0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Being Boss. Today, we're pulling a timeless EOFire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active and we'll be breaking down the simple way to boost your core sales without spending more to drop these value bombs I have brought Panos Siozos into EOFire Studios. Panos is the CEO of LearnWorlds, an innovative e-learning product, LearnWorlds has evolved and grown to be among the top online course platforms with a five star rating by its users. And today, Fire Nation we’ll talk about how happy users bring in other users to your business, how online courses are versatile products, there are lots of ways to promote it and how they are the future and so much more.

0 (47s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Panos and our sponsors. Is this your year? Visit ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire to see how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped thousands of entrepreneurs to dramatically increased profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire. Marketing Made Simple hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing work. In a recent episode, Amy Porterfield shared her five email marketing Secrets for long-term business growth.

0 (1m 28s):
Listen to Marketing Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts, Panos say What's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1 (1m 42s):
Hi, for our nation, super excited to be here and and be hosted by John. One thing that is quite interesting, I guess in my past is that for five years I've worked in the European Parliament in Brussels on research and innovation issues, negotiating budgets of billions of Euros and meeting some of the strongest political figures in in Europe. So this has been super exciting and a great lesson for me in my life.

0 (2m 6s):
I love that. I find that super interesting when we can kind of come from diverse backgrounds, both work and location and always take something from that Fire Nation, learn something, educate yourself on something new cuz you never know how that's gonna play a role in your future endeavors. And as I was sharing with Fire Nation Panos in the introduction today, we're focusing on the simple way to boost your core sales without spending more money. So let's kind of back up a little bit before we really touch that topic and talk about LearnWorlds. How did LearnWorlds start? The

1 (2m 42s):
Three co-founders we go way back in e-learning. We all have a background that's researchers in e-learning personally have a PhD in educational assessment and so does my co-founder. And we've published research and we've built many, many platforms over the years. So that was our research. Is the, is the backbone, I guess the d n a of the, of the company research into e-learning

0 (3m 5s):
LearnWorlds was an aha moment for somebody whose aha moment was that? Like where did that aha moment come from? Talk to us about like the evolution of the idea and then how you turned it into a reality.

1 (3m 18s):
The main reason that we came out and came together and built this platform is was frustration and frustration by the state of learning and frustration by the kind of platforms that were out there. We were, I would say we were really pissed off by the kind of learning experiences people had, unusual platforms and we thought that these were so way behind and so substandard in comparison to the things that we were studying in the academia. So we knew that we could do better. We knew that e-learning is not just throwing a PDF at somebody and consider this to be like training or throw a video and and say, okay, now you're done, you're trained, you can, you can go out and continue. We knew that we could do better. People these days are so used to having slick digital experiences with our gaming devices, their iPads, their apps, so just creating something that is substandard when it comes to learning doesn't cut it anymore.

1 (4m 7s):
So we wanted to create something that would had a great learner experience, something that users would be able to, to spend time to really immerse themselves in, in, in the learning. And that's the, the concept of, that's the, the concept I guess behind, behind Learn words. Also, we know that just interacting with the content is not enough. This is also the, the, the concept of learns is that it's a whole ecology of learning because you don't just need access to the content, but you need access to the instructors, you need access to the experts, you need access to all the things that are happening around the field that you're studying, like the top Twitter accounts or the other resources that really compliment your, the, the, the content and let you learn and about the stuff that you, that you love.

1 (4m 51s):
Whether it's acquiring a new business skill or some skill to, to advance your career or just, you know, you learn something around your hobbies and the things that interest you as a person.

0 (5m 1s):
At one point you realize you could create this business out of your entire product of research. So what was that turning point? Take us there, talk us through that. Like what did that process look like?

1 (5m 12s):
As a background, we are engineers, so we thought that if we just build the best possible platform, that would be enough. People would appreciate and they would say, oh, what the platform will, will jump right away and use it, but obviously it doesn't work this way in the real world. So the first thing that we did is when we first got together, we wanted to create our own online school and teaching teach content, teach courses ourselves mainly about web development. HTML five, CSS three. So if, if we go back a few years, these things weren't really available on the net. So Team Treehouse just was up, Linda was publishing courses around that. So we wanted to build our own content. Obviously building the content is very, very difficult and we learned this, the, the, the hard way.

1 (5m 55s):
But the moment people started accessing the courses and checking out the platform, they were amazed. And we had, even though it wasn't our initial plan to just create a platform, people started asking for the platform. They said, you guys have some great content, but we really love the platform, so can we use it for teaching marketing, data analytics, programming, photography, whatever. So at that point we realized that okay, we might have some good content, but what really people are interested in is the platform. They can use it to teach whatever they like and they can use it to start selling the courses. And this is when we just made a, a, a pivotal, I would say, and publish the platform in a software as a service format where everybody can just go in, start a free trial, put in their credit card and start selling teaching and, and selling online courses.

0 (6m 42s):
So Panos, let's be frank, most companies struggle with growth. Most entrepreneurs struggle growing their company, their product, their service, their mastermind, their podcast, their social media, like whatever it might be. Growth is something that we all struggle with to one degree or another, but LearnWorlds. You've been growing Fast Brother. What has been your secret to this exponential growth that you're currently experiencing?

1 (7m 7s):
The basis of all this is having a great product because as I said, we weren't marketers by by training. We, we didn't know how to do that, but it's the product that's been carrying us all these years. So we, this is what gave us the drive and the impetus and also brought in lots and lots of users and users, happy users, bring in other users and refer, refer them to them for free without even having to, to give them like a compensation or anything else. So this has been for us a great, a great experience and, and a great game. Having a great product. So even though we are may not be the biggest platform around, we see lots of amazing feedback from our customers. And another thing I guess that really, really helped us in, in making this connection with the customers and having really, really happy customers is that how devoted we have been, I would say we have been obsessive about customer support because we know how difficult it can be to have to learn a new platform, launch an online school, have to do marketing, have to create your content.

1 (8m 7s):
I mean we've all been there almost I guess entrepreneurs are, are trying to juggle different things and try to balance things and we know how stressful this can be. So we wanted to be able to help people. So we created an amazing customer support team and also we've published an amazing content that helps them in, in this process and so far this pays off. People are happy and they are happy to refer us. Yesterday we had, we had a great feed, some great feedback from somebody who said that, I really hate to do this because I think that using LearnWorlds is a competitive advantage and I don't want other people to find out about you, but I really have to give you a great public testimonial. So they were kind of ambivalent whether they wanted to, to share this secret that they have that they found in us with, with other customers.

1 (8m 52s):
So this is the kind of relationships that we try to cultivate with people through their product and their customer

0 (8m 56s):
Support Fire Nation. I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday and it was fantastic and we were kind of talking about the evolution of Facebook and if you look back over the years of Facebook, they were really just focused on one thing, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. But what have they shifted into over the past year or so? Customer satisfaction, customer support. They are focusing on the customer experience. So just like Panos was saying, you Fire Nation need to be focusing on this customer experience, the customer satisfaction. If you can support your customer better than your competition, you are going to win at exponential levels. The name of the game in 2020 and beyond is customer satisfaction, customer happiness, customer support, customer experience.

0 (9m 40s):
Make that happen. Now we're gonna be talking in a little bit about what panelist is doing differently, how course creators can stand up from the competition cuz he has a lot of focus on this and how you can become actually successful in general selling your course and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Are you ready to grow your business now what if you could learn the proven systems and processes that have been used to grow thousands of multimillion dollar success stories at ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire. See how Clay Clark's proven business coaching has helped thousands of entrepreneurs to increase profitability dramatically. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Sound too good to be true?

0 (10m 20s):
Go to ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire to see thousands of documented client testimonials. Because Clay only takes on 160 clients, he personally designs your business plan for you. Then Clay's team of talented designers, videographers, web developers, workflow maps and accounting coaches will help you implement that proven plan. See thousands of verify success stories and schedule your free one-on-one 13 point assessment with Mr. Clay Clark himself today at ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire Knowledge will not attract money unless it is organized and directed through practical plans of action. Become the next success story. Schedule your free 13 point assessment today at ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire.

2 (10m 59s):
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0 (11m 28s):
So panels we're back and a lot of the problems that entrepreneurs run into and companies run into is they just do little micro changes from what everybody else is doing. So everybody's basically doing the same thing with LearnWorlds, you're doing things differently. Break that down. What are you doing differently than the rest of your competition?

1 (11m 49s):
I mean there are so many online courses now around people launching courses. We see hundreds of launches every day. So it's very, very difficult to to stand out from the, from the crowd. Sometimes we say that this is like being in a supermarket and having to, especially if you, if online, of course, creators go to a marketplace or something and try to promote their courses. It's just like being a, a can of tuna stacked in the supermarket. How can somebody differentiate from the, and stand out from the, from the rest? It's, it's very, very difficult. But we've seen that this has been very, very successful for our customers by creating, by adding value to their courses and create really unique courses.

1 (12m 29s):
This is not very easy creating a unique course. It's not very easy, but this is where we go in with some tools that we have created based on our research and giving the, giving to people some, some really unique tools that help them create content and really even on their existing content, allows 'em to repurpose it and give it a new life. One example that we've been using very, very successfully, and I think we are the only course platform that has this thing, is what we call the interactive editor video editor. So people just take specific a a, a usual linear video. They can upload it on the platform and in real time without having to use any video post processing or have to hire an expert, which is also very, very expensive.

1 (13m 12s):
What they can do is on the fly they can add titles, videos, quizzes, sub subscripts, subtitles, anything on top of the video. So even if you take a, a linear video that, I dunno, just describe something, somebody can stop the video, pop up a quiz and ask some, ask a question to the, to the user and the user has to respond and then they receive some feedback. And this can happen in, in really you can design such an experience, such an interactive experience in, in a few seconds. So this has been a great, a great boost for our customers because they take all their existing videos, even videos that might be boring. I mean, if somebody just records a screencast or goes through representation with a voiceover, we've been through this, we know that this, that this experience can, it is not always great.

1 (14m 1s):
It can be boring for students, but once students face this kind of interactivity and they are, they face questions, they see feedback, they, they get pointers that really makes the, that really makes the content sound out. This has been a great boost for, for, for those, for those users. So I, this is just one of the, of the ways that we try to help people to repurpose, to repurpose their content. Another thing that we're doing is that we have a unique ebook editor where people can just upload their text. It can be a Microsoft Word file, they can just import it into the text and this gets converted into a responsive, which is like mobile-friendly text ebook that students can read.

1 (14m 44s):
They can highlight passages of text, they can add personal notes. So instead of just having passive consumption of the content, students get faced with challenges they get faced with, with, with interactivity, with interactions. And this really increases their immersion, increases their engagement with the courses and increases their satisfaction. So at the end of the course, they're happier and they want to consume more courses, spend more time to the, to the, into the platform and are really willing to buy more courses.

0 (15m 12s):
So one thing that I know a lot of people want when they join a company like LearnWorlds or they're using LearnWorlds as their platform is, Hey, how are you gonna help me become successful at selling my courses? You know, that's just the reality of the world. This is what customers are looking for and if somebody can stand up from the competition in that way, they're gonna have a leg up. I mean, you just eloquently described a few things that LearnWorlds does different, a few things that course creators should be doing to setting up from the competition in general. But what specifically do you do beyond the things you've already mentioned to help the people that join LearnWorlds become more successful at what it is they do, which is sell courses?

1 (15m 50s):
What we've done if we, is that we've tried to make this an all in one platform and we offer all the tools that somebody needs to support all kinds of business models that exist around online courses. So people can create and sell online courses as one off. They can sell bundles of courses, they can sell subscriptions, they can sell combinations of courses and subscriptions. So they can sell courses with, with payment plans. So any kind of business model can be supported and we give them all the little widgets and gimmicks that they would need to sell their courses like coupons and discounts and, and also lots of integrations with all the marketing tools, all the tools of the trade that all the top marketers are using from the basics like conversion fix or analytics integrations that will help them to identify what is their audience, who are they, where are they coming from, where they're spending their time.

1 (16m 43s):
And also be able to measure their, their, their conversions and integrations with all the marketing tools for, for example, nobody can effectively market an online course without having some kind of email sequences and using email blasts and, and automations. So we integrate with the top course email, email marketing platforms to, to help them achieve their, their, their objectives. So these are just some of the, of the tools that we, that we offer around this thing. And also lots of support and lots of training. We have one of our mo mo best resources is our own academy where we publish courses both free and some other are accessible only to our existing customers where we teach them about how to create the best possible version of their course.

1 (17m 30s):
So even if they have like basic understanding, we, we give them lots of information about how they can improve their course in terms of interactivity and making it more interesting, but also on how to sell their online course, how to effectively use social media, how effectively to, to use paid platforms like AdWords and, and Facebook. And this really helps people, people, even seasoned trainers who already have tons of content or others who have bigger audiences but haven't been able to use that on the, on the online course reel when they have to, to, to, to learn some new things and learn some new tricks. We give them lots of support to try to make that. One

0 (18m 8s):
Thing I wanna talk about right now, Panos is marketing, also known as getting the word out. I mean, we as creators can have the best course in the world. It can have the best materials and templates and trainings and support and onboarding and all this stuff, but if nobody ever hears about the course, then nobody's ever gonna be able to join that course. So again, from the aerial view, because you've had a lot of insight into what different course creators are doing correctly and incorrectly, give us some advice on effectively marketing online courses.

1 (18m 41s):
Online courses are very, very versatile. Products are very sexy, I would say. And there are lots, lots of ways to, to promote them. I I frequently say that online courses are the e-books of the 2020. So what the e-book used to be like 10 or 20 years back where you used it to give, to get leads or to just en enhance your branding and stand out as a professional, as an author, as a speaker or whatever. This is how e-books are being used today. So even if you're not selling the courses by just by offering a free course, you can get lots of value, you can get leads for your business, you can get, you can get people to know about you so you can in increase your, your consulting jobs or your gigs or whatever else.

1 (19m 25s):
So there's, there's all sorts of ways to gain, to gain lots and lots of value out of an online course even without selling the courses. So one of the things that we've seen that works really, really well is freebees free online courses. Just create a freebie. It can be a minimum course 20 minutes around the concept that you know very well. It can be how to do a minimum campaign on Facebook just elaborating on a marketing concept or how to, to give a, an interesting title for your podcast. It can be something as simple as that, like a 20 minute video or just a few pages of some content and give it out for free. So this works really, really well as a lead magnet because you have people coming onto your website, coming onto your online school subscribing, and then you have their emails.

1 (20m 11s):
And once you have their emails, you can do lots and lots of stuff from remarketing, retargeting, launching your, your paid offers later. So there's lots of value around, around that. And obviously there's lots of ways to, to integrate this with paid content. You can have some paid courses and then just leave some, some courses for free. One of the things that really amazed us recently, we were talking with a huge customer from from Netherlands, one of the biggest technical publishers in the, in the country and what they were doing. So we're talking about publishing, which is an industry that like faced a lots of obviously faces, lots of of pressure in this day and age, but what they were doing is they were selling bundles of physical books with online courses and they were selling like hot bands.

1 (20m 60s):
It was, it was amazing. The, the, the sum of the sales that they have from, from courses alone or e books alone was an order of magnitude less than what was selling for the bundle. People were perceiving the, the bundle to be much more valuable. So that was something that we didn't expect. We were expecting that people would just like sell online courses, but being able to bundle your, your online offering with a physical product, in this case a book. It was a, it was a, a game changing things for, for this particular customer. Also, obviously all the little tricks that we, we've seen even that we see even in, in retail sales, like bundles of courses, buy one, get one free, all these things still work in the online space.

1 (21m 47s):
It, it's sometimes we think that only the, the very elaborate and, and the very sophisticated tricks would work, but still all the basic stuff are already there. People love promotions, people have discounts, people love even the concept of being able to add a coupon and apply a coupon onto their checkout page. So I, if you do all these things well and you have a nice, a nice buying experience and in this case a platform like ours has been optimized for selling courses. So it's not just having the e-commerce part of the, of the platform was not an afterthought, like trying to make things work with plugins and duct taping things, but it, it's a, it's a funnel designed to help you sell online courses.

1 (22m 32s):
So obviously we try to make it as easy as possible with one click people to be able to buy something and just being possible, being able to add your coupon. It's something that really, really makes people happy to, to get this kind of, of discounts. So even these things work very well. And also I guess the holy grail for all internet entrepreneurs is the being able to get recurring revenue. So being able to have lots of flexibility around your online offering and building memberships and creating different levels of subscriptions, tiers like monthlys and year lease and, and Silver Plan that gives access to 50% of your courses and the gold plan that gives access to a hundred percent of your courses and even some premium offers that gives access to one-on-one training, some, some kind of added value like that helps people sell courses for very high tickets, very high prices.

1 (23m 25s):
And, and this is, this has been quite a source of, of income for, for a huge number of our customers.

0 (23m 33s):
Fire Nation. These are strategies and tactics that are working today. Again, panels has his finger on the pulse, he's seeing what's working and guess what, it's not overly complicated. You don't need to be overly complicated and have all these different tiers and all these different structures. You just need to create a great solution to a real problem in this world. Offer it to the right people and you're going to win. That's the end of the game. Like that is the answer. And these strategy and tax and the tactics that Panos is talking about, these are all things they're just going to amplify and ignite your success once you figure out that first part. So Panos, I'm gonna step back from the mic for a second here. I want you to take over, give us a wrap up of everything we've talked about today.

0 (24m 15s):
Meaning give us the one big takeaway that you wanna make sure that we really get after our chat, this audio masterclass today. And give us the best way that we can find out more about you and LearnWorlds

1 (24m 28s):
Online courses are the future. They are the ebook of the 2020. It's a very versatile product. Even if you're not selling online courses, you can, your business and you as an individual can take lots of value out of that. You can gain leads, you can gain exposure, you can increase your branding and your, and your trustworthiness. Creating an online course, it's very, very easy these days. It's very, we make it easy to repurpose existing content. Also creating videos or creating some creating content gets increasingly easier. So what we're trying to do with our own platform is try to to take usual content and, and normal content and give it an extra edge, make it interactive, make it interesting, and give you that added value that will make you stand out from the crowd and make your course memorable and have users spend lots of time deliver, get results out of this course and come back for more.

1 (25m 21s):
Now, marketing your online course is not self-evident. You need to do some work there. You need to understand your audience, you need to know who you are, who you are selling to. But there are lots and lots of proven techniques that still work today. How to get leads, how to create freebies, how to structure your offers and how to, to create an offering that is going to be very, very effective and the value proposition that will get the conversions. And what we do as a platform is we, we learn from hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs, we, we learn from the best and we, IM implement and import all this experience into the platform so that we try to give you the best funnels and the best templates and the best tools that others have found very, very effective and, and created thousands and thousands of, of dollars and, and in sales.

1 (26m 11s):
And we try to make it approachable and easy for everybody to start a very, very successful online school. That's the kind of of job we are doing and hope that we can, that we can help lots of people with, with launching their first online school or launching a successful online school with us

0 (26m 28s):
Fire Nation. If you wanna learn more about LearnWorlds, here's a url, visit LearnWorlds.com/fire. You can learn more about what they have going on if you decide to move forward. They have a special 10% off coupon fire 2020 F i r e 2020. So if you visit LearnWorlds.com/fire and you decide to move forward and check out their platform, fire 2020 is gonna get you 10% off. Anything else panels you wanna say around Fire Nation going to check, LearnWorlds Out before we say goodbye.

1 (27m 5s):
Thanks for the opportunity for being here. I wish all the success in this, in this year to your, to your audience online courses is something that they should definitely consider as a business model or as a compliment to their existing sources of, of income. It's easy, it's much easier than it used to be and we can help them be successful in this Space.

0 (27m 24s):
Fire Nation, this is the roaring twenties, let's get going. Time is ticking and you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with PS and JLD today. So keep up the heat and if you head over to EOFire.com type Panos, P A N O S in the search bar, the show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about today. Best show notes in the biz and of co and of course your call to action Fire Nation is LearnWorlds.com/fire. That's LearnWorlds.com/fire. Enter promo code fire 2020 for 10% off. And Panos, thank you for sharing your truth, your value with Fire Nation today.

0 (28m 8s):
For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (28m 12s):
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

0 (28m 14s):
Hey, Fire Nation, today's value bomb content was brought to you by Panos and have you ever considered creating and running your own mastermind? Well, I've created a free course f r e e to help you do just that. This includes a two hour training with Tony Robbins. Visit mastermindonfire.com, check it out today, Fire Nation and I'll catch you there. Or on the flip side, Is this your year? Visit ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire to see how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped thousands of entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at ThrivetimeShow.com/EOfire.

0 (28m 58s):
Marketing Made Simple hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing work. In a recent episode, Amy Porterfield shared her five email marketing secrets for long-term business growth. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.