The $5 Million Marketing Playbook That Everyone Overlooks | Ali Abdaal

0:00All right, Marketing School listeners, this is a 20 to 30 minute segment of a full interview I've done with an amazing founder, entrepreneur, entrepreneur, creative, visionary, visionary, creative, visionary, you're going to get a ton of marketing, you're a great, you're going to get a lot, you're all the day to get a great. episode. Ali, tell us how you went from$2 to$5 million. In 2017, I started my YouTube channel when I was in my final year of medical school. And in those 12 months, I made about$2, or like$1.76 according to AdSense. I was speaking to my CEO coach and, you know, we were trying to identify areas of my life where I could level up, you know, leveling up.

0:48And a big one was marketing. And he was like, oh, have you read any books by Russell Brunson? And I was like, no, isn't he that scammy internet marketer guy? And my coach, Eric, was like, oh, you've got to read his books. And so I I picked up dot com secrets and I was like, oh, my fucking God, this is bloody incredible. Why have I never read this before in my life? Why have I dismissed this guy's incredible wisdom? Just because I found something aesthetically distasteful 15 years ago. And so then I dove into his whole trilogy, dot com secrets, traffic secrets, expert secrets. And then I read$100 million offers by Alex Formozzi.

1:18I read copywriting secrets by Jim Edwards. And suddenly my mind was blown open with this whole like internet marketing world. And I realized that I've been selling shit on the internet for 10 years, but I've never once read a book on how to sell stuff on the internet. And this was the Bible. And there's so many more things like it. And it's just really obvious stuff for people who understand marketing that, oh yeah, of course funnels are a thing. But that was really the first time I'd heard the word funnel. And I thought, oh, this is what we need to do to our business. And the really cool thing about people like Russell and the rest of the OG info marketers is that they built their fortunes of like tens of millions a year off the back of paid ads and paid traffic acquisition.

1:54Whereas as creators, we have incredible organic reach and huge warm audiences. And so if we can apply the same principles of info product marketing that these guys have been using for decades to make millions and apply them to our own products, for our own audience, for warm traffic, then hopefully we can come close to making similar amounts of money. What's the business model look like right now? You've got courses, you've got a lot of different things going on. Yeah. So fundamentally, we make lots of content and And I think of it as the 99-1-1 rule. So 99 % of our content is free. 1 % of our stuff is paid for the 1 % of the audience who can afford it.

2:28And so like more than 50 % of the revenue comes from our online courses. 20 % of it or so comes from ads, AdSense, 20 % from brand deals, and the other 10 % from affiliates and random bits and bobs here and there. So mostly online courses. We were running our course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. I've been running this every few months for the last two or so years. and you know revenues were declining and post pandemic people cared a lot less about live online education as they seem to care during the pandemic and so for the final cohort i decided to just basically apply all of the principles from dot com secrets and also from 100 million dollar offers and also from copywriting secrets so we redid the offer based on alex homozy stuff we redid the funnels based on ross brunson's stuff and we redid the landing page based on jim edwards thing.

3:11And cohort seven, I think did 300K revenue. Cohort eight did 1.9 million. Wow. And so it was just skyrocket. Well, that's almost seven times. Yeah. Like literally just purely based. And people sometimes ask me, oh, help me make my course landing page or whatever. And I'm just like, look, just read those three books in order and just literally follow step-by-step the exact steps that Alex Formosy lays out in$100 million offers. Great. And then go to the chapter about landing pages that Jim Edwards has in the book, because these people have figured this shit out and we don't need to invent the wheel from scratch.

3:39we can just follow the playbook of the people who've been doing this for a long time. What would you say if people were like, hey, I don't know what my style is. I don't know how to find like, you know, what I stand for. What would you say to these? I would say it depends on what stage of the process you're at. So the way I think about it, and the way that we teach it in our course is there's three levels, level one, level two, level three. Level one is get going. Level two is get good. And level three is get smart. Now level one, get going. That is your first like 10 videos. If someone has not made 10 videos and they're worrying about their niche, they are overthinking it.

4:10Worrying about your niche and worrying about how you stand out is a level three problem to have. A level one problem to have is I just need to start my first few videos. And I know so many people who get like paralyzed by just that initial upload. Oh my God, what are my friends and family going to think? They don't realize that no one gives a flying fuck. They're just like so caught up in their own heads. They're overthinking it. And I was like this back in the day. It took me reading a book called Show Your Work by Austin Cleon to get over the fear of starting my blog. So level one, get going.

4:35That's the first handful of videos. Then level two is get good. And in level two, the objective is to actually get good at the craft of making videos. Now, some people are good at this immediately if they've got a film background or if they're particularly creative. But for a lot of people, you know, at the average age of our students in our YouTuber academy is 36. For a lot of 36-year-olds who haven't been living on the internet their entire life, it's actually quite hard making good videos. And so again, you don't need to worry about your niche over there. You don't need to worry about how you're going to stand out.

5:00You just decide, I'm going to make a video about this sparkling passion fruit, naturally essenced water and you try and talk about it in a way that makes sense. Then you think, you know what, I'm going to make a book review of this book that I just read. And you try and make a video about it. And after you've done this a few times, you get good at the craft of making videos. Now you are finally ready for level three. But before you get to level three, you have to decide, am I treating YouTube as a hobby or am I treating YouTube as a business? If you're treating it as a hobby, you can do whatever you want.

5:26You don't need to worry about your niche. You don't need to worry about your target audience, your competitive analysis, nothing like that. Who cares? It's a hobby. Great. You have fun. You do it for yourself. but if you're doing it as a business the key difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby is for you a business is providing value to other people so if you're going to treat it like a business you then go on to level three which is where you get smart about it like if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant down the road you wouldn't just open an Italian restaurant because you like Italian food you would see what's happening in the area what's the footfall of traffic in the area what other restaurants are there what other Italian restaurants are there what's the way that my Italian restaurant is going to stand out should I even be doing an Italian restaurant just because I like Italian food.

6:03You know, opening a restaurant is a very different skill set to enjoying cooking food. And so taking that same approach to business as you would if you're starting a business to a YouTube channel. And that's why, you know, the advice I would give for someone who's at level three is really think about your YouTube channel like a business. What is the value that your YouTube channel provides? Who is the target customer? What are they like? What are their needs? What are their hopes, dreams, aspirations? All of the standard marketing stuff around, you know, target audience analysis, and then do a competitor analysis, see who else is in the space, see how saturated the market is, analyze all your competitors and see what are they doing well and what are they doing badly so that when you make videos in that niche, you can find a way to make yours stand out.

6:43They don't have to be better than other people's, but they do have to be different. We're talking about this at lunch too. It's like one, YouTube, really any social channel gives you this amazing organic reach, but But we're basically employees of these social platforms, right? And so once you stop playing the YouTube game, your organic reach starts to drop. So how do you plan on combating that? Mate, this is the thing that keeps me up at night. Because as much as it's bought my financial freedom and fun and flexibility and autonomy and all of the good stuff from being a YouTuber, I'm still fundamentally a slave to the algorithm.

7:17Because if I stop uploading, it's only a matter of time before everything dwindles down to zero. Partly what I'm trying to do is to build a business that A, is not reliant on views, because it's quite a stressful place to be. Like, you know, you and I know people, know other YouTubers who monetize exclusively through AdSense and brand deals. That's really stressful because now your business revenue is directly tied to how many views you get. So how do we get to a place as a business where our business revenue is decorrelated somewhat from how many views we're getting each month? And that normally comes from having your own product to sell.

7:47If you have a product in a niche market, that's fairly high ticket. you don't need to be getting hundreds of thousands of views. You just need to be getting a few views from the right audience who will then buy your stuff. And I think a great example of this is August Bradley, who had a YouTube channel about Notion. It still does. And his channel only had like 15 ,000 subscribers when he released his online course. And I think in his first launch of his course, he made about$600 ,000 from an audience of only 15 ,000. And there are so many YouTubers I know with millions of subscribers who do not make 600 ,000 a year because they just don't have a product to sell.

8:22So for us, it's like, A, how do we decorrelate our business revenue from the number of views that we get? And B, more broadly, how do we decorrelate the value that we're giving to our audience from me personally sitting in front of a camera and filming? So one thing that we're trying to do is we've just launched a daily productivity email newsletter modeled after Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic, where I've started off by giving the broad brushstrokes of what I want this newsletter to look like, but we've hired a writer to write it. And it's got like 10 ,000 subscribers on it now. And that thing is growing.

8:54And that means every day, the writer can write productivity advice that I can contribute to, but it's not directly tied to me. And so what we're trying to do is how do we build assets and how do we build kind of delivery vehicles for our courses and products that do not require me to sit in front of a camera? And that's a real challenge. So how are you guys solving that challenge right now? So number one, we're thinking, what are the organic sources of content that we can create that don't rely on me, like daily productivity, the email newsletter, we're thinking of maybe doing something around YouTube as well, because our course is a YouTuber academy.

9:22And so if we had an organic email list, kind of like Colin and Zemir's, where we just gave really good, useful YouTube tips, could that be a funnel to the courses? And then on the product delivery end, we have a customer service head, Alison, our head of customer success, and she's got a team of freelancers and contractors working underneath her. And so what we're trying to do is figure out when we're creating the offers for our courses, how do we deliver value to our audience or to our customers in a way that does not require me? So instead of me hopping on a call with them every time, can we get members of the team to have regular office hours?

9:55Can we hire people to give them feedback on their videos? We're toying with the idea of doing some sort of productivity coaching thing. Obviously, that needs to not be me who's delivering the product. So can I create the curriculum? Can we train coaches on the curriculum? And then can the coaches deliver the product? That's the sort of thing that we're trying to do now. It's kind of like what Think Media does with their YouTube channel. It used to be tied to the founder, Sean Cannell, right? And now it's a bunch of people on the squad. Yeah. So we actually got a lot of inspiration from Think Media back in the day.

10:25And we tried to copy them, basically. So we tried to launch a YouTube channel called the Part-Time Creator Academy. And we had this whole vision for it. And we did a massive amount of competitive analysis. We looked at Think Media, video creators, channel makers, film booth, all of these other channels that were teaching people how to be creators. And we thought, great, let's just do Think Media. Let's just get a cast of characters. Every, you know, every week, one person can film a video. If we have five people, that's five videos a week. This is great. We'll sell our courses. And then we realized, oh my God, it's really, really, really hard growing another YouTube channel.

10:57And we made a few videos. It just didn't feel right. And we shut down the whole project. So I'm filled with admiration for what Think Media managed to do, because Sean has really done the thing well, where he has been able to distance himself from the content. And over time, his gang are featuring more and more in the videos, and he's having to show up a lot less. When you think about your audience sizes, right? So you got close to 5 million on YouTube, like how, like your newsletter and everything, like how big are these other channels? Yeah. So newsletter is about 400 ,000. Instagram is 500 ,000.

11:26Twitter is 400 ,000, 300 ,000, those sorts of ballparks. I think LinkedIn, we've just crossed 100 ,000. Podcast is 300 ,000. Oh, wow. What are you doing on LinkedIn right now? Basically, we have writers who convert my YouTube videos into Twitter threads, and then we copy and paste them onto LinkedIn. Literally just like the threads? Yeah, pretty much. And it works? Yeah, it seems to. What? Okay. And also, if I post something on Instagram that's related to the business, like, hey, we just launched a blah, blah, blah, we'll copy and paste it onto LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a copy-paste venue for us, and it seems to be working.

11:57I'm surprised that's working. Wow, interesting. I thought they got more sophisticated, but apparently not. How about your email list? Like 400 ,000 is a lot. Like, are you buying ads to grow it? Like, how are you growing the email list? We don't really do anything. We have a few lead magnets. We've done a few giveaways in the past. Mostly, we just try, we try and plug the email list somehow in every video. So in the middle of the video, in our sort of video production checklist, we have a checklist that says, have we plugged the email list? So either we'll do that through a lead magnet. So let's say it's a video about how I manage my time.

12:30I'll be thinking when I'm making the video what is the freebie I can give away with this and so one of our most successful lead magnets was just a Google Sheet template that I made that Barb actually made which was very kind of her I sort of use a Google Sheet as my annual calendar and I just said to Barb hey can you turn this into a pretty version that we can just you know let people download and so we just had this as a Google Sheet link and I think we've added 50 ,000 plus subscribers to our email list from one video because people were like entering the email address to get the link to the Google Sheet and then we give them the opt-in would you like to sign up to the newsletter and so it's little things like that and occasionally we'll sometimes just say in the middle of a video hey hey by the way if you're enjoying this video so far then i'd love for you to check out my weekly email newsletter sunday snippets it's just a very short email that i send every sunday and it's got a few thoughts and you know some things i've enjoyed reading or listening to basically copying what tim ferris says for five bullet friday head over to aliabdhal.com forward slash sunday and you can sign up completely for free unsubscribe whenever you want so i'll just say that in the middle of a video and then we'll just get like i don't know a thousand to five thousand subscribers every week coming that's crazy everyone has their own angle i you know i I have a friend, I mean, he's got like a million subs on his email and it's all driven through SEO.

13:35And yours is all, like, that's organic, right? And yours is all organic YouTube, basically. Yeah, we're working on SEO, but we are slowly, slowly getting there. I wouldn't even consider SEO right now. You're good on all the other stuff. So is the email the main driver for your revenue right now? Are you pushing them to like buy or is it like pushing them to a webinar? Like how does that sequence work? Yeah, so the email is the bridge between our content and our products. what we've realized is that or rather what I've realized is I don't really like selling on my YouTube videos I don't really like saying hey I've got a course buy my course blah blah blah because that just feels a bit weird but I have no qualms with saying hey join my email list or get my free 7 day email educational course or whatever and now they're in our list and they've opted in and now I have no qualms with us sending them emails and so like the vast majority of revenue from our courses has come as a result of sending emails to the list.

14:25You're doing launches Like how are you doing that? Yeah, so back when our YouTuber Academy was a live cohort, we did eight live cohorts. We would do launches through the email list. Now we've switched to an evergreen model because I hate live cohort courses. So we've just gone self-paced with that. But we still have an email list for that. And Jakob, our marketing guy, is doing kind of daily emails that are providing loads of value with an offer at the end. And when Black Friday is going to roll around, I'm sure we'll do something there. We're going to launch a new productivity course. So we're going to sort of get loads of people onto the waiting list and then give them an early bird discount and just do sensible things.

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17:21A live cohort course is you sign up to a course, it's running from the 3rd of January to the 24th of February. And in those six weeks, you're going to be joining 300 other students and it's going to be live sessions with interactive workshops and homework and this and that. It's a whole like production. And so we started our YouTuber Academy as a live cohort thing. initially it was just going to be like a$200 pre-recorded course. But I spoke to two chaps, Tiago Forte and David Perel, who had a lot of success making millions with their own life cohorts. And they said, hey, what would it look like if you charged$2 ,000 for this course rather than$200?

17:54And my mind just blew because I could not imagine charging$2 ,000 for anything, let alone for an online course that I was doing. But I was like, okay, cool. Let's give it a go. This, you know, stepping outside of my comfort zone. And so we launched that initial life cohort in 2020. and I expected like 12 people to sign up as a beta tester for the cohort. In reality, 356 people signed up and overnight we made like$400 ,000 and I was just like, oh my fucking God, this is more money. This is like 10 years worth of a salary as a doctor working in the UK. Yeah, wow. And I had just taken a break from medicine.

18:2540 grand a year. Yeah, I was making 40K a year for my first two years of working as a doctor. So I made 10 years worth of that salary in like a week because of this life cohort thing. And it was kind of weird because my YouTube channel is about productivity and personal development. It's not about how to grow on YouTube. I'm not trying to be Think Media. And yet the product that worked for us was a product about how to grow on YouTube. It was kind of weird. And we just kept on running that like eight times. But by around cohort three, I started to feel the pain of having to show up and say the same stuff again and again.

18:53You have to show up every week, right? Yeah. So it was like a six-week course. And every week I was doing like three sessions a week. It was like hours and hours and hours. And I was just like, you're spieling all about YouTube all the time. But the other thing I didn't like about it was I don't like launch marketing. because it's a lot that's riding on this one week. And it felt quite stressful because it was like half of our business revenue was coming from these live launches. And we had three weeks of the year to sell tickets for these live events. And it was fine initially when there was so much pent up demand, but then it felt like we had to work harder and harder to convince people to sign up to the course.

19:26And that just felt kind of not nice. It's not nice to feel like you're the seller in a transaction. And so we decided two years in that, you know what, this is good money, but it's not worth it anymore. It's not worth the stress, not worth the headache. It's not worth the headspace that it takes to run live cohorts. Let's just turn it into an evergreen course. So now we've done that. I hate launches. And so the internet marketing world is used to doing launches, right? And it's like you do the launch and then everyone's like super stressed. Like you feel relieved, but then you have to get ready for the next launch.

19:54And then the next, and then it's like you're on this never ending hamster wheel. Exactly. And then people just burn out, right? But the thing with the live cohort too, it's like, sure, your completion rates might be 98%, but like your burnout rate, your stress rate's a lot higher. So you might as well just go like, sure, evergreen. Like when we used to sell courses, we were sitting in this one boardroom and one of the guys stood up and he's like, gentlemen, we sell courses because courses are perceived progress. People like perceived progress. And everyone was clapping. I was like, okay, that's an interesting way to look at it.

20:26I don't necessarily agree with that. But, you know, I think it's when I worked in online education, It was 98 % of people finish a live, but 98 % of people do not finish evergreen. How are you seeing it? Yeah. I mean, honestly, even with our live, we would charge somewhere between$1 ,500 and$5 ,000, depending on which product they were getting. So only 60 % of people would submit the first week homework assignment. Oh, wow. And by week six, we were down to 15 % completion rate. And this was a course people have paid thousands of dollars for. It's a live course. There is accountability. we hop on a call with anyone at the drop of a hat we have a no questions asked money back guarantee and yet half of the people don't even submit the first homework assignment what yeah at one point i sort of realized you know what i i'm not going to stress out about about the fact that some people are not going to take the course it's totally fine i've bought loads of courses that i've never taken i've never even opened them i've never even logged in it's fine maybe i'll get to it at some point i was speaking to another a friend who does marketing and he said you know probably half the people that buy Peloton don't even unbox the bike.