Course creator and principal owner of TheRiseToTheTop.com, Chris Huntley, has been blazing a trail in online marketing since 2008. Using ThriveCart Learn proved to be the pivotal move that allowed him to break the million-dollar mark.
Fourteen years ago, as a life insurance agent, Chris saw an opportunity to expand his business by expanding into internet marketing when he started his blog about life insurance. It quickly garnered over tens of thousands of visits a month, and it wasn’t long before competitor insurance agents were blowing up his phone demanding to know how he managed to rank on Google for the most in-demand keywords on his own.
‘And it started to occur to me,’ Chris says, ‘that Google is fickle: always changing. I realized I could start a second business training agents how to do insurance marketing.’
Validating the idea
Knowing he needed to supplement his natural talent for SEO and building organic traffic, Chris bought a course called Create Awesome Online Courses from David Siteman Garland at the Rise to the Top. This fundamental training gave him the confidence and knowledge he needed to start planning and building out his own course about insurance marketing.
But before starting work, Chris knew he had to validate his business idea: armed with a Google Doc of the module outlines and a PayPal link, his approach was simple: email insurance agents who might be interested in learning SEO marketing, and ask that they pay $500 in advance. If there was enough interest, the course would go live in 2017.
This bare-bones approach garnered incredible support: Chris sold 22 courses and made $10,000 before the course was even published.
‘I was like – okay, now I have to build this thing!’ says Chris. However, building the course wouldn’t prove so easy… in fact, in his own words, it was an absolute PITA.
‘Too many third-party plugins…’
Already a whiz with WordPress–the tool he’d used to build his blog to phenomenal success– Chris installed a third-party page builder plugin that was supposed to enable him to build a learning platform. But even as an advanced user, Chris struggled to build out his course on WordPress. Not only did he need a course plugin, but a membership plugin as well that would allow him to onboard and manage students, and that was before a cart and payment processor…
‘I just remember it was such a hassle,’ says Chris. ‘Trying to figure out all the if-thens, emails to send to who and when, how to charge them and integrating with the membership plugin and learning platform… it was a real pain.’
ThriveCart: the all-in-one solution
After hearing about the struggle Chris was having, a friend recommended ThriveCart’s shopping cart solution. At that point, ThriveCart Learn hadn’t yet been launched, but as Chris was already familiar with ConvertBox and had used it for welcome messages and exit pop-ups on his site, he knew a similar service like ThriveCart had a good chance of simplifying business operations.
Within minutes, Chris had an embedded cart connected to Stripe and PayPal, and was able to collect payments from students with zero extra plugins and no hassle. ‘I couldn’t believe how easy it was,’ he says.
Ultimately a victim of his own success, Chris made a swift exit from the life insurance agent training space in 2018–that’s after just over a year–when he realized he was training his own competitors too well.
Chris spent the next year building his blog, eventually selling it in a highly lucrative deal that allowed him to focus on internet marketing and SEO consultancy.
But soon, he’d stumble into a partnership that would allow him to brush up his course-creation skills and eventually break $1m in sales.
Breaking 7-figures with ThriveCart Learn
When Chris used his expertise to help one of his favorite bloggers get more leads, it was on a purely volunteer basis. ‘I loved the guy, I loved what he was doing, but he had no clue what he was doing marketing-wise… so I just helped out. It was fun.’
Chris asked him if he ever thought about releasing courses on the subject matter. Although he had a decent sized email list, he struggled to get even 200 of his subscribers to show up for a free training, so he doubted that he could charge people for a training course–but Chris was up for the challenge.
The first course was a $15 one-hour webinar, sold via ThriveCart Learn – at that time, a brand new tool that Chris was dying to try out.
In the end, this short webinar had over 2,000 signups, and was a roaring success. Chris and his blogger partner have gone on to replicate this successful model by offering eleven more webinar-based courses, announced to over 30,000 subscribers on a couple of different email lists, with an early bird offer promoted across YouTube and social channels as well as paid ads.
By offering the course as an initial webinar, they’re able to supplement the in-depth material with a live Q&A. Once the live session is over, it’s edited and polished and uploaded to ThriveCart Learn. It’s a model that lets them actively engage with their audience, while making the most of course sales on the back end. Together, they’ve now made multiple six digits with ThriveCart.
In 2023, Chris and his business partner built on their success with a conference that, with more than ten different speakers, brought even more revenue to the business. But what does the future hold?
‘We’re just gonna keep pushing,’ says Chris. ‘I do all the marketing and we’ve got a decent team of ten different people, and all he has to worry about is content and his podcast. ThriveCart has been an incredible boost for us and allowed us to publish this incredibly meaningful content that’s helped thousands of people.’
But one of the most meaningful turns in his career came when Chris bought the site that started it all: he now owns and operates TheRiseToTheTop.com, where he bought his very first course-creation masterclass.
Now, by using profit maximizers and the all-in-one-platform offered by ThriveCart Learn, Chris and his team grow their revenue every day teaching others – and have fun doing it!
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