← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
He Built a 6-Figure Empire Teaching Google Sheets: Ben Collins Deep Dive
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I wrote this deep dive back in November of 2023, so it's been a little bit of time since then. However, I still think a lot of this is relevant. Ben Collins began his career as a forensic accountant and now he makes six figures a year selling courses about Google Sheets. What the heck is a forensic accountant? From what I gather, Ben was responsible for finding mistakes in a company's books and financial statements and figured out how the fraud occurred. That's not the main point though. The main point is that Ben knows his way around data and and it's a reason he's been able to teach thousands of others how to get better with it as well. Over 50,000 subscribers and multiple six figures earned. He's turned his skill into a full time creator business that allows him to spend a lot more time with his family. So let's dig into how Ben makes money. Ben has a few income sources. He's had a few income sources over the years, but at this point a majority of his income comes from digital courses. He has courses teaching you everything from how to use apps, script if you want to get super nerdy with data to to regular Google sheets, AI for Google Sheets even, and some advanced formulas. There are 12 total courses and actually at this point I think there are more ranging from the AI playbook for Google Sheets to how to build a dashboard in Google Sheets. A lot of times am I going to say Google Sheets within this deep dive because that is all he talks about. His courses range from $99 to $199 or you can purchase multiples as a bundle and save some money. I have some pictures of his teachable account up here as well. I found this little quote in one of Ben's articles and I'm super curious if the 40,000 students included the free ones. So it says. Since then over 40,000 students from thousands of organizations have registered for one or more of my online courses. And spoiler alert, it did include free. It did include the free students. We asked them. I said because if not, even if they all bought his cheapest 97 course, that's almost $4 million from self paced courses alone. So sadly that was an old stat and is no longer accurate and he was running a Black Friday deal at the time, so I should probably remove that from here. He also has cohort based courses. He ran a cohort based course called the Pro sheets accelerator in 2021 that helped his students take their base level Sheets knowledge and turn it into a more robust skill set. He had two courses, cohorts of the course. The first had 37 students. The second had 42 students. Pricing for the second one was $1,595. So at 1595 per person, that's over 120k of revenue from those two cohorts alone. I also had a note. The first cohort may have been a little cheaper, but I couldn't find the pricing for that one. The next one is lead generation, and this is a new one from what I've seen in past deep dives, because I haven't seen other people doing this. But Ben used. He used to do consulting to build Google sheets and API scripts for companies, but no longer does this. But he still has a pipeline of clients wanting to work with him coming in. And so, like, he still has that pipeline, and it's just like, sitting there, essentially, or was. But he now has this little option on his website called Hire an Expert. And instead of taking on those consulting clients these days, he refers those people to a friend who runs an agency. The higher an expert option in his sidebar leads to a Google form that you fill out. He ends up redirecting you to someone who can help and someone who wants to help. I have to imagine that since Ben is giving that company free leads, he probably gets some kind of commission for doing so. The other point to this is affiliate marketing. It looks like there are some affiliate links on Ben's website, but it's few and far between. I didn't want to give, like, a estimate for revenue at that point because I'm not sure that was a huge focus. Okay, let's jump into the growth timeline. So this growth timeline is gonna look a little basic from others because Ben doesn't really do much on social. He does have a few thousand subscribers on Twitter and LinkedIn, but not a ton. And so I kind of just left it simple with this email subscriber growth chart. He started the newsletter actually in January of 2016, which is so long ago, almost 10 years. And actually, Ben, when we talked, he. He called himself a dinosaur of the Internet, which is pretty funny. But, yeah, so he found something his audience wanted to learn about, and he just consistently creates content, content for them year after year. Could he have grown faster? Yes, which is one thing that we get into in our interview later this week, because Ben has actually slowed down his growth quite a bit, and he was actually asking us for advice on what he could do. So Dylan and I did some ideation with him. And so if you're interested in hearing us try and help Someone who has already built a newsletter, 50,000 subscribers. Continue to grow it. Make sure you keep an eye out for that one. He's done this in a way that allows him to spend time with his family and go mountain biking regularly, which, it's like a lifestyle business, right? I know a lot of creators would kill for a lifestyle business that just supports them and they get to do what they enjoy. So I said, while his growth has slowed quite a bit, there's a lot we can learn from the way Ben has been able to build his business and, and keep money coming in even through those quote unquote plateaus. Okay, so the growth levers of Ben Collins. Number one, niche versus Broad. Instead of writing out all kinds of software tutorials, he's honed in on one specific area of focus. And this makes a lot of the next steps much easier. Number two, SEO and organic search. Ben has brought in a ton of website traffic from Google Search. This strategy is responsible for a lot of his success, but it's something a lot of creators actually avoid or just don't think about. Number two, YouTube for non YouTubers. Ben is not a professional YouTuber. He does not have a professional setup. But his videos drive tons of traffic and views to his content. Number four is SheetsCon, the virtual event he set up that drove thousands of subscribers to Ben's email list and over 20k in potential revenue. And number five is free courses. Ben has done a masterful job at getting his readers and subscribers to convert into paid customers. His free courses and lead magnets are a big key to that. All right, so let's dig in. This first one is going to sound basic, but I want you to stick around because this is actually very important. Going niche versus broad. When Ben began his current website, he was writing about all kinds of software. He talked about Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Basic. Everything and anything was fair game. But once he decided to go all in on Google Sheets, everything changed. In April of 2018, he launched the current iteration of his newsletter, sharing one Google Sheets tip every week. It's a really simple premise, honestly. And if you're somebody like me who is interested in getting better at Google Sheets, it's a good read. People began to look for his content when they had questions about the software. Becoming established in a niche helps in a bunch of ways. One, people think of you as the Google Sheets guy. Number two, it makes it easier for people to refer clients and readers to you. Number three, your content creation is much more focused. Number four, it makes it easier to know what paid Products to create next. Now this is the exact same thing, if you recall that we saw with Justin Moore's Deep Dive recently. He does the exact same thing. He is the sponsorship guy, makes it easier for people to refer him. His content creation is more focused and it makes it easy to know what products to create. And this, my friends, is what I see time and time again. And so I just wanted to call this out again because it is worth underlying underlining. This also lets him lean really hard into the niche. Into the niche. Niche. Tell me below which, which one you actually say niche or niche because it's always comes out different and I think I say both and add relevant subject lines for his emails. So I have this screenshot of an email that Ben actually sent around the time that I recorded this and it is, it says like the equal symbol. This is the subject line, equal symbol, Black Friday, parentheses, 2023, comma, Google Sheets, courses comma, 40% off and parentheses. And if you are a nerd or have done any type of formula in Google Sheets, you know exactly what this is and it would make you laugh. And I'm sure his open rate was pretty high for that one. It's so nerdy. But his audience will relate to it because he leaned in hard to that niche. The hyperfocus makes content creation easier. There are a lot of positives to niching down, but personally I think the most compelling is that it's just easier to serve your audience at the beginning of any project. It's the most important thing. I think the most important thing is your ability to stay focused and consistent when your audience follows you for a very specific topic. Hint, hint, newsletter growth. It's going to be much easier to keep yourself focused on that one thing instead of trying to add more and more ideas to your content calendar over time. You can expand what you talk about if you want, but when you're starting out, it's easier to gain traction for something specific than for trying to be someone who talks about whatever they feel like that day. I said, you may, we may look at a bigger creator like Sahel Bloom, who had over 600,000 subscribers and think the opposite. He's pretty wide open with what he talks about now, but in the beginning he was also very focused and he was creating content around finance. Over time he brought intense scope, but he was very focused at the start of his creator journey. The other thing that being focused on a single topic helps you do rank well on Google and other search engines. So number two, the second growth, organic search. Because Ben's website is all about Google Sheets and those related topics. Google itself has a better idea of what his expertise is. This makes it easier for him to rank for specific search queries on Google. Google search traffic can be a little hard to rely on because it can fluctuate quite a bit. Here's the estimated traffic Ben has been able to get from search engines over the years. And I have a screenshot of an Ahrefs graph which shows his growth from 2016 until now or at that time. And there are definitely some hills and bumps along the way. And with everything that's going on with Google, I think this is changing. AI is definitely changing this, but I mean it's still a great source of traffic and potentially subscribers. So when people in his industry link out to his website, they're mentioning Google Sheets, giving Google even more context and confidence that he's an expert on that topic. The result is that he ranks on the first page for a ton of keywords related to that topic, which can eventually lead to core sales. So there is money behind these, these terms. And I have a screenshot of some Google queries that he ranks for and they are all Google Sheets or Google Apps Scripts related. Very nerdy, but very, very consistent. I said over time this traffic can go up or down depending on a ton of factors including competition, algorithm updates and the invention of ChatGPT. And while this traffic is still important, these fluctuations really highlight the importance of moving people to your own platform. I. E. Newsletter, which Ben has done quite well. The third one is his YouTube channel, YouTube for non YouTubers. As I said before, Ben also takes advantage of the search functionality on YouTube, putting out tutorials and other videos on his channel. Since YouTube is one of the top search engines in the world, people often quote it as being the second one, although I have a feeling it's going to end up being first here soon, if it's not already. By creating videos of some of his tutorials, he's able to capitalize on that traffic. But Ben is not an expert youtuber by any stretch. And I wrote, sorry Ben, but he doesn't have great thumbnails. He doesn't pump out content every week. He doesn't have a ton of subscribers. At that point it was 8,700. The audio quality isn't great, but the best part is the content itself is something people clearly want. And then I have a screenshot of some of his past videos and their view counts and some of his videos had a hundred thousand plus views, 78,134 18k was the most recent one. And so it's just people are interested and they like his nerdy style and he's passionate about the content, and I think that just shows through. He said he creates videos when he feels it's necessary to really amplify the written content he's created because he's embedding these videos into the articles he's writing. He's adding views to them as well. Because if someone finds that page and then they start watching the video, voila. A view which can help even more when people find him in a YouTube search. So it's kind of like a little flywheel. You embed the video into the article and then you link to the article on the video on YouTube. Okay. Number four, Sheets Con. Ben put on a virtual event in 2020 called SheetsCon. He did a great job promoting the event and ended up with over 6,750 registered attendees. 3,800 of those actually showed up to watch a live session. That is a lot of people. And I think obviously in 2020, we know what was happening that time. People were probably very, very ready to kind of have a virtual event and be amongst others again. While she's Con was free, Ben found sponsors for the event to help him make up for the cost of running it and for his time. And so he said thanks to our. Thanks to our vendors. And there are eight logos here, Super Metrics, Tiller, Money Glide, a couple analytics tools, and some other Google Sheets related things. These sponsors also help promote the event on our social channels and their own email lists. I also found this post where Ben shared the event on Reddit in the Sheets community. And I have a screenshot of the Reddit post essentially. And he just said, hey, everybody want to share a Google Sheets event that I think you might find interesting? And he kind of broke down what it was. That post got 40 upvotes and 11 comments, and I'm pretty sure that sent quite a few people to register. Between that and Ben promoting it on Twitter and through his email list, he was able to get a ton of people registered. But the craziest part is that all of this kind of. That was all of the promotion that he did. That was it. Just a couple posts here and there. It wasn't like he had a huge marketing campaign behind it. And yet he was able to get over 5,700 people to sign up. While Ben admits he didn't make much money from this directly, he did end up with a ton of new relationships and said it certainly Raised my profile within the G Suite and Google Sheets communities and that was a quote. The 3, 500 or so email subscribers he got could also turn into course sales down the road. And he actually wrote about this and so I'll read this to you for those of you who are not watching. It says and it resulted in about 3, 500 new and high quality leads. These are potential future customers for my online training business and future Sheets Con event attendees. For people on my mailing list, I typically see a 1 to 2% conversion rate. So applying that here would look something like this. 2% times 3,3500 new email subscribers is 70 new buyers at 2,99. That is around 20,930 in future revenue. And he said this is a hypothetical illustration. However, I also called out that this does not take into account the extra subscribers he'll end up seeing from these new relationships with vendors he's he's built and or the future sponsorship revenue that he could have potentially had from building those relationships with the vendors. All of these recordings are still up on his website as something you can get as a lead magnet. Almost like a free course, which is interesting and it leads into our fifth growth lever which is free courses leading to paid ones. In 2017, Ben created an ebook called Spice up youp Sheets Life that he started giving away to new subscribers. There's a picture of it here. It's just really a Google Sheet themed ebook, but it says bonus, a free copy of the Spice up your Sheet Life ebook packed with a hundred Google Sheets tips. The first 100 from this series. It worked pretty well for a while, converting over 2,500 people onto his email list that year alone. But after a while it stopped proving to be as effective. He still gives that away to people who sign up for the newsletter, which is kind of like a surprise and delight. Lead magnet if you will. Reverse lead magnet. But there is also another type of lead magnet. He's trying out free courses. Ben had been following a guy named Wes boss who taught JavaScript and shared tutorials with his audience. He noticed that Wes was running a free 30 day course around coding with Java JavaScript. Ben thought that was crazy at first, creating an entire video course to give it away for free. But then he found out that Wes was adding tens of thousands of people to his email list from that course. This course was helping people learn how to better use JavaScript, but it was also a great lead in to his paid courses. So Ben decided to do the same thing. He created a 30 day challenge around advanced Google Sheets formulas and launched it in December of 2017. That course slash challenge had a pretty big impact on his email list, resulting in it growing to around 30,000 subscribers by mid-2020. Which, that's, that's a lot just for like this free course that you create to leave on your site. I think that's pretty cool. Ben is building up so much trust with his readers by giving away so much free content. Plus you're spending a lot of time with his content. 30 days is no joke. Once you get that much free value from Ben, it's going to be hard to look anywhere else when you want to learn something specific. He has a paid course about. Okay, and then this bonus growth lever. Specific paid courses. For a while, Ben was doing consulting, but not making a ton of money from the email list and website itself. But he thought. He had thought a lot about making a course about Google Sheets and eventually he decided to give it a go. He said, I committed to creating a Google Sheets course. Just one. I would give it a try and see what happened. If it was successful, I could do it again. If not, no problem, I could keep going with my freelance consulting. The first course he created was one around building dashboards in Google Sheets. He had created some free posts around the topic that got a great response from his audience, so he knew that it would be a good topic to start with. He made over $7,000 from an email list of just 2,000 people with that one course. That's a lot. 2,000 subscribers and he made seven grand just calling that out again. The course sold for $149, meaning he converted 2% of his email lists into buyers with that one course. From there, he was off to the races. That was enough to give him the confidence to go create another one. He got quickly. He quickly got started on his next course, a data cleaning course which is now part of his data analysis course. He finished that one in two months and was now making a modest salary from his business. Since then, Ben has created more than 15 digital courses and they're all so specific. Like Google Sheets, essentials, Pivot tables, Data analysis, Lambda functions. I don't even know what half of this stuff is, but it's specific enough that if you saw that and you were struggling with that, I guarantee you're like, yep, let me just buy that. Each one covers a very specific topic. He's even niching down with his courses, allowing his audience to pick and choose which information they want to pay for versus just buying an all in one course. How you can replicate his success I really enjoyed Ben's story because it's a much more sustainable path than many other creators featured. There's no epic growth story, hundreds of thousands of social followers or even paid ads, just a consistent growth over the years while staying focused on one thing. Here are some of the ways you can replicate the success he's had. Niche down in the beginning, Ben started off writing tutorials for a bunch of different software, but it wasn't until he focused only on Google Sheets that his growth really started to take off. When you become established in a niche, you can often broaden out from there. But if you start to if you start broad, it can be hard to find traction because nobody knows what to send people for to you for or what the full thing is. By giving your readers and other creators a very specific thing you want to be known for makes it much easier for them to share with friends and help you gain traction. Growing a topic focused audience will help you learn a lot of marketing and creator skills, and you can eventually translate that into a more personal brand. If you want. Number two of how you can replicate this is Create free courses. A good bit of Ben's email list growth has been from creating free resources that get people to sign up for his email list. One of the keys to this strategy is to make sure you're consistently cleaning your email list of people who are not engaging. Since a lot of folks might sign up for a freebie, you want to make sure you're purging a list of those people and keeping only the ones who want to get your content regularly. If you have paid courses, give them a taste of what your teaching style is like and how much value they might get, and that's a great way to transition them into paying customers. Sure, a lot of people won't ever buy from you, but they still might enjoy being on your email list. And so even if you end up with a few extra thousand subscribers, I'd venture to guess that creating a free course ends up being worth it. The last one don't forget about organic search. While it gets a bad rap, Ben has seen growth and a ton of traffic from people searching on Google and YouTube. With the creation of ChatGPT and now Claude and perplexity and all the things, it can be easy to just write off organic search because it's too volatile, but I'd argue social media is even more volatile. If you're ranking on Google for something, it's got much more staying power than a single tweet or post on LinkedIn you can get traffic from Google for years, while a single tweet won't have that same effect. Build assets for your business instead of just one off promotional tweets and I just want to add to this because I do still think social media is even more volatile than when I wrote this. But there is something to building your personal brand there if you have the capacity and willingness. But I do think there is something to be said about organic search or YouTube search, especially if you're doing something like Google sheets or a tactical type of content. I think it, I think there is definitely something to it. So you know, build assets for your business instead of just one off promotional tweets. But sometimes the tweets build relationships and those are valuable too. If you enjoyed this, stick around for this upcoming interview with Ben. It's not even an interview. Me and Dylan are just throwing ideas at him and he's like, not really sure I love all of these, but maybe one or two he actually sticks with and we'll find out later in the week.