Our Thoughts On Selling Courses In Today's World

- Should you sell courses in today's world? - No. - Well, damn it, Neil.

Let me start this off real quick. So let me explain why. Before you all guys on YouTube.

. . I don't want to see the retention graph like disappear.

This is Neil Patel. (bright music) Helping you succeed through online marketing. Courses used to be a really.

. . They're still a really good way of making money, right?

And a lot of people, especially in the internet marketing world, they would push courses, and some courses would do $20, $30, $40 million a year or so. You know, Tony Robbins would do- - Very few, by the way. Most coaches don't even do $10 million or even $5 million a year but yes, keep going.

- Yes, okay, and you know, Neil and I both used to do courses before, and I think our thinking is a little different now in terms of courses. I think courses still have. .

. There's a time and place for them, but I don't think the best way, and neither does Neil. I don't think the best way to use courses is to sell courses.

- No, I don't think so either. Look, when I used to sell courses, and this was a long time ago, dude, I think I haven't sold a course in maybe seven-ish years. Something long like that, right?

I haven't had NP Digital that long, but we stopped it before we started NP Digital. And I don't know what the exact profit numbers we got to, but I know our peak in course revenue was around like $600,000 a month. Now we've done launches and stuff and we've had, you know, over a million dollars in a month, but that doesn't count, right?

I'm talking about this consistency. It wasn't hard to hit 300, 400, even 500, and 600,000 a month in revenue. The issue we had, and 600 was hard to maintain by the way, but call it 3, 4, 500,000 wasn't a big deal at all.

And most of it dropped to the bottom line in which a lot of it was profit. I'm not talking about like 30% or 40%. Well above 50% was profit.

Sometimes 60%, 70%, 80% was profit. Now, the issue you end up having is if you're making all this money from a course, and this is what people get wrong, they think it's a great business. But you know what's a better business?

Not having the course. If someone's willing to spend $100 dollars, or $1,000 dollars on a course, or $9 on a course, you could have made way more money selling something else. Now what is that something else?

It varies per industry and it varies on what you do, but like for me, why the heck would I sell a course for 9. 97 when I can sell consulting services for $10 million a year? No joke, we've had clients spend, you know, over $10 million with us.

Why would you want people to pay you thousands of dollars for a course or hundreds of dollars, or even $10 when you can make money on something bigger? The market for selling marketing services is much bigger than courses. The people who are buying the courses could have just paid us for marketing spend.

It's like Google probably looks at what we do and they're like, "Why would we want to sell services when we can just sell ad spots? " They're right. They make way more money from the ad spots.

I don't have the platform that they do, so I can't do what they do, but that's a much better business than mine. You know, you look at HubSpot, HubSpot's like, "Why would we want to sell services when we can sell reoccurring software and just give away a lot for free and crush your competition? They got into the game early.

It would be tough for me to do what they do, not impossible, but really tough to build a business at their size. Now, I'd taken some of these guys' playbooks and applied it to the services space business, and it was much more effective for me to do that than it was to sell eBooks and courses. - I remember back in the day, Neil, when you used to sell like a course and then you would give a free hour of your time or something like that.

- Dude, oh my God, that was so bad. I would sell a course for $97 and then I would give everyone a 30-minute phone call. The ROI there did not add up, and what's crazy is, I was like, "Oh, this is great.

It spread. " Only like 17% to 20% of the people are taking me up on the phone call. You know, and then my co-founder, not in the course business, but my co-founder, my ad agency, Mike Kamo, we're like, "Dude, we should remove that.

" And this was years ago before he was my co-founder. And then it happened where I was like, "Huh, conversions didn't change. It ended up being the same thing.

" I was like, "This is great. " - The name of the game here is if you're looking to create any type of content, what you're trying to do is you're trying to create goodwill at the end of the day, and that's what will compound over time. But trying to make a deposit and withdraw too early, that will stop the goodwill building.

- Dude, I'm with you. Give away the courses for free. Don't charge from it.

It's a crap business. Make money from something else. - [Eric] Now, if you have any questions, leave a comment below, I'm here to answer them and help you out.

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