My friends, you will love seeing how to sell online courses in 2023. You don't need any ads. You don't even need any traffic right now. I'll show you how to set all of this up with YouTube and Thinkific, based on my experience selling more than $3 million in online courses. I've made over $100,000 in sales of individual courses sold since 2014, and you don't even need to use Udemy or even have any followers to make this work. I'll start off by showing you some proof that I actually know what I'm talking about here, and then I'll explain why I'm doing this.
These are my Udemy lifetime earnings. I no longer use Udemy. I sold millions of dollars, so this is just what they paid me. I had to sell more than $2 million in courses to get that. I've sold hundreds of thousands online through my own site, which is hosted with Thinkific. I've sold hundreds of thousands on Stack Commerce as well. That's just what they paid me. I actually made millions of dollars in sales on there. I also launched a new crypto coaching community on my website, and these are my sales from that community. I'm selling today, and I've been selling for a long time. Now, here is why I started off this way. You're going to understand in a minute why I just showed you all those numbers.
Start With Your Desired Value
The first thing, before you do anything else with online courses, you need to figure out what is the value you've got. I say desired value because you need to have something to give to others that they actually want. It doesn't matter if you've got something to give other people that they don't want. You need to have something useful to share with someone else who really wants it.
Me, I've got two main categories that I give to others, two things that other people really want. One, I know about crypto. I've been in cryptocurrency investing for nine years. I bought Bitcoin as low as a hundred and some dollars. I've made hundreds of thousands in profit, paid hundreds of thousands in taxes, and missed out on millions of dollars of earnings from a ton of different mistakes. I even quit doing crypto for a couple of years. In my experience, I know a lot about how to be successful in crypto investing. I've made 20-plus points, I've made 10 in profits, just dollar cost averaging over the last few months. That's something people want to know about. That's a value that people are desiring.
The second thing I know about is content creation. That's why I'm up in the studio right now recording this for you, essentially in a live format, because that's what I do best. I am a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer. I've been a Udemy instructor, a teacher, a podcaster. I've even created music and done blogging and a bunch of other stuff. I know about content creation and I know about crypto. Those are both things people want to know about.
The beauty of this is that even if you're thinking, "I don't know anything that other people would want to know about," I didn't know anything about crypto 10 years ago. I didn't know anything about content creation 11 years ago. I intentionally selected things I had a lot of work to do on and a lot to learn about that would build desired value. You can look around and figure out what you should learn about today, and even if you just learn a little bit more than other people, you can easily give this.
Establish Your Authority
Once you've established what your desired value is — and that's really the hardest part, because once you've got that, it's simply putting in the work — the next thing you need is authority. You need to communicate clearly that you know about what you're saying you know about. That's why I am making a video about how to sell online courses. I showed you all the money — actually a fraction, not even all the money. I've made much more than what I just showed you, but I showed you a few screenshots of some of the money I've made selling online courses. You now know that I can deliver the value that I'm saying I can deliver. I've established what I have to give, and I've established my ability to give it.
Get Quality Traffic With YouTube
The next thing, if you want to sell online courses, is quality traffic. I'm going to show you how you can get this even if you have no traffic and no followers right now. And if you've already got that kind of traffic, this is going to be real easy for you. You get quality traffic by giving the value and establishing your authority for free to people who are searching or browsing. The best place to do this is YouTube, by far.
I've tested and tested every other angle. In my experience, Shorts, Reels, and TikTok are a total waste of time for almost everybody. Many of the people telling you the opposite are doing things that you won't be able to replicate, but you can get YouTube search to work for you. YouTube search will work for almost anybody, whereas creating viral TikTok and Reels content is something most of y'all are not going to do very well at, and most of you will struggle to deliver your value proposition. Shorts and Reels don't work very well because there's not enough time to really establish a connection, to establish that desired value, to establish that authority, and the algorithms are bad at putting those in front of the right people.
If you want quality traffic, I suggest you do one video a day on YouTube. This is what I've done to build a channel from zero to about 10,000 subs, hundreds of thousands of views, and thousands of dollars in earnings in just three months from scratch. You can easily do this too if you've got your value and you get to work. If you film one video a day, you will rapidly learn and get better, because if you are trying to film a video every day in some halfway-done studio, that's a real pain in the butt, and it will be difficult. In that difficulty, you have to constantly innovate. I know I have a sick setup in this studio where I can film. I knock out a live stream — I do a three-hour live stream and I upload four videos a day on average in about four or five hours of time. I've just practiced, and I've got a studio that makes this easy. If you do a video a day on YouTube, you will rapidly learn and get better and continue to fix one thing after another that slows you down.
The easiest way to crank out videos fast is to just stop editing them and practice constantly speaking as if you are on a video. You'll get used to it, and you just accept a little bit lower quality of video and crank them out. That works great for me. Then, copy thumbnails and titles from others. I literally took the thumbnail — Sunny Lenarduzzi did a video about selling online courses three years ago, I loved her thumbnail, and I just straight up copied the thumbnail idea from her. Somebody else did a video and I put it on with the same basic title, and I changed a couple of the words on it. You don't need to come up with your own stuff. Just look at what works and copy it straight up. That's perfectly legal. Now, don't take somebody's thumbnail directly and use it as yours, but you put your own style on it.
Collaborate To Grow Faster
If you really want to speed up your growth, collaborate with others and you can grow much faster. I grew my crypto channel from zero to 10,000 subs and hundreds of thousands of views, all off of organic traffic in 90 days, with thousands of dollars in earnings. I did everything I just described. One of the main things I did that helped the most, and that most people wouldn't have either tried to do or been able to do, is that I collaborated with Joe Parys, who's a top crypto YouTuber, and he featured me on his channel like 20 different times. That's because we have a relationship. I've known him for six or seven years. I've helped him a lot, and this was him helping me a lot, which also helps him a lot too.
If you can find someone who's already got traffic, figure out how to give them value. Whoever you've already got in your niche, work with them and collaborate with several others, plus do video marketing. I've got videos that show up in search — easy money, baby. If you want to work with me directly on building this, the best way today is to join my community, the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what's working and help creators get moving. You can join us — join the Jerry Banfield Family.
Don't Do These Things
Now let me show you some things not to do. Don't put a whole bunch of different kinds of videos on one YouTube channel. That went very wrong on my other channel. Once you've got your channel and you're getting your first thousand subs, focus it. And I'll say it again — in my experience, TikTok really isn't worth your time.
The Ideal Product: A Course With Coaching In A Community
Now, for those of you that want to get into online courses, I've set this up to really give you everything you needed to do before that, because there's no point in trying to sell an online course when you don't have an audience who's ready to buy. You need to have a product, but there's no point in having a course before you have an audience. Once you've got an audience on YouTube, it's very easy to start selling an online course from there. It's so easy even I can do it.
What I'm going to go through from here is how to set up everything step by step with your online course to make it successful. Keep in mind, I've sold a lot of online courses. I've tried a lot of things, I've learned a lot about what not to do, and this is the ideal product. Your ideal product is an online course with coaching in a community. These are three things people really want. I will not buy an online course that doesn't have coaching in a community with it. I have only successfully been sold two online courses that cost more than $100. One, because it had a Zoom call with the creator, plus a community and an online course. The other one, that I'm still disgusted I bought to this day, all it had was a stupid online course with no value above it. I would never buy something like that again. This is why an ideal product should include all three of these, because people want and need communities.
A Discord server is the easiest way to provide community for people. Alternatively, you can use Telegram or something like Slack. Discord is the most popular and the easiest to use.
Why coaching and community beat a bare online course
People also want the ability to have coaching, and in my experience the products that sell best pair a course with real coaching and a community around it rather than selling each piece on its own. What is amazing is that most people do not even use the one-on-one call within the first week of buying, but they love knowing that it is there whenever they need it. I have tested selling a course by itself against selling it bundled with coaching and community, and the bundle wins every time. If you just want to sell an online course for $10, you are not going to make much money that way unless you get it up on Udemy, and that is a whole other thing which I do not even recommend messing around with. You want to be able to sell something worth several hundred dollars, and I am going to talk a lot more about pricing in a minute, but these are the fundamentals of an ideal product. If you want the same kind of coaching and community for yourself, the best way to work with me on all of this today is to join my Jerry Banfield Family community.
Where to host your course
Once you have an ideal product in mind, you need to figure out where to actually host it, and I suggest Thinkific. I have tried Teachable. I have hosted my classes in a lot of different places. Thinkific is the best platform I have found in terms of speed, and I hate using slow websites. People's Teachables are so darn slow, and I have tried some of the others like Kajabi and Podia. Trash, and they cost more. Thinkific is exactly what you want.
Inside my billing you can see the different plans. I have the Grow plan, which is $149 a month or about $1,800 a year billed annually. It includes what I really care about that the plan below it does not have. It has Zapier actions, so you can automate things in Zapier for the course, it removes Thinkific branding, and you can send bulk emails. These are really nice features to have. If you want the cheapest option, then the Start plan is going to have what you want. The Start program has all the basic features, and you really want to have memberships and bundles available unless you are only ever going to offer one course. If you are just going to offer one single course and that is all you are ever going to do, then it will work fine to do the basic plan for $432.
If you have never sold a course before and you are brand new to this, the basic plan is a perfectly good place to start. If you are a serious crypto creator, I would grab the Grow plan, get it annually, and get those Zapier actions, the bulk emails, and remove the Thinkific branding, because it looks kind of cheap when it says "powered by Thinkific" on it. You might want memberships and bundles one day, and you want to commit to this for a year anyway. Thinkific also runs a 30-day free trial that is very helpful for deciding whether you want to commit to an annual plan, and the annual billing gets you 25 percent off. That free trial time makes it easy to test the platform and see if you really like it before you lock anything in. When I first signed up years ago, part of what motivated me to keep at it was funding my own little habits, like buying more Gods Unchained cards, which is great.
Building the course inside Thinkific
Let me take you inside Thinkific, because I want to show you every little detail of course creation here. This is the difference. What I really would hate is for you to spend a whole bunch of time creating a course that then does not sell. That is exactly why I have already told you what you need to do to set up your sales to begin with. If you have done the work to build a YouTube channel through search traffic and through collaborating with others, then you have warm traffic: people who already know you, people who already love your videos. It is very easy to sell to them simply by putting a pitch in your YouTube videos. Really easy. Joe Paris has sold millions of dollars doing exactly what I am showing you right here. He uses Teachable instead of Thinkific. I have used both, and I like Thinkific better. It works, and it works great. However, there are certain details you can get right in Thinkific that make a big difference between selling one course versus 10 versus 0 versus 100.
Once you sign up for Thinkific you get your account, and this is the side menu you will sign into. I am going to explain everything. The first thing to do is create a course. There is a basic landing spot where you go to your courses. I have 50-plus courses on my website that I created over a period of years. If you just have one course, then there is less work for you to do and you do not have to worry about anything else. You click on whatever course you want, and you land on the curriculum page of the course. On the left side you have chapters, and inside a chapter you have lessons. Lessons can be video, text, PDF, presentations, multimedia, downloads, and even a live. Then you add chapters, which are just a collection of lessons. On the landing page you basically add lessons and split them into chapters. Very straightforward.
The main option I think you should check on each lesson is to make your video downloadable. If somebody is going to pay hundreds of dollars to watch your course, one thing you can do to make it a lot easier for them is make the video downloadable. I know your mind will tell you, "Oh, what if they share it?" But if you are making something good enough to share with other people, it will probably help your sales and brand recognition if they take the time to download it and then share it somewhere else. Make it downloadable so people living in Bali or in areas with intermittent internet connections can download your whole course and watch it offline. This is something people really like being able to do. When I do not have this checked, people always complain, so check that box in each individual lesson.
If you want to speed up your upload process, one nice thing you can do is use the bulk uploader. You put in a chapter title, then grab your video files from your explorer and drop them straight in, and they upload really fast. So if you have already filmed your course, you can drag the files into each section and each chapter, and they will upload very quickly.
Settings, and why the course name matters most
On the settings tab, the main areas you need to pay attention to are the basic settings, the course image and description, and the SEO. Those are the ones to go through. For your course name, I have chosen to name mine "Crypto Coaching Community" for my crypto audience and "Creator Coaching Community with Jerry Banfield" for my creators. I have tried out a lot of different names, and the name is something you will need to work on. The course name is one of the more important aspects of your entire course.
For example, Joe Paris calls his course "How I Made $200,000 in a Single Week with Crypto." That is a great title to clearly sell his course, because that is something people want to find out about. He is emphasizing the learning he is going to give somebody, showing how he turned a few thousand into a few hundred thousand in just a week. I tested different titles across a lot of different courses over the years. One format I really like is "How I." For teaching online, the best course I ever took from someone else was called "How I Make a Thousand Dollars a Day on Udemy," by Alan Hill. At the time I was making barely maybe one or two hundred a day on Udemy, and I took his course for free because he gave out a free coupon to it. After watching it I said, "If this course can make a thousand dollars a day, I can make two or three thousand a day." And that is exactly what I ended up doing.
So a title like "How I Make a Thousand Dollars a Day" or "How I Make Two Hundred Dollars a Day in Crypto" works because your title needs to set up expectations on the value you can deliver. I tried "How I Make a Thousand a Day in Crypto," but I did not really like that, because it set up the wrong expectation. If Joe Paris titles his course "How I Make a Thousand Dollars a Day in Crypto" and can then show people how he is earning all that money by staking, that is very easy value delivery. For me, I realized that when I used the thousand-dollars-a-day title and then showed people that I am buying $50 a day and waiting several years to sell for a thousand, that sets up disappointment and it does not make clear the real value I deliver.
That is why I named my two courses and course bundles "Crypto Coaching Community" and "Creator Coaching Community": to emphasize that the main value I am delivering is coaching and community, because that is what people really need in crypto. There is no other crypto coaching community, and there is almost no other cohesive, valuable community like it. So I have emphasized the main value I provide right in the title, and I did the same thing with my creator community.
You should put a lot of emphasis on this. One of the biggest things to consider before you even create your course is the name, and it needs to be something where people see it and think, "Yes, I want that." Then you have to match that with how you sell it. In my experience the number one mistake people make in crypto is not having a mentor, and the way I framed the solution was through coaching, community, direct access to me, and a group of people all learning together. Your course name and the value you deliver have to line up very clearly. Today, the way I bring all of that together is inside my Jerry Banfield Family community, where you get me, the material, and a group of people to grow with in one place.
If you are not sure what to do for your name, just look at what other people are doing for their courses in your same niche, and you can name yours something almost similar. For the course URL, I suggest keeping it as absolutely simple as possible, because Thinkific already builds a long URL for you: it is already going to be your website slash courses, or bundles slash, so I would just make this one word if you can.
Setting the course up the right way
For my crypto community it's just crypto, and for my creators it's just creator. One thing I want to point out here is that I have this listed as a private course. If you select private course, it makes it so people cannot buy it without some other kind of access, and I've done that on purpose because I sell my crypto coaching content as a bundle. There's also a hidden course option, which makes it so people can only reach it directly through the link. Most of the time you don't want to use either of those options, but I've selected private course on this one because I only want to sell the bundle, which includes access to all my other courses. I don't want people buying this course directly. I want them to buy the bundle, and I'll walk through the bundles a bit later.
Now for the image and the description. Honestly, I don't put that much into the image, because it doesn't matter that much. People are pretty much only going to see it at checkout, so I just uploaded a picture of me with crypto coins. In my experience you want to put your effort into the right places and not waste it where it doesn't matter. A simple image with your face and a relevant background will be fine.
The course description, on the other hand, does matter. Since I'm building a crypto coaching community, I want to bring in the feeling that you're no longer on your own, that you're part of something. So my description reads: we're a team of experienced cryptocurrency investors ready to help you avoid the mistakes we made, answer your questions, and empower you in maximizing your returns. We're ready to connect with you on Discord and Zoom today. I noticed from Alcoholics Anonymous that "we" language is very powerful, and to me joining a community like this is about going from I to we, from being alone to now having other people on the same journey as you. You're part of something bigger. That's why I write my course description to match my title and to match the value I'm giving. Back when I had this titled "how to make a thousand dollars a day," I wrote it differently to match that title.
That shift from I to we is really the whole point, and it's the same reason I built the Jerry Banfield Family today. The best way to go on this journey with me now is to join the community, because you get other people walking the same road instead of trying to figure it all out on your own.
The last piece here is the SEO settings. You want to make sure you copy your course title from your basic settings, and copy your SEO description from your course image and description. The SEO title is what actually shows in the browser tab, in Google, and at the top of your page, so you need to copy and paste these in so they pull correctly.
How I price a course
On the pricing page is where we'll talk about course pricing. I've sold a lot of courses, anywhere from $5 at the minimum up to about the maximum I've sold at, and I've seen others sell even higher. Joe Paris tested out a bunch of higher and lower prices, and he found the key point seems to be about $500 or less. That is pretty easy to sell a course for. Over that it starts to get more difficult. Can you sell higher? Yes. But if I'm showing you a simpler approach where you don't need any webinars, no ads, and you can do this just off YouTube search traffic, then you can definitely sell a course at $500 or less doing exactly what I'm showing here. So I'd suggest a maximum of $499 for a course price.
And then have fun with it. You'll notice I made one of my courses $456.78, because I like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Four plus five plus six adds up to fifteen, it divides really nicely, it's just a fun-looking number, and it's something people haven't seen anywhere before. Sure, I might technically lose about $41 versus selling it at $4.96, but I think it's more fun. For branding, it is nice to stick out and have a price that's a little bit playful.
Now, I've tried selling a lot of courses cheaper, and here's the problem I ran into. If you sell a course cheaper, all the effort you put into selling it is the same, so you might as well sell something you can make good money off of on each sale. I'm thrilled when someone drops nearly $500 to buy one of my courses. When someone pays $10 for a course, it doesn't really make my day. But one $500 sale a day is a good paycheck. That's $100K a year for me from selling one single course a day, whereas I'd have to sell 45 of the $10 ones a day to match it. So if you have massive amounts of traffic on something like Udemy, where everybody else is selling for 10 or 20 bucks, then sure, go low. But if you've got your own website, in my experience you should sell anywhere from $199 at the minimum to about $499 at the maximum, and really aim for $499 if you can.
One-time payment vs. subscription
The last thing I'll cover here is whether you should do a subscription or membership at all. I'm going to summarize a lot of testing and say: just do a one-time payment. Think about it this way. I tested the crypto coaching community at $50 a month. Would I rather have somebody pay $50 a month for nine months, or immediately have someone pay $450 up front? A lot of others in crypto charge something like $50 a month for a community, and I tested it. But the problem is that people will just as easily drop almost $500 as they will sign up for a $50-a-month membership. That's because people hate recurring subscriptions and they add a huge theoretical cost to them in their heads. People love one-time payments with lifetime access.
It's just as easy to sell someone on almost $500 as it is to sell them on $50 a month, so I suggest selling one higher-priced lifetime access offer and not bothering with the subscription. Sometimes you'll get people joining a subscription who wouldn't have paid for the bigger program, and in that case they just cause a lot of trouble, are obnoxious, and you wish you hadn't even sold to them. I love lifetime access because people know exactly what they have to put in and they get that indefinite benefit. So my suggestion is to sell something close to $500 and not bother with anything else.
Building the landing page
Once you're done with your course, you click publish, and then the next thing you need to do is build a landing page. This is where your work comes in to start getting sales. On the left side you have each different section, and on the right you see what your sales page looks like as you go. Now, some of you might get obsessed with building something really pretty, so here's what you need to know about that. If you get warm traffic, even a terrible sales page will convert well. If you get cold traffic, even a beautiful sales page will do nothing. So if you focus on building your YouTube and getting warm traffic ready to go, your landing page can be pretty half-baked and still convert really well.
Don't worry, especially when getting started, about having every word perfect. I see so many people spend way too much time on stuff that doesn't matter. Literally do the least, keep it as simple as possible, and just get it out there. When you click on each of these sections, it brings up a submenu with all the different options, and you need to click into those submenus to find every little setting you have. Think of it as a bit restrictive in what you can do on the landing page, but it goes faster than most of the other course hosting platforms I've found, and it's much cheaper than getting some landing page builder and juggling multiple domains. This way you do it all on one domain and it all works really smoothly. You don't want to pay separately for web hosting and for your Thinkific when you could just put all of it on one host.
Here's an example to pay attention to. When you click on the course banner, that's your main sales button. You go down, add a button, and then customize what your button says, and you need to make sure you point it to the right checkout page. If you want to sell a bundle off of a course page, this is what's great, because you can link to a different product and have the buy button go through there, like I'm doing here. This is where you customize your entire customer experience.
Bundles and memberships
Speaking of bundles, let's go back and look at memberships. To use this you have to have at least a $79-a-month plan. If you don't plan on having multiple courses, you can skip this little section. Memberships are really nice if you've already filmed multiple courses, because they can be an easier thing to sell than a single course. For example, someone building crypto content could make several little mini crypto courses and then bundle all of those into one mega course or one membership offer, which makes it a lot easier for people to navigate than one single big course. If you've got a lot of content, you definitely want to go the membership route and break it into multiple different courses.
I happen to have 59 different courses on my website, plus two different coaching communities that give people access to most of them. I have a membership for my crypto coaching community that gives access to all the courses, and then a creator coaching community that excludes the crypto course and gives access to all the rest. On membership, you click each individual product and then select which products you actually want included. If you have multiple courses, this is where you add them, and you can drag them to order how they appear on the page. The settings are a little more minimalistic on the bundles compared to the courses. You just need your name and your URL. The private and hidden membership options work the same way, and the SEO and the page code work the same too.
Pre-launch pricing and early access discounts
You'll notice my price on the membership here is actually $345.67 instead of $111 higher. So here's what you can do when you first release your course: you can say that it's in pre-order or in early access. That lowers people's expectations and it allows you the ability to sell your course and your community before they've reached the money and the maximum value they're going to have. I'd just launched my creator coaching community that day. I'd had one before, and now, with the success of my crypto coaching community, I tried my creator coaching community on a monthly subscription and that got exactly one member, because the cost was too high at $99 a month. With the success of the crypto coaching community I could see exactly how to sell the creator coaching community, so I relaunched it that day.
Then I say that it's in early access to give people an expectation, like, hey, if you join, you're literally going to be the first person in it with me today, and for joining earlier you get this exclusive discount. Then I'm giving people two or three weeks and I set a countdown timer, and anyone who buys after that has to pay a higher price. That's one clear way to get people to take action faster and to sell your course when it's earlier on. As you continue to make your course, your community, and your coaching better, and you make more and more sales, then you can raise the price up and not offer a discount with it. And on the landing page, a lot of the options are almost exactly the same for selling a membership as for selling a course.
Once you've got your course and/or your memberships created, there's a bunch of settings you want to go through, and I'll show you all the ones you need to know about. Click on settings, then set your site name and site address. That makes everything so much simpler and easier. I suggest you put something up like, if you're Superman Crypto, do something like supermancrypto.com or superman.com. Then for your site address, you're going to need to stick a www on it so they can map it there, and you're going to need to forward your naked domain over to the site address, so that if somebody just types it without the www, it still goes to the www version. You can do that in your settings, and they give you plenty of instructions on the site URL.
Domains, policies, and email integrations
I also blanked out my site emails, but you'll need a reply-to email and a support email on there. For your URL, you'll click add custom URL, put in your domain, and usually you want to just do a www and then remap the main one to your www. Thinkific will give you a URL like this to start, but you don't want to use it like that because it looks cheap, and you don't want to be trying to sell somebody a $500 course on a thinkific.com URL. So pay $10 or whatever it costs you to get the domain, and map it to your own URL. You'll need to do a privacy policy and a terms of use. I keep mine as simple as possible and just let people know that I may send them emails related to the courses they buy.
On the apps, if you go over to apps you can integrate MailChimp, which works great. As soon as any user signs up on your Thinkific website, you can add them directly onto your MailChimp email list. MailChimp is the best email marketing provider I've found. I've tested a whole bunch of different ones, and if you have under 500 on your email list, you can do email marketing on MailChimp totally for free, and it integrates directly with Thinkific. So MailChimp is going to be your best bet for email marketing. I personally hate email marketing, so I often don't send any emails at all. I can't be bothered to do it. I just like making videos.
Watching the orders come in
Once you've got those set up, you're going to want to know where your orders tab is, because this is how you see the sales coming in. I'll show you in a minute how you can set up text message notifications every time you get a sale. I love these. I love getting those texts every day that I'm making a sale. It really makes my day. So you click over on orders and you see the sales continuing to come in. You can see a few people are still on my old subscription program, and once they've caught up to this amount, actually less than that, then I'll cancel their subscriptions and they'll have lifetime access.
One of the big things you need to make sure to do is click on your notifications. In Thinkific, go to support your students and click on notifications on the very bottom right. Then here's what you need to do. I've got bundle welcome emails right here, and these are the two things I sell. Well, I haven't technically sold the creator coaching community yet, but it will sell, especially now. For the crypto coaching community, I have a welcome email, so as soon as somebody buys it, they get an email automatically delivered to them with all the details they need in it, and the creator coaching community is the same.
Here's what it looks like when you click on edit: you'll be taken to an email screen, and I put in my subject line, "Success — your creator coaching community welcome." Then I replaced the default with this: thank you very much for joining the community, and I give them a link so they can actually go access what they bought and know exactly where they bought it. I tell them about the discount to set expectations immediately, like, hey, this is not a finished product. Then in that email I give them a link to the Discord server, a link to book time with me, a free coupon, and a direct phone number to text or WhatsApp me if they have any issues.
Now, unfortunately, sometimes people have email blockers and that welcome email may not always get through, so I'm thinking about setting up a fail-safe in MailChimp to send the same basic information about an hour later, just in case the email from Thinkific didn't work. The ideal scenario, if you're just selling a course like with my crypto coaching community, is that I also set up the text messages, so if I see someone buys but I don't see them join the Discord server, then I'm able to manually email them directly from my Gmail and say, hey, I see you just bought the course but you didn't join the Discord server, just making sure you got the information.
Customizing your home page
The next thing you're going to need to do, after you've got your order notification emails up, is customize your home page. Go over to design your site, go to site pages, then go to home page, and this is where you can customize your header, your footer, and the home page of your website. I've kept the home page of my website extremely simple, because I've already got landing pages to sell my products. I have my Twitch, my Twitter, and my YouTube. These are my core business. My YouTube, my Twitch, and my Twitter are where I give out value for free, and then I've got my paid products right here. I've got links to both of my communities, and I'll explain how those work. That's really the last thing you need to do in Thinkific to be ready to start selling.
If you're on the plan I suggested, the $149 a month one, what you can do is get Zapier. If you have less than 100 sales a month, you can set this up for free. You might have to pay a little bit if you're expecting more than 100 sales per month. I think I pay like $30 a month. I use Zapier to automatically post all my new YouTube videos directly out to Twitter and Facebook, which is really helpful and saves me a ton of time. Then I set up a zap so that every time I get a new order in Thinkific, I connect my Thinkific account to Zapier, I select the app, then I select the event "new order," and it notifies me every time I've made a sale.
When you're selling a product that's hundreds of dollars, you want to be able to provide quality customer service. So this sets me up: I get the text message, then I see somebody join the Discord server right after that, and I can guess that the person who just bought is the same person joining the Discord server. If I don't see them join the Discord server, then I can reach out and send an email saying, hey, I see you bought this yesterday, how are things going with you? Looking back on all of this now, the tools change but the principle doesn't, and today the simplest way to work with me on any of it is to join my community at the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what's actually working right now.
My own landing pages and checkout
That's the entire presentation, 42 slides, on exactly how to sell online courses in a lot of detail. Now let me show you exactly what I do on my own site. I've got my Twitch link there, and I have the exact same header as footer. I keep things super simple, because I want people to go watch on YouTube and follow on Twitch. Then these are the landing pages I've got set up. I just put "How may I help you?" and then these are the two main things I do: you've got my crypto coaching community and you've got my creator coaching community. If you're reading this, you're probably a creator, so you'd click on creator coaching community.
This is a default banner, and it includes the same text you put in there. You can edit this if you want to, but I think it's ideal if you just keep it the same. My call to action here is "join today and save $111." If you click on this, here's what it looks like: it comes up right here, you've got the picture, you've got the price, and I've got mine set up where you can use a credit card with Stripe, or you click on PayPal and pay with PayPal. You definitely want to have Stripe and PayPal set up, because for me, I don't want to use Thinkific payments, I want Stripe and PayPal. This allows the most buyers, because some buyers only use one or the other.
Keeping the checkout and contact simple
Some people can't use one payment method or another for one reason or another, and this checkout is super simple. Name, card, and PayPal, you have the terms of privacy, they click agree, complete purchase. It's easy and it works really effectively. Then your email is listed down at the bottom, whatever email you have set for your support goes on the contact us button, so whatever you set that button to is the email people can reach you at. Make sure that's an email you actually want to have publicly accessible.
How I write my landing page
Now let's talk a little bit about the landing page. I keep mine pretty simple. I stick to the value that I'm offering, and I put myself in the position of someone who's thinking about buying. Someone looking at my creator coaching community is more than likely a bit lonely as a creator. You need to know the pain point of the people you're offering value to. If you've been like me, you've just been in your studio, you've been creating online, you've been uploading a lot of stuff, and a lot of the people you know may not understand what you do very well. You may feel like you're on your own a lot of the time.
So I put my headline up top, and I change my landing page from time to time, but it's a simple statement: creator coaching community, and then, life is better with friends and mentors. That's setting up the value proposition. It's a statement I think almost everybody would agree with. Then we go down the page and start getting people to nod their heads, because if you want people to buy, you want them nodding along. Life is better with friends and mentors, I mean, unless you want to suffer and be alone, then you might disagree with that.
Then I start asking questions. Do you want to be a part of a team, not just on your own, but a team of content creators that are all trying to help each other succeed? Are you ready to have a mentor that's been an entrepreneur online since 2011, with millions of dollars in earnings and over 60 million video views, that's ready to help you get the best growth in your income and following you've ever seen? That's it, one line plus a couple of sentences, very simple. The idea is that if someone answers yes to both of those questions, then this is for them.
Explaining what you get in a few bullet points
Then I explain in four quick bullet points what you get. Access to the Discord server where you can direct message me questions anytime and chat with all of us 24/7. If you don't use Discord, I've got a phone number. If you want to talk with me, you get a call. And then you get access to 50 plus video courses that will help you as an online creator. If you want to learn how to film videos really fast, I've got two short courses showing exactly how I crank videos out like a boss in my studio. I mean, I've just ripped, I'm working on having a 50 minute video right here, and it took me about an hour to set this video up.
This one single video I'm filming could be worth a lot. In my experience a video like this took me about two hours to make and can go on to generate real income, and that's the value of the learning I'm communicating. You see how simple this is, and yet I imagine it will be effective because it's almost the same format as the crypto creator coaching community.
All of these video courses are included. I've got a video course in there that shows you all the details of when I first launched my Thinkific, how I set that up, how I made 11 thousand during my first month using Thinkific years ago. Then just tons more courses, Udemy, YouTube, TikTok, three daily motivation courses, which if you're a creator is important, autobiography, WordPress website, Twitch streaming, and an entire course on Zapier, plus a newer YouTube course from 2020, and so on. I've got all these courses included.
Then I scroll down and add my instructor bio, my YouTuber stats, my subs, crypto investor, and so on. If you want to be a part of this and learn all of it directly from me, the best way to work with me today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where you can message me questions anytime and go through everything alongside the rest of us.
Being honest about timeliness
Back when I ran this, I added an early access window in a way that's honest. It adds a little bit of timeliness, and I hate the dishonest sales pitches a lot of course creators use where, oh, it's a limited time discount, and if you keep checking there's always a limited time discount. Mine actually had a real deadline, and after that the price went up and stayed there. When you first launch something and want to get the first few people in, it can be nice to have an early access window, but at some point you just want to sell it at full price. Discounts can be good, but Thinkific wasn't set up that great for discounts.
One thing I noticed about the call to action is that people love to get distracted by how much they're saving versus how much they're paying, so buy today to save can work when you first launch. Afterwards, once that early window is done in a few weeks, I just turn it into join today or join us today or something like that.
Bundle pages versus course pages
So that's how I have my landing page done for my creators, and you'll see it's only slightly different from my crypto coaching community. Almost everything is the same. I literally copied my one landing page, pasted the words for creators instead of crypto people, added an extra couple of lines because there's a few things different with the crypto one. That earlier page I showed was a bundle landing page, but a course landing page is a little different. On a course you get to have all the sections of your course laid out, people can see the lectures, they'll have a summary of the lessons and the hours of video content, and other than that everything is going to be the same. I added a featured courses section to show some of the other courses that are included when you buy this. That's how I've done my landing pages.
Why a mentor changes everything
My mindset with setting these up, if you are a creator, is that having a mentor is one of the biggest things that will make your success so much easier, and that's why I branded everything with a coaching community. You get a call with me, you get a Discord where you have lifetime access to message me and ask questions. I've been able to grow my new YouTube channel from zero on crypto to 10,000 subs, to thousands of dollars, to hundreds of thousands of views, because I have two mentors that have YouTube channels that are already where I want to go. Superman Crypto talked with me a bunch in 2022, and Joe Paris has talked with me almost every week in 2023. I've been mentored, and now I'm doing what they are doing. Joe sold millions in his crypto course, and I took the exact same format he was using, changed a few things to make it unique to me, did very similar to his YouTube channel, changed a few things to make it my own, and I've been selling these courses every day, starting from zero.
One of the biggest things you can do for anything is to get a mentor. When I got sober, it was tough staying sober without a sponsor, but I got a sponsor, and it's been very easy since then. I have a couple now. For my business, I really struggled when I started out because I wouldn't get any mentors, but I've been gifted with people like Joe Paris and Superman Crypto and others who were formerly students at one point in my courses, or who paid for coaching, and who have now done so well that they've been able to mentor me. So I'm grateful that I know the value, as a creator, of having a mentor and a community, which is why I've relaunched my creator coaching community with a brand new Discord server. If you want to go deeper into this side of things, I've put a lot of it into my YouTube Coaching playlist as well.
I really appreciate you spending all of this time with me. I love long format, very detailed content like this. I've got more videos on my Jerry Banfield business channel that are similar, anything related to business, streaming, and content creation, along with my crypto channel, my original channel, and my gaming and recovery channels. Thank you for going through all of this with me, and I'll see you soon, maybe in the community.