Amy Porterfield: Scaling Your Business Past the Million-Dollar Mark – YouTube

Transcript:
(00:00) when you are building a business 80 is mindset twenty percent is mechanics and I can teach the mechanics all day long to my students but if they don’t believe they can do it or if they don’t have that mental toughness all my strategies don’t even matter [Music] today I sat down with Amy Porterfield I have known of Amy for many many many years but this is the first time we got a chance to have a longer form conversation she is a super impressive human she’s sold more than 80 million dollars of online courses to teach

(00:46) fledgling entrepreneurs how to build their own business online she has a very highly rated podcast online one of the highest rated in The Entrepreneur Space online marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield and she’s a New York Times bestseller I loved recording this conversation she’s just a fun person to talk to um we cover a lot of ground from tactical things that you can do to Market your business and to stand out amongst the crowd to the Strategic things that she did to grow this Empire online um also some kind of bizarre personal

(01:19) things that I just have fun asking and hopefully you’ll have fun listening too without further ado right Amy Porterfield I appreciate you uh carving out some time to talk today I’m so happy to be here thanks for having me or sure um so uh you have been kind of circling around and actually in our CRM for many many many years and we have not gotten the time a chance to really dive into things but before we do I want to get kind of the the general background on who you are for those that don’t know so I always say I’m a ex-corporate girl

(01:56) turned accidental entrepreneur I never really aspired to be my own boss or be an entrepreneur until my very last corporate job so my last corporate job was with Tony Robbins as the director of content development I was there for almost seven years and it was an amazing job and I was really good at corporate climbing that corporate ladder and getting the raises and the awards and all that good stuff my ego was really tied to that and I love the work I did I got to travel the world with Tony and bateen work on the content that he does

(02:26) at events like Unleash the Power Within date with Destiny you know Tony you know those events but here’s what happened one day Tony decided to bring in a bunch of online business owners into the San Diego headquarters and he they were all men and they were all around this big oak table and humbly enough I was called into the meeting to take notes and so I was sitting at a side table and typing away taking my notes and I probably took the worst notes of my life that day because Tony went around and said tell

(02:56) me about your businesses because one of the things that I think Tony does well of of many things is that he finds out who’s killing the game and then he dissects it and learns from that and we were wanting to get more into the online space and so these guys were all selling courses masterminds memberships online and so one by one they went around and they talked about their businesses and if you know the online space you would know these guys Frank Kern Jeff Walker Brendan Bouchard Evan Pagan like they were really big names at the table and

(03:26) so they talked about their businesses but all I heard was Freedom they were working when they wanted where they wanted how they wanted they were being as creative as possible they were coming up with these Amazing Ideas they were impacting lives and they were making lots of money and my ears perked up and I thought I have no idea how they’re doing this but I want a piece of it and it was the first time in my whole life that I realized I’m not free and I never have been and I I would love to call the

(03:54) shots and do my own thing so it was about a year from that fateful meeting that I drove out of those San Diego offices with all the boxes in my little white car driving away to start my own business long story short the first two years were horrible I didn’t know how to be an entrepreneur I stumbled my way through I got into debt but finally I started to figure it out and the way I figured it out was I started to create digital courses and sell them online and teach people online marketing and that was my sweet spot fast forward 14 years

(04:24) later I have a multi-million dollar business we’ve generated over 80 million dollars in Revenue we’ve helped 50 000 students create their businesses and their courses and I really really love what I’m doing but really truly it felt very accidental in the beginning um I have so many questions on that uh and the a bunch of those people sitting around that table are clients of ours and I know very well at this point well it was also cool for them at that time right because they were sort of the I look at them as the OG uh internet

(04:57) marketers right they were the original people that cracked the code to really get rich online make money online um in a way that had Independence right as you said absolutely we’re all living that independent life and I wanted a piece of that yeah and actually for anybody that wants to go back in the archives I hate that that turned into um an info product for Tony and I can’t remember do you remember what it was called the new money makers and I was part of that program yep and a lot of those guys Russell Brunson was another one that was

(05:32) on that product Marie forleo was the only female on that product it was a really cool product and it’s so funny you bring that up because most people don’t know about the new money makers but the cool thing about it is that they were like groundbreaking at the time they were doing things that were like unheard of and very very cool and strategic but today that’s just like the norm so it’s on the so far and it’s changed so much but back then it was really innovative yeah and Mike koenigs I think was

(06:02) another one who’s uh yeah a good buddy there and it might be the new money Masters I think it was the new money I think you’re right yeah but yeah my kenix was there it was a really cool product yeah I think uh Masters seems more on brand for Tony than me it does right yeah um I love that so the uh the transition I mean that was the the compressed version of um your story which is awesome I want to dig into today and how things have changed in the last few years because you mentioned that the first two years

(06:34) were rough um so I guess first let’s talk about that and let’s talk about kind of the transition to making it be powerful and not rough when it went out on my own I always knew I wanted to create digital products I just had that in me I learned that when I was still with Tony and that meeting really changed things for me because that’s what all those guys were doing but I didn’t know how to do it on my own so I went out and I became a consultant and I did social media for small businesses and I had a bunch of clients

(07:05) and I hated every minute of it I literally created a business that I hated and when you think about leading corporate and going out on your own you think you’re going to be on a beach Sip and monetize the laptop and just your dreams and making it happen I didn’t look anything like that I worked more hours than I did for Tony which is crazy because we worked a lot of hours and I did not make a lot of money and so I realized I wasn’t good at the one-on-one I didn’t enjoy it I didn’t know how to

(07:32) set boundaries I was a yes girl at the time so I took all the responsibilities at the end of a call they had zero I had all of them and I couldn’t get it done so it was miserable with the business I created and a lot of times people will just go back to what they know but I knew that I was meant for more and I needed to do something different so that’s when I decided I’m going to create my first digital course now I put it together I stumbled around it and I got this digital course together and I

(07:59) looked around on social media and it felt like everybody was making lots of money online and I had come from that Robin’s world so I had seen proof that it worked so I thought I’m making a hundred thousand dollars there’s no doubt this first product is gonna make a hundred thousand dollars 267 dollars in profit later I was devastated and I thought I’m not cut out to be an entrepreneur this isn’t working I can’t create those info products and so I thought I would have to grovel back from my job luckily I have a really

(08:27) great husband that kind of picked me up and pushed me back out he’s like you’re not going back and so I continued to crack uh perfect my craft of creating these courses and finally it hit and so once I had a digital course that was doing well I just doubled down on it and so I started creating courses over and over again selling them with webinars and email marketing and social media and that’s what really propelled me into getting past those first two really bad years it was just kind of sticking with

(08:57) something until it finally stopped from a marketing perspective what was the difference between uh the what you’re doing today to sell those courses and what you did initially in that first year oh I love this question so if I think about the first year that I created and launched a course to fast forward to this year the number one thing that is incredibly different and this is something that everyone can get on board with I’m just better at it because back in the day I did webinars and I’ve been doing webinars since day

(09:31) one of creating courses back in the day I did email marketing I did social media but it was it’s more of a mindset shift than anything else and just getting really good at understanding webinar conversions and copy conversion and understanding my audience more I also didn’t have an email list and so that was huge you know back then I didn’t realize it if I don’t have a loyal email list I essentially don’t have an online business Tony used to say like that is the most important asset in your

(10:03) business is your database your subscriber list your email list and I didn’t have one so that was that’s the number one thing that was different and now I have this motto today that every day you have to be list building you don’t have to do it consciously to happen in the background of your business but your email list is the most important asset in your business if you’re doing on Business Online I don’t care if you’re selling a physical product an info product you have an e-commerce whatever it is you’ve got to

(10:29) have a thriving email list I didn’t have that back then so that’s number one reason why I struggled and I just didn’t understand how to show up and sell online and so I’ve just gotten much better at that but it’s funny I’ve never thought of this question I appreciate you asking it wasn’t like I was doing anything dramatically different I just stuck with it and got better at my craft so fundamentally uh are you saying that the funnel was the same it really was because if I look at it
(10:59) I’m really trying to think I use paid ads back then Facebook only I used uh an opt-in a freebie I used my webinar and then I learned different strategies along the way I did one or two webinars where today when I launch a digital course I’ll do five T to eight live webinars back in the day I didn’t realize it when you’re on a webinar that q a is everything spend time on the Q a stay as long as people are there I would jump off and probably leave a hundred thousand dollars on the table back then
(11:30) when I was doing these because I didn’t know so it’s nuances that I’ve learned and perfected but the funnel absolutely looks very similar than it does today now I will say that it’s way more sophisticated so let me give you an example back then I would post on social media and and at the time Facebook live was really all there was that was like the the thing that worked the most Facebook lives and Facebook ads I rarely do that at versus how much I use Instagram now so it’s a different platform Instagram for me converts a
(12:03) whole lot better than Facebook but in addition we use a manychat strategy where we tell people on Instagram all right in the comments post the word video and I’ll send you XYZ for free kind of thing and we grow our list by using Automation in manychat in the DMS of Instagram that has become a big part of our list growth where back in the day it didn’t even exists yeah that makes total sense did you do anything manually back in the day because you know manychat the Advent of first off the Advent of DM selling
(12:36) comment selling is relatively new last few years here at best um did you have somebody manually coming through inboxes to respond at that point or do you have a different kind of Automation and does that still come into play do you still sell on other ways other than through DMs so to back then I didn’t even take advantage of my DMs I didn’t even know to go in there or make it automated so it wasn’t even part of how I did it however I was really active in comments like back then blogging was more popular so I was active in blogging
(13:09) comments I was more active in my customer support emails because my audience was smaller so I could personally respond to everyone so I did a lot of grass roots activity back then versus today it’s less Grassroots however there’s still a high touch point so let me make a comparison back then I might have gotten into an email in my help desk it was just me and an assistant so I would personally answer a question about the course they’re thinking about buying today I have a team of three or four at the time during
(13:40) a launch customer support reps but I still get into my help desk about an hour a day during a live launch and I personally respond with a video or my voice because they’ll never believe it’s me if I don’t they’ll just believe that someone acting as me and my team so I do that for an hour a day and week rush it because they know I care and I’m giving my time so I’m still looking for a high touch uh opportunities and that’s why the DM strategy that’s automated now is more High touch because we’ve
(14:12) personalized it as much as we can so even back in the day I was doing High touch today I still do it but in a bigger way in a more strategic way I love that well I think there are good lessons there both for brand new people and for experienced people because uh whether you’re you know eight nine figures into business and you’re introducing a new channel and you’re saying hey we’re going to create some info product now or something totally unrelated or you’re brand new in the beginning you still
(14:41) need to be high touch to figure out what’s working right yeah you can’t put automation before um understanding I totally agree and I think you know when I was a smaller business and it was just me and my assistant Rebecca uh I spent so much time figuring out who this audience was you know it kind of uh touches my heart a little when I think about the early years I knew the names of the people on my email list I knew if they had kids or what they were struggling with I knew them more because it was a small handful versus hundreds
(15:14) of thousands of people on my list now and so I was able to be in relationship with them conversation with them and really understand who they were and I think my strength today if you fast forward 14 years you ask me who my audience is and I could rattle off what they’re thinking where they’re struggling what they need but it was a lot of the work that I did in the early years so that’s when I think it’s so important when you can have those touch points because you do have a smaller audience yeah
(15:41) um there was a there’s kind of a I think a famous entrepreneurial story about uh the origins Airbnb and before they started uh they were told uh as they were kind of try like flailing about a little bit they were told to go knock on their customers doors and find out what they wanted and the response was what are you talking about like that’s not scalable at all and their guidance was this is the only time in their Journey where you can do things that aren’t available so now is the time to really understand your customers in that
(16:12) way really believe that that’s the gold and starting out in a small audience so anyone listening right now that you still have a hold of a smaller audience that you can connect with take advantage of it won’t always be that way yeah uh so one of the things that you said I think is it was always frustrating to me when uh I was trying to figure out entrepreneurship and how to execute business which was mindset you said the biggest difference between my funnel then and today was mindset and I always felt when I was new
(16:44) that that was like the most irritating response because it was like no no tell me what to do right um but today I very much believe that a first off huge Tony Robbins fan he was a tremendously transformative character in my life and I think he is the one that was responsible for me understanding uh that idea of mindset and shifts um but can you tell me a little bit about how you think about things differently at scale versus when you were just getting going yes and speaking of Tony one of my most favorite things
(17:18) he ever taught me was when you are building a business eighty percent is mindset 20 is mechanics and I can teach the mechanics all day long to my students but if they don’t believe they can do it or if they don’t have that mental toughness all my strategies don’t even matter and so now I have found myself over the last few years incorporating the mindset into my teaching because I know that I can’t get in them to the Finish Line without it and so totally agree with you 100 back then when I was first starting out I did
(17:52) not prioritize mindset even though I was coming off of the Tony Robbins job I just put my head down I learned the funnels the strategies the conversions the webinars all of that I was obsessed with and that’s all I wanted to learn and then when things got really really hard and I made 267 dollars I felt like I was a failure and I’d have to go back to that job like that was the first thought because mental toughness was not even a focus of mine luckily I had great people surrounding me to encourage me to
(18:21) keep moving forward but I didn’t do that on my own fast forward to today because I have more money and more influence and opportunity I have a therapist I have a business coach I have a wellness coach and I am in masterminds because all of that to me is mindset like my business coach we do not talk funnels we do not talk web conversions or webinar convergence we talk leadership and how I can cast a vision with my team of 20 full-time employees to make sure that we are all moving forward in the right way
(18:54) and so I just prioritize the mindset more today than ever knowing if I’ve got that on straight I cannot lose and so it really is a conscious effort to do the work that’s one of the most challenging things for me through my journey is this never-ending shift of what being productive needs for me so you know I grew up in this space of transactional sales I grew up selling Cutco knives aggressively um and so that’s really cool because I can’t even imagine the skills you have from that so that’s cool
(19:35) Vector Marketing which is the marketing arm for Cutco phenomenal phenomenal um training ground for entrepreneurship and for sales I mean just the Reps alone the number of transactions you get to do you know thousands of appointments sitting down but very short sales cycle and so you get these dopamine hits which conditioned me to feel like that’s what winning was right these little hits I I I’m being productive when I’m closing a transaction and transitioning from you know zero to a million a million to five five to ten
(20:13) ten to twenty ten to fifty etc etc at each phase you are expected to do something different as a CEO and uh and everybody handles that differently but for me mentally making the shift of what’s next and how to recondition myself has been very challenging um how have you I know that you recently made a transition out of that seat uh or the roles changed you brought somebody on what was that like for you mentally to hand the reins off to somebody else one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done so I’m deep in it right now my
(20:51) uh someone on my team’s been with me four years funny enough she came from the Tony Robbins world and she’s been with me four years and then now she is my CEO and I’m taking a mentor I’m my mentor has you know showed me what it means to transition out of that CEO role and letting somebody else lead the charge I didn’t realize in the beginning it meant she’s making the decisions she is uh responsible at the end of the day for if we’re hitting our goals or not I’ve never in 14 years been in an
(21:21) experience where it wasn’t 100 on me and so I love it and my days are shorter like on uh yesterday my work day I was done with my action items at 2PM which is unheard of for me and so I see my workload lesson in she’s taken over the leadership team she’s working with all the Departments like it that’s amazing my ego has taken a hit though like what do you mean that I’m not making the decision if we’re going to do this on the launch or do that what do you mean that I’m not talking to the CFO of our
(21:54) company anymore or that the leadership team isn’t looking for me to lead them and so so much of Entrepreneurship is checking your ego at the door and I’ve had many many instances where I’ve had to do so I also feel a little bit lost right now like where is my time best spent kind of like what you were saying earlier figuring out what should I be prioritizing where should I be spending my time and it just it’s so hard to figure out and I’m deep in it right now but I think this is my next growth uh
(22:27) challenge like to get to the next level of where I want to go and so I’m here for it but dang has been difficult yeah well I definitely relate to that you do okay I’m not alone oh man I think it’s uh I think that the the beginning of that is self-awareness right the beginning of that is just recognizing hey I need to show up as somebody else right now um and uh that you mentioned this notion of your coaches not being tactical or in some way they’re strategic but they’re not working on the mechanics of the business
(23:03) they’re working on the overarching guidance of the business right and who you need to be yes um on that note and this is I think well I think it’s relevant to a lot of people but it is uh becoming more and more challenging to uh missile plan I think to your products but it’s more and more challenging to figure out who’s full of and who’s not um how did you oh it’s it’s especially with the you know this infusion of AI coming right now uh and you can basically just grab and repurpose content as if it’s yours
(23:43) um how did you go about finding the business coach that you had in the deciding who to listen to oh I love this question because I agree there’s a lot of crap out there and you’ve got to be really careful and I’ve definitely dealt with it I’ve gotten in situations where I’ve realized hold on this person isn’t who I thought they were they’re not uh in line with my values and I’m gonna have to cut bait which is really hard because I am a people pleaser and I want to make everyone happy but yeah you got to be
(24:12) super careful with that so for me I like to choose mentors in two ways number one if I’ve known them for a while and I genuinely know behind the scenes of their business because if I am friends with someone for a while or or we’re in a pure setting and they share the good bad and ugly and they’re willing to do so that makes me trust them a whole lot more so speaking of my business Mentor it’s Michael Hyatt and I’ve known him for at least 10 years I would say and I’m friends with his daughters he’s got
(24:43) five daughters and I’ve just been in and out of his world a lot I’ve spent money on his group coaching programs before I spent money on his digital courses and then we became friends I two years ago moved to Nashville and Michael lives here in Nashville and so we both have lake houses at the same place outside of Nashville so we have a friendship as well but at the same time during that friendship he shared the good bad and ugly I knew what his business was doing behind the scenes and I don’t want to
(25:11) work with a business coach if I don’t know that one they’re likely making more money than me or they’ve gone through the same challenges that I know I’m going to go through and they can guide me so that is very important to me I pay a lot of money to work with Michael so it’s really important that I know that and so you can’t always get that lucky like being friends with the person and being in their world but you can do some investigative work so the second way I choose somebody is if they are
(25:38) recommended to me by someone I trust so I might get a coach that I don’t necessarily get to go behind the scenes of their business but so and so has worked with them they’ve gotten great results and so now I’m going to trust that here’s an example I just started working with a consultant in my business to help us holistically look at where we’re shining where we’re growing where we’re thriving and what is costing us too much time or money and so he’s doing a whole holistic approach on the
(26:01) business he was I don’t I’ve never worked with him before but he was recommended by someone that I really trust and it’s been a beautiful situation because of that but those are usually the two I know them well or they’ve been recommended uh I like that how leery are you investing money to find those things out because in the beginning if you don’t get a referral or maybe you get a referral but you’re taking it with a grain of salt which by the way tremendously important so there are people that I really trust
(26:34) that refer things to me but I also have to know who they are and so great I trust them in one area but I also have to have enough contacts to say I still need to do my own homework um so with with Michael Hyatt for example you said that you invested a bunch of courses with them and going through his uh training material um what what’s what’s enough to put your money on the line to figure it out uh a little bit more time than actual what’s enough in terms of I took two courses so that’s enough I wanted to
(27:11) kind of see how he shows up online I wanted to see how he navigates different things like even how he navigated black lives matter or the metoo movement like how he showed up in the world as a leader um I wanted to be in his proximity so I gave myself time to go to his Live Events and and be in that world so to me it was time I think a good year of being in someone’s proximity taking their courses or group coaching or whatever they offer and really paying attention gave me uh the the confidence to say okay I’m ready to move
(27:47) forward now I also wasn’t ready to hire a coach you know during that time so it didn’t feel like I had to rush it because it was a lot of money and I just wasn’t ready to invest that just yet so I think it was more time than anything um yeah I think there’s also a good lesson which I what I heard is you what you said was you weren’t ready what I heard was you took the time and those might have felt like the same to you but I know for myself and for a lot of people they always feel like it has to happen
(28:23) right now and so hey patient I totally get that I want it yesterday most of the things in my business I want to do it yesterday so I get that well good job taking your time on that one thank you I you know one thing I’ve learned along the way and and the growth of my entrepreneurship and business there’s power in the pause and I don’t want to pause I’m an Enneagram three let’s go let’s hustle let’s get it done I’ll do any work it needs to get to the goal I want but what I’ve noticed is
(28:53) when I pause and don’t make the decision today and I sleep on it and I consult a few people I’m obviously going to make a better decision and if I look back at all the mistakes that I’ve made along the way most of them were very quick decisions I didn’t want to ask anyone because I didn’t want their opinion because I kind of knew they would probably tell me to slow down and so I don’t ask and then I regret it and so the power of the pause it’s been saving me a lot in these later years of my
(29:21) business that’s great there’s power in the pause yeah um one of my frames that’s parallel to that is sometimes the most productive thing I can do is nothing uh Amen to that I one million percent agree and to to kind of build off of that I’ve had two situations in like the last two months where I have said no to something or let go of something that I was going to move forward on and I decided not to and the potential for revenue and profit was big I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars that I
(29:58) said no to because I knew the timing wasn’t right and it’s easier to do that when you have a thriving business I get that but I feel that I’m very lucky that I can say no to those things but in the back of my mind there’s this voice that wasn’t there 14 years ago so it’s developed over the years that said okay we’re gonna let go of this you might lose 250 000 in Revenue but something better is coming and you got to be patient something better is coming it just happened two days ago I said no to
(30:26) something and in the right away I heard that something better is coming just just hold on and so if I can believe that I can make it happen yeah that’s very hard when you don’t it’s definitely much easier when you’ve got a thriving business um though you you do hear these sort of iconic stories like um you know Zuckerberg not selling for a billion dollars and driving it anyway uh and of course we hear there’s tremendous bias in those stories because we hear the good ones right that is true that is true yeah that’s a
(31:06) good lesson regardless um so okay let me let me pull it into a kind of the present uh things are transitioning pretty quickly in terms of potentially different marketing models different tools to use um and I want to kind of talk about you know any shifts that are being made right now but one of the things that uh and you answered it uh in aggregate by saying you’re better uh during the webinars you’re focusing more on conversion metrics uh Etc but there are a lot of information products out there there are a lot of products on how to
(31:45) Market how to create a business um what do you think it is about your model and or your product that has allowed you to accelerate and gain traction the way that you have oh I love this question so first of all you said the word model I do have a framework and I think that a lot of digital courses teaching people how to do things are lacking the framework so one of my courses that is like my bread and butter is called digital course Academy and digital course Academy we call it DCA has a framework there’s a
(32:20) very specific way that I teach how to create a digital course and how to launch it and so I take them through this framework step by step by step very specific and I do believe that put me on the map because people are using the DCA framework to launch their courses I’m known for that that’s another thing I’m known for something so if you were out in in my space in my world and you said who can teach me how to create a digital course I have no doubt in my mind that I’d be in the top three of whoever is
(32:51) listed now that is not by mistake it’s by lots of years staying in my lane and so as Andre entrepreneurs We crave variety we want to do this and that and try this and I want to add this and I want to add that where one of my secrets to success is I’ve always stayed in my Lane yes I’ve gotten bored at times yes I wanted to try something else but then I come back to well if I’m feeling bored right now what could I do different in this next launch that would be exciting and different and new let me give you an
(33:20) example I’m launching digital course Academy in September and I’ve launched it many times since 2019 this exact course 2019 to today and for the first time we’re going to go into a studio and many of your listeners will know what I’m talking about where all the screens of people on Zoom are behind you and there’s a really cool software that you can integrate to get people to engage in prizes and a lot of fun and a lot of conversation I’ve never done webinars that way before and I don’t know if it
(33:49) will work I don’t know if it’s going to increase conversion I don’t know if it’s going to be a little bit too flashy that maybe it won’t but I have to try and so I’m excited to try something new for something I have done for years and years but at the end of the day I’m teaching people how to create and launch courses and that is what put me on the map because I don’t Veer away from that and so that’s one thing that I think really makes a difference and then I just have a very specific teaching style
(34:15) I’m very patient very virtual hand-holding step by step no stone left unturned so I know what I’m about and I can easily communicate this is this is who I am and also I have a podcast that I have been doing since 2013 and people get to experience me and I teach on that podcast so they get a little piece of me before they pay money to work with me and I do think that podcast has made a difference in terms of getting people to trust me more inside my courses that’s such a tough thing too and maybe
(34:47) you have a mechanism that I don’t know about but it’s a tough It’s like a billboard right it’s a tough thing to track directly to the metrics it is definitely and what we do is when we look at the growth of the podcast and really pay attention to our downloads but we do a lot of freebies inside of my podcast I Market my own things I have a sponsor but I also Market my own thing so we track which episodes are the most popular depending on not just downloads but how many people are downloading the freebie
(35:16) that goes along with it and so we can get a sense of where they’re gravitating toward and I have a lot of freebies around digital course creation and so that helps immensely as well interesting uh do you do the freebies are they unique to the episode or do you have sort of an aggregate freebie that’s driving towards one product I do both for a long time there were there was a year that every single episode I did and I used to do one episode a week now I do too but every episode I did had a freebie with it and
(35:45) I did that for an entire year and it was way too much work and I had a smaller team at the time so I’m like this it would seem to be the same people were signing up for that freebie so I let go of that strategy and now every three or four episodes has a very specific freebie for that episode we just did an episode I recorded about Ai and how to use it to create courses there’s a cheat sheet for that but then I have four or five overarching freebies that if I don’t have a specific one for that episode I’ll do a more of a general one
(36:15) that relates to my audience but we’re making a huge effort there because I do think a podcast is a great list Builder if you are intentional about creating those freebies and mentioning them often yeah uh I could see that really bogging your marketing team if you’re creating a unique one for every single episode yeah and my marketing team doesn’t do it so that’s a really great point because it will bomb them down at we have a podcast team it’s a small team of two people and they will create the freebies uh because
(36:48) you’re right it will really throw things off if I have them creating all those freebies every day I love that well I think that the any business um information selling information and also uh podcasts but content in general or these potentially huge levers both for list building and other monetization strategies even if it’s to cover ad costs for example um so I want to dig in a little bit deeper here with your podcast you mentioned that you did have a sponsor uh certainly it’s not like you need to have the
(37:26) revenue from a sponsor what was the decision there why did you choose to have a sponsor versus not uh how did you look at that okay so let’s think about that I gotta think about this because you’re right it’s not like I had to have the revenue in order to keep the business going however I put a lot of time and effort into that podcast we do two episodes a week now and uh the content in my podcast is very important to me so I’m very much involved and we just felt like if we’re gonna put this much time and
(37:56) effort to it what if we could tie Revenue to it to make it worth all that time and effort beyond the impact we were making and so it was definitely a conversation around revenue and because my podcast is so big and does a a lot of downloads a month we were able to get a really good number if that number came in low I don’t think it would be worth it but because I get over a million downloads a month the number came in high and I thought that number is worth it now in addition to that my HubSpot is my sponsor I only promote HubSpot and
(38:29) they have a network so that means at the beginning of every episode I do I promote somebody else’s podcast in the network but that means they promote me and so I was looking for growth just not money and so I felt like I chose a sponsor that was focused on helping me grow my podcast as well as making Revenue with it and now that I make Revenue with my podcast I’m able to put that money back into the business particularly with paid ads which I highly believe in and so it was just another way to help us grow our Audience
(39:00) by taking that revenue and putting it back into the business got it yeah that’s interesting so growth engine ultimately absolutely yeah yeah that makes sense and the there’s uh you know I said it as if I think I I didn’t mean to but I think I said it as if taking revenue or having a revenue based decision was a bad thing um it’s a choice right but it’s I’m always interested because some people feel like uh sponsorship is taking away from another CTA so you have a sponsor and then you’re not able to promote your own
(39:33) things the same way uh you make a great point I thought about that hard and we wouldn’t have chose a sponsor if they had like some kind of rule that I can’t promote my own things as well as promote theirs I wouldn’t have done it um also the hubspot’s pretty cool I don’t do this but they don’t mind if you have other sponsors in addition to them I think that’s two in wads and I don’t love it but it’s an option so I didn’t feel like I was in jail with them when we started to work with them but you
(40:00) were right I I do believe promoting HubSpot twice on my podcast it is going to take a little bit away from me promoting my own courses my own freebies we still do it and we still have success with it but I’m sure it hinders it just a bit so it is a choice for sure yeah um I mean there are a million choices to the business um too many yes it is exhausting uh and the but the the idea of the growth engine which is use the money to push it back in and it’s sort of um smart money right you got the money but you got another benefit which was
(40:35) the network is promoting your show yes I think if it didn’t include that I probably wouldn’t have done it so you’re right um I wanna I wanna talk about how you run things today so you know we talked a little bit about the transition to handing the rains off to a CEO uh you talked about in the beginning hating the business that you created uh the gap between those two things uh is an important one and different entrepreneurs approach this differently I grew up in the frame of if I’m not driving hard I’m not making
(41:16) as much progress as I could be making uh so I’m sort of consistently trying to figure out the equation of how do I do the things to feel like I’m being productive um running as quickly as I can and feeling fulfilled right and enjoying the process um what what changed in the beginning of the business that you hated to deliberately creating one that you love you know I had to get really clear on what my priorities were the reason why I really didn’t like the first two years of my business is that I was doing
(41:56) one-on-one service work there was only so much money or impact I could make and I was tied to individual clients with very crazy uh unrealistic expectations because I allowed it to happen that way and so I wanted freedom I left my last job that paid a lot and was super exciting with Tony to do something on my own so if I didn’t have the freedom it wasn’t worth it I might as well go back to that job and so I moved into creating digital courses and selling them because it gave me the freedom to do what I want
(42:29) now if you fast forward today I have a husband who is retired from the fire department and he’s only 52 but he retired we say retired because he’s not going to get another job and partly because his wife makes a lot of money and I can support our family and my husband was gone every 24 hours at the station and now he’s home every single day and that is a beautiful thing as I get older I’m in my 40s now as I get older I want more time with my husband I want more time with my son and I want to
(42:59) do the things that I absolutely love and that has become a priority to me I have to admit and I’m not proud of this it wasn’t a priority when I started my business my business was my baby I’ve never had a child of my own my son is my stepson since he was four years old and I think partly why I’ve never had this huge desire to have children but partly why I probably didn’t have kids if I’m being really honest is I got so into this business what can I do what could I create it became my full identity and at
(43:29) times I think I lost sight of why I’m doing all of this not just to make a whole bunch of money in the bank at the end of the day it didn’t even matter and so if I didn’t have my health and my family and the things I love so to answer your question today I have my priorities more in check and partly because I have a husband that came to me a few years ago and said enough is enough like I never see you we are not connected like we used to be this business is kind of overtaking you this is many years ago actually but it scared
(43:59) me and I’m so lucky that he spoke up like that so I think it’s just getting my priorities straight and realizing why I’m doing what I’m doing and I hustle a whole lot less these days and I make a whole lot more so I I really do believe less is more but I had to figure that out and I was very scared to do less I’m like you that I I believe that hard work was everything and I needed to work my butt off to actually earn this and get what I have I don’t think I should have to work so hard I don’t think anyone
(44:29) does so the question that the Hustler will ask is how do you hustle less and make more yeah and this is a really important question there’s a few things I’ve thought about this for a long time because I have to be careful I never want to say something that really truly I don’t believe or isn’t true so I ask myself in those first few years did I have to hustle do I believe I had to hustle to get to where I am today and I do and I tell my students the first few years I do believe you’re hustling and
(45:05) you’re making sacrifices because you don’t know what you don’t know and all of it is new and you’ve got to experiment and you got to go all in but I wish after like two three years I started to scale back I went many years without scaling back but now what I know how do you work less but make more you have to find that thing in your business that is working well and double down you have to say no more than you say yes because as you grow opportunities are going to be knocking on your door every
(45:37) which way I just had one yesterday do a webinar with us it’s three people that have tons of influence we’re going to all do it together we could get a lot of people on our email list we could sell a lot of our books because these were authors sounds really promising no that is not where my focus is right now I’m focusing on launching in two months I’ve got to put my head down and just get it done so I have to say no more than I say yes which is not easy to an entrepreneur and also I have to be willing to double
(46:04) down on what’s working instead of continuing to add new projects new campaigns new products so that means that sometimes it gets boring and you’ve got to find a way to make it exciting again without adding more so what’s working in your business how can you optimize a double down study how to do an evergreen launch in our Evergreen in a bigger way or what are people doing in their launches now that you’re not doing that’s the kind of learning and studying that keeps me excited about what I do
(46:33) that’s great that’s great advice I had a conversation with um Rich Chef friend the other day and we were talking about this specifically and his advice uh and there’s uh it’s a long conversation but his advice was find variety outside of the business oh that’s so good a hundred percent agree yeah yeah he also said he’s terrible at doing this and he’s notorious for going going to the you know Midway point and then shifting gears and doing something different um honesty but it’s just a really good
(47:09) point I have a good friend Marie forleo that always says you do not need to monetize all of your interests Hobbies things that get you excited you have to make money on all of that and I think as entrepreneurs we think we do but yeah oh that’s where you can find that variety yes well I struggle with that too I I talk to my my father about uh his Hobbies as a retired human and he’s doing these things and I just think I feel like I would want to do those things exactly it’s it’s sickness we have for
(47:43) sure Perhaps Perhaps um okay I have to I I have to ask uh tangential totally irrelevant to probably everybody else but I’m curious what’s the tattoo on your arm oh it says love you more so every time I tell my husband I love you he says love you more and so that’s what it says but here’s the deal my husband does not have like a lot of tattoos or anything and one uh Day last year I asked him would he get matching tattoos with me which is super girly for the record like did you ever do it and then he’s like well what
(48:16) would we get I’m like something that we say all the time and we both knew in the moment I can’t believe this man got the same tattoo on his arm but his arm says love you more and I love him so much for it but yeah we have matching tattoos we’re a little cheesy like that that’s beautiful uh I I have a long story about my lack of tattoos but uh ultimately it comes down to Mohawk and no tattoos I can’t I know people people are always wondering where it’s hidden uh but the answer to it is the the short
(48:51) answer is no tattoos because I can’t think of anything or I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted my plate forever and your story is great because it’s exactly it’s it’s it answers the question yeah it means something for sure I have another one that we won’t talk about that means nothing and I was 18 and I probably need to get it it’s not a stamp if that’s what you’re thinking but it’s still not great and I you can’t see it anyway but I’m just like why did I
(49:23) get that so I really do think that you are smart by just waiting and if it ever comes to you then that’s the time yeah well uh you know as with most things in life it’s a mixed blessing right um I have a I have a very good friend who has a bunch of those tattoos where he thinks well that was stupid I don’t know why I did that they’re all over his body but he has a very good reframe thank you John Roman he runs a group called The Front Row dads which is a group four male entrepreneurs about being family men with businesses not
(49:59) businessmen with families I love that I do too it’s beautiful um that’s his plug but he’s got all these tattoos from different areas of his life and he is a master at asking questions in framing situations and his frame for these tattoos is no I don’t want to remove them they are part of my story and they remind me of who I was at these different points in life uh and I like having those memories present I love that I think that’s important what a great reframe right yeah um I love it um awesome well I appreciate you carving
(50:36) on time today but I know we’re coming into an end um you have a another launch coming up uh you have a presumably formulaic approach to doing this so before we close out if you could uh tell us a little bit about a the launch but B how you’re structuring it and what’s different this time I know you mentioned a different venue a different form to do this but how do you keep doing these on a routine basis in improving them um teach here well thank you so much for asking so digital course Academy is the program
(51:12) where I teach Google how to create and launch a digital course from scratch and then take that course and launch it over and over again staying in your lane becoming known for something and getting that consistent Revenue to come in and so this year so uh we’ve done it for many years as I mentioned a few things we’re doing different number one is that last year or the year before we decided to add well two years ago we added a boot camp and it was a free boot camp how to get started with the digital
(51:37) course which then led into and if you want more join my program well we realize that we’ve got like 20 000 people in the boot camp but it converted really low like I want to say like four or five percent and so I thought something’s off here so the next year we did a paid boot camp it was only forty seven dollars but people had skin in the game and it converted at 25 I mean that’s wildly different and that’s higher than what my webinars convert at and so once we figured that out we thought okay let’s go and so this year
(52:10) last year we had 4 000 people in a paid boot camp this year the goal is 8 000 doubling it which is a ridiculous goal but that the word we chose this year as a team is unreasonable let’s be unreasonable so we set a very unreasonable goal for this boot camp but we’ve got a lot of strategy in terms of how we’re going to get it we don’t just set a goal and say I hope it works fingers crossed like we’ve got strategy in place to see if we can make this happen and so that’s one thing paid boot
(52:36) camp but now we want 8 000 people in that paid boot camp and then in addition to that we’re going to double down on this manychat strategy that we’ve been using and find a way to really boost it to start getting those leads in in this personal way of asking questions they DM we have the conversation with them all automated but getting them on our email list and nurturing them so the DM mini chat type strategy we are going to double down on that as well and really what it is and this is what I teach my
(53:06) students we look at what worked last year and then ask ourselves can we eliminate a few distractions that didn’t work and can we double down and do even better this year so it’s always just building off of what we’ve done the year before and then one more little Nuance you know I could teach digital courses all day long five mistakes people make with digital courses how to sell on a webinar with digital courses how to teach in a web or a digital course all that however the mindset is just important what I was mentioning earlier
(53:36) so there’s going to be a lot of content that I put out there that is around mindset and changing people’s uh thoughts and then behaviors in terms of how they grow a business and I think that’s just as important so we’re going to see a lot of that infused into the launch as well so anyway thanks for asking and I I could talk about it for way too long so I get so excited but that was generous of you to ask no I have a nuanced question there which is speaking of uh changing improving Etc [Music]
(54:07) you mentioned you know we’ve talked a little bit about the manychat on all witches for those that don’t know a tool to create basically chat Bots right to have these branched logic automated chat Bots um we are you know July of 2023 moving into the AI World um are you playing with AI responses have you thought about I mean obviously you thought AI chat Bots where does that fit in it’s at all if it’s not part of this are you playing with it how do you see that so it is a big part of this and where it lands in two ways number one I
(54:45) believe that everything I teach in DCA you can fast track it with AI I don’t believe that it’s a and this is not because I’m biased because I teach this but just using AI to create and launch a course you lose so many nuances versus learning from a framework and learning from someone who’s gone before you and made all the mistakes so I think a course like this in AI together it’s like a perfect combination so I’m going to teach people how to use prompts to get their course done quicker and I’m
(55:11) going to do that in the pre-launch before anyone buys just to show them what they can do but inside digital course Academy we’ve created cheat sheets for every single lesson and I’ve got many many lessons in there to say okay you just learned how to do let’s say how to outline a digital course and there’s these five steps to do so now here are the prompts to plug into AI to get this done faster and then here are the things to look at so you don’t have a general watered-down outline which I
(55:39) think a lot of AI is doing I do think a lot of the responses are missing hearts and grittiness and stories and if you’re just taking what you get from AI you’re totally losing your whole journey of uh how you can teach something in a way that brings it to life but at least you’re not staring at a blank Google doc so every lesson now in digital course Academy has an AI cheat sheet I’m really excited about that yeah I agree with you with that I also think that there’s benefit to um learning the framework and you as an
(56:13) entrepreneur are missing a huge chunk if you are looking for the shortcut as opposed to using it as a tool to learn yes totally agree with you you couldn’t set it better um that’s great so where can people find out about the course or find out more about Amy Porterfield well thanks for asking so amyforterfield.
(56:34) com forward slash DCA for digital course Academy that’s where you can get on the wait list and and get alerted when we go live and then I have a podcast called online marketing made easy so if you love podcasts and you love this one you might like mine as well so thanks for asking I love that Amy I appreciate you carving outside thanks so much I appreciate you having me awesome welcome take care bye love it I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it I need your help there are three places you can find Beyond a million the podcast itself
(57:04) beyondthemillion.com which has some cool free resources including a free course and we finally launched the Beyond a million YouTube channel I would love it if you would go there and subscribe and if you don’t want to you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content check it out youtube.
(57:22) com forward slash at Beyond a million [Music]