believe about your course.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketingConnect with Kerstin:🔗 https://fluentlanguage.co.uk🔗 https://AILanguageClub.com🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapAlison Ellis has made over $650K selling online courses to florists over the last 10 years. She's got 10,000+ students enrolled in her programs and literally built her office from the course revenue.But here's the thing.. a lot of the "proven" strategies just didn't work for her audience.Tripwire funnels? Didn't convert. Webinars? People signed up but didn't show. High-pressure countdown timers? Her audience doesn't respond to urgency the same way.Why? Because florists are creatives. They got into flowers because they love flowers, not because they love marketing. They'll spend $5K on a fancy design workshop but hesitate on a $500 business course.In this episode we dig into what actually works when you're selling to people who don't think like marketers. How Alison went from making YouTube videos she didn't think anyone watched.. to $9K in her first five weeks.. to building a course business that's been running for a decade.We talk about her Flower Math course, her $1,500 Art of Good Business program, her Patreon membership, the in-person workshop she runs in Vermont, and what she's changing this year to get more sales.If you sell to creatives, coaches, artists, or anyone who's not naturally business-minded.. this one's for you.🔗 Check out Alison's website at https://realflowerbusiness.com🌸 Find Alison on Instagram and YouTube at @realflowerbusiness

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Need better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesAiko Hemingway is an English pronunciation coach who went from around 4,000 YouTube subscribers to over 11,000 in about a year. One video drove most of that growth.In this episode we talk about how she researched what was working for other creators in her niche and made her own take on a high-performing topic. We also get into why her attempt to repeat that success with a similar video did not work.We discuss the tension between making content that gets views versus content that converts into paying customers. Aiko has found that her broader videos get more views but her specific pronunciation content converts better. Most course creators deal with this same challenge.We also cover how she went from targeting everyone to working specifically with Japanese company executives and professional singers. When she said everyone is welcome she got zero clients. When she niched down she started making sales.There is a good section on the mental blocks around selling. Aiko has three courses she has never promoted to her list because of self-worth issues. We talk through how to get past that using a problem-agitation-solution email format.She also shares how she landed a TEDx talk after years of future journaling and practicing at Toastmasters.🔗 Connect with Aiko at https://aikohemingway.com🔗 English pronunciation coaching: http://hatsuonkyosei.com#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Need better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesErika Quest started her online course business with just 167 email addresses scraped from her hard drive. Within a year, she had built a six-figure side hustle. Today she has around 5,000 people on her email list and 3,000 of them are paying customers. That ratio is absolutely wild.In this episode of The Art of Selling Online Courses, Erika shares how she built her platform Level Up Movement in the fitness and Pilates education space. What makes her approach different is her focus on high-touch customer service and relationship marketing. She actually responds personally to customers instead of relying on bots and automations for everything. Her philosophy is simple but powerful: loyalty is a relationship.We also talk about her business model of selling other people's courses. She finds experts in her industry, produces all the marketing and delivery, and splits the revenue with them. Her 2026 calendar is already fully booked with talent. All of this growth has happened organically with no paid advertising.Erika runs three promotions a month and hosts monthly live workshops she calls Claster Minds. She went from 20-30 attendees when she started to nearly 200 ticket sales for her most recent event.If you have been thinking about starting an online course business but feel like you are not expert enough or do not have a big audience yet, this conversation will show you what is possible when you just get started.🔗 Connect with Erika at https://levelupmvmt.com🔗 Connect with Erika on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erikaquest#onlinecourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Add 30% to your revenue with order bumps in 3 simple steps 🏅 https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/order-bump-blueprintKate Bee has helped over 4,000 women quit drinking through her online course The Sober School. In this episode we get into how she built her business, what's working in her funnel right now, and why 52% of her students go on to join her membership.Kate started out as a BBC journalist and began writing an anonymous blog about her own journey with alcohol. That turned into a coaching business that now helps women stop drinking without the shame, labels, or deprivation that often comes with traditional approaches.We talk about her lead magnet the Wine O'Clock Survival Guide and why it works so well for her audience. We get into her £47 mini course called the Sober Reset and how 12% of those buyers convert to her main programme Getting Unstuck. And we discuss why her students stick around in her membership the Stay Sober Club.Kate also shares how she thinks about selling transformation instead of information, why she focuses on making her students feel truly seen, and how she's built a community on Mighty Networks that people genuinely don't want to leave.🔗 Check out Kate's work at https://thesoberschool.com 🔗 Follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesoberschool#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapAllie Bjerk made $1 million in just 10 months selling online courses. But here's what makes her story different: she did it without building a huge audience first, without relying on freebies or lead magnets, and without spending years creating content.Instead, she went straight to selling low-ticket products to complete strangers through ads.In this episode, Allie breaks down exactly how she built her "tiny offer" funnel, from her $17 front-end product all the way through to her $25,000 coaching program. She shares why she believes you can grow your audience with buyers only, how to choose a low-ticket product that doesn't cannibalise your main course, and the psychological triggers that turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.We also get into the nitty-gritty of running ads in 2025. Allie talks about how she tests new creatives, why she starts with just $25-30 a day in ad spend, and what happened when she dropped her price from $27 to $17 (spoiler: her conversion rate tripled while everything else held steady).If you've been putting off selling because you think you need a bigger audience first, this episode might change your mind.🔗 Connect with Allie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alliebjerk🔗 Visit Allie's website at http://AllieBjerk.com#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 15 sales page elements you can't afford to miss - free checklist 📝 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/elementsKyle Buller has close to 7 million podcast downloads and sells courses for $10,500. No sales calls. No big sales team. Just his podcast doing the heavy lifting.About 70% of his high-ticket buyers tell him they signed up because they'd been listening to him for a year or two before buying. That's the power of long-form content. When somebody spends an hour with you every week, they're building a relationship and trust before you ever make an offer.In this episode we talk about why being authentic and vulnerable matters more than ever, why people are sick of the polished facade, and what happened when Kyle lost his 107,000 follower Instagram account overnight with no warning.If you've been wondering whether to focus on short-form or long-form content, this episode will help you decide.🔗 Check out Kyle's work: https://psychedelicstoday.com #OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Send us Fan Mail🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapKyle Cook launched his first course after just 3 months of experience with the topic. He offered unlimited refunds from day one. He ignored every social media platform except YouTube.Today he's got 1.7 million subscribers, 14,000 paying customers, and course launches that bring in $30K to over $100K.In this episode, Kyle and I talk about why you don't need to be an expert to teach something — and why being an expert can actually work against you. We dig into his unlimited refund policy and why it hasn't hurt his business at all. We talk about how he spends 6-9 months creating each course, with 75% of that time spent before he records a single video.Kyle's also refreshingly honest about what he's not doing well. He's got over 100,000 people on his email list and almost no automation in place. No tripwire funnel. No real welcome sequence. He admits he's leaving a lot of money on the table — and we talk through exactly what he could do to fix that.If you've ever held back on creating a course because you didn't feel ready, or you've been nervous about offering longer refund windows, this conversation will change how you think about it.#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing👨‍💻 Check out Kyle's website: https://webdevsimplified.com/🧑‍💻 Follow Web Dev Simplified on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WebDevSimplified🤝  Get In TouchIf you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.