256 How I Built a 6-Figure Online Business (20 Hours/Week)

Gillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.

John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and her reasoning for it is worth listening to carefully.

They also get into webinars, which Gillian is pretty blunt about. She says 10% conversion is her standard, and anything under that feels like a flop to her. She breaks down exactly which price points make sense for webinars and which ones don't, which is genuinely useful if you're trying to figure out where they fit in your own business.

There's also a great section on how she found and hired her integrator, how she thinks about building a small team without losing her lifestyle, and why shrinking her team actually made the business more enjoyable and sometimes more profitable.

Gillian has been making videos about online business since 2017 and has clearly thought carefully about how to build something sustainable. A lot of what she shares here is quietly counterintuitive. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.

Check out Gillian's work:
🌐 https://gillianperkins.com
🌐 https://creatorfasttrack.com
🌐 https://startupsociety.com 
📸 https://instagram.com/gillianperkinsonline/
▶️ https://youtube.com/gillianperkinsonline/

Transcript

A 20-Hour Work Week Reality

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I normally almost always keep my work week under 20 hours per week. We do multiple six figures every year. Honestly, I'm enjoying running the business more than I have since I ever started, just because I'm loving that I'm the person in there talking to the students, and that really makes my work so much more meaningful. The business actually makes just as much money, if not more, when the team is smaller and I'm more hands-on and we're running fewer live cohorts. Working for myself, working online, especially digital products, have had such a profound impact on my life that it really is first and foremost my mission to bring that opportunity to as many, especially parents as possible. Because I think that society is better when parents spend more time with their kids, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Hello

Gillian’s Mission For Parents

SPEAKER_00 0:45

and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies to perhaps top performance in the online course industry. My name is John Edgeworth, and today's guest is Gillian Burk. Now, Gillian is the CEO of Startup Society, the host of the Work Let's Earn More podcast, one of the most watched YouTubers in the online business, is teaching people how to start and build profitable online businesses to earn passive income and allow for a flexible lifestyle. Now her entrepreneurial tweak started early, just 14 years old, what began to teach a fruit that's just a few neighbours, grew into the Northwest School of Music, one of the largest music schools in Oregon. And years later, she bought that same teaching instinct online. Her YouTube channel now has over 700,000 subscribers, more than 35 million views. Then in 2018, she started Startup Society, a monthly membership that's since guided thousands of entrepreneurs through her step-by-step framework, all while keeping her work week under 30 hours as a homeschool mom of six. For anybody building an online course on membership, Gillian is a near-perfect case study. She's built an audience from her own expertise, turned it into recurring revenue business, and done it on a part-time schedule. Gillian, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here and thank you for that intro. Very flattering and very accurate. Very accurate. I will say I normally, almost always keep my work week under 20 hours per week. But to say I keep it under 30 was even more accurate because that is always true.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

I um I'm really curious for you. It seems like I've I've looked a bunch of your videos and kind of uh watch what you've been doing for for quite a while. It seems like your audience is like people who are just getting started. Is that fair? Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, it is primarily people who are getting started. I really do have a heart for those people because, you know, working for myself, working online, especially digital products, have had such a profound impact on my life that it really is first and foremost my mission to bring that opportunity to as many, especially parents as possible. Because I think that it, you know, society is better when parents spend more time with their kids, for sure. And uh it can be difficult to do that when maybe both parents have to work in today's economy or even just dad's gone all the time working way too many hours, that sort of thing. So I try to bring this lifestyle, this opportunity to as many parents as possible. I do also, you know, have plenty of people in my audience who have been in this game for several years, and I help them to take their business to the next level with um, you know, with sales strategies for online courses, like you talk about here. Um, but the majority of

Choosing Digital Products To Sell

SPEAKER_01 3:20

my audience, you are right.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

So, what are you what are you helping people to do? Is it to start any business or is there certain kinds of businesses you're helping people to get going with?

SPEAKER_01 3:28

So, specifically online businesses that sell digital products, um, primarily online courses and memberships, some like coaching and services as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Okay, cool. So, can you give people some kind of idea of the size of your business? Doesn't need to be revenue, but like number of students or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Yeah, for sure. Well, um, I have a quite a big audience on social media, especially and particularly on YouTube. So there's over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube, and then I solidly um have an email list of it swings between like 50,000 to 100,000 depend on where depending on where we are in that list cleaning cycle. Um, and then we do like multiple six figures every year. It fluctuates from year to year depending on whether I had a baby that year or not, more than anything, to be quite frank. Um because I I think you probably mentioned I have six kids. So there have been a lot of years when I had a baby and then I take several months off, and that slows things down a bit. You know, I have a great little team that keeps things running while I'm gone, but without the what do you call that, the uh the I don't know, the entrepreneurial founder, the the visionary at the helm, you know, things don't normally grow while I'm gone. And then depending on what the economy is doing or not doing, you know, it might be easier or more difficult to get it to grow. So sometimes we're closer to a million, and sometimes it's more like a couple hundred thousand, you know, but it just uh swings kind of back and forth.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

What kind of price courses are you selling to people?

SPEAKER_01 4:54

So I try to price intelligently, meaning that I try to offer lower cost courses for people who are just getting started and then more expensive programs for people who are further along, and you know, they have more confidence in their business idea because it's really making them money. They also have more uh profit to be able to reinvest into their business. So my entry-level product starts with a membership that's uh normally $49 per month. Um, and then we have like a handful of courses, a small handful, like three course that are a few hundred dollars. And then we have one or two uh high-ticket programs that are a couple or a few thousand dollars that we kind of alternate back and forth depending on what it seems like the audience is most looking for.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

And do you run those the high-ticket programs? Like are they on an ongoing basis or are they like cohorts? You just run.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Yeah, we run them as cohorts. Even the the courses that are just a few hundred dollars we typically run as live cohorts. We have evergreen systems that run in the background where people can join them with more of that like DIY self-study approach. But I love the energy that we get when we run them live, and I notice that the students get, you know, the very best results when we do that. So I make that a priority to run each program live at least once per year.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Okay, so talk us through how that works. Like give me give

Live Cohorts And The Validate Accelerator

SPEAKER_00 6:10

me the example of the the cheapest course that you've got that you're also doing it kind of as a a live cohort or however you describe it.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, okay. So that would probably be um we have two, but um the business one is called Validate, and it's all it's an eight-week accelerator that guides the students to test out their product idea and ensure that there's demand and run their first launch and get their first sale so they have the confidence, you know, that there is demand for it. And um, we only run that program as an accelerator actually, because it's a fairly like intensive process for eight weeks. We get a lot done in those eight weeks between a lot of um like messaging work um and market research in the opposite order. First we do market research, then we work on messaging um and just packaging the product really well, and then we actually run a launch with them. And it's too much, I think, for somebody to do self-study. It would be overwhelming. It would absolutely end up taking them at least twice as long. And a lot of the beauty in it is kind of hurrying up and getting it done. It's not for everybody, you know. Some people, I think, need a longer, slower approach. But for the people who are ready to hurry up and make this happen, validate is an awesome option.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

And how much do you sell that for?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

And we typically sell it for $497.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Okay. And then how does it work in terms of you're saying it's you're you're doing it live with people? Are you doing uh group coaching calls? You've got like a Facebook group, like how do you kind of manage the live element of it?

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yeah, yeah. So um, and uh we'll say about the price. Um the reason I say it's typically $497 is because sometimes we offer kind of two tiers where there might be a tier that's a little bit cheaper, maybe around $400 or $500, um, that is while it is um still we're still doing it together, but it's self-steady in terms of they're not getting any like one-on-one hand holding. And then oftentimes there's a higher tier we offer that's closer to a thousand dollars, where they actually have some one-on-one calls with a coach as well. In terms of how we do it with the students, not a Facebook group, but we have a Slack group where we are with them on a daily basis. And then we also do a live group coaching call on Zoom every single week throughout those eight weeks of the program. And the other thing is that every all the students are going through the same part of the process each week. So we're all on week one together, we're all on week two together, and so on, which makes, I think, the conversation like it really facilitates the conversation in Slack really well because everybody is working on the same objective and struggling with the same things at the same time. So we're all on the same page.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

And how do you find it for the kind of margins on that? Because I think uh I'll tell you why I'm asking. Like, so a lot of people listening are selling courses with no coaching. And I do my best to try and convince people to also do coaching programs because I think a few reasons. One, you can sell them for more money. So therefore, if you've got an audience who are spending $250 with you on your courses, which same people or some proportion of those people will spend a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars or whatever. So it's like I've got a a friend who's teaching bass and he sells uh the course, his membership is like thirty-five bucks a month, but he also sells a ten thousand dollar group uh a one-to-one coaching program. And it's like it's not with him, it's with his coaches. So it's like this and I've seen this work consistently in lots of different niches. So I try and convince people kind of there's there's all this extra money that's there. And there's a percentage of people who are in your audience already who are ready to go pay for this thing. And people want some extra support. But the pushback I get from people is that they don't want to manage that. They wanted the lifestyle part of it, right? They want the the freedom of time, they don't want to be on calls too much, they don't kind of want to handle that, they're not sure about hiring coaches. Now you're big into the lifestyle element, but you've done this, you've hired coaches and you've got this running. So I think you've got some some insights that'd be really useful for people in that kind of situation. Could you kind of share how that's worked for you, what's been good, what's been bad?

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Yeah, yeah. Well, I would first say the margins probably wouldn't be that great if you only had a very small handful of students in a higher ticket, you know, more hands-on, more high-touch program like that, and you also wanted to outsource

Coaching, Accountability And Real Results

SPEAKER_01 10:20

the coaching. So, like if you hired a coach or two or three, and you only had three students in the program, obviously like you're probably losing money at that point. But if you can get, I would say, it doesn't have to be a huge group, sometimes even just a dozen people or 20 people into this program, then the I mean, the margins I would say are there, even if you are outsourcing the coaching. It's only a couple or, you know, a handful of hours per week of work that you would be outsourcing. I think it works the very best when you do show up as the creator of the course and you are hands-on with your students, um, at least as as much as you can be, and that's not exactly what I mean. I mean as long as um it's possible considering the number of students and the number of like interactions happening. So, you know, you get to a point where maybe you have hundreds of students in the program and they're talking to you so much, you gotta, you know, get some help with interacting with them and just with responding to them. But most that's you know, that's not most people's situation. So if you do have like a few dozen people in the program, you can probably handle the interacting with them in your community and also running the coaching calls in, I would say about five hours per week, you know, maybe as much as 10. And the reason why I love running the programs this way is as I mentioned before, that the students get such better results, which not only like makes me feel good, you know, that I'm actually helping them, but also it is the best for the bottom line, I would say, because it leads to testimonials, it leads to word of mouth, you know. A customer who comes in and set and looks at your course and says, wow, this is a great course, they're not going to refer anyone. But a customer who comes in and whether or not they're impressed with the course, but they go through the course and they get real results, then they're gonna be talking about their results to other people and mentioning your course. Um, and so you'll naturally get those word of mouth referrals. And I think that, you know, the customers are by far the most successful when they have that that coaching and especially the accountability I would say that comes with the coaching and the accountability that comes with the little bit of peer pressure of everybody doing it all at the same time, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it's great. I think one of the other reasons why it's such a really big deal is that like I think there's a bunch of people that are starting to worry that like AI is going to mean that courses aren't as effective as a way of like teaching. And I think it's like, well, okay, so what are you gonna do about it? So there's no point just worrying and getting annoyed at AI about it. So it's like one of the things that I've seen people do that seems to be working really well is increasing the amount of like um community feedback, group coaching, one-on-one feedback, just like trying to make it more of like something that you just can't get with the AI because you've got the human interaction like with other people in the community, like you're saying, for the accountability, for the feedback, all those kinds of things. Um I just think it's like it makes a lot of sense. It's just harder. But it's like, okay, that's all right, we can do this, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Yeah. And I don't know, like if you are looking for something that is like absolutely super passive and you never have to interact with anybody, then I can see why you wouldn't want to do the coaching, you know, if you want that Tim Ferris um four-hour work week, you know, I made a thing once, I put it up for sale on the internet. Now people buy it while I'm sleeping. Um then actually I I I don't think that's gonna work out for you very well. Um especially with AI on the scene, you know, uh that that used to work a long time ago that used to work, and it just doesn't anymore. There's too much competition with other courses, other programs that are out there, and certainly with the ease of AI. So, I mean, you might get a sale here and there, but it's not gonna be a real business. To be a real business, I do think that you have to be there, you have to be present, you have to be working with your students. It you know, it could be asynchronous if you want. Um, it doesn't have to be you on camera necessarily, and it doesn't have to be a lot of interaction, but I do think that you need to be present and showing up for your students.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Now, one of the other things that you've said is that you believe you can build a $500,000 business with a tiny team of only a few part-time contractors.

Tiny Teams And The Integrator Role

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Is that how big's your team that you've got?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

You know, I it like it's fluctuated over the years depending on my needs, whether, you know, if I was having a baby, for example, I needed a bigger team to run things while I was gone. Lately, I've been like in the office doing so much myself and um and whatnot. So I've really downsized my team. I have one mostly full-time person. She she works about the same amount as me, so if we're calling that full-time, you know what I mean? 20, 30 hours a week, normally closer to 20. And um, so I've got her, and she, if you are familiar with like the rocket fuel um sort of approach, um, so she does the integrator side of my business. Basically, she's like the project manager, the business manager, whatever you want to call it, and I do the visionary side of things. Um, and then I have literally just uh kind of three other people who all work very, very little. One is a graphic designer, one is a video editor, and one is a podcast editor. So they each have their own like area of expertise, their own businesses. I wouldn't really even consider them part of my internal team. Um I used to have a much more of an internal team where I had coaches and customer service people and all that who worked for me, um, who interacted with the customers, you know, uh the and worked significantly more hours. These three um individuals, they all have their own business. I'm just their client. They do a few hours of work for me each week to help us produce the content. Um so it's the smallest my team has ever been since I started, but honestly, I am enjoying running the business m uh more than I have since I ever started, if that makes sense. Um, just because I'm loving that I'm the person in there, like talking to the students, and that really makes my work so much more meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Nice. What's the biggest the team ever got to?

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Um, it was over a dozen people. I would say if you count those like external freelancer people, it was probably up to about 15. Yeah. So not huge by any means, but um it's a it's a very different look and feel than you know the tiny team I have today that I would say is basically like two plus a couple extras. Or or kind of one. I mean, me and me and one other person. So depending on how you're getting it.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

I'm a massive fan of um that book, Rocket Fuel. Um for anyone who's not read it, it's basically the I the co core concept is it tends to be that the kind of person who starts a business is a visionary type person, but they don't necessarily want to be the same person, they're not the same personality type necessarily, who makes the trains run on time, who organizes everything, who is like uh the the ideal project manager, they're more of like the I've got this new idea, let's go in this direction, I've got this new thing to strike. His his thesis is in the book is like there's a whole there's lots and lots of businesses that have run really well because I've had one person who was the front of the business doing exciting things, new ideas, etc., and someone behind the scenes who made everything run really smoothly. And that's the visionary integrator kind of concept. So how did you manage to find your integrator? Because people ask me about this. I've got someone in the business who is very much the integrator and it's amazing. And people ask me, How did you find them? And I'm like, luck. And I'm like, that's I know that's not repeatable. So have you got any insights for people?

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Well, I think it probably would have been a lot, lot harder, um, maybe over 10 years ago. But I hired my integrator right about seven or eight, eight or nine, eight or nine years ago. Um, it was in 2018 that I hired her. So I guess that's eight years. Um So first I'll say I hired her what most people would consider to be too early. Most people would say don't hire a business manager or an integrator or some sort of role like that if you don't really have much of a business to manage, if you don't specifically have a team. Okay, that's the main thing. It's like hire some other people, and then when there's like enough for them to manage, then it might make sense. I hired my integrator, her name is Courtney, as soon as I had the revenue. Okay, as soon as, and so I didn't have any other team. I literally I had a video editor. That was it. Me and a video editor. So there was nobody for her to manage except for me, and that was literally why I hired her to manage me and to c help me keep my messes organized. Because as you were describing, I charge forward with all my ideas and I make a big mess in the process. Um I I'm the person in the workshop, you know, making the project and leaving my tools all over the floor and losing everything. So I could tell that this was holding me back, and it was definitely going to create bigger problems down the road. It was making it so my business would ultimately not be scalable, would probably not be sustainable, and so I needed some help. And I didn't know I needed that. I thought I was just, you know, bad at some things until I read that book, Rocket Fuel, and it was just such a light bulb moment for me. And I immediately realized that that would change everything for me. And in fact, it was true. Sometimes you think something will change everything for you, and then you know, turns out like, oh no, there are 10 other problems. But in in my case, that was very much what I needed. Now, how I found her and how I would recommend anybody to find her, and why I say that it's so easy now is because now there's this industry called online business managers or OBMs, and there are a couple, um, maybe more than that, but I'm familiar with a couple specific individuals that run great training programs that teach people how to be OBMs. Now, that's not to say that every person who comes out of a program like that is going to be a great OBM, because I do think that being a great OBM relies heavily on personality and then is very much facilitated by training, you know, by those hard skills. Um, so the person who trained my OBM, her name is Sarah Noked. She runs the OBM school. She has a fantastic program, and she turns out hundreds of students per year. And so if you're looking for an OBM, an online business manager or an integrator or something like that, I would highly recommend actually contacting Sarah Noked. Um, and like I said, there's other people who do this too, but and telling them, you know, that you want to hire somebody like this, and they will give you referrals. They will give you a handful or, you know, as many as you want, basically, of at least potentially qualified and most likely qualified people. So when I hired mine, um I I didn't know about that yet. So I did not actually ask Sarah or the the OBM school or or anybody like that. I instead put up a a job post. Um, and I think back in the day, you know, we were all in the Facebook group. So I think I thought I shared it specifically in some Facebook groups, but I was asking for an OBM, an online business manager. And I remember I ended up interviewing about half a dozen people, and there were two or three that stood out as like maybe a good fit, and I'm really glad that I picked Courtney because she turned out to be like as amazing as possible, you know, and she's been with me ever since.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Well, that's amazing, isn't it? So have the same person with you for nine years. That must have been a really good connection.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

You do you feel like you is it was there anything that you did in that process that helped you to have made the right choice, or do you feel like you got a bit lucky as well in terms of that? Like, is there anything that other people can learn from that they might be able to do when they're doing that kind of interviewing process for it?

SPEAKER_01 21:25

I chose I always like to say that I like to hire bossy people. I like to hire people who are confident in what they do and they're not afraid to tell me what they think and not afraid to take ownership of roles. And so that was one of the reasons that I picked Courtney over the other um people who I interviewed was because when I interviewed her, she presented a plan to me of, you know, how she was going to change my business. And which is very different than how most people would approach an interview where, you know, they would just answer the questions and, you know, anything that the the you know new potential boss was asking them, they would say, Oh yeah, sure, I could do that. That that was not what Courtney said to me. You know, she's she said, here's my plan for how we're going to change your business and how we're going to make your business work better. And that sounded great to me. And I didn't know, you know, for sure if she would be capable of that or not, but I loved that she had a plan and that she was being so proactive like that. And in fact, you know, she came into the business and that was what she did. She really took ownership in an incredible way. And it was not me managing her at all. You know, I I hired her to manage me. And so that would be my advice to anybody who is trying to hire somebody for that integrated role or that business management role. Hire, hire somebody who has the skills but also is confident in their plan and confident as a leader in their own right and let them manage you. It's it's different than how maybe you would be managed. So in a marriage, right, you have the husband and the wife and it works best, I think, and you know maybe this is controversial opinion, but I think it works best when one person is at least to some degree the leader. And in my opinion, it works the best when the husband is the leader. Sorry, we're getting into controversial territory here. But so that's one kind of leader. But there's a different kind of leader and that is the mom leader, right? The mom is the leader, especially of the of the children, um, in the sense that she's like managing things. She's helping them to be at the right place on the right time and pick their lunch for them. And that doesn't mean that they're not their own independent people who have all sorts of opinions and thoughts and ideas and things that they pursue. But the mom kind of is a nurturing leader. Like she takes care of them. And that was the sort of leader that I needed in my business. Like I was the visionary. I was the husband in my business but I needed a work wife who could make sure that my laundry was clean.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Okay. Yeah I will not describe my uh my integrator as my work wife that's fine. It's not going to go down well with him. Okay. Talk to me a little

Launch Cadence With Evergreen Funnels

SPEAKER_00 24:10

bit about your the funnels and email email promotions that you're running. When you're running uh how many how many of those live uh cohorts do you do a year? You mentioned you've got quite a few of those.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Yeah. So it depends a little bit on like how big my team currently is and how hands on or hands off I'm being with things. And what's interesting, well maybe I'll get into that well maybe I'll get into that in a moment but um so basically like if I have a bigger team and I'm being more hands off, each cohort requires less of my direct time and involvement, right? And so we can run more live cohorts, but then when I have a smaller team and I'm being more hands-on then we run fewer live cohorts. But what's interesting is that generally the business actually makes just as much money if not more when the team is smaller and I'm more hands-on and we're running fewer live cohorts. You would think that fewer live cohorts would equal less revenue and sometimes it does equal somewhat less revenue, but the profit margins are bigger because I'm not bankrolling a larger team. So at the end of the day we certainly end up making more profit but we also even sometimes end up making more revenue with fewer launches as well. I I guess I didn't quite answer your question though. With a bigger team we typically run between six to twelve live cohorts per year and closer to twelve. When there's a smaller team it is normally a little bit under six. So like I would say four to six.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

And do you do any other promotions of like the the DIY courses or the templates or anything else like that in between when you're doing those fewer live cohorts?

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Yeah for sure. So I try to run some sort of live promotion at least every other month even when it is a you know very small team and but I can't necessarily like launch a live cohort for one of the bigger programs. So yes, so it'll be kind of like a small pro so maybe for example we run Validate for eight weeks. Two months later we're launching a six month program as a live cohort. And so then for the next couple of launches we might be some of our DIY self-study type programs. And so I basically try to alternate between bigger offers and smaller offers as I'm launching throughout the year. Something else I guess that should be mentioned here is that in addition to these live launches that I run, we'll say about six times a year, I also have evergreen funnels that are working in the background that are selling our self-study programs, all of them. And so there's three or four depending on the season of these funnels that are running just all the time and yeah just generating revenue in the background.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

So how do you coordinate those when you've got the live launches? Do you stop do you pause those when you're doing the live launch or do you kind of have them pause and then carry on where they were like how do you how do you manage that?

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Yes, yes. Well um primarily we uh we we just make sure that we think about this before each live launch. You know, if it is one of the couple three programs that there is an evergreen funnel running for in the background, we certainly think about okay how do we want to navigate this? Most of the time we pause the evergreen funnel a couple weeks before so that the newest leads coming in will get the you know the experience of the live launch because that does tend to convert at higher rate certainly. And then even sometimes when we run other program launches where there isn't an evergreen funnel running it for it in the background, we sometimes still pause some of those evergreen funnels again because we will probably see the best results if those people go through the live launch, not just the evergreen funnel.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

And who gets the evergreen funnel is that like a recurring thing or is that just only new people get it for the first six months or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Mm-hmm they're each multi-stage. So when somebody first comes into the list they depending on you know their entry point they'll go through one of a handful of different welcome sequence experiences and then get pitched the product.

Pitch Early With Evergreen Newsletters

SPEAKER_01 28:10

And I'm a firm believer in pitching early I think that when somebody first subscribes to your list that is when they are the warmest lead that is when they are the most interested in whatever the outcome is that you are teaching and therefore the most likely to buy. And certainly not everybody will buy I mean obviously but I don't just mean because of course you know only 5% or so of people buy. Not that but some people will be in the place to buy right now and some people will need to get to know you more or learn more about you know the problem they're facing or your approach to the goal, those sorts of things. So I like to give them the opportunity to buy early on and I try to do it with I I do it with a short um sales promotion. So because not everybody will be ready now it's normally somewhere between a 48 hour to 72 hour sort of promotion. So just a couple of days um give them the opportunity but not hit them over the head with it. From there and of course there are different versions of this for different entry points, different products but um they go into what I call an evergreen newsletter. So this is maybe kind of what you were alluding to here but we have normally about six months worth of emails that they're getting either once or twice per week. That is staying focused on you know the topic that they originally signed up for giving them helpful information and making soft pitches to them, inviting them to maybe get on the wait list for the next time the program opens um or to sign up for the webinar that relates to that program, but never actually offering them the program to buy. I shouldn't say never almost never there's like one point normally in the middle of each of those evergreen funnels where it does because you know maybe they just need to be asked to buy the product and they're not going to click anything else. That is the case for some people but most of the time we've got these soft calls to action if they click on it it that is going to send them into an actual promotion promotional sequence. So for example you know they click on the webinar that both will you know potentially they register for the webinar watch the webinar go through the webinar funnel but even if they don't it's going to tag them as basically a hot lead for that product and then they are going to get the webinar promoted to them more heavily and then the product will go

Webinars And Price Point Strategy

SPEAKER_01 30:25

on sale for them.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Nice. And one of the things you mentioned there is that you found that the live launches do better. And I've found I always find this.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yeah and I normally I see about twice twice the conversion rate.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Why do you think that is I've got I've got my own like info and evidence or whatever but I'm really curious to hear like why why do you think that are there specific things that you're doing that are different? Like are you doing any Facebook lives or webinars or anything like that? Or like why do you think they work better?

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Yeah I honestly I I have some theories but there's also part of it that makes me scratch my head a little bit um because it's so consistent that we do get twice the conversion rate with the live launches than with the Evergreen. The Evergreen is 100% worth it because it is like pretty much totally passive, right? So there's and I also it's not just that it's passive income. It's I don't want to make everybody wait months and months and months for my live launch. Like if they want to buy now I want to give them the opportunity to buy now I really want to be helpful to them when they need the help. In terms of why the live launches work so much better in the past like several years ago I would have said it was because of essentially social proof that they saw the launch happening on social media. They saw the chatter on social media they saw me talking about it on social media so they were getting they were experiencing this on multiple platforms first of all so they were seeing it in email and then also on Instagram maybe also on YouTube. And again they were seeing that that chatter and so they saw other people being excited about it and that made them want it. But in recent years and maybe I shouldn't even say recent years, I am not somebody who's on social media very much at all. And I don't use it personally hardly at all and I don't really enjoy using it for my business and so I hardly do. There have been times in the past when I did more but most years and especially in more recent years I don't and so the live launch experience actually is so similar to the Evergreen experience in terms of it's basically just email. One of the only differences is that I normally do a live webinar with a live launch and I do think that that is one of the biggest differences because I often get the majority of the sales for a live launch during the live webinar. And so I would say that that probably is actually the biggest difference between the two and the thing that makes the difference between the conversion rates.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Could you do a pitch to the audience right now about why they should consider webinars because I struggle sometimes to get people to do this. And I'm like you guys are YouTubers you're great on camera. You're great at creating video but people don't want to do webinars very often and I love them. I think they're absolutely fantastic. They're one of the best performing uh marketing channels but people rarely want to do it.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

So what's what you know how have you got it set up so that it it works well for you have you always found it easy was there stuff you found difficult that's kind of helps you to get to this point where you're running them really well I gotta say I say the same things to my audience that you were just saying and in some of my programs I basically require the students to do webinars because I want them to get good results and they are the most effective sales mechanism in my experience not just in my opinion but in my experience they are by far the most effective sales mechanism. I would say like lowest tier sales mechanism is going to be generally social media. You know you try to run your launch on Instagram and it's gonna be maybe not crickets but not a lot of sales for sure. You can step that up to to email marketing and now it's consistent at least now we consistently get you know about a 1% conversion rate like it's pretty solid um but it's low. And then you can step it up from there and I would say like my next tier after that would probably be just like multi-channel. So like you're doing it on social media and email that sort of thing especially if you have a video component. So if you are doing YouTube and you actually make some videos where you're able to talk in length not like extreme length but like you have a little bit more time and space to be talking about your method about your program those sorts of things. Not that they're sales videos. I'm talking about educational videos here. And then my next here is like huge step up is webinars. I very consistently get minimum 5% conversion rate on webinars and it's normally 10% or higher. If it's under 10% we're like huh that webinar was kind of a flop what happened right 10% is my standard for webinars which is you know obviously head and shoulders above the 1% that we see for email. So I would say to anybody you know if right now your course is selling great uh via email or on social media then don't do webinars. You don't need them. But if you are struggling to make sales or if you would like to see a lot more sales come in definitely do webinars. You can do an Evergreen webinar and by the way nobody's pretending their evergreen webinars are live anymore. Don't do that. Okay but you can make a webinar style video and you can put it on a page on your website and you can use it as an opt-in offer. You know everybody uses maybe not everybody almost everybody uses opt-in offers to grow their email list. What's the purpose of all that, right? We're trying to get people on our email list so ultimately they buy our product the opt-in offer that converts better than anything else is a webinar. You're gonna get a high conversion rate of people signing up for the webinar and with any other opt-in offer the person will sign up then they'll get on your list and then 1% of them will end up buying your product if that use a webinar you will have 5% of people just like that one change if you do nothing else. And then of course you know the highest tier in terms of conversion mechanisms would be you know the one-to-one sales call, which makes sense sometimes, you know, if you have a high ticket product but if you're selling an online course for a few hundred dollars it probably doesn't make sense. And so your sweet spot really will be a webinar live or recorded.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Yeah and I think webinars also are really good when you're selling something that's a little bit more expensive. Like if you're selling something for 100.150 you can do that fine with email. It's like well the downside to webinars is you've got like a drop-off in terms of conversion percentages, right? Because you've got to get people first of all to open the email then to click through to the landing page and to register for the webinar and then to turn up to the webinar and then to stay to the end of the webinar and then to buy, right? So you've got all those potential drop-off points. But if you're selling something for like I don't know it depends if it's B2C or B2C but let's say $600 or $1,000. Like it's gonna be hard to do that by email in most in most niches.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah okay I think that's a really important point. You know I was just talking about like what in general converts the best but um different price points of products. In my opinion under about $200 you're better off actually not using a webinar generally because you can make enough sales just like running ads to a sales page really you know or to your shop or via email. All those very direct ways of promoting your product can work really well. Certainly under $100 I would not use a webinar because like you're saying there's all these conversion drop-off points. Every time you add another one of these points where the person has to convert from your email to your webinar registration page or your webinar registration page to actually showing up for the webinar or the webinar to buying every time you add one of those it tends to cut your sales in half at least so you want to only use you want to use the minimum number of conversion points that you possibly can to sell your product. And with a product that is under one to $200, you can get away with a lot fewer conversion points. You can send people straight from social media to your sales page, you know, or anywhere to your sales page and actually make the maximum number of sales possible, I would say we also I don't think generally want to use webinars for very high ticket products. Generally I say over about $2,000. Now there's like a little bit of a gray area there I think where you could use it for a higher ticket product than that, but you definitely would need a a learn more like book a call, you know, book a discovery call sort of called action not a buy now called action. I find that the buy now on the webinar call to action works the best in that $200 to $2,000 price point. Yeah. And above that you're either saying book a call or else you're not doing the webinar at all and you're just asking people to book a call initially and doing the one-to-one sales.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Yes like sell by chat and that kind of thing starts to work when you've

Tripwires Versus Reverse Funnels

SPEAKER_00 38:55

got the higher higher ticket stuff or sales calls like you're saying but if you've got something in that in that sweet spot that Gillian is talking about here, consider doing a webinar. Consider trying them because they work so well okay now we've only got a few minutes left uh I just wanted to to ask you about do you ever run tripwire funnels?

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Oh okay um yes and no I have tried many of them in my day and I've had very mixed results with them. I think that they are excellent if you are running paid ads and you're trying to recoup ad spend excellent. I have generally not run my business that way. I've experimented with it and I always come back to um my my long form content, my content marketing that really is what works the best for me. It's what keeps my profit you know margins up the highest they can be it's what attracts the the best most engaged audience that really buys my products at the highest rates you know it's it's just a win-win win. So I don't generally do that. And then when I have tried using tripwire products with my organic audience what I found is that it overall has a negative impact on my revenue because so many people buy those small products and then don't use them. Of course not everybody but a lot of people do. And then I think that creates a barrier a mental barrier for them to wanting to buy the more expensive product because they feel that they should use that cheap product before they you know spend even more money. I also think that it can set up an expectation of your product being cheap, your products being cheap. And so I actually prefer kind of a reverse funnel strategy where we start out with the highest ticket products as at least the initial pitch really to set the tone and be like, okay, here's you know here's the standard here's what you can expect. And so then when they do see one of my less expensive products it feels more like you know a great deal and something that they want to take advantage of. So I lead with that highest ticket product. It's not necessarily that people are buying it then but it is at least like planting a seed in their mind and price anchoring. Then we can transition to maybe a lower ticket product and then when they see the quality there then that is when they often end up upgrading, you know, or having an upsell happen where they invest in the highest ticket product.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Nice. Okay so you think of the the initial point as being like offer the high ticket product in order to anchor that make them think this is the kind of price stuff is when they then see something for $200 or something they're like oh what an amazingly cheap deal they get in and then they complete that then they and ideally if it's a cohort they're more likely to finish it and then because they succeeded they're more likely to upsell to the next level.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Yeah for sure that's really interesting. Yeah so I get them interested in that first product you know that first expensive product and it makes them interested in working with me because they see it as this high value thing. And you know maybe they've been following me for a while as well. So now there's like multiple reasons why working with Gillian feels like this sought after thing. And so then when they get the opportunity to maybe work with me for two four five hundred dollars then it's like oh and now this is doable you know because initially you know they wanted to invest in the $4,000 program but you know they had various reservations. You know they weren't quite sure if it would work for them and if it would be a good investment you know if they would get that ROI. Now like here's the opportunity to test the

Where To Find Gillian Perkins

SPEAKER_01 42:15

waters.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

That's fascinating. Okay. Well Gillian thank you so much for coming on today. I really really appreciate your time. If people want to go check out your site or your YouTube channel where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Yeah you can look me up just my name Gillian Perkins anywhere you want. I would recommend you know either going to gillianperkins.com or looking me up on YouTube just by typing in my name. You'll find a a huge collection of YouTube videos. I've been making videos about online business for well since the since twenty seventeen so I think nine years now. So there are nine years worth of videos that you can learn from if you want to learn more about these strategies for selling digital products online and making a living with your online business.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

Awesome. Gideon thanks so much and as always thank you for listening. We will see you next time.