Understanding How to Build an Online Course with Tom Libelt

Simon Dell: Welcome to the Paper Planes Marketing Podcast, and today I am with Tom Libelt. And Tom is somewhere in Thailand, aren't you, at the moment? Tom Libelt: Yeah, south of Thailand, Klong Muang, overlooking at a beach from my window right now. Simon Dell: Brilliant. For those of you who want to pick that up, that's obviously not a Thai accent. Where are you from originally? Tom Libelt: Originally from Poland, moved to the US when I was around 10, and when I was around 33, 34, just started living all around the world. Simon Dell: Awesome. And you have an excellent job that allows you to do that, I guess. One of those lucky people that gets to sit on a beach with a laptop, really, don't you? Tom Libelt: I'm in an air-conditioned space with a window. I never get those pictures at the beach with a laptop. Simon Dell: Nobody shows those pictures, yeah. You are the owner of a platform called WeMarketOnlineCourses.com. Even the galactically-stupid people out there will probably guess what you do from the title of the website. But just for everybody's benefit, give us a quick overview as to what you do on a day-to-day basis. Tom Libelt: Well, on a day-to-day basis, I'm trying to make sure that my clients sell courses. That's the whole idea with the service. Any project I tackle, that's the only goal. The goal is not to make your sales P/S look beautiful and to make your sales funnel pretty so you can share it with your friends. It's only someone comes in, you take them to a sales path of least resistance, and they buy a course. That's the whole strategy behind it.  Obviously, a lot of variables. It's marketing, so a thousand things that could go wrong and have to be reiterated, but that's the whole thing. We market online courses. I make sure this brand is as simple as it gets. Simon Dell: It does sound simple, but I guess the process for what you go through is fairly complicated. We're going to talk about that today, and we're going to talk about that because you and I have spoken before. But we're going to talk about that. Perhaps it's more important now, given what's happened in the world that this is obviously being recorded at the end of April 2020 when we are coming out of a virus crisis that has engulfed the world and has seen many, millions of businesses, shut down for short-term, long-term, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. A lot of people are seeing businesses fail because of this. What we want to talk about in context is people that have been thinking about building an online course. Maybe for the past couple of years, but especially for the last six weeks. I guess you must have seen an explosion of people trying to put things online in the last six weeks? Tom Libelt: I've seen an explosion of that. I've seen more people than ever. I spoke with some of the other platforms about this. I've seen more people than ever sell their first thing online in the last month. And I've seen a lot of the more established course creators make more in April than they did in the whole year previous.  Simon Dell: Viruses are good business for online course creators. Tom Libelt: Yeah. It's more luck than anything. The online course space, a lot of the e-commerce space is - because I have friends with stores and things, and there are just outrageous amounts of business right now. But on the other side, there are other businesses that stopped. If you're in the online course space or thinking about getting into it, it's definitely the easiest it's ever been to sell something online. Simon Dell: And prior to talking to you, I did a talk on Tuesday lunchtime to an organisation called CCIQ, which is the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland to their members, so about 200 of their members. We were talking exactly about this thing about getting online, putting a course online, taking your knowledge of building an online course. And I came up with some examples for them of people that have done it in the last few weeks. My favourite one is a website called YouProbablyNeedAHaircut.com. Have you seen that one? Tom Libelt: No, but it's the same type of branding as mine, right? You tell me, I'm like, "Yeah."  Simon Dell: They do a video chat with a stylist who will coach you through a live haircut.  Tom Libelt: This could come out really well or really, really bad. Simon Dell: I'd imagine there is a massive disclaimer at the start when you sign up saying that the terrible haircut that you're about to inflict on yourself has absolutely nothing to do with them. Tom Libelt: I think the disclaimer should just be borrowed from the same people who have you jump from airplanes. Simon Dell: Yeah. I think it was a fantastic idea. I found it the other day and I thought, "Yeah. There's always winners out of these situations." Tom Libelt: There's actually a lot of winners. I'm in a bubble in this industry, and yeah, I'm seeing just tremendous growth for a lot of businesses. It's kind of hard to say it, but for me and for a lot of online guys, this is probably one of the best things that could have happened to the industry. Because what's happening now is, a lot of people who have never done things online, it's forced them to learn. Some of the other folks, it's the first time they had to order something online, or complete some kind of a transaction, or get a delivery by doing something online. It's forcing people to go online and it's like riding a bike: once you learn it, "Well, why should I do it any other way later on unless it's getting groceries, getting a haircut, or going to the gym? I can't find anything in the store anyway, so let me just go online and figure it out." So, it's a great thing in the online space. Simon Dell: So, if anybody's listening to this and they're thinking about building an online course, whether because of what's happened in the last few months or whether it's that they've been thinking about doing it for a long time... What's the very first starting point that you say to people they need to think about? Tom Libelt: It's just have the expertise.  Simon Dell: It sounds fairly obviously now that you say that. Go on, keep going. Tom Libelt: I've spoken to a lot of people who come up to me with ideas, and the thing with courses is you need a transformation. You take someone from "my hair is mess, now I have a great haircut" and there's the transformation that happened. There's a value on that. How much does a haircut cost? So, you need these components in every course. But you know, I do run into people like, "Why do you want to build this?" I've just been travelling for the last few months now and I want to go back to work. But that doesn't qualify you to give diet advice. Or someone recently, "I'm creating a course on how to not get sick from COVID." I was like, "Are you a doctor?" He's like, "No, I'm an SEO guy." I was like, "Well, there's disconnect. I'm not working with you." So yeah, I mean, just the expertise. Obviously, you need to know what to teach someone. It could be something you experienced or you've done, or you can show some examples that you've led people through. If you have that already... You can actually draw out this transformation, you have the expertise, then the second piece is, "Is there a value to it?" Some courses are easier to value than others. If I'm teaching you how to pass the course yourself, so pass some exam or certification, there's a much easier transformation value there because it's external. Some companies are like, "I will hire you if you pass Series Six or pass the CPA exam." And we know if they don't pass it, it's a $60,000 job out the window. Very easy to put a value on it. Where others, it's not. "I'm going to teach you how to speak better" or "I will teach you how to perform better." You have these very vague transformations, and part of the marketing process, which is 80% of the whole job of selling the course, is figure out: How do we put a value on this? How do we position it so there's not only a product and market fit, which you need to sell anything, there's also an educator fit. People need to like you and want to learn from you. So, we need to position the whole triangle to match up for you to have this thing work. Simon Dell: Let's assume that you've got the experience. You've got the knowledge. You're confident that you've got a transformation that you can take people on. Would you be sitting there saying to people, "You need to map that course out. You need to write it all out, break it up into segments before you start recording stuff." Or is it "Start recording stuff and then work it out as you go along." What's the best process for you? Tom Libelt: Anytime I sell something, I want to make sure that the market wants what I'm selling before I make it and try to really build it. And with courses, you need to be able to sell this transformation before anything. You need to sell people on the idea that yes, I will give you $297 to help me with something, so you know that there is a want; the market wants this. And then you can create the course based on whatever. Pre-selling is a big thing, but think of now as I need to design a beautiful funnel and put all the setups now. Initially, you just need to make sure that people want to buy this transformation from you. And you can say that you are selling it at a discount to the first 30 people, and the course will start in 2 weeks if we get 25 people in. If not, I will refunnel the money. You can position it in different ways. But the danger of building everything upfront, and I've seen this happen, is someone comes up like, "Tom, I've built this huge thing on how to build private practices stress-free. It's a great course. People are stressed out and I want you to market it."  And I'm like, "Okay. One, stress means different things to different people. That's a very vague transformation, saying you're going to be stress-free. I don't know what the value is." I don't really get stressed out from work, so the value to me would be zero. Maybe someone else has, so one, that's a big problem. You haven't sold any of these, so you haven't tested the market. It's possible that if I start positioning, people will say, "I don't care about your stress-free transformation. I want to get my first clients" or something else. And then your course now doesn't fit what the market wants. So, I've had these situations with a public speaking course. I've found that people want to know how to persuade others into doing things more than be able to public-speak. I was like, "That's a beautiful course but nobody cares about it." And what I'm able to sell, you just don't have so you have to remake. That's the danger of building before you test the idea. Now, you can create the outline -- because if you're selling a transformation, you'll tell them the steps. You can't tell how or why, but you just tell them these are the steps, this is the value, this is how I'll transform you. Do you want it? And if people say yes, then you got a business going. If you don't, then think of that saying, "It takes 10,000 steps to master anything." Well, it takes 10,000 reiterations to make a great business. So, you reiterate until people do want it. So, you just have the thing. And I've seen a lot of business who initially started with an idea, and they kept on moving and pivoting. They finally sold something that people do want, and it's in the same niche, some buyers but just very different angle, different outcome in some ways. But yeah, pre-selling is key, at least the idea. One thing I can add that I've seen -- because we're talking about high-value courses. We're not talking about the crap sold on Udemy. Often, it's an application to a phone call, right? Because if you can sell and see what the people are, "Where's the friction, the objection, things like that?" in the first 25 sales, that is all you need to create a sales page or a video that will now work without you having to make those phone calls. You're using that data. I recommend highly to initially talk with your customers. Because that will give you everything you need for the copy. You don't need to worry about copywriters or any nonsense out there. That's all you need. That's all the weapons you need to get your website working. Simon Dell: Would it be worth people doing a short hour-long course or something and testing that out in the marketplace before they sit down and record lots of content? Is that worth doing it? Tom Libelt: I mean, once again, it could be a completely wrong course. Let's say you have an outline and you came up with 30 modules, because it's going to take this many to teach people. There are going to be some key concepts that you will teach someone. And often, I would test this key concept theory sell the course. Let's say if we have four different concepts, little gold mines in there, like this golden nugget, that golden nugget. This helps a lot. It moves people through. Why not do a three-day challenge around one of them? Why not do a three-day mini-course that just teaches people this one little concept and they're like, "Oh wow. If you help with this, I want to see what else." But what that does to is it gives you the entry point. It shows you where the interest is, and it helps you build on the back of that. Because then you can be like, "Well, I know what brings people in and I know that this is a good path. But what else from this course? Does the rest work?" If I teach you how to be comfortable in front of the camera... Just an example. That's probably a crappy idea. But if I teach you that, why do you want to be comfortable in front of the camera? Is it because you want to sell? Is it because you want to do presentations? Is it because you want to create a YouTube channel? You might be more interested in some of the tactics and strategies to grow the YouTube channel to 1,000 subscribers. You see what I mean? What are you doing after this first step? And then you can build it in 50 different directions. But it's good to take pieces out, and at least you know, "Okay, well this piece, people are interested in so I can build on that. And if I know they want to be comfortable in front of the camera, now we have at least a starting point where I can teach you why this is probably important." And if you spoke with your customer, maybe three emails or however, and this is why you're speaking with them, you know what the outcome is. And one of your customers might actually give you the idea for the course, right?  Simon Dell: You mentioned something earlier on in terms of price. We'll talk about price in a bit more detail later on, but you said something that I say all the time, where people price it in a weird way where they go $297, or $197, whatever it is. But it always seems to end in a weird or strange number. Not that 7 is a weird and strange number, but you know what I mean. It's not rounded up or anything like that. Obviously, there's a lot of marketing psychology around pricing. You price things at $299 because people's brains sees the 2 and they don't see the 3. What's the reasoning for you picking those quirky numbers for pricing for a course? Tom Libelt: If you ask the majority of people what their favourite number is, it's going to be usually 7. So one, they say the 2 in the beginning, so they don't see a 3, it seems like it's less but it's not really. Gas stations are always going, "2.87, 2.88, 2.89" to not get the number. But the number 5, 7, or 4 because that's a favourite number for a lot of people. So I just, "When I test, when I market, what's the majority?" And people are not logical. That's why you use a lot of these little techniques. It might cause the conversions to go up and there's no real rhyme and reason for it. But for me, I always think of it, that's the most common lucky number for people. Simon Dell: That's fair enough. Let's talk about format. Again, I guess there's no right format for any course, but what do you see works better? Is it video? Is it audio? Is it just text, or should it be a mixture of all of those kind of things? How would you advise people to think about the format of what they're putting in the course? Tom Libelt: Look at yourself as a customer. We all know that people learn in different ways. So if you want to become a good educator, you tailor it towards everyone. So you have the text, the video, the audio. Because people learn in different ways. That's the only way to think about it. As to the actual course itself, we have two different types of buyers. We have the Walmart buyers... If you're in America, you know what Walmart is. It's a discount store with cheap pricing and you have a Nordstrom buyer which is more popular. There's a key difference between Nordstrom. The Walmart buyers, the cheap course buyers, they like a lot of things. They like to buy bargains, bundles, "Give me 30 hours plus 15 bonuses and some toilet paper." Super happy. They'll probably never take the course, but that's what they want. The Nordstrom buyer, and this is where you're going into $300-500 price range, they value their time so they know that, "Maybe 1 hour of my time is $100. If you're going to sell me a 30 hour course, that's $3,000 or whatever of my time, plus the price of your course." What they're looking for is the quickest and easiest way to transform, to take your course. If they're trying to run a campaign on Facebook, if you can help me in 30 minutes to do the same thing as this other guy's promising in 10 hours, I will pay you the premium because this is what I want to do as fast as possible, efficient. What you think of your course, if you're pricing it higher, you actually want it to be as flaw-free as possible.  Simon Dell: Actually, the higher the price, the less content almost. Tom Libelt: It's just the 80/20, so the most important content. There's a guy, a friend, Anton Kraly called Drop Shipping Lifestyle. This was like 5-6 years ago. I don't know if it's still around, but the course became huge because it had a big transformation around it. A lot of people who were doing the dropshipping back then were making 5-6 figures in their first year. Great transformation. The course was initially 40-45 minutes when he showed it to me and it was selling for $1,500. And people were buying it like crazy. And I look at it and he was right. He took me exactly, because I've seen maybe two modules to see how he was positioning it. He shows me why he's doing it, where he's finding the product, how he's finding it, how to put the first product out, how to get your first sale... It took me to this path and I'm like, "Dude. This is amazing." And it was very short, a very short course. But I mean, if he just followed it... And obviously, you have to think a little bit because you're still running, creating a business. But I mean, just the path it took you through, I'm like, "Wow. I don't need to think about any of these external things, like where do I put this out? How do I write up the description? What kind of picture?" He showed me everything very quickly. They would like this. They would like that. They would like this. Make your sale. Keep going. That's what you want to do for those Nordstrom shoppers if you're thinking about how the course should be made. Simon Dell: Does quality matter? If you're recording video or if you're releasing PDFs, should the video be recorded with a proper videographer, or is your iPhone good enough? Should PDFs be branded? How much effort should you go to if you're releasing a course like that? Tom Libelt: I only have two thoughts on this. The first one is when you think about Google, for example... And Google says, "I want you to write quality content." And I've never heard anyone describe what the quality content is properly. We don't know. So, this is very vague. But I'll tell you this: Great quality videos will not save bad content. And great content will sell even if it's a poor video. Simon Dell: Even if it's poorly-produced. Tom Libelt: So, you obviously want as professional as possible, especially if you're trying to run the business like Masterclass. You're not going to take someone that's super famous and put them on a grainy video. That's their business model. "We're bringing the most known celebrities and experts." You need a top-notch production for that. But for yourself, if you're teaching dentists how to get 30% extra sales next month, you think that dentists is going to care because your video is grainy if you teach them how to do that? No. They won't care at all. So, I wouldn't really worry about that. Obviously, as you grow your business, you want to improve. So when you get the money, you can remake things and make them much better professionally. But it's not needed to start at all.  Simon Dell: Talk to me about platforms. We've started building something in Teachable. We've got another client that's building something in Teachable. There are a lot of these things cropping up everywhere. I'd imagine someone like yourself is fairly platform-agnostic, but what platforms do you gravitate to? And when we spoke before, you also mentioned about taking the payment processing outside of some of these platforms. So, interested to hear about that as well. Tom Libelt: I'm big on control. If I'm thinking of my own business, I really want to control the process. I want to control my sales pitches. I want to control my payment process. The only reason the platforms exist is to host the course, and almost all of them do it poorly. It's ridiculous. Thinkific and Teachable, I like both and they're both known for downtimes. Teachable customer service is horrible. Thinkific has their own problems. We had a payment problem once, I remember, where PayPal didn't work for a week and they didn't tell us until five days after. I feel like, okay, fine. Your only job is to host the course and you're barely doing that properly. I'm definitely not, "You need to go with this or that platform. I think initially, either of them will work. Zenler is getting a lot of attention lately because they're making the sales process easier, which means they are helping you map things out and then put them up. Once again, there's a control aspect. Do you really want the platform to do that, even if it does it well? Kajabi, it's harder to set up than just upload, but a lot of people are very happy with it. And those I think are the big four that I usually work with. But I don't think the platform really matters as much. Whatever you put it on, eventually if you get big enough, you're going to build something custom of your own. That's what always happens. If you get big enough. But yeah, platform's a platform. Simon Dell: You've got your platform. You've got your content. You're the expert. You test it out with the marketplace. I guess the last step is really building audiences. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and the best way of building audiences. I'm also interested to hear your thoughts because when we spoke last time, you said something to me that really blew my mind or put the light bulb on: There's a one-year lag or a 365-day lag between someone finding out about you and actually purchasing your course. Talk to me about that, because that's really interesting. Tom Libelt: If you've been in the online space for a while, the main thing that people are scared of is the scammers. Because making money online, people come, people go. So, half the battle is to get people to trust you. And what we usually found with courses is that the people don't buy in your initial offering. For example, if you get some traffic in from wherever it is, and you drive them into an opt-in page or a webinar, and then you run them through your sales sequence. And if they don't buy in that first week or two in the beginning, it usually is due to not enough trust -- usually. Like, everything else matches but it's just the trust issue. So, what we found is by staying in front of them -- if you have their email, it's easy. You can do remarketing and email at the same time, and then you just stay in front of them for about a year. You will see an uptick in sales from everybody around that time -- whether it's a year, a year and a half, but you'll see the first week, a lot of sales, then they trickle in and you'll see another uptick a year from now, a year and a half. Because people, just by being in front of them, they now trust you enough that they're going to buy from you. It's the weirdest thing but it's really common with our testing. Simon Dell: This is a very broad marketing question and the answer's on a case-by-case basis, but when you talk to your clients, where do you see the most success from them in terms of generating leads? What particular channels? Tom Libelt: My first question is: Who is your ideal client? Because if you're looking for a dentist, you're probably going to look on Facebook or LinkedIn because it's easy to target them. If you're looking for someone trying to pass a Series Six exam, they're going to often ask those questions on Quora, or on Google, or on YouTube. You need to think of your client. Are you looking for a profession or are you looking for certain actions they need to take? What is it that they're looking for? If someone wants to become a freelancer, YouTube and Google or Quora will probably be much better than Facebook because how do you target someone who wants to become a freelancer on Facebook? How do you get that? This is very directly correlated to who your ideal client is. And most people don't know who it is because they haven't spoken to any clients. They haven't presold. You have to tackle each battle at a time.  Simon Dell: And from my perspective to answer my own question, "What would you say to clients in these circumstances?" It would be to test all of these channels and measure the success rate. Things like Google Analytics and Facebook backend, and the backend of all these training platforms can often tell you where customers have come from. If you spend $1,000 in Facebook and you pick up 10 customers for a $1,500 course, then that makes complete sense to keep spending money there because your return on investment is great. But I would imagine a lot of people aren't measuring that properly. Do you find that? Tom Libelt: Yeah. This is why we make sure that any clients that comes in, the first wing we set up is marketing tracking so we know exactly if you sold a course, we can backtrack through all the channels and see where they came through, the entire path, which email they clicked on, and which ad they came from. Simon Dell: Do you use Google Analytics for that or do you have a different platform that you use? Tom Libelt: It's a combination of things, but we have a service called WeTrackYourMarketing.com. We've seen that every single person we've worked with, we set that up for. Last October, I went to a conference and I just put up that website with two paragraphs and a deal, and I think 16 people bought, it was a big number from a small room, and I'm like, "Oh, people do want this." It's an easy way to start a business, but we do track. We do track the marketing. It's very, very important. You need the numbers. You need the data. Often, what we've seen is that Google and Facebook lie about their conversions. They'll under-report or over-report by maybe even 30%, which is crazy when you're spending a lot of money. So, we needed an independent thing. Google Analytics is okay, but when you get to the interplatform part of online courses, it often just lacks. If you are bringing people into your website then driving them to a webinar, then going through another responder, then going to Thinkific... You know what I mean? Five different platforms, it cannot handle that whole path. It's good for the initial part, if you're only doing your website and Thinkific, you'll be okay. But when you start putting in other responders and other things which you want to track... Because it's kind of good to know if you wrote a 10-email sequence, which link or email is working for you? That's when you can really improve. But yeah, tracking is key in marketing. And this is one of the funniest things, too. I always tell people, "If you want to stop losing money on marketing, track them first." Simon Dell: There's a lot of information there that you've given us today and a lot of really good information for people who are thinking about building a course, or even people who have already built a course. It's perhaps not been as successful as they thought it would be. I guess my last couple of questions for you would be: What courses have you seen out there, and they might be or might not be customers of yours, and you've mentioned a couple earlier, but people that do this stuff really well: Who is out there really kicking goals in the marketplace? Tom Libelt: The ones I've seen most consistently to work really well is if you help someone pass an exam that they need. I've seen those over and over just killing it because they have that external motivation. It's two things: They'll have the value on the transformation and they'll have almost a timer running. Because that job says, "You have until next week or next month, and if you don't..." You don't even need to tell them, "I'm only selling this for 5 days." No. They don't really have that. Now, it's just you're providing that. So, I found those work really well. A lot of the business courses, if I can promise you to get 30% more sales or fix your conversions by 30%, get more organic traffic, I find those working really well too. And the skill ones are hit and miss. There's a guy that teaches people how to play piano, by teaching them very popular songs. It's doing well, but I've seen others completely bomb with it. Often, what people find too is that the course is not what your market wants. I'll give you an example. There's a friend of mine in the private practice space different than the other person I mentioned. He tried to sell  courses. He has a big audience and everything. And he found people don't want it. These private practice people are so busy. They don't want to learn or go through this. What they want is a membership. They want to be able to come in once a week with their one biggest problem, have it addressed, and moved on. And he made a lot of money this way. Then when you asked, "What platform do you go after?" If you really think about private practices, and this is where psychology helps to understand some of this, they often work with problem people. A lot of people spilling out their problems to them all the time. And what I found with counselors/therapists often, this is a lot for them, and they're not very happy people at home. If you hear about problems all the time, you're just not happy. What do unhappy people like doing?  Unhappy people like posting motivational quotes. So, to find the private practice people... I know this is such a weird thing. He started posting motivational posts towards them on Pinterest, and it became the number one traffic driver. You follow your customer. And often, it's not the most obvious thing. He didn't go after private practice people on LinkedIn, because he tried, didn't work well. Didn't happen on Facebook, but he found what they want and they want to read inspirational things and find inspirational things for themselves to repost on their social media, and they were looking for it on Pinterest. Simon Dell: Last question: If somebody wants to get a hold of you... I'll repeat the email address WeMarketOnlineCourses.com... Is that the best way of finding you? Are you on LinkedIn or is there any other channels that they could ask questions? Tom Libelt: I am on LinkedIn. Really easy to find. If you go to Smart Brand Marketing, just click on the contact form. That's the brand that all my sub-brands are on. If you just go on there, click my contact form, you can reach me really easily and then you'll find whatever I'm working on. Whether it's WeTrackYourMarketing or WeMarketOnlineCourses, whatever else I come up with, it's always under that umbrella. Simon Dell: Brilliant. Mate, thank you very much for your time. It has been very, very interesting. I think even more so given the times that we're going through at the moment. Hopefully, people out there that are thinking about pivoting their business to take it more online can take some of the ideas and suggestions that you've made today and actually have some success with them, so thank you very much for your time today. Tom Libelt: Thank you for having me.