The Art of Selling Online Courses

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Ross Rosenberg has 38 million YouTube views, over 200,000 books sold in 12 languages, and a podcast in the top 2% globally. 

Ross is one of the world's leading voices on codependency and narcissistic abuse. He founded the Self-Love Recovery Institute back in 2013 and has been building his audience online ever since, mostly by figuring things out as he went, which is both the charm and the challenge of his story.

We talk...

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Eddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.

That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?

Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story...

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Gillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.

John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and...

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Kim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.

We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually ne...

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Most course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.

Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.

It sta...

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David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn...

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Jayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.

But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.

Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and...

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Bethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.

This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, lea...

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Nicole Hullihen runs a full-time VP role in pharmaceuticals, leads a family, and still finds 25 hours a week to build a course business on the side. I honestly wasn't sure how that was possible, but listening to her talk about it, it starts to make sense.

Nicole is the founder of Execute The Vision, where she teaches Excel and business operations skills through courses, done-for-you templa...

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Pete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.

I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.

We got into the structure of his three-course a...

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Leah Bolden built a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and nearly 200 million views by teaching one thing really well: how to fix your home. And she did it by speaking to people exactly like a friend would, not like a tradesperson trying to impress anyone.

Dominik sat down with Leah to talk about how See Jane Drill went from a classroom suggestion to a full course business, and the conversation ended up being one of the more grounded and honest ones we've had on this show.

Leah...

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Arnel Nisbet has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, 700,000 monthly views, and runs her entire business completely on her own, no team, no editor, no outsourcing. She's also a full-time mother of three. And when Dominik sat down with her for this episode, she openly admitted her biggest blind spot: "My email list is my weakness."

That kind of honesty is rare, and it's what makes this conversation so good.

Arnel started her channel out of pure necessity. She had three tiny kids at home, limited work options locally, and thought if...

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What happens when a digital artist with 1.1 million YouTube subscribers decides she wants to work less, not more? That's exactly where this conversation went.

I sat down with Flo Visser, the founder of Art with Flo, one of the most popular Procreate tutorial channels on YouTube. Flo started the whole thing almost by accident, after a friendly Instagram competition with her boyfriend spiralled into a viral...

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Mark Smith has been teaching bass guitar online since 2013. He has 450,000 YouTube subscribers, 150,000 people on his free membership, and a back catalogue of courses that includes one with 25 hours of video content. By any measure, he has built something real.

And yet, sitting down for this conversation, Mark is the first to say he's left an enormous amount of money on the table. No tripwire funnel. Email campaigns with one email at the start and one at the end. About...

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Jason Kleinberg was trying to become a rock star. That's genuinely how this whole thing started.

He played in bands, toured the world, recorded music. Sounds great until he tells you it mostly meant sleeping on floors covered in dog hair. At some point he started teaching fiddle, put some videos on YouTube for one student who kept asking him to film everything at 9pm when Jason was starving and just wanted to go home.. and somehow that turned into Fiddlehead, a full-time business doing just north of $200k a year.<...

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The job market is changing fast. My guest today thinks we've got about 6 months before it looks very different to what it does now.

Hemanand Vadivel is the co-founder of Code Basics, an EdTech platform out of India with 650,000 registered learners and over 6,000 five-star reviews for their courses and bootcamps in AI and data. They're doing about $2 million a year in course revenue... bootstrapped from day one, no outside funding, and no sal...

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What would you do if someone told you to put your entire best-selling online course on YouTube... for free?

Most course creators would say no way. Emma McAdam said yes. And it took her from 100,000 subscribers to nearly a million.

In this episode, my new co-host Dominik Dragun sits down with Emma McAdam, a licensed therapist and the creator behind Therapy in a Nutshell, a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers. They talk about how Emma built a thriving membership business while giving away her best content for free...

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Joseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free.

That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world.

In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works...

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Josh Wright is a classical pianist who's performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and on America's Got Talent. He's grown a YouTube channel to over 200,000 subscribers and 20 million views, and built a whole online course business teaching piano students all over the world.

And yeah, that's all pretty cool. But maybe the more interesting part is how he actually built it.

His whole channel is built around sharing his weaknesses. Not in some cri...

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James Testani has built Good Guitarist into a channel with over 600,000 subscribers and nearly a million views a month... and he did it without chasing trends or trying to game the algorithm.

His whole approach has been evergreen from the start. He releases lessons, they get a trickle of views, and then a year later they're just quietly bringing in people who searched for exactly that thing. It's a slower build, but it compounds ove...

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Tom Geiss is the founder of GD&T Basics, a training company that teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing to engineers and manufacturers. It's a topic he'll openly tell you is boring to most people... and yet he's built a seven-figure business around it with a team of 10, no paid ads, and no sales team.

In this episode we talk about how Tom approaches building course content around the problems his stude...

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I've had the pleasure of meeting Benny Lewis a couple of times at conferences over the years, and I'm really happy to finally have him on the show. 

Benny built one of the biggest language blogs in the world, with over 2 million monthly visitors at its peak, a bestselling book, and a growing team. But at the height of that success, he was working 20-hour days, clinically depressed, and struggling with his health. In this episode, Benny shares what that period really looked like, how he got through it, and why h...

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Liam Ward is a blues harmonica player, teacher and founder of learntheharmonica.com. He's built a course business with 240,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views... and he barely checks his numbers.

In this episode we get into why Liam thinks your business doesn't have to run your life, how he's built a passive income school that fits around his life as a musician, and why joy might be a more useful metric than revenue for a l...

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Marnie Ginsberg built Reading Simplified from a private tutoring clinic into an online academy that's served over 16,000 members and reached more than 3 million children... and she did it with no business background and no outside capital. Which is just remarkable.

In this episode we get into something that I think a lot of course creators will really resonate with. Marnie's business is literally called Reading Simplified, and yet her own instin...

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Alexis Haselberger has built a multiple six figure business with a small audience.. and honestly, most people are surprised when they hear that.

She's a time management, productivity and stress reduction coach who helps busy professionals do more and stress less. Her clients include Google, Lyft, Workday, Capital One and Upwork, and over 229,000 people have taken her courses on Udemy.

In this episode we dig into how she's built...

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Spencer Russell went from classroom teacher to building a business with over 5 million followers and 10,000 customers. In this episode, he shares why he believes your backup plan might actually be the thing holding you back from success.

We get into the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy and how Spencer found a niche in the toddler reading space that nobody was tapping into. He talks about the momen...

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What happens when none of the careers in your industry feel right? Sahara Rose De Vore found herself in that exact spot. She had a degree in hospitality and tourism management, she'd traveled to over 84 countries, and yet nothing in the travel industry clicked for her. So she did something most people wouldn't even consider. She created a...

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Mark Smith films birds in slow motion. That's his niche. Ospreys, eagles, hawks in ultra slow motion. And it's got him 980 million views on YouTube and 6 million followers across platforms.

In this episode I sit down with Mark and we get into how he built this massive audience from one incredibly specific niche. He picked up a camera again at 40, almost didn't start YouTube because he thought nobody would care, and...

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What would you do if you had no audience, an email list of 50 people, and zero courses to sell?

That's exactly where Trevor Dimoff was when he decided to figure out how to sell a course before he'd even built one. He talked to 50 people, listened to their problems, came up with a solution, and pitched it back to the same people he'd interviewed. The result wa...

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Jori Chisholm has been teaching bagpipes online since 2003… before YouTube even existed. He was literally the first person to ever teach a bagpipe lesson on a webcam. Fast forward to today and he's running bagpipelessons.com, reaching students in 30 countries, and last year he hit 3.2 million views on Meta and 320,000 on YouTube.

The wild part? He wasn't even trying to hit those numbers. His strategy was simple…...

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Here's something I hear all the time... course creators telling me they feel weird about selling. They got into this to teach, not to become marketers.

Kerstin Cable gets it. She's been at this since 2013, runs a language learning business, has recorded over 240 podcast episodes, and recently started AI Language Club. 

When I asked her about marketing, she literally said "but John, we're not marketers." And honestly, that's what ma...

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Alison Ellis has made over $650K selling online courses to florists over the last 10 years. She's got 10,000+ students enrolled in her programs and literally built her office from the course revenue.

But here's the thing.. a lot of the "proven" strategies just didn't work for her audience.

Tripwire funnels? Didn't convert. Webinars? People signed up but didn't show. High-pressure countdown timers? Her audience doesn't r...

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Aiko Hemingway is an English pronunciation coach who went from around 4,000 YouTube subscribers to over 11,000 in about a year. One video drove most of that growth.

In this episode we talk about how she researched what was working for other creators in her niche and made her own take on a high-performing topic. We also get into why her attempt to repeat that success with a similar...

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Erika Quest started her online course business with just 167 email addresses scraped from her hard drive. Within a year, she had built a six-figure side hustle. Today she has around 5,000 people on her email list and 3,000 of them are paying customers. That ratio is absolutely wild.

In this episode of The Art of Selling Online Courses, Erika shares how she built her platform Level Up Movement...

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Kate Bee has helped over 4,000 women quit drinking through her online course The Sober School. In this episode we get into how she built her business, what's working in her funnel right now, and why 52% of her students go on to join her membership.

Kate started out as a BBC journalist and began writing an anonymous blog about her own journey with alcohol. That turned into a coaching business that now helps women stop drinki...

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Allie Bjerk made $1 million in just 10 months selling online courses. But here's what makes her story different: she did it without building a huge audience first, without relying on freebies or lead magnets, and without spending years creating content.

Instead, she went straight to selling low-ticket products to complete strangers through ads.

In this episode, Allie breaks down exactly how she built her "tiny offe...

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🔥 Looking for predictable revenue growth? Access our FREE 7-day roadmap to increase your income without paid ads or sales calls! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap

Allie Bjerk made $1 million in just 10 months selling online courses. But here's what makes her story different: she did it without building a huge audience first, without relying on freebies or lead magnets, and without spending years creating content.

Instead, she went straight to selling low-ticket products to complete strangers through ads.

In this episode, Allie breaks down exactly how she built her "tiny offe...

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Kyle Buller has close to 7 million podcast downloads and sells courses for $10,500. No sales calls. No big sales team. Just his podcast doing the heavy lifting.

About 70% of his high-ticket buyers tell him they signed up because they'd been listening to him for a year or two before buying. That's the power of long-form content. When somebody spends an hour with you every week, they're building a relationship and trust before you ever make an off...

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Kyle Cook launched his first course after just 3 months of experience with the topic. He offered unlimited refunds from day one. He ignored every social media platform except YouTube.

Today he's got 1.7 million subscribers, 14,000 paying customers, and course launches that bring in $30K to over $100K.

In this episode, Kyle and I talk about why you don't need to be an expert to teach something — and why being an exper...

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Ashlee Young went from teaching 20 hours of private piano lessons a week to making over $70,000 a month with her online course business. And she did it by showing up just once a week to teach a single live class.

In this episode, Ashlee shares exactly how she's scaling with ads, why she's phasing out her high-ticket program, and the mindset shifts that allowed her to charge $3...