It’s been quite a year so far. Here are statistics of whats happening when it comes to Centsei:
Overall Stats
Course Registrants –
We’ve had 114 registrants in our Fundamentals of Personal Finance: Couples edition course. This is huge! This means that’s we’ve helped over 200 people get on the same page with their spouse, learn about the tools we’ve created (The CAP Budget System, the Simple Banking Infrastructure, our credit card and travel hacking system, and much more.) We definitely feel like we are making an impact.
Total Social Media Reach –
Across all channels, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we reach over 12,000 people. As some of you may know, we are a huge fan of building audiences, and this is a key strategy for us going forward. Borrow audiences to build your audience.
Where most of our Sales come from –
How much have we spent on paid advertising? Less than $100. Most of our sales have come from:
A. Word of Mouth
B. LinkedIn (What? No, seriously.)
C. Messaging our Followers on Instagram
A couple thoughts on these strategies. We’re stoked on Word of Mouth, and we’re working on ways to try to inspire it. Affiliate programs, certifying personal finance coaches under Centsei to teach our content, etc.
LinkedIn has been surprisingly fruitful due to the overwhelming reach. With one post, Dan recently reached 30,000 people. He only has 7,500 connections. This is because there is a content deficiency. There are more people on LinkedIn than there is content, so your content gets shown more often. This happens a lot on newer content platforms, and changes as the platform becomes more congested with more content. LinkedIn is taking a lonnngg time to get congested with content, but it is becoming more popular with content viewers. Good news for us.
LinkedIn will continue to be a significant strategy for us moving forward.
As far as messaging our followers on Instagram goes, this has worked because we did a Live Course in the Month of February. There was a sense of urgency, and we occasionally also offered a discount of some kind for “signing up right now”. We only had 10 spots, and we were able to fill those.
We like doing the live courses, because it helps us understand questions our users have and it helps us feel more hands on, though we don’t want to do every month. It’s a lot of work. This will probably be a twice a year/once a quarter thing.
Lesson’s Learned
Don’t give up. Sometimes, and especially at the beginning of this for us, we feel like what we’re doing isn’t making that big of a difference. But then a sale comes in. Or someone tells us they tried one of our financial tips and it saved them a bunch of money. Or they stopped fighting with their spouse. Or they just paid off $10,000 of debt.
The truth is that anything worth doing is going to take time to build, and really what’s required is patience and consistency. We’re ready to do this for a long time, and we’re going to hit our goal of reaching 1,000 course registrants. No matter what.
Ideas for future Growth
Borrow audiences to build your audience.
Now that we’re starting to get some cash to grow, we’re looking where to put it.
Possible options are:
Instagram Influencers with 100,000+ followers, high engagement rates, and speak to our target market.
Google Ads
Facebook Funnel
We’ll be experimenting with these more over the next couple months and we’ll share what we’ve learned as well.
One of the key strategies for us that I can’t emphasize enough for others is PODCASTS.
The average Podcast episode has 150 downloads. That’s the opportunity to speak to a room of 150 people FOR FREE. This is so difficult to organize in real life. Podcasts provide the opportunity to share your message and story in such a casual environment. Podcast Hosts are also always looking for valuable content to share with their audiences, and so if you have something of value, don’t hesitate to reach out to them!
Make sure you understand the Podcast Host’s mission and purpose, and see how you can help them achieve it. We’ve loved the Podcast Hosts we’ve worked with so far, and are excited for the relationships we’re building with them now.
Thanks for reading this far. We’re committed to making the world a better place through Personal Finance and sharing our lessons learned along the way.
Onwards,
Dan & Kay