The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry.We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions
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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:
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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.
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.
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Send a textI'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
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Send us a textHeath Adams, better known as The Cyber Mentor, built an 8-figure training business and sold it. In this episode, he shares how he did it starting from scratch with no sales team, no ad spend, and just pure organic content.We talk about how he grew 50% year over year, why he believes authenticity beats algorithm hacks, and how he scaled from a one-person operation to 30 employees before the acquisition. Heath also gets into why he focused on one channel first, how he structures his email promotions, and what he's learned about pricing from selling everything from $30 subscriptions to $2,500 live trainings.If you're building a course or training business and want to know what it actually takes to scale to 8 figures, this one's worth your time.
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Send us a textToday's episode is absolutely fascinating. I'm sitting down with Rich Thompson, who built his online tutoring business from literally zero to generating millions in revenue, and his story is going to blow your mind.Rich started out as a one-on-one biology tutor charging £200 an hour (about $300 US), which sounds amazing until you realize he could only work with about 10 students a year. He was stuck in this paradox where he'd built this successful tutoring practice but had to physically sit next to students to make money. Not exactly the location-independent lifestyle he was dreaming of.So he completely re-engineered his approach. He analyzed 10 years of exam papers, figured out exactly where students were losing marks, and created an online program that's now helped over 65,000 students. The growth was meteoric - he went from breaking even at $10,000 in year one to hitting $700,000 by year five.But here's where it gets really interesting. When COVID hit, the UK government cancelled exams and 95% of his subscribers vanished overnight. Rich watched his entire business almost disappear. He told me if he hadn't been conservative with his spending that year, it would have been the end of his company.We dive deep into his funnel, his marketing strategies, and some surprising insights about advertising to teenagers versus their parents. He shares exact numbers on ad spend and ROI that will make you rethink how you approach your own campaigns. Plus, we do a live review of his sales pages where I spot some quick wins that could dramatically increase his conversions.If you're running an online course business or thinking about starting one, this episode is packed with lessons from someone who's been through the highest highs and lowest lows. Rich's honesty about what worked, what didn't, and what nearly killed his business is refreshing and incredibly valuable.
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Send us a text Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-youWhen Wendy Solganik spent months building out a sales funnel for her art courses, she was following all the conventional wisdom. She'd already seen the Jeff Walker launch formula work in other industries. She knew the playbook. But after investing significant time, energy, and money, the funnel simply didn't convert.Instead of doubling down on what the gurus were teaching, Wendy made a counterintuitive decision. She went back to simple email marketing and built her online art school into a thriving business that now features courses from 40 different creators.In this episode, Wendy shares her journey from law school dropout to successful course creator. After developing irritable bowel syndrome from the stress of law school, she took a year off and followed her urge to learn pottery. That decision eventually led to running a stationery company for 15 years, followed by a stint in the online diet industry where she first learned about course marketing.Today, Wendy runs a unique online art platform where she positions herself as "the primary student in my own school." Rather than trying to be the star, she curates courses from artists she's genuinely excited to learn from. Her approach challenges many assumptions about online course businesses - she deliberately keeps prices low ($27-$147) despite seeing competitors charge $2,000, and she's built her success on passion rather than psychological marketing tactics.We discuss why organic Instagram is now "very very little of the effective marketing" she does, despite having a large following. How she's become "partners with Meta" through paid ads, spending significant money daily. Why she has "no idea where my sales are coming from" due to tracking challenges. And how email marketing became her most effective channel after abandoning complex funnels.Wendy's story offers a refreshing perspective for course creators who feel overwhelmed by complicated marketing systems. Sometimes the simpler path, driven by genuine passion for your subject matter, leads to better results than following someone else's formula.Check Wendy's work out: https://www.willawanders.com/
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