Episode Transcript

Martin 

We actually met last year at the web summit and I knew from our discussion straight away that I wanted to have her on the show. So, you know, with that being said, Talita, welcome. Awesome. 

Thalita

Thank you, Martin. Thank you for having me here. 

Martin 

Excited to get into it. So before we jump into some more specific questions around HubSpot and your courses, take us back, before you were doing what you’re doing today and teaching online, sort of, yeah, what were you doing on your career and what led you to this point today?

Thalita 

Sure. So before getting into online courses, I was working as a marketer. I spent most of my career working in -house for marketing teams. I transitioned to working as a consultant more or less when COVID started. And that’s when I got into online courses as well. Actually,

My first online course was a COVID project, as fun as it sounds. Yeah, you know how we all had a lot of time in our hands. I decided to give it a go and I published my first online course, more or less in the first second semester of our COVID crazy times. Yeah, so this is it. I work with HubSpot, as you mentioned, and marketing automation. So inside of digital marketing, you have different fields you can specialize in.

My area of expertise is marketing automation, which is basically the use of technology to automate marketing tasks. For instance, suppose you go to a website and you send a message through a contact us form, you receive an automated email saying, thank you for contacting us or something like that. So this is marketing automation in action. There’s no one behind the computer waiting for new messages, manually replying them.

it’s actually an automated process. And for that, I use a platform called HubSpot, which I specialize in. 

Martin 

Nice. And for our audience who have not used HubSpot before and dived into the world of marketing automation, tell us a little bit about the application, sort of some of the core functionality, and I guess where you specialize in teaching as well.

Thalita 

Sure. So HubSpot is an all-in-one business platform. It started out as a marketing automation platform, as a CRM and marketing automation platform. And it expanded into a sales platform, a customer support platform. So there are features for different types of teams inside HubSpot. HubSpot is strong on marketing automation, which is, you know, kind of these types of processes that I was just talking about. So you can create workflows to automate marketing tasks. And it has a

CRM as well and in build CRM, which is different than other marketing automation platforms like Salesforce, for example. So where you have to conduct different apps to make the magic happens inside HubSpot, you have everything in one place only. And in terms of which feature inside HubSpot I specialize in, that would be then the automation section of HubSpot, which is where you can create this cool workflows to automate tasks and save time with marketing. Yeah, so I guess. HubSpot is more popular.

small to medium sized businesses, so it’s still growing into the enterprise market. And yeah, I guess that’s a hub spot in a nutshell.

Martin 

Yeah, and in your early career when you were first working with HubSpot in your jobs,

What sort of projects were you working on? And I guess today, what sort of freelance projects do you do at this point, if you’re still doing any? Yeah, walk us through a little bit of the specifics there.

Thalita 

Sure, so actually got into HubSpot because I focused mainly on inbound marketing throughout my career. So I’ve always been involved in inbound projects. You know how in marketing you can specialize in paid ads, you can specialize in SEO, you can specialize in email marketing. And I’ve been more or less focused in the inbound marketing field. And HubSpot in itself is an inbound first tool. So the platform was built in a way that it…

It’s built upon the inbound marketing framework, right? So that’s how I got into it in terms of why, I guess I decided to specialize in HubSpot. It happened more or less like by accident. So in 2018, I worked for a startup in Australia, actually in Sydney. 

Martin 

Nice.

Thalita

Yeah, I worked for a startup in Sydney where they were using HubSpot. I had no idea what even HubSpot was. And my boss at the time came to me and said to me, we want you to,

find out how to use HubSpot. And I’m like, sure, that sounds great. I looked at it and I’m like, okay, where do I even start? It’s a little bit of a complex platform. So you start learning more with practice. And yeah, and then after that, you know, I got another job where they were also using HubSpot. And then I started consulting, you know, also for HubSpot projects. In terms of what I do as a consultant, I still provide HubSpot consulting services. I basically help, you know,

Businesses use HubSpot better. So typically a client comes to me, they just signed up to HubSpot and they go, okay, we have this tool, we don’t know what to do with it, help us. And that’s where I come in, I look at their CRM, I help them optimize processes and automate things. That’s basically.

Martin 

Yeah, and those clients that do sign up to HubSpot, like what’s the main…

What’s the main reason that they’re signing up? Have they just like heard about it from a like recommendation or is it like, we need to manage our customer base better or is it more around automation? Like what are the main reasons they actually sign up for? And then I guess they get to that point where they say, okay, we’ve got it now. How do we actually use it? Yeah. I’m curious to hear what their motivation is to get signed up.

Thalita

Yeah, sure. So the main reason would be really to have everything in one place only. When a business starts hosting their email list in a CRM, new needs arise, right? So you have your CRM, then you want to start doing lead segmentation, then you want to start doing automation, but then you might need the sales guy to look at the CRM and tell you if the profiles are okay, if we need to segment leads in a different way. And so you start getting a bigger demand for…

for more features around that system. And that’s really the main reason why businesses start using HubSpot. Of course, you also have businesses that are, you know, are, let’s say, passionate about automation. They want to automate all their processes and HubSpot is great at that specifically. So there’s really kind of many different reasons, but that would be the main one, I guess. So the need for having everything in one place only.

with integrations, sometimes it’s a little bit of a mess when you have to integrate a CRM with an external form system or an external email marketing platform. Sometimes it can get to a point where things don’t really connect as expected. And so there is the advantage of having everything in one place only. Yeah.

Martin 

And now, you know, you’ve obviously been teaching on Udemy for a while, over 10 ,000 students sort of gone through there and your other courses as well. Tell us a little bit now about, you know, the people that are taking your courses, who are they? Are they, you know, business owners themselves or are they more or less people that have worked in a company and they’re using the platform. Yeah, who are the students that you serve most at the moment with your courses?

Thalita 

For my courses on Udemy, most of my students are marketing professionals that need to learn HubSpot for their work, for their jobs. And I’ll also have business owners who just signed up to HubSpot and want to learn how it works. Most of my students are really professionals working at businesses and either their manager told them, hey, you have to go and learn HubSpot or, you know, it comes from themselves where they go, okay, I need to get that skill for my job.

And then eventually you’ll have marketing consultants as well. So people who are thinking about, you know, offering marketing automation with HubSpot as a service, that those would be the three main groups of students.

Martin 

Gotcha. Cool. Cool. And I’m really curious to hear more about this. And we already chatted a little bit about it at Web Summit, but the transition from sort of working in a full -time job to then consultant, freelancer, now sort of educator, because I went through that transition as well. And actually in my, I guess, career, I sort of tried to put the freelancer before the full -time in some ways. And I sort of…

the early days of my freelance career were sort of quite up and down in terms of clients coming and going and sort of just some form of predictability. And then going back to full -time, having a full -time job and then wanting to go freelance but trying to pick that right time and basically take the leap is, it’s a big decision, it’s scary, it’s unpredictable. So yeah, I’m curious to hear about.

you know, that transition for you, was there a lot of doubts in the early stages? Like, did you know you wanted to go like, like, when did you decide that you wanted to go freelance? Why did you want to do it? And yeah, talk us through that transition.

Thalita 

Yeah, sure. I mean, it was a journey full of ups and downs. So most of my career, I spent working in -house for marketing teams. So I was so used to the office day to day, nine to six, just having a team, coffee chats, right? That kind of office vibe. When we moved to Portugal, I moved to Portugal with my boyfriend. This was like six months before COVID started.

I was, you know, we were of course in a new place. He had a job already. I didn’t. So I started looking for jobs and I applied at local companies and I was just about to start a new job. This is the most frustrating part of it. I was about to start a new job at a startup incubator. And then of course, you know, COVID turned the world upside down and I was like, well, that didn’t happen. So I didn’t start working at that company. They told me, Talita, look, we will have…

to change your plans because we have a pandemic going on. So this was when I actually started looking into freelance, mainly because we were in that situation where looking like actually, you know, it’s crazy to say this looking back, but really going to an office and doing a job interview wasn’t really possible anymore out of a sudden. Right. So I started looking into freelance platforms. I created a profile on Upwork and everything started from there. Thankfully, I was able to leverage some of my old

contacts, so people that I’ve worked with in the past. So this is how I got my first project. So this was really, really amazing. I’m very grateful for that. But yes, I was full of doubts. I didn’t really know how to talk about myself, how to explain to people what I did. I didn’t really know how to do my own personal branding, how to sell my services. It’s really a different skill set that you have to.

that you have to have. And I sort of learned on the go. I did some online courses on the topic. I talked to people who were doing it. But yeah, you learn by doing when you need it, right? And so yeah, then I started freelancing. Since the beginning, my freelance projects were all around HubSpot and marketing automation. I wanted to leverage that aspect of my expertise. And that’s actually maybe interesting to mention as well. So I considered just, you know, freelancing in digital marketing as a…

generic as a general field, right? But I realized that the more generic you go, the higher your competition is. So I, you know, if I would have gone in that direction of just applying for a general digital marketing project, I would be competing with so many people, right? Now, if you start going niche, if you start, you know, focusing on one aspect of your expertise, then it’s much easier to get clients. This is one thing I learned.

in the beginning of my freelance career. So yeah, and then, you know, as I mentioned before, we had so much time in our hands. One of the projects that I was working with was for a company that was working with course graders. One of their main target audiences was course graders. And at the time I was like, course graders, what do you mean? Like, do people make money with all their courses? Like, I was completely new to the topic. I had absolutely no idea.

And I met course creators online, of course, during COVID. And that’s how I got into online courses. And that’s how I got introduced to this entire new world for me. So that’s it. Yeah. And I decided to publish my first course.

Martin 

Okay. So you were you were so you were meeting them and speaking with them for your previous job and that’s when you started to realize, oh, wow, there’s this whole world. I don’t know about maybe I could create my own course. Is that what happened?

Thalita 

Exactly. This is exactly what happened. So I met up with an instructor online at one point and they were telling me about their day -to -day lives. And I’m like, wow, that sounds like the dream. You work with your creativity, you help people at the same time, you get to choose your own working hours, which I kind of had already working as a freelancer, but still as a freelancer, you have client meetings, you have to have a specific schedule. And yeah, and that’s how I got introduced to this world. And it was

so exciting to see this and I published my first online course and yeah that’s how it started.

Martin

That’s cool. And where did you host your first course?

Thalita 

So my first course was on Udemy mainly because this instructor at the time told me, yes, Udemy sounds like a great channel for the type of courses you want to sell, which in my case, marketing and technology is really a strong focus of Udemy nowadays and still is. Of course, there are marketplaces for all types of fields really if you think about it. There are marketplaces that are a little bit more specific towards creative courses, others.

you know, business courses and so on. So I went for Udemy because of that, mainly my niche. Yeah, so that was the story.

Martin 

And yeah, and that’s a really interesting topic is the, cause I know you’ve seen both sides of this coin is the self hosting, your own courses versus marketplace, you know, platforms like Udemy, for example, Skillshare. Yeah, I guess walk us through, or I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinion on the differences between those and why you decided to go marketplace versus self hosting in the beginning.

But then I know you have some self -hosted courses now. So yeah, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the differences between the two.

Thalita 

Yeah.

Sure. I look at this as really two different ways of working with the same thing. It’s almost like two different types of work at all because…

So, and we call them self hosted, just, you know, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll call them self hosted courses, you have your, your course on the website and your marketing your own course, right? Now, that versus working with a marketplace, what are the main differences? So in a marketplace like Udemy, Skillshare, and, you know, Open Sesame, CyberU, Coursera, these are all marketplaces. The main thing is that,

you don’t do your own marketing, right? So a marketplace is typically selling your course for you. It has, this has the good side and the bad side. Let’s talk about the good side first, and then we’ll talk about the bad one. So the good side is, of course, if you don’t have an email list, if you don’t have a previous audience, you don’t really have, you know, a big social media following or something like that. You don’t really have an audience yet. It’s a great way to get started.

Thalita 

because you’re exposed to a marketplace that has that audience or that advertises to that audience for you. So that’s a great way to get started when you’re still building your online presence. And that’s one of the reasons why I went for this as well, just the fact that at the time I didn’t really have a strong social media presence. And in fact, I’m still building my presence on YouTube and LinkedIn and so on. Now, of course,

And the other good side of it is that you can get a little bit more hands off. So one thing I think about is, you know, if I decide to randomly do a backpacking trip and spend three months hiking in the Himalayas or something, I still have that passive income coming on a monthly basis, which is great. Depending on your life situation, this is exactly where you want to go.

you know, someone who just had a child or you’re moving to a different country, right? So many different life scenarios you can have. So these are the good sides. Now the bad sides, of course, you, because they are doing your marketing, you pay them a commission on course sales. Now every platform has their own commission and it really depends on how they sell your courses. On Udemy, for example, the course fee comes from whether they sold your course on,

on Facebook or via affiliate marketing or other channels. So it really depends on that. But yes, in simple words, you’re giving them a chunk of your course sales, which might be not interesting for some people, right? So that would be definitely the downside. The other aspect is that typically, it depends a lot on marketplace to marketplace as well, but typically for the major marketplaces, you don’t really have access to your shoot and email addresses.

And email marketing is a strong channel for selling online courses. So that is a little bit problematic. But you can still leverage marketplaces as a lead generation tool by using work around. So one thing I do on Udemy, for example, and that’s completely within the rules, it’s really by leveraging the, we have like a marketing, kind of an email marketing feature inside the Udemy portal.

which you can use to communicate with students. It’s kind of difficult to explain, maybe it sounds abstract, but basically you don’t see people’s email address. You just, you have a UI for sending an email, but you don’t see the database itself. So you can do that and you can redirect people to your website, you can redirect people to marketing materials. And so that’s how, you know, they can come to you. But…

Martin 

And that’s within the terms that it’s okay to, you know, if they’ve bought your course and you can communicate through there, you can say, hey, I think you might like this over on my website and drop them the link to your website. That’s okay.

Thalita

Yes, you have to make it in an educational way. So for example, in Udemy, we have something called the educational emails. And I think you can send up to four a month or something like that. But basically, you can redirect people to an educational asset and you can place a CTA in that educational asset. So usually what I do is I send people to blog posts. And then at the end of the blog post, there is a call to action. Hey, check out my online course on XYZ. So you can do that. It’s totally inside the rules. Yeah, but.

Thalita 

it’s still, you know, there is like a mental obstacle to it, right? So people have to go to your website, they have to get to know you, and then they’re going to click on your CTA, and then maybe they’ll sign up. So you’re adding extra layers to that process, which could have been a much more direct process when, you know, you have a Facebook ad or something going on and people go directly to the landing page and sign up. So it’s basically adding an extra layer of complexity to the process.

But still, it’s still definitely a good lead generation tool. This will be the main differences.

Martin 

No, the super, super cool. Yeah. Super interesting to hear because, you know, in the agency for us, we, you know, most of our clients, you know, have started, you know, by building that audience first. So whether that’s on YouTube or Instagram or, you know, building their email list, um, uh, building their blog traffic and they’ve sort of went that direction, uh, first plat like sort of audience first and then, you know, credit a course to sell to that audience. Um, so it’s really cool to hear this other.

progression that you can take of, yeah, starting with, you know, Hey, I’ve got expertise, I’ve got a course, but I don’t have an audience yet. So that’s where the marketplaces are a great place. And it sounds like you’re also building your audience by getting on there as well. Because, you know, as you said, the lead generation, you said people are sort of reaching out to you on LinkedIn, you’ve gotten projects from what you told me, like through this by people, you know, contacting you. So that’s really, really cool. You obviously there’s the, you know,

as you said, the costs associated with it, and maybe you give up a bit of your control and a bit of that ability to remarket to them through email marketing, but it sounds like there’s a lot of pros to it as well. You know, like you’ve got a full -time marketing agency essentially doing all your marketing for you and promoting your course all the time. So yeah, I think that’s really cool for, you know, cause I know in some ways, you know, we’ve heard different opinions on this of people saying, I love marketplace and

Some online course, people in this space are sort of saying, don’t go down that path and stuff. And it’s great to hear that, it’s not just so black and white like that. It’s cool to hear. Yeah.

Thalita

Absolutely, yeah. One thing I tell people, I think, you know, people, as you said, they feel very strongly about this. They’re either in favor or completely against, and in my opinion, they can work together. So think of a marketplace as really an awareness channel where you can get that first audience. You can leverage your own personal branding. You can show your expertise and you can get…

getting to, you know, get exposed to that audience in the first place. It’s the same way that you would leverage social media or ads or so it is kind of a awareness channel in that aspect. It has its challenges like with everything else in life, but I think both can work in combination. So if you see this as as a tool really for your own marketing and then send people to your website and then.

That’s where they can sign up for more offers and stuff like that. They can perfectly work well in a combination, I think.

Martin 

Yeah, for sure. And on the other side of that now, like building your audience, like what are you doing these days in terms of, you know, I know you’ve got some stuff on YouTube and LinkedIn. Yeah, what are you sort of focused on this year for building up your audience yourself on your own terms, let’s say.

Thalita 

Yeah, I started to finally take YouTube seriously. With YouTube, in social media in general, it’s that kind of thing where you start and in the beginning you’re all excited, publishing every week, and then it can get to a point where you’re like, okay, I need time, I need to allocate enough time for it and resources and so on. I am starting to take a serious content scheduling, take it in a serious way, this is what I mean.

And so that’s YouTube and then LinkedIn as well. Those are my main two kind of awareness channels in that aspect. Building a community, I think, is all about kind of being out there for your students. And I see that happening on YouTube. I see that happening on my LinkedIn profile. I see that happening on even via email in a certain way. So I am looking to kind of put people in a group. I still haven’t figured out how exactly I should do it. I know that there are…

kind of group community building platforms like Circle and others similar to that. So that’s probably my next step is really to find a way to build a community from that. I think once you have a community, you have a very strong marketing channel as well because you don’t really have to kind of convince people that you’re an expert over and over again, right? They are there, they know you, they trust your work. And so I see that.

definitely see the potential in leveraging communities. And that’s what I want to go for this year as well. Yeah.

Martin 

Yeah, and just on the community side, what platforms have you considered? You mentioned Circle, I know Schools popping up a lot more as well. We’ve obviously got the Facebook groups still popping up here and there. Yeah, have you sort of went down that rabbit hole yet and thought about where you want to host or build that community and the differences between the platforms?

Thalita 

Yeah, I started looking into it. I went from everything from Slack to Discord and Circle and all the other platforms in between. I really haven’t got to the point where I signed up to something and I created the group yet. So I can’t kind of tell much more on that, but I’ll definitely look into it more and yeah, start working with this because…

I think right now one challenge that I’m having is, and I have no problem in being transparent about it, is that my students are kind of all over the place. I have some people that talk to me via email. I have some people that talk to me on LinkedIn. Some people, I’ve had meetings with them and they have my WhatsApp number and everything. So I have students in all places, YouTube channel, and I really want to centralize the whole thing. And that’s why I started looking into communities. It’s one challenge to be overcome. Yeah.

Martin

Totally. Yeah, and I know like WhatsApp groups are sort of floating around more and more now as well. I’ve heard people are having a lot of success with those. So, you know, another one for you to consider. Yeah, exactly. It’s part of your research. The next thing I wanted to ask you was in terms of, you know, the students that have gone through your courses, what has led to the most success for them in terms of, you know, the courses that you’ve created?

Yeah, what is in your courses that has led to them, you know, succeeding in their career in HubSpot challenges, let’s say. Yeah, we’d be curious to hear what’s worked well for you there.

Thalita 

Sure. So it’s actually interesting to talk about HubSpot themselves. They have an online university and they have courses about HubSpot and they have courses about inbound marketing, sales and other kind of business related topics. But their courses are much more into the theory of things. So they talk a lot about, you know, the inbound methodology and they talk about sales and sales alignment. But they don’t go into specifics as far as how to use HubSpot and, you know,

how to operate properties and create emails and use the CRM, like really specifics. They’re starting to do more of that, but until some time ago they didn’t. And I guess that is the main…

USP in terms of what I’m bringing to the table is really the fact that I’m putting myself in the students shoes and thinking, okay, someone who saw this for the first time, what do they think? Like, what are all these things here in this menu? What does contacts even mean? So I really did this exercise for each and every course. I did this exercise of putting myself in people’s shoes and really thinking, what is the experience of working with a platform that you might not have?

fully understand. And also using real world examples. So in every single course, I’m always using examples in terms of, suppose stuff that I say, like, suppose that your manager asked you to create a report on conversion between awareness and interest. The way you would do that inside HubSpot is you would come here and you would click on that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I’m trying to.

bring that reality to the course experience, which is something that, yeah, I think that’s what I’m trying to do differently in what I do. Yeah, I think those are the…

Martin

Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. I can imagine there’s a lot of theory that gets thrown out. I like, you know, I, you know, empathizing, I guess, with the platforms themselves trying to, you know, educate everyone on how to use it can sometimes be a bit difficult to have these real world examples, but for sure it’s cool then that you’re able to, you know, take what they’ve sort of created and create very, very specific examples.

that based on your own work and yeah, I can imagine students learn a lot quicker once they go, okay, this specific situation, here’s what I’m gonna do as opposed to just the general theory about it. So, no, that’s really cool. And I would love to hear, obviously you’ve got all the skills yourself, like how are you using those HubSpot skills and functionalities in your online education business today? I would love to hear that.

Thalita

Yeah, I think the way I translated my HubSpot expertise into online courses is by, I guess, being flexible. That’s, you know, so.

is constantly evolving. They actually change their UI.

look at it and you log in, it’s like, well, things are looking differently here. So you have to be flexible if you’re using marketing automation platforms. And I wanted to translate that flexibility to my approach of creating courses. Because the way I see it is that when you’re creating a course, you have to play so many different roles, right? You have to plan, you have to outline the content, you have to record the content. So there’s another role there of like being the presenter or, you know, and…

then more often than not, you have to be the video editor as well, and you have to be the customer support of the students. There’s so much stuff you have to do. So really that aspect of being flexible in how I deal with it, that was the main aspect that I wanted to translate from my HubSpot expertise to creating courses. Yeah.

Martin 

Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. Really cool. And sort of pivoting a little bit more again, I would be curious to hear like, what do you love most about teaching online? Because a lot of people are curious about it. A lot of people are currently doing it or teaching in a different capacity, but maybe not online yet. And they’re thinking about doing that. And of course, you know, we often hear about all the benefits to it and a lot of the really cool stuff.

So I’d love to hear what do you love most about it and maybe also what are some of the downsides as well like just to hear both sides of the experience of teaching online.

Thalita 

Sure, sure. So the way I see my work is really that type of work that aligns with my mission statement in life. I read this book some time ago, an excellent book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of the habits is really around having your own mission statement, right? And I created my mission statement when I read that book. And I realized that…

Something that I feel strongly about is that I want to help people grow and I want to inspire people.

by being creative, by expressing myself in an authentic and creative way. And online courses for me is the real world expression of that. It’s really my way of kind of putting that mission statement to work. So that’s, it’s really my passion to help people and to help them perhaps go well in a job interview or get a better job, get a promotion or find a job because they have a HubSpot skill or something like that. So that difference that I’m making in people’s life is,

is really the best aspect of this course. I very often get emotional when people send me emails saying, you know, just so they know your tutorial helped me go well in the job interview or stuff like that. That’s really the main aspect of what I do really. That’s kind of the reason really why I wake up every morning and I start recording this course. So that’s the main…

main best side of it. Of course, if you go into practical terms, it’s great to work with online courses because you do have a lot of flexibility, right? Unless you have a big team where you have to have time commitments and stuff like that, if you’re doing this by yourself, you can still manage your own day in a way that is good for you. You can…

be very flexible with your time. Sometimes I’ll take a few days off just because I want to go for a trip or I want to do something else. So you have that time flexibility that you don’t necessarily have on a full -time job. It’s usually not, it’s a more stactive thing. Now, I guess the downside of being an online course grader is the fact that still it’s online. So I think nothing substitutes being with someone.

you know, in the same physical space, right? It’s completely different. I do feel sometimes that I would love to just, you know, have kind of, I don’t know if local workshops or things that make me engage with the community in a physical way, right? So I can be there and I can teach directly and I can answer questions on the go and it’s a whole different experience. Yeah, online courses are still online. That’s what I would say. Yeah.

Martin 

100%, I’m so glad you mentioned that because I mean, we didn’t even speak about this, but you know, I also feel the same way working online for now, six years plus, you know, I’m getting to the point where I do miss, I miss a little bit of the commute to the office, you know, having a coffee on break, going to lunch with people, just a bit of the office antics. Of course, there’s a lot of downsides and you know, don’t miss the…

the rigidness of it and a little bit of the inefficiencies that happened in a lot of offices, but certainly missed the social aspect. And, you know, you and I spoke last year at Web Summit, we’re both based here in Lisbon. We both work in the online education space. So yeah, we’re going to be still keen on doing this is creating some form of meetup and event that we can do here in Lisbon for people in this space or people curious about it.

to, yeah, because also that’s something I’m looking at in my own life, in the work life of like, yeah, just getting more in -person contact. You know, of course it’s great to chat online and, you know, we’re doing our podcast here remotely, even though we’re based in the same city. And that’s, you know, that’s really cool and everything. But for sure, I do, you know, miss a little bit of that in -person, yeah, exposure and experience.

So yeah, looking forward for us to organize that.

Thalita 

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we’ll organize this. I think it will be amazing. And, you know, it’s crazy to say, but in Lisbon nowadays, well, we have such a growing community of, you know, people doing all sorts of things, projects, entrepreneurship and content creation, but still, we don’t really have a cohesive group that meets to talk about those things, right? You know, creating courses or creating content online. So that’s what we’re set to change.

Martin 

That’s what we’re gonna do. So if you’re listening and you’re in Lisbon, yeah, keep an eye out for our next event. We’re gonna wanna have you there. All right. Absolutely. So we’ve got like another five minutes to go roughly until you’ve got to jump off. 

What advice would you give someone getting started with online courses?

Thalita 

I think I have three tips for someone getting started with online course. So the first one is the one that definitely made the biggest difference in my journey is really to go niche. When you’re trying to create courses on topics that are too generic, you’ll be competing with a lot of people. If you’re talking about marketplaces, you’ll be competing with literally thousands of thousands of instructors. So try to go niche. There are creative ways you can go niche.

even if you’re working with a generic topic. So just to give an example, let’s say you’re creating courses on content marketing or something like that. You can still go niche by saying, OK, I want to have a content marketing course for SaaS businesses, a content marketing course for small business owners, a content marketing course for people working at a business. You can work with different types of audience in a way that you can choose that’s

specialization in your niche. So there are creative ways you can go niche and you know, so there are so many tools that you can leverage to find your niche as well. But definitely go niche and don’t, you know, go for topics that are super competitive and generic. That’s the one that definitely made the biggest difference for me. I think the second tip would be be patient. It’s a process. When you start creating courses, it’s often that you fall into this trap of

Where are the results? Where are the results? When am I going to get rich and buy a yacht? And things don’t happen this way. Everything takes time. You have to be patient. You have to give it enough time. Building an audience takes time. Creating a course out there takes time. So definitely be patient with the process. And to finalize, my third tip is really do more of what’s working. So.

Sometimes you do stuff because you saw about it online and you think it’s a great idea and then you realize they actually might not work for you. And, you know, one example could be someone said you should be in all social media channels at the same time. Well, I would go against this opinion. I would say go for those channels that are really working for you. So once you identify that one channel that is working for you, whether it’s, you know, Instagram or Facebook or even not a social media channel, another.

channel, email marketing, whatever, focus on what’s working and don’t spend too much time doing things just for the sake of doing them, just because people online are saying that you should do it and or, you know, friends are saying you should do it. So definitely focus on those things that are actively bringing results and revenue and students and so on. Yeah, those are my three tips.

Martin

Yeah. Awesome advice. Awesome advice. Well, look, thank you so much for, for jumping on the podcast. It was really great to finally make this happen. And yeah, super looking forward to our event in Lisbon and keeping in touch here. For anyone that’s listening and interested to learn more about you or your courses, where should they go?

Thalita

They should go to my website. So that’s Talita Milan, Talita with TH, talitamilan .com. This is where I, you know, publish all my latest resources and courses and news and updates and things like that. I’m also on LinkedIn, same thing. So you just search for Talita Milan and I’ll be there and I’m happy to connect. And thanks for having me. That was really cool to be here. Awesome. Thanks, Martin. Speak to you soon.

Martin 

Perfect, perfect. Okay, thank you so much. It was great to have you and yeah, speak to you soon.