Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs. Today, I’m recording live a series of interviews with entrepreneurs about how they do online marketing. And it happened because I had this realization that I’ve interviewed people who are great at marketing about how they built their businesses, and I never took the time to probe and understand how they grew it by letting people know what they did, by buying ads to do it, by writing content to do it, by messaging their current people. And it’s something that I want to learn.
And the person who I especially felt bad about was Ryan Deiss, that I pressed him a lot for how he built his company and is he part of this, like, online marketers who are taking advantage of people and stuff like that. He knew those questions were coming up. We had brunch where he had brought them up, so he wasn’t, like, thrown by them or upset about them, but I was. I missed an opportunity to really learn how he did it, and so I’m bringing entrepreneurs on to ask them about this. The one person who I did do a good job of finding out about her marketing was the woman who you are about to get to know now Amy Porterfield.
Four or five years ago, I was trying to improve my online membership site and so I loved how Amy did things. Everything she does feels like she’s really good at marketing in the way that she communicates not like a marketer, but like someone who is just talking to a friend who happens . . . I mean, she just happens to be good at buying ads because she spent some time on it. She happens to be good at sending out emails. She happens to be good at podcasting, and so you want to find out how she did it. So there’s an approachability to it, but also an authenticity to it that I want to learn and I want to get good at. My feeling is that when it comes to marketing, I just want to press my foot on the gas and just accept it has to be bad at times, but it’ll lead to growth in business, so you suck it up and take it. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and Amy doesn’t do it that way, and I want to learn from her.
So Amy Porterfield, according to the top of her website, here’s what she listed, and I’m just going to read the whole thing. She teaches business owners, educators, and entrepreneurs the profitable action steps for building a highly-engaged email list, creating online training courses, and using online marketing strategies to sell with ease. I’m going to find out how she not so much does those, but how she promotes the ones that she does, thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first will help you hire great developers and designers. It’s called Toptal. And the second will help you hire, excuse me, host your website, it’s called HostGator. I’ll tell you about those later.
Amy, good to have you here.
Amy: Well, thanks for having me. I’m honored to be here.
Andrew: Hey, Amy, are you actually using your mic? I should have asked you before, but it sounds a little different. Can you tap your mic?
Amy: I am.
Andrew: You are using your mic.
Amy: Maybe a little closer?
Andrew: Yeah.
Amy: Okay, here we go.
Andrew: You were a little bit nervous about doing this interview. Why?
Amy: You make me nervous to be quite honest.
Andrew: Why?
Amy: Because you asked questions sometimes that I know you want to go deeper and I know you want to get to the root of it, and I just hope I have all the answers you want. But funny enough, you and I were at a lunch about a year or so ago, and we were all talking around the table and you asked my integrator, like a project manager, Chloe, a question, and we still joke about how intense the question was, and how she was like a deer in the headlights. Now, I don’t even remember the question, but she’s like, “Oh, you’re talking to Andrew? Good luck today.”
Andrew: I wonder what that was. You know what? Actually, I was going to reach out to Chloe. I looked her up on LinkedIn. I had a sense of how to contact her. And then I said, “You know what? That’s a step too far for this. I think I know where I want to go with it.” But I do that a lot, because I want to really [inaudible 00:03:40]. I don’t know. I’m just naturally curious.
Amy: It’s a good thing. You’re a great interviewer, so I love it, and I’m nervous about it. But let’s just do it.
Andrew: Your website says that you are seven figures. Can you be open about what the revenue is right now, Amy?
Amy: Yes. So, so far this year, we’re at about $5 million in revenue for this year?
Andrew: Five million?
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Selling what? Like, what’s the big course?
Amy: So digital courses. Digital Course Academy is a course where it’s so meta. I teach how to create a digital course and how to launch that digital course with webinars using live launching strategies. And so it’s everything nuts and bolts step-by-step how to do it. So that’s my big signature course.
And then I also have an evergreen course, meaning it’s an automated webinar that runs every single day, and that’s List Builders Lab, and that’s where I teach how to build your email list. And I start with that one, that one’s $397, so it’s a cheaper program than my bigger one, which is $2,000. And it’s a great place to start the conversation. Anybody who wants to grow a business online typically needs to have an email list, and I can’t do a good job of teaching the big strategies if you don’t start with that list building foundation, so that’s why I have that program to start.
Andrew: And how do people find out about you? What’s like the first step that a stranger would go through to know about Amy Porterfield?
Amy: It’s either you see an ad on Facebook or Instagram about my list building course or you see an ad about my podcast or someone recommended my podcast. So usually, my evergreen webinar or my podcast is how you get into my world.
Andrew: And so you’re promoting your podcast first? How do you know if that works if people even listened it? Dave from Proof and I were just talking about how tough it is to promote podcasts.
Amy: So I agree. I do think it’s tough to promote a podcast. I think I have a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations from people out there. My podcast, definitely, is a huge list builder for me. We survey people and say, “How did you hear about me?” And they say, “So and so recommended your podcast.” So it definitely is a feeder for me.
Andrew: My favorite episodes of your podcast are where you and someone on your team talk about what you did in just like we’re sitting on the couch vibe.
Amy: Oh, I love that you say that. I need to do more of those. Those are the really fun ones. And I love to pull the curtain back and share what we’ve done inside the business. So, yeah, those are the good ones.
Andrew: If you do $5 million in revenue, how much of that is profit in your type of business?
Amy: So about 60%, so our expenses are around 40%.
Andrew: Wow. And so net is really powerful?
Amy: It is, yeah. It’s something that we really focus on closely. So we don’t, actually, have budgets for everything we do. However, one of my specialties is simplifying the business and doing what works over and over again. So if we did a launch in January, which is what we did, we’ve done launches for seven years now, we know how to do launches, we know pretty much what we want to spend and where we’re spending it. So we try to stay within that same kind of recipe each time we launch, so our goal is always no more than 40% expenses.
Andrew: And so one of the things that I told you before we started is we didn’t send out, I think, a single email for Mixergy all of 2018.
Amy: Talk to me about that. Why didn’t you?
Andrew: I couldn’t sit down and write it. I couldn’t find someone who could do even a first draft and capture my voice. It was so painful that I just said I’m going to give up on it. I’m going to spend more time finding guests, talking to guests, getting to know them. And one of the things that Megan, who helped put today together, actually didn’t help, she did it. She kept sending me your emails and saying, “Look, you could send out an email for every episode.” Because you do that, right, Amy? I mean, for every podcast episode, you send out an email. And it feels, I don’t know how to express it. It just feels good. It feels right. What’s your process of creating an email for let’s say a podcast?
Amy: Great question because it’s a big deal in our business. This is definitely how we engage our existing email list, how we have a relationship with them. So number one, I have a copywriter. And I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head how much we pay her because she’s on a retainer and she does a few things different things, but she’s expensive. So we definitely invest in a copywriter. And we batch, so we do six at a time. So I do six podcasts at a time, she writes six emails at a time. Like, everything we do, we try to batch. And six isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot for me. I’m not a really quick content creator, so six works.
And so she’ll sit down and she’ll write those six emails. And one, she’s just really good and she’s worth every penny. But two, we Voxer. And so when I have an idea, I send her a quick Vox and say, “Hey, when you write the email for such and such episode, let me tell you a quick story.” I don’t always do that. But I try to do that when something pops into my head. So she’s hearing from me, she has a connection to me. And because I’ve been at this for 10 years, she can dig into the archive, she can see tons of stuff I’ve done, and she’s taken the time to really get to know my voice. And so having a . . . I could never sit down and write all those emails either, so I get it.
Andrew: And so you’re thinking of a story and then recording it for her. And the reason you use Vox . . . is that what it’s called? Voxer or Boxer?
Amy: Yeah, Voxer.
Andrew: Voxer?
Amy: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s because it’s audio based and you could just record and send it over?
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: I’ve been doing that too. I’ve actually been using this tool called Otter, and I just record into it and it automatically transcribes it so the person can then go and use that as a first draft for whatever becomes their next version. I just can’t think of stories and things to bring out. I’m too engaged in the conversation. By the time this is over, I’m not going to remember what was most exciting.
Amy: And I don’t always either, so she either has to ask me or she has to come up with some kind of thing that makes sense. Like, she’s going to have to be creative.
Andrew: Okay, and so that’s the way that you work for most of your content, most of your email where you’ll record something and say, “This is what’s special. Here’s what I remember. And she’ll go and write the first draft and then . . . or if you don’t have that, she’ll pick up by going through your episode?
Amy: Yeah, so that’s what usually happens. She’ll listen to the episode and she’ll pick something out of that and maybe expand on it and have a little fun with it. She tries to add a little entertainment into each email, but most of the time I’m not giving her stories.
Andrew: I used to be like so appalled by the idea that someone else was ghostwriting someone else’s content because it’s their voice. And then I read a book about Johnny Carson getting into Hollywood and being shocked himself that all the comedy that his favorite comedians were putting out there on television was actually written for them and eventually, you know, sharpened by them, and then he eventually understood it, and he became this guy who had like a machine of writers who were writing his stuff. And I said, “Oh.”
Amy: It’s hard to get over that hump. I, too, felt a little uncomfortable. It’s funny, I did a podcast episode and I think it was called “10 Things I Don’t Want You to Know.” Or it was “10 Things I Feel Embarrassed About.” And one of them was, “I don’t always write my own copy and I definitely don’t write my own emails.” And then, I talked about why that felt funny and why I do it. So I get you. I felt the same way. But I think it’s necessary, because the alternative is you’re not sending emails and, I think, you’re missing a huge opportunity when you’re not emailing your list every single week if you’re churning out great podcast episodes.
Andrew: And so for you, it’s an ad on Instagram and Facebook. It ends up on a landing page that might promote the podcast and get people to go subscribe to it?
Amy: Yes. And we just started podcast ads. What we did is we looked at some of the people we really admire, and we . . . you know, how you can go on Facebook and see which ads people are running?
Andrew: Yeah.
Amy: And we noticed that a lot of the top podcasts are running a lot of ads. And so we thought, “Well, we’re going to do some more of that and see how it goes.” Now, I also do a lot of list building through my podcast, so a lot of the episodes, not most recently, but in the hundreds and the late hundreds, have a lot of freebies and so we tend to want to pick those episodes so we can get some list building going as well.
Andrew: You know what? I’ve nodded my head and I said, “Yes, I do know that you can see what other people are buying . . . what type of ads other people are buying.” I didn’t know that. Where do you go to see what other people are buying?
Amy: So I knew that you were going to ask me that. And I can’t remember how you do it, but it literally, is something kind of new. And so I can find out and send it to you for sure. Or if you want me, I could text my team right now and say, “What is that? How do you figure that out?”
Andrew: I would love it. I would love to know what it is.
Amy: Okay, you want me to do it right now?
Andrew: Sure, go ahead and do it.
Amy: Okay, hold on.
Andrew: Oh, look at this. Jeremy is saying, “Go to the business page and click on Info and Ads.” So I’m going to do that right now. I’m going to go Amy Porterfield.
Amy: Okay. Good. I was going to say I think it’s easy.
Andrew: I guess this is part of Facebook’s desire to be more open.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: I’m on Amy, wait, no, this is the personal page. You and I are friends on Facebook, so I got that. It’s the one that has 3 million people on it, right? Three million fans is that . . . no [inaudible 00:12:45].
Amy: I was going to say, “That is not me.”
Andrew: Okay. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going go . . .
Amy: Go to Tim Ferriss. I want you to see that.
Andrew: So he buys a bunch of ads. And what I noticed with him is he buys ads to his like checklist.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Or he buys ads to something else that then gets someone on the list and then he promotes it.
Amy: So yeah. So a lot of those . . . Jenna Kutcher does a really great job of podcast ads as well. Those are two of the people that we looked up and we thought, “Oh, they’re doing great stuff.” If you go to mine, if you don’t see podcast ads, it might be because right now we’re promoting something, so we might have paused them during this week. But typically, we just started running Facebook ads for our podcast.
Andrew: I see it.
Amy: Oh, good.
Andrew: Amy, thanks fantastic. Jeremy, thanks for pointing it out. Yeah, I see all of Tim Ferriss’ stuff. So he’s got his not-to-do list with a nice image. He’s got a photo of himself saying that he learned from a bunch of interviewees, and he has a photo of himself standing next to Tim, I mean, to Tony Robbins, etc.
Amy: Yeah, it’s good stuff. I mean, he does a great job with his podcast ads.
Andrew: Do you do any kind of marketing that’s not ad based, that is still measurable?
Amy: So let me think. We are so heavy on Facebook and Instagram ads. We really don’t. I mean, we use Instagram. So here’s the deal. We use Instagram for Instagram Stories pretty heavily. So I finally got past the fear of showing my face on video. I’ve done it for years, but I’ve always hated it. And then I thought this is ridiculous. Like, let’s just stop this and I had a lot of insecurities about my weight and how I looked and all that, and so I thought, “Let’s just fix that. Let’s just get healthy. Let’s move past this.” Because I am all business. Like, I am obsessed with my business. So if my insecurities are holding me back, that bothers me.
And so anyway, I just got past a lot of these fears that I’ve been grappling with for years and years and starting to do more video. So I do Instagram Stories more. I jump on Facebook Live more, just not ads or anything just to connect. I have seen a huge shift in the engagement of my community and the conversation in the DMs just for showing up regularly. So that’s a little bit of a very big, actually, soft marketing strategy, but it works for me.
Andrew: I didn’t see you doing that. And so this is on . . . I guess I’m not following you on Instagram. And so are you being personal there? Are you just talking about your day, you are?
Amy: I’m doing a little bit of both. Now, I’m not the type of person that will take you into my kitchen and have you with me all day, every day and on my walks and with my husband. I don’t do a lot of that. But I do enough of it that you get to come into my world for sure. And then, I’m constantly talking about marketing.
But here’s another thing that’s changed for me over the last year. My business has exploded over the last year. And I think one of the reasons why is I finally realized that I’m a strategy girl. I teach step-by-step. I get in the weeds. I talk marketing all the time. But one thing that I realized is if I don’t talk about the mindset, that the shifts that need to be made, the fear the concern, the worry, all of that, if I don’t address that, they’re never going to have the big impact that they could with the strategies and steps that I’m teaching. So I’ve infused a lot of mindset, obstacles and blocks and shifts that need to be made, and I’ve started to talk about that.
Now, I’m no Tony Robbins, but it does help that I address it. And I always address it as, “Let’s talk about the challenge I’ve had. Maybe you’ve had this as well.” So it’s always has to come from a place of sincerity.
Andrew: Got it. That makes sense. Let me come back in a moment. I’m going to talk about my first sponsor. And then, I want to come back and understand how do you know what fears they have?
Amy: Okay.
Andrew: I keep hearing, “Survey your audience all the time.” But they’re not telling you your fears. I have one thing that’s worked for me. I want to know what’s worked for you.
Amy: Okay.
Andrew: First, I’ll do a quick add for Toptal. If you’re out there and you’re looking to hire developers, go to toptal.com/mixergy. They’re going to get you the best of the best developers. I was just talking to someone who is in the info-marketing space, Dave, who now runs a site called Proof. It’s a software tool. He’s not a developer himself. He needed great developers. He went to Toptal, he hired from Toptal and it was more of like a temporary thing. I need the best of the best to get my team up and running, the best of the best to give us a skill that we don’t have ourselves, and that’s how he keeps improving the software.
If you’re out there listening, or frankly, Amy, if you’re here listening and you want to hire a developer, consider going to Toptal. When you go to toptal.com/mixergy, the first thing they’ll do is not get you hired or hire someone for you, it’s they’ll get you on a call with someone, you tell them what you’re looking for and if they’ve got that person, they can get you started pretty quickly.
Go to toptal.com/mixergy, you’ll get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours in addition to a no-risk trial period of up to, I don’t know. Go to toptal.com/mixergy. [Up to two weeks 00:17:35]. I just don’t want to like promote the free trial and risk-free. If you need a developer, you’re going to love them. You shouldn’t do it for that. All right, toptal.com/mixergy.
So what has worked for you for understanding people’s fear?
Amy: So one of the things we do on our webinar registration page for . . . so I’ve got this free webinar all about list building, how to kick-start your list building. And when someone registers for the webinar on the very next page, the Thank You page, we have a quick little survey. So we do survey, but that’s not the only way I get the fears. And we ask, “So when it comes to list building, what is your biggest challenge?” We have radio buttons, and then we have other, where they can fill it in. But it’s things like the technology, not enough time, not know where to start. Like, we listened to enough to narrow it down and then we do the survey.
So a few things. One, we get a lot of responses from that because they just registered, so they’re more apt to fill out that survey. And just a little marketing side note, whatever they answer in terms of, let’s say, they say it’s technology. In the post webinar email sequence, we will address their biggest challenge personally. We’ll say, “You let us know it was technology. Let’s talk about that.” So we use that information.
But that has been a huge eye opener for me, what they’ve told me there. Another thing is that I have something called the Insider’s Club. It’s a Facebook group only for my students, my alumni that have gone through my programs. And once a month, I’m live in that Facebook group. And they get to ask me questions for a full hour. I’ve been doing this for over two years now. If you read between the lines of their questions, you will, definitely, see their fears. And, typically, what I see between the lines is that I don’t have all the answers. I’m looking at what everybody else is doing and I do not compare. I am so behind. I’m too old. Like, it is very obvious. But it’s been something that I’ve had to perfect in terms of me learning how to read between the lines, and it’s been incredibly effective.
Andrew: Yeah, do you have an example of that? I know that this is putting you on the spot.
Amy: Yeah.
Andrew: Because people don’t explicitly say, “I’m too old.” They feel something else and they express it in yet a different way.
Amy: So yeah, let me think about one. It just recently came up about someone. Oh, there was this guy talking about how he’s been in one industry for his whole life and now he’s in his 60s, and he wants to branch out into something new. And he was asking about where does he start there. But there were all these really weird questions that he shouldn’t even be worrying about, about what he was asking.
And what I said was, you’re worrying about all this stuff, because your deeper worry is that you’re too late in the game. You don’t have all the answers because you’ve started too late because you shared with me that you’ve known something else your whole life. And so that’s when I start that conversation. And right away, he writes, “Yeah, you’re right. You nailed it.” So it was kind of like these questions are silly, and you’re asking them for the all the wrong reasons.
Andrew: All right, that’s something that we need to do. I just, actually, highlighted for myself here the timestamp with when you said, “What they told me,” so that I can go back to my team and implement what you said around there. And here’s what I got from you. When somebody registers for a webinar, they clearly are coming in with a need big enough that they’re willing to put their contact information in and show up at a certain time, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Andrew: We need the very next page needs do what you do what you say, “What?” Actually, what I was thinking of, tell me what you think of this is, “What are you looking to get out of this? Or what’s the problem you’re looking to solve today? What’s a win for you look at the end of this, right?”
Amy: I like, what’s a win? I’ve never used that question, but what does a win look like? You asked me that when we first got on here.
Andrew: Yeah.
Amy: And it’s almost jarring like, “Oh, I could tell you what I want?” I love it. So that’s a great question. But I do think the radio buttons and kind of giving them some suggestions, and then keeping one open-ended is helpful, so that you can . . . it just it allows the process to be easier for them.
Andrew: And then your email software will based on what they said fill in the blanks in the email and make sure that yes, we will get to technology?
Amy: Yes, we use Infusionsoft and we use a tagging system on that survey in order to let us know what kind of email they need to get during the funnel.
Andrew: I think, actually, you, at one point, told me that there was an issue with Infusionsoft, but you didn’t mention Infusionsoft. And then it was another guest, it was Tim Sykes, who was listening to you with me, who said, “What she didn’t want to tell you is it was Infusionsoft.” And that’s the problem. I keep having like this issue with them. They are just so tough to deal with.
Amy: It’s been tough, definitely. And I will tell you for all of our funnels, we use Infusionsoft. For all of our automated funnels, we use Infusionsoft. We also use PlusThis. You know PlusThis?
Andrew: Right, yes.
Amy: Yeah. So, typically, in anything we do, there’s some feature of PlusThis that’s involved.
Andrew: We do, too, and that adds another layer of complexity.
Amy: I know.
Andrew: Because have to A/B test it. You have to then go to this third-party software to get A/B test.
Amy: It’s so true. And I don’t want to go off tangent, but I’ll tell you a challenge we’re having in our business, something that’s like really near and dear to my heart that I want to figure out. And that is that we teach how to do webinars in my Digital Course Academy program. So it’s an expensive program and I want to make sure I give them everything I can to make it as easy as possible.
But putting together a live webinar with your email service provider with any extra tools you need to do with Zoom, with integration back end, timing, email marketing all of it, I can’t make it any simpler than the technology. And so my students are saying, “This is too many steps. It’s too much. I’m overwhelmed.” And I wear that on my soul, like, “Oh, my gosh. I want to make this easier.” But our team has been trying to clean it up because we have an integration guide for them.
But at the end of the day, it is a lot of steps. At the end of the day, marketing is not always easy. And if you really want to dial things in, you’ve got to piece together some tools. There is no one tool that is going to be our savior. And I wish there was, but it’s something that we’ve been dealing with. We want to make it easier, but it’s not always easy. It’s kind of complicated sometimes.
Andrew: You do it for your team. They need to have a set of steps to do this.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Right. The idea that we’re just going to put ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels will handle the whole thing and people will show up or WebinarJam and they’ll do. It doesn’t work that way.
Amy: It does not work that way. And I guess I just want to be really honest with my audience and I’m hoping that creates a bigger connection with them saying, “Guys, I’m making it as simple as I can for you. And it’s not a one-click thing and it’s all going to be done. So don’t let anyone tell you it is.” Yeah.
Andrew: You know what? I’m glad to hear you say that because when I went to find your name, one of the things that I found was your name in my Evernote. I found a note that I had about the software that you use for your webinars, and I saved it and I never went to test it out and I said, “Oh, that would have saved me so much time. That would have done everything for me because I’ve been using it. It’s great.” No, there is a set of steps.
Amy: Yes, always. Definitely. And it takes some time and it takes a lot of tweaking.
Andrew: So I need to do more tweaking. This live event, one thing that I was that I was thinking was, “Oh, if I would have reached out to Brian Harris, he’s got some kind of tool that helps when someone registers for something, encourages them to go tell their friends and then rewards them when they do.” And he would have put it on for us because he’s got like a services component to his business and I didn’t. And there’s always another thing like that. What’s your process for making sure that you do keep iterating and improving?
Amy: So you’re right. There’s always other stuff that we can do. And to be quite honest, there is a lot that I want to do that I don’t do. And here’s the secret for me. I have this really small team. There’s six full-time people on my team, but I have one person on my team that her job is to tell me “No,” and it’s, it’s sucks. And I don’t love it, but we use a system called EOS. And EOS is from the book “Rocket Fuel” the book “Traction.” And with EOS, you have a visionary, which is me, the owner of the company, and an integrator, which is Chloe, who basically, she makes sure that whatever we say we’re going to do, it gets done.
And so when I come to the table and say, “Well, Brian’s got this cool tool that you can [throw on 00:25:41] the end of it and you can do XYZ.” If we are maxed out, she will have to say, “Okay, we can do that, but that means we’re not going to do this.” And so it’s, like, I want to be a kid in a candy store, but I can’t, and that’s what I meant by “We keep things as simple and streamlined as possible in the business.” And if you look, we do a whole lot less than most people, but we do well revenue-wise and expense-wise because we don’t, actually, have a lot of those bells and whistles.
Andrew: So here’s what we do. For an event like this, one of the things I’ve learned is create a checklist.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Right? And we just we use Basecamp because it keeps things simple and quiet. And so we’ll have a checklist of the things that we did to put this together. And we’ll copy that next time we want to do things. Actually, before we do, we’ll make changes to it. So if I say, “I wish we would have done this viral thing that Brian Harris has.” I would go and write a note in that main checklist that says, “Next time, here’s a suggestion for improving. Next time, somebody else should be proofing the promotion material a little bit better because we made a mistake with Rand Fishkin’s post.” And then next time we go in, I will say, “Okay, all these things were just things that felt like fires last time but aren’t important and what’s critical? And if it’s critical, let’s add one checklist item or two checklist items.” What do you think of that process?
Amy: Okay, so you and I could have marketing babies together. I mean, we’re just really very similar in that sense. We do almost the exact same thing. But one thing that . . . so when I worked for Tony Robbins, one of the things I loved about a discipline he had was he would get off stage, and I was in a position that I was working on creative content, so I was always there. He’d get off stage, I’d be right there, and he would say, “Let’s debrief.” Before he went to pee, before he took some water, before he did anything, “Let’s debrief.” And so he would look to me and the team and say, “What do you think worked? What didn’t work?” And then, he would download and everything he thought about that segment on stage or that day, basically, was end of day kind of thing.
And so I took that into my own business, and while a launch is going on, we have one Google doc where everybody in the moment goes to the Google doc and just jots down a note that they don’t want to forget, “This worked great, this didn’t work great, this was weird, whatever,” in different sections, whether it be the webinar, the email, the social, whatever. And then, we compile it all. At the end of the launch, we’re done. We’re not trying to remember anything. It’s already in there. And then one person on the team takes that turns it into a keynote, and reports to us what worked, what didn’t work, what we’re going to change. And we record that so we can, actually, go back to it if we want.
This is something new, we just started in January, but it feels very good that nothing’s going to be forgotten. And I love that . . . I need to add one discipline that you said, which is okay, then you look over everything and say, “What really feels necessary to do again or to keep? We can’t do it all.” I was talking to Marie Forleo the other day. She’s going on a book launch September, October, and she said, “We did a whiteboard of everything I want to do, everything the team wants to do for our book launch. Then we went back and crossed out the majority of it because we can’t do all of it.”
And, I think, the discipline of crossing out the majority is what, probably, most people don’t do.
Andrew: Yeah, I have a hard time with crossing things out because I want to do so much. I’ve got so much energy.
Amy: I want to do it all.
Andrew: I went for a run yesterday, it was going to be a half marathon. I said to my wife, “Olivia, I think I’ve done enough half marathons. I should up it.” She goes, “Yeah, you should.” And so I went for a run. I said, “Let’s go to 15 miles. ” Then I got to 15 I said, “Just another one mile.” And I said, “Why did you drink that whole Gatorade? It has 160 calories in it. Go burn that off.” And before I knew it, I had to stop before dinnertime.
Amy: Are you being serious about this? Is this . . . ?
Andrew: Yeah, it’s 100%.
Amy: I never can tell if you’re serious.
Andrew: 100%.
Amy: That will never happen to me that I can run that much. That is insane. That is insane.
Andrew: I do that on a regular basis. And part of it is this need to like . . . it’s not to prove to anyone that I’m a Superman. I didn’t think I would tell anyone except for Olivia, but it’s to just take on more, and you don’t feel that. You don’t have this need to just take on more because you can’t sit still?
Amy: I want to. I genuinely want to. But I’ve seen what it will do to my team. I’ve seen burnout on my team. And I also have a husband that’s a firefighter who is not in this world. And he’ll say, “I haven’t seen you for five days.” So I have to remember the stuff that’s not related to work. And I have to find . . . I know I don’t believe in total balance. But I have to remember there’s other things that I have to focus on. So I guess that’s why it stops me. But I do have that desire that I do want to do more for sure.
Andrew: Why are webinars working for you when I keep hearing that they’re not working so much anymore?
Amy: So, you know, I hear that they’re not working, too, and then I see, literally, and this is not just a plug, I see so many of my students talking about their successes with webinars. And here’s what I think is important. One, is that some people do a webinar once or twice, and they think it didn’t work, whereas I have my students do four or five webinars during a launch because it takes more than one or two to make it work. I also believe that if you focus more on what the product is and your messaging, that webinar is going to convert better. So learning how to talk about your product, learning how to do a webinar that makes people walk away.
So I have this motto when you get on a webinar of mine, you walk away, no matter if you buy or not, feeling excited, inspired and driven to take action, no matter if you buy or not. And I say this motto every time before I go on a webinar, and I teach my students to do the same. So if your webinar gives more than you ask for, I do believe that is a recipe for success. So I can’t even fathom people saying webinars don’t work. There’s just it’s not true.
Andrew: Wow, I thought that people were just burned down on it. They want everything right now. And you know what? I think that one of my issues with webinars and in general, this is one of my issues, I don’t do the excited and inspired or even driven. Well, maybe driven. But it’s more like I’ve got some information I need to get to you. And if I’m doing inspiration, or I feel in the back of my head that I’m almost like these . . . oh, this is like my own negative chatter. I am then becoming like these empty Instagram people who are doing nothing but posting quotes to try to motivate you, and there’s no substance to it. And that’s my own issue, it looks like.
Amy: And that would never be you. First of all, you don’t even have that in your DNA not to offer immense value. And I always I see that this is the thing, you and I are the same in that inspiring doesn’t necessarily come natural to me. But I realized if at the end of that webinar, if I taught them something they could do, but they don’t believe that this concept is very doable, they will not take action. So I had to start weaving in this idea of what it looks like to make this doable for them. So that motivation, inspiration part is essential in any webinar. And you don’t feel rah rah for sure.
Andrew: How do you find a way to do that? Because if I wanted to give another tip, I would just hunt down the tip that worked best for people and then include that. If I’m looking for something that inspires people, I don’t know how to find that.
Amy: Okay, so let me tell you, Stu McLaren taught me this. This is I learned 100% from him. I strip out the testimonials in my webinar and I put in the stories. And I tell stories of other people and what they’ve done, but I really focus on where they started in the struggles they had. And the stories are what inspire and motivate and make people think it’s doable. So we’re on a mission this year. And all we care about is getting those stories from people. We’ve never done a good job of this. Now, we’ve got a whole database.
So I was doing a webinar with Stu or doing a podcast episode was to a couple weeks ago, and he came to my house and we sat in my studio, and I was going to ask him 10 questions about building a membership site.
So we sat down and I had my 10 questions in front of me, like you, totally prepared ready to go. And I look over at his notebook, and all he has is names of like 50 people, names, and then a little note next to every name. He was prepared to answer my questions with stories of people that have done it.
Andrew: That’s great.
Amy: Right? I don’t have that. I don’t have a list of names that I could just tell stories. And I believe, and he’s become such a huge . . . Stu has always been successful. You know, Stu. But he’s really come into his own over the last few years and is doing his own thing. And it has to do with that human connection he’s been making.
Andrew: So in an ideal world, when I asked you, are webinars even working? You would have said, “Well, actually, Mary Klein came into the session, having done 10 years of webinars. It wasn’t working the way it did before. And then what she did was,” and tell me what she did. “And as a result, now she’s doing a webinar a week.” That’s the kind of thing.
Amy: Exactly, exactly.
Andrew: I get that. I resonate with that and that is, actually, useful and it’s interesting, and it connects me back with my audience. By the way, Owen Schrock in the audience is saying, “Stu is awesome.” Stu McLaren, really, is awesome.
Amy: I love him.
Andrew: How do you pull out those testimonials from people? What do you use to find people’s successes and then record them so you could tell them?
Amy: That’s a great question. So you’ll love this because you’re a systems kind of guy. So we have one person on our team, where her main objective is to find these people, get on the phone with them. We have a whole system of interviewing them, asking the right questions, putting together a loose outline, giving it to a copywriter to write into a story. Like we’ve got the whole thing going on. And it’s worth the investment for us because we know stories are what will make that impact, motivate, inspire and sell.
And so, one, we have a system for it. I’ve noticed that nothing works in my business if there’s not a process, if there’s not, literally, an SOP for what we want to do. But to get really tactical, we have this Insider’s Club, this one Facebook group, it has about 8,700 people in it, all my alumni from all my courses, and that is where we encourage them to share their wins, use #win, and we encourage them to tell their stories there. And so anytime they do, when they do, we try to celebrate. I make them a video. We get excited for them.
And then we also tell all our students, “amyporterfield.com/win. Go there, tell us . . . we ask you a few questions and they could tell their story there if they don’t want to do it publicly. So we have to give them the mechanisms and the way to tell us their stories. If we don’t, like, last year, I didn’t, no one told me their story. I felt like I had no testimonials. Although there were hundreds out there, I just didn’t ask for them properly.
Andrew: Yeah, they come into my inbox, and I don’t even bother labeling them anymore in Gmail because I don’t look at them. Oh, that’s another big win. All right. I’m actually, like, ripping out pieces of paper here to make sure that I actually follow up on this stuff. Let me talk about my second sponsor, and then I’ll come back with some of the things that I’ve gotten out of this interview, and then where we’re going to go next.
The second sponsor is a company called HostGator. You know HostGator. Everybody knows HostGator. It’s a place where you can go get your website hosted inexpensively. It just works. And they don’t say it on the site, but they’ll scale up with you if you need a more robust site, more management, they’ll do the whole thing for you.
Amy, let me ask you this within the ad for HostGator, if somebody wanted to start a site for something, what’s a good way for them to figure out what to start the site for? Like if they wanted to . . . if they’re following your process, and they say, “You know what? Amy is teaching me how to have a course. I’m going to go to HostGator, I’ll get my website, I’ll have my course.” What’s the thing that they could do to find the topic to launch your site on?
Amy: I usually tell my students, most of my students have some kind of idea about what they want to do. They’re just not sure if it’s going to work. So we do something called course calls.
Andrew: Okay.
Amy: They get on the call with seven people, and they talk it out and they get with their ideal customer avatar, and find out how they feel around the topic. Not how they feel about, “I’m going to create this course. Do you want to buy it?” But around the topic. And that, usually, gives them a lot of clarity.
Andrew: So if I want to do one on, say, dog training or how to code a website without actually coding, you know, using tools like Zapier and Bubble and all these free tools that are now coming out there to enable you . . . well, they’re not free, but inexpensive tools that allow you to code without coding, I might get on with seven of my friends and just have them hear me out?
Amy: They have to be seven people that are your ideal customer avatar for a product like this. So first I teach them how to figure out their ideal customer avatar, and then I teach them how to get on a call and really do their due diligence. Because as you know, a lot of people will move forward with an idea that has never been vetted, and so that’s where they get themselves in trouble. So before we create that website, we do some course, we call them course calls.
Andrew: Okay, so do a course call. And on the course call, what are they looking for? Are they looking for problems? Validation?
Amy: Yes, fears, challenges, problems. What have they tried before? What have they paid for? What books are they reading about it? Like, where are they spending their time? What questions do they have about it? All of that. And if for some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a there, it’s because it’s not a challenge. We have not hit on the meat of what it needs to be, so they go back to the drawing board, they do more calls.
Andrew: Oh, that’s so helpful. So then I might, if I had this idea for a site that helps you create software without coding, I might talk to people who’ve tried it in the past or maybe have taken courses on how to code in the past.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: And then, when they tell me where they hit a roadblock, I might, actually, get an idea for a blog post that overcomes it. Something like, “I tried Bubble. It didn’t work for coding up sites.” I might say, “Well, here’s what you should have been doing with it not trying to . . . ” Got it. I don’t actually have a quick answer for that problem, but I get it.
Amy: I don’t.
Andrew: Anyone out there who has an idea and wants to host a website, or if you don’t like your hosting company right now, go to hostgator.com/mixergy. I’ll be honest with you, they’ve got a really low price there that, actually, is very basic hosting. It does what it needs to do and doesn’t do much more. If you want to scale up the way that we did, what you could do is just call them up when you’re ready and you can scale up, get dedicated hosting, get more this, more of that, even WordPress-managed hosting, they don’t advertise it at all, but they have that in there always at lower prices and they’ve been around forever so you can count on them. Go to hostgater.com/Mixergy to get the lowest price out there. Amy, I talk like in New Yorker. I talk too fast, hostgator.com/mixergy.
Amy: Impressive, though. It’s impressive.
Andrew: Thank you. Now we’ve got a four-year-old and a two-year-old and they’re starting to talk just like fast like me.
Amy: Wait, you’re not from New York, right? Are you always [from San Francisco 00:39:54]?
Andrew: I grew up in New York, and New York is still part of me. It is like . . .
Amy: Will always be.
Andrew: It really is. Where did you grow up?
Amy: Orange County, California. It’s just up the road.
Andrew: Did you feel like you’re like that?
Amy: I’m a valley girl. No, I’m really not. But I do feel like a California girl. The number one way to know I’m a California girl, if I go outside and it’s 65 degrees, I’m freezing. So yeah, I’m [a wimp 00:40:16].
Andrew: I’m the opposite. I come in in a T-shirt. I cycle in the cold here. It’s nothing because this to me in San Francisco, is warm weather. So I like the idea of somebody on our team going and doing interviews with anyone. If they say something positive, and it’s like, I could see that there’s meat to it, we should just send a writer. It doesn’t cost that much. Go and do an interview. I’ll pay you for it, write up a post. And then, do you use it for something? Are you planning on using it for, like, a email, for a blog post?
Amy: Great question. Yeah, so basically, now we’ve got this bank that we keep everything. We use Dropbox, we use Airtable, we use Asana, we use all these tools. But we end up with a bank of, let’s say, a bunch of stories. And then what happens is if we’re going to go . . . so in September, we’re going to launch Digital Course Academy again. So here’s what I’ll do. One, I’ll go in there, read all the stories and I’ll put the ones I love the most in my webinar. And then, I’ll put another list of stories for my Facebook Lives during the promo. And then, I’ll put another few for my podcast. So I’m going to pick and choose the best ones for podcasts, Facebook Lives, webinar, sales pages.
So on sales pages, we might turn them into a little bit more of a testimonial. A testimonial, just so everyone’s clear is different than a story. A testimonial is, “I took Amy’s course. I followed it step-by-step, here’s my results.” But a story is more of the challenges, the struggles, who that person is and why they did what they did, and how they feel now that they’ve gotten results. So there’s a time for testimonials, there’s a time for stories.
Andrew: I get that. And then, when you say you’re going to do it on Facebook Live, you mean bring them on and have them tell their story with you?
Amy: Yes, that’s something I’ve just started to do. And it’s so powerful when people could hear in their own words and it’s not just about me telling their story.
Andrew: I’m looking for more ways to capture that, like, systematically.
Amy: Yeah.
Andrew: And you notice I keep bringing up Brian Harris. I just like that guy and the whole way [inaudible 00:42:07].
Amy: Me too.
Andrew: You know him?
Amy: I only know of him. We’ve talked on email for a hot minute, but I think what he does is really solid. I look at his stuff. Definitely.
Andrew: One of the things that I feel like he wants to get into software. You could see that he keeps moving into more and more software and services. I get the feeling he enjoy the education, but he really wants to explore this passion of software. He wrote his own core software, and at the top of the core software, he has a button that says, like, “Report your win.” So his whole core software is set up as a checklist. So you’re supposed to go do this and yes, there happens to be a video for the checklist, but it’s a checklist. And then, when you’re done, there’s a thing at the at the top.
Amy: I love it.
Andrew: What’s interesting is that he has that systematically built into his software. I’m not using his software. I think we’re still using Wishlist. Are you still using Wishlist?
Amy: So I use Kajabi and I absolutely love it. And the reason I love it is because I feel as though my course looks really solid and really polished with very little code or work on my end, and it’s not any special coding. And here’s why we moved to Kajabi. I wanted everybody on my team to be able to make any change necessary to the course at any time. And we felt held captive when we started to do custom thing in Wishlist. So we took that whole customization kind of thing away and went with Kajabi and it’s been a lifesaver.
Andrew: By the way, Chris Luck is listening to us. He just chimed in with two things. Number one, “Hear that Andrew? Kajabi.” Because he’s been telling me about Kajabi. He builds his stuff on Kajabi.
Amy: Andrew, it’s the best decision I made. And I am affiliate, but I wasn’t an affiliate when I went to them. Best decision. I want you to check it out.
Andrew: Yeah, we should. I think, we had for a long time this belief that we could build it ourselves, so let’s just build it ourselves and that’s a mistake. The other thing he said is when I asked you about whether webinars even work, he says, “I’ve done just over $200,000 with a webinar two weeks ago. They are gold. Everyone should do them.” So he’s still into webinars.
Amy: Love it.
Andrew: Chris, I’d love to have you come on and talk about what you’re doing there. I’ve known Chris forever. He, actually, encouraged me to start selling stuff to my audience. He won’t do a Mixergy interview.
Amy: Why?
Andrew: Because he knows me so well. He should, right?
Amy: This is not as bad as I thought. But I will tell you something. I like to be really honest with you.
Andrew: Yeah.
Amy: I worry sometimes that when you and I talk, my stuff feels a little bit fluffy to you or a little bit soft, where, I think, “Well, he really wants analytics or he wants the actual strategy or whatnot.” But I will tell you, Andrew, that over the last year when I’ve allowed myself to focus a little bit more on the soft metrics and the soft strategies in marketing, that things have changed for me. And so I’m glad we got this opportunity to talk about some of this stuff because, I think, it makes a huge difference.
And Ryan Deiss was on stage, I think, at Traffic and Conversion. I think that was the event where he talked about these soft metrics and why they’re so important. So I just appreciate you letting us have this conversation that’s a little different.
Andrew: What do you mean by soft metrics?
Amy: Meaning such as I listened to my students and I call them on the phone and we do course calls. Or we ask them what their fears or challenges are, or I’ve infused more motivation and inspiration into my webinars. That feels soft to me, but the bottom line has changed because of it. So I think it’s just an important conversation to have.
Andrew: So I think you’re under estimating, or maybe it’s because I always have a scowl and like this determined look. Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics, said, “Andrew, you don’t have to be so intense. Just chill out.” And I said, “I’m not being intense to get a result. I’m being intense because that’s who I am. Maybe that’s a New Yorker.” I’m literally taking notes here and pulling them out so that I could tell someone. And I know exactly who’s going to do what on these things.
Amy: Cool. Which is nice. Yeah.
Andrew: To go back to the team and say, “This is a great idea.” And again, going back five years into my notes back when I was using Evernote, I had a list of things that I asterisked to say, “We need to do it.” And I remember following up and doing it. I think I get so much out of this conversation, out of my conversations with you. I think maybe my face needs to let you know that. I think I need to just say it.
Amy: Well, I’m glad. I’ve always wanted to do your show, I want to make sure we get to the good stuff that’s going to [inaudible 00:46:13].
Andrew: We are. This is fantastic.
Amy: Cool.
Andrew: The wins, what’s a process that you use to get that? So you keep telling people to go over? Do you have like a . . . I’m thinking, should we put an email into our sequence when somebody signs up? Should we have a big button at the top of our site to let them know? I’ve done it really okay in the past. I want to be great at it.
Amy: I think we could even be a lot better at this. We have a new customer onboarding sequence, which is if you’re a new student of mine, you get an email every single week while the course is live. And the final email is a celebration email where we’re asking for the wins. But here’s the problem with that. A lot of times, my courses are 10 weeks. They are not done with their entire course and ready to launch it in 10 weeks. That’s not how it’s designed, so they’re not going to have a win. So a few things. I think we need two months later send out an email asking for their wins, wanting to hear from them. I’m starting to see a lot of success come in. I launched my course in January. So here we are in May, and I’m just starting to see it. So this is the time we should be getting in front of them.
Also, I think it’s important . . . Stu does this where he ends a course with a celebration, and he lets people know, “Okay, we’re celebrating now, but here’s what I want you to pay attention to.” And he kind of helps them realize what a win is, “When you do this, that’s a win. When you do that, that is a win, and I want to be the first to know.” So he defines what a win is so they know. Because a lot of times my students will say, “Getting 1,000 people on my email list, that’s not that much. Amy has over 200,000.” Like, no, 1,000 people on your email list is a very big win. So identifying the wins, I think, is important.
But I’ve learned through leadership that over communication is incredibly essential, and I over communicate with my team and I need to over communicate with my students as well. The win thing has to get in front of them many, many, many times.
Andrew: Yeah. And frankly, even in front of me. Like I remember, Clay Collins, the founder of Leadpages, he said several times, “I only got into software because of Mixergy. And here’s how.” He said it at his conference, introducing me that, “This is why I got into software.” And then I never did anything with it.
Amy: Come on.
Andrew: That’s a win. That’s not just like a day-to-day thing.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Go and get that written out somewhere or interview him about it and do that. And then you also mentioned the celebration. I, at one point, after I sold my company, I just started exploring different groups just out of fascination. One of the things that I noticed was a lot of groups that, you know, in-person groups is what I mean, like old stuff like Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club, I went to those things. I went to . . . I forget what the . . . Landmark.
The Landmark thing was interesting because what they did was it’s something that other groups did, they would have a graduation day. And so I wasn’t just popping into a random webinar to tell me, or a live seminar to tell me what this stuff is. I went into somebody’s graduation day, and they brought their family in to celebrate and graduate with them. And through that, you can’t help but hear, “This is what it is and what it does for me.” And if you want afterwards, as part of this graduation ceremony, you can go to a smaller room and actually learn something. And we did that once and we should do that more. You’re aiming for this graduation day.
Amy: I’ve never done that. I’m taking that one. That is a great thing. It’s graduation day and let’s hear from those who have gone before you. I love that.
Andrew: You know who did a graduation day kind of interesting is Dane Maxwell. He flew me to Vegas to speak to his people in a private room in Vegas. And I looked around and it was all these people and I noticed something that they all had in common. They all had a sale. And I thought that was kind of interesting. How do you all have sales? He said, “The only way you could come to this is if you have a pre-sale. You have to sell something before you make it and then you get to earn the right to come to this event.” That was kind of interesting, too.
Amy: That’s cool. I like that a lot. Very cool.
Andrew: Okay, so here’s what I’ve written down. I’ve got, keep telling them what a win is and hunting for it. We should have somebody who just interviews our members. And we’ve got that. I’ve got a good writer now who should finally go and do that. I need to find a way to record. And I don’t think I’m going to use Voxer. I think what I should do is . . . I don’t even think that I could record into my own thing. I can’t talk to myself. I love talking to people. It should be someone on my team on a regular basis, maybe even on the team calls, when we’re talking, I hit record, and then I send it to Otter and that way we have it transcribed.
Amy: Yes, I think, that is so smart. And really quick, you know, if you identify one person on your team to do this, we have a goal, three interviews a week. And we, actually, have a metric. We check metrics every Monday. One of the metrics is, how many people did you talk to you? Did you get to the three interviews this week?
Andrew: With the person who’s doing the wins?
Amy: Mm-hmm, three interviews. It doesn’t mean that she’s going to create three stories a week. Maybe one story isn’t really going to work. She literally gets on the phone and interviews three testimonial stories every single week. That’s her goal. And before that, it wasn’t happening so frequently, so we had to put a metric to it.
Andrew: That’s a good one. Actually, we do need a metric also for success. You know, one problem that we had with metrics for success . . . you have a couple more minutes?
Amy: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Okay, great. One problem that we had with metrics for success was, I want to know how many people are going through the program and learning something that was useful. So what we did was we said, “Five weeks in, send them an email, say, “Are you getting a result?” If they are, then that becomes the numerator. Or basically, it’s, how many people said, “Yes, they are versus how many people did we email?” The problem is that number changes too much. Some people don’t sign up to use it right away and they don’t want the pressure. I need some way of knowing whether what we’re doing works or not. Do you have that? Because I know you’re selling and you want to know things are working.
Amy: So what we’ve tracked how long it takes somebody to create a course and how long it takes somebody to, actually, get it up and running. And so one of the metrics we say is we know it takes at least 60 days to create a digital course, and at least another 30, if not 60 days, to put together all the assets and launch it. And so that is one of our metrics that we’re looking at. One, we get asked all the time, “Well, if I buy your course, how long is it going to take me?” But two, we know when to go and talk to people, it’s going to take them a while to get going. So, you know, we do have a little bit of that. We could definitely do better.
Andrew: Okay, I’ve got a lot here. Is there one last thing that I didn’t ask you about how you market what you do?
Amy: How I market what I do.
Andrew: How do you get people to know? Here, let me let me remind you of some of the things you said. Number one, you said, look, I wasn’t really big on bringing people into my life and doing like an Instagram Live isn’t something that comes naturally to you. And you still don’t bring people into your cooking life and your [big 00:52:58] life all day long. But you go on there.
Amy: Yeah.
Andrew: You do that. Then, you also do these Facebook Lives or you answer questions. The other thing you said you do is you buy Facebook ads and you know the Facebook ads are working not just for people like you, but for podcasters. Well, actually, you’re a podcaster, too, is because you go into their Facebook page, and then where it says, “Info and Ads,” you can see all the ads that they bought. That’s really helpful. That was useful for me to see. You’re buying ads, still leading people to webinars. You said you’ll even do five webinars for a launch?
Amy: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: Okay, let me see. Okay, is there anything else that’s working for you? [inaudible 00:53:30].
Amy: Yeah, one more thing, I’m going to tell you that this is definitely more tangible. And one thing I’ve really dialed in is my own frameworks. So people have been doing this for years and years, but I didn’t realize the power of it until I did it in my last course. So I created this framework called The Profitable Webinar Framework. And it, basically, is how I do webinars slide by slide by slide. But I put it together in a framework and I showed it visually and then I taught it practically by using a slide deck that I generated a lot of money with, and then I walked my students through it.
The reason I’m telling you this is I think everybody has to have a framework that they say they coined, it’s theirs, and they can refer back to it. Let me give you an example. I have a weight loss coach. Over the last year, I’ve been working with a weight loss coach, and she has something called the four basics. And it’s, basically, her framework to get going with weight loss. And the conversation always starts with, “Well, you got to know my four basics. Here’s the framework of how to get started.”
If you have something that is yours, that it’s you’ve coined it, you’ve created it, and it either starts the conversation or it’s deep into what you do, you always get to go back to it and it sets you up as the leader, it gives you something, a foundation to talk about, and it’s what you’re known for. And you can have even a few in your business, but I I’ve noticed and I’ve watched people really do well in the online space, even more recently, they all have some kind of framework. And, I think, it’s valuable and it’s what I’ve done this year, and that’s helped me a lot as well.
Andrew: You know what? That, actually, is absolutely right. I always thought, “Well, I don’t have that. And I have to go back in and make that up because that’s another marketing tool.” But that’s not true. Because I, actually, do have certain things that I believe in that we have to do. And I get frustrated when people don’t do it in a certain way.
Amy: Yes, that’s it.
Andrew: And I need to articulate it to the people who are working with me, and then why limit it to them? Why not go beyond it? Right?
Amy: It’s so true. That’s what I mean. You’ve got to have those few things that you keep going back to because it separates you from everybody else. Now, people are saying, “Oh, have you checked out Amy’s Profitable Webinar Framework? You got to check that out.” And it’s an easy conversation starter for you and other people as well.
Andrew: What’s another framework that you have? I just enjoy [inaudible 00:55:42].
Amy: I’m trying to think. I have one called the . . . well, this is very arrogant. It’s called “The Porterfield Process for Outlining Your Online Course.” And I, literally, named it after myself and it’s my five phases of outlining a digital course, and that’s my framework. And the great thing is I’ve been at this for a while. I know how I do it. So now I had to just put it down on paper and give it that . . . it’s silly. Eben Pagan taught me this years ago, give it a title, name it, own it. And so “The Porterfield Process for Outlining Your Course” and “The Profitable Webinar Framework,” two things that to me are golden. And it’s where a lot of the results are coming from because I go back to it again and again.
Andrew: Yeah, I think outlining a course or outlining education is one of the questions that I asked you about five years ago because it seems so silly. Whenever I ask people, how did you teach this thing? They never know. They just like say, “I kind of knew it.” But I want to know a process that I can walk away with.
Amy: Yes.
Andrew: Like, you and I both know Ray Edwards, the writer.
Amy: I love him.
Andrew: He’s fantastic. He told me that you hired him back when you were working at Tony Robbins and every time he tries to buy your course because you guys have a relationship, you refund his money and he found a back way to pay you and have you keep the money. But I asked him how he knew how to teach? And he just said, “This is one of the things that comes naturally to me.” Which I get because he’s so good at communication. What I want is a process that helps me see it to improve what I do, and I could see how what you’re saying helps.
You know what? Actually, one last question from Chris Luck, who’s been chiming a lot here. He’s asking, “Amy what are you most excited about that you will be focused on to scale this year, 2019?”
Amy: So thanks for asking. I appreciate that. We are creating a membership site. So, basically, when you go through one of my courses, it ends, let’s say, in 10 weeks. And we’ve realized students are like, “Don’t go anywhere, Amy. Like, we’re not ready for you to leave, and we’re still working on this.” So we’re going to invite people into a coaching/membership program that extends the experience of being inside of my digital courses. Ninety-five percent of my revenue is generated from my own digital courses, so that is my business model. But we’re excited to add one more thing to the mix. I feel like it’s not going to complicate things, but it’s going to take my best customers and encourage them to continue the journey with me. So that’s what we’re working on. We’re launching it in the fall.
Andrew: Wow. All right, I get that. Thanks so much for being here. For anyone who wants to go follow up with you, Amy, is the best place to send it just go to amyporterfield.com? You don’t have a slash something. Just that?
Amy: Perfect. No, amyporterfield.com, perfect, or Instagram. I do a lot on Instagram. I’m just Amy Porterfield.
Andrew: I’m going to follow you right now on Instagram and then, I’m also going to start to Instagram like my day here, which is kind of exciting that I’m getting to talk to so many people live it and I’m not doing anything.
Amy: Yes. This is fun. You’ve got to do it. Is you’ve got to remember to do it, and that’s the hardest part.
Andrew: Yeah.
Amy: Andrew, I love, love, love chatting with you. And this was not as scary as I thought it would be. And I’m really, really honored that you included me in this because I’m a fan and I always have been. You’re a big deal, so thanks for having me.
Andrew: Thanks you so much for coming in here and answering all these questions that I’ve had for you. I really appreciate it. Amy Porterfield. Check her out at amyporterfield.com. I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first will host your website right and will put up with the fact that I read their name way too fast. It’s called HostGator.com/mixergy. And the second will help you hire phenomenal developers toptal.com/mixergy. Thanks, Amy.
Amy: Thank you. See you guys.
