The Art of Selling Online Courses

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Jeff Alipio had 170 followers when he launched his first course. Most of them were friends and family. He sold to nearly 500 students anyway, almost all of them complete strangers.

Dominik sat down with Jeff, a Philippines-based video editor and course creator with over 15 years in the industry, to talk about how he pulled that off, and why he thinks the obsession with follower count is one of the biggest traps course creators fall into.

What came through clearly in this conversation is how simply Jeff thinks about audience quality versus audience size. He makes the point that a million followers who came to you for prank videos are not going to buy your video editing course, and he built his entire growth strategy around that idea. Facebook ads, targeted tightly, finding the specific people who actually wanted what he was selling.

Jeff also talked through what he teaches inside Video Made Easy, his course for Filipino freelancers starting from zero. It goes well beyond editing basics. There are modules on storytelling, personal branding, profile optimization, and a freelancer mindset section about building a career that AI cannot easily displace.

The end of the conversation got practical. Jeff's advice for anyone who has the skills but hasn't launched yet: stop waiting for the perfect course and start with what you already know. The overthinking is the thing that's actually slowing you down.

Check out Jeff's work:
🌐 https://jefalipio.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/jef_alipio/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@jeffreyfernandoalipio7209

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I sat down with Dan Lee, a self-taught wooden boat builder based in the Cotswolds, who turned a lifelong obsession into a full-time business, funded almost entirely by online courses he runs from a farm workshop. It's a genuinely great story.

Dan started building model boats at eight and full-size ones at seventeen. When COVID hit and his previous business, making tree-shaped bookcases, looked like it was going to collapse overnight, he decided to go all in on something he'd always wanted to do. He built a website, started modernising old wooden boat plans using CAD and CNC technology, created his first online course on varnishing, and never really looked back.

What I found fascinating talking to Dan is how clearly he's thought about why online teaching actually works better than in-person for hands-on crafts. The camera angles, the controlled lighting, the ability to overlay animations showing wet edges drying in real time. It's not a compromise on the in-person experience, it's genuinely better for teaching the foundations.

We also got pretty honest about where Dan's business has room to grow. He's doing well with Facebook ads and his courses are covering his workshop overheads, but his email list is sitting mostly untouched. We talked through what that could mean if he actually started using it properly, and the numbers are exciting.

If you're building a course business around a physical craft or a niche skill, I think you'll get a lot from this one.

Check out Dan's work:
🌐 http://www.danleeboatbuilding.co.uk
📸 https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding
▶️ https://www.instagram.com/danleeboatbuilding

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Brad Yates has 425,000 YouTube subscribers and 60 million views, built over nearly two decades. He has never once sat down to plan a content strategy.

I had a genuinely fun conversation with Brad for this episode. He started out as an actor, trained as a hypnotherapist when his first child was on the way, stumbled into EFT tapping through a workshop, and then one day thought it would be cool to put a guided tapping video on YouTube. He uploaded it, figured he was done, and came back six months later with another idea. That's basically how the whole channel was built.

What struck me most was how clearly Brad has thought about what he actually wants from his life and business, and how little he's willing to compromise on that. He talked about limiting the number of emails his marketing team sends, refusing to redo popular videos just because they performed well, and turning down tactics he knows would probably make him more money because they don't feel right. He quoted Bowie on why the mid-80s were the worst period of his career. It all hung together in a way that felt unusually honest for a business conversation.

We also got into his product lineup, his two memberships, his evergreen programs, and a new platinum lifetime membership he recently launched. If you're curious how someone builds a real business almost entirely on free content and genuine purpose, Brad is a great example.

I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Brad's work:
🌐 https:///www.tapwithbrad.com
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCiHZMZejDS4RIxDdBwoie9A

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Dr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.

When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know. So she started recording it. Her colleagues thought it was a strange move for a serious physician. She did it anyway.

In this conversation, John sits down with Andrea to talk about how she built that audience, what she's learned about YouTube after 240 long-form videos, and where her business is headed. One shoulder exercise video she filmed in her home during the pandemic, hair a mess by the end of a full day of recording, has now crossed ten million views and generated over $60,000 in ad revenue on its own.

They also get into the practical side of things: how Andrea runs two separate email lists for patients and healthcare professionals, how she uses AI to help develop scripts and thumbnail ideas, and the funnel advice John shares live on camera for growing her healthcare professional list faster.

Andrea is thoughtful, generous with what she's learned, and genuinely funny. If you're a course creator who came from a professional background and wondered whether your credentials could translate into an audience, this one is worth your time.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Check out Andrea's work:
🌐 https://www.doctorandreafurlan.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrea.furlan
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaFurlan

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Timotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.

Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That last one tends to annoy people. Timotej makes a pretty good case for it.

They also get into the real stuff, the Facebook ads that do the heavy lifting, a Black Friday email disaster that tanked his deliverability for a year, why his School community experiments mostly flopped, how he went from doing every sales call himself to building a team of ten coaches, and the moment he raised his price to seven and a half thousand euros and a client just said yes without blinking.

There's a lot of honesty in this one. Timotej doesn't sugarcoat what went wrong, and his advice to his younger self, the kid with the headset on streaming to a few hundred people on Twitch, is just two words: sell earlier.

If you're building a course or coaching business and thinking about where to focus your energy, I think you'll find something useful here.

Check out Timotej's work:
🌐 https://timotejbonifer.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/timotejbonifer/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@timotejbonifer

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Most people who build a 122,000-subscriber YouTube channel and help over 20,000 students learn an instrument have figured out marketing. Beth Blackerby hasn't. And somehow it still worked.

Beth is the founder of Violin Lab, one of the very first structured online violin curricula on the internet, launched before "online course" was even a phrase people used. She started in 2007 because she noticed that adults learn the violin completely differently from children, and almost nobody was teaching to them. So she built something from scratch with no playbook, no subscription model to copy, and no real marketing strategy.

In this conversation with John, they talk through how her tiered membership works, from $35 a month for full curriculum access to $95 a month for weekly personal video feedback. They get into why she built loyalty pricing that dropped members down to $10 a month over time, what made her vibrato video the one that changed everything, and why she hid a marketing trick inside one of her most popular videos that had people emailing her every single day.

John also walks Beth through what an email funnel could look like built on top of everything she's already created, and it's one of those conversations where you can hear someone seeing a whole new layer of possibility for the first time.

Beth also talks about the in-person workshops she's been running since 2012, including one at a music retreat outside London, and why playing together in a room is something no online forum can replace.

She's warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Beth's work:
🌐 https://violinlab.com/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@violinlab

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Scott Gardiner does around $100K a month and has never taken a single sales call. No closers, no discovery Zooms, no objection handling. Every offer is evergreen, bought at whatever hour suits the buyer, while Scott is somewhere else entirely.

He helps men whose marriages are falling apart, guys whose partners have already said they're done. And he got into it the hard way. Six years ago his own wife told him she was done.

Dominik sat down with Scott to hear the full story, from being made redundant during COVID, spending $15,000 on a mentor he could barely afford, grinding through a fitness offer with four offshore setters and $2,000 a week in ads, to the moment his wife said she couldn't do it anymore, and how that sent him in a completely different direction.

They got into a lot of the practical stuff too. Why Scott thinks sales calls are only necessary if your offer is unconvincing. How he uses a $7 sprint course to feed his weekly subscription. The difference between problem-aware and solution-aware buyers, and why so many creators are building audiences full of the wrong one. What his email strategy actually looks like, three to five times a week, workshops, loom videos, and a document with payment at the end of a survey. And his kitchen table test for anyone thinking about launching something new.

Scott is one of those guests who has clearly thought hard about all of this, and is honest about the mistakes along the way. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.

Check out Scott's work:
🌐 https://elevatedman.com.au/q
📸 https://www.instagram.com/iamscottgardiner/

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Most productivity coaches tell you to do more. Carl Pullein built a business teaching people to do less, and better. And it's working to the tune of around $300,000 a year.

I sat down with Carl recently and really enjoyed this one. He's a British productivity coach based in Seoul, South Korea, with over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, 17 million views, and an email list of 25,000 to 30,000 people. He built all of it over ten years, one video a week, around two proprietary frameworks he developed himself.

We talked about who he's actually helping, how his business breaks down between courses and coaching, and what's driven his growth. But honestly the most interesting part of the conversation was watching Carl work through some things in real time. He knew he was leaving money on the table with his YouTube promotions and his email list growth, and we got into the specifics of what he could change and why it would make such a difference.

He's also thinking bigger. He wants $500,000 this year and $10 million by 2030, and he's got a clear idea of how corporate training fits into that picture.

Carl's a thoughtful guy who's built something real, and he's genuinely honest about where he's been too relaxed and what he's going to do about it. That combination makes for a great conversation.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Check out Carl's work:

🌐  http://www.carlpullein.com

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Carl_Pullein

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Alex Dunitz has built one of the top Italian language learning channels on YouTube. 266,000 subscribers, nearly 30 million views, a custom app with gamification, private lessons, group courses, books, webinars, trips to Italy. The whole thing.

And yet, when I sat down with him, the first thing that struck me was how much opportunity he was sitting on without fully realising it.

Alex is brilliant at what he does. His co-host Marta Cappellini spends around eight hours preparing a single ten-minute video. They have a genuine teaching philosophy, a real community, students who argue with them about lost points on the app. The product is genuinely good. But like so many course creators I talk to, the gap between what they've built and what they're earning is bigger than it needs to be.

We talk about how Passione Italiana grew from a local adult college side hustle into a global brand, why Marta was such a turning point for the channel, and what Alex calls the "euro drop" moment, his version of the penny dropping when a student finally gets it. We also get into the gamification system he's built on his website, including a points and ranking structure where students can rise from peasant all the way to emperor using Roman coins called Sesterzi. Genuinely fun stuff.

Then I put on my consultant hat for a bit and we have an honest conversation about funnels, email lists, and why pointing YouTube viewers at every product at once might be the thing holding the revenue back. Alex takes it well. Better than well, actually.

I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Alex's work:
🌐 https://www.passione-italiana.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/passioneitaliana.official/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8gGkW17A_kbDCVNGvzGMrw

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Derek Callan has been coaching business English for over 22 years, has clocked more than 10,000 hours of in-company training, and has built a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers and nearly 10 million views. He is, by any measure, someone who knows his stuff. So what I really wanted to get into with him was the messier side of the journey, figuring out who your real customer is, what they actually want to buy, and how to build a funnel that lines up from first click to paid client.

Derek recently launched a high-ticket one-to-one coaching programme targeting professionals who freeze under pressure, presentations, meetings, the calls that matter. He sold out his founding five spots from a small segment of his email list. We talked through where to go from there, how to price it, and a specific idea around selling a paid assessment as a tripwire that leads cleanly into the main programme.

We also got into what he learned from our Instant Course Sales programme, why mindset is the biggest barrier in language learning, and what it actually looks like to try to align your YouTube content, your lead magnets, and your offers when you have several courses running at once.

Derek is genuinely great to talk to. Warm, thoughtful, honest about what is and isn't working. And the bit near the end about asking his wife to summarise the podcast for him... I will say no more. You will enjoy that part.

Check out Derek's work:
🌐  https://www.derekcallan.com/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@derekcallan-englishforpros