December 15th, 2020
It's been a week since I launched Lean SEO, my first info product, here's a look at the numbers:
- Sales: $28,226
- Hours spent creating: 85.5
- Hours spent promoting: 18.5
- Total hours: 104
Sales
My sales strategy? None. No ads, and no elaborate landing pages.
Just:
- emailing back and forth with people interested
- tweeting about SEO related things
- an email list of 150 people
- sharing my process of creating the course itself
Preorders (with a discount) totally killed it. More than 50% of my sales were preorders.
Launch day sales were a bit weak. I think the price was too high for Twitter. However, I think there will be a nice long tail of sales. I'm still making a few sales every day. (~$500/day)
Time
I set an ambitious deadline on purpose.
I know this SEO framework like the back of my hand, so the hard part was getting it all out of my head, and making sure it was solid, digestible, and actionable.
~70% of my time was spent WRITING. And rewriting. and rewriting.
Course creation:
Most of my time was spent on course creation:
- outline (~30 hours)
- slides (~30 hours)
- screencasts (~10 hours)
- misc (~10 hours)
The rest of my time spent on promotion:
- emails (~12 hours)
- tweets (~5 hours)
- misc (~2 hours)
Here's the full time tracker.
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3/ Feedback
Although it's early, I've gotten some nice feedback.
My goal with this course was to share my exact framework for how we 4x'd traffic in 6 months at starterstory.com.
It's no BS, all about taking action, and I love when people tell me that's why they like it!
Should you create a course?
100% yes.
Especially if you're a founder/expert and have some specialized knowledge.
Why?
- It doesn't take that long
- A nice cash infusion for your business
- You'll come out the other side stronger
- It's really fun!
I walked away from the course knowing MORE about SEO than ever before.
And finishing this course made me even more confident about the Lean SEO approach, and how we're going to use it to grow Starter Story to 1M/month and beyond.
Over the years, I've been VERY skeptical about selling info products (mostly my own ego), but now, my mind is changed.
I had a boatload of fun working on Lean SEO, and found myself really excited to work on it every day.
Next steps?
-> Build out a course marketplace at starterstory.com
We've interviewed thousands of founders, why can't they also sell courses about the companies they've built?
Logistically, creating a course is quite easy. The most important thing you need: valuable, specialized knowledge!
If you have some interest in doing something similar, please let me know. We can help a bit with the audience and promotion.
Email me: patrickswalls@gmail.com