The exact costs of doing your own marketing

Last two weeks I got lots of encouragement from my readers to keep writing. In total, I got 89 positive responses and one negative one.

The feedback I received was split pretty evenly among 3 groups:

Group 1: Shorter is better: this segment recommended me to write shorter emails because they don’t have time to read long stuff.

Group 2: More actionable content: this group enjoys useful content that can be directly applied to help grow their businesses.

Group 3: Be yourself: The other group told me not worry about what people think, be myself, write as I please, and have fun in the process.

Last year, I conducted a similar survey which revealed that almost 70% of my readers run their own businesses and had purchased one or more of my online courses in the past.

This means that most of you are interested in learning efficient ways of generating more revenue. With this in mind, it seems I should focus more on my experience in marketing and creating online courses.

Well, today I’m going to try to do that by sharing the exact costs of running a medium size evergreen webinar marketing funnel to sell a premium online course ($500 to $2000 USD).

The list below contains the exact list of software I’ve used to host, sell, and promote online courses.

Software & Tools	Product	Monthly	Yearly
Email Automation	ConvertKit	$49.00	$588.00
Landing Pages	ClickFunnels	$97.00	$1,164.00
Web Host	Hostgator	$4.00	$48.00
Domain	NameCheap	$10.00	$10.00
Website Builder	WordPress	$0.00	$0.00
Webinar hosting	Everwebinar	$41.42	$497.00
Course Hosting	Thinkific	$39.00	$468.00
Text messages	Twilio	$2.00	$24.00
Task Automation	Zapier	$13.75	$165.00
Traffic Analytics	Google Analytics	$0.00	$0.00
User Behavior	Hotjar	$29.00	$348.00
Surveys	Google Forms	$0.00	$0.00
Sales Chat	Tawk	$0.00	$0.00
Stock images	Pexels	$0.00	$0.00
	TOTAL:	$285.17	$3,312.00

If you plan to self-host your online courses and promote them using webinars, you should be ready to incur similar expenses.

Not all the tools listed are required (Twilio, Zapier, Hotjar, Tawk) but they can be extremely useful for funnel automation and optimization.

Email automation costs above are based on a list of up to 3,000 subscribers and they increase quickly as your email list size increases.

What about the cost of generating leads?

It depends on how you plan to generate traffic. If you choose the content marketing route, then the main expense will be the sweat equity invested in creating great content such as writing on your blog or/and creating free YouTube videos.

If you want to pay for your leads then you need to set aside a monthly budget for paid advertising. Most online instructors run Facebook ads. It’s not unusual to start with a $5 per day budget and as the funnel gets optimized grow that budget to $15-$20 a day or $600 per month.

A great way to fill up your funnel with high qualified leads is by promoting your funnel via affiliates or JV partners. You don’t need to invest any capital up front but you’ll need to put the time to build the right relationships.

Marketing is hard!

A proper marketing funnel can take several weeks to build and months to get it to profitability. After a lot of trial and error and patience, you should be able to get all the moving parts working smoothly. However, the work is never done, for a funnel to stay profitable one has to continuously spend time maintaining it and optimizing it.

The alternative – if you have not time, money, or patience – is to simply upload your course to a marketplace like Udemy or Skillshare and let them worry about the marketing stuff.

Let me know if you want to learn more about course marketing and I’ll share more next week!

Peace, love, and cookies.

Miguel

P.S: If you’re interested I’m giving away a full free month of access to all my courses HERE.