This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello. Hey there, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau, your host for Side Hustle School. Today, we're gonna talk about online courses, which is something we've talked about from time to time, of course. But what I wanna focus on today, 'cause there are lots of online courses out there, we often hear stories of how some of them come to be in terms of idea generation, like where does the idea come from, how does the person know that there's a need, why do they choose that topic as opposed to anything else they could choose.
Well, all that's important, but also how do you sell one? Like how do you sell one of these online courses? Once you have a course, does it sell itself or is there more work to be done? Well, you might not be surprised to hear that there is more work to be done, but the better question is what kind of work should you do? Because your time is limited.
You don't have hours and hours to experiment and you want your time to count. You wanna be effective, you wanna be efficient. Well, this is what I wanna focus on for today's story because it's about a featured case study who pursued at least seven different marketing strategies for his online course, but one of them was far more effective than the rest. In fact, it helped him go from earning $200 a month when he first started to $1,000 a month, just a few months in. This is about a guy in Utah who needs some money to pay for a medical emergency in his family.
And instead of just working harder, he works smarter and creates something that has the potential to earn money for him over and over. I'll tell you all about it as well as that most effective marketing strategy, at least for him, right after we say thanks to today's sponsor. [Music]
Today's story comes from Caleb Kingston in Salt Lake City, Utah. By day, he's a UX designer. And for his side hustle, at least so far, he's created two online design courses.
In the first month, his first course brought in $200. But four months later, his courses are consistently earning $1,000 a month and seem to be growing. What did he learn along the way that made a difference? Well, first, Caleb did not have a traditional high school or college education. So when he was learning his trade, he mostly relied on online courses and tutorials.
He found that he excelled in UX web design, basically helping companies design their websites and e-commerce stores to be more helpful to their customers. Or you could say to help them make more money. Caleb's wife recently had a medical emergency that set them back financially. So he wanted to find a way to pay off the bills and also to save for the future. After attending an event for the side hustle book tour, he decided it was time to create and launch his own course.
To create that course, Caleb studied up on what other people had done. He looked at the outline of other courses he'd previously taken and then wrote his own outline. Then as he recorded his course, he discovered other topics he could add in. He used some software called ScreenFlow to record the course, and he learned to do that by doing. Whenever he'd create a video, the program didn't always behave as expected, or he'd realize there was just something he didn't know how to do.
So he'd pause the recording, learn how it worked, and then record again once he'd figured it out. Side note, this sounds very similar to my side hustle school experience. When I was first doing a podcast, I had no idea how to do it, and basically it was a learning process every single day. In some ways it still is, but I just kind of powered through and the more I did it, the more comfortable I became. And getting back to Caleb, the course took him about five weekends working from his home office, constantly telling his wife he'd be finished shortly.
In fact, he says those long weekends and time away from his family have been the hardest part of the project so far. He believes it's worth it, but that time commitment didn't end once he finished making the course. Next he had to market it, he had to sell it. So what happened and what did he do? Well, at first the course didn't sell very much.
So Caleb took a course on selling courses. And one of the first things he realized was that he needed social proof to help people feel comfortable buying. People have to believe that the course is gonna work for them. They have to trust that it's gonna be worth their money and their time and it's gonna have a good outcome for them. So thus began his plan to try more than seven different strategies to move things along.
He gave away his course on LinkedIn. He also joined Slack groups related to his topic and gave it away there too, and then had discussions with other members asking them to review it. He created a promotional video and posted it on YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn. He answered questions on Quora and ended the answers with an invitation to the course. Once they signed up, he would send a direct personalized message to students asking them for a review once they got to the 25% point of the course.
And then he replied to every single review as it came in each day. However, the most effective strategy of all was joining and contributing to Facebook groups. He joined dozens of them related to his course topics of user experience and user interface design. And he included posts with a link to download the course for free and then ask for reviews. Now you might be wondering like he's giving this course away for free and asking for reviews.
How does giving your course away for free earn you money? Well, at first it earns you that social proof, which may actually be more valuable. Because once he got the first 15 or so reviews, he immediately saw his course bump up in the search rankings and then it began to sell itself. Now two more things. Caleb also created a website called App Design Tips.
And then he made a YouTube channel with the goal to get to a thousand subscribers soon after launch. All of that is a lot of work, but he says the most effective thing by far was joining and contributing to those Facebook groups. And remember when he joined, he wasn't selling directly, he was contributing and inviting people to take the course for free. But in doing so, that generated positive reviews and then encouraged other people to feel comfortable purchasing. So he's essentially making an investment of his time and investment in those students and an investment in all the students who are to come.
After he finished his first and second courses, he had to make a decision about the next one. There's a new design tool coming out called Envision Studio. And he thought if he got early access and was one of the first people to make a course on it, he would dominate the market. At the same time, he was worried there wouldn't be much demand because it's a new tool and not a lot of people have access to it. So to make the decision, he created a survey and sent it out to all those Facebook groups he was a part of.
That survey asked people what their job title was, what tools they're currently using and what tool they wanted to learn the most. It turned out that Envision, this new tool, was in first place with 44% of the votes. So that confirmed his thought that this new course could be a winner. Oh, and he also made sure to ask survey respondents to enter their email addresses to find out when that new course comes out. Very smart.
To manage all this different work, Caleb writes his ideas on a Trello board. Because he's busy with his job, he doesn't have time to do much during the week, but he tries to make sure to accomplish at least two or three tasks, even if it's a simple task like fixing an issue on his site or responding to a Facebook comment. I mentioned this project is very new, making $1,000 a month so far. And by the end of the year, Caleb hopes to get to 10,000 students, 10,000 YouTube subscribers, have five courses and increase his side hustle earnings to $5,000 a month. We'll have to see what happens with that, but I admire his ambitious goal.
He is paying off those medical bills and even better, he's building something for his family's future. [Music]
Okay, so a couple points here. As I read you that long list of tasks, that long list of stuff that Caleb did to market his course, it's probably easy to get overwhelmed. And you could hear, "Oh, I've got to be on YouTube. "I've got to do this thing on Quora.
"I've got to make sure I market on LinkedIn. "I've got to do my search engine optimization. "I've got to do this and that." The thing is when you're starting to do something like this, you don't know which marketing strategy is gonna be most effective. You might have an idea, but you don't know for sure. So often the best approach is to do exactly what he did, which is try a bunch of different stuff and then abandon the ones that aren't fruitful, focus on the ones that are.
In his case, it was Facebook groups. It was that strategy of giving the course away for free, requesting reviews. It's not surprising that those reviews tended to be positive, first of all, because he's got a good product, but also because he's given the course away for free. And then as he generates those reviews, that in turn creates trust, which in turn leads to sales. Now also, we haven't talked about this in a while, but there's an important side hustle principle that better results or higher results, whatever your goal is, they don't usually require the same amount of effort as the initial results.
In other words, in this example, Caleb was able to go from $200 a month when he first started to $1,000 a month a few months later without working five times as hard. And that really is the key point. Like it took some time. It took some focus and energy to make this. He had to have those weekends away from his family.
And then once the course was complete, his work wasn't done. Then he had to go out and market it and figure out, okay, what is the best strategy to get this to people? How can I have that social proof that will in turn create the trust that leads to sales? But my point is, even though it required some work, at that point, the work was much more financially rewarding. And you can apply this principle to any number.
Like if you start making $1,000 a month, it's not as hard to go to $3,000 or $4,000 a month, or even more than that, whatever it is. And that's why if you haven't done this before, if you haven't had a success of your own, or if you just haven't started yet, that's why I want to get you to $200 or $500 a month or whatever it is, even a relatively small amount, because at that point, you can then focus on what comes next. And it won't be five times as hard or 10 times as hard. The key point is having the right idea in the first place, then getting that idea complete, at least complete enough to share it with people, and then focusing on, okay, how do I increase my sales? What is the next course or the next product or the next service?
What is the most logical iteration? What is the most logical next step? So that I can make not only a relatively small amount of money, but something that is potentially very significant to me and my family. That is the side hustle school model, the process, the collective story that you hear over and over in all the stories I bring you every day. So in his case, he tried a bunch of different stuff, but the Facebook group strategy was by far the most effective.
I hope that is helpful to somebody out there. And for everyone out there, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I mentioned a number of different tools in this episode in terms of recording the course and the platforms that he marketed the course on, et cetera. We're gonna link all that stuff up for anybody who's interested. Those links are at sidehustleschool.com/413, 413.
Come and check that out. Say hi to me there or on social media. And come back tomorrow because I'll be here. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
