This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
In today's story, a digital marketer is determined to make a career out of her true passion. And that passion is belly dancing. She now sells a course that brings in more than $100,000 a year in net income. She does this in part by spending $15 to $20,000 a month on Facebook ads. As we have seen before, this is a hard nut to crack.
Most people end up losing money on social media advertising. But when it works, it can work really well. If you can get it to a point where for every dollar you spend, you bring in $1.20, let's say, or even $1.05 for every dollar you spend, then you just wanna spend more money because then it's a very profitable investment. There's also a process you can follow in a case study like this, which is why these kinds of stories are some of my favorites because you can learn a lot. There's a whole model.
You can learn to identify a specific problem and the problem that this woman identifies, you'll hear about it in a moment, is fairly personal, to creating a product that solves the problem and then, of course, to learning to sell and market it. So it's all here in one quick package. Great story today. These six-figure belly dancing course, that story's coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Jennifer Sobel was introduced to belly dancing when she was just 10 years old.
Her dad took her to a restaurant where a belly dancer performed and Jennifer was in awe. Fast forward a bit and she's now been doing it herself for nearly 15 years. She says it makes her feel deeply connected with her body. But belly dance is a hobby, not a business, right? Well, during that decade and a half, Jennifer had met countless belly dancers who wanted to get paid a real income, but she didn't know anyone who had made it a reality.
And as a digital marketer, her day job, she was even a guest on a podcast once where a consultant told her there was not enough demand for belly dancing for it to become a lucrative business. But despite the odds, Jennifer wanted to see what could be done. In February of 2019, she decided to create a product, partly as an experiment, but also in response to a real need she discovered. A fellow belly dancer had confided to her that the practice had helped to solve a personal problem. That personal problem was bladder leakage.
By strengthening your core muscles, it's much less of an issue for women. Why is this also significant? Well, because it points to a problem in need of a solution. One day, Jennifer was working out on a treadmill and noticed a commercial for a urinary incontinence drug. It reminded her of the conversation she'd had.
In doing more research, she discovered it was absolutely true. Belly dancing prevents leakage. Jennifer even found a study in the Journal of Physical Therapy Science that examined the effectiveness of belly dancing on strengthening the pelvic floor. With that, Jennifer realized this was her ticket to income. Sure, a lot of people were interested in belly dancing simply because it was cool, but she bet that a whole lot more people would be interested if they knew it could help with an intimate problem.
To test her hypothesis, she decided to spend $25 on Facebook ads. The ad would have a lead magnet, which is basically something to draw people in, so she could see how many women were interested in her idea. And Jennifer decided that for $25, if there were five people who opted in within the first 12 hours, she would move forward with making her product a reality. When she checked her stats the next day, however, she found that a whopping 25 people had signed up and Jennifer was blown away. This was all the proof she needed that she was taking a step in the right direction.
With that, she began to create her online belly dancing course. She used knowledge from personal training, acupuncture, and meditation to come up with the best possible combination to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. From there, she found a videographer in a studio space to start filming the course. She was able to spend just $25 an hour on the videographer because she found them through a nonprofit organization that helps women gain experience with film. She also spent $25 an hour to rent out the studio space.
It took about five hours to record the course and between the filming and editing, it was ready in two weeks. She excitedly released it in June of 2019 on her new website, thebellydancesolution.com. But unfortunately, nothing happened. Jennifer had taken two steps forward and one step back. Thankfully, this was just the beginning.
She redesigned her sales page, adjusted the price, and relaunched in August. She was, after all, a digital marketer. From there, she started to get more sales and traction. Over the next eight months, Jennifer had a fire in her belly and focused her efforts on making what she called micro-optimizations. She wanted to turn more of the people who were visiting her website into customers.
And specifically, her goal was to increase her conversion rate by 0.25%, like a quarter of 1% every week. Some of these micro-optimizations included adding a coupon image to her sales page. That action alone increased the conversion rate by 0.5%. She also added a plugin that showed a live feed of all the people who had just purchased the course. And with that, she saw another jump.
Finally, in July of 2020, Jennifer let go of her last marketing client and was officially selling belly-dancing classes full-time. Instead of constant service work, she could make money overnight from a course she had produced months before. She's now expecting to bring in, get this, $160,000 in net income this year from the belly-dance solution and a second course, Feminine Fire. She credits her success to making those small adjustments over time, as well as simply not giving up. The majority of her customers come from Facebook and Google Ads, where she now spends thousands of profitable dollars a month.
As I mentioned in the introduction, for every dollar she spends, she makes more than $1, which is a good formula. She loves that she gets to help women live happier and healthier lives, and she's got some plans for the future. She's working on a blog, a YouTube channel. And not only that, but Jennifer hopes to release a line of belly-dancer clothing, further shaking up the industry. [Music]
Awesome six-figure belly-dancing.
I love it. I love making this program even 1,700 days in, because keep finding all these different cool things that people are doing to make money, doing something they love, and something that helps people, which you can clearly see illustrated in the story. Now, I took a look at Jennifer's website, the bellydancesolution.com, as well as femininefireofficial.com. She's got two courses, a little bit different messaging, different targeting. But what I wanted to point out was, she's really good with this language.
She's got some negative qualifying language, right on the homepage for both these sites. And what I mean by that, I'll just give you an example here. On the first one, it says, please note, what you're about to discover is designed specifically for women 30 plus, who are tired of traditional workouts. If you would rather sit on an exercise bike, run for miles, or pile into a crowded gym class, this program may not be right for you. So isn't that interesting?
She's essentially disqualifying a number of people who might be coming to the page. And by doing that, she's really trying to identify with her ideal customer, like who are they, what are their needs, what do they want, and what do they not want. And then on the other page, the feminine fire one, she has a warning to everyone reading this page. It says, before you go any further, there's something you need to know. Most women will fail at learning belly dance, or even worse, they won't even give it a try.
Why? And she goes on to answer that and pre-sell her course, essentially. But in reading that introduction, I'm intrigued. I'm like, oh, that's interesting, that's provocative. I want to know.
So this is something you can apply when you're thinking about your messaging and you're writing your copy. Don't be afraid to use that negative qualifying information where you're saying like, if this is who you are, this might not be for you. And over here is the person I am trying to reach. It's really important 'cause it creates this solidarity with the people who are actually going to purchase the course or whatever it is you're selling. Of course, we could say more, but I will leave you with that today to keep it concise.
Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to everything mentioned here, the wide world of belly dancing. Just come to sidehustleschool.com/1704. One, seven, zero, four. I hope you will subscribe or follow.
Got a new episode coming up tomorrow and every single day after that. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
