Building an Online Course Empire with Nick Stephenson: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. And today we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down building an online course empire. To drop these value bombs, I brought Nick Stevenson into EO Fire Studios. Nick is a USA Today bestselling author, course creator, and software company co-founder. You can learn how to create and launch your own digital course at Create Awesome Online Courses. And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about planning out the end goal and how you need to have an online presence to launch anything, and a marketing plan in place and oh, so much more.

0:41And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Nick and our sponsors. Want to learn how to get booked and paid to speak? Great news, I've arranged direct access to my good friend, Graham Baldwin's proven speaking business system from the Speaker Lab. Go to eofire.com slash speaker to grab your spot for our live training on May 28th and learn how to get booked and paid to speak. Nick, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? And that probably sounds very strange in a British accent, but thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

1:25And this was a question I put some thought into because there's so much out there in terms of kind of assumptions and misinformation that a lot of people kind of don't get their heads around. But I think for me, probably the biggest thing most people would disagree with is I believe that you don't need permission from somebody else or somebody else's kind of approval to be successful, especially if you're starting your own business. So many people I hear from, they get so worried that what they're doing might not be good enough or that they're not enough of an expert. Maybe they're not the number one person on the planet at something.

2:07So do they have permission to succeed in that field? And again, with authors as well, I talked to a lot of authors and they worry and worry about whether their writing is good enough and who's going to tell them, yes, this is good enough. And from where I'm standing, I think it's up to you to kind of give yourself permission to be successful. So you have confidence in your own skills to get where you want to be. And don't wait for somebody else to kind of tell you what to do and to tell you when you're ready because only you are going to know that. I think for me, that's something a lot of people kind of assume has to be the case.

2:44So, you know, that's where I'm coming from on that. I don't know what you think. Well, I can tell you if I was waiting for permission from somebody to launch Entrepreneurs on Fire back in 2012 when almost nobody heard of what a podcast is, I'd still be waiting, Fire Nation. I'd still be waiting because nobody was going to give me permission. And I didn't look for it. I didn't ask for it. I just went ahead and did it. And guess what, Fire Nation? Today, as I mentioned during the intro, we're talking about building an online course empire. And we got Nick here today, who did at one point have a nine to fiver, or maybe it was like more like most people where you really do the math.

3:19It's like eight to sixer. What finally convinced you to quit the day job? I like to call it the DDJ or the dreaded day job. I mean, this is kind of what we were all conditioned towards at school was, you know, you do your schooling and then you go to university or college to go into a specific field. And I was one of these fairly useless students who was kind of a little bit directionless. I didn't really know what kind of field I wanted to go into. So I ended up doing English at university, English literature, which is, has almost no real world implication whatsoever. and then eventually switched to law which I found I thought you know this would be my ticket to a stable career that I'll enjoy and then it turned out I didn't enjoy law in the slightest so I ended up randomly going into a marketing job at a very large kind of multinational corporation and it was okay for a while but then I think like a lot of people who are working corporate roles, you kind of often end up feeling like you're just one cog in the machine.

4:30There's many lots and lots of machines in there and you're one tiny cog. And it kind of felt like whatever I was doing didn't have an impact overall. So that was kind of what I learned about myself was I want to be able to create something that has an impact. Let me just break in here for a second, because I think this is an important point to sit on for just a minute. Fire Nation, if there's some common theme I've heard over the years, it's that people want their work to matter. They want what they do to make an impact. If you're going to spend four, six, eight, 10, 12 hours doing something every single day or four days a week or five days a week or seven days a week, you want that thing to matter.

5:13And that's just a core human desire. You know, we were able to fulfill that pretty easily back in the Cape Man days. And we're just like, yeah, I spent all day today collecting food. Like that matters. Collecting firewood, that matters. Improving my shelter, that matters. But today, sometimes we can get caught up in this work that just doesn't feel like it matters. Like nobody even cares or would notice if you did or did not do that thing. So Nick, keep on going, but I just wanted to jump in there with a little perspective. Well, that's exactly it. I mean, my job was, for all intents and purposes was to prepare PowerPoint slides for people.

5:48So it's like the impact of my work was I'd either get told it was a good slide or a bad slide, you know, that kind of thing. So it was, you know, some people really thrive in that kind of environment, but it wasn't for me. And I knew that I wanted to, you know, this took me a long time to figure out, but I knew that I wanted to A, be creative and B, to have that work have a positive impact in some way that I could see. So it wasn't an overnight thing. I mean, this is like 10, 15 years of self-discovery. And some people are lucky and they kind of know this to begin with, but it took me many years of doing entirely the wrong thing to figure out where I wanted to be.

6:29And once I decided I didn't want to be in that kind of career, then I began looking for a way out, which was initially with writing. Now, I do want to talk about that because I want to know why. I want to know why you decided to start with becoming an author because let's be frank, it's kind of difficult these days to get noticed in a world where pretty much anybody can write something, self-publish on Amazon, and then sell three copies of a book, two to your mother and one to yourself. And it's a busy, difficult, crowded, saturated market where even if you do, by the way, make it big and have a really successful book, you're still not making much money.

7:12So why? It comes back to this idea of being creative. And I'd always really enjoyed creative writing. I mean, I did it at school. I chose classes at university in creative writing. I always enjoyed them and did really well at them. And the problem is, you know, you're at school and you have careers day or you have careers advice. author never comes up no one ever sits down and goes you might want to be an author here's how you go about doing it the the idea had never even crossed my mind that this was even a remotely viable career path but around the time when I was starting to think you know how am I going to get out of this corporate job was around the time that Amazon's Kindle self-publishing platform Kindle Direct Publishing really started kicking off.

8:02So sort of 2010-11 was when it really started to ramp up. And I started reading these blog posts from previously traditionally published authors who were struggling, who had put some of their books up onto Kindle and were now making a lot of money, a lot more money doing that than they were with their publisher. And, you know, I kept kept coming back to this idea of writing and writing. You know, I was reading a lot at the time as well. I still do. And I thought, you know, I'm reading these novels and I'm thinking, you know, if I can map out kind of what a novel needs to include. And I was reading sort of thrillers at the time, sort of James Patterson type thrillers.

8:43And I sat down one day and I got a spreadsheet out and I just mapped out every chapter and what every chapter what happened in each chapter and sort of marked out these main action beats. And I thought this is like a blueprint for a novel. This could be interesting. So I kind of went away and had a crack at writing a novel and took about a year to get something that was vaguely passable out there. And I just thoroughly enjoyed the process. And I thought to myself, you know, on the one side, this could be a ticket out of the corporate world. On worst case scenario, I had a really good time. So there's absolutely no regrets, even if this goes nowhere.

9:23So I put the effort in to get a good cover. I got it professionally edited, got it out onto Kindle. And during this whole time, I was writing a blog about the process. And I was outlining what I was struggling with, what I was working on, what worked, what didn't work. and when I launched I had this blog following of mostly other authors actually but you know authors read books believe it or not and a lot of them bought the book out of support you know I wasn't trying to push a big marketing campaign or anything I just mentioned it in a blog post and it sold some copies and then it continued to sell some copies and it I bought a little bit of advertising and it sold more copies and then the Amazon algorithms picked it up and it started selling more copies so i released another book and then started selling more and repeated the process and three or four books in um it snowballed to the point where i was making the same amount each month that i was making from the corporate job and i was just lucky enough to be in a position where the company was restructuring and they'd offered um like this redundancy package and with the money coming in from books at the time and the redundancy money coming in, it made a lot of sense to focus on what I was really enjoying and what was going places, which was the writing.

10:44And Fire Nation, that's where I want to jump in and really focus on the fact that sometimes when you do follow that passion that you have with obviously some mix in of expertise and skill set, you start to kind of like pull on this thread and then you don't really know where it's going to lead. And then before you know it, you're like, whoa, this is actually kind of working. Because I can tell you being, you know, kind of unmotivated and kind of lousy at a job, not saying that you were lousy at your job, Nick, but I mean, it's just like, you can't be good at something that you're just so uninspired by.

11:13You just can't be good at it. Um, then you find that, wow, I'm actually kind of good at this one thing because I really enjoy it. And then before I know it, whoa, look at this, like, look at the revenue this is bringing in as a result. And it doesn't happen overnight. It happens over time, especially when you're putting in the work and the effort and being consistent. And we have a lot to get to, Nick. So we're going to take a quick break, thank our sponsors, and then dive in to the big shift. Fire Nation, stick around. There's a lot to consider when starting your own business and protecting your identity and privacy are top concerns.

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13:40That's eofire.com slash speaker. Nick, we're back after you were really able to get some pretty legitimate revenue coming in from your passion of writing and being an author. You made a move into courses and into software. Talk to us about that move. Like, let's really get into the specifics there on that story. Absolutely. So, I mean, you remember I had this blog that I was writing at the beginning where I was charting my ups and downs and failures and successes and people were starting to follow me and people were joining um at the time was a little wordpress blog and you know people could follow your blog um and later on i introduced an email sign up which kind of accelerated things but i had this sort of audience of authors um who were interested in how i was getting on and what was working and how they could do the same thing and eventually i was getting so many questions via email all the time And usually the same topics, by the way, that I decided it would be so much easier if I just created some kind of training material that I could just give to people.

14:50And it was at this point I started researching online courses. And I found David Seitman Garland of Create Awesome Online Courses around this time via Pat Flynn and took one of the webinars and thought, you know, this is exactly what I'm trying to do. Although I hadn't realized that, you know, you could charge for this quite, quite so much. People would be willing to pay quite so much to learn something like this, which was surprising. And so I started going down that path as well, creating training for people, free training at first and then moving into paid training. And what was fascinating about this was the pleasure that I got from writing.

15:31I got a similar pleasure from creating the training material and talking to authors and helping them. with the added benefit of coming back to this idea of impact was that they would tell me when things went really well. So, you know, with the books, I might get an email from a reader saying, hey, Nick, you know, I really enjoyed your book. When's the next one out? And that kind of feels nice. But working with authors and helping them build up their career, you know, I get emails saying, Nick, I quit my job yesterday to become a full time writer. You know, my life has changed. I can't thank you enough.

16:04and that's just a whole nother level of impact and helping people that way um just became almost addictive you know being able to to see people taking the material that i presented using it adapting it to their own sort of circumstances and then getting great results with it just felt brilliant and while i was working with the courses and the books at the same time i realized that to serve my customers in the best way, I had to focus on the courses. So that's what I did. I kind of phased out the writing and really doubled down on creating more material, more training, helping more people, introducing sort of email coaching to people, and really trying to dig down into each student as an individual.

16:52And that's what was, I think, really satisfying. So it was an organic transition as I discovered more about myself and what kind of drives me to get up and do work in the morning. And you've had a lot of success and you've been able to now, you know, essentially co-found and now, you know, be the person behind create awesome online courses. So you see a lot of people doing a lot of things. You see a lot of people doing things right. A lot of things, a lot of things that people are doing wrong. What do we need to know? And let's just get specific with one, maybe two things to make an online business course successful?

17:31Sure. I mean, I was lucky enough to be able to go and work with David on Create Awesome Online Courses after years of working together on other projects. And so I've had a kind of this fascinating insight into people making courses and, you know, doing what they do on that side of things, not just authors and one of the main things is focus and this is when people first come in and they're thinking about creating a course and they kind of they give me their ideas and the number one issue I find is it's not focused enough so for example you know someone would put up a link to a sales page and it would be something along the lines of you know how to how to do marketing for example and you'd look at it and you're like well this this is this is too broad you know this isn't specific enough to appeal to a specific person and because you know there are a lot of courses out there now the market is quite big you really have to have that focus to differentiate yourself from other people so my personal example was i taught marketing and email list building and email marketing to authors, specifically authors, not just anybody, specifically to authors.

18:45So that meant that it had that appeal, that niche appeal to get noticed in that crowded marketplace. So the number one thing is focus. I'd say after that, it's creating something that is going to have that impact. It's going to help teach people. So really planning out what the end goal is for your students. Where do they need to get to? What does their life look like when they have succeeded? Where are they now? And what are the steps in between? And if you can map that out for a course, for example, those are your modules. Step one, module one, et cetera, et cetera. Moving from where they are now to where they want to be with that focus.

19:28And that kind of underpins everything. so you could have the best kind of marketing strategy on the planet. You could have an amazing kind of ads campaign running all the time, evergreen funnels, all these wonderful technology. But if the course doesn't appeal to the right person and if it doesn't walk them through it in a way that's accessible, it's not going to work. Now, what if we don't have a huge ads budget? I hear that as a concern from a lot of people all the time. They're like, okay, I understand I've got a niche. I've got to focus. Nick and John are always talking about that. Niche, my flipping face off.

20:04So I get that. I've got the process down, but I don't have a lot of money to advertise on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, fill in the blanks. Just don't have a huge ads budget. And, you know, I probably don't have like a huge organic audience like some people that are out there as well. What do you recommend for those individuals? So I'll start by saying that advertising is something you're going to have to do at some point but everybody starts off small you know five bucks here and there to experiment and find out what works and i have a link for that later on but outside of advertising what i found great success with um is a couple of a couple of things number one is having a free book on amazon and this comes back to the author thing again because you know this is kind of bread and butter stuff for me.

20:56But if you are marketing an information product or your product or service can be tied into an information product in some way, then having a free book on Amazon, on Kindle, is a lot like your website on Google, except instead of competing with 60 billion other websites, there's there's a far smaller number of products competing with you. So if, for example, you have a plumbing service, let's say, or a plumbing business, you could write a short book all about how to plumb your own bathroom and put it onto Amazon, set it to free so that it gets picked up more often. Free books on Amazon do tend to get a lot more downloads than paid ones.

21:44And inside the book, You have a lead magnet and a link through to your website where people can learn more about you, maybe get a lead magnet, a bonus chapter or something. And this is what I advise to anyone starting out. If you can spend a few days writing a useful kind of pamphlet or short book, it doesn't have to be very long, that's helpful to your target audience. If you make it free on Amazon and all the other e-book stores as well, it will pick up a lot of organic traffic effortlessly. effortlessly. And this is free stuff. This is free traffic. And a proportion of these people will click through to your website.

22:20And as long as your website's set up in the right way, you can collect those leads and follow up with them later on. The other thing I always recommend people do is team up with other people. So joint promotions in every way imaginable are some of the best ways that you can get things rolling, especially in the beginning. So finding other people in your market you don't necessarily directly compete with and teaming up and pooling resources and going out there and sharing kind of the burden. So, for example, if you're starting to build an email list and you've got 100 people on your email list, for example, if you can find four other people with a similar reach, now you've got 500 people that you have access to, which is incredibly useful when you've got a launch or a promotion coming up.

23:06You can rely on this sort of network of people to help you get where you want to be. And then later on, there's more complex things like affiliate deals and partnership deals and sponsorship deals. But it all comes from finding people to work with. And this is especially helpful for people who work at home all the time. You know, having this human connection outside of your home office is incredibly important on a sort of on a spiritual level, I guess, as well. But those would be my number one and number two kind of top tips if you're just getting started. And Fire Nation, I want to bring in a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

23:43here, which is, you don't have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. And that's the whole point of this. You take the first step with what you have, where you are, and you see what happens. You see what is revealed for that next step. Like Nick and I were jokingly talking about the amazing weather here in Puerto Rico pre-interview and he was telling me all about the fog he's dealing with. It's like that when you're taking steps. It's like there's fog on the entire staircase, but you take that next step, boom, the fog clears a little bit. And then you see that next step, especially when you have people like myself and Nick and others who have created great content for you to help guide you along the way.

24:20But even us, even we can't share with you exactly what that clear step looks like. You're going to find that out for yourself with help and with guidance from us, but only so much. Take that first step. And speaking of step one, let's end with a bang, Nick. Where do we start? Number one thing you have to figure out is what is your product? What is your service? As we said earlier, that focus. So if you're a course creator, what is the topic of your course? What specifically is the outcome people can get by taking the course? nail that down and everything will flow from there and on a practical side to launch pretty much anything you're going to need to have some kind of online presence you know a website that's set up in the right way to get you what you want and you're going to have to have a marketing plan in place so if you're going to go down the free book route or the joint networking route or you're going to do some advertising and make sure you have a plan in mind for how you're going to get started with that.

25:27But it all starts with for course creators, you know, the topic, the idea, the plan for other people, you know, nailing down what is your product, having that ready to go is going to make life a lot easier for you. So if you're literally just getting started, if you're sat at work listening to this and you don't have an idea for a business, That's where it all starts. You know, having that idea and then kind of critically analyzing that idea to see if it's viable for the right people. Once you've got that nailed down, all the other stuff will come a lot easier. Let's end with a bang, brother. Where can Fire Nation find out more about what you have going on in this world, connect with you, any call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye?

26:10Absolutely. So as we mentioned earlier, you know, advertising is going to be an integral part of especially when you get to the point where you want to scale up but also at the beginning when you're sort of feeling out the marketplace trying to figure out you know who's going to be interested in what i've got how much is it going to cost me to get clicks um so we have put together a free 80 minute workshop for you all about facebook advertising so we've teamed up with a facebook ads professional he handles over 100k us dollars of monthly ad spend and in this workshop he shares with us what he does with his clients so when people come to him for his service he walks them through the whole thing you know he doesn't just jump in and start running ads it's thinking about again you know what is the focus what is the topic who is the perfect customer where do i find them how do i appeal to them and then how do i use that information to create ad campaigns that are going to be successful so whatever stage you're at you know no tech experience required this workshop is going to help you really nail down those ideas in your head.

27:16So we've got a link for you at nerdly.com forward slash fire, which is N-R-D-L-Y.com forward slash fire. Free 80 minute workshop. Enjoy the material. It's going to help you out no matter what stage you're at. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with NS and JLD today, so keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Nick in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything. And one more time, Nick, give us that URL for that 80 minute workshop. That's nerdly.com, which is N-R-D-L-Y.com forward slash fire.

27:58Nick, thank you for sharing your truth knowledge, value bombs with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you for having me. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Nick and Fire Nation, what can 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com today.

28:43I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Want to learn how to get booked and paid to speak? Great news. I've arranged direct access to my good friend, Graham Baldwin's proven speaking business system from the Speaker Lab. Go to eofire.com slash speaker to grab your spot for our live training on May 28th and learn how to get booked and paid to speak. Thank you.