How to Create Your Own Online Courses With Cat Howell

Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker. I’ve been chatting with Cat Howell, the founder and CEO of Eight Loop Social, an Auckland-based marketing agency. In the last episode, we touched upon the psychology of selling. Today, we’re going to talk about her selling online courses and how that could be a great revenue stream for businesses. What are some of the things you discuss when you talk about the courses? And how long have you been doing courses for?

Awesome. And obviously, you’ve helped a number of your clients hit six-figure revenues. What are some of the tactics or pillars you recommend? I know nobody’s going to learn everything in an hour—some of it’s the same stuff—but there must be certain key strategies. Like, “Here are the four things we do,” or five things. Obviously, it’s only an hour podcast, so we can’t cover everything, but if you had to highlight a few pillars for success, what would they be?

Yeah, it always seems to be the big thing with most people—it’s just, like, not launching, right? They’re scared to death of this or that. I talk about it with the UCLA students: the biggest thing is just doing it. Just start writing; start doing this. It’s probably going to be terrible. Every first article I ever wrote was terrible. The first video that anybody does on YouTube is terrible. It’s always like that, right? It is what it is. You just have to get over it, right?

And the thing is—I’ve talked about this in the past—but the way I got my job, or the career at UCLA being an instructor, was because of my content. Literally, if I hadn’t put my content out, they wouldn’t have known about me, because I didn’t apply for a job in personal branding or the influencer space. They reached out to me because I was a practitioner and they read my articles. So, you know, if I hadn’t done that, you have to put it out there. Of course, it’s scary and all this other stuff, but I have people—like a friend of mine, I won’t say his name, he probably listens to the podcast—his girlfriend has been working on this Facebook thing for probably about two years now. And I’m like, “You guys, by the time you launch, all the stuff you put out is old,” you know? So you gotta just go—just put some stuff out.

With my course, we’re doing kind of what you talked about: we’re gonna put, yeah, whatever—eight or ten videos, have a foundation, and then build it as people start asking questions. Like, “Hey, we had questions about this? Great, now I can go build out something behind that.” Really, the foundation of what I’m doing is “how to be an influencer,” but it’s not necessarily how to get a pink poodle and get on a private jet with caviar, right? I mean, maybe, but the idea is building a personal brand and a foundation to go pitch brands, and be able to get a free hotel stay, or get your car payment paid, or whatever it is, right? It’s the psychology of doing that and explaining to people why brands need to work with them—because most brands don’t know how to work with influencers. They don’t know what to ask, how to negotiate; they don’t know these certain types of things. So we want to help influencers be able to create that, and be able to obviously show the value of what they provide.

Yeah, it’ll be interesting. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll probably pick your brain. We’ll probably keep in touch—that’s probably when I’ll bring a briefcase of money from the lottery down to you and be like, “Hey, looks like you owe me a free hour,” or something, or whatever the deal is. Yeah, cool.

So when you’re developing these courses—I mean, is there… like, we’ve talked about strategies and stuff, and things that bring higher conversions. Can you tell us maybe an example of a client you’ve worked with? Obviously, everyone wants a course that makes money, but I think you touched on it: it’s kind of like influencer marketing. People read that article I wrote about, “For every dollar, you can make eight,” and they’re like, “I want to do that program!” And I’m like, “Everybody does, of course,” but that doesn’t happen for everyone, right? We have to have proper expectations. So can you tell us a little story of maybe a client you had where you guys absolutely crushed it, and you did a great course? I want a good case study of where Cat went out and crushed it.

Great insights, Cat. Since we’re talking about money, I wanted to pause the conversation to talk with our listeners here. If you’re looking to grow your business and make money, you can count on us to help you. You can hire us for services like SEO, PR, content marketing, social media marketing, and more to help skyrocket your business. For more details, check out shanebarker.com.

We’re going to be doing something—I mean, the thing is, we kind of work this backward, because we’ve done a lot. I mean, I’ve done a lot in the influencer space, and I’ve been writing about it for seven or eight years. I do a lot of keynote speeches about it, but I don’t do tons of managed services anymore. It’s like we used to do tons of managed services, and then we started pulling back and just doing the education side of things. I mean, they’re still continuously learning. Obviously, we have influencers on the podcast, so there’s synergy there, but I might talk to you about the messaging side of things. Because once again, I’ve always grappled with whether to go real general—like, “Hey, all influencers, we’re here to help you create a foundation,” whether you’re doing makeup or whatever—or if you’re just looking for free hotel stays. You still need a base, like “Hey, you have a website and a custom email address,” and so on. You’re not gonna go superhotgirl29@gmail and then get Nike. It’s like, “Okay, you’ve got to pull your stuff together a bit,” right? So that’d be interesting. I’ll talk to you about messaging. You guys obviously help with messaging when it comes to courses. Is that something more? Do you have a course on messaging?

We have done that with clients in the past, where you really just see where the funnels are and whether people are gonna bite on them. That’s kind of the big thing, because people create something and throw it out there—and nobody bites. It’s like, “Well, that sucks.” I’m like, “Yeah, ’cause you spend six months on it and nobody likes it, right?” So you really want to be agile—able to move on or change or go in a different direction. I think some people don’t understand the value in that. I mean, they will after they do a course, spend all the money, and then don’t sell anything. They’re like, “Okay, maybe I should have put a little more time into researching or taken a look at these funnels to see if they’re working.” Because you’re gonna put it out there, and somebody goes, “Now for every dollar, you’re making two dollars.” Well, that’s a good little deal going right now. You can build a course around that because there’s some interest there.

No, and I love that because I think that’s a big thing. Everybody looks at failure, and when people ask me, “How can I be successful?” I say, “You gotta fail 10,000 times.” They’re like, “What do you mean, fail?” And I’m like, “Everybody is where they’re at today because they failed. The people who haven’t failed are the people who didn’t try.” Ninety-nine percent of people aren’t going to make it on their first try, and your second business is probably gonna fail, too. You have to go through that process—it’s a healthy process. We’re all where we are today because we face-planted a hundred times, a thousand times, whatever that number is. If you don’t learn from that, then that’s the real failure. If you say, “Oh, I got investment money early, then I blew it at a club, maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” at least you learned something.

I’ve talked about this in one of my previous podcasts, but I got sued by the Attorney General of California for 65 million dollars—whoa! And it was one of those moments where I thought, “Oh my God, what just happened?” I won’t go into detail because I’ve talked about it before, but I realized that you couldn’t have taught me what I learned in that process at Harvard or any business school. Nobody’s going to give you a fake scenario where you spend two years and two million dollars fighting a lawsuit. That’s real life, and I didn’t ask for it, but it happened. Now, when people say, “Oh, you failed at that?” I’m like, “No, not at all.” It just meant I learned one more thing not to do, or I figured out a different way. Those are wins—it’s all about perception.

I have a buddy, Chris Rudin, and we’re doing a company called Fail Forward. The idea is you fail, then you go forward. You can cry, be emotional, spend a week by yourself if you need to, but you have to get back up. It’s about how quickly you do that and how quickly you learn. The way I start a business now is a thousand times different than it was 20 years ago. Back then, I had investment money and thought, “I’ll buy a press release.” I paid 500 bucks for it, got it, and literally didn’t know what to do with it. Now you can get a professional press release written for ten bucks, and you know exactly where to distribute it.

That’s where courses come in. I think anybody could create a course, because everybody has unique knowledge they’ve learned in life, and there’s somebody out there who wants it. You can do keyword research and find something people are already looking for. For example, you mentioned the relationship niche. I’m working on a site called howtogetmyexback.com because I discovered there are hundreds of thousands of people every month searching for, “How do I get my ex back? My girlfriend? My boyfriend? What do I do?” And the basic advice is like, “Don’t drink too much and text them. Don’t drive by their house. Definitely don’t buy a gun.” It’s all obvious stuff, but people are hurting and want the help. My team told me not to tell anyone, so I’m like, “Okay, I won’t—until tomorrow,” and we’ll just release this podcast in 2028. But it’s fascinating. People break up, get back together, and do it all over again, so they’re searching for this advice—usually doing all the wrong things. That’s just from what I’ve heard. I’d never do that, of course.

From online courses to getting back with exes, the conversation trajectory here has been crazy. At this juncture, we’re running out of time. I’ll continue my conversation with Cat in the next episode. Stay tuned.