“I realized that I’m doing the same stuff as I was doing at the first launch, this is like launch number four, and I’m not growing like I should be. What’s the missing piece here?”

“What I discovered? There’s a big difference between your audience and your customers.”

- Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com

Today, we’re speaking with Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko.com, about the importance of talking to people in order to make sure your messaging is on point. I’ve been a fan of Brian’s for years now, and his site is one of my favorite sources for everything related to SEO and building backlinks.

Today, Brian is going to walk us through how sales of his flagship course, SEO That Works, started to stall by the 3rd or 4th launch, even though his email list was growing like crazy.

And no matter how much he looked at his analytics, he couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. UNTIL, that is, he started talking directly with his customers.

So listen closely and find out how Brian dramatically increased his launch numbers with a simple human-first approach.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• [00:02:27] Where Backlinko was in October 2013
• [00:03:33] How Brian decided to launch a flagship course
• [00:04:10] How Brian got the feedback that led him to create a new course
• [00:04:50] How long it took Brian to create that first course, and how long it takes to create a course now
• [00:05:31] How Brian learned what people thought about SEO from reading blog comments
• [00:07:19] The overall structure of Brian’s first course
• [00:08:07] How Brian promoted his first course
• [00:08:33] What happened when Brian launched his first course
• [00:09:26] How the audience changed after the launch of the first course
• [00:11:26] How many people Brian tried to sell the first course to
• [00:13:39] How Brian knew he could do better than he did at his initial launch
• [00:14:22] The online course that Brian took to learn more about selling, and what he learned from it
• [00:14:27] How Brian went about reaching out to customers who had been successful with his material
• [00:16:10] What questions Brian asked when he reached out to customers
• [00:17:09] What Brian found out from asking those questions
• [00:19:23] How Brian changed the messaging and course after talking to customers
• [00::21:37] Why talking to people is the only way Brian could have discovered the changes that he needed to make
• [00:22:35] How Brian’s next launch size tripled after making changes
• [00:23:28] How Brian applied his new knowledge moving forward