Want create an online course, but unsure how to launch it? You don’t have to go at it alone. The fantastic folks at Teachable reached out to me to come share with you the techniques I used to launch my video courses (and other products) over the last two years, so that you could use those techniques yourselves.
These strategies led to:
- Collecting 2,800 email addresses in the first three days of my first product test
- Collecting 17,000 email addresses in a week for another product
- Pre-selling my first course, and making $10,000 in sales
- Launching my first course and making $48,150 in sales in 10 days
- Setting up an automated, self-sustaining lifestyle business that’s run for the last 2 years
And when I started, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was trying to figure it out as I went, building my parachute on the way down, and didn’t have a massive resource like this article (or all of the other great ones on the Teachable blog) to help me get there.
By the end, you’ll have everything you need to successfully launch your own course. I’ll give you the exact tools, emails, techniques, everything, that have worked for me and others who have replicated our successes since then.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Step 1: What’s Your Goal?
The biggest mistake I see people make when they launch a course is not getting crystal clear on their goal.
It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of “oh, if I build it they will come!” but selling a product is hard work.
I personally love using a very quantitative goal style, typically using some sort of spreadsheet to go along with it.
First, you need to ask yourself “what’s my goal revenue?”
Don’t lowball it, that’s boring. If your goal is to make $500 you need to shoot a little higher. For our first launch, we had a goal of at least $25,000 in sales on a $500 product, which meant 50 sales.
With that number, we could get a rough idea of how many email addresses we needed to promote the course to. Obviously the math on this isn’t perfect, but it should give you some ideas.
Let’s say you have a $500 product. You could, if you’re good, probably get 2% of your email list to buy it. So if your goal is 50 sales like us, then you would need 50 / .02 or 2,500 email subscribers (at least) to feel reasonably confident that you’ll sell enough to hit your goal.
Or let’s take a goal with a smaller product. Say you have a $100 course and you want to sell $10,000 worth. You might get a conversion rate of 5% on a good email list, so you can say $10,000 / $100 = 100 sales, and then 100 / .05 = 2,000 email addresses.
Go ahead and plug your numbers into the spreadsheet. Pick your goal revenue, what you’re charging for the course, then it’ll pick a conversion rate for you and tell you how many sales and email addresses you should shoot for to hit your goal.
This is a conservative estimate. We planned on a 2% conversion, but ended up getting more like 4%, so you could definitely beat these numbers.
Now you know how many sales and email addresses you need to hit it. The next step is to get those emails.
Step 2: Create a Free Test Product
Now that you know how many email addresses you need, you have to create something that people would be willing to give up their email address for.
I can’t emphasize this enough: the product you give away to collect email addresses must be something worth paying for.
Most people completely botch this step by rushing through their free product to throw something together in hopes that people will toss in their email address, and never get past this step.
If you don’t create an amazing free product, one of two things (or both) will happen:
- No one will put in their email address to get it
- People who do sign up for it will be disappointed and unsubscribe
Your goal has to be to make people go “I can’t believe they’re giving this away for FREE.” It should legitimately confuse them how you can give it away. Anything less than that is a waste of your time, and a waste of your potential customers time.
That means do NOT:
- Give away a PDF. No one needs more PDFs.
- “Give” them a webinar
- Do something lazy like send them to a blog post when they sign up
- Give away a short video
Here are some better ideas:
- Give away an actionable email course
- Give away a video course
- Give away a big collection of materials
What’s worked well for me is email courses. They allow me to test the material and make sure people are interested in it, they’re easy to put together, and my strength is my writing which fits well with that medium.
To create a great email course, all you need to do is take 5-10 of your most interesting subjects from your course, write up a more concise guide to the most exciting parts of them, and then put those emails in an autoresponder sequence in an email tool like MailChimp.
That way, whenever someone signs up, they get your email lessons delivered to them over a couple weeks, keeping them excited and engaged for the next one.
You could also create a free sample course and host it on your existing Teachable school. This would be a great way to make sure people are interested in learning via video, and not just over email, and will show them the quality they can expect with your larger paid product.
Whatever you choose for your test product, you must build virality and reach into it. Here are a few ways to do that.
Step 3: Build Virality and Reach into Your Test Product
A “viral loop” is any system within your product for someone who signs up to bring additional people with them.
For example, this article has some degree of virality because you could (and should!) share it with your social media audience. Based on the number of viral loops in the product, and their given likelihoods, we can figure out a “viral coefficient” for our product for how many additional people each signup brings in.
Let’s say that you have 100 followers on Twitter, and 5% of them would click on this article if you shared it. And let’s say there’s a 10% chance you actually share it. That means that for each reader, there’s a 10% chance they’ll share it and that I’ll get 5 additional viewers, so each reader brings in 0.5 additional readers. That’s pretty good!
For Programming for Marketers, we put these little viral loops everywhere.
When someone signed up, they got an email asking them to refer the course to a friend in exchange for a bonus collection of tactics for using Zapier to automate their processes:
I’m super excited to help you become a more technical marketer over the next two weeks.
Until, then, I have a little bonus for you. Nat (my partner) and I pulled together a resource with 15+ automation hacks non-technical marketers can use today without writing a line of code.
If you click here to email a friend about this free course, I’ll send this bonus to you right away. Just leave “bonus@programmingformarketers.com” CC’d so we know you sent it 🙂
Love,
Justin and Nat
Later on in the course lessons, they’d also get CTAs to share the course in return for more bonus tactics that weren’t mentioned in the lessons. We mostly used Pay With a Post for these, since that made it extremely simple to gate content using social shares:
[at the end of the lesson]
There’s one thing missing though. You still have to manually run these codes every day, which is still very easy but not quite ideal. We wrote up a short “bonus lesson” on how to make these codes run automatically for you as frequently as you want. If you’d like to learn how (don’t worry, it’s easy!) you can get it here by sharing the course! (mixing it up, not an email this time 🙂 )
For Traffic1M, we got even more aggressive. I coded a series of landing pages that asked people to tweet about the course, and email about it, in order to get bonus materials.
These pages were extremely effective, garnering 10,000+ shares on social media in the first week. At least half of our 17,000 signups came from that strategy alone. The easiest way to implement it for yourself is to use SmartBribe, which will create a series of pages almost exactly the same as those for your own product.
However you do it, you want to create some way for people who use your free product to bring their friends along with them.
In addition to virality, you also want to include some way for it to naturally extend beyond your own audience. The easiest way to do this is to involve other people who have their own audiences. We didn’t do this for Programming for Marketers, but it was the core of what we did with Traffic1M:
By including all of these people, we not only got a more diverse collection of tactics, we also were able to tap into their audiences for helping promote the course. They were invested since they were a part of it and were gaining exposure from it, so they were usually happy to tweet or share or email their list about the course.
The most important piece to remember here is that if you’re going to involve other people, you need to make them look good and you need it to look professional. No one wants to share a janky landing page with their audience, and you don’t want to be aggressive in demanding that they promote it for you. Let them know when you launch it and how they can share it, but don’t be rude about it. Your goal should be to make them want to share it.
Step 4: Launch the Test Product
With your free product ready to go, and plenty of viral loops and other people involved, it’s time to launch it.
Your main goal here should be to collect that goal number of email addresses as quickly as possible. For Programming for Marketers, that goal was 1,000 in our first weekend. For you it could be higher, lower, whatever your spreadsheet came up with.
You have a few primary ways of doing this.
Share the Product Everywhere People Would be Interested
Ideally you’ll already be involved in some online communities related to your product. These could be forums, facebook groups, message boards, Slack channels, anywhere that people who would be interested in your product hang out.
On your launch day, share the free product to as many of these as you can find. For Programming for Marketers, those were:
We already had some reputation in these groups, and they all had marketers who were interested in learning about programming, so the free email course did extremely well, driving nearly 8,000 visitors in the first three days:
You want to find communities like these where you can share your free material without coming off as too spammy. These could be niche specific ones, or general learning sources like Highbrow.
Again, one of the biggest factors is going to be how valuable whatever you’re giving away is. Communities will be much more forgiving of an epic free product than they will of a cheap thrown together one.
Promote Through Your Contributors
For everyone who contributed to your product, email them and let them know that you’ve launched it and that they’re being featured in all of these communities. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to share it with their audience, so you can even include an email template that can send to their list, or a Click to Tweet that they can use to tweet about it.
Again, don’t be too aggressive about this though. You don’t want to annoy them by being too demanding of their time.
For Traffic1M, an additional way we promoted our contributors and gained some more interested in the course was by hosting a reddit AMA in the Entrepreneur subreddit:
This ended up getting a good amount of engagement, but didn’t turn into a huge number of signups relative to other channels.
You can also use these high-influence people to drive traffic to your free product simply by letting them know you featured them in it. Create a list of everyone whose online information you cited and linked to in the course, and send them an email just letting them know you featured them.
I, personally, would not directly ask them to share it. When I get emails like that I immediately archive them. But if someone features me in their work and it looks legit, I’ll usually end up sharing it. Just let them know that they were featured, and hope that since you created a great free product they’ll want to share it with their audience anyway.
Promote Through Your Existing Channels
Whatever audience you already have, promote your free product there as well. This could be through another blog or email list, but it could also be as simple as promoting on your social media channels.
You likely have some friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn that could be interested in it, and once they’re in then they’ll be more likely to share it with their network and so on. Don’t be too embarrassed to share it with your own network! They’re going to be the most supportive people out there.
At this point, you should have your initial set of email subscribers, and be ready to move on to the next phase. The only thing you should do before focusing on that is make sure that your free product is continuing to be given away automatically through whatever traffic sources you have, so that you’re continuing to get email subscribers while you gear up for the main launch.
Step 5: Prove People Will Pay
There’s one final step before you launch your full, paid course: prove people will pay for it.
This is essential for making sure you’re on the right track before you build the course you’re planning on launching. And even if you’ve already built it, this is useful for making sure you have your pricing right.
Take a subset of those email subscribers you collected, ideally a sample with high open rates, and send them an email letting them know your full product is launching soon and they can pre-order it for a discount.
We did this with Programming for Marketers by emailing our 5-star subscribers with a link to a landing page telling them about the course, and giving them an opportunity to pre-order it for $250.
Though, at first, we priced it too high and said it would be $500 to pre-order and the full price would be $1000. When we didn’t make any sales, we reduced the price, sent a sorry email, and tried again:
This is why this phase is so important. By testing the price we realized that our initial expectations were too high, and that we’d do much better by lowering it. When we went from $500 to $250, we went from $0 in sales to $10,000 in sales. Pretty big difference!
You can also, if you like, send a few different emails with different prices to see what the profit-maximizing price is. Take your top subscribers, break them into three groups, and send them three different priced landing pages to see what converts the best. If you want more information on pricing, be sure to check out this resource from Teachable to go much more in depth.
Either way, this test email to your best subscribers should convert at least as well as your goal conversion rate. If it doesn’t, that might be a sign you aren’t on to a good product, or your price is too high, or both.
If that’s the case, try again like we did. But once you have that successful price test, you can go ahead with finishing your full course and finally…
Step 6: Launch Your Course
That’s every single email we used to launch Become a Technical Marketer and make $48,150 in those first 10 days.
The strategy we used it based on a combination of Jeff Walker’s “Launch” formula, with some additional notes from Bryan Harris’s guides on launching his own courses.
You can think of launching your course in three phases:
- Pre-Launch
- Launch
- Post-Launch
Each phase has its own goals and set of emails, starting with the pre-launch.
Pre-Launch
Your goal during the pre-launch is to get your email subscribers excited about the product you’re about to launch. It’s to deliver them some extra value on top of what they’ve already received, completely for free, and to show them a sample of what’s going to be in the full course.
We did that with 1 teaser email, then 3 “bonus content emails.”
Teaser Email
The teaser email simply let them know that we were about to launch it and that they should get excited, and that we had a question we wanted their answer on:
Justin and Nat here. We’ll be sending you more technical marketing lessons (we made a bonus video on automating content sharing, among other things!) in just a little bit. But first we need to ask you a favor…
We’re really close to wrapping up our long-awaited technical marketing master class. We will be releasing it in mid-June. But before we do, we have to ask you a quick question. Can you help us out?
You can answer the question (and get a little more detail on the master class) at this link:
[removed]
Then a few days later, we sent the first bonus material email.
Pre-Launch Bonus Material Email 1
A recent study from job-search site Indeed.com showed that the average marketer makes roughly $64,000… while the average technical marketer (or “growth” person) makes $83,024.
Guess what separates these two groups of people (besides the car payment for a BMW)…
Technical skills!
But, picking up technical skills can be horribly painful. Learning to program is hard. There’s a reason Google and Facebook pay entry-level programmers $100k+.
When I started developing technical marketing skills as the head of growth for Exceptional Cloud Services (which Rackspace acquired for $10m+), it was painful.
But, I had to do it. I was tired of waiting days to make a small copy change to our website, or have to wait for developers to run a simple SQL query for me. I was sick of being unable to dig into marketing campaign data, and tired of asking others to create landing pages for me.
In short, I was tired of feeling like I was bad at my job and a burden to the team. So, I decided I’d had enough. I decided to teach myself the technical skills that would allow me to excel as a marketer.
Now, I did it the hard way: I tried learning programming from scratch. But after going through tutorial after tutorial, I found out there’s a huge difference between learning how to build an app and learning enough programming to be a dangerous marketer.
So far, every site out there is obsessed with option A: teaching you to become a developer. Trust me, I know. Look at all of the courses I’ve taken on Codecademy!
Once I learned just enough to become dangerous (just a bit of HTML, CSS, SQL and how to use GitHub and Terminal), I immediately became more effective. I was less of a drain on team resources and built out 50+ landing pages all on my own.
I thought this was the coolest thing ever 🙂
Just learning how to make changes to our web page (after learning the basics of HTML and CSS) allowed me to run an A/B test that bumped our signups by more than 20% in a week. That was a good week.
My new technical skills made me more effective, allowed me to get more done, and made me a better team member. It’s also made me a more attractive candidate in the job market: since leaving Rackspace, I’ve gotten many offers from companies desperate for marketers who understand how to leverage technical skills.
In fact, virality expert Andrew Chen (advisor to companies like Quora, Facebook and SumoMe) has talked about how technical marketers – “growth hackers” – are responsible for the growth of companies like Uber, Facebook, Dropbox and Slack.
“The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer.”
In today’s day and age when you can no longer take out an ad in a newspaper and assume your product will sell, understanding how to make use of technical tools and resources is MASSIVELY important.
However, as I found out, you don’t need to learn programming to become a technical marketer!
Instead, you can learn and apply a few technical concepts we’ve covered in our free email course – things like automatically building your Twitter following using programming scripts – to do more with your marketing, and get 80% of the benefits of being technical. You can do cool things like build your Twitter following automatically like we show in this BONUS video.
If you don’t believe me, check out today’s video on how you can automatically re-share your content using a simple Twitter script that we pulled together just for you (it’s not available publicly).
Click here (or above) to get it.
In 2 days, we’ll illustrate this concept even more by sending you another video showing you how to mine your Twitter followers for high-quality people to engage with without having to write a single line of code.
A few days later, we sent them another bit of sample material.
Pre-Launch Bonus Material Email 2
Wow, thanks for the many questions and comments on our last lesson! In the last email, we showed you why becoming a technical marketer is such a good investment (you get paid more, can do more, and can automate many tedious aspects of your work), and showed you how to automate sharing your evergreen content on Twitter.
Some people asked if technical marketing skills were only applicable to early stage tech companies. Recently, IDC surveyed hundreds of CMOs from every industry, and reported that these CMOs – the people responsible for shaping the marketing industry for the next decade – said that “50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds.”
This means that – if you’re planning on a career in marketing and aren’t technical – you better hope you don’t compete for your job with someone that’s technical.
Though technical marketing may have first received attention thanks to the technical “growth hacks” used by companies like AirBnB, Twitter, and Facebook, now every field wants (and needs) to tap into the unique skill-set of marketers with technical skills.
This is why Nat and I are so passionate about helping marketers become technical: because it’s critically important to their jobs. In fact, Stephan Heller – head of Merchant Marketing and Inbound Sales at Groupon – had this to say about our free email course:
“After going through the Programming for Marketers email course, I had my entire team at Groupon go through it… I recommend it to any other “non-technical” marketer in the company.”
Groupon – the fastest growing company in web history – wants a more technical marketing team that can do more, learn more, and execute marketing campaigns faster and more efficiently.
However, they don’t want to waste time teaching their marketing hires how to code: after all, few marketers need to know how to build an iPhone app from scratch, or how to spin up a web server.
Instead, these technical marketers want to do things like automatically download public Twitter data for everyone who follows their page and mine it to figure out who their followers are, and what kinds of content they’ll like.
Today, we pulled together a short video that will show you how to do just that:
(Or go here to get it.)
Now, the crazy thing about the above video is that you can get this information simply by understanding how to run a simple programming script.
Wait… you didn’t see a programming script?
That’s because it’s hidden behind the Google Spreadsheet: you don’t even need to see it!
And guess what: that’s how easy technical marketing can be!
Becoming a technical marketer doesn’t take years of study or an $80k computer science degree. In fact, you can run your own programming scripts, build Python scrapers and create landing pages with just a day or two of learning the core concepts that marketers need to know… not all the other stuff that’s important only if you’re trying to create the next Instagram.
Simply by learning a few simple concepts – like how to read and run programming scripts – you’ll become one of the most technical (and most valuable) marketers in the world.
In our next email, we’ll show you how to automate some of the most useful analytics queries you regularly run, using a special spreadsheet that we whipped up just for you. . But for now, can you click here to tweet at us and let us know what you thought of today’s lesson? How are you going to use your new social data mining abilities?
And then finally, our last “pre launch email” with the last piece of bonus content.
Pre-Launch Bonus Material Email 3
Thank you for all your comments and excitement over our last email. We’re excited that YOU’RE excited to learn and apply the different technical marketing concepts we’ve covered, and we consider ourselves very fortunate that we can share more tips with you all.
In our last email, we showed you why becoming a technical marketer is such a good investment (you get paid more, can do more, and can automate many tedious aspects of your work), and showed you how to pull down all of your Twitter followers’ info and mine it for good leads. We’ve also covered various ways we’ve used technical marketing in our respective careers, and shown you the kinds of results we’ve achieved by using technical tools.
As promised, we have even more goodies for you. At least 95% of marketers we know use Google Analytics to check on top referral sources, top keywords, which campaigns are performing the best, etc. But checking it in Google Analytics requires the same annoying steps and filtering every. single. time.
No more. We built a spreadsheet for you that will automatically sync with your Google Analytics and create the reports you need (and has the ability to create any others you want!).
Go here to get it.
But however great it is that we can show you step-by-step how to do something like mining your Twitter followers, it’s no replacement for giving you the skills to do these kinds of things on your own (you know, teach a man to fish and all).
That’s why we’ve spent hundreds of hours learning these skills and distilling them down to the essentials you need to become a technical marketer. Where all other “learn to program courses” take months and hundreds of hours to get through, we teach you the core concepts you need to become technical in less than a few hours a week.
This is also why we started at the beginning. So that you – a non- technical marketer – can learn and apply these skills even if you have zero technical knowledge.
This is the goal of what we’re doing at Programming for Marketers: make every marketer on the planet technically proficient. We don’t ever want marketers cleaning data in Excel or manually running weekly reports. Instead, we want you all out there doing things! Running new campaigns, reaching new customers, automating tedious aspects of your job… and getting paid better than ever before to do so.
If you know you need to improve your marketing skills and become more technical, this course is a perfect fit.
This isn’t just a bunch of hacks or high-level blog posts strung together. It’s a system to give you the technical skills you need to level up in today’s marketing world.
How can you enroll in the course?
Tomorrow (Tuesday, June 9) at 10:00 am EST, we’re going to open up the first ever Technical Marketing Master Class for enrollment. To our knowledge, this is the only course in the world that teaches marketers how to become technical, without the need to fully learn programming.
However, since every student has personal interaction with us, we’re going to be limiting the number of students that can join the class to ensure that we have enough 1-on-1 time with each student.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be emailing you a link with more details and instructions on how to enroll.
Stay tuned, Justin & Nat
P.S.: Today’s action items:
Action Item #1: Write down what would be different in your life and work if you had technical skills.
Action Item #2: Hit reply and tell me what you would DO tomorrow if you woke up and had the skills (HTML, CSS, SQL) of a technical marketer.
Example: “I would update our website without having to wait for engineering to make the changes I want.”
Take 15 minutes. Think about what it would be like. Then hit reply and share it with me.
P.P.S.: Be looking out for tomorrow’s email with more details on the course and enrollment info.
Once those were all out, we were able to start the launch emails.
Launch Emails
Within the launch emails, we wanted to create a few different forms of urgency to encourage people to buy. Customers will tend to wait until the last minute to make a decision, so you want to give them a few different last minutes to increase the number of total sales you get.
We did this by creating three different deadlines: an early bird deadline, a bonus content deadline, and then the final deadline. Here’s how those emails looked.
Launch Email 1 (Opening + Early Bird Discount)
Good morning!
The Become a Technical Marketer course is now LIVE and open for enrollment.
We stayed up way too late last night getting everything ready for today. Also, as we were building out some new lessons for you all we got to talking and decided to add more bonuses.
Really good bonuses. Like…
Unlimited Consulting with a group of other technical marketers, curated and managed by us
30-Minute Strategy Skype Call with Nat and Justin to help you apply your new technical skills
AND!
As a gift to all of you eagerly awaiting launch day, both full-pay packages are 15% off till tomorrow night at midnight EST.
BOOM!
Just use the coupon code SKILLBUILDER at checkout. To get all of the details on the course and enroll, click here …
So, now you have two options.
Option #1: Keep being someone who someone who tries to hack their technical marketing education together over years, half- completing programming tutorials and trying to apply them to marketing on your own.
Option #2: Join Become a Technical Marketer and let us help you build skills that will make you a drastically better marketer (and drastically change your earnings trajectory).
Learn technical skills without going through a $20k dev bootcamp, or getting a $100k college degree.
Show your boss and co-workers how talented you are.
Become one of the most talented and valuable marketers in the world.
…
What’s it going to be?
Click here to join the Become a Technical Marketer course
Justin & Nat
P.S. The discount goes away at Midnight EST tomorrow, so get in at the lower price now while you can!
Launch Email 2 (Early Bird Closing)
Hey!
Two quick reminders…
Reminder #1: Become a Technical Marketer, our killer new course, just opened for enrollment.
If you want to build your technical skills so you can do cool stuff like…
Build landing pages and test your own ideas, without help from developers
Write and run your own SQL queries to analyze data Automate tedious aspects of your job (reporting, ugh) Get paid more!
…then you should be building up your technical skills
The best way to become technical (short of taking years to become a programmer)? Buy our new course and we’ll make you a dangerous, technically proficient marketer.
In fact: If you don’t automate one aspect of your work after going through lesson 1, I require you to ask for a refund.
Reminder #2: For another couple hours you can save a bunch of money on the course. 15% to be exact.
At midnight EST this morning the SKILLBUILDER coupon code will vanish forever.
It’s never coming back (not even on the next launch).
Just click the link below and the discount will be automatically applied.
So…
ENROLL IN THE COURSE NOW 🙂
Justin & Nat
P.S.: We added a “pay all at once” option too, so if you didn’t want to pay in installments, you don’t have to anymore.
P.P.S: Don’t forget this also comes with 30 minutes of phone time with us where we can talk about any technical marketing goal you have. That’s going away soon as well!
Launch Email 3 (New Bonuses)
Hey there,
For the past few days, I’ve been working on adding some awesome bonuses to the Become a Technical Marketer course.
Welp, this afternoon I’ve been busy hammering out the details. I think you’ll like them.
Here they are:
Bonus #1: Photoshop CS6 Tutorial (normally $199) I’m REALLY excited about this!
This is my friend Jeremy Shuback’s flagship product. It’s helped thousands of people learn photoshop effectively, which can be incredibly useful when creating elements for a landing page, editing an ad, or tweaking a logo.
Many of you mentioned that you wished you knew a bit more design. This class will help – you’ll learn how to leverage the world’s most popular design tool (Photoshop) in the world.
With this bonus you’ll get immediate access to his entire course, forever.
All included in your purchase of Become a Technical Marketer. BOOM!
Bonus #2: 3 Months Free of Moz.com SEO Tools Suite (normally $198)
This is my favorite tool for SEO. If you’re trying to grow your social footprint or your organic traffic, Moz’s suite of tools is a must- have.
Whether you get it for free with this course or not, I highly recommend using it.
Bonus #3: Digital Copy of Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
What is the VERY hardest thing to do when you’re trying to run a business?
No, it isn’t building a product…
It’s getting traction.
Traction (warning: as the co-author, I’m a bit biased :)) will help you figure out which of the 19 possible traction channels make sense for your business. The book is full of case studies, research, and interviews with 40+ founders (including the founders of Wikipedia, reddit, Kayak and more) about how they got traction.
With this bonus, you’ll get a copy of Traction for free to go with the other 2 bonuses.
How do you get the bonuses?
Easy.
Enroll in the Master course, Become a Technical Marketer.
When you do, I’ll email you immediate access to Traction, the Photoshop tutorial and your Moz discount.
Just one important thing…
All three bonuses will disappear on Wednesday June 17th @ 11 pm PST.
POOF! Gone forever.
Thats 48’ish hours from now
So stop procrastinating and go enroll now. You can be building your technical skillset in the next 5 minutes.
Justin & Nat
PS: Remember, Become a Technical Marketer comes with a 30- day MANDATORY refund policy. If you don’t improve one aspect of your marketing job with your new technical skills, we require you to return it for a full refund.
So, if you’re on the fence, join and focus on execution. If the strategies just don’t work for you, I’ll make you get a refund. Sign up here, or just reply to this email and let me know any hesitations you have.
Launch Email 4 (Bonuses Going Away)
Just a friendly Wednesday morning note about something time- sensitive…
If you followed along with the Google Analytics reporting spreadsheet we sent out last week, you know that I’ve opened up registration to my new course on how to become a technical marketer… Become a Technical Marketer (we’re not creative at naming things).
This course covers everything we’ve used to automate outreach marketing campaigns, gain thousands of Twitter followers, dig into data using SQL and create and update landing pages without the help of developers. It’s also the reason I got a $60k raise within 12 months, as I went from a junior marketer to a technical growth practitioner.
Here’s the time-sensitive part:
The biggest problem I have is taking action. I over-analyze things, and come up with excuses for not moving forward.
I want to make sure you don’t struggle with the same things I do. So…
Two days ago I added three bonuses as an incentive for you to take action right now.
…and here is the time-sensitive part:
All 3 of those bonuses will go away at 11:59 p.m. PST today (Wed, June 17).
No more procrastinating.
Here are the bonuses:
Bonus #1: Photoshop CS6 Tutorial (normally $199)
This course will show you how to go from someone begging designers to help you make a single change in photoshop, to someone who’s capable and confident with design and photoshop. This is an entire standalone product that my friend Jeremy currently sells for $199.
But you get it for free when you join Become a Technical Marketer.
Bonus #2: Three Months Free of Moz.com SEO Tools Suite (normally $198)
This is my favorite tool for SEO. If you’re trying to grow your social footprint or your organic traffic, Moz’s suite of tools is a must- have. Whether you get it for free with this course or not, I highly recommend using it, and want you to reap the benefits. Plus, you need a Moz account to do some neat stuff with using Followerwonk to scrape your followers.
Bonus #3: Digital Copy of Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
Traction will help you figure out which of the 19 possible traction channels make sense for your business. The book is full of case studies, research, and interviews with 40+ founders (including the founders of Wikipedia, reddit, Kayak and more) about how they got traction.
How do you get the bonuses?
Easy.
Enroll in the Become a Technical Marketer course today.
When you do, I’ll send immediate access to the all of the bonuses.
ONE IMPORTANT THING.
All three bonuses will disappear TONIGHT (Wednesday, June 17th) @ 11:59 p.m. PST.
That’s just 16’ish hours from now
So grab the bonuses and go enroll now.
You can be building your technical skillset in the next 5 minutes.
Justin & Nat
Launch Email 5 (Course Closing Warning)
Heads up…
Enrollment for Become a Technical Marketer, our course on how to build your technical skillset and become a technical marketer, closes tonight, June 19th, at 11:59 PM Pacific.
That’s just a few hours from now.
This course was designed specifically for marketers who want to learn technical skills. It’s for marketers like me who’ve tried to pick up programming by reading tutorials and articles online for years… yet were never able to learn from resources created for people who want to become developers.
Try Become a Technical Marketer today (enroll here)
Reminder: Everyone who enrolls today in the Become a Technical Marketer Master Course will get 5 additional bonuses. Here are my three favorite…
Resource #1: A personal Skype call with Justin and Nat
Resource #2: Free access to a course on learning Photoshop (normally $199)
Resource #3: 3 months free of Moz’s popular SEO tool (a $198 value, free for you as a new technical marketer)
(Click the link above for details on all the bonus resources.)
If you know it’s time to start building your technical skillset, enroll in Become a Technical Marketer.
Here’s what you get when you enroll:
The full Become a Technical Marketer course, forever Includes 100+ videos, lessons and assignments that take you by the hand and show you the exact steps you need to take to go from no technical skills to writing your own Python scrapers, SQL queries, editing your own landing pages and more (even if you are starting from scratch). – Total value: $1,200..
Private Technical Marketing Community: This is where 100+ students are already helping each other, sharing new hacks and the results of campaigns they’re running. This is also where we’ll be running the Technical Marketer job board, for those looking for freelance gigs or to work as a technical marketer. – Total value: $350
And just yesterday I added a new bonus for everyone who purchases tonight before enrollment closes.
Web Scraping with Matt Ellsworth: This is an entire flagship course created by Matt Ellsworth. Matt is an expert at web scraping, and was the VP of Growth at Storefront, a company that’s raised nearly $10mm. While Become a Technical Marketer goes into detail about how to build Python scrapers, Matt shows you how to scrape the web using tools like Import.io and Kimono, and shares some of his incredible hacks for scraping hard-to-find information. This is the perfect supplement to the course. This course sells for $149 on Matt’s website (but you get it for no cost).
Additional Personal Skype Call: Anyone who purchases before the close of enrollment today will get one additional call with us to discuss how to implement any technical marketing ideas you have, or just discuss growth strategy.
Even better…
The course (and all bonuses) are backed by a 30-day mandatory refund policy, meaning if you buy the course and don’t get serious results, I require that you request a refund.
I’ll refund you 100% of your cost. No questions asked. So all the risk is on us. As it should be…
Try Become a Technical Marketer today (enroll here).
I’ve talked to several folks today who were on the fence.
Here is what I suggest…
Grab the $97-per-month plan and hustle hard for your first 30 days. If you don’t get MAJOR results, you aren’t going to hurt my feelings by asking for a refund.
It’s on me. If it doesn’t produce, you shouldn’t pay me.
Try Become a Technical Marketer today (enroll here)
Still have questions?
Here are some of the most asked questions (and my answer).
Will this course continue to be updated? And will I get free access to future versions?
Yes! This is THE flagship product of Programming for Marketers. It will be updated on a regular basis.
All updates are free, forever.
How much more is in the course vs. what you already put in your free email lessons or Udemy course?
Think of our Udemy courses or email course as two chapters in a book, and the Become a Technical Marketer course as being an entire college class.
The course goes into MUCH more detail, with use cases, examples, checklists and video tutorials on every single strategy.
Email lessons are flat. Singularly focused on tactics. The course is dynamic and specifically engineered to teach you multiple technical skills, not just a few (really cool) technical marketing hacks.
What if I’m literally starting from step 0? Zero technical knowledge whatsoever.
Yes!
The entire first module is about the basics of programming, software and web tech.
It’s specifically engineered to take a COMPLETE NEWBIE and show the exact steps you need to go from zero to technically skilled.
Can I afford this right now?
At the end of the day that’s a question you have to answer.
However, I can tell you that the skills taught in this course got me a $67k salary hike inside of a year.
The pricing model is specifically designed to enable beginners to get started without breaking the bank. If you’re in massive credit card debt or facing severe financial hardship, DON’T buy this course.
But I will challenge you on one thing….
Instead of thinking about how much ANY item costs, ask yourself how much does it cost in relation to how much it makes you.
For example, if you take a college class that costs $1,000 and as a result you can go out the next week and make $10,000 in income, would you pay for it? Absolutely!
It’s not about the bottom-line cost; it’s about the return on that investment.
Use the 30-day refund policy to your advantage. Grab the cheaper option. Work your face off. And if, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work for you, I’ll make you get a refund.
How much time will this take to complete the course? Great question!
The course is self-paced. Once you complete one lesson, you can move on to the next.
Each module starts by giving you a recommended time to work per day. From there you can work as long and hard as you like.
However, if you don’t have enough time or if life just happens, you can slow down and take your time.
…
Still have questions? Hit reply and let me know.
I’ll be answering email and would love to chat with you. Ready to give it a try?
Try Become a Technical Marketer today (enroll here)
– Justin and Nat
P.S. If this isn’t right for you, no worries! Tomorrow we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming of free technical hacks. And we have a good one coming. Stay tuned…
That was the last launch email. But there was still one more to send…
Post-Launch
The post-launch email is a final opportunity for people who didn’t purchase to still buy the course, even after the official “close” date.
We sent this email to people who had opened up most of the emails we sent, and clicked on the link to the course, but who never ended up buying it. We suspected that they were really on the fence about it, but maybe the monthly payment was too high.
So, we sent them this email:
Happy Saturday!
First, thanks for letting us invade your inbox over the past two weeks. We’ll be returning to our regular, free emails full of technical marketing goodness next week.
Second, I saw that you clicked through to our course landing page and ended up not buying.
Just wanted to ask you – why not?
We’re not pros at doing this course launching thing, so would love your feedback. Why did you decide not to join? Reply and let me know – I’d love to hear from you.
…
We also got a lot of feedback over the last few hours from people who wanted to get into the Become a Technical Marketer course but simply didn’t have the money.
I get it. To be honest, when I started out on my journey, I didn’t have the money either.
So I had an idea. What if the monthly payment was more affordable?
The cheapest way to start the course was $97 per month. I want to give those of you who are early in your careers a head start, so I adjusted it to $66 per month (for 6 months). That’s $31 per month cheaper than any previous option.
This offer is only good for 24 hours and will expire tomorrow @ 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. If you were sitting on the fence, hopefully this makes it a no-brainer.
Click below and you will be taken directly to the check-out page: Enroll in Become a Technical Marketer at the discounted price! Justin and Nat
PS: The course is backed by a 30-day mandatory refund policy, meaning if you buy the course and don’t get crazy results, we require that you request a refund.
We’ll refund you 100% of your cost. No questions asked.
So all the risk is on us to provide an amazing course. As it should be.
PPS: If you need a quick reminder of what is included in the course, click the link below for the full sales page. Click here for full details on the course
Click here for details on the course
This final post-launch email did incredibly well, accounting for at least $6,000 of sales that never would have happened otherwise.
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