222: How To Sell 25,000 Online Courses Without An Audience With Joe Nicoletti

Podcast: Download (Duration: 49:44 — 68.3MB)

You can sell online courses without an audience by borrowing someone else’s. Joe Nicoletti has sold over 25,000 courses and built an email list past 100,000 subscribers with no blog, no content marketing, and no signup forms on a website. Every one of those subscribers came from teaching free webinars to other people’s audiences and splitting the resulting sales 50/50.

Joe was a corporate manager in St. Louis who got rejected from pizza delivery jobs for lacking pizza delivery experience. He was a casual user of Scrivener, a writing app, when he noticed people in the comments of a Michael Hyatt blog post saying they wanted to learn it but found the learning curve too steep.

This episode covers how he validated the course by building it in public, how he got a cold introduction to an influencer with a large writer audience, the done-for-you pitch that gets busy people to say yes, and why he charged $27 before he had any idea what the course was worth.

Key takeaways

• Build the audience relationship backward: find the pain first, build the product, then partner with people who already have that audience.
• Affiliate webinars grew Joe’s list to over 100,000 subscribers with zero ad spend and no blog.
• You do not need to be an expert. You need to know slightly more than the person you are teaching, and nobody ever asks about credentials.
• Split webinar sales 50/50 and offer a done-for-you setup so the partner has to send two emails and nothing else.
• Get introduced through someone in the influencer’s circle rather than pitching them cold, since a personal introduction bypasses the inbox entirely.
• Give the course away free at first to collect feedback, then let buyers tell you what it is worth. Joe went from free to $27 to $47 that way.
• Lead outreach with what the partner’s audience needs, then mention the revenue split second.
• Do small webinars for tiny audiences to build a results track record you can show bigger partners.

How do you find a profitable online course idea?

Find a course idea by hunting for the pain people are already complaining about publicly, rather than building what you think they should want. Joe’s rule is that you are never wasting time researching an audience and collecting their actual language.

His Scrivener course came directly from blog comments. Michael Hyatt wrote about using Scrivener for his writing, and the comment section filled with people saying the learning curve was too steep, that they had given up, and that they wished a course existed.

The standard he sets before building anything is being able to write a page out of the customer’s diary. Most people skip that groundwork and dive into production.

His analogy is blunt. Nobody wants three-pack abs, so stop trying to convince people they need three-pack abs and build the six-pack version they are already asking for.

Where do you research an audience when you have no following?

Research where your audience already gathers, which means forums, Facebook groups, Reddit, or Twitter depending on the niche. Joe found writers congregating on Twitter, which is the only reason he started there.

Google is the entry point. Search your topic plus the word forum and you will surface the communities discussing it.

BuzzSumo is his other tool. Type in a topic and it returns the most-shared articles written about it, which tells you both what resonates and who wrote it.

That last part matters more than the content research. Joe typed Scrivener into BuzzSumo specifically to identify bloggers with engaged audiences he could eventually partner with.

Do you need to be an expert to create an online course?

You need to know slightly more than the person you are teaching, and that is the whole requirement. Joe was a casual Scrivener user who had never written a book with it when he started building a course on writing books with it.

Nobody ever asked about his credentials. He was terrified they would, and the only reaction he got was appreciation for showing someone how to do something they wanted to learn.

His reframe on the self-doubt is useful. Instead of asking “why me,” ask “why not me,” and then notice you have no good answer.

The worst case he imagined was a total flop that still taught him how to build a curriculum and produce an online course. That downside was acceptable enough to start.

How do you validate a course while you are still building it?

Build the course in public and let the audience specify what goes in it. Joe reached out to people one on one on Twitter, showed them what he was making, and asked what else they wanted included.

Someone asked whether the course covered making an ebook with Scrivener. It did not, so Joe went and learned it, recorded a tutorial, and came back to that person with a preview.

That loop is the entire method. Ask, build what they said, show them, repeat.

His Twitter following at the time was roughly seven people. He had to ask someone what a hashtag was and what you were supposed to do with them, then searched the Scrivener hashtag and found the conversation already happening.

Should you give your course away for free at first?

Giving early copies away free buys you feedback and confidence, and it lets buyers tell you the price. Joe was too nervous to charge, so he generated 100% off coupon codes in Gumroad and handed them out on Twitter in exchange for feedback.

The responses set his pricing. People told him they could not believe he was only charging $27 and that they would happily pay $97.

He raised it in steps rather than jumping. $27 became $47, and buyers kept recommending it to friends at that price.

The pitch that made the free version easy to send was framing it as a work in progress. He said he was building something and looking for feedback, then offered the free code.

How do you launch an online course with no email list?

Launch by teaching a free webinar to someone else’s audience and offering your course at the end. Joe’s first webinar was for Jeff Goins’s Tribe Writers group, arranged by a mutual connection, on a couple of hours notice.

He flew home on his lunch break from his day job to run it live, terrified. It generated around $1,000 in sales, which was the most money he had ever made in a short period.

The critical detail is the registration page. Joe set it up himself so that everyone who registered through the partner’s email joined his list, which gave him roughly 1,000 subscribers interested in Scrivener from a single event.

That was the moment his strategy changed. Rather than spending two or three years blogging to build an audience, he could borrow audiences other people had already spent years building.

What is the right revenue split for an affiliate webinar?

A 50/50 split of all sales is Joe’s standard, and it is what every partner accepted. His framing is that the partner spent years building the audience and he spent months building the product, so they meet in the middle.

Stacking the split further in the partner’s favor is a reasonable opening move when you have no track record. A 75/25 split, or even letting them keep everything while you keep the registrant emails, is a legitimate incentive.

Joe never had to go that far because partners consistently offered to split it evenly. The email list is where the long-term value lives regardless of how the immediate revenue splits.

How do you get an influencer to say yes to a webinar?

Make the webinar zero work for the partner by handling every piece of it yourself. Joe pitched it as a done-for-you service: he built the registration pages, ran the technology, went live, and wrote swipe copy for the promotional emails.

The only thing the partner had to do was send two emails. Joe went further and told them they did not even have to show up.

He explicitly designed the pitch around the partner’s likely objection. A busy, successful person hears “webinar” and pictures coordination, page setup, and email writing, so removing all of that removes the reason to decline.

Multiple partners told him afterward how much it mattered that they had nothing to worry about. That friction, more than the revenue share, is what usually kills these deals.

Should you lead with money or with the audience benefit?

Lead with what the partner’s audience gets, and mention the revenue split almost as an afterthought. Many established influencers are already making plenty of money, and what they actually protect is their relationship with their audience.

Joe read partners’ blogs to figure out which ones cared most about their readers. For those, his opener was that their audience clearly craved this information and he believed he could genuinely help them.

The money line came second, phrased casually. Partners typically responded by mentioning they got questions about the topic constantly and never knew how to answer them.

The partner is also taking a real risk. They are lending you credibility they spent years accumulating, and acknowledging that shapes a better pitch than leading with commission percentages.

How do you get introduced to influencers you do not know?

Work outward from the influencer’s circle instead of approaching them directly. Joe’s method was to ask who might be in their inner circle, then who might be in that person’s inner circle, and build relationships at the edge.

He asked everyone he met a standard question: do you know anyone else who would benefit from this, and would you be willing to introduce me? Nobody ever said no, and the worst outcome he could imagine was a decline he could easily absorb.

The chain is traceable. Someone introduced him to Andy Traub, a super connector who knows everyone, and Andy introduced him to Jeff Goins, who had a large writer audience.

The successful Goins promotion produced a testimonial that opened the door to Joanna Penn and her audience.

Jeff had never seen Joe present and agreed anyway, purely because he trusted Andy. That is the whole value of an introduction: it bypasses the gatekeeper and the ignored inbox.

How do you build a relationship with a busy influencer on social media?

Show up consistently for months without asking for anything. Joe commented on, shared, and engaged with every Michael Hyatt blog post for six months to a year before making any request.

The payoff came unprompted. Hyatt recognized his name, saw his Scrivener Coach handle, and asked him publicly whether there was a way to work with an editor who uses Microsoft Word alongside Scrivener.

Joe did not know the answer. He said he would find out, spent a week researching what other authors did, developed a workflow, and recorded a thorough video walking through the solution.

That reply got him direct email access to someone actively looking for what he sent. Michael Hyatt later became one of his biggest affiliates.

What is the fastest way to get someone’s attention online?

Tell someone you applied their advice and report the results you got. Joe’s observation is that this makes the recipient look good and gives them credibility, so they almost always want to hear more.

That is exactly how he met Bryan Harris of Videofruit. Bryan started answering questions about Joe’s course on Twitter unprompted, vouching for it as one of the best courses he had taken.

Joe noticed, clicked through to Bryan’s profile and blog, and messaged him. They are close friends today.

The generalized version is to ask how you can make the other person look good. Help them share, help their audience, and focus your time where they already care.

What can you offer an influencer when you have nothing to trade?

Offer whatever skill you actually have, however unrelated it seems. Joe felt bad early on because everyone else could offer introductions and he knew nobody.

His skill was graphic work, so he offered to design ebook covers. Partners were thrilled, because a cover redesign had usually been sitting on their list forever.

That is the general principle: identify your skill set and offer it without hesitation. The thing you consider unremarkable is often a real problem for someone else.

How do you build a track record for bigger webinar partners?

Run small webinars for tiny audiences to generate results and testimonials you can show larger partners. Joe advises doing a webinar with 10 attendees rather than waiting for a big opportunity.

Small audiences also give you the best feedback you will get. You can interact live, ask questions, and hear objections in real time.

The escalation is mechanical from there. Joe approached partners who had turned him down, showed them the Jeff Goins results and testimonials, and got a different answer the second time.

Do you need a blog to build an online course business?

No. Joe’s business was built entirely on affiliate webinars with zero content marketing, and he has no blog and no signup forms on a website.

His site functions as a sales page for his products. The 100,000-plus person email list came exclusively from webinar registration pages.

The conventional order is blog for two or three years, build an audience, then create a product. Joe built it backward: find the audience, find their pain, create the product, then build relationships with people who already have that audience.

Progress feels slow at the start and then compounds. Within a year he went from nothing to a growing email list and a business earning several times his day job income.

What tools do you need to launch an online course?

Start on an all-in-one course platform like Thinkific or Teachable, both of which have free plans and handle the technology for you. Joe spent the better part of a year building infrastructure that those platforms now provide out of the box.

He previously ran everything on WordPress and abandoned it as plugins broke and stopped communicating with each other. The hosted platforms remove that maintenance entirely.

For webinars he uses GoToWebinar for reliability at large attendee counts, after an early cheap service crashed and kicked people off mid-session. Zoom and several other options work well for smaller audiences.

For email he runs Infusionsoft because his course catalog is complex. His recommendation for anyone starting out is ConvertKit, on the strength of its clean interface.

Are conferences worth it when you are just starting out?

Conferences work as a shortcut for building the relationships that everything else depends on. Joe bought a FinCon ticket when the conference came through St. Louis, during the same period he was applying for pizza delivery jobs, and it was a genuine financial decision to discuss with his wife.

He arrived with nothing going and knowing nobody. The takeaway was realizing that the people he had put on a pedestal were ordinary people who had taken action on their ideas.

Relationships from that single conference persisted for years, including mastermind members he would not connect with until much later. Joe still did most of his outreach online because he could not afford to travel much.

Frequently asked questions

Can you sell an online course with no email list?

Yes. Joe Nicoletti sold over 25,000 courses by teaching free webinars to other people’s audiences and capturing registrants onto his own list.

Do you need to be an expert to teach an online course?

You need to know more than your students, not more than everyone. Joe built a Scrivener course as a casual user who had never written a book with the software, and no buyer ever asked about his credentials.

What percentage should you give an affiliate for a webinar?

A 50/50 split of course sales is standard and is what Joe used for every partnership. Offering 75/25 in the partner’s favor is a reasonable way to land your first deal without a track record.

How do you get an influencer to promote your course?

Get introduced by someone already in their circle, and make the promotion zero work by building the pages, running the technology, and writing their emails for them. Lead with what their audience gains rather than with the commission.

How should you price a new online course?

Give early copies away free in exchange for feedback and let buyers tell you what it is worth. Joe went from free to $27 to $47 based entirely on what customers said unprompted.

What is the best platform for hosting an online course?

Thinkific and Teachable both handle hosting, payments, and delivery, and both offer free plans to start on. They replace roughly a year of custom development.

How do you research what course to create?

Search your topic plus “forum” on Google, find the Facebook groups or subreddits where your audience gathers, and use BuzzSumo to identify the most-shared articles and who wrote them. Collect the exact language people use to describe their problem.

Do you need a blog to sell online courses?

No. Joe built a list past 100,000 subscribers and a seven-figure course business with no blog, no content marketing, and no signup forms on a website.