[WAMA] Jerry Banfield: Best selling Udemy Instructor and Entrepreneur - April 23rd 7pm EDT

We're really excited to be holding this event with Jerry Banfield. He is a best-selling instructor on Udemy, SEO & Facebook Ads expert and motivational speaker.

Update 23/4/2015

Thanks to everyone for attending and to Jerry for the great content!

The recording of the event is now available for all War Room members:


Link to Jerry's SEO Course (Save $179) Exclusive Warrior Special Offer:

The Complete SEO Course: 300,000 Clicks from Google

Transcript of the Jerry Banfield Warrior TV: Warrior Ask Me Anything Event

[00:09]

James: Welcome to Warrior T.V. I’m James.

Daniel: And I’m Daniel. Today we are really excited to be talking to Jerry Banfield. Jerry has been a long time Warrior Forum Member, he is a bestselling Udemy author, Facebook and SEO specialist. Welcome Jerry.

[00:22]

Jerry: Thank you guys for having me.

[00:26]

James: Jerry, tell us about your story. How did you get to where you are today, and what do you do day to day and what are you most proud of in your achievements?

[00:34]

Jerry: Well my story seems like a miracle and it seems kind of ridiculous at the same time. So I started just messing around creating a website about three and a half years ago about video game addiction and now here I am talking to you guys which it doesn’t even kind of make sense. So I was so bad when I started out three and a half years ago, I got really frustrated, I couldn’t even hardly make a website. So then I learned all these other things and now somehow I am able to teach them.

[01:07]

James: So how did you go about learning all the skills that you have? Did you learn online or did you take a course at a University?

[01:16]

Jerry: At the time I started my company and my gaming addiction site I was in a PhD program at a University, the University of South Florida in Tampa. I was studying criminology there, so yes that doesn’t relate at all to doing things online and out of that I just kept trying to learn things. And I learned it all I swear I learned everything the hard way. I didn’t take a course on anything, I didn’t hardly get any help I just kind of rammed my head into the wall on just about everything, with Facebook, SEO, I did it all the hard way and learned a lot doing it that way.

[01:56]

Daniel: Yeah great, I know that a lot of warriors can relate to that, sort of going through their day to day struggling and just not seem to get anywhere. I have actually got a question just about that from Paul S. who asks, “Was there like an aha moment where finally it clicked and the stars aligned and you knew what you were doing?” I think a lot of people can relate to that. Was there any moment in particular where that happened for you?

[02:26]

Jerry: Yeah there were a lot of aha moments. I had this aha moment at the beginning. I used a Google custom search engine and put it in library computer search engines, and then I would clean up on the Ad revenue and obviously that worked horribly. And so I have had all sorts of aha moments along the way. And the thing is it is hard to tell with an aha moment if it is really right or not at the time. The data tends to do the best job of that so most of our aha moments have been crap. I have been all excited about stuff like oh yes this is going to work really good. And then it will work for like a week and stop or it will work for a month and stop. And I tend to try and figure out what I should do every day and see what works over time.

So if I can get a little bit of growth over time, if something will work and grow a little bit every day then I actually try to stay away from aha moments. Now that tends to be me getting into another bad or waste of time somewhere.

[03:31]

James: So was there anything that started off as an aha moment but has now turned into something that you do every day and you are really happy with?

[03:40]

Jerry: I guess the Udemy courses would be the best thing because I had no sales the first six to eight months on Udemy, it was nothing but frustration. I made my course free; I figured I’ll just give it away if no one wants to buy it. And then I had a big aha moment when I got included in the daily deals and could see my sales starting to actually go up and making a lot of sales. When I hit around $1,000 last July, I, “Oh wow this might actually work. I’m just trying this for the first time seriously. If I put my whole effort into this, I probably could do a lot more than $1,000.” So that is something now I’m doing every day.

[04:24]

Daniel: Yeah I know that you have a huge following on Udemy, you have got over 40,000 students across 19 courses as well, across a variety of topics like internet marketing, there is also some self help books and things like that as well that people can learn from. So one of the questions we have here is how do you actually come up with ideas for your Udemy courses and do you do market research prior to it or do you just follow your passion or your gut instinct and what you think will be successful?

[05:00]

Jerry: Thank you whoever asked that question that is a really good one. I actually do both. I try and do my creative passion, like I have a dating course. I think that has made around $100 which is awesome that people have paid to hear me talk about dating. So that obviously is just a passion course. I felt like doing it and knocked it out.

What I do now that helps a lot, I do pull from the Udemy. They put out a hot topics list. They tell you exactly what courses they need, at least in the subject material. So I draw from that and I have made several courses now off of that. With another instructor I went and found a guy on Odesk who was very good at teaching the material Udemy said they needed. I worked the whole process, paid him to make the course, and then we got the course up on there and now it sells really good. So I kind of do both. Having the passion is important and at the same time people on Udemy learn technical skills, so you have got to have good technical skills courses also.

[06:08]


James: So when you started off on Udemy obviously there was not much traffic coming to your courses, how did you grow that business to your courses?

[06:18]

Jerry: To say there is not much traffic coming, that is quite accurate. And I was really disappointed with Udemy to start with because on You Tube I could throw a video up, get all kinds of organic search traffic, all kinds of positive feedback. On Udemy I threw a course up: nothing .And one of the first things I did that worked well, I did a Facebook ad and put out a free coupon and that worked well. And then from there I just gave the course away from free everywhere, gave all my courses away for free everywhere, got a ton of traffic and then I got students in all the courses so then they were a lot more sellable, they got more reviews, more engagement, more organic ranking.

So the main thing I did, I just gave the course away for free and that helped out a lot. And most people didn’t want to do that or don’t want to do that because they are lowering their value. I figured if no one is taking my course I might as well give it away for free. And now I have finally disabled most of the free coupons on them.

[07:21]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting. I know a lot of people are following a similar tripwire offer and we see it sometimes in the war room, lots of Udemy courses are being given away for free and they are great courses. They are usually hours of content. People get a lot of value out of them.

One of the things with Udemy is that they all are video courses. What sort of set up and how do you go about producing those videos and making not just content but also the video production as well and making sure like it is really great value?

[07:57]

Jerry: What I try and do is I figured out a system that works for me, a way that I can very quickly make the videos. So I guess the shortest response I can give is the path of least resistance. The biggest different I notice between me and other instructors, they spend a lot of time producing the course, scripting material, making presentations. I go absolute as fast as possible. Like when I made the other day I made a little of an hour of video in two hours of actual time. So I set everything up, just pump videos out as fast as possible. I either do webcam like this or I do screen capture or I just narrate.

And what happens, sometimes I make a video that is not very good. Well what I do is I just ask people, “What do you think, what do you think, what do you think?” And that way people say, “Alright I hate this one,” And I just remove it, I put another one. “Oh good we like that one.” Alright. And then I do more. “Oh good.” So I just kind of brute force, get out as much video as possible.

And then occasionally I make something terrible and I have to remove it. But I’m willing to face my fear on that because I get a guaranteed result. I know when I make all the video it is out there. So I try and do as much as I can with the least resistance.

[09:17]

James: It is very interesting the way you talk about that. Adrian R. is asking, “If you were starting out now what would you do differently? How would you approach things differently?”

[09:28]

Jerry: I would start out now, you just erased what I had online, I would start out with creating more good first. And so what that means is immediately try and make some value. I wasted a lot of time getting started because I just was trying to make money, trying to do whatever I could to get sales. And that resulted in me wasting a lot of time not adding anything. So in other words when you make a video on something that is helpful to people you have added something. When you are spamming messages on Facebook, sending cold emails, trying all kinds of tricks to get sales in the door, that is not adding something in fact that is wasting people’s time.

Now sure, when I make a bad video that might waste people’s time too. But what I try and do is focus on doing as much good as possible and that tends to be the theme in all of my courses. Like on Facebook, do as much good, get as big of an audience as possible. Do as much good on SEO as possible. Give Google all the good content they want and then you don’t have to worry about all these problems that come from trying to exploit or cheat or things like that.

So if I wanted to do as much good you are probably okay well what does that mean? I would start straight out on You Tube because You Tube is loaded with free organic traffic and feedback. When you are first starting out getting told what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong is really helpful. And when you are sending out messages and doing a lot of the things people try and do to get started you get so much negative feedback, you don’t get any good feedback lots of times. So You Tube was the first thing I did that really helped me start to grow. And then from there I would go into Udemy again because Udemy has very easy monetization, tons of organic traffic.

So if I had to start fresh, straight to You Tube and to Udemy.

[11:24]

James: Interesting. We’ve got a lot of questions coming in and so we want to try and get through as many as we can but let’s jump into Facebook for a second. Do you find that Facebook has changed over the years you have been using it to advertize and how have you gotten around those difficulties?

[11:40]

Jerry: Yes Facebook is massive changes. When I first started out you could make good ads that get low cost likes, low cost traffic in the U.S. There are all kinds of tricks to get cheap U.S. likes. The newsfeed competition wasn’t as fierce. A few years later now, even global and I know I’m part of the problem this is happening, even ads and likes in Pakistan are starting to cost a significant amount per C.P.M’s. So Facebook ads are ridiculously competitive.

When I started out page likes were really valuable. All you had to do was rack up page likes, throw content out there. Now page likes are nearly worthless. So that is the biggest single change I have seen. Everything was all about pages before. Pages don’t get hardly any organic engagements so they are just nearly worthless.

Facebook is a lot better now about mobile ads. That is the biggest positive change I have seen. Facebook didn’t hardly have any mobile ads before. Now if you want mobile traffic like if you want to promote some kind of local business there is lots of good mobile traffic things you can do on Facebook that if you use the ads and take the time things like event promotion locally; really exciting and those weren’t available before.

So it is a lot different than it was before; it is a lot more expensive.

[13:07]

James: Have you got any sort of tricks that you use to get around some of these changes and is there anything you can share with us about how you advertize with these difficulties?

[13:17]

Jerry: Yes. Usually when a truck or a train is coming at you in life you try and get out of the way so when the expenses were going up rapidly on Facebook I just turned my ads off in protest for months, I said this is stupid I’m paying two cents a like in third world countries? I turned my ads off. So I had my ads off for six plus months, no Facebook ads. And then I came back to it and I found some more things like website conversion ads that work a lot better now. And the power editor works a lot better now it was really frustrating a while ago. So I just turned my Facebook ads off and started doing more things like You Tube ads and Google Adwords again. And that is sometimes if things are getting frustrating and being a real pain, sometimes just taking a break…I took a big break from Facebook ads and now I am back trying new things with Facebook ads.

Video views ads now, if you want low cost post engagement, video views ads are really sweet. I’m able to get 1 cent per video view in the U.S. even, really low cost engagement with the video view ads so I’m experimenting with those right now.

[14:38]

Daniel: So I have got a question here from Tommy F. who asks, “What sort of tools do you use to run your business and create those ads and like the Udemy courses and the You Tube videos? You have obviously got a home studio set up there. Are there any other tools or particular tools that you have found that are extremely useful to your everyday business?”

[15:03]

Jerry: Yes the first one that comes to mind is Camtasia studio. Camtasia studio if you use windows really helped perform all kinds of filming. That is probably the number one tool I used that is like a downloadable software.

I just got a brand new IMac which makes these webcam videos so easy. So that is a really Apple products I have found are a lot easier for making videos and I can literally now render a ten minute video and start uploading it in like two or three minutes. So I found that really helpful.

And then I use a lot of Google services, Gmail, Google calendar, to sync everything up.

And then I just keep testing things so try and test and set things up whatever is the easiest to use, whatever causes the least frustration, what can I do to speed things up and get them going faster?

So it is a lot of trial and error. One time I bought two microphones one week and then couldn’t figure out how to use them; there is a lot of trial and error all the time. This is another; drop cloth. I have got a different lighting set up; I just keep trying new things all the time.

[16:20]

James: Let’s jump back to where it all began with your gaming addiction website and the SEO and getting lots of traffic there. How did you track this traffic and how would you do things differently today?

[16:31]

Jerry: On the gambling addiction website I had Google Analytics and that is all I did to track the traffic. I actually got the website, I stuck an external link in Wikipedia that stayed there for a year so that was an early sort of hack I guess I did. And now I track things mostly on Udemy through sales. I just, where are my sales coming from? I try and have a specific like a You Tube video; I will tie in an exact coupon code. So I try and track everything to a call to action today, or call to action whatever phrase you are using, cost per action. So everything to me is about action, where is that sale coming from, how much profit did I make on that sale? And Google Adwords now, I can see exactly how much it costs me to show ads and how much in sales I am getting. And so that gives me a lot better return.

The gaming addiction website was a total disaster in terms of revenue. I spent money, I tried things like selling t-shirts. I tried all kinds of things, ad sense, absolutely nothing would work to make more than a few hundred dollars. And I think I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars trying to sell t-shirts. And I made about $1,000 total.

[17:49]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting because a lot of people do start these niche sites and they go through a similar thing where they are struggling to do that as well. I know that you do currently have your own blog at the moment. Was there any tips or maybe some tools, plugins or themes that you are found are really helpful to you as well?

[18:12]

Jerry: Yes. For the log, the main thing is just having the most words possible linking it with a video. So for Google if you want to rank first, a two to three thousand word post is what ranks in Google. And if you are trying to buy SEO on articles yes that gets expensive fast. So what I have found, another trial and error thing I have found, surprisingly I can talk a lot faster than I can write. I can talk about ten thousand words an hour. That means in an hour I can do three to five full length blog posts, just talking. And the best part is it takes no effort. I have been talking my whole life. I have got thirty years, maybe 29 years of experience talking whereas writing it takes a lot more energy. And I can’t make nearly as much writing.

So I just talk everything now and then I have workers on Odesk that actually transcribe what I say and put that in a blog post. So that ends up allowing me to produce five plus times as many blog posts in the same amount of time that other people take to write their blog post.

So again just do more good, more quantity out there. And if you don’t have a desire to hire someone on Odesk even using some automated program like dictation speech to text, even using that can work a lot better than trying to write out your post.

So same thing, try the path of least resistance. What is the easiest way for me to put the most out there in the least time.

[19:55]

Daniel: That is really interesting because a lot of people go through and they are so concerned with SEO, they just want the 1.5% keyword density and they want to make sure they have the H1’s and H3’s correctly done. But what you are saying is go for that. Do you have any particular keywords in mind when you rank or is it just all about what you want to sort of say at that time?

[20:18]

Jerry: At first I don’t know what is worth ranking on. So what I do is I just talk and make what I want to, what I am passionate about first. And then I look at my webmaster tools and see okay where am I coming up in search results, what are people looking for? And so far this has been my biggest SEO success, at least on my website. I was talking about Patreon and I saw the competition was low and tons of search results. So then what did I do I made several more videos about patreon and then actually sat there and wrote a blog post on the main keyword I saw people were searching which was top patreon earners. So I sat there and put a lot of effort into writing a very targeted blog post and now that one blog post brings in a ton of traffic. And then I have a little hello bar to link to my patreon profile to get actual conversions in there so that people will pledge to me, I pledge back.

So what I do is I just start with whatever I want, I watch the same thing on You Tube. I make videos, often they don’t get a lot of search results but what I do I see okay here is what people are searching for and then I aim a video specifically at okay let’s…like with the Facebook ads I just put out a couple of brand new tutorials to start. I saw oh people are searching for all these terms. So now Facebook dark post, Facebook power editorial, Facebook cheap ads, Facebook marketing. And once I see what people are actually looking for, then I aim the intentional effort that way.

[22:00]

James: You mentioned a few times you have used freelancers to help you transcribe your videos or all these other tasks. What are the most important tasks that you have gotten freelancers to do for you and how can other people leverage this talent online?

[22:14]

Jerry: The most valuable task I have got freelancers to do actually is to teach a course with me on Udemy. That has been an amazing opportunity because they are sitting on there with all this experience and they don’t know what to do with it. And all I have to do is go find them which takes time, which takes effort, which requires screening through a lot of people, but there is a goldmine on there if you can go find the right freelancers who know the right things and bring them in, get them to teach a course with you and then put the course on Udemy. And that has been the single most valuable thing I have done so far because that is actually producing ongoing revenue, for both me and the freelancer get s a cut of the course too. So they have actually made more money already on the sales than they did to make the course. And for them it is a guaranteed win because I have just paid them to make the course, I get the copyright and then I say, “Hey will you answer the questions in the course for a percentage of sales?”

So it is a guaranteed win for them and for me , I already know the topic is hot, it is pretty much a guaranteed win for me too as long as I get a good freelancer through all of the steps it takes to actually get them to make the course.

[23:31]

James: So let’s talk about Udemy a bit more. How many people do you find sign up for your courses that don’t pay and how do you get them to actually fully subscribe to the course and be a paying customer?

[23:44]

Jerry: When I started out I just gave my course away for free and now I have things like if you buy a warrior special offer then you get a free code. And I’ll have giveaways like I will give a few of my courses away free every month. Other than that I don’t have free coupons available. So what I did is I just built a big following to start with and then closed the floodgates so to speak. So now that I’m established, now people have to pay to get in and then that helps me to make more sales.

What I did originally to monetize and what I do now almost every day, all those people who just came in and took the course for free, I have essentially got them on a mailing list now. Udemy allows me to send two promotional announcements offering another Udemy course to every course twice a month. So if someone took ten of my courses free and now I have made ten more courses I can send them up to twenty promotional emails every month through Udemy’s system. So that is what I did to turn all those free opt-ins essentially, or free people taking courses into additional sales.

And the best part is Udemy then tries to turn all of them into sales also because every course someone is enrolled in, Udemy tries to email market to them in addition to what I do. So that is why I love Udemy. Udemy is a good distributor. Like if you can get your physical product in the right store, Udemy does a very good job the same way like Wal-Mart or Target might do to sell your physical product.

[25:26]

Daniel: That is really interesting. I know that our Warrior payment system has a similar integration with that as well. Do you find that is enough to …like organic traffic or do you still need to invest in say Facebook marketing and You Tube videos and things like that to really take it to the next level?

[25:45]

Jerry: Yes you definitely…the way I look at it is my main responsibilities on Udemy, first I have to make courses. Nothing happens without making courses. Once I have made courses my second responsibility is to get those first sales in, get those original sales. I looked at my data; I have 20 something courses now. Last month the average customer bought between three to five courses in one month. About two thirds of the course sales were repeat purchases from people buying three to five courses. So that means the original customer is extremely valuable.

So what I do, I have my You Tube channel, my websites, everything is designed to make that original sale because once I have made that sale, then Udemy can hit them with additional sales, then I can hit them with those promo emails and most of the time I’m looking at an average of two to three more course purchases out of that person that purchase the first course. And if you combine that it is this positive feedback loop then which is amazing. And you won’t get that positive feedback loop started just on Udemy. So you really need to make the original sales, then Udemy will make some more organic sales which makes it easier to make more of my original sales and it just builds on itself. And it is got incredible momentum now.

[27:15]

James: You use Udemy and a lot of the warriors use Udemy as well. Have you tried any of the other online education platform windows or any of the other offerings?

[27:28]

Jerry: Yes I have replied twice to Lynda now, no response there so not sure what is up with that. I have hundreds of courses I have tried to put on skill feed and skill feed is true passive income. Once you get a course on there like Udemy I have to answer questions, I have to keep the course updated, Udemy takes work it is more active income. Skill feed is great, if you can actually get your videos uploaded. Skill feed has got a huge backlog of videos they haven’t went through to review yet, their business system is not very efficient right now, but I have put a lot of effort into Skill feed to get all my videos up there. And I also have a course on curious.com which is Yahoo’s learning platform and the problem with curious is they don’t have much traffic there. So there is no point. I also put a course on an Indian learning website. There is no point in putting your course somewhere that doesn’t have traffic. Udemy has got traffic, Lynda has got traffic, Skill feed has some traffic but the process is a disaster.

And most other places they just don’t have the traffic to merit the time you take to put the course up there.

So that is my experience so far with trying other platforms.

[28:50]

James: I’m curious if on Udemy there are any features that you wish they had which would help you out to get more visits or more clicks or whatever it might be, more sales. Is there is any one feature or two features that you think they are really missing and you would like to see?

[29:10]

Jerry: As an instructor I would love to see more conversion tracking. I can see exactly which promo code was used to buy my courses and in the reports I can see more details like was it a Udemy or organic sale, did it come from my website? In terms of really lasering in on what the difference was between tracking sales there is not a lot of resources I can do. Even using Google Analytics it can still be hard to match everything up and it takes a lot of time. So if you notice with me I try not to take time to do the things if possible. And I would love to see more landing page optimization. They don’t have many AB tests set up. I just emailed instructor support; they said it is not a priority.

So for promo videos, the new landing page set up has a promo video that takes up at least a third of the screen. The promo video is one of the huge edges I have got selling my courses. The Udemy team gives you a perfect promo formula however that is not what I have found actually works to sell my courses. For better or worse if I put my face in the promo videos the sales usually dive. If I do screen capture, the sales usually do really good. I have literally seen the sales almost stop when I put a promo video of my face on there talking. And then I take it and put a screen capture on there and the sales immediately start back. And I’m like well that was good feedback to get. Don’t put my face on the video; that is good.

So more testing integrated hopefully will be something they do. Most testing is not ideal if you have to manually put one promo video up and then manually replace it with another one. Overall though using coupon codes, it is really easy to tell. For example my Google Adwords campaigns are working right now. The promo code and the Google conversion tracking makes that really easy.

Facebook conversion tracking [31:11 pixel.] I have been begging, I have tried asking them for theirs; they don’t have Facebook conversion tracking pixels right now and I have tried to explain to them look I have the top Facebook course give me a pixel, I can’t do anything with Facebook ads in Udmey until you give me the pixel because there is no point in even trying until conversion tracking is set up.

Facebook conversion tracking and Google, what they actually allow you to bid on in Google and Facebook is a fraction of the data they have about their users. So if you really want to get good results, you have got to let them use conversion tracking that is integrated. When Facebook makes a sale or Google makes a sale and you have got a track, then they know what they did right. So if they know what they did right they can use 100% of their data to try and do it again because they both want you to spend as much money as possible and they know if they are giving you what you want you will keep spending more money with them.

So I think that is a good overview of what I’m looking for out of the Udemy features now.

[32:18]

James: I think that gives a real insight to the way you think about the data and stuff behind the scenes. Look we are running out of time but we have got a few more questions. Dan W. is asking, “What is the most common or biggest mistake you see people make when starting on Udemy and what would you recommend to them?”

[32:40]

Jerry: It is the same mistake I made: expecting instant results. I put up a course and I was so mad. Look I put all this time and energy into this course and no one is buying it. So Udemy works really good over the long term but expecting instant results on Udemy is a big disappointment. So I would try and do consistent daily work myself, because then I don’t do my work based on results. When I started out, I put a ton of Energy into Udemy in one day, get my course up, be all excited: no sales for a month. So then I would say forget Udemy, wait a couple of months, I would make a couple of sales. Okay let me do a little bit more. Same thing, a bunch of energy, no more sales. Okay forget about it.

So essentially it took me eight months to take Udemy seriously and it seems most people, same thing. Either they put too much in and then withdraw and say screw it, it is not worth my time. Or, they are so fear motivated which I understand that they are so worried about things going wrong nothing gets done. Let’s talk about this, let’s think about it, let me script it.

I started working with another instructor, local man, I mean it literally took several weeks to just try and figure out he wanted the first course position and just talking, what should we do? And I tried to explain to him I have made three courses right now since you have been emailing me about this. So Udemy is a very quick system. It is not like setting up or teaching a course at University. You can just throw whatever you want out there and you don’t have to worry about losing your job if you give them some bad content. They will say no and you can try again.

So it rewards not being afraid. You just throw stuff out there and if people don’t like it you will take it off.

[34:40]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting what you were saying about people jumping around from one ship to another, not really giving their 100% all day. They only give 100% for a short period of time and then they give up after a period of time. We have got a question here from Bruno who is pretty serious about becoming a Udemy instructor. He has got some eBooks and things like that but he is a little bit camera shy. What would you suggest how to go about becoming an Udemy instructor for someone in Bruno’s situation?

[35:08]

Jerry: Screen capture, screen capture is what I did starting out because I on a more practical note just thought it was too much of a pain to try and do videos on camera and I noticed I rarely watched anyone else’s videos on camera. All the videos I watched were usually screen capture because I was trying to learn how to do something and I really don’t need you to talk about it, just show me what it is. And so if you are camera shy you have to work around that. So screen capture is a really easy way to work around that. It avoids all of the time it takes to make a presentation also.

What I see are a lot of instructors that don’t like going on camera, they spend hours making a beautiful power point presentation that then takes ten minutes to present. If you just screen captured it, it wouldn’t look maybe quite as nice but you would have an hour or two of video in the same time it took to make ten minutes.

And with about everything I say this having done it the hard way. I made power points getting started and I said this is stupid; it takes too long to make this damn thing. Why don’t I just capture the screen? So screen capture.

[36:23]

James: You have a warrior special offer available now for the warriors, your complete SEO course which has had 15,000 and more students. Would you like to tell us a bit more about that course and a bit more about the offer?

[36:36]

Jerry: Yes it is a fresh perspective on SEO because when I was trying to do SEO I tried to learn all these tricks, tried back links, all kinds of SEO tricks, looked at all kinds of other people’s products, hired freelancers, bought people’s products, bought Fivr gigs, don’t do that. And SEO is really frustrating because all I was looking at is I guess the normal way people look at SEO. “Well I have these keywords, I want to rank on them, I need traffic, it sucks I’m not on the first page.” And that is what I thought of SEO.

And then what I discovered it is all about inbound marketing. If you really want to do SEO, it is just looking at your inbound marketing data and then using that to intentionally make good content straight at the keywords you are ranking for.

So like I shared about make an article and look at the search terms and then intentionally make another article straight on those search terms. And forget about competition. So that is what I do in my course. I give you a fresh perspective. SEO Was not a world of just trying to rank your website against other people’s websites because it is a world of all websites ranking on all keyword terms everywhere. So the fresh perspective is this: I don’t just have to do SEO on my website, I can do it on my You Tube channel. No t only that I can apply SEO to my Udemy courses, on my warrior forum posts. I can do SEO anywhere.

And think about it this way. Is it easier to do SEO on my page rank two website or is it easier to do SEO on my page rank nine You Tube video or on my page rank whatever Udemy is? One of my biggest successes I have had recently is search traffic on my Udemy courses. So I shared all those free coupons back links. How many times have you heard back links in SEO? I shared free coupons from my Udemy courses and they got shared virally. They went viral or whatever all over the place; back links absolutely everywhere. My organic search traffic went from like 50 to a few hundred, to over a thousand on one course in one month. And these are all search traffic. You would have to pay anywhere from $1 to $10 a click in Google Adwords to get that same person to go there.

And that is what was amazing about it. I tried all kinds of tricks to get stuff like that for my website, nothing worked. I share a few Udemy coupons: back links everywhere. So the idea is think of SEO across everything you could possibly use, instead of just thinking SEO is this limited competitive thing on your website.

So the course goes into a lot of detail then about how to essentially have an open mind about SEO, like okay I’m going to optimize my Udemy courses, You Tube channel, website, Warrior forum post. I’m going to optimize everything for SEO and I’m forgetting about the competition. I don’t care where I’m ranking on these keywords. It is like a fire sale, I’m just going to go and grab as many keywords as I can get and walk out with them.

[40:07]

Daniel: Yeah that is a really great strategy. I know in using that strategy you have been able to generate over 300,000 clicks to your You Tube channel, website and also your Udemy and warrior forum posts as well. So it is definitely a strategy that works. The course itself usually sells for $199 but warriors for a limited time are able to pick up the course with over a 90% discount, where it comes down to just $19.97 and we will put a link to the forum to that WSO in the forum as well.

[40:37]

Jerry: Yes and that is cheaper than even on my website. It is not even that cheap on my own website. So I am honored that you guys invited me to do this.

[40:46]

James: It has been great to talk to you today Jerry, thanks for your time. I think everyone will find it very valuable and we will see you around the forum.

[40:55]

Jerry: Thank you guys very much for having me, this has been really cool to do and I hope this has been helpful for everyone who watched.

[41:03]

Daniel: It definitely will be. Thanks a lot for your time today Jerry.

[End Recording]

Hi Jerry, Thanks for this WAMA. I just shot you a couple questions and hope to receive some answers based on the recent trends in Facebook Ads.

Thank you Alaister for keeping up with these helpful WAMA's. It's bringing back some good 'ol folks back here

Louis Kennedy

I just sentnu a question related to yr income. Hope.u can answer it.
See u on thursday!
Teo in Brazil

I just signed up and got few questions posted

I will definitely attend and ask questions with the pre-register.

just to compliment you for being so * kind and respectful * of your students in discussions.
I had another udemy instructor bark at me for wasting his time. so for that comment I can
no longer have any interest in that instructor's future courses and reputation (unfollow immediately).

thx you again jerry ! glad u are being featured on warrior forum.

I will never miss this for anything. Thanks for this Jerry. I sent some questions to you and I will be waiting for reply.

Thanks Jerry! Looking forward to the session.

Our Warrior TV: Warrior Ask Me Anything Event with Jerry Banfield is now live!

Watch here: http://www.warriorforum.com/

Join the conversation on Twitter: @warriorforum @Banwork #WarriorAMA #WAMAEvent

https://twitter.com/warriorforum

Thanks warriors & Jerry for another great Ask Me Anything event.

Jerry's exclusive special offer for Warrior Forum members:

The Complete SEO Course: 300,000 Clicks from Google

Could you recommend your best methods

Could you recommend your best methods Thank you

Is there going to be a transcript written up?

What it takes to launch a course on udemy?
What it takes to earn first 1K?
How many courses will add up?
And is promotion easy or difficult on udemy?
How long does it take for 1st sale?
What is the best approach to create videos of somebody doesn't want to video himself?
What is the best way to create videos?
If we outsource the voice over how much would it cost?

The recording of the event is now available for all War Room members:


Transcript of the Jerry Banfield Warrior TV: Warrior Ask Me Anything Event

[00:09]

James: Welcome to Warrior T.V. I’m James.

Daniel: And I’m Daniel. Today we are really excited to be talking to Jerry Banfield. Jerry has been a long time Warrior Forum Member, he is a bestselling Udemy author, Facebook and SEO specialist. Welcome Jerry.

[00:22]

Jerry: Thank you guys for having me.

[00:26]

James: Jerry, tell us about your story. How did you get to where you are today, and what do you do day to day and what are you most proud of in your achievements?

[00:34]

Jerry: Well my story seems like a miracle and it seems kind of ridiculous at the same time. So I started just messing around creating a website about three and a half years ago about video game addiction and now here I am talking to you guys which it doesn’t even kind of make sense. So I was so bad when I started out three and a half years ago, I got really frustrated, I couldn’t even hardly make a website. So then I learned all these other things and now somehow I am able to teach them.

[01:07]

James: So how did you go about learning all the skills that you have? Did you learn online or did you take a course at a University?

[01:16]

Jerry: At the time I started my company and my gaming addiction site I was in a PhD program at a University, the University of South Florida in Tampa. I was studying criminology there, so yes that doesn’t relate at all to doing things online and out of that I just kept trying to learn things. And I learned it all I swear I learned everything the hard way. I didn’t take a course on anything, I didn’t hardly get any help I just kind of rammed my head into the wall on just about everything, with Facebook, SEO, I did it all the hard way and learned a lot doing it that way.

[01:56]

Daniel: Yeah great, I know that a lot of warriors can relate to that, sort of going through their day to day struggling and just not seem to get anywhere. I have actually got a question just about that from Paul S. who asks, “Was there like an aha moment where finally it clicked and the stars aligned and you knew what you were doing?” I think a lot of people can relate to that. Was there any moment in particular where that happened for you?

[02:26]

Jerry: Yeah there were a lot of aha moments. I had this aha moment at the beginning. I used a Google custom search engine and put it in library computer search engines, and then I would clean up on the Ad revenue and obviously that worked horribly. And so I have had all sorts of aha moments along the way. And the thing is it is hard to tell with an aha moment if it is really right or not at the time. The data tends to do the best job of that so most of our aha moments have been crap. I have been all excited about stuff like oh yes this is going to work really good. And then it will work for like a week and stop or it will work for a month and stop. And I tend to try and figure out what I should do every day and see what works over time.

So if I can get a little bit of growth over time, if something will work and grow a little bit every day then I actually try to stay away from aha moments. Now that tends to be me getting into another bad or waste of time somewhere.

[03:31]

James: So was there anything that started off as an aha moment but has now turned into something that you do every day and you are really happy with?

[03:40]

Jerry: I guess the Udemy courses would be the best thing because I had no sales the first six to eight months on Udemy, it was nothing but frustration. I made my course free; I figured I’ll just give it away if no one wants to buy it. And then I had a big aha moment when I got included in the daily deals and could see my sales starting to actually go up and making a lot of sales. When I hit around $1,000 last July, I, “Oh wow this might actually work. I’m just trying this for the first time seriously. If I put my whole effort into this, I probably could do a lot more than $1,000.” So that is something now I’m doing every day.

[04:24]

Daniel: Yeah I know that you have a huge following on Udemy, you have got over 40,000 students across 19 courses as well, across a variety of topics like internet marketing, there is also some self help books and things like that as well that people can learn from. So one of the questions we have here is how do you actually come up with ideas for your Udemy courses and do you do market research prior to it or do you just follow your passion or your gut instinct and what you think will be successful?

[05:00]

Jerry: Thank you whoever asked that question that is a really good one. I actually do both. I try and do my creative passion, like I have a dating course. I think that has made around $100 which is awesome that people have paid to hear me talk about dating. So that obviously is just a passion course. I felt like doing it and knocked it out.

What I do now that helps a lot, I do pull from the Udemy. They put out a hot topics list. They tell you exactly what courses they need, at least in the subject material. So I draw from that and I have made several courses now off of that. With another instructor I went and found a guy on Odesk who was very good at teaching the material Udemy said they needed. I worked the whole process, paid him to make the course, and then we got the course up on there and now it sells really good. So I kind of do both. Having the passion is important and at the same time people on Udemy learn technical skills, so you have got to have good technical skills courses also.

[06:08]


James: So when you started off on Udemy obviously there was not much traffic coming to your courses, how did you grow that business to your courses?

[06:18]

Jerry: To say there is not much traffic coming, that is quite accurate. And I was really disappointed with Udemy to start with because on You Tube I could throw a video up, get all kinds of organic search traffic, all kinds of positive feedback. On Udemy I threw a course up: nothing .And one of the first things I did that worked well, I did a Facebook ad and put out a free coupon and that worked well. And then from there I just gave the course away from free everywhere, gave all my courses away for free everywhere, got a ton of traffic and then I got students in all the courses so then they were a lot more sellable, they got more reviews, more engagement, more organic ranking.

So the main thing I did, I just gave the course away for free and that helped out a lot. And most people didn’t want to do that or don’t want to do that because they are lowering their value. I figured if no one is taking my course I might as well give it away for free. And now I have finally disabled most of the free coupons on them.

[07:21]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting. I know a lot of people are following a similar tripwire offer and we see it sometimes in the war room, lots of Udemy courses are being given away for free and they are great courses. They are usually hours of content. People get a lot of value out of them.

One of the things with Udemy is that they all are video courses. What sort of set up and how do you go about producing those videos and making not just content but also the video production as well and making sure like it is really great value?

[07:57]

Jerry: What I try and do is I figured out a system that works for me, a way that I can very quickly make the videos. So I guess the shortest response I can give is the path of least resistance. The biggest different I notice between me and other instructors, they spend a lot of time producing the course, scripting material, making presentations. I go absolute as fast as possible. Like when I made the other day I made a little of an hour of video in two hours of actual time. So I set everything up, just pump videos out as fast as possible. I either do webcam like this or I do screen capture or I just narrate.

And what happens, sometimes I make a video that is not very good. Well what I do is I just ask people, “What do you think, what do you think, what do you think?” And that way people say, “Alright I hate this one,” And I just remove it, I put another one. “Oh good we like that one.” Alright. And then I do more. “Oh good.” So I just kind of brute force, get out as much video as possible.

And then occasionally I make something terrible and I have to remove it. But I’m willing to face my fear on that because I get a guaranteed result. I know when I make all the video it is out there. So I try and do as much as I can with the least resistance.

[09:17]

James: It is very interesting the way you talk about that. Adrian R. is asking, “If you were starting out now what would you do differently? How would you approach things differently?”

[09:28]

Jerry: I would start out now, you just erased what I had online, I would start out with creating more good first. And so what that means is immediately try and make some value. I wasted a lot of time getting started because I just was trying to make money, trying to do whatever I could to get sales. And that resulted in me wasting a lot of time not adding anything. So in other words when you make a video on something that is helpful to people you have added something. When you are spamming messages on Facebook, sending cold emails, trying all kinds of tricks to get sales in the door, that is not adding something in fact that is wasting people’s time.

Now sure, when I make a bad video that might waste people’s time too. But what I try and do is focus on doing as much good as possible and that tends to be the theme in all of my courses. Like on Facebook, do as much good, get as big of an audience as possible. Do as much good on SEO as possible. Give Google all the good content they want and then you don’t have to worry about all these problems that come from trying to exploit or cheat or things like that.

So if I wanted to do as much good you are probably okay well what does that mean? I would start straight out on You Tube because You Tube is loaded with free organic traffic and feedback. When you are first starting out getting told what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong is really helpful. And when you are sending out messages and doing a lot of the things people try and do to get started you get so much negative feedback, you don’t get any good feedback lots of times. So You Tube was the first thing I did that really helped me start to grow. And then from there I would go into Udemy again because Udemy has very easy monetization, tons of organic traffic.

So if I had to start fresh, straight to You Tube and to Udemy.

[11:24]

James: Interesting. We’ve got a lot of questions coming in and so we want to try and get through as many as we can but let’s jump into Facebook for a second. Do you find that Facebook has changed over the years you have been using it to advertize and how have you gotten around those difficulties?

[11:40]

Jerry: Yes Facebook is massive changes. When I first started out you could make good ads that get low cost likes, low cost traffic in the U.S. There are all kinds of tricks to get cheap U.S. likes. The newsfeed competition wasn’t as fierce. A few years later now, even global and I know I’m part of the problem this is happening, even ads and likes in Pakistan are starting to cost a significant amount per C.P.M’s. So Facebook ads are ridiculously competitive.

When I started out page likes were really valuable. All you had to do was rack up page likes, throw content out there. Now page likes are nearly worthless. So that is the biggest single change I have seen. Everything was all about pages before. Pages don’t get hardly any organic engagements so they are just nearly worthless.

Facebook is a lot better now about mobile ads. That is the biggest positive change I have seen. Facebook didn’t hardly have any mobile ads before. Now if you want mobile traffic like if you want to promote some kind of local business there is lots of good mobile traffic things you can do on Facebook that if you use the ads and take the time things like event promotion locally; really exciting and those weren’t available before.

So it is a lot different than it was before; it is a lot more expensive.

[13:07]

James: Have you got any sort of tricks that you use to get around some of these changes and is there anything you can share with us about how you advertize with these difficulties?

[13:17]

Jerry: Yes. Usually when a truck or a train is coming at you in life you try and get out of the way so when the expenses were going up rapidly on Facebook I just turned my ads off in protest for months, I said this is stupid I’m paying two cents a like in third world countries? I turned my ads off. So I had my ads off for six plus months, no Facebook ads. And then I came back to it and I found some more things like website conversion ads that work a lot better now. And the power editor works a lot better now it was really frustrating a while ago. So I just turned my Facebook ads off and started doing more things like You Tube ads and Google Adwords again. And that is sometimes if things are getting frustrating and being a real pain, sometimes just taking a break…I took a big break from Facebook ads and now I am back trying new things with Facebook ads.

Video views ads now, if you want low cost post engagement, video views ads are really sweet. I’m able to get 1 cent per video view in the U.S. even, really low cost engagement with the video view ads so I’m experimenting with those right now.

[14:38]

Daniel: So I have got a question here from Tommy F. who asks, “What sort of tools do you use to run your business and create those ads and like the Udemy courses and the You Tube videos? You have obviously got a home studio set up there. Are there any other tools or particular tools that you have found that are extremely useful to your everyday business?”

[15:03]

Jerry: Yes the first one that comes to mind is Camtasia studio. Camtasia studio if you use windows really helped perform all kinds of filming. That is probably the number one tool I used that is like a downloadable software.

I just got a brand new IMac which makes these webcam videos so easy. So that is a really Apple products I have found are a lot easier for making videos and I can literally now render a ten minute video and start uploading it in like two or three minutes. So I found that really helpful.

And then I use a lot of Google services, Gmail, Google calendar, to sync everything up.

And then I just keep testing things so try and test and set things up whatever is the easiest to use, whatever causes the least frustration, what can I do to speed things up and get them going faster?

So it is a lot of trial and error. One time I bought two microphones one week and then couldn’t figure out how to use them; there is a lot of trial and error all the time. This is another; drop cloth. I have got a different lighting set up; I just keep trying new things all the time.

[16:20]

James: Let’s jump back to where it all began with your gaming addiction website and the SEO and getting lots of traffic there. How did you track this traffic and how would you do things differently today?

[16:31]

Jerry: On the gambling addiction website I had Google Analytics and that is all I did to track the traffic. I actually got the website, I stuck an external link in Wikipedia that stayed there for a year so that was an early sort of hack I guess I did. And now I track things mostly on Udemy through sales. I just, where are my sales coming from? I try and have a specific like a You Tube video; I will tie in an exact coupon code. So I try and track everything to a call to action today, or call to action whatever phrase you are using, cost per action. So everything to me is about action, where is that sale coming from, how much profit did I make on that sale? And Google Adwords now, I can see exactly how much it costs me to show ads and how much in sales I am getting. And so that gives me a lot better return.

The gaming addiction website was a total disaster in terms of revenue. I spent money, I tried things like selling t-shirts. I tried all kinds of things, ad sense, absolutely nothing would work to make more than a few hundred dollars. And I think I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars trying to sell t-shirts. And I made about $1,000 total.

[17:49]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting because a lot of people do start these niche sites and they go through a similar thing where they are struggling to do that as well. I know that you do currently have your own blog at the moment. Was there any tips or maybe some tools, plugins or themes that you are found are really helpful to you as well?

[18:12]

Jerry: Yes. For the log, the main thing is just having the most words possible linking it with a video. So for Google if you want to rank first, a two to three thousand word post is what ranks in Google. And if you are trying to buy SEO on articles yes that gets expensive fast. So what I have found, another trial and error thing I have found, surprisingly I can talk a lot faster than I can write. I can talk about ten thousand words an hour. That means in an hour I can do three to five full length blog posts, just talking. And the best part is it takes no effort. I have been talking my whole life. I have got thirty years, maybe 29 years of experience talking whereas writing it takes a lot more energy. And I can’t make nearly as much writing.

So I just talk everything now and then I have workers on Odesk that actually transcribe what I say and put that in a blog post. So that ends up allowing me to produce five plus times as many blog posts in the same amount of time that other people take to write their blog post.

So again just do more good, more quantity out there. And if you don’t have a desire to hire someone on Odesk even using some automated program like dictation speech to text, even using that can work a lot better than trying to write out your post.

So same thing, try the path of least resistance. What is the easiest way for me to put the most out there in the least time.

[19:55]

Daniel: That is really interesting because a lot of people go through and they are so concerned with SEO, they just want the 1.5% keyword density and they want to make sure they have the H1’s and H3’s correctly done. But what you are saying is go for that. Do you have any particular keywords in mind when you rank or is it just all about what you want to sort of say at that time?

[20:18]

Jerry: At first I don’t know what is worth ranking on. So what I do is I just talk and make what I want to, what I am passionate about first. And then I look at my webmaster tools and see okay where am I coming up in search results, what are people looking for? And so far this has been my biggest SEO success, at least on my website. I was talking about Patreon and I saw the competition was low and tons of search results. So then what did I do I made several more videos about patreon and then actually sat there and wrote a blog post on the main keyword I saw people were searching which was top patreon earners. So I sat there and put a lot of effort into writing a very targeted blog post and now that one blog post brings in a ton of traffic. And then I have a little hello bar to link to my patreon profile to get actual conversions in there so that people will pledge to me, I pledge back.

So what I do is I just start with whatever I want, I watch the same thing on You Tube. I make videos, often they don’t get a lot of search results but what I do I see okay here is what people are searching for and then I aim a video specifically at okay let’s…like with the Facebook ads I just put out a couple of brand new tutorials to start. I saw oh people are searching for all these terms. So now Facebook dark post, Facebook power editorial, Facebook cheap ads, Facebook marketing. And once I see what people are actually looking for, then I aim the intentional effort that way.

[22:00]

James: You mentioned a few times you have used freelancers to help you transcribe your videos or all these other tasks. What are the most important tasks that you have gotten freelancers to do for you and how can other people leverage this talent online?

[22:14]

Jerry: The most valuable task I have got freelancers to do actually is to teach a course with me on Udemy. That has been an amazing opportunity because they are sitting on there with all this experience and they don’t know what to do with it. And all I have to do is go find them which takes time, which takes effort, which requires screening through a lot of people, but there is a goldmine on there if you can go find the right freelancers who know the right things and bring them in, get them to teach a course with you and then put the course on Udemy. And that has been the single most valuable thing I have done so far because that is actually producing ongoing revenue, for both me and the freelancer get s a cut of the course too. So they have actually made more money already on the sales than they did to make the course. And for them it is a guaranteed win because I have just paid them to make the course, I get the copyright and then I say, “Hey will you answer the questions in the course for a percentage of sales?”

So it is a guaranteed win for them and for me , I already know the topic is hot, it is pretty much a guaranteed win for me too as long as I get a good freelancer through all of the steps it takes to actually get them to make the course.

[23:31]

James: So let’s talk about Udemy a bit more. How many people do you find sign up for your courses that don’t pay and how do you get them to actually fully subscribe to the course and be a paying customer?

[23:44]

Jerry: When I started out I just gave my course away for free and now I have things like if you buy a warrior special offer then you get a free code. And I’ll have giveaways like I will give a few of my courses away free every month. Other than that I don’t have free coupons available. So what I did is I just built a big following to start with and then closed the floodgates so to speak. So now that I’m established, now people have to pay to get in and then that helps me to make more sales.

What I did originally to monetize and what I do now almost every day, all those people who just came in and took the course for free, I have essentially got them on a mailing list now. Udemy allows me to send two promotional announcements offering another Udemy course to every course twice a month. So if someone took ten of my courses free and now I have made ten more courses I can send them up to twenty promotional emails every month through Udemy’s system. So that is what I did to turn all those free opt-ins essentially, or free people taking courses into additional sales.

And the best part is Udemy then tries to turn all of them into sales also because every course someone is enrolled in, Udemy tries to email market to them in addition to what I do. So that is why I love Udemy. Udemy is a good distributor. Like if you can get your physical product in the right store, Udemy does a very good job the same way like Wal-Mart or Target might do to sell your physical product.

[25:26]

Daniel: That is really interesting. I know that our Warrior payment system has a similar integration with that as well. Do you find that is enough to …like organic traffic or do you still need to invest in say Facebook marketing and You Tube videos and things like that to really take it to the next level?

[25:45]

Jerry: Yes you definitely…the way I look at it is my main responsibilities on Udemy, first I have to make courses. Nothing happens without making courses. Once I have made courses my second responsibility is to get those first sales in, get those original sales. I looked at my data; I have 20 something courses now. Last month the average customer bought between three to five courses in one month. About two thirds of the course sales were repeat purchases from people buying three to five courses. So that means the original customer is extremely valuable.

So what I do, I have my You Tube channel, my websites, everything is designed to make that original sale because once I have made that sale, then Udemy can hit them with additional sales, then I can hit them with those promo emails and most of the time I’m looking at an average of two to three more course purchases out of that person that purchase the first course. And if you combine that it is this positive feedback loop then which is amazing. And you won’t get that positive feedback loop started just on Udemy. So you really need to make the original sales, then Udemy will make some more organic sales which makes it easier to make more of my original sales and it just builds on itself. And it is got incredible momentum now.

[27:15]

James: You use Udemy and a lot of the warriors use Udemy as well. Have you tried any of the other online education platform windows or any of the other offerings?

[27:28]

Jerry: Yes I have replied twice to Lynda now, no response there so not sure what is up with that. I have hundreds of courses I have tried to put on skill feed and skill feed is true passive income. Once you get a course on there like Udemy I have to answer questions, I have to keep the course updated, Udemy takes work it is more active income. Skill feed is great, if you can actually get your videos uploaded. Skill feed has got a huge backlog of videos they haven’t went through to review yet, their business system is not very efficient right now, but I have put a lot of effort into Skill feed to get all my videos up there. And I also have a course on curious.com which is Yahoo’s learning platform and the problem with curious is they don’t have much traffic there. So there is no point. I also put a course on an Indian learning website. There is no point in putting your course somewhere that doesn’t have traffic. Udemy has got traffic, Lynda has got traffic, Skill feed has some traffic but the process is a disaster.

And most other places they just don’t have the traffic to merit the time you take to put the course up there.

So that is my experience so far with trying other platforms.

[28:50]

James: I’m curious if on Udemy there are any features that you wish they had which would help you out to get more visits or more clicks or whatever it might be, more sales. Is there is any one feature or two features that you think they are really missing and you would like to see?

[29:10]

Jerry: As an instructor I would love to see more conversion tracking. I can see exactly which promo code was used to buy my courses and in the reports I can see more details like was it a Udemy or organic sale, did it come from my website? In terms of really lasering in on what the difference was between tracking sales there is not a lot of resources I can do. Even using Google Analytics it can still be hard to match everything up and it takes a lot of time. So if you notice with me I try not to take time to do the things if possible. And I would love to see more landing page optimization. They don’t have many AB tests set up. I just emailed instructor support; they said it is not a priority.

So for promo videos, the new landing page set up has a promo video that takes up at least a third of the screen. The promo video is one of the huge edges I have got selling my courses. The Udemy team gives you a perfect promo formula however that is not what I have found actually works to sell my courses. For better or worse if I put my face in the promo videos the sales usually dive. If I do screen capture, the sales usually do really good. I have literally seen the sales almost stop when I put a promo video of my face on there talking. And then I take it and put a screen capture on there and the sales immediately start back. And I’m like well that was good feedback to get. Don’t put my face on the video; that is good.

So more testing integrated hopefully will be something they do. Most testing is not ideal if you have to manually put one promo video up and then manually replace it with another one. Overall though using coupon codes, it is really easy to tell. For example my Google Adwords campaigns are working right now. The promo code and the Google conversion tracking makes that really easy.

Facebook conversion tracking [31:11 pixel.] I have been begging, I have tried asking them for theirs; they don’t have Facebook conversion tracking pixels right now and I have tried to explain to them look I have the top Facebook course give me a pixel, I can’t do anything with Facebook ads in Udmey until you give me the pixel because there is no point in even trying until conversion tracking is set up.

Facebook conversion tracking and Google, what they actually allow you to bid on in Google and Facebook is a fraction of the data they have about their users. So if you really want to get good results, you have got to let them use conversion tracking that is integrated. When Facebook makes a sale or Google makes a sale and you have got a track, then they know what they did right. So if they know what they did right they can use 100% of their data to try and do it again because they both want you to spend as much money as possible and they know if they are giving you what you want you will keep spending more money with them.

So I think that is a good overview of what I’m looking for out of the Udemy features now.

[32:18]

James: I think that gives a real insight to the way you think about the data and stuff behind the scenes. Look we are running out of time but we have got a few more questions. Dan W. is asking, “What is the most common or biggest mistake you see people make when starting on Udemy and what would you recommend to them?”

[32:40]

Jerry: It is the same mistake I made: expecting instant results. I put up a course and I was so mad. Look I put all this time and energy into this course and no one is buying it. So Udemy works really good over the long term but expecting instant results on Udemy is a big disappointment. So I would try and do consistent daily work myself, because then I don’t do my work based on results. When I started out, I put a ton of Energy into Udemy in one day, get my course up, be all excited: no sales for a month. So then I would say forget Udemy, wait a couple of months, I would make a couple of sales. Okay let me do a little bit more. Same thing, a bunch of energy, no more sales. Okay forget about it.

So essentially it took me eight months to take Udemy seriously and it seems most people, same thing. Either they put too much in and then withdraw and say screw it, it is not worth my time. Or, they are so fear motivated which I understand that they are so worried about things going wrong nothing gets done. Let’s talk about this, let’s think about it, let me script it.

I started working with another instructor, local man, I mean it literally took several weeks to just try and figure out he wanted the first course position and just talking, what should we do? And I tried to explain to him I have made three courses right now since you have been emailing me about this. So Udemy is a very quick system. It is not like setting up or teaching a course at University. You can just throw whatever you want out there and you don’t have to worry about losing your job if you give them some bad content. They will say no and you can try again.

So it rewards not being afraid. You just throw stuff out there and if people don’t like it you will take it off.

[34:40]

Daniel: Yeah that is really interesting what you were saying about people jumping around from one ship to another, not really giving their 100% all day. They only give 100% for a short period of time and then they give up after a period of time. We have got a question here from Bruno who is pretty serious about becoming a Udemy instructor. He has got some eBooks and things like that but he is a little bit camera shy. What would you suggest how to go about becoming an Udemy instructor for someone in Bruno’s situation?

[35:08]

Jerry: Screen capture, screen capture is what I did starting out because I on a more practical note just thought it was too much of a pain to try and do videos on camera and I noticed I rarely watched anyone else’s videos on camera. All the videos I watched were usually screen capture because I was trying to learn how to do something and I really don’t need you to talk about it, just show me what it is. And so if you are camera shy you have to work around that. So screen capture is a really easy way to work around that. It avoids all of the time it takes to make a presentation also.

What I see are a lot of instructors that don’t like going on camera, they spend hours making a beautiful power point presentation that then takes ten minutes to present. If you just screen captured it, it wouldn’t look maybe quite as nice but you would have an hour or two of video in the same time it took to make ten minutes.

And with about everything I say this having done it the hard way. I made power points getting started and I said this is stupid; it takes too long to make this damn thing. Why don’t I just capture the screen? So screen capture.

[36:23]

James: You have a warrior special offer available now for the warriors, your complete SEO course which has had 15,000 and more students. Would you like to tell us a bit more about that course and a bit more about the offer?

[36:36]

Jerry: Yes it is a fresh perspective on SEO because when I was trying to do SEO I tried to learn all these tricks, tried back links, all kinds of SEO tricks, looked at all kinds of other people’s products, hired freelancers, bought people’s products, bought Fivr gigs, don’t do that. And SEO is really frustrating because all I was looking at is I guess the normal way people look at SEO. “Well I have these keywords, I want to rank on them, I need traffic, it sucks I’m not on the first page.” And that is what I thought of SEO.

And then what I discovered it is all about inbound marketing. If you really want to do SEO, it is just looking at your inbound marketing data and then using that to intentionally make good content straight at the keywords you are ranking for.

So like I shared about make an article and look at the search terms and then intentionally make another article straight on those search terms. And forget about competition. So that is what I do in my course. I give you a fresh perspective. SEO Was not a world of just trying to rank your website against other people’s websites because it is a world of all websites ranking on all keyword terms everywhere. So the fresh perspective is this: I don’t just have to do SEO on my website, I can do it on my You Tube channel. No t only that I can apply SEO to my Udemy courses, on my warrior forum posts. I can do SEO anywhere.

And think about it this way. Is it easier to do SEO on my page rank two website or is it easier to do SEO on my page rank nine You Tube video or on my page rank whatever Udemy is? One of my biggest successes I have had recently is search traffic on my Udemy courses. So I shared all those free coupons back links. How many times have you heard back links in SEO? I shared free coupons from my Udemy courses and they got shared virally. They went viral or whatever all over the place; back links absolutely everywhere. My organic search traffic went from like 50 to a few hundred, to over a thousand on one course in one month. And these are all search traffic. You would have to pay anywhere from $1 to $10 a click in Google Adwords to get that same person to go there.

And that is what was amazing about it. I tried all kinds of tricks to get stuff like that for my website, nothing worked. I share a few Udemy coupons: back links everywhere. So the idea is think of SEO across everything you could possibly use, instead of just thinking SEO is this limited competitive thing on your website.

So the course goes into a lot of detail then about how to essentially have an open mind about SEO, like okay I’m going to optimize my Udemy courses, You Tube channel, website, Warrior forum post. I’m going to optimize everything for SEO and I’m forgetting about the competition. I don’t care where I’m ranking on these keywords. It is like a fire sale, I’m just going to go and grab as many keywords as I can get and walk out with them.

[40:07]

Daniel: Yeah that is a really great strategy. I know in using that strategy you have been able to generate over 300,000 clicks to your You Tube channel, website and also your Udemy and warrior forum posts as well. So it is definitely a strategy that works. The course itself usually sells for $199 but warriors for a limited time are able to pick up the course with over a 90% discount, where it comes down to just $19.97 and we will put a link to the forum to that WSO in the forum as well.

[40:37]

Jerry: Yes and that is cheaper than even on my website. It is not even that cheap on my own website. So I am honored that you guys invited me to do this.

[40:46]

James: It has been great to talk to you today Jerry, thanks for your time. I think everyone will find it very valuable and we will see you around the forum.

[40:55]

Jerry: Thank you guys very much for having me, this has been really cool to do and I hope this has been helpful for everyone who watched.

[41:03]

Daniel: It definitely will be. Thanks a lot for your time today Jerry.

[End Recording]

good. i like it very much

Jerry definitely seems to know what he is talking about.

Thank you each for your kind feedback and to the warrior forum marketing team for inviting me to do this! I look forward to answering your questions this week!

cool, interesting

thanks for helpful AMA