Keisha Blair: Welcome to the Holistic Wealth podcast. I’m your host, Keisha Blair, wife, mother of three, author of Holistic Wealth and Founder of the Institute on Holistic Wealth. This show will showcase various experts in the key pillars of holistic wealth. Each week, we deliver the best information on how to become holistically wealthy and live your best life.
Today, we have a very special guest with us, we have Marcio Santos and Marcio is the founder of Nerd Digital and he trains his clients or he advises clients on how they can scale their online course to six figures. So that’s a great topic. If you’re interested in that today, Marcio, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
Marcio Santos: Hi Keisha, how are you? Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Keisha Blair: And likewise, I’m glad you’re here to share because I’m an online course creator. You know, due to my book, Holistic Wealth people came back demanding a course. So, I created a certification program. So, I’m eager to hear from you and I’ve checked out your blog and it’s amazing. There are some amazing case studies there. I read several posts already. And so, I know you have deep, deep expertise in all things related to course creation and launching and SEO, I am a big fan of that as well. So, can you just start with giving us a bit of your backstory, how you got started in this field and when your journey?
Marcio Santos: Yeah, that’s for sure. So, I got started, you know, over a decade ago, doing basic digital marketing. So, web and graphic design, slicing images so that they can be used on websites. And then I moved from there onto creating learning courses. I created some learning materials. From there I worked in more like communication design. So, designing websites and newsletters and things like that. Later on, I did some marketing work working at an agency where I worked for brands like BMW, Western units, Scotiabank, bank of Montreal. I kind of was feeling a little bit, let’s say over worked, right.
Working around the clock at the agency. And my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the time. And I made the decision that I wanted to be with her as much as I could. I quit my job and then I just started doing consulting and went back to web and graphic design and then started studying a lot of digital marketing.
So, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, content, marketing, a whole bunch of things. And I worked in that first for five, six years strictly in that scope of being a consultant. I was able to work with a company called Code fire, which taught me a lot and just like I happened to get hooked up with a course creator through my network. And that’s really where it started. This was just a year ago.
Keisha Blair: Amazing. And I’m still thinking about your mom, as you said that, you know, her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s because we’ve had so many guests who changed their careers or changed their lifestyles, me included because of like a sudden illness or sudden death. And those stories are always most powerful because it’s amazing the sacrifices that we all make. And so, I just wanted to go further into the course creation, because as I stated earlier that for me, in terms of my journey, as a course creator, my book was kind of the catalyst for that course being launched. I mean, the demand came from readers, you know, of course when I launched the book, I thought yes, it’s non-fiction, I probably should create some courses at some point, but I didn’t realize it would happen like that with readers coming to demand it. And so, at the first half of lockdown, I sat down and penciled it out for about six months and launched. So, I wanted to get from you in terms of, people knowing, you know, how will other people want this course? Am I creating something that somebody else wants or is it just me? Because the demand for me came through the book, but can you tell us in your experience how people can go about knowing that this will be something that somebody is willing to spend money on?
Because I think that’s the basics, right? In terms of even thinking about, okay, the launch strategy and what do I put in my course, the first bit of it is, well, will people even want this?
How To Assess Demand For Your Online Course
Marcio Santos: Thatâs a very, very important question. And usually, a question that many people ignore, and they’ll begin creating a course without asking that question. And without going through those types of questions. And when I train my clients, there’s a specific phase which we call it the first phase of the product phase, where we really dive deep into who your product is for, for your courses, what does that avatar look like? Then we go into, what is the key transformation that your course is offering to this person?
And then three is how we package, so how do we come up with a positioning statement that’s clear and relevant to that avatar so that they’re going to want to buy it? So that’s an overview of the process and one tactical thing that you could do. It’s funny that you mentioned your book because this is one of the things that I teach actually is that you can use other books for sources of content for you a course. So, when we think about a course, I mentioned before that we have to think about what is that key transformation this person is looking to make right? If, if we go to amazon.com for example, right? The world’s largest bookstore, and we searched for a book on your topic, let’s say for example, it could be gardening.
And the objective of gardening is what to have a beautiful garden for spring, right? So you can host your friends out in the garden. Have a barbecue and you want to have your beautiful garden. Cool. So type in gardening, under books on Amazon and what’ll happen is you’ll see a list of books and the books they’ll start to show you different types of gardening books. Some might be for, you know, multimillion dollar type of gardens. Some might be do it yourself. It might be a vegetable garden, a rose garden, different types of gardens that will already show you what people are paying for already. Right? You may think that wait, I said courses, but these are books. I’m talking about a course.
Yes, that’s true. But the way that the books are still answering questions that people have, right? They’re still trying to help people overcome certain obstacles. And of course does the exact same thing, except it does it in a different media. The course essentially can be like a book. The book could be like, as you said, the book can be more of like a blueprint for a course. Right? So you could use other people’s books as a measure to see whether or not your course would be interesting, but that’s, that’s one way to look at it. And this goes kind of counterintuitively to what other people might think, because the first thought may be Walmart go. If there are a lot of books on the topic, And that’s what I want to sell my course on.
Then there’s too much competition. How do I stand out? And there are many different ways for you to stand out. I mean, one, you still have to get people’s attention, which is a bigger, bigger conversation. And then you have to convert them into a lead and having a conversation with them. And so, there’s still going to be competition out there by your guests. And that conversation is well then how do you stand out?
Keisha Blair: Yeah, no, absolutely. And that’s also great, especially when you look at bestselling books, books that have been best sellers that have really resonated with readers on a particular topic. I can see how that could be a really good strategy, for people starting out. And of course, as course creators, sometimes we get bogged down with content questions. Like for instance, I remember when I was drafting, this certification program readers were like, yeah, we want to be Certified Holistic WealthTM Consultants.
So, they didn’t just want any ordinary course. They wanted a certification program and they wanted something that would help them, you know, some of them were financial advisors, for instance, they wanted something to go above and beyond to give something, you know, more to their clients. So, the question is, what do you decide and how do you decide what to put in your course? I think people can get bogged down with content questions. And do you know your example of books I think is a very good, good example for this because many people have that lead magnet. So, there’s the free mini course. And then they’re like, well, how much do I put in the mini course? You know, the big course, the larger course that I may want to charge in excess of a thousand dollars for instance?
And of course, you know, many people get bogged down with the figure too and well, what am I offering for that? And who was going to pay me for a course that costs that much, all, all important questions.
The Process of Course Creation and Execution
Marcio Santos: Then those are all the questions that we answer for our clients. One thing that I just observed, there are a lot of questions, packed together, and a lot of ideas percolating, and the key important thing that you want to do whenever you’re trying to tackle a new problem is to break that problem apart and creating a course is one job and launching a course is another job.
And so if we remove the launch conversation for a second and just talk about the course creation, then I think it becomes a little easier to start with. We talked about assessing the demand, and I gave one example of using Amazon to assess, you know, whether there are other books on the topic and how, how interested are people in this topic?
How many reviews are there you could look at that, but what are the quality of the reviews what’s being said in the reviews? What are the chapters in the book? What are they covering and what are they not covering? How old is the book? What are some trends, but there’s a whole bunch of ways that you can figure out the content that you’re going to put in there when it comes to depth.
One thing that I’ve seen that works really well is simply a good structure. Think about the structure of your course in nine modules. And nine modules breaks down really easily into three phases, and the mind works really well with three. If I say, for example, a sentence and I say, look Keisha, even as a financial advisor, I’m not a financial advisor. I have no ideas about that. But if, if I were even to say something like Keisha, you know, if you really want to save enough or to go to the world cup with your family next. You got to reduce your spending. You’ve got to invest, then you have to delegate as long as I can come up with three ideas for that, that answer already sounds more intelligent than if I were to give you 10 or give you just one.
People can’t remember 10, right? But they can remember three. They can remember three better, they can remember the three principles of physics. They could remember three, whatever. So breaking things down into nine modules usually fits really nicely into three phases because then the conversation becomes, well, my course helps you do get to this transformation and we do that by getting you through phase one or phase two and phase three. Right? So that that’s one good framework for you just to start with when you’re creating your first course is that, and as you’re ideating across these nine modules, You want to do your research. And usually this research, the best place to start with this research is with this one-on-one combat. If you’ve helped a client get this particular transformation before then go back and see what were the steps that you helped this client with to get there.
If you’ve never done that before, you’re trying to create a course because like, well, people aren’t making money online. I need an extra source of income, whatever your reasons are, you’re trying to come up with a course instead of trying to be useful. And that’s not a good place to start. Right. So the whole purpose of course creation, it’s more about scaling your knowledge and scaling how you can help other people. And it’s less about making money. Yes. That’s a lagging indicator. If your course is successful, people enjoy it. Great that transformation. You’re going to get some, you know, the sales afterwards, but the idea should be to help.
Keisha Blair: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a good framework for sure. And it’s simple, it’s easy to remember. And it’s also easy for people checking out the course in terms of the value added and, and whether or not they’ll benefit from it. And you mentioned metrics a while ago, which is so hugely important because I think most course creators, or we see a lot of that online now, how I scale to six figures, I got to six figures. And of course, that can be intimidating for some people just starting out. And as a metric, as you mentioned, if you’re not hitting that target, then you might feel that you donât have a good course when in fact you do.
So I just wanted to get into that because I know that most people are interested in that scaling to six figures bit. So let’s say, we’ve gone through getting through the hurdle of figuring out that we have sufficient demand for this course, which is important. And we figured out the content needs.
And now we’re thinking about scaling based on your experience. And I know there are several different variables in this. I see people doing webinars and launches and massive launches. Can you kind of break down for us once the course is ready? And I know there’s several aspects in terms of the website and the landing page, which also has to be the sales page, which also has to be good enough to convert leads but can you just break down what goes into this six-figure line, Jamie, and how do people get there? How do they achieve this with their first course? The six-figure launch out of nowhere. Can you just tell us, you know, help people get there in the journey?
Scaling Your Online Course to 6-Figures
Marcio Santos: Yeah. So I would go back to the last part of my previous answer, which was, you want to start with a real case study. You have to have proof that you’ve helped somebody get that transformation. If you can do that, well, then the next question is, okay, well, how do I do this for two, for five, for 10, for 50, for a hundred people? And you do that through. So there’s two answers to this one. It’s you want to start from your experience Right? So packaging that experience, breaking it down and documenting all the steps. That’s where you’re going to get the course information, which is going to help you scale. Then the next part is going to be putting a group together, Right? So when you’re first creating your course, one thing is actually this is a bit of a false belief that if you build it, they will come.
And the idea there is like, I’ll create my course and I just have to sell it to a hundred people or a thousand people, and I’ll make six figures, but you can’t just get people out of thin air. Right? So unless you have people before, that’s your first thing that you have to do. You have to go out and help more people. Now let’s say that you have helped more people. You have more case studies and you’ve refined your model, then you can scale it. And then the scaling process is more mechanical than not. So the second phase of our training is the funnel phase and the funnel phase is essentially building out a funnel, at least a very basic funnel that helps people helps attract people to your way. Helps convert them into leads, nurture them so that they’re ready for the next phase for your launch, but it saves these three steps, right? So in order for them to do that, you need a lead magnet. You need to be able to write some decent copy, and then you need to be able to string these things together so that they all talk together and automatically transform this person from a random visitor that you’ve never heard of, that you don’t know anything about into a lead.
That’s given you a first name and so you can start a conversation with them in the next launch phase. That’s essentially like the phase two phase three. Let’s continue with this hypothetical idea where you then have, for example, there are many ways you can go about this, but like one basic way is you have a nurture sequence email where you offer value to this person and you help them understand how you’ve helped other people, how you can help them.
You try to start a conversation with them with this person. Maybe they replied to you. You can try getting on a phone call with them, you can try inviting them to the group. I’ve been doing our live webinar and throughout this process, what you’re doing is you’re building trust. You’re building likeability so that this person can then be more likely to the purchase once you open cart. So that’s like one rough, very basic 1.0 funnel that you could set up.
Keisha Blair: And so I’m wondering about people out there who want to launch. But are just not, for whatever reason, not interested in doing it via webinars or via other means you mentioned group coaching. As one option and, you know, it’s so important to get that feedback and to refine the course material, you know, most experienced course creators know, for instance, when I designed the certification program, I went through several different iterations. Students, because they came forward and requested it, they had ideas. Right. And they had ideas on what they wanted to see and what would be helpful out there, where the gaps were in the field and in the industry and kind of where the information gaps were. And that’s so important for like the group coaching.
So I’m just wondering in your mind, like if somebody does not like webinars or a group coaching, kind of set up. Have you seen other options for launching and scaling your online course without those two components or like different variations of them? Like, probably like one-on-one, instead of group coaching one-on-one with several people over time to get feedback and to fine tune. Or, you know most 6 figure launches though, come from some kind of live webinars set up. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, is it that you have to have that webinar framework to have that six-figure launch where you’re speaking to 200 people and then X sign up and you get, you know, you get your six-figure launch from that?
And I know there’s organic leads through SEO and that’s something I also want to talk to you about, but I will let you lead us in terms of where we need to go, you know, in terms of the options available.
Marcio Santos: So, when it comes to a webinar, what you want to think about is that the webinar’s a tool to scale yourself. This’ll be able to scale your knowledge so that you presented to more people. The other thing is to see is to realize that the webinar can be used in two different ways. One is you could use the webinar to address people so you can use them for example, let’s say you just share on social media or you buy an ad to promote your webinar and you say, Hey, join this webinar to get the exact framework that’s going to help you improve your finances with Keisha Blair. And you’ll do this in the next seven days, you’ll be able to save 7,000. That could be a webinar and the whole purpose of that webinars to start this conversation, because there’s a few things that are going to do with where you’re going to attract some people you’re going to teach them. And then hopefully you’re going to monetize a portion of that audience.
So, you can think about the webinar as, as living, let’s say middle of the funnel or top of the funnel where you’re attracting people in and you’re having this conversation, then you kind of brought them into a lead. That’s the whole purpose of that. The other person or the webinar could be tatted deliver your course. So, your course could be delivered, will be called an evergreen style. Maybe you record everything first, then you make it all available. And then people consume it as, you know, whenever they want, or you do more of like a webinar style. So, you say, Hey everybody, I’m going to deliver my course on these days at this time log in and we’ll have a conversation with that.
So I think that’s how webinars can be seen. That’s what I’ve seen so far in the course world, but it is very effective. One thing that I’ve noticed a lot is that webinars are used mostly on the front end to convert cold traffic into leads and prospects, and even buyers like there’s, as you said, there’s a small percentage of people that will buy on their first visit to a webinar, but more chances are not what happens is that you deliver a one hour webinar and the webinar’s actually helpful helps these people, your audience get an understanding of their problem, getting understanding of, you know, how they can solve it, give them that.
Show them a clear roadmap for how they can get to the other side. And then during the video, answer some questions that might challenge their trust in you. Those go a very long way to helping you stand out in their mind because you’ve now delivered value to them. You’ve now helped them with this idea, this problem that they’ve been struggling with.
Right? So if we’re talking about finances, most people struggle with their life without actually engaging that problem. They kind of want to put it, sweep it under the carpet, want to put their head in the sand and they want to deal with it. Whereas if they’re on your webinar, you’re offering them a solution right then and there, the webinar can talk them through it.
And maybe you sell, maybe some people buy them some don’t, but at least if you’ve converted them into a lead, you can then have a conversation with them after through email to convert them later during your launch as well. And so, yeah, that’s how the, the two ways though that the webinars can be and webinars can be used both in evergreen, which are, you know, courses that kind of just sell forever all the time. They’re always open or you can use them for a course launches specifically.
Keisha Blair: I wanted to ask about organic traffic to your website. So, you know, you’ve posted your course, you have your sales page up and yeah, you want to get some organic leads and you want to rank in Google. So SEO is so important. And for most course creators, they have blogs as well, you know, that they use to attract visitors. So I’m wondering if you have any advice and especially, you know, with 2021. And I know things get updated very often with Google, with the algorithm as well, any advanced techniques? Cause it’s so, you know, it’s, it’s so frustrating for people to Google SEO trends and Google SEO tactics and you meet upon the same generic advice.
It’s the same generic advice that says put up a blog, mention some keywords, people will come and then often people don’t come. Often your article isn’t ranking or not on the first page. So any advice for people listening in on using SEO and maybe some more advanced techniques on how they can leverage SEO to get that traffic and to get those, you know, those page views and the rankings on?
How To Get Organic Traffic and Use SEO To Promote Your Course
Marcio Santos: Yeah. So I’ll tell you that doing SEO work is not easy for anybody. It’s not easy for me. It’s not easy for agencies. It’s not easy for experts. It takes a lot of experience and it takes a lot of hard work. So if you’re feeling that you’re posting content, you’re doing what you believe to be all the best practices. You’re not getting results. Don’t feel frustrated. Don’t beat yourself up. You’re not alone. Okay. So first thing I’ll say about that, the second is in terms of tips, if you’re a course creator, the one thing that I’ll tell you is that you’re probably sitting on all the content that you ever need to create.
And the reason why is, if we go back to the previous idea about defining your nine modules. Each of your nine modules should be created. So that we’re 10 modules or however many modules you have, they should each answer a specific challenge that your audience has. And each of those could be its own blog post. Right. And you might think, for example, wait a second, Marcio, if I just take my course material, create a blog post out of it and post it on the web. But if am I not giving away all my content Right? And the answer to that is yes and no. I’ll tell you a case study that can help you. So for one of our clients from, K heat from rad rates.co, he came to us a year ago and he had some SEO traffic and they’re doing, you know, several thousand visits per month.
So they’re already in a pretty good place, but he was curious to see what we could do together. And I saw that he had more opportunity. He already had a bunch of blog posts on his website. And one thing that you’ll find is, especially if you’re running a WordPress website, is that WordPress encourages you.
And a lot of the advice that you’ll hear is to postmark content, to use categories and to use tags. What happens is, do you use categories? A lot of categories can use a lot of tags. Then when you post too much content, what happens is you can actually do yourself, a dis-service. On the SEO side by having a site that’s too big. So there’s this important concept that, you know, among the SEO is that we’ve called link juice. And Link juice is the idea that people will link to your website. So let’s say you post a valuable piece of content or you go on a podcast and somebody links to your PA your website from that podcast page, right?
Each time somebody links to your website. What you’re getting is some juice, some linkages to that page and to your domain as well to your website. What you want to do is anytime you do receive a link and you can check this with a tool like a trust.com to see anybody that’s as links pointing back to you.
What you can do is you can carefully pick where you send the additional links shows too. So let me give you a very clear example here. Let’s say you have links pointing to your, your homepage of your website. And you just created a new blog post about a post COVID financial recovery, definitive guide.
And you want to promote that. What you’re going to do is you’re going to make sure that you link from your homepage to this page, because what that does is that sends some, some of this juice that that’s collected on your homepage to this new page. And what that does is it signals to Google that this page is important.
What you can then do is you can go out and reach out to your partners, your amplified. What we call amplifiers and ask them, Hey, so-and-so I see, I saw that you wrote about this topic, or I see that you have a page where you collect a lot of different articles on this topic. Why don’t you add mine to your list? Because mine is also a very important offer. Some very interesting perspective because it’s related to post COVID. It’s helpful for women and Or X, whatever X reason and the owner of the other page, I say, cool, I think this is relevant. And none of the other articles are covering this. I’m going to add a link to yours as well.
So through these types of practices, what you can do is end up building links directly to this page. And again, anytime you link to one, a website links to your website, what those links tell Google is that those other website owners are trusting your content. They’re trusting you. They’re trusting what you have to say. And what Google will do is reward you with higher rankings. So anytime that you get a, backlink what we call a back link to your website. That is the holy grail of SEO. Anytime you can get links pointing to your website, they are super valuable to your SEO ranking.
And they’re the fastest way that you can increase the performance on the SEO side for your, all of your content. Because anytime you get a link back to your website, it also increases what we call your domain authority. And so when you first create a website, you start with authority zero, and eventually you can end up with authority 100 theoretically. Right? So Amazon has like a domain authority of like 98 in Google has an authority. So it follows us what we call this logarithmic scale. And so that means that for you to get from zero to one or zero to 10 is easier than it is to get from 40 to 50. When you’re at the bottom of the scale, it’s easier to go up, but as you get up, the curve is steeper.
And so it’s harder for you to move up the scale. Anyways, the point is, is that when you increase your domain authority, it increases the learn. If all of your content, all of the pages on your website. Going back to the SEO, the specific SEO questions. If you have too many categories or tags, get rid of them, delete them. If you only have one category, good. If you only have one tag, that’s fine. You don’t need 50 tags. You don’t need 30 categories on your website, unless you’re like the Huffington post. If you’re running a small blog or your niche course, you should probably only have one category. If your course is Financial advice, just have a financial advice category and don’t create financial advice, home finances, auto finances. And, you know, don’t do that because what you’re doing is you’re just creating more pages on your website that aren’t necessary. Get rid of the tags as many as you can as possible.
And then also with the content, this is something that we do with our client is combine, your content as few pages. So, this idea that you have to create, and this is something that you’ll read all the time is post every day and create content all the time. What happens is you end up creating very thin content and Google does not reward thin content.
It’s very rare that you’ll find a post with less than 500 words, less than 700 words ranking on page one, they will, if they’re in a very obscure market and let’s say for example, crypto, right. So, if you’re right, if you’re writing in the crypto space and you’re writing about a new NFT that was just released, or you’re writing about a new update to Ethereum 2.0. Then you have zero competition, you could write something super shallow and Google will rank that, right? Because Google wants to show a result. So, if you have a small little niche website, what you can do is combine a lot of the content together. So, to give an idea, Getaway back to the financial advice topic, let’s say that you had a post that you posted on Monday, which was financial planning is important because any list, some ideas, then you have another section which is, reducing your debt.
And then the other posts that you posted. I don’t know, making your first investments. What you could do is think about a topic that could own all three of these posts and instead create one post that includes all three of them and view that page more as a definitive guide that this, that anybody could refer to later, over and over again, with these, with the information that you’ve posted so that this page now answers as much as possible about a specific.
Then that person having to go to multiple pages to get little tidbits of information.
Keisha Blair: I love that example of the definitive guide to post COVID recovery. I love that because not only is it topical, but it really jives with the second book, the second Holistic Wealth book that I’m writing, which is holistic wealth art of recovery from disruption, which is actually available for pre-order now.
And that definitive guide sounds like, kind of like in the same vein. So, that’s amazing. So there’s so many things that you mentioned just like in terms of getting the most out of backlinks. And of course, as you were talking, because I know how important that is and there’s real longevity in that Right? because I remember, this article that I wrote went viral. It was the basis of my book, Holistic Wealth. It’s entitled âMy husband died at age 34. Here are 40 life lessons I learned from itâ. That was the title. And I wrote it, a few years after my husband died and it got so many backlinks. I mean, it went viral and I wrote that article in December, 2017 and you know, viewers, listeners, if you want to go Google that right now, you’ll see, it’s still number one for the search terms, âMy husband diedâ, so if you Google, âmy husband diedâ, just on a whim, you’ll see that article ranked number one. And it’s been there since 2017, which is phenomenal.
And I think it’s just because of the sheer amount of backlinks that has, it has like over 150 backlinks. I mean, from 150 different websites, I don’t know if that’s still the same. I haven’t checked, but you know, as you were talking about the importance of back links, that’s what came to me. I was like, wow, that article, and then the other question that came to me is, because that just happened randomly, people just connected to that article. The title was amazing. You know, it was something very vulnerable, which I think is why it went viral. Right. And it really spelled out why this was such a very vulnerable moment for me and what readers need to take away, like those 40 life lessons.
But let’s say, somebody has this new website or this new course, and they want to get backlinks fairly quickly. I mean, It’s hard to get a viral article. It’s hard to repeat a viral article. I’ve never had a repeat of that, even though I’ve tried because there’s no formula. Can you, offer any ideas on how people can get backlinks fairly quickly and maybe high-quality ones, and I know that’s not easy when you’re talking about top websites, like MSN, and Yahoo.
But I’m sure that’s the next question that readers have in mind as well. How do I score those and, get those backlinks. You have a very good case study on your website called the âPinterest trapping techniqueâ. And I read that technique a few days ago on your website and people listening and go to Nerddigital.com and check out that Pinterest trapping technique article as I’m talking, I’m thinking, well, that’s probably a good idea for getting some quick backlinks, but like, can you tell us in terms of your experience? because I’m not very experienced in this. In terms of getting it set up quickly, what could be a few options for getting those needed backlinks?
How To Use Backlinks To Improve Your SEO
Marcio Santos: Oh, so that’s, yeah, that’s a big question. I mean, it’s a bit of a pie in the sky dream, you know, to think that you can very quickly get backlinks. It’s not something that’s easy to do.
And that’s why it’s so highly rewarded. So, because it’s something that’s hard to replicate. That’s why Google still uses this. At least with SEO, Google uses this because I’m not sure if you know this, but there is no rule book to SEO. There is only tests and experiments and then data that’s collected from those. And it has an experiment to then break these hypotheses about whether what will work in SEO. There are tools that, you know, that crawl the web that try to imitate Google’s crawler, so that we can find out how SEO works. The Google crawler works, but the truth is nobody knows. Not even people inside Google know, like the way the technology is set up the way the algorithms are set up in there based on what time of day it is, where you are.
If you’re on your phone, if you’re walking, if you’ve searched for specific things in the past, if you are a specific age, all of those things will impact what your search results are. I don’t think that this is easy. Now, if you want to go into execution, there’s still really good things that you can do, especially if you’re a course creator.
So one of them, as I mentioned, was to take the modules that you have from your course and turn those into blog posts. The second idea is to create a global, and if you think about a glossary or Wiki page, what this could be is the longest list possible. That’s the, you can come up with a hundred different terms that someone has to know or might want to know at some point in time when taking your course, and you can think of this as the, you know, the, hundred ideas on financial management or a hundred terms or financial advice that you need.
And in there, you can very quickly think of them as little tweets. You’re just going to offer up these quick definitions. So you, because financial statement, a financial statement is whatever balance sheet, a balance sheet is, whatever profit is. Right. And you simply define all of these terms. If you can put a page together like that, which shouldn’t be too hard. If you’re a course creator, your content, that should be something that you should be able to execute very quickly. And once you’re done it will look great. You’ll have this really useful resource for that, you could share this with your partners.
You could share this with people on the web and people are likely to want to link to this because it’s useful and it’s helpful. And it’s interesting. So if you make a good design with it, that’s a bonus, that can increase the likelihood that you’ll get more backlinks. That’s a second idea that the third one is for you to work with some partners and find it, figuring out where your partners are, what we call amplifiers. This is like a key step. The key step that you have to do, even for your correspondences, it’s an effective way to get backlinks. And these amplifiers essentially are people that have an audience that speak about related or adjacent topics to. So for financial advice, for example, if you are more in the, um, personal finance, you might speak with somebody that’s in real estate, you might partner with somebody that’s in gardening.
You might partner with somebody that’s in education. So there are some adjacent topics that are related to finance, but not directly, but that, you know, from a personal perspective, they might also be interested in discussing those. So another way of thinking of this is okay, who has an audience that could benefit from learning more about some financial advice
fundamentals, but they don’t, that’s not their core area. You can put together a list of those, what we call amplifiers and create an article, targeting them. So if you could come up with a topic, which is beyond the scope of this conversation, but if you come up with a title for that page, then you could find these people and then you reach out to them and say, Hey, so-and-so I featured you on my blog post because I think you’re great at this or good at that.
Here’s a link in case you want to check it out. That’s a very quick and easy way for you to get some traction and SEO because you put together something interesting. You’ll put something interesting for the right people. And three it’s likely that at least some of those people will want to link it back to your content or at the very least they will share your content.
How To Scale With Facebook Ads
Keisha Blair: Yeah. And that’s a good way of getting those needed backlinks as well, and really fast and efficient way. So that’s amazing. So that would be, that would be one example of a blog post and the glossary would be another example of the kind of blog posts as well. And, you know, as we were talking Marcio, I was thinking about ads. Because then, you know, then the conversation goes into, well, do I need paid Facebook ads? How much is my ad budget? You know, how much do I need to spend on ads to get the traction that I need to have a six-figure launch? And of course, I know that you also specialize in advising your clients on how to do this without having to do paid Facebook ads. And so I wanted to get your perspective on that. Cause I know, you know, of course creators have those questions in terms of, well, do I need to run ads? And if I don’t, is that suicidal? You know, am I creating a situation where I have no chance of getting that traction if I don’t have paid ads?
Marcio Santos: Yeah. So just to clarify in my program, I do teach how to, to set up and scale with Facebook ads. But the idea there is that you’re not spending all of your cash on Facebook ads. I think that the core tenant of the program really is about growth. We’re focusing on your growth and it’s doing your growth in the most predictable way. So depending on where you are paid ads, you may need paid ads or you may not, but let’s say for example, if you’ve built up a huge email list with 20,000 subscribers or 30,000. It’s likely that you will need ads. You can use ads to scale this even further, but you probably don’t need to get to six figures. Another thing is that if you don’t have a list, if you simply don’t have an email list or you don’t have, let’s say a Facebook group or somewhere where you’ve brought together a small community or, people that are listening to you is going to be very, nearly impossible for you to sell your course.
You might sell it to a handful of people because it really is a numbers game at that point. So, to answer your question about the Facebook ads, Facebook ads can be very helpful. And one thing that you want to think about, and this is actually something that I’m planning on executing now is to be a little bit more, a little bit more of the long game when it comes to, to ads.
And so your first approach might simply be to create an ad. That’s like a direct response. So, you create an ad and the ad says, where buy this course today on sale. Now that’s very direct, especially if you think about, dating somebody back in the day when I was single, I could think about, let’s say a hypothetical situation where, I see a girl and I like her and I wouldn’t just go up to her and ask her to marry me. That’d be insane. But if I said, hey, you know, I’m heading over there to the soccer field we’re going to play soccer do you want to join us? That’s like a first engagement first type of conversation at first. Hey, we’re going to the arcade next week. Do you want to join us? Hey, we’re going to, do you mind, would you like to go to the movies with me?
So little by little, you ask a little bit more of that person. You engage with them a little bit more until you’re ready to pop the big question. And similarly with the sale, you kind of have to take a similar approach. Whereas you might differ the first time when you show an ad to a person, the ad can actually be driving a person to a piece of content. So, you can send them to a blog post. If the blog post is valuable enough. And ideally there’s a lead magnet on that page that converts people, you can send them to a webinar, which again, goes back to this idea of why webinars are interesting. You can sit there, right? So, you can create an ad that promises a specific solution and they get the solution through that webinar.
And, what that does is it then builds up your email list with that you can then sell to these people later. So, because I said this idea of playing the long game with the ads is not to limit yourself thinking strictly about that buy now ad there’s a bottom of the funnel ad. Think about what other types of, what other content can you promote? middle and top of the funnel that makes people aware, for example, that they have a specific offer makes them maybe want this, this solution later. So, let’s say for example, you have a top of the funnel just, did you know, you know about these top ideas that you could be, these top things that you could be saving thousands of dollars on your taxes every year?
If you’re finding the finances, the person’s like, no, I didn’t know that. Tell me more. So, they maybe like go to a blog post or go to they engage with that content. And later what you can do is you can bring market to these people. So, it’s what we call remarketing is showing them an ad based on their previous behavior. Once they’ve been to your site, even if they haven’t clicked on an ad, if they’ve been to your site, if they’ve converted on a lead magnet, but they haven’t made a purchase. For example, this is like e-commerce style. We’ve learned a lot of this from e-commerce businesses. After they’ve taken a specific action.
It’s like, well, I know that they’ve downloaded a lead magnet, but they haven’t watched my webinar where they haven’t booked a call or they haven’t made a purchase from my course or my book. Then I can show them an ad saying something that’s more specific to them. If you market to this person, it’s more likely a few things are more likely one.
You already know that they’re interested in you because they became a lead. So you’re not showing your next ad to a cold audience. You’re actually showing it to somebody. You kind of know what’s likely to happen, your cost is likely to be lower as well. Right? So if you show an ad to the person that already knows you, your cost is going to be lower, which your click through rate is going to be higher, which then your sales are more likely to be higher as well.
So that’s one way that you can think about Facebook ads and being it’s going to be slower for you to. But that’s definitely a way that, that you can get there in a more profitable way.
Keisha Blair: Sounds good. And like, I know as you’re talking, people listening might be thinking about budgets and how much do I spend on Facebook ads? I’ve launched a book before, so I’ve had to do Facebook ads in terms of that launch. I know it’s specific to everyone’s budget specific to how much they want to spend, how much you have to spend and what you think that return will look like. And of course also with your personal financial identity because I’ve been talking about that quite a bit, a lot on this podcast, and I know you took the quiz Marcio. And so, the first part of the question is any rough ballpark that you see in terms of ad budgets for Facebook ads. That have been kind of effective in terms of providing enough value.
I know people are thinking about that. And, and of course the second part of my question is just in closing, if you could just tell our audience what your results were under personal financial identity quiz, that’s available on the Institute on holistic wealth website. I’ve had so many course creators on this podcast. They’ve described their webinars and conferences to me. And depending on your personal financial identity, whether you’re a minimalist or maximalist that can sway from, you know, I had champagne for all of my guests in my conference when I promoted my online course to bare bones, minimum launches, and both are, you know, both can be amazingly successful. And both can be an equally rewarding experience for your clients and your sales targets. So I’d just love to get into that with you too. Cause I think that’s also important.
Marcio Santos: I kind give you a specific, because it really depends. But what I could tell you is that there’s two key approaches that you want to take to this. And they go back to my previous answer. If you’re going with an ad campaign, which is very direct, where you’re just simply sending people to a page where you hope they buy, right. That’s like a sales page. Then like your book, for example, then what you need to think about is simply a matter of You really need to think about, you know, what is the cost of your book?
And then how much are you spending on ads, deduct whether or not you’re going to pay for shipping or not. And just to simply do the numbers so that you see whether it’s going to be profitable for you or not now, as you show your ads to more people, and if you have more ad variations, what Facebook will do, all platforms do this, but Facebook will help you decide which ad to show to people.
It’ll test the ads for you, but it’ll display that it’s for you. Ideally, what should happen is their cost per lead or your cost per sale. And your case could go down over time. So as it learns more than it should get cheaper. So when you first start off out with your, with your ad campaign, maybe you’re paying 10 bucks, a lead 15 bucks, a lead at 20 bucks a lead, but it’s possible over time that that can go down to 18, 16 to seven to $3 per person.
So that’s, that’s one approach is to really just do your numbers. And I actually have a free calculator that I can provide, um, for your audience later, if they want to do that. And then on the other side, it’s to think about it more. If you’re going with this more long-term approach, where you’re simply promoting your content and you’re using budget to amplify and promote your budget, promote your content.
That’s a completely different approach. And to that, You can just simply set aside a budget. Let’s think about your honor revenue. And then you say, okay, I’m going to dedicate this much to marketing. And then I’m of that marketing. I’m going to take a small portion of that and I’m going to dedicate it to promoting the content that I’m creating, whether that be a new webinar, like you mentioned, would that be a new blog, post, a definitive guide or whatever you could after you publish this thing and share it with your newsletter and everything, you can then use a platform like Facebook to amplify that to more people.
And then do the second step, which I mentioned, which is great market to these people that already took action. So if they’ve already been to your page, if they’ve already downloaded lead bank or whatever, then take the next step and inviting them to do the next step in the process. But that that’s join a free course or take a webinar with you or a vocal call with you or join you on a retreat somewhere. I know that you’re in Ottawa. So maybe there’s you do a live event, not Iowa. Maybe that’s the group that you want to. That ad too. So those are two different approaches that you can take to you’re defining your budget. Oh, and then
Keisha Blair: Those are awesome. Like, I love those ideas.
Personal Financial Identity
Marcio Santos: And then for the second question, which was my profile, I’m a Minimalist. So I have no shame in telling you that I am cheap. I really think it, and I don’t know where this comes from this like childhood thing or where I think that’s why I got into SEO where I got so attracted by SEO is that when I learned about SEO and how you could get traffic to your site, theoretically for free, because it’s still taking a lot of time and you have to hire people to help you with it and graphic design, all that stuff. But I think the initial idea of getting free traffic was like, what we could do that. Okay. I’m in, you know, tell me more, but yeah, that’s my financial profile. I’m very much like a value buyer. You know, I really want to get the most out of what I’m paying for. There are a few things that I’m a bit more bullish on like training and courses.
I spend a lot of money on that side. And if you were to look at my banks, they may be like, what? You’re not, you’re not a Minimalist Marcio. I think overall, I might be a minimalist as a result of the quick. There are definitely areas of my life where I’m not like, is my wife’s birthday yesterday. I spent as much as I could. Right. So in some areas, my family, for example, there’s some areas why I go all out, but other areas I couldn’t care less about, you know, certain things I just don’t spend in those areas.
Keisha Blair: And those are some great insights too, especially as it relates to minimalism and SEO. Cause you’re right. I think that’s why so many of us get hooked on SEO that notion of that free traffic and not having to always be spending on ads everywhere. So, so that’s amazing. And thank you so much for that insights Marcio, and as we’re wrapping up, I just want to give you a chance to tell our audience where to reach you, your website and social media. And you just let the audience know where to reach you?
Marcio Santos: Yes, for sure. You can reach me that www.nerddigital.com. That’s N E R D D I G I T a l.com. Or you can hit me up on Twitter as well @marciosantos.com at Marcio Santos on Twitter, or send me an email: Marcio@nerddigital.com. And I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have for, if you have a course, that’s ready to go. Or if you you’ve launched before and you need more help or you’re trying to scale your sales with their courses hit me up. This is something that I’m dedicated to. I highly believe that human connection is more powerful than AI and AI will never be able to disrupt human connection. And that’s what you deliver in a course. It’s your ability to help somebody through human connection. And so it’s something that we’re dedicated to here and they’re digital and we want to do more of is help more course creators get out there and scale it.
Keisha Blair: Absolutely. And thank you so much once again, for being here and sharing your knowledge with us, your journey. I think this was an amazing episode for people who are trying to scale a course or just thinking about launching a course soon. And so, yeah, as Marcio just said, you can find him on his website or social media, or just then. And email. So thank you so much for joining us today Marcio was amazing having you.
Marcio Santos: Youâre welcome. Thank you
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