Generating $110k+ From Our Training Courses: A Step By Step Breakdown
Get a detailed breakdown of how our new course series generated over $110k in revenue for us. See what we did, what we spent, and what the results were.
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Yes, But What Did YOU Actually Do?
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who tell you what you should do without explaining what they’ve done in detail.
In this post, I wanted to break down a successful campaign we’ve run. This one is unique because:
It worked extraordinarily well.
We invested significant money ($25k+) into it.
It highlights the importance of execution and power dynamics.
The Background
My consultancy, FeverBee, has had training courses since 2011.
We have updated them many times since, with the last major update in 2017. From 2011 to 2019, I ran the courses live, with six live training sessions accompanying the on-demand components. The typical fee was $750 per course.
I stopped the live course during the pandemic (probably at the wrong time) because I was tired of teaching the same material. So, they remained as on-demand courses available to anyone who wanted them. During this time, they generated around $15k to $20k in revenue, which is still fantastic money but not a game-changer. However, this revenue has been dwindling over the years.
In 2022, as part of our consultancy roadmap, I decided to revamp our training courses.
My goals were multifold.
Build awareness amongst new community professionals. People who sign up for our courses today are often senior community professionals in 3 to 5 years. We always play the long game.
Generate leads for our business. People who complete our courses are often excellent leads for us.
Reinforce the idea of ourselves as a premium community consultancy.
Increase the revenue generated by our courses. I wanted to make training a $50k+ part of our business.
Positioning The Courses
We had to overcome two significant challenges
Before we began, I spent some time thinking about the challenges we had to tackle.
Competition. 2022 wasn’t like 2011. I wasn’t in my own tide pool anymore. There were many more consultants in my space, many of whom had created their courses, and some platform vendors had created courses, too. If our new courses would generate revenue, we needed to figure out how to ensure they were better than existing courses. I felt our content was better - but so did other consultants. Besides, it’s hard to prove the quality of the content without first signing up for the course.
Attention and promotion. Attracting attention online is more challenging than ever, and many old techniques no longer work. We needed to find a new way of reaching and engaging people beyond our mailing list. Distribution would be key.
Fortunately, we also had some competitive advantages to leverage.
Our Three Major Competitive Advantages
I also knew back in 2022, we had some competitive advantages we could leverage.
We had more resources we could invest in the courses. Over 13 years, we had a comfortable cash cushion we could leverage when needed. I also had a team who could take on most of the client work while I concentrated on courses.
We had a bigger audience we could promote the courses too. We had a mailing list of 20k+ people to whom we could promote the courses.
We had better relationships with vendors. This wasn’t as much of a given as the previous two, but I strongly suspected we had better industry relationships than anyone else.
The challenge is to leverage these unique advantages to create and promote our courses in a way that no one else can match.
In short, we needed to set the bar higher than anyone else could reach.
Four Pillars Of Our Strategy
The core strategy came down to four key decisions.
Create four distinct courses. Instead of just one course, I created four, ranging from beginner to advanced. My key goal was to develop courses that would appeal to a broad audience, many of whom categorise themselves by their level of experience and expertise.
Another reason I created four courses was that I wanted to run each once per quarter. This would always give me something to promote. In the past, I’ve launched multiple courses, trying to target everyone, and had to run too many courses at any given time.
Create a professionally recorded course. Most existing courses are filmed at home—many on a webcam. I decided to book a studio and record them professionally. This would not only help us achieve our goal of presenting as a premium consultancy and highlighting the difference in quality, but it would also give me hundreds of video clips I could use in other content.
Give one course away for free. My goal was always to publish the first course (the beginner course) for free. Many organisations are new to building communities, and if they took my course, I suspected the odds of them hiring us for consultancy work would be significantly higher. I also suspected that once people completed the first course, the odds of them taking the second course were substantially higher.
Partner with a major platform vendor. I aimed to partner with one of the major platform vendors in my sector, who could promote the course to a huge audience of prospective customers who weren’t already part of our audience.
Aside - Notice that ‘creating social media content’ barely appears on this. That’s not because it’s insignificant but because it’s nowhere near the most significant thing to get right.
Executing The Strategy
Success always lies in execution rather than planning. The steps above only work if they are well executed.
1) Creating The Course - 2023
I hired Adam Hannis to film my courses. I wanted someone who could take care of everything and let me show up at a studio and shoot. I knew Adam from previous work his former company had done for us. Now that he was going out on his own, I suspected he’d be open to working at a discount and wholly committed to doing a great job. (Adam, if you’re reading this, you were a star!).
Adam costed the entire project and sent a line-item quote. I removed a few items I felt weren’t essential, and then we did the shoot. The shoot lasted three full days and included promotional videos and photos.
The key here is to prepare everything in advance. All the course material, the script, and everything else should be created in advance. If you don’t do this, you’ll waste your precious studio time figuring out what to say. Don’t assume you can make it up live - have the transcript ready to go. If you haven’t had much practice reading from a teleprompter, you should try that too.
Adam spent a few months editing the videos and sending the final videos for revisions. We did some back-and-forth until we were happy with the outcome.
Subtitling
One challenge was subtitling. The automatic translations frequently misheard my words and inserted random words into a sentence. To solve this, we did two things.
We used AI-Software (VEED Pro) to do the subtitles. This had the added benefit of predicting what I was likely to say. The error rate on these videos was far lower.
My virtual assistant watched the videos and fixed a few outstanding issues (while also catching some minor issues we missed).
We hosted the course on Northpass, which has been hosting our courses for over ten years already (more on them in a second). This enabled us to set up certificates, quizzes, and more.
Overall, the process results were great, and we had some great promotional videos we can use.
2) Setting The Price And Structure
Everyone dreams of setting up an on-demand course and attracting passive income.
In practice, this rarely works well. We’ve experimented with this extensively over the years and have always found that cohort courses (with set times to sign up and take the course) perform much better than on-demand courses.
It also impacts the price point. People expect to pay far less for an on-demand course than an actively managed cohort course. The majority of Udemy courses, for example, are in the $10 to $100 range. I didn’t think this would work for us.
The key point is that we’re selling to organisations. The people who pay for the course are usually not the people who take it.
We’ve tried pricing courses from $100 to $8000 in the past. Generally speaking, I’ve found the optimum course price to be $600 to $850. This price range seems to fit nicely with many people's training budgets. It is an expense, but not so great that organisations worry too much about it.
However, at that price point, you usually need to be running live activities.
This is why the course isn’t just a set of on-demand videos—it also includes weekly workshops that allow people to test and practice their skills.
The lesson is that you must include live sessions if you want to charge more.
3) Finding A Partner
Now and then, you have lucky days when golden opportunities appear before you.
While filming my course, Gainsight (one of the major platforms in my sector) announced they had acquired Northpass (our LMS). I remember reading the news in between takes on my phone.
I recently spoke at a Gainsight event and knew they would be eager to spread the message of community + education amongst my audience.
This is where the importance of nurturing strategic partnerships becomes apparent. I approached my contact at Gainsight, and we discussed a few ideas before eventually deciding to have them sponsor the beginner course they would give away for free to their customers, and we would drive people to, too. We would also do joint promotion for their work.
You’ll notice above that the approach is exceptionally relaxed (because we know each other well). It comes in the middle of an email thread discussing other collaborations. Building trust over many years has laid the groundwork for this sponsorship.
This method works much better than contacting strangers out of the blue and asking them to sponsor you. Start building strong relationships with partners now.
This is a dream scenario for both of us.
A significant platform vendor is paying me to generate leads for my business. At the same time, they are attracting hundreds of people to their mailing list at a fraction of the cost of any social ads campaign.
3) Selling The Courses Package To Clients ($20k)
Once the courses were nearly ready, I offered them as a line item to clients who needed to train many people at once. This is great for clients who have to train many staff at once, especially when they have a budget surplus at the end of the year.
Our biggest client then bought all four courses for 10 to 20 staff members for $20k - which covered almost all of our costs before the course began. One or two other clients paid staff to join this course under a special license.
For some other clients, we offered to add people to the course to improve results and increase goodwill.
4) The Email Campaign For The Beginner Course - Part One
I see many people make the same mistake when launching a course.
Their promotional strategy reads like this:
I’ve created a course - you can sign up.
The course is really good - you should sign up.
Here is social proof that the course is really good - sign up.
Here is a discount for the course - sign up.
Time is running out to sign up for the course.
Last chance to sign up for the course.
In my experience, this doesn’t work so well unless you have a 100k+ mailing list.
People tune out of pure promotional content pretty quickly.
Compare this to the messages we sent out to promote our free course (click to view each email):
The difference is that we contain useful value in every email people read.
We treat this as a marketing campaign - this time, we want people to realise that community skills are valuable, there are levels to it, and they make all the difference.
Within a few months, we had 1400+ people sign up for the free course.
5) The Email Campaign - Part Two
Once we felt good about the beginner course's success, it was time to promote the more advanced course. For this course, we focused on the same theme (the value of excellent community skills).
My goal is not to tell people that the course is great but to show them it is.
We do this by constantly sharing free snippets from the course within the broader marketing context.
Here are the emails we sent out.
We want to upgrade your community skills. This is essentially the announcement, but it relates to a point of view people can believe in.
Compare your community skills to these examples. This is where I want to highlight the difference this course can make by comparing what most people can do to what they should do.
Stop churning out awful community content; there’s a much better way. This is from our course content lesson. The real goal is to highlight how different the course is from the typical advice shared. It gives people useful information they can apply right now.
Out-of-date discussions are becoming a big problem. This is also a lesson from our course, it addresses a unique, common, problem that many people face (you might recognise it from here). Again, it’s useful advice which people can immediately apply.
The Killer Mistake of a $250k+ Enterprise Community. By far the most popular email of the campaign (putting stories and money into the title seems to be incredibly effective). It shared a detailed lesson from the course along with evidence of it working.
The FeverBee Advanced Community Skills Course. This email was the final reminder about the course. I wanted people who hadn’t been paying attention to know we were offering a course just by looking at the subject line. In hindsight, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped.
The result? Approximately $25k generated (in addition to the sponsorship and sales to clients - which brings the number to around $65k).
(the 56 figure includes bulk purchases, clients, Gainsight staff, and others).
[Update - now at 62 people]
5) Custom Workshops
Another exciting thing happened after we launched our free training course.
I began getting several requests from custom workshops from people who watched the free training.
Here’s an example.
I’ve traced three workshops to these courses. This, in turn, generated as much revenue as we did from the course (albeit with a lot of preparation- see The Perfect Workshop).
Although it’s hard to prove they wouldn’t have hired us without the courses.
And it’s worth noting we’ve only published TWO of the FOUR courses we’ve developed. I’m excited to see what happens when we publish the other two later this year.
Even after that, we can rerun the same course series next year.
Additional Benefits of Courses
A few other benefits of these courses.
Increase in mailing list subscribers. The promotion and the free course increased our subscriber numbers by a few thousand people.
Content to be reused and remixed in many formats. We can use this content for social media posts anytime, upload them to YouTube, create new courses for others, etc…
Likelihood of more clients. Outside of the workshop, I can’t directly link new business to the course, but historically, we have tended to attract more clients when we publish new training courses.
It’s nearly always better to sell a consultancy project than a product.
Lessons To Learn
You need a large audience who trusts you a lot to start with. Otherwise, you can get lots of attention but zero sales, which is heartbreaking and painful.
Competitive positioning is key. You won’t be the first to offer a course - so what makes yours utterly unique in the market?
Free courses are a terrific lead magnet. You can give the course away for free and grow your subscriber base significantly.
Strategic partnerships can help - if you use them well. You need to build the relationships in advance for this to work.
Choose from three price points. Either make it cheap (up to $100) and sell on-demand, make it mid-tier ($500 to $1000) and live, or make it premium $2k+ and personalised.
Email campaigns need to be engaging to read. Don’t just spam the audience with promotion - demonstrate the concepts of the course people will learn.
Good luck!
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