Watercolor Painting Academy
Watercolor online classes. Taught by a professional artist.
Long time no see :). So actually after a lot of considering we moved from WordPress to Podia to host our academy. The 2 main reasons behind the decision are:
- Simplicity
- Saving
Simplicity because running on WP mean having to deal with regular updates and bugs that will come with it. LearnDash the plugin we were using can become sluggish at time and as ton of options, you also need to maintain a server etc...
Saving because to run on WP we had to use lot of plugins & app like, LearnDash for LMS, Active Campaign for email marketing, Vimeo for hosting our videos, CloudWays for our server etc... All those are gone with Podia.
So you loose in flexibility, but win in simplicity and save a bunch of bucks.
We continue to publish a new course every month and send an email to our 2k mailing list.
We have a free mini-course you can enroll in on our blog that generated our mailing list contact, plus all our free members.
Most big courses and academies use ads funnel to generate paid signup and we would love to do that too, but it's a big investment.
You need to pay an expert and invest in the ad budget, and in general, you lose some money before you start making some and with $220 MRR, we have a tight budget :).
I know it's not crazy, 3 paid members, but well, we should celebrate every small victory right :). We started to level up our blog game (where our SEO come from) as well as our Pinterest game which represent like 70% of all blog visit and starting to put in place a bunch of automations via MailerLite to up-sell free members.
Woop, woop! Well, we didn't see that one coming, even though our yearly tier is definitely the best deal, most people go for a monthly subscription which they can cancel anytime. Anyway, it is always awesome to get that kind of email in the morning and we can't wait to get to a level where those happen weekly :).
Ok so at this point I realized few things:
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It would take us a long time before we create enough content so that would be a no brainer for people to signup for a paid account on a regular basis.
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The tech was way too advanced for the use we made of it.
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Our monthly expenses for that tech were not justified.
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Our users liked simplicity.
So, in the light of those realizations, I decided to get rid of Active Member 360 and replace it by Restrict Content Pro. I got rid of Active Campaign and replaced it with Mailer Lite and finally started using LearnDash for our course content. I also redesigned the academy to be more simple.
Woop woop, without doing any marketing or ads of any kind (we were still waiting to have much more content on the platform) we got our first paid customer! Well, it's only $29, but man, that felt good to see the result of your hard work being appreciated and rewarded. Of course let's hope it's the beginning of many more :).
After getting our first testimonials we took the time to build up our landing page and form our pricing. We created 3 tiers: Free (with access to 6 free lessons), monthly ($29) and yearly ($197). We based those prices mostly on the competition and on what we thought was a fair price.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Hey, sorry for the late answer. This whole virus thing had us moving around a lot. So basically we created a private Facebook group at the very beginning and used others watercolor related Facebook groups to recruit our first beta testers.
As for now we tried Google Adwords few time with not so much success. Facebook I think would be the better candidate, but it's way to expensive at our stage.
We have a blog: https://watercolortravelers.com and we are focusing our work on actual content to build a proper SEO long tail and eventually get our signups from there.
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At this point we decided to ask our beta members for testimonials, closed our beta-test and started accepting paid members. Our beta tester were happy with the content so they gave us really nice reviews that we've put on our landing page. We were almost ready for a grand opening.
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Nevertheless to say, amazing UI buddy.
I would say an online chat bot is what you are missing. Do install a free one (may be tawk.to) and check out the conversions and go for the better ones according to your requirements.
Following your journey. All the very best. :)
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Thanks man, I really appreciate it :). We had one and it wasn't used much and took LOT of loading time, way to much so we removed it.
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I was using tawk.to for a while and didn't had experienced any of page speed loading issues. You can use messenger bot as well . Both are easy to integrate and works really fine.
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So actually I re-install it and it didn't eat up my loading time so, thanks for the reminder ;).
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Great. :)
Just checked your site, didn't saw the chatbot. You might have turned it off for the time.
Well another plan I wanted to suggest to you is get into Reddit and be active on relevant subreddits. One I am getting reminded is r/forhire/
Another one is https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/
Hope you can be active over there. You can also run targetted ads in this r/watercolor . I am sure if you set up the ad right you will get some good conversions even if you start up with a basic budget. Quora is also good and will give you min CPC.
All the best, Looking forward :)
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Yeah we did some Quora ads, didn't work. As for Reddit I don't know. Isn't the biggest troll farm on the web after 4chan? I'll look at the ads though :).
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Yeah I did use that one too. I'll give it another try and test for loading speed. I'm surprise it didn't add any :).
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What a beautiful website you have Lesly. How many beta testers did you have?
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Hey there, thanks a lot :). So, as for this morning we have 276 members, 99% on the free plan which is ok as we think we need more content and we already knew it would take us time.
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That's a lot! Would be interesting why that one person decided to take a subscription and the others did not yet. If you want to read a good book about customer conversation I'd suggest The Mom Test.
I took a closer look at the website on my laptop today and the only two comments I have are that with the subscriptions it was not clear right away that the most right subscription is the annual variant (which has a huge discount btw :o). The second thing I was actually looking for was a short video with a lesson or a speed painting about what I'd get when I sign up.
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Ah, yes, I guess peoples like free stuff :).
I plan on asking - at one point - our only yearly member, but she just signed few days ago so I'm going to wait a bit on that.
For the different tiers we try to push the monthly one, that's why there is nothing that drive the eye to the yearly one that offer, indeed, a huge discount :).
As for the video well, we actually plan on creating one, but we want to film it in our studio to give it a nice "hand made" feel and as for now we are stranded in Thailand because of the virus. Plus, technically you can sign up for free and watch 6 lessons.
But I get you point. We have a bunch of video on Youtube and on our blog, I suppose I could just add a popup link to one of those somewhere :).
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You need to understand that all our courses are very long, we are talking hours of videos here, so it took us time to create them, then record and edit and all that while working and traveling. Sometimes we got over our head. We were planning on releasing a new course every month.
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Well done for completing the full course!
I've been working this week on the first module of my own course, and it all takes waaaay longer than I expected.-
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Indeed :). When we started we where like: "Yeah in x weeks it's done"... ahah, we quickly understand how long it can be to produce quality course content. Patience and perseverance are key!
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Wow, so it took us 6 months to record and edit our first course - the biggest and most important one - the beginner course. A big 30 videos course that we had to create while traveling between Vietnam and Thailand. We also had to invest into and test different gears for sound and light.
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