Creating a membership site on a micro-niche, with Jim Fricker II 
Episode 10, Season 2 – Jim Fricker

 

Welcome to the tenth episode of the second season of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. 

Our guest for today is Jim Fricker II, a content creator and travel Spanish expert from spanishandgo.com, helping people travel to Spanish-speaking countries with confidence.

From learning a language to creating business opportunities. Listen to this episode if you want to learn how it was made possible.

• Jim’s story of finding love and a micro-niche is at 1:12
  
• The two ways to start creating content that provides value are in the first part of the interview
  
• How to upsell when you’re starting with a podcast? Find out at 3:55
  
• Spanish and go’s most successful offer in their membership is at 6:27
  
• Find out the main reason why people want to learn Spanish at 10:45
  
• The three things that Jim used to generate traffic are at 13:05
  
• The different membership offers created from a podcast are at 15:37
  
• Two platforms in running membership sites and various courses – Teachable and Hyax
  
• Jim’s opinion about the frequency of sending email to his list is at 17:55
  

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Important Links:

 

Learn Spanish and Go Podcast

youtube.com/c/SpanishandGo

dailycookie. co

Transcript:

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode





Open Transcript

Voice over:

Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he reads a business book every two weeks, usually an audio format while walking or running Ziv Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello and welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery podcast. I’m so excited today to be with you and to share with you an interview with Jim Fricker from spanishandgo.com. Jim Fricker has been successful in creating a membership site on a micro niche together with his wife, May Larios I hope I pronounced that well correctly. Hello, Jim, how are you?

Jim:

Doing great, Ziv. Thanks for having me. And yeah, you got her name, right? A lot of people messed that up. It great job. You nailed it.

Ziv:

Cool. So are you, you created spanishandgo.com. Tell me the backstory, like the origin story. How did you get to the idea even?

Jim:

Yeah, so originally a studio producer, I helped musicians record and produced their music. And I did that for years, but I always had the travel bug. So I decided way back in 2010 that I wanted to learn Spanish so that I could travel to other countries and get around and, and learn a little bit more about the world rather than just sitting in a dark studio all the time, all day, every day. And so, in doing that, I started on this journey to learn Spanish and coworker of mine. I was working part-time at a food co-op. She told me about this website and it was a language learning exchange website, kinda like Facebook, but mainly just for meeting other language partners in there. I met my wife. I met May and we practiced learning each other’s languages and learning about each other’s culture.

Jim:

And from there, we just really hit it off. She invited me to come down to Mexico. I had never been there before and we began to travel around a bit and it was just so much fun for both of us, for us to share our cultures with each other and to get to know some new places. And we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could combine our forces, she was a language teacher. That’s what she went to school for. And, and that’s what she was doing professionally when I met her and work together and to be able to share Spanish culture with English speakers. So basically doing what she did with me, being able to share Spanish culture with gringos, with native English speakers, primarily from the US and started an online business that way. And so we started looking at the different options. There were to do that, and we eventually decided that we’re gonna make it happen. And first it started out as a podcast idea. Then we thought, oh no, we should maybe go down the YouTube route. And, and so we started there and then eventually circled back around to doing the podcast. And now we also run Spanish immersion retreats. So it’s become quite a bigger than we originally anticipated, but it’s going great.

Ziv:

So you took this idea of teaching Spanish and you started to create free content on YouTube and back to the podcast. And you chose to do it in a very special way, your podcast on purpose, they provide a lot of value. Can you explain to me what you’re actually doing in your podcast?

Jim:

Yeah, so the podcast is aimed at anybody who’s around the late beginner, early intermediate learning stage of Spanish. The podcast themselves are all in Spanish, I’d say 95% in Spanish. And the content is focused on helping people connect to the Spanish speaking world. So, so that could be any different Spanish speaking country. Our goal ultimately is to travel to every Spanish speaking country and interview different people from different Spanish speaking countries about the culture, the food, and also give some language advice. So it’s not really grammar lessons. It’s more so a conversation. And mainly between my wife and I. So my, and I, we have half hour episodes speaking on these different topics. And then there is a membership component to that where listeners can join to get additional content, to help them better understand what they heard in the podcast better to test their comprehension of what they heard in each episode. And we provide full transcriptions. Like I say, quizzes, a breakdown section in English. There are different tiers to the membership, but the podcast itself is free. And obviously we can upsell to those other tiers to help them out more.

Ziv:

And this is very interesting because one of the membership levels that you choose to present is actually for people that going to focus only on the podcast content itself. And just go through the transcript of them, almost like a minimal, kinda like a patreon type of support, even where they basically support occasion of the podcast exclusively and enjoy the transcript, which helps them learn Spanish. And then there are other levels that are more immersive in all the way up to a level where you can study with you guys once a week, after being used to listening to you through the podcast, it makes total sense to upgrade to an experience that is more one like one on one, but it’s a group lesson, but it’s a deeper relationship. So can you tell me what’s the most successful package that you offer in your subscription, in your membership?

Jim:

Yeah, the basic level is the most popular level, which is great for us because it doesn’t overwhelm the classes that we offer, which is the higher tier. And we have about 80 students at that level right now. And that’s just that one single tier. So with that, we’re able to provide all of the content that we promise once a week, that goes along with every episode of the podcast. And then they have access to that whenever is convenient to them.

Ziv:

And what happens in the next tier?

Jim:

The next tier is the plus membership. And that’s where they have access to the group classes once a week. And with that, we don’t focus on grammar much ever because we don’t think it’s the best way to learn a language. So in general, we have a class that’s related to the subject of that week’s podcast episode, for example, let’s say one week we talk about, which is like this mythical creature in Spanish speaking countries, sort of like Bigfoot or maybe the Loch ness monster, but it, this mythical creature that some people really believe in that goes around, sucking the blood of goats of farmers in the middle of the night. And then the farmer will wake up in the morning and find their goats dead and having these two or three bite marks in their neck, for example. So we might do that week since that was the episode, a class that’s related to mythical animals or something like that. Or if there’s a cultural episode, maybe we’ll talk about cultural differences between their country and Spanish speaking countries.

Ziv:

And one of the things that make you more specific in more niche is that your promise is a promise that you actually fulfill yourself, which is that you will be able to travel. You’ll be able to understand the culture and you’ll be able to speak Spanish and you did it yourself, and you are helping other people now with it. And it’s more of a specific type of people that wanna travel. Do you see any like over time, any additional type of avatars being attracted to your podcast?

Jim:

Well, we are seeing more people attracted to the podcast maybe from, from different parts of the world or different motivations for learning Spanish with the podcast versus the YouTube channel. So the YouTube channel is geared a little bit more towards people, specifically from the United States who want to learn Spanish, who are interested in this, or possibly moving to a Spanish speaking country. We try to keep that a bit more accessible to a broader audience so that we can kind of funnel people in and say, oh, okay, this is a bunch of free content about cultural differences in, in Mexico, or maybe how to tip in Mexico, how to get around different Spanish speaking countries. But then if you really wanna take your Spanish to the next level and take it more seriously, we offer the podcast. We’re affiliates of a number of different Spanish programs, different travel programs that we can sort of upsell to our audience.

Jim:

We also have a, our Spanish immersion retreats. So that’s an opportunity for them to join us in person. Obviously, as the pandemic begins to wind down, we’re able to offer those a little bit more. We actually just finished two weeks of Spanish immersion retreats here in Mexico. And that’s where we can bring a group of up to 10 people each week. And they can join us for an immersive experience where we have classes every day, we have tours, we have different cultural experiences for them, so they can really immerse their immerse themselves in the Spanish speaking language.

Ziv:

And in terms of the reasons why people wanna learn Spanish, is it mainly for traveling or is it now also getting to the point where people want to learn Spanish for business reasons? What can you tell me about that?

Jim:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So more specifically with the YouTube channel, it does seem like we get a lot of people who are interested in possibly retiring in a Spanish speaking country. And often that has to do with the lower cost of living. Maybe people really love the food, especially in Mexico. That is one of the most common places that people from the us retire to is, is Mexico. So it’s a cheaper cost of living great food, great culture. Aside from that, we don’t get too many people outside of just the travel space or the retiree space. We do see that occasionally, but generally the people who follow us and are interested in our journey, which is to visit every Spanish speaking country. They have similar motivations, you know, they wanna get around and know the world and maybe see what Spanish speaking country fits the most to potentially live in or retire in someday. So that’s generally the audience we see for the podcast and the YouTube channel.

Ziv:

How long did it take before you started to make this into your business? Your full-time gig?

Jim:

Yeah, so we started late in 2016, a but neither my wife or I were full-time at that point, I was still running my recording studio. She was still teaching at a school in, in my hometown, had to go through the whole immigration process. So eventually she was able to, to work in the US, but it was, and until 2017, but the summer of 2017 that we went full time. And that’s where we were really working hard on the YouTube channel. And we didn’t actually start the podcast until about a year and a half ago. So we’ve been doing that every week, a new episode every week for about a 80 weeks now.

Ziv:

Wow. Right now what’s working better for you in terms of generating traffic. Is it the YouTube or is it the podcast?

Jim:

It’s quite a mix. Actually, we kind of view this as a three pronged approach to attracting leads, right? So we have the YouTube channel and in our videos, we do our best to add lead magnets. So people will come check out the website either for more information or to download a PDF that goes along with each episode. And so that’s one prong. We have YouTube, right? Another prong is the podcast. So we have the podcast on our website as well, that brings in a certain amount of traffic. But then we also have the blog and much of the blog is basically our YouTube videos converted into blog form, but that does great for SEO. So that brings in people and we’re starting to see for the first time people joining us on our retreats, who found us just because they were searching for were Spanish immersion retreats in Mexico, which is interesting to us because at first it was usually people who came from our YouTube channel. And now we’re starting to see kind of across the board. Some people are coming from YouTube. Some people are coming from them, a podcast, and some people just found us because they were searching for an immersion experience in another country.

Ziv:

Sweet. So YouTube, podcasting and blogging altogether. But these days you basically generate content mainly for the podcast. Do you do the audio editing yourself?

Jim:

So we actually do have a team that helps us produce the podcast and helps us with other aspects of the business. So we have a woman who helps us with the editing of the podcast, as well as our videos and another woman based in Mexico. She helps us with the whole membership aspect. So she’ll take the edited podcast, she’ll transcribe it for us. She’ll pick out the most important words and phrases from each episode that we wanna break down in our breakdown section audio, which is basically a whole another podcast, that’s exclusive for our members. And so every week, along with a half hour podcast, we do another half hour in English breaking down the most important words and phrases from each episode.

Ziv:

Nice. And how do you present the exclusive podcast? Is it through a membership site? Like as an online course? So how what’s the technology stack around behind that?

Jim:

Yeah, so the breakdown section is available on a few different tiers. We offer one, we recently started experimenting with, and this is the lowest level in terms of financial commitment that we have in the podcast. And that’s available through apple podcasts, it’s through their membership program. So you can offer premium content on apple podcasts, and that allows people to try it out. We offer a three day free trial period. And then after that, they’re converted to 499 monthly payments to access new breakdown sections every single week. But we also offer the same breakdown audio in other tiers. So in the basic tier, our most popular tier for the podcast, it’s available in the materials in that. And we also have it available well in the plus membership and they get basically everything plus the classes.

Ziv:

How do you technically share the audio file with your members?

Jim:

Yeah, so we’re using two different platforms. If you don’t count apple podcasts right now, because that’s exclusive to apple listeners, we use Teachable run most of the membership, but we are slowly transitioning over to Hyax, which is a newer, similar to teachable platform where you can run membership sites and different courses.

Ziv:

Sweet, one last question. This has been very informed, not even very inspiring by the way. I don’t know if you guys are listening to this can hear my excitement. This is such a, a brilliant case study of taking something you’re passionate about and not just getting a content business, but getting a lifestyle business as well. And just choosing about something very specific, just traveling niche and retiring niche a bit over time and helping people with something that you actually do yourself. So my last question is about email marketing. What’s your opinion about the frequency of sending an email to your list?

Jim:

Yeah, it’s been difficult for us to stay consistent with this, but generally we have a weekly newsletter where we’re sharing the most recent content that we have since we do have content basically on three different platforms between the blog, the podcast and YouTube, we try to share what we came out with every week and then a little bit more information about, oh, okay. Maybe one affiliate program that we enjoy using has a sale. So we’ll share that in a newsletter or if we’re announcing some new Spanish immersion retreat dates will include that as well. So we try to include as much value in each of our newsletters as possible, kind of give our audience an update in terms of what we’ve been up to, maybe what country we’re in or what location we’re in and then a bunch of additional resources that can help them out. And that works really well. We’re able to maintain a much deeper connection with our audience that way, because we can write to them in a bit more casual of a manner. And it’s more so for the people who wanna stay up to date with what we’ve been up to. So in my opinion, that works great.

Ziv:

Cool. It’s been inspiring, Jim Fricker. Where can people go again to learn more about what you do or connect with you?

Jim:

Yeah, you can find us on spanishandgo.com. Also, if you wanna listen to the podcast where anywhere you listen to podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and we also have the YouTube channel by the same name, spanishandgo,

Ziv:

And we’ll put it in the shownotes of today’s episode are the links to both the website and the YouTube channel. And you can find spanishandgo in any podcast player even right now, as you’re listening. Thank you so much, Jim, it’s been a pleasure to connect and to share your story through this podcast. And thank you everyone for listening. See you next week in the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.

Voiceover:

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