Oscar Garcia Teaches How Automation and Sales Funnels Can Help Scale Your Business

Jeremy Deighan
Hey, everyone, thank you for listening to the podcast today. I am happy that you are here with us. And I'm also happy to have our guests today, Oscar Garcia, who is an expert in marketing, and has worked with many clients to help them scale and grow their online courses.

And so there's a lot of great information he's going to provide us with today. And I'm excited to dive right into this topic. So how are you doing today, Oscar?

Oscar Garcia
I'm good, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me, man. I'm gonna be having such a blast here today.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, glad to have you on. I always like to do research on the people who I'm interviewing, and I was checking out your website earlier today. And website looks great. Looks like you're doing a lot of really great things.

Love your thumbnails for your content in your video, they made me chuckle a little bit. So I always like to see people's, you know, personalities injected into their content. And so looks like you just really have a wealth of knowledge and have fun with it, which I think is important, right?

Oscar Garcia
I think so. I mean, if you're gonna have a business, you might as well have one that is a little fun to have and could feel the lifestyle you kind of want to have, you know?

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely I agree. I mean, if you're not enjoying the process then what's the point of it. So let's go ahead and dive right in, I would just like to hear a little bit about you and your business.

So if you could just take a minute or two and kind of give us a little history about, you know, what were you doing before you got into online business and marketing? And then what brought you into this world?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, so before marketing, I used to work for Macy's in their executive development program, right out of school. And, you know, it was kind of like a two year rotational program where they put you to different divisions in the business.

So you can kind of learn from a leadership standpoint, and in one division was the macys.com. So actually looking at the website, seeing what was happening, what wasn't happening, and what you could do to improve. And then the second rotation was credit operations. So how does credit actually work.

And so long story short, after doing that, for about two and a half years, I had a great time with amazing people, I loved my teams, I hated the job. And I knew that essentially, if I wanted to provide for my family and take care of you know, my mom and my dad and any potential, you know, future kids I might want to have, I knew I couldn't do it working at a nine to five.

So despite the salary, despite the benefits, so I decided to pull up my 401k. And I was like, "Alright, let's go start a business." Thankfully, in my school days, I had befriended someone who wanted to start a business, he just didn't have the time or the know how. And I asked them, if I could move in with him, he gave me his extra spare bedroom.

And then eight months later, we had a six figure business selling online soccer training programs. So from there, I kind of started attracting more clients who were all in different areas of business, you know, homecare, you know, health, wellness, finance, all that kind of stuff.

And then I've been helping them kind of build funnels and sell essentially courses, because everyone kind of wants to turn their knowledge into income, right and make kind of like this passive profit kind of model.

And so I've helped do that. And now I'm just someone who kind of understands the process of attracting cold traffic and turning them into a customer through, you know, sales funnels and leveraging really like the power of like systems and online marketing and automations, to give not only your market better solutions to their problems, but also helping you have a business where, you know, you don't have to be focused on it 24/7, you can essentially run it by emailing once a day to your email list. And you're good to go.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Very cool. Yeah, I love this topic. You know, obviously, I'm in the online space, talking about, you know, also trying to help people take their knowledge and passions and turn those into online courses, online education and elearning. So that they can build that kind of more passive model, where they're not having to clock into, you know, a nine to five job every day of their life at a job that they don't like.

And I think that's what brings a lot of us into this world. I mean, that's what I was doing was I was working that job that I didn't want to be at, you know, and look for ways around that. So this is great. I think it'll be really fun to talk about some of these different topics that you mentioned, turning cold traffic into customers using funnels using automations.

Before we get into that, though, I do want to go back for a moment and I want you to think about when you moved in with your buddy and you were living with him and you say, Yyu know, in eight months, you had built this six figure business. I would say that that's not always typical for new entrepreneurs to come out of the gates and build that success right away.

So can you tell me like, what was it that attributed to that success? Obviously, y'all had to have made some right decisions along the way. So what were you doing to help out with this business?

Oscar Garcia
I love how it comes off as like making right decisions. We made a lot of mistakes, man, we were definitely failing forward, we were just, you know, busting our heads through walls. I left the nine of five to work, you know, essentially 80 hours a day kind of thing, especially in the first couple of months.

And I was just relearning what marketing actually was. Because, you know, I went to school to get a degree in marketing. And, you know, I supported my way through school, doing like search engine optimization, building websites for people, but I never really knew marketing, like, I had no idea what a sales funnel was until after the fact.

And then, so, you know, I kind of did what, what everyone else does, and they just open up Google. And they type in like, you know how to make money online. And then the whole idea of like, affiliate marketing and drop shipping, and like sales funnels came into play. And, you know, I kind of just started diving deep into it.

And then of course, it's really hard to build a business these days without hearing the name, "ClickFunnels." And so I read one of his books, the DotCom Secrets that kind of really explained what a funnel was. And I was like, "Okay, this is really, this is really eye opening. And I can kind of see how it works."

And then I kind of started to see everything as a sales funnel, like going to a mall, right? Like just people walking around in front of a store, that's traffic that people going in, you know, that's a conversion kind of thing. And so I was like, "Okay, this is something that happens everywhere. So if they can do it, why can't I?" kind of mentality.

And, you know, I remember the first landing page I built. And this is kind of the secret to success here. The first landing page that I built was probably converting at about 3-5%. The first time and if anyone who's anyone knows anything, you at least want to be somewhere between 20 to 25% minimum, if you're offering for something for free, but I was stuck at 3-5%.

And I probably did about 93 different split test variations, before I actually maintained a 30% conversion rate. And the only thing I changed was one word on the landing page. And mind you I had done like, you know, I changed the color, I changed the layout, I changed the words, all this other kind of stuff.

And it was really just one word that I needed to add to my landing page that really boosted conversion rates, and it achieved 30 but then it went high as like 75% from cold traffic. And a big reason why I got that word was just by interviewing my market and surveying them constantly.

Because even though we didn't have like, such rapid success, right out the gate, it was a lot of, you know, hit and misses, we would run ads, we would lose money, we would build up this page, this landing page, make it look really great. I thought it looked amazing. And it would convert terribly. Right?

And so you kind of have this conversation with yourself. It's like, "Okay, is it time to quit? Should I try something else? Like my 401K only lasts three months, what are we going to do here? So I need to go work for Uber."

But no, thankfully, you know, we were able to generate some sales. And through those sales that were coming in, even though they were very slow, I would survey them through like automated surveys, or I'd get on the phone with them and just ask them questions, and then just really kind of figure out, you know what the problem in that market actually is, and once I got it from their own words, and put that into the landing page, everything else started to work, the landing page start to work.

And what we were doing at the time was, here's a free offer. And then here's what we call, like a quick 30 day online course for like 27 bucks. So some people might call this like a tripwire offer. I like to call it a low ticket offer. But something that's essentially no brainer. And by just having that one step after the opt in process, I mean, we were able to start paying for our leads.

And so essentially, we're building our list for free, and then making sales on the back end. And then that's what quickly, you know, allowed us to scale. So it was a lot of beating our heads against the wall, interviewing our people for six to seven months. And then once we figured that out, oh man, then it was like the floodgates were open.

Jeremy Deighan
That's awesome. In the past couple of minutes, you have dropped a lot of information here. So, I'm going to go back and I'm going to go through these things one by one. Because I felt like it you know, someone goes back and listens to all the things you just mentioned, you really did just give us a lot of value just in that one little phrase.

So first of all, I wanted to mention to you you talked about you know what you learned about funnels, you start seeing them everywhere. I drive my wife crazy with this, we'll go to a restaurant, you know, and, you know, they'll sit us at the table and I'll be like, "This is the opt in," they're sitting us down and, "Would you like an appetizer?" "Look, they're trying to upsell us. Here's the low ticket offer." You know, I agree with that. 100%.

You know, I appreciate you saying that. It wasn't always you know, chocolate and roses in the beginning that it just wasn't easy going that you were working hard you are actively working on this business 80 hours a day you were making mistakes, and you were learning and sticking with it.

I feel like in the entrepreneurial space, people have this idea that you're going to do what you did come out of the gates running, have a lot of success, have six, seven figures in your first year and have this passive lifestyle and drink cocktails on the beaches. And it's not like that, you know?

It's going to take work, it's going to take dedication, there's going to be mistakes, you're going to have to figure things out. But if you get through that, and you do figure those mistakes out, and you refine and get better over time, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is success on the other side of that. So I just want to say, I appreciate you being open and honest with us about that, because I think it's important for people to hear.

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, I know, 100% man, it's just like, you know, don't get me wrong. I learned a lot from Click Funnels, but the whole idea of like the one funnel away, right? Yeah, it's true. One funnel can change your life. But it's not as simple as just like, "Okay, well, let me add these four steps in my business. And I'm done."

It's constant work. It's constant optimization. It's constant tweaking. And, you know, I just think a lot of people need to kind of open their eyes and really seemed like, Okay, if you have a business man, like, you're gonna have to work for it. Like, it's your baby, you know?

And you spent so much time trying to figure out what's the right strategy? What's the right tool? What's the right, X, Y, and Z. But then you don't spend enough time into committing to actually figuring out what's going to move your business forward. And I think that's a big mistake that many entrepreneurs make, especially early on, it's like, you know, figure out a strategy, stick to it, but then commit, go all in until you start getting like results.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, you're one funnel away from the success that you're looking for. But it might take 100 funnels to get there. You know, and then talking about funnels, something else you mentioned was increasing that conversion rate by testing different things, which is, you know, what we'd call a marketing, A/B testing or split testing. And this is what people do not do enough of.

The people that I've talked to, and the clients that I've had in the past, they expect you to write the perfect copy and throw it on a landing page and assume that that's going to start generating sales and conversions right away. And that's not the case, you know?

You get better by refining, you get better by testing, like you said, you were you were testing colors, you were testing different fonts, or you were testing different titles or descriptions, like images, you want to do that. You want to take your sales page and say, "What's my conversion rate over time? And if I change it out to this image, or I change out the color of this button, does that increase or decrease the conversion rate?"

So I think it's really cool that you talk about that, because not a lot of people mentioned that. And I do feel like that's pretty important.

Oscar Garcia
The best companies in the world, like take a look at Agora Financial. If you don't know about them, look them up. They're constantly doing a B split tests left and right. I mean, your Facebook account, like how many times have you tried to follow along on Facebook, like how to set up a Facebook ads, and your account looks completely different than what you see on video? I mean, the biggest companies in the world are doing it. So there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing that either.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, for sure. And then the final point, which I think kind of goes back to that, too, is the split testing. And the A B testing is trying to figure out what your market is responding to. And you tie this in by saying, you know, you found a word through your market through your audience that helped when you were doing the testing, make all the difference in the world.

And I feel like this is the most important thing of everything that you said, and probably the thing that I talk about the most is it always comes back to the audience, it always comes back to the customer, and what are they struggling with? What are their goals or desires or beliefs? And how do they talk? And then how can we get into the minds of them?

And, you know, serve them the information that we're trying to give to them. And so you talked about, you know, you are interviewing people, you're talking to them, you're giving them surveys, I think that's so brilliant, because I don't think until someone does that, and they truly understand.

You know, we're experts, especially in the online course world, like, you know, I'm an expert guitar player, and I'm an expert at programming, and we know the information, but we don't really understand the audience. We don't really understand the marketing for the audience until you really dive in and you have these conversations.

So getting on calls with people, surveing, asking questions, I feel that's probably one of the most important things that you can do for the success of your businesses. Would you agree with that?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah. 100%. And I think, you know, something that I'm a big advocate of, and I think anyone who's listening to this podcast should do immediately is implement and if there's something you want to implement is, you know, pick up the book, you know, "Ask" by ryan levesque, skip the first half of the book, read the second half, and then open up a Google form or a type form, build out your survey and then put it in your email welcome sequence.

So that way they get the welcome email, but then the second email is you just surveying them, like, "Hey, let me know what your situation is, let me know a little bit more about you," and then link to a survey. So that way your auto responder is constantly collecting answers for you that you can then use later on down the road to improve your copy to improve your offers.

I mean, when I'm working with clients to try to figure out what kind of bonuses we should create, I just pull up the survey. And I asked like, "What are these people talking about? And I get ideas for bonuses, I get ideas for little cool add ons. The really cool thing about actually surveing your people is that you really figure out what they actually want. So like the one word, and I probably misspoke. And that was actually a phrase.

When I first was building my landing page, I kept using the word Footwork Drills, because we were going for soccer players at the time. And so you go online, you look at Footwork Drills, left and right. For people, you know, that are creating content or selling courses.

But the survey, it was showing that people were just trying to play with more confidence, they just didn't want to look silly out on the field when they were you know, playing with the ball. So we switched, get a 15 minute footwork drill to like get a 15 minute play with confidence drill. And then that's what really blew conversions through through the window.

Jeremy Deighan
That's so cool. I'm working with a couple people right now. And we are implementing surveys into their lead generation funnel. So when someone you know opts in to a lead magnet, and then we hook up a survey behind it so we can get some of this information. I can't wait till this goes live, because I'm immediately going to send them this podcast episode and say, "Look, it's not just me."

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, no, I mean that honestly, it's a game changer. And I love it. It's like my favorite little trick. And I don't even know why it's a trick. I feel like everyone should be doing this. But it's like, it's always there. Every time someone joins my list, they're gonna get an email., "Hey, tell me a little bit more about your situation." And I'm asking specific questions like, you know, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to XYZ?

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, you know, I love analogies. And I love using the food analogy, because I feel like we can all relate to good food and good restaurants. But I always say it's like you go out and you want to create a restaurant and you spend all this time and money into the building, the utilities, putting your staff together, you know, making the food and the menu and all these things.

But you never want to go out to ask the neighborhood what it is that they would like to eat. If you were to do that you would have a successful business, because you would go out and ask them, and they would tell you exactly what they want. And then you make that menu around that.

And you know that you're going to have a winner because the people have told you what they are expecting. I mean, we see this in software development when people make beta programs, and now people are doing beta online courses, you're not just going out and building the thing right away. But you are asking your audience what it is that they are interested in.

So just going off of that topic is a beta program or a pilot program for online courses, anything that you have seen work before, or anything that you've done in the past?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, I mean, in fact, I love selling programs, before you actually create them, you know, first thing you need to do is just get like a positive results. So it's like, it goes back to the survey. So what I've seen done before is send out a survey and it's okay, I just want to make sure that I have everything that I need.

And make sure that I'm covering everything that you want as part of this course. And if you give me your response, I'm gonna give you this course for free. If no one answers your your, your survey results, even if you're giving away all this cool stuff for free, probably a bad idea. But if you get some really good responses, you're gonna get people, you're gonna get responses from people who are actively looking for your course.

Right? So now you have data. Now you can compile that, now you can kind of see what's happening and make better strategic decisions on how you want to position and sell your course. So then, you know, once you have that data, I've collected surveys from people, I've put together this course I've had some really cool add ons on here.

How about you go ahead and get inside this beta course right? Now, let me know what you think. So now you kind of going into like phase two of testing your course, once you've got the survey data, once you get the beta testers in there, now you're actually ready for what I would call it like your actual first real live launch.

And at that point, you pretty much kind of understand how people are using your course, what they like, what they don't like, and more importantly, the language they're using to communicate your course whether they find it valuable or not. And that's kind of the simple three step strategy that I've used time and time again.

Jeremy Deighan
Very cool. Yeah, I love that. And I'm going to ask you a question I get quite often and just hear what your response is. You know, one of the main concerns when I present this to someone is they say, "Why would someone pay for something that hasn't been created already?"

Oscar Garcia
For the promise of new hope and new opportunity. So when we're selling something, it's really important that we position something as being different. You know, being different and having some kind of differentiator is key to success.

Whenever you provide something that's different. It creates a new hope, a new opportunity for your prospect of market to think, oh, you know what, this sounds really cool. That sounds really interesting. I kind of want to try this out. And so that that idea of knew that a deal of promise that I feel of being like an insider of being a part of something, or being a part of a community, so to speak, is what's going to drive some people to take interaction.

And of course, I'm not saying that like, when you do that, let's say you post that today, on your Facebook newsfeed, you're gonna get 1000s of people to join in now, you might only get one or two, but it's a start, it's a start, as opposed to creating, you know, let's say, eight modules with four videos and each, right?

And then creating all this effort signing up for all this tech, launching it and then getting nothing. You just want to make sure that you are going to be getting a return on your time, your energy, your effort, and also any kind of money that you're investing. But as far as anyone signing up, before something gets launched, people do it day in and day out, every single day, they love being part of community.

And if you don't believe me, take a look at the video game world. That whole space was literally built on betas, okay, and the most successful games. fortnight was a game that came from beta. And it started with the freemium so it was free, and then they charge you for other things to play up.

And I think at some point was making like $3 million a day. Don't quote me on that. But it was something crazy. But it just goes to show that like, you know, it's just a matter of creating a community and having a really strong promise. And if you can do that for yourself with your courts, you're going to be able to find the success, of course, as long as you're willing to put in the hard work for it.

Jeremy Deighan
So going off of this talk about having conversations with your audience and doing maybe like these beta type programs. I know that something that you had mentioned to me in the past was that you'd like to do virtual workshops for your your own business.

So can you talk a little bit about your virtual workshops, how you run those, and then how they benefit your business. Because I feel like if you're doing these workshops, you're in more direct communication with your audience, and you might be able to get feedback from them. So just what does that look like on your end?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, so on my end, I like doing virtual workshops. So one that I run continuously is called the One Day Funnel workshop where we essentially build out an entire low ticket funnel for anyone attending the workshop. And the reason why I prefer doing virtual workshops is because, well COVID is kind of throwing a wrench into things right.

And so we do get a little bit more interaction when everything is live. And I like being there actually workshopping because I'm not just teaching, I'm like, "Okay, look, here's the landing page. Alright, we're gonna spend 15 minutes building out our landing page. Toni, do you have questions? Sarah, do you have questions?"

Like it's more interactive and kind of everyone learns from each other. And it's really cool to see the different kinds of businesses that that join up, you know, you might have someone who's selling dog treats versus someone who's selling, you know, holistic meditation music, and someone who's selling natural sleeping pills, like it's just all these different kinds of business.

But it's really cool to see how these principles and frameworks kind of all go. So I love the live element of it. And then typically, what I do is I record the event, and anyone who purchases obviously gets the recordings.

And so to be a part of the live event, that's going to come in at a higher price range. So let's say to make it easy, the live workshop is 100 bucks, what I could do is once the recordings are done, I can then put that into a course and then sell that, for example for 50 bucks right half off because there isn't the left component with me there isn't the live q&a, there isn't the live feedback that they get if they were to join live.

So a good way to think about it is the closer they get to you, the closer they get to the expert, the more access they are getting, the more value they're gonna be getting, which then justifies the higher price point.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, cool. So you, you tell everyone, "I'm going to put on this workshop. If you want to join live, it's going to be $100 you're going to be able to come on we're going to build something right there in front of you. You can ask questions, you have to direct access to me, anything that you struggle with, I'm going to be right there with you to help you out."

You record that, and then anyone who attended live gets the re-recording free, I assume automatically. And then you can now repackage that information up and sell it for a discounted rate just because people aren't getting it live. That's correct?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, correct. And then you can use that evergreen, and then you know, put it into an evergreen funnel and sell that off. You know, it's just important to note that like, again, it's it's people are paying for the access, right. And so the closer they get to you the more premium of a rate that you could charge.

The reason why I love virtual workshops is because at the end of the day, they walk away with something tangible. And something that has always kind of been true with anyone that I work with, to sell courses, is speed of results matter.

Like if you can have like your big promise, and then have a way of producing that promise even faster, that's generally going to help you out to get higher conversion. So a workshop we get it done in a day, as opposed to a course, that might take them maybe two, three weeks to go through on their own.

So the unit, you're not only paying for access to the expert to answer your questions, and walk away with something tangible, but the speed of results is also there.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, this is really cool. I like this idea. You really got me thinking about some really cool things you could do. So the workshop is done in a day, typically, how long would you say they last?

Oscar Garcia
Five hours. I typically do them from 11am to 4pm Eastern.

Jeremy Deighan
And then how are you streaming? Is this just like through Zoom? or Facebook? Or how are you presenting the information to them?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, so it's super simple. And like, it's funny, because you'll probably ask me about like my tech stack at some point. And even though I love simplification, my tech stack is a little bit more complicated than most.

But when I do my live workshops, it's all done through Zoom. It's super simple. It's just like, "Here's the link, you know, come on in," I hit record. And that's pretty much it. But then to deliver my course, I actually don't use like an all in one system, like Kartra, or Kajabi, or anything like that, I actually use a combination of BuddyBoss with LearnDash, mixed into it. And then I use Thrive Themes to build on my funnels and everything else. You know,

Jeremy Deighan
I do sometimes ask people about their tech, but I try not to indulge into too much because people get stuck in paralysis by analysis. And I really tried to explain to people that listen to you know what it is that's being said and implement that however you have to.

If you have to implement it through a Facebook Live, you can do it on Zoom, do it that way. If it's you know, some other way, whatever, you're still using Skype because you're stuck in the early 2000s, do that.

Oscar Garcia
Yeah. I mean, like, tech is just a tool, not a strategy.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Yeah. So this is great. But I think that the reason why I want to ask that question is, I feel like this shows people that you don't have to make it complicated. This can be something that can be done very quickly. I mean, you could put together a workshop today and start advertising that to people.

And then once you have it recorded, like you said, it's evergreen, this could be a mini course or like a low ticket offer. Or it could be maybe even a piece of your course. So let's say that you plan on doing five modules in your course? Well, you could do five separate workshops, and then piece those together into a course.

Do you think that would be possible?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the end result, and how are you going to get them to the end result. If you can eliminate the steps, like if you have a three step process, rather than like a 16 step process, that's going to be way more attractive, right? And I say process, but it could be modules or whatever.

But yeah, there's no reason why you can't for example, before you create your course, or your master course, if you will, do a live workshop, and essentially turn those recordings into some kind of, you know, mini quick course that you can then sell while you are building your master course.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, I like that. Because, you know, some core subjects are pretty easy, and could be little standalone courses by themselves. Some subjects, if you're teaching like graphic design, or maybe showing your quilting, you know, you could have dozens and dozens of mini courses, because you could take little pieces of subjects.

And then other courses are a little more involved, you know, and are gonna take a little more. Like if I teach online courses, there's a lot that goes into that, you know, there's the creation, the marketing, the tech, the selling, there's a lot, but I'm thinking to myself, you know, you could break these down into little workshops.

And by doing so, I might not teach the whole course but maybe I'm just going to help you script your course or outline your course and by the end of this five hour workshop, you're going to have your whole outline and your script and your slides or whatever completed ready to go.

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, and just to just to throw a little monkey wrench in there. You know, something that I've done I've done in the past with previous clients is like they do because many workshops and then they put all of their workshops behind a membership.

So now they're getting recurring revenue and giving access to all the menu work drops, you know. So that's another way to add, you know, another different income stream to the business.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, I mean, I think this is just such a really cool idea, especially if you are in a niche that warrants multiple types of courses. Like I said, if you are teaching, you know, graphic design, in one month, you're going to do a workshop and you're going to teach logos, or you're going to teach a very specific, you know, thing in graphic design.

And then the next month, you're going to teach another topic, like you said, you could build a library of these have them behind a membership wall. And over time, just keep adding and adding and adding, and people are really going to enjoy that. And then you have the added benefit of what we talked about earlier, which is you're speaking directly with your audience.

And so while you're doing these workshops, you are recording it, and you're taking note of the questions are asking the feedback that you're giving them. And so if you do decide to turn this into a much larger course or product, at least you have that information that you can refer back to and say, "Okay, I didn't explain something really well here, or they had a question about this. Let me take that and add it into the final product."

Oscar Garcia
Absolutely. I love it.

Jeremy Deighan
Cool, awesome. Okay, something else I wanted to ask you about is once someone has created their online course, so let's just say that, you know, maybe someone goes out, they do a beta program, or they do this workshop idea.

And they got some good feedback, they put together a product, and they want to market and sell it. And there's many different ways of going about this. You could do organic traffic strategies, you could do advertising, you can do social media. What are some ways that you like to recommend to help people sell their online courses?

Oscar Garcia
So first and foremost, I'm a paid traffic person. So I love ads. Whatever the platform is, it doesn't matter. Stick to one, figure it out, use that one platform to advertise because I'm just not a fan of creating content to generate sales and stuff like that. It just I feel it just takes a whole lot longer to get a proven framework in place.

The other thing too, is like a lot of people are focused on on getting that first sale, like through ads or through creating content. But what's really cool is if you could turn your customers into advocates, and I think a lot of people forget about referral programs. I'm not sure why.

But it's something that I haven't seen too many actually implement correctly. Maybe they just not aware of how or what have you. But a referral system is so easy to set up. It's so cool to have because you essentially empower your customers to refer you more business, you reward them.

So let's say we take your idea and you create like multiple, like micro workshops, there's nothing that's going to stop you from saying, "Hey, customer A, thanks so much for buying my workshop. By the way, if you refer your friend, not only will you get 25% off your next workshop you decide to purchase from us. But your friend will also get 25% when they decide to sign up."

So that right there you have your own word of mouth marketing kind of generator, where your customers who are going through your programs, consuming your content are going to then be engaging with more of your ideal people. And rather than having to pay Facebook or Tik Tok or YouTube to generate that sale for you, you rewarding your customers to bring them to you.

Jeremy Deighan
This is a really cool idea. I think you're right. I don't think a lot of people talk about this too often. Essentially, you're creating your own affiliate program for your products.

Oscar Garcia
Affiliate program I would probably use they have their own following if you will, whereas this kind of more of like, "Hey, you know, Sally just bought the program. Hey, Sally, do you want to recommend one of your friends?"

So, for example, when I'm using affiliates, I'll probably give them a 50% commission, right? So if I'm selling $100 course, they'll get 50 bucks for every commission they get in, because my sole purpose for using affiliates is just to kind of like build my email list, if you will, I'm not necessarily using them to to make, you know, money on the bottom line.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay.

Oscar Garcia
So with referrals, though, it's kind of more of a thing that runs by itself, whereas affiliates that have to constantly like train, make sure that they have resources to push my products have emails to push my products.

With a referral program, it's just a matter of like, "Hey, Susan," for lack of a better example, "here's this URL, share with your friends, if anyone signs up through your link, you get 25% off or you can get $100 gift card" or what have you, you know.

And so more often than not the probably going to recommend like, you know, one to five people, whereas an affiliate might bring you like 100. So there's kind of like a difference there.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, gotcha. Okay, I'm glad you clarified that makes a lot of sense. If you did like a membership paywall, do you think maybe you could offer like a month free or something like that would be beneficial? Because you're just trying to get more people in the door, Right?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, absolutely. You can offer a month free in my experience, you know, money talk, money is the best motivator. So what I would recommend you doing is like, if you know what it costs you to acquire a customer let's say you're running ads and it costs you you know to sell $100 course it's costing you 25 bucks.

Then you know your customer acquisition cost is $25. So essentially, it's, you know, 25% off. So it wouldn't hurt you to implement a referral program where you're giving away 25%. If that's already what it's costing you.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Very good. Okay, cool. Yeah, this has been some great information. I'm glad that we had you on the podcast today. I know that you are very knowledgeable in the areas of marketing and can really help out.

We've talked about a lot of strategies that I think can help out the beginners out there that people who are just kind of getting going on their journey. But I want to help out the people who are also maybe a little further along the path who's been doing this for a while, who have a course and they're just trying to scale.

So are there any strategies or advanced techniques that you could talk about that you see working really well, right now that maybe some of the more advanced users listening to this podcast could take away?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, you're probably not spending as much as you should be on ads, if you are using ads, that's an issue that we had kind of early on is that, you know, we were generating a lot of money, and essentially, we put $1, and we would get $4 out and we're like, "Wow, this is really great."

But you know, at that point, we should have been spending $4, you know, to get essentially $8 back. And I think what ends up happening is whenever someone tries to scale through ads, their numbers tend to go all out of whack. And you know, they kind of they kind of tend to lose money.

So it's really important that for example, Facebook, which is a platform that I love to advertise, even in today's world, you kind of have like a three campaign approach where one campaign is aimed at warming up cold traffic.

And so this campaign, the sole purpose is to provide value. So you probably have some like how to videos, you probably have some demonstration videos, you might have some testimonials, going talking about your product or service, or you know how great your course is. And that's so purpose is just to get people to get warmed up.

And ideally, you're using videos here. And the reason why is because Facebook tracks anybody who watches a video. So campaign one warm people up using video, you know, doing demonstrations and how to videos, campaign two is pretty much a retargeting. Anyone who's watched that video and sent in sending them to your email list. I'm a big fan of building email lists.

You don't have to if you don't want to, you can send them straight to your course. But that whole second campaign, the goal is to redirect them, and retarget them to get them onto my email list. And then finally, it's all about plugging up any any loopholes within your funnel within your sales process.

So then the third campaign is just a retargeting campaign, where you find out where people are dropping off, maybe they go to your landing page, they didn't opt in, maybe they saw your sales page, and then by that third campaign is meant to then redirect them and get them back into inside of your sales funnel at whatever point they dropped off. So then that way they can take the next step.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Just to recap, make sure I got this right. So the first campaign is kind of relationship building, we're taking cold leads, we're turning into warm leads, and kind of showing them who we are. Second campaign is kind of the driving force of getting them into our email list so we can continue to nurture them and sell them more products.

And then the third campaign is a retargeting campaign, just to capture anyone who you know, hasn't bought or signed up and to drive them back into our funnels. Is that correct?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah. 100%. And then like, you know, we could go deeper into kind of like the budgeting strategies, but then you know, we'd be here for like, another three hours.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, no worries. Well, you know what, if you'll take me up on it, then I would love to have you back in the future. And maybe we can do a more advanced episode and dive deep into some of these strategies.

I think it'd be great to have you back on. I just appreciate you coming on today. At times getting short here. And I have so many more questions, I'd love to ask you. But I really do appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this information.

We'll make sure that we link up your recommendations for the books that you mentioned in the show notes. But if anyone wanted to find out more about your business, and maybe how they can get help from you, where can they do that online?

Oscar Garcia
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I don't have anything for free to offer or anything like that. But I do email my list every day. And I just, I like to consider new ways that I drop a lot of value bombs in their daily.

So if you'd like to be a part of my email list, just head over to Oscarmgarcia.com. And just sign up there at the homepage, or connect with me on Instagram @marketingwithOMG. And those are pretty much the only two ways.

I like to keep my business simple, but at the same time help you create a business that fuels your lifestyle. So let's do it.

Jeremy Deighan
Perfect. Yeah, let's do it. For sure. Oscar, thank you so much for your time today. We love having you on the show and I just look forward to your continued success in the future.

Oscar Garcia
Thank you, Jeremy, really appreciate you having me and thank you to all the listeners.