Mark Virkler puts an entire course online free every month, then sells that same course to the people watching it. Not a preview, not a trimmed sample. All ten sessions, open to anyone with a link.
The free course funnel he built has cleared around $5,000 a month for four or five years. What makes it work is the line he draws between watching something and owning it.
What He Sells
Virkler runs Communion With God Ministries and Christian Leadership University. The catalogue is about 100 correspondence courses, built out of the 50-plus books he has written, all teaching a four-step method for hearing God's voice.
Students work through a course with an instructor who grades their submissions and reports the result to an office in Buffalo, which maintains the transcript and issues the degree once enough courses are finished. Twelve weeks per course.
That is the product. How people find their way into it is the part worth studying.
What Came Before the Funnel
Virkler hired marketers first. Several of them, over a period of years.
“They never made me a penny.”
Then he found ClickFunnels, watched a free 90-minute presentation from the company's founder, and bought the course that followed for around $900. He took the $4,000 add-on that came with a technical person to build the first funnel with him. About six weeks of Zoom calls later it was running. He had spent $5,000.
The advice he paid for came down to one sentence: give away your best product, give it away free.
His first reaction was the one most people have.
“If I give my best product away free, I will go broke.”
How the Free Course Actually Runs
The courses were already sitting there. Most of Virkler's books have a companion series of ten recorded sessions, one per chapter, each running 30 to 60 minutes with slides, questions and answers, and students reading their own written work on camera. He had tried live webinars in the early years and abandoned them, because connection speeds at the time could not carry slides reliably.
So the funnel runs on inventory that already existed. One session goes online. Anyone can watch it for 24 hours. Then it comes down and the next one goes up in its place. After the tenth, all ten return together for a 48-hour window so people can catch whatever they missed.
One rule holds the whole structure up: nothing is downloadable. You can watch all ten sessions and end the month with none of it.
The Distinction the Whole Model Rests On
Alongside the free run, Virkler sells the same ten sessions in a form the buyer keeps. His own words for that pitch are the clearest statement of what is actually being sold:
“If you want to own this, because hearing it once is not enough.”
The paid version adds the slide decks, an audio version for the car, an e-book, a workbook, and 30 minutes of coaching with Virkler. He totals the bundle at $1,000, prices it against a normal $197, and runs it at $97 for ten days.
Every element of the free experience expires. The session window, the recap weekend, the discount, the bonuses. The content is generous and the access is on a clock, and the clock is what converts.
Turning One Launch Into an Operation
The first month, he sold about a hundred bundles at half price and cleared roughly $5,000 in profit. That paid back what he had spent building the funnel, in month one.
Then he ran it again with a different course, and has run it every month since with one of his top twenty. With twenty in rotation, the same subscriber can be offered something new for well over a year before anything repeats, and every run brings in people who have never heard of him. Watchers come from more than a hundred countries. The profit has held at about the same level throughout.
The library is doing two jobs here. It is the thing members get, and it is also the thing that brings them in.
The Publishing Habit Underneath It
A monthly launch needs an audience still paying attention when it arrives.
About a year ago Virkler started publishing daily, which he did not want to do and says so plainly. What changed his mind was becoming a daily reader of someone else, a lawyer in Florida writing a morning take on the previous 24 hours. He wanted that in his own inbox, so he built it for his list.
The output goes out at 7am Eastern, seven days a week: a written post, and on at least three days a 14-minute recording so people can listen in the car or the kitchen instead. Every post ends with a link to something on the site. A free monthly newsletter collects the month's posts with a video from him at the top.
It is a small habit with an obvious job. When the free course opens, the list is warm because it has heard from him that morning.
The Team That Runs It
The operation is small and mostly part-time.
Three secretaries work from the Buffalo office, covering accounting, customer relations, and the phones. A phone tree routes calls from that office out to home offices in other states, so someone calling to ask which course to buy can be transferred to Virkler himself in Florida.
His son handles the technical work. His daughter-in-law built the WordPress sites – five websites in all, most on WordPress already, the rest moving over from platforms like Drupal, which he found harder to modify. His daughter works as a secretary from her own house. His granddaughter drops the video into the daily posts, a task Virkler says he never learned to do because she was glad to do it. Three generations, no office required for most of them.
Teaching runs on about a dozen part-time instructors spread across several countries, paid per student per completed course. Work comes in, the instructor grades it, the result goes to Buffalo, the transcript updates.
What Membership and eLearning Operators Can Take From This
Virkler does not run a membership site. He runs a course business that solved acquisition by giving the product away, and the mechanics transfer whether or not you share his subject matter.
The gate is on the format, not the content. He doesn't hold back any lessons. People can watch everything for free, and they pay for the version they can keep and watch again later. If your paywall currently decides which lessons people get to see, there's another way: let them see all of it, but only for a limited time.
His back catalogue works like inventory. With twenty courses in rotation, he gets twenty promotions to the same email list before anything repeats. So the archive doesn't just sit there as a member benefit. It brings in new customers.
The deadline has to be real, or people learn to ignore it. His scarcity comes from how the course is delivered. Each video actually comes down after 24 hours. Nothing gets downloaded for free. That's harder to fake than a countdown timer on a sales page, and it's why “hearing it once is not enough” works as a reason to buy instead of just a marketing line.
The funnel paid for itself in the first month, and it's been running for four or five years on videos that were already recorded.
Dr. Mark Virkler is the founder of Communion With God Ministries and Christian Leadership University. You can find him at cwgministries.org
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