276 1% of Your Views Belong on Your Email List

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Mark Wales has had a career that is genuinely hard to believe. Sixteen years in the Australian Army, four tours of Afghanistan with the SAS, an MBA from Wharton, a stint at McKinsey, and then he won Australian Survivor. Now he is building an online course business around leadership and resilience, and he emailed John to say he had been studying the podcast and was ready to build his funnel.

What made this conversation so good is that Mark is right in the middle of it. The course is built, the YouTube channel has 1.8 million lifetime views, and the goal is $5,000 AUD a month in revenue. But the email list is at 1,300. So John walks through exactly what needs to change, from where to place lead magnet CTAs in videos, to the 1% opt-in benchmark Mark should be hitting, to how many offers he needs to make consistent monthly revenue.

There is also a genuinely fun stretch where they figure out how to turn Mark's keynote speaking appearances into a lead generation machine, including an idea involving shipping his new book to every attendee who signs up that Mark reckons could hit a ninety percent conversion rate.

Mark saw the potential of online courses back in 2017 when he was project managing course builds at McKinsey. It took him a few more years to put all the pieces together. You can feel in this conversation that the pieces are finally there.

I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Mark's work:
📖 Mark's New Book, Mission Ready: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761902796/
🌐 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-wales/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mark.a.wales/?hl=en
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mark-wales

Transcript

Planning Beats Perfect Plans

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's not about the plan, it's about the planning. I would sell millions of dollars worth of these courses and I was like, this is this is clearly the future. I've had like 1.8 million over 18 months.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Nearly everybody can get a 1% opt-in rate. Hello

Meet Mark Wales And His Story

SPEAKER_01 0:13

and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies, secret hacks, and top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth, and today's guest is Mark Wales. Now, Mark's had about four careers, he's been at the sharp end of every one of them. He spent 16 years in the Australian Army, rose to the rank of major. He served four tours of Afghanistan with the SAS Special Air Service, where he commanded a troop in some of the toughest fighting that Australian soldiers have ever seen. When he left the military, he didn't slow down, he went and got an MBA at Wharton, one of the best business schools in the world, and then went to work for Control McKinsey. Then he did something that most McKinsey consultants don't do. He went on Australian Survivor and won it. He's also raced in the Eco Challenge in Fiji, had a role in the Mad Max film Furiosa, and he's written three books. His memoir, Survivor, Life in the SAS, was a national bestseller. His first novel, Outrider, is about China invading Australia. And his third book, Mission Ready, is out at the end of this month. These days, he takes everything you learn in these very different elite worlds, special forces and top tier business, and he teaches data keynote speakers for the YouTube channel, an online course around leadership, resilience, and performing under real pressure. His whole thing is the patterns of the same whether you're leading a troop in Afghanistan or running a company. Clear mission, relentless improvement, focus, and bias to act. And he's actually a listener of the show as well. He emailed me a little while back, told me he's studying course funnels, and he's in the middle of building all this out right now. So we actually get to look at this while it's still being built. They know listeners love. Mark, welcome to the show. Mate, thanks for having us. Big fan, very excited.

The Leadership Gap In Business

SPEAKER_00 1:41

So talk us through. Who's your audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Who do you help with your courses?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Well, when I was in McKinsey and Company, I noticed that some of the people getting that were kind of in their mid-20s getting promoted to small team leadership positions were technically good, but they had no real kind of leadership training in the in the way we might in the way we might do it in the army. So I just remember kind of noting that. And then um after I left the military, became a keynote speaker, and I would speak to a lot of companies about uh resilience and leadership and and small kind of tips and tricks you can do, which are kind of best practice, I guess, for small team leadership. And I've now consolidated all that into a book, and I kind of wrote the book so I wanted that to be a curriculum for the course. So I've then gone out and I got an instructional designer who's actually a UK guy as well, and he's been fantastic, and he helped me turn that book into something more coherent and that would go on kajabi and and be well structured and ready to go. So that's that's kind of how I

Instructional Design That Actually Teaches

SPEAKER_00 2:40

landed on it.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Can you talk us through that process with instructional design? Because I think so I've had a couple of instructional designers on the podcast before, but I think most course creators are are putting this all together themselves. So, what's been the benefit for you of working with someone like that?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Well, I was lucky because when in my last year at McKinsey and Company, I was put in like a almost like a McKinsey startup, which is called McKinsey Academy, and we built online courses for companies that we were working with or training. And I was a project manager, I I helped kind of build and project manage all the courses that were happening. This is in 2017, and I remember working alongside an instructional designer to do that, and I had no idea what they did. I was like, What are you what do you guys do? And this lady sat down and explained to me about how they are trained in the science of teaching and uh how people absorb knowledge. And when they design a course, it's kind of like almost like architecture, they're trying to design to remove everything that's unnecessary and just have what's left over for that transformation promise that you're driving towards, and also the science about how people learn, whether it's auditory or you know, all the different modalities for learning uh there across it. So I just I just remember thinking realizing how valuable they were, and uh, I think it really is the secret source for online courses. I've seen a few that you can kind of tell when they've had that extra design uh applied to them. So yeah, I think I he's been fantastic. I I got a very detailed kind of brief from him on how he would do it and pull it together, and uh for me it was well and truly worth it.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

If you're listening and you're like, well fuck, I need to know more about instructional design, then go and check out episode 113 with Mariana Pena. So she was somebody who I had connected with because she was doing work for another client. I've recommended her on to other people who have worked with her and just raved about her. So it's like, have you got you you mentioned you work with somebody, as do you want to give them a shout-out as well?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, yeah. Well, his name, I'll just bring it up. He's also a Mark. It's Mark Gregory. Uh he I found him on Upwork, and uh I've worked alongside him, and his company's called uh it's called The Customer's Shoes, which I thought was great. So he's he's really experienced at this stuff, he's been doing it for ages, and he specifically helps online course builders that work in Kajabi. So it was a great fit for me. Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

All right, so that was episode 113 for Mariana Pena, um, and the customers' shoes for Mark Gregory. So go check those guys out. Okay, so talk us through a little bit about what it is that you're teaching to people, like what the stuff is that's the crossover between military and leadership and leadership within business.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Well,

Mission Planning Execution And Reviews

SPEAKER_00 5:20

the the major categories I've got, and there's four of them. One is kind of how you um how you prepare yourself individually to perform at a high level, and I just cover three basics diet, exercise, and rest, and how to integrate those well so you can get the best out of yourself. I'll talk about mission planning, so how you look how you actually go about deciding on what your mission is going to be and how you disaggregate that down into tiny milestones and execute on it. So that's another part. Um, and there's another part on execution, so some tips on how you can kind of keep people in cadence and uh executing often, how you deal with failure, how you uh prepare. You when you're planning how to prepare for failure and try and mitigate risk as much as you can. There's a few processes I cover in that, like after action reviews and something the military call war gaming, which we used to do. The business businesses call it pre-morteming. But it's basically making sure that you go through a plan and de-risk it as much as possible before you kind of uh seek contact with the market, or in my case it was the enemy. You would want to make sure that you fought as much of that battle in a in an air-conditioned room with a whiteboard uh before you ever went out in front of someone else, you know, in in the field where it's too late to adjust your plan. Um so we spent a lot of time really refining our plans then. I I still use that now, I think it's a super handy way to do it. Um so yeah, they're the other kind of major categories I cover in the course.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

What do you find in terms of the the amount of planning that's needed with business versus in the military?

Bias To Action Versus Overplanning

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Because there's obviously much low in a way, there's a lot lower stakes, right? You're not gonna get shot, you're not gonna get killed. It's like there's a certain amount of I've been I've been um working on this for quite a while because I'm like sometimes I'll plan stuff out in so much detail and then my plan turned out to be bullshit because I didn't understand the world nearly as well as I thought I did. And sometimes it's like, well just get the fuck on with something and like as long as it's on the right as long as it's on the right task, I seem to sometimes be better off just cracking on, getting something done, iterating, iterating, iterating, rather than trying to plan it all out in advance. What's your thoughts about it?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

No, you're you're right, there's that tension between having a bias to action and kind of iterating as you move, which is a you know, it's the gr it's the uh kind of best practice for developing products, versus uh uh a lot of planning. I think um in the military there's the you know it is high stakes and all that, but also we're not there's no profit imperative. We we do have the time sometimes to do that additional planning. But in business, I can say it's and we used to say it in the army, it's not about the plan, it's about the planning. It's if you go through the process of thinking about how to execute your mission, that's where the value lies. Your plan will always fall apart to some degree. It just once it comes into contact with the opposition or whatever, it will degrade. Um, and that's where your agility and your bias to action and your adapting kind of comes into play. And also, if you are doing your war gaming, you can predict some of those friction points before you even go into it. So, yeah, you're right, there's always that tension between having a bias to action. But if you do get get the chance and you get faster at planning, you know, 30 minutes to 60 minutes of planning can can save you a lot of issues later on. So, yeah, I always encourage it.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

One

Using AI To Build Faster

SPEAKER_01 8:39

one of the things that's been leading me to work to get started on something faster is AI. Because all of a sudden, so it used to be right. So I a couple of weeks ago, I was like organizing an outreach campaign. Um, and I was like, I've got six different spreadsheets, and I've got to try and analyze, you know, organise everything between them. I was like, it'd be great if I had a this all pulled together into one CRM system. And I've thought that a number of times, and I was like, I wonder if I could just get Claude to build this for me right now. And it's like four hours later I had like it built. Whereas it would have been if you go back two years, right? That was that was a three-month project or something, you know. And if you do it in a pre-existing CRM, then maybe it's like a week's project. But this was like, fuck, that's it's kind of changed the game in a certain way. And I'm still trying to figure out this balance between like so Claude's got this um a planning feature, and my uh my friend Steph always gives me shit because I always get it to plan, but then I don't read the plan. I'm just like, okay, you planned it, go. And it's like put in the back pocket, let's let's fucking move, let's get started, and then I kind of iterate from there as fast as I can. And I'm not convinced that I'm wrong, because it's like I I I I talk to people about it, and they're like, You've got to read the fucking plan, dude. And I'm like, I don't know. What I'm doing seems to be working for some reason. I think it's partly because the world's kind of changed because Claude and Codex and whatever mean that you can just move so fast with some of these things that it's crazy. Yes. What's I don't know, I'm just I'm kind of riffing on this, but like, what's your experience? How are you kind of figuring this out yourself?

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Well, my my point is always to have that what your goal is in mind, and the plan to get there matters a lot less than than navigating the path to that goal. So um I try and keep that really clear mission, a very time-bound thing that's achievable and specific and something exciting that I'll actually remember. Um, for example, I'll I'll be like, all right, I want to have a a book manuscript done, and I want it done by the end of the year, and I'll just reverse engineer the whole thing time-wise, and I won't always follow that plan, but at least I know I'm heading I need to make a book, that's what I'm heading towards. Um so yeah, I I think if you if you set that clear mission, you can give yourself a good sandbox to play, and it doesn't matter how you get there, you can you can be as aggressive or as fast or as you know meandering as you want.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Have you

Bottlenecks Focus And The 80 20 Rule

SPEAKER_01 11:04

ever read um a book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt? No, but I've heard of it. Yeah, I have heard of it. It's about the theory of constraints, and I've got kind of obsessed with this in the last couple of years of like trying to look to see how can I get better at using it. The basic concept is um theory of constraints says that within business there's always one thing that's the bottleneck. It's not six different things, it's like what's what's the one thing that's really holding you back the most? And then it's like, right, work on that and see how can you improve that so that that's no longer the bottleneck. And there's I've just started reading a book called The Algorithm, which is by a guy who used to work as the president of Tesla. And so he the algorithm is like Elon Musk's business system and his basic concept is yeah, yeah. I think some of the stuff it's like if you can kind of go, Oh yeah, I do that, and it's like you don't fucking do it like Elon does it.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

It's like Elon sleep on the floor at the bottleneck, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Well, yeah, I'm not fucking doing that, yeah. But um so the the the steps in it are question all the requirements, if it's not a law of physics or a uh law of the country, then can you just cut the requirement and then delete everything you can, and then if that if you haven't deleted so much that you've got to put some back who didn't delete enough, then simplify everything and then automate it. And it's like, but it looks like he's fucking ruthless about it, you know, like about how much like how aggressive he is on what is actually really required, you know, and he'll probably go. A lot of people think he goes too far with some of the stuff that he does, you know. I know that Doge didn't go down that great and a lot of uh a lot of people in the States, but like this kind of well because you're talking a lot about like focus and like what is the area you need to be focusing on, or like how do you how do you kind of layer these things together? And and I know you're you're a big fan of like the 80-20 rule. What what are you doing with any of this to try and do you find you struggle with it? Do you find you keep going back to doing too many things or not focusing on the right step and then have to kind of get back on top of it yourself?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yeah, yeah, I get um you you kind of track too many shiny objects at once, and I think I try and uh do a daily audit where I pull myself back and go, Are you on track? Are you heading towards the thing you thought was important? Um, is it still relevant? Is that mission still relevant? I think and what you're saying with Elon Musk, he's obviously he's doing something right because he built rocket ships to go and ask so so you must be doing something well. Um but yeah, it's something I try and track as often as I can. And that whole 80-20 concept was talked about a lot at McKinsey, and that and the theory behind it is obviously that there's not everything's not linear, like more effort doesn't equal more outcome. Sometimes some things are much higher impact, and your job as an entrepreneur is to try and find those few things that really drive impact, concentrate your efforts on those, whether it's your you know bottleneck or whatever your constraint, whatever that is, um, and drive as as hard as you can towards those those limited things that drive 80% of the impact.

Building A YouTube Channel For Scale

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Talk to me about your your YouTube channel, because I've been going through watching some of your videos, and it's like you've got a couple of it seems like you've got a couple of kinds of videos, like some that are about leadership and some that are about like what's going on in the news, military, this kind of stuff. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's a bit of a mix. And I start, and one of the reasons I started is because I do uh uh keynote speaking, but you you can only do as as much work as you can attend to. So this was my attempt to kind of go for scale and try and you know, it's YouTube, you can get to as many people as as uh as as is possible. But I started last year, at the start of last year, and I thought, you know what, I'll do some leadership videos, and I did some of them, they did okay and um not too bad. And then I eventually I was just playing around. I did one video late at night. I was like, I should talk about some international affairs stuff. There were some um Chinese vessels that had circumnavigated Australia, which was very exciting for us. We don't get many visitors down here, so I talked about it, and everyone was excited, and I thought I'll just talk about it, and I I think I'll record it late at night, and I thought no one was gonna watch it, so I was just carrying on. I thought I was talking to myself, really. And um, we put it up and it it ran away. It got nearly it's got nearly 400,000 views, got me most of my subscribers. So then I was like, well, I'll do a bit more on kind of international affairs because I've got a background in it and and have an advantage, I guess. Um, and so that was just uh and I'm now built it to a I think I've got like 23,000 subscribers, which is good, knowing that I was gonna write this book and launch a course and hopefully get a good kind of number of email sign-ons from that. So that's the part I'm still working on now, is just lists trying to build that list and build the channel at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yeah, the the thing that I think is always tricky with YouTube is the views is is kind of a um like an ego metric to an extent, right? But it's like you need a certain amount of views in order to get the subscribers in in order to get the email opt-ins, in order to get the sales. Like you have to get people onto your email list really to make to make most of the revenue from it. And it's like if you have something that's bang on topic, then you'll get a higher opt-in rate. But if it gets fuck all views, then that's no use to you. So it's like, okay, how are we gonna buy it? It looks like you're getting a something like about 50,000 views a month.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Is that about right? Or where are you at? That sounds about right. I think I've had like 1.8 million over 18 months. So I it'd be that'd be about right. Okay, okay. So maybe slightly higher then, yeah. Um and how big's your email list at the moment? It's about 1300. And I mean, I've just I've just not been good at just setting up because I've got a few points where people can join, and I've now got a QR code when I do a keynote presentation, people can jump on that. And and I'm just trying to integrate all that now and just be better at making sure it's kind of everywhere to grow that list more.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Yeah, because

Lead Magnets And The 1 Percent Rule

SPEAKER_01 17:01

that's that's what I was looking at is the the places that you have got the opt-in mentioned, and it's like you've sometimes got it in a pinned comment, you've sometimes got it in the description, but it's not front and center. And you're not mentioning it that much in the videos. And that's what I want to really encourage you to do. It's like if you can find even on your you know, international affairs video, it's like, well, some of the people watching are going to be interested, and some of the people are watching are gonna be like a you know, want move to that next step. It's a much lower percentage than if the video is specifically about leadership, right? Yeah, but some of them are, so it's like, well, let's let's give them the opportunity to get on the list. So I know you've got a couple of lead magnets, right? You've got the the uh course workbook you're currently giving away for free, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:52

They're they're that one's quite new, yeah. We've only just built that. So I'll start, yeah, I'll start putting that out with course-related material. It may even be too generic, like it might need something more specific to a video. Um, so I'll probably create a few more, but the other one I've got, which I sent you was the summary of the keynote presentation I do. Um, so that's that's not a bad one as well. But I'm sure there's plenty I can do, which are just you know, p PDF pages or of whatever that are relevant to that presentation.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

And I think there's like there's a balance here, right? So you want to have lead magnets that are relevant to the video, but s and I know people who make a f a new lead magnet for every video, and it's like, okay, that that's great because it means it's exactly the right thing, yeah, but it's then time consuming to make it. So you've got to kind of balance between these things. So the the the right balance generally is to have like, okay, what themes am I covering? Here's my four themes, six themes, whatever. And then have a lead magnet for each of those things, and then mention that one and mention it in the video somewhere, probably about after point one of your let's say you're doing a right, the six main points I'm making in this video. Do it after point one. Because if you look at the the the percentage of people watching a video, it it drops very quickly in the first 30 seconds, and you're trying to like get the hook right so it doesn't drop too fast, whatever, but then it gradually peters out, it's gonna get lower by the very end. So if you don't mention the lead magnet till the very end, then you uh have less people watching, right? Let's say you've only got 30% of the people, that's less good. But if you mention it too early, it'll cause more of a drop-off in the percentage of people watching. So it's like, okay, what's the balance? And my experience is the best place to put it is after point one. So you had your hook, your intro, maybe, you made point one, and then you go, and if you want more info about this or you want to learn whatever, you want to get our mission ready plan, you want to know how to use this kind of tactics that the military are using, but in leadership, download and it doesn't have to be long, like 10 seconds. Yeah, exactly. Telling people about it, right? But just mention it and then have it above the fold in the description. So by that I mean you know you've got that more button before that, yes, like prime real estate and the pinned comment, and just like make it really hard to miss it. Yeah, yeah, lower. And what what I've seen is that nearly everybody can get a 1% opt-in rate. So that as in a percentage of views, yeah. Which would mean if you're doing 60,000 views a month, you should be able to get 600 opt-ins a month. That's the one I'm looking for.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

That's almost for definite, right? That that's the one I was looking for. I wasn't sure what the benchmark was. I I know you knew it, but I I was trying to figure out what it was, but yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

So nearly I've I've I've not had any client who hasn't managed to get to one percent, but there are people who've gone way higher. Now, the the videos that go way higher are ones where the lead magnet is almost kind of needed in order to make sense of the video for like it's a perfect fit. So I'll give you examples, right? It's not from your space, but hopefully we can kind of translate it. So uh I mentioned quite a lot on the podcast. A friend of mine, Jack, runs banjo skills, and he um is teaching songs in a lot of his videos. So it's like, I'm gonna teach you how to play X song on the banjo. And if you want the tabs, which is like basic sheet music for strings and string instruments, then you can grab those here and he's put the link and he's put it high up in the description, he's put it in the pinned comment, whatever. And he might say the link on the, you know, actually say it in the video and show it on the video as well. And he can get six percent. I think he's had as high as occasionally 10% of views convert to email opt-ins. So therefore, he only needs a tenth as many or a sixth as many views for that video to be as good. So that's the balance. That's when my my kind of general recommendations to people is when you're looking at how good was this video, if you can look at how many opt ins did I get rather than how many views, that's much more connected to how much money you're gonna make from that video.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Um, and also I took some notes from a previous uh podcast you did where the course creator was talking about how they posted a lot of their course videos directly to YouTube. So I'm gonna uh do something similar and have uh a lead magnet for each of those. So hopefully we can get good alignment um as well. Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

I love it. Okay, so that's opt-ins. The other thing

Mapping Revenue Targets To Offers

SPEAKER_01 22:24

that you'd asked me about before was you want to get to 5,000 a month in revenue with course sales. Was that right?

SPEAKER_00 22:32

I yeah, yeah, that's that's what we're gonna aim for over the next 12 months.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Okay, cool. So here's my here's my back of the envelope sums, and all of these need to be adjusted because your niche will be slightly different to other people's and your email is conversion rate and whatever, but we're just gonna use these as kind of like average average conversion rates. So your course is gonna be 997? Yes. Okay, cool. Aussie. So let Aussie, okay, cool. So what's that like? Oh, if the whole thing's an Aussie dollars, then that's that's all good, right? Uh when you say $5,000 a month, is that $5,000 Aussie dollars as well? Yeah, yeah, Aussie, yeah. Okay, cool. Yep. So if you put that on discount when you sold it and you sold it for like, let's say $700, but you had like some upsells and order bumps that went with it as well, and your average price was maybe a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred. What's kind of more really a thousand dollars, something like that. Yeah, then you need to make an average of five sales a month from that. Now, the thing is you can only really run a promotion for that kind of thing like every few months. If you run the promotion for the same course every month, people start to get tired of it and it doesn't kind of work nearly as well. So you're probably gonna want to have some other things that you're promoting in the months in between. And I'm just kind of uh was was looking at well, what else have you got at the moment? You got your 30-day email challenge, you were considering selling the courseworkbook. Um the the thing that the in terms of offers in your space is I don't know if you're interested in this, but like one-to-one coaching can pay a lot of money in the kind of space that you're in.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

You did mention you've I think I just your most recent one you were talking about. This um I th I'd be open to it for sure. It sounds like a smart move.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah. So I've got someone I'm gonna uh I'll give you details, I'll connect you with him afterwards. Have you ever heard the uh episode with uh Itmar Morani? Don't know if I have. So he's ex uh Israeli special forces, uh, teachers leadership and mindset, sells one-to-one coaching, sells a group coaching programme, like a lot of stuff that kind of overlaps with what you're doing, right? Yeah, so I'll perfect. Uh I'll give you the details of his uh podcast episodes, but I messaged him before this and said, uh, do you wanna do you want me to connect you with Mark? And he was totally up for it. So if you want, I'll connect to you guys afterwards. So if anyone else wants to listen to an episode with Itamar, then episode 80, How to Know If Your Mindset Is Off with Itmar Morani. And I know I did another one with him. I'm gonna try and find that as well, uh, where he just was uh launching a book as well. Um find that one right now. Okay. So if you had that combination between those things, I would say if you could get your email list to 5,000, you'll be in a really strong place. If you can get it to 10,000, you almost couldn't help but hit your your target in terms of revenue, right? Just as long as you're doing regular promotions of it. I was chatting with Jack just before this episode to check where he's at because I know that he's like um he was doing about that kind of amount of revenue. He's averaging five thousand dollars a month. He has got an email list of sixty, five hundred and he's doing a promotion every month. So he also, on top of this course sales, he also does one-to-one coaching with people, which makes him a bunch of extra money. But just from course sales, uh he's doing uh uh the the five thousand a month. Now, one of the things he's got that helps with that is he's got multiple offers, so every month he can promote something. He's got a membership, he's got a course, he's got um sorry, he's got like 10 different courses on different things, and he can kind of test that out and see like what's what's converting and and always have a different offer to kind of make people. He can bundle stuff together, he can split stuff out. So that's really helpful in terms of course sales, is just having at least three offers. Gotcha. And and ideally even more is kind of helpful.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

So you would say uh in my case, for example, uh the long-form course, maybe the 30-day ML course and some a membership or coaching option.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

I think those three would put you in a great spot. I think between the three of those, you'd you'd be you'd be good. I think a group coaching program in your space, you could definitely charge uh a thousand a month for group coaching. Um you could probably do more, but a thousand is like definitely doable. Uh one-to-one coaching, depending on who you're going after, who's in your audience, you could charge a lot for the kind of stuff that you're doing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Um how do people normally run one-to-one coaching? Do they is it a is it a bound piece of time and then access uh via phone? Like how do people normally structure it?

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Yeah, so the the standard is just to have a um a fixed amount of time on Zoom calls, and then some people will throw in, okay, you can also message me in between or ask me stuff in between, but other people don't. Others are just like, no, this is our time, this is our slot for doing it, and that's fucking it.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

You know, you won't hear from you between yeah, yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

Yeah, um, yeah. Like I've got a bunch of coaches who I pay who I wouldn't I would never think of messaging them in between. I'm like, that's little phrase. Like, well, I haven't paid no, just haven't paid them for it. It's like they're I'm paying them for an hour a week. So it's like, well, let's fucking talk for an hour a week. Um we do it, like we do one-to-one coaching for people, and we are also available through Slack or through what I don't think it's through WhatsApp. I think Slack or email as well. So we've that's our offer, but we might charge someone for one-to-one coaching two thousand up to like maybe I think the highest might be ten thousand, depending on how much support they're getting per month. Gotcha. And then that will include a certain amount of a certain level of support that they can kind of get.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Even 8020 we were just talking about, some people are just a small number willing to pay that that huge amount.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

That's the thing. That's the thing with one-to-one coaching, is like it's it's not for most of your audience. So it's got to be that either you build an audience of people who have enough money to be able to pay the extra, or you have a big enough audience that a percentage of them have enough money to be able to pay it. So you'll typically find that um like this is quite an extreme example of it, but like in the if someone's teaching music, they might be selling their courses for a hundred dollars each, but there is a percentage of their audience, a good enough percentage, that they can charge ten thousand dollars a year for one-to-one coaching, and that's learning music, right? It's a hobby for nearly everybody. Gotcha. Wow. Um, musicians generally aren't rich, but there's a percentage of people who've got enough money and this they want to just do better with their hobby and they're they're willing to pay for it, you know. Um, and so Scott Devine, who runs Scott's Bass Lessons, he they do like five million-ish a year, and a million of it is uh one-to-one coaching, and the majority of their audience are paying $35 for a uh all you can eat membership. So it's like that's a that's a difference, right? Big spread, yeah. And if you're helping people in business with leadership and that's gonna help them to make more money and whatever, they're willing to pay generally more money than someone who is uh just doing it for a hobby, you know, as a general rule. Yeah, the things the other things that you'd mentioned in terms of like revenue streams, you'd said merch YouTube members, ad revenue, and partnerships. I'm gonna make a suggestion that you you pretty much uh cut all of that.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Yeah, it's I was just gonna have it as a lighter, don't even worry about it for now, but yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Because the percentage of money that the amount of money you can make from YouTube from ad revenue is tiny compared to what you can make from courses. I I so I don't know much about the YouTube membership system, but I don't think it's the I don't my my expectation, what I've what I have seen is you don't make anywhere near as much from it as if you were selling your own membership through to your own email list rather than directly from in YouTube. So I I think it's like it's just not worth working on. I'm if anybody out there, any listeners are like, no, fuck, I've making loads of money from my YouTube membership, tell me. I would love to be I'd love to be corrected. But my experience has been it's just you can make so much more from get someone onto your email list, sell to them direct than you can from just like having a uh a YouTube membership with with members' videos.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Yeah, I mean YouTube are very encouraging about memberships, obviously, because I think I'm pretty sure they think that's a good idea. Because they make some money for you. They're always telling me to do it. You should do this. I'm sure you think I should do that. Of course you do.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yeah, it's amazing how people's uh encouragement goes up when they get paid for it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 31:22

People are very encouraging when uh when they are able to clip a ticket, I guess.

Keynotes As A High Trust Funnel

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Talk to me about the keynotes that you're doing. How how did that come about? How did you start doing those and like how often do you do them?

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yeah, this was a this was a funny one. I um I did my first one to a small bank. I had someone who's like, hey, look, we'd love we've got a small thing happening, we'd love to hear from a military person. Like, can you help? I was like, Yeah. And I got some advice about how to price it. And um I think it was about four and a half thousand Aussie for a 45-minute keynote speech and then 15 minutes of of QA. I was like, Really, that's a lot of money. Anyway, I rehearsed for a while and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to say, but I just came up with some concepts and shared that with the audience. And um, you know, that was that was the first time I'd ever done it. I was quite worried about it. But then the kind of penny dropped, I'm like, you can actually do really well with this. And I heard about other keynote speakers and the type of money they're able to make if they booked a lot of events. So I just stayed at it, and um every every now and then I'll try and do something that was either TV related or uh the book or whatever, and it just gives you an extra bit of notoriety or a bit of extra demand. Um, different speaking bureaus will book you out. I I focus on resilience, uh, leadership. It's all built around kind of my experience enjoying the SAS and then um how all the lessons I learned in the army were useful in business and and vice versa. And uh that's what I teach now is how the best of both those worlds I think you can kind of merge and get some great advantages from. So it's a it's a great job. If you can book the work, it can be really, really fun, really lucrative. It is hard, you've got to perform and deliver no matter how you feel. Um, and sometimes you they can be I got up to I think about a thousand people in the UK about a year ago, and that was I was nervous before that one. That's a high stakes kind of presentation. You don't want to get that wrong. Um, so but most of the time it's in Australia, kind of East Coast cities. I'll do 200 to 400 people at a talk, and there'll be uh all sorts of different industries and companies are just looking for a speaker that that um can teach people about how you can get the best out of yourself in terms of high performance or just some leadership tips or just how you deal with things when they go wrong. I talk about a battle that we planned in great detail and it just went terribly, and we were stuck in a valley for 12 hours trying to get out. Um, and just talk about how much of a nightmare it was, and people take their own kind of tips from that about how to plan and um you know stay resilient when everything's going wrong.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Everyone's like, well fuck, I got really pissed off when stuff went badly on my last project, and no one was trying to kill me, and I was not stuck in the I wasn't stuck in some hell valley.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

I need to get some perspective here, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's taught me a lot though about it taught me a bit more about it helped with the YouTube stuff, and then vice versa, when I see videos that do well or badly, some of it's related to your performance, you how you modulate your voice, or maybe you're boring, or um, so that feedback I've found has been helpful going to into YouTube as well. Um, yeah. Do you use that as a way to get people onto your email list as well? I think you mentioned you had some QR code that you do use it at. Yeah, so at the end of my talk, I'll just say, hey, look, if you want a summary of this keynote, I've got like a four-page PDF you can just um download it here, and I send a link to the event organizer as well. And it's just a point where it's kind of a good alignment um for the people to kind of onboard themselves. Does it work? How like what kind of percentage of people sign up?

SPEAKER_01 35:00

Do you know?

SPEAKER_00 35:01

Um It's about anywhere from probably uh one to four percent, kind of in that range. One to four percent. So I'll get I'll do a talk if I you know if I do three or four hundred people, I might get you know twenty or thirty.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

I'm wondering, just thinking out loud here, if it would be worth your while to offer them your book, like what the cost ought to be of shipping a copy of the book to everybody, because then it seems to everyone like, oh, that's such a great offer. Definitely so I feel like it would get you a higher percentage. If those are the people who would be a great fit and you're gonna make enough money back from them, then that could like totally be worthwhile. Like, what's the what would the cost be of your own book shipping it out to everybody? Five dollars, ten dollars a person. I don't know. I feel like that's it.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

So are you saying are you saying that that would be um something we would give to them for signing on?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

That's not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Like just give the like if they are the if they're the perfect audience and they're the people who've got a good job actually paying you for one-to-one coaching and you really want them on your email list, then paying ten bucks per person and shipping them a copy of your book, and then if they read your book, they're now a much hotter lead, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Because they're like one thing I was able to get the publisher to do um was and they put at the back of the book Oh nice, that's great. Yes, so that that is super handy. That takes them to um it takes them to the page where they can download literally the the course playbook for this. Me and my partner were talking about maybe because it's like a 43-page workbook, we're like maybe we actually make this a bit smaller, carve it down to maybe six or eight pages and and sell the main one. But yeah, either way, there's a there's a QR code for that, so that's that's good too. But I like that idea though about potentially sending him a book because uh you know, cost of acquisition, it might work out to be pretty, pretty uh lucrative.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

Yeah, and like it I feel like it would get a higher percentage of people, and if all of them are real if these are the really good leads, then you then you're willing to put more effort into it. But also I think when you're talking to the organizer about it, it's like that's a that's a feels like a great offer to them. It's a great offer. You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna send all of your anybody in your audience who wants it a copy of the book by post for free, then it's like, oh fuck yeah, let's let's talk about that, let's mention that, let's tell everybody they're gonna get this. I feel like you could get a bit more hype.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

Oh, I I reckon everyone would sign up. Oh, I reckon that would be like a 90% sign up, right?

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

And then at that point, obviously you get their email address as well, and you put them onto the email list and you follow up with those guys afterwards, and you you know, they might have to take you to go on the email list, but like you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

It's a genius plan because they're probably the warmest audience you know that you that you'll get. And there's that trust, they kind of build up a bit of trust by watching you know you tell a story or share something vulnerable. Um, I talk a bit about mental health. I I came back from Afghanistan and had PDSD after my first tour. People kind of trust you when you've revealed a bit of yourself like that. Um, so yeah, that I think that could be a really good, really good plan.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

The other thing I do in that process, so have the place for them to put their address, their name, their address, their email address when they're signing up. But then, so then they hit submit on that, but then the next page I would have like maybe it's just one question, or maybe it's one question in that initial sign-up form, but says something like, Do you want Mark to contact you about how you could implement some of these tactics for yourself? Because if they've said yes to that, then they're basically saying, I'm a hot lead. I want I want to do some coaching with you, Mark. Please get in touch, you know. And you've got permission, they're almost requesting, or they are requesting, for you to like do that outreach and get in touch with if you spent the next day after that sending individual messages to everybody to get them to you know to get in touch with those ones who'd said yes, then you wouldn't make coaching clients from it.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Yes. Would you make that a just a calendarly link or an employee?

SPEAKER_01 39:12

I would first of all ask, because the thing is, right, when it's at the end of your talk, you've got like a f a a small amount of time. You've got the QR code up on screen, they scan the code, they go to put the details in. There's only so long you can leave it for them to go fill it in, look in their calendar, find a time, all of that before it's like they need to move on to the next thing in the in the talk, right? In the in the watch conference. So I might put it there, but I wouldn't expect everyone to fill it in straight away. But um, and I I think if I put something, I would put like a 15-minute slot. I wouldn't put like a full sales call type thing, but like a 15-minute just to check who which of those are really a good fit. But if you found people weren't filling that in, I think that would just be a time would be a time thing. And then what I would do is just individually message each one of those people the next day, um and and suggest let's jump on a quick call and just kind of talk through what the options are or something like that, and then and then I think the far you'd need to do that fast. It would need to be like the that evening or the next day or something that you're doing that follow-up with people, because the drop-off after that of their they're kind of going, who was that guy again? Oh yeah, I signed up for something last week. I've forgotten, you know. It's hard.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

One thing I could do is I could take the books with me and just if people sign up, they can then take them from the venue as well, save a bit of shipping potentially.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Yeah, how would that work in terms of how do you justify the fact that you want their contact details if they do that?

SPEAKER_00 40:40

You're right, probably better, and they might not want to carry it. Might be better to yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Yeah, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

It's actually difficult to fly with that stuff too, believe it or not.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

If you're flying with 300 books. I had a friend of mine. Yeah. I had a friend of mine who, you know, flying back, uh, who uh she was she was launching a book and she didn't offer because she wanted to get volume going through so that she could go up to like number one on Amazon or whatever it was. So she was like, if you buy a hundred of my books, then you get like this coach, this coaching offer with me, and it was a great deal. And I was like, Great, I'd I'd love to do some coaching with you, Jody. That sounds dope. So I I bought the hundred books, and but I was like, but I don't want a hundred books, like I don't like my bookshelf, I don't want a hundred of the same book on my bookshelf, right? She's like, Well, you can give them out to people. I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to be doing that. So I'm like, have you got somewhere that I could send these books to? So she organized some charity that was like, I don't know, the Princess Trust or something. And so I shipped a hundred books there instead of getting them. And then I was like, Well, fuck, I I now don't have a copy of the book. I've bought a hundred copies of this book. I should have sent 99. So then I had to buy a hundred and first copy and get that sent to me. But I think if you'd be right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

I mean, this book's coming out in a week too, so I might do, I might do something similar, but maybe not a hundred. But uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

Yeah, yeah, it depends. It's like it's I mean, that's just kind of a way of gaming the system, right? It's like because someone could just pay you the money for for coaching, but if instead, if you do that, you get a much lower percentage, but it gets you up to the top of Amazon. You can say Amazon best seller or whatever it is, I don't know. I don't know how the uh the Australian best seller lists work, because you've obviously got different ones that are based on just sales and other ones that are based on sales from certain shops that certain you know distributors.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

Amazon's the most responsive if you want to, it's kind of updated hourly, so you can kind of see by the hour if you're going like if I if I do an email campaign, I'll be able to see within an hour or two if it's kind of worked, which is which is good. Um but I I like that idea though of the keynotes with the book offer because I'm like it's a warm lead. Yeah, it'll probably cost like $25 Aussie dollars. I can get books from the publisher for like $17 and then you know shipping. Um, but that's yeah, it's a smart idea.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Yeah, certainly worth testing, I'd say, yeah, like and just kind of seeing. Um dude, this is great. I f I love what you're doing, and it's what I really like is we're kind of we're getting the chance to see you kind of a little early in the journey, but I can just see you're gonna smash this. You're absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

I hope so. I'm excited. I've been wanted to do this for so long because I I remember watching it in McKinsey. We would we'd spend maybe and this is before all the core software was really developed and uh production was high like we would spend about 150,000 US on a quite a long form course, but we would sell them for I'd sell them in hundred thousand dollar batches to companies and I would sell millions of dollars worth of these courses and I was like, this is and they would train each one would train thousands of people. I'm like, this is clearly the future. Um it just took me a long time to get the right team together to and the right message um to be able to do it. So yeah, I'll I fingers crossed, they'll be excited to check in and let you know how it's gone for sure.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

Yeah, I'd love to have you back on again at some point when you're like, right, I've hit the 5,000, now I'm I'm aiming at, you know, I'm like kind of different milestones. Welcome to come back on.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Yeah, definitely. I've actually had um another one I've had coaching from is Tina Tower, who's uh an Aussie course creator, and she's done a great, she's built a great kind of niche for herself here. So um yeah, the coaching's good. It's a good idea too. So I'll have to include that. Awesome.

Where To Find Mark And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Dude, if people want to go check it out, if people want to get your book, this is gonna come out after the book's launch. So what's the what's the website? Uh the website is get missionready.com. Check it out. Perfect. And then if you want to look for Mark on YouTube, it's just search for Mark Wales, W A L E S, and that's going to come up. Um and get missionready.com and Mark Whales on YouTube. Mark, thanks again, man. This was awesome. I loved having a chat with you today. Thanks, mate. Exciting. Thanks a lot. If you found this super useful and you want to know one of the things we covered was about growing your email list faster, you can go to data drivenmarketing.co slash guide. That in there, there's a guide that's going to take you through all the steps for growing your email list uh faster from your existing audience. Thanks so much as always for listening, and we'll catch you guys next time.