Serving Equestrians Online with Krystal Kelly

Serving Equestrians Online with Krystal Kelly

Krystal Kelly is the genius behind the brands Equestrian Adventuresses and the International Equestrian. She started as a coach who traveled the world, working with showjumpers and riding students. The International Equestrian was not designed to be an online business, but after Krystal got married and moved to England, she realized she didn’t want to be tied down to working at stables.

She decided to figure out how she could serve people online. Equestrian Adventuresses was born out of a passion project, sharing her traveling and horse adventures, and she sells horseback riding courses through The International Equestrian.

Making Money Online as an Equestrian

Many of Krystal’s lower-priced courses are on Udemy, an online course platform. When she started, she made about $20 a month and was delighted that making money on the internet was possible.

It took about a year for Krystal to learn Udemy. Until that point, she had spent most of her life outside and little time behind a computer. She kept taking courses and trying new things with SEO, and updating her brand. Today she has about 25 courses on the platform.

Udemy isn’t Krystal’s primary source of income. She uses it as the start of her sales funnel to drive people to her site, where her full-length courses live. She’s now served 10,000 students on Udemy, most in the equestrian niche. People from all over the world have purchased her courses to learn how to ride and interact with horses.

The great thing about a course platform like Udemy is that it drives traffic for you. You have to learn how to get your course to rank on the platform, but they already have a massive audience of users looking for courses (similar to YouTube, but people pay to access the content).

Krystal doesn’t drive any traffic to Udemy (because she doesn’t own it). She drives traffic to her own website where her larger courses live. She works hard to get her Udemy courses to rank #1 in searches like “horseback riding.” Once she achieves that goal, she moves on, letting it run on its own without touching it.

Udemy doesn’t allow you to capture user’s emails or do a lot of marketing that pulls people off their platform, but Krystal has some simple and easy ways to get her people from Udemy onto the website. Every time she launches a new course, she sends her students a message. No link, no rule-breaking, just a message that says, “I just launched another course. Go and check it out!” She also mentions her books and other courses at the end of every video. The people who are interested find their way to her website.

The Equestrian Adventuresses Book Series

At the beginning of the pandemic, Krystal found herself stuck in Germany with some extra time on her hands. She decided to write a book about horse travel and turned to her community, asking people to submit stories. Today, it’s a wildly successful book series that just published its 5th book.

The books get better as the series progresses. Every story has a different author, and the stories are incredible. One story features a woman riding across Argentina with two toddlers. Another submission came riddled with emojis detailing a 19-year-old’s misadventures of riding a draft horse and hunting for her food in the bush of New Zealand.

Advice for Equestrians Who Want to Make Money Online

Krystal has spent a lot of time learning different platforms, marketing methods, and ways to reach people. If she could go back and do it again, she would choose one thing and go all in. You can make a living on just Udemy courses or just writing self-published books and selling them on Amazon.

Picking that one thing and deciding to go all in saves a ton of time. Krystal has made a lot of money doing many different things, but she thinks she could have been more effective in choosing one.

This is easier said than done. Learning is very addictive, and it’s easy to tell ourselves it’s all related, or this will be the next best thing that makes or breaks our business. We only have 24 hours to get things done, and focusing on one thing helps prevent burnout.