69: Doug Noll: From Trial Lawyer to Online Course Creator – Making 40K in 10 Days
From Trial Lawyer to Peacemaker, Award Winning Author, Teacher, Trainer and Successful Online Course Creator
My guest today is Doug Noll. Doug left a successful career as a trial lawyer to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity and he executes this calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher trainer, and a highly experienced mediator. Doug helps people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts to training life inmates, to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum security prisons.
Episode Highlights
How his introduction in neuroscience impacted his career and led him to help people resolve interpersonal and ideological conflicts
Finding your audience and market and driving traffic to your site, the lessons he learned from trial and error
Using a target audience, he launched an online course and made 40K in ten days
In this episode, Doug shares his journey from trial attorney to successful online course creator, peacemaker and mediator. He talks about all the twists and turns he took to become a successful online course creator. He gives examples on how he targeted his audience, built Facebook campaigns to drive traffic, continuously reviews his analytics and creates high value content his audience wants to buy.
Tune in to hear how he targeted his audience and generated 40K in 10 days.
Mentioned In This Episode
Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I have a special guest here with me today. I have Doug Noll. Doug left a successful career as a trial lawyer to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity and he executes this calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher trainer, and a highly experienced mediator. Doug's work, carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts to training life inmates, to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum security prisons. Doug, thank you so much for joining me. You have such an interesting story. I can't wait to have a conversation with you.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Thank you, destiny. It's great to be here and I hopefully can provide some wisdom from all the mistakes I've made in my life.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Well, why don't you begin and tell the audience a little bit about your story. You can go back as far back as you'd like, and just give us an idea of how you got to where you are today.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
So I was born in Southern California in affluence, in an affluent community to upper middle-class family. But unfortunately I was born with a lot of defects. I had, I was born crippled, partially deaf, partially blind, bad teeth. Left-Handed lots of problems. However, I did manage to stand in the right lane for smarts. So I have pretty good brain, but the problem was as a kid growing up is, I mean, I couldn't walk until I was about three and a half years old. And so I was way, way behind developmentally with my peers and, and being a smart geeky klutzy kid was not it just was it was tough growing up. Let's just put it that way. However I did, I ended up going to Dartmouth college and graduated and then came back to California and went to law school, did well in law school and decided to move into central California because I live in the mountains.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And so from 1977, until 2000, I was a hardcore trial lawyer. In fact, I joined my firm, I clerked for a year for a judge and then joined my firm in 1978 in September and tried my first jury trial in November of 78. And the whole idea was throw me into trials, trial, try as many cases as possible become and just become a big time trial lawyer. And so that's what I did for 22 years. And then through a series of events that I won't bore everybody with, I concluded that being a trial lawyer was not my calling. And I went back to school, enter in my master's degree in peacemaking and complex studies and became a peacemaker and a mediator. And I left, I left my law practice in $10 million on the table in 2000 to open up my own peacemaking and mediation practice.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
And that's where my life really started. And that led to 10 years later. Well I discovered some, I studied in my master's degree program. I was introduced to neuroscience and so became a lay student of neuroscience as it relates to peace and conflict in the brain and emotions. And then in 2004, stumbled across a technique that allows anybody to deescalate an angry person almost immediately based on some really interesting neuroscientific findings. It's incredible how it works. And then that led me to, with my colleague Laurel coffer, founding prisoner piece in 2010, where we were invited in by women who were serving life sentences and the largest, most violent women's prison in the world to train them to be peacemakers and mediators so that they could stop the violence in their prison. And that has blown way out of what we ever expected. We're in 15 California prisons today, we're in a prison in Connecticut, 14 Greek prisons, and we've got startups in Nairobi, Kenya, and also in Italy, of course the pandemic has put us on hiatus, but that has given us the opportunity to take all of our curriculum and put it on video.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
So we're hoping by the end of the year, we will be able to offer prison, our prison, a peace curriculum, which is quite extensive to any prison English-speaking prison in the world. And even non-English-speaking speaking prisons because we'll subtitle everything in whatever language we need to subtitle it in. So that's kind of the short version. I live with my wife on 10 acres, South of Yosemite national park and the beautiful part of California, where there not very many people. And the pandemic has not affected us at all because we rarely leave our property except to go up mountain to the little, our little store and buy whatever groceries we need and life is pretty darn good.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So I think it's very interesting that you left your trial lawyer job of 22 years, all that money on the table and went back to school and majored in peacemaking and mediation. I've never heard of that major before. And I have three college degrees myself.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Well actually, if you look around in those days, there were, there were maybe 10 programs across the country like that. But today, I mean, there were thousands undergraduate programs and graduate programs. Almost every major university has a conflict studies program or a conflict resolution or dispute resolution program. And, and of course it's also in law schools, you'll find that many law schools have ADR or alternative dispute resolution classes. So it's become quite quite the thing in the last 20 plus years.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So going, you know, kind of the work that you're doing is it primarily focused in working with this prison population or what other type of clients do you work with?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Well, I'll just give you an example in the, in this, this, and this week I have worked with affirm high-tech firms startup between the two business partners and they were renegotiating the ownership of the company and they reached an agreement and the wife of one of the owners didn't want to do it. She thought her husband was giving away the ranch. So we did they called me in to mediate that, and we actually got the whole thing resolved in under an hour. It was amazing. Another case, you know, typical, more typical case an employment case where an employee terminated and found a lawyer and was suing the employer for wrongful termination. That's a more kind of run of the mill kind of mediation case. And I've got another case pending where a university is calling me in to mediate a dispute between the faculty of the English department and the other institutional people around academic freedom issues, concerning equity equity, and gender diversity issues that are being mandated.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
And the faculty say this is an infringement on academic freedom. And so, and they were at loggerheads and quite emotional about it. So I get called into these kinds of disputes where, where there's a lot of emotion, a lot of upset, sometimes it's high stakes. I mean, I I've mediated immediately to a case once where as a half a billion dollars in real estate at stake, a real real estate partnership breakup, it took 60 days. And usually, usually it's, it's important. They're important issues. Sometimes there's no money involved like the academic case where it's all about values and I've, I have a series of processes that I have developed over the years that allow me to go in and help people figure out what's really important to them. And then on that basis negotiate in a non distributive way, a resolution to the problem.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And I get paid for that. Yeah. But that's, that's the important part too. And I can definitely relate, you know, I've worked as a, as a associate vice chancellor of academic affairs for a university, you know, so I could definitely relate to the faculty issues. So that made it extremely clear for me. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And I'm the board, I'm the chair of the board of trustees of our local law school. And I, you know, I teach, I teach graduate school at Pepperdine university at the Straus Institute of dispute resolution and also at our local law school. So yeah, I'm, I'm no the academic side pretty well.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I can see a high need for what you're doing, especially in our society. And I, I love the, you know, kind of the techniques and what you're doing to deescalate issues like this. Let me ask you this. So you've been working with and working with these clients and getting paid for that. At what point did you decide to add online courses to your portfolio? Well,
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It was really 2008. I had a very thriving commercial mediation and arbitration practice where I was, I wasn't making as much money as I was making when I was a trial lawyer, but I was making a pretty darn good living. And then when the economic collapse occurred you know, no economic activity and nobody's fighting, nobody has any money. And so nobody hires lawyers, nobody's going to hire mediators. So I had to pivot and reinvent myself. And so I kind of did it. I did a self assessment and thought, well, what do I really know? And what can I teach online? Cause I was, I've been a teacher, you know, graduate school professors since the early 1980s. So I know how to end up before that. I I've taught all kinds of things all my life. I'm a secondary black belt, certified ski instructor. I mean, I've taught physical stuff. I've taught intellectual stuff, I'm a teacher. So I thought, well, what I really know is negotiation. And I probably know more about negotiation than almost anybody else on the planet because of my academic studies research and also my experience. So I put together my first course, which was called negotiation mastery for the legal professional, which is a nine hour intensive advanced legal negotiation course. And what's interesting is that lawyers are terrible. Most lawyers are terrible negotiators. They think they're great, but they're off. They're awful.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
I thought they were supposed to be good at that.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
They think they're good at it, but they aren't because the, they don't learn negotiation in law school. The professors that teach negotiation haven't negotiated themselves. So it's all an academic intellectual exercise for them. And as a law student, you don't, you have no context to understand negotiation. So, so the way most lawyers learn to negotiate as they follow another more senior lawyer around to mediations and they just do what the what the senior lawyer does and that's how they learn. It's kind of an apprentice process, but the problem is the senior lawyers don't know how to negotiate either. And they don't know any of the tactics and strategies, and they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And it is the perfect, I've mediated over 3000 litigated disputes. I mean, out of those 3000 cases, I've maybe seen 10 really good negotiators. Can you imagine that?
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Wow, I would have thought in that profession, a lot more people would be trained to effectively.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And so that's what got me going. I said, well, maybe I can, I can make my job easier because if I can train lawyers to be better negotiators, then, then the mediations and negotiations that I mediate are going to go a lot smoother and faster because I'm dealing with pros instead of idiots. I mean, this case I had the other day I was dealing with one side was a pro. The other side was an idiot and it just makes it a lot harder and to, to get cases settled. But when you got pros who are trained and understand what negotiation is all about, you know, then you can, you can usually help the clients get to where they need to get in any given case. So that's what was my impetus to getting the to, to building legal pro negotiator. And so that was my first online course. And then I learned something very interesting. Very few lawyers want to learn how to negotiate. Some do I've sold, it sold a fair number of courses, but it's really interesting how, how few lawyers want to learn, how to become master negotiators.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Well, and going back to your point, they probably already think they are good and good
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That's right. They think they're good. They know deep inside. They aren't, here's the thing, lawyers know deep inside what their limitations are. If there are any, in any way honest with themselves to say, you know, I'm really don't know much about negotiation, but they've got a kid themselves and kid their clients and kid their colleagues that I'm a rough tough mean junkyard lawyer, litigated trial lawyer. Most of them have never tried a lawsuit either, which is also, that's a whole nother story, but they just haven't, they haven't learned how to negotiate. And so they, so it's really hard for them to admit to a weakness in their knowledge and experience when this is what they do every day. And so it's been interesting to see who buys the course and who, and, and, and how many people don't buy. The course I've been working. I've been doing a marketing campaign now to 15,000 lawyers. And so far in that, in that group of random group of trial lawyers across the country, I haven't sold one course to 15,000 lawyers.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So who's buying legal pro negotiator,
Speaker 2 (13:27):
The people who probably don't who mediators I've got some good government government agencies that are buying it for their lawyers people who are enlightened and, and want and recognize their, you know, the small percentage of people who recognize that they need, they want to learn more advanced skills. And I mean, I'm talking advanced, we're talking about Bayesian theory talking about behavioral economics, decision-making theory, probability analysis, doing decision trees, concession planning, stuff that most lawyers have never, ever heard of and don't have a clue about. And, but there was a small subset of lawyers out there who want to improve. And so they buy the course. It's just so interesting to me that there were so few lawyers that are interested in their own. Self-Development fascinating.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
So that was one of your first courses, the legal negotiator. What other courses do you have and when did you launch them?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
I had developed this, as I mentioned earlier, I developed this process for deescalating angry people in almost in 30 seconds. And I taught that in two mediators and judges from about 2005 through again, 2008, 2009, 2010, when the conference market dried, because nobody had any money. And then I decided that I would, this is so powerful. And then we started, I started teaching that these skills were the foundation of our curriculum with prison of peace, along with a lot of other things. So I decided that I would teach these skills online. So I put together in 2012, I think 2013, I'd put together a course called It's Pure Magic. And it was basically these deep listening skills and not your mom was active listening. This is something very, very different counter-intuitive and counter normative, but extremely powerful. So I put together It's Pure Magic, and it was basically a, probably three or four hours of lessons and exercises on how to listen to emotions, essentially.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's what this is all about. And so that was my second course. And my plan was to build out, I, I, I created a website called negotiate a center life.com, which is still out there, but it's pretty inactive. And my plan was to build up a series of courses around to help people to give just basic advice to people. Because I recognize that people, you know, people don't know how to buy a car. They don't know how to negotiate. They don't know how to be in relationship with each other. They don't know anything about emotions. You know, we are, 96% of families are emotionally dysfunctional. And so people come out of their families into adulthood, emotionally dysfunctional. That's why there's a lot of problems. And our educational system is not teaching things that it needs to teach for people to have the practical skills that people need to have in order to have a thriving, successful, happy life. So Negotiate a Centered Life was initially set up to start doing those kinds of courses. And that's when I started doing webinars. And then I built another website called Advice and Wisdom. And what I was doing was flailing. I have all these great ideas, but I really didn't understand how to do online marketing. So I was, I, you know, I learned sort of learned about the concept of funnels. I was using an I've been using WordPress since it came out. And yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
What year was this when you realized this?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
I think 2013, 2014, probably six or seven years ago. It seems like it seems like a century ago to me now.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
It's not too long ago.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
So so much has changed in seven years. It's unbelievable. So I did that for a while. Sold some courses. I, you know, my big struggle again, was marketing it and figuring out who's my target audience. And then figuring out price points. I, I played all kinds of, they did all kinds of price points in here. I got this goal. People would take this course and say, my God, this is life-changing. And I, I just couldn't find the momentum for people to come in and buy the course. And at one point it was offering it for 49.99. And then I just said, well, I'm just going to play around with price. So I played around, I moved, I priced that course anywhere between a thousand dollars and 49.99, 99, nine 99, $999.99 cents all the way down to 49.99, trying to figure out what was the price, the determining factor.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
And I determined the price is not the factor. It's, it's how you target your audience, who, who is your audience. And the problem that I have had with that course in the kind of the subsequent courses is that my audience has every human being on the planet, which is impossible because these are foundational life skills that every person needs to have. I got an email from a guy who took my latest course in India, and he said, this is every human being on the planet needs to take this. I'm going to make sure that every person in India and Africa knows about this course in the next 10 years. Well, that's pretty cool. We'll see what happens. But so I get these kinds of incredible testimonials. And, and so I've learned now that I've got to retarget. So we started off with It's Pure Magic, did that for a couple of years, didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Then in 2017, my fourth book came out Deescalate how to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. And it became an Amazon bestseller. And now it's in four languages and has done pretty well by the way, you don't make money selling books. So don't think you make a lot of money at it. I make a little bit of money, but not a lot. And that caused me to now, I, now I wanted to start learning how to market the book. So I got turned onto ClickFunnels in 2016, 2015, 2016. I tried putting up a course called how to be a great dad. I wanted to, I wanted to teach parents how to do this stuff. I said, okay, I can target dads who really want to learn how to connect with the kids and be emotionally competent. Dads. Didn't want to learn how to do that. Interestingly enough. And, and so then I recast the course into a deescalation, how did the escalate? And that was an upsell from my from my book. So the book I would, people buy the book for 10 bucks, free book, just shipping and costs. You know, you can do it for 10 bucks. And so they sign up and then they get the list. And then I do the upsell and I learned all about that upselling and all that stuff from Russell Brunson and click funnels and all that stuff
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Via
Speaker 2 (20:07):
A Facebook ad funnel. Well, yeah, I was starting, I was doing Facebook ads. I was doing Google ads play didn't I, at that time, I wasn't using native ads, but that came later. And I was again, having a difficult time. I mean, I was selling some stuff, but it wasn't, it wasn't barn burning. Like I thought it would just really be effective.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
So
Speaker 2 (20:33):
All of this then led to me. I mean, I took dozens of courses and I took, I mean, I, I got into Russ Ruffino's clients on demand thing, $9,000 course there a lot of money and learned a lot. But unfortunately my big, my big kick about them, his, his program, is it just as you're starting to master what he's teaching you, and you really need the coaching and help to get the details done, they abandon you unless you want to pay another thousand dollars a month, which after paying 9,000 bucks, I didn't want to do that. So I thought the program was good and I learned a lot, but the really key part of it, which is marketing the, the fine detailed marketing part would come at an extra cost. And so that, although I learned a lot it really never turned into anything.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
And then, and then, so then I turned away from courses for a year or two and got in and started thinking about affiliate marketing. So I took John Crestani, he's a super affiliate system course again, learned a lot about affiliate marketing and, and, and and, but didn't make a, did make a lot of money on it and didn't even cover my costs, which is what happens to a lot of affiliate marketers. And there's a reason for this. And then I ran into Igor tiekafits, igor, igor, igor and I actually became friends. He's a interesting guy, a Ukrainian Jewish guy that lives in Toronto now. And he's one of the most famous email marketers around right now, very successful. And he taught me a lot. And what he said is the money's in the list. And, and so then I got started working on email marketing and learning about lists, but I still didn't get it.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
And then last year I I've been following a guy. My name is Shane Shane Malala, who is a malloc. I think of his name is he's lives in he's. I think he's Irish or English, Irish, I think, but he lives in Lisbon Portugal, and he's got a company called thrive themes. And he, I started using him. He had a product, a WordPress plugin and years and years ago, a really advanced plugin at that time for generating email leads, opt-in pages and stuff like that. And he had, I think he figured it out. And what he taught me was that you don't need a big list. What you need
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Is a buyers list.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
If you have a thousand people on your list who are loyal buyers, you can make a lot of money. And the proof of that was this last fall in August and September, my wife has a very large list, 10,000 people. And we, a lot of her people are empathic. They're, they're highly sensitive people. And so I got the idea, well, we got this, you've got all these people that are we've targeted. Why don't we do a course? And so she did a live course and had like a hundred people sign up for this live course. And then we took the live course and broke it into, she recorded everything. We broke it into an online course, and we marketed that over 10 days and made 40,000 bucks in 10 days.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
And I said, these guys, everybody, all the people I've talked to there, right? If you've got a highly targeted list, you can make a lot of money, but you've got to have the targeted list. And the targeted list is the hardest thing in the world to build. It just takes time and money to build that list. You've, you're investing. You can invest a lot of money and a lot of effort, and a lot of time to build that list before you're going to be able to make a profit. And unfortunately, nobody really talks about that. You know, you can take all these online courses, all these internet gurus say, you know, make money fast. And you know, you don't have to do a webpage. You don't have to do this. You don't have to do that. And all you got to do is follow my system and you're gonna make buckets of money, not true, not true. You know,
Speaker 1 (24:24):
The prize dog that Russ has program clients on demand. Didn't walk you through that, in that 9 thousand dollar program that you had.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
They walked me through how, I mean, I, I, I loved Russ and I loved the people that he came working with, working with you know, but they did. They, unfortunately, they didn't take me the last mile. And that's what was really disappointing. I figured out they taught me how to do webinars and how to do a you know, basic funnel processes and all that stuff. I mean, refining what I already knew. But they didn't, they did not, they didn't take me down the last mile. And so it was a lot of money with not a lot with nothing to show for it. And I don't know what his program is today, how he, how he does stuff. I mean, I will say that it was really excellent training. There's no question about that. I learned a lot just like Chris Donnie's program, if you want to do affiliate marketing, that's the, if you can, and if he can, if he can stomach John, Crestani, who's a weirdo.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
But, but he's obviously very, very knowledgeable about, about affiliate marketing. Then those are it's worth it. And for people who are starting out, I mean, you do have to take a lot of training. You have to spend a lot of money taking courses to learn how to do this stuff. And the other thing is it's changing all the time. So, so the when we did the impact course, I mean, that really, that proved to me that having the buyer's list is really the secret. So how do you go about building the buyers list and that now then gets to the whole issue of targeting. So, one of the other things I've done with this, so in 2015, 2016, I hired a consultant to help me put together paid 5,000 bucks. I paid a lot of money to consultants over the years, paid 5,000 bucks to fill, to help me put together the great dad course, because I wanted to teach this stuff to dads, because I figured if dads could learn how to listen their children into existence, which is my tagline through these skills, you know, they could, they would have really happy families and be very powerful fathers.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Well, didn't, it didn't work, but I was, didn't give up on parents then I didn't want it to do a, I did a course called Parents. Game-Changers same ideas, repackaged in a different way for parents in general. You know, if you've got a, if you've got kids who are and yelling, or you got a three-year-old, who's having constant tantrums, you know, there are way they're using the skills that I teach. You can eliminate tantrums in four months. I mean, literally I've had people email me saying unbelievable, the change in my, in my, in the behaviors of my three and four year old in just a couple of months. And that's because I understand how, how childhood development and how the human brain develops, and parents are doing it all wrong. They're doing it all wrong. And because they don't know any better. So here's a course that says, this is the right way to do it.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
And it's, and it doesn't require you to do what you used to have to do it. You just have to do something a little different than what you've been taught or what you think is right. And it works because it's how our brains are hardwired. So I did Parents game-changer that didn't go very far. Then, then I hired a guy for 2,500 bucks in London to help me really do. Parents Game Changer . And this guy was smart. And he, I learned a lot about marketing from him, but he wasn't able to get Parents Game-Changer going, he's still working out a little bit, but we just were not able to get any momentum momentum on it. So what I've learned from all of this, and then, so then that led me to, to the current courses I've got, which are Developing Emotional Competency and Advanced Emotional Competency, which I'm just now starting to market.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
And here's the secret. The secret is before you build a course, before you do anything, find your market. And there's some, there's some really easy ways to do that. I learned this, I learned this from my guy in London. Facebook is, is love it or hate it. There are ways of using Facebook to test your audiences and that's what you need to do. So what we did, what I've been doing is you do a video, just pure information, no selling, no pitching, no nothing. You, all you do is give good information, good value video of five to 10 minutes long posted on your Facebook page. You need a business page to do this. And then, and then boost it, do a Facebook campaign. Don't do the post in the post boosting. You've got to actually do a Facebook ads campaign and do a Facebook ads campaign and start testing, target audiences and see who watches the video.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
And what you want to do is over a period of time, depending on how much money you've got and how much you can invest, you want to get, wait until you got it. 50 to 75. You've got a thousand people who have watched the video between 50 and 75% of the whole video. And sometimes what you'll have to do is go in and redo the video. I had to do this a number of times because I'll say, okay, why am I getting a drop-off of 30, 40, 50% at 25%? And I go to look at the video and say, what's going on? Why would people be dropping up? So it's a constant process of experimentation. But when you finally get a video that where people are starting to watch it all the way, pretty much all the way through, then you wait the month or two, it takes until you've got at least a thousand people who have watched that video. And then what you do is you build a custom audience. And from there you build a lookalike audience, and then you start marketing to the lookalike audience, which is what I'm doing now,
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Marketing to them with a lead magnet to get them on your email list or how,
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, no great question. So I've done. I did lead magnets for years, but the problem is that that everybody knows what a lead magnet is. You know, you, unless you have a lead magnet that really hit somebody right now, most of us are not going to give up where email that's, where we're besieged with emails. So, so, so you gotta be either you have something super Val. And the problem with lead magnets is that if you give too much away, then there's no point in them buying the course. If you don't give enough, then you know that there are people that are unhappy or they take the lead magnet and they unsubscribe. So lead magnets are okay, but what I'm doing now or quizzes. So what I do for example, on emotional competency, what I'm saying is what are your emotions say about you take this quiz and find out.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
And so, and so I'm, I'm directing this to right now. My Facebook campaign is going to women who were tech managers, they're, they're in management, business management, 35 to 55, us Canada. And they are in some kind of tech management job. And with Facebook, of course you can target that. And my Facebook, my targeting campaign revealed that that was that's a market where people are interested in. What's really interesting is that right now I've been running this new campaign only for four or five days, but I'm getting the most clicks to the quiz from women who are 45 to 55 years old. Really interesting. It's interesting to watch the democratic demographics. So the idea is, is the funnel now is to
Speaker 2 (31:49):
And I've got I'll put this in the larger context in a second, but just so people can understand the strategy that I'm using. It's. So I, I develop my market, I build a lookalike audience. Then I build a Facebook campaign, driving traffic to a eight question quiz. It's a hard opt in. So if they want the report, they've got to, if they want the results, they've got to give me their email address. And then once they get, give me their email address, they go into a 14 day auto responder. You know, it's an email sequence, automatic email sequence. And in that auto responder for the first seven days, all I do is give information. I don't do any selling. I don't pitch anything. And then on the seventh day, I start to pitch the course. And so for the next seven days, it's, it's a hard pitch now.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
And I'm just getting people to the end on this sequence that I'm just now getting people. They're still two days away. From the end of the course, I have a CA I have a, I've created urgency scarcity. I have a countdown timer. If they, if they get past the 14 days and then try and make change their mind, they won't be able to buy the course. It just expires. And that's the end of it. And it'll take them through it resets in 30 days. So they can come back in 30 days and buy the course. But so urgency, urgency and scarcity is really important. And I'm testing, I'm split testing the splash page, the landing page, where, where they come to the quiz off of the paid paid, paid PPC from Facebook or rev content I'm using native ads to I, then they go to the quiz.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
I watch how many people go through the quiz where the drop-offs, where people dropping off. Then they land on the opt-in page. And, you know, I split test that to see what my conversion rates are. And so you got to figure that for every person that lands on your splash page for the quiz, you might only get 10 or 15% that are going to give you an email address. And if you've figured that costs you a buck or two bucks a click, just to get people to land on the splash page. You're now beginning to see that just to get the email is going to cost me 10 bucks. However, the gamble is that if they've gone through the quiz and they gave me their email address, they want to learn more. And so they are going to be pretty interested. So it's worth it to me. If I could spend 10 or 15 bucks to get a lead that turns into a sale where I charge I'm charging $189 for the course, I'll do that all day long. So that's the thing, what's my cost of acquisition. And in fact, if my cost of acquisition is even $25 to get a customer that's highly profitable.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
So thank you for laying that all out for us. And I can see why a quiz would be a great lead magnet in the situation that you have.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Yeah, I mean, this is, again, something that I learned from the fry ping people and their platform is if you're a WordPress person, they have an amazing platform. I've got ClickFunnels too, but I don't like ClickFunnels that much anymore.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah. And I don't, I don't use ClickFunnels. I use other systems, right? What are you using for your quiz? I have try interact. What are you using?
Speaker 2 (34:47):
It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's it's built into thrive themes. So it's called it's all totally built in. I mean, that's why I love thrive themes. They've got a totally integrated system in WordPress, and there's another service that just came out called fluency crm, where you can integrate your whole email system into WordPress. So you don't need to get response or a MailChimp or active campaign. Everything integrates into WordPress. So it's, you don't have to ever leave your site to do everything from, from lead generation to emails, to auto responders, to your sales and landing pages, to your quizzes, to courses. I mean, it's amazing now everything is integrated. It's incredible how, how, how it works and you can control everything a lot better. And it's not that expensive. I mean, I actually, with fluent CRM, I'm going to probably drop get response here eventually, but I mean, get responses cost to me. I don't know, a hundred bucks a month. And so that's all $100 a year. CRM fluentcy CRM cost me $270 a year for five sites. You know, I mean, incredible cost savings and it, and it delivers, it delivers everything I need for email.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
So Doug you've just walked us through this new funnel that you're, that you've built. And I'm definitely interested in hearing later about the results and really what you're seeing there. What else do you see as next steps in 2021,
Speaker 2 (36:10):
I've come to the conclusion that you've got to, if you're going to be building online courses, you've got, gotta be prepared to drive traffic to your site in every way possible. So that means not only PPC, but also organic. So you've got to you, you really have to understand search engine optimization. You have to be willing to generate a lot of really high value content. I just posted yesterday, for example, a blog post it's one of the longer ones that I've written, it's over 4,000 words long. But it's score. I use rank math for my SEO stuff, and you know, it ranked 97 out of a hundred with an SEO score and you have to structure your website in a very specific way to make it Google friendly. And, and here's what I found. I mean, I rebuilt this website, Doug noll.com. I've had it for years.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
It was just sort of my speaker site. And I really didn't do much with it. And I, I tore the whole thing down and rebuild it last August. And today it is, I am. My visitor count from organic is growing at 175% per month. I've got 5,000. I had nothing, you know, eight months ago, and now I'm getting 5,000 visitors a week. And it's all due to how I rebuilt the website, the platform I'm using. I'm really, I've got a lot of time, right? A lot of content. You got to learn how to say. So here are the skills you need to learn. You need, you need to know how to do content writing. I took a thousand dollar course to become a certified content marketer to learn how to write content. And it's, I'm a, I'm a good writer. I mean, I've written four books, I'm a lawyer.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
I, you know, I mean, I've written thousands of articles, but content writing is its own separate skill and you have to learn how to copyright. So I took another thousand dollar course on learning how to copyright and you have to learn how to do email. So I took a course on a bunch of courses on how to do email stuff. I mean, these are skills that you have to be taught. You can flail around, but, but you just can't, you don't expect to be successful unless you willing to invest a lot of time and money in one learning how to do it. And then to doing the work like that blog I posted yesterday you know, that was two days worth of work to get that thing done. And now I'm going to start another blog today and learning how to do keyword.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
One of the things that I do is I use, I have a lot of tools, so I do a lot of keyword searching. So what am I going to write about what content do I need to do? And what I do is go out and using, I use keywords everywhere. And I just think of keywords around all the things that I'm teaching and writing about and that, and I find low hanging fruit. And so I'm looking for keywords where there's a lot of traffic and there's not a lot of competition. And then I have a whole content spreadsheet on that. I have set up where I've got 50 or 60 keyword phrases, and I try to post, I'm going to start on today on another one. And I've got a keyword phrase it's getting on average 10,000 searches per month. They're not very competitive, so I can rank for it probably in three or four months. And I'll write a big blog on it. And in three or four months or five months or six months, I'll be ranking on the first page and I'll do it. Then I'll do a YouTube video to go along with it. Youtube and Google of course is owns YouTube. And so whenever you do a blog, it's a good blog. Then you want to do a YouTube video to go along with it. So you gotta learn video editing. You gotta learn how to produce video
Speaker 1 (39:31):
And what I'm hearing Doug, as we've gone through this conversation today, is that you're continuing to educate yourself and learn new things. And you've done that for many, many years. I have one, one last closing question for you. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there? You have a wealth of experience, a ton of knowledge. What would you say to them?
Speaker 2 (39:55):
I would say don't start creating a course until you have an audience. We all have expertise at something, but is there an audience that wants our expertise? Is there an audience that's willing to pay 200 bucks because we have something to teach them. That's the, that was the biggest mistake I made. I mean, if you go back and even look back in 2008, when I did the legal negotiation course, I just assumed I had an audience. I just assumed that people, lawyers were like me were curious and wanted to learn and want to improve themselves. I was wrong. And I made the same mistake in 2013, around, around negotiated, centered life. And it's pure magic. I just assumed these I've gotten so many testimonials. And so many people saying this is just amazing that I thought, Oh, everybody in the world is going to want to want to do this not true.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
So what I would tell people is if you've got an idea for a course and you want to do online, make money online, doing courses, which is a fantastic way to do it. In fact, every internet guru I've ever heard says, the only way to really make serious money online is to produce your own stuff, because then you control it all. When you're an affiliate commission, you've got, when you're doing affiliate sales, you've got all kinds of other problems. However, you have to target your market. And the proof of that was the empath course when we made $40,000 in 10 days, I said, okay, everything that I've learned is right, but the key is having a targeted list and building that targeted list and investing a lot of money to build a targeted list. And, and let's say it cost me 20 or $30,000 to build a list of two or 3000 people who are loyal buyers.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
If I release a do the math, if I spent a year developing that targeted list, I'm not making any money and I'm spending a lot of money, but here's the math. Let's say the average course is $200. I've got a list of let's just make it really easy. A thousand people who will buy anything I put up. All right. So every time I put out a course, if it's a $200 course, and I got a thousand people, that's $200,000, I do three courses a year, that's $600,000 a year on a thousand person email list. That's where the money is. So how do you get that out? So the secret is getting that thousand person list. And that's where you're going to spend your time. And money is finding, building that targeted list of people who love you to death will buy whatever you sell forever, forever.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
And all you have to do is keep the lists, keep building the list, keep growing it. People drop off. You want more people. And obviously 2000, if you if you have a 2000 person list doing what I'm talking about now, all of a sudden, you're at 1.2 million a year and, and all, so you keep building the list. And then the next thing is to just to build super high quality courses that your list really wants. And that's how you make money at this. You don't make money with elicit 10,000 deadbeats. That's why I don't like lead magnets. I mean, I've spent thousands of dollars with the Facebook lead program. It's a good way to get cheap leads. You can get rid of cheap leads, but they're not buyer leads. And you need to be thinking, I need to be spending 25 or $30 a lead, ultimately to get people who are going to be really interested in what I buy.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And that's a lot of money. I mean, you may spend 10 or $15,000 for a list of, you know, 500 people, but Hey, I'll take 500 people times 200, any time, a hundred thousand bucks, I'm not going to that pays for itself, but you got to have the money up front to be able to do that. Or you just go very slowly. And if you can't afford paid advertising, that's why the organic side of the business is super important. Build content build. I mean, the Google formula now is eat expertise, authority, and trust. Make sure that you put up valuable content that people can find when they, when they do Google searches. That's the secret.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
And thank you, Doug, for that. I'm a big fan of organic content and doing your own content, marketing, blogging, podcasting, that sort of thing. Where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (44:03):
My I've got a lot of websites, but the primary website is Doug Noll, N O L L D O U G N O L L.com. My email address is Doug @Dougnoll.com. I am like most content creators, solo preneur. I don't have an entourage. I don't have a secretary. I don't have assistance. So if you email me, I will respond back personally. You can go to my website and learn about all the kinds of things that I write about. Mostly I'm writing about deescalation and emotional competency. Two things that I think are sorely needed in this world that we live in today. And I've got a ton of content and courses and all that stuff. So that's probably the best way to find me and get to me. Of course, I'm on all the usual platforms. I've got a big following on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Although I don't hang out on social media, I do have followings. So, and I think that's important too, but I would not that I guess another piece of advice that we're getting the, and don't waste your time on social media, don't hang out on social media. It's a waste of time. Use social media smart. If you're on, if you're on Facebook, more than 20 minutes a week, you're wasting your time. You're distracting yourself and you're not being productive. You use Facebook as a tool. You use LinkedIn as a tool. You use Twitter as a tool, but you don't hang out there.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
And I, I would definitely agree with the comment that you made earlier is the email list, the money's in the list. And that is a very true, a very, very true statement. Doug, thank you so much for joining us today. I loved your very interesting story and what you do, I think is very unique and loved everything that you mentioned to us and LA also loved how you were continuing to educate yourself. So thank you for your insight today. We enjoyed having you.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Thank you, Destini. I hope I was of some help. Thank you.