0 (2s):
Who's ready to rock today. Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like my first million today, we'll be focusing on how to sell over $2 million of an online course with the skills and knowledge that you already have Fire Nation to drop these value bombs. I brought Lucas Lee-Tyson into EOFire studios. Lucas started a multi-million dollar marketing agency from his college dorm room, and now has a multi-million dollar online course teaching others how he did it. And today foundation, we'll talk about how to get the idea for your online course validation. Getting your paying customers scaling to a hundred and then eventually $500,000 a month using YouTube ads and so much more.

0 (48s):
When we get back from thanking our sponsors, are you looking for a proven business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire. Lucas, say us up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 22s):
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me back, John, and obviously great to be back in front of the Fire Nation. My thing that I believe about becoming successful is that I think it is entirely possible to become an overnight success or to get rich quick. As some people would say. I, however, do not think it is possible to get successful easy or get rich easy. I think a lot of people think that it can't happen quickly, and I think it is entirely possible if you work hard and are following the right systems and the right processes,

0 (1m 54s):
I think we're going to be focusing on here today for our nation are the right systems and the right processes. And Lucas has had a ton of success. And even in the last two years, as I interviewed him last, which is why we're bringing him back on the show today, because he's going to be sharing some pretty exciting things that I may have teased during the introduction. So Luke is how did you get this idea for your online course?

1 (2m 18s):
Yep, absolutely. So two years ago, basically I was on your podcast sharing my story about how I built this Facebook ads agency for my college dorm room, and eventually grew it to a multi six figure level. And not only with going on your podcast, I was obviously also sharing, you know, my story and things that I've learned on my social media and just with people that I'd connected, you know, in my personal life and professional and things like that. And naturally people started asking me, you know, how it was possible. Not only was it possible, you know, that I had, you know, built this agency basically from my college dorm room without any, you know, investment money with, with basically like $0 in my bank account.

1 (2m 59s):
But people also asked me questions about the work that I was doing for clients. You know, they wanted to know about Facebook ads, you know, back in 2019 in 2018, Facebook ads were kind of still new. A lot of people were just hearing about it for the first time. So naturally people wanted to know, oh, you know, I have this cousin who thought about running Facebook ads. I was wondering if you'd be able to help them out and things like that. And I started to, you know, do basically one-on-one consulting and coaching with people, not only helping business owners with their Facebook ads, but also helping people who wanted to do the same thing that I had done wanting to start basically a Facebook ads agency, a Facebook ads, freelancing business, and helping run ads for clients.

1 (3m 43s):
And I did this for a while. I probably did only one-on-one consulting and coaching for probably like three to six months before I realized it wasn't the most sustainable thing. I realized very quickly that even, you know, the clients that I was working with and the coaching clients that I was helping coach very often had the same similar questions and problems. I found myself getting on zoom calls, Skype calls and repeating myself. When I realized that there was probably a better way to go about monetizing my knowledge and monetizing my expertise. So I knew a lot of people at the time had done similar things that they'd put together, either an online video course or an ebook or something to that effect that basically allowed them to offer value, offer knowledge, offer expertise, without limiting their time.

1 (4m 31s):
You know, there's only so many hours that, you know, you could get on zoom or get on Skype and a day and help walk someone through it. But if you record that, if you productize your knowledge and expertise into a product, theoretically, an unlimited number of people could consume that. So that was how I first got that idea and how I first got started.

0 (4m 47s):
How can you Fire Nation scale and leverage your time when you find yourself saying the same things over and over again to individuals or maybe even small groups of people. And this is kind of one of the things we're going to be working through here today, but let's be honest just because you find yourself answering the same questions doesn't necessarily mean there's a really meaningful course there. It could be an indication, but we want to now talk about validation. So how did you validate that idea for your online course once it kind of sparked as an idea in your minds?

1 (5m 21s):
One of the ways that I initially validated the course was something that I always like to do. And actually one of the very first things I did when I was actually starting that Facebook ads, agency business was seeing if there was anyone else doing it, basically seeing if there was competition that existed in the market, as I've been, you know what I would call an entrepreneur as someone who's been starting online businesses for close to eight years at this point. And my very first businesses all failed because I would spend, you know, months building this thing, this product, that service that I thought people would want. Cause I thought that it was this new, amazing thing, but then I would release and it would be crickets. You know, no one would pay me money for the thing that I had created.

1 (6m 2s):
And I learned a really valuable lesson back then that if you can see if there's validation in a marketplace, if there's other people who are offering, maybe not the exact same thing, but something similar, then there's probably a good chance that if you release something that's similar and maybe even a bit better, maybe even a little different, if it has a unique spin on it, then you're probably going to be able to make money with it as well. And I did a little research and I found that there were tons of people offering digital marketing, training, digital marketing courses, and also courses specifically about how to run a digital marketing agency at the time. It wasn't this new and novel idea, but it gave me a lot of validation that maybe, you know, I wouldn't be the first person to offer this and maybe it wouldn't be, you know, the number one selling course on this topic.

1 (6m 46s):
But I knew that if I could create something that was unique in some way, if it was something better than what existed in the marketplace at that point, then I would probably be able to do pretty well with it. And at the time I had an email list, an email list was super important and it's something that also allowed me to validate this idea of very quickly was this idea of learning in public. At the time, I actually had a blog which I still have growth, cave.com, where I was basically sharing updates on what I was learning in my agency, how things were going, what I was trying and what was working, what wasn't, and I'd naturally built up, you know, a couple thousand people on that for who wanted to keep in touch with me, who wanted to kind of learn how things were going.

1 (7m 27s):
And also obviously had, you know, social media, Instagram, Facebook profile, all of those things. So once I had validated that there were other people making money with this style of product, with this style of teaching through an online course, I sent out a very brief kind of test pitch and I wouldn't even call it a sales pitch. I would more just call it a question because it wasn't like I designed, you know, some fancy website. I didn't even have, you know, a sales funnel on ClickFunnels at the time. I literally just wrote on a Google document, what I was thinking of putting together. I literally wrote on the document. A lot of people have been asking me about this. So I thought I would kind of test the waters. Here's what I'm thinking of putting into this course.

1 (8m 8s):
Here's what, you know, I'm thinking of pricing an app. Let me know if you're interested. And I emailed that exact Google document. I didn't even pretty it up or anything. I emailed that exact Google document to my email list. I sent it out on my social media and literally within, probably within 24 hours. But if not, like within a week I had gotten my very first five customers on that course. And most importantly, those first five customers all told me why they were interested in the course why they actually ended up paying for it and then went on to tell me, oh, you know, if you're actually continuing to add more things to it, here's what I would love to say. So not only did I validate the idea very, very quickly, but kind of staying lean, but just seeing what people were interested in and kind of just keeping it simple.

1 (8m 52s):
Literally only sending out, you know, a Google doc. I also got very valuable feedback on those things that were eventually going to allow me to differentiate my course from everyone else was that feedback from actual paying customers, for the things that they were looking to learn and the things that would make my course better than everyone else,

0 (9m 10s):
Fire Nation, a lot to take away from here. Some things I want to add on and repeat from what Lucas was just sharing is number one, does the competition even exist in the markets? I mean, pioneers, remember those first movers, they're often the ones with arrows in their backs. So it's not a bad thing to have competition out there. And does that competition look successful? Like are they actually doing well and making sales and Hey, if you're finding that people are advertising for their stuff, they're probably making money. Cause you can't just spend money forever on ads without actually making money being successful. And can you provide different and or unique solutions like think about that Fire Nation, you know, you can provide different or unique solutions for the same problems.

0 (9m 53s):
Then you have an opportunity to stand out here. And I love the Amazon products example that I've definitely talked about on the show before, where go to products that you love, that you're thinking about maybe bringing to the market and what are the one and two star reviews, like what are people complaining about then maybe this product or service is missing or that they wish it had as a feature or a benefit. And then when you create that thing that fills that void, you have a chance at winning. So you scaled Lucas to over a hundred K a month in your second month was kind of hearkens back to your response to the success question I had at the beginning. So you did it using YouTube ads, share your secrets with us.

1 (10m 36s):
Absolutely. Well, I think one of the reasons why YouTube ads worked so well for me and I had actually tried a bunch of other ways of advertising. I'd tried Facebook. I tried Instagram at the time, which previously was my area of expertise. You know, it was a little embarrassing to not be able to sell my own product on Facebook ads while using Facebook ads. But I kind of realized that YouTube ads were this new avenue that not a lot of people were using, just because the product that I was selling was inherently video based. It was a video based course that had around, you know, six modules in it. It was probably like 20 or 30 hours of content. And I kind of realized if I want someone to actually go through this course to actually see results and actually enjoy consuming it.

1 (11m 17s):
I should probably go after people who are already consuming videos in the first place. And that kind of, you know, put a light bulb in my head. And I said, why not try YouTube ads? And as I was doing research into YouTube ads, which at the time I had literally zero experience in I'd never run them before I realized that YouTube is obviously owned by Google, which means that a lot of the targeting options with your advertising on YouTube allow you to leverage the things that people are searching for on Google, which is very, very powerful because obviously Google number one search engine in the world is what everyone's using to, you know, do research on products and services and companies before they ever actually purchased unlike Facebook advertising, where they obviously have that custom audience, those lookalike audiences that are really, really powerful, but the majority of the targeting that's available on Facebook is only basically what's built into the platform.

1 (12m 8s):
You know, for example, if you're selling, you know, a fitness product, like a fitness course or fitness supplements, you can basically just go into Facebook's targeting and type in weight loss or fitness and things like that. And you'd be competing against every single other company and advertiser that's using that exact same targeting with YouTube. Not only do you have the ability to target exactly what people are searching on Google, but you can customize it in such a way that you basically have an audience that's customized to you and that theoretically no one else on the platform has access to. So just like when I was validating my course, I actually did the same way with my YouTube targeting. I was going through all these YouTube targeting.

1 (12m 48s):
I realized that you could target people based on what they had searched in Google and a light bulb. Again, went off in my head and I realized, I just did all this competitor research. Why don't I try showing ads to people who are looking for my competitor's products? You know, people who are already interested in Facebook ads starting a Facebook ads business. Why don't I just target people like that? And I kind of saw it as low hanging fruit that maybe there's not, you know, thousands or millions of people searching for these things, but these people are probably the hottest buyers inside this market. These are people who already know, you know, what they want to buy. They're kind of just doing that research for that purchase decision. So that's why I ended up doing, I launched my very first ads for targeting, you know, competitors of mine at the start.

1 (13m 32s):
And I think I launched that at like 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a day. And previously, June, 2020 of that year, I was doing around like 10 or 20,000 a month from selling it just organically. And as soon as I launched that, the very first campaign things took off, you know, it was like putting gasoline onto a fire. And even though I was starting with a very small budget, it's like I said, I was targeting the super hot buyers who were basically already in the market to be purchasing a product like this. And the course was priced at 1497 or 1500 bucks. And it was literally an instance where I was putting in, you know, a hundred, 200 bucks a day and getting 1400 or $1,500, sorry, back on the backend.

1 (14m 15s):
So it was a very, very profitable start to the campaign. I was able to scale to a hundred thousand dollars a month, literally in my second month using YouTube ads because I got started with the super hot, the super low-hanging fruit, easy to target audiences that at the time, I don't think a lot of people were thinking to use or even using at all. And as I started, you know, kind of scaling up, I did a lot more similar styles of targeting. I did what a lot of people in marketing call long tail keywords, where if someone is for example, searching for camping equipment, you know, maybe they're looking for the best tent. One of the things that someone who's looking for the best tent might type into Google is best 10, 20, 21, or best tent for long mountain hikes and things like that.

1 (14m 58s):
And obviously someone who's doing that extensive research, someone who's searching for a longer term keyword is generally going to be a much more likely to become a customer because they're doing that extra layer of research. And they're looking up a more specific thing versus someone who's just looking for camping equipment or best camping equipment and things like that. So I started to scale beyond just competitor targeting by using those long tail keywords, but it was the same exact thing. I was able to start with a very small budget, but still be incredibly profitable because they were fairly low hanging fruit of people were already interested in this type of product

0 (15m 34s):
Fire Nation. You can see the value of bringing someone on who's currently having success in what they're doing, making things happen, and then sharing with you what they're doing so that, Hey, you can implement this in your business for your course. And then you can see similar results. And we have so much more to be talking about when we get back from thanking our sponsors is your wifi struggling to keep up with your streaming work gaming video, calling eons more. I'm willing to bet your answer is yes, especially when these activities are going on all at once under one roof as time to treat your home to the world superior wifi system with Orbi wifi six by Netgear, no more buffering, no more dead zones and no more dropped wifi connections or be wifi six by Netgear is perfectly engineered to ensure a faster superior wifi connection across even the most demanding and sophisticated, smart homes of any size.

0 (16m 27s):
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0 (17m 14s):
Yup. Even through the great recession and he does it for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee at a time when Inc magazine reports that by default 96% of businesses will fail. Within 10 years, clay is helping businesses like yours to grow on average by 104% annually. How's this even possible clay only takes on 160 clients. So he personally designs your business plans. Plus Clay's team helps you execute that plan with access to graphic designers, Google certified search engine, optimizers, web developers, online ad managers, videographers workflow, mappers and accounting coaches visit thrive time show.com/fire, to see thousands of video testimonials from real people, just like you, who clay has helped over the years.

0 (17m 54s):
That's right. Do your research and view thousands, not hundreds of proven, documented and archived video testimonials from real people, just like you at ThrivetimeShow.com/firee, then schedule your free consultation with clay himself to see how he and his team can help you thrive. So Lucas, we're back and let's talk a little bit about validation. I mean, we've already gone over some of this, but if we want to validate our idea for our course using free tools and free software, I know you have some recommendations for us, so break those down.

1 (18m 29s):
So the very first thing that I would recommend anyone doing, whether you're trying to start an online course or a coaching program, or really any style of business and you want to use YouTube ads, the best thing that I can recommend is first going through the Google ads manager, actually creating a free Google ads account as there's a ton of tools built into there that let you do a lot of that initial research that I talked about before, kind of validating whether there's people actually selling these style, the same style of products that you want to sell, kind of validating those longterm keywords. All of those things are built right into the Google ads dashboard, and you can access them completely for free. It's not like you have to pay them to have access to those tools.

1 (19m 10s):
That is where I first got started. And in addition to that, the Google trends functionality that if you just Google Google trends, it basically is very similar to the keyword tools that are built into the Google ads manager, but they let you see a much more historical kind of trends. You know, for example, if you were to type in COVID 19 into that, you would be able to see the exact spikes and inflection points that people were doing a ton of research on COVID, you know, over the last year, I would recommend using tools like that and using the tools like the Google keyword planner that are built into the Google ads dashboard to do research on the specific, again, the specific style of product or service that you're thinking of advertising.

1 (19m 52s):
So when I was using those things, I was typing in things like digital marketing course, Facebook ads course how to run Facebook ads, how to start a Facebook ads agency. I was plugging it into those tools that I was seeing. Okay, is this something a trend or a product that's kind of on the rise? Is it kind of plateauing or is it kind of on the decline? And I saw with a lot of those cases that year over year or month over month, a lot of the things that I was searching were trending upwards and at worst we're kind of, you know, stagnating, plateauing, none of the things that I was looking up were kind of declining or losing interest as generally, if something's losing interest, you probably wouldn't want to be in a market like that. Anyways, beyond that, you know, kind of like I said before, I always recommend when you're still in that validation stage of the business is to keep things as lean and simple as possible.

1 (20m 39s):
Obviously there's great tools out there, like click funnels and lead pages and Kajabi and all this stuff to design, you know, beautiful websites, beautiful sales funnels to kind of people buying your product. But literally, like I mentioned before, my very first five customers literally purchased off of a Google document and they just sent money to my PayPal account. And that's what I always recommend is just keeping things as lean as possible when you're first getting started. So that then you're able to kind of validate the idea quickly and simply reinvest any cash or revenue that you generate back into the business and using that to scale up really quickly.

0 (21m 12s):
Wow. Fire Nation so much great content here. So many great tools and softwares that you can use to really get this process moving. And if you can believe it's Lucas has now scaled from a hundred K a month to 500 K a month using you guess that's YouTube ads. So what the heck Lucas is going on?

1 (21m 32s):
Well, a lot of people don't believe it because a lot of companies and advertisers of this size think that they have to use, you know, every platform on their, you know, they have to do Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tik, TOK, basically everything, but by simply doubling down on what's worked well for us. We've been able to not only grow the company to the level it is, but also continue providing our students and our customers an amazing experience without having to add on, you know, a million different team members that we would have to worry about in the marketing department. So the biggest thing that I think has attributed to our success is that YouTube is a platform that's very unlike Facebook and Instagram is kind of like I mentioned before Facebook and Instagram advertising, obviously great there's people that absolutely crush it there, but they never worked for me for this style of product.

1 (22m 18s):
Because one, I think that video style products like online courses, coaching programs, not only lend to kind of a video based advertising platform, but also because YouTube is something that everyone just naturally goes on as a part of their day. You know, if someone has something they're wondering about, they're going to go to Google and they're going to search it, you know, if someone is having trouble, you know, building that new piece of Ikea furniture, if someone's, you know, even a college student's having trouble with their homework first place that most people naturally go, it's either going to be Google or it's going to be YouTube to look up a tutorial or a how to, and as a result, the audiences for so many of these different styles of products on YouTube are absolutely massive, literally millions and millions of people that is just growing by the day as more people enter into a marketplace, they start consuming that content and they start learning more about it.

1 (23m 7s):
And obviously, you know, the market that we're in, it is in business and digital marketing. It's something that's been absolutely exploding over the last three years, but other markets, even things like health and fitness, like I mentioned before, or love dating and relationships are other markets that are absolutely exploding on YouTube ads that I think there's still a ton of opportunity for advertisers to take advantage of. So one thing that we found, you know, obviously when we were first getting started, we were starting with these competitor style audiences, these longterm, or these long tail keyword audiences that really allowed us to scoop up some low hanging profits and really just get profitable quickly. As we growing further and further, we wanted to kind of expand the net that we were casting onto YouTube.

1 (23m 50s):
So rather than targeting keywords that were like how to start a Facebook ads agency, we would kind of open up the net and start targeting people who are only searching for things like how to start our business or best online business to start our best side hustle even, and naturally, you know, seeing what works. And the cool thing is, is once we found a lot of those keywords and a lot of those audiences that did end up working those things are completely evergreen. We have campaigns that have literally been running on simple keywords like that, like how to start a business or best side hustle, 21, 21, or even just targeting the keyword Facebook ads that have literally been running for nearly a year now and spending thousands of dollars every single day because of the massive reach that YouTube has and that people are able to access on their platform.

1 (24m 34s):
So obviously there's a ton that goes into it on the backend, continuously improving our product, improving our business and making sure that our customers are having a great experience with our program and getting results, but on the advertising and marketing side, fortunately YouTube makes it, you know, very, very simple. And I can say this as someone who previously was a tried and true Facebook marketer, that Facebook does have a lot of pitfalls when it comes to scaling, you know, a ton of people have had that experience where, you know, they launch a campaign on Facebook and it seems like it's working well, but then they try and increase things and things go completely out of whack. We haven't really experienced that with YouTube. Obviously there is that to some degree, but because the audiences are so, so massive, I think there's just so much opportunity for advertisers and marketers like us to just scoop up those interested prospects and give them a product or service that's actually going to provide value to them so

0 (25m 26s):
Much opportunity out there, Fire Nation for you to scoop up as well. I mean, learn from the best implement take action. So Lucas, with everything that you share with us, brother, give us the number one takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything you shared. I know you have a great gift in call to action. So share that now, and then we'll say goodbye.

1 (25m 48s):
My best point of recommendation has to be on focus as like I mentioned earlier on, I do think it is possible to get rich quick. I don't think it's possible to get rich easy just because I think a lot of people naturally are spreading themselves too thin. You know, kind of like I've talked about before. There's people who think, you know, oh, you know, if my thing is working, I need to advertise it on Facebook, on Instagram, on Tik TOK on YouTube. I need to do it everywhere to date. We've only ever advertised on YouTube and it's only ever been this one single product. And that's another thing there's so many people who try and develop, you know, alternative products or kind of secondary solutions to the main thing that's working. Whereas we've experienced massive levels of success by simply doubling down on what works.

1 (26m 32s):
So that would be my number one recommendation.

0 (26m 35s):
You have a great call to action and gifts for Fire Nation.

1 (26m 38s):
Absolutely. So back when I was first getting started, like I mentioned, I had to do a lot this stuff manually, which ended up working out, but it took a lot of time. And a few times I wanted to rip my hair out of my head, especially when I was trying to do a lot of that early validation, spying on competitors, trying to build those longterm keyword audiences using a lot of the free tools. It ended up working, but I found it to be very, very limiting. So my team has actually been building a tool called leopard ads that actually allows you to do both of the most important things that I did when I was first getting started on YouTube. It allows you to spy on competitors or actively advertising in your marketplace using YouTube ads.

1 (27m 19s):
You can actually look behind the scenes on the exact YouTube ads that they're running. You can see the exact videos that they're running, the exact funnels that they're driving traffic to. Not only that, but you also have the ability to build those long term keyword audiences. The things that I was using to get started at such a minimal budget, just 50 or a hundred bucks a day, and our tool lets you do it with just a few clicks. And if we're giving away a free copy of it, if you go to leopard ads.com/fire, sign up for the free training there, and you'll be able to do that right away. If you're interested in doing what we have done and seen massive levels of success using YouTube ads,

0 (27m 58s):
You heard it from the master himself. And you know that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with LLT that's Lucas Lee and JLD that's John Lee today. So keep up your seats and head over to eofire.com type Lucas in the search bar and his show. His page will pop up with everything we talked about here today. Lucas, thank you so much for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Awesome. Hey Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Lucas ends Fire Nation. What can 3000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you?

0 (28m 38s):
How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a revolutionary 17 step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs. And now you can get it in one place. UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you looking for a proven business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire.