Sell Over $2M of an Online Course with the Skills & Knowledge You Already Have with Lucas Lee-Tyson: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Success Story Podcast. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to sell over$2 million of an online course with the skills and knowledge you already have. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Lucas Lee Tyson and EO Fire Studios. Lucas started a multi-million dollar marketing agency from his college dorm room, and now he has a multi-million dollar online course teaching others how he did it.

0:37And today, for our nation, will talk about how it's possible to get rich quickly. However, no one gets rich easily. How to put knowledge and expertise into a product and how to focus on the thing that works for you and double on down. And so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Lucas and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators and your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:09AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Lucas, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Awesome, well, thanks so much for having me back, John, and obviously great to be back in front of the Fire Nation. My thing that I believe about becoming successful is that I think it is entirely possible to become an overnight success or to get rich quick, as some people would say.

1:51I, however, do not think it is possible to get successful easy or get rich easy. I think a lot of people think that it can't happen quickly. And I think it is entirely possible if you work hard and are following the right systems and the right processes. Well, that's one thing we're going to be focusing on here today, Fire Nation, are the right systems and the right processes. And Lucas has had a ton of success, and even in the last two years since I interviewed him last, which is why we're bringing him back on the show today, because he's going to be sharing some pretty exciting things that I may have teased during the introduction.

2:26So, Lucas, how did you get this idea for your online course? Yep, absolutely. So two years ago, basically, I was on your podcast sharing my story about how I had built this Facebook ads agency for my college dorm room and eventually grew it to a multi six figure level. And not only with going on your podcast, I was obviously also sharing my story and things that I had learned on my social media and just with people that I'd connected in my personal life and professional and things like that. And naturally, people started asking me how it was possible. Not only was it possible that I had built this agency basically for my college dorm room without any investment money, with basically like zero dollars in my bank account.

3:11But people also asked me questions about the work that I was doing for clients. They wanted to know about Facebook ads. Back in 2019 and 2018, Facebook ads were kind of still new. A lot of people were just hearing about it for the first time. So naturally, people wanted to know, oh, you know, I have this cousin who thought about running Facebook ads. I was wondering, you know, if you'd be able to help them out and things like that. And I started to, you know, do basically one-on-one consulting and coaching with people, not only helping business owners with their Facebook ads, but also helping people who wanted to do the same thing that I had done.

3:47Wanting to start basically a Facebook ads agency, a Facebook ads freelancing business and helping run ads for clients. And I did this for a while. I probably did only one on one consulting and coaching for probably like three to six months before I realized it wasn't the most sustainable thing. I realized very quickly that even, you know, the clients that I was working with and the coaching clients that I was helping coach very often had the same similar questions and problems. I found myself getting on, you know, Zoom calls, Skype calls and repeating myself when I realized that there was probably a better way to go about monetizing my knowledge and monetizing my expertise.

4:27So I knew a lot of people at the time had done similar things that they put together either an online video course or an e-book or something to that effect that basically allowed them to offer value, offer knowledge, offer expertise without limiting their time. You know, there's only so many hours that, you know, you could get on Zoom or get on Skype in a day and help walk someone through it. But if you record that, if you productize your knowledge and expertise into a product, theoretically, an unlimited number of people could consume that. So that was how I first got that idea and how I first got started.

4:59How can you, Fire Nation, scale and leverage your time when you find yourself saying the same things over and over again to individuals or maybe even small groups of people? and this is kind of one of the things we're going to be working through here today. But let's be honest, just because you find yourself answering the same questions doesn't necessarily mean there's a really meaningful course there. It could be an indication, but we want to now talk about validation. So how did you validate that idea for your online course once it kind of sparked as an idea in your mind? One of the ways that I initially validated the course was something that I always like to do.

5:38And actually one of the very first things I did when I was actually starting that Facebook ads agency business was seeing if there was anyone else doing it, basically seeing if there was competition that existed in the market. As I've been, you know, what I would call an entrepreneur, someone who's been starting online businesses for close to, you know, eight years at this point. And my very first businesses all failed because I would spend, you know, months building this thing, this product, this service that I thought people would want because I thought it was this new amazing thing, but then I would release it and it would be crickets.

6:11No one would pay me money for the thing that I'd created. And I learned a really valuable lesson back then that if you can see if there's validation in a marketplace, if there's other people who are offering maybe not the exact same thing, but something similar, then there's probably a good chance that if you release something that's similar and maybe even a bit better, maybe even a little different, if it has a unique spin on it, then you're probably going to be able to make money with it as well. And I did a little research and I found that there were tons of people offering digital marketing training, digital marketing courses, and also courses specifically about how to run a digital marketing agency.

6:46At the time, it wasn't this new and novel idea, but it gave me a lot of validation that maybe I wouldn't be the first person to offer this and maybe it wouldn't be the number one selling course on this topic. But I knew that if I could create something that was unique in some way, if it was something better than what existed in the marketplace at that point, then I would probably be able to do pretty well with it. And at the time, I had an email list. An email list was super important. And it's something that also allowed me to validate this idea very quickly was this idea of learning in public.

7:19At the time, I actually had a blog, which I still have, growthcave.com, where I was basically sharing updates on what I was learning in my agency, how things were going, what I was trying and what was working, what wasn't. And I had naturally built up a couple thousand people on that for who wanted to keep in touch with me, who wanted to kind of learn how things were going and also obviously had social media, Instagram, Facebook profile, all of those things. So once I had validated that there were other people making money with this style of product, with this style of teaching through an online course, I sent out a very brief kind of test pitch.

7:57And I wouldn't even call it a sales pitch, I would more just call it a question because it wasn't like I designed, you know, some fancy website. I didn't even have, you know, a sales funnel on ClickFunnels at the time. I literally just wrote on a Google document what I was thinking of putting together. I literally wrote on the document, a lot of people have been asking me about this. So I thought I would kind of test the waters. Here's what I'm thinking of putting into this course. Here's what, you know, I'm thinking of pricing it at. Let me know if you're interested. And I emailed that exact Google document.

8:26I didn't even pretty it up or anything. I emailed that exact Google document to my email list. I sent it out on my social media. And literally within probably within 24 hours, but if not like within a week, I had gotten my very first five customers on that course. And most importantly, those first five customers all told me why they were interested in the course, why they actually ended up paying for it. And then went on to tell me, oh, you know, if you're actually continuing to add more things to it, here's what I would love to see. So not only did I validate the idea very, very quickly by kind of staying lean, by just seeing what people were interested in and kind of just keeping it simple, literally only sending out a Google Doc, I also got very valuable feedback on those things that were eventually going to allow me to differentiate my course from everyone else.

9:14Was that feedback from actual paying customers for the things that they were looking to learn and the things that would make my course better than everyone else. Fire Nation, a lot to take away from here. Some things I want to add on and repeat from what Lucas was just sharing is, number one, does the competition even exist in the markets? I mean, pioneers, remember those first movers, they are often the ones with arrows in their backs. So it's not a bad thing to have competition out there. And does that competition look successful? Like, are they actually doing well in making sales? And hey, if you're finding that people are advertising for their stuff, they're probably making money because you can't just spend money forever on ads without actually making money and being successful.

9:53And can you provide different and or unique solutions? Like think about that, Fire Nation. You know, you can provide different or unique solutions for the same problems, then you have an opportunity to stand out here. And I love the Amazon products example that I've definitely talked about on the show before, where go to products that you love, that you're thinking about maybe bringing to the market. And what are the one and two star reviews? What are people complaining about that maybe this product or service is missing or that they wish it had as a feature or a benefit? And then when you create that thing that fills that void, you have a chance at winning.

10:31So you scaled, Lucas, to over$100K a month in your second month, which kind of harkens back to your response to the success question I had at the beginning. So you did it using YouTube ads. Share your secrets with us. Absolutely. Well, I think one of the reasons why YouTube ads worked so well for me, and I'd actually tried a bunch of other ways of advertising. I tried Facebook. I tried Instagram at the time, which previously was my area of expertise. It was a little embarrassing to not be able to sell my own product on Facebook ads while using Facebook ads. But I kind of realized that YouTube ads were this new avenue that not a lot of people were using just because the product that I was selling was inherently video based.

11:16It was a video based course that had around, you know, six modules in it. It was probably like 20 or 30 hours of content. And I kind of realized if I want someone to actually go through this course to actually see results and actually, you know, enjoy consuming it, I should probably go after people who are already consuming videos in the first place. And that kind of, you know, put a light bulb in my head. And I said, why not try YouTube ads? And as I was doing research into YouTube ads, which at the time I had literally zero experience and I'd never run them before. I realized that YouTube is obviously owned by Google, which means that a lot of the targeting options with your advertising on YouTube allow you to leverage the things that people are searching for on Google, which is very, very powerful because obviously Google, number one search engine in the world, is what everyone's using to do research on products and services and companies before they ever actually purchase.

12:07unlike Facebook advertising, where they obviously have that custom audience, those lookalike audiences that are really, really powerful. But the majority of the targeting that's available on Facebook is only basically what's built into the platform. You know, for example, if you're selling, you know, a fitness product, like a fitness course or fitness supplements, you can basically just go into Facebook's targeting and type in, you know, weight loss or fitness and things like that. And you'd be competing against every single other company an advertiser that's using that exact same targeting. With YouTube, not only do you have the ability to target exactly what people are searching on Google, but you can customize it in such a way that you basically have an audience that's customized to you and that theoretically no one else on the platform has access to.

12:52So just like when I was validating my course, I actually did the same way with my YouTube targeting. I was going through all these YouTube targeting, I realized that you could target people based on what they had searched in Google. And a light bulb again went off my head and I realized I just did all this, you know, competitor research. Why don't I try showing ads to people who are looking for my competitors products? You know, people who are already interested, you know, in Facebook ads, starting a Facebook ads business. Why don't I just target people like that? And I kind of saw it as low hanging fruit that maybe there's not, you know, thousands or millions of people searching for these things.

13:26But these people are probably the hottest buyers inside this market. These are people who already know what they want to buy. They're kind of just doing that research for that purchase decision. So that's what I ended up doing. I launched my very first ads for targeting competitors of mine at the start. And I think I launched that at like$50,$100 a day. And previously, June 2020 of that year, I was doing around like$10 ,000 or$20 ,000 a month from selling it just organically. And as soon as I launched that very first campaign, things took off. It was like putting gasoline onto a fire. And even though I was starting with a very small budget, it's like I said, I was targeting these super hot buyers who were basically already in the market to be purchasing a product like this.

14:13And the course was priced at$1 ,497 or$1 ,500. And it was literally an instance where I was putting in$100,$200 a day and getting$1 ,400 or$1 ,500, sorry, back on the back end. So it was a very, very profitable start to the campaign. I was able to scale to$100 ,000 a month, literally in my second month using YouTube ads, because I got started with the super hot, the super low hanging fruit, easy to target audiences that at the time, I don't think a lot of people were thinking to use or even using at all. And as I started, you know, kind of scaling up, I did a lot more similar styles of targeting.

14:52I did what a lot of people in marketing call long tail keywords, where if someone is, for example, searching for camping equipment, you know, maybe they're looking for the best tent. One of the things that someone who's looking for the best tent might type into Google is best tent 2021 or best tent for long mountain hikes and things like that. And obviously someone who's doing that extensive research, someone who's searching for a longer term keyword is generally going to be much more likely to become a customer because they're doing that extra layer of research and they're looking up a more specific thing versus someone who's just looking for camping equipment or best camping equipment and things like that.

15:30So I started to scale beyond just competitor targeting by using those long tail keywords, but it was the same exact thing. I was able to start with a very small budget, but still be incredibly profitable because there were fairly low hanging fruit of people who are already interested in this type of product. Fire Nation, you can see the value of bringing someone on who's currently having success in what they're doing, making things happen, and then sharing with you what they're doing so that, hey, you can implement this in your business for your course, and then you can see similar results. And we have so much more to be talking about when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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18:43If you travel for part of the year to attend conferences, go on vacation, or to visit family, why not Airbnb your own home? Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. So Lucas, we're back and let's talk a little bit about validation. I mean, we've already gone over some of this, but if we want to validate our idea for our a course using free tools and free software. I know you have some recommendations for us, so break those down. So the very first thing that I would recommend anyone doing, whether you're trying to start an online course or a coaching program or really any style of business and you want to use YouTube ads, the best thing that I could recommend is first going through the Google Ads manager, actually creating a free Google Ads account as there's a ton of tools built into there that let you do a lot of that initial research that I talked about before, kind of validating whether there's people actually selling these style, the same style of products that you want to sell, kind of validating those long term keywords.

19:47All of those things are built right into the Google Ads dashboard and you can access them completely for free. It's not like you have to pay them to have access to those tools. That is where I first got started. And in addition to that, the Google Trends functionality that if you just Google Google Trends, it basically is very similar to the keyword tools that are built into the Google Ads Manager, but they let you see a much more historical kind of trend. For example, if you were to type in COVID-19 into that, you would be able to see the exact spikes and inflection points that people were doing a ton of research on COVID over the last year.

20:25I would recommend using tools like that and using the tools like the Google Keyword Planner that are built into the Google Ads dashboard to do research on the specific, again, the specific style of product or service that you're thinking of advertising. So when I was using those things, I was typing in things like digital marketing course, Facebook ads course, how to run Facebook ads, how to start a Facebook ads agency. I was plugging it into those tools and I was seeing, okay, is this something, a trend or a product that's kind of on the rise? Is it kind of plateauing or is it kind of on the decline?

20:57And I saw with a lot of those cases that year over year, month over month, a lot of the things that I was searching were trending upwards and at worst were kind of stagnating, plateauing. None of the things that I was looking up were kind of declining or losing interest as generally if something's losing interest, you probably wouldn't want to be in a market like that anyways. Beyond that, kind of like I said before, I always recommend when you're still in that validation stage of the business is to keep things as lean and simple as possible. Obviously, there's great tools out there like click funnels and lead pages and kajabi and all this stuff to design you know beautiful websites beautiful sales funnels to kind of get people buying your product but literally like i mentioned before my very first five customers literally purchased off of a google document and they just sent money to my paypal account and that's what i always recommend is just keeping things as lean as possible when you're first getting started so that then you're able to kind of validate the idea quickly and simply reinvest any cash or revenue that you generate back into the business and using that to scale up really quickly.

21:59Wow. Fire Nation, so much great content here. So many great tools and softwares that you can use to really get this process moving. And if you can believe it, Lucas has now scaled from 100k a month to 500k a month using, you guessed it, YouTube ads. So what the heck, Lucas, is going on here? Well, a lot of people don't believe it because a lot of companies and advertisers of this size think that they have to use every platform on earth. They have to do Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, basically everything. But by simply doubling down on what's worked well for us, we've been able to not only grow the company to the level it is, but also continue providing our students and our customers an amazing experience without having to add on a million different team members that we would have to worry about in the marketing department.

22:48So the biggest thing that I think has attributed to our success is that YouTube is a platform that's very unlike Facebook and Instagram. It's kind of like I mentioned before, Facebook and Instagram advertising, obviously great. There's people that absolutely crush it there, but they never worked for me for this style of product because one, I think that video style products like online courses, coaching programs, not only lend to kind of a video-based advertising platform, but also because YouTube is something that everyone just naturally goes on as a part of their day. You know, if someone has something they're wondering about, they're going to go to Google and they're going to search it.

23:25You know, if someone is having trouble, you know, building that new piece of Ikea furniture, if someone's, you know, even a college student's having trouble with their homework, first place that most people naturally go is either going to be Google or it's going to be YouTube to look up a tutorial or a how-to. And as a result, the audiences for so many of these different styles of products on YouTube are absolutely massive. Literally millions and millions of people that is just growing by the day as more people enter into a marketplace, they start consuming that content, they start learning more about it.

23:54And obviously, you know, the market that we're in, it is in business and digital marketing. It's something that's been absolutely exploding over the last three years. But other markets, even things like health and fitness, like I mentioned before, or love, dating and relationships are other markets that are absolutely exploding on YouTube ads that I think there's still a ton of opportunity for advertisers to take advantage of. So one thing that we found, obviously when we were first getting started, we were starting with these competitor style audiences, these long-tail keyword audiences that really allowed us to scoop up some low-hanging profits and really just get profitable quickly.

24:31As we started growing further and further, we wanted to kind of expand the net that we were casting onto YouTube. So rather than targeting keywords that were like how to start a Facebook Ads agency We would kind of open up the net and start targeting people who are only searching for things like how to start a business Or best online business to start or best side hustle even and naturally, you know, seeing what works and the cool thing is is once we found a lot of those keywords and a lot of those audiences that did end up working Those things are completely evergreen We have campaigns that have literally been running on simple keywords like that like how to start a business or best side hustle 2121 or even just targeting the keyword Facebook ads that have literally been running for nearly a year now and spending thousands of dollars every single day because of the massive reach that YouTube has and that people are able to access on their platform.

25:21So obviously there's a ton that goes into it on the back end, continuously improving our product, improving our business and making sure that our customers are having a great experience with our program and getting results. But on the advertising and marketing side, fortunately, YouTube makes it very, very simple. And I can say this as someone who previously was a tried and true Facebook marketer, that Facebook does have a lot of pitfalls when it comes to scaling. A ton of people have had that experience where they launch a campaign on Facebook and it seems like it's working well, but then they try and increase things and things go completely out of whack.

25:55We haven't really experienced that with YouTube. Obviously, there is that to some degree, but because the audiences are so, so massive, I think there's just so much opportunity for advertisers and marketers like us to just scoop up those interested prospects and give them a product or service that's actually going to provide value to them. So much opportunity out there, Fire Nation, for you to scoop up as well. I mean, learn from the best, implement, take action. So Lucas, with everything that you share with us, brother, give us the number one takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything you shared.