The Art of Selling Online Courses

234 How To Actually Make Money With a Small Audience

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 234

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🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap

Alexis 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 Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Setting The Stage: Less, Better

SPEAKER_02

I think everyone's always surprised at how well my business is done for how small my audience sizes are. I have like 35 one-on-one coaching clients. I have a wait list of six months for coaching clients. 229,000 people have taken beauty courses. They have a fairly successful business, and to this point I've been able to avoid doing the things that I don't enjoy. Well, if I don't want to do it, then I'm not gonna do it well. My own kind of ethos in my business is always, you know, hours down revenue. That's what I want.

Guest Intros And Business Snapshot

SPEAKER_01

Hello, and welcome to the art selling online. My name's John Handwell. Today is the lecture. I'm gonna productivity and threat productivity. They can do more of what they want and left. Let's talk thousands of take control of their time. Our clients include Google, Lyft, Workday, Capital One, Upwork, and more. To successfully build Lyft with multiple six figures per year. Today, we're going to be talking about building an online course business in a sustainable, time-realistic way, why doing less can sometimes lead to better results, and of course, about email marketing funnels as well. Alexis, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01

And we've also lucky enough to have Dominic on the podcast today as well. And Dominic is from the team over at Data Driven Marketing, and he's going to be chiming in from time to time as well. So welcome, Dominic. Thank you very much. So, Alexis, can you talk us through a little bit more detail? Like who is it that you're helping with your courses?

SPEAKER_02

So I tend to help people who are, you know, either entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, busy executives, um, working parents, basically people with way too much on their plates. And they're trying to figure out, you know, most of I would say almost everybody I work with is actually very successful. They're just doing it by brute force, right? They are they are working too much, they are stressing too much, and they want to keep that success, but they want to do it in an easier way. Like they want to have more time for themselves and their families.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So they're not like, how can I just go chill on a beach somewhere? They're like, how can I still be super successful, but just do it without being stressed about it and in like 30 or 40 hours a week instead of 60, maybe.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like I think people are like, wow, this uh this kind of modern work world has really got me working every night after dinner, and I don't want to do that anymore.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_02

Or I don't want to be working on the weekends, or or I just don't want to be so stressed about the work that I am doing. I don't even care about the hours.

Who Alexis Helps And Why

SPEAKER_01

I just want like less stress in my and so how are you doing that with people? You've got courses, right, on Udemy. You've got courses on your website. How else are you like helping people through this? Do you do coaching with them as well?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So I have kind of four verticals in my business. So I have one-on-one coaching, I have team coaching, I have the online courses, and then I also do a lot of corporate workshops and things like that. And so it just depends on, you know, what someone's appetite is and what their budget is, right? Um, does somebody want one-on-one bespoke coaching, me hand holding, or do they, are they kind of more do-it-yourself or as want to go at their own pace, um, have got so little time that they need something like a course because they can do it in five minute chunks and make progress.

SPEAKER_01

What how what kind of percentage do each of those make up of your of your business? How does that work? They're all about a quarter-ish of my business. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. That doesn't normally work out quite as neatly as that.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, I'm sure it's not that neat, right? But it's like it's not that different. Yeah. They're all pulling, they're all all of those verticals are pulling their weight, let's say.

SPEAKER_01

And do you is there one of them that you want to do you want to grow the courses more than the others? Or are you totally happy with it being quarter each? Or how do you feel about it?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I would love to grow the courses more because I feel like, you know, my my own kind of ethos in my business is always, you know, hours down, revenue up. Like that's what I want, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, and so, you know, when you are doing live services, right? When you're coaching and when you're doing, you know, workshops and companies, that's great. I love that stuff. But it does require my time, right? Whereas courses are something that kind of compounds on the time that I've put into it.

Revenue Mix And Scaling Choices

SPEAKER_01

I was chatting with a friend the other day who he's uh he does coaching. And uh he'd been considering, he'd moved from just doing one-to-one to doing group coaching. He made a course and he was like, What I might do is just charge so much money for my coaching that I just don't need to worry about any of the rest of it. And he told me how much he was charging, and I was just like, Oh, you sound like you're on the right track. Like he worked with some very wealthy people. And I was like, Okay, cool. I mean, like as long as you get the money without increasing the number of hours, then it doesn't kind of matter too much, does it? It's just courses is one way of doing it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think there are lots of ways to do it. And then I think also it's like, I love coaching, but I also really love content creation. Like I really like making the courses. I like that process a lot. Um, like that's that's really fun for me. And I really like coaching too, but it's a lot more mentally draining. And so I, you know, I the reason I started actually the like my primary course that's on my website is because at some point during the pandemic, I had like 35 one-on-one coaching clients. And I was like, this is unsustainable. Like I need to, like, I have a wait list of six months for coaching clients. People need help now. Also, I'm kind of getting towards that burnout edge, which is not ex not at all what I want, right? And I was like, I gotta do something about this.

SPEAKER_01

You burnt out, I'll take on your problems. I'll become burnt out for it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was like, okay, I can't get this to the point where like I am no longer in integrity with what I teach, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's not a great role model. So what's the um what's the difference? Because you got Udemy course and you've got on your website. Are they the same courses just sold to different places? No, completely different courses.

Udemy Vs Signature Course Strategy

SPEAKER_02

No, they're completely different courses. So the so essentially like I got into I got into courses because in like 2018, somebody from Udemy reached out to me just cold, and they were like, hey, we don't have a great time management course for our Udemy for business product. Would you be open to creating one? And at that point, I had like never even taken an online course, right? Right. I have but then I was like, yeah, of course, sure, I'd be happy to do that. You know, and so then I did it. I found out I liked it. That initial course had quite a bit of success, and I was like, oh, that's interesting. Um, and then you know, over the years, I've created a bunch more courses for Udemy, but very narrow courses, um, much shorter courses. And then the course that I sell on my website is essentially my one-on-one coaching program repackaged as a course. And the reason that I don't sell that on Udemy is Udemy has a price cap, and that course is worth a lot more than I can charge on Udemy.

SPEAKER_01

What do you charge for that course on your site then?

SPEAKER_02

That's$697.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Oh, yeah, that's way over what yeah. Udemy stuff is like$100 reduced to$15 kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02

Completely different ballgames. Like Udemy is a volume play. It's like a low-ticket volume play. And you know, my I don't kind of don't like the word signature course, right? But like my signature course on my website um is uh just has a lot, it's a lot more value. I there's a lot more in it. Uh, you're gonna get more out of it, right? Versus Udemy is very, very targeted. I think there's so much value in the Udemy courses as well. And I've had, you know, over, I think 229,000 people have taken the Udemy courses. That's amazing. But it's a very different game.

SPEAKER_01

That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

How does that one work? You said uh Udemy business. Is that like have they got like a subscription thing that you get a little bit of money if someone takes a course, or do people buy your course with like I don't really know Udemy very much.

SPEAKER_02

So Okay, yeah. So Udemy has kind of two platforms. So they have the marketplace platform where people are just buying your course, right? And you get some amount of money from that, depending on whether it's a link that you know you derived or whether people are just finding it organically on their site, you get a different amount. And then Udemy for Business is a business subscription program that they have. And so businesses buy essentially seats in Udemy, and they have a kind of all you can eat like plan. And then you as a course creator get paid based on the amount of minutes watched of your courses each month.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So kind of like LinkedIn learning, I think it's called.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I haven't actually that's on my list to explore LinkedIn learning, but yeah, I don't know much about that one either.

Distribution, Pricing And Volume Games

SPEAKER_01

Maybe you should have 229,000 people on there as well. Yeah, that'd be great. Um so with course revenue then, is that where most of your course revenue comes from from Udemy?

SPEAKER_02

It does, yeah, right now.

SPEAKER_01

But you're looking, if you're looking to grow, are you looking to grow on Udemy or are you looking to grow your own uh the core the signature course? I mean, I think I'm happy to say signature course without air quotes and and you know Okay, we can call it signature course, and I will try to not be annoyed by that.

SPEAKER_02

Um yeah, I mean, I think I am trying to grow both. I think that the advantage Udemy has, right, is that at this point, like I can put a course up there and it will start getting traction because my other courses have traction, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um and I think that it's honestly just a lot harder to market and sell courses through your own funnel, or at least it is for me, right? And then I've certainly had some success there. But uh like I don't know any kind of coach who's like, you know what? I love doing marketing. Marketing's the best.

SPEAKER_01

That's what I want to do, right? So nearly everyone, nearly all of our clients who are making a lot of money already when they come to us before um before we've helped them. So they're all the same, right? They all hate marketing, they all don't want to do their funnels, they don't want to do email marketing. But the ones who are already making a lot of money anyway, is because they've got a big audience, because they like content creation, right? So it's well, I'm so good at content creation, I'm so good at building a YouTube audience that even though I hate doing work on the funnels and email marketing, it's I'm still making whatever it is, 30,000, 50,000 a month. And then we work with them and help them to make a lot more. But that's I think one of the crucial bits. If you want to make a lot more money from your uh from your own course on your own site, then I think it's just like it's gonna have to grow the audience quite a lot bigger there. Because you got like a, I don't know, a few thousand people on following on YouTube or something like that at the moment.

Audience Size, Platforms And Tradeoffs

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I'm a I am like a small, I'm small pickings from the audience side. Like I think everyone's always surprised at how well my business is done for how small my audience sizes are. Um and you know, I think that's it, it's an interesting thing, right, in 2026, because it's like, yeah, how much do I really want to be on all these social media platforms, right?

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's an important decision, right? You could you can be not famous and make a lot when you're doing executive coaching and you're doing uh group coaching and you've got higher ticket offers like that, because you can you can grow those kind of things through referrals to a certain extent, it's like as well as you know, YouTube audience. So it's an important decision to try and make. But if you want to make a lot from selling your own courses on your own site, you need to have some like high volume source of traffic, whether it's ads or Instagram or YouTube or whatever, right? But like every single one of our clients has got something like that if they're making a lot of money for selling course because courses is such a volume game, because the price is so much lower, it has to be the volume so much higher.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Is that something that you're thinking about, like growing because you you're obviously not completely sure, but is it something you're considering to to work on growing your YouTube audience bigger or Instagram or whatever?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think that, you know, actually I was just thinking about this the other day, and I was like, you know, I think that if I n if I'm gonna have to choose some platforms, because I'm kind of like, you know, I'm all over the place right now, but not in any kind of big way, right? And I think that like growing my YouTube and LinkedIn are actually the places that I um am most interested in. I I think like Instagram, TikTok, all of those things. One, I don't really enjoy well, I'll say I actually do love TikTok as a user, but I have I don't like TikTok at all.

SPEAKER_01

She says scrolling for hours.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I will say, like, I I actually have this deep love of TikTok, but I have recently deleted it because of all their their policy changes.

YouTube Search As A Growth Lever

SPEAKER_01

I've never installed it because I like I know that I would love it. Don't it's too dangerous and I can't trust myself. It's so dangerous.

SPEAKER_02

It is so dangerous because now, you know, I I don't have it anymore. I do still have Instagram on my phone. I find that after five minutes of scrolling at on Instagram, I'm bored. But like I could lose hours to TikTok. Like it's crazy, that algorithm. So um, so yeah, like I don't love scrolling that much. And I think that one thing that I've learned from, you know, and a number of people who have done really well on social media, right? Is that it's really a science, right? It's that they are figuring out what works, they are building scripts based on the things that like that doesn't appeal to me very much. You know, like that type of content creation doesn't really, I don't really enjoy it. I don't think it's my strong suit. Um, and it's in when I think about things, I was thinking about YouTube and I'm like, my videos on YouTube that have had the best success are my videos about tick tick. Tick tick is not tick tock, tick tick is a task manager. It's like a task manager app. And like those videos have, I don't know, 30,000 views on them. And like my other videos have very few views on them. And so I I'm thinking if I'm going to double down on a social media as traffic source, it would be YouTube and it would be for how-tos on products and things that I'm using because those intend to do the best.

SPEAKER_01

Are they is it search-based? Uh people like do you know if people are finding those videos through search or through discovery on YouTube?

SPEAKER_02

I don't know. When you ask people, like I I don't know if you've had the same experience.

SPEAKER_01

You can look on you can look on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, well, here's another thing I'm terrible at. Analytics. I hate analytics so much.

SPEAKER_01

Um if you want, we could look right now in your in your YouTube studio at the Analytics. You don't have to, if you don't want to, but like sure.

SPEAKER_02

We can. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

You want me to open it up? Yeah, yeah, open it up and share screen and I'll tell you where to click and we can have a little look at the we'll look at those top videos.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

Platform Fit: LinkedIn Reality Check

SPEAKER_01

Because it makes the reason I ask is it makes quite a big difference to the way that you create those videos. I'm an amateur in in YouTube. I started working on YouTube as a traffic source, spent about six months on it, was starting to get somewhere, and then realized that we had actually a uh a much better marketing channel that was working for us, so I kind of stopped working on it. But it's like I I knew enough to know that the search versus discovery is a very different approach. Okay, so for anybody listening, we're gonna we're gonna kind of talk you through this as we go. So can we find under content the your one of your top videos?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, how do we find that?

SPEAKER_01

Okay, go to reach, uh, which is in the top menu. How videos find it? YouTube search. Yeah. So your top one at least is yeah. So so what we've discovered. What we've discovered is yeah, 52%, 52% of people who are seeing that video is through search. There's a different approach you can use with search. There's various tools you can use to find out what terms are people searching for in your space, um, and then make videos directly addressing those. And then there's like a whole we've had Justin Brown on before, uh, who's an amazing YouTube. He he runs a YouTube channel about uh tech, but then also teaches people how to build a YouTube channel based around search as well. Interesting. Uh primal video, I think they're called. And so if you listen to the episode with uh with Justin, it might be a little bit out of date now, but it's an an absolutely great kind of class in how this whole thing works. Let me see if I can find the um the right episode. Uh Justin would have been about maybe a year or so ago, I guess. Justin Brown. Hundred and episode 151. Crush YouTube SEO with Justin Brown's tips.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Um and I'll send you the I'll send you the link. Um put it in chat. All right. So okay. So that's an option, is is YouTube and LinkedIn as the places to kind of focus on. That makes sense. Um why LinkedIn? Because you've got a lot of corporate clients?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I get a lot of corporate clients. I have a lot of work with a lot of execs, and that's my biggest followership.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. How many f how many followers you got on?

SPEAKER_02

I think around 7,000.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So just for reference to kind of help you make the right decision, we've almost never had anyone who's uh um we've talked to, who's a client, who's been a guest on here, who is making a lot of money through uh selling courses via LinkedIn. I'm not saying it's not doable. I'm just saying this so that you can be like, if I if you need to decide at some point, do I focus on YouTube or LinkedIn, you've kind of got all the information, right? We've had one person on who was absolutely crushing it with LinkedIn. She teaches how to grow your audience on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02

On LinkedIn.

Work You Enjoy Vs What Scales

SPEAKER_01

So it's kind of like an absolutely perfect fit. Her name's Lara, Lara Acosta, and she came on the podcast. She's absolutely fantastic. I've met her a couple of dinners in London as well. Episode 154, How to Grow on LinkedIn and Build a Personal Brand That Lasts. So I'm not saying so it definitely is doable. It just the the number of people who we've seen who are successfully doing it with YouTube is much, much, much higher than the number of people doing it with LinkedIn. Now it might be the fact that your audience is corporate kind of balances that out, but I felt like I better mention that so that you can kind of use that to decide. Are you gonna do both? Or you would one be better than the other, you know?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because I am not seeking a business that is a hundred percent online courses, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And then I think there's for me, I'm like, okay, there's value in kind of written thought leadership stuff on LinkedIn. And then there's also value in YouTube, of course, as well. And it's interesting, you know, I I find myself in a really interesting position, right? Because I I really like to focus on like what do I like to do? Right. Yeah. What is it that I want to do? And so that's why I'm like when I think about these platforms, I'm like, well, if I don't want to do it, then I'm not gonna do it well. You know? So like when I think about Instagram, et cetera. It's like, I feel like I I look at those things as like necessary evils. Maybe that will change at some at some time. Uh but yeah, I think about like what do I like doing? And I think that if and then I also think maybe this is false, but like I also think, well, YouTube, okay. Well, what do I go to YouTube for? I go to YouTube to search how to do something specific. Right. And so like there is, I think, that's a supposition. I think that I could do more videos like the ones that are doing well on YouTube for me. And that there would be value in that. And I definitely know, interestingly, that I have I've gotten several coaching clients through those specific YouTube videos too. So I think there's value in the growing that channel because it can grow to different verticals of my business as well.

SPEAKER_01

That makes sense. The thing with YouTube search that is really important is a viewer who comes from search is considerably more valuable than a viewer who comes from Discovery on average because they have intent.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

Practical Systems: Task Design That Works

SPEAKER_01

Because they actually they have a problem, they are trying to solve it. Whereas with Discovery, they're scrolling through YouTube looking for some kind of entertainment. And you have to make a video that is entertaining enough to get someone's interest about a topic that is also business and try and gradually move them over into now. They obviously must be thinking about that topic to some extent, or they wouldn't watch it at all. But even so, it's like it's you kind of got to try and grab their attention. Whereas a search viewer, they're like, Oh, this is what I wanted to know. I wanted to know how to do this thing. You've made a video telling me how to do this thing. Yes, great, I am now going to watch this video. And so the view time is much higher, the click-through rate is much higher, the sustainability of those videos tends to last for longer. It depends if it's a if it's a thing that will go out of date. Yeah, everything that makes Yeah. Yeah. But um, I've got videos that are still getting views from search that I made seven years ago, you know. And it's like they just keep kind of gradually cranking along. So that's that's a really positive thing. If you like watching those kind of videos, you've made some videos like that that did really well. That's a good sign that, okay, cool, there's something there that you could probably work with. Yeah, that's cool. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Uh yeah. Why did it take me? Yeah, this is this is kind of like following my whims, right? I'm like, yeah, I go, I'm over here, I'm over here, I'm doing stuff I like, I'm doing stuff I enjoy. Sometimes I'm like, yeah, my business has just grown through happenstance in some way. Like I'm sure I did things, right? But you know, I have a fairly successful business. And to this point, I've been able to avoid doing the things that I don't enjoy.

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's one of the things that I actually um Dominic can tell me how well I succeed at this, but I try and do within the business. So I'm trying to line up things that people are good at doing, things that they like doing, and what the business needs, and trying to find where's there the sweet spot between those. So for example, uh Dominic, we found was exceptionally good at strategy and was really good at talking with clients. And so he's been in charge of the group coaching program. Dominic, what do you how would you say you could be you could be honest, but maybe not brutally honest?

SPEAKER_00

I'll just agree with you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You you don't have to just agree, but if you're gonna really disagree, tell me afterwards, you know. What do you think? How well do we do at that? Like trying to make sure the business runs in that kind of that your job lines up with the things you're good at and the things that you like doing as much as possible.

Prioritisation, Constraints And Someday Lists

SPEAKER_00

Well, the point here is you can just look at our team. So we're not changing our team uh like regularly. We have the same people working for uh for the company for a few years now. So that just tells you that people have found their spot in the company and everything is working great. People are happy and they're always happy when they're doing something they love, which in my case I'm doing that. So So uh as long as you find that perfect balance, I would say that you will have a really good company that uh will eventually grow even further because you have people that are doing what they love and you have a really good person behind the brand who is making sure that everything happens that way. So yeah, that's just my two cents. Cool.

SPEAKER_01

Alexis, could you give the listeners some tips around some of the stuff that you're teaching people? Uh like what's one practical change that you think course creators can make if they're feeling if they're feeling overwhelmed by doing everything? Yeah. I mean, I think if that's the wrong question, feel free to give me a better question, you know?

SPEAKER_02

No, no, no, that's a great question. So I think that most course creators are working for themselves, right? And people who work for themselves tend to um tend to overwork and let work bleed into their the rest of their lives. Some people like that, right? Some people are like what we call integrators, where they really have like no boundaries between their work and their life and they like that. And other people do better when they are segmenting a little bit, when there is a boundary between their work and their life. And so a lot of times it's the mental boundary, not even the physical boundary. So I think a couple of things that anyone can do uh that will help them to be able to get more done, but also to have some mental space from their business, which is really important to be able to have good ideas and to maintain energy, et cetera, is to use some sort of a task system, right? That's probably why those videos about tic-tick are uh are getting more views, right? To use some sort of a task system. And it doesn't matter really what it is, as long as it has four fields, as long as it has a place for the task name, whatever that is, some sort of description area where you can put like what is the next step I need to do to move this thing forward, or next steps, a date so that you can sort by date, not due date, but like next action date. When am I gonna do this thing? When am I gonna take the next action? And some sort of a commenting field so that you can keep track of what you did and when, so that you don't have to keep all of that in your head. So I think like that's step one is get it out of your head. Because if you try to prioritize with all the things in your head, it becomes really difficult to do and it becomes overwhelming really fast. Um I can keep going. I have I have lots more to do.

SPEAKER_01

What was the difference between field two and field four? You said like a description one and then a commenting one.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So description is what we're doing next. Commenting is what has already happened, right? So most task apps will have a, you know, a comment field where you put a comment in and it timestamps it. And what this does is it helps you to, for anything that's like a longer term task or project, it helps so that if you have you ever had this situation where you show up at your computer to do something and it's something that maybe you haven't opened for a couple of days or maybe a week or two, and you spend the first 10 minutes just trying to figure out like where you were, where did you leave off, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah.

Daily Experience Over Distant Goals

SPEAKER_02

Right. Or if you are like, wait, I I this client, I think I've reached out to them a few times and they haven't gotten back to me. Like you're looking in your email to see when did I reach out? Is it appropriate to me to reach out again? You can keep all that information in the task system. And then you save yourself all of those minutes that you spent looking around for that because you just like, oh yeah, this is where I left off. This is what I did. Oh, I've emailed Alexis three times. Maybe I should pick up the phone and call her. Um, so that's the difference between the commenting field. It's like forward looking versus what's already happened.

SPEAKER_01

Gotcha. And what do you see are like any of the mistakes that people are making? Obviously, one might be not having a task list manager, but like what's some of the places where you see people are people are going wrong that are causing the problems?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I think that people are trying to do too much, right? I think almost everyone I work with comes in with the idea that some way we're just gonna be able to Tetris everything together and they're gonna be able to do everything they want to do within the time that they had to do it, right? And that's just not true. Like ambitious people, and I'm gonna count course creators in ambitious people because otherwise you wouldn't have started a business trying to do something. You want to do way more things than you have time to do. And when you're living in this kind of fantasy land that somehow you're gonna be able to get all the things done, then you don't actually focus and prioritize necessarily the right things because you're not making that decision of, okay, what are the things that are actually going to move the needle that I should focus my limited time and attention on? And what are the things that can wait or should go on the back burner, et cetera. So, you know, I'll give you an example of this. I think of more ideas that I would like to do in my business every day than is possible to even add into my task list, right? And so I have a section of my task list of undated things that are, you know, categorized called someday maybe. And this is for like all the shiny new ideas, right? Where I'm like, oh, that would be great. I would love to do that. That sounds amazing. Or like, you know, even you've you've given me two podcasts to listen to, right? I'm like, should those be the things that I really prioritize uh over the things that I really need to get done today? Probably not, right? Like there's other things that I need to do.

SPEAKER_01

It's fine, Alexis. We're just gonna keep probably. Probably. Probably.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Um so you know, I have a list, like my my list of someday maybe items is like, I don't know, 600 things long. And I will go back to that sometimes when I'm doing some planning to be like, ah, which of these ideas would be good to bring into the real world? But if I kept all of those ideas in my primary task list, I would easily become overrun with ideas and find it very difficult to prioritize or make progress on anything.

SPEAKER_01

I had a uh, I still have uh a document where I would keep all of the ideas of all the things that I'd thought of that I could be doing because my brain would just run and run and run. Yeah. And it reached the point where I had a table of contents for it because I categorized it by different areas of the business. And generally what I found was the best thing to do was put something in there and then never look at it again. Right.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01

At least got it out of my head.

Whims, New Courses And Experimentation

SPEAKER_02

Yes, that's exactly right. Because quite frankly, am I gonna do the vast majority of those 600 things on there? Probably not. But they're also not taking up mind share, right? Yeah. And so I think that's really important to be able to just recognize that we all have limited time, that even the most efficient person on the planet has a max capacity and that rest is actually really important, right? I think a lot of people think to themselves, well, I will rest when I have become successful, right? Like when I am making$30,000 a month, when I'm making$100,000 a month, then I will rest. And the reality is like you and me and everyone else, we could work 18 hours a day for the rest of our lives and there'd still be more work tomorrow. And so I don't know about everyone else, but I work for myself in large part because I want to enjoy my life, right? Because I want to be able to make the decisions around how I'm spending my time and what I'm spending it on. And quite frankly, I have a lot of hobbies. I have a family, I have a lot of things I want to do outside of that. And so if I work, work, work, work, work, work, work, I will never have time for that stuff. And I can't just wait until it's, you know, until I'm successful, because then then I'll have some other goal, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot about how most of your life is not the stuff that you were planning on doing. It's all of the just every day. How is your life day to day? How is it week to week? What are you up to? If you don't try and figure out how do I make sure all of that is good, then then that's that's most of your life that wasn't made good. So it's like, okay, well, every day when you're working ideally should actually be enjoyable. Yes. Like it shouldn't be like, oh, I'll suffer today and then tomorrow and then Wednesday and then Thursday and then Friday, so that I can go and whatever, do this thing. Because one of the things I found was that like a lot of the goals, once I hit them, you then had another thing that you wanted to achieve anyway. So it was like, well, okay, well, I better bloody enjoy it now, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I better enjoy the process to some extent. Otherwise, I'm really causing myself trouble.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think that humans in general really undervalue the day-to-day experience and overvalue the goal, which is exactly what you have just said, right? Like, even when I worked for other people a long time ago, it's like my my goal for a job was like, okay, how do I feel at the end of the day? Do I feel like crap at the end of the day? Not the job for me. But if I come home and I'm like, you know, I have time for the other things into my life, I use my brain in a way that felt good. The people that I worked with were enjoyable to be around, and I feel like I made some sort of progress, that feels like a good day. But if I don't have that, it's probably not a job I should have.

Funnels, Evergreen And Webinars

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I was working with uh uh a coach I tomorrow, and he's uh he's been on the on the podcast actually. I'm not gonna give these to you because I I know you're not gonna listen to them anyway. But episode 80. And uh I'm writing them down. Episode 80. What was the other? He came on not that long ago, actually, but I know it might not have got published quite yet. I'm not sure. Um and he asked me, like, what are your what are your goals for how you want your life to be? And I was very pleased with myself because I have them written out very clearly for myself. And there's stuff on there like uh lots of dinners with, you know, three times a week, dinners with family or friends, uh beautiful views, um to uh be in this kind of shape fitness-wise. And there's also on that list um how much money I want to make and how I want the business to run and what have you. And at the bottom of the list was the emotions I wanted to feel. And he said, How come the emotions that you want to feel are at the bottom of the list and how much money you want to make is at the top? And I was like, Well, it's just all of my goals, though not in a particular order. And he's like, No, no, I don't think that's true. He's like, I think that because money is measurable so easily, you've put that at the top of the list. Because it's easier to kind of understand and focus on. And the emotions are much harder to measure and you've put them at the bottom. And I thought about it a lot. First of all, I told him he was wrong, but then I thought about it a lot and I decided maybe he was right. So what I did is I put the emotions all as the this is the actual goal, is to feel these emotions. And then everything else was subsidiary to them. Was like, I want to earn this much money so that I can feel this thing. And what it made me realize was I was setting the goal with the idea being when I achieve the goal, I will feel the emotion. Instead of how can I feel that emotion every day and feel calm and proud and uh happy every day, not in seven years when I've hit this goal and this goal and this goal and this goal and whatever. And it was revolutionary for me. And I'm not saying I always succeed at it, but it was like, oh, this this is a very different way of thinking about life and goals and what you're actually, you know, trying to do.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. And because like this is gonna be morbid, but tomorrow isn't guaranteed, right? And so if we don't live our lives in a way that we're actually enjoying them, feeling the emotions that we want to feel today, then we may never get that, right? And that's sad. Um, you know, it what you're describing, it's like I always I always use lawyers. Sorry to throw lawyers under the bus, but I always use lawyers as an example. It's like no lawyers listen to this podcast.

SPEAKER_01

That's not true. Phil, hey, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_02

Phil, Phil, I'm sorry. Um sorry for what I'm about to say. But um you probably know colleagues like this too. Like, how many lawyers have you met who went to law school, worked at a big firm, working 100 hours a week, only to realize they hate their jobs, right? They didn't want this. It's like they have put in all the work to do the thing that they thought would bring them happiness and success, et cetera, only to wake up and realize, like, yep, I'm rich and I don't actually enjoy my day-to-day life. Sorry, Phil. Maybe you do.

SPEAKER_01

Phil's Phil's fine. Phil's uh he's done his uh his his lawyering and he's now making courses. So you know. Okay, great. Perfect.

SPEAKER_02

Well, what happened there, right? Yeah, he's doing great.

SPEAKER_01

All good. Um what's what's like next for you? What's your vision? You you kind of mentioned you want to grow the courses. Are you is that like courses more than the other parts of the business? Or is it like, no, well, it's just you want to grow courses, but you also want to grow coaching and you want to grow executive coaching and other stuff?

AI, Webinars And The Future Of Courses

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I kind of want to grow them all. And it's you're you're kind of reaching me in an interesting time because I am not a um I'm not a New Year's resolutions person. I never make New Year's resolutions, but I am a like word of the year person, right?

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And my word this year is whims.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Because I am trying actually, what you know, this conversation that we've been having is actually very much about this kind of enjoyment of day-to-day life. And what I want to do more of this year is just kind of follow my whims. So, for instance, today I am gonna be putting a new course on Udemy that is based on it's about about boundaries, that is, you know, something that I already did for a client. A client had a, they wanted me to create a series of videos for their uh staff about boundaries. And I thought, oh, I could just put this up as a course. So I'm gonna like put all those things together. And that's just like a little whim thing, right? Will this make me a lot of money? Will it not? I don't really know, but it sounds fun, right? And so uh when I think about, you know, that's why I've been thinking a lot about like what social platforms am I interested in using? Which ones am I not really interested in using right now? Um, I'm like, yeah, it's fun for me to make half two YouTube videos. I like doing that. I'm gonna try that and see if it works. But uh, but I think that when I look back at my business, the times that my business, I mean, my business is doing great now, but like the times that I felt like it's really gelling and I'm enjoying everything, it's when I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? Uh, which is probably antithetical to everything that you teach people about um, you know, about funnels and marketing and all of that stuff. And, you know, we're gonna try it. And maybe it doesn't work. And maybe you go back to the city.

Closing, Where To Find Alexis

SPEAKER_01

Antithetical, it's it's it's very different to the stuff we're teaching, but I I don't know if they are really in conflict. Like what we're saying to people is look, you spend all of your time making content that builds up a big audience and making great courses, and yet you're not making nearly as much money as you want to make. What about if you spent five hours a week or seven hours a week, or maybe even ten doing the work on the bit that you don't particularly like, but it would make you all of the money. It would allow you to probably double or maybe triple your revenue. How about that as a concept? Like not stop doing all of the other stuff that you like doing and everything you're enjoying or whatever, but just some amount of effort into this thing that is the only bit that really makes money. It's like if you depend, you know, I don't want to tell anybody what their goals are. People do none of my business. Yeah. But if people's goals are double their revenue, yeah, and they're not doing any work on email marketing funnels, it's like, uh, this is hard to kind of to make sense of. And it's like, I want you to be happy. So therefore, if I can help you to be learn how to do this thing in a way that is maybe not so distasteful, you know, you actually like the output from it. And you instead of being incredibly uncomfortable going, like, I don't know what to do, I don't know how to do it, like, oh well, now I know how what to do and how to do it, and I get something that I like at the end of it. And it's still not my ideal work, but it's like, that's okay. And it makes you all the money. It's like, well, that's probably a pretty good idea, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that seems very reasonable. It's a very reasonable approach.

SPEAKER_01

Is it sorry, like you're when you've got the Udemy audience, can you do email promotions to them through Udemy? Or like how does that work?

SPEAKER_02

So you can in a way. So you can do so you can and I do, um, but you can so you you don't I don't have their emails, right? So it's like through the Udemy system. Yeah. And then you can't email anyone that is um a learner in your courses from the Udemy business side of things, right? So you can only email people that have been in the marketplace, which I get it. Like it's annoying as a course creator, but I get it because they are saying, like, well, our, you know, our employees didn't sign up to be getting a whole bunch of emails from the courses that they're taking. Right. So so you can a little bit. And I definitely like anytime I do uh I put a new course up, I'm doing some kind of cross cross-promotions or in the, you know, but you can do like a little final lecture in Udemy where you can like promote your other courses and things like that. So there are ways to cross promote within Udemy.

SPEAKER_01

Got it. Okay. And for the promotion out to your own email list from your site, how often are you promoting your your course to that list?

SPEAKER_02

So right now I have it set up entirely this is also an experiment. I have it set up just entirely evergreen, and I'm not doing any promotions outside of, you know, people join my list, they get on the welcome sequence, they get into the um pitch sequence with deadline funnel, uh, and then they either buy or they don't, and then they get put back into that cycle every three months.

SPEAKER_01

So it's the same series of emails repeated every three months. Okay, cool. You ever tried webinars?

unknown

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

And I do, yeah. So I've done live webinars. I used to do live webinars to um sell my group coaching, which I'm not actually doing. I'm only doing team coaching now. So like if a company comes to me and they're like, hey, we want to do your coaching program for our team, I'll do that. I used to run a two-cohort a year group coaching for the course. And so I was doing webinars, live webinars for that. Uh, that was working. It was, you know, it's interesting. It was like it worked pretty well at the beginning, and then over time it worked less. Um, it seemed harder to to fill those spots. And then right now I do have an evergreen webinar for as as like part of the lead magnet for the the course.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Cool. Dominic, what's your thoughts? Is there anything that you would do you think we've learned enough that we've got anything we could suggest to Alexis in terms of what might work better for her, or have you got any other questions for her?

SPEAKER_00

Well, I saw that you don't have any order bomb cells. Is that for the main course that you have on your website?

SPEAKER_02

This is correct. And this is on my task list somewhere. Yeah, perfect. Like, think about this. Um, but it hasn't been like to be honest, like the the course side, the non-Udemy course side of my business has not been the primary thing that I've been thinking about over the past few years, right? Yeah. So it's I I literally started selling that as just a course alone, not with the group coaching last year. So no, I have not built all of that out. I had a question, I actually have a question for you guys now that I've heard about you here. Um okay, so I have this supposition that because the thing that the people I work with struggle with is time. And most of them have inboxes that are out of control and they're not reading all of their emails. Um, I just I would just be curious, like I had the supposition that like webinars, one, are not that like are a little less interesting to people who have zero time to spare. And also I'd be curious how you think about, you know, email market. I mean, I'm not gonna stop email marketing, but like how you think about different niches and their appetite for these types of um marketing and lead magnets and things.

SPEAKER_01

Webinars is an interesting one, right? So webinars worked better five or ten years ago than they work now because so many people have like seen so many webinars and it's kind of it's like a marketing tactic that's a little bit less um it's it's harder to get people onto the webinar and to to stick around. But they still work insanely well. They're still like one of the m the highest performing marketing conversion tactics that there is. I did an episode with um uh Jack Copkins a little while ago, uh where we were kind of talking this, talking this through, and he's still got it as his like the main thing that he's teaching people. I know Jacques.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah, of course, you've been on his podcast, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's awesome. So he came on, um he came on a little while ago and we kind of talked through about uh about webinars. And and I've seen it work in so many different niches, so many different spaces that even though everybody is very busy, I still think that it's like the chance of it working is high. Like all of these things write are tests to a certain extent, you know, or you could think of them as as uh as uh whim whimsies that you could try out and see that see if it works or not, right? But but it works so often that the chance of it is high. Now, does it work less well in your field where you're specifically targeting people who don't have a lot of time on their hands? Like quite possibly, right? But that doesn't mean it's not then a really good tactic. In the same way with the email marketing, it's like email marketing is so much better than all of the other tactics in terms of making sales of like low-ticket courses. And by low ticket I mean like anything under like probably 500 pounds, something like that. That it's not even worth really considering the other options. Even if it works less well in your niche than it works in somebody else's, it's like what what are you gonna do about it? Like, you know, if you make a YouTube video promoting it, the results you'll get from it are like one twentieth of what you would if you did an email promotion to an to a list that you built from YouTube. Yeah. Maybe, but I don't know if it matters enough to then necessarily do anything differently as a result of that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah. And and to be honest, like I have an evergreen webinar funnel, right? So like I am not saying I'm not doing these tactics. Um I'm just cu I was just always curious about that. And it's you know, it's interesting because yeah, I think like I have not I certainly sign up for webinars and then I uh never, I never go to them. But um but what I don't attend to them.

SPEAKER_01

Don't be ridiculous, you know.

SPEAKER_02

No, I don't attend them. But do you want to you want to know what I do do now? Sure, tell me. Okay. So when I do have something that I'm like, oh that sounds like interesting, but I'm definitely not gonna spend an hour on it. I wait for the recording. Yeah, and then I I just set up my AI note taker at the same time. And then I use granola, which let which lets me chat with the notes afterwards. So I just look at the notes and then I'm like, oh, dive deeper into that topic. So I just have the AI watch the webinar for me now, and then I look at the notes.

SPEAKER_01

Inquisit. Yeah. I think that there is I talk about this often on this podcast. There is a point in the future. Where it will be expected that there is an AI element within your course that the person can just quiz rather than necessarily take the course.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

You know, because just everybody's doing this all the time. So many people are going onto YouTube, you know, got systems for going through someone's YouTube channel and extracting all the information or saying, go and look up what does Alexis Hasselberger say about this thing and then give me the feedback and tell me what it is specifically I need to do based on everything you know about me that we kind of will need to. Maybe it's not quite yet. Some people are starting to do it, some people aren't, but like we'll need to at some point just have that as a default. It's like you've got the course, but there's also the AI which is going to be allow you to do this. Because it's great, isn't it, when you can do it. It's so as a user, it's so good.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. No, I mean I literally felt like a genius when I figured out that, like, you know, I'm not the only one who did it, but I was like, oh, I can get the information without actually showing up. Amazing.

SPEAKER_01

We had uh a guest of the day, uh Lydia Marachova. Um I'll see for everyone listening if they if I can find the um the podcast episode number. But she actually stopped selling courses and she rebuilt her entire knowledge base into a chatbot and then sold people access to the chatbot, which they can then talk to through, I think it's Telegram in her case. Um where is the episode? Ah, here we go. Episode 215, how her AI launched 3X to her best course launch. So she found she did that and then she made a great webinar for it. Yeah and then she launched it and yeah, it made three more, three times more revenue than her course business had ever made in a month from any launch.

SPEAKER_02

I love this idea.

SPEAKER_01

I love this idea so much. And so I suspect we're going to see more of those happen. If you if anyone listening has got a business that has done that, if you've done that selling an AI instead of selling your course or selling it as well, message me. I'd love to have you on uh and talk more about this and kind of find out what it is that's working. But um that was I thought really interesting to just go direct to that rather than let people go through and hack it together themselves. She built her own one and then sold it to people. And then it it it it actually chases them. It's like their coach. So she's teaching people how to learn language. And so this little uh telegram bot will then go and message people and go, so you know the thing we talked about on Tuesday. Have you done that yet? Have you implemented that? And it's just like, oh my god.

SPEAKER_02

I love it. That's so cool. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Alexis, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you getting up early, coming on, and uh sharing all of your uh your experiences and your wisdom with us. Yeah, thank you. Um if people want to go check you out, and maybe people are listening and thinking, man, I could do with some uh time management. I've got too much stress, I want to get on top of my stuff. Where should they go?

SPEAKER_02

Best place to find me is my website, which is alexishasselberger.com, which I hope you'll put in the show notes because no one will be able to spell it. Um and then I am all over the various social medias at do more stressless.

SPEAKER_01

All right. So that's Alexis Hasselberger. Alexis, I think most people can spell A L E X I S, and then Hasselberger, H A S E L B E R G E R. And we will put the link in the in the show notes as well. So it should be there too. Um Alexis, thanks so much. Really, really appreciate you coming on. Um, as always, thank you everybody for listening. And Dominic, thanks for joining us as well. Thank you.