In this episode, host Julie Hood shares one of the most important ways to track your success… this is the secret sauce of many of the top course creators so you can start today with your own tracking project.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares one of the most important ways to track your success… this is the secret sauce of many of the top course creators so you can start today with your own tracking project.
LINKS MENTIONED
Want to get your question answered on a future episode of the podcast? Leave your short audio question at AskJulieHood.com.
The three tools for tracking:
Use this spreadsheet to help you record your numbers.
(Some of these are affiliate links and I earn a commission when you sign up. I only recommend partners I have vetted and tools I personally use.)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What should you be tracking?
Email:
Tool for this is your email newsletter program.
Social media:
Tool for this is the Insights/Analytics on the different social media tools
For your course:
Tool is hopefully your course hosting software.
Affiliate program:
Tool is whatever program you are using to manage your affiliate program.
Podcast:
My software hosting tool – Simplecast – tracks all this for me.
Links:
This is a big project to set this all up so just start with a small piece and get going with one of the link tracking tools. It will evolve and build over time.
COME VISIT!
Clubhouse
Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood.
CourseCreatorsHQ.club – to join the waitlist for my upcoming Clubhouse course
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Hey there today. I want to talk about one of the secret sauces, of course creation, tracking, and specifically what's working and what's not working in your course business. Plus I have a special free offer for you to get coaching with me. So let's get to it. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses.
And now here's your host Julie Hood. So first up, do you have a burning question about creating or marketing your online course? And your question could be answered in a future episode of this course creators HQ podcast. Just go to AskJulieHood.com and submit your question. I have an audio recorder on there. You can submit your name and your question and we'll review those and possibly include them in a future episode.
So that's AskJulieHood.com and I'd love to hear what you've got going on, what questions you have, and maybe you'll be featured in an upcoming episode. All right. So next up today, I want to talk about one of the success secrets that I really don't hear a lot of the gurus mentioning that often, but it is incredibly essential to your success and knowing what's working and what's not working.
And plus I will tell you my seven figure clients do this really, really, really well. They spend a lot of time on this. So what is the special secret that I'm talking about? It's tracking and by tracking, I mean, paying attention to the results from everything that you're doing in particular, the links that you're sharing, but there's lots of other tracking that you can do.
So let's get started today with a few of the things that I want you to be thinking about tracking and adding to your system. And then I will get into some of the tools that you can use. And all of these things will be included in the show notes. At coursecreatorshq.com/55 that's coursecreatorshq.com/55. I'll include the links to everything that we are talking about today,
so that you can get back to some of these tools that I'm mentioning first up for your email. I want you to be tracking the number of subscribers you have, the open rates and the click rates that you're getting so that when you are sharing things, you know what people are interested in, which subject lines are doing well and what they're clicking on.
And then an advanced part of this is being able to track how many people actually buy from an email, that's much more sophisticated. So just start with the other things. If you're a beginner and then eventually you can get to figuring out, Hey, how many people use this email and actually purchased? So the tool to do this is probably your email newsletter,
programming, whatever analytics they provide, you will help you keep track of these numbers for how well your emails are doing. And sometimes I'll tell you I'm really surprised because I will go back and look at an email that I shared a couple of weeks ago, and I will see the open rates and like, Ooh, that one wasn't very popular. Oh my goodness.
That one was way more popular than I thought. So just paying a little bit of an attention to what's working and what's not working with your email can make a huge difference in how well you're reaching your students and potential students. Okay. Next step on social media, there's lots and lots of things you can check and track for social media, but there's two that I really want you to pay attention to.
One is keep an eye on how much engagement you're getting by that, you know, are people liking your posts? Are they commenting on your posts that helps build your social media profile? And then secondly, how much are they clicking? So we want to get people who are connected with us on social media. We want to get them off of social media,
onto our email lists onto our promotions onto our website so that the assets are not just on the social media website. So Facebook doesn't just own all your followers. You want to get those on your email list. So the tools for doing this are typically either the insights or the analytics that you can look at on the different social media sites. And then we're also going to talk about click tracking at the end.
So you can also use that for your social media. Okay. Now for your course, what should you be tracking? So I want you to know the number of visitors to your sales page. So how many people are going and actually looking at the sales page of your course, and then of course, how many sales are you actually making from that?
So that gives you a conversion tracking. So you can see how well am I doing with the people that I'm sending, because if you have a lot of visitors to the page, but you aren't getting any sales, then that means the traffic that you're getting and the people that you're connecting with are not a good fit for your course. So that's just one thing you can kind of keep an eye on and we want to see that in an upward trend.
So you want to see that the number of visitors to your websites is increasing and hopefully your course hosting software will track this for you. So hopefully it's got some kind of built-in. So it can tell you how many visitors you are getting next up is an affiliate program and by an affiliate program, I mean, where other people are able to sign up with you and then the system actually gives them unique links to your course to share.
And so then you have some tracking on the backend that this affiliate program will give you. So this is things like how many clicks have affiliates sent to you? How many sales have been provided by them? What payments do they need to be made that, you know, they're earning commissions a percentage of your sales. So what payments need to be made to them and have,
have you paid them recently? So the tool for this is whatever program you're using to manage your affiliate program. So for example, Kajabi has a built in affiliate program. When you upgrade to their second level. Thinkific, Teachable, they all have built in affiliate programs when you're at an upper level of their tool. And that should be tracking all this for you.
You just have to go look at it periodically and see what's going on. Okay? And then if you have a podcast, I also would love for you to pay attention to how many downloads an episode gets. And this isn't the end all be all statistic because just because someone downloads an episode doesn't mean they actually listened to it, but it is one of the things that we can track on our podcasts.
The second thing that's really interesting to watch is how many unique listeners you're getting. And depending on your tool, you may or may not be able to know this, but unique listeners means new people that are coming to check you out. So you want to have that stat and then also keeping track per per episode of how things are performing. So my software hosting tool,
it's called Simplecast and it tracks all this for me. So I can go in and see, oh, what are my best performing episodes? Which ones are the most popular because then, Hey, maybe I want to do some more topics similar to that, or how are they doing when they first launched? So I'm, I'm releasing this on a Tuesday.
How well does this episode perform over the next seven days? And what can I do to adjust or improve that over the next week? And I've noticed I do some social media promotion for my episodes. And if that doesn't happen, I've noticed the downloads for the episode in the first week are obviously much lower. So just some of those simple things can really make a difference in your marketing.
And you only know that when you're looking at your tracking and you're looking to see how things are performing, okay. Now the really fun one for you to be doing for your tracking is links that you are sharing. And by this, I mean, you want to know when I share a link to a promotion or when I share a link somewhere,
how many clicks is that link getting? And then what actions are being taken because of that. And so this is something that I've become really, really passionate about because I track nearly every link that I share, because there's some really fascinating knowledge that you can get in knowing how your links are performed. So I went back today and I checked, I have 949 different links that I've created over the past few years.
And I can go back and look and see how many clicks each of them have gotten. And it's really interesting because here's just a few of the things that I've learned. I went back and looked at them for this episode. So here's just a few things that I learned because I had this tracking in place. So I could very, very easily update a link when necessary.
So here's where this came in handy. You guys know I have been pushing the big Kajabi promo that ended last month and all of the links that I shared to help track what was going on. Suddenly that promotion is no good anymore. So I can easily redirect that using my tracking tool to go to a promotion that's actually valid right now. So I went through this weekend and updated,
hopefully all of them so that people aren't going to a link that doesn't work anymore. And if I had just shared the raw link, there would be no way to update that. But because I have this tool where I'm creating my own links, I can go in and update any links really, really easily. And then another thing I learned is whether or not my students are using the links that I've shared with them in their courses and how many of them are clicking through because I'm giving them some information.
So I could see what are they using and what are they looking at? And the other thing I learned is how many clicks I got on a partner's freebie that I was giving out this past couple of weeks. I wanted to see, you know, where people interested in this, how popular was it, did people click through, to potentially sign up or not.
I also looked at how many podcasts clicks I get, because you know how I told you at the beginning of this episode, that you could go to coursecreatorshq.com/55 and to get all the notes so I can track how many people click that link and see what's most interesting, you know, is this an episode that gets a lot of people following up?
Are they interested in the notes? All of those things are very fascinating to know what you guys like, what you are interested in. I also could see how many people visited my clubhouse room and my Clubhouse link to sign up, you know, how many people are interested in clubhouse. I also created, if you've ever shared a Google Doc with someone,
you know, it's a big, long ugly link. And so I will shorten those with my, my link tracking software so that it's a simpler link to be able to share. It's easier for me to remember and I can see whether or not people are clicking on them. That was very interesting this week to see whether or not people were clicking on the links.
Now, I can't tell who's clicking. That's not what this specific tool tells me, but it just gives me counts of how many people are clicking. Okay. So how do you do this? If you want to set up this fancy tracking for yourself to be able to share links and keep track of what's so popular with your audience. So there's three different tools that I recommend that you could use.
The first one, if you have a WordPress site, you can download a plugin called Pretty Links Lite, and it's free. It's called Pretty Links Lite. You can install that. And that's what I use for all of my 949 links have all been built with pretty links. The second tool that you can consider using is called Rebrandly, and I'll have the links in the show notes to this for you.
And they have an option where for $48 a year, you can create a custom link with a domain name of your own. Now it will be separate from whatever your website is. Cause you have to basically give them the domain name to use. You still own it, but they have to use a very specific domain name for you. So you might have to pay 10 bucks for a different domain name,
but then ask, contact their support and say, Hey, I want the $40 per year option so that I can have a custom domain. And that's with Rebrandly.com. And then the third tool that we also use quite a bit with our clients is ClickMagick with a K and it's a bit more expensive, but it has a lot more features and it can do some conversion tracking for you too.
So that's a little bit more elaborate. It's $37 a month to get started with them. And if you really are digging deep into this whole tracking system, that might be a tool that's best for you. So setting this up and getting your tracking system in place, it can be somewhat of a big project. So just bite off a little bit of this,
figure out, you know, which of the three tools am I going to use and spend a little time once in a while, getting this set up, start tracking some things so that, you know, what's working best for you. And I do have a tracking spreadsheet that I give out on my Sunday night planning emails. So I'll put that link to in the show notes,
in case you want to start actually writing down some of these numbers, cause there's kind of a two-step process of this. You can be looking at these numbers and getting an idea, or there's also the option of let me actually record these numbers so I can see the trends and see the numbers from six months ago. But I want you to just at least start looking at them,
even if you don't necessarily have the time to go in and be writing down all these numbers and tracking them somewhere, at least start looking at these things, because I think you'll be so excited about the knowledge that you're able to gain about your subscribers, about your users, about your visitors. You know, what's most interesting to the people that you are working with.
So I hope you got something fun from this episode. Something to think about something to play with that will help you build your course creator business. And I want to thank you for listening and subscribing. I so appreciate it. And then finally make sure if you have a question that you're wondering, Hey, I wonder if Julie could answer this for me,
be sure to go to AskJulieHood.com. That's ask Julie hood.com and leave your question for me. I want to hear it and you might be featured on a future episode. So thanks so much for listening. Have a fantastic week and we will catch you on the next episode. Take care.