245 What 13 Years on YouTube Taught Me

Get your tripwire product ideas here: 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/tripwire

Mark 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  

Transcript

Big Numbers And A Bigger Lesson

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Uh 450,000 subscribers to YouTube. 99% of my revenue in a year comes from email. Got fifty thousand subscribers to that. No trickwise, none of that. I've never done that. So I've started 2013. So you can imagine the fuck. I've been there for feedback. I have got zero money for five. Throwing it all in the face.

Beginners, Intermediates, And Retirees

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello and welcome to the Art of Stelling Online Courses. We hit your winning strategies and secret hands, top performance in the online course industry. My name's John Asphalt and today's guest is Mark Smith. Now Mark is the creator of Talking Bass, which provides bass guitar courses from beginner all the way up to advanced level. He studied music, completed his bachelor's in 1998, and went on to become a professional bass player across all styles. Or, as Freddie Mercury wants to put it, he's a musical prostitute. He played in rock and metal bands before and during college, worked in theatres, function bands, jazz bands, big bands, cruise ships, tribute acts. Then he decided he didn't want to go travelling anymore and stayed home and he released his first ebook in 2013, started up a YouTube channel, released his first course in January 2015. He's been building ever since. Mark, welcome to the show, man. Hello. Great to be here. So talk us through who are you helping with your courses. Is it more focused on beginners? Is it more on advanced? Is it kind of like is it an even split? How's that work out? Beginners, I I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

I I I have no data.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

There's a lot more beginners out there, right, than there are advanced people.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

The way I look at this is that even a schmuck like me, I'm not going out and buying courses on stuff, you know, I'm not watching YouTube videos on how to play bass. Anybody above a certain level is obviously not going to be doing that. They might go and look at, I don't know, like John Patty Tucci, or one of these bass players that's like a, you know, like a massive jazz name that's going to be doing soloing and stuff like that, and you'll watch masterclasses and things like that. But in terms of online instruction, it's it's not gonna be it's certainly not advanced guys, definitely. No, yeah, yeah. Um maybe there's the very absolute beginner, uh, which is a again a very different demographic to like the intermediate kind of thing. I would say that uh myself, Scott Devine, Josh Fosgreen, all the dudes that are doing the stuff in this space, we're all dealing with the beginner to intermediate. Like the middle intermediate. A lot of those people don't think the beginners are intermediate. That does happen where they, you know, if you've been playing for a certain amount of time, you get a vibe and think, oh, you know, I'm I'm doing really I'm doing really well now, but a lot of the time there's a little bit of Dunning Kruger in there where it's like you you kind of don't know what you don't know kind of thing. So I would say it's about that. One thing I would say is that the majority are gonna be retirement age.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

That is, it seems to be a thing. That's really common in music. Music courses. I was just chatting with somebody yesterday about this. So it's not a it's not a hard and fast draw, but it's really common that music course audiences is retirement age.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yeah, definitely. And I think I've got a good take on why that is as well. I mean, because I I was I'm 50 now and I was um a kid once upon a time, and I know that at that point Yeah, believe it or not, and back then, I, you know, in terms of money, I I'd have had I'd have had to have asked my parents for um anything. I I remember so like I started in about 1990, and back then VHS um Hotlicks videos and and all this kind of thing. They were the they were the thing at that point, yeah. And even that, they were like 25 quid. Um and I was like, oh no, I you know, I it that was expensive back then. It was like, oh, uh and I'd get a Billy Sheehan one and a Stu Ham one and a John Paitucci one and and I'd have to ask my parents for the for the cash. And it's just one of those things where you just don't have that kind of money, and then as you go further along, I suppose once you get into the 20s, 30s, 40s kind of range, people have got responsibilities, they they're they they're gonna have jobs a lot of the time they've given up what they were interested in when they were 16, and then they've got jobs, they've got kids, they've got this, they've got that. Every hour of the day is taken up and they've got stuff going on, but then they hit retirement age, or they get to that age where they've got loads of disposable income and a little bit more time, and all of a sudden it's like, right, I've always wanted to learn this, or I played it back in the 60s or the 70s, and now I want to do it, and that that just seems to be the thing. That I yeah, I I I think I like I say I've not done any any research on this, uh which I ought to do, but in terms of the ages, definitely fifty fifty and above, more sixty and above.

YouTube Growth And Lead Magnet Choices

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Okay. And how big's your audience now? Because YouTube's your main thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Uh 450,000 subscribers to YouTube. Um that's been fairly consistent over the years. I mean, some people like Scott really, um, who's like the the kind of big guy in this space, he he was going up about the same rate and then all of a sudden boomed, and he's like one point something million now. And mine's been fairly consistent over the years. It goes up about two, three thousand uh a month, and it's and to be honest, it never really drops, it never goes below, it never really booms. So I've got which I kind of like, I don't mind that. As long as it's not dropping, I uh I I don't mind that. Um so there's like 450,000 on there. Uh in terms of the website, I have a free membership, which is my basically my only lead magnet these days, and that I've got 150,000 subscribed to that.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Oh wow, okay. And how's that you promote that in all your videos, or how's how do you get people into that?

Why Email Drives Nearly All Revenue

SPEAKER_01 6:05

I used to. I I'm so bad at a lot of this. I I think part of it is because I started in 2013. Um uh just after my daughter was born, I didn't want to do any um I didn't want to go away anymore. I was always going away playing. And two days after my daughter was born, um I had to go away. I was for four months. So when I came back, I was like, man, I'm not doing that again. And that's how that was born. I wanted to start doing Skype lessons. And so it started back then, and over the years, I mean it's what 2026 now, it seems it's just gone on for ages. And I've done things at certain points and then abandoned them and done other things, and it's like, you know, you just keep throwing different things out there. I I used to be very, very strict with the um members thing and the and the lead magnet side of it. I'd be on every single video that'd always be subscribe to the YouTube channel, do this, do that, you know, like ring the bell, all that kind of thing, and then oh, um uh remember to go to Talking Base, sign up for the membership and all that kind of stuff. And I did that a lot. Over time, um, especially over the past few years, I've been trying to streamline the videos a little bit more, partly because YouTube, when it was, it was it wasn't in its infancy when I started out, but there wasn't the kind of stuff that there is now. Whereas it's almost a science now when people do stuff, and it was like you just tried everything. And back then you could get away with having an intro. You know, I used to have this thing, this thing that I used to do at the beginning, and um I'd sit there talking about all the stuff that there is available. Now, like every second of the video is precious in terms of keeping people on the, you know, because the your subscriber count is a total vanity metric now. It means absolutely nothing. Like I there's people that will have 10,000 subscribers, but they'll get millions of views on certain videos. Um, it really doesn't put it out to the uh subscriber count. It used to, it used to, uh that's why a lot of my older videos are like millions of views, because that's what it used to do. But these days every time I start thinking of saying, oh, so remember, subscribe to this and do all that, it's just time I sometimes think I'm wasting. The the I think the key is to kind of integrate it into the topic, which is easier said than done. It depends on what you're talking about. But I've done it a few times where I'm kind of talking about, I don't know, arpesios or something like that, scales. And then I'll I'll kind of slip it in there, like, oh, there's a coupon code for a course, blah de blah, scales course over at Talking Base. In terms of the membership, that is the one that has kind of been pulled back quite a bit. Uh I j I tend to go more na these days for the coupon code kind of thing with a a course because I suddenly realize that I'm actually making money out of those. Not a lot. You'll get a few people, you know. I might get 10 people by a course in an evening just off one of those, you know, on the night that it goes out. And I'm like, man, I've made a couple of grand there. I might, you know, that's better than the ad revenue, that's for damn sure. So I'll, you know, do that. And yeah, that free membership thing's gone a bit by the wayside. I am going to change that though, because the one thing that you'll know about is that selling cold is just not that easy to do. And um, I do prefer getting people onto the email list um because that that has actually cut the the amount that I get per month. It used to be like about 2,000 a month that I used to get. Over the past year or so, it's gone down to about 500. 5000 when on a you know, sometimes, but that's really dropped off.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yeah, uh getting people onto the email list is definitely the way. Like in 99% of circumstances with course creators, you're better off getting people onto the email list rather than trying to sell direct. Because even though some people are loyal channel subscribers and fans and they watch all the videos and they know you're when they're warmed up already, a lot of people, I mean you can look at the stats, right? A lot of people, it's the first time they watch a video. So, all of those people, if you try and sell direct, it's just you're not got much of a chance with them, really. But if you can get them onto the email list, and it's it's not like you get a high percentage onto the email list either, but like maybe it's maybe it's two percent of the views you get on the emails. Maybe if you've got a perfect fit lead magnet, maybe it's five percent, maybe on a rare occasion it's ten, but that's very rare. It's like two two two percent is like a is a is a strong average, you know, two or three percent. Um but of those ones you get onto the email list, you've got a much higher chance of selling those guys something. If you have a tripwire straight away after the lead magnet, can you can possibly sell 10% of those people something straight away. And every month on the email list you can sell probably, if you do a really good job, like 1% of the email list something. And so the bigger the email list, every month you're kind of building up that that recurring revenue. You do you do regular promotions, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, I I mean not to the level that you would do. Um basically, when I do a promotion, it's like cause because that's how in terms of my promotions, it's either gonna be a sale or it's gonna be a course release. I'll do an email at the beginning and I'll do an email at the end, and it'll be like a two-week thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

And that's it. Um I might put one in between, and that might be a l uh often that's just because I might do a live stream of something, and just to kind of help promote it. But to be honest, live streams don't really help that much with that. I that that's another thing that doesn't really I'm doing way less of those. I used to do them like four times a week, and it's like that doesn't actually help in any way. But I know what you mean about the email list because it's the one thing I mean, I don't there's so much in terms of marketing that I do not do, no tripwise, none of that stuff. Um, but one thing I do know is that even with my minuscule amount of marketing that I actually do, the email list without that, I would be broke. There we I would not be making like hardly anything compared. Yeah, like I if if any of my friends are starting up anything or I get asked for advice on starting like a YouTube channel or something like that, I'll say get your email list sorted immediately because that in terms of doing a sale, it all comes from I would say like 99% of my revenue in a year comes from the email list.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Yeah, it's just the way it works in this business. It's just like that is that's that's the system. The system is YouTube, views, get those people into lead magnets, build the email list, send regular email, you know, an email promotion every month. Yeah. And if you've got a new course, great. If you've got an existing course that you're reselling, also great. You know, but just do that every month. I think, yeah, if we can get you, I know you're going through an audit with the team at the moment, but like if we can get you sending better email promotions with the whole warm-up sequence and the and the launch and the all the different angles, you're gonna see a big jump in revenue. Like it's it's gonna make a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

I think so too. I mean just I mean, listening to you and Yosip talk about tripwires, I was sat there listening to it and I was like, oh my god, I cannot believe that I've never done that. Because it's so obvious. It's like none of this stuff is rocket science. It's like it's like the minute that you hear about uh somebody like let's say that you present a certain thing like that a tripwire, upsells, order bumps, it's so obvious. It's like, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. And the no I'm so annoyed that over the years, because it's it's not like I'm one of the uh people that started in 2023. I mean, I listen to a lot of people on the podcast, and it's like, oh yeah, when we started in 20. Well, we started in 2019 and then it built up in 2023, and it's like, man, I started in 2013, and so you can imagine the backlog of email subscribers over that time and the amount of people that I have got zero money from. It's just I look back and think, what have I done? It's like I hope I get some more because it's almost like I've thrown it all in the bin.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Yeah. Yeah, well, it's one of those funny things, right? When you're 30, you look back and you think, oh, if only I could go back and talk to my 20-year-old self and give them all this wisdom, right? But then you're like, oh shit, I'm gonna have the same thing when I'm 40, and I so then when you're 40, you look back and you go, oh fuck, you fucked all this stuff up as well. Yeah. And then it's happening again. Now you're you said you were about 50, right? Somewhere like that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, oh fuck, my 40-year-old self, if I could have should have told him, tripwire funnel, better email promotions, here you go, here's here's a million in cash extra, you know.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

I mean, there is so much like that. I mean, um, I the time that I really wish I'd have got in touch with a marketing company would have been 2020. Uh like everybody, the COVID thing. Uh I remember you, you know, when we went into lockdown, you know, I can't even remember we were in power at that point. Were it Boris? It was Boris, wasn't it? And they went on and says, Oh, you we're gonna be having this, you know, lockdown thing. And I was like, Oh man, I'm not gonna be able to go into my unit. Oh no. Uh so I brought a load of stuff home. And I'm sat there thinking, oh, what am I gonna do? I'm not gonna be able to do my YouTube videos, I'm not gonna be able to do this, I'm not gonna be able to do that. And then a friend of mine who used to do some of the Google ads that I used to do, um, who's in SEO and he does a lot of stuff like that, um, he uh rang me and he says, Um, I think you need to do a sale. And I went, why? And he says, your numbers to your website have like tripled, you know, just over this week. It's going crazy. And I'm like, okay. I did a sale, and it was the big thing that changed everything for me. Up to that point, I'd been doing okay. I mean, it was like, it was like probably five to low six figures kind of annual revenue. And that I remember getting to the end of the year and just being like, oh my god, that was like I mean, it all went, it all died down, obviously, but that would have been the time because I would have had so much like extra money to put into the marketing that would have come back. And I'm so regretful that I didn't do all of this stuff that I want to do now, back then.

Tripwire Funnels That Actually Convert

SPEAKER_00 16:59

If you're listening to the podcast and you're thinking, well, what's this tripwire funnel Malaki? There's a few episodes I'll give you a quick uh debrief, but there's a um there's a few episodes for you to go check out. 132 is in fact, let's start with 102 is exploring tripwire funnels with Yosep. And then 125 is about uh tripwire as well, and 132 is about how to optimize your tripwire funnel, so those are good ones. And then we mentioned the episode with Scott uh Divine from Scott's Base Lessons, and that's episode 117, building a five million dollar music education business with Scott Devine, so you can go check those ones out as well. So a basic idea, just for everyone listening, a tripwire is basically when you have someone signs up for your lead magnet, and on your confirmation page you have an offer, and it's generally something quite cheap, but normally$27,$37, something in that kind of ballpark where someone could just really easily, without knowing you all that well, go, Oh, I could get that, and if it's not good, I'm not gonna be upset at myself. Full sales page for it, and you have like a 30-minute countdown timer with a a discount. So maybe it's something that's normally$97, it's heavily discounted down to 27, 37, whatever. And you uh you you have that available on sale straight away, and that converts really well. It's like the page, the step in your funnel converts better than any other one. And almost no one has anything for sale at that point. Most people just have a thanks very much for signing up, and that's it. Um, but about three to ten percent of people will buy at that stage. Uh that's kind of a normal conversion rate if you do a good job with it.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

So I've got a good uh example of how you could do that as well, because I've been thinking about it over the past few weeks since I've been sat there listening to you waffle on about it. And I'm like, what could I do? Now, one of the things that and and out of everything that I do, one of one thing I do know is if you can provide value, like a lot of value, uh for free. You know, like in terms of educational value for free. That is one of the keys to a lot of this. Like I know for just from anecdotally and you know, testimonials and stuff that like because like let's say my courses, for instance, the courses that I do are a bit bigger than they should be, to be fair. I mean they're they're crazy. So like some of them are like like I've got a sight reading one that's like I mean, it basically takes you from beginner to advanced degree level, and it's like 25 hours of video. So I thought about it when I after I'd done it, I thought 25 hours of video. Lord of the Rings is only three hours. It feels quite long, doesn't it? It's 700 pages of an ebook that I've done for it as well, and knocked all this out fairly quick as well. And that's one of my courses. Maybe I'm an idiot for doing something that big and having it as one thing, but one thing that people do get with that is they get a lot of value for money, that's for damn sure. So that's an extreme of it, obviously. But like taking that and putting that in everything, like all the free stuff that I do, like the YouTube videos, they're always gonna be quite there's gonna be a lot of value to them. Um well with the uh tripwire, I was thinking, well, really, I just need something that's gonna be real that's gonna answer the question that all of those people want, right? Um that I can do very quickly. Because obviously the tripwire's got to be a small thing, not a big stupid Lord of the Rings thing. But um I've come up with it. I think I know what to do. So one of the problems, I mean, this probably sounds a bit weird to listeners that have got no idea about guitar or bass, but one of the things that everybody moans about is the size of the hands as a as a bass player, because it's a big instrument, yeah, they've all he's got frets that are like quite far apart, and I I've got fairly big hands, so like I've never really had that much of a problem with it, and I've got a big stretch. But you don't need a big stretch, you d that's the thing. Everybody thinks they need a big stretch to play on bass, and they think, oh, you one finger per fret and all this kind of stuff. And they and I've I I used to have Skype students that used to sit there saying that no, well, I can't do that, and I can't do that because look, I've got tiny hands. I I just can't do it. I can't do it. And I'm like, it's a technique thing, it's not a it's not a physical thing, because I know bass players that are tiny. There's a guy that lives near me on the Isle of Wight, and he he used to work on the ships with me, and he's about four foot ten, and he's got tiny hands, but he's a pro bass player and he can play he's amazing. So it but the key is moving around the fretboard, it's like actual position shifts, right? That is gonna be my tripwire. It's gonna be a small course on how to you know traverse the fretboard without a big stretch, you know. Solution to the small hand. Whatever it's going to be. I'll come up with some title, come up with something like that. But I think that almost every single person that signs up for that email list stroke membership will be interested in that, especially at a very um low price. Uh-huh. But again, it's it's finding the the thing that all those people really need. It's kind of kind of, you know, find the problem that they've got and solving that problem. Which I guess that's the same with all of these course things.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Yeah, one there's a few things, there's a bit of an art to kind of finding just the ideal tripwire. One of them is you really want it to be something that's that's uh gonna solve the problem in about a week. Yeah. It's not big, it's not a big course, it's not gonna have a big requirement for them, something quite easy to do. And they can they can make some progress in a week, not like sell your entire course extra cheap or anything like that. And then it also ideally wants to fit with the lead magnet. So the best performing one we've had was we had a lead magnet was five free meditations. So this is someone in the self-development space. And I've talked about this on the podcast before. Um, Teal Swan. And so she's said it, she's got these five free meditations you get uh is the lead magnets everywhere, all over the YouTube, all over the website, whatever. And then the lead the tripwire is the meditation vault. So it's it's I forget 30 meditations for$27, something like that. Um when we first did it, it was 27 meditations for$27, which had a nice ring, but then she cut she's done more and bung them all in there as well. And so everyone who's signing up for the lead magnet is by definition interested in meditations. So therefore, everyone who's signed up for the lead magnet is interested in more meditations. Now, not all of them are willing to pay for it, but a good percentage are, so that fits really well. But then you also want the tripwire to ideally fit with the courses. So you want people who've bought the tripwire to then later on be like the same kind of people who would buy your courses. So you're trying to make the whole thing flow beautifully. Um it's easier said than done, but that's part of the process if we're working with somebody. Um, I'm sure when you're working with the team, they'll kind of go through this with you of like how do we create the something that there's that exact flow so that all of the people who sign up are likely to buy the tripwire, are likely to buy the courses, it all kind of fits nicely together.

Teach Without Talking Down

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Um so what's your uh what's your thing about when you one of the things you'd said to me beforehand was don't talk down to the audience, don't try and be an authority. Can you talk me through that? Like what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed with um teachers in general, and Americans are really guilty of this. Right. Like Brits don't seem to be as bad because they're quite self-deprecating. But there's a type of tutor, especially in music, because it doesn't happen in science so much, because you've got to know your stuff anyway, where they want you to know that they're really good. It's almost like a like a plea for authority kind of thing. And I I think what that does if you do that, some people buy into it. People that are, I don't know, that that respect strength and power and stuff like that. I don't I don't know. There's like a weird little kind of psychological thing going on. But the majority of people want to relate to that person. Now they're obviously gonna want you to have authority, it's the not otherwise, why are they listening to you talk about something that they're trying to learn? But in terms of that kind of relatability thing, I think that tends to go a long, long way. It's the reason that people like Brian Cox do well in the science space, you know, like the education there, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You don't relate to them totally, but they seem like the kind of everyman kind of thing, but a very clever version, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:59

Do you think Neil deGrasse Tyson seems like an everyman?

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Actually, that was a bad idea. That was a bad example because he's a little bit more, in fact, perfect example of that Brit American team.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He pisses me off, man. I listen to him and I'm like, oh shut up. Yeah, yeah. You just you're so pompous about it. It's like it it he irritates me a lot. Whereas, yeah, uh Brian Cox, I get your point.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Example actually of the of the difference between the two, but you get it worse in music with um certain people, especially in the jazz space. Now, I've got a jazz degree and I've played jazz a lot. I like jazz.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

I mean it's like it's not I did not know you could get a jazz degree. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean at Leeds College of Music, it was um that's the that was their thing. Berkeley College of Music in America and Leeds, they were the two that did jazz, but it's it there was like classical and jazz. So if you played anything other than violin piano and didn't do that, you did the jazz degree at Leeds. Okay. Um so nothing against jazz, right? But there are a lot of people in that space that that have that kind of elitist kind of like pompous kind of way, where they really want you to think that they that that it's almost mystical. It's like like it's it's this thing or you or for you to know that they have studded their arse off, you know, that they've I've done all this, and now you're listening to me because I've done all the work and I've done all this. Now, I'm the opposite of that. Now bear in mind that me, Scott, all those people that are doing it, we've all we've all been in that academic space, so it's not like we're not like that. But in terms of the presentation, I don't want to come across with any kind of ego, kind of just that kind of talking down to the audience thing. Um and I and I know that on the face of it, somebody listening to this might think, hold on, um, do people really do that? And it's like, yeah, they do. And it's it's often just that kind of um authoritarian kind of way of presenting.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

It it just seems like I d like if you're but it sounds like it does work, that it's just it works for a different audience to the one that you've got. Is that fair? Like to some of these people, presumably, are very successful doing it that way.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Um yeah. Um I guess not in I don't think in so let's say that we take it into my niche, like the bass niche. There's a bunch of guys that are that I'm friends with that uh, you know, some of the I mean one a perfect example, you might not have heard of him, is a guy called Jeff Berlin. He is one of the greatest bass players that's ever lived, one of the greatest musicians. He's he's phenomenal, a jazz great as well. He was a big fusion guy back in the 70s. A lot of people might have heard of Jacko Pastorius. Well, he was about the same time as that, but he was like this next level kind of guy, very, very academic, came from a classical background, played violin before. He is what you would consider the kind of extreme of that side of it. And he's and he and he wears that as a brand, to be honest. Right. But if you're wanting higher numbers, and I always think this with Jeff, like if you just toned it down a bit and he actually just related a bit more and was a bit more compassionate in the way that he actually sees things, he would probably do so much better. But like, if you were to look at the like the like I said, the three guys in our space that are sort of like the bigger YouTube ones are uh Scott, me, and Josh, Foscreen of Baseballs, we all pretty much have the same kind of manner, and it's that and it it it works with probably YouTube a lot better. If it was a TED talk, maybe not as so much. If it was a Harvard lecture, maybe not so much. But in terms of YouTube and actually trying to generate uh an audience, I think it helps with that quite a lot. There are people that follow people like that, Jeff Berlin. Um, and I'm not dissing Jeff Berlin, you know, I get on with him really well.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

But it's it's just what works in terms of growing a YouTube audience, is what we're kind of discussing. Not like is that. Yeah, okay. Do you think that's the same across you might not have so much experience with this, but do you reckon that's the same across all music niches? Because there's a lot of people who uh there's a lot of people with music courses who listen, so I think it's quite interesting to be.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Yes, I think it is the same across them all. There's if you were to look at some of the uh big piano channels, some of the big guitar channels, a lot of those guys have that relatability factor. I think it's just part and parcel of that that platform. I think if you if you try to be too I think what it comes down to, you know, is being yourself in a way. Every time I I I talk to some of these people that are a little bit more like that, when I actually talk to them away from what their public persona is, they tend to be a lot softer and a lot more you know, because like if you were sat chatting over a beer and you were talking to somebody, they're not going to be sat there being all, you know, I mean, some people do, fairly. I've met Sam Mark. But but by and large like I always like to think, what would they sound like if they were talking to the parents?

Scripts, Teleprompters, And Sounding Natural

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Yeah. You know what? That's it's That's a theme that comes up a lot. When I ask I ask everyone who comes on, like, what's what's the secret to your success and like what's what things you do differently and what have you before we do the podcast. And it's very, very, very common that people say it's about being yourself, it's about being authentic. And what's interesting is that's actually not that easy to do on video.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

It's really hard.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Right? It's like, and I I think I do a good job on on the podcast, but I partly because I've done the podcast for a long time, but partly because it's a conversational thing, right? So it's easier as part of a conversation to do that. When I what I found, I started for a while doing um more typical YouTube videos, like, you know, just presenting to camera, lots of b-roll, all of this kind of stuff, uh heavily scripted. And it was I was taking quite a while to get to the point of properly sounding like me. And what I actually found, I did some work with some, I had like a videographer who was like a YouTube coach/slash videographer, what have you. And the style that he wanted me to present in was actually more like that kind of authoritarian, here's how it is, kind of presenting in a quite a and I was just like, after quite a lot of time thinking about it, and I don't know if I'm if this is right or not, I was like, I think I would have been better off if I'd been doing them more casually, more relaxed, more sounding like me. But taking a script and making it sound like you, even if you wrote it, it's not it's not fucking easy.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

It's really hard, and it was the thing I knew that I wanted to do that. So um one thing you'll find with music dudes that do this, we've obviously had many, many years of performing and in whatever thing. So we generally don't get shy of being on the camera and stuff like that because we spend all the time on stage. One thing that you it's kind of the same thing as being on stage in that when you very first start playing, like my very first few gigs, I just remember being uh like not petrified, but like there's all this anxiety, and you stood there and you're hoping that you play everything right, and just your brain, the synapses are just firing off, and you're just like, oh, everything oh, and then and then gradually over the years, like I look so bored sometimes on stage these people gonna be. I mean it depends on the gig, but like man, like I if I like I I remember there was a time uh when I used to I did cruise ships for quite a while, it's where I met my wife, and I mean I mean they can get pretty ponderous at times. And I I remember being on stage and I suddenly realized I got about you know, like when you're driving and you don't know where you can't remember the journey. I got about halfway through this set and I was like, I have no idea what we've played, and I was sight reading, I was sight reading the music, I had no idea what I'd read, what I'd done. All I knew is that I'd been wondering about what drink I was gonna get from the bar after, and then they were having a curry night upstairs and the thing, and I was trying to figure out in my mind which curry I was gonna have and and and how I was gonna do it, and I was spending all my time doing that. So, in terms of the relaxation, that's about as relaxed as it gets, doesn't it? And that's what I'm reading, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Maybe a little too relaxed, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you get into this kind of relaxed state where you and actually when you're in that relaxed kind of state, you tend not to make as many mistakes. You tend to be more you you can just deal with stuff a lot better. Like if anything goes wrong on stage, you know, for most musicians, the first time that the mixer goes down or your amp packs in, or you oh no, my lead's going. First time those kind of things happen, it's like, oh God, what am I gonna do? After a few years, it you it's just the easiest thing to deal with because you just do stuff while you're playing, you can you can sort stuff out because you relax, because you're not thinking, you're not stressing about it. Now, when I started doing YouTube, I was kind of taken back to when I very first started uh playing live on stage. I was like, it it's such an unnatural thing to do. Like camera and talking to a camera with nobody there. I mean, like, at least when you back in the day when it was all TV and everything, and you got like, you know, you go to the BBC or whatever, you'd have a team, there'd be cameras everywhere and stuff like that. But these days, it's just a camera and you, and it's just so unnatural, it's just so weird. And I find that really difficult to get my head round. But over time, I mean, if you were to go back through my channel, you'd see this in action. You see how the very first ones, um I tried this is how I'd do it. I'd be like, hi again, Mark here from Talking Base. I'd be like really slow because I'd be like, oh no, I can't talk quick because you know, I talk quick anyway, proper yaks, you're like, me. And so I could I thought I can't talk like that, I'm gonna have to talk slowly because there might be people from Peru watching me. So I'm gonna have to go slowly and do it like this. And after a while, uh, as I became a little bit more confident with it, I started listening back to what I was doing and thinking, that doesn't sound like me. It just doesn't sound natural. And then the more that I just started being like me, the better it became. And just, you know, I doing the live streams helped a little bit with that because at least then you're doing it to an audience because even though they're not in the room with you, at least they're on the laptop or whatever. So I found it a little bit easier to get used to it that way. But I still use scripts, like I mean, Scott's really good at winging it, he just like he just like turn it on, bang. But I I like to have a battle plan when I go in with uh a YouTube video because like I'll have a very definite thing I want to get across, and I think, well, if I'm just gonna wing it, I might not get it put across correctly. So I will script it very, very precisely. Then I'll put it on the teleprompter and I'll use it to get started. Because often that's the hardest part is getting started with the video. That those first few seconds, when you've pressed record and you're trying to get started, if you're just winging it, you're like, um uh the ums and ahs come in. If you've got a script, you can start with the script and then I'll go off script. So as I like I have to sometimes because I'll be playing something and I can't be reading the script while I'm doing this. So the minute I get to the bit where I gotta show you something, that's when I go off script. And I've got a little keyboard, there've got it sat here actually, and then I'll I'll press space bar to uh to make the teleprompter go up and down. So I'll do that and I'll just keep switching it back on and off. And sometimes I'll only use the uh script for the first part, but at least I'll have a plan of action going in. So I'll keep it going so that I can see what I'm supposed to be talking about and then just improvise around it. But that takes quite a while to get used to, especially to be able to talk naturally while you're reading a script. I found that another hard thing. I would advise anybody wanting to do a YouTube channel to start out like that if you're not used to being on camera. If you script it and then you go for it, start by just following the script. You've got to get you've gotta get used to it somehow. Uh is pointless thinking, trying to speed up the process. Just read on that script, read, keep reading them, and then slowly try coming off script and just I know a lot of people use bullet points, uh, and they'll just have bullet points and they'll do that, which is great. And I'm guessing people like Scott probably do that actually, because it must have some form of direction. But um I tend not to use bullet points. Um I'll just use I use the script as my bullet points because I can just let it run. And then as I'm seeing what I'm supposed to say, you know, I just I just change what I'm how I'm saying.

Audits, Website Jenga, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense. One thing I wanted to ask you about was uh you're doing uh audit with Josip and the team at the moment, right? How's that have you gone through that enough so far that you could talk about it? Because I know some people who listen to the podcast get in touch and say, you know, I've listened for two years and I finally thought I should reach out. And I thought it might be useful for some people to kind of hear well, what's the process kind of like? Have you have you had the first workshop already?

SPEAKER_01 39:56

The first one uh with Yosip, and um I mean that was basically a case of me just sort of telling him, you know, what what I what what there is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Um But you've not had the second one yet, you're not gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

No, that's the first of April. So they're they're currently going through stuff, and I mean, like I've said before, I mean, it's over the years, it's just what can happen is it can end up like a Jenga tower. So that you start like, especially with the website, like because I do everything myself, so I do all the website and all that. And what you start with, so like however long at 13 years ago, what I started with then is not necessarily what I want it to be like now. But you have this big unless you totally redo everything, yeah, you have this back catalogue of plugins and depending on how you do it. Like if you use WordPress, you'll have like plugins in there. I mean, it's a little bit easier if you actually code it all yourself, but if if you've got plugins that are this, that, and the other, trying to like I say, it turns into a Jenga tower where you're like, oh, okay, well, um, I'm gonna change this bit, and it's the block that you shouldn't pull out, and the whole thing comes crashing down. So there's a little bit of that with my with with everything that it's this this huge load of stuff that's been generated over this time. Um, and I think part of the audit is gonna involve sorting through all of that. Um but I gave him some ideas about about that stuff. I mean, he also gave me a few ideas while we were chatting on that first one. Um like obviously talking about order bumps. I mean, Yosip's face when he when he was uh when he was asking me about some of the data. It's like he'd asked me about something like about the email sequence, and it'd be like, Well, I used to have one, and then it's like, how many emails would you do? Uh and it's like, well, in about three, and it was like a welcome one. And then it'd be like, Well, how many emails do you send on one of your campaigns? Like Black Friday, for instance. And I'm like, Well, I'll I'll have one on the first day and one on the last day, and he's like, and then and then it'd be like, Well, how long do you spend on your emails? Like, I don't know, about three minutes, maybe three minutes, four minutes. Like, do you not like money? Do you not? I know, I know but thing is it's been working. And I think some other people might fall into this trap. So, like, over time, the one of the main things that I would say as a tip for people starting out doing YouTube and all of this stuff is just perseverance. If if you just keep going, something'll happen. And that's kind of was my mantra at the start because I didn't make any money for about the first two, three years. Um, we were living off my wife, so she's a singer, and we were just living off her gigs. And I'm there trying to set everything up, and you come to a point where she's like, Well, um, Mark, uh, you're gonna uh are you gonna actually make any money out of this? And I'm like, Yep, yep, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. And then I I released uh, you know, I released an e-book, I got I could and that brought in a little bit of money. I do remember doing that, that was 2013, 14, something like that. I'd written this e-books, the ref uh whatever it is, the study book of scales. It was just a scales book. And I've always wanted to, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a novelist, I wanted to be the next Stephen King, right? So I love writing. So the writing part for me is dead easy. So I thought, I know, I'll write a book. So I wrote this book, and I remember getting in the bath after I'd done it. I absolutely stunk. I'd been doing all this stuff, I was like, oh, I need to get a bath. I get in the bath and I set uh as it went live, the and I just remember hearing the pings on my phone as the PayPal things, you know, like as I was getting. In orders. And it was the very first time that had ever happened. I was like, oh my God. But at the time we were broke. And I'm hearing these coming in, and it was like, oh man, that's I I'd sold two of them. I'm like, well, that's one Skype lesson I don't have to do. And then it's like and they just kept going. And I'm sat in the bath going, Woo! We're making money. And but then that's when I started making money while you bathe.

SPEAKER_00 44:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

Yeah, yeah. Totally. So we um then that you know the course thing started. And of course, you just let it go, you just keep going, and eventually you start making money. And and I was making what comparatively for for a musician, because musicians don't make much money, you know, it's not uh it's not a good career to have. I mean, I don't want to tell that to any of the people following my courses and everything, but it's not a good it's not a good I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

They're retirement age, they're probably not expecting this to be their career now, is it?

SPEAKER_01 44:59

Exactly, exactly. So as a career, it's never that good. But you're you you know, if you make a little bit of money here and there, it's it's it's fine. And and and it's amazing what money you get from certain places, but anyway. Um but this was like far and away above anything that I could have got as a musician, even if I'd have been playing for Justin Timberleg. I mean, it was like it was I I was like, oh well, it's doing well. But just because you get into the six-figure zone, it that isn't the amount that you could be making. But because you you get to a stage where you think, oh, that's alright, you kind of think that that's it. That you've put oh, I release a course, those people buy it, that's how much you make. All of this other stuff, order bumps, upsells, blah de blah, email sequences, da-da-da-da-da, all of that stuff that people do in marketing is extra to that, and you don't you just don't realise how much better it could be. Um I mean, like I've said before, my friend that's the sort of big one in this space that works with you guys, Scott, divine, he makes a pretty decent amount of cash, and I just remember watching him sort of pull away with that, and the big difference between him and someone like me. Uh I mean, we have different kind of channels in a way, these days, we used to be kind of the same, but he's kind of pulled forward and it's the marketing. And I've always known that because I know him so well, he's just there talking about it, and it's like he gives me ideas. We'll sit there and it'll be like, oh, if you do, it gets this calculator out, if you do this and do that, and click, click, click, click, click, click. The high value one that he talks about, the high ticket thing. I remember him telling me about that, and he says, Oh, by the way, if you do this, click, click, click, click, click, tells you what the money's gonna be for over a year. And I'm like, man, it's like these ninja tactics, even though they're really obvious, but it's like these ninja tactics that you just don't think about as a as a as a because everybody that's probably listening to this, probably, I guess most of them, start off doing the courses because they're good at the thing that they're doing the course about, rather than coming at it from I'm a marketer, that's 99.999% of people listening.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

That's them.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

Yeah, yeah. And so that's what they focus on. And they don't realize that the marketing side of it is so, so important.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Yeah. So if you want to hear that one that the about the high-ticket offer that Mark's been mentioning from Scott, that's episode 117. And I just thought if you want to learn more about I mentioned about tripwire product ideas, if you uh I've got a guide about how to figure out your tripwire product ideas, it's got 15 different high converting tripwire product ideas for you. You can go to datadrivenmarketing.co slash tripwire and you can download that as well. Mark, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your whole journey and your wisdom about everything that's been working. If people want to go check out your channel, they want to go check out your site, where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 48:02

Talkingbass uh YouTube channel, that's easier to find. Put that into YouTube and my face will pop up. Uh the website is talkingbase.net, that's there. Yeah, Instagram and Facebook. I tend not to go on that much these days, but um, yeah, that's the main places.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

Wicked. Well, Mark, thanks so much for coming on. Really, really appreciate your time. And uh I'll talk to you soon.