💡Tips To Pivot Your Business Using Online Courses 📱 With LeahRae Getts

How can you leverage online and social media platforms for your business? In this episode, we have LeahRae Getts, owner of Digital Trailblazer, share her experience on her online business journey together with her husband Todd. They started an online business with no experience at all. Now, they are helping experts, coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs create, launch, sell and scale profitable online courses and coaching programs. Learn tips on how to pivot your business using online courses by staying tuned!

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Impactful Entrepreneur Show Guest Interview

I am here with Leah Rae Getts. She is the Founder of Digital Trailblazer. She founded it with her husband, Todd. They are experts on all things, digital courses in terms of creating and selling as well as all things YouTube. Welcome, Leah.

Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here with you, Adrienne.

I'm very excited to have you here. If you would, for those who maybe have not met you yet, could you tell them a little bit about your story and how you're finding yourself here?

My husband and I years ago became online looking for a way to create a sustainable income that allowed us both to be home with our children. I went to nursing school. He was a teacher and a band director even. We had no experience in this world but we knew of the possibilities here and invested in ourselves. We got coaches, went through a ton of training, learned this world, implemented and took a lot of action. About eighteen months into starting the online business, we were able to retire Todd from his then six-figure job that he had and was no longer a band director.

We were able to retire him and that was a big day for our family. It was less than a year after that that we hit our very first six-figure month. There's a lot of opportunity in the online business world for those who are super committed. Things may be simple but they're not easy. It does take commitment but the reward and the possibility are so huge. If you want to create something big, we've never lived in a better time. We're in a very blessed place in the world to be able to sit on our butts at home, do great things behind a computer that impacts people's lives and can support our family in probably better ways than we could with our traditional jobs at a college and stuff.

There are a lot of opportunities in the online business world for those who are super committed.

A lot of people reading are maybe in a similar place as you. They started the business because they wanted to be home with their kids or the freedom to fill their days with what they wanted to fill it with. For those of you reading, I've known Leah Rae for a while. She is the queen of action-taking and implementation. You're going to get some good nuggets from her. I'm excited about that.

Thank you.

One of your expertise areas is creating online courses. When it comes to creating and selling online courses through social media specifically, what's the biggest mistake most newbies make as they try to move into that space?

We first started with network marketing for a while. Affiliate marketing was a big one for us for quite a long time and we made a lot of good money with it. We knew that you could create a digital course, the expertise and value to help and teach people different things. However, we put it off probably way longer than we should have because it was daunting. We didn't have a roadmap of how to do it. We knew that there were some technical pieces to it.

Having the expertise means having the value to help and teach people different things.

We had the misunderstanding that you had to do a big launch with a bunch of affiliates and all this stuff when you first start. You don't have to do that. I would suggest not doing that but all of those sorts of unknowns held us back for way too long. If you have a skillset some level of expertise that can help people, serve people and help them reach a goal, digital products are an amazing way to do that. You're able to pour yourself out to people, help them get amazing results.

It's also one of the most lucrative things that you can do online. With digital courses because of how you set things up and structure, you can afford to drive paid traffic, cold audience people who've never seen you before ever on anything. Get them some information, have them watch a webinar and have them make a purchase right from there.

With webinars other than advertising costs, it's going to vary based on your industry and what you're doing. It's essentially 100% profit compared to affiliate marketing, where if you're in digital products, you're like 30% to 50%. If you're looking at physical products like Amazon affiliate stuff, that's 3% to 7% or something tiny where the amount of traffic you'd have to drive, you can't do any paid advertising for that. It doesn't pay out enough to do that. There's a lot of flexibility. It's the fastest way to scale up your income in your online businesses by offering digital courses.

That makes sense because I was cold. I didn't know you at all. I found you on social and then I ended up buying every course you ever made. It works.

Honestly, you can think about it from a selfish way of making money. In reality, people like you, our friend Lindsay and other people whom we have impacted their lives, made great friendships and changed the trajectory of their businesses and their lives altogether. We wouldn't have done it if we weren't selling our course. Even if we were selling our course but we weren't using paid traffic, we would never touch them.

They will never have seen us organically. There have been times in our business that we've had to turn off ads and work on redoing some things. I feel guilty. Every time I'll run into Lindsay, she's like, "Where was that ad?" How many of those people are we missing when we're not running ads? There's a huge opportunity.

When I first discovered your courses and started taking them, they were so value-added and beneficial to me that I'm the one who paid for them. I paid money but I wanted to thank you for selling it to me. That's the benefit of a great online course. To those reading this and have delayed way too long in getting started or struggling with beliefs that maybe they can't do this, are not ready for this or good enough is there a mindset shift that you would recommend that people make that can help them to get over that hurdle?

If you've explored a bit online, especially in your niche and industry whether that's weight loss, fitness, business, marketing, whatever realm that you’re in, you're going to run into some people who you're like, "They're making a full-time income online selling digital courses?" That comes from a good place but know that people from all walks of life, expertise levels, can do this. I would encourage you to plugin with someone who has a system, course or something to teach you and walk you through the process. Todd and I would have never launched our first course that we sold a lot of had we not paid a coach to walk us through it. It was too overwhelming.

We knew that we had the skills to teach. We were good at teaching and we knew what we had to teach people but the idea of putting it all together, all little pieces of the process and then the selling. Putting together the course is a one-and-done easy thing. It's the sales process that you continue to refine, get better and play with. It was too much to take any steps forward if we didn't have someone guiding us.

Online Courses: We're just in a very blessed place in the world right now to be able to sit at home and do great things behind a computer that really impacts people's lives and can support our family.

Whether that means you buy a course to walk you through it or a coach, get some help. If you're like, "The investment." Todd and I paid $1,000 a month for a year for the coach that took us from making $10,000 to $20,000 a month in affiliate commissions to multiple six-figure months in a row. Would I do that again? Yeah.

If you're not willing to invest in yourself, no one else is going to be willing to invest in what you offer. You have to build this. If you're working with a client creating an online course and for some reason, it's not selling, what's the first missing skillset or piece that you look for to troubleshoot to help them?

There are two sides to it. One is the traffic and the other is the offer. If they have no traffic coming to it, it doesn't matter how good the offer is. They're not going to make any sales. If they've got a tiny bit of traffic, nothing's happening traffic-wise. I can't even tell you if your offer's good because we don't have any numbers to work with. If you've only had six people make it through your sales process or webinar, I can't tell you if your webinars are any good because that's on the people that give me that data.

Is it a traffic issue or an offer issue? You've had a bunch of people coming through but your numbers aren't good. Maybe you don't have a good attendee rate, ten attendees to sales rate, all of those sorts of things but you can't have that data until you have the traffic. Traffic is usually the first question. Especially for new people getting started, it's typically where the hang-up is because they haven't worked on paid traffic yet and are trying to do it maybe organically. They're not driving enough traffic to the offer.

I'm hearing, in terms of major steps to look at, traffic is one and then analyzing the quality of the course or the presentation that sells the course in another one. What are the 2 or 3 key steps that are important in building the course before you even get to the traffic piece? It's a super simple framework if people are trying to wrap their heads around this.

Let's say that you have a level of expertise. You've done something pretty cool and could help other people do it. You've never put together a training course before and haven't coached anybody else through that process yet. Honestly, I would have you start with a free Facebook group. Invite people to the Facebook group. Get the type of people that you want to help be specific to that audience.

Not everybody who you can get into the group, just the people that fit who you want to serve and help. Invite from your network, groups and places that you're connected with people, fit that audience and then you can run ads to bring people into your group. Honestly, how I would do it is that I offer a free lead magnet, a free PDF guide, something that they can access.

The pop-up after that is to join the group and give them the link that they can click on. You're generating the lead and getting them into a group. Build up the group and walk them through the process. It's okay to give away some great training while you're creating your course. Don't have this idea like, "I can't give it away if I want to sell it later." You can and you should because number one, you're going to test your training.

You're going to see. Just because you took this path, maybe that won't work for everybody and you got to help them overcome some things or take a little bit of a different journey to get to the same goal. You can test all of that with your Facebook group. You're going to do lives, daily workshop stuff or whatever within that free Facebook group and get results.

The goal of that Facebook group is to understand your target audience, who you're serving, what challenges they are coming up against, help them overcome those challenges and get results because that is how you create an amazing course that truly serves and helps people but it's also how you sell your course.

If you've never had results and got no testimonies, you have to be the slickest salesperson there is to get sales on your course. It's not going to work. It's going to be way too hard. The easiest way to make sales is not by telling but by showing people results, you've helped others get, helping them understand you've helped all of these people get these sorts of results and you can help them too. I would start with the free group, help them for free, get the results and then use everything you're learning from that to create your course but also gather the key components that you're going to need so that you can sell your course as well.

It's using a Facebook group as a place to build an audience and for market research to get some people, initial results and testimonials.

Honestly, you're going to have a warmed-up group for the full course. You're going to have a full, complete training course and not going to give every bit of that to the group. You're going to give them some key things that are going to help them get some results. They're going to be in a great warm audience that you can test your webinar on. If you can't convert warm traffic with your webinar, get them to make the purchase, you got to fix your webinar before you try and get to cold traffic.

Warm traffic is much easier to sell to than cold traffic. You're going to warm up that audience, create a great course from it, help them, create great testimonials and do your first live webinar to that same audience. You're testing to see how the webinar's converting because it's going to convert better for them than it will when you start running paid traffic to it.

Warm traffic is much easier to sell to than cold traffic.

There's a lot of folks probably reading who don't create digital training courses. Maybe they sell physical products but those physical products are related to some area of expertise. For those who are maybe struggling with how can I implement or I apply what Leah's teaching, anyone who's selling a physical product can create a training course around whatever that topic is.

We're helping someone who sells or is an affiliate or something for some freeze-drying machine, dehydrating freeze dryer thing. He's creating a course around teaching people how to free dry. It's like hydrating but it's cold or something. I'm not sure. I haven't gone through the course but he's teaching people how to do that.

That's a great example. If Leah knows someone who's selling a course on freeze-drying food, chances are anything that you are selling. You could make a course and get it injected with cash by selling that course. I love it.

Following this through, he creates a great course introducing people to the world of freeze-drying, teaching them how to do it. I used to be at least a mild prepper, if you will, a little bit. We had some stuff but for someone who's thinking about doing that thing, it's overwhelming. Even learning how to can, a canning course would be awesome for women. There are so many that are interested in it but their moms didn't teach them how to do it.

Online Courses: Offering digital courses is really the fastest way to scale up your income in your online businesses.

It's the same concept. He could create a course, drive a bunch of traffic and sell his course. In the course, what would be a legitimate thing? People are trying to purchase their freeze drier. Give a review of some of the features you want to make sure that they have and this is my recommended one that I liked the most from this link, which is his affiliate link. Not only is he going to earn money from selling the course but he's going to earn affiliate commissions from any referrals he makes within that course as well, which could be even food containers.

Hopefully, our readers have some creative juices flowing and thinking of ways that they might be able to use this. I also know one of your expertise areas is YouTube. You've got lots of sales on YouTube. For those reading this who want to hit that next income threshold next quarter by making the most of social and they think they want to move into YouTube or in it but are not getting results yet, what are some key pieces of advice that you could give them, little tweaks they could make right away to get some quick results maybe or turn things around if they're not getting results on YouTube?

The biggest thing is to understand your analytics. The three biggest analytics you need to look for are your click-through rate, which is your CTR, which is how many people see your thumbnail and title for one second or longer and choose to click on it. Your click-through rate, your average view duration. How many minutes and seconds on average? Does somebody watch your video and your average view percentage? Is that 30% or 90% of a video? What is the percentage?

General guidelines, you want to get your percentage 50% or above. That's a good rule of thumb. It varies. The types of videos you're doing all kinds of things but a good thing that you should be shooting for is 50% or above. Thumbnails, people make the mistake of spending all of this time creating the video. Last second, throwing together a quick thumbnail and title for it, bad idea. You don't even need the keyword if you're into that. You don't even need that in the title.

Having something clickable as a title is way more important. If you get a title and a thumbnail that are hot and that convert, a high click-through rate, YouTube is going to do everything they can to show your video to people. If it's clickbait and they jump off right away, your average view duration, that's going to be horrible. That's going to tank it differently. If your average view duration, minutes and everything is solid, getting that click-through rate up is going to go crazy.

We changed one of our older videos. Todd watched our daily videos, 48-hour real-time view and saw that some of our old Instagram videos were getting more traffic than normal. We haven't done one of those videos in a long time. I wonder what's going on. Instagram did another shift in its rules and algorithm. A lot more people were starting to get blocked. He changed the thumbnail on an old video showing the message everyone's seeing and the click-through rate is 17%.

For those of you reading, that's a high click-through rate. For reference, what is a decent click-through rate? As people try to improve it, what should they do more?

First, you have to understand yours. It's about seeing what your numbers are and then working on getting them higher. Every industry is different. You have to keep pushing yourself and not compare yourself to other people. For us, our channel average is 6.1%. If I release a video and it's 4% or above, I'm happy. If it's getting into the 3%s, I start playing with the thumbnail, switching things out and messing with it to fix it.

The little fine-tuning elements are worth it.

Spend more time on your thumbnail and title. The thumbnail should grab their attention and get them to read the title. They should stop their scroll on YouTube, get their attention, read the title, get them to want to watch and have to click. If you think about it, it makes sense. YouTube is a business. They want people on YouTube to consume videos so they can put ads in front of them. That's how they make their money.

I haven't seen the stat inside of YouTube but you can see it. We use TubeBuddy as one of the tools that we look at with our channel. You can see something that it's seconds per impression or something like that. It's calculated based on the average view duration, how long on average people are watching your video, plus the click-through rate. They figure out on average, if YouTube gives you an impression, show your video to someone, they're going to get this many seconds of view time.

If you have a decent click-through rate and a crazy, amazing average view duration, they're going to show it. If they're going to give you some of their real estate, putting your video in front of their viewers, they want to make sure they get the most that they can out of it. That analytic isn't even in YouTube that I've seen. It's something to think about. How much time are they going to get on average every time that they give you an impression? The higher that is, the more they're going to show it to people. It's business. It makes sense. Whether that comes from an amazing click-through rate and an okay view duration or vice versa either one is going to serve you.

For people who are reading who maybe have been accustomed to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or some other platform and questioning like, "Is it worth trying to get sales out of YouTube," how do you get a sale from YouTube?

The easiest way to get a sale out of YouTube getting started is to find what would be considered a long tail, cute keyword, whatever that's called. You take something that doesn't have as much competition, there are not as many videos out there and you can rank for it. It's specific to whatever you're selling. We make $1,000 a month in sales on a channel with 6 subscribers, 20 views a day because we are ranking for a video that is a review video. It's a review of a specific type of kitchen tool. We sell the tool.

It's a brand that we own that we manufacture and everything else we sell through Amazon. We get a higher percentage of the profits because we own it. We're not doing an affiliate thing but we have the review video where we test it against a bunch of the top competitors and give real results. We show them exactly how these things are holding up against each other. Not only are we ranking in YouTube. It's not a ton of traffic. Twenty views a day isn't ranking. That's not crazy. That's pretty small but we're also ranking in Google when people look for reviews on that topic.

We're getting traffic from Google, YouTube itself, between that and able to make several sales a day organically. It doesn't have to be a big keyword. It can be something that doesn't have a ton of traffic but you can create a great video that has people ready to pull out their credit cards. Who's going to look up a review video for a kitchen tool? Someone who wants to buy a kitchen tool. If I can lay out for them why they need to buy this one, they're going to be willing to do it. It has to be laser-focused on your offer, whatever you're doing. If you can get them at that credit card in hand point and rank a video on that, it's money in the bank.

It's a long-tail keyword, take the time to tweak the thumbnail, make sure the title makes them want to click, have a super helpful video teaching something about your topic and then a link to where they can buy it. How many subscribers and visits a day do you have?

We have 6 subscribers and 20 to 21 views a day.

Online Courses: The easiest way to make sales is not by telling but by showing.

This is not a strategy only for people who have huge audiences. For people who are reading and thinking about getting into YouTube, there's a lot of hope there. Thank you for sharing all of your insights and tips and tricks with us. I understand that you have a free gift for our readers too.

I have a tip sheet, a quick guide to help you make more sales, specifically with your digital products. Some of it is going to apply elsewhere if you're not into that quite yet but we're going to help lay out for you what you need to do to make more sales with your digital products and optimize your profits.

For those who are reading, be sure to grab the freebie. For all of the expert speakers that we're featuring at the summit, they're all offering free value to you. All you have to do is click and enter your information. They'll send it to you and you can start to implement it immediately. Remember our promise to each other or our deal at the beginning that you were going to take action on something that you learned from Leah Rae. Take some action and get the biggest sales quarter ever. I'm excited about everything you shared with us, Leah Rae. Thank you.

You're welcome. Take care.

See you in the next episode.

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About LeahRae Getts

LeahRae & Todd are the owners of DigitalTrailblazer.com and specialize in helping experts, coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs to create, launch, sell, and scale profitable online courses and coaching programs.

They are award-winning marketers and sought-after speakers, having been recognized for their success in the industry by multiple organizations, and featured on stage, in podcasts, as well as in other interviews and articles.

They started their online business with no experience - Leah a previous nurse, and Todd, a band teacher. But despite their lack of experience, they took action, learned from their failures, and eventually developed a system that anyone can use to create a profitable online course or coaching business.