Dance Teacher Launches Toe Tapping Online Course

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome to a new week. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. Now listen, great episode today. For everyone who is a personal trainer, performer, or anyone at all who gets paid for teaching anything in person, you should pay attention to this episode.

An online course may be the most logical side hustle for you to pursue because if you build it correctly, it can earn money for you over and over. Now, you might think that online courses are only for marketers or Instagram celebrities, but some of the most popular ones and the ones that earn the most money in the longterm are about simple everyday topics, including some stuff you probably haven't thought much about. So in this story, for example, a tap dance teacher overcomes self-doubt and launches a toe-tapping online course, proving to himself that he's not tapped out, right? Get it? But wait, there's more.

Now, speaking of overcoming doubt, this is important. He struggled with imposter syndrome. Took him quite a while to make the course, not because of the technical aspect of it, but just because he was afraid to put it forward. And I know that so many of our listeners have the same struggle, but this guy managed to overcome it. And this course is now his primary means of income as he continues to do something he loves.

And he's also exploring new things while he's got this passive income arriving every single day. So a lot of things we can learn from this one, and it's also just really fun. I enjoyed working on a story all about tap dancing. So stay tuned. That story is coming right up.

Here's a quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Bill Simpson believes it's impossible to be unhappy tap dancing. He also believes that everyone secretly wants to learn how to do it. This opinion comes from personal experience. He has dedicated his life to mastering the art of tap.

As a teenager, he'd watch old movies featuring stars like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and dream of being just like them. To him, tap dancing was a rare form of magic. With it, all of life's problems could melt away as you entered the whimsical state of flow. Bill's captivation led him to serious study. Slowly but surely, he began to master the art form.

Now over the course of the next decade, he became a bonafide tap dancing star in his own right. Eventually, he became one of the most well-respected tap dancers in Australia. He choreographed shows, performed in musicals, and learned from masters all over the world. In short, tap dancing was Bill's life. Beyond performing, teaching tap became his full-time job and main source of income into his late 20s.

He enjoyed it, but it had one big built-in problem, or let's say a limitation. He was only one person, and one person can only teach so much, even when that person can tap dance as fast as he could. You see, teaching didn't afford Bill the flexibility he wanted in life. It was strictly an in-person job, and if you weren't there, you weren't paid. On top of that, although he loved tap, he'd spent so much of his life on it that he was feeling the urge to try new things.

He wanted to dance to the beat of a different drum. But with the way his life was set up, it just wasn't possible. So Bill decided he had to make a change. He would start a side hustle with the goal of eventually creating a full-time income. Answer of what to do was somewhat obvious.

He chose to start an online tap dancing course. In this course, he would cover all the main steps and film in high-res video from different angles. He wanted to make the most definitive course on tap dancing that existed anywhere. He figured he would have it done in five weeks. Write it in week one, film week two, edit week three, tell people in week four, and debut it to the world in week five.

Boom, it was easy. And it was easy, or at least the first two steps were. The writing and filming was done in under two weeks. But after that, what Bill calls his imposter gremlin showed up. He began to doubt himself, questioning whether or not the course would be any good.

Furthermore, he lost confidence in his own ability. He constantly found himself asking, who am I to teach people how to tap dance? The struggle became so real that it took Bill several months to make more progress. When it came to dancing, he was an expert. But to complete and launch the course, he felt like he had the equivalent of two left feet.

What helped him shuffle forward was forgetting about the enormity of the task. Instead of trying to make the perfect course for everyone, he focused on making the perfect course for one person. For him, that one person was a version of his 16-year-old self. With that character firmly in mind, he powered through and finished. It took six months in total, but he was incredibly proud of it.

To get to step five, putting it out to the world, he would need a website. He got lucky when his preferred domain name, HowToTapDance.com was available. He registered it right away, credit card fumbling in his hands the whole time. He installed WordPress and used his own rudimentary skills to modify a theme to his liking. It was April 2016 when he was ready to launch.

The Just Tap Tap Dancing course was about to take center stage. Bill was confident he delivered on what he set out to do, providing the best tap dancing course possible. He built a small email list from teaching over the years and used it to kick things off. Roughly 1,000 people were notified from his newsletter that the course was ready for purchase. Within the first few days, he made $1,500 in sales.

He was clicking his heels all the way to the bank. But sales dwindled fast because the original source of referrals was tapped out. So Bill decided to turn to YouTube. He edited parts of the course into an eight-minute video tutorial that covered some of the early material. It performed well and kept sales trickling in.

Then he made a tiny change that yielded big results. He changed the thumbnail on that video to something that looked more enticing and instructional. Then, bam, the video took off. It became the top result for searches of how to tap dance in Google and YouTube and still receives over 1,000 views per day. In fact, that video is so successful, it's the main driver of sales to Bill's website, which in the past year has generated $40,000 for him.

It's enough revenue that he's taken a step back from teaching and now has the time and finances to explore other passions and interests. Today, Bill is grateful that he didn't tap off into the sunset. Instead, he pushed through his self-doubt and hot-shoe hustled his way to success. [Music]

So now I want to learn how to tap dance. I was looking at his website, partly to see if I could offer any critique, but also to see like, okay, you know, what's my next step?

My next step and step and step after that, right? 'Cause that's how it works. But anyway, great topic. He owns this market now. It's kind of like some of the small niche markets we've talked about before in the past that can be very profitable.

I was thinking of a story we did about personalized handkerchiefs. This couple that's actually making a million dollars or something, it's like a seven-figure business on personalized handkerchiefs. Another story we did about parrot supplies. This woman who, again, owns the market of parrot supplies. So all kinds of topics out there that you can be an expert in.

You don't have to think about something grandiose. Think about something that you're excited about, that you have enjoyed sharing with others. Especially, as I said, if you are a teacher, a trainer, a coach of any kind, teaching anything in person, is there a way that you can share your knowledge more widely? Now I mentioned his website. It looks really good, actually.

I think it's a good model of this kind of product. He's got several price tiers, which is always smart. You got a beginner's version, you got a middle version, and then you've got a get everything all together for, I think, it's something like $97. Really good price point. And he also prices in US dollars, even though he is in Australia.

Great decision. For a lot of folks out there, if you're in Australia or New Zealand or Canada, the UK, if you want to reach a global marketplace, the largest group of buyers is usually in the United States to start with. But also, for the past couple years, at least, the exchange rate of the US dollar has been quite favorable. So if you're in Australia and you're getting paid in US dollars, you're essentially earning a premium on every purchase. So smart of him to do that.

My only suggestion is he needs to work on more sources of customers because it's great that that video is still bringing in so many views and therefore so many referrals. But he needs to work on more sources of customers because what if that goes away? What if somebody else comes along and it's like how to tapdancebetter.com, how to tapdancebetterthanbill.com, which is probably not going to happen, but still just always get to have more than one main source of referrals. So I loved working on the story. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. There is something out there that you can teach. You can share. You're an expert in something. Everyone is an expert at something.

I really, really believe that. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/982. Come check it out. Come on out at Tapdance and come back tomorrow. Got a lot more coming up this week and beyond.

Thank you so much for listening, my friends. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]