February 1, 2023

Transcript: Ep #079 Creating Rock Stars: Scaling a 7-Figure Course in a Competitive Market With Josh Rosenberg

[00:00:00] Oscar Garcia: Welcome to the OMG Show, the podcast that helps course creators grow their business with profitable paid traffic funnels. My name is Oscar Garcia and it’s my mission to help you, the course creator, drive more traffic and convert more customers so that you can have a thriving and sustainable business.

In today’s episode, we’re gonna take a look at how to create market and sell in almost seven figure course in a saturated market, even if you’re not the subject matter expert. While creating a course on something we personally know seems to be the way to go for many, finding others to partner with brings in a different version of success and freedom, especially if you apply marketing practices that simply work.

That’s why my guest today is none other than Josh Rosenberg, who partnered up with his longtime friend and traveling musician to enter the highly competitive learn how to play guitar market. Together. They created a product that virtually sells on autopilot and grants freedom to them both. We’re also going to unpack how to find the right niche to enter and start a business.

How to improve your copywriting to drive more conversions, and how to find the right kind of people to partner with.

Make sure to stay until the end of the podcast to discover how you can join a free community of course creators that will give you the attention, accountability, and access to the resources that will help you launch, run, and scale your course.

Just a quick disclaimer. We did have some technical difficulty during the recording of this podcast, so we’re going to be joining in on the conversation as Josh explains what happened after he lost $80,000 in ad spend. But nonetheless, Josh breaks down the entire process for us. With that, let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, man. you pretty much blew your ad budget, $80,000. What happened after that?

[00:01:30] Josh Rosenburg: So I had, I had to figure out a way that this is gonna work. with very little, options left, and as a copywriter who spent years doing that, we write emotionally. We try to figure out whatever it is keeping you up at night, scaring the hell outta you, causing you to grind your teeth and lose sleep. We need to figure that out and really make that pain worse and dig that knife in there and really show you how, even though you think things are bad now, how much worse they’re gonna get if you don’t fix this problem soon. And then we offer you the solution and we show you why it’s better than every other solution out there.

. And that’s all well and good in certain niches. And most marketing copyright books will tell you that this is almost a universal truth. , which it isn’t .

[00:02:12] Josh Rosenburg: In the world of music, everybody shares a common language, even if you’re an absolute beginner. You’re probably not going, decide one day I’m gonna pick up the guitar.

just to go to the store and buy a guitar off the shelf without any questions about anything. A lot of times the store clerks are gonna, talk to you and help you out. They’re gonna recommend here’s a book or DVD or whatever. For absolute beginners, a lot of times people are gonna do their research.

[00:02:36] Josh Rosenburg: And so what we think of as an absolute beginner, really, they have some rudimentary knowledge. And so you’re, they’re speaking a language where they understand what a note is. what a cord is, they know what scales are and tempos and rhythms, and if you don’t talk to them at that level, you’re not gonna get their attention.

[00:02:54] Oscar Garcia: So I wrote this really long intricate sales letter, spent a ton of time on it. Hired this, designer that owed me a favor, who did a bang up job. . And that flopped. And that flopped because it was heavy on like direct response marketing copy techniques. Is that why it flopped?

[00:03:08] Josh Rosenburg: Exactly. so I said, you know what, let me get on my own head. Let me try something completely different and

[00:03:14] Oscar Garcia: You had a Jedi mind trick yourself.

[00:03:16] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah. And a lot of times when you’re this deep into it, you can’t see the forest from the trees. , you’re gonna try just to swap headlines and see if that makes a difference. It’s really hard to step back and take a full 180. but that’s what I had to do. and I realized, okay, most people, they wanna just sound good for themself. Maybe, if they got a significant other, be able to play something cool for them, play some of their favorite songs. Really for the main goal for a lot of people.

is they wanna be able to have fun with their buddies, jam with their friends. . Yeah. After doing research, I realize this market is men over 45, the kids are outta the house. They, especially if they’re guys that are in their late fifties or mid sixties, somewhere in there. , they got nothing else to do during the day and they wanna be able to get together with some friends and go into the garage and recapture their youth feel cool again.

Even if they were feel really cool in the first place, , but that’s what they wanna do, Yeah. Yeah. And, . I said, okay, let me talk to that guy. and the whole statement, the whole thing became about having fun with your buddies. Yeah. And maybe if. Because God knows all over the country, anybody that’s gonna be learning rock or blues or country guitar or anything like that.

[00:04:27] Oscar Garcia: Yeah.

[00:04:28] Josh Rosenburg: There’s going to be some bar that has open mic performers coming in that they love to go to. Mm-hmm. , that that’s their spot, you know, it’s got good wings and cheap beer. Yeah. And they would love nothing more than to get up on that stage with their friends and be able to jam at the open mic.

Yeah. And have their wife or their girlfriend be, screaming and cheering for them. Like they feel like they got their very own groupie. That’s who I’m talking . That’s how I’m gonna talk to them. But we’re gonna show you, here’s how we get you to do that. By learning the fundamentals of guitar.

[00:04:58] Oscar Garcia: and learning these things along the way and all of a sudden, now things start to change. , now sales start to come in. Oh, okay. we’re onto something here.

[00:05:06] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah, got it. First thing we gotta do is we gotta maximize this lifetime value. Yeah. So let’s create some upsells, I’m doing slightly better than breaking even on ads, but nothing much.

I can’t scale this by any means. if I’m spending a thousand dollars and I’m making 1100. or a little under 1100, that’s not something you can scale at that point. So we gotta start adding some more upsells in place. . Okay. So we created some of those and every dollar that we made in the beginning went to funding creation of these upsells.

But I did something where, I wanted each upsell to almost standalone as its own product.

[00:05:40] Oscar Garcia: Okay.

[00:05:40] Josh Rosenburg: Because somebody buys my front end product, and it’s the beginner course for 101, they’re gonna see this upsell for five seconds, and they’re gonna make up their mind, they’re gonna scroll down that page.

They’re gonna look at some of the bullet points. They’re gonna look at the picture of all the pretty box art of everything they’re getting. , they’re gonna see the price. And they’re gonna forget about it. Whether they take it or not, they’re gonna forget about it. . So two weeks from now, I wanna be able to turn around and take that upsell and treat it like it’s a new front end product.

So whether we’re learning how to solo or more intermediate level guitar playing or music theory.

[00:06:10] Oscar Garcia: Yeah.

[00:06:11] Josh Rosenburg: Any of these things can stand alone as their own upsell. So now that I got you on the list, I’m gonna sell you the 4, 5, 6 different products we have. , I’m gonna sell you each and every one of them. It might not be today, but you’re gonna eventually buy them, or as many of them as possible.

[00:06:26] Oscar Garcia: So are those four or five different products that you positioned as like additional offers, did they all come from that core offering or were these added on afterwards as like new completely separate programs?

My partner originally wanted to make everything, all one. They wanted to include everything under the sun. And I had, I spent a while explaining to him, you can’t do that.

[00:06:44] Oscar Garcia: Gotcha.

[00:06:44] Josh Rosenburg: Because you could sell somebody one time, but then what else are you gonna sell them? What happens? So they were designed At all times that they would be very complimentary. That if you bought the beginner level stuff, it makes sense. You wanna learn how to play songs and the intermediate stuff. And then for a lot of people you wanna be able to play lead guitar cuz that’s the cool stuff.

That’s the sexy stuff, that’s, the guy that’s soloing that everyone’s really watching.

[00:07:06] Oscar Garcia: Rockstar man. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:07] Josh Rosenburg: Nobody gives a damn about the rhythm guitarist standing over there by the drummer. Well, in order to be able to do all that, you also need to know theory. . , right? So all of these products could stand on their own.

So maybe you’re coming into this and you’re not a beginner. Maybe you’ve been playing for five years, , and you just want the advanced stuff. Maybe you are good at that, but you don’t really understand the mathematics and science behind how music works. Okay. So we’re, you can take just the music theory course and that’s fine.

[00:07:30] Oscar Garcia: Yeah.

[00:07:31] Josh Rosenburg: So this was the turning point where things started to change. Now we’re going into it, in 2023, we’re experimenting with some new business models. But going back to something that we were talking about in the very beginning that you had loosely, lightly mentioned is you had said something to the along the lines of, , this being not one of the hot, trendy niches.

, and this has always been a big pet peeve of mine. all of these marketing gurus telling you to go after the hot up and coming markets. you’ve got the tik toks, you have cryptos, you had NFTs.

[00:08:00] Oscar Garcia: Yeah. Yep.

[00:08:01] Josh Rosenburg: High ticket coaching, high ticket offers, whatever it is. And then a minute later they turn around and start cursing at everyone and they’re saying how saturated this market is with 24 year olds who don’t know any different.

It’s dummy, you are the one that told them to do this. They’re following your advice. I mean I learned how to play guitar way back when, right? And so when I follow YouTube and I see there’s countless of there’s a guitar, tuna, there’s a bunch of different programs out there. for someone who’s learning, there’s a lot of different options. But the fact remains and the reason why it seems such a cool thing that you were able to do was that you were able to penetrate that market, right? it doesn’t matter in terms of the saturation. I think the saturation is more what people perceive than the actual reality of what’s going on within the market.

Yeah, I’ve personally been a fan more of evergreen markets than flashing Pan ones. Hundred percent. So right now it’s January 9th, 2023 when we’re recording this, and what you see everywhere is AI art and AI writing. ,

[00:08:52] Oscar Garcia: ChatGPT is taking over. Yeah. How do I use it? How do I leverage it?

[00:08:56] Josh Rosenburg: And I don’t believe that by April it’s still gonna be as hot of a topic. It’ll still be used. people still be creating art and copywriting with it. And the technology will have improved. But now it’s hard to go onto Facebook and try to find a single conversation that doesn’t involve this, that does, that’s not sustainable. , there are people that are coming out that stayed up 24 hours to produce their content to get it out the door first. Yeah. And they will sell and they’ll make money. And, six months from now that well will have dried up. Whereas something like Learn to play guitar, I could be selling the same content 10 years, 15 years later. Yeah. It’s not going to spike up and have a sudden humongous launch day. like, you know, AI stuff or crypto did last year or NFTs, but it also isn’t gonna crash.

So how do you analyze those markets then? What do you look for in a market when it comes to, okay, this is gonna be something that I definitely wanna jump into and potentially create an offer for? Like, how are you analyzing. there’s a number of different criteria, but if we’re talking about sustainability does my dad know what this is? My dad’s in his mid seventies, retired out of Florida, wearing his Tommy Bahama shirts all the time.

[00:10:01] Oscar Garcia: Living the Life.

[00:10:02] Josh Rosenburg: If I were to go to him and say, Hey Pops, do you know about how to invest in real estate? Or Have you ever heard of real estate investing courses? course he’s gonna say yes. Yeah. Hey, how about, woodworking course? people, of course I teach you how to make bookshelves and carpentry and stuff, or things that, Teach art projects or play an instrument, all of those things he’s gonna say yes to. Yeah. So that might be one good criteria.

If I ask him about ChatGPT he’s not gonna know what I’m gonna ask, what is that? Like one of them Pokemons?

I think that’s important, depiction, because Yeah, while something is trendy, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna, you’re gonna be able to build something sustainable with longevity and I think that’s the end goal that we’re trying to get after is let’s build a business that is sustainable so that 5, 10, 15 years down the road, we can still tap into it if we need the income.

[00:10:44] Josh Rosenburg: right now when it is an emerging market. I wanna look for, the utility what different industries can utilize this and what is the most boring industry? . Because if you’re looking for, a flashy investment that’s sexy, that if you invest in it and in a year you’ve made 500% great. You got lucky. Something like a 3D printing. has so much industrial utility building bridges, repairing roads, building houses, there’s medical uses for it.

they’re trying to create organs from it. Yeah. housing for, People that have no money at all in foreign countries and stuff, there’s so much utility. So what I’m trying to do is if it’s an emerging market, where are there different use cases? that have money that are going to be able to, if everything looks good, will continue to work with it long after it’s no longer popular and trending. , there’s an article right now about how next month the first AI lawyerThis is gonna be used for public defenders to replace public defenders if you want. , they’re the, lowest paid attorneys. , they also have the lowest win rates because they’re given so many, stacks of cases that they only spend an average of six minutes with each client.

And 99% of the time they’re telling ’em to just strike a bargain. Just plea, even if the person is completely innocent, just plea because they don’t have the time to devote to you. . So now if you have the option, and you know that you’re innocent about using an AI lawyer that doesn’t need weeksto debrief and to research and everything and could do a better job For free. With mm-hmm. No work that could change the way that certain,court cases are done forever. There’s a ton of utility in that.

[00:12:19] Oscar Garcia: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, before we start going down, rabbit hole of AI, utility and all that, I do wanna backtrack cuz I know, one thing that is gonna be asked is when you talked about how when you were creating the course, you were thinking about from day one. Okay. What are some complimentary things that I can offer for to position like upsells, right? So what was your thought process for that? How did you determine what’s gonna be part of the main course? What’s gonna be a complimentary program? What’s gonna be the upsell? what was the thought process? Cause I know many people are just like, if we’re saying that we can be a rockstar, it would make sense to have all this stuff in it. But at the same time, we need to have those auxiliary products in order to scale the business. So how did you approach that?

[00:12:54] Josh Rosenburg: Sure. This is something I see a lot of course creators do. That’s a mistake. most people have the best of intentions and they really want to help improve people’s lives. And they wanna show, their expertise by creating something that’s just, it involves it. They’re giving you everything in the kitchen sink. And for consumers, that’s overwhelmingly too much content. They’re never gonna go through it. two. You are really trying to solve one problem at a time. . And if I teach you, this is how we play the first few basic chords on guitar, and then how to take those chords and play the melodies of most, of the pop songs you’ve ever heard.

Because. Every major pop song, they use the same chord progressions, the same standard, scale, the same tempos. , they just put everything in slightly different orders. But here’s how we take those same three or four chords you just learned and figure out those different orders and those different progressions to play every single pop song you’ve ever heard.

that’s solving one big problem, and that’s cool. Now, if I then go on top of that and say, oh, but we can do that with jazz and blues and folk and country and Western and this and that, and then there’s soloing, and then there’s theory, and then there’s this, and then there’s that, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, it’s too much.

[00:14:04] Josh Rosenburg: You don’t know where to begin, where to end.

[00:14:06] Oscar Garcia: It’s a hundred percent,

[00:14:07] Josh Rosenburg: it’s overwhelming, and quite frankly, you’re never gonna go through it. If I want you to have a real change and a real improvement, it’s better for me to figure out a way to condense it down to as small of a piece as possible. And even if that means I’m selling it for less money, Let’s say you wanna learn how to cook and that’s another great, industry that’s never going away. Yeah. Because everyone’s gotta eat . Now there’s 8 million recipe books and stuff out there, and I’m a big fan of the meal delivery kits like Blue Apron. I’ve always had an idea for one that teaches you how to cook by sending you the ingredients and then showing you three different difficulty levels. Yeah. From the average, total amateur to this is what a real chef, how they would do it. Nice. But regardless, I digress. Let’s say you’re teaching somebody how to make, the perfect omelet. If I can do that in a 10 minute video and you come out, that’s, I know you’re gonna be able to get to the end of that. , and from that point on, you’re never gonna have to worry about making another omelet again. , you know the technique to do this, why wouldn’t you come back to me for more stuff? So it gives you the opportunity for you to get results in advance.

[00:15:11] Oscar Garcia: whenever we’re in, like they’ll learn to make money online niche. I always say the easiest way to get someone to give you a thousand dollars, it’s to go out of your way to, make sure that they can make $10 for themself. Yeah, I like that. I like that. And so it’s what most people were hesitant as far as giving your best stuff free, right? It’s like, well, if you’re showing me how to make an omelet, that’s a pretty good content piece. If I’m in that niche, if I’m in that market. But then now it’s like, okay, well what else can I make after that? Right now you can’t Now. Now you have them, so what’s the next thing that you’re gonna show them?

Maybe you’re gonna show them how to make, I don’t know. A frittata. . Right. You know what I’m saying?

[00:15:39] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah. Yeah. My free line content, the thing that you come to my Optin page and get the free video on that could be how to make an omelet. Now for $10, here’s how to make 75 omelets. There you go. . but if you don’t wanna do that, we wanna go straight for a $67, $47, $97 sale. It’s also when you’re selling something for $10, it’s hard to get them turn around and then spend a, a few hundred on upsales. Yeah. So you gotta anchor the prices differently and there’s different strategies for that. , we’re solving every problem that anybody at any time could ever have, we’re really selling nothing to anybody.

. Cause there’s not gonna be that many people that say, yes, I need all of these things solved. if you’re, just wanting to learn how to cook today for the very first time, all you can make is ice cubes and a bowl of cereal. . There’s no way that I’m gonna be starting off with like advanced french pastry stuff and sushi stuff and all that.

[00:16:23] Oscar Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s no reason for me to include it. Plus, I don’t know if you even like that food for all.I like how you’re positioning though, because it’s like, how do we actually create something that, that is really helpful and by helpful meaning people are actually gonna consume it because, If I were to give everybody like, Hey, we’re, here’s how do we make omelets, but we’re also gonna learn how to make, 800 other dishes. The chances, like you mentioned, of someone going through that and actually applying what you’re teaching them are very slim. pretty much slim to none. However, by focusing on one specific theme, here’s how to cook an omelet, the chances of people going through that are highly successful. Yeah. And I think that taking that approach in terms of figuring out, okay, this is my main course and here’s all the auxiliary components that I could offer as either bonuses or order bumps or upsells or what have you, should follow that same thing. Okay, let’s, what’s the one problem that’s a solving, let’s figure that out, and then offer that.

Ask potential upsells or order bumps down the road.

[00:17:09] Josh Rosenburg: You know what’s funny is, I saw a video. We’re, it was a YouTube video. Guy is a chef and he is showing you how to create some of your favorite fast food, burgers from home using store bought ingredients. Oh, cool. But he’s, yeah. Yeah. and I love me a Whopper.

but they’re really unhealthy for you. But he is going down the science of, why the ingredients are in a certain order. Mm-hmm. , what it does to your taste buds when they are stacked a certain way, And then also, if you had ’em in different orders, your buns would get too soggy, stuff would leak out, your tomato would slip out.

[00:17:37] Josh Rosenburg: So why are they stacked in a way so that the sandwich keeps its integrity the entire time you’re eating it. And it gives you the fir perfect taste. And he does this with the Whopper, the Big Mac and, spicy chicken. Wendy’s, . And then his books that he was selling were basically, how to make fast food, style food at home using better quality ingredients.

[00:17:56] Oscar Garcia: Wow. Of course I go, I went ahead and bought that . It was 10 bucks and it was the coolest thing, Are you making whoppers tonight? Is that what’s happening, ?

[00:18:05] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah. if I have time to get out to the store, I’m now making myself hungry. But yeah, no,but that was the thing. And it could be at any price point, it’s that’s almost irrelevant. It’s what? free line content can you create that people haven’t seen before. That is new. That has a utility that, that’s different. That’s cool. In this case, , would never have thought of like why the ingredients are stacked in a certain way cuz of, the sandwich holding its integrity and also having that certain bite, that flavor that . But as soon as he presented me with the idea for that, I was like, oh wow. Okay. That’s actually a cool concept. Yeah. it was something that I hadn’t heard before that I hadn’t thought of, but, it was, entertaining for me and I got value out of it.

And so now I know this guy knows what he’s talking about. , he clearly, he is somehow an expert at doing this, food . And it didn’t matter if the book was $10. If it was $97, Ifor 97, I would’ve wanted some more bulk to it, some more bonuses and stuff. but regardless, I was already set on buying it.

. And so there’s, at this point, there’s no reason for him to then tell me how to do, more high-end, fast casual dining. So Olive Garden kind of food or Outback Steakhouse or Yeah. place where you sit down for a little bit longer and have a meal. Yeah. And they bring you a check.

[00:19:16] Josh Rosenburg: That could be an upsell right there. there’s no reason for that to be included in this course.

Got it. So it seems like your preference is to have some kind of what you call free line content, which is like content that seems to be talking about something that we’ve all heard before, but in a different manner. In a different way. And then essentially if that content is solid and strong enough, it pretty much sells the program without you having to go through all these loops. Yeah, my friend was a,photographer. , and he did a lot of wedding photography and a lot of, which involved a lot of portraits and he wanted help putting his course together.

this was eight years ago and he couldn’t come up with anything free line. . I’m watching him with the clients who had hired him to take the portraits and he is telling them, you stick your neck out, abnormally far, like more than you would and you tilted up a little bit. Yeah, and what happens is it thins at your neck.

[00:20:02] Josh Rosenburg: You don’t have the shadows, you don’t have the lines it. Makes your face, it makes the muscles a little bit tighter so that it actually accents your jawbone more. . And when you tilt it up, it helps to eliminate some of the shadows under your eyes, your nose, and your mouth. Yeah. And I said, there’s your free line.

He goes, really? That’s so basic. I’m like, not to me it wasn’t not to anybody else. Yeah.

Yeah. Now I know how to take better pictures, And every photo I’ve taken since then, I’ve taken like that in my face a little bit forward. And all of them came out better cause I used to be the least photogenic person ever.

And now I’m slightly better .

[00:20:34] Oscar Garcia: So walk me through, essentially your funnel. what’s the free line content you guys are creating and where are you sending people? so you, after they consume that content

[00:20:41] Josh Rosenburg: sure. So we’re rotating different ones all the time. we haven’t found one that will universally work for us always. and that’s something that’s important too. . Just cuz something works for you in January doesn’t mean it’s gonna be working the same way in June. Especially if you’re scaling to larger numbers and you’re getting, tens of thousands of clicks a day.

very soon you’re gonna hit market saturation and the same people who have seen the same offer . And if they didn’t opt in on day one, they’re sure opting in the ninth time they see it, right? Yeah. Yeah. we have some that are teaching you the very basics of how to hold the guitar, what the strings are, the picks.

It’s a few videos that teach you how to strum your even before you learn how to make your first chord. just. the neck completely open how to make strum. Then we have some that are teaching you that are maybe for a little bit more advanced, that are teaching you the basics to playing a song that sounds in the exact same style as ACDC

okay. And then we have. , other content that we rotate out. Now these are all part of our course. sometimes we might go ahead and create stuff special for this. other times we will just take some videos that are in the course and somebody buys the course. they’re gonna watch it twice.

Not a big deal. Yeah. but yeah, so we’re constantly taking, new frontline content and rotating.

[00:21:48] Oscar Garcia: And how much is, the course right now? I think last time I checked it was $67. Is that still the price?

I believe so, yeah.

[00:21:53] Oscar Garcia: Okay. Do, and do you have some idea of conversion in terms of like how many people are like watching this content, going to that page and actually, buying through?

[00:22:01] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah, so we have a round from, Completely,cold traffic we’re around, three and a half to 5% conversion rate depending on the traffic source they’re coming from affiliates. Depending on the relationship those people have with their lists, yeah, it might be, upwards of five and a half to 7% conversion rates.

we then have a 33% conversion rate on up to number one, 22% on upsell two and 19% on upsell three, average cart value of $279.

[00:22:26] Oscar Garcia: Boom. I love that breakdown, man. That was awesome. So talk to me about the upsells now. once you purchase that, what’s upsell one, two, and three, and how are you positioning them? Because those are amazing conversion rates on those. backend upsells. Most people struggle getting it past 10%, on that first upsell.

yeah. I’ve been doing this 16 years . I’ve, this is a majority of what I do, so I busted my butt on this. yeah, we’re constantly trying repositioning new copy, how are we presenting it?

[00:22:50] Josh Rosenburg: What order are we going in? and so what I do is write on the checkout page. There’s, you’re gonna see three order bumps. You’re not even gonna see any promotion for this at all. Okay. You’re just gonna see on the side, Hey, you’d like that and you’re already on the checkup page.

How would you like to add this to your order for an extra 10 bucks, extra $200, whatever it is. Yeah, I think we’re testing one of them at $197 or at $97, and then some other lower price ones, and I did that specifically knowing people will take the lower price, $10 ones.. and then the upsells, upsell number one is gonna have your highest conversion rates.

So you wanna stack that one, make that your highest price. offer, because by upsell, three people are tired, they’re fed up, they’re, they’re not gonna wanna buy. So that’s one, $197. Okay. And basically, our, guitar soloing course. It’s like, Hey, by the time you get done with Rock Guitar Mastery, you’ll know how to do this. You’ll all have played, 15 songs. One of the things in our course is, there’s a bunch of different songs that people learn and they incrementally get harder.

, we call it our three level learning system, where our level one, it’s basic notes. It’s about as easy as you can get number two, we now add in some power chords, or which are just very simple, one or two finger chords. . And we make the rhythm a little bit more interesting, a little bit more, tension-filled and creative.

[00:24:02] Josh Rosenburg: And by level three, that’s how the real artist would play it with the , the real chords they would use with the, real rhythms and everything. And that can be very tricky for, yeah. For people. rhythm is absolutely the most important thing to learn, but it’s also something that’s the most overlooked.

so by the time you get out of this, you’re actually pretty intermediate. good. I can’t call you quite advanced yet, but you’re well-rounded guitarist. So the next thing you’re gonna wanna do is be able to play your favorite songs.

[00:24:26] Josh Rosenburg: So now that you know how to play a guitar, we’re gonna teach you how to play literally any song you could imagine just about maybe some obscure stuff like Dream Theater is a little more complicated. , but it’s gonna be a lot of, there’s Steve I on there, . Yeah. Yeah. that’s a little bit outta the scope, but not if you work hard enough.

Yeah, they’re just, just cuz Zack Wild is playing in a million miles an hour. It doesn’t mean you can’t slow it down and apply these same principles , it’ll just take longer. So it’s gonna be a lot of ear training, learning the different chord progressions for each style. Ieverybody says every blue song sounds alike.

Every punk song sounds alike. Yeah. Because they are alike. sound the same. They follow structure. ac dc has 12 albums out, but they only have one song. It’s the coolest song in the world. But you see what I’m saying? It’s . Okay. What we hear in our ear to be perceived as different songs are just very minor cosmetic differences.

. So now if we can show you the patterns and the rhythms that make that up and show you how to train ear to detect those differences, now you can play literally any song you want. Yeah. Cool. That’s where we’re gonna get you on upsell one. , and that’s more of our intermediate into being an advanced player.

, right? . And now we come to being the advanced player, wanting to solo, wanting to,look cool. So there’s our soloing course. And after that, we have these, add-on courses. Now these are the same as our order bumps, our low ticket and order bumps. , these are $10 courses and they teach you one specific thing and one of them might be how to play standing up.

[00:25:47] Josh Rosenburg: Cuz when you’re learning, you’re playing sitting down. Yeah. if we can teach you in 15 minutes how to now play standing up. Cuz most people have so much trouble when they try this the first time. Now we can solve that problem for 10 bucks. or how to jam with other musicians. Cuz it’s one thing when you’re playing by yourself or with a backing track or a loop track.

But the first time you sit down with other human beings, that’s, most people have a real difficult time being able to get into it and get the rhythm and the timing and know when to come in and when to sit back. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re gonna show you that’s another $10. that’s how we have an order.

We wanna make sure that we’re sending you chronological. from starting to what is the end goal? And one thing that I really dislike is when you’ll have a software company or the, they’re selling you some piece of software that comes with all these different templates. Yeah. And then they withhold most of them.

So Yeah. When you buy the front end, sure. You’ve got these 15 different Instagram style filters and effects, but the. Hundred and 50 that they already have prepared. now you’re gonna have to pay extra for that. When they could have included in the first one, got more goodwill from you, charged you a bit more for it, and then presented something that’s stronger.

That could also be its own front end offer. As that upsell.

[00:26:59] Oscar Garcia: A hundred percent. Yeah. and obviously it’s conversion rates, right? And you have pretty amazing conversion rates for those three different upsells. Now, how do you approach those that say no? Do you continue to email them in the backend with those exact same offers, or, do you do something completely different? How does, how is that handled in your case?

[00:27:15] Josh Rosenburg: Sure. So yeah, those are the same offers. that we’re gonna continue to hit them up on. The upsell copy is written differently than when we take it and we make it a new front end offer. , because remember there’s on that page for less than 10 seconds. they’re scrolling bullet points. What does the pretty picture look like? What is the price? if there’s a headline that’s really big and bold, they’re gonna say, okay, let me read that cuz they can’t avoid it. Yeah. But then a week or two later, they’ve forgotten all about it. . And so now we’ve instead of made this upsell, completely dependent.

on, it’s no longer a pack of filters. that we withheld. Now it’s its own product. So now it becomes its own standalone. and our email marketing, our autoresponder system is set up that it detects, if you bought this, we don’t market it to you again, but if you didn’t buy it, we’re gonna still market it to you.

[00:27:59] Oscar Garcia: So you’re segmenting your list based on who’s doing what inside that funnel?

[00:28:03] Josh Rosenburg: Exactly. And then they’re gonna get an autoresponder series that is gonna be promoting the heck out of that for the next week, 10 days, two weeks. Wow. we have different strategies and tactics about how we’re gonna go about doing it.

the scarcity we have in it, we can speak for an entire day about just emailing . so we’re gonna,Focus on that, and then by the time you’ve got to the end of that, let’s just call it 10 day sequence. for upsell number one, if you still haven’t bought. Okay. We’ll give you a few days of good content, let you chill, let look, get more value from us, and then we’re gonna start you down the path to the next upsell.

[00:28:35] Josh Rosenburg: because that’s also its own standalone product. are you all just writing these emails and advancement, letting the automation do all the work? Or are you all in the habit of writing an email once a week or once a day or how was your email handled? so in the beginning I wrote out all of my emails one at a time. and. that works if you’re doing a, email blast . But when we’re taking our customers and segmenting them and wanting them to have that same career path, that same, roadmap. Yeah. Then that needs to be done through an autoresponder. Now these autoresponders could run 60, 90 days, and by the time someone’s at now we’re at the very end of all of the programs that we going, that we’ve created, that we’re gonna sell them.

Yeah. So now they can move to a general list and we’ll send out, email blast. To that general list. Got it. So somebody could be on my, in my email list and not be part of that general list for 90 days. A couple of months. Yeah. Yeah. in fact, I think with Rockar Mastery it’s closer to a 60 day sequence.

with other brands that I’ve worked with, some of them could be as long as 120 days. Wow. Iit really depends on their catalog. Yeah. Somebody’s got 15 different offers that they wanna sell, those above affiliate offers, then it’s just gonna take that much more time that. .

[00:29:41] Oscar Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. I like, and I like how you handle what the segmenting and it makes complete sense where it’s like you wanna set up this system first to essentially scale your backend and then ultimately put ’em in a general list where then you’re continuing to touch base with them, at a later time.

Once they’ve gone through this essentially sales engine engine, yet you got built out and the runs automatically. Yeah. Now, I’m super interested in and in diving more into your traffic now, are you all using any kind of paid ads for this or is it strictly organic or a combination of the both.

[00:30:06] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah, it’s a combination of both. It’s something that always needs to be tested. Yeah. we’re with guitar. It’s one of these niches that’s been around forever that if you look on, YouTube . The channels that are getting the most traffic are ones that have been around for 10 or 12 years that are still getting, a few million views a month.

Yeah. YouTube rewards them for, still being relevant. They are the ones that chop at the top of the list queries. . So if you’re looking to play, this song by the Beatles. and that channel that’s been around forever has been having people learn, they’ve been teaching that song for all this time.

YouTube is gonna reward you. we’re doing some YouTube ads, some Facebook, Instagram ads. we’re testing out some TikTok stuff. Building a brand new YouTube channel from scratch. I know some people are very good at this. Guitar. Happens to be a very competitive space. . And that’s not my forte.

So we will be buying, our own ads that run on their network. Cause I might as well just siphon their traffic a hundred percent. Yeah. and if that scales up, Then I can very well approach them and look about acquiring their channel from them. find investors go, so I can acquire with no money out of pocket, maybe work out some kind of equity deal and basically say, look, all of your traffic is buying from us

we can either keep this going and you don’t make a single dollar for all of the sales that you’re selling us, or you give me, give us equity in your channel. , and we give you royalty for every sale that comes in.

[00:31:32] Oscar Garcia: That’s a such a smart play that I think too many people overlook. .

[00:31:36] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah.

okay. And so when you’re sending them through the ads, are you sending ’em straight to the sales page or do you have some kind of lead magnet in front?

[00:31:44] Josh Rosenburg: We’re always testing it and rotating them. Okay. Possibly. Yeah. And here’s the thing, when you’re spending even a thousand dollars a week on ads with a lot of the big networks.

What they don’t tell you is that they’re take, they take, at least a month, some longer to figure out who your exact audience is. Yeah. And so they’re trying to cast the biggest net possible. Mm-hmm. , , and they whittle it down over time. You’re going to have days, especially in the very beginning because they wanted to make sure you’re happy on days one and two , where you get a lot of sales coming, and then you might go a week and not make a single sale

[00:32:17] Oscar Garcia: a hundred percent.

[00:32:18] Josh Rosenburg: That’s just part of it. It sucks, but it’s part of how it happens. you have some networks that don’t allow you to go directly to the landing page. They need a pre. Also, if you’re doing something that violates any terms of their advertising policies, you could get your whole account shut down. So having a prelander on a different domain is very important.

I would rather have that freelander shut down than my whole domain, and you don’t even have to be doing anything wrong. You could have something as easy as the, a simple trick to make the world’s best peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yeah. But for some reason, their spiders, their, automation has picked it up and it’s triggered a red flag.

And the accounts should shut off. And if you’ve ever tried to get a rep from Facebook on the phone to manually review it and guide you on what to do differently, you know that’s next to impossible. You need to know people that know people. Know people. Yeah. You need to be. it happens to me about a year and a half ago and I had to wait three months in order to get my account reactivated, so I feel the pain . So it’s, if rule thumb is its best always go to a freelander on a different domain. Yeah. makes sense. Just protect yourself. CYA.

[00:33:21] Oscar Garcia: Now in, in terms of tech, I think before you mention that you’re using your own kind of web design team to,to run all the tech for this course. Is that correct or did I get that wrong?

[00:33:30] Josh Rosenburg: We had somebody, we had a web tech team design the, members area for Rockar Guitar Mastery. Okay. That’s on our Amazon servers. That’s got 900 firewalls. It’s the most secure thing you want, and I’m still paying a fortune every month for that.

[00:33:43] Oscar Garcia: Oh yeah. But I bet upload times are a hundred percent and everything’s super quick and fast.

Speedy .

[00:33:48] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah, no, it’s fantastic. And then other domains of ours are on, semi-private or virtual private, server. They’re WordPress sites. , I have all the secured on them that you could have without slowing the site down to a crawl. having paid for those developers that much money to build this custom page, it was a mistake.

so you don’t actually need that. not that I really wanna promote any of the big funnel builders services out there. cuz they all have their pluses and minuses and if ClickFunnels servers go down, Then everybody’s business has gone down. Yeah. So I don’t like that. I like, to have redundancy and have things across a couple servers and switchovers and stuff. Yeah. But the tech really doesn’t have to be anything fancier, expensive. Period.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I’m glad you pointed that out because I think too many people get too much into their heads as far as what tech and getting the best tech, But in the beginningyou just need to be able to throw on some copy on a page, make sure you can, bring in transactions and then make sure you just can deliver the good, Yeah. Yeah. it’s, You grow that stuff out as you start to scale. um, it’s always best to reinvest, between five and 10% of all of your, ebitda, all of your revenue profits back into your business.

and. That 5% of that, I usually call that, maintenance because stuff is always gonna go down. Yeah. Or you’re gonna wanna build something new and then another 5%. and by new, upgrade your email servers, upgrade your hosting servers, another 5% to add on new products. and new offers, or find the right people to partner with.

[00:35:14] Josh Rosenburg: That’s awesome, man. I think the last question also that I just have top of mind is,I was pretty impressed In terms of like your email management system, so like what tech are you using to handle all your emails? Is, are you doing something like an active campaign or is it something more intricate? like a keep or something like that? no. It’s a company called Campaign Refinery. They’re similar, they’re much smaller than Active Campaign. They have, I know the owner, we’re friends,I know how anal he is about, keeping deliverability high. About, open rates. I. I’ve, he’s shown me millions of times about some of his biggest senders out there, mailers out there. , guys like Alex Hormozi are getting 51% open rates. Yeah. Wow. Even that system . Yeah. Whereas if you’re on an, active campaign or eye contact, you’re lucky to get above 10%.

so it’s nothing that complicated or that fancy it. Honestly, it’s even cheaper than most of the active campaign pricing tiers. . But it’s to way better service. So I use that. Seline is another really good one that I like to use. they’re easier to use. campaign refinery is a little bit tricky.

[00:36:12] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah. You gotta get them, But, there’s always going plus and minuses, and they’ve got some really slick gamification options. . So when people open your emails, if they click on a link, they earn points, they get, they notify of this. Oh, that’s cool. They get, they could earn metals for being active enough and maybe get them discounts or they unlock some kind of content when you get enough metals or whatever.

so gave a fight engagement essentially.

[00:36:33] Josh Rosenburg: Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t dug too far into that yet. I plan to, probably towards the end of this quarter when I have some.

Cool. Cool, man. listen, I wanna be respectful of your time, and I know we’re at the top of the hour and before we end here, I just wanna give people the opportunity to know how they can find you, how they can work with you. Maybe they have an idea and they’re like, dude, hey, we can scale this to the moon and I need your help . where can they come in contact with you? yeah, My other business is, very good marketing consultants.com. . You can email me Josh at very good marketing consultants.com.

come to the website. normally the way that I work is I, wanna be able to come in a very meaningful way and be able to,make you the most amount of money in the most different avenues possible. a lot of times I would like to come in to be, if I believe that we’re a right fit for each other and everything looks to be going, looks like it’s something that we can both leverage.

[00:37:17] Josh Rosenburg: I’d like to come in as your partner, invest in the business, help you grow it, and then hopefully, be able to help you, plan to exit it at some. for the highest valuation, multiple possible. I love that cuz not too many people think about exit strategy. but for so many that can be a nice retirement right then and there, Oh yeah. listen, if you get a 10 x multiple, that means that you’re getting paid. It for 10 years worth of that business is revenue. Yeah. All or all at once or maybe, over a period of time. But really it’s the way that peoplego from being rich to wealthy real fast.

[00:37:47] Oscar Garcia: A hundred percent man.

listen, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you having on, and honestly, I wish you and your partners and all the other different assets that you’re working with, nothing but success. Cause it seems like you definitely got, your thinking, right? You got your automations good, you got your business principles down set.

thanks again and wish you nothing but the best.

[00:38:02] Josh Rosenburg: Thank you very much, Oscar. You have a good, all right, you too.

[00:38:05] Oscar Garcia: So there you have it. Josh just broke down how he was able to take a $67 course and scale it to almost seven figures, even though he is not the subject matter expert. Just goes to show how powerful understanding marketing and sales can be, especially if you have a funnel that both grows your list and converts that traffic into customers.

Now if you wanna be a successful course creator, there is no need for you to have to do it on your own. I invite you to join my free course Creator Community Marketing & Mojitos by heading over to www.oscarmgarcia.com/beta, and signing up the community will be free for the first 100 members that join.

And with that, you get, again, access, attention, and accountability. You need to make sure that you can scale your course from anywhere. Come on in. We’d be happy to have you. Once again, the URL is www.oscarmgarcia.com/beta with that, thank you for listening to today’s episode. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and make sure to come on back for the next one!

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