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Why Isn't My Online Course Selling And How To Fix It
Episode 3323rd August 2026 • The Email Marketing Show • Email Marketing Heroes
00:00:00 00:10:08

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You built the course. You launched it. You know it can help people. So why aren't the sales coming in?

It can feel frustrating when you put your heart into creating an online course, only to see people scroll past it without buying. The good news is that the problem is often not the course itself. It is usually how the course is positioned, priced, marketed, or what happens after someone buys.

After working closely with clients and studying what separates successful online courses from the ones that struggle, four clear patterns stand out. These are the Four Ps: Positioning, Pricing, People, and Potential. Fix these four areas, and you can unlock far more sales from the course you already have.

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FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

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Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

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Transcripts

Today I'm going to show you why your online course isn't selling as much as it could be, and how to fix it, and each one of these techniques is going to help you to sell more and more and more of your online courses and your programs until you're making so much money, you're basically like Scrooge McDuck, you know in that scene where he dives into all the money and all that sort of stuff?

You're going to be like that, basically, kind of, not exactly. Anyway, whenever I work really closely with my clients inside of my Velocity Game Plan program, what I'm doing is I'm actually looking at where the things dry up. I'm looking at where are the opportunities for them to make more from what they're already sitting on, to unlock literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

he first P is positioning. In:

If someone sees the promise of what you're offering in your course and they think for a moment that they can get that same information from ChatGPT, they won't buy. So what you need to do is make sure that the outcome of what you're promising and how that you're suggesting it is not ChatGTPable, all right? We used to talk about making things unGoogleable. Now it's unChatGPTable.

So there's a few different ways that you can do this in practice. One is to make it so that it's your proprietary method that has gotten a specific result. You have to talk about the results of your system.

Because what that means is when somebody sees, oh, I want to get that result as well. And the only way that person got that result is by using your system. The only way to get your system is by paying you for it and enrolling in your online course.

That's the first bit. It's the proof and your proprietary system. The second way of doing this is support the course with some kind of implementation.

This could be through rather than just saying, here's the education, here's the training, have at it, study it, don't study it, I don't care. You're actually going to help people through coaching calls. You're maybe going to have a group where you offer support, or they could have access to AI tools or other tools that make getting it done easier and getting it done well and doing a good job of it quicker.

So that's the second one, is to support with that implementation. Thirdly, you actually have to position yourself against AI, usually by calling out how that they've already tried to solve this problem with AI before, because you are absolutely right that before they come to you, they have already asked ChadGPT, they've asked Claude, they've watched a couple of YouTube videos, they're coming to you already very jaded. And you can now call out on that and say, well, you probably already tried to do this using some prompts or using some feedback or using a plan or a system from ChadGPT.

You probably noticed that hasn't worked and tell them why it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked because of X, Y, and Z reason. I also recommend that you start referring to your thing, not as a course, but as a system or a method or something else, not a course.

The reason is, a course is what you do at school. It implies learning, sitting in a dingy old classroom, right? We now live in a world where people no longer want to learn things. All they want is to have them and have the result.

And we've been spoiled by this. And the reason it's happening is because we can now have next day delivery on pretty much any physical thing. Thank you to Amazon, very, very useful service.

But also we now know because of AI, we can have instant access to any information, and we can now have it customized to us in our situation. So once your course is what we call AI defensible, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to look at your pricing. And that's the second thing.

Is your price perhaps too low? You see, every one of us has got our monthly income goal, right? If yours is $100,000, you can earn that in a few different ways. You could sell 100 $1,000 offers, or you could sell 10 $10,000 offers. And what I want you to do here is you just tap into your skills.

If you're really good at volume and you get lots of audience and lots of reach for your stuff, but they're just not converting, then you can align your price to be lower with the high volume. Whereas if you aren't sitting on volume, you can go for low volume, but you're going to need higher prices. But you cannot have a low volume, low price business.

You need to choose high volume or high price, okay? But I want you to be aware of one thing, and it's called no man's land pricing. No man's land pricing is a specific price point that is too high for someone to say yes to and buy without speaking to someone on a call or a consultation. But it's too low to actually warrant the effort and the time involved in having that call or consultation.

And that price point in most markets is the price between $1,000 and $5,000. If I get on a webinar, and so I see a sales video or a BSL or a sales page, and the thing is $1,000 or less, I'll consider clicking the button, putting my credit card information in, bang, and I've got it. When it gets over $1,000, I kind of want a bit more of an experience that person.

The exception is like if we're during one of those big live launches, there's lots of momentum, lots of live events, then maybe if it's a multi-day launch, definitely much easier. But between $1,000 and $5,000 is a really tough price point to get somebody to go, yes, I'll just buy it. But between $1,000 and $5,000 is also a price point that is so low that it's not really worth getting on a sales call for.

So you are better to make the decision, am I going to make this offer $1,000 or less, or I'm going to make it $5,000 or more and do sales calls? That's what I want you to be aware of with your pricing. And next, it's about who you're selling to, and this is called people. When your course isn't selling, it may be because you either don't have enough new people coming into your world, so you need to work on that audience building element, or that the people you are attracting are actually the wrong ones.

And I see both of these all the time with clients. First of all, when someone joins your email list, you're going to add in a clarifying qualification question on that signup page, whether you're doing webinars, a lead magnet, whatever you're doing, you want to add an extra question, which is literally thinking about what is one multiple choice question you could ask someone so you would instantly know whether they are the perfect person to buy your offer or not. And you're going to add that question to your lead magnet, to your opt-in page, to your signup page.

That's how we're going to qualify these people. And if you find out that you're getting a lot of the wrong people in, which happens every now and again, I want you to take a look at the language that you use in your ads, the language that you use in your social posts and on your signup pages. Can you push away all of the wrong people and make the right people feel seen and understood? Because when you do that, you'll drop more of those right people because they're like, this is exactly what I'm looking for.

It's not too low level. It's not too high level. It's exactly where I want to be.

And everybody else is like, that's not for me. That's what really good marketing does, right? Really good marketing does three things. It lets the audience who've got a problem feel seen and lets them feel understood.

And it gives them hope that there is a solution. And hopefully that solution is yours. And the fourth of these Ps is potential.

So let's do some simple maths. I bet you're pleased about that, right? Let's imagine you own a shop and someone came in and the most they can spend with you in that shop on an item is $1,000, right? Then what you have to do is realize, okay, I've got to get that customer to come through the door. So what's my cost on getting that person through the door? Maybe you're willing to run your business at a 30% profit.

So that means on $1,000, you can spend up to $700 getting the person into the room, into the shop, and you've got 300 left to pay yourself. Awesome. But if someone can spend $10,000 instead of just $1,000, you can now spend up to $7,000 and you still keep 30%, only that instead of $300 you're keeping, you're now keeping $3,000.

So when someone buys your course, what else can they buy? If you have something that is 10 times the price of your course, you just need 10% of people who buy your course to also buy this other thing if it's 10 times the price and you instantly double how much money you make. So let's imagine the first thing is $1,000 and the second thing is $10,000. All these people are buying the $1,000 thing and then 10% of them buy the $10,000 thing.

That means 10% of $10,000 is $1,000. So you've got the $1,000 that you made from the second item and the $1,000 from the first item. You just doubled your money by having only 10% of people.

You could probably do way better than that, but getting just 10% of people who buy the first thing to buy the second thing, if it's 10 times the price. So one of the reasons your course may not be selling is because there is nothing more to buy. So you are being throttled by that initial price.

So they are the piece of why your course may not be selling and how to fix it. Now, of course, how do you get more people onto your email list so you can do all of this stuff? Well, I'm pleased you asked because if you go check out this video, I'll show you some awesome free ways of getting a lot of really good people, the perfect people onto your email list. Go check it out now.

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