The Email Strategies John Ainsworth Uses to Make $10,000 Per Month From a Website Getting Just 20k Monthly Visitors

Today's Guest On the Niche Pursuits podcast is John Ainsworth. He's making $10,000 a month from 20,000 monthly visitors. And in today's interview, he's gonna deep dive into how he did it!

John has a background in mathematics, sales, and marketing but now specializes in helping course creators monetize their offers for maximum profits.

But, to say this interview is targeted towards course creators is missing the point because the tips, tactics, and information John shares are ideal for any site owner.

The conversation kicks off with John talking about how to build an email list using different opt-in forms. He shares various tricks to increase subscribers, and how to use that list as a monetization tool, even if you don't have a course.

He then dives into what it takes to successfully monetize a course.

The income John talks about is staggering, and it's hard not to feel inspired and excited about the possibilities.

As the chat progresses, John and Jared brainstorm on the call about how to create a lead magnet for Jared's website, which I'm sure will benefit many of you.

Other Things John Ainsworth Discusses During The Chat:

• What he does to make $10,000 a month through from 20k visitors a month and an email list
• An email framework for selling courses
• How to vet your content to see what type of courses would be suitable to create
• Advanced tips for course creators
• The three things you need to convert your audience to purchase your products (or affiliate products)
• Why people are leaving so much money on the table
• Why he laughed out at a woman who said she wanted to earn $10,000 per month
• How having traffic and the right system can make you money
• What to send to your email list
• Email opt-in conversion rates
• Growing your email list through social media
• How a client went from 100 opt-ins to 800 per week
• Examples of lead magnets
• How many email promotions to send each month
• Using order bumps and upsells to increase your revenue with courses

This podcast episode offers something for everyone. So whether you have a course, are thinking about creating one, or simply have a site and want to build an email list, you can learn a lot from this inspiring interview.

As always, take notes and enjoy the episode.

Links And Resources Mentioned During The Interview

• Get Your Free Course Creators Profit Report
• Clickbank

This Episode is Sponsored by: Rank IQ

Watch the full episode:

Read the full transcription:

Jared: Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today. We have John Ainsworth with us, John. Welcome. 

John: Thank you very much great to be here. Yeah. 

Jared: Yeah. Glad to have you here. And, uh, we were talking pre-show about what we have in, in store for us today. This is a, I was sharing with you.

This is a topic that we haven't touched on in a while, if at all. So it's going to be a really fun, deep dive into, uh, we'll just say maybe some opportunities that a lot of, a lot of website owners are leaving on the table, but before we, uh, before we get into the meat and potatoes, why don't you bring us up to speed on you and your.

John: Yeah. So I had a background initially when I got started in, uh, mathematics and then sales. That was my kind of skills. When I got started, I did sales jobs all the way through university. And I worked in, I worked in marketing for a bunch of years, kind of got into it, I guess, 20 years ago, something like that.

And I, um, I was, I was working in fitness marketing and I was working with like gyms and local councils and hospitals, all kinds of people. And then I think it would be about 2015. Dot com secrets came out. That's certainly when I first came across that and I read that and I was like, oh, this is where has this been?

All my life. Like, this is the thing. And I was like, I could immediately see those like such percentage than that. And what I found is really interesting. Loads of people in marketing are really creative and then not really data-driven. And I was like, I can pull all these bits together. I can get these funnels running work and analyze funnels.

I can figure out conversion rates from one stage to the next. I can figure out how to get more people. Into these, um, fitness classes, kickboxing classes, gyms, all this kind of thing. And what I did is I started going through all of these different funnels and figuring out what worked and talking to different people and finding out conversion rates and analyzing stuff and spent years doing analysis around that and started to get really good at it.

And what happened was we got so good that we could fill out. Any of these things, the gyms or the Kickbox and clubs, or what have you. And then what would happen is they didn't need us anymore. 

Jared: I said a marketer, right? A good marketer, 

John: grateful I've I've spent so long trying to get good at this thing. And now that I'm good at this thing.

It doesn't actually, I actually would be better for me if I just kind of dragged it out a little bit more. I'm not, but I'm not going to do that. So I started looking for like, who's got more capacity and this is probably like four or five years ago, something like that. And I started looking at stuff online.

Right. I looked at. Uh, e-commerce SAS businesses course businesses, and I've narrowed it down to course creators. I found that was like the audience that we work the best with people. Who've already got a website they've already got organic traffic. They've already got trust for their audience. They've got courses and they don't know how to build the funnels to convert one thing to.

Um, so I worked, I worked a lot on that and that's been like outstanding for us. It tends to be that course creators are experts in the field. They love to share. They build up an audience through years of creating free content, but they're not making as much money as they deserve. And most of them have no idea of the potential of their business.

Like it's just mind boggling. And I think this is true with niche sites. Enormous. I think niche sites like authority sites at the. The most undervalued thing on the internet, like people could be making like 10, 20 times as much as what they currently are, but their business model is wrong. And the whole system they've got stuff as well.

They're just making money from ads or affiliate, then it's like, they're just missing most of the money. So, um, yeah, we had someone recently, she's got a big YouTube channel and she went from, she, she came to me and she was making like three grand a month. And she told me she wanted to get to 10 and I laughed at her and I didn't mean to, but I just came out and I was like, but you're not going to go to 10.

You're going to go to like 30,000 a month. And I was wrong. I just didn't go to 30,000. She went to 50,000 and then she had another 50,000 and then the next month, 70,000, then 60. And it's just like, it's just like, it's just math. There's just these. If you've got the traffic and you've got something to sell and you use the right system, Then it, you, you make good money from it.

And it's just amazing. So, uh, yeah, that's kind of the background how I got here. 

Jared: Well, what a tease, because I'm pretty sure that, uh, the majority of people listening are exactly in that someone in that moment, not a YouTube audience, but of course, a website owner that has content monetized by go figure Amazon affiliates, maybe making 2% on their affiliate commission.

Uh, ads, whether it's, you know, a premium ad network or something, but still, I mean, how much, how much it sounds like, you know, you're a pretty strong believer that if content creators are leaving a lot of money on the table, when it comes to the business model that they're currently using, 

John: Yeah. So I've got a friend, um, used to be a client, amazing woman runs this blog called perfect English grammar, and they have good, really good traffic.

And she's been running that blog for years and, you know, giving away free content and she makes decent money from ads. Right. She makes enough money from ads to like pay for her lifestyle and what have you, but she makes like eight times as much from. Courses as yourselves and that's yeah. Yeah. It's, I'd say it's an average about eight times as much.

She's still running some ads, you know, but it's like, yeah, the, the money from this is so much more. And I think what happened what's happened is people have got into a certain. And so they, they've learned about how do you drive SEO traffic. They've learned about how do you build up affiliate links and ads.

And that's what everybody else in that group that they're in does. And then there's another group of people over here who are doing something else. And they're like, well, we're not talking to them. We're not looking at that. We're not thinking about that because that's not our thing. That's not what we're doing.

And so they don't realize how valuable. Their site is how valuable all that traffic is and how, what that can convert into. And it's, it's, it boggles my mind. Cause I look at it from outside. I'm like, oh, I can just see it. Cause I work with these people all the time and I've worked with people who don't have the courses or have got courses and, and uh, you know, not got the marketing or have gone all the way through and set the whole marketing up.

And I can just see what the numbers. You know, we just have spreadsheets with them. We let analyze it all the time. We can say that's what it's worth, but it's not, no, it's not that people don't realize 

Jared: for, eh, cause I know we're going to get into a lot of the details about what you recommend for this kind of stuff.

But before we do that, Let me ask you this. Do you think that I'm trying to put myself in the position of a listener who has a website with content on it, but a lot of people go into a lot of people go into website or niches that they feel they're an expert in. They have expertise from some sort of past, uh, uh, or maybe it's an interest.

Uh, but a lot of people are in niches where they chose it, maybe more for the SEO reasons, for the competition reasons. Feel that they're an expert that just to give people a frame of mind, is there start listening to the rest of this interview? How important is expertise in the, um, the kind of the course creation and monetization ideas that, that you have?

John: Yeah. So we don't miss three parts to this kind of business model of what I'm talking about. You have to have traffic, you have to have courses that have got product market fit, and you've got to have the marketing system and the funnels that convert the audience into buying the courses. Now, the only part of that, that I work with people on is the funnels and the marketing.

Like how do you actually convert your audience to find the courses. I'm not an expert around course creation. I think if you are the expert in your topic, it's, it's relatively straightforward. It's a bunch of work, right. But it's not, it's not rocket science. It's like you go through and you learn, how do you get good at PR?

How do you put together a good course? You on you'd learn about learning outcomes and about work books and about all the steps that you need to have and content structure, and what have you. There, there are courses you can take. You then you have to check that it is the thing that your audience wants, that your audience is like, that's what they're really interested in you to survey them and talk to them and understand what is it they're interested in.

And so once you are to try and answer your question, I was like you were saying like, do you have to be an expert in order to create, because you don't have to be, you can hire people who are the expert to create the course, as well as you hire people to create the content. It's I know quite a few people where they have never.

Being the expert in that topic, they just haven't have a, an area that they are building a site around. And then they also get, you know, people to create the courses about each of those topics as well. 

Jared: Okay. I actually was hoping you might say something like that because, um, you know, that kind of gives everyone permission to.

To, to go down this model, depending on where they sit and where they lie on their, their, their journey right now, you know? So that's great. That's great to hear. Okay, well, let's kick off. Let's talk about that. I mean, you mentioned there's three things you want to dive into to kind of some of the steps that people can embrace and harness for this process.

John: Yeah. So there's three things you want from a marketing point of view, from a funnel point of view. If you want to convert your audience into buying courses, then there's three different things you need to have in place. You have to be able to increase the number of email subscribers, build up your email list from your audience.

You have to get your email subscribers to then buy each month, and then you want to lastly increase the revenue per sale of each of those sales. And if you do those three things, then that converts your audience into making a good amount of profit, providing them with great value because you're providing these great courses.

And if you're starting out and you haven't got the courses yet you can start doing this through selling affiliate courses, the margins on courses that you sell as an affiliate are outside. You know that like 30, 40, sometimes even 50%, it's a high margin product. You can start with that before making courses yourself, test this out and see which of those courses are selling, which things are popular and then go, okay, I'm going to make one of those myself for my audience and not bother with this other one, because that didn't sell so well.

Jared: Uh, and as, as a lot of people listening, they're going to be experienced with marketing, other people's products. A lot of affiliate marketers have experienced in that, um, just really quickly, where do people, any recommendations for where people go to find courses like that? Um, is it pretty niche specific or are there any more general platforms that kind of give that operative?

John: Oh, ClickBank is a good one. Yeah. So you're going to click bank and you can find which, which things are available. Where are people offering things as an affiliate or for you to be an affiliate? 

Jared: Okay. Okay. So, uh, you know, validate that what people want. Yeah. Because we've all heard the stories of where, you know, someone spends months and months building something and then it's crickets.

Uh, and it's because it was the wrong, the wrong product fit. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent product fit is so important. Like we've got clients where their best selling product will outsell the worst selling product, but like 10 times it's like, so if you really want to know that before you spend a bunch of time making it, which end of the list is that 

Jared: right?

Yeah. You don't want that to be the, uh, you don't want them to come by happenstance. 

John: Yeah. 

Jared: All right. So, um, okay. So w with, with, with that process or that research in mind, uh, uh, and I love your tip about actually selling to somebody else's course first to, to, to, to determine product market fit. You know, I mean, there's enough courses out there that you can probably test a bunch of different ones before you dive into your own.

Yeah, yeah. 

John: A hundred percent. So you want me to talk through building the email list? 

Jared: Yes, let's go through email lists because this is an area. I think a lot of, uh, we, we have these conversations as website owners, you know, inside sidewalls all the time, which is, I mean, I think a lot of signers will get maybe in the early days, 10 or 20,000 visitors a month, but certainly more established sites are getting 50, a hundred, 200, 300,000 visitors a month.

And not either not building an email list or not putting an energy and real concentrated effort. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. And there's so much money that's available in the list. And there's a, there's a bunch of places where people go wrong here. One is a lot of people think, well, I don't make money from my email list, so I not going to bother building it.

Or sometimes people think. Well, I've put the effort into building it, but I make any, I never know what to send out to people. What have you, so we're going to go through this and make three, three steps here. First is building the email list and then what do you send to them? And then how do you increase the revenue?

So even if people have got something on their site in order to grow their email list, so like a lead magnet or a newsletter opt in what we see. Is it 95% plus of people have got an option rate of somewhere between your 0.5 and 1% of the total traffic they get under 1% of those people each month will end up onto their email list.

Now good level is about 2% and great is about. The best we've had is 9.3. Now the range will vary depending on the niche that you're in. And so some, some niches it's like, you can't probably get past maybe 3% and other ones it's like, you can get way, way higher. And I don't have data on like, which ones are, which I just know.

That's what we've seen from implementing the whole system. It still sometimes tops out on the kind of ground grumbled 3%, but on average, 5% is doable for most people. So there's a few really simple things that you can do for this first one is a turnoff double opt-in. And so a lot of people have double opt and it comes by default on most of the email marketing service providers.

And it's, it kind of makes sense because you're like, well, you don't want people on your email list of email addresses and valid. But there are other clever ways of checking. If the email address is valid than insisting that someone has to click this one time on this one link that you've. Into that first email.

If you send out emails on a regular basis, you could S you can do a, a clean every three months and say everybody who hasn't opened any emails in the last three months, we're going to remove from the list, same, same effect. Exactly the same effect, except revenue goes up by about 20%. And you probably double the number of leads that you get every month.

Wow. 

Jared: Because yeah. 

John: Yeah, because double opting in is a pain and people miss that email. And then if they miss the email, they never get onto your email list. And a bunch of those people are good leads. Some are not good, but a bunch of them also, when we've run tests on this, it's doubled the number of opt-ins and on average revenue goes up by 20%, obviously only a few, then sending out emails that are going to make you money, but like that we get into that either.

Right? So that's the first one. That's really easy, but you have to, you still want to do that clean up, but only every three months. The second one is to show your lead magnet more often on your site. So if you've just got a new of option, then instead of that, replace it with a lead magnet. So this is something you're giving away for free.

That is a real value to your audience, that they can get value from ferry very quickly. It could be a tempered. Or a swipe file or a calculator or a quiz, something along those lines, they don't have to do anything. They just fill it in and then they get the value. You can do an ebook, you can do a video course.

They're fine. But best is something that's just immediate value that someone can get. Like, so the, the site that I said about that had 9.3%, opt-in, it's a paintable.cc and they are teaching digital artists. How's it be better at art and how to make money from it as well. And their opt-in is free. Digital painting brushes.

Oh, so you, you put in your email address, you get the painting pressures, you upload them into whatever software you're using something in Adobe. I'm going to guess. And then you've got them as instant value straight away. So that's the one that's done the best ever for us. So once you've got that lead magnet, you want to put that everywhere on your site.

Most people will have it in a couple of places. So there's a bunch of different things you can do here. You set up a pop-up so that after someone's been on the site, A minute, five minutes, whatever you choose, then it pops up asking, do you want this free thing? Um, in online opt-in forms in blog posts, this is an absolutely massive one.

So people who run, who do a lot of SEO tend to have tons and tons of blog posts. Each of those blog posts can have top. If it's long, if it's like, let's say 2000 words, top, middle, and bottom, you can have the opt-in for. For your lead magnet. So as someone's reading through the article, you have the option for me.

Now, some people will have ads in all of those places already, right. Or affiliate links. So you're going to have to make some kind of a balance here, but it's. I would suggest putting it in some of those places, building up the email list, you'll start to make more money from the emails than you do from your affiliates and your ads.

And then you can put in more places. So that might be a gradual process for some of the lessons, a sidebar, if there's a sidebar on the blog, but the opt-in form there as well, just basically put it everywhere that, you know, anywhere, that kind of makes sense. Do you audience tend to also have like a big social media.

Following as well, or was it mostly SEO? Traffic? 

Jared: Yeah. You know, I think, uh, you'll see different stages. I think probably most website builders are going to start with driving traffic from an SEO standpoint and then bolt on some different social media channels, if it makes sense for their niche. 

John: Okay, cool.

Cause there's some ways you can grow through that as well. They were really powerful. So I think I've got a couple of examples of the kind of results this has got. If that's all right. So we've got a client in the personal development space and they were getting a hundred opt-ins each week. And we put lead magnet in every blog post that they had.

And we had put it in as an X intent popups. So someone's going to leave the site and it pops up saying, before you leave, do you want to get this free lead magnet? And in their case it was five free meditation. That's the thing we're giving away. So it went from a hundred opt-ins week up to 800 opt-ins a week.

And from doing that, um, so that was, that was pretty huge straightaway. And then paintable, I mentioned before their option rate was 3.4, 9%. We went through to the same thing. I've just said added lead magnet to every blog posts. In line need magnets within book posts, we had the pop-up, um, and we removed any other things that they had on the site.

So whether we're talking about the lead magnet and challenges and go buy the course right now, we moved. All of that stuff. Just had the focus on the lead magnet, and that went from 3.49% to 9.3%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not none of this. This is not complicated. This is, it's a bunch of work. Someone's got to go through all the blog posts and put this in, but a VA can do it.

It's not a complicated job. It just needs doing, you've got to, you've got to do it. Well, you've got to make sure that your pop is attractive. That is well designed that you've got to have the right structure to it. That's like a load of details to, there is a basic concept. It's really pretty 

Jared: straight it's work, but it's not complicated work is what you're saying.

You know, it's not something that you're, you're. You're going to get wrong necessarily. It's just something you've got to put a couple hours in or line the pieces up to have. 

John: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like when we're working with our clients and our group coaching program, we're helping them with every one of those steps about like, okay, what does the headline say?

What kind of lead magnet is going to work? What exact texts you put here? Does this, is this well-designed, is it, is it the right structure? But even if you don't do that stuff right. If you don't get it perfect. You just point doing this, it's going to make a massive difference. 

Jared: Can I ask you one quick question?

Is this really more of a personal question? I hope that some of the audience also, uh, feels the same way. So, uh, one of my websites, I have a lead magnet and, um, I, I, I'm not very good at thinking of good lead magnets. So I basically just took a couple of blog posts and put them together and do a little ebook.

And I offer that and I was talking to my wife and she's like, are people even really interested in, in, you know, in getting free books or PDFs? Like, is that overplayed? Oh, that was a good point. I'm like, I don't really know, but I can't think of another better lead magnet. Um, like how do people, can you give some tips for maybe how people can think about coming up with really attractive lead magnets in their 

John: space?

Do you want to brainstorm for you? Here's an example. We 

Jared: could, we could I've uh, I, you know, it's in the a it's in like the, uh, uh, my audience is, is in the home, uh, home space. Right? So it's, it's basically about topics for around the house, how to improve things for around your home, how to, you know, take care of things around your house better.

And so they're just coming for informational content. 

John: Okay, cool. And what is your, what's your, any of your top blog posts? Like what things do people. Loving 

like 

Jared: how to clean this, how to fix that, uh, you know, air conditioners, uh, you know, sinks, kitchens, baths, all that kind of stuff. 

John: Got it. One of the things that's amazingly effective with lead magnets is specificity.

Like an example in the I'm trying to think how you define this space. People who are like looking to.

To grow their own vegetables have be self-sufficient space. This is one that was a really good test done on by digital marketer. And they came up with a lead magnet, something like how to grow enough food for a family of four in 16.7, four square meters. Oh my goodness. Okay. 

Jared: Okay. That's 

John: yeah, that's okay.

Well, it happened, it was fascinating. They did this study where they went and looked at all of the lead magnets. HubSpot did these reports about like what opt-in rates were for each of their different lead magnets? And they went through and studied like all of them. And we're like, ah, we're looking, we're finding some common themes here.

And specificity was one of the things that made a really big difference. Okay. So is there, is there something, is there like an overall topic there that, cause I, I do think that. Um, ideal then not the best thing, but they are one of the easiest things to make. Right. And to have good results with doing, putting together the best, the best blog posts.

Um, And, and making that into something. So that is a, that's a relatively easy one. Are there any resources or downloads or things that you've got that you ever normally would sell to people that it, but not for that much money that could be useful for these guys? 

Jared: Well, We've had a little bit of success selling, um, like, uh, like checklists for people, um, where, you know, it's like, if you're looking to fix this, here's a checklist to go through.

You're looking to clean a bunch of different things. Here's a checklist and an ordering and that sort of thing. And you to be thinking about. Uh, it's not as much as a calculator maybe, but some sort of way to kind of take stock of what you have in front of you and this, this sort of list would help you take stock of it and be a lot more valuable than reading about how to do it, you know?

John: Yeah. Totally. Checklists are amazing. Yeah. How many checklists do you think you've got all together? 

Jared: Oh man. If you look at some of the individual blog posts, I mean probably 20 or 30. 

John: Okay. So your lead magnet could be. He is five checklists for fixing the, the top things you were going to want to fix around your house.

Jared: Yup. Yup. Yup. And you can even get it specific to, um, each, you know, type of blog posts could have, like, let's say your time about your kitchen, that could be specific to that, you know, that checklist and then outdoors would be specific to that checklist so forth and so on. And so that specificity could even be, we know the audiences on this blog post, so we can deliver them a specific checklist for that type of a.

John: That is like, Extra advanced. It would a hundred percent work better, but it's going to take a bunch more time kind of thing. 

Jared: And you're almost saying you don't even need to go that far, necessarily out of the gate, right? Okay, good. 

John: Yeah. Start with what's your top three or five that you'd be happy to give away.

That's what we did with the meditations. They were selling 27 meditations. People love them. We're like, what if we splintered? Fine. I'll just put that everywhere. Now. There's other things that we could have done and we could go through each of the blog posts and have the perfectly MagnaFlow that it's so far 

Jared: down the list, right?

You're talking 80, 28. What's going to get you 80% of the, the value in the game for just, you know, 20% of the effort, the first 20% of. Exactly. 

John: That's like every single thing we do has been run through an 80 20 analysis and like, okay, here's the 20 things that we'll eventually get to. Here's the two that we'll do first and then we'll come back to, and granted, we've got clients that we work with on a done-for-you basis that we've, I think we've got some we've worked with for, uh, just over a year now.

And we've helped them go from 20,000 a month to 200,000 a month. And we haven't done that yet. So it's way down the list. 

Jared: That's good. It's a good reminder. Cause that's the other thing you can just go so deep down the process and you'll never know, but you didn't need to, and you didn't need to spend all that time that you could have spent on so many other 

John: things.

Yeah. I always tell everybody you have to implement stuff before you optimize it. Don't go. Well, I'm going to do the perfect version. Do something, get that in place. Every step that you put in that currently didn't exist. Moves your business forward astronomically. When you optimize it moves it forward incrementally and every smaller, incremental improvement you may cause.

And not this, but you just have to have the whole thing in place. You'll make a bunch more money, then you go right. Cool. This is great. I can afford to hire a team. Who's going to go through and implement the next phase of staff. 

Jared: Right. Okay. Okay. So if we have we covered email and opt in or are there any other points we'll make on that?

Okay. Yeah. 

John: Go for it. I've got social media followings. Then you then also put the lead magnet everywhere on social media. So let's say you've got an Instagram channel that's doing really well. Every 10th post would then point someone to the lead magnet. So you've got a bunch of different graphics made up about it each with a side benefit, maybe you get five.

And every 10th post, you put one of those up and that will point people to it. Now, the guys I mentioned before, who are in the personal development space, I'd said they went from a hundred to 800 opt-ins from their website traffic. Well, they had a huge social media following. It was really big. And so they went from 800 opt-ins up to 5,000 a week by doing this work with social media.

Right. No, everybody's going to get that. That's that's, uh, you know, that was pretty cool. They 

Jared: had a good social following, but certainly, you know, people who have smaller social followings might still get an incremental bump in conversions or opt-ins that is just by, by leveraging their list. Okay. 

John: A hundred percent.

Yeah. So that's, that's how you grow an email list in the first place. That's kind of the basics of it. The second thing is once you've got an email list or how do you make money from it? So we've talked about, you know, selling, um, affiliate, affiliate links for courses, you can do affiliate promotions for the products you're already promoting, even before that.

And most people. I'm doing that, right. They all send emails, three medalists promoting the things that are on the site. You can totally do that. And that's probably the easiest place to start actually. And then maybe move into courses which has, but then going to have a really good margin and then maybe making your own courses, but like one step at a time, you know, the problem most people have with email.

Is that they own, if they ha if they send out email promotions, they do it normally three times a year, black Friday, maybe July 4th, maybe new year. It's almost always three. And I just like 95% of the time, 95% of people I talk with. That's what they do. And when you look at their revenue, when they send one of those promotions, there's a big spike in.

I'm like, well, so why don't you send more of them? And they say, well, I don't want to annoy my audience. And then they all unsubscribe. So this is predicated on the idea that sending email has to be annoying. Well, sending email promotions has to be annoying if it wasn't annoying and it made you money, you could do it way more often.

And so that's what we recommend people to do two email promotions a month, but you don't want them to be spam. You don't want them to be sales or you don't want to be annoying. Cause otherwise people don't unsubscribe. What you want is for them to be engaging and useful and helpful and include promotion as well.

And then the people who don't buy, which is like in every email promotion you do, 99% of people are not going to buy. But if 1% of people buy and you've got a decent size email list, that's a lot of money. And if you do that twice a month, it really adds up to a lot of money. Right? If you got, so we've got clients who let's say got 20, 30,000 people on their email list and they've gone from making.

3000 a month to making about 20,000 a month. You know, as like that's the kind of increase you can get with that kindness and the traffic sizes that you're talking about. If someone's got 20,000 websites, A month, they can easily build an email list that size it's like, that's just a thing, you know, it's not, it's not like, oh, maybe if you haven't, if you work at it for years and you're a good person, you strive and you determined you succeed because they know there's just things to do and you do them and you do build that size of, I mean, 

Jared: I just did the math while we're, while we're talking here, if we're looking at the 20,000 and we're looking at, um, a 3% opt-in rate, you know, so can go back to.

What we just talked about with coming up with a good offer with coming up with an enticing offer, we're playing around and testing a couple offers, but 3%. I mean, that's, um, uh, that's uh, what does that 600 people a month? 

John: Yup. Yup. And so we've lost 6,000 in two years, you've got 12,000. I mean, obviously be balanced subscriber as well, but it's like ballpark.

It's like. Yeah, you start 

Jared: to build something significant. I mean, you're going to be at 10,000 and a year and a half, and that's assuming your traffic doesn't grow month over month, which, you know, if you're working on your site, your traffic grows. So you can be at 10,000 subscribers in less than a year and a half, maybe a year with some traffic growth.

And then, like you said, a list that size can produce some sizeable revenue. If you're actually paying. 

John: Ready to can. Yeah. Yeah. 10,000. And you're like, okay, you go, you probably going to be making, I mean, this is, this is going to vary based on niche maybe, but just as a, as a ballpark kind of middle of the road, somewhere around 10,000 a month from that kind of size email list, 

Jared: I just think it gives people a real, because you hear about this kind of stuff and you think in the back of your mind, maybe you think, oh, A hundred thousand visitors and I've got to spend years building this email list.

And, you know, I just, I think in our example, but 20,000 visitors per month is very doable. Especially if you put into practice a lot of things that, that people hear week over week on this podcast. And man, to put that, to dangle that carrot a very realistic carrot in front of them, in terms of the value of an email list, that's really, really motivated, you know?

John: Yeah. Yeah. Email lists are so valuable. Like it's just mind-boggling versus website traffic. So if yours, if you've got a cold course business already, right, you've got website traffic, you've got courses that you sell. You're building up the email list, but you're not sending out emails regularly. You're leaving a.

80% of the revenue on the, on the table. Now, if you're sending out three times a year, it's about 80% of it. That's the average results that we see with our clients is that they five times their revenue, that's the average. Some people it's double, some people it's 20, but on average, five times, that's like most people can do that.

It's just, it's just, that's where the money is as well as how people build up enough trust with the brand. And. Go ahead and make purchases on these kinds of things is through email. 

Jared: Okay, well, you have me convinced, uh, less I'm taking notes too, by the way, but, okay. So let's keep going. So, um, you know, we're talking about, about, you know, basically the opportunity that comes with, uh, selling to your email list, not being, not being, uh, uh, a victim to just only, you know, selling a couple times a year, actually creating a system around selling multiple times while giving a lot of that.

Yeah. 

John: And do you want me to give you guys a framework around like what those emails might include? 

Jared: Yes, very much so. Cause I think there's a lot of struggle perhaps around, oh my goodness. I'm getting emails. I have my pop-up set up and I know people who are in this spot, I have people, but what I do with them now, you know, what know now Howard, I go, 

John: yeah.

So this is, this is for if you're selling courses has a very simple framework that you can use is called a gain logic, fear going, going. That's the, that's the name of each of the types of emails. You can consent. You send six emails in five days and you have Monday through Friday with two going out on Friday.

So the gain email is something that people can gain from sorting out this problem. You're not promoting your course directly. You're talking about what is the benefit of solving this problem in your life? How might your life look different if you do this, what's it going to look like in a day, a week, a month, six months, if you work on this problem.

So what you're trying to convince people up here is that the problem is worth solving. Not trying to convince them that your course is worth buying. Now within that email, you then say, and if you want help with this, we have a course that you can get and it's 30% off. And you mentioned that a couple of times, then the amount as well, the logic is then what's the logical reasons why you need to go and sort this out.

What is the, we've talked about? Like the gain, how is your life going to be different? But some people are much more. Been motivated as much by the benefit the most more by logic. So what's the logical reasons to go and do this. What is it that you need to, um, what exactly, how are things going to change in a, in a logical structured, organized manner?

And then the fear is another angle on the same thing. So the fear is, well, what's the problem that you've got and what's going to happen if you don't solve it. And so how's that going to affect your life? How's that going to affect your family? Or what have you, we're not trying to do scare-mongering here.

Like fear maybe is, is too strong of a term here, but it's like, what is the problem? That's going to stick around with you if you don't sort this out. So what we're trying to do is educate the audience about why they would fix this, how their life could be better, how it could be changed. These emails should be useful if they don't.

It's a very, very, very important that they use for it because otherwise people are gonna stop reading your emails, but then within each of them, you're mentioning, there's got this course on discount, 30% off this week. Now the going, going gone emails a much more straightforwardly promotional. You still want them to be entertaining and useful and helpful, but they're more focused on the people who in the first three emails thought.

Yeah. That's right. I do need to sort this problem. I am going to do something about that. I'm not sure yet whether to buy your course. So we're going to have things like frequently asked questions that people have. We're going to have testimonials. We're going to talk about the benefits of your course.

You know, what's good about it. And within each of them, you're talking about how long there is left for that 30%. So the first one is going to say 24 hours. The next one was going out on Thursday. Yeah. So 24 hours, the next one's going to say six hours. And the last one's going to say maybe two hours, something like that.

And the very last one is very, very, very short. It just says just a quick reminder that discount's going away in three hours time. If you want to go get the cool system and very, very simple and straightforward. So what we're looking to do is provide tons of value for the people who don't bond. But the value should be.

Appropriate towards the topic that the course is about. So if they are interested in it, then it helps them move forward towards making that person. 

Jared: So a couple of things I took from that is first off, give a lot of value, mention your course, right out of the gate, mention what you want to sell to them out of.

And so that they're not maybe, you know, kind of blindsided by it when you give the offer in four days, but then when you're, it sounds like deadlines are also very important on these. Yeah. If I'm, if I'm kind of reading between the lines, it's important to introduce deadlines in the, in the sales process.

John: Yeah, a hundred percent. So when you're selling courses, deadlines is one of the most important tactics that you use. So if people have, I've had people say to me, I had a friend, she said to me, I don't want to put discounts on when people get used to buying with discounts. And I said, well, then just raise your prices.

And then they they'll always buy with discounts, but it'll always be at the pre what the previous price was anyway. And she didn't listen to me for two years. And I, I talked to her a little while ago and uh, I said to her, so how's everything going? She said, revenue is up by 50%. That's crazy. What did you do?

She's like, I started doing email promotions with discounts. I was like, 

Jared: Cool. I was like, just keep 

John: your mouth shut. John. Say I told you, so 

Jared: she probably forgotten at that point had been so long. Yeah. It's like I had this brilliant idea that I came up with. Yeah. I mean, I've heard the same argument before, but you know, Um, discounts have been proven to move the needle.

And this is a pretty, you know, in many ways, this is a pretty new, uh, audience member, someone who's just been on board with you for a couple of days or weeks or that sort of thing. And so I can imagine discounts plus deadlines would really help them make a decision one way or the other about whether they wanted to buy that course or what.

John: Yeah. A hundred percent. It's it's very much with these kinds of things. It's not a course. It's not something generally that somebody needs to get right now. And so you need to give side, make a decision. That's a good point areas. You can have different reasons why somebody should. Go ahead and buy something.

You know, there's, there's Robert Cialdini's classic texts on it, where he identified six different reasons why people tend to buy. And so you've got authority and reciprocity and scarcity and urgency, which is what we're looking at here with deadlines and likability. And there's all different reasons.

Why now in different areas, if you're selling like a luxury yacht, then deadlines is not the thing that. But if you're selling courses and deadlines works amazingly well, 

Jared: right. That's a good distinction. That's a good distinction. Okay. Okay. Any other tips for how to make more sales with the people that you have in your list?

John: Ah, do you mean in terms of, uh, increasing the revenue per sale or how to. So tell me, ask me again. Yeah. Oh no, 

Jared: no, no problem. We were talking about just, you know, how to start taking people from being on your list to actually making money in your list. And I know that we spend a lot of time with the framework.

I appreciate you outline the framework for us because you know, that kind of detail will help people go put that into action. I just want to make sure we didn't gloss over any other things inside that bucket that you had. I didn't want to, you know, I want to leave you hanging in there or if you had any other tips to share on that, that kind of.

John: Got it. Yeah. I mean, that's the absolute 80 20 of it is do this every month. I would start with doing once a month and then eventually, once you're making good money. You moved to doing twice a month. Okay. And just the crucial thing is doing it. So do not over-complicate these emails. I had a client who was selling home recording studios.

So he used to be a sound engineer. He built up a website where he had, I forget exactly, but I think I, 10,000 website visitors month, something in that kind of ballpark. And he sold the courses only directly on the site. He didn't have. And email marketing going out to bounce it, but he had an email list and he was just the most beautiful person to work with because he never over complicated at any single thing.

I just would say to him, right. Here's a framework. He'd go. I don't totally get that, John. I don't totally understand it yet, but I'll give it a bash and he'd go do it. And the next week he'd come, you know, and we had calls twice a month. That was that. The two weeks later, he come back and go, oh, I did this thing.

I don't know if I got it right. But I made a bunch of money from it. How do we make it better? Is that what we do next? Or do we do something else? And he just had no barriers about it. He'd just go and give it a go. You know, it's just like, try it out, come up with the best. He could put something together.

Like when we're working with our coaching clients, we like, okay. They, they write the email, they go through our training about it. We give them a template, they write it, they send it to us. We get feedback on it. Like there's a whole process, right? I have to have that to make money from it. If you do something you'll make money and then you go, oh, that was quite cool.

Like as an idea, in terms of percentage of your email list, if you do this badly about nought 0.1% of your email list will buy from you. Now, if you've got. Uh, tiny email list. Okay. That's probably not going to make you much money. If you've got a massive investor, you've got a hundred thousand people on your email list, then, uh, that's gonna make you what, like a, a thousand sales, no, sorry.

A hundred sales, a hundred sales, a hundred sales. Yeah. And so if you're making a hundred sales and it's at $97, well, then you've just made $10,000 from that email promotion. Yeah, that's a rest like doing a really, really bad job of it, nor 0.1%. If you do an amazing job with it, you, if it's a new course, then you might get like 1%.

I've occasionally seen 2% of the list by, but as a general rule, the average middle of the road, looking at north points, regional 0.5% of her email list buying every time you do. Um, and then if you just doing that twice a month, that really, that really starts right up. So if you do it badly, you're still gonna make way more money than not doing it at all.

And you started to get the hang of it and then you'll do a bit better the next time. 

And 

Jared: you're getting that nice, positive reinforcement, you know, nothing's better than working on a project or working on a task where you've already seen that the results tangibly lead to more gain to more profit. 

John: Yeah.

Yeah. 

Jared: That's, this is, this is like drinking through a fire hose to some degree. I say that sometime doing it this year, but this is definitely one of those that qualifies. Um, I don't, uh, we're, we're starting to come up to the end here, so I want to make sure we had talked, uh, pre show, uh, about, um, about this.

Uh, one of the areas was how to make more. Yeah, once you get a little bit further down the road. And so I just want to make sure we touch on that. I want to make sure we talk about how to make more, once you are in the selling process. And again, this might be down the road for a lot of people listening.

Part one part two might be more for the people who have an audience, um, going to their website, but they're not maximizing it via emails and via sending emails. Maybe talk to the people who do have a course who are in the process of having an email interaction and exchange on a regular basis with, with their, with their list.

What are some ways maybe some more advanced ways, maybe not to make more money from that? 

John: Yeah. So if you've already got people buying courses from. And if any product this works for, but you know, courses we're talking about today, then this is the easiest thing you could possibly do to increase your revenue.

Like if you've already got all that stuff in place, then this is the one to do. First it's called order bumps. And almost nobody uses them and they always, always, always work. And they're incredible on average, they increase people's revenue by about 20% and they take almost no time to set up. So an order bump is when you're on the checkout page, you've gone to the sales page.

You've read about the course you decided yet. That sounds good. You click add to cart. You're on the checkout page and someone's filling in their credit card details, putting in the name, that kind of thing. Order bump. On that page, you have a tick box of something else that person could get. Let's say you're selling a $99 course.

The order bump might be $37. And it's an additional workbook that goes with it. Or it's an additional set of checklists that might fit well with that course at that buying or. It's a Q and a, with a number of people who've implemented this system for themselves. And you're going to sell that as well. Or it's a audio book that goes along with it and it's like, what have you got that could fit.

Don't like I said, implement before you optimize, just whatever you got that might. And if you, if you've got something that's kind of a mediocre fit, then you'll get about 30% of people will buy it. Wow. That high. Yeah. And it's you have two lines of texts sending it it's because it's in that spot. When they're in the process of buying, right.

You don't have to write a whole sales page. You've got just two to three sentences, something like that. If you do, you've got the perfect order bump that absolutely fits. And you craft your text perfectly. You might get 50 or 60% of people buying. Yeah. 

Jared: Is that the significance? Is it because they've already opened, they've already decided to open their wallet, so they're kind of already gotten over the hump.

And so it's like, yeah, if you continue to give them something that also solves problems for them, that they'll just continue to order. Yeah, 

John: exactly. It's exactly what it is. So that's the easiest one. And then the second one, this is a bit more advanced as the upsell. So you've, they've gone through the checkout, they've put the credit card details, then they click submit.

The next page they see is the up sell page. Now, normally most people there just say, thank you very much. Your product will be with you soon, or here's where you download it. If instead of that, you have another. On the upsell page. So that is probably the next logical step. So maybe they've bought one course.

You sell in the bundle of all of your courses, or you say you've sold them the beginner course. Now you sell them the intermediate one, or you sold a membership and it's, you've sold one month. Now you sell three months worth. If you're doing this with products, you've sold them one bottle of something. On the up sell page, you offer them three bottles for discount.

That's the, that's the basic idea. There is you have the next thing that they could get at a discount. Again, whatever you do, don't invent something new for this page. Take something you've already got and put it on there. Okay. And nearly all checkout software has this functionality of order bumps, upsells.

Jared: And these sound like pretty low hanging fruit. I mean, you kind of teased it as, Hey, you're basically adding an order bumps and upsells from products you already have, or you're piecing together things that make sense from the product suite and the course suite that you already have at your disposal.

John: Yeah. Yeah. So David Vigneault the guy I mentioned earlier, the home recording studios, uh, courses, I talked to him about. On a strategy call. So we did a free strategy call. We went through and we figured out how much more money he could be making. And this was this going to work for him. He hadn't signed, he signed up to do coaching, but he hadn't started the coaching yet.

It just, I just told him he should have this. And he went over into Kajabi, which is the software he was using and looked up, all the bumps, found it, set up some order bumps, one of his products. And within, I think it was three days instead of auto bumps and upsells, and he was making 30% more work. Just like that.

Yeah. And they made that forever since it's like, it's like, you could just set something up and it's way better than not having anything 

at 

Jared: that stage. You know, the whole part of today has reminded me. And I don't know if this is, this is an observation that anybody else can kind of recognize, or at least synonymized with.

A lot of the foundation of how people build websites that, um, that listened to the niche pursuits podcast is on the back of SEO. And so we just have it drilled into our minds that this is going to be a long, slow process. It's going to take a lot of time, but the good news is once it starts to build, and once it starts to hit it, it really hits and you get those exponential growth curves.

And then the traffic does tend to maybe stick longer over time. It's much more sustainable, but we're so. That's going to be a long, slow and hard process. And so much of today is almost the opposite of that. It's almost lean on all your hard work to grow those, those websites, those content sites, and, and so much of this can actually be done relatively easily.

Not over complicated. It does take work, but it can be executed and implemented really relatively quick. 

John: Yeah, absolutely. So what I see the people that we work with and we only work with people. Who've already got an audience and they've already got, uh, courses is that they have, they've done all the work.

Well, they've done so much of the work, but it's not being realized yet the value of it hasn't been realized. So our part is, is wonderful because if you just put what we're doing into something where they don't have much traffic. What does it doesn't do very much, but someone's built up lots of traffic and a big email list already.

And then you put our system and price within eight, eight goes absolutely crazy. And so that's just wonderful. I get to give people very good news on a regular basis. There's really nice. 

Jared: Yeah. So how can people follow along with what you're doing? Where are you located at? What are the things that you, um, that you and your team.

John: Yeah. So what we've got for your guys is a course creators profit report. So what we will do, if people already have website, they've got traffic, they don't even have to have, um, courses yet. They can go and fill this in. They can go to pimp your funnel.com. Okay. And they fill in about 10, 12 questions, something like that.

And we will do a personalized report for them. About how much more money they could be making and what things they could from the stuff I've said today, what order would you do that in some links to some training about it so they can get all of that for free at a pimp, you'll find a book on. 

Jared: So I was like a better offer than a, uh, the knee book or something.

I'm going to guess that one converts better than an ebook. And you've probably tested that actually. Um, so pimp my funnel.com and they can kind of answer that information if you will funnel. Yeah, I D I, I hadn't written it down yet, so good. And we'll get that in the show notes so people can, um, can, can click below, um, no matter how they're listening here.

Um, I mean, I think maybe partying words for people, um, for someone. Who doesn't have a course. What's your number one recommendation that they can do right now. And for someone who does have a course, what would be your number one recommendation for them to do it? 

John: Yes, I haven't got the course yet and they haven't got the email list.

I would start with that. Okay. Taking something and start building up that email list. And if you've got the lead magnets, then start putting them everywhere. And once you've, if you've got an email list, but you haven't got the courses yet, I would start selling. Something to your email list, sending out usefully mails that also sell, whether it's the current products you have in affiliate or courses.

Jared: Right. If you click bankers spine could find some. Yeah, 

John: yeah, yeah. If you've got the courses already, you've got an email list. You've got courses you're already making sales. The courses I would, first of all, start with the order bumps. And then what back was through the stuff we've gone through today, then start sending more emails and then start building your MLS bigger.

Jared: So I think every single person listening can slot themselves in somewhere they're in that process and know what the next step they need to take. Yeah, John, thank you so much. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that, that, that we need that we need to touch on really quickly before we go? I think we got, 

John: I mean, I, don't the only thing and I have to say this to people, to our clients all the time is, do not over-complicate this.

Just do something to start with. Don't try and do it. Perfect. Just get started and you will make more money. And then you go that John Guy did know something and then you can move on to the next step. 

Jared: Hopefully it's not several years later when we forgotten that you're the one who gave us the advice.

So much for coming on board today. Like I said, this is a topic we haven't talked about in quite a while, and I feel really inspired to go do something with, um, with my site and my traffic. And, uh, I hope a lot of other people feel the same, but this is a really value packed episode. Thanks so much for coming on board.

John: You're very welcome. Absolute delight. Thanks so much for having me. 

Jared: It's your thing. Cheers. Have you been frustrated with your Google traffic lately? Are you tired of tools that make you search through millions of keywords and require a math degree to figure out there's an SEO tool called rank IQ that can.

They're ranked number one on G2 for both ease of use and customer satisfaction. Rank IQ gives you a list of the lowest competition, high traffic keywords in your niche. And they're all clear when. When you choose one of their handpicked keywords, their AI takes over and gives you a simple report telling you what Google wants you to cover in your blog post.

Whether you have a new site or have been around for awhile, rank IQ will take your Google traffic to a whole new level. Go to rank iq.com/niche pursuits to lock yourself in at 50% off their monthly. I'll put this special link in the episodes of 

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