Hey, before we jump into the show, I just wanted to take a second and say thank you for listening.
I know that life is busy and you have a lot of options when it comes to the content you consume.
So whether you're new here or you've been listening to the Think Media podcast for years,
I just want to say thank you and I appreciate you. Okay, let's jump into the show.
I don't believe someone's going to pay me for anything unless I give them value first.
Why can't you still sell after giving away free content?
The more I give, the more opportunity I have to sell.
The more people I can bring in from the top of funnel with free content,
the more opportunity I have to give them to go deeper with me.
Are there already people selling things and making money in this topic?
That's a general global like, okay, this could be valuable.
I don't do a lot of public selling on social media or YouTube.
I usually just sell to my email list so it happens behind closed doors and it's very targeted
and these are very warm leads.
What if there was a way to turn your knowledge into $1,000 or more per month in just 30 minutes a day?
What if there was a better way than YouTube ad revenue when it comes to earning money from your content?
Well, in this episode of the Think Media podcast, I'm super excited to be talking with Graham Cochran
who is a best selling author.
He's a YouTuber, business coach.
But ultimately, he originally launched a project called the Recording Revolution.
A YouTube channel that was all about helping people mix their audio and learn how to make
radio-ready songs and it not only blew up, but he was able to monetize it in ways that the
average creator and entrepreneur doesn't know about.
So buckle your seatbelt because in this episode, we're going to be learning about how to package
what you know into an online course, YouTube tactics, and getting into a lot of juicy content.
And so I'm super fired up, but Graham, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, honored to be here, man.
Love what you're doing and excited to talk shop.
Yes, and so I want to start off with your story to give us a little bit of context.
Today, you're a specialist.
You wrote a book, how to get paid for what you know, and all about turning your knowledge
passion experience into an online income stream and your spare time.
But what I love about you is similar to one of my passions and that is that like,
you did the thing before you taught the thing and you didn't just start like teaching
online courses about online courses, but you had this whole era where you took what you knew about
recording and musicians and all that kind of stuff, built up a channel, built up courses,
made a ton of mistakes, and then now you're an expert in all of that and you can help people
scale even more by packaging what they know into something like an online course.
But take us all the way back to where you were in 2009 and how this all started.
Yeah, man, it's funny that you have to even qualify that because I feel like anybody can
teach anybody how to make money online these days and that's how they make money online,
which is what I do now, but I did do it in a hobby niche, which I think is encouraging.
Just a side note that there's plenty of people that will say you can only make money online
if you're teaching people how to make money online. It's like absolutely false.
Most of my students are making money online, teaching something other than like how to learn French,
how to walk your dog, how to fix motorcycles, how to get rid of back pain.
So anyway, it's a real thing and I didn't know this world existed until and I didn't even want to
be an entrepreneur to be honest. That wasn't a world I knew. My dad was an engineer.
My mom was a school teacher. I just wanted to do music. That's what I wanted to do.
I was like the worship leader at church kind of guy. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to
make music videos and I was trying to get a record deal in college and that fell through and I
got married youngs. I had to get a real job and actually provide and I kind of let the music
dream die. So 2009 to your point, I moved with my wife to Florida, we're in Tampa, Florida now
to help a buddy plan a church and got a job. We all just moved and got jobs and we had a first
baby. We bought our first house down here at my age 26 and then I lost a job. My second job
in the same year in the middle of the great recession. So we don't know anybody here except for the
people we're planning a church with and I'm like freaking out and I don't want to go back to a job
I hate. I've already felt like my dream died years ago and so I thought, well, you know what?
I do have a freelance audio skill. I kind of did that for like a side hustle for years mixing
records for bands. I'm trained in that. I went to school for that. I'm loving making records for
myself and I was like, maybe I can do that full time. You know, there's always side money, but
maybe it's this is my sign to go full time. And that's what got me into actually YouTube because
I was like, you know what? I need leads. I need clients and I don't know anybody in town. So while
I'm trying to network in town, why don't I just blog? I put up some videos on YouTube. I think
I launched my channel in January 2010. I was like, and maybe someone will see like what I'm doing
in the studio. I'll do some tutorials and here's how I got a kick drum sound. Here's how I'd
make the vocal sound like this. And maybe I could somehow get leads. And that was what all I
thought I was going to do is to get some leads for the freelance stuff. That's amazing. And today,
the recording revolution is now not your main channel, although with 639,000 subscribers, 720 videos,
which also kind of wild is you have passed the brand on to other creators, other talent,
which I think is a massive kind of it's a mind-expanding thought because a lot of times
when people think of YouTube, they do think it's limited to themselves. If all they're building
is a personal brand, then perhaps that's true. But you have defied a lot of common myths that many
people think before we get into kind of how you packaged free versus premium or paid content.
What were some of the lessons you learned for the recording revolution YouTube channel to grow
to over 600,000 subscribers? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things, right? I mean, I think
part of it I was a little lucky with the timing at that time in that niche or that industry,
the music production, everything was like a guarded dark secret. No one was sharing the how.
How do you make records sound good? All the all the big time producers weren't sharing.
You would be lucky if you got an interview with somebody like Crystal Lardalge or Dave Pinsot or any
of these guys that were mixing all the big bands and they maybe shared a secret. But anyone who's
learned audio and figured it out, it's just stuff you learn. I'm not trying to diminish their skill,
but it's like I'm not them, but I know how it all works. And so I was just trying to put out the
content that would help my friends who were trying to figure this out as well. And so my friends
was like my avatar, their musicians. They want to make a professional sounding recording. They're
not an engineer. So they think like a creative brain, not a technical brain. They just want to make
their music sound good. They don't need to be famous necessarily. They want to know what to buy,
what not to buy. And they just want the truth. And so I that's what I had in mind when I made
videos. And I think I grew quickly, I grew slowly at first. So I don't want to say I grew quickly,
but you know, maybe 18 months and I started to see some traction of posting every single week for
like 18 months. At that point, I started to see some traction because no one else was sharing
the truth. They were talking around the subjects. Or it was really light conceptual content. And I was
cracking open the software. You know, we use a tool called Pro Tools, which is a lot like Photoshop,
but for music. And I was like, Hey, here's how you get this sound. Here's the tool. Here's the step.
And you could literally go do it and get the results. And people like, who's this guy sharing like,
this is so helpful. And I was explaining complex things in a simple way. So I think it kind of
helped in terms of I was one of the first people to really start telling the truth about music
production back then. At least on YouTube, maybe people were blocking about it. That helped.
And it was also a convergence of the, just like with video, right, gear costs came way down.
And so there was more of like this hobbyist market that was coming up saying, Oh, I can,
I can get a recording studio for cheap. And so there was a high interest in doing music
production at home at that time. And so it was a perfect time for me to get on and start teaching
all this stuff and teach them what to buy. And it really just took off because I just kept
telling the truth, speaking to real people. And I, and something you've talked about before is
getting really clear on who the avatar is that your channel is for. I had that dial down so
well that I think people either, either liked it or didn't like it. And that made it help,
helped me, helped me grow out, I think. Man, that's some powerful insights. You know, I've heard
it worded this way, moving the free line. And I think one of the big things that holds a lot of
people back is they're afraid, especially if they aspire one day to create an online course.
They're like afraid of giving away too much or they get in paralysis. Oh, should I share this or
should I hold back? And I think holding back is a bad strategy. You know, and be like, should I
hold back when loving my spouse? Like, I don't know, I just don't want to kind of love them fully.
Should I hold back when loving my friends? And maybe it's a fixed pie thinking too.
Like, of course, there could be the idea of, you know, are you going to run out of everything
you have to say? But if you continue to grow, and if you realize something like this is so complex,
there's, you know, a name just happened, the National Association of Music Merchants. I spoke
there one year for I think, sure. And that's an Anaheim. There is endless depth to home studio
recordings, studio monitors, software, questions people could ask. Your top viewed video as well
is six years old, 3.7 million views. And it's how to build a home studio, core desire for under
$350, which is a radical headline because $350 is nothing for a home studio. So your second most
viewed video, a million views, recording great vocals and two steps. So success leaves clues. And
it's cool to see. And then I love that you said, you know, it still took 18 months. Everyone out
here is trying to get viral videos in a gold play button in 18 days. And so just the patient,
patients, and persistence of consistent content. And so you start building up this channel. You
are very generous with your knowledge. You share real, raw, gritty, authentic, and practical,
deep tactics people can use. And thus your channel starts to grow. You start to build trust.
You start to build a brand. At what point did you package what you know into an online course
and what was like your first product that you watched? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, real quick
to your point, giving, well, you can't give away too much. I don't, I don't, I don't believe in
that ever. And I've been told many times like you give away too much content. And I think, I'm like,
I think you give too little away. I think the reason why I was able to grow is because I gave
so much away. No one would care about me or know who I am if I didn't give so much away. So I've
never seen giving away free content, cannibalized paid content. Just I've been doing this for 14 years
and two brands. It's just my experience. The more I give, the more opportunity I have to sell
and people love it. And there's a lot more we could unpack there is sort of why you can still sell
when you're free giving content on the platform. But I, I experimented with selling content really
quickly because I, I realized that, you know, what I thought was a way to make money, which was,
hey, I could sell banner ads on my blog. You know, this is 2009. Hey, I could, you know, try to do
I don't think the monetization option was available for me at the time on YouTube. It was so early.
I just started posting. But I had some readership and I had email lists. And so I thought, you know,
banner ads, some advertising, some partnerships with some brands, microphone companies, you know,
speaker companies. And I made, you know, a few hundred bucks here or there. And then one day,
I was planning on doing like a massive series on YouTube on this topic,
teaching this software, pro tools, you know, back in the day, like I couldn't upload videos longer
than 15 minutes. And I was like, I'm going to need three to four hours to explain this software
that's confusing people in a way that I want to explain it. I was like, I could do that as a YouTube
series. And don't get me wrong. I've done tons of YouTube series that were super long and
imbingable, which is a lot of fun. But I was like, this one's going to be so long. Let me test
something. Let me see if someone would actually buy content from me. So I filmed this four-hour course.
I didn't know it was called a course. I just filmed four hours of explaining this software,
chopped it up into logical sections, put them in a zip file, got a PayPal button,
used iWeb on my Mac, and then emailed my list and said, hey, I have this thing and I called it
pro tools boot camp. And I sold it for 47 bucks. And I said, basically, this is the most
popular software in the audio world. I was like, here's the best way to understand it without
it being complicated. It's not going to be boring. We're going to make a real song together,
and you're going to see how to use this as a musician. See if you want to buy it. I didn't think
anyone would buy it. And I remember the first sale I got. I was in Seattle. I know you're from
that area. Originally, I was in Seattle. My grandfather's funeral. And it was after the funeral,
and I was back at the condo where my grandparents lived downtown. And I needed to go get some Wi-Fi
because they didn't have internet in there. But you know, this is 2010. They're like, they don't
have internet. So I went down to their cafe to get Wi-Fi, just to check email. And I got like a
paypal. You have money type email. I'm like, who's sending me money? You know, I didn't have a
client. There's only 47 bucks. I'm like, that's such a random. Oh, that's the course that I've
I emailed up to my list. Some dude named Paul bought this zip file. And then he loved it. And then
another person bought it and another person bought it. And I didn't make much money. It wasn't much
of a launch. Like, you know, any Porterfield and Jeff Walker would have laughed at me. But I didn't
know they existed. And I was like, huh, somebody paid me for digital copies of videos that I filmed.
I've already filmed them now. And I could now sell these videos forever. And that was like six
months into this journey for me. So it was very early on. I didn't make much money. But that was when
I understood digital products and for I just had the vision all of a sudden of like, oh my gosh,
what if I had more courses? What if I had more of a bigger than audience? What if I could sell these
at higher price points and all the above? And I just saw all these dials. I could imagine these
imaginary dials. I could start to turn up in this fantasy of a future. And I just got really excited
about what was possible using YouTube to drive leads to my list to then offer them even more
in-depth paid training. And that was way more exciting to me than ad revenue. Well, and that is
powerful experience through telling your story kind of starting with the 1.0 version. And now
it is grown and recordingrevolution.com store. I'm sure has had multiple iterations. But I see
three different digital products, total home recording, musical income, mixing university.
So you've made multiple products and now you have multiple businesses as you continue to scale.
But I do want to take it back. Why can you still sell after giving away free content? You alluded to
that earlier and you said you have some more content on that. Drop that on us. Yeah, this is like one
of the best questions that people ask. They should ask this question if they're trying to
sniff out this business model, right? Because people think here's what I hear. People think they
even think you do YouTube, which is it's all free and you just get this massive audience and
then you make money off of brand deals or ad revenue or whatever. Or you sell merch or you have
paid courses and you're thinking about funnels and digital marketing. And then you just have to
drive ads to get people to buy your thing. They view them as two separate worlds or two separate
games that are being played. And I posit to you that it can be one and the same. Yes, you could do
either. I'm doing a hybrid. I'm building an audience on YouTube. And the video is like,
and this is why I sent all my people to you and to think media to learn how to do video and even
YouTube stuff because I know that when they watch your video, what's going to happen? They're going
to get educated. They're going to they're going to trust you. You're trustworthy. And I know
you're trustworthy. I mean, I know you as a real person, but like I could watch a hundred of your
videos and feel like I know you. And like that's a powerful thing, right? So then now if you had
something to sell to me, I already know who you are. You trust the already like you. It's so much
easier to sell. So I see them as like these beautiful things that work together. So coming back to
your question in my book, I talk about this because this is one of the biggest questions. I don't
think anybody would read the rest of the book. If we didn't address this early on of like, okay,
well, if I'm going to be making free content and giving it away in something I call the value
circle, I talk about in chapter two, then how am I going to still sell the thing? I mean, people
are very confused. And so I think the content is your marketing engine. It's what gets you
discovered. That's why YouTube is so powerful, right? It's a massive search engine. You can build
authority and credibility. People can test drive you. They can go watch a video of yours and say,
wow, I did what Graham said, and it worked or I got the results. He must know what he's talking
about. Never have to give me a dime. You can test drive my knowledge, test drive my thoughts
or my experience. And if you like me and you want to go deeper, then why would you buy something
from me? Why would you buy a course on mixing if I just taught you how to mix on YouTube? Well,
the reasons are, in my opinion, and maybe you have some more too, Sean, is like, I think one,
an online course or a paid community, let's just say online course, you can go way more in depth
in a course. It's just the vehicle it allows for a little like deeper, deeper, deeper dive into
certain things in a 10 minute video, even a 20 minute video, even a 30 minute video on YouTube,
I have to hit a bunch of things that can be valuable, but I can't go as in depth as I want to.
And there's other videos I'd want to put in a course that aren't going to be clickable on
YouTube. They're not going to serve the algorithm. It's just, but it really you need to know this
so you can go more in depth. It's curated information. The more people get on YouTube,
and I welcome everybody to get on the platform this room for everybody, but the more people,
the more overwhelming it is, because there's so much more videos, many more videos, and where
there's overwhelm, there's opportunity, right? So if you're overwhelmed, just take my course
because it's step one through 20 or it's A to Z, everything you need to know in one place,
just log in, and you can just go linearly. I'll hold your hand through the process. People
are paying for that curation. They're paying for proximity to you because inside my course,
now you're a customer, and now you can like in a kajabi back end or teachable or whatever you use,
you can like leave a question under a video, and I'm going to answer your question because
you're a customer. I can't answer every YouTube question. I mean, I guess I could, but I just
don't have the time for that kind of thing. I want to live my life. So you get the priority
response from me because of now you're in proximity to me as a customer. I can have more
downloadables and other assets that help you learn it, and people pay attention when they pay.
They people who pay pay attention, and there's that psychological thing of they're going to
dive in because they paid for it. They're going to get results. So all of those things come together,
and that's just with a course. If you have a community element to this thing, well,
now you can get into my private community, and now you can talk to my other customers who are
going through courses. You can talk to me. You can add live coaching elements to it behind
a pay wall where you can really deep dive. So people, I think, are going from far away,
your free stuff to closer, maybe on your email list, where now they're hearing from you regularly,
to really close if they buy a course of yours, ultimately to any kind of coaching relationship,
they're paying for proximity to you. And I think we're in an age of people finding the teacher
they like, finding the personality they like, and wanting to pay to not just have access,
which sounds like this weird constitutional thing. But I will pay to get closer to an educator
or a content creator who I really respect, and I want to learn more. And I want that person
to actually know my name too, which is kind of a cool, I want to be in relationship a little bit.
And so you pay for proximity, and that's the powerful thing of the more people I can bring in
from the top of funnel with free content, the more opportunity I have to give them to go deeper
with me, and I've never seen it cannibalized. We've experienced the same thing, and those are
some powerful insights. I'm sure the listener is dying to know, though, you mentioned the value
circle. And so in chapter two of your book, it's give, sell, over-deliver, receive. Just give us
a little bit of a breakdown of what is the value circle, and what are these four touch points?
What are some nuggets around them? Yeah, so if I explain my business on the back of a napkin,
that's what I would draw. Draw this circle, and the top of it says give, and then to the right,
sell, the bottom, receive, and then over-deliver, and then the fourth one is receive, and in the middle
the circle is the word value. So what drives a good business is not really the widget, or the course,
it's the value that it imparts, and usually that value in our type of world comes in the form of
transformation. People aren't buying information, they're not buying a course, they really want to buy
transformation. I want to lose 20 pounds, or I want to be more productive, or I want to have a
better marriage. All these things that take, these are transformations that I want. In my case,
I want to make my recordings go from sounding like crap, to sounding professional, and like proud of
sharing it with my friends, or putting it on Spotify, or now I'm teaching people how to launch
business, so I want to go from a nine to five I hate to having a flexible business that's six
figures a year, and 20 hours a week to run, or whatever it would be. That's a transformation
they're buying, and so I have to give them value at every point in the journey, so I don't believe
someone's going to pay me for anything unless I give them value first. And so I like to lead with
generosity, so that's why I'm big on content. I've outsourced and automated and eliminated almost
everything I can in my business, except for valuable content every single week that's truly good,
and I think about it like this piece of content might be the only video of mine, or podcast of
mine, or whatever that they interact with. I want to make sure it's life changing, even if it's
in just one percent life change, so that their interaction with my brand was really valuable and
positive. If I do that well for free, that gives me the right to then sell them something, or offer
them something, it's maybe a better word, and then what I offer them better be valuable as well.
Like I better have a product that's even better than my free stuff, because of all the things we
talked about, and it gets people results, so you don't want to bait and switch them and sell them
a piece of crap. You could, but you won't be in business for long once they find out. So you give
value for free, you sell something valuable, and they're like, wow, this is totally worth what I paid
for it. And then you over deliver, you give more than they thought they were going to buy. You can
do this in a lot of different ways. I'll sneak in like a mini video training on the welcome page
of a course, and they buy it. I'm like, hey, I didn't tell you about this, but I have an entire
training on X that I want to just give you as a gift and blow their minds. I saw Brendan Bouchard
do this years ago. He had this really powerful training after I bought a course of his, and I was like,
oh my gosh, this is, this is even better than the course. Like I didn't even know this was in here,
wasn't on the sales page, wasn't a bonus, it was a over deliver, and you can see companies do this
all the time big and small ways. Even sweet water, right? You buy audio equipment from sweet water,
and like my kids know sweet water, not because they care about audio, but because there's candy in
the box when it comes, there's like smarties and all these candy. And that's not like a major thing,
but it's the little thing of like, oh man, they put someone put candy in the box, and it just,
it's a beautiful experience. So you give value, you sell valuable stuff, you over deliver with
something valuable. If you do those three, the fourth part of the value circle is in you will
receive value. You're already going to receive money if you sold, but you're going to receive
testimonials, you're going to receive people sharing your brand, like you've got to follow Sean,
you've got to check out the media. This guy's awesome, this stuff is awesome, and then that gives you
the opportunity, the both the money and the testimonials give you the opportunity to keep giving
away stuff for free, which is now you're back to the top of the circle, and that allows you to sell.
So you can see how they all kind of work together to stay in business, and you don't want to go out
of business. You just want to keep the circle spinning and spinning and spinning. So you need to sell
so that you can give and you need to give so that you can sell and it all kind of circles around
value. It's a beautiful framework, and so our community is listening to this, and they've made
the decision, okay, I've committed to YouTube, and I'm getting views, I'm getting subscribers,
and I'm just starting, but I'm also trying to build out my business plan and think down the road
what will I sell one day, or what, which piece of my knowledge will I package, or perhaps
we have many people in our community that are still not, they're on the fence,
not even because they're hesitating, because they're still in the planning stage. They have multiple
topics they're thinking about. I want to start a channel about this, or pivot my channel towards
this, and we do emphasize a lot of clarity is power, reverse engineer, first, every battle is one
before it's even fought. If you're going to go into business and you want to quit your corporate
job, or go part time, or be able to do this full time, it's smart to start with the end in mind.
So what is step one is find your idea, and you have a profitability framework. Sometimes people
struggle with online courses, because it's maybe not position right, they make it, but it's
crickets, it could be a marketing problem, but break down how to actually come up with a
profitable online course for those who may have the misconception of, yeah, if I build it,
they'll come, you know, what will people even want? And why would somebody even want my online
course? So what is the profitability framework? Yeah, so this is the most important part,
because what I'm teaching is like not just how to have a big YouTube channel, right? That to me,
it's a means to an end, like it's a tool, because what I'm teaching is how to build a business,
which really helps you build the life you want. So it's important to understand the role of everything.
So if you start with the end in mind to your point, which is I want to make a sale,
I want to sell something so I can have an income, then you have to, like anything,
you have to have something that the market values. And so part of what we talk about in that
chapter of the book is, you know, start selfishly, like just what do you love to talk about?
What do you love to do? What are you good at? What are you passionate about? What have you
had experience with? I don't like to use the word expert or expertise only because it paralyzes
people. I never, I haven't felt like an expert. I didn't feel like an expert when I started the
recording revolution. I knew a lot about recording. I was just sharing what I knew, you know,
that could help people. I didn't feel like an expert when I started a personal brand business
coaching, but I had had a lot of success, you know, selling stuff online and building a business.
And I could share what I, what's worked and what hasn't worked. So you get rid of the expertise
language, but you maybe create a list of, you know, all the things that you could talk about on
YouTube or could build a channel around that you would enjoy. And my, you know, my list would include
football, star wars, pizza, you know, really nice hotels, you know, travel, you know, my faith,
it would include, you know, family stuff, it would include personal finance and investing,
like all the stuff I dork out over, whatever my library is in the books behind me, it's like,
it would include all these different things. And you couldn't make the case that any one of
those could become a business. I mean, people are making money probably off of every single one
of those niches, but you start with what you love and what you're good at, then you have to then
take that list and filter it through the lens of, is there an intersection where one of these or
two of these or three of these line up with what people value and will pay for? Is there a market
for this? And this is not as complex as it sounds, right? Like this is our gosh, are there already,
you know, books being sold on this topic? If there's books being sold on Amazon, lots of them
around the topic, then you know a major publisher has already put money into the market research
to say, I'm going to print books and push this author because we think we can make money. They've
done the research for you. If there's, you know, affinity groups on Facebook or you big YouTube
channels around this subject, all of these things are good indicators that, you know, there's a
market here. The more saturated the better, I think, because then it's proof that you can make
money in this market. If it's hyper niche, we don't see anybody doing it. It could be either
amazing because you're the first one and you're going to crush it or it's a really bad idea
because nobody really wants to buy a course on how to iron your ties, you know? Like there might
be some niche that's too small. So to be safe, look for, are there already people selling things
and making money in this topic? That's a general global like, okay, this could be valuable.
And then I, I really think what makes it even more important is drilling down to real people.
What do real people say about this? Where are they getting stuck? What are their real dreams?
Is there a gap in the market that you could come in and be more specific around?
And so what I want to get to is just like the concept of, you're in YouTube lands where I think
you've got people that, and you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, are already excited about
YouTube, want to do YouTube, see the value in YouTube. I get a lot of people. I'm having to
convince to do YouTube because they want to jump to, I want to sell a course. I want to have a
paid community. I want recurring revenue. I want passive income. And I'm like, okay, what are
you going to sell? I think a course on this. Great. Do you know anyone's going to buy it or do
you have anyone to sell it to? And they don't yet. And so I'm trying to convince them, why don't you
build a YouTube channel first and start to create content and see if anybody cares and not only do
the, if they care, figure out what part of it do they care about? Like every video I put out is a
test to see which, which topic is really the hot button issue that I should probably pay,
create some paid material around. And I don't know that I can guess, but it's really the interaction
with my YouTube audience and then my email list if they go deeper to figure out, okay, what could
I help you with more? What do you, if I could give you results in the next six months that you
would want, what would they be? And if I could coach you one on one, what would you want me to help
you with? And if you start to see trends and patterns, then you get a better clue of, okay, in
general, I help people make recording easier. But more specifically, what part of it do they want
the most help with? And that's a better way to then go build a course because now you basically,
you're extrapolating from your YouTube data of what people like and just going deeper on that
subject. Otherwise, you're, you're guessing and it could be an educated guess, but I'm not that smart.
So that's how I see those things working out is start with your passions and interests,
see if there's a market for it, drill down what specifically do people want out of that. And that's
not as, as fast of a process as maybe we would like. You're very familiar with the YouTube world.
And then of course, your core way you serve and help people today is you help people package
what they know and turn it into a course and learn all the gritty details. And, and really,
so you understand both. I'm just curious some stories from your community. People you've helped
of some examples of online courses that maybe might be surprising to our listeners,
or that might be kind of interesting and that might help stretch our thinking into just what's
possible and what kind of online courses people will actually pay for. Yeah, so this is fun, right?
I have a student in Lane. He was a pastor and he started a YouTube channel and a brand called
Preaching Donkey and he wanted to help pastors preach better sermons. And so he started with an
ebook. He was writing ebooks and he wasn't, you know, he maybe would sell like a thousand dollars
worth a month. And that's when he found me and was really kind of, it wasn't necessarily me,
but figuring out maybe it shouldn't be a book. Maybe it should have like a course and some more paid
things. And so he started to work on towards that end. So he built out his book idea into a course
and then multiple courses and then a paid community. And then he got some one-on-one coaching from
that. So he's gone from maybe a thousand dollars to two thousand dollars a month with an ebook,
which, which was pretty consistent, to doing fifteen thousand dollars a month now consistently.
He moved to the beach where he wanted to live in Florida and his wife stays home now and works with
the company. And so it's him and his four kids and his wife living in the panel of Florida,
fifteen K a month. And he's working, you know, last time he emailed me a couple weeks ago, maybe
10 to 20 hours a week. And it's all started by helping pastors preach better sermons. I have a
student named ICO who teaches native Japanese speakers how it helps them better pronounce their
English. So think about like business executives, you know, actresses and actors who are
trying to come into the English market and they already speak English. She's not teaching them
how to speak, but they're trying to get rid of the accent a bit and pronounce English a little
bit better. And so she was making a thousand to three thousand dollars a month hit her miss doing
some coaching. Now she's doing thirty thousand dollars a month. She's built out a framework. She has
a funnel. She sells everything from a membership to a course to cohort coaching, but they find her
through YouTube and then they go deeper with her. And she's got a tiny, it's a tiny micro niche,
but she has cheat charges really high prices because it's such a unique group of people who are like,
you're the only person that does this. And I need this help in my business career or my acting career.
Or she has a couple of athletes now that want to move to the States and play baseball. And so they
want to speak better English or pronounce it better. So she's doing like 30 K a month. And then I've
got students that teach not just guitar, but ambient guitar, right? Like how to do ambient guitar
well, which is a style of guitar playing with delay pedals and all this kind of stuff, which is to
me super niche as a guitar player. Like I'm like, how could you build a channel around that? But he's
got a channel called ambient guitar academy. And he's built that into a six figure year business.
And he works about 10 hours a week max. And now he takes Fridays off. He's got his son. And it's just
it's gone from fledgling. Like can I do some videos to a framework system to now take these leads
from YouTube and build out consistent income? Well, one of the things these are stories are so
inspiring. But one of the themes that I also love is there's a lot of values alignment with our
community because people want to maybe not just have freedom from the thing they're doing now,
but family is a value, faith is a value. And no doubt about it, setting things up takes work,
building some things out takes work. And this all takes work. But to hear the stories of doing it
10 hours a week, 12 hours a week, being able to take Fridays off once you have some of the automation
pieces here, or especially this is why we also love online courses. I think media is because
building it is one thing. But once you've created it, you now can create it once but sell it multiple
times. And you know, we've updated our core YouTube course a few times. So there's we circuit that
as the globe spins around, we've probably rebuilt it about four times. And certain industries also
shift more like YouTube has updates and saying all that, the dream is this lifestyle that it creates
and the freedom that it creates. And so in just a second, I do want to dive even deeper into
the income engine and talk about these four focuses that you can focus in a business like this. And so
we'll get there in just a bit. But I do know that listeners may be at a place where they're ready
to package what they know and do an online course. And they are looking for that step-by-step.
And so I definitely wanted to let everybody know you've got a class. We made it easy to get to at
thinkincome1k.com. That's the number 1k.com. Of course, we'll link it up in the show notes. This
is all about how to generate your first $1,000 a month of passive income in just 30 minutes a day
and learning the four steps to create a dependable online income. You're going to get a lot
more nuance and detail there. So check that out in the show notes. And we'll of course also link up
so much I want to talk about in the pages of Graham's book How to Get Paid for What You Know.
But that's of course available on Amazon as well. And so that will be linked up in the show notes.
Talk about now the income engine. So there's so many pieces. How do you build that?
How do you structure it? How do you do that? And people can follow you and learn all of that.
But the course is done now. So what is the income engine and what are these four steps?
Yeah. So one of the questions I get is, okay, Graham, I built a business and I built the course
and maybe I've launched it and it's out. What next? What do I do every day? That's like the question
I get. So what do you do? It's a funny question. But if you get to that point, that's a huge
accomplishment for one to like have launched your business, actually put a product out there in
the world. And even if you made a hundred bucks, like you did it. Now what? And so the way I looked
at it, I was trying to answer this question over the years, I realized, man, there's four things
that I'm still doing every week in my business. And so that's what I call the income engine. How do
you keep this thing spinning and have the better chance for things to grow? Because I think momentum
theories are a real thing that are given enough time. If you're delivering value and you're
consistent enough time, you will gain momentum. A video will pop, you know, something will happen.
You can't control some of those things, but what do you do in the meantime? And so it's really
simple. The system that I teach is like really basic, but it's like you need a lead generation
machine. And so I believe in content marketing, meaning I don't run paid ads and I never have.
So I'm not spending money on marketing. It's all free, but it's my time, right? But I really
believe in the power of content marketing. So if you've ever thought you have to do paid ads,
I'm a good test case. I've done two seven figure businesses and I didn't run paid ads for either
of them. So it's possible. Not saying you can't, but you don't have to, but you need leads. And so I'm
teaching content marketing. So that means every week I'm creating new content. And to me, it's at
least one piece of content a week, one main YouTube video. We could split that up into some
reels and some other short form content or chop it up. One main video podcast or something like that
per week. So the more content you put out, you never give up doing that because that feeds the engine.
And that's how you got started in the first place. The second piece of the engine is
growing your email list. So as much as I love YouTube, and I don't think it's going anywhere,
and I think you probably agree, I want to get people off of YouTube onto my list, right? Because
I own the list. If I just build up a big Instagram following or a big TikTok following and then
Instagram gets no one cares about it and TikTok gets banned from the US government. And then YouTube
shuts down, you know, then I have no access to the audience. I've worked hard to build. So I want to
make sure that it's not just on YouTube, but I want to invite my super fans like, hey, come
deeper with me. And that's a big part of what I teach in the book is like how to create lead
magnets that get people to want to leave YouTube and join your list. And why would they want to?
And what does it look like? But the list is important because that's who I'm ultimately selling to.
I don't do a lot of public selling on social media or YouTube. I usually just sell to my email list.
So it happens behind closed doors. And it's very targeted. And these are very warm leads. And they
convert better for me. So I always want to be list building always. And I'll do that even like,
even in my book, if you read my book right at the back of the book, there's a giant opt like
lead magnet. Hey, do you want this entire mini video course 30 day training? Go to grahamcocker.com
slash whatever. Like there's a lead magnet in the book because I don't have their email address,
even if they read my book, I want them on my list. So I'm always list building.
Number three is real quick. I'm always nurturing that list.
You don't just build a list and just sell to them, you know, they're still your people.
You're still you're still leading them and teaching them. So most of the emails I send are
just valuable free content going back to the value circle. I'm teaching them new stuff.
I'm sending them to my latest YouTube video. I'm like, I noticed something in the news that's
interesting and relevant. I'll send it to them. I'll like, if I'm on this podcast with you,
I'll let my people know about your podcast. You should check out this great conversation. I have
Sean. Like it's always nurturing every week minimum popping into their inbox, staying top of
mind and let even if they don't open your emails, they see your name. Yeah, that graham guy is really
that's super helpful. That's super helpful. So you're not always selling. You're just adding value
and nurturing most of the time. And then the fourth thing is, well, you built the course. You can
build more products too. You know, like there's way more you can build. It could be a second course.
It could be a membership community like a paid community. It could be a group coaching program
with 12 of your best students. You take them through and you're real close working with them.
It could be one-on-one coaching. It could be a weekend retreat that you're hosting in your city.
It could be, hey, I launched a book. You know, you should read my book. It could be anything.
You know, one of my my buddies, Rameet Sayte, like he just launched a Netflix special, right? He's
gone from like blogger to he's on Netflix now. So he's going to use his email list to, hey,
guys, watch me on Netflix. That's technically a product. He's getting paid by Netflix to do a show,
but he's using his list to let people know about it. So it could be anything, but that's the
four things. It's content, email list building, nurturing the list and coming up with new products
and building out a legit product suite because there's so much more you can offer to a variety of
different people at a variety of different price points. Wow. And if we take it back to recording
a revolution, how many products over the years have you had? Currently, there's three available
publicly on the store. And today, you've got all kinds of ways you serve people helping,
especially like people in the Think Media podcast community. Packaging what they know into an
online course. But back when you were doing that, but doing it for learning how to learn recording,
learn mixing or build a home studio, how many products over the years did you create in that
business? Yeah, probably like 20, you know? Wow. And did you retire some of them? I mean,
have some maybe they were archived or updated. Yeah, some kind of disappear like they weren't that
great. Some I had one little mixing course called Rethink Mixing and it was a $99 course and it was
not created in HD. It was it was it was not I didn't think very technically great. It was just me
like mixing a song in front of you and I just chopped it up. That thing has made me over a million
dollars just was one little $99 course. It just kept selling for seven years and I kept saying I
need to update it. It's it looks so fuzzy and crappy. I could make it better, but it kept getting
such amazing results for my students that I almost felt like there was something magical about I
don't want to touch it. So I left it and let it run in my funnel for for I never had a big launch
never launched well, but it made me over a million dollars over a seven year span that one little
course. And I eventually just cannibalized it and made mixing university, which is just a whole
whole nother ball game. But I was like, I'm going to let it run as long as I can. But yeah, so some
things I phased out replaced some things I created collaborative courses. I mean, going back to
what I was saying at the beginning when there was no music producers teaching the the dark art
of recording in the in the mid 2000s, it's funny come 2015. I had I would go to NAM every year.
I started to get to know a lot of producers and they needed alternate forms of income. You know,
the record labels were drying up. Streaming is really cannibalizing music sales and so they have
fewer clients to mix. These are these are like my mixing heroes, like making the biggest records
and and they sort of have conversations to me like, Hey, you got a big audience. Could we
do a course together and split the money? Like, yes, we could. So I made multiple products with
multiple big name producers where we would film them teaching their thing. And I would sell it
to my audience and we would split it because I had the marketing machine, the leads and the trust
and goodwill. And they had a name that was famous. And we I created a ton of products that way and
made them a lot of money and I made a lot of money and it was a lot of fun. And so yeah, I
made a lot of different things over the years. And one other thing I will say is the platforms
these days that you can use to sell your products. If they're courses like Kajabi, I'm a Kajabi
evangelist. So I'll keep saying Kajabi. But there's lots of options. What I love about these tools
is you can have products, but then you can have offers that are separate, meaning you can get creative
and say, look, it's black Friday. I want to take my three most popular courses, bundle them together
and call it something new. And I did that with like five of my best products. I called it the
radio ready system. It wasn't a new product. It was a bundle of my five best products at 60% off
with a shiny new thumbnail. And I just told them like, look, these are my five best products. It's a
whole system. That thing started to sell so much better. I had a higher price point, but it was
really just me repurposing and selling some different stuff in a different way. And it's just so
easy to do that and get creative with your offers over the years with these kind of tools. So it's
a lot of fun. In just a second, I want to learn what you feel like some of the habits, disciplines,
and your kind of final thoughts about the traits of successful people that lean into this business
model. But before we get there, I want to remind everyone a couple of things. And that is that
there's obviously a thousand nuance points to learn about all of this. And so definitely check
out the show notes. Graham's YouTube channel over 50,000 subscribers. A lot of nuances about
building your email list and writing copy. And how do you host all this stuff? And so he's got
a ton of free content there. And he also has a deep dive class that you can check out at think
income1k.com or we'll just link that up in the show notes. And so I highly recommend if you know
you're ready to do this. And actually, I recommend watching that regardless because it's always nice
every battle's one before it's even fought reverse engineering and and thinking through even if
you're not ready to pull the trigger right now, thinking through, okay, where's this all going?
And how am I setting this all up? And how am I positioning my YouTube channel, my content? And we
talk a lot about picking the right niche or the right topic because once that's huge. If certain
topics do not align as well with actually packaging things into a digital product later. So to your
point, depending on what your aspirations are, it's good to think things through. And so
definitely check that out. That free class that Graham has for you is at thinkincome1k.com
that just simplifies a link for you to get there. And you can check that out on the show notes.
And then Graham, I have that final question for you in a second. But if people want to connect
with you, where can they follow you online and everything like that? Yeah, the only social platform
I spend time on is Instagram. So at the Graham Cochran, you hang out me there or on YouTube,
hit me up. Yes. And so all of this will be summarized in the show notes. But Graham, I am curious
now that you've been able to serve, particularly entrepreneurs, creators, you know, some terms
that we love around here is contentpreneurs, YouTubepreneurs. And infopreneurs is kind of one of
the words of somebody who takes their knowledge or their information and turns it into a business.
And YouTube creators, entrepreneurs, small business owners, this would be our community. But
specifically for people that figure out how to thrive like your pastor, friend, and student who
is now got this thing down to 10 to 12 hours a week, able to serve people, help pastors preach
better and also spend time with his family is created that freedom. People like him, what are some
of the habits, disciplines or traits that are necessary for success or lasting success in this
industry? I think the greatest trait you can have in almost anything in life is discipline
to keep showing up. I mean, it's so overstated, but it's underused. I mean, people are looking for
a shiny thing or something. It's an excuse to not just do the thing that's in front of you. I've
never known what I'm doing, right? I'm figuring it out as I go. I've always felt like if you hear
the term in posture syndrome, I always feel like I don't belong here. Eventually, someone's going
to find out that I'm just Graham. I'm just the guy, you know, and when I started my business,
we were broke on food stamps. I had a baby and I'm in my spare bedroom,
making videos, writing blog posts, tweeting out, figuring out how to host a website on WordPress
in 2009 and the plug-ins and feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm just Graham in the spare bedroom,
broken on food stamps. That's how I felt while I was starting out. Even though I've had
some success that makes me feel like maybe I know something, I thought the feeling would go
away and it hasn't. There's this element of, well, I'm still going to show up anyway and I'm
not going to quit. I felt early on and I think I developed this because I couldn't control much
about our finances back then. I was so desperate to make money. I was like, I can't control anything
other than I'm going to show up every day. I'm going to get in my office and I'm going to create
something that's valuable for somebody put out there in the world and hope it helps.
And hope isn't really the best strategy, but it turned out that content creation that's valuable
and showing up consistently was good. I was probably stubborn enough to stick with it even
though I probably could have quit multiple times and had a wife who supported me which
when I wanted to quit, so I really thank her a lot. I think the discipline to keep showing up
because so much of this business is, we've talked about, is figuring it out, like figuring out
messaging, figuring out your take on things. When you get a little more confident on YouTube,
you realize, especially if you're in the education space, but I think it's true even if you're in
the entertainment space on YouTube, getting more polarizing in a good way, like just putting a
stake in the ground and saying, this is what I really believe and you can disagree with me and
not having to be a jerk about it, but just being confident, people are attracted to that,
that content does better, but that took me a while to be confident to sort of stick some stakes
in the ground. So the discipline is huge. And then the big thing though, I see the biggest mistake,
I see some of these people making and my students too, eventually if they listen to me enough,
they know like my philosophy and they either like it or they don't, but one of the biggest
mistakes is just trying to make a lot of money. That's actually not that hard. If you stick in
the game long enough, like in YouTube, some of this stuff, you can figure out how to make money
online. You know what's harder and more impressive is how to build a great life and build a business
that takes care of your income needs, but you also have time to take your kids to school, pick them
up, go to church, get enough sleep, you know, like go to the gym, wash your minivan, like whatever,
like have time for friends. It's have a vacation and the business still run without you.
That is more impressive and not hard, but it's more intentionality is needed. And so what I'm
trying to teach students is don't think about all I want to make six figures. Yeah, and six figures
and I want to work, how many hours do you want to work? How many days do you want to work?
Have you ever thought about taking Fridays off and making it a family fun Friday or a date day
with your wife or like have you thought about some of these things? Because if you think about some
of those things, there's tools and strategies to help you not just make money, but make them within
these parameters of, you know what, I'm going to draw a line around my time, around my schedule,
around the type of activities I'm willing to do. And you can still make a lot of money
in these type parameters. And I think a lot of people just never stop to think about it. And so
they're just thinking about one goal, which is reaching my income goals without the lifestyle goals
and both can be achieved. Powerful insights and man, it's so inspiring to talk to you because of
really values alignment. And the idea of having a greater mission, that's bigger than money,
and then the idea of not giving up once you want most for what you want now. You know,
I always, I think I stole a quote from Larry Osborne, which was, if I gain the applause of the crowd,
but I lose the love and respect of my children, I've failed. You know, if I make a lot of money,
but I blow up my marriage, I've failed. And of course, with deep empathy for our community,
I know all kinds of stuff can happen in our life, in our marriages, in our families. And maybe
sometimes lessons that we learn the hard way that can always help us reinvent and, you know,
press on into the future with greater wisdom. But you and I are both in all kinds of circles,
and we speak at events where we do get around people. We're in the green room with some people
where it kind of could be scary. I hear some people say, you know, if your, if your wife and kids
aren't on board, who cares? You know, it's like, we're going forward. Anyways, like where you got to
just chase your dreams, you got to cut loose dead weight. And there is stuff of like about your
circle and about different things. But at the same time, I think that ambition, a lot of people
get messed up with this. People of faith, especially get messed with this. They think ambition is a bad
thing. No, it's not that ambition is a bad thing, but toxic ambition is a bad thing. Oh, that's
all episode I'd love to have, man. Just that's near and dear to my heart for sure. Yeah, it's a real
thing. And it's, and actually you could be on either side of the spectrum where you could be on
the side of the spectrum where some, some people need more. You're like, actually, it'd be really good
for you to get some ambition. And maybe to capture some God-given vision and have a little bit of a
drive. But for some people given to, you know, getting getting disconnected from their core values,
ambition could lead you to the wrong place and potentially lead you away from the things that
matter most. So I, so grateful for you in respect to Graham. And grateful for all that you've shared
there, disciplined to just keep showing up. And then really thinking about what are your deepest
values that you can actually align what it is you're building around Graham. Of course, we have
all those resources that we highly recommend in the show notes. Graham Cochran, I want to thank you
for coming on the Think Media podcast.