Welcome to a special episode of Interact’s Grow Podcast, where we share insights and strategies to help you scale your business. In this episode, we’re excited to have Benyamin Elias, the Vice President of Marketing at Podia.
Benyamin shares his insights on the importance of email collection in the early stages of course creation, the structure of online courses to ensure completion, and the unique features of Podia. He also provides valuable tips on course marketing, performance tracking, and using free content as a marketing tool! If you’re a creator looking to monetize your work or knowledge, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to learn how to establish an audience, launch a successful course, and take your business to the next level with Podia.
Hi guys, and welcome back to Interact’s Grow podcast. So great to be with you as always. I’m your host, Jessmyn Solana. And today we have a special guest episode. So I do have Jackie with me, but we have Benyamin Elias from Podia. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me so excited to have you here.
We have a relatively old article that we wrote a couple of years ago with Podia, which I’m sure has, we’ve both like really so many different features and have different things going on with both of our platforms. So we’re really excited to kind of dive into online courses and, let everybody know like how to structure your online course so that people actually finish it.
First and foremost, though, can you go ahead and tell us a little bit more about your role and your background at Podia? Sure. As you said, my name is Benyamin and I’m the VP of marketing at Podia. I came up from the copywriting content marketing side of things. I was actually a creator myself on the side of, you know, my full time, my full time work.
Before this, I was at ActiveCampaign as director of content and then director of growth. And as for the context on Podia Podia is a, a platform that lets you manage all elements of your business in one place. So you can have your website, you can sell digital Courses and downloads and products.
You can have a community, you can run your email marketing and Podia and coming soon. Maybe even by the time this podcast is out, you will be able to run a blog on Podia as well. So it’s really a, a place, a lot of our customers say mostly they’re solopreneurs and, and online creators. A lot of them say, Oh, it’s great to be able to move off of all these other platforms to keep everything in one place, one tool that I have to use.
Benyamin, quick question on that is Podia really for somebody just getting started because it has all these features in one place or do they typically start somewhere else and then move to Podia? Yeah, it actually really is a great place to start. We try to make it so that it’s as easy as possible for anyone to start an online business.
Podia has a free plan and it really lets you do a lot. You can build your entire website. You will be able to do all of your blogging on the free Podia plan. You can even start selling products. We do find when we talk to online business owners and online creators that they tend to start making in some other platform, like mostly like YouTube or something like that people are really looking for more of my work or they want coaching or they want more advice from me.
That’s when they, they start to look for a a platform. So it’s maybe not the very first thing, although with blogging, you know, that could be the place that someone starts publishing. But it, it does tend to be the very early on in someone’s experience as a creator or an online business owner.
I love that. I love that. So when you’re into, when you’re in Podia, you’re getting started for the first time in the platform. What are some of the best practices so that you can get the most out of using Podia? Yeah, that really would depend on, on which reason you’re coming to Podia for. So if you’re a person who is trying to sell an online course, which is a lot of our customers.
You can hop right into the online course builder. It usually helps to have some sense of what your course is going to be, or have some custom research. Podia has a lot of resources on our website about how to go about doing that. And I imagine we’re about to talk about it a little bit more. Also if you are someone who is more trying to use Podia as your primary website, there are lots of examples of Podia customers who have.
Podio sites that look great. And you can see those at podio. com slash examples. And a lot of our customers say that they, they start from that list. They go through and they look, okay, this person’s style looks kind of like mine. This person’s looks like mine. And that’s the easiest way to, to get to a website that you really love.
Something that we hear from customers, a lot of website builders are drag and drop. Empodia is not drag and drop. It’s we say point and click because you, you click on a thing and you say what type of section you want. And the result of that is that it’s actually really hard to make something that doesn’t look good.
You’re not going to have to like struggle with padding issues or like drag a thing into place and then have all the work you did go scattering across the screen, which I think anyone who’s ever used a drag and drop builder has experienced. So that’s one of the nice things about if you are trying to hop in to use it as a website builder, that you really can just look at a beautiful website and then recreate that very easily with all the customizations that, that you want for yourself.
What would you say is, I guess, your favorite feature out of, Everything. I know it’s probably really hard if you have all these really great ones. Oh boy. Like if someone was like, okay, I’m thinking about Podia, like give me the number one feature you would recommend. I think the thing that I got really excited about when I joined really was the website builder.
So when I joined Podia we had a two week trial and a no free plan and a 39 a month plan. But as I started using the website builder, I was like, wow, this is really a lot easier than, you know, the sites that I’ve built in WordPress or Squarespace or something like that. That’s really cool. I guess this is at the time it was a more recent feature.
It was something that had developed out of like a landing page builder. What you need to sell courses and products and stuff like that. But as we were looking at that, we were like, you know, a lot of people can probably really use this. But it, you can’t charge 39 a month for a website builder like that.
So that’s when we started to really look, examine who we were for and what we wanted to. To give people and that’s why the website builder is free and it’s available on free plans is that we looked at and we’re like, wow, this really would be a lot easier for people to build websites in this if we’re getting more specific, because the website builder is like a whole platform and some companies and not just a feature.
I really love the embeds feature, which makes it so easy to just embed your podcast or your YouTube videos or your social media or a form of some kind, or, you know, we just announced a countdown timer that you can embed all of this kind of stuff super easily. You can embed from all these other tools with just the link.
You don’t ever have to touch code which is great because. Stuff starts to break when you start touch code website. Is it like a sales page to your course or is somebody’s main site and then they can have additional pages that are maybe sales pages, landing pages, launches, things like that. Yeah, it is a full website.
It started out as a sales page for courses because people needed those. But then as the features developed and developed and developed it became clear that like, no, this is a real website builder that people can use as their full site. As we have been running our, our private beta of the blogging platform, that was sort of the last ingredient for a lot of people.
And we’ve heard from a ton of beta users. Wow, this is great. I can finally move off of WordPress. It was the last thing that was keeping me on WordPress was that I needed my blog. Or I can finally move off of Squarespace or Wix. And yeah, it’s a fully featured website builder. You can have multiple pages.
There is a template in there. If you were to start up, the default template is a homepage, a services page and about page. And it’s really very easy to make look how you want. Is there how am I trying to ask this? So there’s some interact customers, people who are using quizzes, right? Who don’t necessarily have a website.
Maybe I’m thinking specifically of Morgan, who uses Instagram. Her audience is entirely on Instagram. She wanted to start building an email list, but she was using her quiz in a way where the quiz was essentially the website. Like, that’s where you guided people to because it was Lead collection. Right. So I guess my question to you is, is there a right or wrong way to go about creating a website versus creating a course?
Like which one comes first? Do you need to have both? Yeah. You know, usually you would have some sort of landing page to send people to you. A lot of people use LinkedIn bio pages. You can make a great LinkedIn bio page with Podio. We have some information about that. But regardless of what you’re doing, I’d say the most important thing early on is to start collecting emails.
You will find it much easier to sell the products that you make if you start collecting emails. Podia does have Podia email as well, so you can send people into Podia. You can send all of your emails from Podia. We really want to make it so that every step of this, of growing a business can be done in Podia.
buT when we were doing the, the customer research and really talking to all of our creators, which we do quite a lot of that’s what really stood out is that people start by making a thing that they want to make. And it’s usually native on some platform where there’s an audience, but it’s so hard to get audiences on those platforms to go and do an additional thing to take a step, especially because you never know when an algorithm is going to change and and tank the reach that you get.
So as soon as possible, really even the number one regret we heard from really large and successful creators is I wish I had built that email list sooner. So as soon as possible, I would say have some way to collect your resources. In a landing page that lets you collect people’s email addresses, that could be a link in bio, that could be a quiz, it could be a podium landing page, it could be a lead magnet.
I, I think that what the specific answer is probably going to depend on what kind of person you are. I don’t know about what kind of person, what kind of creator you are, what your content is, what you’re, what you make content about. But you really want to be building that list and building that audience so that when you do launch a product whether it’s a course or something else, a lot of folks start with digital downloads.
You have that list of people who is ready to hit by right away. You can send the email, you can see the sales come in versus, you know, posting about it and trying to get people to get to a link and then to buy a thing, which is a lot harder, especially because they’re probably doing it on their phones.
Yeah, we talked to our quiz customers about that too, like sometimes in the way that you’re collecting research from your quiz or the way that you’re segmenting people will find that they don’t actually have an offer for a big group of people on their list. So, instead of just like, making the offer right away for them, they’ll sort of create a wait list on the quiz, or maybe their website landing page.
So you sort of verify that people actually want to purchase this thing. You’re building excitement for it. And then you can go actually build it because, hey, there’s all these people that are ready to buy it once it’s ready. Yeah, we have some features in Podi that help with that also, we’ve had people actually sell their courses before the courses are done.
So you run a four week course, you build two weeks of it, you start selling the course, and you are building the last two weeks while the people are going through the first two weeks. For me personally, that’s a little high stress. But I definitely have seen people be very successful with it and with waitlists in general.
I would always say it’s a good idea to To build wait lists for products that you are, especially for your first product. Because it gives you a sense of the level of interest that people have. It, the worst feeling is when you launch a product and no one buys it. So you want to do anything you can to, to stack the odds in your favor ahead of time.
I do want to talk about Jackie, like how to funnel your audience into your course using a quiz. But before we get there, I want to touch on, or more so ask you, Benyamin, how, like at what point in your business is the right time to have a course? It’s a great question. And it’s one that does vary. We have seen the most successful people launch with.
Some set of near guaranteed buyers. Sometimes that means that they have a really big audience and they’re selling a product, maybe it’s 1, 500 and they will get a lot of buyers from that group. Sometimes they have a very niche audience and they sell a product that’s a thousand, 2, 000, but they are very successful in getting four or five people to buy it, which.
Is all you need at that type of price point. What tends to happen or a pattern that we see often is especially among the people who wind up very successful is that they focus first on making their content and growing their audience and building their email list, and then they start to get questions and the questions wind up being.
Similar. And so they, they get asked, Hey, can you coach me? And maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Not everyone wants to, to trade their time like that, or really wants to do one on one coaching, which is a separate skillset in some ways. Or they just start to answer these questions over and over and they find, Oh, I’m answering a lot of the same questions.
I wonder if I could. A save time and B, like get some income. If I bundle this together in some kind of resource, and that’s usually where people start. They usually start with some kind of e ebook or workshop or workbook or something like that, A PDF or a, a webinar series. Something that’s a little bit quicker to create and is lower risk if it doesn’t sell.
Well, you know, if you make a $10 ebook or even a $50 ebook. And it doesn’t sell well, well, you didn’t spend all the time shooting video and writing scripts and, and editing video and that kind of stuff. And if it’s based on questions that people have been asking you specifically, you probably know that there is a market for it, or at least an audience of people who has those questions.
And then after that is when people start to move into, to building courses that let them dive more in depth into specific. Challenges. And those do tend to be the courses that we see are more successful is the ones that are scoped around a really specific challenge that an audience experiences in terms of.
You know, courses. So this, as you were saying that it, it kind of popped into my head that I’ve seen some people have one very specific course, but then I’ve seen people with, let’s say three courses for different parts of their business. What would you recommend is the best way to go based on the stage of business you’re at?
Yeah, so as always, I have to say it depends, but I would say generally, we say it all the time. Yeah, it always does depend. I would say for most people, most of the time, it makes more sense to start with a tighter scoped course that solves a specific. Challenge and that’s often not what we hear people wanting to make.
So I will talk to, I’ll think, try to think of some examples here. Yeah. Okay. I talked to a personal trainer who really wants to make like a full fitness and nutrition course, and it’s like a six month curriculum. And that’s tough, right? It’s tough to sell people on doing anything for six months. How detailed is your calendar out six months from now?
Unless you have like a big vacation plan, it’s probably not that detailed. And that’s high risk to make, it’s high risk to sell, you probably are not going to sell a whole lot of it. And if you only sell, you know, two people on it, and then you have to be coaching them through the whole six months, now you are, have tied yourself up a lot also.
Instead, if you sell a course on a very narrow topic maybe you have high protein foods for fat loss or something like that, and you have, it’s a recipe course, and, and that’s something that people can take and use right away. You’re probably more likely to get some sales out of something like that.
Another example I like to use is there’s a creator who has a step by step jazz piano course. Right. As someone who tries to play jazz piano, I was going to say plays, but we’ll say, tries to play. I greatly appreciate step by step, uh, nature of that. But at the same time, like it’s a multi, it’s a long, long, long course.
And it’s a lot to go through. There’s another creator who’s very successful in the seven figures of revenue who sells okay, modal scale exercises for jazz piano. And that’s really a lot tighter, right? Like you could. See yourself buying this course, going through the exercises. It’s not as expensive, but they, this creator has a whole portfolio of courses in another market.
One of our podia pros M Connors of the creative bodega. You may have seen her on Instagram. shE teaches people how to make great looking designs in Canva. And she’s got lots of courses that are on really specific elements of doing that. On social media templates or design tricks and things like that.
They’re not 6, 000 courses, but they sell great and she does great. Because again, they, they solve a really specific challenge. So for most people, most of the time, I would recommend find a product in the 50 to 150 price range, maybe it’s a two to four week course or something in that range, maybe it’s a 10 or so video course that you can.
Really perfectly solve someone’s very specific problem for and if you can sell a course like that, you are on your way to, to making your portfolio of products that you can sell over time. Again, there are exceptions, but I think most people, even when they eventually wind up at having like the big flagship multi thousand dollar course, that’s super long and people actually buy most people.
If you go back in time and you look at their first products, it’s something a little bit more specific like that. And that’s where I would recommend most people start. Before we get into marketing your course, does it, I feel like of the courses I’ve taken, I start real strong and I usually don’t finish every single module.
Is that important as a course creator to look at and recognize? And what do you do when you see people aren’t, I mean, they’ve paid, so maybe that’s the goal, right? But like, what do you do if people just aren’t completing the course? Yeah, it’s a really tricky question. And people have different opinions on this.
As you said, they paid. So if they don’t complete the course, in some ways, that is not the biggest problem, as long as you are delivering what you said that you would deliver. There are a few things you can do. Cohort based courses are something that have gotten some level of popularity. I think they are Mixed.
So that’s like we have a live start date. Everyone goes through at the same time and maybe even there’s homework and you’re going through on a regular basis. You can run that type of course in Podia. I think that it is fine to do that if the content makes sense for it. And especially if there’s like some level of instructor feedback or, or community that you’re trying to build around the course, but it also is tricky because you will really shrink your market a lot.
Because not everyone is like ready to commit to a time based thing and you can’t always be selling courses that started at a particular time. They tend to be very stressful to run also because you, that, that period is a lot of customer service and doing it all yourself. But again, completion rates will go up if you do that.
The, another philosophy is, well it’s again, not necessarily my job to, to get people through the whole course. There are some simple things that you can do who, and I think most people do something along these lines. Which are just, just having automated email set up to, to ping people periodically when new lessons are available or when they probably should have moved on to a next lesson.
You can do that at various levels of, of. Complexity. But for the most part, I really think it comes down to the content and the tighter you can scope with this minimal amount of fluff the more likely people are to carry through. There are a few things in the content that I think are really useful for this.
One is that you really want to lead with. Something valuable that someone can use right away. And this is a very common, I think, mistake is, is starting with some sort of foundation material or philosophy or something like that. And that’s tough because especially if someone is someone who buys a number of courses, they’re going to see that a lot.
They’re going to be a lot like, okay, first we have to set our goals. It’s like, that’s nice, but I did set my goals already. It’s why I bought the course. And it may be that the goal setting is an important part of your system that you’re offering. But you still want to start again with here’s something you can take and use in the next 10 minutes.
Here’s something that’s going to change the way that you think about this topic. And if you can lead with that, you’re really a lot more likely to get people to look at your next thing, because They’re hooked, right? They, they were like, Oh, wow, I got value from this right away. From the first lesson, it changed how I approached this topic and they’re just much more likely to keep carrying through the rest of the course.
So I think if you nail a lot of the fundamentals, if you have a really tight scope for your course, if you haven’t like blown up how long the course is, and it’s really a densely filtered set of advice that takes 10 ish videos to deliver. You’re already really well on your way to getting more people to look at your stuff.
And then if you can lead with again, something really useful that someone can use in the next 10 minutes, like your best quick tip before you get into what often exists in courses, which is your longer term growth and change. That’s really going to help carry people through to seeing the rest of your work.
Very cool. As you were talking through that, I even imagine breaking up the course. Like you were saying, like, make sure they’re excited when they end. They, you’ve hit on this, like, very niche topic. So if people aren’t finishing it, maybe break it up into two modules. And that’s like the second follow up course that you could possibly charge more money for too.
Especially if you have multiple topics in a course. People will sometimes sell a shorter form course, like, okay, this is a four module course. Each module is a few videos. And to use the fitness example, module one is like fitness fundamentals. And then it’s module two is exercises. And then module three is nutrition and module four is something else.
You could easily sell a full course on each of those. Modules and yeah, the, the benefit to starting with a small course is that it shows you what is most interesting to people and what they’re willing to buy and you can always expand on it later and sell a higher ticket product. Yeah, and we’re all about with the quiz to like, lead what lead with what people want, because that’s what they’re going to buy.
But then in that course, sell them what they need so that they need to keep buying it. Not that they need to keep buying your products, but they’ll get all the way through that flow again. 1 more thing. Just sorry, before we get into marketing. The course Benyamin, what are your thoughts on, we just came from a conference where there was like a hot take on how much can you give away for free?
So maybe this is marketing your course a little bit. How much of the information within your course are you able to use in marketing or in content that people are too scared to give away for free? Because like, I don’t know, I don’t want people to not buy because I’m saying all of this. What’s your take on that?
I think people have different perspectives on this. I would say you are not likely to be in trouble. If you give a lot of stuff away for free. I, I personally would say give as much away for free as you can. Because People are not, this is actually very important and I’m glad you asked the question, people are not paying for information.
Information is everywhere. You can find most information on most topics on YouTube. If you really wanted to do that, you could ask ChachiPT to give you a curriculum and study it yourself. tHat’s not what people are paying for. People are paying for the result that you can get them. And they, for some reason believe that you are the person to get them that result.
That can mean that you have added structure to the information so that it’s step by step. That’s why I take a step by step jazz course and not, you know, 10 courses on some modal exercise, because I really want to know that at the end of six months, I’m going to be making clear progress. Versus like scattered brains doing all sorts of random stuff.
So they pay for the structure of the course. They might pay for the materials that you were actually giving them, like the worksheets and things like that. They might pay for coaching or feedback from the expert, or they might pay because they trust you specifically, but they’re not going to trust you specifically if they haven’t seen your free stuff and thought that it was good.
So I say most of the time you can give away a lot of stuff for free. It will hit differently in a course, you will go more in depth on stuff, you might add more examples of things or more ideas, or again, I have opportunities for feedback but most of the core insights are public. And this is true for most really big creators that you see out there too they talk about their content in all kinds of different places.
It’s not necessarily that the course is the only way to get it or that their courses have something revolutionary in it. There’s a quote from Oh, what is his name? Derek Sivers. If information were the answer, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs. And we’re not so, It’s not that people are paying for information that they can’t get anywhere else, even if your information is very good.
There are multiple things that they pay for when you sell them a product. And it’s important to keep that in mind because your free material is really your best marketing material. I love that. Jackie, anything else? I was just going to say, I don’t think this is a hot take anymore because the answers I’ve heard from other people are very similar.
Someone at that conference had even said, I think it was You could have, you could give away your entire book in. Podcasts in posts in content, wherever, right? But people are paying for the fact that it is packaged together in one place. So at interact with the same way, we give everything away for free, except for the tool itself.
Right. Because we want you to be equipped with the information and the strategy and the best practices that you would need in order to make the most successful quiz for your business. We want to see you be successful. Therefore, we have to give you this information. We don’t want you to pay for that.
Also, you could probably Google it and I hear that. I do have 1 last thing before we go into marketing. I know I keep saying that, but I really quickly wanted to ask you, Benyamin, in terms of, you know, understanding the performance of your course as it’s running. What. Like, what type of analytics should you be paying attention to inside of podia?
Honestly, I would say for most people, and we get this question a good amount. It’s like, everyone wants to see like, what percentage of people do this thing? What percentage of people does this thing? You can look at course completion, what lessons people are completing and all that kind of stuff. It’s not that instructive to you because someone could finish half your course and have learned the one thing that they really wanted to learn.
The, the key thing that I would say is. If you are running a course for the first time, or, you know, maybe you’re, you’re running it for the first three times and you’re still early in it. You can’t learn what you want to learn without talking to the people who buy your product. You should go talk to them, you should schedule a call with them, you should ask them questions about what made them sign up, what was going on in your life when you signed up what was the one thing that you really want to take away from this, and what has your experience been going through the course, like that type of question is going to tell you so much more than any like, Well, let’s see, 37 percent of people stopped at this lesson, so what does that mean?
In courses and in any media, you’re going to see drop off, so you’re going to see, you know, 100 percent of people who bought it, bought it, that’s obvious. And then 90 percent of people who bought it logged in and saw the first lesson, and then 70 percent see the third lesson, and by the time you get to module 4, maybe you’re at 40%.
yOu will always see a decline because it’s impossible to go up from the hundred percent that you started at. So it’s not super interesting to you that there is a decline, especially because you might only be working with a hundred people, so you don’t know how, how significant that really is or how important it is.
And you have no way to like test changes, uh, it’s much more important that you understand what people wanted to get and whether or not they’re getting it. I like that. I like that a lot. So I guess we will finally get into marketing your course. After pausing on that for a while, Jagi, do you want to touch a little bit more on how you’ve seen people use a quiz to funnel new audiences into their courses?
Yeah, we have a full YouTube video on this. So we’ll even link it in the show notes. But essentially, if you’re using a quiz as your lead magnet, that’s the thing that’s attracting people to your business to your site to your top, like, whatever it is that your course is on whatever course topic you’re coaching on.
And then when someone answers your quiz questions, you can learn things about them. So, like, maybe It could go as detailed as like, what’s your budget on doing this? Are you looking at working with somebody directly? If you’re offering those types of services is this even like, is this topic even the right fit for you or is it something else?
Right. And so you’re able to use that segmentation, which with Podia the leads, you have to use Zapier, but Zap will send all of your quiz leads and the result that they got from the quiz into Podia so that in the email marketing itself, you can speak to the very things that they’ve said within your quiz.
Like. I don’t know you’d be a perfect fit for this course, because whatever the reasons might be. So I guess, Benyamin, I’ll pass it over to you because obviously my answer is quizzes. What other ways, especially for those people who are just getting started? How are they getting eyes on their brand new websites or if it’s the course that they’re leading with?
How are they sharing that with the world when they’re just getting started? Yeah, it’s a tough question. And when we, when we run surveys on our customers, we, we ask like, what’s the number one challenge that you face in your business and far and away at every level of experience at every level of revenue, the answer is growing an audience.
So there is no silver bullet. I would say that the people who are most successful build the audience first. And they don’t try to launch a big course to a small number of people. They try to launch a smaller course to a big number of people. And flipping the script that way is I think very important.
It also breaks you out of some like make money quick thinking, which is a tough way to run a business. So I don’t have, unfortunately, like I said, I don’t have a great silver bullet. I think what you said about quizzes makes a lot of sense. You have to try to capture people from the platforms where you are.
Reaching them, but this is how we would think about it is who can you reach? And then how can you stay in touch with them? And then finally, how do you sell to them? When we we have a, a course on Podia called get noticed that is on this topic. If you go to podia. com slash get noticed, you can see it there.
We do have some advice for people who are building an audience in terms of who they should focus on. We, as we said earlier free content is super important. You really want to give a, a ton of advice away for free. You want to make sure that you are solving people’s problems for free. There’s again, another quote, now I can’t remember who, who this was.
So we may have to Google it after the fact, but if you solve someone’s, right. Ask chat should be T maybe it was if if you solve someone’s problem for free. They’ll pay you to solve their problem. And that’s super true. And that’s how the, the big creators do it is that they’re making stuff for free publicly.
One piece of advice that we do give people who are trying to, you know, create and monetize a business a little bit faster is to think about the, the tier of person you want to reach and how easy it is to reach those people. What most people come out saying is, Oh, I’m for everyone. I want to reach the whole internet.
And that’s really hard because you don’t know the whole internet. That’s really difficult to do. What we’d like to say is think about the people who already know you. So what’s the level of connection that you have with someone? There are people who you know so well that you could text and get a response at any time of night.
There are people who you know well enough that you have their phone number, you could talk to them, they, you know, probably haven’t talked to them in a little while, but you could in theory send them a message, people whose email addresses you have, and you could be exchanging emails with them.
And then a little bit further, you go, okay, well, I’ve seen this person out in the world and out in my industry, and they know who I am, and I know who they are, but we don’t really know each other that well, you keep going further, this person’s out in my industry, but they don’t know who I am, I just know who they are, and then you go further, and you have strangers on the internet, and when you think about it that way, it’s like, oh, well, Why am I down here trying to reach all the people who I don’t know at all, when there are all these people further up that I actually could just get in touch with right now.
This is tough because you don’t necessarily want to just like hit up your friends and family and say, Hey, buy my cool course thing. But if you’re really thinking about like your industry or your niche or where you are, and if you’re embedded in that space, you know, people who are making content about this stuff.
There are people who, who you see. And they see you and you don’t know each other that well. And if you sent them an email about, Hey, I’m working on this thing. I’d love to chat and get to know you or something like that. You would wind up Establishing a relationship with them and opportunities will come from that.
This was, this was our hook in our first lesson of get noticed. And we have comments on that video that are like, I tried this and I got nine sales. And that’s the place that I would start is aside from, you know, I’m, I have an approach that really works for people. My content is really good. It’s rock solid.
I give it away for free. anD I’m publishing it because you have to have stuff to show people. Then I would think how easy is it to reach these different types of people? And start with the people who are easier to reach instead of the people that are super hard to reach. Yeah, and just going back to the idea of free content and how you’re using your course and even in your interact quiz, is well, now that we have this AI feature, you could literally plug in your website.
Modules or content from it into interact AI so that it’s creating a quiz about this very topic because especially as you’re growing your audience or sharing audiences with people that are in similar spaces or tangential spaces it’s so much easier to sell something, sell something for free, or give something away for free than it is to ask.
For a course sale, so if you leave them in with your quiz, get them on your email list, continue learning about them, talking to them, connecting with them, building that relationship, then it’s so much easier. Like, you’re saying to make the sale because those people are sort of like, moving up in your network, right?
They’re not just the people that I met online that would never respond to me because they don’t know who I am. Yeah, they’re not the cold, the cold bleeds anymore. Sorry, I was just pausing for. For, I never know if you guys are going to say something else, but yeah, no, I love that. Jackie, in terms of quizzes, if people are like, okay, this sounds cool.
I do have a course that I’m ready to start marketing. I don’t feel like my email list is big enough. You know, maybe they did the course before building their email list, which, which type of quiz would you say they should get started with? Well, in the words of Benyamin, it depends, right? What is your course about?
What are these people thinking about? Where are they at right now in this? journey in this season as it relates to the topic. If it’s something that they want to learn or need to maybe be more aware of themselves and their styles and their preferences, then a personality quiz probably would be the best fit because that’s exactly what the quiz is doing.
It’s teaching them more about themselves and how they can apply themselves in different situations to get to that dream or ideal state that they’re looking to, that your course is going to help them get to. But if your course is maybe on. I don’t know if it would make more sense to lead them in with like, Hey, how much do you know about this specific topic?
Not necessarily yourself, but like maybe, I mean, going back to your example, Benyamin, maybe it’s about jazz piano, right? Like where are you at right now? Then maybe a score quiz is better because they’re able to understand, okay, this is my level of experience. I didn’t know. I didn’t know all of these things.
Therefore I might need to dive into this beginner course before I go to the more advanced version or, you know, buying one module versus the whole set at this point. So it really depends on what’s the goal, who are you talking to, and what do those people want to know. The best quiz that you’re going to make, and probably also the best course that you’re going to make, is the best content you’re going to make, is designed entirely for the people that it’s supposed to be.
That are supposed to be buying it or that you want to buy it, right? Like you’re so focused on your ideal customer that they, they really feel like you get them because the content matches what they’re looking for so well. And I think that’s the best way to grow your traffic. Your audience, your email list is giving people exactly what they want, not necessarily what they need.
I think that’s what you sell them. Once they realize you can help them solve this initial problem. Or you give away this, this valuable information that’s helped them to this point. Now they’re ready to purchase from you so that they can get to the next level. When I’ve made courses or when I’ve managed content teams, I often use the analogy of like you, when you have to give a dog it’s medication you know, you put the pill in the cheese or in the peanut butter and then you give them the peanut butter.
They don’t want the medication. They want the peanut butter. And the same is true of course is exactly what you said. You have to give them what they want, what they’re looking for. And then slip them in what they need as they’re going through the course or your, your content in general so that they can be actually successful.
Yeah Dan Bennett of videos for entrepreneurs says the same thing. Put the medicine in the cheese. Yeah. It’s a good one. Yeah, I was dying. Cause I have to give my dog peanut butter to give her her medication. So that one immediately clicked in my head. Last thing I want to ask Jackie, I think we have a video on this where people could watch it in detail, but could you quickly explain one more time how Interact speaks to Podia if they want to connect the two platforms?
It is currently through Zapier. So essentially, typically, probably the way that you’re using quizzes in Podia is your quiz is the lead generator. You’re collecting somebody’s email from there. Zapier is sending it right into Podia. So you can do the segmentation and then all of the emails, the sequences, the workflows that hopefully maybe you already have set up in Podia for your course.
You’re just funneling them into that very sequence based on what you know about them from the quiz and where they’re best fit for your for the messaging that you want to send them. Love it. Benyamin, any last sort of quick pieces of advice you could give to course creators who are just getting started, are really excited to get a course out there maybe not quite have one yet?
The number one thing is to have content that makes people sit up and take notice. You have to have a, a message, a content, a hook that leads people to think, wow, that’s what I’ve been looking for this whole time. And I really want to stress that because creators often feel like, oh, I have great content.
I have great information. It’s not always about the information. It’s about how the information resonates with the person you’re talking to. So if you don’t have people who are saying to you on a pretty regular basis, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. You are probably not yet at the stage where you’re ready to sell a course on it.
And it’s worth digging more into your own content, researching your audience, more talking to more people so that you can get to the point where you can give people stuff that they are really excited to use and excited to buy. I love that. I love that. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. We will link all the resources you need for Interact and Podia into the show notes.
yoU can go check out our new AI feature at tryinteract. com slash AI. And Benyamin, can you quickly give us the URL that you want to direct people to for Podia? Yeah, you can go to podio. com and check out all the features and sign up for a free plan if you’re interested. We also talked about podio. com slash get noticed and that is our course on growing an audience from scratch even if you don’t have anyone that is currently paying attention to you.
And that could be another useful resource for you. Love it. And that’s the hook guys. Cause that’s what everybody always asks us for too. Like, who am I sharing this with? I need an audience. So that’s a great website link to share. Love it. Well, thank you guys both for chatting today. And for those who are listening, we’ll see you next time.
Bye. Bye everyone.